nadosi.com

John Jantsch (00:00.676)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Prasanna Dungal. He is nearly two decades of experience building businesses in marketing, tech, healthcare, and SaaS. He’s a managing partner by Grow at Grow by Data. He holds a bachelor’s degree with honors from Cornell, a master’s in engineering from Princeton, and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management. means he paid a lot to get educated. He was born.

and raised in Kathmandu. Probably the first Kathmandu on the show today, but he now resides in Boston. So welcome to the show, Prasanna.

Prasanna Dhungel (00:40.91)

Thank you so much, John, for the nice introduction and I look forward to the conversation.

John Jantsch (00:45.392)

Yes, yes. So we’re going to talk basically about SEO today. And I know that’s a lot of the work that you do at Grow by Data. A lot of change, know, AI, other things going on, a lot of, I mean, you even see people on LinkedIn saying SEO is dead. So how are you telling people they need to prepare today for changes in traditional search results?

Prasanna Dhungel (01:12.622)

Yeah, that’s a very hot, popular topic for folks in source, growth marketing, marketing altogether. You’re right. I don’t think SEO is dead. I think it has evolved. In fact, it’s the era of Google AI and just chats and all of these, in fact, has provided further impetus, in my mind, to storage.

Because the way I like to think about search is you’re asking a question and Google is answering today, but then new sources are answering. And you’re trying to understand how the answers are being presented, whether it be visually. Like in retail, for example, we like to say that the search result page is increasingly becoming like the Amazon results page, with a lot of product pictures being visible, your Reddit being visible, many times like, you

John Jantsch (02:06.372)

Yeah.

Prasanna Dhungel (02:12.236)

over the last year or so, videos and so on. So I think search has evolved. You have to look at paid search and traditional SEO in a new lens. And in fact, it’s created, I mean, there’s just a lot of interest to capture that. And I think the ones that are really going to win are going to be ahead versus be stuck in his or her old ways. But I think there’s a opportunity ahead.

John Jantsch (02:41.486)

Well, the one thing that I think is leading a lot of people to saying, I mean, people are seeing their organic traffic dropping. mean, I think that’s reality, but then they’re also go to the Google homepage or search page and they see the AI results or AI overview that comes there. And you know, there are many people that they get their answer and off they go. Right. So the so-called zero click, you know, era I think has really got a lot of people worried that, you know, all the effort they spent on producing content.

over the years is now going to go away.

Prasanna Dhungel (03:14.444)

That’s a fair concern. And the concern is Google is answering the question right on the sort page versus now letting us click and go into the page. So that remains. The way that we will have to see how that evolves, the next few months or the next year. Some are, in fact, saying it’s because of that that

John Jantsch (03:23.544)

Right. Right.

Prasanna Dhungel (03:42.264)

Folks like us are moving to newer channels to discover, right? But that said, folks are also using it as an opportunity for brand building, which is when you get picked up by these zero click results, you are in fact reminded, like you’re seeing a TV ad almost, and you’re remembering a brand, and then ultimately you remember that to make a purchase. So…

That’s one way that I know brands are thinking about it. But that said, I think just relying on that is challenging. Perhaps top of awareness studies keywords have had fewer clicks, or if any. And then increasingly, know source marketers are focusing on other types of content which require someone to click and go in. But the other way I like to actually show the positive is

If you are visible on Google’s zero source clicks, it could also indicate that you could be more friendlier to LLMs. And so you could get picked up by some of the chat engines. And so if you’re not getting picked up at all, I think that’s a problem. You want to get picked up. can obviously, you can rely on it alone. You have to use other sources, but you had to get picked up so that you also get picked up in the other sources.

John Jantsch (04:54.02)

Mm-hmm.

Prasanna Dhungel (05:09.228)

which in fact are almost like zero clicks or just even on the chat. That’s how I think about it.

John Jantsch (05:16.494)

So people are, mean, content is, you mentioned content and I want to go to types of content. One of the bits of advice I’m hearing from a lot of folks is this idea of a lot of information content, the how-to type of stuff is really what Google is kind of consuming in the AI overviews. But if somebody is actually searching to solve something or searching for a specific type of…

company, you know, those high intent searches are still there and happening. Would that suggest that we should be moving our content very much to much more intent driven content as opposed to kind of that top of the funnel, you know, show up in search content?

Prasanna Dhungel (06:04.334)

So I think it depends, right? If you believe that the top of the funnel content serves what we are trying to find very well, right? Then it may not be worth being the ninth or the tenth brand out there to capture that. There’s diminishing return, right? However, if you feel like your point of view is very strong, then why not create the brand in the first place? It’s about brand touch point.

John Jantsch (06:15.172)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (06:33.166)

Mm-hmm.

Prasanna Dhungel (06:33.806)

But assuming that’s not the case, you are right. I do think then, you know, trying to go in and capture demand, you know, in the middle of the funnel or lower funnel, you know, and then really trying to draw someone searching from those is also a wise strategy that I know many have followed. Like we were talking to a large financial services client recently, and what they were telling me is, hey, you know, we’ve, we, I mean, we don’t see the ROI of really investing in top of the funnel content anymore.

John Jantsch (06:59.928)

Mm-hmm.

Prasanna Dhungel (07:03.148)

because we’re not getting folks to come to our site. And many times I talk about the brand being mentioned on top of the funnel, but sometimes the brand isn’t even mentioned. And so it even defeats the purpose of presenting your brand in front of someone. And so these guys were, in fact, creating newer types of content like quizzes or infographics or more deeper content that needs the user to interact to get the answer. And that’s where they were gravitating towards. And I’m actually seeing more and more brands do that.

John Jantsch (07:33.028)

Well, are there metrics, new metrics, different metrics that we should be tracking today to really understand how, although this AIO is kind of affecting our search.

Prasanna Dhungel (07:46.232)

We like to use share of voice as a metric to really track a brand’s visibility on Google, on Google AIO, on Batesource, what have you. And then we like to dissect it by different lines of business, by different intent, by different geographies, by different languages. So that’s the 50,000 foot metric that we use. But that said,

I do agree with you. think a question that you want to begin to answer is, OK, if AI results are a proxy to brand visibility, then how much brand searches are you getting? And is that rising midterm? Is a metric I think you should be tracking?

Like if you’re doing the right things, even if you’re not getting the click, are people remembering your brand? And not just the brand term, but brand plus. And then there may be a time lag. For example, you know, when I purchase something, it might be a few weeks out, it might be a few months out. Or am I seeing, you know, so one way to do this would be, you know, am I visible in these results, zero click results? And is that rising? And then after a few weeks out or so,

Is the amount of brand searches rising and is that compounding? I I think that’s one way I’ve known that brands are tracking that.

John Jantsch (09:19.856)

So break down share a voice just at, I’m sure that every client’s different, but you know, essentially how do you start measuring share a voice?

Prasanna Dhungel (09:26.958)

Sure, so I like to give the example of running shoes, right? So imagine I am searching for running shoes, running shoes, men’s, women’s, and so on. So when you search for that keyword or a group of keywords, you want to be searching not just once, but over time, across different geographies, across different devices, across different times of the day, so you have enough sample.

And what you have to do is, how often is your brand mentioned on the search page? So for example, on shopping ads, how often is Nike visible versus Adidas or Hoka? On your classic blue links, how often is Nike visible? On virtual listings, which is a free product listing from Google, how often is it? So if you imagine real estate on the page and there’s 1,000 spots in there,

and the spots are consumed by videos, shopping, and organic, and even Reddit and so on. How often is Nike’s domain visible? Or Nike mentioned, you just kind of say it’s visible maybe 300 times over your sample size. Then we like to say you have a 30 % share of voice. And you might care to understand how that varies by Spanish versus English.

New York versus Toronto and so on. So you slice it but at the highest level it’s how often are you visible in that real state.

John Jantsch (11:01.934)

So in this AI overview world, the zero click world, are there things that you are helping brands try to understand? Like, obviously we want to show up there, but is there an intentional approach or are there best practices to make sure that your brand is showing up there? Or is it simply a matter of if you’re showing up high in search anyway, for some of those terms, you’re probably going to show up in the results? Or is there a way to get your content intentionally to show up in

the AI overviews.

Prasanna Dhungel (11:32.856)

Sure. So what we do is we dissect what are the sorb elements visible within AIO, right? So you have, like in retail, you have maps sometimes show up on the AIO results. Sometimes you have a description. Sometimes you have the product that shows up, you know, like you’re trying to discover products. So the first thing to do is really try to understand, deconstruct AIO, what exactly is visible by different types of source terms. You know, so sometimes if you are

John Jantsch (11:39.236)

Mm-hmm.

Prasanna Dhungel (12:02.254)

trying to, if you source for a bottom of the funnel type of a question, if AIO does show up, it’s a different mix versus on the top. So that’s one. The second is we look at whose brand is being mentioned on each of these sort elements. Like for example, who is getting the free listings on running shoes? Which brand is it? And then we try to deconstruct, OK, the why.

And what we’ve seen is there’s a few elements to getting picked up on AIO. Sometimes the way the content is written, you know, in bullet forms versus free flow text, we’ve seen that that gets picked up. Many times for retail, we’ve seen that inclusion of attributes like GTIN, you know, and rich product attributes on the PDB page also helps you get picked up. Sometimes other attributes like reviews and ratings and pricing.

John Jantsch (12:51.556)

you

Prasanna Dhungel (13:00.61)

These other product dimensions, if it’s rich, then it gets picked up. So at a high level, think for your traditional text, having bullet forms and making it easier, understandable, having questions in there, not long content, that has gotten picked up, number one. For retail, it’s really rich product attributes on the PDP page. And making sure that if you’re not getting rejected by Google Merchant Center,

or if you’re not getting flagged by Google Merchant Center, then it’s likely to get linked. And then the classic techniques of being cited by credible sources, those are other signals we’ve seen.

John Jantsch (13:44.11)

So we’ve been talking a lot about the AI overviews, but if you scroll down pretty much any search these days, scroll down a little bit, some of the top organic results are being delivered from Reddit. And so, you know, know a lot of people are starting to pay attention to that and go, well, how do I get my stuff to rank on Reddit? What are you telling clients about their participation in Reddit? It is much different than say Facebook and LinkedIn in terms of the ecosystem there and the culture there.

so how are you advising folks to, to hopefully get some of their content or their, their answers, whatever it might be to show in Reddit.

Prasanna Dhungel (14:23.438)

Sure. we were, I’ll give you a live example. We were working with a large shoe company and the first question they were asking us is, is Reddit visible on the sorp for the questions that I, for the queries that I care to. And so we helped them understand how, what questions Reddit was visible on. And number two, we went into Reddit and then what we helped them understand is how they are portrayed.

John Jantsch (14:38.244)

Right.

Prasanna Dhungel (14:52.75)

you know, to folks like us, like, you know, if you’re trying to source for running shoes, who is very active, like who is active on Reddit? Is it Nike? Is it, you Hoka? Is it Adidas? And then how large of a community that Reddit thread has for say Nike running shoes or Nike running shoes. And so what we tell clients is first of all, try to understand where Reddit is visible. Number two, really try to understand your

your Reddit thread versus your competitors Reddit thread and is it one that you have a community manager running or is it just organic? And then the other thing we do is we’ve actually helped clients answer a bunch of questions on Reddit. One is we find that a lot of people are talking about pricing on Reddit. What does that sentiment look like? What does product quality look like?

John Jantsch (15:45.572)

Mm-hmm.

Prasanna Dhungel (15:51.778)

you know, and then how people are saying good or bad things about it. And so by giving that visibility, what we recommend, what we recommended to this client is you, I mean, they didn’t have a community manager and we said, you know, it’s an increasing channel. know, you get a lot of visibility. People are going there to understand what they like about your product. They’re giving ideas. And so we were recommending that they have a community manager who constantly analyzes and stays on top of it.

and then curates the experience. So you cannot just say whatever, but that said, remaining passive is also not a good idea. You want to have a point of view and sometimes there might be an opportunity to run an ad. When someone has a concern about the brand, then advertisement is a source of being on top of those that are looking at your brand. So you also have a strong point.

So these are some of the techniques that we have been telling clients.

John Jantsch (16:51.982)

So what kind of pushback are you getting on? And this is always the case, but we went through a period there where everybody was leaning on attribution. Like if you can’t prove that this got me a customer, then I don’t want to pay for it. And now we’re telling people you’ve got to be here and here and here. some of these places, a community manager, for example, is not a salesperson, right? They’re not going to create conversions. So how are you helping people kind of

Prasanna Dhungel (17:15.032)

Yes.

John Jantsch (17:21.276)

work through that ROI conversation when in some ways we’re talking about participating and engaging in ways that you can’t measure.

Prasanna Dhungel (17:31.34)

Right, so your question is, how are we helping clients think through the question of, if I put a dollar and the returns aren’t obvious, like a community manager, how should they think about it? And so the way we like to describe this is, if you use search as a proxy, then there is a certain amount of, the search volume is a proxy on demand for your service or product.

John Jantsch (17:41.08)

Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Prasanna Dhungel (18:00.788)

And so, know, if what you’re being exposed to is a lot of Reddit in there, right. And then a certain percentage of them click through, you know, your classic CTR model there and they go in and it’s a highly uncurated, poor experience. Then you’re losing, right? So it sometimes is defense and sometimes it’s offense. So offense could be, you you put in a dollar and you get $3 back. Okay. But then.

defense is if you don’t have someone in there, it’s almost like insurance, right? If you don’t have a community manager, then your brand perception could be tarnished. And if you’re Rolex, as an example, and someone thrashes your band, and next year you want to raise prices, people are not going to pay $10,000. They actually already have an impression that Rolex is probably not $10,000, and you might want to get $1,000.

John Jantsch (18:32.196)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (18:39.832)

Yeah.

Prasanna Dhungel (18:58.774)

And the other part, in my mind, John, is think about the generation that is getting into Reddit. Some of the brands we work with, they have a slightly more older demographic. And they’re trying to recruit younger demographics to, in fact, purchase from them. And the younger demographic are going into these communities. And the first impression they have, if there is no impression or if the impression is bad, then you are

John Jantsch (19:11.533)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (19:20.483)

Yeah.

Prasanna Dhungel (19:28.294)

not going to get them on board. So I like to even say that brands have begun to think of this investment almost as defensive. It’s like a leaky funnel, right? If you don’t yet go to Home Depot and buy something to fix your faucet, then you’ll just keep leaking. That’s also a way that brands have in fact approached that question.

John Jantsch (19:30.232)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:39.736)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (19:49.412)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, makes sense.

John Jantsch (19:54.584)

Yeah. Well, awesome. Well, lots of changes, lots going on. I appreciate you stopping by the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there somewhere you’d invite people to connect with you and learn more about the work that you’re doing there?

Prasanna Dhungel (20:05.462)

Yeah, absolutely. So you can connect with me on LinkedIn, Prasanna Dhungyal. Or you can go to our website, growbydata.com, and you’ll find me on the executive team. You can find me on LinkedIn, on Twitter, PD277. Happy to be helpful. And this is a fast-changing work area and would love to be helpful and supportive.

John Jantsch (20:30.116)

Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into one of these days out there on the road.

Prasanna Dhungel (20:34.656)

Absolutely. Thank you so much,

The Future of Marketing Is More Human Than Ever

The Future of Marketing Is More Human Than Ever written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Carlos Gil

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Carlos Gil, global marketing leader, bestselling author of The End of Marketing, and Brand Evangelist at GetResponse. Carlos is known for his bold approach to digital marketing, particularly in how brands can rise above the noise in a world dominated by AI, social media, and content creation.

Carlos challenges the status quo with his core thesis: Marketing as we know it is dead. The future isn’t just about technology—it’s about reconnecting with people. As AI tools like ChatGPT reshape the landscape of content marketing and digital advertising, brands must refocus on what can’t be automated: human relationships. From employee advocacy to authentic storytelling, Carlos shares actionable strategies for creating a brand strategy that thrives in a tech-driven world while staying rooted in human connection.

Carlos Gil’s perspective is a timely reminder: in the race toward automation, don’t lose the human heart of your brand. The brands that will win in the future are the ones that embrace empathy, connection, and authentic communication—at scale.

Key Takeaways:

Marketing is evolving—not ending. Brands must adapt by becoming more authentic, relational, and human-centric.
AI in marketing is powerful, but limited. Tools like ChatGPT can support email marketing and content creation, but they can’t replace real brand relationships.
Employee advocacy beats influencer marketing. Instead of outsourcing trust, Carlos encourages companies to empower employees to become true brand evangelists.
Omni-channel marketing is essential. Businesses must diversify their presence across platforms while prioritizing ownership of their audience through email and direct communication.
The most effective marketing strategy? Human connection. Creating real value through stories, vulnerability, and engagement helps brands rise above algorithm-driven sameness.

Chapters:

[00:09] Introducing Carlos Gil
[02:23] Brands Need to Humanize
[07:46] AI and the Need for Human Relationships
[12:25] Communicating the Human Element of Your Brand
[15:49] Omni-channel Marketing

More About Carlos Gil:

Connect with Carlos Gil on LinkedIn
Read The End of Marketing: Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media by Carlos Gil

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01.09)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Carlos Gill. He’s a global marketing leader and author. He’s a US brand evangelist at GetResponse with over a decade of experience helping brands thrive in the digital age. He’s also known for his bold results-driven strategies and insights on leveraging AI, social media, and email marketing to drive growth and engagement. Today we’re going to talk about his latest book,

The end of marketing, humanizing your brand in the age of social media. So Carlos, welcome to the show.

Carlos Gil (00:36.991)

It’s great to be here on the show, John. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (00:39.232)

So wait, marketing is over, it’s not just evolving? Like it’s the end? What do mean by the end?

Carlos Gil (00:45.635)

the end is just that look, you know, the first line, then the marketing, it’s real provocative, the title itself is intended to be a provocative, engaging title to real people in and the first line of the book, not to spoil it for anyone, because I hope you go out and buy it, but it’s marketing as we know it is dead, right? And like, that’s the caveat that as we know it, and I say this, because I myself being millennial, right? I’ve been around now for multiple decades and generations, I’ve been able to see

John Jantsch (00:47.477)

You

John Jantsch (00:53.72)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (01:05.699)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Carlos Gil (01:14.079)

it’s kind of shift throughout my lifetime from once not having digital technology to having digital to having the web to now everywhere we turn, we’re seemingly connected and there’s this just friction between brands and consumers. And, I know we’re going to talk about the books. I don’t want to give too much away early on, but the whole premise of the end of marketing is that brands want to be able to rise above all the digital noise that’s existing today.

John Jantsch (01:15.918)

Mm-hmm.

Carlos Gil (01:42.377)

they need to become more human. And look, to be transparent with you, I wrote this book in 2019. It came out in 2019. The very end, this was before COVID. I then sat down and wrote the second edition during COVID in 2021, the second edition came out. And I have folks that reach out to me through social media, just about every single day, John. And they say like, wow, like, did you predict what was going to happen, especially with like the whole AI piece? Because I would say then the marketing speaks more so today.

John Jantsch (01:44.632)

Yes.

John Jantsch (01:48.302)

Hmm.

John Jantsch (02:05.752)

Yes.

Carlos Gil (02:10.335)

to a 2025 reader honestly than in 2019 when I wrote it.

John Jantsch (02:16.685)

You know, think though that that’s actually, mean, I’ve been around a little longer than you, uh, Carla said, so I’ve been doing this, uh, a little longer. And so I’ve seen these ups and bounds and I mean, people have kind of used this idea of the end of marketing numerous times because anytime something really changes, they’re like, Oh, the old way is dead. Um, so I, I, I, I 100 % agree. It’s changing faster than ever. This idea of, you know, all AI is creating.

more sameness and more noise than ever before. So touch a little bit more on this idea. I’ve been really preaching lately that I think branding or brands are going to become more important than ever. You use the word humanizing brands. How does a business need to be looking at that today?

Carlos Gil (03:06.803)

Look, when I wrote Dundee marketing, one of my inspirations behind the whole thesis, which is that if brands want to survive this AI apocalypse that we are like right now in, right? Whether you want to accept it not. Yes, it’s still the early days of AI, but what does that really mean? Like AI is evolving really fast. So early days of AI might mean that a year from now, like everything that you know about business is just completely flipped upside down on its head. So

John Jantsch (03:16.75)

Cheers.

Carlos Gil (03:35.453)

When I wrote this book, I started thinking about what’s the competitive advantage from a marketing standpoint for any business or any brand. And that’s relationships. And I know this having worked previously on the inside of brands, leading social media, having previously worked for LinkedIn, being a social network that you can’t really scale or automate relationships. Right? So when you think about what AI is able to do, yes, AI can

write copy for you a lot of the AI that we refer to as more so language models, such as chat GBT. So yes, AI can write website copy and social media copy and it can operate a lot faster than human being great. I love it. But at the end of the day, is it as effective as a human behind the controls? I think that’s that’s TBD. What I can tell you that AI cannot do is automate relationships between humans. That’s like a core theme of the

John Jantsch (04:32.162)

Mm-hmm.

Carlos Gil (04:33.427)

book. The core theme is just that like at the end of the day, whether you use technology to help you do your job or not, a relationship means means a lot, especially in this era that we’re in where I fully believe by 2030, the value of a relationship. I’m not talking about social media follower, I’m talking about real relationship being able to, you know, hop on a webcast, do something like this with you, connect people, sit down, have human to human interaction, there’s going to be an immense

John Jantsch (04:53.686)

Mm-hmm.

Carlos Gil (05:03.263)

premium on that experience. And for brands in order to stand out, you can’t automate that. So how do you stay competitive when you’re a multi billion dollar brand and you’re looking to stay competitive within your own category? Well, it’s simple, right? You’ve got influencers, right? That is one solution. But influencers, as I write in the marketing, they’re really just a band aid. They’re a temporary solution, right? You hire an influencer.

They promote your brand. see a little temporary bump in traffic to your website, right? It looks good. But when that influencer goes away, they take their following with them. So in order to sustain that success, you need to start making people the faces of your company. And ironically, the role that I’m doing now, what I’ve been doing with GetResponse for the last year, GetResponse being an email service provider that was created in the late 90s, is they brought me on board to serve in this brand evangelist role.

I really was that mean. So I wear multiple hats, right? Internally, I’m a marketing, you know, strategist, thought leader within the brand, but on the outside, I’m doing this, I’m on podcasts, I’m a company spokesperson, I’m speaking on behalf of the company at events. I just came back from South by Southwest, I was on the scene, creating video content. This what you’re kind of seeing in action through myself is honestly, John, like the perfect bow to put on my own book.

John Jantsch (06:01.004)

Mm-hmm.

Carlos Gil (06:30.163)

that I wrote the end of marketing because I’m living it, I’m doing it, I’m showing other organizations out there. This is how you humanize your brand through people. It’s not always hiring influencers, it’s having a really strong and effective employee advocacy strategy, it’s training your employees to really humanize your brand through their own content. And then it’s also going out and finding individuals that can embody your brand and bringing them within whether it’s hiring an influencer in house, right, to work for you for a year.

John Jantsch (06:46.52)

John Jantsch (06:58.541)

Mm-hmm.

Carlos Gil (06:59.475)

whether it’s hiring someone like myself to go out and create content on your behalf, it puts a human face and voice on the company. And I tell you what, this, I believe, is the new wave going forward for brand marketers and the smart ones that figure out that balance of how to still sell, how to still market, but doing it in a way that feels authentic. You’re doing it through a real human being. Those are the ones that are gonna stand out. Otherwise, I really believe you’re gonna start seeing a lot of companies

Start scaling back on social, start even scaling back their digital presence because, you’ve got AI that now is able to operate faster, move more lean, create content for you. And that in itself creates a real challenge for brand marketers.

John Jantsch (07:45.452)

You know, I’m seeing actually there’s, this whole kind of AI is going to replace people, you know, kind of a meme that that’s out there very wide. And, and there’s no question it’s replacing functions. but I actually had someone on the show the other day that has created it’s an AI tool. And they said that what it’s actually doing is they’re using AI to do a lot of, I don’t know, let’s call it grunt work, that, that people used to have to spend their time to do. And it’s actually freeing their people up to

to do more relationships and to spend more time, you know, just meeting with people, over lunch, you know, or whatever it, you know, it might be. And I think that that’s actually the way, the smart way that people are going to invest in their people is to not, to not look at this as like, we can, we can go down to two people now because we can have AI do all this. It’s like, no, we can actually re align or refocus what our people actually do that is going to, you know, establish this brand, you know, as a different, know, standout brand.

