John Jantsch (00:09): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Micah Solomon. He’s an expert on customer service, hospitality, and the customer experience. He’s a bestselling author, consultant trainer, e-learning trainer, producer, training producer. It’s a lot of training and a keynote speaker, and we’re going to talk today about one of his newest books called Can Your Customer Service Do This?: Create an Anticipatory Customer Experience that Builds Loyalty Forever. So Micah, welcome back to the show.

Micah Solomon (00:46): It was so great to be with you last time and this is a pleasure to return.

John Jantsch (00:51): So let’s get right down to it. Define anticipatory customer experience.

Micah Solomon (00:57): The basic, I guess, equation for customer service is you ask for something, I give it to you assuming you paid, but anticipatory customer service is another level. It’s where I am serving even the unexpressed needs and wishes that you may have. And it’s a great way to bind customers to you to make them feel like this is my place.

John Jantsch (01:23): Yeah, I mean, we’ve probably hopefully all been at a restaurant. That’s an example I love to use, where the server brought something you didn’t even ask for because they knew you were getting, I mean, simple as water, right? I mean, you didn’t have to ask for it. They thought, well, you’ve drank your water, you’re going to want more, and they bring it. I mean, that’s a pretty simple example, right?

Micah Solomon (01:42): Absolutely.

John Jantsch (01:44): Go for it. I was going to pile on now using more words out of the subtitle itself. There would be some that would suggest that no matter how great your service is, loyalty is dead. I’ll let you hit that one out of the park.

Micah Solomon (01:57): Well, if you believe that, then it is right. The thing to remember is in the olden days we would talk about customer lifetime value,

John Jantsch (02:08): And

Micah Solomon (02:08): I think it is hard to prove that figure now because John, as you pointed at it, is a lot easier to switch vendors. So I’ll suggest you think about something called customer network value. So if you’re delighting a customer, you number one, get their business and you number two, get all their recommendations. So it’s a pretty big deal.

John Jantsch (02:35): It’s almost like thinking of providing great customer experience, great customer service as a referral tactic almost. Right?

Micah Solomon (02:43): Absolutely. I like to say customer service is the new marketing.

John Jantsch (02:48): Yeah. And I remember from our last conversation, I know this is something you’ve done for years, but you start this book out with your secret shopper role. Talk little bit about how you’ve done that. I mean, maybe even just give a story about doing it like you do in the book. I’ll be happy to. You need to put a disguise on though, right? First,

Micah Solomon (03:10): Do you want to show that picture? That’d be funny. I can grab it. Hang on. So this is one of the more extreme disguises I might or might not use. So I don’t mystery shop anyone except my customers and they ask me to do it because they want to know an overall feeling I’m getting for the service. So I start out with this wonderful day that I’m having at a five star resort, one of the greatest places in America, and I wake up on the 33,000 thread count Egyptian pizzas, and I head down to the spa and all the while I’m making notes. Now the spa’s a little tricky because to make notes on my iPhone or whatever it is while they’re facially me is a little challenging, but it’s nice work if you can get it. At the end of the day, I order room service and one of my tests is I ask them for cocoa not to hot, and only the best people will get that. Most hotels won’t even notice the instructions. The ones who do either forget to do it or they give me this ridiculous, it seems like they cooled it down with ice. So the not too hot, I mean it’s because it’s my Goldilocks challenge. Then when I’m done, I send my confidential report to the c e o or whoever the boss of the division is and they can make use of it.

John Jantsch (04:38): So do you ever find, and again, I know you’ve done that for years, right? I mean that’s something you’ve kind of made one of your sort of signature applications. How’d you get into this work? I mean, I think a lot of people you’ve sort of specialized in one aspect of it. I think a lot of people customer experience got some talk in marketing, but it’s not seen as a whole area. How did you come to find this to be your life’s calling?

Micah Solomon (05:05): So there are two stories, two explanations, and both of them are true. So the PR friendly one is, I created a manufacturing company. This is some years ago, and our widgets were no better than anyone. They were also no worse. So as time went on, I realized that what differentiated ourselves was the customer experience. So when I sold the manufacturing company, I thought, well, this is what I do. And I called a friend of mine, Leonardo, who did all of this stuff on the hospitality side, and I had done all of it on the business to business and so forth side, and I said, Hey, all this, I know all this. Let’s write a book together. And he said, no, I think I’m going to write my own book sometime. So I was like, okay, good luck with that. So maybe a couple months later I call back and I say, Hey, Leonardo has that book coming.

(05:58): And he’s like, oh, this is how optimistic, let’s say he was. He says, I think I’m going to go off one day and write it all. So I was like, okay, good luck. One minute later he gets back on the phone and he sounds like he has his tail between his legs and he says, Micah Solange overheard my side of the conversation and she said, you absolutely have to write that book with Micah clearly not getting around to it yourself. So that was my first book, exceptional Service, exceptional Profit. It was co-authored by the two of us, and I kept learning more and more things, writing more and more books, working with more and more companies, and that’s what I do. So that is the PR friendly official story. The other story is he was born, or at least from a very early age as an excessively particular person. So in the book, I have a reconstructed letter from my counselors at camp, which tells you a lot, and it’s something like, dear Mr. And Mrs. Solomon, we have had the arduous pleasure of having your son Micah at summer camp. Usually the suggestions and complaints we get are along the lines of that old Hello Mata, hello father song where it’s raining too much and there are alligators in the pot and everything.

John Jantsch (07:18): She silverstein, right?

Micah Solomon (07:20): Yeah. And so one of those guys, I think his one that’s similar is I’m being eaten by a boa constrictor, which is a great one also. But Micas were much more specific in advance. They were like the two whistles at the waterfront aren’t quite in tune with each other. The sloppy joes doesn’t pair well with the orange juice and the mess hall and so forth. We have enjoyed having Micah for this summer, but we were also happy to return him to your care.

John Jantsch (07:48): So that’s when you didn’t realize it at the time, but that was your signal that you were meant for this. So I actually find that Google reviews are really helpful because not just as a consumer, certainly they’re helpful for that. Somebody’s got terrible reviews, you don’t go there. But as a marketer, I really find them helpful because the words that people actually use voluntarily really say a lot about what’s going on at that business. However, no matter how good a business is, you see everybody gets one and two star reviews for some reason, and maybe it’s deserved every now and then it’s deserved, but sometimes people are just odd. You’re never going to make everybody happy. Nothing is truer than that. So what do you suggest people do? I guess I’m asking a two part question. Obviously with upset and unhappy customers, but then also just with unreasonable customers.

Micah Solomon (08:45): So I spend a lot of time in the book with the first category customers who are upset, unhappy, frustrated, and I have a service recovery framework which all great companies have, whether it’s Nordstrom or whether it’s Carleton or Zappos, mine, which I’m kind of famous for spells mama m a, and the reason it spells mama, actually going back to Leonardo, my co-author, he’s Italian through and through. So we’re talking about how companies tend to be too legalistic when they’re trying to work with us. They’re like just the facts and blah, blah, blah. And we said, well, why don’t we make it sound like your mother or a quintessential Italian mother? And he said, well, my mom’s really not the right model. She was kind of tough, but let’s say this stereotype. And she’s like, oh my bambino, you hurt, you’re ouchie. Let me put a bandaid on it. Maybe here’s a lollipop. Rather than just the facts ma approach where we’re like, let me see, young man, were you wearing the crop

John Jantsch (09:46): Protective

Micah Solomon (09:46): Head gear before you had it out and so forth. So the first thing is to make time to listen. We are all such good troubleshooters that we kind of think we know the solution before our customer has even spoken. So let them vent and then it has some different aspects, but basically agree with your customer what you’re going to do and by when, and then do it. Now I think if you look at the unreasonable Google reviews or TripAdvisor, a high percentage of them are from people who never or customers. That’s

John Jantsch (10:18): So true.

Micah Solomon (10:20): If I get a one-star review for my book, which thank goodness I haven’t yet, it can be like, I ordered this from Amazon and they said it was out of stock,

John Jantsch (10:30): Right? I’ve gotten some bad reviews. It’s like the cover came in tattered. Well, you bought it from a third party, it was used. That’s, it’s really rough. So

Micah Solomon (10:40): If they’re a semi reasonable person and if you are able to figure out how to reach them,

John Jantsch (10:45): Then

Micah Solomon (10:45): Work with them. And when it’s all over, personally, I have no problem saying, Hey, do you think you could update that review? And some people will, and some people are just so lazy that they won’t. Now, I will tell you, some of my clients, or even people just friends of mine operate, let’s say a restaurant and they call me and they say, Hey Micah, I just, it’s horrible review, and I’m sure it was my competitors down the street. So I’m like,

John Jantsch (11:07): Okay,

Micah Solomon (11:07): Lemme look at the review. But it’s so specific. Clearly this is someone who’s eaten at the restaurant. So I’m like, it’s never the restaurant down the street, just like on the show a Sherlock, it’s never twins. The solution is never that. There’s two twins with the same

John Jantsch (11:23): Characters.

Micah Solomon (11:24): So by and large, it’s not your competitor. Certainly there are famous examples where it is, there is this horrible thing. The Mark is a wonderful hotel in New York, and there was this kid who was very, very abusive to them and started this social media campaign against it. But those are really, except

John Jantsch (11:41): Yes, I actually over the years, had a business one star review and it was like, that’s the competitor’s wife. It was a construction company. It was very obvious that it was, and Google to their credit removed it. But yeah, it is goofy what people do. Oh my goodness. You talk a lot about, and I know a lot of people who talk about customer experience being a real competitive advantage, particularly in one of those where it’s like, you sell this, they sell that you’re about the same price. You’re about to say price. I mean, talk a little bit about that idea of really viewing it as a profit center almost, or certainly as a true competitive advantage.

Micah Solomon (12:19): So it’s getting very commoditized out there. So how do you distinguish yourself? Well, maybe you’re lucky and you have an astonishing product nobody else has. Maybe you have, let’s say suites that are literally over the water in Aura. So you can have a great location or the first frick location for gas station, but most of us don’t have that.

John Jantsch (12:41): Most

Micah Solomon (12:41): Of us, the default is that we’re pretty interchangeable with our competitors. So customers will leave because they found a better price because someone else has a better website or seriously for no discernible reason at all. So how do you get out of this? Well, you have to become memorable, and you could do that with amazing advertising and marketing. I don’t want to dismiss that, but the thing is that great marketing only resonates if it’s true, right? There have been campaigns that were really clever, but the reality of being that customer wasn’t like that.

John Jantsch (13:19): So

Micah Solomon (13:19): You got to get the customer experience and then they will be become ideally loyal. A loyal customer is less price sensitive, and believe it or not, they’re more forgiving of your minor foibles, believe it or not. And if something goes terribly wrong, they will give you the courtesy of reaching out to you. So they’re also more open to any line extensions you have and they will become an ambassador for your brand. They’ll do what I like to call word of thumb marketing on their phones. So loyalty is very valuable and the customer experience is one of the ways to get there.

John Jantsch (13:57): I know for a fact that you talked about less price sensitive. I mean, I know that in some cases I’m paying more, but I’m like, I don’t care because the cost of the hassle or the cost of not having them know my name when I come into the store to me is high and I’m not alone. I’ve seen surveys as high as 90% of people surveyed saying they’ll pay more for a better experience. What role does community feedback play? I mean, getting that feedback, just like you went in Secret Shop, you told the C e o, this and this, but what role to actively asking your customers, are they getting what? Could you do something better? Could you provide a better service? Do you advocate that?

Micah Solomon (14:41): Well, certainly you want to be surveying your customers, but you got to do it really quickly and you have to not hound them if they don’t want to

John Jantsch (14:50): Reply. In

Micah Solomon (14:52): Fact, and this may not be true anymore, but a few years ago, Ritz Carlton was not only the highest on chip advisor in the luxury category, they were highest in any category. And so she told me, well, our secrets are two when we do a great job. Number two, I never hound customers to leave a review. I never solicit that. I don’t have a thing on the counter saying, please leave a review. So the people that leave a reviews are really passionate about us.

(15:20): Now, if you are going to survey people, number one, 80% of surveys are written completely wrong. If you want to write a perfect survey, look in my book, it’s there. If you are so impious or cheap that you don’t want to buy my book, then I think the best thing to do, well, you probably don’t own Apple products either, but if you own a couple products, look at their surveys, they’re pretty good. So what makes a survey good? Well, number one, you want to ask the most important question first, how satisfied are you with that? Then you get to the itty bitty Diddy was a bathroom cleaner, so forth, because if you ask was the bathroom clean and oh my God, you have the most clean bathrooms ever, like McDonald’s pride itself on, then that’s going to tint the rest of the survey or especially the next question that you ask.

(16:09): Or if your toilets are horrible, that’s going to have excessive weight. So first, ask their overall impression, then get into the smaller areas that you want them to talk about. When we have five, or I heard a clever argument for having four or six levels, the idea of using four or six is that there is no middle point. So you can’t be lazy in your hands. Don’t give them 10 and don’t ask them on a scale of one to 100 because customers shouldn’t have to do math for you. And so there are a few, but one thing I would say is if you are surveying your customers leave at least one blank space where they can vent or they can give very specific feedback. So that’s tip number one. Tip number two is you’ve got to scan them right away because if you’ve got an really upset customer and they write all about that, you need to get back to them right away. You can’t wait until the end of the month when you’re batching these and reading them. And that’s a mistake that a lot of companies make.

John Jantsch (17:10): Yeah, it’s funny. I think most people can forgive a mistake taking care of what they can’t forgive is doing a really bad job of taking care of it or ignoring it. It just makes it even worse. We’ve gotten, I can’t believe, 19 minutes into the show and I haven’t said ai. That’s awesome. I haven’t said AI yet. Let’s talk a little bit about how you see AI impacting this kind of arm of the marketing world of experience and service.

Micah Solomon (17:37): Well, it’s both early days and boy, things are changing quickly. I have a triangular model of AI in customer service. So at one Vertex, I’m going to use up my geometry training in a moment. One vertex is the customer or the prospect, and the next is the agent, and the third one is the ai. So a customer can come in using the ai. In fact, the best search engines on websites are AI powered. That may take care of them. If it doesn’t, then they’ll reach out to an agent. But when they get there, the mistake is to think no more AI should be involved. The customer’s going to keep using ai. I mean, they’re going to go on the thing that my mom calls the Google and look around. I know it’s really funny if she’s not your mom and they’re going to keep looking at Google and the agent is going to keep using the ai. AI is great at turning a generalist agent into temporarily a specialist when they’re answering a call.

John Jantsch (18:33): Yeah, yeah, I think, I mean I’ve even heard reports of people saying that they’re able to really get less experienced agents, less trained agents necessarily who have the right sort of spirit, who now have all the answers at their disposal as though they’ve been there for years. So I think it’s a win for everybody. I appreciate you coming to by and spending a few minutes with us. How can people contact you, find out about your work? Obviously get a copy of the book, Micah.

Micah Solomon (18:57): So to reach me, you can come to my website or just Google my name, but it is the challenging extremely biblical name. So it’s Micah, m i c a h at Micah Solomon, m i c a h s o l o m o n.com. If you want to email me, there are no a’s in Solomon or my website is a little easier, it’s micahsolomon.com, but you can just use Google and misspell my name. They’ll get you to me. I’ll get you to just

John Jantsch (19:27): Customer service expert. There you go.

Micah Solomon (19:30): To buy my book. There’ll be a link on my site, which will give you a free sample right away, but if you go to Voldemort’s site, oh, I’m sorry, Amazon site. It’s there, it’s available. They are shipping it now, and you can read a pretty long and pretty fabulous sample there before you decide to buy it.

John Jantsch (19:46): Yeah, awesome. Well, Mike, it was great catching up with you, just having you spend a few minutes on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road soon.

