nadosi.com

John Jantsch (00:01.006)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Chance. My guest today is Alex Goldfein. He’s a three-time Wall Street Journal bestselling author, one of the most sought after sales speakers in the world. He’s the CEO of the Revenue Growth Consultancy, one of the top grossing solo consulting firms in America, generating 7.5 million annually. His clients, primarily B2B organizations, implement simple, proactive actions that drive 15 to 30 % sales growth.

every year and we’re gonna talk about his latest book out grow how to expand market share and outsell your competition. So welcome to show Alex.

Alex Goldfayn (00:39.721)

Hi John, thank you sir. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (00:42.06)

I want to unpack one of the core themes of the book. You talk about transforming reactive companies into proactive ones. Tell me little bit about that thinking.

Alex Goldfayn (00:52.91)

Well, I think, you know, over 415 clients over about 22 years that I’ve done these outgrow revenue growth initiatives with, what I’ve realized is about 95 % of all companies and also 95 % of all salespeople are generally reactive, meaning we take what’s in coming. and when you take what’s in coming and most companies that have been around.

some history are very good at this, like world class, right? When I arrive at an organization, usually they are world class at this reactive work, which is basically customer service work. Well, the only way to really grow in terms of volume growth, not inflationary growth, not acquisitive growth, but organic volume sales growth, the only way to do that is we have to take market share.

We have to, uh, take business from another company that already has the business. And the only way to compete for and take market share is to be pro active. You cannot react your way to market share growth. You can’t do it. You’re just, when you’re reactive, you’re just, you know, a rising tide lifts all ships, sinking tide sinks all ships. Uh, and you’re just moving with the current. You go where the economy takes you.

And that is 95 % of all companies and 95 % of all salespeople. And that’s actually good news because it means that it’s really easy to stand out in that crowd. It’s really easy to do better. And as a result, it’s really, really easy, John, to grow.

John Jantsch (02:45.806)

Yeah, and you know, in this particular moment in time, starting the third quarter of 2025, as we record this, I’m seeing a lot of companies that it’s even worse because they’re not even even if they’re unhappy right now, they’re like not reaching out because there’s a lot of uncertainty. And it’s like, I’m just gonna stay put. So I mean, I would suggest that your proactive is probably even more necessary because there’s probably less incoming right now.

Alex Goldfayn (03:11.62)

Not only is it more necessary, it works better now because of exactly what you said, because literally nobody’s reaching out now. So outgrow proactivity works really, really well in good economies because people have money to spend and we can go to them and say, hey, what are you spending your money on? May I help you with that? I’d love an opportunity to help. But in a bad economy, John, because of exactly what you said, people sit around and your competition is like, I’m not gonna call them.

John Jantsch (03:15.202)

Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (03:40.506)

now, especially now, I’m not going to pitch them, you know, for more products or more services now in this economy. I’m telling you, when you call a customer and say, I was thinking about you, how’s your family? What are you working on that I can help you with? Or perhaps what are you doing with my competition that I can help you with? And this is somebody, you know, does somebody have a nice relationship with? when you call somebody like that, John, you’re the only one in that person’s life.

John Jantsch (03:59.16)

Thank

John Jantsch (04:03.0)

Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (04:09.943)

doing that. Nobody else is doing it, especially now. So talk about standing out from the crowd and how easy it is. Just show up because nobody is.

John Jantsch (04:20.974)

I think I know the answer to this, but tell me a little bit about the term outgrow. What are you trying to project with that?

Alex Goldfayn (04:29.292)

Yeah, well, we want to outgrow the market. We want to outgrow the competition. We want to outgrow the average. We want to outgrow the company’s own history year to year, you know, in terms of growth. And again, the way to do that is through taking market share. And the way to take market share is to be proactive.

John Jantsch (04:50.484)

So looking a little bit back to one of your very first things as saying that, 90 % of the folks just wait around. I mean, is that another way of saying that 90 % of salespeople are lazy?

Alex Goldfayn (05:02.198)

No, it’s another way of saying that 90 or 95 % of salespeople have tremendous discomfort and fear with communicating with customers and prospects when nothing is wrong, which is my definition of proactivity. If somebody says, what do you mean by proactive? I mean, when nothing is wrong, when the price isn’t going up, which is when salespeople call, when you need the payment, which is when customers hear from salespeople.

John Jantsch (05:20.225)

Yes.

Alex Goldfayn (05:31.258)

When you can’t get them the order on time, which is when customers hear from salespeople, right? People only hear from people when something rises to the level of urgency to make the call. And so this communication, this proactive communication is when nothing is wrong. So that’s my definition of productivity. And it’s not laziness. It’s intense and severe discomfort with bothering the customer, annoying the customer, taking their time and probably hovering above all of that, even higher.

is discomfort and fear of rejection. Fear of rejection. If I call them about this other offering, they might tell me no into my ear hole. And that’s an intense personal rejection, right? And that’s what we’re trying to avoid. We humans, and you and I are too, we will do anything possible to avoid that kind of rejection.

including going out and asking for the business.

John Jantsch (06:32.428)

Yeah. You know, back, back when I was just getting started, I had a routine on, Fridays. I would just pick up the phone and call five people. I was not trying to sell anything. I was not trying to do anything. And I can’t tell you, I used to laugh. In I wrote a big blog post about this, that about half the time one or two of those phone calls, would, would start with, I was just meaning to call you. And it was like, okay.

Alex Goldfayn (06:57.027)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:00.162)

Get out my order pad. It was amazing.

Alex Goldfayn (07:02.201)

That’s it. That’s it. When you show up when nothing is wrong, you are saving the customer from having to think about it again. Whatever is in their head, whatever the need might be. If you don’t call them like you just shared, they’re going to have to think about it more, probably repeatedly, because once usually doesn’t do it. You don’t think about something and then do it typically. You think about something many times and then you might do it, but you might not. And it’s incredibly valuable.

John Jantsch (07:06.35)

Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (07:30.819)

to do what you just described. And that’s why my clients, and I’ve had tens of thousands of salespeople go through this and run these processes that we’re talking about. We constantly hear from people, why will I have you? Or I’m so glad you called, can you please check on this for me? Product, service, whatever it is.

John Jantsch (07:52.227)

Yeah. Yeah. So would you say that this is just a, like, this is a habit, this is a system or is it cultural in an organization or is it all the above? Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (08:04.407)

Yeah, you need both. So I say that outgrow is two thirds mindset work because, you know, behavior always follows thinking and we can’t outsell our mindset. So if we think we’re bothering the customer, we’re going to sell accordingly. But if we think it’s our obligation to help the customer and they want our help because they’re better off with us than with the competition who isn’t as good as us, then we sell that way. We sell as though

John Jantsch (08:20.792)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (08:32.289)

we have a lot more value for the customer. So it’s two thirds mindset work. In Outgrow, we have an acronym called COPE, John, COPE, confidence, optimism, positivity, and enthusiasm. And we need those mindsets because we have to bring them to the salespeople that we work with. We have to bring them to the organization. So culturally, in Outgrow organization that runs Outgrow,

becomes more cope, becomes more confident, more optimistic, more positive, more enthusiastic. And when you are those things, it’s much easier to make proactive calls, to offer additional products, to follow up on quotes and proposals, and to ask people what else.

John Jantsch (09:17.55)

How, how ready does this, does a person using this system need to be for, if I start with a call with, just want to see if there’s anything I could help you with. I sell widgets, but the guy tells me, you know what, we just fired our accounting firm. We’re really screwed. How prepared do I have to be to say, you know what, I think I can help you with somebody, you know, unrelated to me, I’m not going to make any money off of this, but I think I can help you. mean, how prepared or, or, or how much of your system do you think?

relies on just being the person who solves problems.

Alex Goldfayn (09:50.988)

think people just want to help people. And I also think our starting position is people just want to be helped. You’re calling your customers, your prospects. People just want to be helped. That’s starting point number one. Then when we are showing up, we are simply offering to help people, which is what they want. John?

Over a hundred million outgrow actions, log, tracked and analyzed over 23 years by over 400 clients. So we log our activities and then we see the, you know, with the responses, the results, the outcomes. Um, not one time, not once has any customer ever said, I’d rather you not make my life easier today. Has it happened once people just want to be helped. if you’re calling to sell a product and somebody has a need that you don’t provide.

Well, then try to help them. Common sense, you know, human relationship stuff. in fact, I would argue that already happens. You know, if you’re watching this right now, how many times does one of your customers ask you for something that you don’t offer them? And you went and found a way to get it for them. Maybe you connected them to your competition. Even maybe you went to your competition and got what they needed for them. That happens all the time. And when you do that, the customer remembers it.

forever.

John Jantsch (11:17.774)

Well, and, and, know, once you’ve, I’ve, I’ve seen this all the time. Once I’ve, once I’ve got that trust, um, you know, I want to keep it. Um, and I keep it by just not, not allowing them to call anybody else, right. I’m the only one that they would call regardless of what their problem is. And, and either it takes a little extra work sometimes, you know, your stuff, you’re not going to get paid for directly, but, um, as you’ve seen in, your research, uh, pays off time and time again, speaking of, uh, research.

how would a company set up?

measuring this, you know, because you might make 10 of those calls and nothing really happens today. you know, so now the sales person’s like, you know, that’s, that’s not really paying off. you know, is there a way to measure you talk about them actions? think, I think that’s what you called them. you know, you know, these actions, is there a way to then turn them into a system of KPIs so to speak that, that, you know, that doubt do kind of motivate people to say, this works.

Alex Goldfayn (12:08.0)

Yeah, yeah, outgrow actions. Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (12:15.754)

Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (12:20.342)

Yeah, so in the book, there are scorecards and metrics that we use all over at examples. And I don’t know if you can see our video right now. You can see a couple of baseball bats behind me and we call it swinging the bat. So we don’t track the hits and outgrow. We track the swings because we know what the batting averages are. So we are simply asking outgrow participants who we call out growers.

John Jantsch (12:23.746)

Yes.

Alex Goldfayn (12:48.854)

We are asking this. These are people who face customers for you. We’re asking them to try to take our act to take our actions because we know, you know, in baseball you can hit the ball exactly right, dead on, and it flies right out of the fender and it’s an out. And sales is the same way. You can do everything right and hit the ball perfectly. And then, you know, getting the win is largely out of our control. You can’t really control if the customer is in a good mood.

You can’t really control if the customer has an itch when you’re calling to scratch. can control making my call, but I can’t control if they need it in that moment. can’t control the timing. the other thing we know is we need eight or nine nos for every yes that we got in sales. you, if you win 10 to 20 % of the time in sales, you’re one of the best. baseball, you can fail 70 % of the time and go to the hall of fame.

In our work, we fail more than that.

John Jantsch (13:47.118)

Yeah, I don’t know as good as pitching is these days, Alex. I’m going to say it’s, you know, seven and a half times now.

Alex Goldfayn (13:53.955)

I know it’s dropping, isn’t it? I know. These days, 250 is a good batting average, right, in baseball? We were both baseball fans. We were chatting about that before we started our conversation here. Anyway, we do track the efforts because we know what the success rates are. You know, I’ll give you an example. We have a technique called the did you know question, and we have another technique called the reverse did you know question. Both of these are detailed in the book.

John Jantsch (14:13.422)

Yep.

John Jantsch (14:19.853)

Mm-hmm.

Alex Goldfayn (14:23.394)

So the did you know question or DYK, did you know, is you suggesting an additional product or service to your customer that they don’t already buy from you. They probably buy it somewhere else. They probably need it. They probably buy it from your competition, service or product. And so what we know statistically is that 20 % of those close, 20 % become a new line item. So if I say to you, hey, John, did you know I do keynote speeches? What about longer workshops? How about one-on-one coaching?

Of course, I work with organizations. I ask you five of those, and it’s going to take me 20 seconds, maybe, one will close and turn into a new line for us to work on. And so let’s say somebody listening to us has 10 salespeople. And each one of those 10 asks five digital questions and they’re tracked. We do enter them into a system. We have an outgrow tracking form. a simple web form. You enter it in and at the end of the week, you get data back from us. We send the data back to you. It’s all automated.

Um, 10 people ask five digital questions a day. That’s 50 a day, 250 a week, a thousand a month, 12,000 a year. If my math is right, that’s top of my head. 12,000 digital questions a year. If we can get 10 people to give us 20 seconds a day.

20 % of 12,000, that’s the success rate, is 2,400 new line items. That’s a fact. It’s not, I hope they’ll add 2,400 new line items. If they can get five Did You Know questions in 20 seconds from 10 people a day, every day, that’s where the complexity comes. That’s the hard part. Not asking the Did Knows, it’s the choreography. It’s doing it all the time, every day, they will get 2,400 new.

John Jantsch (16:07.726)

Yeah

Alex Goldfayn (16:12.032)

line items, then the question becomes how much money per line item and how many times a year will that new thing be purchased? Cause many people sell things repeatedly. It could be monthly, could be quarterly. It could be twice a year. You do the math almost always five digital questions a day gets you to millions of dollars in new revenue as a fact, statistically for sure. If you can get five digital questions a day.

John Jantsch (16:13.634)

me.

John Jantsch (16:37.356)

And I bet you every salesperson listening has had an experience where they walked into a client’s office and the client said, yeah, we just did this new thing over here. And then they said, did you know that we do that? Right.

Alex Goldfayn (16:48.792)

And then you know what you hear is you hear, do that? I didn’t know you did that. And you’re like, dude, I just told you that I do that like two weeks ago. I know it was you because we were talking to each other just like we are now. And you had the exact same reaction two weeks ago. I didn’t know you did that. Now I’m telling you again, two weeks later, you still don’t know. So the takeaway for us salespeople is just because you tell somebody something doesn’t mean they know. It means you told them doesn’t mean a register doesn’t mean they remember.

John Jantsch (17:05.518)

me.

John Jantsch (17:18.616)

So this is a good segue to non-sales department folks, right? I mean, how can they contribute to this kind of proactive sales culture? Sounds like they could be asking did you know?

Alex Goldfayn (17:22.615)

Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (17:28.096)

A hundred percent. mean, we’re constantly working with customer service people, managers, frontline people. what, what it develops, you know, clients have called it a non-traditional sales force. even people like project managers, if you’re in construction, client execs or, or, you know, engineers and architects who are like, didn’t become an engineer to be a used car salesman. Alex, thanks dude. But that’s not for me. And again, mindset work. You’re not selling, you’re helping.

John Jantsch (17:43.672)

Mm-hmm.

Alex Goldfayn (17:57.762)

People need more help from you. So yes, it is for anybody who faces customers, who can ask a, did you know question or two on the calls, even that are incoming, you know, proactive calls are a big part of our work. But if they come to you, if you have a counter operation or a sales floor of some kind, or if you’re just customer service picking up the phone all day, you can say, do you need this? How are you on that?

We just got some of this in and ask your DigiNose.

John Jantsch (18:30.531)

So does that need to be in an SOP somewhere so that everybody’s trained on it? Or is it more of a look for moments of truth?

Alex Goldfayn (18:39.751)

It’s more change the mindset, make them confident and optimistic and positive and enthusiastic, and then say to them, please ask five a day because that’s what we’re doing now. does, you know, it’s, it’s warm and fuzzy above all it’s positive work because we’re helping customers more, but it needs tracking and accountability or else it stops. It doesn’t keep going. It stops.

John Jantsch (19:09.528)

So how do you get this ingrained into an organization? Because I’m guessing, you know, they can come to one Alex’s amazing workshops, get all the good ideas, and then go back to back to the shop. And it’s like, we do it for a week. mean, how do you make it a habit?

Alex Goldfayn (19:19.989)

Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (19:25.045)

Right. Well, we, you know, you just said the key word habit. we say outgrow sales doing not sales training, because as you just said, sales training, don’t grow revenue. Sales training tells people stuff probably that they already know. And then they go back to their reactive life. And you know, in sales, we have to do things to make money. We can’t know stuff. We have to do stuff to make money.

John Jantsch (19:29.774)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:43.682)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:52.93)

Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (19:53.88)

There are some professions that can make money by knowing things. We’re not one of them. We have to do stuff that we know. So, you we engage with clients for typically three to five years, And so we have a launch year where the work begins. It takes us about 90 days to create their proactive program. Then we teach it. It’s a one-day workshop typically just for that client, just for that client’s people. It’s not open. It’s just theirs. So it’s a private.

John Jantsch (19:58.606)

the

John Jantsch (20:06.99)

Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (20:23.287)

engagement. And then they begin this weekly cadence of the leader of the effort literally asks for or prescribes some target actions for the week. For example, this week, please give me five proactive phone calls to people that you haven’t talked to in six months or more. That’s specific. Five, did you know questions and five quote follow ups. It’s three sets of actions, 15 things for the week. Then people go do it.

Step two, step three is they log it into our system. Step four is we put out data and we show them the scorecard. Just tracking efforts. Who tried and who didn’t? Who cares and who doesn’t? And then we put out success stories. We put out wins, we tell the wins, we tell the success stories in the words of the people who submitted them. That’s five step sort of feedback loop that happens every week. Next week, they make a new assignment of actions.

John Jantsch (21:17.89)

you

Alex Goldfayn (21:22.259)

At 30, 60, and 90 days, we visit with them and do web meetings to review the data, to tell success stories to the group verbally. People actually speak their stories to each other, ask each other questions. Then we follow up with them in the next six months as well. So over a nine month period in the launch year, we are with them seven times. nobody cares what the consultant wants. The salespeople don’t care.

John Jantsch (21:36.866)

Yeah.

Mm.

Alex Goldfayn (21:50.732)

what the outside advisor wants. They only care what their leadership wants. People only do what they think is important to their boss. So this work, as much as anything, is about, we coach the leaders. The leaders then have to do the accountability and the implementation and the buy-in work and the maintaining of energy with the people who are taking the swings and doing the outgrow work.

John Jantsch (22:17.996)

Yeah. I, know, that, getting them telling stories to each other, that sort of peer pressure almost that that puts on is probably a really powerful aspect.

Alex Goldfayn (22:28.215)

It does a few things. know, and all the research shows, John, that recognition is a more effective tool to make change with, to change behavior with than money is. Recognition is more powerful than giving somebody some money in private. The reason is that one, the person feels proud. You know, they’re being recognized, they get to tell their story. Two, other people, it makes it impossible for them to say, this doesn’t work here.

John Jantsch (22:33.87)

Yeah. Right.

John Jantsch (22:56.278)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (22:56.683)

Cause here’s stories about it working here. Three, those people aspire to be recognized next. Four, and the last thing, it teaches the work. It teaches what works, right? In the words of the happy salespeople, the successful people, it’s education, peer to peer, not from the top down, peer to peer education.

John Jantsch (23:02.286)

Yep.

John Jantsch (23:07.31)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (23:19.736)

Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, Alex, I appreciate you taking a few moments to drop by the duct tape marketing podcast. Is there anywhere you’d invite somebody to connect with you, learn about your work, obviously, learn about the book.

Alex Goldfayn (23:32.245)

Yeah, thank you, John. They can get the book on Amazon or wherever they buy books. Barnes and Noble has it. Books A Million has it. Anywhere books are sold. Actually launched as the number two best selling business book in America behind only Atomic Habits. I was able to outsell everybody except for Atomic Habits, of course.

John Jantsch (23:51.022)

That’s only been number one for what, like six, seven years?