Carlos Gil (08:36.575)

100%.

Carlos Gil (08:43.263)

Yeah, look, 100 % I have a love hate relationship with AI. use AI throughout my day. But what I will say is that it’s very easy as a marketing professional to become reliant on AI to the point where it almost makes it hard for you to think for yourself. And that is free slope of all this technology, right? You become super reliant on it. And then chat GPT goes down. It’s like, oh my god, like, I forgot how to I forgot how to write. Right? Like,

John Jantsch (08:59.471)

It’s just

Carlos Gil (09:09.369)

It literally becomes like that. So what I always say is like, look, you need to find ways to make AI your trusted assistant. Historically, you have a marketing agency that you work with, you lean on them to write your social media ad copy, you lean on them to help you ideate like you have to build a relationship. You’re using chat GPT, right? You have to build a relationship with your chat GPT. There’s no other way around it. I have now spent a couple of years finessing and refining

John Jantsch (09:31.394)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Carlos Gil (09:37.203)

But what I will say is the way that I use AI helps me actually be much more creative. Because I know now that I have a trusted companion within Chad GBT that if I’m, for example, in an airport and an idea comes to my mind, I can speak into my phone and I can get real time feedback. Right? I can help, you know, ideate with the help of AI without having to call someone, without having to pay an agency. Right? So like there’s that aspect of it that I believe has it’s good.

John Jantsch (09:46.232)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (09:55.736)

Yeah. Yeah.

Carlos Gil (10:06.815)

But then there’s the other aspect of it that if you rely so much on AI to do all the heavy lifting, all the grunt work as you call it, or the menial tasks, now you are removing the human element out of things like copywriting or even writing an email or a text message. Like it’s crazy. I see people all the time now. I’m on airplanes a lot and they’re writing a text message and they go over to ChatGBT.

to almost like copy, edit the text and then they go back. It’s like, my goodness, like this is going to continue to create this friction as I like to call it between humans and technology. And it goes.

John Jantsch (10:37.038)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:45.566)

Imagine when we have an entire generation that that’s all they know.

Carlos Gil (10:49.821)

Well, like imagine what’s really scary is imagine you and I not even have to record a podcast because there’s so much content of you and there’s so much content in me over the years. The AI knows my face and my voice and it could just recreate this conversation. Like it exists right now. There’s AI conversational platforms that you can record 15 seconds of your voice and it will just record a podcast for you. It’s insane what it can do. And that’s great. We’re going to continue to see that.

John Jantsch (11:04.94)

Yeah, people are doing it. Yeah.

Carlos Gil (11:16.127)

I firmly believe that we’re entering an era where there’ll be bestselling books written by AI, top podcasts on Spotify that are created by AI. There’s gonna be new billionaires are created. There will be new billionaires created because of AI, because of systems. My whole point here though is don’t lose sight of human to human relationships. Like that will always outweigh

John Jantsch (11:22.822)

totally.

Carlos Gil (11:43.487)

what technology can do. And the reason for that is because, you know, this is like just old school business, right? It’s like, I’m going to speak right now that the Gen Zers out there, they’re listening or watching, like business has always been predicated based on who you like, trust and relate to. So if you like someone, you have a higher likelihood to do business with them. If you trust them, if you relate to them, you want to do business with people that you like, trust and relate to. And I’m sorry, in an AI driven world, where it’s really noisy,

John Jantsch (11:48.866)

Yes.

Carlos Gil (12:10.367)

Yes, it becomes challenging to sift through that noise. But inevitably, if you’re able to connect with people, IRL, or you’re able to connect with people online and kind of weed out the AI element of that relationship, like, yeah, man, it’s just old school business 101.

John Jantsch (12:28.238)

You know, a lot of times people, think everybody gets that, you know, that idea of be more human, be more human. But this sounds really silly, but I have a lot of people who are like, well, how do you do that? You know, how do you, how do you communicate that? And I, and I think the, the real thing that AI doesn’t do is it can’t make up a story that only I know, never will. Um, you know, right. So storytelling, uh, vulnerability, uh, I don’t see too much AI kind of saying, look, I made this mistake and here’s what I learned from it.

Carlos Gil (12:46.099)

Right?

John Jantsch (12:54.827)

So, I mean, think some of those elements need to be in our marketing to kind of show or communicate the humaneness, don’t they?

Carlos Gil (13:02.139)

Absolutely. And look, like the other element of this that I want to reel and it’s something I’m very passionate about right now is this whole notion of owning your data, right? Like AI aside, AI is great from operational standpoint, but we are living right now in this just noisy digital ecosystem. And I write about this in the book. I talk about this one when I’m on stage. I take it you’ve seen the movie Cast Away, John? Right. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time. And anyone that follows my work, whether you read it or you read my podcast,

John Jantsch (13:10.712)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:25.198)

yeah, sure, sure.

Carlos Gil (13:31.795)

like this, or you see me speak on stage, I always make analogies. I’m like, what kind of has helped me as a marketer define my voice in this whole space is I’m not a textbook marketer. one these guys that I’ve been in the trenches, I’ve done the work, I’ve worked in corporate, I’ve started businesses, and I learned and I go out and teach. And I use a lot of analogies. So my point of where I’m going with this is that in the movie Castaway, Tom Hanks is stranded on this island. And throughout the movie, he’s talking to a volleyball named Wilson.

And I often use this comparison that we as digital marketers are the equivalent of Tom Hanks speaking to a volleyball, right? We produce all this content. We spend all this time in the lab making videos, making shorts, making reels, writing blogs. And if no one consumes them, right? No one’s listening. Then that is the equivalent of Tom Hanks speaking to Wilson. So you have all this noise that’s taking place every single day. And it’s not just brands competing against other brands. Like way back in the day, I used to run social media for a brand named Winn-Dixie.

there’s supermarket chain here in Florida. And the primary competitors was Publix and Walmart, and Albertsons and a couple other stores. Well, nowadays, if you’re a supermarket chain, just using this example, you’re not competing against supermarkets, so we’re talking about food, you’re competing against bloggers or vloggers, you’re competing against influencers, cooks, you’re competing against anyone that’s in your category, that’s taking market share away from your brand, which is why I go back to the basis of

relationships be important. And one of my passionate topics right now in this era that we’re in is this notion that you need to own your data. You cannot rely on these social networks to give you reach. You cannot rely on the little breadcrumbs that Metta or Instagram give you. You just can’t. We recently saw TikTok go through a very scary situation where they were temporarily banned. And that I believe should be a wake up call to every single business, every single creator, influencer, anyone.

John Jantsch (15:15.15)

you

Carlos Gil (15:25.545)

who’s relying on these technologies to grow and promote their business, you cannot rely on them. You need to use them for reach. You need to use them to create awareness for your business. But inevitably, you need to be taking those relationships, i.e. those followers, you to move them over into systems and platforms like email. You need to own data and you cannot be reliant because unfortunately, when you do become reliant on these systems, you are just putting too much control in their hands.

John Jantsch (15:53.71)

Yeah, you know, it used to be, mean, when, I don’t know, let’s say 2005, 2006 or so when social media started, you know, popping on the scene, it was very much seen as a top of the funnel. Like here’s how to get reach. Here’s how to get exposure. Here’s how to get seen. But you got to drive people back, you know, to the property of your own. Mainly, we tried to drive people back to our websites, right? We’d post our blog and say, here, come read my blog here. Well, now a lot of those platforms.

Don’t ever want you to leave. And so, you you get penalized for doing any of that kind of drive people back. And another thing I’m seeing happen is, you know, on TikTok, you’re seeing entire journey or entire, you know, funnel happening on TikTok. It’s no longer just top of the funnel. People are actually transacting. So, so how, how do people kind of balance that idea that I now need to be more places with like a full, you know, full range of content as well as, you know,

I 100 % agree, own your own data.

Carlos Gil (16:56.157)

You know, I’ve been saying this, John, since probably about 2015 when I started speaking. I go back and I look at some of my earlier content. I’m like, man, I’ve been saying the same thing for a decade now. And one of the key terms I have said to folks, and this goes back to when I worked in corporate marketing running socials, have an omnichannel presence. Don’t be married to one platform. Use these platforms the way that they use you.

And I’ll just tell you as someone that has spent a lot of time in these platforms as a user, and again, having worked for a major social network, these social networks at the end of the day, they all do the same thing. They’re all digital advertising platforms. And I think this is something that’s lost upon the majority of creators because again, like let’s think of it, your average business owner, your average influencers using platforms, they’re just trying to get rich. They’re trying to continue to build a community, get followers. The name of the game should not be to get followers.

Your objective as a business needs to be to generate more revenue, right? Followers, it’s a vanity metric, right? Like, you know that you’ve worked in the industry for a very long time as well. So I always am constantly preaching this. Use these platforms the same way they use you. The way they use you is they’re using you because you’re creating contents, keeping people on the platforms. And as long as you’re keeping people on the platforms, they’re selling more ads and they’re making more money, right? Like they are in the business of making money. That’s what these social networks do. And again,

John Jantsch (17:52.878)

Yes.

John Jantsch (18:20.184)

Yeah. Well, and let’s throw Google in under the bus too. mean, that’s what Google’s, you know, existence is as well.

Carlos Gil (18:25.193)

Yeah, it doesn’t make them bad. Like by any means, like if anyone from Google or LinkedIn or better, any of these platforms are listening or watching, like this doesn’t make them bad. It’s just understanding the game. Like these are businesses. So if I am running a business, right, I always use this analogy again, going back to the analogy, if I, for example, am running, let’s just say a flea market, right? We all know what a flea market is. You cannot walk into my flea market and set up a table and sell without paying a hundred bucks to the owner of the flea market.

John Jantsch (18:35.554)

Right. Yep.

John Jantsch (18:49.762)

Right.

Yeah, right,

Carlos Gil (18:53.929)

to rent for a day. If you’re a barber, you can’t go to a barber shop and cut hair and not expect to give the owner his or her cut. That’s just business. Social media networks operate the same exact way. And again, it doesn’t make them bad. You just have to understand the rules of the game. And normally when I do my talks, have like, sorry, I have this slide behind me and it has like a casino and like Zuckerberg’s face in front of it. And I always say like,

look at meta, for example, and like they are a form of casino, because they’ll give you a little dopamine, they’ll let you win here and there in the form of a viral video or your post might reach, you know, more than 1 % of your following audience. But they’re not gonna let you win all the time. And they’re not gonna let you do it for free. And you have to pay to play inevitably. And again, man, like I love this space. Like, I know we’ve talked about AI, and we’re trying to get as much in and in the time that we’re together. I love I just love the space, man.

John Jantsch (19:24.654)

Yeah.

Carlos Gil (19:50.911)

I’ve worked in social media professionally since oh wait, I got onto social media in 1995, back then when I was 12 and it was known as AOL. I have grown up evolving with this in my life. I’ve made a lot of money as an entrepreneur using it. I’ve made a lot of money as a creator using it. I’ve helped businesses make a lot of money using these tools. Like I love them. They’re great. However,

where I do keep it 100 as a thought leader and speaker in the space is what I’ve already said. And I’ll repeat it one more time. If it’s cool, you cannot rely on these networks alone. You have to have an omni-channel strategy. And that means go wide, have a presence on multiple platforms, build a community within those platforms. Don’t just rinse and repeat your content because now you’re not giving people an incentive to go follow you in different channels. And most importantly, you need to find ways to own your data, which is pretty simple. Start up a newsletter, right?

John Jantsch (20:33.038)

you

Carlos Gil (20:45.671)

to get response, sign up, get a newsletter. And then as you’re creating content that people enjoy seeing, remind them, hey, if you want to see more of this, if you want to be a part of my insider circle, my club, my mastermind, however you frame it, now you have a solution to give people that you own. So you don’t have to rely on the out.

John Jantsch (21:02.435)

Yes.

Yeah. I, know, just another practical nod to that idea is that a lot of times people have to bump into you in about five places before they start paying attention. you know, so it’s, it’s the old, gotta hear, you know, I gotta hear your message or see your sign or whatever it is multiple times before I’m really going to, to start tuning in. Well, Carlos, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. Where would you invite people to find, to connect with you first off, but then find out more about the end of marketing.

Carlos Gil (21:34.303)

Yeah, for sure. So once again, John, thank you so much for having me on your podcast today. It has been a pleasure. You can learn about the end of marketing by going to Amazon. Just look up end of marketing. There’s the first and second edition. Also, I want to call out, get response, shout out, get response, go to get response.com. You can sign up for a free trial there. If you have any questions with regards to setting up a newsletter, email marketing, please be sure to reach out to me. You can connect with me on all the socials, Carlos skill 83 and LinkedIn.

is my go to platform of choice if you want you can connect on me there but I love Instagram I love tiktok love Facebook I am a proponent of look let’s get to know each other LinkedIn is great but you only get to know so much about me and me of you on LinkedIn it’s professional social network and at the end of the day so if you’re on Instagram look me up at Carlos guilty 3 let me know that you heard this episode of the duct tape podcast and any way that can help you out let me know I’m here I got you

John Jantsch (22:32.878)

Awesome. I appreciate it, Carlos, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Carlos Gil (22:37.599)

All right, John, I appreciate you.

Your Book Launch Needs a Marketing Plan

Your Book Launch Needs a Marketing Plan written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Alex Strathdee

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Alex Strathdee, CEO of Shelf Life and author of Before the Bestseller. Alex is an expert in book marketing, having helped over 1,000 authors across 50+ niches get real results. His insights challenge the traditional belief that publishers will promote your book and reveal the essential strategies every author must use to drive their own success.

During our conversation, Alex shared powerful and practical advice on how to sell books, create a compelling book launch plan, and avoid the most common book marketing mistakes. From free reader seeding to building an author email list, Alex outlines a repeatable book sales strategy that empowers authors to treat their book like a business asset—whether you’re self publishing or working with a traditional publisher.

Alex’s approach to nonfiction book marketing is data-driven, entrepreneurial, and deeply practical. Whether you’re a seasoned business owner or just starting out, the insights from this episode can help you avoid wasted effort—and get real ROI from your book.

Key Takeaways:

Publishers won’t market your book. Authors must take ownership of their book promotion strategy.
Think of your book like a product. If it’s good (and light, as Alex says), it needs only wind—your marketing—to take off.
Pick a sales goal. Whether it’s 1,000 or 20,000 copies, defining a target helps guide every marketing tactic.
Use free reader seeding. Get your book into the hands of people who can talk about it and create buzz.
Break down your sales goal into channels. Consider email, podcasts, Amazon ads, or lumpy mail to move copies strategically.
Your email list is gold. Start small with 100 engaged readers and build from there—this is traffic you own.
Use VA support for outreach. Outsourcing book promotion tasks helps you scale more efficiently.
Don’t overlook physical presence. Alex shares how one book sold millions after being spotted in a car wash!
Design a book funnel. Use your book as a lead magnet for higher-ticket services like courses or coaching.
Presentation matters. From soft t-shirts to custom editions, packaging your book with care can spark word-of-mouth and long-term publishing success.

Chapters:

[00:09] Introduction to Alex Strathdee
[01:03] Do Publishers Promote Books?
[02:45] Mistakes in Book Marketing
[06:54] How is AI Affecting Book Marketing?
[08:30] What is the Goal of your Book?
[09:39] Seeding Readers with no Audience
[13:34] Team and Tools to Help You with Your Book
[16:03] Positioning Yourself to get Lucky

More About Alex Strathdee:

Check out Alex Strathdee’s Website
Connect with Alex Strathdee on LinkedIn
Read Before The Bestseller: Your Proven Path to Book Sales Without Wasting Time & Money by Alex Strathdee

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00.951)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Alex Strathdee. He is the CEO of Shelf Life, where he helps authors market books. After working with over 1,000 books and 50 plus niches, he wanted to know what advice to give authors whose books weren’t selling. Clients include Mike McCallewitz, Alan Dibbs, Michael Bungastanier, Tony Fidel, Reid Hoffman. He hosts.

his own podcast, Before the Best Seller with authors who have sold over 10,000 copies, which include Dan Pink, Kim Scott, and others. But we’re going talk about his book today, Before the Best Seller, your proven path to book sales without wasting time and money. So Alex, welcome to the show.

Alex Strathdee (00:47.864)

John, it’s a dream come true being here growing up with you as one of the marketing greats to get to have a chat with you is pretty cool.

John Jantsch (00:55.227)

I appreciate that. So I know the answer to this, but I’m just going to let you let you hit it out of the park. When I write a book, doesn’t the publisher promote my book?

Alex Strathdee (01:09.422)

You would think that is why we exist is because Seth Godin, I know, has a good statistic that, you know, authors spend 90 % on or they make revenue from 90 % of the 90 % of the revenue is from their backlist and they only spend 2 % of their their budget on actually launching new books, which is a statistic that every author should be listening to and thinking, oh, so I can’t expect my publisher to actually market.

John Jantsch (01:10.627)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:24.835)

Huh.

John Jantsch (01:36.725)

Yeah, I’ve actually published, let’s say I self-published one book, six books have been with major publishers. And I can say that not only do they not promote your book, they don’t know how, quite frankly. I mean, they’re pretty rooted in some ancient approaches.

Alex Strathdee (01:56.43)

And that’s how I came into this industry was actually getting like pretty much scammed by someone who was like, oh, here’s what book marketing really is. And I was like, oh, wait, I’m going to be our famous rich, you know, author tomorrow. Wow, that’s fantastic. All I have to do is become an Amazon bestseller. Cool. And then you quickly find out that’s that’s not how you become an author.

John Jantsch (02:11.458)

Yeah

John Jantsch (02:16.035)

Well, and the other thing of course, and I’m sure you’re experiencing this, my first book came out in 2007. There weren’t a lot of nonfiction books, quite frankly, particularly from marketers. Now there’s probably been five titles that have come out since we started this show. I mean, it’s crazy.

Alex Strathdee (02:32.942)

There’s a marketing book for every niche now. There was one book that I was marketing that is, Kroll Space Repair. It’s insane, the niches that you find these days. But I love niches. I think niches are some of the best places to market.

John Jantsch (02:47.285)

So where do you find, we’ll start with the mistakes. Where do you find people making a mistake? I know the biggest one is they write a book and go, okay, now what? Probably, but what are some of the other common mistakes?

Alex Strathdee (02:56.77)

Yeah, the first. I’ll first start with a piece of education and it’s how to think about your book, and it’s a analogy that I actually stole from Ricardo Fayette of Reidsy, and it’s it’s the book is a ship analogy where essentially your book is a ship and how good your book is is how and how, you know, the word of mouth will spread for that book is how light the material of that ship is made of. So if you have a really, really good book, you have a really young.

think I was reading your Wikipedia before this as well. You like your woodworking, so we’ll use a nice wood reference here. You know, if you have a really good book, then it’s a light piece of wood, right? So, you know, then your book, all that that ship needs is some wind in the sails and it starts to cruise along. If your book is made of lead, meaning it’s a terrible book and people don’t want to share it, then yeah, you can strap rockets to the side. But the second you turn off those rockets, it’s going to sink to the bottom of ocean. So the first thing is to think about your book as a ship.

John Jantsch (03:46.563)

You

Alex Strathdee (03:54.72)

And so the next question you get is, well, how do I know what my book is made of? And the answer to that is by product testing it. So it’s by committing to. this is, your question was, where do people actually start with their marketing? The starting point is picking a number. So that is the Bill Gladstone, who’s the late former literary agent to people like Eckhart Tolle, Marie Kondo, Jack Canfield. His whole thing is that in order for a book to be commercially successful, you need to see 20,000 copies into the wild.

Now, if your book is about crawl space repair, the odds of you seeding 20,000 copies is pretty low, right? So you get to realize that there’s some nuance in here, depending on the industry that you’re a part of. Rob Fitzpatrick says that number only needs to be 1000. He’s a author of right. You saw books. He focuses more on like writing really, really good nonfiction books. And the truth is the numbers somewhere between 1000 and 20,000. And it’s up to the author to figure out what that number is.

John Jantsch (04:29.559)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (04:43.478)

It’s a book.

John Jantsch (04:51.053)

So.

I mean, again, I’m trying to process that comment. if I’ve published a book or self-published a book or I’m thinking about putting a book out, am I now then one of my first tasks is I need to get a thousand people who I think would be interested in this and send them a copy?

Alex Strathdee (04:58.094)

Yes. Yeah.

Alex Strathdee (05:12.46)

That is one of the ways. we call that free reader seating and the the but yeah, essentially once you have your number, what that is, is that’s empowering because where most authors start in their book marketing is just talking to, you know, like marketing salespeople of, you need this program, you need this program, you don’t really know what you’re trying to achieve. You just kind of think that like, well, if I make the New York Times bestseller list, then my book did what it’s supposed to do, right?

John Jantsch (05:13.709)

Yeah.

Alex Strathdee (05:36.814)

And so just having an understanding of what you’re actually trying to achieve with your book is that will solve half of your marketing issues. Because once you have your number, you break that down into, OK, I’m going to move 200 copies through podcasting. I’m to 100 copies through my email list. I’m going to move 200 copies through Amazon ads. Right. And then you actually break that seeding number down into many goals. And those are the different tools of book marketing that I talk about with him.

John Jantsch (06:02.263)

So we’ve probably all encountered a book that you’re like, this is really bad. Why is it selling so many copies?

Alex Strathdee (06:11.852)

Yeah, yeah. The one of my one of my shocking things, it’s kind of like, you know, Febreeze didn’t sell until a marketer figured out how to make it sell right. Like until someone was like, it shouldn’t have no smell. It should have a smell because that indicates to people that the room is clean. Right. So, you know, at the end of the day, I think you can have a pretty mediocre book. And if you have a really good marketing strategy behind it, it’s going to do a whole lot better than a book that has no marketing and is, you know, the best book in the world. And

You know, so that’s one of the things I tell authors is like, you know, I know we have a fellow friend, Mike McCallewitz, you he and get different, you know, are you like, you have a responsibility to market if your thing is the best thing on the market. You know, you’re being selfish by actually not having a marketing plan behind that book. And there’s a lot of authors would be bestselling authors that get stopped because they’re, think that marketing their book is beneath them.

John Jantsch (07:05.763)

Yeah. So we’re, always make a joke of this. We’re seven minutes in the show. I’m going to mention AI for the first time. so how is, how is AI affecting in your view, both the written word as well as the, marketing component of, of marketing.

Alex Strathdee (07:14.542)

Let’s do it.

Alex Strathdee (07:28.844)

I think what it comes down to is brand at the end of the day, you know, there’s, that’s one of the big issues on Amazon right now is there’s a lot of people selling courses for like make a million dollars writing AI created books or whatever have you. Yeah. And it’s like, you can put those books up there, but you’re still going to have the same issue that the regular author has, which is to market those books. Like, so I think that

John Jantsch (07:40.023)

Right, 10 books a day, right, yeah.

Alex Strathdee (07:52.518)

I’m not afraid of, you know, I think it comes back to your marketing, right? Like if you have a really good marketer who’s empowered by AI, then maybe they’ll start moving some AI books, but we’re starting to look into using tools like make.com to automate like social media creation and posting based on like best practices in the industry. So think make.com is a great low code platform for some people who are a little more tech savvy to start looking at. But I mean, there’s, lots of ways, you know, like we use chat GPT to write our job descriptions.

John Jantsch (08:14.765)

Yeah, yeah.

Alex Strathdee (08:20.44)

You know, like you have someone on your team that takes half a day to write a job description, just ask ChatGPT to ask you for a meta ads expert and hire them in the Philippines, right? So I think there’s a lot of things that like from on the surface level, ChatGPT can start to really help authors with, you know, where they don’t have to know how to write a full on job description. They can have ChatGPT do that for them. And then on a deeper level, you can start using platforms like make.com to create workflows and go a little bit deeper with the tools.