John (00:03): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Chris Gillebeau. He is an entrepreneur, writer, travel enthusiast, speaker, and podcaster. He has visited almost every country in the world, works independently and, motivates people to do the same and live a rewarding life by following their passion. His blog, the Art of Non-Conforming, has more than 300 views per month, and he’s also a super, super longtime fan of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and Duct Tape Marketing. He wrote that, I’m just reading what he wrote. Okay. And more recently published his latest book, Gonzo Capitalism, how to Make Money in An Economy That Hates You. So Chris, welcome back to the show.

Chris (00:48): Thank you. It’s been too long. Thanks for having me back. I am a longtime fan of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and the Duct Tape Marketing Empire, in fact.

John (00:55): Well, I want to start with the fact that I was feeling pretty good today, but then I learned that the economy hates me, and so I’m kind of tell me, I

Chris (01:04): Dunno that it hates you, John. I dunno that it hates you because you work for yourself and you have always been kind of on the forefront of helping people navigate self-employment and entrepreneurship and such. I think the subtitle of the book, how the Economy Hates You or How to Make Money in That Environment, I think it relates to how a lot of people are feeling resentful and critical of a system that they believe has a small number of winners and a large number of losers. A lot of young people obviously are graduating college or university with a tremendous amount of debt and not necessarily something on the other end to help pay that off. And it’s not just young people, it’s like young people of all ages we could say, who aren’t able to afford a mortgage who’ve been priced out of this economy. So there’s a lot of resentment and at the same time, there are a lot of opportunities for people to do something for themselves. So I don’t know that the economy hates you, but it does hate a lot of people, or at least a lot of people perceive that.

John (02:05): Yeah. And so you, I mean, I suppose the bear you are poking is a traditional, go get a job, work for a company, get a salary, hopefully climb the corporate ladder or whatever that means. I mean, is that the economy or that model I guess that you’re suggesting is at fault or at least that people are still pursuing that model?

Chris (02:26): Well, I feel like I’ve been poking that bear for a while. I feel like what’s different or what’s new in the past few years, I feel that everything about power and money, the dynamics of power, the perception of money, that is what has shifted for so many people. And so there’s a whole renegotiation of the employer-employee contracts, both formally in some ways with all this increased interest in unions, but also informally just with people embracing the great resignation and quiet quitting. There’s a whole chapter in the book about people who are doing this over employed thing where they’re working multiple full-time jobs remotely without either employer knowing about it. So they are kind of taking matters into their own hands. And these are not low paid workers, just to be clear, these are professionals who are earning six figure incomes often more than once, not

John (03:17): Punching a clock for anybody. So that

Chris (03:20): Exactly.

John (03:21): Yeah.

Chris (03:21): Right. So I think there’s a lot of changes that I’m just kind of pointing to. I think the bear has been poked, whether by me or anybody else.

John (03:29): Would you say that this is a American issue? I know you spend a lot of time in places outside of America or I mean, is that sort of a part of what’s informing you in this and that you’ve seen it happen or you’ve seen it operating better in other places?

Chris (03:45): That’s a great question. I was just in Canada all last week and a lot of these issues resonate there as well. I’ve done lots of travel as mentioned. I feel like it’s a global issue. We’re so connected these days. Social movements might start in one place, but then kind of quickly extrapolate elsewhere and such. So I don’t know that I would say it’s particularly American. Maybe in some ways it’s magnified here just by population size and the number of people who are leaving in droves to do something different and such. But I think all over the world people have interest in these kinds of things.

John (04:16): Maybe a level of entitlement that exists here probably adds to the anxiety perhaps

Chris (04:21): Maybe. But I mean, you could kind of pick at that a little bit and say, okay, it’s entitlement, but is it really entitlement or is it more just a general expectation of investment? If I invest tens of thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars in my education, is it reasonable to expect that I’m going to be able to use that in a way that’s going to hopefully pay that back at some point? And if I shouldn’t, maybe I should just adjust my expectations then. But if I adjust my expectations, then I should do something different.

John (04:53): I wasn’t really going to go down this path, but you’ve mentioned it a couple of times now, so I want to delve into that a little bit. Should we not be going to college? I mean, should we not be sending our kids to college?

Chris (05:02): Oh, I mean, I think it depends on what you want to study, what you want to do in life. It’s not should or shouldn’t. I think it’s like should you blindly go to college without any other goal or path? Maybe if that’s your situation, maybe do something different. Take a gap year. That’s a wonderful thing for people traveling and doing different stuff or volunteering. There’s all kinds of opportunities.

John (05:22): Yeah. Well, I still don’t know what I want to do in life, so I can’t imagine that having that answer. Of course. So all good business books, you quote Nicki Minaj, I think, and you’re specifically, I think pointing to this novelty as currency. I wonder if you could unpack that one for us.

Chris (05:41): I think the quote from Nick Minaj is, if I’m fake, I ain’t noticed because my money, and I think during the pandemic in particular, we saw, we’ve talked about power a little bit, but in the money side there was more than a trillion dollars of stimulus money. And there are all these digital currencies that we’re launching all the time and people asking questions about what actually is money, John, if you and I create our own currency and then one other person comes along and buys it, have we then created a market of millions and millions of dollars worth of value, or is that all just completely made up and at what point does it become not made up if five people buy it, if 10 people buy it, and so on? So I think a lot of people are thinking differently about that. So that’s like if I’m fake, well, I don’t know. My money is not fake, or at least it’s as fake as anybody else’s money. It’s as real as anybody else’s money. So that’s some of what I’m trying to look at.

John (06:36): So in some ways, when I read, especially the examples that you cite in the book of people doing some really out of the box things, I mean, it feels like just an amplified continuation of your art, of nonconforming. I mean, you’ve really been talking about alternative ways to make a living for a long time, and a lot of them a hundred dollars startup, I mean, that was all about like, Hey, you don’t have to go this path. You can go this path. So has something changed particularly in the last three or four years that really gives it the Gonzo label?

Chris (07:09): I think there are two things. I think number one, the pace or the scale of it has changed. Things happen quicker. Now, I think you and I, for what, 15 years or so, we’re building up our email lists and hopefully we got a decent number of people on them, but now they’re lots of 15 year olds who have millions of followers on TikTok. And it just happens. It just happens so quickly. I told the story in the book about Miss Excel. You probably know her name’s Katt Norton. She’s selling these Microsoft Excel training courses and she’s making multiple millions of dollars from these courses. And this has been built up in a very, very quick period of time. So pace and scale I think is quite different. And the second thing is the decentralized nature of it, or at least the ability for some things to be decentralized.

(07:57): So like I say in the book, I’ve been doing e-commerce stuff for 25 years, or at least I used to do e-commerce, and when I started I was like 19 years old and I thought, oh, everything is for sale now. And this is so easy. This is free market for the whole world and such. But in a lot of ways it was still very centralized. You still had to have a merchant account from your bank. You had to go through various approvals and gatekeepers and such. It’d be able to take credit cards. And so I used to say on the internet, nobody cares if you’re a teenager, but you really had to have your parents or somebody helping you gain access to things. Whereas now there’s lots of networks with blockchain and other things where people can just do whatever they want and nobody, there isn’t somebody that’s giving approval or disapproval to certain things. And that’s true across venture capital and lots of other, it’s true across social movements. I look at some of that in the book as well. So decentralization is the second point.

John (08:53): So I think the cutting edge of folks that you talk about in this book and that I think are going to really take this book and go, yeah, I can go do something different, I think are a lot of individuals in many cases that are just, I don’t know, is exploiting the right word, exploiting the TikTok algorithm or universe that’s out there. Can, and maybe I’m jumping ahead of myself, but what would you advise what I would call more traditional businesses or even heaven forbid, enterprises could learn from essentially these new ways?

Chris (09:25): Yeah. Well, I mean on that exploiting point, I mean I think the algorithm exploits us. Mostly the exploitation is going the other way around. So if somebody’s able to figure out a tip or a trick or a hack or something that works, I think good for them. As for enterprises, I think the best enterprises are open to new ideas. They have their mission and their vision. I think that’s very important. I think it’s good to not just pursue every trend or tangent, but at the same time you want to recognize when the world changes. We have to change. And throughout history, there’ve been various shifts that have endured. There’s things that happened that are kind of small change, but then there’s the agrarian revolution and the industrial revolution and such. And so I think this is kind of the money revolution in the sense that there is a little bit of a before and after and you can choose to remain blind to it.

(10:17): And people do that in times of change and that’s fine. But I think people who really want to thrive, and again, people can be leaders of an enterprise organization or a company, then they are kind of saying, okay, what are the skills I need to build for this new economy? I mean, AI is changing everything and we don’t want to drop everything in our business to focus on the latest thing. It could end up just being like the metaverse, but I don’t know, I think five years from now, things are going to be quite different than they are now. And so you want to adapt to that. You want to be open.

John (10:49): I do have some NFTs I’d like to sell you.

Chris (10:51): Do you really? Are they 95% off now?

John (10:54): So that does beg the question because a lot of people jump in, I don’t know if we’re going to call ’em early movers or whatever they are, but N F T five years ago, three years ago, you couldn’t talk to somebody without that being then it was crypto, you already dropped ai the conversation. So do you run the risk or does it matter of, I already mentioned novelty as currency. A lot of these ideas are novelty that will go away. So do we run the risk of chasing after the next thing instead of building something that maybe has some measure of legacy?

Chris (11:27): Sure. Yeah, no, it’s great. I think a couple of things. So most of my work is for individuals. It’s not for companies. I’m always thinking about that person out there, and if you know your life mission, first of all, I have great clarity on what I’m supposed to do and build, then I think you shouldn’t listen to anybody or pay attention to anything, just go and do that thing. But a lot of people are not in that place, and it takes a long time to come to that place. And so I think it’s perfectly reasonable to experiment and do different stuff. I also think with some of the stories in the book, there’s a story of the guy who’s a sleep flu and he gets paid to sleep or actually not sleep because people are waking him up throughout the night. This is being streamed on Twitch and he’s got this bedroom that he’s hooked up with all these digital distractions.

(12:12): He’s making $50,000 a month doing this, so is he going to be doing it for the rest of his life? Probably not. But number one, it’s $50,000 a month. He’s this young guy from Australia. That’s pretty cool. Number two, it’s a crazy story. He’s going to have the story for the rest of his life if he stops doing it tomorrow. He’s got this story. He’s built these skills. He’s learned about streaming. He’s learned how to build this whole thing where lights and sirens are attached to talk transactions and things. The skills that you acquire now, the foundation you build is going to be relevant. It is going to be relevant for whatever happens next.

John (12:43): Yeah, that’s a really great point. I mean, there’s learning in everything that we do, isn’t there?

Chris (12:48): Absolutely. Absolutely. I think the learning process is just as valuable as whatever the outcome is.

John (12:53): Chris, in many ways, your Gonzo capitalism play kind of started with your blog and with writing I think, and content has still today, obviously books or a big part of it, content today is still a big part of yours. Do you think content is one of those plays that really does have a very, very long life, that it’s certainly not over, it’s not done, it’s still something someone could jump into today?

Chris (13:15): Man, I hope so, John. I mean, because that’s my world. That’s our world. I mean, I’m kind of biased there because that’s what want to write books and make the podcast. And I mean, that to me is I still think that valuable messages are worth sharing and can reach an audience for sure.

John (13:32): If somebody were going to jump into it. I mean, a lot of times people will say, well, you got in when it was hot thing and you built your audience. But if I wanted to start the day, what would I have to do?

Chris (13:43): Yeah. I mean, I guess I feel like on that point, everything I’ve started, I always felt like I was late when I started blogging. I thought I was really late because I saw a bunch of people that had been doing it before me. And when I started the podcasts or the podcast, it’s just one of them. I started six years ago and I was like, man, I’m really, really late for the podcast world guys. You had been doing it for a long time. So I’m not too convinced by the too late kind of argument. But as we’re starting now, I guess I’m not sure if it’s any different. It’s not so much capitalizing on being early with something. What do you hope to do that’s hopefully a little bit different than somebody else? And at least who do you hope to help with it? What is the message and what kind of clarity can you offer?

John (14:23): You’re write about gamers earning digital currency, the whole virtual reality world. If I’m looking for ideas that are going to be the next whatever, big thing, where do you recommend people go or how do they get exposure to some creative ideas like that?

Chris (14:41): Yeah, so they start with their own skills. Start with your own skills, your own set of knowledge. Make a list of not just things that you’re excited about or passionate about, but things that you’re good at, things that you have knowledge in. Try to look for some things that are a little bit lesser known. Don’t just think about your formal education, your traditional career path. Think about whatever else it could be. And so for video games, there’s a whole chapter in the book about blockchain video games. I kind of got immersed into this world and spent a lot of time like buying different gaming assets. There’s this whole world now where there are video games that are also financial marketplaces. So it’s a game in the sense that you’re competing against other players, but you’re also investing real money. And so once you have your skills and your talents, then it’s like, what is out there? What is out there that I could find? Reddit is a great source of that. Look at Reddit, look at other networks.

John (15:31): One of the categories you write about in this book that I found kind of fascinating is something you call prediction markets.

Chris (15:37): Talk

John (15:38): About that one. But then also maybe how would, again, I can’t call ’em traditional businesses, I’m not sure what else

Chris (15:44): You

John (15:44): Call, but how would businesses take a little bit of a cue from the folks that are playing in that market?

Chris (15:50): So I experimented a lot for this book. Each chapter of the book is kind of an experiment and what happened, how much money was involved and what the outcome was and such. I won some, I lost some. And one of the things I did was this world of prediction market where people can bet on anything. So everybody knows about the stock market. They know you can bet on sports, but you can also bet on Drake’s next album on how many streams it’s going to get. I bet on the T Ss a checkpoint line, how many people are going to go through security tomorrow or whatever day? I bet on Brittany Spear’s conservatorship case, I made $200 off that. So all kinds of things. If you want to get into it, there’s a lot of platforms. One is called Predict It, predict it.org. Another one’s called Calci, K A L S H I K A L, SS H I, poly Market. There’s a few different ones you can kind of go and experiment. As for traditional businesses, I don’t know. I think this is just something to be aware of that in the future, the very near future, anyone anywhere will be able to bet on anything. And that is different than it’s ever been before. There’s always been a lot of regulation about that. And so that could affect all sorts of different events

John (16:53): Growing up in the age when Pete Rose got thrown out of baseball for betting on James now, and that’s Bangs is now the number one sponsor of every sport. Isn’t that crazy?

Chris (17:02): That’s right. That’s right.

John (17:04): So I know you have a ton of stories in here, and this is always an unfair question, but do you have a favorite that you illustrate in the book?

Chris (17:11): Oh, that’s good. That’s good. Favorite cloud story? Well, I always like these wild and wacky ones. There’s a story of a British teenager who made $400,000 naming Chinese babies. She was giving English names to Chinese parents, and her goal was to pay for university. Obviously she covered that in a little bit more. So there’s a lot of stories that are kind of like one-offs, but I guess there’s also a chapter about online education of just maybe more normal people who are just like, they had an idea, they kind of got good at something. But there’s a woman named Whitney who taught outdoor education survival skills, and she got famous from being on a reality TV show, but then she got a little bit of famous, but then she really built a sustainable business around teaching women and others, but particularly women, these outdoor survival skills. And so I thought that was really interesting.

John (18:03): Well, Chris, it was great having you stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You want to tell people where they can connect with you if they like, or obviously find a copy of Gonzo Capitalism.

Chris (18:12): Yeah, John, thank you so much. It’s been too long and I’m really glad to come back. So it’s Chris Gibo, chris gibo.com, 1 93 countries on Instagram, or the podcast is called Side Hustle School.

John (18:23): Yeah, and don’t worry about spelling Gibo. We will.

Chris (18:26): Thank you. Thank you, sir. I appreciate that.