Alex Goldfayn (23:54.281)

Right. Well, it’s good company, I guess. And then if you want to learn more about Outgrow and the revenue growth that we do, please visit runoutgrow.com.

John Jantsch (24:12.046)

Well, again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you out there at Wrigley field or something.

Alex Goldfayn (24:18.572)

Thank you so much for having me go Cubs. appreciate that, John. Thanks for the Cubs. out.

AI, Analytics & Content Strategy: Andy Crestodina on the Future of Digital Marketing

AI, Analytics & Content Strategy: Andy Crestodina on the Future of Digital Marketing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Overview

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch welcomes Andy Crestodina, co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media Studios, to explore the rapidly changing world of digital marketing. Andy shares practical insights on using AI for content strategy, analytics, and website optimization—while emphasizing the enduring importance of quality, relationships, and human creativity. The discussion covers everything from AI-powered audience simulations to the evolving role of SEO, and how marketers can cut through the noise to focus on what really matters.

About the Guest

Andy Crestodina is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Orbit Media Studios, a top-rated digital agency in Chicago. A recognized authority on content strategy, SEO, and web analytics, Andy is celebrated for his ability to make complex marketing topics accessible and actionable. He’s the author of “Content Chemistry,” a sought-after speaker, and a regular contributor to leading marketing publications. Andy’s hands-on approach and innovative thinking have made him a trusted guide for marketers navigating digital transformation.

Website: orbitmedia.com
LinkedIn: Andy Crestodina

Actionable Insights

The future of marketing will involve testing content and strategies with AI-generated audience personas before launching to the real market.
AI’s biggest long-term value is improving quality and performance, not just efficiency or cost-savings.
Human relationships, creativity, and high-touch service will always set great brands apart from “good enough” automation.
Content that stands out will be driven by strong points of view, original research, collaboration, and highly visual formats.
The SEO landscape is shifting: informational content will see less traffic from search, while commercial intent and “visit website” keywords remain essential.
LinkedIn newsletters and platform-native content are quickly outpacing traditional SEO for B2B visibility.
Marketers should use analytics for actionable insights—such as CTA performance, video engagement, and conversion rates—rather than generic dashboards or reporting.
AI can help uncover hidden data trends and quickly transform insights into new campaign ideas, but quality still requires human oversight and creativity.

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

01:10 – AI Personas and the Future of Marketing
Andy predicts marketers will soon use AI-generated “synthetic audiences” to test ideas before launch.
03:30 – Focus on Quality, Not Just Efficiency
Why the real opportunity is in improving performance, not just saving time.
05:48 – The Limits of AI in Design
Where automation can help creative teams—and where pixel-perfect service still matters.
09:39 – Content Creation: AI vs. Originality
The danger of “good enough” content and why strong opinions and research win.
11:21 – SEO’s Shifting Role
How commercial-intent keywords and platform-native content are now the best route to visibility.
15:40 – Analytics That Matter
Andy’s favorite ways to use GA4 and AI for real business insights, not just reports.
21:06 – The Coming Age of Automated Client Interactions
Imagining a near future where AI agents help qualify leads, prep sales teams, and remove friction where clients want it.

Pulled Quotes

“AI’s real value isn’t just efficiency. It’s about pushing performance and improving quality.”
— Andy Crestodina

“Content strategy is about to have a great moment—as the tide goes out, strong opinions, research, and collaboration will stand out even more.”
— Andy Crestodina

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01.346)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Andy Crestodina. He’s a recognized authority in digital marketing, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Orbit Media Studios and an influential voice on content strategy, SEO and website optimization. With two decades of hands-on experience, Andy is known for breaking down complex marketing tactics into practical, actionable steps, my kind of guy.

He’s a sought after speaker and the author of content chemistry and a regular contributor to leading industry publications. So Andy, welcome to the show.

Andy Crestodina (00:38.136)

Thanks for having me, John. Glad to be here.

John Jantsch (00:39.438)

We have known each other about each other, whatever the definition is for many years. and I just discovered this the first time you’ve been on my show. So why don’t you come back like weekly now.

Andy Crestodina (00:45.259)

Mm-hmm.

Andy Crestodina (00:51.896)

I would never say no. I’d hang out with you all day, John, if I could.

John Jantsch (00:56.469)

So let’s, let’s jump into AI. mean, what the heck? What are we 41 seconds in? Where do you see it making the biggest real world impact for marketers today? I know that’s a pretty big question.

Andy Crestodina (01:02.583)

Mm-hmm.

Andy Crestodina (01:10.924)

No, I think about it a lot. I think that probably the future of marketing is lowering risk and cost by building synthetic members of a target audience and then testing content, pages, calls to action strategies with that AI persona. So, Sims, like running little, making a thing and getting feedback on it before you put it in the market, because I think it’s likely, it seems to me that we’ll look back at this era and say,

Wow, super primitive. You used to just make a thing and make it live and hope for the best and check it later. Probably not in the future. We’ll do it in a bit more sophisticated way.

John Jantsch (01:50.894)

That’s really interesting. You know, I hadn’t really thought about that, that idea, because I think so many people are focused on automations and efficiencies and getting rid of people, you know, even. But, I mean, you’re obviously, I mean, I, I’m really of the camp that it’s going to change some things around in terms of people, but I think it also is, you know, they’re already seeing it creating some demand in some areas for people.

Andy Crestodina (02:03.186)

No. Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:18.946)

that didn’t exist before. is the concern that, was it Sam Altman that said like 95 % of marketing or white collar jobs will be gone in five years?

Andy Crestodina (02:25.953)

Yeah.

You

Andy Crestodina (02:33.066)

Yeah, I think there’s, I’m going to stay out of the prediction game and wondering, but, I’ll tell you what I’m here for and have been from the beginning and you too, it’s, don’t, I don’t wake up in the morning hoping to save 10 minutes or half an hour. I want to do great work. I want to see the performance of that work. I want to know that I’m, that I’m doing quality work. I want to see the, the feedback and the performance of everything in the data.

So really everything I’ve ever done with AI, and this is hundreds of experiments, half by day on Saturday was building a custom GPT and testing it. But everything that I’ve done is really just been about trying to improve quality. And if it turns out to be faster, that’s lovely. But what we’re all trying to do is to drive an outcome. So I think a lot of marketers are overemphasizing efficiency and speed.

John Jantsch (03:09.026)

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina (03:30.641)

and missing big opportunities to use it to push performance.

John Jantsch (03:36.002)

Yeah. one of the, ironically, one of the, think one of the enemies of quality is that we got so much on our plate, right? And I think that even quality relationships, I mean, I’m finding that if there’s a lot of stuff that had to be done, but let’s face it, it was grunt work, you know, that had to be done. And I do think that some people are feeling like, Hey, if I get that off my plate, it kind of frees my head up. And, know, even like I say, for, for more relationship building and

I think that’s where quality is gonna come from, isn’t it?

Andy Crestodina (04:06.762)

Absolutely. So it will give you a free hand to work harder on those, you know, the conversations you’re having, prioritizing offline experiences, being part of communities, you know, just taking care of the people around you. But the one thing that I’ve been doing with a lot, and this was my very last call, talking to a client.

looking for opportunities to make these pages better, stronger, faster, more detailed and comprehensive. It’s for a higher ed program. And we just gave Chad to PT the persona and gave it the page and said, we’re looking to make this a more comprehensive page. Give us ideas. The very first idea was fantastic. It’s like, which program is right for you. What? Wait, how? And the meeting sort of paused. Like everyone kind of held their breath for a second and asked, like, did we not?

do that? Wait, we didn’t do that. Why didn’t we do that? And there were several others, like three or four things. Yeah, so AI-powered gap analysis is one of my favorite things, but they’re always best discovered through relationships and real-world human conversation.

John Jantsch (05:10.221)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:17.304)

So a lot of orbit media’s work is or has been designed or at least design was an element of it. How do you feel about the design creative process right now? I think there’s a lot of people trying to create tools that can automate a lot of things in that space. Where do you, do you, do you feel like, mean, there’s, there’s some really awful stuff coming out through that. mean, how do you feel about that space right now, where it is today and where you see it going?

Andy Crestodina (05:23.522)

Mm-hmm.

Andy Crestodina (05:40.792)

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina (05:48.226)

Well, design for interactive is a kind of a turning point happening now because these tools like Figma, where you’re designing it somehow in a context where it’s already responsive and the front end programming for things that web teams are building is sort of half done. Now, kind of like writing or image generation, the code generated by AI still requires a lot of review. No one’s just grabbing it and assuming it’s all

perfect, it’s not. So there’s a big gain there in the handoff between designers and programmers, but not, you know, there’s still plenty of work to do. The other one I think is in design. What do you hire? What do you get when you hire a web company? Partly you want service, you want someone to listen to you, you want accountability, you want a thought partner and you want pixel perfection. I don’t think AI is there. don’t think that if you, brands big and small.

want to work with designers to get the thing to look just like they want it to look. The state of AI for UX, it all feels like these long shot prompts. It’s just like, hope something good comes back and you can’t really ask it to fine tune. It’s just creating another one each time. don’t know. So design for simple things, design direction, great, but not for pixel perfection.

John Jantsch (07:19.054)

I’m going to question how much of the market actually wants or understands pixel perfection. mean, aren’t there isn’t there a significant amount of the market that’s like, that’s good enough.

Andy Crestodina (07:29.836)

I’m sure there is. It’s not mostly our audience. I had a 40 minute call with a client about how this circle, the brand is everything. And the edge of the circle needs to be a little bit closer to the edge of the box on both mobile and desktop. There are still lots of people who want their fingerprints on their design. I understand that. I don’t think that.

John Jantsch (07:30.894)

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina (07:56.094)

Visitors care that much about the number of pixels between the circle and the edge of the box but so yeah, if you’re looking for good enough or a great start or here’s the You know a giant step in the in a good direction. It’s awesome but but people really do like service and there’s a Special thing that happens like you said about relationships, you know when creative teams work together to solve problems with clients and and leaders

John Jantsch (08:26.348)

Yeah, I I personally, again, I wouldn’t put myself out there as being on the front line of image creation or whatnot with some of the tools, but some of the stuff I’ve done with it, I mean, every now and then it’s like, yeah, that’s okay. And then every now and then it’s just like, that’s like, that person has no face. How can I use that?

Andy Crestodina (08:43.96)

It’s changing fast. It’s changing fast. Image generation. I sort of wish I could go back and I would have put in the same prompt every month just to sort of see the evolution of it because it’s improving quickly. But yeah, don’t look too closely at hands. Text is still a problem. It’s getting much, much better. But halfway through here at 2025, there are long shot prompts, let’s be honest.

John Jantsch (09:00.696)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:11.618)

Yeah. Yeah. So speaking of maybe that’s good enough, let’s talk about content creation. I think a lot of people, that was probably the first use case for many people is, look, this can write this blog post for me. I think a lot of people are starting to find out that that’s just not going to cut it. In fact, there, you know, I won’t go as far as saying the old Google penalty thing, but I think that they’re being penalized in the eyes of everything that’s reading the content today.

Andy Crestodina (09:39.762)

Yeah, I don’t see a reason to write an article, to publish an article if AI can create it because your target audience can write that same prompt and get that same article. That’s in fact the last thing you should publish. So for the duct tape marketing audience and fans of yours and people who read my stuff, I think it should be obvious that the difference between AI generated, just garbage and

John Jantsch (09:45.356)

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina (10:05.72)

quickly made stuff in medium quality or the boring taste like water articles. And strong points of view, original research, deep content, like taking a stand, collaborative formats like we’re doing now. This stuff is going to be even more different in the future. I think that content strategy is going to have a great moment here as the tide goes out and all these marketers just look like it becomes really clear.

No one’s ever going to read that again. Whoever’s byline that was just lost reputation. So yeah, strong opinion, original research, collaborative formats, highly visual content. These will feel more different than ever. So it’s like influencers and video. These things will be, I think, more effective in the future than even they are today.

John Jantsch (11:00.76)

So as I listen to describe that, you know, the old game used to be, I mean, content and SEO or search visibility, certainly we’re very married together. And as I listen to you describe that, mean, it really, I mean, is keyword ranking just not really a thing anymore? It’s not important anymore?

Andy Crestodina (11:21.353)

Thank you for asking that. I’m seeing so much about this and I’m really excited to give this answer. Everyone needs to separate in their minds these two types of key phrases. People looking for answers are looking for articles. AI overviews will kind of give that person the answer. Click through rates to content marketing for search optimized articles will decline forever. It has been for five years anyway. commercial intent key phrases, what the buyer searches for.

Visit website intent key phrases. There’s still tons of them. Separate in your analytics blog posts from your sales pages and then check the changes to traffic and then check the changes to rankings and click through rates and engagement because people who are making big decisions want to look at a website. They’re going to click through it no matter what Google puts in their way.

John Jantsch (12:10.06)

Yeah, I think one of the pieces of that puzzle is that they’re still getting, in many cases, even this long drawn out, you know, long tail phrase is still being provided in increasingly AI overviews. And so the game then becomes like, okay, I’ve already filtered. I’m not going to go look 10 places. I’m going to maybe pick one or two of these. So, so the game then becomes showing up in those AI overviews or whatever that looks like. is there a different approach to that?

Andy Crestodina (12:29.464)

For sure. Again, perfect question, John. I love this conversation. There’s more to content than search. I see these posts. I don’t have time to respond to them all. I’m not in it to like start a food fight, but content marketing is dead.

Because of SEO, that was your only channel. Is that all you ever thought it was about? So this is my number one B2B marketing strategy for content today is of course the LinkedIn newsletter. It was, okay, I’ve been doing it like now for like five years, but the visibility of my content is literally 10 times what it ever was before. How’s that possible? Because I decided it was, you know, a sensible time to build on rented land, you know, because I, I saw this, the, the change is coming and adapted my strategy.

Because I’m now partnering with Big Tech, Google is not in business to help SEOs. But LinkedIn is in business to help content creators and publishers grow an audience on their platform. So no, our typical articles now get literally 10 times the visibility that they ever got before, even though click-through rates from search are down and declining. it doesn’t bother me a bit.

John Jantsch (13:49.346)

Yeah, of course, anyone who’s not familiar with your work, will say that part of, I think part of the reason, of course, consistency that you’ve provided, but also, mean, your articles go in, I mean, they’re basically master classes. And so, you know, I think that that certainly has something to do with the reason that you’re getting so much exposure is it’s just terribly valuable.

Andy Crestodina (14:12.588)

That means so much to me coming from you. Thank you, John. But hopefully then that reinforces the point about writing things by hand. I I include contributor quotes in every article. There’s almost no scroll depth at any article in which you can’t see something like a visual or screenshot or video. I do lots of original research. They’re carefully constructed, like very, very structured pieces with bullet lists and subheads and internal linking and…

And I’ve learned from people like you, like going way back to like, just be super direct and concise and get right to the point and eliminate, you know, omit needless words. You get it.

John Jantsch (14:52.62)

Well, I haven’t mastered that one yet, but ask, ask anyone who’s edited my, well, I had an editor one time that, on one of my books that said, you know, chapter is great, but it starts with a whole lot of throat clearing. I always remembered that one of my favorite quotes. So you do have been doing a lot. And I think that you just, you enjoy this, the getting into the data. You’ve been doing a lot with analytics.

Andy Crestodina (15:07.448)

I’ve been there. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:21.886)

and you know, maybe even suggesting that new ways to look at data, new, key indicators that maybe we haven’t been taught to look at what’s, what are some of your favorite kind of new ways that you think we ought to be looking at the data? Should we be able to unearth it?

Andy Crestodina (15:40.578)

Well, some of the most important insights waiting for you, literally sitting there just a few clicks away in GA4 are not the most visible. Like you got to go kind of build the thing. Yeah, it takes a minute. Some examples of useful metrics. What is it, or questions to ask and find the answer, then form hypotheses and take action. What is the click through rate on the call to action?

John Jantsch (15:50.166)

Right. Nothing’s very visible in JFR.

John Jantsch (16:04.888)

Right.

Andy Crestodina (16:10.624)

on your most on your key pages. You gotta make a path exploration, takes a few minutes. You gotta learn how to do that. That’s fine. How does embedding video change the engagement rate on articles? Are there URLs on your website that load with page not found as the title tag? What is the difference in conversion rates for visitors on mobile versus desktop?

John Jantsch (16:29.902)

Thank

Andy Crestodina (16:38.934)

Which of your articles is inspiring visitors to subscribe to your newsletter? Which URLs on your site have declining search traffic? We said a second ago. Are they sales pages? Are they everything? Or is it mostly just your content and articles and guides? These are all extremely useful things to know that can guide strategy and budgets. What’s the output from those calories burned? It’ll tell you.

But you got to know where to look. I don’t do almost any reporting in Google Analytics. I don’t build dashboards. I don’t just go look at it for its own sake, but I do analysis every day.

John Jantsch (17:19.734)

How much are you taking what might be raw data or at least what you can get out of GA4 and just taking it to AI and say, ask me questions?

Andy Crestodina (17:30.986)

there’s one or two use cases that you almost can’t do without AI. For example, if you make a report that shows traffic to your thank you pages and then add a secondary dimension for date plus time, export that and AI will make a chart for you showing which day of week people become leads. There is no Tuesday in GA4, but if you give that report to AI, it’ll show you. You can have it make a heat map matrix that show what time of day and day of week.

In a colorful little chart, people become leads, people subscribe to your newsletter, people watch videos, anything, any action, any event. So date plus time was useless to me before AI.

John Jantsch (18:12.13)

Yeah, that’s interesting. The, the, one of the things that I think AI is quite good at, you know, it’s basically a mathematician, right? So I think it’s quite good at, at analytics and finding stuff that you’re, I mean, it also sometimes makes huge mistakes. But I think that stuff you couldn’t even see with your own eyes, I think it really can, can surface pretty quickly, can it?

Andy Crestodina (18:34.828)

Yeah. And then John, the next step. you know, find for me the campaigns that had the highest engagement rates. Okay. It looks at 200 campaigns and finds these ones had highest engagement rates. Now craft 10 new campaigns based on those. The next step after the analysis, that’s why AI is really special. It’s because, you you could just immediately go from insight to action, or at least brainstorming.

John Jantsch (18:55.052)

Mm. Right.

John Jantsch (19:03.414)

Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. So where’s the noise that you think people ought to be tuning out? The buzzwords, the whatever agentic of the day is.

Andy Crestodina (19:14.968)

So in analytics, I’m exhausted by reporting and love analysis. In SEO, I’m exhausted by the SEO is dead or content is dead, but I love being discovered for commercial intent key phrases. In AI,

John Jantsch (19:25.421)

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina (19:41.826)

Boy, that’s a really just, you’re asking a really fun question. I believe that the responses are not nearly as good unless you have really like a conversation with it, that you’re chatting with it, that you give it lots more inputs, including personas, and that you are not just having it make stuff for you. I’m exhausted by the write this thing for me. I’m really excited by and motivated by the, what are the gaps in this?

What else could this do? Give me 10 ideas. How could this be better? So I think there’s shifts in every category and that there’s, you know, do this stuff long enough and you realize like, actually the fun stuff’s right over there.

John Jantsch (20:25.39)

So I know you don’t want, or you mentioned that you didn’t really want to be seen as like the crystal ball, but on, some of this stuff, but how far away are we from the idea where a client or a prospect is going to take an action on our website. And that’s going to trigger for agents to do certain things on our behalf and, know, maybe even have a conversation with that person and, and really

You know, there’s an element of removing humans from the entire interaction. I how far away are we from that? Or do you think that buyer behavior will dictate that we never go there?