John Jantsch (08:20.76)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:26.573)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:48.675)

important do you think it is, particularly I’m talking about non-fiction books, so business authors, how important do you believe that it is that most authors should also have a course and maybe a certification or a coaching program or something like that that actually comes from the book?

Alex Strathdee (09:06.102)

Yeah, and that’s an interesting, you know, because even fiction and nonfiction have entirely different business models that you’re working with. Right. And so like one of our first steps with authors is always to figure out what is it you’re actually trying to achieve with this book? Because, know, someone who has a this is also like something you have to realize when you’re bidding against people on a lot of the ad platforms like, you know, Amazon.

is oftentimes, especially in the nonfiction niche, you’re bidding against people who aren’t trying to make money on book royalties. They’re trying to sell a twenty thousand hundred thousand dollar course on the back end. So the days of making money through Amazon ads, one of the questions we get a lot. The days of making passive income with Amazon ads is over. They like very few books do that nowadays and very few traditional or self published authors. And I’m talking about self published to get full royalties are actually at that point in their, you know, in their book journey.

John Jantsch (09:34.967)

Yeah, right, Right, right, right, right.

John Jantsch (09:59.181)

So how does somebody who, like in my particular case, by the time I put my first book out, I had a huge email list. I had actually been publishing other stuff online, a blog and all podcasts and all that kind of stuff. So I had a decent live audience. How does somebody who, and let’s jump to fiction maybe, has no audience and is actually not known for writing Western literature, romance novels, all of sudden writes one. mean, how does that person

Seed some readers.

Alex Strathdee (10:30.466)

Yeah, that’s that’s a really great question and to to which does mean that it’s it’s more challenging. So let me let me try to make this as concise as possible because I could ramble for the next how much time you got, John. So when it comes to starting, I mean, you mentioned the number one thing and the most important thing is always to have a newsletter list. That’s the one traffic you control. You’ve had plenty of episodes talking about the importance of that. Right. So.

John Jantsch (10:34.039)

Which means it’s a hard question.

Alex Strathdee (10:56.654)

When it comes to your email list, one of the best ways and I stand on the shoulders of great marketers, know, so like Tim Grahl, who wrote your first 1000 copies, you know, he has a great way to start your Facebook, you know, your email list through Facebook, just reaching out to your friends and family one by one and saying, hey, I’m going to start, you know, writing about this topic.

you would you like to come along for the journey? And like, you know, if you’re running ads, do you know, to your webpage, you might get a conversion rate of like, well, like 3 % on your web on your website. As if you’re messaging people one by one on Facebook, like start with finding a hundred people to put on your email list, start sending out like a new valuable newsletter each week and happy to dive into that if you want. But you know, I just start with like who the people, you know, and ask them, Hey, here’s what I’m going to do. It’s kind of an experiment. Would you like to join and make that your first 100?

So that’s the first step. Any questions about like the email list side? I’m sure you probably were already already on top of that one. And the other way is I’ll actually use an example of a fictional author, John Strelecki. He’s the author of a cafe on the edge of the world. He’s now sold over 8 million books and he, kid you not, just went to chamber of commerce meetings and it hits a, his book is somewhat of a fable.

John Jantsch (11:50.007)

No, no, no, I think, yeah, yeah, we have definitely.

Alex Strathdee (12:11.48)

capable if you haven’t heard of it’s kind of like the go giver sort of that situation that has like a deeper meaning to it that’s easy to pick up on short read. And he went to Chamber of Commerce meetings having one on one conversations with people until he had personally handed out 10,000 copies of his book. He has now sold over 8 million copies of his book. Clearly that worked. And so a genuine conversation you like finding a local group that you can go to and know, hand copies out one by one with a genuine conversation. Now.

John Jantsch (12:14.018)

Yeah, yeah.

Alex Strathdee (12:38.286)

There’s a way you can do this the wrong way and there’s a way you can do this the right way. And I’ll use an example, you know, I’m out here in San Diego, if you couldn’t tell by the mustache and the long hair. we have namaste yoga, cliff side here on the ocean. You know, can picture it, beautiful blue sky, you know, right? You hear the waves breaking and, you know, a nice way to relax on a Saturday and Sunday morning. And this woman was walking by.

handing out post-it notes that just had nice messages on them. Like, you you’re pretty or like, you know, you’re smart or whatever. And on the back of those post-it notes was, you know, a Lincoln invite to grab her book. But like she was starting with value. was like, would you like a positive note? And of course, like, you know, it’s also her, her audience, right? Like an audience of yogis on a cliffside on a, on a Saturday morning at 10 a.m. is, is her demographic. And you compare that against, I was hosting a barbecue for a friend, you know, here at my, my apartment complex.

John Jantsch (13:20.472)

Yeah, yeah.

Right. Yeah.

Alex Strathdee (13:33.534)

And this man, I guess, saw a gathering of us down by the grill and walked down and began telling people about his AI book that we should all go by and read. like most of the people were like service workers, like baristas, no interest in learning about AI. And he’s like forcing AI on everyone. It was the most uncomfortable situation. So like when you’re having these conversations, be the first, not the second.

John Jantsch (13:48.653)

Yeah

John Jantsch (13:57.995)

Yeah, that’s awesome. What would, so if somebody’s, I know there’s wide ranges and variances on all kinds of, depends, but if somebody’s getting started with a nonfiction book, they’ve got a business as well. They’re doing a couple of things. What’s the team, the system, you know, the approach that kind of like they need to be doing this, this, this, this kind of thing.

Alex Strathdee (14:21.646)

Yeah, yeah. And I’m all for systems like one of my favorite marketers, Alan Dibb, know, random acts of marketing don’t work. That’s like I will sing that from, you know, the mountaintops until the day I die. And so, you know, having VA’s is great. You know, I have a whole section. I talk a lot about VA’s and I know you’ve covered a lot about VA’s as well. But the system is start with your high number, break down into the littler numbers, pick out the tools that you’re you’re you know, whether it’s and I’ve got, you know, a few of the tools that

John Jantsch (14:37.933)

Yeah.

Alex Strathdee (14:50.114)

you know, we’ve seen great success with is like free reader seatings, like finding people on LinkedIn. And so having a team member who is actually finding your ideal person on LinkedIn, on Instagram and messaging them one-on-one saying, Hey, we’ve got this free book. Would you like, you know, a copy of it for free? And most of it’s like a free gift. Like, yeah, people are all for, you know, I know you’re a fan of lumpy mail. Like I love lumpy mail. And so, you know, that’s, that’s something that works really well. We’re doing that with like Dan Heath right now that he just launched reset.

John Jantsch (15:09.795)

Yeah. Right.

Alex Strathdee (15:18.586)

And so for him, like that’s already led to two additional, like one lady wrote back and was like, wow, I’m going to make this my book for the book, my book club of like 80 people. Right. It’s like putting yourself a lot of the seating number that you, you pick is putting yourself in a position to get lucky. But like, I find that when it comes down to systems, a lot of the research is, can be outsourced. So like finding those people on LinkedIn, messaging those people on LinkedIn, like you don’t have the time to be there messaging these people one-on-one. and the great thing is, you know, like you mentioned, these people have businesses.

John Jantsch (15:26.381)

Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Strathdee (15:48.48)

If they have, know, like you’re essentially sending them like your business card at the same time, like your, your guess, you know, you, it’s a, yeah, you got to pay for shipping and handling or whatever. even traditionally published authors will oftentimes be able to get a deal with their publisher for like six bucks. Always look at your, author, author copy price if you’re a traditionally published author, but, yeah.

John Jantsch (15:53.272)

Yes.

John Jantsch (16:06.307)

Well, would also tell you those books cost them nothing. I always negotiated a thousand bucks that they gave me.

Alex Strathdee (16:12.053)

Yeah. Good. That’s great. Yeah. That’s I’m going to start using that. That’s really smart. I didn’t know you could, you could get away with that. But, yeah, having people who are doing the researching and the messaging, I think like anytime you’re doing cold researching or cold messaging, like that’s a great opportunity to start bringing in an assistant for that stuff.

John Jantsch (16:31.245)

Yeah, and that kind of thing can be had, you know, fairly inexpensively. I want to go back something you just touched on a little bit, putting yourself in a position to get lucky. I know you spent a lot of time in the book on that. You’ve even got a couple examples in the book. You want to share any Oprah moments?

Alex Strathdee (16:48.21)

One of my favorite stories and a lot of people don’t know this is Robert Kiyosaki. Everyone’s heard of Rich Dad Poor Dad, right? So what a lot of people don’t know is that is how that book became the best selling personal finance book of all time. And the way it was done was Robert called up his buddy who owned a car wash and he said, hey, do you mind if I sell some copies of Rich Dad Poor Dad in your car wash? And his buddy was like, sure, whatever.

John Jantsch (16:54.147)

Sure. Yeah.

Alex Strathdee (17:14.026)

There’s he is a bookstore of one at that point. There is no you know, like customers are looking over at you know, at air fresheners to buy while they’re waiting for their car to get washed or they’re using the unusable bathrooms that you know at car washes and Then they walk, know to the over the cashier and wow, it’s this personal finance book. Let me pick that up I have a little time. Let me read it and So one of the people who happened to walk through that car wash was one of the founders of Amway

John Jantsch (17:17.315)

You

John Jantsch (17:34.477)

Right.

Alex Strathdee (17:40.534)

Now not talking about, whether Amway is a good company or what you think about, you know, rich divorce or anything, but the person picked this book up and loved it so much that he then took it to the other executives. And he’s like, this is a powerful tool for us to educate and empower our people. so Amway started to fly Robert Kiyosaki all around the country to speak at events. And that book quickly became their Bible. And he found his micro community, a lot of

Authors will find their micro community early on. Like Mike McAuliffe did this with Profit First. He was speaking on college campuses and kids were taking home those books on spring break and moms were picking up those books and reading and fixing their company’s finances or the company business or the family business. And that was his following. And he never meant for the book to find its way to those people. yeah, mean, putting yourself in a position to get lucky is what a lot of that picking your number to begin with is doing.

John Jantsch (18:33.911)

Yeah. And really the seating probably, I mean, you have no idea who it’s going to, I mean, maybe you targeted somebody, but you have no idea who, what their circle of influence is. And I think that’s, just becomes a numbers game at that point as you’re, as you’re kind of stressing, isn’t it?

Alex Strathdee (18:49.41)

And that’s why people will be like, give away my book for free. it’s like, well, first of all, a lot of people will put their book up for expensive on launch. And it’s like, yeah, their mom buys it, their cousin buys it, their son buys it. But at end of the day, are you actually solving for any of those people? that’s a big part. Are you actually solving the problem of any of those people? And so that’s a big part of it is your number has to consist of people whose problem you’re actually solving for. Because if you’re not, then no one’s going to get excited about your book.

John Jantsch (18:53.111)

Yeah

John Jantsch (19:18.979)

It was a book that I actually had the author on here. He has since passed away, but called Giftology by John Ruhlman. And he did what I thought was a really interesting thing. His book was published by a publisher, but he talked to publisher into letting him create a special edition of the book. It was hard bound, like kind of leather, you know, had, you know, gold lettering on it. And, you know, he sent out like 4,000 of those.

And it was in this really incredible package and it just, people couldn’t not talk about it. And it just really launched his book because he just got so much word of mouth before anybody had really read it just by the presentation.

Alex Strathdee (19:59.598)

Packages can be a really fun way to do it. Brian Johnson, who recently really released art and actually sent giftology funny enough, like two weeks ago, I had a partnership and I was like this, like do this. So it’s funny that you bring that up. the yeah, and he sent if you’re going to send this is a little like, you know, people love these small little things. If if you’re going to do T-shirts, John, make them the softest, most comfortable T-shirt you’ve you’ve ever worn so that people actually wear it. I have so.

John Jantsch (20:03.094)

Eh.

John Jantsch (20:08.738)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (20:21.091)

Right.

John Jantsch (20:26.049)

Yep.

Alex Strathdee (20:27.096)

Bryan Johnson sent me two of the literally softest shirts I own and they’ve become my travel shirts. So I have walked through about like 30 airports wearing these shirts and been a walking billboard for this guy. So that’s like, if you’re going to do like shirts for your book, make sure the title is on there and make them the softest that you could possibly make them.

John Jantsch (20:32.523)

You

John Jantsch (20:46.403)

Love it. Love it. Well, Alex, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where would you invite people to connect with you and find out more about before the bestseller?

Alex Strathdee (20:56.204)

Yeah, I’m always up for a conversation. know, we pride ourselves in like just having very honest conversations with authors and kind of like where they’re at. We prefer to work with authors for years. So if we don’t think like an engagement is going to work out for more than like a small period of time, then like we’ll tell you that. Yeah, reach out to us. Our website is get shelf life dot com. Feel free to shoot me an email if you have a question about book marketing. Alex at get shelf life dot com.

And yeah, check out our book before the best seller on Amazon now.

John Jantsch (21:27.267)

Well, 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.

Alex Strathdee (21:32.952)

This is a bucket list item, John. Thanks for having me on.

John Jantsch (21:35.395)

You

Build a Brand Gen Z Wants to Work (and Buy) From

Build a Brand Gen Z Wants to Work (and Buy) From written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Len Silverman

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Len Silverman, a veteran marketer, former Learning Center owner, and author of Mesh: Aligning Your Personal Brand with Gen Z. With over 30 years of experience and firsthand insight into the Gen Z workforce, Len offers a clear roadmap for companies struggling to connect with this rising generation of workers and consumers.

Len shares why simply labeling Gen Z as “lazy” or “hard to manage” is a massive misstep. Instead, businesses need to understand Gen Z traits and align their company culture and employer branding with what this generation truly values—authenticity, flexibility, purpose, and opportunity. Whether you’re hiring Gen Z employees or marketing to them, the key lies in understanding the intersection of personal branding and company identity.

Len Silverman’s insights are a wake-up call for any business that wants to stay relevant, both in the hiring market and in customer engagement. If you want your brand to resonate with the next generation, it starts with getting real about who you are—and who they are.

Key Takeaways:

Understand the Gen Z Workforce: Gen Z isn’t afraid to ghost employers—but it’s often due to broken hiring experiences, not apathy. Simplify, clarify, and personalize your process.
Personal Branding Matters: Gen Z expects employers to have a brand identity that mirrors their own values. They’re looking for alignment, not just a paycheck.
Company Culture Is Everything: This generation wants mentorship, not micromanagement. They crave environments where feedback is open, and purpose drives work.
Think Employee Journey, Not Just Customer Journey: Gen Z sees work as part of their life experience. Treat recruitment and retention like a well-crafted marketing funnel.
Authenticity Wins: Performative branding won’t last. Gen Z will call it out. Make sure your values show up in your leadership, actions, and communications.
Mentorship Over Management: Support Gen Z through peer mentors or structured programs to guide behavior, expectations, and professional development.
Generational Understanding Builds Trust: Bridging the gap between Gen X leadership and Gen Z employees starts with empathy, open dialogue, and mutual respect.

Chapters:

[00:09] Introduction to Len Silverman
[00:53] What is the Personal Brand of Gen Z
[02:56] Common Stereotypes of Genz
[04:16] The Old Ways Aren’t Going to Work
[06:39] The Employee Journey
[08:35] Importance of Cultural Consistency
[10:39] Changing Mindsets
[12:44] Gen Z Customers
[14:19] Common Mistakes Trying to Align with Gen Z
[17:11] Turning Gen Z into A Players

More About Len Silverman:

Check out Len Silverman’s Website
Connect with Len Silverman on LinkedIn
Read MESH: Aligning the Personal Brand of Gen Z with your Company Culture by Len Silverman

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01.176)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Len Silverman. Len has over 30 years of experience in marketing his own a seven figure company with dozens of employees in multiple states. As a former Learning Center owner, he has seen Gen Z grow up and has gotten to know the generation and what makes him tick. maybe that’s why he wrote a book called Mesh, Aligning Your Personal Brand with Gen Z of Gen, sorry.

I’ll try. Let’s try that all over again. Mesh aligning the personal brand of Gen Z with your company culture. So Len, welcome to the show.

Len Silverman (00:39.317)

Thank you. Appreciate you having me,

John Jantsch (00:40.864)

So, Gen Z is, as I recall, something like 13 to 28 years old now. Is that who we’re talking about?

Len Silverman (00:49.097)

Yeah, pretty much. look at 1997 as the beginning of that group. So yes.

John Jantsch (00:52.48)

Okay, okay. So the personal brand of Gen Z, what is that?

Len Silverman (00:58.643)

So, you lot of people these days are talking about personal branding. So I thought it’d be really nice to sort of combine that with things that I’m hearing about Gen Z on the street. But just to give you a little bit of a frame around this, I started in the learning center business in 2004. So at that point, Gen Z was seven years old and I owned learning centers for 21 years. So basically I have seen these kids grow up and I call them kids. Obviously some of them are young adults, but

More and more, as I talk to business owners and leaders, I’ve been hearing stories about, they’re so hard to work with and I can’t figure them out. And basically, some people are saying that they’re kind of washing their hands of it. And that really was disappointing to me. And I thought, well, the first thing is you’ve got to understand Gen Z. And I’m not saying that you, as a company, have to completely change to meet them where they are.

But I’m a big believer that you need to understand your customers, you need to understand your constituents, and in this case, you need to understand your potential employees. So I go into a lot of depth in terms of why the generation Gen Z is the way they are. You you can’t paint anyone with a broad brush. So they’re obviously not all the same, but they, you know, they experienced their economic downturn in 08 or 09 and watch what happened to their parents.

who maybe thought they had safe jobs. They saw the whole country shut down for COVID. They obviously grew up with phones in their hands for the most part. So their access to information and their view of the world is so much broader than mine was at that same age that I think their perspectives on working and being a part of a company are very different than my generation, Gen X, was when we were first coming out.

John Jantsch (02:35.064)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:54.828)

Yeah, and I think every, it’s interesting. I’ve read some society or societal studies on generations and a lot of it comes from what their parents experienced. That’s what they experienced as they were coming up. Same with, I was born in the sixties. mean, so my parents were post-World War II and it really has a lot of influence, but from a…

from a workplace standpoint, particularly, what are some of the stereotypes is the best word, that folks are saying, hey, I don’t get it because X.

Len Silverman (03:38.045)

Yeah, probably the one I hear the most is, they’re lazy. They don’t want to work. They ghost you. You you’ll not only set up an interview, but sometimes you’ll actually hire them and they don’t show up for the first day of work. So those are some of the common things that I hear. I also hear really quite a lot about. And first of all, I do want to preface this by saying, I’m not saying this. These are the things I’m hearing, but that they’re they’re kind of uppity that they will.

John Jantsch (04:03.192)

Yeah. Right.

Len Silverman (04:07.785)

they will sit in a meeting with senior executives and chime in like they have an equal seat at the table, which is an anathema to baby boomers and Gen Xers. We just frankly don’t get.

John Jantsch (04:18.552)

Yeah. Not going to turn this into a comedy routine, but I could. So who do you feel? mean, on the surface, you wrote this for maybe people like me that are hiring folks, But I think there’s kind of a broader audience for this, it?

Len Silverman (04:27.817)

Hahaha!

Len Silverman (04:42.557)

What I really, the people that I’m really trying to get to pay attention to this would be folks who are in a position where they are frequently hiring and need to understand that they are going to have to make some changes or adaptations in their company to work with this generation, which now is more than 20 % of the workforce. And obviously it’s only going to continue to grow because these

John Jantsch (05:06.67)

Mm.

Len Silverman (05:10.899)

these guys are becoming more of the age to work. So the old ways of doing things are not necessarily gonna work. And I’ll give you a couple for instance, when I started working, and this was probably the same for you, John, we had mentors and they maybe didn’t call themselves mentors. I had people who would grab my shoulder and say, Len, we don’t do this. You don’t do this in the office. If you’re in a meeting with my boss, you don’t talk. Those were things that I was told.

John Jantsch (05:33.134)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:38.606)

Yeah.

Len Silverman (05:41.203)

And in a lot of ways, I think that the folks that I’ve met with are almost a little afraid to have those kinds of conversations. But I will tell you that Gen Z craves mentorship. It has to be positioned the right way for them. They have a different way of speaking and being mentored than we did, but they still want that kind of tutelage. The main thing is they want opportunities. I found them to be extremely entrepreneurial.

John Jantsch (06:06.594)

Yeah.

Len Silverman (06:10.035)

And that’s whether they’re doing their own thing or within an organization. They’re basically doing what we call skill stacking. They just want to grow their own skill base, which means look for, you know, cross-functional opportunities for them and ways for them to grow their own personal skill, which hopefully they’ll continue to pay back to the company. But from their perspective, it also allows them to take those skills somewhere else. So that’s another thing is you got to be aware you’re.

interaction with a Gen Z employee might be shorter than it used to be with someone Gen X, Gen Y.

John Jantsch (06:43.085)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:48.494)

So if I’m a 24 year old looking for a new place to go work, would there be something in this book for me?

Len Silverman (06:58.847)

There would. First of all, we talk about it you’re going to be very familiar with this. I know that you and I and a lot of other people have talked about the customer journey for a long time and I’m a big believer in it. I know that there are people who have discussed the employee journey, but I hadn’t seen a whole lot where folks saw the interaction between a customer journey and an employee journey. To me, they’re kind of one in the same. And so,

John Jantsch (07:08.974)

Sure. Right.

John Jantsch (07:17.272)

Mm-hmm.

Len Silverman (07:27.847)

If I was a younger employee just starting out, I’d be looking at companies very differently. I would be looking at kind of the pre-application process, what kind of brand they’re positioning themselves with out in the marketplace. So if I get to know them, what are the things they’re going to make me like and trust them? I would be actively looking for companies that are talking about the things that are important to me. And I discuss those in the book.

John Jantsch (07:33.806)

Mm-hmm.

Len Silverman (07:57.225)

But I also give advice to the employer that some of the hoops you have to go through in today’s world when you submit an application to a company are just not going to work anymore. So you’ve got to make it transparent, quick. I’m not going to say easy, but at least it to be manageable for the applicant. So I think that to help Gen Z sort of understand and identify those companies that are clearly

John Jantsch (08:08.428)

Yeah, yeah.

Len Silverman (08:26.293)

trying to make a connection with them will make it a lot easier so they don’t do what I call crop dusting, which is going on and shooting out 40 or 50 resumes a day. Because that’s very disheartening when you do that. So they can spot things that I’m talking about in the book to identify those companies who are clearly making an outreach to them.

John Jantsch (08:38.124)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:47.79)

So, you know, there was a day when, you know, this is a prestigious company. This is a big company. You know, they pay well. mean, those were like, that was like the checklist, right? Now it might be paid a lot of flexibility for time off. They, they give to causes I believe in how much of that sort of balance of the brand is kind of just playing to who they’re trying to attract. mean, because the problem with brand and culture is it’s kind of hard to fake it.

you know, it usually comes out, you know, one way or another. So how much, you know, is, a company, you know, this, this idea of aligning their brand, you know, how much of that is, is intentional. How much of that is just, Hey, we’re already doing this stuff. We’re just not communicating it.

Len Silverman (09:35.445)

In my opinion, it’s very intentional. As matter of fact, I just made a LinkedIn post about five minutes before we jumped on here. And it talks about that kind of consistency that you can, you could talk about culture all day long, but at the end of the day, your culture will show itself through how you and your leaders represent your company on a daily basis. So from my perspective, for those companies that are serious about this, there’s pre-work that needs to be done. You know, you need a, you need a quick audit to make sure that your

John Jantsch (09:47.118)

Mm-hmm.

100%. Yeah.

Len Silverman (10:05.441)

of experience and your brand as a company are what you think that they are. Because otherwise you’re going to keep having these glancing blows where Gen Zers will try you out and they’re pretty quick to discover whether you’re a fit or not. And they’ll go find something else because they clearly have a work to live attitude versus a live to work attitude. So if it’s not you,

John Jantsch (10:19.309)

Mm-hmm.

Len Silverman (10:31.807)

they’ll go find some gig work until they’re able to find the next full-time job. So you really do need to look at your own internals and make sure that your company on a daily basis is what you think that it is, monitor and manage that, and then go out there looking for that new employee base. Your retention will be much better.