John (18:28): Awesome. Well, again, it was great catching up with you, and hopefully we’ll run it to you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Chris (18:33): Okay. I look forward to it. Thanks, man. I appreciate you.

John Jantsch (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Christie Horseman. It’s over 10 years experience in the B two B and B two C SaaS based. She is the director, mother and teacher based in Vancouver, British Columbia currently serves as the VP of marketing at Thinkific, a software platform that enables entrepreneurs to create, market, sell, and deliver their own online courses. And she also writes about marketing for Entrepreneur Magazine. So Christie, welcome to the show.

Christie Horsman (00:40): Thank you so much, John. I’ve been a listener for many years, so it’s very exciting for me to be here.

John Jantsch (00:46): Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate you listening for many years. Many I

Christie Horsman (00:51): Know.

John Jantsch (00:52): So you recently wrote an article and it appeared in Entrepreneur Magazine, four Ways to Create Four Ways Creators Are Revolutionizing Marketing and How Big Brands Can Benefit. So let’s start there a little bit because we are really going to talk about change in marketing, change in B two B marketing. I want to bring in the whole creator topic. So it seemed like that just kind of teed it up for us. So talk a little bit about the primary point you were trying to get across in that article.

Christie Horsman (01:20): Yeah, I think that just coming from my career in B two B marketing and the way the B two B marketing has evolved over time, and one of the biggest, I think impacts to B two B marketing and how people are approaching it today has been through the creator economy and just the change in marketing because you have so many people that are able to open their phone and talk to their audience, talk to people, talk about their point of view, talk about their passion, their unique genius, and how companies are scrambling to get into that mindset of what the creator brings to their marketing tactics and their business and what that means for businesses that have typically been a little stiffer in their marketing.

John Jantsch (02:08): So let’s define a term there. You used the term creator economy, and I’m guessing it’s a pretty buzzy term, but I’m also guessing there’s a lot of confusion about what that means or misconceptions even frankly about what that means. So how do you define that or how do you define that as being maybe different than traditional economic models?

Christie Horsman (02:28): Yeah, so I think there’s a lot of, I’ve read, heard being in part of the creator economy ourselves at think of it, and there’s a lot of definitions out there of what it is and the way that we define it and the way that I kind of look at it is anybody who is out there really using their unique genius, their unique point of view to influence, to attract, to create either a community, a group of people, an audience or sell something through that community or audience. So it’s really just, I think a lot of people would say are creators, are you see these YouTube creators? Are they entertainers or are they educators? And actually think of it, we look at these two categories and define them as such. There are people that are out there that are just creating for the sake of entertainment purposes, which is amazing. And then there’s people out there that are creating for education, and that’s how we kind of look at the lens of the creator economy. I think last time I read, and I think it was in a Forbes article a couple of weeks ago, there was this estimate of what are the creator economy worth? And it’s somewhere between a hundred billion to 700 billion, which is depending on how you define those people that are within it, but it’s growing every day, obviously with the advent of social media.

John Jantsch (03:44): So I think for a lot of people, they see some of the folks that are really doing what seem kind of goofy things that are getting them a lot of attention and maybe making them a lot of money. And I’m sure that big brands B brands particularly are looking at that and going, well, that’s not for us necessarily. So what is the lesson that might come to play that would be practical, usable, relevant for that B two B brand particularly?

Christie Horsman (04:09): Yeah, and I think exactly when you look at, I always look at Mr. Beast for instance, and brands aren’t going to go out there and start trying to jump 1300 motorcycles in a row or something like that, and so do something crazy. But what the dilution, if you bring it down to it that even creator entertainers and educators have in common is it’s this human element. It’s this trusted element and it’s something that brands like big brands really have always been striving for, right? To be that trusted brand, to have that element of yes, come to us for the product or service that you want or need. And it really boils down to that human and that trustworthy element. They’re putting themselves out there so much. We know so much about these creators and they’ve created this humanity as part of towards their audience, as part of their brand that big brands really need to look at and say, how do I emulate this? How do I bring this into our messaging and our core values?

John Jantsch (05:11): So it seems to me there would be a couple logical paths if somebody’s saying, yeah, that’s kind of a missing piece of ours. Obviously they could go create their own connection of some form to their, they’re not fans yet. I guess it would be their customers even or their community. But also a lot of brands are exploring, let’s get one of those influencers, if you will, or somebody that’s a creator that has a big audience, let’s get them associated with our brand. Is there a better way? Are there pitfalls to one way or the other?

Christie Horsman (05:43): Yeah, I think the only pitfalls I see when looking for, I think hiring creator influencers to represent your brand is great. I think that it’s a great way to bridge and find a new audience. If you understand your core customer, where your core customer is digesting content and who they’re looking up to and the creator sphere, it’s a great way to bridge that and gain that new audience. I think where sometimes it falls flat. And this is where again, that kind of trusted component is a lot of the times creators, we always say, they say it’s an ad, they say it’s sponsored and everyone knows that it’s a sponsored deal. And that’s how creators, realistically, a lot of creators make the majority of their money is through these big brand sponsorships. And lately we’ve seen some of that fall off as brands have pulled back a little bit because they’re seeing that, yeah, it’s great for eyeballs, but maybe it’s not always driving the sales they want to see. And so I think that it’s definitely important to align yourself with creators that align with your values and that make sense for your brand. But I would also say that for brands to take the tactics that creators are using and try to employ them themselves to create more of an authentic humanized element for their brand without having to go through that creator or that third party. Right.

John Jantsch (07:05): One of the hallmarks I suppose of a popular influencer or creator is it’s basically personal branding. I mean, they’ve gone out there and established themselves as a voice that does this, or as a person that does this or a person who shares amazing information or how to stuff on a certain topic, how does a brand really adopt that mentality? Because I think that’s real tricky for ’em, isn’t it?

Christie Horsman (07:33): And I think that’s where people have gotten stuck a lot of the time. They think that, and especially I think when we think of B2B traditionally has been very broad strokes in terms of our marketing. We’re trying to capture a broad audience. We’re also trying to be a little bit elusive because we really actually just want you to talk to our sales team who’s going to get you more details. And I think that we need to go away from that and what the creator brings and what brands can start to emulate in terms of tactics are when we think about creating that human element and connection, it’s really about, I’ve seen companies use their employees in a lot of their advertising, for instance, and not just for hiring for actual campaigns. We did this actually last year with our Meet the CSS campaign and we wanted to humanize our customer service team, and we used actual customer service reps in the campaign.

(08:27): And I’ve seen other brands do this where they’re like, look, we’re not good at commercials and we’re not good about talking about this, but what we are good at is actually being customer service reps and here’s why. But it humanizes the brand because you’re bringing in that element of people. And that’s the thing that the creator does is they bring themselves the creator’s life story, their family, sometimes their kids, their dog. And the more that you can do that as a company with your employees to bring them to the forefront really humanizes the brand because it is a company, but it’s also a company that’s made up of actual people with actual lives.

John Jantsch (09:02): That’s one

Christie Horsman (09:02): Way that I see.

John Jantsch (09:04): We’ve certainly for the last few years, particularly as hiring has become more challenging for a lot of companies, we’ve really put their employee or employer branding on the forefront of marketing just because it’s a great marketing message too. I mean, the fact that you have employees that love where they work probably is a good marketing message as well. Not to mention that they obviously are on the front lines of really interacting with customers anyway. So I think a lot of people, I’m thinking makeup for example. A lot of makeup is sold directly to consumers through the creator economy. It’s probably one of the bigger categories. So that model has that model. As B2B folks try, I mean that’s typically a B2C play. They’re not trying to sell to stores. So as that model really something that is influencing or maybe even blurring the lines, there used to be the, oh, I sell only b2b. I mean a lot of marketers are like, I’m a B2B marketer, or I’m a B2C marketer. And sort of blurring the lines now because a lot of the same ideas are being employed, authenticity, personal branding, those things.

Christie Horsman (10:11): And I think the makeup one’s such a good example because it really did open the doors for people to say, this is how I apply this, this is how I do this, this is how I use this. And you can actually see a foundation go on in a video using real people. And I think the interesting thing that how I’ve seen it kind of manifest in B two B has been in the veil being lifted on the product or service that you’re selling. So for instance, I think I’ve seen a couple companies, ourselves included, we’ve played with this a little bit and I think that we have to get better at it. Everyone does, but it’s offering real people those customer stories of how they’re using the product, what does the product look like on the inside, showing more of the product upfront and having real customers talk about it in an unfiltered way.

(11:01): We’ve done this in terms of LinkedIn lives where we just have customers come on and talk about their journey and their company or their personal brand and then how they use the product. And we actually show the product being used. And I think that it’s bridging. We have to figure out how to open that door a little bit more. But it is, I think that’s the transition where we’re saying, look, we not having this, you’re not going to see the product until you’ve had three or four sales calls. We’ll finally show you the product. It’s like, no, we’re going to show you the product up upfront. It’s in our marketing, it’s right here. And it’s being used by real people.

John Jantsch (11:36): It is probably an antiquated terminology, but I think it still means something. But a lot of B two B brands used to spend some money sampling, for example, spend some money on getting directly to the consumer, even though that consumer was only going to go to the store now and ask for the product. So we used to call that pulling sales as opposed to pushing sales. So does the idea of this creator economy that way apply, in other words, get exposure for your product even though you’re then going to tell them go to Macy’s and get it, or whatever, wherever it’s sold?

Christie Horsman (12:08): Yeah, I think that it’s one of the, it’s for me, I think that’s one of the best things about the creator economy is that they’re bringing that audience in. They’re pulling people in and bringing that audience in, that’s the right fit audience. So again, finding the right creator to pair with based on your brand, your objectives, your product service. But from a B two B perspective, it’s even, I think more important because a lot of these companies have such a core ideal customer profile that if you know it, you can go out there and really pull people in with interesting content through these creators because they’re talking about it. And I think about, for us, we talk a lot to people in customer education and these roles and people that run these communities where customer educators are living and talking about their day-to-day problems of how do I make this content? How do I create these programming? And so we’re going out there and trying to pull those people back in into the conversation through those creator communities that they’re building with these really engaged audiences.

John Jantsch (13:13): Alright, let’s talk about R O I or metrics in general. I think because initially sort of a creator economy plays have kind of focused on engagement and building community and things that sometimes are hard to measure. I think that those have obviously, I think people are putting metrics to those, but what do you say to a B2B person that’s just like, how’s that going to move the needle?

Christie Horsman (13:37): Yeah, so I think even I have struggled in the past with, we love working with some of these creators, but to your point, the measurement of the metric that we’re trying to move is brand awareness, which we all know is you can try and try to put some numbers to it, but eventually that there’s something there that you can’t quite measure. So what we like to do is when we’re working with creators or we’re thinking about working with these communities, for instance, we love to think about depending on what it is, but for instance, we held a community kind of roundup event where it was like a mingle event and then it was a bit of a, let’s talk about round table kind of topics and the R O I on events like that. For me, obviously there’s an element of just getting the brand out there and having those conversations, but it’s also about how many people are coming in and actually wanting to have a conversation.

(14:33): So thinking about how many conversations the sales team was able to capture, how many net new names do we get on to our list? And then going all the way down is obviously how are we making that into a sale and tracing that back into these events that we hold. A lot of it’s around influence pipe that influence pipe number for b2b. And then a lot of it for some of our creators is we have a really excellent affiliate program, so we entice them to bring people in and sign them up with the product on our self-serve side. And we have really great payouts on that affiliate side. So that’s kind of the two sides of it. There’s definitely, again, that middle layer of brand awareness. How do we measure that? And obviously we look at things like media and share of voice, but we try to think about that influence pipe on the B2B side and then thinking about that we have those hard numbers on the affiliate side of how we’re driving signups.

John Jantsch (15:25): So think if it naturally was created as a tool for the creator economy. I mean a lot of influencers, a lot of creators needed beyond YouTube, they needed a paywall and they needed ability to have courses and to expand access to them in a paid way. What are you seeing? So I think that it’s well established. That’s a great tool for that. So what are you telling or what would you tell B two B brands now who are like, well, we don’t courses. Does that make sense for us? What would you tell them in terms of their creation?

Christie Horsman (16:03): And to start on how Thinkific was our founder, we actually have a really great founder story, a creator himself. He has a course that’s still today, you can take it, it’s an LSAT prep course. That’s how it started. And he wanted to be able to educate the massive sounds

John Jantsch (16:15): Awful.

Christie Horsman (16:16): Yeah, I know. But that was how we started. And so we really have been through the pandemic, we went through this boom and then we started thinking companies really could benefit from having courses to expand their reach to their customers. And I always think about this when we talk to companies on sales calls even and say, look, do you want to have customers or do you want to have fans? Do you want to have people who are extremely loyal and engaged with your brand? And the way you can do that is through customer education programs, you’re educating your customers to better use your product. You’re creating exclusive communities sometimes in this case. So you’re creating these fans that are incredibly loyal to your company and your brand and that eventually are going to a create more word of mouth and better referrals for your company. But also you’re creating a very loyal group of customers that are fully educated in your product, which is some B2B SaaS. One of the trickiest things is getting people to make sure that they’re using your product when your customers buy it. So

John Jantsch (17:22): More features they use a less churn. Right,

Christie Horsman (17:24): Exactly. And I think in today’s economy too, we see that acquiring customers right now is tough. And so you want to keep the customers you have. And one of the best ways to do that is through customer education programs. We’ve got really good example is Hootsuite, which is a social media management software, and they have Hootsuite Academy and they have built Hootsuite Academy from just a few courses on social media certification to this is a standalone revenue set for them outside of their core. So they’ve got a secondary line of revenue and they’re driving customer loyalty, customer education within the product, but the actual users, end users of their product. But they’re also, they’ve created this certification where it’s like, Hey, I’m Hootsuite certified. I am ready to be your social media manager. So it’s this twofold. And I think for me, when I see companies like that be so successful, and we have a lot of really great customer stories around that, I’m like, why aren’t all companies doing this? Take this education piece that’s happening and bring it into your B2B customers. It just makes sense. And you see that success.

John Jantsch (18:33): Yeah, I think you make a great point. I’ve been using for years when I talk about the customer journey, for many people it stops at buy, but certainly content stops at buy quite often. And I think you’re right. I mean even if it’s just orientation and onboarding and then obviously through what you said, repeat business and referral business, those are great reasons to create content. And obviously that’s a whole category of content that most businesses aren’t even thinking about. You also mentioned a couple times, and I think that B2B brands are really waking up to this idea of community. I think a lot of brands are waking up to this idea of community because for the reason you said it’s sometimes tougher to get eyeballs or keep customers and community is one of the greatest ways to do it. How would you use a platform like Thinkific really as a community model? I mean, there’s a lot of community tools coming up. Circle is one, for example. How is Thinkific addressing, because I believe you were created as a pure content creation and not necessarily as a community tool. How are you addressing that engagement amongst members?

Christie Horsman (19:40): So because we saw when we were, to your point, coming up through content engagement, online education, really that learning management software tool, we saw early on that community was such a hand in hand thing with these groups of people that were wanting to learn together to take courses together. And even if in an on-demand setting, you’re by yourself, community was a way for people could talk about it and learn more and discuss. So we launched our own community product last year and it’s been such a great add-on for both our creator educators, which we call our B two C side, as well as some of our B two B customers, which we call ’em think fake plus because it does bind those people together and it gives you a place where you as a company or you as a creator can kind of moderate the conversation and create more engagement post courses.

(20:35): Because a lot of the time you’re taking an on-demand course, you’re sitting your home by yourself, you don’t get that engagement. The community is a way to bridge that engagement aspect. And it’s been really exciting to see. I actually love our think of a community. I’m in it almost daily talking to our creators because it’s just such an interesting place to be. And one thing for us being obviously B2B and B2C SaaS, we launch a lot of products in there. First we’ll put stuff in there and then we make that exclusive feeling for our community, but also we’re getting such amazing intel back from them as the end users of the product.