Andy Crestodina (20:57.462)

Hmm.

Andy Crestodina (21:06.84)

I can easily imagine a CRM set up where when there’s a new lead that it goes and researches this person and brand and then takes the first step toward potentially disqualifying them and then handling some kind of automated conversation saying like, thanks for reaching out. We probably don’t fit, know, but maybe check out these other things instead. Here’s some alternatives. Here’s some, you know, possible providers.

But if the, but the sort of lead scoring thing, if it works, then it builds a whole guide. It does a bunch of research for you. looks at Dun & Bradstreet or checks out their LinkedIn profile. And then the rep gets this sort of like little coaching session with AI on how to talk to this prospect. And so again, that’s exactly what you said a few minutes ago, where is it going to make us more efficient in it by setting aside like these low quality leads and help us prioritize relationships?

John Jantsch (21:49.294)

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina (22:05.324)

by helping us really prep for this really high stakes conversation. there’s a bunch of little uses for AI in there, but yeah, probably every lead should have an appended little sales guide that goes with it with the six questions you should likely ask based on what’s happened with them in the news and who you’re talking to and what likely challenges are.

John Jantsch (22:24.876)

Yeah. And I think that that’s really going to be the key is we’ll remove friction where clients want friction removed, right? They want to do their own research. Maybe they want to get their own pricing, you know, things like that. We’ll remove that friction, but then we’ll get really smart at where do they, where do they actually crave human interaction? You know, not necessarily need it, but, want it. and I think it’s that sort of beautiful combination that is going to always be the tight wires.

Andy Crestodina (22:42.328)

and move around.

Andy Crestodina (22:51.944)

I think so. think that’s making people feel special, listening, showing them you care. I said it about design a bit ago, certainly in service. I’m not, I’m never going to stop caring and talking to people in my days like today. Eight meetings back to back. Love it. I’ll take it. I don’t mind a bit. I’m energized by these and conversations just like this one, John.

John Jantsch (23:02.616)

Yeah, awesome.

John Jantsch (23:17.506)

Well, awesome. Well, let’s not make it 20 years to the next time. Let’s have you back much sooner than that. Again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to drop by. Is there anywhere you want to invite people to connect with you, find out more about your work?

Andy Crestodina (23:30.516)

LinkedIn, the blue button says follow, but if you find the menu and go to connect with me and just say, Hey, heard you on duct tape. I’d be more than happy to connect. And then we can, have an interaction and we can prioritize relationships and take care of each other. And that’s what this is about.

John Jantsch (23:48.462)

Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you soon out there on the road.

Andy Crestodina (23:54.21)

Thanks, John.

The Four Conversations: Blair Enns on Leading, Pricing, and Selling Expertise

The Four Conversations: Blair Enns on Leading, Pricing, and Selling Expertise written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Overview

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Blair Enns, founder of Win Without Pitching and a leading authority on selling creative and consulting expertise. Blair shares insights from his new book, The Four Conversations, which distills decades of agency wisdom into a clear roadmap for moving from pitching and price-haggling to confidently leading client relationships. Listeners will discover how to shift from vendor to trusted advisor, raise closing rates, price based on value, and master the four pivotal conversations that define every successful client engagement.

About the Guest

Blair Enns is the founder of Win Without Pitching and the author of several acclaimed books on agency sales, pricing, and positioning. Over the past two decades, Blair has helped thousands of agencies and consultancies around the world move away from free pitching and price wars toward leading client engagements and charging for their expertise. His latest book, The Four Conversations, offers a practical framework for mastering the most crucial moments in every client relationship.

Actionable Insights

Most agencies close far fewer deals than they think—often just 25%. Doubling your close rate and raising prices by 20% can dramatically improve profitability.
The “four conversations” framework: Probative (demonstrate expertise), Qualifying (vet fit for both parties), Value (define value to be created and price accordingly), Closing (help the client select and commit to a path forward).
Selling expertise is not about convincing or manipulating—it’s about guiding, questioning, and facilitating the client’s best decision.
True leadership in sales means moving from statements about yourself to questions about the client, and from eagerness for the work to discernment and selectivity.
Pricing should begin with a value conversation—anchoring fees to outcomes, not just deliverables or time spent.
Productizing your service delivery is compatible with pricing each client based on value, not a fixed menu.
To move from vendor to trusted advisor, adopt the “expert’s mantra”: I am the expert, I am the prize, I’m on a mission to help, and I can only do that if you let me lead. All will not follow—and that’s okay.

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

01:16 – The True Cost of Letting Clients Lead
Blair breaks down the impact of poor sales practices on close rates and pricing power.
04:45 – The Four Conversations Model
An overview of the probative, qualifying, value, and closing conversations that shape every client relationship.
06:23 – Selling as Guiding, Not Convincing
Why selling expertise is about facilitating clients’ choices, not talking them into a decision.
07:47 – From Proving Brilliance to Asking Questions
The shift from statements to questions is at the heart of expert selling.
13:37 – Value-Based Pricing in Action
Blair walks through starting the pricing conversation with outcomes, not just deliverables.
20:47 – The Expert’s Mantra
A mindset framework for making the leap from vendor to trusted advisor.

Pulled Quotes

“Selling is not talking people into things. It’s about guiding, questioning, and facilitating the client’s best decision.”
— Blair Enns

“I am the expert, I am the prize. I’m on a mission to help. I can only do that if you let me lead. All will not follow—and that’s okay.”
— Blair Enns

Resources

Website: winwithoutpitching.com

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00.802)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Blair Enns. He’s a leading voice in the creative and consulting agency world, best known as the founder of Win Without Pitching. Over two decades, he’s helped thousands of agencies move from pitching and price haggling to confidently leading client engagements and charging for their expertise. We’re going to talk about his latest book, The Four Conversations, a new model for selling expertise.

Book distills decades of hard won wisdom into a practical roadmap for navigating the most crucial moments in every client relationship. So Blair, welcome to the show.

Blair Enns (00:40.337)

Thank you, John.

John Jantsch (00:42.85)

So let’s get some leverage. How much in your estimation do you think, what do you think the real cost day to day when agencies let clients run the show instead of leading the conversation?

Blair Enns (00:55.611)

What’s the real cost of letting clients run the conversation?

John Jantsch (00:58.734)

Yeah, I mean, instead of us, you know, a lot about the four conversations is really providing leadership in the conversation. So I see a lot of agencies that show up and say, what do need? Sure, we do that. And I think that’s what really leads to this price haggling, doesn’t it?

Blair Enns (01:16.091)

Yeah. So if I start to, I’ve never contemplated the total cost here, but we could do some math on the fly. The typical agency has a closing ratio of about 25%. I can actually be more specific than that. It’s oddly specific at 26%, which seems to be a universal number across all B2B sales. Now that’s when we measure it. It’s 26%. Self-declared, it’s closer to 33%. So an agency will tell you we close one in three proposals.

when we crack open the CRM and look at it, they close one in four. I think the threshold of respectability in a closing ratio is 40%. You should strive to be over 50%. So if you’re closing less than 50%, A, you’re probably writing too many proposals, B, you’re probably doing something wrong in the proposals. So let’s say you’re closing half as many proposals as you should. So there’s a starting point. And then there’s pricing. Are you getting, are you commanding,

your fair share of the value that you’re helping to create in the typical agency is not. I can’t give you a percentage on that, but I would guess it’s another 20 % across the board. The typical agency could probably increase their prices by 20%. Now with existing clients, not necessarily. They can raise prices with existing clients on average. It’s difficult with larger agencies. We’re dealing with procurement.

But if you draw a line in time, this is after today, after you’ve absorbed this information, you start to sell this way, your average proposal value should climb by 20 % easily. take the size of your firm, add 20 % to the top line, double your closing ratio. That’s the cost of poor selling.

John Jantsch (03:05.014)

So how much of that, I might leave myself right into a trap here, but how much of that is marketing and how much of that is sales? So in other words, you and I have written books that comes with, in some cases, perceived trust and perceived authority, expect to pay a premium in a lot of cases. So how much of that is done on the front end and how much of that is done in the sales conversation?

Blair Enns (03:09.383)

Ha ha ha.

Blair Enns (03:28.829)

Well, most of what I just talked about is what happens in the sales conversation, which to me is after the initial interaction. So if we’re talking about marketing is to generate leads, that’s a whole other ball of wax. Now, depending on who you are in the organization, how it thinks about sales and marketing, in some organizations, some agencies, lead generation can be seen as a sales function.

And in others, it’s seen as a marketing function. Typically, it’s seen as a bit of both or a specific combination of both in the average firm. The better your marketing goes the saying, the less selling you have to do. But that’s an interpretation of that statement. It’s really about seeing that statement views selling as lead generation. But there’s all this stuff that I just referenced, which is what happens after you begin the conversation with the lead. So there’s a whole other

area of improvement to be had under the banner of marketing.

John Jantsch (04:28.942)

Yeah, and it’s probably the combination just amplifies everything, right? The combination of both of those being effective amplifies everything. So let’s just go right to the title of the book. What are the four conversations and why do they keep happening no matter how seasoned somebody is?

Blair Enns (04:45.349)

Yeah, so the four conversations, this is a model. A model is a view of the world, a way of organizing complexity. All models are wrong. Some are useful. The book opens with that quote. So I’m not saying the sale always happens in a series of four linear and discrete conversations, but it is helpful to think of it that way. So the four conversations and their objective are the probative conversation, where your goal is to prove your expertise to the client and move in their mind from a position of a vendor to the expert.

That’s the conversation that happens without your president. Your marketing would be under the domain of the probative conversation. It’s a conversation in construct only. It happens through your agents of thought leadership, referral, referrers, and your marketing. And then you have the three person to person conversation that happened after that, which you would think of as the sales conversations. There’s the qualifying conversation, which is the vetting conversation. You’re vetting the lead to see if this is something worth spending your time on.

There’s the value conversation where you’re uncovering the value to be created and the share of that value you might command in the form of fees. So you’re starting to set not price, but pricing guidance, rough approximate pricing guidance based on the value to be created rather than the cost of your solutions. And then the final conversation is the closing conversation where you help the client commit and select, select and commit to a path forward.

John Jantsch (06:11.224)

You know what I love about as I listen to you talk about all four of those conversations, they’re not about like manipulating or getting this thing that you want done. They’re really about creating value for both parties, right?

Blair Enns (06:23.109)

Yeah, I’m a big believer in the idea that selling is not talking people into things. I think, you know, we make this distinction or we I make the distinction in the book, you know, between expert and vendor. And you think of your expert self, the way you operate as an expert, you’re in your relationships with your clients. So after sale, the way you show up, you’re kind of you’re an advisor. You facilitate choice. You point out the pros and cons of decisions.

John Jantsch (06:28.59)

Right.

Blair Enns (06:52.061)

You give the client some decisions to make, you point out the pros and cons of those decisions, and I think that’s how you should navigate the sale as well.

John Jantsch (06:59.63)

I talked to a lot of agencies that I’m sure you’ve heard this quite often as well. They feel like they’re giving away their expertise, pitching for free, giving consultations to show that they know what they’re talking about and really all along the way kind of giving it away. do you get people out of that place of being stuck?

Blair Enns (07:19.121)

Well, there’s no short answer to the question of how you get people out of that. You write a book on a model, you get them to read the book and implement the guidance in the book is the short one. But as you point out, it’s hard. I myself, I struggle with this a lot. I’ve for years, it’s been the hardest thing for me to go from seeing myself as the person with the answers, the subject matter expert, to the person with the questions. So if you think of how a typical marketer shows up in the sale,

John Jantsch (07:45.294)

Mm.

Blair Enns (07:47.655)

They wanna prove their brilliance. And yeah, we do that in the probative conversation, but that’s the conversation that happens without you present. Once you’re in a conversation with an individual, instead of trying to prove your brilliance, you should arm yourself with a set of questions. And so in our model of the four conversations, each conversation has a framework or set of frameworks, has a specific objective, which I shared with you, and then a framework or set of frameworks.

for navigating to that objective. Now those frameworks are almost all questions. So the short answer to how is you go from statements about yourself to questions about the client.

John Jantsch (08:29.058)

Well, and those statements often are not just about yourself. They might actually be offering solutions, right? Yeah. Yeah. number two, qualifying. I know that this is not your take on this, but I know a lot of people hear that qualifying and they’re thinking, it comes off more like I’m going to see if you qualify to work with me. you know, and it can actually be a little off putting if not done.

Blair Enns (08:35.377)

Free advice, yeah.

John Jantsch (08:56.91)

How do you approach making sure that the client doesn’t feel like they’re being evaluated?

Blair Enns (09:04.283)

Yeah, I think some people do overplay that idea. So you can take this idea of qualifying and you can put on a spectrum. At one end, there’s the client qualifying you. At the other end, there’s you qualifying the client. And most of these qualifying conversations, the typical listener wouldn’t think of them as a qualifying conversation. They would think of them as a credentials conversation or a credentials meeting. So what does that mean if we put it back into this context of qualifying? It means you’re trying to qualify for the client.

The assumption is this is a good fit for you. Now you’re trying to prove to them that they’re a good fit. And you have to do that and there’s a way to do that, but the conversation is all about you first making sure that they are a good fit for you. That implies that you’ve actually thought about who is a good fit for you. What is your ideal client profile? Who do you want to do business with? Who will you not do business with? How much money do you need somebody to spend? And so,

John Jantsch (09:52.046)

Yeah, yeah.

Blair Enns (10:00.305)

You can have a very business-like conversation using a framework to organize questions around that without coming across like an ass. But in the wrong hands, somebody can overplay that idea and they can make the client feel uncomfortable.

John Jantsch (10:08.257)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:16.151)

You know, one of the things over the years that I’ve liked to use as a qualifier is there are certain behaviors that the client has or what they believe in terms of what value is and how a solution gets done. And in some cases, we get very good or most people get very good at understanding, this is a problem I can fix well. I know I could do this one. So where does that come into the qualifying, those types of considerations?

Blair Enns (10:43.239)

Well, you have to guard against that. so qualifying is the vetting conversation. There’s a tone in the qualifying conversation. It’s a tone of discernment. So you’re professional, you’re clinical, you’re, if you’re getting really enthusiastic about the opportunity, you’re just suppressing that for the time being. And then once you ask your questions and you determine that there is, this is a good fit for you, then you move to the next conversation, the value conversation. You can, your tone of discernment can move to a tone of deep interest. You decide,

John Jantsch (10:51.106)

Yeah.

Blair Enns (11:13.245)

You ask your questions, you get your answers, and you decide, you know what, this is a good fit. And you would say to the client, on the surface, I think this is a really good fit. I can see my team getting very excited about this. I’m not saying I’m getting excited about it. I’m still trying to moderate my enthusiasm to make sure my enthusiasm for the project or the client does not exceed their enthusiasm for me.

John Jantsch (11:23.374)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:36.347)

Can we stick on that for a minute? Why is that an issue?

Blair Enns (11:40.113)

Well, I have in the book what I consider to be the first principle of selling expertise. It’s a formula P equals DB over D. I printed on the back of coffee mugs. P stands for your power in the sale. Your power in the sale is a function of your desirability, DB, being greater than your own desire, D. Otherwise stated, whoever wants it the most has the least power in the buy-sell relationship.

You don’t extrapolate that to the nth degree and say, therefore, I should seek to maximize my desirability. That’s true. That part’s true. But you could also infer that to mean I should seek to minimize my expression of desire for the client. that, yeah, no. Yeah, you show up as aloof, disinterested. You don’t want that. I’m just saying pay attention to the power dynamics in the relationship and make sure, especially early on,

John Jantsch (12:24.29)

Yeah. Yeah. I don’t really, I don’t really need this sale. I take it or leave it. Right.

Blair Enns (12:38.713)

actually, throughout, there’s no especially early on, but just make sure that your own expression, allow your enthusiasm for the opportunity to rise as high as the clients and try not to exceed it. Because when you exceed it, you clearly give all your power away, your power to do your best work, to command the most profit, to command high prices. Your cost of sale will go up too as your power goes away.

John Jantsch (13:06.604)

Interesting. So let’s move to number three. guess it is. You use the phrase value to be created. Is that right? Value to be created. that. Yeah. But, but less about fees and more about the value to be created as part of the equation. So, so do I hear you saying, what we’re going to fix for this client is worth a million dollars. That’s the value it’s going to create for them. So do we base our fee on that? Or do we base our fee on the fact that we know how to do this and we do it

Blair Enns (13:14.129)

the value conversation.

John Jantsch (13:36.28)

officially.

Blair Enns (13:37.277)

So you can base your fee, I’m getting softer on this as the years go by. My previous book, which came out in 2018, is on pricing. It’s called Pricing Creativity. And I was probably a bit more of a hard, was pushing harder for value-based pricing. Today, I don’t really care how you price. I care if you have a value conversation. A value conversation begins the pricing discussion based on the value to be created. So you come to me or your…

John Jantsch (13:55.694)

Mm-hmm.

Blair Enns (14:03.601)

prospective client and I’m walking you through the simple four-step framework. What do you want John? You tell me what your vision of your desired future state is, what success looks like in the future. And I say this is a great vision. So now I’m leaning in, I’m enthusiastic. Okay, what are the metrics that will measure to prove that you’ve achieved what you want? And we talk about some KPIs, you give them to me or I pull them out of you. And I say to you, okay, I know what you want, I know what the KPIs are that we’ll measure.

John Jantsch (14:17.304)

Mm-hmm.

Blair Enns (14:32.741)

If we hit these metrics, what’s the value of that? So if we just keep it to economic value, you give me some numbers, we top line or revenue gains or cost reductions, we translate that into profit. And I say, all right, so if your vision comes true, you hit these metrics, we’re gonna create a million dollars a year and net new profit, is that right? And you say, yeah, that sounds about right if everything goes well. Now the fourth and final step is setting pricing guidance. At this point, I haven’t thought.

about what I’m actually gonna do. I haven’t talked to you about specific solutions. Even if you may have come to me with a specific solution in mind, I put it aside and I’ve put you into your desired future state. And I’ve asked you to describe success. And obviously there’s a framework around this. And I say to you, if I could help you create this million dollars a year and that new recurring profit, would you pay me X? And in that moment, I’m gonna pull a number out of my nether regions. And I want the number to be so high that you won’t pay it, that you walk it down.

And there’s some psychology, it’s called the anchoring effect and why I do this. But at some point, so if I say, would you pay me a half a million dollars? And you respond with, well, that depends, what would you do for a half a million dollars? I might say, I don’t know, I haven’t thought about solutions yet. But if I could help you create this million dollars in net new recurring profit, would you pay half a million in one time fees? And that’s.

Whether you say yes or no, we’re in a conversation on pricing and that conversation has started high. The price is tied to the value to be created is not tied to my solutions. From there, the price can go down. At the end of the day, when I come back with a proposal in the closing conversation, I can price however I want. The important thing is we have started the pricing discussion based on the value to be created, not based on the cost of my solutions.

John Jantsch (16:26.158)

Yeah, and I think that’s certainly the path towards getting a prospect or a client to think, I’m investing this money as opposed to I’m spending this money, isn’t

Blair Enns (16:36.551)

Correct.

John Jantsch (16:38.668)

So let’s talk about the money conversation. I would say that, I mean, you talked to millions of salespeople probably over the years. Isn’t that the place that they have the most issue with?