John Jantsch (10:36.237)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:53.41)

You know, I wonder how much generations, whatever all the letters we apply to them, millennials and Gen Xs, I wonder how much they could learn from that. Cause you know, was that, there was that kind of, they’re just lazy, you know, they don’t want to work hard, you know. And some of it was like, no, they just want to have a life. And you know, here I am working 80 hours a week, you know, thinking that that’s like the way.

And if they don’t want to do that, then like they’re wrong. So I’m, you know, I wonder how much the, um, you know, the new workplace, the modern workplace in the world could actually maybe gain from, uh, a different mindset.

Len Silverman (11:34.889)

You know, I remember clearly, I can’t remember if I talk about this story in the book or not, but I remember clearly one of the very first corporate jobs that I got. I’d been in the job maybe six months and my boss calls me in his office and he says, Len, I gotta tell you, I really appreciate your work ethic. And I had no idea what he was talking about. He said, you come in on time, when you go to lunch, you only take an hour for lunch. And he said, I gotta tell you, I’ve worked with a number of people your age and it’s very unusual.

Okay, and I’m Janette. So I don’t think what we’re talking about now is anything totally new. I think every older generation in a way kind of thinks the younger generation is a bunch of screw ups, which, you know, clearly they’re not. But what’s different today is I think we all talk more openly. I think that the ability to have these kinds of conversations are so much easier than they used to be. So now is a great time for employers to pick up on.

John Jantsch (12:06.711)

Yeah, right.

John Jantsch (12:11.426)

Yeah, every generation, right?

Len Silverman (12:35.623)

and realize, you know, again, this is a growing workforce. We have got to figure out how to make this work for everybody. And you mentioned work-life balance is going to be incredibly important for this generation. They’re going to look for, you know, what kind of community impact you’re having. So there are things that you could pay attention to and kind of put in place again, before you go out there full throatedly trying to hire these younger people.

John Jantsch (13:03.16)

You know, we’ve spent most of our time talking about employing the generation, but there’s a lot of them that could be customers too, right? And so would a similar kind of brand alignment, you know, apply to your marketing messaging?

Len Silverman (13:06.378)

Yeah.

Len Silverman (13:18.421)

Which is precisely, and I’m glad you brought that up, it’s precisely why I think that the employee journey and the customer journey are so closely related. Because early in that process, it doesn’t matter if you’re positioning your brand for employees or for customers, that voice should be the same. And so I do think that this has a huge impact. If you’re going after a Gen Z consumer base, the book clearly lays out what’s important to them.

John Jantsch (13:25.08)

Yeah. Yeah.

Len Silverman (13:47.303)

and can really help a company to kind of align not just their communication, but more importantly, what they’re doing every day with what Gen Z is looking.

John Jantsch (13:55.298)

Yeah, there’s certainly a growing trend in marketing circles of this idea of employee branding, where the idea that you’re a cool company to work for is a pretty good marketing message too.

Len Silverman (14:01.545)

Hmm?

Len Silverman (14:06.452)

Right.

I think it is. Yeah. I mean, we, want to be the cool kids and it’s, it’s good to work for a company that you could be proud of because as you know, I mean, you’ve got, you know, the marketing hourglass and the bottom of the hourglass is basically repeat and refer, which is retention and being an advocate for your company out in marketplace to find other employees. our end goal is really the same. And that’s to convert these employee customers into advocates for our, for our business.

John Jantsch (14:22.348)

Yes. Correct.

John Jantsch (14:40.312)

So I think a lot of companies, whether they wanted to or not, found that as a practical nature, we’re not going to find the people that we want if we don’t kind of realign our brand. What are some of the mistakes you see people that are actually trying to change? What has either been their perception or their reality? What are some mistakes in trying to kind of adapt and align with this new generation?

Len Silverman (15:06.345)

You know, it’s hard to say if it’s a mistake or not, because I think that the jury’s still out a little bit. But, you know, we’ve read in the press about DEI initiatives. And, you know, right down the street from me, we have Tractor Supply as an example, and they had initiated DEI as a department. And then they pulled back on that because they were getting pushback from their customer base. So were they doing that in order to grow sales, or were they doing that

John Jantsch (15:12.494)

Mm-hmm.

Len Silverman (15:35.547)

in order to attract this younger generation. I don’t know which it is, but again, it ultimately turned out to be a misalignment with their company culture. So I would say if you’re doing these kinds of things, if you are looking to use pronouns with all of your employees, just make sure that that absolutely aligns with the company you are. And you’re not simply doing that to try to placate

John Jantsch (15:46.401)

Right.

John Jantsch (15:55.246)

Thanks

Len Silverman (16:04.777)

Gen Z. Does that make sense? Those are the mistakes that I see. If you’re genuine, you’re fine.

John Jantsch (16:05.666)

Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent.

Well, and I think you go to really the root of all of this is be who you are is probably going to now, there some things that you can do to where I see people making mistakes is they have that alignment, but they just don’t communicate. You know, it’s like, well, of course we do that. That’s, know, that’s the right thing to do, you know, as opposed to, but then can you take that too far? And, you know, you see companies.

Len Silverman (16:27.977)

Right.

Len Silverman (16:32.732)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:39.534)

promoting their environmental consciousness. And it’s like, make styrofoam. So how far is too far?

Len Silverman (16:48.019)

But they’re aware of it.

Len Silverman (16:54.843)

You know, I think that is a very interesting point. And I think that is for each company and possibly its own board of directors and its customers and its employees to kind of decide for themselves. But you know, again, in marketing, we talk about content pillars. And I think for a company like we’re talking about, if I were them, I would come up with three or four areas that I would want to talk about, and then I would weight them. So

If environmental issues are important, but maybe they’re not the most important thing, I might spend 10 to 15 % of my time talking about that. And that would be internal conversations first to make sure that we do have that right mix that feels right.

John Jantsch (17:38.158)

How would you advise a company that wants to realign their brand, there’s also, it’s like, here’s our culture and we believe it and we’re gonna stay true to it. How does somebody like that attract, so they attract folks that want a job. How do they get that, how do they turn them into A players? They may be a little bit misaligned initially, but is there a way to then say, look,

Here’s how we do it here. Here’s why we do it that way. And some will fall off, but some will turn in day players.

Len Silverman (18:10.515)

You hit the nail on the head. We do it this way and this is why we do it this way. That’s the most important thing for this generation. They want to understand why. And if you’ve established a culture that I think we’re both talking about, then the whys are going to be there. And the other thing, I’ll go back to the mentorship thing again. You know, I talk about this in the book. I think it’s critical for these new employees.

You could set up a buddy, could be a peer mentor, it could be a leadership mentor, but someone who reinforces that message and helps that newer employee to shape how they’re presenting themselves to align with the company, most importantly, understanding why we’re asking to do that. And it could be, hey, I’ve been on your social media and I got to tell you that some of those things just don’t really align with what we’re doing. And let me tell you why, this is my customer.

and my customer doesn’t really like to see that on social media. okay. Well, that becomes pretty clear.

John Jantsch (19:09.442)

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let’s talk about abbreviations and punctuation. No, I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. We’re not going to go there. So, so Len, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by. Where can where would you invite people to connect with you? Find out more about your work, but then obviously more about the book Mesh.

Len Silverman (19:18.389)

It’s dangerous stuff to talk about.

Len Silverman (19:35.687)

It is very simple. The easiest place to go is Lensilverman.com.

John Jantsch (19:42.606)

Awesome. Well, great. I think, it’ll be interesting to see, you know, we’re talking about Gen Z now what’s the next generation and what’s going to be like their iteration, right? that’s what we’re calling them. We’re going back to a, okay. Okay. All right. Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to side by. Hopefully we’ll see you out there on the road someday soon.

Len Silverman (19:54.835)

Yeah, Gen Alpha. That’s what we’re calling him,

Len Silverman (20:07.093)

Thanks, John.

Why AI Isn’t Replacing You—It’s Freeing You

Why AI Isn’t Replacing You—It’s Freeing You written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Keith Lauver

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Keith Lauver, a serial entrepreneur, product launch expert, and founder of Atomic Elevator—an AI-powered marketing company behind Ella, a high-definition marketing platform. With six startups and over $34 million in product launches under his belt, Keith brings a sharp, practical lens to how AI can be used to transform marketing and business operations—especially for small business owners and agencies.

During our conversation, Keith broke down the real-world applications of AI marketing and how it’s not here to replace people—but to remove bottlenecks, automate repetitive tasks, and unlock creativity. By shifting the way we think about tools like ChatGPT and agent-based workflows, Keith challenges small businesses to stop treating AI like search and start viewing it as a team of collaborators. He also shares how his own company operates without a traditional org chart—thanks to the power of strategic marketing tools and automation.

Whether you’re leading a team, launching a new product, or running a solo consultancy, this episode offers a practical look at how AI and marketing automation can help you grow smarter, leaner, and more focused.

Key Takeaways:

AI is an amplifier, not a replacement. It removes low-value tasks so entrepreneurs can focus on strategy, creativity, and relationships.
Small businesses are underusing AI tools. Many still treat AI like a search engine instead of leveraging its full potential for automation and productivity.
High-definition marketing creates clarity. Tools like Ella reduce “fuzzy” marketing by integrating proven marketing frameworks and better data.
Agent-based AI is coming. The future involves task-specific agents collaborating in workflows—streamlining execution across teams.
Forget the org chart. Keith’s company operates around tasks, not job titles—powered by AI and fractional expertise.
Personalization needs data. AI in business thrives when it can access behavior, style, and preferences—delivering truly tailored content.
AI unlocks your superpower. By automating what you’re not great at, it helps you focus on the work that energizes you and drives business growth.

Chapters:

[00:09] Introducing Keith Lauver
[01:52] Understanding the Practical Uses of AI
[04:17] What are AI Agents?
[07:45] How Does AI Affect Organizational Structure
[11:46] AI Doesn’t Change Human Value
[16:22] Personalized Marketing
[17:37] Ella AI
[21:22] Privacy Concerns with AI

More About Keith Lauver:

Check out Keith Lauver’s Website
Connect with Keith Lauver on LinkedIn

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by

Want to elevate your marketing game? AdCritter pairs Connected TV ads with precise digital retargeting to drive real results. Discover how their full-funnel strategy can help your business grow smarter. Let them know Duct Tape Marketing sent you, and you’ll get a dollar-for-dollar match on your first campaign! Learn more at adcritter.com.

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00.923)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Keith Lover. He is a serial entrepreneur and marketing expert who has founded six companies, raised over $34 million for product launches and now leads Atomic Elevator. His team specializes in product launch support and created Ella, a pioneering tool for high-definition marketing.

He started his entrepreneurial journey at 14. He secured clients like Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and inspires others as a speaker and mentor. We were just talking about it. He lives in Red Lodge, Montana, active community in community service through Young Life. So Keith, welcome to the show.

Keith Lauver (00:44.526)

Thanks so much, John. Good beer.

John Jantsch (00:46.172)

So what did you do at 14?

Keith Lauver (00:48.026)

my gosh. So I had the opportunity to, build a software platform for an airport in Billings. was painting pipes in the summer and they found out I knew something about computers. And during the regular smoke break time, I started creating a database to keep track of the paper towels and other inventory got invited upstairs. That turned into an invitation to build the software.

John Jantsch (00:56.883)

John Jantsch (01:09.907)

Keith Lauver (01:14.862)

And apparently KPMG had offered him a bid for about $20,000. I said I’ll do it for two and they took it. So that was the very first commercial client I had.

John Jantsch (01:26.547)

Well, I think I started my first business when was 16. It was not nearly as glamorous. I was going door to door convincing people to let me seal their driveway. I paid my way through high school and college doing similar things.

Keith Lauver (01:32.723)

my gosh.

Keith Lauver (01:38.016)

That’s.

Keith Lauver (01:44.072)

I think the idea of asphalt going down and paint going up, we do what we have to do. I just caught a lucky break that day, right?

John Jantsch (01:47.347)

So we, we’re going to talk about, AI a lot today. I think, it’s a hot topic. It’s probably the hottest topic going right now. I, have, in fact, I’ve started a group I call practical AI for marketing. because I think it’s just a lot of, with any technology, there’s all this futuristic talk of what it can do.

or what it, you know, is going to do someday. And I really liked always bring it down to, okay, that’s great, but what should it do? So in terms of, of your conversations with smaller businesses, how do you help them see the practical uses of AI and not sort of the robots running the world, you know, future.

Keith Lauver (02:25.271)

Yeah

Keith Lauver (02:40.046)

You know, one of things that I like to do is separate the application side of things from the construction side of things. And I think there’s a lot of people that are confused about that, John. think, you know, I’m reminded of a workshop that was being done for business owners in Montana a couple of weeks ago, and they brought in a prompt engineer and machine learning expert for the day to teach them how to do stuff that most of them really didn’t care about and frankly didn’t understand.

John Jantsch (03:06.557)

Right?

Keith Lauver (03:08.738)

that that was what was going to be the topic. So don’t think people even know what this beast called AI is. So there’s people who are building tools and then there’s people who are actually using tools. And those two probably need to be separated before I could even answer the next part of your question.

John Jantsch (03:25.029)

Yeah. Well, first off, then let’s back up a little bit. What percentage of businesses, business owners, people working for businesses, do you think are actually using even a simple interface like chat GPT?

Keith Lauver (03:37.888)

I think every business owner I’ve talked to has at least experimented with and tried chat GPT. When we take forms on our website, we ask them how frequently are they using it? And I would say that probably a quarter of them aren’t using it more than once a week. And that’s surprising to me. They still haven’t found that thing. And if I might offer a hypothesis about why, I think we are used to something like Google where

John Jantsch (03:55.847)

Yeah, yeah.

Keith Lauver (04:06.978)

You type in a search and a computer gives an answer. And AI’s potential is so much different than that. But most people are sitting down and thinking about this as a search tool and maybe a little bit smarter search tool. And they’re just not sure what’s beyond that even at the application layer.

John Jantsch (04:25.757)

So one of the things that, I don’t know, I, you you talked about bringing in this, large language model expert to talk about things and like that just goes nowhere with the business owners. So I’m going to bring up agents, which, know, maybe we have to kind of break down a little bit, but that’s one of the areas where people are like the future’s coming. You’re going to have, you know, agents replacing all of your people. We don’t actually have agents yet. Not really.

because there’s a lot of things that I think are going to happen, over, mean, I think we’re going to have some simple task bots. but, but, but the one that people throw out, tell your agent to book me the best ticket on this flight, you know, blah, blah, blah. Well, they’ve got to have access to all the data, all the airline things. And those people aren’t going to share that information. Or if they do some big tech company, it’ll be the one that does the interface and we’ll just be a product of theirs like Facebook.

Keith Lauver (05:20.994)

Okay.

John Jantsch (05:23.973)

and not, not a user. talk, I just went and rambled all over the place there, but talk a little bit about, you know, the, the, where we are now with agents, what agents are, guess, where we are now and really what is going to be a hurdle to this large scale adoption.

Keith Lauver (05:41.516)

Yeah. So as I understand and use agents, they basically are bots, you will, programs that can perform a discrete task and do so in repetition and kind of string those tasks, perhaps one to another, to another. And instead of like right now, if you sit down and chat GPT and say, Hey,

John Jantsch (05:49.203)

you

Keith Lauver (06:02.926)

you know, can you give me input about a story or can you review this website and tell me the pros and the cons of it or whatever the query might be, an agent can actually do something that’s much more complex and a series of steps. So it might be, can you build me an entire website? Right? And step one is this and step two is this and step three, I think where agents are today,

John Jantsch (06:18.621)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Keith Lauver (06:27.538)

is still very much in the experimental world. I love the fact that as a company that’s created a platform, we now can begin to move our entire architecture into what they’re calling agentic. So we’re able to take what we were finding other ways of doing and we can now do it better and easier because most of the things that we need to have done are complex and require more than one step and agents will help us do that.

John Jantsch (06:40.883)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (06:53.757)

Yeah, no, there’ll be a lot of stringing these things together too, right? You complete this task and then go give your output to this agent who then has been trained to do X, right? I mean, is that kind of another way to look at it?

Keith Lauver (06:57.55)

for sure.

Keith Lauver (07:02.487)

Yeah.

I love that vision, John, that really interoperability of agents. It’s like, why not have the thing that’s really good at X talk to the other thing that’s really good at Y and talk to the other thing that’s really good at Z. In the field of marketing, of the analog metaphor, if you will, would be the branding person who just is the wizard in the marketing world, right? They’re able to just say, this is the emotional state that we’re going to evoke for people.

John Jantsch (07:12.179)

Right.

John Jantsch (07:31.123)

Mm-hmm.

Keith Lauver (07:34.254)

pontificate on that. And then you’ve got the designer who tries to interpret that. And then you’ve got the copywriter who actually puts words to it. And then you’ve got the HTML person who has to construct it. And then maybe you’ve got somebody that needs to be the messaging architect that’s thinking about it. And then the performance person, we get all these different things. Wouldn’t it be great if those could all be strung together?

John Jantsch (07:56.731)

Yeah. And I think that’s a, maybe that’s a little bit of the dilemma of how people, when they’re thinking about embracing AI in general is that, you know, one, one vision I’ve seen is, the org chart that has maybe those, those analog managers, if you will, is that what we’re to call people now? Analog managers. but that, but then each of those people will have three agents that help them do their function.

Keith Lauver (08:14.83)

I hope so.

John Jantsch (08:24.371)

and they’ve all been maybe specifically trained on a thing, but then I’ve also seen people say, no, we’re going to have, we’re going to have the data analysis agent. That’s going to go across department. you know, how do you, how do you see the org chart of the future?

Keith Lauver (08:39.266)

You know, I think, the org chart of the future is probably going to be as diverse as organizations of the future. think models, what’s beautiful about what’s happening in this world is the models can be completely novel. can create things that have never before been seen. An example is, you know, we have been building our go-to-market plans using our software itself. We haven’t needed really a marketing department. even haven’t had to do.

John Jantsch (08:40.305)

Peace.

John Jantsch (08:56.466)

Yes.

Keith Lauver (09:08.352)

advertising in a traditional way. Most of our team is fully fractional and we can all cooperate and actually perform at a much higher level for a lot less money. And I don’t even know what an org chart is. We had a potential investor asked us to build one and I’m like, we haven’t, we don’t even have one for our company. It’s just not the way we operate. We kind of collect around tasks and bring expertise to those tasks and then perform those tasks.

So it’s just a very different organizational model that we’ve chosen. And I think there’s a lot of freedom in how people are going to build the company.

John Jantsch (09:43.827)

But see, I hear an org chart in there. It’s just way different than anything we’ve been taught. So I think it’s still, because an org chart to me is not people doing jobs. An org chart is what functions need to be done. And so I think that’s kind of what you’re describing, but we’re all just used to this is our head of that and this is our VP of that. And I think that that whole, that’s what’s interesting about it. think what’s going on is it’s not just like,

Keith Lauver (09:48.878)

Yeah, yeah.

Keith Lauver (09:57.516)

Ooh, I love that. Different, yeah.

John Jantsch (10:13.405)

How do we augment what we’re already doing? It’s how do we rethink everything, right?

Keith Lauver (10:18.772)

I love the freedom. think the moment, when we accidentally discovered this idea that turned into this platform for marketing, call Ella, when this was not an intentional discovery, it was pure accident. And in that moment, every single neuron in my brain fired every pattern from that 14 year old kid who wrote the software for that airport and Billings to the guy who’d been a student of marketing for the last decade fired and said, wait a minute.

I can do this differently now and I can ask this question in this way and get a completely different perspective than the old model was go to the expert. If we invert and put all the experts into a model, it shifts and everything changes. And I’m addicted to that innovation. So I think it’s wonderful.

John Jantsch (11:07.633)

Yeah. Yeah. So, one of the certainly themes that is prevalent is that this technology is going to replace a lot of people. mean, every technology does, right? I mean, or at least changes, you know, what those people do. Where do you fall on kind of the, it’s going to revolutionize industries, replace a lot of people, augment, you know, lot of the value we can bring. I mean, where do you fall on that?

Keith Lauver (11:20.814)

you

John Jantsch (11:37.867)

continue.

Keith Lauver (11:39.342)

So yes, yes, and yes. I do think that AI is going to transform, to augment, to replace. But I don’t think that changes our sense of self. I don’t think that changes our value of fact. If anything, for me, what it’s done is created more freedom around that. I talked to so many people on our team. We’re avid minute by minute users of AI.

John Jantsch (11:41.391)

Yeah, OK.

John Jantsch (11:50.034)

Yeah.

Keith Lauver (12:08.974)

We’re more confident in what we can do and in the gifts that we’ve been created to bring to the world because we augment the things that maybe we’re not as good at. I’m a visionary, I’m not an integrator. So I see big ideas and when you ask me to actually turn that into a you know, a set of sequential steps, I just, my brain hurts. I don’t like that work and I don’t have to do that work anymore. So.

John Jantsch (12:13.939)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (12:35.795)

Yeah. Peace.

Keith Lauver (12:36.246)

I think it’s not replacing people, but it’s replacing some of the things that we as people have done. And what that does is gives us the freedom to go back to what is our zone of genius? What is our superpower? What is it that we love to do? And I don’t think AI will ever replace humanity. I think it’s just bringing us up to be the very best versions of ourselves.

John Jantsch (12:41.317)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:57.395)

Well, it’s interesting because I certainly, I’ve always, you know, from a marketing standpoint, we’ve, our monitor has always been strategy before tactics. Um, and I think that in a lot of ways that makes the strategic thinker who can also master AI, who also understands marketing operations. That’s the job of the future, isn’t it? As opposed to the agency that comes in and does the stuff.

Keith Lauver (13:22.06)

I think that’s right. I would say our focus has actually been trying to go in and provide even greater effectiveness and efficiency for the strategists. And so because of that, I see a world where AI can actually do a lot of the strategy when well-guided and augmented by humans through that. I would say for me, as I’ve contemplated kind of my own work shift in the last, say, year, most of my time is now relational.

And that can’t ever be replaced by AI. Most of my time is getting to understand people and their problems and then finding a way to bring that in. But I’m not spending time on strategies so much as I am building relationships that allow my tools to build that strategy. So I think that’s a higher level.

John Jantsch (14:12.413)

Yeah.

Well, there’s such a, even though it’s more one-to-one, there is such a brand aspect to that. There is such a trust aspect to that. And I think that those are the things that are really going to allow the, if there’s going to be winners and losers, I think people that get that, think are going to side on the win.

Keith Lauver (14:23.063)

Ooh, I love that. Yeah.

Keith Lauver (14:33.326)

You know what I love about what you said there too is just kind of reminds me of the benefit to AI in getting us out of ourselves that if we’re going to be able to establish trust, one of the ways that I do this today that I did in 12 months ago is I talk about the fact that I run everything I do through a blind spot and a bias detector. I run everything I do through the lens of our software.

that can look at 100 different marketing people’s perspectives. And that actually increases my trustworthiness, my credibility with somebody because I’m actually admitting my own limitations.

John Jantsch (15:05.811)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (15:16.339)

Yeah, yeah, that’s one of my favorite prompts is like, what should I be asking you? Or what am I not asking you? You know, that kind of thing, you know, or, or I sometimes have to say, stop agreeing with me. That’s a brilliant idea.

Keith Lauver (15:24.43)

Yeah.

Yes. I like to think that my AI is sometimes a little bit too puppy-like. You know, it just wants to wag its tail and say, yes, Keith, I love you. Will you rub my belly? It’s like, yeah. Exactly. It’s like, no, no, no. Or even when I ask AI to be to go do something and the end result, if I say, is this biased? And she says, yes. I’m like, well, why did you do that in that way in the first place? So.

John Jantsch (15:54.021)

Right. So, so, I have one more question, but I really do want, we haven’t, I want to spend some time on what you’re doing specifically with Ella because it relates to everything we’re talking about. But, one of the things that, anybody who says the five things that are coming this year, you know, personalization in marketing is, certainly a buzzword that’s going to be on that list all the time. is, is, and it seems AI can help that.

But I also don’t see a lot of people doing it yet. And is the real missing ingredient is it can’t personalize without access to data.