John Jantsch (21:12): Yeah, I’m sure more and businesses will wake up to this, but I’ve certainly seen it firsthand. We certify agencies in our methodology and they go through and they love it. They get a lot of great training, but we have agencies that have been with us 10 years and they’ll tell you point blank, I stay for the community. I don’t need John and his team anymore. I stay because I’ve made friends here. And I think that’s a huge element for business, isn’t

Christie Horsman (21:35): It? It’s that peer to peer communication that they get that’s hosted by, if you’re smart, it’s hosted by you. The other thing is, I think a lot of companies don’t realize is there are communities out there about their product or service, and if they’re not in the conversation, it’s happening without them.

John Jantsch (21:52): Yeah, absolutely. That’s great point for good or bad. Right. So Chris, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the show. You want to tell people where they can connect with you and find out more, a little more about what we talked about today?

Christie Horsman (22:03): Yeah, so I’m obviously on LinkedIn. It’s Christie Horseman, VP of Marketing at Thinkific. If you’re looking for Christie Horseman’s and you can always come over to thinkific.com, you can check out the products and service there. And also we’ve got links on there to our social and our communities, which all of my team run. So I’m always hopping in our community if you need to, you want to join there as well.

John Jantsch (22:24): Awesome. Again, I appreciate you taking a moment and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road in beautiful Vancouver.

Christie Horsman (22:32): Thank you so much, John. Appreciate the opportunity.

John (00:09): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Ann Janzer. She’s a non-fiction book coach and author of multiple books on writing and marketing, human behavior and cognitive science fascinate her and she is always searching for clues to improve our communication. We’re going to talk about our newest book, the Writer’s Voice Techniques for Tuning Your Tone and Style. So Ann, welcome back to the show.

Ann (00:38): Thanks for having me back, John. It’s great being here.

John (00:40): So let’s talk a little bit, obviously voice and style, tone and style, writer’s voice. I know prior to you writing your own books, you started writing other people’s books, basically writing in other people’s voices, right? And tones. Would you say that that kind of developed your fascination with this idea of voice?

Ann (00:58): It was actually. So I haven’t done ghostwriting for books. I’ve done one book, but it was my marketing career. I was a freelance marketer and every week I’d pop over to a new company and try to figure out how to write in their brand voice. And sometimes actually fairly often with the small companies, I would define the brand voice for them. And then as blogs came out, I started ghost writing for executives, blog posts and interviews and all kinds of stuff. So that definitely piqued my interest in writing voice and it taught me a lot and it got me interested in the topic. I think it’s the most neglected and misunderstood part of the writing craft, but there are four groups of people that pay a lot of attention. Ghost writers, obviously poets care a lot about voice fiction writers because they’re trying to get their characters voices and marketers, marketers because they really care how they show up to their customer as part of that relationship with is the brand voice.

John (01:56): So would you say that you feel like, yes, I have a voice, I know what it is, maybe I haven’t perfected it, but I mean I know when I’m doing it,

Ann (02:06): I feel there’s a lot of talk about finding your authentic voice and I think voices are like shoes. There are shoes that fit us really, really well, but I wouldn’t wear my hiking shoes to the opera. I think we should be able to pull on the right one for the right occasion, and we almost know how to do that instinctively if we’re intentional about it. So yeah, when I first set out to write my first book, all of a sudden I was writing in my own voice and not the customers and the first draft started coming out just too much like a corporate it. There was some. So I had to keep going back and it wasn’t really until I got the second and the third edition of that book that I really got comfortable in. What’s my writing voice for a book? What part of me do I want to be? How do I want to show up for people there? What do they need to hear from me?

John (02:56): And just as a writer, would you say that that’s something that matures in people? I know I started really first writing seriously 30 years ago, and I look back at some of that now and it’s awful. And not to say that my writing is brilliant today, but it’s certainly changed.

Ann (03:16): I do. I think even if you were writing in a voice that feels authentic and comfortable for the situation, we change, we develop our speaking voices age over time. So why wouldn’t our writing voices change as well? Yeah, I do think so.

John (03:29): For me, I’ll just use myself as an example. I became more authentic when I became more confident in my writing because I wasn’t as worried about using big words or whatever it was I was trying to do. So let’s talk a little bit about some of the early mistakes somebody might make when they’re trying to find a voice.

Ann (03:45): Sure. Yeah. So one thing we do is we try to write the people around us and then we’re not really comfortable. It’s like wearing shoes that don’t fit quite right. I think other people can tell we’re walking funny because our shoes aren’t fitting quite right. So I keep going back to the shoe metaphor. I don’t know why. But yeah, so people think, well, I want to be an expert, so I’m going to show up with the big words. That’s the most common thing I see. And that just backfires so badly with the reader if they’re not familiar with those words or you’re just making them do extra cognitive work. And I’d rather have them focused on my ideas and not my sentence structures or not my vocabulary. So that’s a really common mistake. I think too often people think, oh, I’m going to write a book now, or I’m going to write this important essay and I’m going to put on my serious writer hat and I’m going to try to think back to what I did in college and I’m going to do long sentences and I’m going to really try to uplevel it.

(04:40): And that almost always backfires. It’s not comfortable. It’s hard for the reader and it doesn’t give them really good sense of who you are because you’re putting on something that may not feel legit to who you are,

John (04:53): Right or wrong. There’s a lot of advice out there, particularly in writing for business circles that talks about writing at the eighth grade level or something like that, whatever the level is supposed to be, somewhere less than you might write your college essay type of work. Does that show up in voice, first off? Is that valid? And secondly, does that show up as part of voice?

Ann (05:13): So first, I think it is valid in the sense that most marketing writing, it’s not that your customers are dumb or don’t have college degrees, but they’re reading it on their phone while they’re in line for a Starbucks, for heaven sakes, how

John (05:24): Much don’t make me work,

Ann (05:26): Don’t make them work too much. And this is so true. If you’re writing an email, my goodness, just highlight the things you want people to do with it. So yes, so I think the eighth grade thing is valid. The really interesting thing, and there’s a chapter in the book on this, is that most of those grade level things are based on two factors and two factors only. How long your words are, how many syllables there are in a word, and how many words there are per sentence. And so if you just go to some shorter words and shorter sentences, your grade level goes, and so you think, well, is that a legitimate measure? But I think it is because longer sentences make us keep more working memory involved in a sentence before we can close it and compute the idea. So I think that’s legit. So that was part

John (06:08): One. Anyone who’s edited my work over the years, I use a lot of parenthetical phrases and they just are always cutting those out. Darn it.

Ann (06:17): I am also a huge fan of the parenthetical and you know what, you do what you need to do in your first draft and then you can tune it and revision.

John (06:25): So I’m curious about this idea of selecting voice. I tend to think I write the same voice no matter what I’m writing, but that may or may not be true. But is there kind of like I’m going to choose this voice today, I’m going to choose this voice today dependent upon the situation, or are we really that flexible?

Ann (06:41): Well, we are flexible to some degree. I mean, if you were writing something to a third grade classroom, I’m going to say you would write it differently a little bit. I mean, our relationship with the people we’re communicating with voice is just, writing is just another kind of human communication, and we have some native skills for that. What I want people to do is think about being intentional about the choices they make about how they’re showing up just because this is comfortable way for you to write and it’s the way you’ve always written. Is this what the reader needs from you in this situation? Do they maybe need more encouragement and less expertise or vice versa? I mean, what does the reader need? And then you can lean into that part of your natural human communication skills.

John (07:23): I was going to talk about the reader. Obviously every reader would probably interpret voice differently. I mean, somebody reads Cormick McCarthy, for example, differently. Probably not everybody gets the same thing out of that. So how much responsibility do we have to start with the reader?

Ann (07:38): Yeah, well if we think about it, the voice is reconstructed in the reader’s head. It doesn’t really live in the page. It only lives when it lands in the reader. And to some extent, that’s a little bit out of our control. Someone can show up in a really bad mood and just say, your voice sounds like this or that, and we’ve all had bad reviews of something. Maybe it’s like, wow, okay, I never saw that in there, but okay, you did. So we can be intentional and try to help the reader find it in the way that we hope that they will, that will be most helpful to them. I cited a study in the book, which I think is really, really interesting and it would be interesting to reflect on is when you read silently, a lot of people, they kind of have a little inner reading voice. They’re actually narrating to themselves silently and quickly, but they’re narrating. And I’ve talked to people about this and some people are like, oh yeah, I think it’s my voice. Or if I know the author, it’s their voice. But people kind of hear a voice. So your voice in writing doesn’t really belong to you. It belongs to the reader, which is a crazy thought. And

John (08:41): It is interesting. I know sort of along the lines, reading your own writing out loud changes or maybe you put the inflection that you meant to be there, but it certainly can change or it’s a good test almost, right? Does this sound like what I want it to sound like? Because that’s maybe how the readers or the listener’s going to experience it.

Ann (08:59): Yeah, reading your own out loud, reading other people’s writing out loud can tell you something about what they’re doing, which is always really fun. And then getting the computer to read your work out loud because they don’t know what you were trying to say. And you might find out where somebody perhaps won’t put the emphasis where you thought, and maybe you want to reconstruct that sentence to make sure that it’s crystal crystal clear. So those are all good techniques to get at how the voice lands.

John (09:24): You want an interesting experience? I’ve done this over the years, read a book and listen to the author at the same time. And that is a really immersive way to hear voice. Yeah,

Ann (09:35): Yeah, I’ll bet it is. Yeah, that’s a great idea.

John (09:40): Hey, have you ever tried to hire freelancers and found that the quality of work was lacking or you got all the outsourcing excuses as to why the work didn’t get done on time? Well, desk Team 360 has revolutionized the outsourcing game with their insourcing program that eliminates all those frustrations and excuses. You get unlimited graphic designs, website funnels, C R M, email automation, integrations, automations, really anything that requires you to log into software. Imagine all the time and frustrations you can save from trying to get your tech work done properly. We use Desk Team 360 every day in our business, and so I’ve negotiated you a 10% deal. That’s right. Just go to a desk, team 360 info, book a discovery call, and you’ll receive the special duct tape Marketing 10% off because hey, your pal John always takes care of you. So that’s it. Go to desk team 360 info and book your call today. Try that. So there we have personality traits. Are there writing voice attributes that we can identify, that we can practice, that we can try to hone?

Ann (10:50): Yeah, absolutely. There’s a bunch of things that we can do. There’s stylistic choices that we make that we can use and experiment with in the book The Writer’s Voice, I have people experiment at the extremes. Sometimes try to write something using only one syllable words so hard, but really fun because it makes you think about the words that you choose. We can also try to plug into an emotion or we can try to plug into an intention that is not our normal one and really experiment. I think that most people find that their range of writing voice is much larger than they actually use most of the time. And they may find that as they push out to one side or the other, they find something really fun that they can bring in or that might be a nice addition to the way that they normally write.

John (11:37): Should you fight for some of your voice and style decisions? I know that one of the things that I think it’s intentional now in my writing is I will list three things and I will leave out. And so instead of this and this, I’ll say this, this, this, and it’s intentional, but it drives your Chicago style guide editor crazy. So are there things that once you know they’re intentional, and I’m not saying that you always just say it my way or not, but I mean are there things that you might do that are a part of your voice that you say no? That’s just like a little trait.

Ann (12:12): Absolutely. Think people use, that’s something that you do. People can use punctuation. We can legitimately use sentence fragments if we are using them well and know what we’re doing. So a good editor should never smooth out your voice, should never eliminate your voice. They might clear things that are in the way of people hearing the voice and that’s legit. But if in your case, if you were submitting to a publisher and this is your thing, just say, this is part of my style guide. This is the John Chach style, this is what I do with list the three. Deal

John (12:43): With that. Okay. You heard it. You heard it here first and said I can stop. I can start sentences with a preposition. Okay, so there,

Ann (12:51): Yeah, absolutely. Go for it. Just say it’s intentional. This is my personal style.

John (12:55): Alright, so you use both these words, tone and style, and I’m curious if you could help us define those or at least differentiate those.

Ann (13:03): Yeah. So style to me, and they’re so often used interchangeably. The style to me is actually the set of tools that we use to put things on the page. So I have the Chicago manual style. The addition I have is like four inches thick or something. So many style decisions, right? Semicolons not

John (13:24): Get drunk and white.

Ann (13:25): Yes. Yeah,

John (13:26): Much shorter.

Ann (13:27): Well, it doesn’t tell you what order things need to go in a book. I mean, this is the bible of stylistic decisions. So there’s thousands of decisions and we do most of them without thinking about them. And that’s fine, but it’s the tools that we have and tone is what those tools create. So style is maybe the painter’s brushstrokes tone is the picture right, and the picture is perceived by the viewer tone of your reading. Is that the tone as interpreted by the reader? So I use stylistic things to project a certain tone and hope that it worked, cross my fingers and hope it works.

John (14:05): So we’re going to get into the format of the book itself, but I’m curious, I know you did some research kind of led you to your decisions about what went in the book. Tell me a little bit about that project.

Ann (14:15): So I did two things. One is that I interviewed a bunch of people about how they felt about their writing voice and what they thought about it. And I really found this again, sense that it’s something that most writers just don’t really give that much thought to. And yet when you ask them questions about what they would change, they all have things that they would want to change about their writing, which I think is interesting. And then I was working on this book and I started creating exercises to play with the different ideas. And I got a group of people, bless their hearts, let me send them these exercises once a week. Crazy things to do. Some of ’em I really found out were way too hard or too involved. So I dialed them back and I just tested them on people as well as myself of course.

(14:56): And that it was interesting because John, I said out to write a traditional book, it was going to be a book and maybe there would be an accompanying work. And I was halfway through it, all this research, I may have maybe 23,000 words of a draft. I mean, I was really in the book and I said, you know what? Reading a book about writing voice and hoping to be a better writer is reading a cookbook and thinking that’s going to make you a better cook. It is not. You got to actually do the cooking, you have to actually do the writing. So midway through, I just abandoned it and I merged the workbook and the book together, cut a lot of the traditional parts of a book out, put in a lot of the exercises in the book, said write in this here. I made it really welcoming for people to pick up a pen and write. And I’m really,

John (15:44): Because showing a picture, it’s big old workbook, right? It’s

Ann (15:47): Big. It’s workbook format. I really want to just get that idea that my gosh, you better pick up a pen when you get this thing and it’s okay to write in it because that’s how you’re going to get the value from it is doing the ideas in it.

John (16:00): Yeah, actually, one of the books I wrote had prompts in it every day and you were supposed to write, and I can’t tell you how many people wrote back to me and said, oh no, I can’t write in the book. You need to produce a workbook.

Ann (16:10): Precisely. I’m one of those people. It’s like, I must’ve gotten my hand slapped for writing a book when I was a child because it’s like, even if there’s prompts, it’s like I’m not going to write in that. What are you nuts?

John (16:18): So talk a little bit about some of the exercises maybe. I mean, there are many, many exercises. So maybe pick out a handful and say, well, here’s what you’ll encounter on this exercise just to give people a flavor.

Ann (16:31): Yeah, so sure. So I’ll give you two really radically different ones. One of them, which I really enjoy, is just to strip out everything except the punctuation. And it’s something that you’ve written and it’s so interesting because it tells you something about your sentence structures.

John (16:45): Wait a minute. So we’re just left with periods and commas, is that what you’re saying?