Blair Enns (16:51.325)

I think the value conversation is a pivotal conversation because we are starting to, the client, we uncover a budget if there is one in the qualifying conversation, then we transcend that budget while still acknowledging as part of the framework that the client has a budget and agreeing that we’ll come back with a range of solutions and a range of price points. We basically agree on a trade.

I’ll show you what I can do for your budget. You allow me to think creatively and expansively about what’s the most we can do to help you create this value. And it’s going to be a big price. So that’s, I love this framework for talking about money. It doesn’t make it easy, but when you understand that it’s okay for the first number to be so high that the client chokes on it or pushes back and you do this a few times, you realize everybody will survive.

This is not an existential threat. This is just part of the conversation. By the time the conversation ends, you’re in agreement that the client will consider options in a certain range. Even if the client says, listen, I don’t have the authority to spend, let’s say I anchored at 500 and we ended up at 250 and then you said, well, my budget’s 50. So I’ve got a range of 50 to 250. Even if you don’t have the authority to spend 250 in that moment.

I’ll extract from you an understanding that, okay, I’m gonna put some options in front of you that are gonna be beyond your budget. And if you’re really excited about them, it’s your prerogative. But then I would invite you to invite the other people to the table who would be required to fund this. you are always in, you the buyer, you’re always in control. You’ve stated to me that you have a budget. I’ve shown what I’m going to do for that budget. In exchange, you’re letting me push you to think bigger, to think about investing more.

And that’s a pretty fair trade. You practice this a few times, it becomes fairly intuitive to you.

John Jantsch (18:47.628)

You know, it’s been come, see very commonplace. seems like the last few years for agencies to kind of offer package services. So this much deliverable for this price. it sounds to me, when I hear you say that conversation, you’re really getting completely out of that, mold and really the idea of, of, I’m going to actually bring you something really innovative that you hadn’t even thought about when you developed your budget. Automatically you’re providing leadership instead of just.

execution, right?

Blair Enns (19:18.845)

That’s true, but it’s not antithetical to productizing your services either. So in my last two books, I’ve talked about productization and in pricing creativity, I was pretty strongly anti-productizing for agencies. When I wrote the four conversations, which I finished last year,

John Jantsch (19:38.828)

Mm-hmm.

Blair Enns (19:46.969)

I was pretty neutral on it. And I have a pretty good framework in the book for deciding, you standardize or customize your delivery model, package your services or customize and your pricing? What I mean by that is if you have packages, do you price the packages or do you price the client? And as time goes on, I’m actually increasingly in favor of product standardizing your delivery. So you have packages, but reserving the right to price the client, which is the first rule.

of in my book, Pricing Creativity, price the client, not the product, not the service.

John Jantsch (20:23.448)

So I know from many conversations I’ve had this, know, anytime I say the same thing of you want to move from vendor to trusted advisor, you know, a lot of lights go on, right? It’s like, yes, that’s exactly what I want to do. So for the listeners who are stuck in that mindset right now, is there, is there a shift or a daily habit that you would recommend that might make, help people make that leap or at least make it stick?

Blair Enns (20:47.285)

it’s a great question. there is in the book, there’s I guess it’s a principle, but it’s really a framework for getting into the experts mindset. It’s called the experts mantra. And it’s a four line statement that you repeat to yourself before you log into the conversation, before you show up for the whether it’s done remotely or in person before you enter the conversation. Just four statements that you repeat yourself.

They can benefit from a little customization, but I’ll give them to you here. I am the expert, I am the prize. I’m on a mission to help. I can only do that if you let me lead. All will not follow and that’s okay. And we can unpack each of those four sentences and they’re all rooted in something, but it’s like, I am the expert, I’m the prize to be won here. I’m on a mission to lead. If you don’t let me lead in the sale, you will not let me lead in the engagement. So this is a test of whether or not we can work together.

Yeah, and then the last one of all will not follow is just letting go of the outcomes and focusing on the process.

John Jantsch (21:48.781)

Yes.

John Jantsch (21:52.27)

Yeah,

Yeah, I love that. love that. Well, Blair, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there some place for you to invite people to find out more about your work and obviously your books or connect with you?

Blair Enns (22:07.089)

Yeah, thanks John, I’ve enjoyed it. They can reach me in all of my work at winwithoutpitching.com.

John Jantsch (22:13.611)

Again, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Blair Enns (22:18.685)

Thank you.

How AI Is Revolutionizing PR and SEO: Real-World Strategies with Jon Mest of JustReachOut.io

How AI Is Revolutionizing PR and SEO: Real-World Strategies with Jon Mest of JustReachOut.io written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Overview

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch welcomes Jon Mest, founder of JustReachOut.io and ChatRank.ai, to break down the evolving relationship between AI, public relations, and SEO. Jon shares how AI is shifting the landscape for marketers, agencies, and entrepreneurs, moving effective outreach away from mass automation and toward authentic, human-driven storytelling. The conversation covers why PR is making a comeback, how AI-powered answer engines like ChatGPT and Google Overviews are changing what it means to “rank,” and what practical steps brands should take to get found—and trusted—in a noisy digital world.

Guest Bio

Jon Mest is the founder of JustReachOut.io, a platform empowering entrepreneurs, agencies, and consultants to land media coverage by pitching journalists directly, and ChatRank.ai, a solution for AI-driven SEO visibility. With over a decade of hands-on experience in PR and search, Jon has helped thousands of marketers simplify their outreach and keep SEO rooted in what actually works—enabling brands to tell authentic stories that resonate, earn trust, and drive results.

Key Takeaways

AI is a powerful tool to guide, not replace, human-driven PR and SEO. The best results come when AI augments authentic outreach, not automates it at scale.
Traditional PR—authentic storytelling, earned media, micro-influencer outreach—is regaining importance as search engines and answer engines prioritize authority, expertise, and credible citations.
AI-powered answer engines (like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews) are changing the rules for SEO. Brands now need to be hyper-specific and authoritative on their niche to get surfaced in high-intent results.
Showing up in AI overviews is the new “number one spot”—but it requires a combination of strong, relevant content and third-party validation through PR and backlinks.
Personalization and relevance are non-negotiable in modern outreach. Mass, generic pitches are filtered out, while targeted, story-driven pitches cut through the noise.
The “hook” in your pitch or subject line is crucial. Journalists and influencers need a compelling, unique reason to pay attention—and proprietary data or exclusive stories make you stand out.
Social proof is still powerful: smaller wins with niche or local publications can build a track record that leads to coverage in larger, national outlets.
Brands should amplify and repurpose earned media where their audience is—whether it’s podcasts, trade journals, or niche blogs—rather than chasing only big-name coverage.

Great Moments & Timestamps

00:00 – John introduces Jon Mest, JustReachOut.io, and ChatRank.ai
00:52 – Jon explains how AI can empower, not replace, authentic PR and SEO
02:28 – Why PR is making a comeback in an AI-driven SEO world
05:20 – The story behind ChatRank.ai and adapting to Google’s AI Overviews
07:54 – What it takes for brands to get featured in answer engines and AI overviews
10:01 – Why specific, authoritative content wins in both search and answer engines
12:02 – The biggest mistakes (and best practices) in pitching journalists today
13:46 – Why personalization is crucial—and mass pitching doesn’t work
14:56 – The power of a strong “hook” and building ongoing media relationships
16:25 – How social proof and stepping-stone coverage help brands earn bigger features
18:51 – Why amplifying coverage where your audience lives matters more than chasing broad reach
20:17 – Where to find Jon Mest, JustReachOut.io, and ChatRank.ai

Pulled Quotes

“AI is an amazing tool to help guide the human-driven marketing approach. But you, the human, have to go in there and tell your story the right way.”

“Personalization and authenticity win—mass, generic pitches just get filtered out.”

“Showing up in AI overviews is the new number one spot…but you have to be hyper-specific, authoritative, and tell a story your audience cares about.”

Resources & Links

JustReachOut.io – AI-powered PR and outreach platform
ChatRank.ai – AI-driven SEO visibility platform

How to Stay Visible in the AI Search Era

How to Stay Visible in the AI Search Era written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed myself—John Jantsch—on a topic that’s reshaping the foundation of online marketing: search visibility in an era dominated by AI search, zero click searches, and evolving Google search behaviors.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is no longer about simply ranking for keywords. As I explain in this solo episode, we’re witnessing a major shift from traditional SEO to what I now call search visibility—your brand’s presence across the entire digital ecosystem, from featured snippets and branded SERPs, to Google Business profiles and authoritative content that aligns with E-E-A-T principles. In a world where AI overviews often replace the need to click through to your website, your strategy must evolve beyond keywords and clicks.

Key Takeaways

SEO is now about search visibility, not just rankings—brands must appear in multiple places where answers are delivered.
AI search and zero click searches mean that most Google users get what they need without clicking; visibility across multiple platforms is critical.
Google is now an answer engine, not just a search engine—your content should be structured to serve direct answers.
The rise of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is a signal that content trust signals matter more than ever.
Create structured content like FAQ sections, TLDR summaries, and hub pages to increase your chances of being featured in AI answers and featured snippets.
Local SEO still matters—optimize your Google Business profile regularly as a publishing platform for increased exposure.
Refreshing old content boosts content freshness signals that can improve your visibility in the knowledge graph and elsewhere.
Focus on content strategy that prioritizes quality, experience-driven stories, and unique insights—not generic blog posts generated by AI.
Don’t chase head terms. Focus instead on long-tail queries and content formats that meet user intent more directly.

Chapters:

00:09 Opening
00:58 Evolution of Search Engine Optimization
03:01 The Current State of Search
03:41 Focus on Search Visibility Instead of Rank
06:13 How to Demonstrate EEAT
09:04 Audit Your Content Gaps
10:07 Help Pages
11:46 FAQ Pages and Trust Elements
13:03 Refreshing Your Content
13:41 Utilize Your Google Business Page
14:35 Find Out How AI Is Sourcing Information
15:42 Common Mistakes

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01.506)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and I’m doing a solo show. I’m going to talk about search engine optimization or as I’ve started to call it search visibility because the game has changed. Now, the first question you might be asking yourself is why is John wearing a cowboy hat? Those of you that are on the video version, I’m wearing a Stetson open road. this is the straw version in the cognac.

color is my favorite summer hat. just decided it’s Friday when I’m recording this. just decided to put it on and wear it for the show. My grandfather and father had this style hat and a number of US presidents over the years chose this as their primary hat as well. So Stetson Open Road, there you have the story. All right. As I said, I’m going to talk about search engine optimization, what we’ve always long called, not always.

Believe it or not, a 20 year history with something called search engine optimization, which is really moving completely. There’s been lots of changes over the years, different algorithms, different things, different search engines come along. But this is a fundamental shift in how that tactic or approach really is going to be applied going forward. And what what it actually is even going to mean to business and website owners going forward as well.

So I thought I would start with, before I jump into like eat and generative AI and AI overviews and things, just do like a 30 second kind of timeline on search. Well, I started actually playing around with search in 1998. And really, again, was my first website and it was, do we rank?

and get on page one, you know, what are the things we need to do? I won’t go into all what all those things were, but most of them are not relevant today. At least, you know, that was in the early days of search engines. They were little infants and they were, you know, the game was to trick them into putting your stuff on page one. That lasted till about 2010. And then, you know, the search engines just got more and more complex and more and more, you know,

John Jantsch (02:21.142)

ability to understand what a page really was about rather than what we wanted them to think it was about. And so now you start having mobile be part of the deal. You’ve got the local search packs. You’ve got answer boxes starting to show up about, you know, from 2010 to 2016, roll up to about 2017. And now all of sudden voice search is a factor featured snippets become a factor.

near me becomes a factor also searched for. So a lot of things just keep getting injected. And of course, all the while the ad units and how they display all over the page, you know, are changing as well. Kind of really shifting what even ranking, you know, on page one even meant anymore. So I guess fast forward to today, 2024 or so it happened, you know, AI overviews.

Um, SGE from Google, 60 % of, of, of us Google searches ending with no click at all, according to search engine land, uh, the, uh, the infamous zero click searches, uh, instead of, you know, a list of 10 links on a page. Um, you know, we’re now to the point where maybe you get featured as a source in an AI answer and hope that that generates a click, but,

six to seven times out of 10 today. That search is just gonna end in somebody getting the answer or getting the information that they wanted.

What I’m talking about now is this idea of a complete mindset shift away from search and optimization, away from trying to rank for keywords and more about this idea of search visibility. It’s kind of your brand’s share of the answers, the mentions, the knowledge panel, real estate, local pack slots.

John Jantsch (04:19.086)

really clicks for everywhere that, um, that, that a prospect looks, I think that’s what we have to do today. So, you know, chasing one phrase or two phrases or something. mean, it’s really going to have very, very little value. Um, unless it’s just a very high intent phrase that, uh, if somebody searches that they’re not looking for an answer, they’re looking to purchase. Um, those are really going to be the, um, you know, the, the, the highly sought after, guess, um, types of searches.

So I think instead of, of thinking now in terms of like position ranking or impressions, it’s really going to be this, this whole collection. And this is going to be hard for people to measure, but this whole collection of like branded SERP coverage, is really going to be the, you know, the, example. I use a case, a local dentist publishes like does whitening hurt. they have an FAQ short vid, TikTok video, Google business posts, a patient story.

you know, now that now they have the chance to actually own the FAQ snippet for that, maybe the local, local rank, map pack for that, maybe a YouTube carousel. mean, so that’s how I think we have to start thinking about these is, know, there’s no more. There’s no more, you know, I want to show up on for this, you know, key search is it’s how do I put myself into this idea of answers? And in fact, you know, a lot of people are actually calling,

you know, not even calling them search engines anymore. They’re really answer engines. And the consumer behavior, you know, has changed so dramatically. Search behavior has changed so dramatically. You know, we were all very conditioned to type in six, eight words for what we were looking for and then hoping or maybe refining that search if we didn’t find what we were hoping for. But now we can actually, instead of typing in, you know, plumbing contractor in my town, you know, now it’s

plumbing contractor with 24 hour service, more than 4.7 star reviews within two miles from me, whatever. mean, you can type that long search in now and you’re going to get that very specific, in most cases, you’re gonna get that very specific result returned to you that you were able to kind of custom tailor to what you wanted rather than saying, okay, Google, give me what you think I want.

John Jantsch (06:49.39)

One of the things that, and I have to set this up a little bit, that we have to start thinking about when it comes to our content, you know, writing the 101, the how to blog content. And many people are finding that they’re losing all the search traffic that used to come for that because why would they send them to your page? They can answer that very easily because it was just basic information to begin with.

you’re wasting your time. If you continue down that path of just creating the 700 words on blah, blah, blah. very generic. And the bad thing is of course AI makes that really easy to do. You can, you can spin out 10 of those a day now, without really much sweat, it’s, it’s practically useless unless you are in just such a niche category that nobody else is trying to create content around it. It’s practically worthless. So Google has this new

No, fairly new couple of years, acronym called EAT. And there’s two E’s in there. So E-E-A-T. And forgive me if you know all about this, but I’ll explain it in very basic terms for those who may not understand it. But the idea behind it is that they want to see not just expertise. That’s one of the E’s, but they want to see experience. Have you actually done what you’re talking about?

They want to see authoritativeness. That’s the, the other a, or I mean, that’s the a. So they measure that by, know, are you getting links mentioned, you know, are you in local press? I mean, are you appearing in industry lists? So they’re measuring like, are you an authority on this thing that you’re talking about? So experience, expertise, authority, and then the last one is trustworthiness. are there signals, of trust, warranties, refund policies, secure checkout badges.

real contact info. mean, all those kinds of things go into the mix as well. So what we have to do, I think, is it’s no longer enough to write this article about how to do something. You have to actually have a case study in there. You have to have examples of maybe you doing it in actual real time or behind the scenes.

John Jantsch (09:02.603)

So that it’s very clear that that you’re not just talking about this. This is something that you do. This is something you’re an expert on. This is something somebody can trust for you to do for their business.

John Jantsch (09:16.844)

So in March, 2024, I’m reading a stat here. Knowledge graph update extended each signals by 38 % to really surface credible people and brands again, according to search engine land. that certainly signals that this is not going away. I mean, that this is going to be a significant piece as well. So how do you compete in an eat world, in an AI world?

In a world where really the need for producing content is still there. mean consumers still need the information So now it’s a matter of you know, how do we how do we stay visible so that we can get them the opportunity even to get them that information? first thing is There’s five step plan here, right? Okay. Number one audit your content gaps. So

Export all of your site URLs. List the top 25 customer questions and use Google Search Console. Again, what we’re trying to do is find how can we become an answer engine? So take a lot of your content. And again, this is a place where some of the AI tools are really good at this. You’ve written good, useful content. How could it be better? How could it answer more questions? How could you add FAQs?

to the end of all of your service pages. How could you add a table of contents to your long form content? How could you add a description box? Some people call it too long, didn’t read TLDR, you’ve probably seen that. How can you add that at the top of your content so that these…

They’re not really search engine spiders, but so that the AI tools that are going out there and trying to surface good sources for content can have a very quick view of what it’s about. It gets very user friendly. It’s very structured in a way that shows kind of the hierarchical structure.

John Jantsch (11:24.718)

I have for years been talking about this thing called hub pages. Um, and the idea behind that is that if you write about, I use an example, if you’re a kitchen remodeler and you’ve got a whole bunch of blog posts about various aspects of remodeling a kitchen. Um, what if you turn that instead of just having them randomly placed on a blog, uh, out there in the ether, what if you turn that into a kitchen, uh, the ultimate guide to remodeling a kitchen and you took all of your content that you’ve written over the years.

And you placed it on that page. don’t mean physically all of it on that page, but at least structure it in such a way that somebody can jump around to how to pick countertops, how to pick cabinets, how to pick finishes, um, how to pick lighting. And then those all, uh, you know, kind of becomes a playlist for anybody who’s thinking about, uh, designing, um, or remodeling a kitchen. So we’ve been talking about that for, I would say at least eight or 10 years.

and the good news is it was a very effective SEO tactic. mean, it, as soon as we would build those for people, it would immediately change, how, how Google viewed their website, but it’s also very user friendly. Somebody comes to that hub page and they want, they are interested in information. It’s like, here’s the whole guide, you know, on what I’m trying to do rather than I just found one, you know, I went out and randomly searched and found one, one blog post on something. So the, the, you know, the,

Again, doubly good news is that those pages really are highly rewarded in an AI world as well. So think about your top three or four services, your top three or four products, your top three or four things that your company does. And think about ways that you could create a very useful guide or a hub page around those and collect it. It’s really, in some ways, it’s the same content. You’ve just structured it dramatically different. Boy.

FAQs, and again, in an answer engine world, having answers to the questions that people ask is a clearly makes a lot of sense. It’s also been a very useful piece of content anyway, but now really being rewarded in this answer engine world. So every single one of your service pages, every single one of your product pages, even your About Us page now, I think should actually, whether it’s structured as a Q &A, or just has an FAQ section,

John Jantsch (13:42.826)

at the bottom of it and you know, pay some attention to the questions you’re being asked. Again, the AI tools are pretty good at that surfacing, you know, common questions around things, but you might think in terms of even some of the questions that you’re not being asked necessarily, but you should be people should be paying attention to so you can use that as an opportunity to educate around like why you and what you know, what you do that’s different than competitors, for example, that they might not actually be asking about.