Keith Lauver (16:33.304)

think that’s a great insight. think I would challenge how much data we can give it access to. would say in general, I’ll give you an example. I love what there’s a tool called Crystal Nose has done, which is they’ve used AI to go, you know, essentially determine somebody’s personality. And that gives you a degree of personalization to present information in a particular style. So for example, anytime I do a sales follow-up,

I run it first through Crystal and I have Ella rewrite it to that person’s disc profile. And that gives me a level of personalization that’s not just this was the conversation we had, but this is who you are and how you probably prefer to receive information. So I think we’re getting closer to it.

John Jantsch (17:17.169)

Yeah. Yeah. And it might just be bullet points and short sentences as opposed to, you know, necessarily, hi, John. Exactly. Right. Right. So talk a little bit about Ella. If somebody came to you and said, what’s Ella?

Keith Lauver (17:26.321)

Yes. Exactly. These are the three things we talked about. Sign here.

Keith Lauver (17:38.86)

Yeah, so we describe Ella as a high definition marketing machine. And the reason that we’ve chosen to describe her that way is we have found as professional marketers that most marketing has historically been very fuzzy. The fuzziness has been caused by specializations and fragmentation, right? The fuzziness has been caused by shifts in tactics and expectations. And the fuzziness is the fact that at the end of the day,

Most marketing is really a hypothesis that needs to be tested out there anyway. So it’s social science, it’s behavioral science. And so what we’ve said is let’s try to provide more pixels to the picture. Let’s take frameworks and connect them. Let’s take pictures and define them in greater resolution. Let’s interconnect them so that when somebody says, I want to talk to John about duct tape marketing,

John Jantsch (18:10.515)

Yeah.

Keith Lauver (18:34.37)

they’re able to do so with just a high degree of precision. So Ella is a tool that enables better messaging, more discrete personas, and essentially better results because of this high definition process.

John Jantsch (18:49.907)

Yeah, boy, will say, you you used a fate, one of my favorite words, frameworks. Um, you know, one of the best things you can do if you’re trying to get some sort of output out of, uh, out of an AI tool is, is to say, use this framework, uh, that’s well-defined. think at least it gives it some guardrails to say, okay, you know, I’m not just going to write something that hopefully sounds good. You’re going to write something that.

Keith Lauver (19:04.216)

Yes.

John Jantsch (19:14.875)

maybe is using a proven framework. And so it’s going to be more effective right off the bat, whether or not the outputs, know, word for word, what you’re going to use, at least the structure will be there.

Keith Lauver (19:18.093)

Yeah.

Keith Lauver (19:25.538)

Yeah, I think frameworks, you know, I got drawn into the idea of frameworks because I was a computer guy who fell into the field of marketing, right? I’m used to here is a subroutine. If you’re going to tell a story, here’s seven blanks to fill in. Donald Miller, thank you for giving me the seven blanks to fill in. Like I need that kind of thing. And what has been true about all the frameworks, at least that I’ve experienced is while fantastic, they’ve always been discreet.

John Jantsch (19:32.541)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (19:44.381)

Yes, exactly.

Keith Lauver (19:55.008)

and probably more unitaskers. So they’re fantastic for one thing, but they are often missing another thing. And what, least in my mind has been the missing link to all of this is a unifying, almost marketing operating system that pulls all those frameworks together. And that’s the big aspiration for what we’re trying to build.

John Jantsch (19:59.675)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (20:16.817)

Now, are you staying very focused on the niche market of, and I thought I read this, of SaaS go to market, or are really putting yourself out there as any type of business or industry?

Keith Lauver (20:27.21)

yeah.

Keith Lauver (20:31.756)

Yeah, we started in the field of SaaS. Obviously, we are too a SaaS product and understand those frameworks very well. But as Ella has so quickly grown, people are contributing their own frameworks. We’ve got authors who are saying, use mine. Or we’ve got practitioners who say, have you heard about this amazing system called duct tape? And I’m like, yes. Yes, I have. And so we’re trying to integrate those. And so

John Jantsch (20:36.147)

Sure.

John Jantsch (20:47.251)

Sure. Right.

John Jantsch (20:52.999)

Hehehehehe

Keith Lauver (20:58.988)

The idea of Ella is she can help with B2B, B2C, really across industries. And she’s getting smarter every single time somebody uses her and at least volunteers their feedback to Ella.

John Jantsch (21:13.619)

So one question that comes up a lot of times and will probably be continued to be debated forever, but are there privacy concerns? You know, I’m sharing all of my personal company data. that something or, or, you know, as an agency, I’m sharing my clients data. Is that an issue with a model like, or a tool like Ella?

Keith Lauver (21:36.64)

It is an issue for all AI and Ella has decided to respond to that with kind of a very clear privacy policy, a very clear non-disclosure agreement that we enter into, and also very clear technical parameters where we have opted out underlying our tool is OpenAI, but we have basically disallowed OpenAI from using any prompt

for training purposes, any prompt for storage purposes. And so we can say with confidence that we are protecting the confidentiality of that information. And I think it is important that we do that.

John Jantsch (22:15.461)

Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s going to be, you know, a raging debate for some time. And I think we’ll end up having, won’t we end up having the same thing that happened to the search engines, that, you know, the, the, all the privacy and all the stuff that they’re, they’ve been doing and not telling anybody. We’ll, we’ll come back to in lawsuits probably.

Keith Lauver (22:35.31)

I am excited to see how intellectual property will continue to evolve around all of this. But in the meantime, we’re going to let people do great work and keep what they’re doing private.

John Jantsch (22:38.291)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:47.155)

Well, Keith, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you’d send folks to learn more about Atomic Elevator and your work?

Keith Lauver (22:56.652)

You bet, AtomicElevator.com and we’ve got free trials available. We’d love to sign up anybody. Let them take Elifer spin for a couple of weeks and see what kind of impact you can make for their clients.

John Jantsch (23:08.627)

Again, appreciate you taking a moment and maybe I’ll run into you one of these days next time I’m up in Montana.

Keith Lauver (23:15.713)

I hope that would be the case.

How Businesses Can Thrive in Uncertain Times

How Businesses Can Thrive in Uncertain Times written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Bill Canady

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Bill Canady, seasoned business leader and author of From Panic to Profit. Bill has spent over 30 years driving business growth, leading industrial and consumer companies, and refining strategies that help businesses navigate uncertainty. He founded the 80-20 Institute to help organizations maximize efficiency, optimize operations, and scale profitably.

During our conversation, Bill shared invaluable insights on how businesses can not only survive but thrive during uncertain times. We explored the power of the 80/20 principle, the importance of business optimization, and why leaders must embrace change to maintain business efficiency and maximize profits.

Bill’s insights provide a practical roadmap for scaling a business while mitigating risks. By focusing on efficiency, strategic growth, and adaptability, businesses can turn uncertainty into opportunity.

Key Takeaways:

Embrace the 80/20 Rule – Focus on the 20% of customers, products, and efforts that drive 80% of your revenue growth. This business strategy ensures efficiency and profitability.
Optimize Before You Scale – Scaling without first improving operational efficiency can amplify inefficiencies. Businesses must earn the right to grow by eliminating waste and focusing on what works.
Adapt to Market Changes – Interest rates, supply chain disruptions, and economic shifts create uncertainty. Business leadership requires agility and a proactive growth mindset to stay ahead.
Invest in High-Value Customers – Instead of chasing every lead, customer focus should be on retaining and nurturing the most profitable relationships.
Leverage AI and Technology – Tools like AI-driven insights and automation can help businesses enhance business efficiency, cut costs, and improve decision-making.
Lead with Transparency and Strategy – Employees and stakeholders look to CEO tips and leadership for direction. A clear profit strategy backed by data fosters trust and alignment.

Chapters:

[00:09] Introducing Bill Canady
[01:01] What is Panic Mode for a Business?
[03:54] The Stockdale Paradox
[06:22] The 80/20 Principle
[10:59] Small Customers that Need Much Attention
[12:58] Earning the Right to Grow
[15:11] Where to Start When Fixing Panic Mode
[16:44] How Will AI Affect Business?

More About Bill Canady:

Check out Bill Canady’s Website
Connect with Bill Canady on LinkedIn
Read From Panic to Profit – Uncover Value, Boost Revenue, and Grow Your Business with the 80/20 Principle by Bill Canady’

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00.962)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Bill Kennedy. He is a seasoned global business executive with 30 plus years of leadership in industrial and consumer markets as chairman of OTC Industrial Technologies and CEO of Arrowhead Engineering Products. He has driven significant revenue and profit growth.

He’s passionate about business strategy and founded the 80-20 Institute to help companies scale profitably. We’re going to talk about his latest book called From Panic to Profit. Uncover value, boost revenue, and grow your business with the 80-20 principles. So Bill, welcome to the show.

Bill Canady (00:44.578)

Hey, it’s great to be here, John, and you’re a fantastic hype guy, so I should hire you.

John Jantsch (00:48.238)

I’m just reading what you gave me. So, I like to sometimes start with words that are in the title of a book. So, what does panic mode generally look like for a business?

Bill Canady (00:52.526)

You did perfect.

Bill Canady (01:05.378)

Yeah, you know, that’s a really interesting question. And if you think of the scale from your house is on fire and your boat is sinking to, maybe you’re just not making enough money, right? But a lot of times it’s situational and companies are looking out and they cannot figure it out. And in today’s world, what that means is interest rates have gone up, can’t cover your debt, cash is not coming in the patient needs.

John Jantsch (01:30.274)

You know, probably wasn’t going to go here first, but I think I will now since we talked about, I’m talking to a lot of business owners that in 2025, even if business seems okay, are, are feeling a little panic of uncertainty. like change is happening faster than anyone can keep up with it. And of course, you know, we could unpack the whole political, scene, you know, that is causing a lot of disruption as well. So is, is, is.

Can Panic Mode actually be, I just don’t know?

Bill Canady (02:02.945)

I think for most of it, it really is that, you know, being a CEO or an owner or founder, you know, I’ve heard other people use this site. This is nothing original for you. It’s like staring in the abyss, but having someone throw rocks out of it that you can’t see them coming and chewing glass from time to time. So when you’re in this chair, no decisions that you get to make are the easy ones. All the fun stuff, like where we’re going to dinner and how big a bonus to give, someone else makes those, right?

John Jantsch (02:17.58)

Yeah.

Bill Canady (02:30.975)

It’s the, I’m not sure what to do next. That’s what arrives here. And today, maybe it’s always been this way. I don’t know, but it moves so fast, right? Whether it’s a tariff that’s in or out, whether it’s a interest rate that’s going up or down, you think you’re going left, you really, maybe you’re going right. Perhaps you’re not even sure. So it’s the lack of control that causes us staying awake.

John Jantsch (02:39.736)

Yeah, right.

John Jantsch (02:54.082)

You know, know a lot of business owners, leaders of organizations feel that part of their job is to exude the posture and the, you know, everything’s going to be just fine, you know, for the team. But when you’re in panic mode, how do you do that?

Bill Canady (03:08.587)

You know, it’s an interesting piece. So I kind of go the opposite. Not like I don’t know what I’m doing, but more about the unvarnished truth. This is where we are. It’s what we’re facing. However, we have a plan to deal with this. And our plan deals with understanding where we’re going, because our destination hasn’t changed. But you know, like use a sailing metaphor. Sometimes the wind blows from the left. Sometimes it’s from the right. We have to be able to deal with that.

And that’s really what the book is about. It’s a, do you actually get through it? What’s the simple, basic stuff that you need to do? And most of your money, most of all the good stuff comes from just a few pieces of that. So having a destination, being able to articulate, that’s what people want.

John Jantsch (03:54.232)

So this might be a good time to visit one of the principles in the book. You talk about the Stockdale paradox. I think that’s a little bit of what you described there. A lot of listeners may have encountered that. The first time I’ve heard that term was maybe in Jim Collins’ work. I don’t know if he created it, but you want to define that based on what we just talked about.

Bill Canady (04:17.195)

Yeah, absolutely. So your own point there. So Jim Collins was interviewing a gentleman by the name of Admiral James Stockdale, or Jim Stockdale, and he had been a prisoner of war. And Jim, and he was the highest ranking one, and he’d got a lot of men through it, where he did a fantastic job. And he asked him, so who didn’t make it? And Stockdale goes, well, that’s easy. It was the optimist, right? And what he meant by that was,

John Jantsch (04:44.622)

Yeah

Bill Canady (04:47.285)

You have to have a sense of unvarnished truths. This is what’s gonna be hard, but you have to believe you’re gonna get through it. And when you set false expectations or really unknown expectations, we’re gonna be here on Friday, we’re gonna be here by Easter, whatever it is, you don’t really know. So you’re better off to share that, but give people hope, the confidence that you are gonna get in through. And that was what the Sockdale Paradox was all about is it’s gonna be hard, but we’re gonna make it.

John Jantsch (05:17.554)

There is another end to that of course is the pessimist too, right? Who is just, never going to make, you know, it is kind like you just have to balance that optimist pessimist, right?

Bill Canady (05:25.709)

You do, you do. And some of us, you know, we like to think we’re realist and all that. you know, it’s funny, I see this in so much. You see it in today’s climate. It’s like when you’re a CEO, you need a goal you’re going for, whatever that goal is. So it’s a destination. You need a strategy to get it there. Your highest chance of success is having your team come in, buy into that strategy. Even if it’s just an okay strategy, it’s perfectly fine for it to be that way.

But if you’re all pulling on the same ore, rowing in the same direction, you’ll get there. You can have a fantastic strategy, a wonderful strategy. No one buys in, you’re not going anywhere. So this is where the negative person kind of falls apart a little bit. You’re trying to get everyone together, but you have this, and a lot of times they think they’re doing you a favor, like a voice of reason. That’s good early, because we need to challenge and pressure test and be little battle tested, if you will.

Some point you got to put all your hands in the middle and stack hands and go after it. If you can’t get that person on board, this is probably not the PlayStation B.

John Jantsch (06:28.526)

Yeah, well, again, going back to, I guess in this case, the subtitle of the book, you spent a lot of time talking about the 80-20 principle, the Pareto principle. You know, it almost sounds cliche because every business book, not every business, a lot of business books, a lot of business blogs, you know, people talk about that principle. But why do you think that it has become so universally accepted?

Bill Canady (06:54.379)

Honestly, I think it’s a couple of things. One, it’s really kind of a universal law, right? It turns out most of the good stuff comes from a very few pieces. And we use 80-20, the Alfredo Pareto figured that out, looking at pea pods and farming and all sorts of things. I use it because I tend to wear a blue shirt every day, even though my closet is full of red shirts and pink shirts, my wife has bought me. So we tend to do the same thing over and over and it tends to be where we get it. What happens is,

John Jantsch (06:58.69)

Yeah.

Bill Canady (07:23.805)

is that we get distracted by other things. Now the reason 80-20 is so attractive is it’s quantitative. It gives you the sense you can actually figure it out. It’s not just the black art. But as Eisenhower said, plans are useless. It’s the art of planning that’s critical here. Same thing with the data. You get that data. It is just factual. It just is, right? You can argue with it. You can say you’re different. It just is the data.

You have to decide what you’re gonna go do with it and you recognize everybody you’re involved with gets a vote too.

John Jantsch (07:58.222)

Yeah, and one of the pieces that you mentioned here, but I’m going to allow you to mention it more directly, is that if the agreement is, yes, 80 % of our profits or whatever come from 20 % of our customers or 20 % of our efforts, you kind of have to define what that 20, which 20%, right?

Bill Canady (08:18.807)

That’s right, because it won’t tell you what your strategy will be. It will tell you where you’re making money and even more importantly sometimes tell you where you’re losing money. It’s funny, you may think, well, I gotta go get more out of others. Sometimes if you just stop losing money, it turns out to be pretty powerful, right? So looking at that data and so there’s no surprise. So I always use an example. We talk about fair but not equal, right?

The example I use is people with their spouse and their sibling. You think about what you give to your spouse on their birthday versus what you might do on your sibling. My sister, I send her a text, right? And sometimes I’m late. My wife, do I take out to eat? I buy nice things. Why do I do that? Because my life is surrounded by my wife and my children and things. If I don’t take care of her, if I don’t look after her in a way that she’s got options, she can go somewhere else.

Same way with our customers. If you identify your best customers, the data will tell you that. And you know they’re your best because they buy a lot and they pay their bills. Go do more with them. They already value because they’re in. The one that you’re buying very low is buying very low. You’re probably their B vendor, right? They’re getting it from somewhere else. So identify with the data, then figure out how to take care of them in a way that they care.

John Jantsch (09:38.286)

Could you also bring that say to operations or even to how a CEO might use their time? You know, we all keep really busy because the clock says we’re supposed to be there from X to X. When in fact, know years of doing this myself that I would say 10, 15 % of my actual efforts deliver all the money. So maybe I had to just go fishing.

Bill Canady (10:03.029)

You know, there’s a lot of truth in that. see people who are, who are really amazingly efficient and do a lot of fishing too. I, I’m not that good, right? I, I, I, I think I’m still wasting a good portion of my time, but, but I, try, I try to get better at it. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s identifying those pieces surrounding yourself into it and, and, and getting after it is so hard though. And you know, when you start out, if you’re an entrepreneur, what’s the first thing you do, right? You’ll take any order. You just need to get started.

As time goes by, there’s only one of you, we’ll just make it a sole opener, and there’s only so many hours in a day. At some point you go, I’m maxed out, right? I don’t have anything left in the tank, I don’t have any time, I don’t have the resources. You have to start, you then have to start making decisions, right? You have to start those folks and you have to start saying no. And it’s important to say no to the right area. What typically gets our time is the squeaky wheel.

John Jantsch (10:40.59)

Mm-hmm.

Bill Canady (10:58.657)

And so if you have a small customer, they can wear you out, you’re doing all these things. You look at results at the end of the year, it was de minimis. That big customer, may not, they may be self-sufficient. They’re clearly happy because they’re a big customer. Go get more of that. Go spend that time around. Then you can go fishing all you want.

John Jantsch (11:16.398)

So you just revealed, I haven’t named this universal law yet, but one of my universal laws is that there’s this inverse relationship between how much somebody pays you and how much attention they need.

Bill Canady (11:29.459)

Absolutely. You know, there’s something about it, right? We all have the story, you know, of that tiny customer. So Motel 6, you remember that? We’ll leave the light on you, Tom Modep. So Motel 6, when I was in grad school, we did a study on it, or it was a case study that we read. And, you know, they ran that whole hotel with one person.

There was only ever one person, which by the way, if you ever stayed in it, you believed it. it was a wonderful hotel and all that, but they were so efficient. So we’re doing the case study and then they said, how do you think they did it and what they did? So if you came into a Motel 6, there was a counter there, a person behind it, that was the person running everything. Behind them was the laundry, right? They could just turn right around. It wasn’t a pretty wall, it was laundry machines.

John Jantsch (11:59.042)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:19.598)

Hmm.

Bill Canady (12:22.433)

This was back in the days when I was there, when he had VCRs and they would at eight o’clock, they’d put the VCR, the video in, right? And things like that. And so the biggest issue they had with their employees and they would fire them for this is an employee would get a call from a room, say room 10 and that person would be having a problem and whatever the problem is, right? The employee would leave and go check on it. Now, what would happen is during that time they’re going to solve this one issue,

They’d have 10 people come in, try it, no one’s at the front desk. Phone or ring? No one can answer the phone. So they had to put in hard and fast rules that you cannot get distracted by trivial things. And so it’s a really stark example of that, but they ran a whole hotel with one person. And I don’t remember now what was it they were charging, probably 30, 40 bucks, but they made money at it because they were efficient.

John Jantsch (12:54.947)

Yes.

John Jantsch (13:17.698)

So there’s a line in the book.

somewhere, but I wrote this down that you talk about businesses needing to earn the right to grow before they can scale. And I think that’s fairly nuanced. So I’d love it if you’d kind of unpack what you mean there.

Bill Canady (13:35.917)

It is.

Bill Canady (13:40.056)

So my favorite line with that is a baby does not make a bad marriage better, right? So what we mean by that is it’s interesting. You can be really good at getting customers, but if you can’t satisfy them, what you wind up with is a whole bunch of short-term unhappy people. When you come into an operation and you’re looking at it and there’s problems, it’s generally not just a sales problem. There’s operational problems.

John Jantsch (14:07.499)

Mm-hmm.

Bill Canady (14:07.533)

There’s inventory problems. There’s supplier problems. You need to correct a lot of those as you’re going so you can actually earn that right to go get the business because you know, a customer, don’t care what our problems are. They just want what they want, just like anyone else and as they should, right? So if you can’t ship on time, if you’re a problem, if you have quality defects, before you go get more people to see how bad you do, perhaps you want to go back in your factory and clean it up a little bit.

and do some tech time studies and look at your sourcing and on and on because there’s very few of us that have products you can’t get anywhere else, right? Most of us have something that’s easily attainable, no matter what our differences are. Make sure you start with getting the machine running well, get the engine in the car capable of getting where you need to be while you’re out getting those customers. It’ll make a big difference for

John Jantsch (14:57.954)

Yeah, that, I’m not sure where I heard this, it reminds me of the line, we’re losing money on every sale, but we’re making it up on volume, right?

Bill Canady (15:05.645)

in volume. That was the old spark plug things. We’re going to sell spark plugs for $1. We buy them for $2, but we’re going to make it up in volume. We used to say that on it. I started out as a sales guy. I love them, but I always felt like it gave me a license to make fun of them. There was never, just, man, if operations can make this thing and I can only sell it for $1, that two bucks needs to be their problem. When you own the business or you’re running the business, you have to look at the whole P &L.

John Jantsch (15:12.43)

you

Okay, yeah.

John Jantsch (15:20.97)

Hehehehe

Bill Canady (15:34.015)

and you got to figure it all out. Just because you can get it out on time doesn’t mean you make that money at it, right? It takes a lot of effort.

John Jantsch (15:38.254)

Yeah. So if I was a business owner, I had a variety of issues that I’d identified that had me in panic mode. And I said, Bill, come on down and take a look at our company, fix us. Where do you generally start?

Bill Canady (15:54.902)

You know, it’s the most amazing thing. So I get everyone together. I get them in a conference room. And the first thing I ask them is, what is our goal? What does good look like? And not some, we’re going to be better human beings and treat people with dignity. That’s all important too. But where are we going? What’s the destination? I have yet to have the same answer out of two people. You go around that table and operations will say something operations like, we got to be on time.

John Jantsch (16:17.902)

Hmm.

Bill Canady (16:23.467)

The majority of times, the goal is set by whoever owns it. In private equity, typically they want to get at least three times whatever dollar of equity they put in, it’s called Moit, multiple loan invested cash. A private company is whatever the values of the owners are. Sometimes it’s parochial, take care of my employees in my town. Almost always it’s the dividend as well. That’s how they take care of their family and themselves, what they live off of. That’s really very important. In a public company,

John Jantsch (16:47.438)

Yeah.

Bill Canady (16:50.303)

It can be all sorts of things. That’s why it’s so hard to run a public company. At the beginning of a quarter, it’s one thing. At the end, you need that penny to make your earnings per share. Start with that. If you start with what the value is, what that goal is, your job as a CEO is then to figure out, make that goal, and you and your team figure out the strategy of how to get there. Most people never do that.

John Jantsch (17:16.716)

believe that we’re going through, you I’ve been doing this 30 years. know you said you’d been doing this, this work for 30 years. So we’ve seen some, the world is ending moments and know, ups and downs and cycles and whatnot. I feel like, and here, this is maybe a record. I’m 17 minutes into the show. I’m just now mentioning AI, but I think, I feel like what’s going on with AI and how that’s going to change business is really,

We’ll get through it. There’ll be new industries, there’ll be new jobs, but I feel like we’re in a time where people have to decide, do I go this way or that way with my business? Standing still is not an option. How do you feel like that’s going to shake out? This is just a guess, but what’s your view on how that’s going to shake out the next two, three years maybe?

Bill Canady (18:05.293)

I remember in the 80s, late 80s, I didn’t have a cell phone and never heard of computer. And then I get a cell phone and my first cell phone was analog, right? And they were coming out with digital. I’m like, I don’t know if I want to switch, right? Same thing with computers, right? If you’re old like I am, you’ve gone through all this. AI is not only coming, it’s here, right? It is absolutely going to have an effect on us and already in our businesses.