Ann (16:48): Periods, commas, semicolons, dashes, just the punctuation kinds

John (16:52): Of exclamation points for me,

Ann (16:54): Exclamation points you get to see. It’s like, wow, I really do use a lot of exclamation points. And I did this and then I did the same thing for other writers that I admire in different genres. So for a literary writer author who I’m on his email list, I did it for one of his posts and his punctuation was much more free flowing than mine. It was very interesting. So that was kind of fun. And then on another extreme, one of these exercises where I asked people to test their extremes. I have an exercise called fancy or folksy, and to take the same thing and write it in asite or obscure or fancy, just, I mean set the dial to 11 on that. I mean, just go be crazy, be nutsy. Just do something super out there. And then to do something that’s super folksy or slimy or just way more than you would ever do. And I had so much fun doing these, first of all. So it’s like a warmup. It loosens things out and it also makes you think, wait, there was that thing there. My metaphors got looser when I got folksy. Or, it’s very interesting. You test the extremes and then you find maybe your center could be a little one way or the other. So those are two of the kinds of exercises. That’s fine.

John (18:03): Alright. Because nobody’s going to listen unless I mention AI today.

Ann (18:06): Yes, yes.

John (18:07): Where do you think will, I mean there’s lots of opinions about AI and writing in general, but where do you think we land with style and tone and voice?

Ann (18:16): So this is so interesting because as I was writing and working and researching, AI was really chat. G P T was evolving in crazy ways. And a part of me first thought, oh my gosh, if you can just ask chatt to make your writing funny, it’s going to do it and maybe no one needs this book. And I’ve completely switched. I think that AI actually is making us think about voice more than we did. So it’s very interesting. I think the book is timely in a way I didn’t expect with that, which is we read something first and we go, oh, that was written by ai. There’s no human there. So we’re aware of when voice is off or missing or generic, and I think we recognize the value that there is in a real human voice connection. What’s really who we are, that human connection

John (19:05): Theoretically. Wouldn’t machine learning be able to read enough hemmingway to produce hemmingway voice?

Ann (19:10): Sure. I mean, you can ask it to write something like this author, that author Hemmingway and people are, so if that’s what you want to do, if you want to upload everything yours and say, write in my style, you could do that for little transactional writing and things. But I think that the reason that we connect with someone, if you’re writing as a solo printer or small business owner, I think your value is yourself, is your personality. And I abdicate that, is to give up something that is important to your brand. I think that AI could be an incredible tool as part of the writing process. And I’m working still on how I integrate it into my writing process. Yeah,

John (19:52): It’s a great assistant, but I’m with you. I think where the real edges of voice or I might say something like, well, that was a load of crap. I mean, I might write something like that. I don’t think AI would ever write that. And I think that’s the edges of our voice that it’ll never be able to pick up because it might be how we’re feeling that day.

Ann (20:12): That’s right. It’s not. It’s for the most part, trending to the middle, trending to the norm, language patterns, that’s what i’s looking for is language patterns. So I don’t want to advocate that. And I think when I read something from you, John, I can see your voice. I can see your written, I can picture you, and I don’t want to lose that. So if AI helps more people get things out into the world that are authentically their ideas and their thoughts, then it’s great. But I just would be really careful about asking it to write for you,

John (20:42): Have it write metadata on your webpages all day long. Title tags, go for it.

Ann (20:48): Please, please. And it’s a lovely non-judgmental brainstorming buddy. You can give it an idea. It comes back with ideas and you’re like, yeah, that’s okay. Actually, that metaphor is kind of lame, but it made me think of this other one, which I think is better. So I use it for those kinds of things. There’s a lot of uses, like I said, it’s a tool. We can use it well, we can use it poorly. I think the great writers will learn how to use it well and be more effective and

John (21:11): Efficient. And that’s a great point. I mean, I think even for marketers, it’s not going to replace marketers, but somebody who is strategically focused, who is using AI might replace marketers. That’s the key. It’s like you almost have to be using these, but you have to be using them in the right way.

Ann (21:30): That’s true. And so that’s a learning curve. We’re all climbing still.

John (21:34): And of course a year from now you and I’ll be having a totally different conversation about too. Right? Exactly. That’s part of the climb, right? And you want to tell people where they might connect with you and obviously pick up a copy of the writer’s voice or any of your other works.

Ann (21:48): Sure. The easiest thing is just to look for my website, which is my name Anne with a silent e janer.com. I have an email list that I share writing practices every other week, and once a month I do a drawing for writing related book. And it’s just entertaining if you want to be part of that. And the book is available in any place you can buy books. If they don’t carry it, you can order it from them. But it’s called the Writer’s Voice.

John (22:13): This seems like a good workshop. Are you doing a workshop with this?

Ann (22:16): That is in my fall thing to figure out because yeah, it is practically that workshop built into it, right?

John (22:23): Yeah. But doing it with a cohort I think would be kind of fun.

Ann (22:26): I think it would be a lot of fun to share those exercises with people. So I think you’re

John (22:30): Right. Well, Anne, it was great catching up with you and having you spend a few moments at the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. And hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Ann (22:38): Yes, thanks a lot, John. It’s great being back.

John (00:09): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Janstch. My guest today is Jeremy Kenerson. His journey in internet marketing began in 2009 when he assumed leadership of the sales team at Infusionsoft, better, now known now as Keap. In 2013, he found his own digital agency specializing in the complete customer lifecycle, and over the last decade, he has mastered the art of outsourcing, investing over 1 million in overseas teams, making him a true authority and remote team delegation. He’s revolutionized outsourcing with his insourcing methodology as the founder of Desk Team 360 and is a longtime partner of Duct Tape Marketing and the Duct Tape Marketing Agency Network. So Jeremy, welcome to the show.

Jeremy (00:58): Thank you, John. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

John (01:00): Let’s start with that first term. How do you define insourcing? That’s a term you I think are spending some time trying to give some space around. So in a nutshell, what is insourcing?

Jeremy (01:11): Yeah, as quickly as possible. So outsourcing is your sourcing folks that are outside of your office. They could be in the United States, they could be overseas, whatever you’re outsourcing and insourcing is where we bring everybody overseas into an actual office. And we found that, well, we found when I ran my own digital agency and I was outsourcing, I came across all the same excuses and frustrations everybody else has dealt with. The work didn’t get done because of this, that and the other thing. And I eliminated all of that by bringing everybody into an office. We control all the internet providers, the electricity, the computers, and having managers, so bringing everybody in house,

John (01:50): So kind of one direct cable to the in-sourced office. So you set out, I think in, I don’t know if this was the original plan, but right now what you’re trying to do with Desk Team 360 is to change the industry a little bit. What kind of issues have you encountered in trying to get to where you are today?

Jeremy (02:09): I think the biggest thing, just going back to the beginning, it was funny. I met somebody that was at Infusionsoft years ago. His name was Brett, and he said, Hey, how’s it going? I was like, oh, great. He is like, what have you been up to since you left in Infusionsoft? And I started telling him all these things and he’s like, ah, you had the entrepreneurial, I’m like, what’s that? He’s like, you just went after every single idea you possibly could that you thought would make you money. And so that was the first hurdle to overcome was actually closing down all these smaller businesses that were making a little bit amounts of money here and there. So being able to focus, I think was the first hurdle we overcame.

John (02:43): Yeah, I’d say a lot of listeners probably share that part of their journey if hopefully they’ve figured it out. Our model in the agency world is really a lot of outsourcing or a lot of delegation of work rather than the business or certainly the owner of the business doing the actual work of fulfillment. But a heck of a lot of people I talk to have said, yeah, I’ve tried to do this and put this thing together and that thing together and it’s more work than it’s worth. I mean, what do you say to folks that kind of talk about outsourcing is just not being able to do

Jeremy (03:16): It? Yeah, I find a lot of people deal with that same issue and it comes down to outsourcing. And not just outsourcing, I’d say delegation. It doesn’t matter where they are. If you’re delegating something that’s a skillset that you need, not just in business, but as a parent in life, I need to delegate these things. And a lot of times people jump into it, they jump into a lot of things that it’s just going to be sunshine and rainbows. It’s going to be super easy. I need to get this thing off my plate so I have more time to do this. And we get so impatient as entrepreneurs that we look at those things and go, oh, it wasn’t worth it. It didn’t work out. Something happened when in reality, if we take the time to actually learn this skillset, it’ll save us so much time in the long run. But you have that awkward phase when you hire anybody, whether it’s hiring an in-house employee, they’re in an awkward phase of one to two months before they’re able to actually take time off your plate because before then they’re coming to you asking you all these questions and everything. And the same thing with outsourcing overseas. It’s not something that’s just going to happen right away. You have to learn how to communicate and work with people outside of the office and key. That’s what I teach my clients when they first come on board.

John (04:24): I mean, if I had a whiteboard here, we could draw this little graph that would show kind of like, because I do think a lot of people think that it is like, oh yeah, I’m hiring this people that’s off my plate now. And it’s really actually more on your plate than it ever was because now you have to actually document it and get what’s in your head out of your head so somebody else can do it. So I think people underestimate that there’s kind of a period of more work as opposed to fantasy land isn’t there? Yeah,

Jeremy (04:51): That’s a good way to say it. Fantasy land, because that’s what it is. It’s a fantasy to think that you could just hire a person, give them all these things as if they’ve worked with you for the last five years and know what’s in your head and know how you like things done. It’s just not realistic. So whether you’re doing an in-house or outsourcing, it’s the same thing. You just got to take the time. And I like what you said, it’s like getting the ideas out of your head and creating an actual s o p so that next time you hire someone, it doesn’t become a pain in the rear. You’re able to use that to help the onboarding process a lot

John (05:21): Faster. Yeah, and I’m sure you have a lot to say about this as well, but I’ve certainly found one of the pitfalls is lack of communication that it’s like, oh yeah, I’ll use one of the things you do for a lot of your clients. I need a website and think, okay, that’s going to get a website built. And so we’ve found actually you can’t over-communicate enough in several formats, and especially if you know what you want, getting that communicated takes some time, doesn’t it?

Jeremy (05:51): Oh, it does. And that’s what I spend a lot of my time working with my clients, training them how to communicate the requests site’s a little bit bigger. That definitely isn’t something that you just send to an email and say, Hey, I want a website, and then it’s done. So what I always tell our clients is schedule a call with your account manager when you have a bigger project, like a website project. Let the US based account manager know the 30,000 foot view of the project so they can help quarterback that project as it’s getting done. I think that really helps a lot with those type of bigger projects, having that US base account manager to talk to and outline the project.

John (06:26): So we’ve mentioned Desk Team 360 a number of times. It’s probably a good point in the show to say what Desk Team 360 is and does, I mean, I think people have probably figured out you provide some outsourced services, but let’s kind of give an overview.

Jeremy (06:40): Sure. Over the years, I kind of call it outsourced marketing implementation. So we work a lot with your clients and different agencies, a lot of different entrepreneurs, but really no matter what business you’re running, whether you’re doing marketing for another company as a consultant or an agency or an entrepreneur doing your own marketing, there’s a lot of things that take place. First is the strategy, and you got to know what your strategy is, and then you need to be able to write that content for that strategy. So if you’ve got a marketing funnel, well, you need the sales copy, the sales page copy, you need the thank you page copy, you need the email copy. If you handle the strategy and the email and all the content writing, our clients will send us over projects, and then we’d get all the graphic design, all the tech set up. So creating the landing pages and ClickFunnels, connecting it to your website, connecting it to the emails and your C R M and using Zapier and getting everything integrated and tested and working. We handle all of the graphic design and all the tech work.

John (07:38): And I think that’s a great point to go a little deeper in because I think a lot of times people underestimate, we use the example of a webpage or a landing page or a website that to actually make that function as a marketing tool, there’s probably some other integrations that have to happen into your C R M so that you can create follow-up sequences. So over and above design, you’re actually hooking all those parts together for people too, aren’t you?

Jeremy (08:04): Correct, yeah. All the finer details. I’d say if there’s a software that you use for your marketing, then give us the login and we can get it working for

John (08:13): You. So I’m sure there are other people that do this, but you have a particular financial model as well, a subscription based model you want kind of as well?

Jeremy (08:21): Yeah, sure. So right now we have three different packages. One is unlimited graphic design. The next one is just the tech, so just handling the logins and the emails, the websites and all that stuff. And then there’s the pro, which is the combination of both. You got unlimited graphic design and unlimited tech help all for one low monthly fee of 9 97 a

John (08:41): Month. Well, I’ll tell you selfishly, we use Desk Team 360 before our clients, but we promote it to all the consultants in our network to use for their clients as well, because having that fixed, or at least an idea of that fixed a lot of times one-off things come up or you need to redesign something here. And so you really can predict your costs that you’re going to have. And I know that’s one of the things we really love. I’ll tell you the other thing for agencies, even if you don’t have, we have a lot of folks that are getting started, maybe have two or three clients, a subscription feels scary to ’em. They’re not working on their own websites. And so actually having somebody there to be able to go, oh, let’s get these four pages done that we’ve been talking about for six months. I tell you that I tell people that and they’re like, oh yeah, I guess I could use it for that.

Jeremy (09:30): Yeah, a lot of people will have their own website as a low priority task that when no priority, they’re submitting stuff to us, we’re able to get to work on that.

John (09:38): Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, that’s great. Talk about some of the results that you’ve seen or maybe some of your favorite projects or anything that you’ve worked with somebody.

Jeremy (09:47): Yeah, so I mean people are just saving tons of time. Some people are saving 20 hours a week, 30 hours a week, 40 hours a week, just a ton. One of our clients is an agency and he’s been with us for about four years, and he started off just like you guys did. It was like, oh, let me test you guys out with one. Okay, cool. You guys work great. This is awesome. I love working with you. Let’s up it to three. And then he just kept increasing and growing his agency to where now he’s up to about 20 tasks at a time. So he actually has his own dedicated teams with us now, and it’s just really cool to see someone go from just starting off with their agency and being able to grow. Because when I did my agency, I don’t do my agency anymore. Why? Because it evolved. But if I knew then what I know now, I probably would still have my agency because I started off hiring all in-house people and it’s just super expensive. I got to the point where as we were making more money as the business owner was making less money, and that’s not a good business model to be in. So outsourcing helps a lot.

John (10:46): Sorry to chuckle, but I’ve heard that exact statement before. So let’s talk a little bit about the business itself. What has been your best method of say, generating leads and new business for your own organization?

Jeremy (11:01): So this is something where a few years ago I went to an event and when you go to an event and you hear the same thing over and over again, but every once in a while you hear something and you’re like, I do that. Why didn’t I do that? I wasn’t doing it. And it was just talking about joint venture partnerships. So especially with dealing with agencies, there’s people, like right now I have a relationship with someone in the esthetician business, so she has a huge following and she’s now using us and has used us and now is referring us, and now she’s promoting Destin 360 to her list. But same thing with agencies. You can connect with somebody that has a big influence in a particular niche. And I hear a lot of people, they’re scared to niche down because they feel like they are committed to that for the rest of their life.

(11:48): They can’t take on any other clients unless they’re in that niche. And I tell people, no, you can still service other people, but your marketing campaign is geared towards that one niche, but then get another niche and then get another niche. And if you can continue to build relationships like that, that has helped desk team faster, grow faster than anything else besides that, as Facebook ads have become more expensive, we went into the realm of cold outreach, so I’m still doing a lot of the traditional stuff, but just playing with as many things as possible. But that joint venture partnership really got the needle moving the most.

John (12:25): Hey, have you ever tried to hire freelancers and found that the quality of work was lacking or you got all the outsourcing excuses as to why the work didn’t get done on time? Well, desk Team 360 has revolutionized the outsourcing game with their insourcing program that eliminates all those frustrations and excuses. You get unlimited graphic designs, website funnels, C R M, email automation integrations, automations, really anything that requires you to log into software. Imagine all the time and frustrations you can save from trying to get your tech work done properly. We use Desk Team 360 every day in our business, and so I’ve negotiated you a 10% deal. That’s right. Just go to a desk, team 360 info, book a discovery call, and you’ll receive the special duct tape marketing 10% off because hey, your pal John always takes care of you. So that’s it.