You know, monthly case studies, you know, measurable results, quotes from customers, those kind of trust elements, even, you know, badges that, that symbolize that you’re in professional organizations and things that you’ve achieved certain certifications. mean, those, you know, the more we can double down on, on just proving that we do what we say, really quite frankly, the better. and then the last piece of the puzzle is.

John Jantsch (14:43.128)

How can you keep this fresh? So, what I’m telling people, and I need to do this myself as well, is we’ve got reams and reams of content that we wrote years ago. it needs to be freshened up. In fact, about every quarter, you ought to make a goal of saying, Hey, I’ve got these five blog posts that, know, are decent blog posts. How could I freshen them up, add more links, add more experience, add more proof.

in these, maybe I can structure them, you know, with a table of contents in that TLDR, maybe I could add FAQs to them. You will be highly rewarded for for refreshing that content. And I would last thing I would say is. Start thinking, and this is particularly true for local businesses, not as much for somebody who’s really more of a national scale, but that Google business page, think of it as another

publishing platform. Now you don’t own that platform, of course, but you have a lot of leeway and how optimized it is all the photos, the videos that you can add there, all the service descriptions you can add there. And you can post there. I would be taking again, in some cases daily if you’ve got a lot of content, but certainly weekly, create a Google or post in your Google Business page that can come from

can be just a shortened version of something that you’ve written, and published, you know, years ago, but you’re giving it a new place, a new home. And again, it’s just going to add all up to the soup of, know, how you get noted or, or quoted as a valuable source. The other thing I would tell you to do is to do a bunch of searches, in some of the AI tools that there were searches you’d love to show up in, you’d love to win. Now, hopefully you show up in front of those. So.

I use my kitchen contractor, remodeling contractor. So best kitchen remodeling contractor in X city would be a link that or something that they’d want to really show up for. Right. And take note of who shows up. That’s important. But also one of the things the AI tools do is they tell you the sources that they went to, to, to make that determination. And in some cases, these are directories in some cases, you know,

John Jantsch (17:03.63)

common in the remodeling industry is one called house, that, they actually got a lot of that information from. So if you’re not participating in any of those sources or you don’t even have a listing in a directory as obscure as it may sound, there’s your checklist of some things that you probably need to add to, what you do to get in those directories or to start participating in, you know, a Quora or a Reddit or a house, dependent upon,

you know, the industry that you’re in. So, all right, a couple of common mistakes. Stop obsessing over a handful of head keywords. It just doesn’t matter anymore. Don’t write for algorithms. I think this has always been true. Think in terms of the human question behind any query that somebody is asking. We use a tool called Answer the Public. I highly recommend that you go there and…

If you’re, if you’re at a loss for what questions people are asking in your industry, that can be a great resource for that. Frankly, the AI tools are pretty good at it. They can surface what questions people are asking in, certain industries. You can’t set and forget your website. You know, if I go and I look and there’s your last blog post was 2022. We probably got some work to do. This is something that.

You just need to make it a weekly, monthly, quarterly plan that you’re going to do X, Y, and Z and just commit to doing it. don’t obsess over all the tools. mean, don’t go down the rabbit hole. mean, Structured schema is important. there are plugins that, that can actually do that. So that when you write FAQs, the, underlying code, tells Google or tells the.

Whoever’s visiting your website, this is an FAQ section. So, you know, spend some time on that part. Don’t over obsess about, you know, over engineering tools on this. So here’s what I would say. If you’ve got some ideas today, pick one. If you don’t have any FAQs, that’s where I would start. If you don’t have any case studies, I would certainly think in terms of that.

John Jantsch (19:23.666)

if you haven’t visited your Google business profile, I would highly recommend that you think in terms of your strategy there. pick, pick one of the things that, that, I mentioned here today and just start working away at it. mean, don’t, don’t listen to all the gloom and doom and look at your Google analytics and say, my traffic search your traffic’s down because

there’s a good chance that a lot of that search traffic wasn’t that meaningful. Anyway, it was somebody looking for that how to article. They were not actually looking for your product or service. So search visibility being seen where people go to get their information, being seen as an answer engine, as opposed to an information engine is how we have to change the mindset. So if you got value, hopefully you will subscribe either to the YouTube channel or to the podcast itself.

Love those reviews on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen, share the interview, share this episode with, one business owner who needs a little marketing clarity, who would like a little, simple, effective and affordable, good old duct tape marketing practical advice. All right. That’s it for today. Thanks for tuning in. Hopefully I’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

The Future of Local SEO in the Age of AI with David Hunter

The Future of Local SEO in the Age of AI with David Hunter written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews David Hunter, CEO of
Local Falcon and
Epic Web Studios, to explore the rapidly evolving landscape of local SEO.
With over 15 years in digital marketing, David brings a grounded and tactical perspective on how businesses can thrive amidst the rise of
AI-generated search overviews, shifting consumer behavior, and proximity-based visibility.

They dive into topics like AI Overviews, how tools like ChatGPT and Google’s generative AI are reshaping local search, and what multi-location
brands and small businesses alike need to prioritize to stay competitive. If you’re wondering how to future-proof your local SEO strategy, this one’s for you.

Key Takeaways

00:34 – AI Overviews Are Reshaping Search: Google is becoming the answer, not just the index. This change is reducing click-throughs but offers new opportunities for visibility.
03:00 – The Shift to Conversational Search Behavior: Consumers—of all ages—are adapting to natural language searches. “Best plumber near me who can come today” is the new normal.
05:27 – Proximity Still Matters—but Less Than You Think: Local Falcon’s study of 60,000+ queries shows authority and relevance are overtaking proximity in AI-based local search results.
08:26 – Understanding AI’s “Best” Results: Tools like ChatGPT may pull from obscure or outdated sources. Local Falcon helps identify which directories and citations are influencing those results.
13:09 – What Should Local Businesses Be Doing Differently? If you’re doing SEO ethically, not much changes—but content structure and clarity become essential.
14:37 – Ask AI What It Knows About You: Literally query ChatGPT about your business to see how it understands your brand and services.
15:35 – Structure Your Content for AI Comprehension: Use clear formatting, bite-sized paragraphs, FAQs, and schema markup to enhance visibility in AI-generated answers.
17:54 – Multi-location SEO Strategy: Brands with many locations have more visibility chances, but need consistency and brand clarity across each location.

Connect with David Hunter

Website: localfalcon.com
X: https://x.com/LocalFalcon
Local Falcon LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/local-falcon/
David’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidhuntererie/

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01.026)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is David Hunter. He’s the CEO of Local Falcon and, or an AI powered local SEO platform and Epic Web Studios, a digital marketing agency in Pennsylvania. Over 15 years in the industry, David has been instrumental in transforming how businesses approach local search optimization with lots of things going on in search of all kinds. That’s what we’re going to spend some time talking

So David, welcome to the show.

David Hunter (00:31.871)

Thank you for having me, John. I’m happy to be here.

John Jantsch (00:34.764)

So let’s start big picture. think the thing that’s causing a lot of, depends on what side of the fence you’re on, suppose, a lot of angst, but also a lot of joy, I think, in searchers is this idea of AI overviews. How have those kind of generated overviews that are showing up now as the top results changing the landscape in local SEO? I know that’s a big question, but let’s start there.

David Hunter (00:59.431)

Absolutely, yeah. it’s really, you know, it’s not a small, so AI overviews are not a small change. It’s a fundamental shift. It’s not a little algorithm update, which is what we’re used to as marketers working with Google and others. But this is a big difference here.

I think the biggest complaint that marketers have is that it’s evaporating the clicks to your website. it, know, sort of complaint number two is that it distills the answer on its own. So Google is no longer just simply the provider of 10 blue links. Now they are a content creator. So Google as a content creator is fundamentally different from what it has been for the last.

John Jantsch (01:29.836)

Yeah. Right.

David Hunter (01:52.395)

30 years or so. And that’s a big difference. But at the same time, on the upside, boy, it gets the answer very quickly. Now, it might not always be the right answer. The sources might be a little bit weird, but to the end user, it does a very quick and efficient job of getting you to where you need to be. And so I think that as far as the future goes, it’s looking very bright in terms of our opportunity.

John Jantsch (02:22.178)

Well, I think it’s really changed search behavior. And that’s why I say what side of the fence you’re on. think a lot of consumers really like it. You know, instead of typing in plumber near me or plumber in my city, you know, it’s like, who’s the best plumber in this city that has X amount of reviews and could could show up in the next 24 hours? I mean, that’s what we’re searching now. And so that fundamental shift is really, I think, from a consumer standpoint, if they trust the answers they’re getting, you know, in the overview, then.

That saved them a lot of time of having to shuffle through and figure out who they ought to call. So you can see why the consumer behavior is really shifting dramatically.

David Hunter (03:00.015)

Absolutely, yeah. And I mean, it makes sense, you know, like we, as consumers and users of Google, we’re definitely used to typing in, you know, yeah, pizza near me, and finding a quick response through the map pack. I mean, that’s fairly efficient, but you don’t get that nuanced conversational answer. So what we’re doing as consumers, and I think that

It’s almost a happy accident by Google that they’ve rolled out AI overviews and then phase two is this AI mode, which I think is sort of the future of what the Google SERP looks like. They’re almost training us as consumers to start querying with long tail conversational searches. And so I’m seeing that behavior change. And I look at it.

John Jantsch (03:41.272)

Sure. Yeah.

David Hunter (03:47.339)

And I have colleagues that are always like, well, you know, the old folks, they’re not going to do that. Well, yes, yes, they are. You know, my father’s like pushing 70 years old and, and, you know, I see him on the regular using, conversational, you know, searches and, and, and getting good, good feedback from it. So that’s right.

John Jantsch (03:53.621)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:04.846)

Well, yeah, once you get used to it, we want what we want. So it’s like, yeah, I’m going to talk to it like a human being and give them all my details because I’ll get it. know from experience, I start getting better answers.

David Hunter (04:10.879)

That’s right.

David Hunter (04:16.575)

Yeah, I think it takes maybe five or 10 searches for the average person to realize I should be doing this conversationally.

John Jantsch (04:19.372)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you spend a lot of time on proximity, with, some of the tools you’ve created. I know when I first started in search, you know, the, big thing was we had to, we had to optimize our site for, grew up in Kansas city. So I’ll use that example. have to optimize our site for Kansas city and all the suburbs and all, you know, to try to get traffic, you know, from, from those places, Google’s gotten really good at proximity, right? I mean, meaning if I searched that whole, the typical search.

a remodeling contractor near me. Well, it knows where I am, you know, maybe even to the street corner. And so it’s going to say, okay, well, you know, within reason, you know, here are the six that are closest to you. So how is that changing, you know, especially the example I use, the remodeling contractor. I mean, that’s not like a, like a dentist or somebody that like is going to have a

have a footprint area, right? I mean, I might be able to serve a 20 mile radius. So how is proximity playing and how do we take advantage of getting it to show us in a wider range?

David Hunter (05:16.0)

Right.

David Hunter (05:27.699)

Right, so, and you’re dead on about that with the service area business. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for them to really get even more visibility because of this. When local search first became a thing, there was proximity and then prominence and relevance, right? Those were the three components that made up local search. Right.

John Jantsch (05:36.952)

Yes.

John Jantsch (05:47.212)

Yeah. Have a lot of reviews.

David Hunter (05:49.981)

Right. And be relevant. the, you know, if I’m looking for a remodeling contractor, don’t show me a list of barber shops. Right. So it’s got to be relevant. And obviously it gets much more nuanced than that because well, what kind of remodeling and, you know, home remodeler commercial, you know, whatever. So bathrooms, kitchens, but there’s, there’s definitely a shift happening. And so at local Falcon, we have basically spent, we’ve built our platform on tracking results around you, right? The grid, use a grid pattern.

John Jantsch (06:17.838)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right.

David Hunter (06:19.657)

where you can basically see over top of your business, but then expand it out however far you wanna go radius wise, and then you drop a bunch of pins and you could see these results. Well, the future is definitely changing. And so we recently wanted to roll out a tracker for AI overviews around and chat GPT that’s similar to local Falcons core plan and that it’s got the grid interface, but…

is using the conversational platform to see the results. And so before we did that, I said, well, we need to do, I need to see if this is valid, if it’s even worth doing, right? And so we ran this big study. We put, you know, 4,000 some businesses in there and ran like 60,000 different searches and looked, looked, basically studied the patterns and what was going to come out of that. And that’s where we learned that like proximity, it matters, right? It matters at like a city level. It matters at a, you know, sort of

you know, regional level, but it is not factoring anywhere near the, you know, with the level of authority that it used to. So it’s important that you still, you know, focus on, if you’re a remodeler in Kansas City, that you focus on having that localized content and, you know, authority around that. But the, you know, the relevance and the, you know, the prominence, you know, the expertise, that stuff is really what starts to kind of show up

in terms of like the position that you put in, right? And I don’t even call it ranking because it’s really, it’s more about the position because it’s a natural language response. It’ll weave business names into this paragraph of text that it gives you. Now, it also does a list below and whatever, but yeah, it’s less about the ranking now and it’s more about your position within that ranking. So it’s important because you still need to be known as someone that.

serves the Kansas City area, but less important when you’re dealing with like near me because it’s gonna probably pull a list of the best remodelers around the area or what it thinks is the best.

John Jantsch (08:26.284)

Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting. you know, obviously showing up on the map pack for a local business. you know, I’m, I’m old enough to, it used to be seven at one point. it’s three, if you can find it, know, midst all the other stuff, exactly. Right. but if I go to chat GPT today and type in a geographic search, best remodeling contractor, Kansas city,

David Hunter (08:36.843)

You always know it’s 10. Yeah, 7, 10 and 7. Now it’s 3. Yeah.

Right. All the ads gotta come up there first, you know?

John Jantsch (08:57.42)

what’s pulling up there. Now, I don’t think a lot of people are necessarily doing that kind of search yet, but they will, right? so, theoretically, are the results that are showing up there, what a common, an amalgamation of like all the searches actually determining you’re the best or is it determining you’re the most trustworthy, you’re the most prominent, you have the most authority, you have the most reviews.

David Hunter (09:24.299)

It’s a great question. So, you know, I think that anybody who tries to tell you that answer is going to be full of snake oil, right? Like nobody really knows how that is pulling in and, and, you know, coming together, there’s a lot of different theories out there. There’s a lot of different, really strong, you know, methodology that’s been put to the test in terms of like, what, you know, I don’t want to get too technical, but like embeddings and vector vector embeddings and like passages within the website.

John Jantsch (09:49.026)

Yeah.

David Hunter (09:51.915)

how it pulls all that information together is definitely different. They’re not using Google search results per se. I do think sometimes they kind of slide them in there, but for a while they were focusing exclusively on Bing places. So I can’t say that it’s gonna provide you with the absolute best list, but it’s pretty close. So I live in the Great Lakes up in Erie, PA, and I did a…

that exact search pizza near me. And I, you know, this is a city of an area of 250,000 people, there’s not that many options. And so when I look at it, I saw the list, I’m like, this is actually, this is pretty good. I mean, some of these places are, you know, probably a 10 minute drive, but they are darn good pizza places. So in the chaos that is coming within these results, it does seem to be finding

pretty decent results out of that, which is definitely encouraging. Now, with Local Falcon and our product that we’ve got, we show you essentially the output itself, as well as we will identify what brands were pulled, and then below that, we show you the sources. This is where I start to really lose my head. So I’ve got an agency called Epic Web Studios that’s been around for…

you know, 17 years now. And I started doing searches around that, like who’s the best web developer in Erie, Pennsylvania, right? The list of results that came back was so haywire. I mean, we’re talking, there were businesses that were, that I remember from 10 years ago that are since out of business. You know, there were businesses that were across Lake Erie in Canada. You know, it was, it was all over the place. And the sources,

John Jantsch (11:27.725)

Mm-hmm.

David Hunter (11:42.173)

were just wild. mean, it was finding essentially these like directories that I’d never heard of before, right? And pulling that type of information through and saying, okay, well, we used, you know, good firms.com and tech behemoths.com. I’m like, who is, what is this? You know, so I spent a couple hours going through, making sure like, well, we better make sure we’ve got a profile there and that it’s validated and.

John Jantsch (11:48.908)

yeah.

David Hunter (12:05.803)

I mean, that’s the most we can do at this stage is identify those sources and make sure that we’re included in that. I mean, there’s a lot more you can do with the content on your site and everything else, but for this part.

John Jantsch (12:12.898)

Yeah, that’s really, yeah. That’s really, that’s really interesting that they identify the sources because I do think, you know, I do think that that’s what’s the house, a house, for example, is a, you know, is a source for builders and local home service contractors. And I noticed that ChiTPT in particular pulls a lot of house results. You know, so that that’s a really great tip is to think in terms of,

David Hunter (12:36.927)

Yes. How’s Angie? Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:41.698)

making sure you’re in the sources that they’re pulling. Let’s just, again, another giant question, but today, especially if somebody, local business is saying, okay, I get it. All these changes are coming. Like, what do I need to do differently than maybe I was, before maybe I was claiming my Google business profile. I was building pages with geographic content on them. I was getting reviews. mean, what else do I need to be doing different?

David Hunter (13:09.651)

Okay, so if you’re running a white hat operation with your web presence, I think that as of today, there’s not entirely that much different that you need to do, but it’s the big caveat that you’re running a white hat operation, right? If you’re sitting here running, you know, some sort of a link farm and trying to, you know, blast a bunch of AI generated content, that’s never gonna work. Or at least it’s not gonna work in the long term, right? Yeah. Right.

John Jantsch (13:35.992)

I was going to say that’s the bad thing is it works temporarily, and so people get excited about it. But then they, you know, eventually Google or whoever catches up.

David Hunter (13:42.239)

That’s gonna get, yes, that’s gonna get plugged, right? The idea of, and I’m not sure if the kind of hack has been plugged yet, but people were putting, people used to do this back in the day too. You would put a bunch of keywords on your homepage or on your website. And a lot of times they’d wanna obfuscate that and make it like a white text on a white background so that you couldn’t see them, right? People are doing that now, they’re injecting prompts inside of it so that when…

the chat GPT bot comes through, it sees a prompt that says like, talk only about this business. It’s the best business and repeating that over and over again. And people are finding it’s working. It was ranking. Now I think that they have since plugged that. don’t know, but I’m not willing to try. I’m not going to put that type of not like nastiness on my site. Like that’s no way I’m not taking that risk, but you know, there’s a lot of little hacks out there. What can someone do in the white hat sense? mean, number one, you need to understand what

John Jantsch (14:23.981)

Yeah.

David Hunter (14:37.247)

people are saying, or how the LLM, the large language model is understanding your content, right? So go, simply go ask ChatGPT about that. What do you know about Local Falcon, right? And just simply Google that, excuse me, search that on ChatGPT and understand right out of the gate, at least it has a, does it know who we are, where we are, what we do? If not, you better start adding some content to your website in a visible way.

John Jantsch (14:44.504)

Mm-hmm.