John Jantsch (18:26.488)

Yeah, yeah, right.

Bill Canady (18:32.173)

it is making an impact. Not in maybe some of the really meaningful ways, but I think I saw the other day on, you know, we’ve got a terrible war going on around the world. I think I saw where they’re trying to fight the war with robots. Now, I don’t know if you saw that in there. So, I mean, look, we are definitely in the future now. AI, just like we thought computers would get rid of everyone and cell phones all of a sudden would kill all these. It changes things, but it means we can do more. And you, as a person,

If you want to do it, maybe you got to get new skills. Sometimes that’s the case with it, but you can continue to grow and go on and on and on. So whether you embrace it or not, doesn’t matter. It’s happening. It’s happening around us every day. Everybody I know now either has, if you’ve got Microsoft co-pilots in it, this is a very simple example. If you’re my daughter, means I’m paying for her subscription to chat GPT, right? So everyone’s got it and they’re using it to just even write simple documents now, right? We’re doing faster in our…

John Jantsch (19:23.214)

you

Bill Canady (19:30.005)

our turnaround time is, it will allow more throughput for us. It will cost us some jobs for sure, but we’ll also create a whole new industry we haven’t even thought about. So embrace it, whatever level you’re comfortable with. This rocket’s leaving the platform here.

John Jantsch (19:41.699)

Yes.

John Jantsch (19:45.836)

Yeah. Yeah. No, I’ve, I’ve said that at least for the last couple of years that, the only risky move right now is to just try to stay put and hope it goes away. Sure. That’s right.

Bill Canady (19:55.501)

It’s never worked even without AI, you know, there was not going anywhere as making the decision. You’re basically punching out. So you’re going to go backwards or forwards. My thought is go with it. The other thing I would add to it is, you know, for most of us, I mean, there’s some big fancy companies out there that do all this. Most of us are at best fast followers, right? I’m just really starting to embrace it and use it. I sat on a university board. We have students from all over the world.

John Jantsch (20:18.318)

Mm-hmm.

Bill Canady (20:25.357)

Now when you call our number, they actually interact with AI because they can do over a hundred different languages, right? And can you imagine having a hundred different people available at any time and they’ll send it all out? You still need people, but it’s really enabling a lot of different growth opportunities.

John Jantsch (20:32.078)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (20:37.368)

Alright. Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:43.512)

Well, I was going to say opportunity is really the word because a lot of people fear change, but change always brings opportunity. And that’s really where I think we are.

Bill Canady (20:52.747)

Gotta be agile, gotta be flagged. It hurts though, right? I mean, Jesus, what else? I had someone like today, I don’t know if you experienced this, but you can get ahold of me on a cell phone, text, email, Teams. I’ve got a new thing they call Notion they’re sending me things on. So I’ve got all this stuff and I’m like, can’t they just like, know, can’t they just pick one? Well, they’re never gonna pick one. That problem’s a build problem, not anyone else. I’m the one that has to change.

John Jantsch (20:55.894)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:18.498)

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Bill, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. there anywhere you’d like to invite people to connect with you and find out more about from panic to profit?

Bill Canady (21:29.441)

Yeah, so first I can just go right to my website. It’s my name, BillCanady.com. You can see it right here on the screen. I encourage everyone to come there. You can look at the book, look at my other stuff. Happy to help in any way possible.

John Jantsch (21:40.78)

Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Bill Canady (21:45.943)

Sounds good, John. Thank you so much for having me. This was fantastic.

John Jantsch (21:49.016)

Awesome.

How to Outrank Big Competitors in Search

How to Outrank Big Competitors in Search written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Sam Dunning

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Sam Dunning, founder of Breaking B2B, an SEO firm specializing in SEO for revenue—not vanity metrics. Sam shares his insights on how small businesses can compete with industry giants in Google rankings by focusing on B2B SEO strategies that drive organic traffic and real conversions.

We discuss the dangers of falling into the “traffic trap”, where businesses chase high-volume keywords that don’t convert, and instead explore long-tail SEO tactics, strategic keyword research, and the role of AI in SEO. Sam also shares practical techniques for competitor SEO analysis, leveraging on-page and off-page SEO, and adapting to Google search updates to maintain visibility.

If you’re tired of seeing competitors outrank you in search, this episode is packed with actionable strategies to help your business dominate Google rankings and drive revenue.

Key Takeaways:

Avoid the Traffic Trap: Prioritize keywords that drive inbound leads over vanity metrics. Focus on search engine optimization that brings paying customers, not just clicks.
Use Long-Tail SEO to Compete: Instead of targeting high-competition terms, optimize for landing pages SEO with niche-specific keywords that align with customer intent.
Maximize EEAT for Authority: Build trust and credibility through technical SEO, backlinks, and authoritative content that aligns with Google’s EEAT framework.
Adapt to AI and Google Search Changes: Stay ahead of Google AI overviews and algorithm updates by creating high-value, user-focused content.
Leverage Local SEO & Competitive Analysis: For service businesses, local SEO is critical. Optimize Google Business Profile, target location-based keywords, and analyze competitors’ weaknesses to rank higher.
Invest in SEO Strategy, Not Shortcuts: SEO is a long-term game. Avoid SEO mistakes like low-quality backlinks and keyword stuffing. Instead, build a sustainable SEO content strategy that drives consistent business growth.

Chapters:

[00:09] Introducing Sam Dunning
[00:31] Approach to SEO Strategy
[03:42] SEO Isn’t for Every Business
[06:21] SEO is a Long-term Game
[08:53] Your Marketing Niche
[13:00] Google Search vs AI Search
[15:24] SEO and Local Search
[18:46] Where to Start with SEO

More About Sam Dunning:

Check out Sam Dunning’s Website
Connect with Sam Dunning on LinkedIn

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00.98)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Sam Dunning. He is the founder at Breaking B2B, an SEO firm and the host of podcast by the same name, Breaking B2B. So Sam, welcome to the show.

Sam Dunning (00:20.738)

Hey John, thanks for having me on man. Looking forward to the chat.

John Jantsch (00:23.822)

So I know that one of your promises, taglines, messages, whatever we want to call it, SEO for revenue, not vanity. So let’s start there. How do you define that distinction and how do you use that to sort of differentiate yourself from other SEO firms?

Sam Dunning (00:42.742)

Yeah, great place to start. So in short, it’s after going through the pain myself. It’s so before I got into SEO as a profession or ran my own consultancy or agency, kind of working with past agencies, teams, contractors, and also potential clients, prospects, and customers that come to us. So much of the time get frustrated as they’ve either tried to do SEO themselves.

hired contractors, hired teams or whoever it may be, but have focused on the wrong metrics or wrong outcomes. So they’ve fallen into what I call John the traffic trap, which is even more important in the world of AI as AI search, LLMs take over slowly beat at Google’s market share. They’ve fallen into something called the traffic trap. What does the traffic trap means? Well, it means they go for informational based keywords on Google search.

John Jantsch (01:38.48)

businesses.

Sam Dunning (01:39.734)

So think of things like simple searches, like what is a KPI, how to build a website, what is a CRM, stuff that’s easily answerable nowadays with things like AI overviews in Google, which show up as really high juicy traffic terms, but are not likely to result in conversions, AKA inbound leads, demo requests, booked calls, or whatever that main call to action your B2B company wants.

John Jantsch (01:50.49)

Yep.

Sam Dunning (02:07.092)

So they fall into that trap thinking we need to get traffic at all costs, but it’s not going to result in, or it’s very unlikely to result in a book called demo or conversion. Now I thought, well, that’s a waste of time, especially running, running a business myself. And I’m sure you’re the same John, like most marketing that we put, whether it’s our own resource or agencies or contractors want to result in actual kind of qualified leads or revenue. So we flipped that on its head. thought, how can we do the opposite of that?

and focus on what is a dream client actually searching for when they need our offer, when they have this very specific problem we solve or they’re comparing alternatives and how can we show up and start driving qualified inbound traffic for those terms.

John Jantsch (02:50.0)

Yeah, and I think one of the things, know, there are a lot of people that have enjoyed what looked like a lot of good organic traffic that are kind of freaking out because all of those information searches are going away or Google’s like hoarding them, right? And so a lot of people have seen real drops in traffic and they’re freaking out, right? But what you’re saying is that was garbage traffic anyway, wasn’t

Sam Dunning (03:03.566)

Mm.

Sam Dunning (03:10.978)

Yeah, now, now don’t get me wrong, top of funnel or informational based SEO isn’t completely dead. But if you’re doing a very light version of it, stuff that can be simply answered by an AI or LLM, then that probably is a waste of your time. And those prospects that are searching for that kind of stuff, like very simple what is or very simple how to terms are probably just going to land on your page, get the info and bounce off.

John Jantsch (03:35.93)

Yeah, yeah, I do. I do it dozens of times a day myself, right? You because I just want to figure out like, how do I make that thing work in this tool that I’m using? And I know I could find somebody who’s written about it, but I can’t even tell you what their website was or what it was about. So SEO really, with a lot of small business clients, is so misunderstood that it gets a really bad rap, you know, because a lot of people hire SEO people, they don’t know what they’re doing.

Sam Dunning (03:51.522)

Yeah, yeah, that’s it.

John Jantsch (04:04.804)

they’re getting some reports once a month that seem to say they’re ranking for something and ultimately they get really frustrated. And, so, you know, what is it that you think, the, the, the, true, like value-based, let’s put it that way. Cause there are a lot of scammers out there. The true sort of value-based SEO firm is, is going to be telling their clients today. that is kind of different.

different than smoke and mirrors that I think a lot of SEO folks have used to describe what they’re doing.

Sam Dunning (04:37.238)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I’d say one of the first things is that SEO is not for every business. And what do I mean by that? Well, I mean, first and foremost, you have to be in a sector that actually has demand to capture. So you have to be in a known category and have folks, AKA your dream clients or prospects actively searching for your offer. Because if you’re trying to create some kind of new tool, new service, new offer, Google is, SEO is always best as a demand capture channel.

John Jantsch (04:43.216)

Hmm.

Sam Dunning (05:05.036)

So you need prospects in market searching for your offer. That’s the first thing. The second thing is you actually have to have resource to make it worthwhile. Whether that is your own cash, like you mentioned, they’re hiring a contractor agency, whoever it may be, that you can invest to actually give it a good amount of time to see success, or you need the resource in-house. Marketers that actually know what makes a solid SEO campaign.

know how to actually build a revenue driving SEO program, whether that is creating, doing solid keyword research around what your dream clients search or when they need the offer, building content that matches that intent that resonates with dream clients and is also following SEO best practices than the other elements of SEO, be it link building, technical SEO, et cetera. And you have to have the longevity to make it worthwhile. And you can, don’t get me wrong, you can see results with SEO done right as quick as 90 days, but

John Jantsch (05:56.613)

Yes.

Sam Dunning (06:03.762)

If you’re looking at it as a quick hit and you’re thinking, yeah, I’ll do this for a month. Then I might switch and do paid ads. Then I might do some social ads. Then I might try some outbound sales. Then I might do some review sites. Then it is a waste of your time. Do another channel that you can give a chance or stick to paid media.

John Jantsch (06:20.398)

Yeah. So what do you tell a client when, mean, because you, just told me something a lot of clients don’t want to hear, right? It’s like, no, I, you know, I, see my top three competitors are, know, on top of Google. How come I’m not? so, you know, how do you kind of set the expectation for that fact that it’s a long-term game? Because let’s face it, there have been SEO folks that I sound like I’m really negative SEO, but I’ve just seen too many small businesses get kind of burned by just not understanding it. And so not knowing what they’re even buying,

Sam Dunning (06:46.53)

Yeah, I get it.

John Jantsch (06:49.902)

So because a lot of SEO firms hide behind that, it’s a long-term game, it’s a long-term game, which just means you’re never gonna get results.

Sam Dunning (06:57.516)

Yeah, it’s that classic response, right? Like the client says, or the potential customer says, how long does SEO take agency says, six to 12 months, sign our 12 month retainer and we’ll be good. So what you said is correct in the sense that let’s face it. Most of us, whether we’re a B2B service company, tech company, software company, we have giant competitors, right? We’ve got the top three, the top four, the top five that always come up in sales conversations to an annoying level.

John Jantsch (07:06.298)

Right.

Sam Dunning (07:25.57)

And they’re probably, if we’ve not done SEO ranking above us for some of those core terms that we want to start driving leads for. Now, usually for those juicy terms, there’s quite often competitors owning those. So let me give you a tangible example. If let’s pretend we sold proposal software as a tool. We might want to own terms like best proposal software or best proposal tools, et cetera.

But those are gonna be extremely competitive. You’ve got massive software companies like Proposify, Quilla, PandaDoc, well-funded companies that have a ton of cash to spend on marketing and SEO. Now, how can we beat these companies? Because we’re probably not gonna get ranked for that keyword for years, realistically. Well, that’s when you need to do something called long tail SEO. And you need to, instead of thinking like we’re gonna rank for best proposal software in this instance, we might go for things like, we might pick niches that…

that are maybe underserved or that we’ve historically sold well into. So you might think, all right, short term, like the next three months or so, we’re gonna go for like proposal software for FinTech teams or for sales teams or for HR teams, or we’re gonna target competitors. Like we’re gonna go for Proposify alternatives or GetAccept alternatives, all that kind of stuff. there’s always quick wins you can grab with SEO, but it’s naturally knowing first and foremost, what niches you wanna target.

John Jantsch (08:28.464)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (08:43.14)

you

Sam Dunning (08:44.972)

what your prospects might be searching for and realizing that those really super competitive terms are going to be owned by the giants and that we have to chip away at the stuff they’re under serving.

John Jantsch (08:53.936)

Yeah. And I love that idea. You know, I have people come to me all the time and they’re starting a business and they’re like, should I choose a niche? And I’m like, well, my take is, mean, if you have a real reason, like you’re an expert in that and you’ve worked in it all your life. Otherwise, I think what happens is a lot of people choose niches they think are good. And, but, you know, then they’re like six months later having to start their business over again. but I’m always telling people you don’t have to choose a niche, but you should niche your marketing.

Sam Dunning (09:15.48)

Mm.

John Jantsch (09:21.412)

And that’s really what you’re talking about is that, you have campaigns that are like, say professional services is a category for you. Well, there’s 10 subcategories in there and you should be messaging to those 10 subcategories. And I’m hearing you say that that’s a, that’s a solid foundation for approaching SEO today.

Sam Dunning (09:42.122)

Exactly right exactly right. So I always say Like going back to marketing fundamentals like SEO Let’s ignore SEO for a second the main marketing fundamentals are have an offer But have an offer that serves a dream client that ideally has historically bought well into your service is in a niche that can easily Ford your offer Has the expensive problem you solve is motivated to solve it and has no issue spending cash on it

If you can get those lined up, that’s good, not just for SEO, but for marketing in general. So I have a very simple, I’m a simple guy. A lot of my strategies are straightforward when it comes to actually building out your SEO, like what keywords should we target? What type of content should we create? I recommend folks, whether it’s a founder, whether it’s your marketing leader, whoever in your organization makes sense. The very simple strategy for finding what I call money keywords, which in simple terms of commercial keywords that your dream clients will search for needing your offer.

Fire up a Google Sheet, fire up an Excel Sheet, split it into four main columns. Column one is what you actually call your offer. Going back to proposal software, that might be proposal software, proposal tools, proposal platform. Column two, what are those money niches that you’ve historically sold well that can have the problem you solve and motivate to solve it and can easily afford the offer? Could be, like you said, financial firms, accountancies, whatever those niches are. The third is what are those main competitors that always come up in sales calls? That’s column three. And the fourth is…

This is probably a framework you’ve talked about on the podcast. I’m sure jobs to be done. What are your dream clients jobs to be done? What are those struggling moments they face? Maybe they try to do something internally, like they cobbled together a solution on Google sheets or Excel, or maybe in the sales proposal world, like it would be like something like how to build a sales proposal within Google docs or how to, how to build out sales proposals that convert all that kind of stuff. Why do I build those four columns? Well,

John Jantsch (11:14.544)

Mm-hmm, true.

Sam Dunning (11:37.486)

It helps me build out long tail keywords that my dream clients were actually going to search for needing the offer. And if I get, if I’m, if I have a team, then I might involve my sales team. So they can actually come with me to say, look, these are competitors that come up. These are the niches that are doing well right now. Um, these are the common frustrations or our clients jobs to be done or struggling moments. And then we can have well-informed keyword research. That’s also going to fuel our content when we get to that stage.

that our target prospects are probably actually looking for when they need our offer.

John Jantsch (12:10.248)

So one of the things that if we could do a quick search and find 10 blog posts on people saying SEO is dying and AI is going to eat all SEO organic traffic. one of the things I’m hearing you say is, or at least that I’m seeing is, if you’re really focused on high demand, AI is not really returning results for somebody who is looking to hire

an accountant in their community right now, right? mean, if somebody who’s really doing that level of search, they’re not getting an AI overview for that, are they?

Sam Dunning (12:46.766)

Not so much not to say there aren’t it’s like right now from what we’re saying a lot of the AI Overviews and more for informational based searches Not always but quite a lot of time now. There’s there’s obviously two sides to the coin with your typical Google result now There’s sometimes an AI overview at the top Then you’ve got some a couple sponsored listings. Then you’ve got the organic results in between but that aside You’ve also got LLMs like chat GPT search perplexity, etc

John Jantsch (12:49.956)

Mm-hmm.

Sam Dunning (13:16.416)

Now, a lot of folks are saying stuff like, when I say a lot of folks, mean, random marketers on LinkedIn, et cetera, they like to make a lot of noise and saying stuff like Google search is dying and all this kind of stuff. the truth is that LLMs, whether that is chat, chat, GPT, perplexity, et cetera, are gaining chat. GPT is especially are gaining a bit more market share, but it’s nothing in comparison to Google. Google’s still growing and it still is by far the most searched engine. when it comes to those prospects.

John Jantsch (13:26.405)

Yes.

John Jantsch (13:44.752)

So what do we, just to put a number on that, 2, 3 % for the LLM?

Sam Dunning (13:50.67)

I can’t, I can’t remember what it’s last valued at, but Brian Fishkin has just done a report. So one of the, one of the well-known SEOs he’s just put out a report to show that I mean, Google is literally kind of a hundred X or so more compared to some of these LLMs. So what I’m saying is the thing to consider is if you have a more technical user, so if your end clients are more technical, they’re probably using more AI search. If not, they’re more of a layman.

They’re probably still using Google for now, but it’s more to be aware that AI is on the rise. We can certainly dive into some ways that you can rank on LLMs and chat to you between similar happy to dive into that. But I think that’s one thing to bear in mind. Most folks are still using Google when they have intent to review offers.

John Jantsch (14:36.848)

Yeah. Sometimes we forget about, you know, what our target market does. Like, do they read the newspaper? Do they, you know, it’s like, that’s what we need to pay attention to. Right. So, so, uh, instead of ranking on the LLMs, I’d let’s for a minute go into local search. Um, so a lot of, let’s say I’m a local home remodeler. Um, I mean, in, in this day and age search has really been, I mean, we can run ads and do things, but search has been a big driver of business, uh, for me, especially if I can get myself in that three pack.

Sam Dunning (14:50.211)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (15:05.776)

So how is local search going to be impacted?

Sam Dunning (15:10.614)

Yeah. I mean, to be blunt, I don’t do tons with local businesses. most exactly, exactly. So a lot of my clients are kind of more national, not necessarily serving, serving small end industries. Now, yeah, some of that, again, some of that, certain searches will, will be appearing in whether it’s Google AI overviews. So you get the quick review, and that sort of things. And I think more of it is understanding the crux of SEO in my opinion, at least.

John Jantsch (15:14.67)

Yeah, because B2B is more national, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Sam Dunning (15:40.814)

is yes, you follow simple guidelines with technical. So for example, if you were, say, I don’t know, providing HVAC in a certain state of the U S so let’s say in New Jersey, those kinds of HVAC services in New Jersey, for example, if we actually want to typically what’s going to rank for that is probably a landing page. And the usual framework I like to follow for a landing page is problem. Are you facing this problem with whatever’s going on in your home? This is the impact of that problem.

We’ll agitate a bit and then this is the solution. This is how we’re well equipped to solve these issues, these bleedneck frustrations. And then you’ll probably show some examples of your offer. You’ll have some client testimonials and reviews might have an FAQ like what’s your pricing? How long does it take? What’s your refund policy? And you have a call to action to book a call. The crux of SEO is reviewing what’s ranking right now. In this case for our target search term, this offer in this location.

And how can I completely blow that page out of the water? How can I make my page more helpful, more useful, more educational, trustworthy and convincing to this dream client? And a lot of that comes down to customer research, like knowing what your prospects actually care about their jobs to be done in their end goals. Yes, you need basic technical SEO. So you need your focus keyword in the URL. You need it in the H1 in the MetaTitle description. And you might want some internal links on that page to other blog articles or other useful pages. But if you can follow that framework.

With local SEO, in most cases, you can actually outrank competitors without even worrying about backlinks. Cause a lot of these local websites, they’re not really doing a lot of SEO. They might have like a couple pages, like homepage, couple service pages, portfolio contact. If you can actually strategically build out what I call these money pages for like offer plus industry, offer plus location, and do that in a systematic way that’s custom research backed, then you can, you can probably start ranking quite nicely and pulling in some leads.

John Jantsch (17:14.412)

Yeah. Right.

John Jantsch (17:36.034)

You said one of my favorite words that you Brits say, HVAC. I love that term.

It’s a little different than the way us Americans pronounce it.

Sam Dunning (17:50.23)

It’s also niche isn’t it when Brits say niche and US says niche. I always get those two mixed up.

John Jantsch (17:51.788)

Yeah. Well, I have learned niche too. I rather prefer niche. So that’s one. I have a lot of Canadians that are clients and a couple of their words of process is one that as opposed to process that I love to harass them about. you went into a business, they said, Hey, Sam,

Sam Dunning (17:59.071)

Okay.

John Jantsch (18:16.506)

Come help us. We’re not ranking for anything. You know, they’ve got a decent business. They’ve got a decent product or offer. I mean, that’s not really the issue. Where do you start? I mean, what do you, how do you kind of start the process? And let’s say they’ve bought into, it’s going to be a six month process. Do you have a set? You know, here’s what we do first. Here’s what we do next. Here’s how we expand that.

Sam Dunning (18:37.678)

Yeah, yeah, so you start with what we briefly touched on earlier. So understanding the main offer, problems they solve, competitors, industries that they serve well, that have that expensive problem and motivated to fix it and have cash to easily invest in the offer. So you build out that Google sheet, formulating those offers, industries, jobs to be done and competitors, make those four main columns. And then from there,

John Jantsch (18:42.82)

Yep.

Sam Dunning (19:05.026)

We’re making our money long tail commercial keywords. So what service do you want to make at us, Or what offer?

John Jantsch (19:12.99)

you know, let’s do mine, marketing strategy.

Sam Dunning (19:16.182)

Okay, it’s quite a nice broad one. And do we want to serve like specific niches? Are we gonna?

John Jantsch (19:18.442)

Yeah, let’s go with home service businesses where we’re going to serve like remodeling contractors, roofers, landscapers.

Sam Dunning (19:26.23)

Yep, lovely, lovely. Yeah, yeah, so we could, if we wanted to drill down on those niches, some of our offerings might be, some of our money keywords might be like marketing services for landscaping or best marketing agency for landscapers and hitting some of those home niches. And then once we’ve kind of worked out, once we’ve exhausted what I call these long tail keywords, and then if we go to kind of…

That would be kind of some of the high commercial intent keywords. If we, if we went more jobs to be done, it might be how to rank higher as my home services business or why is my business not showing up on Google? Why is my landscape business not driving leads or why is my landscaping website not converting? Those might be some of the struggling moment searches.

John Jantsch (20:11.442)

So those were all questions, by the way, right?

Sam Dunning (20:15.116)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are things that probably come up on discovery calls. That’s how you pull those. So make an exhaustive list of that. Like I said, if you’re the founder, you’ll know a lot of these, but if you perhaps have a sales team, they can help you contribute to that. Then simplest way to actually build content that ranks is to just Google those keywords. So let’s say marketing agency for landscapers or best marketing agency for landscape or something like that. Google the keywords, see what the top three organic pages are.