(13:18): Go to desk team three sixty.info and book your call today. I get asked this question all the time. Somebody’s either just getting started or they want that one thing. What’s one thing I could do that would really make a difference? I always point ’em to that. Strategic partners are really a great way to go. I mean, they may have prospects they could introduce you to where a client might have two or three referrals they could give you. So it’s really the best bang for your buck. Sometimes it takes a while to get going. It’s not an overnight thing, but great bang for your buck. So we have gone, let me look, 13 minutes and 58 seconds. I’m going to mention AI for the first time. How is AI impacting the design business as you see it? I know there’s a lot of hype and there’s a lot of misinformation about the ways people are using, but certainly it’s here at a point and then maybe it’s a follow-up question to that is where do you think it’s going?

Jeremy (14:15): Yeah, so right now with design, I have not had a lot of luck getting the heat, the AI to create a good design. I’ve tasked my team to play with it and just not a lot of good results. It is similar to kind of like chat G P T when that first came out, everybody was like, shouldn’t say everybody, but a lot of people were like, oh, this is garbage. And it’s like, yeah, well, if you put in one question and you get back your answer, how about you drill that question down five different times or 10 different times and you can get some pretty good content that way, but I just have not able to nail it down with the actual design functionality because it just gives a lot of weird images.

John (14:59): Well, so moving away from Dolly and things that are creating images, I’m seeing some services cropping up that are you put in your business where it’s located the industry and you push a button and it’s going to pull in stock photos and things and design a website or at least design a homepage. We can debate whether or not that that is valuable at all, but how are you fighting that sort of, oh, it’s free almost to do this kind of stuff. I mean, when somebody comes to you and says, oh, it’s going to be X amount a month for me to have web design versus getting the stuff that they say is free, what do you tell somebody that might have that argument in their mind?

Jeremy (15:41): You get what you pay for. I mean, I remember when Wix first, not Wix, what was the We Bleed, do you remember? We leave that website design. It was like, oh, you could set one up for free. And then I was like, cool, I’m going to set one up for my dad. And at the time I had no experience with setting up websites, but I set one up for my dad and it looked absolutely terrible, not a designer. So I sure I could try to get it done. Same thing with the ai, and same thing with the graphics, same thing with the website. It’s like you get it done and you look at it and you go, is this what I want my brand to look like? And there’s just something to be said when you have a human being researching and looking into your business and creating designs, creating multiple designs, and then being able to do revisions and go back to get it honed into something you love compared to trying to get something for free and spending a lot of time, a lot of your time and a lot of your energy to create something you’re not happy with anyway.

(16:34): Where a lot of people that try those things, by the time they come to us, they’ve already tried Weebly and Wix and they tried to create a blog on WordPress, but it just ends up being the same result. They’re like, I’d just rather pay somebody at this point, but they’ve wasted three months in the process trying to, yeah,

John (16:49): I think certainly a lot of business owners don’t give enough, I don’t think, give enough value to the impact of design, of good design of consistent design of design that at least to the viewer represents what they think that it should feel like, right? We’ve all gone to a website of an industry that construction or something and it was a templated thing, and you’re kind of like, is that really what I want? Or I expect a construction site to look like? Probably not. And so I think that’s obviously the value of having at least one team work on your things. You really get that consistency or at least have the ability. Do you ever find, I kind of already talked about this idea of over-communicating, we’re pretty opinionated about what we think a website should do and function and not as much about what it should look like, but certainly what should be there, what the journey should look like. Do you ever feel like people like me would run the risk of overcom commuting to the point where you’re just trying to give me what I want as opposed to, Hey, here’s actually a creative design that we think would serve you better?

Jeremy (17:56): Yeah, I think that there’s no way you can over communicate. There’s just no way, and the team’s not going to get annoyed by it. I hear that a lot from people. They’re like, Hey, I don’t mean to bug you, but can you please like dude, you’re not bugging us. Please. The more information the better. And because we don’t, with us, there’s no consequence of doing unlimited revisions. So yeah, give your feedback, give your feedback, refine it until it’s something that you fall in love with. And for you guys, it’s a little bit different because you’re creating the websites for your clients. So instead of being in love with it, you look at it and go, is this good enough to come from us to our client?

John (18:34): Yeah, great point. I love to ask entrepreneurs this. What’s like on the horizon for you? Any new areas or you just really want to keep Oring this boat in the straight direction?

Jeremy (18:45): Yeah, so for the immediate future, yes, we’re directing it. We’re trying to keep it as simple as possible and what our offerings are down the pipe in the future. In the near future, I already have this in beta, is offering like a legit US-based project manager because some of our clients that are a little bit larger, you guys have your own in-house people that are managing all your tickets and everything, but there’s a lot of entrepreneurs that are managing a lot of tickets. They don’t have the infrastructure to go, Hey Billy, this is on your plate now. You take care of this forever. So being able to offer that account or that project manager role where you can meet with somebody weekly or even daily to go through what it is that you need done, what your tasks are and have them organize it and have them communicate with the team, I think will be pretty big for some of our larger clients where they don’t have to, because another position, another hat that they have to wear is managing all the tickets and everything.

(19:42): So that’s more in the immediate future. And then I’m also looking at adding on different services in regards to marketing and also I just forgot that I swear John, ever since I hit 40, things just pop right out of my brain and I’m like, where’d it go? It was right there. Some other services in regards to actual marketing. So being able to do more things with s e o, doing more things with social media, doing more things with cold outreach and having that as part of an offering, especially as we are entering into these different niches. Then being able to set up for estheticians like local SSS e o, like great, we can systematize that template that and push that out to all those clients. We have different clients like you that are niched into something. So being able to systematize that and even white label the services so that our clients can make money off of our services at the same time has been pretty helpful.

John (20:32): Awesome. Well, Jeremy, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. If you want to invite people to obviously connect with you, but then I’ll find out more about Dust Team 360 and the various ways you might be able to help.

Jeremy (20:44): Yeah, if you go to 360 dot, that’ll actually take you to a Duct Tape marketing page of ours where you can get a 10% discount and you can check out all of our case studies and see how everybody’s using it and how and why they love it.

John (20:57): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you out there on the road. In fact, I know I’m going to run into you out there on the road pretty soon in Salt Lake City. Yeah,

Jeremy (21:07): Yeah, I’ll see you next month.

John (21:09): Alright, thanks Chairman.

Jeremy (21:10): Thanks John. Take care.

John (00:10): Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Janstch. My guest today is Steve Woodruff. He is known as the King of Clarity. 37 years in the frontline of sales, marketing, consulting, and entrepreneurship has equipped Steve to guide others in the principles and practices of clear and effective communication. Long time listeners will remember that Steve also wrote a book called Clarity Wins, and we’re going to talk about his new book today, the Point How to Win with Clarity Fueled Communication, which is available probably by the time you listen to this October of 2023 and beyond. So Steve, welcome back to the show.

Steve (00:50): Always a pleasure to talk to you, John. Well,

John (00:52): Let’s start by with a definition how when somebody says, huh, clarity fueled communication, what the heck is that? How would you define that?

Steve (01:01): That’s very interesting. I had been using the term clarity as my sort of key word for many years, and I realized a couple months ago if I ever actually defined this thing, really defined it. And so I wrote a blog post defining what I mean by clarity. But essentially what I’m talking about is communicating in a way that is so simple and easy for the brain to process that instead of pushing people away and shutting their brains down, you’re turning the light on. And that means using vivid, memorable brief words.

John (01:35): So the key word probably in there for me is simplicity, but that does not imply like dumbing it down. I mean, in some ways it’s kind the obvious, right? It’s actually harder to write with clarity and simplicity sometimes, isn’t it

Steve (01:47): Much, much harder. In fact, the big default that I’m up against is t m i. Too much information and we are all tempted to try to say too much. And it’s really a matter of brain science that has convinced me why that is bad. I mean, I think we instinctively know it’s bad, but the fact is that the human brain is processing 7 million bits of information per second from all five senses, and that when you and I are talking to one another, John, it’s 60 bits of focus. We can only focus on 60 bits. And what that means is if we’re going to win in communication, we’ve got to win the 60 bit battle against 11 million bits of competitors. How do we do? Well, we’ve got to be clear, simple, and get right to the point.

John (02:39): So I don’t want to ruin any of your tools and exercises that we are going to talk about, but I have noticed over the years, what’s worked very, very effectively for me is to name things, give things a simple name that somebody can at least go, oh, I think I know what that means, or I want to know what that means. And I’m guessing that there’s something science-based to that, just that tactic isn’t there?

Steve (03:04): Yeah, there is. It’s funny, I call it a memory dart, and a memory dart is a memory dart. So it’s a way of phrasing something that is suggestive and has a hook in somebody’s mind. So when I tell people I don’t like the term elevator pitch for two reasons. Number one, nobody likes to talk in the elevator. And number two, nobody likes to be pitched. I talk about replacing that with a memory dart, a way of taking your compressed message and sticking it in people’s minds. And when you can call something as you did with duct tape marketing, that’s vivid, you have a much better chance of sticking than if you keep it generic and technical.

John (03:45): Yeah, and there have been times over the years where I’ve tried to explain to somebody all the things that something did or even all the benefits of it, and it’s almost overwhelming, whereas if you say No, it’s like this for this, it seems like all of a sudden they can process it.

Steve (04:01): Yes, I am a big believer in symbolic language and in side-by-sides, and those are two of the tactics I talk about of brain-friendly shortcuts. When we use side-by-side, we’re saying, here’s something you know about, well, this is like, or not like. That’s a shortcut to processing and to recognition. And symbolic language is also incredibly important. So if I say, well, John Jan is the Mercedes of marketers, I’ve encapsulated in one symbolic word a ton of information, and it’s memorable and it’s suggestive, and it’s so much better than saying, here are 45 bullet points about John, and nobody’s going to remember 45 bullet points.

John (04:46): If you don’t mind, Steve, I’d rather be the mini Cooper of marketing. It’s

Steve (04:50): Fine. That’s okay. I called my editor Josh Bernoff, I called him the Mercedes of business editors, and he said, I’d rather be the Tesla. I said, fine, whatever floats your boat, man.

John (05:01): Josh was on a recent show. He has a new book ad that puts out some of his teachings on riding. So your framework has four rules. And so maybe let’s go there because I really do think that’s the basis of at least getting people to start to wrap their head around, how do I do this clarity thing,

Steve (05:20): Right? Well, the first thing that I lead with typically, because everybody understands the need, is you have to get to the point. And we have all experienced the frustration of listening to someone who can’t get to the point. Getting to the point means we’ve got to get to the relevant, interesting thing right away. But that’s actually rule number two. Rule number one is you have to have a point probably, oh, whoops. So many meetings, presentations, discussions. You don’t know if the person actually knows what they’re talking about, why they’re even bringing this up. So you have to have a clear purpose and destination. You can articulate yourself in a very short, I figure if you can’t define your point in one sentence, you need to do some work before you start communicating. Because unless you know the point, you can’t get to the point. So you got to have a point, which is the shift that you’re seeking to create in your audience’s mind. You’ve got to get to the point. The third thing is you have to get the point across, which means that even if we’re using the same language and using words that we both know somehow know these words, we might not define them the same way. So if I use the term marketing, I’m going to have a whole bunch of meanings strategies.

John (06:40): That’s my favorite.

Steve (06:41): Oh, strategy is another beauty. There will be a whole list of meanings, thoughts, definitions, ideas and experiences. And you and I can use these words back and forth and not really in our, so we’ve got to make sure we simplify and define and illustrate. That’s getting the point across. And then the goal, especially in business, is we want to get on the same page. So we’re trying to reach alignment and agreement and action and summarize that in writing. So if you look at that sequence, have a point, get to the point, point across and get on the same page, that’s essentially the recipe for every form of communication. You can use that for emails, presentations, books, podcasts, everything has those four rules and it respects the way the human brain wants information.

John (07:34): So would you say, obviously the best part would be to have those four rules in mind as you’re starting to write a draft, maybe even. But would you say that you could also go back and take any piece of content that’s been written and say, does it have a point? Did it get to the point? Yeah, I mean it kind of almost do that same sort of filtering.

Steve (07:51): That’s one of the fun exercises I do in my workshops with my corporate clients is we’ll take a block of stuff, texts, ideas, whatever, and say, alright, let’s dig into this and find the point. How would you actually bring out the point? Because if we present unstructured information to people, if we give them the haystack and not the needle, we’re going to shut them down. So we’ve got to say, here’s the needle, here’s what we’re talking about. Now we can progress to a greater level of detail once we know what we’re talking about.

John (08:25): So let’s talk about length, because I’m guessing that the default or maybe the assumption in somebody writing is, oh, that means my writing needs to be very short. But that’s not exactly what you’re saying, is it?

Steve (08:38): No, there’s some level of detail that’s necessary. So what am my most important strategies in the book is what I call stratification. If you have a block of information, and if you envision a pyramid with three levels at the very top of the pyramid is the distilled the point, the most important thing we’re shooting for here, you got to start with that. And then once people know the point, they will be receptive to hearing a little bit more, some background or some context or some stories. Then they’ll be receptive to details as much as they need. So it’s not that we’re throwing all the information out, but we have to sequence it in a way that makes it palatable. So if you go to a restaurant and you order five courses and they just bring out everything at once, the dessert, the wine, the appetizer, the soup, all great food, I wanted it, but this is not the sequence I was looking for.

John (09:36): Well, in some ways that’s the classic sort of copywriting is spend 80% of your time on the headline. And I mean, in some ways it’s like that’s the ad for whether or not you should invest your time to go any farther, because there’ve been times I’ve read, I don’t know, 3000 word emails or sales pages because I said, this is worth me investing my time in. There’s also been times when I’ve gone, so in a lot of ways that’s what you’re saying is the point may not necessarily be the hook per se, but it’s the thing that’s going to bring me in is it,

Steve (10:09): It’s the thing that appeals to you on the level of personal relevance. It’s the what’s in it for me as an audience, the W I I F M. So salespeople know about the W I I F M because you’ve got to talk about the benefit. Well, in fact, for every communication with every person, we have to lead with the W I I F M, the what’s in it for you. So email, John is one of the areas where I encourage the most immediate change, which is the visual real estate of the subject line in the first sentence is where you’re going to win or lose on emails in an inbox that’s full of stuff and always growing and the person that’s receiving email is going to skimm, delete, put off, maybe read. Well, if I don’t get the point right up there in the subject line, the first sentence, I run the risk of never being seen. And so that’s where you’ve got to say, here’s the call to action. Here’s the deadline, here’s what I’m looking for. And then the details can be later, but you got to hook ’em first.

John (11:12): Yeah, and it’s funny in email because in a lot of email programs, of course that first sentence is, I can see half of that before you even open the email. So you might, you might be talking about a couple hundred characters, you better hook them because they’re going to decide to not even open it. Let’s talk about consistency. A lot of organizations, everybody in the organization’s creating content today, right? Because what we do, how do we make sure that we are all, once clarity is found, how do we make sure that everybody across the board is using that consistent language, how people are, I mean, they just, here’s my style, but from a brand promise standpoint, once we find that message, boy, sticking with it is important. Hey, you ever tried to hire freelancers and found that the quality of work was lacking? Or you got all the outsourcing excuses as to why the work didn’t get done on time?

(12:07): Well, desk Team 360 has revolutionized the outsourcing game with their insourcing program that eliminates all those frustrations and excuses. You get unlimited graphic designs, website funnels since automations, really anything that requires you to log into software, imagine all the time and frustrations you can save from trying to get your tech work done properly. We use Desk Team 360 every day in our business, and so I’ve negotiated you a 10% deal. That’s right. Just go to a desk, team 360 info, book a discovery call, and you’ll receive the special duct tape marketing 10% off because hey, your pal John always takes care of you. So that’s it. Go to desk team three sixty.info and book your call today.