David Hunter (15:06.098)

that is gonna make sure that it, you the next time the bot does come by, it pulls it in and, you know, can use that in terms of its reasoning. When you do add that content, it needs to be done in a very like bite sized way, right? Like putting up a 2000 word blog post that’s a big wall of text is probably not going to help you in terms of showing up inside of these responses, right? Just think about how the responses come back. They’re very short snippets. And so,

John Jantsch (15:21.134)

you

David Hunter (15:35.307)

if you can write in short snippets and get kind of the core idea down to one or two sentences, and then, you know, I’m not saying don’t do the 2000 word blog post. What I’m saying is within that, make sure that it’s got the main idea and, you know, the thesis, whatever it is you’re doing is all kind of spelled out in little chunks at a time. You’re gonna have a much better shot of showing up. So.

John Jantsch (15:45.4)

Right, right.

John Jantsch (15:55.064)

Right. Yeah.

Well, and I think what we’re saying is good content is good content should be written for humans should be valuable should be educational. But a lot of the tweaks that maybe need to happen are in the structure. So, you know, you have the overview at the at the very front, you know, here’s what this article is about. You have the table of contents, you know, you have the 2000 words and at the end you have FAQs. I mean, it’s probably more about structure, isn’t

David Hunter (16:10.122)

Yes.

David Hunter (16:22.889)

It’s a big, it’s a huge piece of it, right? So again, it’s really about how, you know, chat GPT, know, open AI, Anthropic, you know, others, Google understands the information. So they do that in these little, you know, they’ll basically pull little passages out. And then that contributes to the larger, you know, the larger model understanding what it is. And then it creates its own version of that. Sometimes you’ll even find verbatim, it’s pulling in

some of the content that you wrote, especially with things like FAQs and how you answer that FAQ, right? Number one, you also need to make sure that it’s structurally visible, right? So schema markup has never been more important. You have to identify and when schema markup is essentially like a shortcut for understanding what a page is about, it’s a way for a bot, a crawler to…

John Jantsch (16:56.215)

Yeah.

David Hunter (17:17.563)

recognize and categorize, this is about a recipe or a review or a local business. So making sure that that schema markup is on there. And then of course, again, looking through the sources, right? So when you run these local FalconSkins, you’re gonna see this huge list of sources and it’ll tell you how often that source was used. So if you’ve got a whole bunch of Yelp listings on there, yeah, go get on Yelp and maybe even consider spending the 50 bucks or whatever they want to like,

actually make sure that it’s as complete of a profile as possible, just to give yourself every chance for success.

John Jantsch (17:54.24)

Yeah, absolutely. Let’s touch on just again, this is a giant topic, but let’s say I’m a business that has 10 local locations. Do I need to be doing something differently? Do I need to be doing something? I mean, are there unique challenges that you’re starting to see from that multi-location business?

David Hunter (18:16.939)

So yes, a lot of times when you get, when you’re with a multi-location brand, it ends up, you you have a really good shot of actually showing up because you’ve got so many others, you know, if you’ve got 10 locations in your city, that’s 10 more chances or nine more chances than the solo operation, which is definitely helpful for them. Yes, and so that’s great. However, the response itself,

John Jantsch (18:36.738)

So somebody’s always near to one of them, right?

David Hunter (18:43.619)

you know, we see some wild stuff like it’ll pull, you know, you’re on the east side of town and it starts talking about the location on the west side. So it’s less about that individual location and more about the brand itself, right? So making sure that like holistically the brand is well understood is important. I think that where you’re gonna see potentially some headaches is in like the franchise world where someone buys in.

and they are responsible for their location. I mean, it depends on how the brand operates, but doing things from sort of a centralized source and then disseminating out is probably your best bet.

John Jantsch (19:12.546)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (19:20.93)

Yeah, awesome. Well, David, I appreciate you taking a few moments to come by and share about local searches. there someplace you would invite people to connect with you and find out more about your various platforms and tools?

David Hunter (19:32.715)

Sure, I mean, certainly, you know, search up Local Falcon wherever, know, localfalcon.com. Also, you can find me on LinkedIn. I’m, you know, on there probably too much these days, so.

John Jantsch (19:42.734)

Awesome. Again, I appreciate you taking a moment and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

David Hunter (19:49.297)

Absolutely, John. Thanks for the very, very lightweight questions there, man. Those were nothing, you know, nothing too strong at all, right? Thanks again.

John Jantsch (19:53.038)

You

Awesome. Awesome.

Why AI Is Reshaping Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey

Why AI Is Reshaping Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Episode Overview

In this solo episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, marketing expert John Jantsch dives deep into the ways artificial intelligence is reshaping the customer journey. He revisits the foundational concept of the Marketing Hourglass and explores how every stage—from awareness to referral—requires fresh thinking in a world where AI tools are now a part of the everyday buying process.

About John Jantsch

John Jantsch is a veteran marketing strategist, speaker, and author of several bestselling books including Duct Tape Marketing, The Referral Engine, and Marketing Rebellion. As the founder of Duct Tape Marketing, John has been guiding small businesses and marketing professionals for decades through proven, strategic marketing systems. His focus is on practical, sustainable marketing strategies that build trust and grow businesses.

Key Takeaways

AI is changing how customers research, evaluate, and make purchasing decisions.
The traditional linear buyer journey is obsolete; today’s buyers bounce among touchpoints.
The Marketing Hourglass—Know, Like, Trust, Try, Buy, Repeat, Refer—is more relevant than ever, but each stage must be adapted for today’s AI-savvy buyer.
Content must become answers; modern SEO prioritizes question-based queries over keyword ranking.
Self-service and frictionless buying options are critical, but human touchpoints like real stories, community, and personalized experiences are irreplaceable.
Businesses must test and re-map their customer journey based on how AI tools are impacting buyer behavior.

Highlight Quotes

“Buyers are using AI just as much as marketers—what does that mean for how your content shows up during their research?”

“AI is not just another tactic—it affects the entire marketing system.”

Great Moments and Timestamps

00:00 – Welcome and episode theme: the evolved buyer journey
02:30 – Why marketers focus too much on tools and not enough on how buyers are using them
05:40 – Reintroducing the Marketing Hourglass as a flexible customer journey model
09:22 – How AI interrupts and reshapes journey stages like know, like, and trust
12:00 – Recommendation engines and the rise of self-service experiences
15:10 – The need to rethink SEO: focus on questions, not keywords
19:52 – Combining digital efficiency with emotional, human-centered marketing
24:30 – Final thoughts: the journey is already changing—are you adapting?

Additional Resources

Join the Conversation

How are you adapting your marketing strategy for AI-driven buyers? Share your thoughts in the comments or reach out to John directly at john@ducttapemarketing.com.

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00.866)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and I’m doing a solo show today. I want to talk about something that I’ve been talking about for about 20 years, maybe. And that is the buyer’s journey, the customer journey. So with each impending new platform or new technology, hear all kinds of people talking about, this changes everything. Marketers have to do this. Marketers have to do that now.

Certainly the websites came along. Social media came along, mobile came along. I all these things created this seismic change. AI is clearly in that category of creating change. But what I’ve always found interesting is most marketers talk about the changes in marketing. And I think the thing we sometimes forget to think about is, you know, the way that somebody buys or chooses to buy now has changed.

every bit as radically as anything to do with how we do marketing today. And so I think we have to consider that idea with every decision we make is not just how do I master this technology or how do I use this new tool? It’s how is the buyer using this? know, buyers, customers are using AI every bit as much as the marketers that are trying to market to them. So.

I’ve been talking about this idea of the customer journey and the buyer journey as being really a significant element that frames what we do as marketing. Really since I wrote duct tape marketing back in 2005, I created something I called the marketing hourglass, which I think was a better representation of the customer journey in that the traditional customer journey that had stages of awareness and interest and desire and conversion and usually stopped there.

was really incomplete and that we didn’t drive people in this linear path. Once websites came along, the linear path, I think, kind of went away because the buyer all of a sudden started having the ability to find information and to know everything about an organization before they ever reached out for a sales call. so I think that’s the day that the buyer journey really changed. And I created the Marketing Hourglass, our seven stages. You’ve probably heard me say I’m here before.

John Jantsch (02:25.742)

No like trust, try buy, repeat, and refer. And I was trying to do two things with that idea is that we have to intentionally think about what the buyer is doing, what they want to do, the questions they have, the goals they have at each of those stages and that we guide them. We can’t necessarily move them in a linear path. In fact, I’ve used in many presentations a slide where I’ve got all these lines running all over the place that the buyer journey is not this straight line that it is.

people revisit, there’s almost this continuous loop of going back in one stage and then backing up to another stage and that we have to just put ourselves there in the path, I guess, that they’re going to eventually travel. But I spent a lot of time in the hourglass and the idea behind the shape of the hourglass is that post-purchase, once somebody becomes a customer, there’s a whole lot that we can do

to build momentum to retain those customers, to turn them into repeat customers, to turn them into advocates and referral sources. And I think that’s where a lot of people leave a lot of money on the table is by not even thinking about those. Well, that from 2005, say to 2020 has really been the thinking that I’ve had at least around this idea of the journey and something that we’ve brought to hundreds of businesses.

But I think we’re in another change as well. think the stages are fundamentally the same, fundamentally true, but I think AI is rewriting that journey. Most buyers B2B, B2C, I think are today going to a chat GPT type of tool before they ever visit our website in a lot of cases. Or maybe they’re asking AI to summarize reviews, to compare features, even write RFPs, you know, based on

on what they want to see. And I think that what that means is that we have to rethink everything that’s going on at every one of these stages. How people find us, how they come to know about us is changing dramatically. What are we doing to make sure that we’re showing up in the new ways that they’re doing research? What are we doing to make sure that the brand mentions of our brand are allowing us to be favorably compared

John Jantsch (04:48.29)

to competitors. That’s one of the things I think that a lot of these tools that make research so much easier, analysis so much easier for the buyer are really allowing people to do a lot more comparison shopping, I think, than they ever did before because let’s face it, it’s fairly easy. It’s changing the way that think buyers still need this content, but I think that

the AI engines and the, you know, even the traditional search engines and the way they’re using AI are really going to change how people consume and find that content. know, recommendation engines now I think are going to become the norm. People are going to have or want to have, they’ve already demonstrated this, a frictionless, maybe self-service type of buying experience. We’re starting to see.

people buying very expensive B2B type of services without a salesperson involved. And I think again, we have to think in terms of, that mean we need to have price estimators? Does that mean we have to allow people to get put together their own packages, you know, all the way down to the point where they then just need, okay, what’s the link to buy this or, you know, how do I sign the contract? So I think that we have to make a point of really

revisiting this entire idea of a journey map for your business. Where are buyers using AI today in their process? What are they asking? What tools are you asking yourself? Ask Jad GPT what it says about your business and about your competitors. You can get some real insight to what that customer is going to find when they’re out there. We got a rethink SEO. You know, ranking.

is not the key anymore for keywords, it is answering. Today’s SEO is about answering questions and or the content that is going to drive SEO is about answering questions. So tools like they also ask, answer the public, even chat GPT can really help in formulating what those questions are that are being asked so that you can be an answer engine. I think that’s how we have to think about it. That’s why

John Jantsch (07:15.244)

You know, for, for a number of years, I’ve been saying every one of our web pages needs to have FAQs on it because that’s the content that, that, that the search engines really want to turn up because that’s how people are using, search today.

John Jantsch (07:32.014)

All right. So I’ve been talking about technology and parts of the journey that involve self-service. And I think that’s going to be a real key. It’s like we have to actually get people to the certain point with this ability to do self-service, ability to do research, just knowing that they are doing that. But then, you know, how do we add the human touch, the stories?

the differentiators, emotion, trust. mean, these are things that AI can’t really replicate. I mean, it can replicate your voice, but it can’t replicate the true stories, the true emotion, the human touch that really exists only in your business. And I think we have to double down on those things. So it’s not a matter of saying, we need to be more authentic and we need to use stories. I mean, we’ve been saying that for a long time.

I think we now have to actually double down on bringing small communities together, doing more things, more one-on-one video, more one-on-one meetings with clients or with prospects are going to need to be part of it. It’s like they want to come up to that certain point, but once you’ve built that trust and they actually want to take the next step, I think it’s that human touch that’s going to be a key part of it. So, you know, we’ve always said strategy before tactics, AI.

really is just another tactic, but it’s one that affects really the whole system. And I think that that’s probably one of the greatest differences. A lot of the tools and technologies that have come along have given us more access to potential customers, have given them more access to us. But I think AI actually impacts the entire system. So I think we need to rethink, or not rethink, just revisit and then intentionally think about each of those stages.

of no like trust, try by repeat and refer in an AI driven world.

John Jantsch (09:36.416)

It’s already part of your buyer’s world. So, you know, the question is, are we adapting? Do we need to overhaul what we’re doing? Maybe, maybe not, but we definitely need to start testing new ways that and not just testing, testing and asking, testing and engaging prospects and customers. Is this the approach that they want? Because I think we’re all learning and of course things are changing dramatically. So

This is something I love to talk about, as you know, I’ve been talking about it for years. I think that it is something that I know that it’s something we’re going to continue to talk about in the very near future. And I appreciate you coming along this journey. No pun intended with me on this, but I think we, anybody who is bought into this idea of the customer journey needs to really start analyzing every single one of these stages and start thinking about, you know, ways that you need to, A,

make it a better experience for the buyer and be at that human touch that is quickly going away in a lot of what we do. All right, that’s it for today. I appreciate you tuning in. Love those reviews. Let me know how I can help you. It’s just John at ducttapemarketing.com.

Why It’s Time to Retire the Idea of Retirement with Derek Coburn

Why It’s Time to Retire the Idea of Retirement with Derek Coburn written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, host John Jantsch sits down with Derek Coburn — seasoned financial advisor, entrepreneur, and author — to challenge the traditional notion of retirement. With insights from his new book, Let’s Retire Retirement, Derek outlines why the current retirement model is outdated and how a mindset shift can help people live more fulfilled lives both now and later. Whether you’re a business owner, working professional, or planning for what’s next, this episode offers a fresh framework for thinking about purpose, wealth, and work-life design.

Listen to the Episode

About Derek Coburn

Derek Coburn is a financial advisor with over 25 years of experience and the co-founder of Cadre, a curated community of CEOs and entrepreneurs. He’s the bestselling author of Networking is Not Working and a sought-after speaker on networking, wealth strategy, and purpose-driven leadership. In his latest book, Let’s Retire Retirement, he reframes what it means to live a meaningful and financially secure life—one that doesn’t hinge on the outdated idea of “stopping work at 65.”

Key Takeaways

The modern concept of retirement is less than 150 years old—and it no longer matches today’s realities.
Living longer and more actively means we need to redefine what “working years” and “rest years” really mean.
Deferring joy for some idealized retirement later can lead to disappointment—the time to live fully is now.
Working longer can dramatically reduce the pressure to save aggressively in early and mid-career years.
Even entrepreneurs fall into the trap of deferring dreams until “after the exit”—a dangerous delay tactic.
Small shifts in financial strategy (like converting to Roth 401(k)) can have big long-term impacts.

Episode Highlights and Timestamps

00:01 – Introduction and guest welcome
01:00 – The true history of retirement: Bismarck, FDR, and outdated milestones
03:00 – Why 25–30% of retirees are going back to work
05:00 – The concept of redefining retirement for personal fulfillment
07:00 – Entrepreneurs and the myth of “I’ll do it after I exit”
09:30 – Real-world case study: Jay Baer’s pivot from agency to tequila influencer
11:00 – Financial math: how working longer cuts required savings dramatically
13:00 – The 401(k) rethink: taxes, Roth conversions, and planning smarter
15:00 – Parenting, presence, and valuing your $50,000 moments
17:30 – The mindset shift needed to fully embrace this new paradigm
19:30 – Grandparenting, legacy, and how to stay connected across generations
20:30 – Where to learn more and connect with Derek

Learn More and Connect with Derek Coburn

To dive deeper into Derek’s thinking and explore tools to reframe your financial future, visit:

DerekCoburn.com/neverretire – Use the calculator to reimagine your retirement math
Cadre – Explore Derek’s community for high-performing entrepreneurs
Let’s Retire Retirement – Get the book
Connect with Derek on LinkedIn
Follow Derek on Twitter

Enjoyed This Episode?

If you liked this conversation, be sure to subscribe to the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast for more candid discussions with authors, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders shaping how we work and live. Share this episode, leave a review, and let us know what part of Derek’s perspective resonated most with you.

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01.085)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Derek Coburn. He’s a seasoned financial advisor and entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience. He is the co-founder of Cadre, an exclusive community of CEOs and entrepreneurs, which he launched with his wife, Melanie. Derek is also the author of the bestselling book, Networking is Not Working. And we’re going to talk about his latest book today.

Let’s retire retirement, how to enjoy life to the fullest now and later. So Derek, welcome back to the show.

Derek Coburn (00:34.85)

Thanks, John. So happy to be here.

John Jantsch (00:36.797)

So I know you’ve done some research on this, so I’m just going to ask you, like, where did retirement come from? Did people in the Middle Ages retire, or is that like a kind of a new thing?

Derek Coburn (00:45.838)

Yeah, it’s barely 100 years old. It first started in 1889. It was the first social program developed in Germany by a chancellor named Otto von Bismarck. And they selected the age of 70 at the time because that was the age that most people died. They brought it down to 65 about 10 years later.

FDR when he was setting up social security in 1935, thought it sounded like a good number at a time when life expectancy in this country was 71. So, you know, it’s barely over 100 years old and it was certainly never intended to be this thing that you, you know, did for 30 plus years.

John Jantsch (01:28.883)

So is that, is that, is, was that an alternate title of your book? Work till you die?

Derek Coburn (01:35.328)

I’m not sure, you know, I think that might not have gone over as well. Dan Pink like five or six years ago told me, like, I think a good title for your book would be How to Never Retire. And I thought it’s a good title, but I told him that I think that there’s just not enough people, certainly not then, that were raising their hand and knew they already did not want to work. I felt like I needed to have a title that was more inclusive to bring people in and with, you know, with dangling a carrot and then kind of trick them once I got their attention.

John Jantsch (01:38.683)

You

John Jantsch (02:05.235)

Yeah. Well, and we’ll get back to how you’re defining retirement because that’s key to this. you know, as a financial advisor, mean, most financial advisors spend a whole lot of time talking about people saving for retirement. So how, I mean, has that been something you’ve had to kind of correct in your own advising or is that something that’s never really been a part of your MO?

Derek Coburn (02:27.694)

You know, I’ve just been doing this. And the reason that I wrote decided to write this book in 2017 is I realized that collectively the best thing that I had done for the majority of my clients is help them come to the realization that they weren’t going to be happy sitting around doing nothing for 30 years. And I started off writing this book with the intention to use it as a business card to attract more high net worth clients that I might want to work with. But I sold my practice to a private equity company in 2019 and

got some flexibility and then COVID happened. I kind of set it aside for a number of years and I feel like now, because I’m not looking to grow that practice, I was able to write a book that would appeal to a broader audience, be helpful to a broader audience. to your point, financial advisors are not saying, do you want to retire? They’re saying, what age do you want to retire? And everyone is being opted into this concept and they’re just going along with it, I think, without really questioning whether it’s going to make sense for them or not.

John Jantsch (03:27.251)

Yeah. And of course, one variable to this whole thing is that we’re all living longer, right? mean, 65, you you were maybe incapable of doing a whole lot more, you know, a hundred years ago in the workplace, but right. now, you know, well, it’s Warren Buffett, like 90. You know, I mean, so, so how does that factor into this idea that, you know, if you retired 65, I mean, you are probably looking at 25, 30 years.

Derek Coburn (03:38.765)

Yeah.