John Jantsch (20:15.952)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (20:28.4)

Sure,

Sam Dunning (20:44.652)

what type of page they are. This is called addressing, assessing the intent. Is it a landing page, a blog article, a how-to, a product list, a comparison, whatever. Probably gonna be, I’d imagine a landing page for that type of keyword. It might be a top 10 comparison, like we reviewed the top marketing agencies in 2025 for landscapers. Probably one of the two. See what shows more in the organic search results. Let’s pretend it’s a landing page. I’d review the top.

John Jantsch (21:03.12)

Mm-hmm.

Sam Dunning (21:12.396)

three landing pages. So what’s ranking now of my competitors. I look for gaps in those pages. Usually landing pages are quite thin. This is our offer. There’s some testimonials. Here’s a to action. So I would do what we talked about earlier, problem agitation solution based on our knowledge of the industry or ourselves team’s knowledge. So start with the hero area, the top banner. This is the offer. Here’s a call to action. Here’s a book of cool calls to action. Are you facing these problems?

around your landscaping company, like struggling to drive leads for your website, competitors above you in organic search results or spending loads of cash on ads and not returning pipeline. Here’s exactly how we fix it. Here’s three video testimonials of customers we sold it for. Here’s our exact process from A to Z. Here’s some FAQs around our offer. Why are we more expensive than other marketing agencies? Do we have a proven process? Do we have a returns policy?

How quickly can I see results? All those FAQs from those kind of really tight objections you get on sales calls. And then yeah, follow the technical SEO basics. So the focus URL has the keywords. So yourdomain.com forward slash best landscaping marketing agency. Same for the H1, same for the meta title and description. So that’s what I call the blow out the water strategy, review what’s ranking, make your page more helpful, useful, educational, trustworthy.

John Jantsch (22:10.03)

Mm-hmm.

Sam Dunning (22:34.84)

Google rolled out a framework called EEAT, Experience Expertise Authority Trust a while back. And for more, I guess, for less competitive terms, that alone, doing that at scale in a systematic way, like saying, look, we’re gonna publish, we’re gonna build out and publish five to 10 pages each month, whatever’s realistic for your company, we’ll steadily get your rankings. When you get to more competitive terms, I don’t know, in the marketing agency world, like things like best marketing agency in the US or whatever it might be,

John Jantsch (22:37.626)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (22:52.624)

Yeah. Right.

Sam Dunning (23:03.886)

you’re gonna have tons of competitors. That’s when you’ll need the help of backlinks to build up your website’s authority. And there’s a bunch of ways to build links, happy to dive into, but that’s just a starting point that I’d recommend.

John Jantsch (23:07.918)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (23:17.348)

My favorite is guesting on podcasts, quite frankly, because we’re going to link back to your site, Sam, and we’re going to promote the heck out of this episode. so that to me is one of the best backlinks that you can get is going on people shows. Plus you get the exposure, you know, you might actually get a client because somebody listens to it. So that’s my favorite. Yeah. Yeah.

Sam Dunning (23:36.79)

Yeah, it’s great. It is one of the best. I’d probably put that as number one or number two for sure. My other favorite is building partnerships, which again has more holistic business play. So this is finding partners that serve the same ICP, the same idle client profile as you, but are not direct competitors. So as a real example, I partner with a LinkedIn ads agency, Impactable. They serve just like me, B2B service and B2B SaaS clients, but they’re not going after SEO clients because they don’t offer it. So.

John Jantsch (23:44.911)

Right.

Sam Dunning (24:05.518)

I approached their founder guy called Justin a while back and I’m a big fan, John of weird, painfully short messages if I’m trying to get stuff done. So I probably sent you one. I find the founder or the marketing leader on LinkedIn. I’ll say something like, Hey Justin had a weird idea to scale your organic traffic and in bounds you against a conversation. He’ll probably connect with me on LinkedIn or whatever channel I outreach email, whatever, and say, Sam, what are you on about? But let’s hear what you’ve got to say. Then I’ll shoot him like a loom video.

John Jantsch (24:30.084)

Yeah.

Sam Dunning (24:33.006)

and just say, look, I’ve got an idea. In this case, partnership play. The small step initially I might offer is I’ll write out a guest blog article for you that will be really useful to your audience. And in return, I just want to link back. And then they might do that and that might grow into, okay, let’s do a podcast together. Okay, let’s do some more content together. All right, let’s start presenting business each other’s way. So it’s gone from just a small SEO play to like reciprocal business. Just like your podcast is kind of has so much more play to it than just SEO.

John Jantsch (25:00.878)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, Sam, I appreciate you taking a few moments to drop by the duct tape marketing podcast, where would you invite people to connect with you find out more about your work?

Sam Dunning (25:09.942)

I really appreciate it. Three, three main ways. Really one is LinkedIn. I post ramblings on SEO each and every day. The second is the Breaking B2B podcast where we interview just like this marketing leaders as well as solo episodes on SEO and what’s working on marketing today. Or the third is if you’re tired of seeing competitors above you and organic search results, stealing traffic inbound leads and more, then we might be able to fix it with our unusual approach to SEO. It’s BreakingB2B.com. Happy to chat.

John Jantsch (25:37.584)

Again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Sam Dunning (25:43.022)

Cheers, man. Thank you.

7 Paths to a Successful Startup

7 Paths to a Successful Startup written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Lori Rosenkopf

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Lori Rosenkopf, Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship at the Wharton School and author of Unstoppable Entrepreneurs: Seven Paths for Unleashing Successful Startups and Creating Value Through Innovation. Lori’s research on entrepreneurship, business growth, and innovation has been published in top academic journals, and she has spent years studying what truly sets successful entrepreneurs apart.

During our conversation, Lori shared insights from her book, focusing on the seven distinct paths to startup success. She highlighted the importance of resilience, adaptability, and business strategy, emphasizing that there is no single formula for success. From bootstrapping a business to leveraging venture capital, each path offers unique opportunities and challenges.

Key Takeaways:

Startup success isn’t one-size-fits-all – Entrepreneurs can achieve success through multiple pathways, including business innovation, technology startups, and business pivots.
Bootstrapping builds resilience – Many successful founders delay seeking startup funding, giving them more control over their vision and business growth strategies.
Recombination fuels innovation – Entrepreneurs who blend unique experiences and skills often discover breakthrough ideas that lead to business success.
Mindset matters – A strong entrepreneurial mindset helps business owners navigate startup challenges and seize growth opportunities.
Pivoting can lead to major breakthroughs – The ability to adapt and shift direction is a key trait of thriving small business owners.
Funding isn’t the only path to scaling – While venture capital is one route, many startups achieve business resilience by reinvesting profits and expanding strategically.
Success takes time and persistence – The media highlights overnight success stories, but real entrepreneurship is about long-term strategy, innovation, and problem-solving.

Chapters:

[00:09] Introducing Lori Rosenkopf
[00:53] Telling Real Entrepreneur Stories
[03:59] The Six Rs
[06:33] The Realities of Disrupting the Market
[07:37] Bootstrapping
[09:58] Technology Commercializers
[11:17] Accidental Entrepreneur
[15:20] Defining Innovation

More About Lori Rosenkopf:

Check out Lori Rosenkopf’s Website
Connect with Lori Rosenkopf on LinkedIn
Read Unstoppable Entrepreneurs: 7 Paths for Unleashing Successful Startups and Creating Value through Innovationl Guide by Lori Rosenkopf

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00.792)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantsch and my guest today is Laurie Rosenkopf. She is the Simon Imidge Pauley Professor, Professor of Management and Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship at the Wharton School. Her research on technology and communities and knowledge flow has been published in top journals. She’s served as a senior editor and consultant and has led significant curriculum and diversity initiatives. We’re going to talk about her book.

Unstoppable Entrepreneurs, Seven Paths for Unleashing Successful Startups and Creating Value Through Innovation. It’s going to be out in, depending upon when you’re listening to this, it’ll be out in April of 2025. So Laurie, welcome to the show.

Lori Rosenkopf (00:43.803)

Thanks, John. Great to be here.

John Jantsch (00:45.88)

So you talk about, I’ve got a one word underlined here that you talk about stories from entrepreneurs that you call the unvarnished stories that you find that really deeply resonate with folks. wonder if you can talk a little bit about that.

Lori Rosenkopf (01:01.231)

Sure. So many of the stories that we see in the media about entrepreneurs tell a successful path without so many of the obstacles and challenges that were faced along the way. And we know that all entrepreneurs are really facing daily, if not hourly, challenges. And so I wanted to tell stories of people who were going

through these challenges and how they got through them because there’s a lot of lessons for all of us across the different stories.

John Jantsch (01:34.796)

Yeah, I would agree. mean, the media loves the unicorn, you know, stories and things. And even in some of those stories, you know, the whole like, we tried this eight times and pivoted eight times before we hit on the thing. And all that really happens is like, look at this big success story. I mean, there’s lots of really big success stories, you know, that people mentioned Ubers of the world that were, you know, other things before they were that. So I think that.

Lori Rosenkopf (02:00.853)

Absolutely. And it’s not just even choosing to pivot because the first approach isn’t working, but it’s like you’re Caitlin, who’s the social entrepreneur in my book, and she has taken a set of girls to discovery days to see different companies, to learn about careers, because that’s her mission, to help girls find great careers. And she’s running bus tours and COVID happens. Well, her business is gone. There’s no bus tours.

John Jantsch (02:27.236)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lori Rosenkopf (02:30.183)

And she winds up doing a virtual program, which allowed her, once she digitized, to Forex her business really quickly. And now it’s grown into a really thriving endeavor. She’s an EdTech now, instead of a bus tour operator.

John Jantsch (02:42.606)

Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. I never want to say that the pandemic was a good thing, but you know how many industries, you know, that really came out of that out of necessity that everybody went, oh, this is actually a better way, but probably would have never really got tried or adopted without that set of circumstances. So you like all good authors. Well, actually, before I get into your methodology, I want to ask you,

How much is your environment at the school really fed into your learning and certainly what you put in the book?

Lori Rosenkopf (03:22.387)

I’m so glad you asked that. role as Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship means that I’m the Faculty Director of our Student Center for Entrepreneurship at Warren. And we have a host of students with a host of different interests who are demographically diverse and are trying to learn how to be more entrepreneurial, whether or not they’ll go and become entrepreneurs right away. And I was seeing stories in the media which were

just the celebrity entrepreneurs, the unicorns, like you said. And those were a singular type. And I really wanted to tell stories of so many of our amazing students and alumni entrepreneurs to give them role models because role models matter.

John Jantsch (03:53.272)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (04:06.764)

So you talk about entrepreneurial mindsets and I’m so glad you picked on the tech bro a little bit image, but mindsets that you call the six Rs. Yeah. Reason, recombination, relationship, resources, resilience and results. I butchered it there, but you can maybe expand on that idea that you’ve distilled into these six Rs.

Lori Rosenkopf (04:31.955)

Yeah, in each of the seven stories we tell, so the seven different paths, there’s not a one size fits all path to entrepreneurship. We talk about each of these different aspects and they’re motivating principles that can help anyone to be more entrepreneurial. And so without going through the laundry list, my personal favorite is recombination. My research has focused on that historically, but the idea that each of us has a unique set of experiences.

John Jantsch (04:36.748)

Right, Yeah.

Lori Rosenkopf (05:01.361)

both in our workplace and our education, but also in our family life and where we’ve lived and the like. And it’s through mixing all of the different experiences and relationships and resources to throw in a couple of others that we’re able to see ideas that allow us to innovate. And innovation is what allows entrepreneurs to create value.

John Jantsch (05:23.8)

So are those mindsets something that we can adopt or have, or are they actually, or have they’ve actually become more like tactics or strategies, you know, that somebody, so like recombination, that can be somebody’s mindset. They might think that way. They may look at architecture or calculus and say, what if we took some of those principles and did this with them? Or they might actually just say, you know, that’s who I am. That’s how my mind works. mean, how

Lori Rosenkopf (05:42.654)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (05:53.016)

How do you kind of, how do you balance kind of that idea of strategy versus mindset?

Lori Rosenkopf (06:00.209)

Well, when we’re educating students, we’re always talking about growth mindsets and figuring out how you can push yourself in new directions. And so I think that recombination, it’s something that one can look backwards wherever they are and say, what’s my mix? And take a little bit more stock and say, if I put these two things together and start to do some idea tournaments with yourself, but also in looking ahead, particularly for younger folks who are saying, what kind of job should I be looking to take or what kind of major?

John Jantsch (06:06.115)

Yeah.

Lori Rosenkopf (06:30.045)

might I take to say, let’s stretch yourself a little bit. Let’s not just take the standard path that everybody follows because then you’re going to be very cookie cutter. But the people who are able to be the most successful and the innovations that have been really the most provocative and disruptive are ones where there’s some novelty involved.

John Jantsch (06:49.492)

I’m glad you used the word disruptive because you actually have that as a path. You feature, I think, is it Amy? I think a lot of people tend to think that way. Like, I need to create something that just disrupts the market. I think a lot of people, that’s their mindset, but it’s actually really hard, isn’t it?

Lori Rosenkopf (06:51.593)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Lori Rosenkopf (07:11.133)

Yes, it is very uncommon, let’s say it that way, in addition to being hard. And I selected Amy specifically because she wasn’t a tech bro. She’s selling originally women’s hair color, but she’s built out a phenomenal omni-channel empire. And at the beginning, she had a little bit more struggle raising funds than someone who was doing it for, say, Dollar Shave Club. But she knew she wanted to do something big and disruptive.

John Jantsch (07:15.724)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (07:22.999)

Yeah, yeah.

Lori Rosenkopf (07:40.937)

She had worked as a venture capitalist, so back to recombination. She knew what was the pattern to recognize, and she saw this market and went for it. she’s essentially a unicorn. She’s doing extraordinarily well. You’ll be seeing more of them in the news.

John Jantsch (07:59.352)

So you mentioned venture capital. I do think that there’s a common feeling amongst people that startups like we’ve got to raise money or this round we’re in this round. mean, that’s a lot of the talk you hear. You give a lot of ink to bootstrapping. And I’m curious kind of your thinking or your approach to that path.

Lori Rosenkopf (08:02.623)

Mm-hmm.

Lori Rosenkopf (08:15.317)

Yes.

Lori Rosenkopf (08:20.467)

Well, bootstrapping is what we recommend to all of our young people starting off. Go as long as you can without raising. And I think these days that advice is getting out there more, but five or 10 years ago, everybody was saying, I need to raise, I need to raise, particularly in a place like Wharton where everyone wants to build high growth enterprises. Bootstrapping, I love this story. Jesse is my bootstrapper. He built a

John Jantsch (08:26.848)

Right. Yeah. Right.

John Jantsch (08:36.301)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (08:49.038)

Mm-hmm.

Lori Rosenkopf (08:50.739)

digital marketing firm. This wasn’t his original training. He was just looking for a way to be entrepreneurial after being a banker. But he was one of the first in Facebook’s API. So lots of digital spends managing that. He sold that. now, all bootstrapped, and now he’s building out additional companies to help other entrepreneurs. You should have him on the show as well. for example,

John Jantsch (09:02.904)

Hmm.

John Jantsch (09:16.366)

Well, make an introduction, I’d be happy to.

Lori Rosenkopf (09:20.755)

Okay, but to go back to recombination, because this is why it’s my favorite, because he built this digital marketing firm, because he had spent a couple of years working in banking and private equity sorts of environments, people from private equity firms are saying, could you help me assess whether this $10 billion acquisition I’m thinking about actually has a capable digital marketing strategy? He’s built a new consulting business on that.

John Jantsch (09:37.582)

Yeah, yeah.

Lori Rosenkopf (09:50.025)

Others come to him say, you outsourced your talent to the Philippines and got all these growth assistants. He’s built another company that hires growth assistants and places them for everyone. So like his entrepreneurial spirit is just incredible and everything he does is bootstrapped. So it’s quite remarkable.

John Jantsch (10:07.512)

Well, and you said there’s a statistic that you shared about bootstrapping and 80 % survival rate after five years. mean, that’s not the common statistic, is it?

Lori Rosenkopf (10:16.724)

Well, right, because you’re not worried about satisfying your investors or your debtors right away. So you have a little bit more time and space.

John Jantsch (10:21.069)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:27.928)

So there’s another term that you use in the book, technology commercializers, that again, I guess that’s a bit of a recombination maybe, path kind of bridging the gap between existing innovation and new market applications. Talk about your story there.

Lori Rosenkopf (10:32.853)

Mm-hmm.

Lori Rosenkopf (10:45.043)

Yeah, I love to use that term to refer to a path where somebody sees that technologies exist and figures out how to bring them to markets that need them. So in the book, I talk about Joan, who had been working as a scientist, a PhD scientist at a large pharmaceutical firm. She calls herself an accidental entrepreneur.

because after many years of doing that and worrying about whether the pills should come in a two pack or a four pack, she wanted to work on life changing medicines. She wound up building a small investing arm herself, not in the pharmaceutical firm, and then becoming CEO of one of the portfolio companies. And now they’re working on cures for cystic fibrosis, which that’s life changing for people. And she didn’t invent.

John Jantsch (11:38.007)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lori Rosenkopf (11:40.787)

the science, but she was able to assess the scientists and small biotechs that were developing it.

John Jantsch (11:48.618)

It’s you’re reading my questions. I was going to the accidental idea because it seems like that’s a threat. Like you mentioned her, but it seems like almost all of the people, there was some little bit of, I wasn’t really trying to change the world. I was just doing this and it led me to that. mean, is that, do you think that that’s, is that just coincidental with your stories or do you think there’s something to that?

Lori Rosenkopf (12:09.413)

Well Well one of the other ours in the book is Reason, know your reason for doing it and there are two kinds of people I’ve seen and and some are Very much. I want to be an entrepreneur from square one They’re like I had the best paper route when I was a kid, you know I was selling candy and middle school etc and it’s just continued and I just had to find a good place to go and be an entrepreneur and make money and some of the stories in my

John Jantsch (12:17.122)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (12:29.198)

Right.

Lori Rosenkopf (12:38.313)

book are those types. But there are others who people, their reason is a deep burning personal passion. And some of them like Caitlin knew that she wanted to do female empowerment stuff from when she was very young. But others came to that through their series of experiences. we don’t say people need to go and be entrepreneurs right away when we’re training them. We just want them to be entrepreneurial thinkers. We want them to go out.

Do some work, learn a space, and then see opportunity and then capitalize on it.

John Jantsch (13:13.42)

I imagine that you have particularly pick on your younger students, if I can for a minute, that they come to the program and initially it’s like, what technology is ripe for, you know, disruption like, or, know, or what’s the app I can create, you know, to create this huge commercial success. How do you help them figure that out?

Lori Rosenkopf (13:35.039)

Well, we do a lot of experiential learning. We have 25 programs in my center where students can do anything from get a $500 award to test out their grandmother’s cornbread recipe and see if they can build it into a brand to $10,000 awards that we give to our students in accelerators who are really pushing and working on ventures. But the experimentation is incredibly important because most of these ideas that people can come up with

when they’re this young age are not the ones that are going to be the source of their career. You know, again, outsized attention to things like Snapchat. But that’s not what we’re typically seeing. But by playing with any venture idea, one can develop a repertoire to become more entrepreneurial, see more of those opportunities and pursue them more effectively in the future.

John Jantsch (14:11.82)

Yeah, yeah.

Right, right.

John Jantsch (14:29.656)

What are some of the kind of most innovative things you’ve seen entrepreneurs do beyond sort of the creating financial returns, you know, for community, for mentoring, for, you know, other things that you’ve seen founders do?

Lori Rosenkopf (14:44.853)

Jared is the founder of a venture capital firm and it’s a venture capital firm that has the mission of creating a thousand diverse entrepreneurs. He felt like he’s an underrepresented minority and he felt like money was being left on the table because there are documented biases about the amount of funding that both women and minority entrepreneurs are able to access.

John Jantsch (15:11.694)

Sure, sure.

Lori Rosenkopf (15:14.323)

He built a firm expressly to do this and the firm is Harlem Capital. And they’ve been able to bring in a portfolio. Everyone is welcome in the portfolio, but diverse entrepreneurs are more represented and they built ways, special ways in which the founders support each other. They’re not just independent portfolio companies and they’re very proud of their statistics, which show that one in nine people who are minority entrepreneurs

minorities working in venture capital have gone through at least one of Harlem Capital’s training programs or internship programs.

John Jantsch (15:51.566)

So are they located in Harlem or that was just a chosen name?

Lori Rosenkopf (15:56.117)

They’re in New York City and I think that was specifically chosen to indicate their mission.

John Jantsch (15:57.838)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this last question is either going to be the dumbest question I asked you or the hardest question. Okay. All right. So how would you define innovation?

Lori Rosenkopf (16:07.029)

Okay.

Lori Rosenkopf (16:12.457)

Hmm. Let me start by saying I define entrepreneurship as value creation through innovation. And that’s why I can come up with those seven pathways, because it’s not just founding a business and disrupting like that media stereotype. then innovation is the application of knowledge in order to create a productive

John Jantsch (16:20.206)

Okay.

Lori Rosenkopf (16:38.293)

product or service or process. It’s anything that’s going to allow us to do something differently and hopefully create value from it and therefore be entrepreneurial.

John Jantsch (16:51.982)

And I guess doesn’t exist today would be one aspect, right? Something new.

Lori Rosenkopf (16:56.819)

Well, in many cases, innovations are adoptions of things from other places. You start off by saying, what if I put out architecture together with calculus? In many cases, people are able to take something that’s effective in one domain and transplant it into another market, for example, or another geography. So those are very common sorts of approaches. So it’s innovative to that place.

John Jantsch (17:22.574)

If I’m reading your book, am I to choose one path or is it amalgamation?

Lori Rosenkopf (17:32.041)

You, if you are reading my book, you should be inspired by all of the stories. And what you would see is that most of the people over the span of a career, so those who were have a little bit more age under their belts, like you and me, they’re able to take different paths at different times. Jackie was a banker originally, she went into tech, she went to square.

John Jantsch (17:53.933)

Yes.

Lori Rosenkopf (18:00.361)

You know, used to have those little white square, I still do the square white point of sale terminals, but that’s where it started. And because she was a banker, she said, my gosh, they can use this data to make loans. She builds out a banking business, Square Financial Services, within Square. And then she sees these banks don’t do enough for fintechs like Square. And then she goes and acquires.

John Jantsch (18:03.308)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure.

John Jantsch (18:13.614)

Right.

Lori Rosenkopf (18:27.731)

in a traditional bank and turns it into this disruptive fintech bank. So what did we have there? She was an intrapreneur. She was an acquirer. She was a disruptor as well. really a career can be an amalgamation of many paths.

John Jantsch (18:47.106)

You know, it’s interesting, you, you mentioned age. and one of the things I’ve seen a lot of and heard a lot of people talk about, I think the media tends to play up these very young, you know, startup founders when in fact, a lot of 55, 60 year olds are actually, driving some of the most innovation, aren’t they?

Lori Rosenkopf (19:06.665)

Yeah, one of my colleagues, Danny Kam, he’s a fellow professor in the management department with me, he’s done some research on the cream of the crop in venture capital, top firms there. And the majority of them are founded by people, the median is around late 30s, early 40s.

John Jantsch (19:19.138)

Yeah.

Lori Rosenkopf (19:27.025)

And I think you’ll see even more of the older entrepreneurs now as we’re seeing all these changes in the workforce and job dislocation and the like. So here are people with a lot of expertise and necessity is a big promoter of entrepreneurship too.

John Jantsch (19:41.814)

No question. Laura, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there anywhere you’d invite people to learn more about your work? Obviously, find unstoppable entrepreneurs.

Lori Rosenkopf (19:54.581)

Well, absolutely. Google my name. I’m the only Laurie Rosenkopf in the world. you can also find the book at all of your favorite places. Read about Venture Lab, where our student entrepreneurs are doing great things. But it’s been wonderful to have this conversation with you, John. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (20:11.918)

Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate it and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Lori Rosenkopf (20:17.141)

Sounds great.