Steve (12:53): That’s one of my biggest burdens with this book is that I’ve worked with a lot of corporate clients and they all have a set of all these different formulas. Here’s our selling formula, here’s our marketing formula, here’s our blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, 15 different acronyms, recipes, whatever, no consistency. And that means that there is no clear communication consistency in the organization because it’s all fragmented. So in coming up with this formula that’s in the book, I wanted to see if there could be one formula that fit everybody, every human being in an organization. And so the four rules and the eight tools are completely universal, and they provide the framework of a language that a team or an entire organization can standardize on so that people can reinforce best practices instead of all be fragmented with their own thing.

John (13:46): So there’s a point in the book, and I think this is a point you’re making, correct me if I’m wrong, I think that a lot of people will get to the point where their clear messaging is helping the organization focus. However, I think you took the leap to say, really that’s our job is to actually help the reader focus. Now, did I misinterpret that? But I really love that point, and I hope that’s the point you were making.

Steve (14:08): Sounds like a good one follow up book

John (14:10): If not addition to, right?

Steve (14:12): That’s right. No, the idea of focus is for everyone in the organization and especially leaders, leaders in an organization have got to have clear focus and put it into clear words so that their people can have clear expectations of what they’re to do. And this is one of the big gaps I find as far as clarity is you might have somebody that could make a good sales message or make a good marketing message, but they’re not clear in the way that they discuss things with the people they’re coaching or managing and leading. And so you want clarity to percolate through everything, whatever you write, whatever, say every meeting you have. And that means it’s an ongoing pursuit. It’s not a one and done deal. I’m still struggling with it every single day.

John (15:00): I want to push a little bit on that because then you may have not have said this directly, but I got this from the, I think great communication actually helps the reader focus because in marketing, a lot of times the most effective marketing helps a reader understand the problem they couldn’t articulate or the symptom of what’s wrong in their business that they couldn’t put a name to. And that’s where I went with focus, because I think that the best writing actually does that for the reader.

Steve (15:29): Yeah, the best writing is going to create mental pictures in the reader’s mind and give them, as you said, the labels that they’ve been looking for, maybe they didn’t even know they didn’t have. And so when you have good creative vivid language that somebody reads and the light bulb goes on, oh, that’s what I’m looking for, that’s what I’m needing. Oh man, it’s wonderful. And so what I often do is I say, look, there’s two levels of writing. One is the technically accurate explanation and you want to start there, then you got to have the really cool way of saying it that’s going to turn the light on and be memorable. You can’t just leave it at technically accurate. You’ve got to be able to say it in a way that the human brain loves. And that’s the eight shortcuts that I talk about in the book that I’ll start with SS stories, snippets, statements, side-by-side, symbolic language. That’s what all that is meant to do, is to give that aha to the reader.

John (16:28): So step one, really define it as you say, as you call it technically accurate, but certainly don’t stop there. I mean, that’s half the job. And when somebody’s come in to say, okay, how’s this going to work for me? At that point, they need the technically accurate definition, but before they’re even going to, I was going to say waste of time, spend the time to find out. It’s got to have the cool thing.

Steve (16:51): Yeah, it’s got to be appealing and simple, and we underestimate the power of simplicity, but I don’t care how smart somebody is, I don’t care how many degrees they have, simple language works, brevity works, vividness works. And that’s how if we’re going to be great marketers and great authors and great consultants, that’s how we’ve got a front load with interesting, relevant stuff. If people are going to engage. Otherwise, there’s too many options. I mean, every one of us has a smartphone, and if you’re presenting and in the first minute or two, you’re not getting to the point, it doesn’t matter how valuable your stuff is, you’re done. Everybody’s going to be tuned out.

John (17:34): And I read a lot of fiction as well as nonfiction and fiction writers I think are a good fiction writer, very good at dragging you in. And you’re going, I want to know. It’s almost like the narrative makes you want to know what, so now you’ll slog through the 200 pages of character development because they drug you in. I want to push back on one idea. I mean, I’m 100% agree with you, but I just want to hear, I know where some people might lead, and I’m going to use an example that you used in yours. I think there’s, you can run the risk of oversimplifying, I believe. And you used the idea of the Hippocratic Oath in the book, and that’s a brilliant example of where people have not only oversimplified, they’ve butchered it. First do no harm is what everybody says, but the actual document says, I will abstain from all intentional wrongdoing and harm, which is much different than first do no harm.

(18:29): If a doctor first did no harm, they wouldn’t cut you open to save your heart. And I think that the point I’m making here is that I think it’s abstained, abstained from all intended wrongdoing and harm is a very different meaning than what sort of the simplification over the years has turned that idea in. And we all use it. Everybody’s used it, I mean uses that, but it’s technically not accurate. So maybe I’ve butchered this example of what I was trying to get to, but I think sometimes in a rush to be cute, almost sometimes we can actually really send the wrong message or oversimplify so badly that people don’t really have the right expectations.

Steve (19:13): Well, I think in the example there, my point in the book was don’t overwhelm the human brain. Yeah.

(19:21): Here’s what you just don’t want to do In any instance, you do not want to overwhelm the brain because that is going to defeat the purpose. That is not what you’re to do as a communicator. What you’re trying to do is turn the light on, not turn it off. So the verbal shorthand of the Hippocratic Oath, yeah, I mean there’s some work that could be done there, but it’s a familiar term and it’s a side by side that people can relate to. But the point of the thing is that we can’t commit malpractice as communicators by just defeating the purpose of, if I’ve got this person on the table when I’ve got a scalp and I say, let’s just cut ’em open and bleed ’em all out and see what happens, well that’s really not so good, whether I intended it or not.

John (20:11): And the overcomplicated thing too, I mean, I’ve done it over the years and every 100% of the time, if I send out something and say, Hey, I’ve got three options for you. You can do this or this or this, nothing. But if I send out something that says, here’s what you must do and why, way better response. Even though I think, well, gosh, I’m giving them options. They can pick good, better, best, but it’s like now they can’t pick as

Steve (20:35): It’s complicated. There’s some science behind that. The more options people have, the more they delay, the harder it is to make a decision. I’ve made major changes in the last three years to the way I email. I used to have emails that were more comprehensive, maybe have multiple themes, and I realized nobody wants to respond to that. So I typically make every single email one theme only with maybe one call to action. And it’s like, you can do something right now with this. It’s way, way better.

John (21:07): Yeah. I know my most effective emails over the year are me just saying, here’s something that happened to me the other day and I’m wondering what you think about and just get into this story. And people are like, huh, I felt like I was talking to you as opposed to the whole, this here’s new idea of the week. So Steve, I appreciate you shopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You want to tell people where they can pick up a copy of the point or connect with you in any way that you think makes sense.

Steve (21:33): Sure. So I can be found, I do a lot of my work on LinkedIn, and that’s where I share a lot of information, write a lot of posts, have a newsletter. So if you looked at LinkedIn and do Steve Woodruff for King of Clarity, or either both, you’ll find me, I’m also@stevewoodruff.com. That website’s in the middle of a rebrand and refresh, but by the time this reaches the audience, it should be done and then the books can be seen on Amazon. The point is there due out October 17th, but it can be pre-ordered before that Clarity wins is there on Amazon. Clarity Wins was self-published on the Amazon platform, so it’s only available there. The point is through Morgan James publisher, so it’s going to be in bookstores. It’s at Barnes and Noble. It’ll be at other online ventures as well.

John (22:15): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking the time to stop by and hopefully we’ll see you again one these days out there on the road, Steve.

Steve (22:22): Sounds good, John. Thanks.

John (00:14): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guest today. I’m going to do a solo show, so it’s just me. Well, I guess it’s just me and you, right? Alright, so here’s what I’m going to talk about. The [00:00:30] evolution of niche marketing, or is it niche? I don’t know. I mean, it depends on who you’re talking to, right? So you’ve probably heard this countless times. The riches are in the niches. So I think this is rung true. This idea is rung true. I don’t know, probably like a decade or so. And I think a lot of businesses have found success narrowing their focus to a specific industry. And I think there are a lot of pros to this. I think some of the pros are undeniable. I mean, if you imagine if you’re a [00:01:00] marketing agency and you have developed Google ad campaigns for dentists in Cleveland, I’m pretty sure those same campaigns and keywords and ads even will be successful in, I don’t know, Detroit.

(01:14): And so there’s a lot of efficiencies, frankly, in this model. And ironic thing is it’s a lot cheaper for you once you get all these efficiencies down. You’ve got content, you’ve got campaigns, you’ve got emails all working in various [00:01:30] markets. You don’t have to write them over and over again. So it’s a lot cheaper for you to provide that service. And the flip side of that is typically people will pay more because, well, my industry, you specialize in working with my industry. So there’s a belief at least that you can provide more value for doing that. So I mean, the pros are obvious, I think, for a lot of people that have gone down that road. But I believe that there are some negatives that are evolving that I think present actually a great opportunity. I mean, if you are [00:02:00] niched down in that industry or you’re thinking about trying to go after a specific industry, I think the market’s flooded.

(02:08): I think that you might have some real competitive challenges, but personally, just as a side note, probably this is probably a topic for another day, but I’ll cram it in here. I’ve always found that the idea of narrowing down to a single industry was a tadd limiting and maybe even potentially boring, at least for me. Again, this is maybe my personal opinion, but to me it’s [00:02:30] never really been about an industry, but about an ideal client. So I’ve always enjoyed a focus on client behavior, their problems, the way they invest in solving those problems. To me, that is a greater driver of fit. So you can actually have a narrow focus. It doesn’t have to necessarily be on an industry. It can be on who you like to serve, a type of client you like to serve. I mean, we lead with strategy before tactics.

(02:56): You’ve certainly heard me say that before, and frankly [00:03:00] is actually limiting by itself because there are a lot of people that just want tactics. They just want this thing they heard about this week from somebody. So there are lots of ways to think about narrowing. It doesn’t just have to be on a niche, but let me just say this idea about the niche landscape. I think it’s really changing for service providers. Flooded niches. I think competition intensified. I mean, if you go looking right now, if you’re thinking to yourself, I’m an S e O firm and I’m going to specialize in working with H V A C contractors, [00:03:30] for example. I hate to tell you, but there are not just one. There are many, many SS e o firms that are really trying to tackle that industry. In a lot of cases. They’ve really mastered it.

(03:40): I mean, there are SS e o agencies that can get an A to C firm in most cities on page one. Now, I would suggest there’s some other limiting factors. I would suggest that in many cases it’s very expensive, but what I think a lot of people kind of fell prey to in a way was [00:04:00] the easy button. I think another example I used SS e o, but website designers. I mean, almost every industry has some sort of template driven website builder that can push your site live in 48 hours for $199 a month. So really as a marketing agency particularly, I mean, how do you compete with that? Here are the drawbacks of course, that I think people are starting to realize, and in a way, bear with me, what presents, I think the opportunity, there are horror stories [00:04:30] that certainly maybe you’ve heard.

(04:32): I’ve heard maybe if you’re a business owner, maybe you’ve experienced a lot of these niche providers took advantage of the efficiencies, if you will, of serving one market and now all the content that they’re producing is just duplicate. The campaigns are identical. There’s in many cases a lack of ownership over the content or even the strategies. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had people come to us and say, I’m not getting any results from my current provider, but I’m locked into [00:05:00] this contract, or I’m locked into their proprietary tools and they’re telling me that if I went out, I lose everything. My website, my content, my campaign’s all gone. I don’t even own any of those. And I understand how people got into this situation. I mean, it was cheap. It was the easy button. They promised the moon. A lot of business owners don’t really want to pay attention to marketing.

(05:22): So it was very easy to abdicate, if you will, of their marketing. But I think I’m finally getting to the 0.6 minutes in [00:05:30] herein lies the opportunity. I think that as a marketer, as a consultant, as an agency, as a fractional C M O, as a fractional marketing department, as a fractional marketing director, whatever terminology or positioning you want to use, I think businesses are starting to slowly grasp that marketing is not just a bunch of tactics. And so the opportunity is to become the orchestrator. I [00:06:00] mean, competing on tactics alone is a race to the bottom price wise. And so I think you’re kind of dooming your business as a consultant if you are just providing tactics. I’m not saying those tactics aren’t needed and that there aren’t people that won’t pay for them, but it’s a race to the bottom price wise. So if you’re the orchestrator, if you’re the strategic provider, if you’re the person that is actually building the plan, then you can use all of those providers.

(06:27): I think businesses need someone who can weave together the [00:06:30] tactical strengths. So if you want to focus on a very specific industry focus as that industry’s fractional C M O, then take advantage of the fact that there are great content producers and website producers and SS e o folks and paid ad campaign folks that specialize in that industry. Use ’em, use the fact that they have built a robust platform that you can actually use very cheaply, but then you can pass on your strategy and [00:07:00] be the orchestrator for that industry. And that’s again, because so many people have been burned, I think that they’re looking for that trusted advisor who can actually make sense of the various parts, the fact that everybody’s selling a piece of the pie. So somebody who can come in and say, look, I’m going to run this for you. I’m going to actually direct to people in your organization, be your niche’s fractional C M O or marketing director.

(07:26): I mean, start with strategic vision. Assemble the dream [00:07:30] team of experts that are out there and just embrace the pool of skilled tacticians, guide them, leverage their skills for maximum. That’s I think, the future. I think that’s the opportunity. In fact, it might be the only thing left. I mean, AI is making the tactics even cheaper. So I think being the person that is pulling the strings, whatever metaphors we want to use is really the opportunity. So the riches may indeed be in the niches, but I think it’s more about [00:08:00] driving the niche strategy than ever before. So my recommendation, dive deep to the fractional niche marketing, become the trusted orchestrator. Discover one of the most profitable ways to position your business against the price driven tactics providers. So I’m curious your thoughts on niche marketing. I’d love to hear from you as I always do, but I also want to remind you in case you forgot, didn’t know first time listener, that [00:08:30] for the last decade or so, I’ve actually been training marketing agencies on this idea of fractional C M O of being a strategist.

(08:38): We license our methodology and our system for creating strategy first, which we’ve done now thousands of times. It is fall of 2023 when I’m recording this. We’ve run about 60 agencies through our licensing program just this year alone. I think more and more people are waking up to this idea that they have to have a differentiator to compete today. And certainly [00:09:00] tactics is a tough way to compete. So if you want to know more about our fractional CMO system that we will gladly license to you, just check out DTM world slash cmo. So it’s just DTM world slash cmo, and you can find lots of amazing information about our system and how you might acquire this approach to drive your business, to scale your business. I mean, we’ve certainly licensed our [00:09:30] system, but we’ve also been training agencies so long that we also teach on lead generation, lead conversion, fulfillment, bringing in account managers.

(09:39): We have a network of over a hundred agencies that collaborate actively. So tons and tons to really either get you started or to really reposition your business. I would say about a third of the people that join us are just starting a business. They see this as the fast track to really get going. And probably the rest of folks that join us are [00:10:00] often either web designers or somebody that has really realized that selling tactics is tough and they need to sell strategy. And then other businesses that are consultants, they’ve just been doing it all, making it up with every new client that see this as really the fast track to significantly improve their billings as well as their profits. So any rate, thanks for listening. Take care. We love those reviews. Hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.

John (00:08): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jay Bayer. He’s a business growth and customer experience author, researcher, and advisor, a seventh generation entrepreneur, and has written seven bestselling books and created six multimillion dollar companies. And we’re going to talk about his newest book, time, the time to win, how to, the Time to Win, how to Exceed Your Customer’s Need for Speed based on the time to win. My intro took longer than it will take you to read the book. Jay, welcome to the show.

Jay (00:45): Hey. Hey, great to be back. Nice to see you as always, John. It’s a pleasure.

John (00:50): You have probably told me the answer to this question, but I don’t remember it, so I’m going to ask you again, what did the first generation Bear entrepreneur Dow

Jay (01:01): Made? Caskets.

John (01:02): Caskets, okay.