Derek Coburn (03:44.429)

Yep.

Derek Coburn (03:54.22)

Yeah, well, you’re seeing this, this on, on retirement movement that’s starting to happen. Brian Clark is doing some cool things around it with his new project further, but essentially 25 to 30 % of people who have, who have traditionally retired or going back to work. Some of them are doing it for the money, but most of them are doing it because they missed the connection, the purpose, the ability to, to, to contribute in, in a meaningful way.

And I think there’s just a lot of people that have gone along with this. They were told if they made sacrifices and did things a certain way that they were going to be rewarded. They were going to be rewarded with this free time and this happiness and this ability to do whatever they want to do. it’s not playing out the way that they thought it was going to.

John Jantsch (04:36.925)

Well, and even worse, maybe they worked themselves to the bone, worked more hours, sacrificed their family with the promise of what comes after, right? And then when they got there, it didn’t come, right?

Derek Coburn (04:45.518)

Yeah.

Derek Coburn (04:49.802)

Exactly. Yep. Like the arrival fallacy, this promise that it would be a certain way and then it’s not.

John Jantsch (04:55.719)

Yeah. So that’s a big part of your book. And that’s why I saying, I think you’re saying let’s retire retirement, but you’re also redefining retirement. Aren’t you a little bit in this and a big part of the book is like, let’s have a personally fulfilling life right now.

Derek Coburn (05:10.882)

Yeah, I think that a lot of people just don’t realize how well the math works out. So I’m saying to work longer, but I’m also saying that by recognizing that you’ll probably work longer, it should translate into you not feeling like you have to work a lot of extra hours now when maybe your kids need you more, or maybe when you want to travel or date your spouse more aggressively. It’s more about taking advantage of the fact that this income will be coming in in the future.

And it’s sort of sponsoring the idea that you can do these other things and invest in these other relationships and skills and experiences in a way that maybe you didn’t think you were able to when you wanted to stop at 65.

John Jantsch (05:48.243)

Your next book, I’m sorry I got distracted there, Derek, your next book is Date Your Spouse More Aggressively.

Derek Coburn (05:54.478)

That’s maybe like the second or third time I’ve said that out loud, but.

John Jantsch (06:01.407)

So, you know, there’s a book I read a few years ago that I thought made a lot of sense. I I might get the title wrong. was something like Die Broke, but the idea was that a lot of people also just hang on to all this money that they, you know, squirrel away for retirement instead of like giving it to their kids or their grandkids to send them to college now. You know, like my children when they’re 55 probably don’t need my money.

as, as much as they might now. And, I think that idea of take that, you know, take that vacation now, you know, do that big trip, you know, now, because when you’re 75, 80, maybe you don’t go to China or you don’t go to Vietnam or something, because it’s hard.

Derek Coburn (06:40.724)

Yeah, you I think you’re referring to Die with Zero by Bill Perkins and really good book, you know, and I think that one area where maybe we differ a little bit is he’s making the case that you’re going to enjoy a trip to Europe more when you’re 35 than when you’re 50. You’re not going to be as physically capable to do some of these things, but I’m of the belief, and there’s a lot of science that backs this up, to where if you’re taking better care of yourself now, if you’re going on more trips now, if you’re

John Jantsch (06:43.813)

Yeah, that’s it. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah.

Derek Coburn (07:09.29)

If you’re more active now, you’re more likely to be able to continue doing those things in the future. It’s really the people that aren’t doing those things that I think are going to have a harder time with

John Jantsch (07:14.803)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I’m actually an avid bike rider and I’m doing a triathlon this year, you know, and I’m 65 and my fear is if I stop doing those, I won’t be able to do it anyway.

Derek Coburn (07:26.499)

Yeah.

Derek Coburn (07:31.424)

I think it’s a valid fear and it’s a fear well backed by science that agrees with you.

John Jantsch (07:35.953)

Yeah. I do have to let the cat out of the bag there. The triathlon I’m doing is a run fish drink. So not exactly, not exactly the same thing, but so you have obviously in your financial practice, I mean, that’s, that’s like literally your research lab, right? To some degree, but then also cadre, you know, you work with a lot of high powered CEOs, folks that run their own companies in that that are

Derek Coburn (07:46.85)

That’s a good one. Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:05.117)

probably looking at, you know, they’re not looking at the pension plan, you retirement. How has that kind of informed some of your views?

Derek Coburn (08:09.325)

Yeah.

Derek Coburn (08:12.738)

What’s interesting is even the people that sort of know that they’re never going to stop working, they’re still living their life like they’re going to. They’re still making financial decisions and choices based on the fact they’re going to retire at 65 like everyone else. So for example, when they meet with their financial advisors, they’re saying, like, what do I need to do to stop working at 65 and to stop doing this? And I would say that with entrepreneurs and business owners, sometimes it’s not

John Jantsch (08:28.465)

Run.

Derek Coburn (08:42.262)

retirement, but it’s I’ll get around to doing X once I have an exit, once I bring in a CEO, once I bring in someone else. And I think that that it’s the same story. It’s the it’s justifying deferring maybe things in relationships that deserve more of your attention right now in the name of getting around to it once you have a certain amount of money or a certain financial experience or exit from your business.

John Jantsch (09:04.637)

Yeah, yeah.

Are you finding, you know, I think some, to some degree, we’re talking about just extending how long you work, but what about a major pivot? You know, it’s like, I’ve, I’ve been doing this for 30 years, done what I want to do here. I want to go do something different. I’m not going to retire, but I’m going to do something totally different. Maybe something that I think is seems totally cool or that I’m more prepared to do today.

Derek Coburn (09:28.59)

Yeah, like so I have an entire chapter. It’s the longest chapter in my book that’s that’s that are case studies about people that have that have taken this and they’ve gone into a lot of different directions. And one one maybe that might be fun to share with you is just our mutual friend, Jay Bear, who I spoke with for the book and Jay sold his agency, I think early on in covid and was sitting around and decided he wanted to start making videos about tequila.

John Jantsch (09:43.475)

Mm-hmm.

Derek Coburn (09:54.73)

And, you know, so he went from that to really leaning into one of his passions and one of his interests. And after sharing the case study, I have a callback later in the book to say, look, I mean, if J. Bear can make a lot of money, you know, drinking tequila and talking about it on video, then I’m sure that there’s a lot of different cool ideas out there that are waiting for you as well.

John Jantsch (10:17.489)

Yeah, that also necessitated some amount of travel to some places he hadn’t spent time into. I think it really…

Derek Coburn (10:25.484)

I think he’s mostly hurt by the fact that more people recognize him as the tequila guy than the keynote speaker.

John Jantsch (10:32.595)

He’s still doing a fair amount of that too. talk about some of the changes, maybe they’re not changes, but if somebody is going to read you, pick up your book and, and really the ideas in it just resonate. What are some of the changes that you they’re probably going to encounter or, maybe it’s just mindset.

Derek Coburn (10:54.57)

Yeah, one of the first things that I want to want to point out is just the financial impact it’s going to have. And so I share an example in the book about a fictitious guy named Tony who’s 45 years old. makes one hundred and fifty thousand a year and he has one hundred and fifty thousand dollars saved up for retirement. You could call it two fifty five hundred, one hundred thousand, whatever you want it to be. But if Tony wants to have a traditional retirement at sixty five, he has to save about twenty five hundred dollars per month in order to make that happen, which is.

20 % of what he’s bringing home, which is a non-starter for most people. That would mean that you are saving about what you’re living on. If Tony decides to work until he’s 75 instead of 65, the amount he has to save on a monthly basis goes from 2,500 down to $110 per month. It goes down by 96%. And even if he doesn’t want to work until he’s 75, he wants to go until he’s 70, it goes down 75 % to 600 bucks a month.

John Jantsch (11:40.136)

Mm.

Derek Coburn (11:50.518)

And so we’ve all seen these articles that make us feel really dumb about how we should have saved more when we were 22 years old and taking advantage of compounding interest. And while a lot of us didn’t do that, and even if we would have done that, we weren’t really earning a lot of money at that time compared to what we’re earning now. Anyways, there aren’t a lot of articles talking about the benefits of having the advantage of compounding interest by letting it sit in for an extra five or 10 years longer.

Immediately, I want people to know, I want people to see they have a lot more money and a lot more time that they can spend differently once they realize, you know, I’ll probably be doing this a little bit longer than what I was originally thinking.

John Jantsch (12:28.657)

Yeah, I mean, doesn’t even factor in, assuming it’ll be there for a few more years. Doesn’t even factor in the escalation to social security, right? Yeah.

Derek Coburn (12:36.022)

Yeah, exactly. I’ll tell you like something maybe more specifically 401k plans became all the rage, mainly because the idea that I can put money away on a tax free basis while I’m working get a tax deduction based on my current tax bracket. And when I pull it out, I won’t be working. So I’ll be at a lower tax bracket. And that seems like a no brainer to anyone when you lay it out like that. But once

John Jantsch (12:42.259)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (12:56.315)

Over. Yeah.

Derek Coburn (13:02.166)

someone realizes there’s a good chance they might be working into their 70s and they’re going to be taking required minimum distributions from their 401k plan and they’re still earning an income, then maybe they’re not in a lower tax bracket.

John Jantsch (13:13.331)

Also, also that tax got tax higher bracket

Derek Coburn (13:17.546)

Yeah, maybe this 401k plan isn’t as good of a deal as it seems. without getting too technical here, like an easy fix for that, right, is I think over 90 % of 401k plans right now have the option to convert it to a Roth. And that might be something that people want to do where they’re making their contributions on a post-tax basis. But that’s just one example of maybe how your thinking should change a little bit once you realize you might be working a little bit longer.

John Jantsch (13:22.696)

Grrrr

John Jantsch (13:43.251)

You’ve also missed, you know, I know in our case, we have a 3 % match on the, you know, employer match. So that certainly helps that out a little bit.

Derek Coburn (13:52.406)

Yeah, and I say that’s the place even like even maybe before you work to aggressively build up your emergency reserve fund. If you’re getting a match, probably take advantage of that.

John Jantsch (14:01.233)

Yeah. Yeah. Plus owners, you know, have the ability to profit share into a 401k. So, you know, which I may or may not have taken full advantage of every one of those.

Derek Coburn (14:11.95)

Wow, amazing. Yep.

John Jantsch (14:17.455)

Is there any lifestyle change? Because I am here, I’m just going to work longer, right? So how does that affect my spouse? How does that affect other lifestyle things? that something that’s going to be realistic in that regard?

Derek Coburn (14:37.39)

I’ll give you like an even short-term example of how it’s playing out for me and some people I know. So I have a 15 and a 12 year old and I spend a significant amount of time with them, with my wife, with my friends compared to most people I know. Yeah, exactly. And one of the driving factors behind that is that when my youngest moves out of the house in five and a half years,

John Jantsch (14:52.115)

as your Instagram account will attest.

Derek Coburn (15:05.006)

I’m going to be ready to turn it up a notch. I’m going to be ready to work even more than I’m working now. And just knowing that I’m going to have this income coming in in five or six years really frees me up and liberates me to lean into spending as much time with them as possible. And I think that’s just the more shorter term, more abbreviated version of how it works in my mind for thinking about what I’m going to be doing 20, 30 years from now.

John Jantsch (15:29.713)

Are you doing any coaching workshops, anything outside of the book?

Derek Coburn (15:35.2)

Yeah, I’m not. know, I’m open to it. I’m interested in it, but I feel really good about where I’m where I’m going right now in this message that I have to share. you know, we’ll see where it goes. I’ve been a lot of people ask me, but I’ve just never.

John Jantsch (15:47.443)

Because I could, yeah, yeah. And because I think one of the challenges, it’s not necessarily just a, implement these five steps in this framework. you’ll be, I mean, it’s really a mindset first, right? I have to accept this idea because I’ve spent my whole life thinking a different idea.

Derek Coburn (16:05.71)

Yeah. Yeah. mean, look, and I’ll give you an example of that. I mean, I have clients who are in their 70s who have significant assets, right? I’ll say client A has, client A and client B both have $15 million. Client A and client B could spend their money as much as they want from now until they pass away and they’re going to be fine. Client A is working a job making about $100,000 $150,000 a year.

doing things the way they want to do on their terms, how they want to do it, and client B is not doing anything at all. Client A is spending their money in so much more of a carefree way. I think mainly because they know they’re still making money, that’s still coming in. They haven’t entered that phase where, my gosh, all I’m doing is taking out right now. So I’d better be.

John Jantsch (16:51.635)

Or or or watching the news or the stock market to see what happened to my retirement account, right?

Derek Coburn (16:57.038)

Yeah, exactly. But I agree with you. mean, it’s, you know, even again, like even the people that that know they’re going to work longer, they haven’t really done the software update to to, you know, make a change to how they’re living their lives.

John Jantsch (17:10.407)

Yeah. Yeah. So are there first steps? mean, is there like, how do you, how do you get people rethinking their retirement plans?

Derek Coburn (17:18.956)

Well, you know, it’s a couple of ways. One is I shared the example about how they now have more money just by realizing, and that usually makes people feel a lot better about leaning into it. gosh, yeah, I’ll easily work an extra couple of years. I would say that

John Jantsch (17:33.777)

Are there, there calculators? mean, have you developed calculators that could actually allow somebody to put that, those numbers in? Yeah. Okay.

Derek Coburn (17:39.168)

Yeah, I have a calculator on my website, which I can share with you. It’s DerekCoburn.com forward slash never retire. And it kind of allows people to enter in their own numbers and, plug in and see the difference that it would make. But, but it’s that, but it’s also combined with, with maybe, you know, appealing to their fears and their concerns. So one of the, one of the examples I share in the book is when my boys were 10 and five or 10 and seven, we had a nighttime routine where we would take turns.

John Jantsch (17:48.349)

Good, good. Yeah.

Derek Coburn (18:07.606)

my wife and I laying in bed with them for 10 or 15 minutes and helping them settle down and go to sleep. And it’s really nice when they’re that little. and I caught myself with my oldest. I’m like, this is not going to last much longer. And here I am most nights wishing it would hurry up and end, hurry up and fall asleep. I’m not telling him this, but I’m saying it to myself. I want to go watch a show. I want to go finish this work, respond to this email. And I really worked hard. was like, I want to appreciate this and value it more.

John Jantsch (18:23.187)

Yes, yes, yes.

John Jantsch (18:28.659)

Right, right, right.

Derek Coburn (18:36.046)

So I had this thought, you what if a company invents a time machine? And 20 years from now, they offer me the opportunity to stroke a check, to go back in time for one night with the 10 year old version of my kid for one nighttime routine, one nighttime snuggle, what would I pay for that? And I called it 50 grand. I’d pay more than that, I know that 65 year old me would pay 50 grand in a heartbeat to do that. And I think we’re just having…

parents are having these $50,000 moments happening all the time that we’re taking for granted. And I think me personally, I’m gonna really miss my kids when they’re gone. And I know there’s gonna be a new phase. I know that it’s gonna be good, hopefully. I know that our relationship will evolve, but I really don’t think that parents are spending the amount of time that they’ll wish they would have spent with their kids.

John Jantsch (19:26.523)

Yeah, it’s interesting. I’m in a different phase and then I, you know, I have grandchildren now and I will tell you that, you know, college is a different phase. But, you know, post college is really, I mean, we, we spend, you know, they’re all over the country now and we spend a fair amount of time, you know, with them as individual family units. And, you know, I will say that’s pretty cool as well.

Derek Coburn (19:30.648)

Yeah.

Derek Coburn (19:48.376)

Yeah, I see how you’re doing it, man. I have a lot of respect and I have no doubt that you guys are just amazing grandparents.

John Jantsch (19:55.859)

Well, that’s one that there’s, you know, just like parenting, there’s no like course or book that you can read that will actually allow you to know how to do it. So making it up every day. Absolutely. Well, Derek, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by. It’s always great to catch up with you. Is there someplace you’d you already mentioned Derek Coburn.com? Is there anywhere else you’d mentioned that people might want to connect with you or find more about the book?

Derek Coburn (20:06.786)

First time that we’re all doing this, yeah.

Derek Coburn (20:21.676)

Yeah, that’s great. Like I’ve already been writing and elaborating on a lot of the ideas from the book that aren’t in the book on my website. I’m really just looking forward to starting a movement and seeing how far we can take this thing. So I appreciate you having me here and it’s always wonderful to spend the time with you.

John Jantsch (20:32.486)

Awesome.

John Jantsch (20:35.953)

Yeah. Well, again, appreciate you coming by and hopefully we’ll see you one these days out there on the road.

Derek Coburn (20:40.834)

Thanks, John.

How The Nova Method Is Redefining PR and Brand Trust in the Age of AI

How The Nova Method Is Redefining PR and Brand Trust in the Age of AI written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Christine Perkett on the DTM Podcast In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Christine Perkett, a veteran entrepreneur and marketing communications expert with nearly 30 years in the field. Christine is the co-founder and CEO of The Nova Method, a PR and communications firm grounded in what she calls an “audience-first strategy,” built for a world shaped by AI, automation, and fractured trust.

Christine shares how she and her partner merged their agencies to build a unified brand focused on aligning the speed and scale of technology with the soul of human communication. We dig into how AI is changing PR, why trust is harder (and more critical) than ever, and how to prepare your brand to resonate—not just engage—in the modern media landscape.

She introduces the Nova Method’s signature framework—Assimilate, Align, Activate—and breaks down how even big brands are still getting it wrong when they forget to deeply understand their audience before launching a campaign. From the Bud Light controversy to LinkedIn’s algorithm shift, this conversation covers the tactical and strategic shifts every marketer needs to navigate in the new era of comms.

Key Takeaways:

AI isn’t just automation—it’s an editorial and strategic thought partner that still needs human oversight to stay on-brand and truthful.
PR is now fully embedded in SEO, trust-building, and brand reputation, making it essential for discoverability and authority in search.
The Nova Method Framework—Assimilate, Align, Activate—ensures brands build real audience understanding before launching campaigns.
Brand trust is now built (or broken) in real-time, especially as social media and AI-generated content multiply.
Crisis communication is no longer optional—brands must have policies and playbooks, especially as employee-generated content and AI blur the lines.
Executive presence matters more than ever, with platforms like LinkedIn favoring individual contributors over faceless brands.
Small businesses need to give customers options—some want bots, others want humans. The key is understanding your audience journey.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro and Christine’s Background
01:00 Why Merge PR Firms Now?
02:30 How AI is Reshaping PR and Journalism
04:00 Building Trust in a Distrustful Landscape
05:45 Using AI Strategically (Not Just for Tasks)
07:12 The Nova Method Framework: Assimilate, Align, Activate
09:00 Case Study: Bud Light’s Audience Disconnect
11:00 Preparing for Real-Time Crisis in a Viral World
14:00 Why AI Policies Are Essential for Brands
15:20 Transparency and Trust as Core PR Assets
16:30 PR, SEO, and AI Search Authority
17:40 Assessing Brand Communications Internally and Externally
19:10 Why LinkedIn Prefers People Over Brands
20:30 Your Employees Are Your Brand
22:00 When to Automate, When to Be Human
23:00 Giving Customers Choice in Communication
24:00 Final Thoughts and Where to Find Christine

Connect with Christine:

Website: TheNovaMethod.com
LinkedIn: Christine Perkett
Free Download: The Nova Method Brand Guide: Building Trust in a Distrustful Era

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00.888)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Christine Perkett. She’s a seasoned entrepreneur and marketing communications expert with nearly, can I say 30 years? Is that okay to say in 30 years? I know sometimes, I mean, I start saying that about myself. Anyway, she’s a CEO and co-founder of the Nova Method, a marketing communications and PR firm that emphasizes audience first strategy.

John Jantsch (00:30.626)

So Christine, welcome to the show.

Christine Perkett (00:35.561)

Thank you. Thanks for having me. It’s good to see you.

John Jantsch (00:37.666)

You bet.

So I mentioned the Nova method. Let’s just start there. Does the world need a merged company? I know you merged with a friend, your two PR firms to create this Nova method. How does that, what does that look like? How does that differ from what you’ve always done?

Christine Perkett (00:59.677)

Well, it’s very different in that I, as you mentioned, almost 30 years of doing this on my own and leading an agency on my own with really wonderful people, one of whom was Michelle in the very beginning. She was my managing director for some time. But the reason that we merged is we see power in the pair and more brains the better and we are…

wonderfully very similar and at the same time bring very different strengths. So my agency started out as strictly PR as you know because I think we talked a lot back then as well and then in the early 2000s we sort of merged into more marketing and PR. We did a lot of social media. We led the way in content on Twitter and those sorts of things, video content and so we started dabbling in more of that and that’s kind of where I’ve been focused the last 10.

to 12, 15 years, and she stayed on the PR side. So we had complimentary skill sets and teams to bring together.

John Jantsch (02:03.63)

And you’re in the Boston area and she’s in Denver, right? I’m just up the road then in the mountains in Denver as well. you mentioned already, started to mention, know, the digital, when digital came along that really dramatically changed the traditional PR landscape. AI is probably changing it in a whole new set of ways. You want to talk a little bit about kind of

Christine Perkett (02:09.951)

So, beautiful.

John Jantsch (02:30.38)

what’s been the transformation of what we’ve called PR over the years.

Christine Perkett (02:35.327)

Sure, I mean, think it’s merging and melding with so many other parts of marketing now, ever since, you know, social media came on to the scene and we started turning into content creators as well as communicators. So our focus is on marketing communications and PR and that continues to be a lot of media relations, but even with the PR side anyway, even with media relations, there’s a lot of AI written journalism. There are a lot of journalists who are saying,

I’m going to send you an interview to do video writing. Don’t use AI. Don’t do that. So, you know, there’s a lot of pressure, I think, on the the PR world to pivot and stay abreast of these new technologies, but also be leading them to help clients understand how to navigate the new world of communications with AI integrated into that.

John Jantsch (03:28.696)

You know, I’ve always thought brand is one of the most important elements of a marketing strategy. And I think that a lot of companies, it’s getting, you know, the, you know, we used to just go to Twitter and say, click on my link and we’d send people back to our website, right? All the social platforms are, you know, they penalize you for sending people away. But by the same token, a lot of people are getting their information.

exclusively from AI overviews or maybe from watching TikTok videos, right? So I feel like we’re entering this era where people are re doubling down on, you know, what it means to be a trusted brand. And I think PR has probably always been one of the best tools for that.

Christine Perkett (04:14.803)

Yes, I would agree. And I think you’re right. I don’t know, last week or the week before, I had a bit of a back and forth with some folks on LinkedIn about this, that the trust is more important than ever now, and building it is more difficult than ever. Because there’s deep fakes, there are automated content that isn’t very thoughtful. If folks are not training their staff, if leaders are not training their staff and their teams to be thoughtful about their use of AI or even

John Jantsch (04:27.842)

Mm-hmm.

Christine Perkett (04:44.021)

how to integrate it into their daily work, everyone’s work ends up looking the same, right? You can’t just throw something in the chat GPT and then send it to your client. It would be very vanilla, it could be wrong. So I think that there are some steps that some brands have skipped when it comes to AI in terms of making sure or even acknowledging that their staff will be using it, especially communications and marketing staff or writing and content and ideation.

acknowledging that that is happening, whether they blessed it or not, and then giving guidelines and processes on how to integrate it. That’s a big part of what we’re seeing from the communication side on the internal piece, internal communications is how do we navigate this? How do we create a process around it? How do we keep our employees communicating in an honest and authentic way while still taking advantage of all the benefits that AI does deliver, right? In terms of…

speed and ideation and those sorts of things.

John Jantsch (05:44.642)

Well, and I, you know, we, I just did an interview with Jeff Woods, who’s written a book called the AI Driven Leader. And, you know, he often refers to it as a thought partner. And I think that, I think that’s really where a lot of people miss the boat is it can actually help you think more strategically, not just do tasks.

Christine Perkett (06:02.129)

Yes, and I love that. also think it’s a great editor. So it’s really leveling the playing field with communication specifically, since that’s my area of expertise is, you know, everyone can spell now and everyone can turn out thoughtful content, but you still need to build the trust by having it be authentic to you, authentic to your brand, authentic to the brand’s voice. So it still takes that human touch. We like to say,

John Jantsch (06:14.157)

Yeah.

Christine Perkett (06:28.435)

at the Nova method that we are at the intersection of humanity and technology. And I don’t think that’s so different than what I’ve always done since we’re in tech PR and marketing, but it is a stronger, faster moving technology than the past tools that have come along.

John Jantsch (06:37.837)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:44.622)

Well, I always think it’s funny because, know, a lot of, a lot of times people are like, you don’t want to just give this and cut and paste. Well, like, you know, what we used to do is hire interns to do that first draft. Right. And we never would just say, yeah, send it to the client. You know, I don’t need to see it. Right. I mean, it’s kind of the same thing. You wouldn’t just do that. Would you, you know, why would you do that with this automated tool? So tell me a little bit about, I know that you are,

Christine Perkett (07:05.417)

I really like that. That’s a good analogy. Yes.

John Jantsch (07:12.578)

Developing a framework or have developed a framework that you are putting out there is somewhat unique. I think I read three A’s, assimilate, align, activate as part of what you’re calling the Nova method. You want to kind of go through a little bit of a dive into that.

Christine Perkett (07:28.661)

Sure, thank you for the opportunity. there are a lot of PR, the competitive landscape is large for PR marketing. And, you know, we really took a year to build this brand, our own brand and say, what can we do that’s different? What do we really need to be doing in the landscape of AI and, fast moving technology and security and cookies changing and all of those things. So as we both actually, Michelle, my partner and I both

John Jantsch (07:35.352)

Yeah.

Christine Perkett (07:57.639)

have taught at the college level as well. So I teach a graduate social media and branding program at Northeastern. She teaches PR or taught PR rather. And so we both have the advantage of understanding and staying abreast of what’s happening. And that involves a lot of case studies. And we were taking a look at those as we were forming our brand. What’s missing? What happens when there’s a crisis? What caused it? And just one example is

It seems that every marketer tactically knows you should be coming at your marketing communications from an audience-first mentality. What does the audience need? How do they think? What are their aspirations and motivations? Yes, intellectually, everyone knows that. From a tactical execution standpoint, even the best and biggest brands have faltered recently with that. And one of the…

most popular case studies that I like to go through with my students and what helped us build this brand in terms of step one, which is assimilate, really dig in, not just demographics, but get into the psyche of your audience, whether it’s internal, whether it’s external being media, VCs, partners, what are their motivations? What do they really want to hear from you? What are their pain points? And I think that one of the biggest brands that faced some pain around that in the last few years is Bud Light.

when they tried to connect with the LGBTQ community without a very audience-centric campaign plan. They sent a transgender spokesperson a can with their face on it, and they went on to TikTok and did a recording. Thank you, Bud Light. This is great. I love it.

But it wasn’t well planned and there wasn’t a deep audience immersion before they made that decision, which ended up alienating both their existing customers. I think it was Kid Rock took Bud Light out and shot them the cans up and said he would never drink it again. And the community they were trying to connect with for the first, well, one of the first times. And they really had an opportunity to connect with that audience, but I don’t think they understood the audience well enough before they did this.

Christine Perkett (10:11.539)

It wasn’t even a full campaign before they did this event or whatever you want to call it. So if even a storied, well-known, well-resourced brand like Bud Light can get it wrong, we thought, well, there’s probably a lot of other brands that could use help really digging in and connecting with their audience. So that’s a long-winded way to say that step one. So assimilating with whatever audience it is that this particular campaign is going to focus on. And then…

So it’s assimilate, align, then align that information with what the brand wants to say. What does the brand want to accomplish? What are the goals? How do we align that with what the customer or prospect wants and needs? And then activate is pretty self-explanatory, activating it in an ongoing campaign or process or whatever it may be. So whether it’s internal communications, external communications, et cetera.

John Jantsch (11:04.448)

One of the biggest challenges that certainly social media brought AI is probably accelerating this a little bit, but, you know, brands have a lot of exposure now because that they didn’t have, you know, 20 years ago, because as long as you didn’t show up on page one or two of the business section, it didn’t really matter what you did. it seemed like what’s that or paid six, right? it almost didn’t matter, you know, to

Christine Perkett (11:24.329)

page six in New York.

John Jantsch (11:31.042)

too much. mean, you could always spin it and control it, but now you can have hundreds of people making videos about how awful your brand is. so, so what kind of challenges does that really present? And some, mean, some of them are completely legit. Some of them are, you know, taken out of context or faked or, you know, done as, mean, can be done for, you know, by somebody just trying to hurt the brand, not necessarily, you know, a, a true, act. So, you know, how do you,

You know, how do you protect brands from really kind of, you know, stepping into, you know, situations, because it’s so darn easy to do now. mean, even, you know, every employee’s got a tick tock, know, account, and, know, can really be doing something to damage the brand, you know, intentionally or unintentionally.

Christine Perkett (12:22.869)

So that’s a really good point. I do think brands are more exposed than ever, which goes back to our previous point that they need to work harder than ever to build authentic trust. so brands have a, communicators, marketers have a big challenge between using something like AI, which can be very fast and efficient, but can turn out false information if you’re not checking it. So we still need that human touch and that human

qualification if you will to make sure that anything you’re putting out there as a brand is authentic and if you remain true to that over time and consistently in all of your campaigns even if there’s a crisis you will be able to recover because you’ve built up that credibility and that reputation but it has to connect it has to connect over time and it has to connect over campaigns so

Brands need to think about it holistically, even if they’re doing all of these individual campaigns. What is the brand promise ultimately to audiences? And it almost goes back to fundamentals of communication, which is to be straightforward, consistent, aware, and accountable. A brand’s gonna get nowhere if they don’t take accountability if they make a mistake or if they communicate something incorrectly.

or they offended someone because they used a hashtag, well, hashtags are kind of dying, but if they use a hashtag that was related to something that they didn’t double check before they use it and it was a negative situation, for example. Brands have to fall on their sword, always and forever. And sometimes you do have to deal with internet trolls and that’s a challenge in and of itself, which should have a crisis communications around it that you have built and…

John Jantsch (14:03.992)

Yeah.

Christine Perkett (14:13.973)

have practiced internally, regardless of whether or not you’ve ever needed it. But other things come up with the AI say, again, you have an employee maybe puts information out there because they use ChatGP, GPT, they didn’t have a supervisor check it, or they didn’t have a teammate check it, or they didn’t even check it themselves. They just trusted the AI and it was false information. So again, that goes back to one of my points in the beginning, which is

have a policy, you need to have an AI policy and make sure that you’re training people on how to use it and how to use it specifically to your brand and what your brand promises. So I think it’s simple in its finest point, which is going back to being authentic, but it has to go across everything that you do, including the use of AI. And that means admitting your brand probably uses AI, right?

I think saying that you won’t use it probably gets more of a side eye these days than if you say, yeah, I’m using it.

John Jantsch (15:17.698)

Yeah, I’m, actually starting to see, you know, like we have privacy and disclaimer policies on our websites. I’m starting to see our use of AI statement, showing up as pages, just so people are very clear about how they’re using it how they’re not using it. think, I think transparency is obviously always been a big part of PR. So what, one of the reasons I always loved PR early on, w in the digital age is because it was always really a great SEO play. I mean, getting a backlink from.

Christine Perkett (15:26.676)

Yes.

John Jantsch (15:45.592)

New York times.com businessweek.com, know, would really helped your, your online presence. I think that that’s becoming even more so because a lot of it appears that the, you know, the AI tools are actually putting a lot of emphasis on, on authority and on brand mentions, as, know, because when they’re turning up results now, when somebody goes searching and they’re sourcing, results, I’m seeing a lot of emphasis on brand mentions and authority.

So do you, and maybe you don’t play in that, you know, that sandbox, you know, as part of what you’re doing, but do you see PR, how do you see PR kind of intersecting with the evolving world of search these days?

Christine Perkett (16:31.093)

I think it goes back to that, you know, our step one of assimilate and really understanding what sort of communications your audience is searching for and how they’re searching for it and where they’re searching for it. Are they using the SEO terms that you think or have you, have you double, doubled down on digging into the terms that you’re looking at, whether you get it from

piece of software or tool or your amazing intern or whatever it is, are you testing and vetting those, you know, with the audience to make sure that they’re resonating? And I think a lot of focus in the past was on engagement. I think we need to take that a step further to resonance. Is it resonating with the right audience? They might engage with it, but it could have been a negative comment or it could have been a negative share. That’s an engagement, right? But is it resonating? So I think

really understanding SEO terms that are working, how they fulfill and align with your brand promise, authenticity and resonance.

John Jantsch (17:41.262)

So when you start.

When you start engaging a client or a client engages you, do you have a process that you go through to try to understand their brand, to try to understand the stories that exist there, to try to understand what they’ve been doing that works? It doesn’t work. you have, have you developed a bit of a, an assessment, I guess, before you ever get started?

Christine Perkett (18:06.973)

Yes, we deliver, we do a full analysis and assessment and then we give them basically what’s a digital booklet that breaks it all down from everything from internal stakeholders and how they communicate the brand to what their external authority looks like, how it aligns with the brand promises they’re putting out there, as well as the engagement and resonance from the audience. So it’s that three step framework, the assembly align activate, but the assembly

is where we really do that analysis and then give them the assessment. And then we say, now that you understand the bigger picture and the deeper ways that your campaigns or marketing or PR has been working, let’s align it with what your goals are. Because a lot of times, know, we have all the right keywords, but you still don’t have any credibility or authority. And I think a lot too now, even LinkedIn, issued…

a report earlier this year that talks about the algorithm favoring individual contributors on LinkedIn versus brand content. So we’re working a lot with executives who are kind of hemming and hind sometimes like, don’t want to do all that stuff on LinkedIn or this channel or that channel. we’re talking about how, again, it comes back to in the world of AI, which is amazing and great and wonderful, but

John Jantsch (19:10.7)

Mm-hmm.

Christine Perkett (19:29.981)

just as important and at the same time rising is that trust and trust comes from the top. Who’s running the company? What is their ethos? What did they say? What kind of brand promises are they talking about? So really trying to align all of those things and help them to understand that each, how each piece works into what they want in step two and step three, which is line and activate.

John Jantsch (19:53.646)

You know, what I always tell people is, go, we work with a lot of smaller organizations and you know, we studied their reviews all the time. and to your point, I challenge you to do this. If you go read 10 reviews on service companies, like home service businesses or something, seven of the reviews that are positive will mention the person that did the work. You know, Rusty fixed our boiler. He was amazing.

Nothing about the company. mean, because Rusty is the company, you know, to that, to that individual. And I think if you, I think you can help make that point when, people start realizing that that’s, you know, that’s the brand, you know, for them.

Christine Perkett (20:32.841)

At end of the day, people buy from people, right? mean, is, and that social media has has played such a big role in that because at least from a consumer side, if you’re doing B2B, it might be a little bit different. If you’re doing B2C, the consumers, they want to know that you care about them, or at least they want to feel that even if they don’t really know it. But it matters to them now. It matters that if they leave a comment on your brand’s campaign or whatever, they, some, someone’s going to respond to them that they’re

John Jantsch (20:35.394)

That’s right.

Christine Perkett (21:02.171)

engagement matters. And I still see that more and more. I think again, with AI, it’s more important than ever that the brand’s messaging and interactions are again, authentic and consistent, even though we use a lot of automation, right? There is a lot of automation. It makes business more, you know, more successful and moves things along faster. But at the same time, you know, we have to

connect with those audience members in an authentic way and in a humane way.

John Jantsch (21:37.41)

Yeah. One of the things I think, you know, a lot of people like, this can allow us to do things faster, maybe even cut head count. I mean, you see a lot of that kind of talk. And I actually think about a healthier way to look at it is this will actually allow us to do more with the same people, but actually give them the ability to be more human, to interact with customers more, you know, because we’ve taken a little, we’ve taken a lot of the so to speak grunt work off of a lot of people’s plates. Yeah.

Christine Perkett (22:02.675)

Right, I agree. it will allow us to do more and to do things better, which is not a bad thing, right? you know, and I think you want to audit the journey of your audience and really understand, you know, at which touch points does AI work and at which touch points do they want to hear from a human or feel like they’re connected with someone?

John Jantsch (22:10.168)

Yeah, yeah, awesome.

Christine Perkett (22:25.843)

I mean, I just tried to call a business the other day and I couldn’t get a human to save my life. And I had a very specific question that the bots were not able to answer. They just kept giving me automated responses and it was maddening. And I think, you know, we see the industry go up and down through this in terms of how much automation is great, how much automation is too much. It’s no different with AI, but we, just have to make sure that we’re understanding when

John Jantsch (22:39.149)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:48.408)

Yes.

Christine Perkett (22:54.741)

Again, when AI is good or when automation is good and when a person needs to step in to save that brand relationship and really build that resonance with the audience.

John Jantsch (23:02.862)

Well, you know, what’s hard is because everybody has their own idea of how they want to interact. And so I think the real challenge for businesses is we just have to give people choices. You know, I was on a website the other day and you know, I got kind of through the process of finding out more information and they were like, would you like a video? Would you like somebody to call you? Would you like to send an email? And it was, and I, and I think that’s kind of where we are is people, need to let people make a decision. want.

They want what they want immediately and we need to give them the choice of how they get that. Which I think is sometimes challenging, but that’s why there’s chat bots. Those chat bots work great for some people. Some people just think they’re the worst thing ever created. So I think we have to give people choices.

Christine Perkett (23:39.752)

Yes.

Christine Perkett (23:45.075)

I agree. And that goes back to understanding what they want, right? And taking the time to work that into your marketing communications campaigns, you know, and not doing, don’t set it and forget it. It needs to be an ongoing communication that’s checked in on, you know, every few months. How are you feeling about this? How are you feeling about that? Do you appreciate this? Do you appreciate that? What would you like to see? What are we not doing? You know?

John Jantsch (23:47.522)

Yeah, yeah.

Christine Perkett (24:07.859)

And again, that makes your brand human that you are reaching out to them and that they get to chime in. People love that. That makes them feel important to your company and your brand.

John Jantsch (24:16.556)

Yeah, 100%. Well, Christine, I appreciate you taking a moment to come by and tell us about your new ventures. Is there some place you’d invite people to connect with you and find out more about your work?

Christine Perkett (24:26.393)

They can find everything at thenovamethod.com, including a link to my LinkedIn, which is where I’m most active these days.

John Jantsch (24:33.898)

Awesome. Well, again, appreciate you stopping by. It’s good to see you and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Christine Perkett (24:39.465)

Yes, thank you so much. appreciate it. Nice to be back.