Jay (01:03): Casket manufacturing

John (01:05): And maybe sold a little Dr. Feel good on the side or something like that out. Not out of the casket making

Jay (01:12): Wagon, I’m not sure. Possibly. Yeah, we went caskets to furniture, to insurance, to et cetera.

John (01:18): I suspect they all wore a similar jacket to what you’re wearing too.

Jay (01:22): Oh, sure, yeah, yeah. I actually have some pictures of my great, great, great grandfather and it’s the big black woolen coat kind of thing. They’re from Nebraska, right? You got to stay.

John (01:35): So the coat weighed about 80 pounds too then.

Jay (01:37): Exactly.

John (01:38): Alright, so this is straight from you. Straight from the book. Time is the heart of customer experience. Why don’t you just take it from there? What makes you say such?

Jay (01:50): Well, coming out of the pandemic, I had this observation, we were talking about all these business trends you talk about on the show, right? Like great resignation and quite quitting, and people wanting to work from home and be leisure travel. You’re talking about this one, the combination of business and leisure travel where you take your kids to the conference and double dip the trip. Baseball games are 25 minutes a night shorter now because of the pitch clock. All of these trends, John, are the same trend. It’s the same trend, which is that we care about time and how we spend it more than ever. And as always, when I create a book project, I want to validate those assumptions with research. So I put together the most comprehensive research report ever done in this country on the relationship between responsiveness and revenue. And it turned out, my guess was correct, speed is more important than ever. In fact, two thirds of customers say that speed is now as important as time. And I think we all feel that as customers, but not very many businesses are tuned around that fact just yet. So that’s why I wrote the book.

John (02:47): Alright, so we’re going to get into most of what you just said there a little deeper, but let me just throw this out there for conversation. I go to restaurants now and I think people are unreasonable about their need for speed, kind of stupid about it. And it’s like, well, can we not enjoy anything anymore? I mean, have we sort of become so obsessed and entitled about I need it and I need it now that it’s maybe ruining the experience?

Jay (03:15): Probably, yeah, probably nowhere in this book do I suggest that this is a net positive. I’m just suggesting that’s a net fact, right? So all I’m trying to do is make you money in your business. I’m not suggesting that we’re all necessarily going to be better as a species because of this continuum, but look, we’ve been doing this for a long time. You and I know you agree with me. Customer expectations always go up. They never retreat. And even within that pantheon, the one that really never goes backwards are expectations around speed. What was considered to be fast five years ago is now slow. And nobody ever ever says, I’ve been thinking, and next time, why don’t you just do that more slowly? That just doesn’t happen, right? So yeah, it’s probably ultimately going to be a road to ruin, but I want to make some money on that road before we get there.

John (04:06): Well, and I think your point is that a lot of us get trained because I’ll throw it out, we can Amazon. I mean, it’s so easy to buy and so fast to buy on Amazon that now if I go to any other shopping experience, I’m like, oh God, I got to put in my name.

Jay (04:22): Yeah, it’s absolutely true. It colors all of our decision making. One of the examples I use on stage a lot is you and I are old enough to remember when you couldn’t, couldn’t get transportation with your app, you had to call a taxi. Literally call a taxi, and you would just call up and they’d be like, okay, he’ll be by to get you. And you didn’t know when he was coming. You didn’t know who. You had no idea how long it would take. You had literally no idea what it would cost. No idea. No idea. Okay, fine. And now of course you can watch the car come with a little animated graphic and the guy’s blood type. I mean, it’s a much different age now. And the reality is customers are making buying decisions every second based on responsiveness. One of the most important findings in this research that’s in the book is that half of all customers will hire whomever contacts them first. Regardless of price. Regardless of price. And so if you know that to be true as a business, why don’t you just organize your stuff so that you’re the first one to respond? It’s such a smart play.

John (05:27): Yeah, I’m thinking of the home services businesses. It’s kind of the joke. It was like, I’m going to call three, the first one that calls me back. I’m not even going to bother with the other two. I just

Jay (05:36): Don’t want him to call me back. I literally did it. I got this house painted not long ago called three Painters as you do. First guy gets back to me in four hours and says, I can’t paint it today, obviously can’t even give you a quote today, but based on what you told me in your voicemail, here’s kind of what I think it’s going to cost, and here’s kind of when I think I can do the job. Second painter called me in two days. Third painter called me in 11 days, at which point I’d already painted the house. So too slow. And so I hired the first one of course, and was not the least expensive. Was the most expensive, but I didn’t care. We interpret speed as caring.

John (06:09): Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this has been a few years back. I’m sure they’ve improved the speed now, but I was in a little town in Mexico when I was just walking down the street and there was a sign that was a bus stop and it said the next bus is sometime between 8:00 AM and 3:00 PM today. I think we were having a freezing moment there.

Jay (06:42): Yeah, I was having a freezing moment there.

John (06:44): We’ll edit that out. I close a few things, we’ll work on that. But did you hear my joke? It was really funny. I was in Mexico a few years ago and walking down the street in this little town and there was a bus stop and said, the next bus is sometime between eight and 3:00 PM 8:00 AM and 3:00 PM

Jay (07:00): It’s like

John (07:02): Maybe this isn’t an American problem. I don’t know.

Jay (07:04): Well, it partially is an American problem, but it’s actually one of the key tenets in the book. This idea that you have to do a better job than you are today probably of setting expectations amongst your customers because in a vacuum of expectations, customers will anticipate that it will be instant because they’ve been trained that that is possible in many ways. And so if it’s not possible for you for whatever reason, you can probably get away with it as long as they know what the deal is and why the bus only comes every seven hours and we’re not sure when the bigger fault is not necessarily being slow. The bigger fault is what I call the uncertainty gap. When you know way more about your operations and the customer knows, the bigger that gap is, the more customer anxiety grows and the more anxiety grows, the more frustration builds and the more frustration builds, they’re less likely to give you money. So if you think you’re over informing the customer, you’re probably informing them just right.

John (08:03): And then of course you set up the opportunity to exceed expectations. Right? I was on a chat today and it said, our typical response today is eight and a half minutes or something like that. The person came on right away. I was like, well, this rocks, I was prepared to wait eight minutes.

Jay (08:19): I talk about this on stage all the time. We learn this in the very first day of business, the first day that you’re supposed to under promise and

John (08:29): Over deliver,

Jay (08:30): But yet in the bright light of day, so often we do the exact opposite, which is mind blowing to me. It’s like we know the rule yet we do the opposite. And so that’s why I was really happy to put this book together, and it is really short. I mean that you can read the book in less than an hour, which is the whole idea. I didn’t set out to do it this way. I was like, okay, I’ve written six regular books. I should write another full length business book about this. And I started writing it and I was like, this is ridiculous. I can’t make you spend six hours reading a business book about speed. This invalidates the entire premise. So it’s a very short book. People love it. You can put it in your pocket, you can knock it out in an hour, but it is jam packed full of info, that’s for sure. There’s no flow.

John (09:11): So there’s another finding that I think people will find interesting, useful. Two thirds of customers say that speed is as important as price. So we will pay more. We,

Jay (09:22): Oh, one of the top six pieces of the framework that I have in the book is that you should offer a fast pass. And every business can and should do this. Disney does it. I think they call it lightning lane now, John, where you pay more and you get to get on the rides faster. Oh,

John (09:43): They’ve got it down so much. There’s like a plus plus. Yeah. Like fast pass isn’t fast enough. We had another one.

Jay (09:49): Yeah. I mean, TSA pre is a fast pass, right? You pay more, you wait less, right? We have fast passes around us, but we think that somehow it only applies to big companies. It doesn’t matter what small business you’re running, you’ve got customers who would love to not wait. Maybe they forgot or maybe it’s urgent or whatever the circumstances are, you should give them that opportunity. So the research that we conducted found one in four customers will pay as much as 50% more than not. Wait. So you should let them do that. You don’t have to change your product or service at all you’re doing is changing your customer sequencing and reaping the financial rewards accordingly.

John (10:33): So I’m trying to think of an example. I mean, could you have conferences do a lot of levels of passes? So is it you get in earlier, you get, I mean, is it different than just perks? How do flip it Flip? How do you make it work for somebody that’s just been doing perks and bonuses?

Jay (10:52): Yeah. Think about conference is a great example. So the conference world is sort of beholden this idea of the early bird. If you register early, we’ll give you a special deal because you want to make sure you’ve got revenue to pay for stuff along the way. Keep the float. I get it. Well, if I was running a conference, I would have early bird, but I’d also have late bird. I would hold some seats back to have late bird and late bird pricing is a 20% surcharge on the most expensive ticket because you didn’t know you could go or you forgot or you didn’t hear about it until too late. So those kind of things can really,

John (11:25): But you knew you were going to be able to make a decision at the end rather than potentially wasting it by buying the early bird. Yeah. Yeah. So are there some cases where I don’t want fast? Yeah, heart transplant and under an hour we guarantee it. I mean,

Jay (11:41): Right. No, you can be too fast. And I’m glad you brought this up because I really want to make sure that A, I want you guys to read the book and it’s really inexpensive. It’s so short. But I want you to read the book, but I also want you to make sure that you don’t think that My advice is, Jay says we should be as fast as possible all the time. It’s true that you should probably be faster than you are much of the time. That’s true. And the data, bear that out. But speed at all costs actually costs your business speed at all costs. Costs. You can be too fast. And what happens is when you’re too fast, it diminishes trust. So the story I like to tell is I went to a Mexican food restaurant here in Indiana, which is a questionable call to begin with because it’s not really home of authentic Latino cuisine in Indiana. But I am like, Hey, roll the dice. And I got chicken enchiladas and they brought me enchiladas in 90 seconds. It was so fast. I’m like, do they have an enchilada machine? Is there a psychic that knew what I was going to get? It didn’t make, it threw me. It really threw me.

John (12:46): It was somebody sent effect. You know that

Jay (12:48): For sure somebody wanted the beef and they had it on the hot window. I know it, but that’s it. I was like, I distrust the veracity of the evangels because they’re too fast. And the same is true in any business. If it’s too fast, you don’t want to go to the fastest tattoo artist either. And actually the company drift the chatbot company, right?

(13:08): Sure. So Drift is one of the largest providers of chatbot software in the world. John. They actually program in an intentional delay in their chatbot responses because it’s all AI is second, the second you hit submit, bam, they could spit out the response in an eye blink, but they don’t do that because if they do it fast that people are like, wait a second, that’s a robot. I don’t know about that. So they put in the three second fake ellipsis like thinking, thinking, thinking, and then give you the same answer anyway because then people trust it. So you don’t want to be too fast.

John (13:47): And I think it’s easy for people to say fast literally means speed, but it also can mean removing friction. And absolutely great example is every time I go to the doctor and I’ve already filled out the pre ahead paperwork and I get there and they make me fill out the same paperwork, and it’s like not only do you not need that step, it’s a terrible experience. So I mean in some ways it would be faster. I doubt it. I mean, I sometimes think they make me fill it out because they figure I won’t be as bored waiting. But could be

Jay (14:19): Actually.

John (14:20): It could be. But again, that’s an example of really what you’re talking about as well, isn’t it? I mean, it all comes under the heading of better experience.

Jay (14:31): Absolutely. And even giving people what they need before they have to ask for it, sort of predictive provision of information is critical. It’s not necessarily faster, it’s just the perception of speed goes up, goes up a lot. And I’ll tell you, one of the techniques that I talk about is this idea of replying without answers. And I’ve been doing this now for about two and a half years in my business and also in my personal life. And it’s had such a big impact on my life, not just with my business colleagues, but with my wife and my kids and my friends and my mailman. So when somebody asks you a question and you don’t know the answer, what do we typically do? Well, we go find out, we go procure the information necessary to respond, and we got to look it up. Or we got to ask Julie in accounting, or we got to wait for my wife to come home to see if we’re free that night or whatever. That’s how we do it. And then once we’ve get the information, then we reply, stop doing that. Stop doing that. The better way to do it, trust me, is somebody asks you a question. If you don’t know the answer immediately you say, John, thanks for the question. Great one. So good. In fact, I got to look it up. I’m going to do that and then I’ll get back to you. So does this mean that you’ve got to respond to everybody twice?

John (15:48): Yes.

Jay (15:49): But the first response, all you’re saying is, I got it. And as soon as you say I got it, it goes off of their mental to-do list and they put it on your mental to-do list. And the psychological change in the mind of the customer at that point is massive. How they perceive your responsiveness goes up dramatically and it actually buys you more time to actually provide whatever the solution is. It’s a great technique.

John (16:17): That’s interesting because I know I’ve done that before, and then after a day goes by, I’m like, oh, crap, I’m going to ask somebody else.

Jay (16:22): Yep. Yeah, because if I send you an email, I mean, you and I respond to emails amongst one another pretty quickly, but if I send you an email and I don’t hear back for a couple of days, you start playing all these games, right? Like, okay, is he on vacation but he doesn’t have out of office. Did he go to spam? Did he change his email address? Is John mad at me? You start playing all these games, right? You don’t know. And that kind of angst in the mind of anybody is not probably a desirable business construct. So you can solve for that pretty easily.

John (16:55): So we have certainly hammered the point home that this is an important topic, but in the three minutes we have left, can you unpack the framework of, okay, what to do? Obviously you’re going to encounter this in the book, but maybe you can give us the shorthand.

Jay (17:09): Yeah, the book’s got facts. Yeah. Six piece framework, some of ’em we talked about reply without answers is one of ’em. Offer a Fast Pass is one of ’em. The first one though, the first thing you got to do is perform what we call a got it audit, which is to figure out how long does it take your customers and clients now to get whatever they need? How long does it take a customer to get an invoice or pay a bill or get a question answered? And when I ask business leaders this, John, because it sounds obvious, they’re like, well, it usually takes two days, but sometimes it’s three, and if it’s a weekend, it might be four. If Bob’s out of town, it could be five. I’m like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That’s not numbers. That’s a collection of stories that you’ve told yourself.

(17:45): If you’re going to figure out how to outperform your competition with responsiveness, and trust me, that’s why it’s called the time to win. Because this is the time that you can use time to win if you’re going to do that. And you should because you’re going to make a ton of money at it. You got to know how long these things take. If you’re going to optimize around responsiveness, you have to know what the average and the media and the mean is for what you’re doing today and almost nobody does know. And so that’s the first step is to figure that stuff out.

John (18:15): Yeah. Awesome. So you have a number of ways that people obviously can connect with you, but get the book. I know Amazon has an ebook version or Kindle version, but tell us about all the other myriad ways that somebody can acquire this.

Jay (18:29): Yeah, the books on Kindle right now on Amazon, as John said, there is a limited edition, three pack of books, one for you, one for a colleague, and one to give to a business when they disappoint you, which I love. Three books, limited edition, special slip case, and I’m going to do this once. You can get those at jaybaerbook.com, jaybaerbook.com, special price on the three pack. And if you go to the time to win.com, you can get all the research that this book is based on for nothing. I won’t even ask you for your email address. Just happy to have you have it. Awesome.

John (19:01): So last question is Pandemic Passover. We’re no longer giving people a pass for,

Jay (19:09): And it was actually kind of a nice ride there for a bit. Customers and companies were kind of on the same page for a bit, right? Where customers would say, ah, I understand supply chain challenges and you’re short on labor and I know you’ve cut your hours, but hey man, I’m just glad you guys are still open. We’re all in this together. Just get it to me whenever you can, right? And that was a lovely, lovely microcosm, but ain’t that anymore? 83%. Here’s the number. We did the research on this. 83% of customers expect you to be as fast or faster than you were pre pandemic. So this idea that they’re going to give you a pandemic pass, sadly, is over.

John (19:48): Yeah, because pandemic caught a lot of people off guard. We should know better now, right? We should have tightened the ship and got a better strategy and no better now. That’s it. Totally agree. Jay, always great to see you. Appreciate you. So Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Hopefully we’ll see you out there on the road again soon. One of these days.