The Truth About SEO, AI, and Content in 2025

The Truth About SEO, AI, and Content in 2025 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Bruce Clay

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Bruce Clay, widely regarded as the “Father of SEO.” With a career spanning nearly three decades, Bruce has witnessed every major shift in search engine optimization—from the early days of simple keyword ranking to today’s AI-driven landscape.

During our conversation, Bruce shared powerful insights into how Google ranking, AI-generated content, and SEO strategy are evolving in 2025. We discussed the impact of search engine algorithms, the role of content marketing, and why businesses must rethink their approach to website optimization and organic traffic.

SEO is changing fast, and Bruce Clay’s insights highlight why businesses must adapt or risk being left behind. Whether you’re an SEO consultant, marketer, or business owner, focusing on SEO strategy, usability, and high-quality content will be critical in 2025.

Key Takeaways:

Quality Over Quantity – Google now prioritizes on-page SEO and content marketing strategies that focus on user experience rather than sheer volume of content.
AI-Generated Content Needs a Human Touch – AI can create thousands of pages, but search engines favor SEO best practices that combine automation with human expertise.
Link Building is Still Relevant—But Different – Google ignores low-quality links, meaning only the highest-authority backlinks contribute to organic traffic and rankings.
SEO Success Depends on Usability – Factors like site navigation, search engine algorithms, and mobile-friendly design impact website optimization more than ever.
The Rise of AI Overviews – Google’s AI-generated answers are shifting how users interact with search results, making SEO consultants rethink search engine optimization strategies.
Brand Mentions Are More Valuable Than Ever – As AI prioritizes trusted sources, appearing in podcasts, guest blogs, and digital marketing discussions is key to staying relevant.

Chapters:

[00:09] Introducing Bruce Clay
[00:53] SEO in 1996
[04:47] The Growing Importance of SEO
[11:19] How to Create Quality Content for SEO
[14:50] Is Zero-Click the End of SEO?
[18:59] Guest Podcasting Can Help SEO

More About Bruce Clay:

Check out Bruce Clay’s Website
Connect with Bruce Clay on LinkedIn

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01.26)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Bruce Clay. He is known professionally as the father of SEO. He’s been a world renowned expert in the field of SEO since 1996. A lot of people couldn’t spell SEO in 1996, probably, right? Bruce programmed the first webpage analysis tool. created the search engine relationship chart, which is earned

Bruce Clay (00:22.021)

John Jantsch (00:27.734)

over 300,000 or did earn over 300,000 downloads in its first month. He wrote and taught how to optimize websites to be found in search, establishing bruceclay.com as the trusted source for how-to information in the field of search engine optimization. So Bruce, welcome to the show.

Bruce Clay (00:46.083)

Thank you very much. Glad to be here.

John Jantsch (00:48.174)

So I would ask you to tell me about your history in involvement in SEO, but that would take the whole show probably, right? So let’s just start with, what was kind of the kernel of SEO? Like 1996, a lot of people didn’t have websites. So what did SEO look like when you first got started?

Bruce Clay (01:07.333)

Let me give you a little bit of background. My background is programming. You know, I have one of these degrees in math and computer science, but I also have an MBA. So I was looking for something that was marketing, but programming and a long-term search, which is an algorithm.

John Jantsch (01:16.302)

Mm.

Bruce Clay (01:32.823)

So that’s what really attracted me to it in its entirety. I got in, programmed some stuff, came up with some of the first tools, and started doing optimization. I have a background in mainframe optimization, so I just moved it over and started optimizing web pages. And they were

John Jantsch (01:51.512)

Yeah, okay.

Bruce Clay (02:00.889)

You know, I was trying to become a consultant, right? And consultants name the company after them and they do consulting and that’s what consultants do, right? And there weren’t a lot of people that were really aware of the power of marketing online, but a lot of companies had websites. They were catching on.

John Jantsch (02:11.736)

Yeah. Right.

Bruce Clay (02:28.325)

If we remember back to 1996, that was when Al Gore invented the internet, right? I mean, the hype was started. This is where you got to be. And a few people. And by the way, I was being found not because people knew to use a search engine to find me, but I was high activity in newsletters. Right? So.

John Jantsch (02:33.762)

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (02:54.979)

Yeah.

Bruce Clay (02:58.223)

People who would stumble into a newsletter would find some of my articles and then they would call me. And the original websites were small, let’s face it. mean, now there’s thousands of pages, but back then, you you get a 50 page website, it’s pretty good size.

John Jantsch (03:12.654)

yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:19.246)

Well, they were kind of brochure aware, you know, is how people kind of looked at him. So it was like, need, we need to put our products on there and how do people contact us? And that’s it. Yeah.

Bruce Clay (03:28.941)

Yeah. And quite frankly, that was my website. And when I think back about it, it was so weird because there were no rules. Right. And my very first website, the home page had a logo, had a paragraph about what we do, and then a paragraph about the main topics of the website. And those paragraphs were my only navigation.

John Jantsch (03:32.312)

Sure, it was everybody’s first one.

John Jantsch (03:37.795)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (03:58.584)

Yeah. Right, right, right.

Bruce Clay (03:59.277)

I didn’t have navigation across the top or down the side. You go in, you read the paragraph, you click, you go into that section. And when I think back about

John Jantsch (04:07.128)

Well, please tell me you had a sign my guestbook link on there somewhere so you could capture an email, right?

Bruce Clay (04:15.073)

No, I wasn’t even doing that. I mean, was, I’m, my philosophy for many, many years is I answer questions until they surrender. I gave away everything, all the information I could. But people who wanted to rank, that was why they called me. And they contacted me by email, because my email was in the footer, our phone number.

And the very first day, it was Wild West. mean, it was there were no rules. Right. This is three years before Google.

John Jantsch (04:56.535)

All right.

Bruce Clay (04:57.965)

I mean, Excite, AltaVista, Infoseek, I mean…

John Jantsch (05:00.12)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. AOL, AOL was in there already, I think even.

Bruce Clay (05:03.247)

This is back in 96. In 96, we were still on motive.

John Jantsch (05:09.198)

Yeah, yeah, sure. All right, well, let’s fast forward. We’ll go back and forth a little bit here, but I would say 2005. I’m going to pin it there, maybe beyond that, but not only were websites very prevalent, know, blogging had come on the scene. You and I were talking about podcasting. I started my podcast in 2005.

Bruce Clay (05:11.503)

So…

John Jantsch (05:35.82)

And certainly SEO had become really a significant marketing channel and practice. mean, you had SEO firms that that’s all they did. talk a little bit about, you know, maybe how important SEO had become at that point. I’m going to fast forward to where we are today, but say, you know, 20 years ago, how important it become and, you know, how people were winning.

Bruce Clay (06:04.229)

Well, there was no effective social media environment. There were newsletters and email. That’s always been here. But SEO on a bang for the buck was highly effective. Remember, for many years, even when Google started, it was just 10 blue links. They weren’t even promoting a lot of ad sales.

John Jantsch (06:29.23)

Sure. Yeah, yeah, of course.

Bruce Clay (06:34.309)

it was, it was very weird. advertising online was just getting going on a lot of environments. but for traffic purposes, it was really, you had SEO and, it was common to have, because Google came out in, 98, 99.

PageRank promoted a lot of people to do links. So there was a lot of early stage spam that were out, they were buying links. There’s no such thing as a bad link. Every link counts, you know, one of those kinds of things. And in fact, was whoever dies with the most links wins. And quality didn’t matter and sentiment didn’t matter. I could say I hate you or I love you and it’s

still page rank. So it was pretty wild at those early stages. If you fast forward to today, Google has exactly the opposite. They only count your best links and the rest are ignored. Going out and getting more links is usually a waste because they’re not going to be the best. And if they’re not the best, Google doesn’t need them.

John Jantsch (07:50.595)

Right.

John Jantsch (07:58.275)

Yeah.

Bruce Clay (08:02.497)

My speculation is Google only uses 20 % of your links and then they only use the ones that are recent. Freshness of your link inventory counts. So yeah, what was going back then for PageRank and manipulation and spamming, those days are long gone. So the actual SEO has changed.

John Jantsch (08:27.138)

Yeah, well, I would say 15 years ago, so moving up a little further forward, all of sudden content became everything. know, people, more content, blog content, know-how content, you know, to the point where it became ridiculous, but it still became a huge, you couldn’t do SEO without new volumes of content.

Bruce Clay (08:50.989)

And that is especially true today. However, the usability of the content has changed dramatically. And you see, I mean, I’m in the same boat as everybody else. We have clients that come to us and say, I just need content. And the answer is more of the same doesn’t help. Let me help the listeners.

If I want to rank for Mouse.

Doing 20 pages on the keyword of mouse is counterproductive and actually hurts your ranking. What you need to do is build a hierarchy of mouse and then the types of mice and et cetera. You build a content expertise and the quality of each page is why the search engine wants you. But having 20 of them on mouse

is not going to help you. also, if you have a lot of pages on information that’s 20 years old, that doesn’t help you. Classic example. I had 6,000 pages on my website. But early on, I would go to conferences, and we would, I’d have a team go, and we would live blog sessions.

John Jantsch (10:24.14)

Yep.

Bruce Clay (10:25.029)

which were great and we’d have links from the people who were speaking and it was wonderful. However, live blogging a session from 2004 on SEO does no good today.

John Jantsch (10:38.91)

A little bit irrelevant, right?

Bruce Clay (10:40.677)

That’s not relevant. And so I went through a process. cut out, I’m down 1800 blog pages, which by the way, still a lot, compared to 4,000, I mean, I had a ton of pages that I cut off my site. And so it isn’t an issue of quantity. It actually turns out that the current issue is the quality of your page.

John Jantsch (10:49.998)

Yeah, sure.

Bruce Clay (11:10.997)

and the fact that you only have one of them. And so you gotta build a hierarchy, you gotta understand architecture, gotta understand how to build it. And now along comes AI. And I can generate a thousand pages a day. And I mean, it’s crazy because those pages are terrible.

John Jantsch (11:32.826)

So let’s talk a little bit about, mentioned the word quality and I think everybody gets that. It’s like that phrase, quality over quantity, everybody gets that fundamentally, how do you, what does quality mean? I know Google tries to give like the EAT guidelines and things like that, but like how should somebody who’s trying to promote their business go about thinking about creating a quality page or quality content?

Bruce Clay (11:57.957)

think that, well, you would look at the Google Quality Rater Guidelines. It’s 160 pages. And you would go through that. And Google does a moderately good job of defining quality. That’s where they’ve defined the EEAT definitions and things like that. However, Google.

also has usability, which isn’t really well defined anywhere. I mean, what makes a page useful? I mean, little things that a site wouldn’t do are usability factors. For instance, do I have jump links at the top of the page? That’s clearly a usability factor. It’s not so much an SEO factor. Do I have breadcrumbs? Clearly a usability factor.

Do I have search on the page? A usability factor, right? Are my links easily seen? A usability factor. And all of those things are also part of what causes you to rank. And I can look at my keywords and do I have them in the right tags and am I running a schema and do I define things correctly?

but that has little to do with is it usable? I mean, okay, I have the keyword in there too many times. I’m a spammer, but that isn’t usable, right? It doesn’t affect usability and usability is an external factor now. So sites that used to rank number one and vanish, that page isn’t less content-wise, less valuable. It’s a

John Jantsch (13:40.077)

Yeah.

Bruce Clay (13:53.817)

The standards have changed. And now usability is a big factor. AI. When AI came out, and I want to mention this, AI came out and originally Google said it has to be human created. Then they changed it. Actual on their website, they changed it to where it has to be useful to humans. Right? Which is a good factor. I think it’s great.

John Jantsch (13:55.331)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:17.474)

Yeah.

Bruce Clay (14:23.609)

However, it was interpreted that AI is okay. And our tests show that if we have a bunch of pages, AI will always be last among equals.

And Google has now got a statement out that says, what we expect of your page is that it is consistent with common knowledge and creates new knowledge. Right? They sound a little diametrically opposed, but, and it’s because the LLM is built based upon common knowledge and consensus. But

John Jantsch (14:55.448)

Yeah.

Bruce Clay (15:06.015)

they’re expecting the human touch to be, and this is my creativity component. And how it’s going to work in the future is something else. But those factors, other than just usability, affect how you rank.

John Jantsch (15:23.63)

So you mentioned earlier the idea of the original Google home screen had the 10 links and nothing else on it. Well, now it’s a shopping mall, right? It’s got all kinds of ads on it. It’s got things for like local, for maps. It’s got organic stuff. It’s got the AI overview. So a lot of people today are screaming about this whole zero click thing is the end of SEO. I’m curious where you stand on that sort of extreme.

mentality.

Bruce Clay (15:54.681)

Well, yeah, that is somewhat extreme because, and wrong. If you want to rank in social, you participate in social and you have your followers. If you want to rank in organic, you qualify based upon the SEO components that allow you to rank in organic. If you want to rank in AI, right, it isn’t

really so much the social component about who you are. And it isn’t the SEO component about who you are. When a consensus is built, individuals are lost. It’s collective information, right? The problem is that the LLM doesn’t go out and spy their websites and chase links or worry about canonicals or

care about your schemas. What it does is it gathers all this information, puts it into an LLM. Now it keeps track of sites, but it’s really consensus information. If you look at search for chat GPT, in order to qualify to be in their search results, they rely on Bing to have previously said,

You’re a trusted site.

John Jantsch (17:24.226)

Right.

Bruce Clay (17:26.549)

AIO requires that Google has you near the top of the results so that they know you’re not a spammer, you’re a trusted site. And then those trusted sites are aggregated to form their results. So the LLM really has the search component as a filter. And that means that you still have to do SEO.

John Jantsch (17:35.928)

Right.

John Jantsch (17:48.972)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so if I can maybe summarize that a little bit, your, keywords or keyword phrases that you’re ranking for today, highly, probably makes it more likely that you’re going to start seeing some chat GPT traffic, for example, for, for, for similar searches. Yeah.

Bruce Clay (18:08.453)

You could very well. Right, now the chat, using chat GPT or AIO, either one, they’re question-based. They’re typically information rather than transactional. And we have written a lot of tools. We have a product called Prerider. And what it does is it analyzes the intent of the page.

And then the intent of the competition and matches them. Right. So you find that intent is important. All this stuff is very, important. But what triggers all that, and this is a very complex world, what triggers it is, is it a question, a how question? And about 16 % of all searches in the Google world are how.

John Jantsch (18:45.72)

Yeah, sure.

Bruce Clay (19:07.663)

So that’s what triggers the AIO. That means that my website has to answer questions. It means that my website to be an AIO has to have an informational bias, right? Transactional sites are harder to have an AIO even show up. So information, how do I do this type query?

John Jantsch (19:29.89)

Yeah.

Bruce Clay (19:37.059)

That is really the trigger. So I have to have a website that qualifies for the question being asked of the chat world.

John Jantsch (19:47.608)

Yeah, sure. Yep. So I’ve got one final question. You’re on this podcast and I’ve always on top of hosting a podcast, actually also am part owner in a podcast booking service. We book a lot of our clients on those and I tell people all the time that being a guest on a podcast is a great, well,

You get exposure, you get content, you get backlinks. I’m curious how you think about, know, cause we, we went through that period where everybody did guest blogging and that stuff just got buried. And I’ve really trying to preach people guest podcasting. So I’m curious your take on that. Do you see that as a strong SEO play still?

Bruce Clay (20:33.677)

I think that podcasts are a massive play. Now, so I’ll come up with the next level. It turns out that since AI is all question-based and because they are not doing searches and establishing all this stuff, they’re relying on the search engines.

mentions are really important. And I think that podcasts are one of the best PR components that there is right now. I’m on a podcast. I believe the podcasts are going to be massive. They are exactly what the doctor ordered in order to get what’s referred to as mentions.

John Jantsch (21:04.174)

Yeah, yep.

John Jantsch (21:18.274)

Right.

Bruce Clay (21:30.245)

And I think that in the AI world, the brand mention is, is dominant. Rand Fishkin just did a session that I watched and he emphasized that a lot of his traffic is from brand mentions of his name associated with certain words and it causes him to get traffic. And I think that.

John Jantsch (21:50.542)

Yep. Yeah.

Bruce Clay (21:59.311)

There’s a lot of people who are concerned about with AIO, you might get less traffic from organic results. I also believe that podcasts and YouTube and all these other mechanisms out there are very, important. And you have to be there. If you’re not there in a year from now, you’re going to be really sad.

John Jantsch (22:23.694)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:29.1)

Yeah, you’re speaking my language. Well, Bruce, I appreciate you taking a moment to drop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where would you invite people to find out more about your work and connect with you?

Bruce Clay (22:41.199)

Well, my website, as I said, I’m a consultant, right? brucoclay.com. It was rather nice and easy to get at the time. brucoclay.com. And then I have other websites that link from there. seotraining.com, seotools.com. Great names, right? And Free Rider, I’ve got others, but brucoclay.com is the best way to reach me.

John Jantsch (22:44.49)

Right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:50.432)

Sure, man.

John Jantsch (22:59.776)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, I appreciate that. I did the same thing. I started my company was Jantz Communications, consulting, right? Before I went to Duct Tape Marketing. So I get it. Again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Bruce Clay (23:19.159)

Okay, great, thank you.

Agency Growth Starts with Existing Clients

Agency Growth Starts with Existing Clients written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Max Traylor

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Max Traylor, consultant, author of The Agency Survival Guide, and host of Beers with Max. Max helps marketing agencies rethink their approach to agency growth by focusing on agency upselling, client retention, and long-term relationship strategies.

During our conversation, Max shared powerful insights on why agencies should move beyond constantly chasing new clients and instead focus on cross-selling strategies and client upsell tactics to generate sustainable agency revenue. From the dangers of relying too heavily on retainer agreements to the benefits of project-based pricing and strategic marketing leadership, Max explains why aligning with clients’ business objectives is the key to profitable, long-term success in today’s fast-evolving digital agency landscape.

Key Takeaways:

Successful agency growth relies more on deepening client relationships than constantly pursuing new clients.
Agency upselling and cross-selling strategies should be treated as core parts of the agency sales process, not afterthoughts.
Agencies should focus on providing marketing leadership services to guide small business marketing strategies, especially when internal leadership is lacking.
Retainers often lead to scope creep and reduced agency profitability — project-based pricing offers better control and margins.
Agencies that shift from transactional services to strategic marketing advisory roles build stronger, more resilient businesses.
Regular client check-ins, focused on business goals rather than marketing metrics, unlock new opportunities for client upsell tactics.
Pricing confidently — and aligning agency pricing strategies with value provided — helps agencies avoid the race to the bottom.

Chapters:

[00:09] Introducing Max Traylor
[01:29] Are Agencies in Trouble?
[04:25] Leadership is Missing
[07:00] Growing Revenue with Current Clients
[11:46] Are Retainers the Right Way To Go?
[15:36] Productizing Your Services
[18:01] Advice on Starting a Consulting Service Today

More About Max Traylor:

Check out Max Traylor’s Website
Connect with Max Traylor on LinkedIn
Read Consultants Survival Guide by Max Traylor

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01.009)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Max Traylor. He helps agencies upsell and cross sell their existing clients. His approach centers on building relationships with decision makers and aligning with their business objectives, which ultimately leads to long-term retention and growth. Max is also the host of beers with Max podcast where he interviews other agency advisors and the author of the agency survival guide book.

series. So Max, welcome to the show.

Max Traylor (00:32.11)

Yeah, I didn’t realize the intro was so long when I was writing it. But yeah, you nailed it. You got it all. What do do now?

John Jantsch (00:37.273)

I cut some out, believe it or not.

You know what? I stumbled on my name, actually, because this is my third show today. So I think I’m struggling. So did I also see you drink a beer?

Max Traylor (00:49.912)

Yeah.

No, that was water. Uh, well you, you caught me with some, uh, cambocha, you know, cause for the gut. Yeah, me too. But I, you know, I’m on, I’m on 10 and a half weeks, uh, after breaking my foot and I got out of the boot. got out of the big walkie boot thing two days ago and, yeah, beer does not help with the healing of bones. So I’m really trying. Um, I’m really trying.

John Jantsch (00:54.183)

I know, that a runner.

okay. All right. I was kind of hoping it was a beer,

John Jantsch (01:06.727)

yeah. wow. Wow.

John Jantsch (01:14.971)

I’m I’m out, out, I’m out.

Yeah, yeah. No, no, you, got to do it. You got to get back out there. So there’s a lot of intrepidation in the agency world right now. I’m seeing, you know, a lot of, our mutual friend, I think I saw you comment on, Marcus Sheridan had a recent post, basically saying the, agency world is over that, you know, AI is replacing a lot of the things that agencies traditionally have done. Where do you stand on, on that? kind of sky is falling.

Max Traylor (01:23.406)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:49.255)

approach.

Max Traylor (01:49.856)

Yeah, I I was, I was, I was saying that 10 years ago. and that’s when I started is 10 years ago. So I think, I think there’s always a healthy dose of one thing going out the door, but you know, I, I was originally, I was seeing what was going on in, in the, in the Martech boost. So you got a lot of, it reduced the barriers of entry for agencies down to zero. So a lot of new entries into the market.

John Jantsch (01:53.925)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:11.867)

Yeah, yeah, Sure.

Max Traylor (02:18.786)

They knew how to design things because it was, you know, CMS world of like low code sites. So people could look like they knew what they were doing very easily. And it causes prices. caused prices to drop across the board. Then you had that surge of, gig network websites, which I think was the first sort of chop at the tactical deliverable.

John Jantsch (02:22.961)

Yeah, right.

Max Traylor (02:43.31)

work that agencies were doing and then I think I think AI just gave it the you the one to knockout punch on On that one. So yeah, I would yeah

John Jantsch (02:49.285)

Yeah. you also, I would say a version in there, squeezed in there somewhere, is you had all the folks that had a team in Philippines doing work and that really eroded pricing as well.

Max Traylor (03:04.054)

Yeah, sure. Yeah. just all the but I mean, I’ve always been in on team strategic work. I think that the the value of a third party is in their expertise, not what they can do. And the the doing of things will always go up and down in terms of you need a specialist to do it or some piece of technology just took that person’s job. I think it’s very difficult to have a long term sustainable professional service business.

where the service you provide is constantly changing, whether that’s being taken by AI or whatever it is. But if you have something strategic, if you specialize in understanding the way people buy, I mean, that might change a little bit over the course of 10 years. And that’s where you can really build up some expertise and monetize it.

John Jantsch (03:37.671)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:50.821)

Yeah, you you see, I’ve been doing this for a long time. So I’ve seen the wave of digital marketing agencies, social marketing agencies, know, that just like kind now you’re seeing AI agencies, people just kind of hopping on the latest train, and they eventually all get wiped out.

Max Traylor (04:09.42)

Yes. the train does leave the station eventually and you’re caught reinventing yourself. Nobody knows who you are. you’re, you’re, you’re, cutting, cutting prices. Yeah. So, that’s, that’s sort of the narrative that I keep talking about is like, be careful aligning yourself with the tactical work. will constantly changed. It will constantly be undercut. is low margin. It’s volume game.

John Jantsch (04:14.503)

Yeah.

Max Traylor (04:37.056)

And unless you’re a volume player, which most of us in this game are not, then we’re going get hurt out there.

John Jantsch (04:43.975)

So I have been preaching that because I think what’s happening is not only strategy become more important. think especially in the small to mid-sized business that really doesn’t have a marketing structure, certainly no marketing leadership, that actually providing marketing leadership as a service I think is sort of the next level of what being strategic means. I’m curious what you think about that idea.

Max Traylor (05:09.474)

Yeah, I agree with that. However, I continue to find that leadership in general and decision making in general is at an all time low. So if the idea is that we’re going to provide marketing leadership and come up alongside sales leadership, product leadership, what I’m finding is that leadership just isn’t there.

There’s rarely a defined decision-making process. There’s rarely a delegation of authority to the members of that leadership team. There’s nothing that says, this is the information we’re going to look at, and we’re going to make a decision every quarter for our budget in this regard. So if that’s not there, then what are you coming up alongside as a marketing?

John Jantsch (06:01.799)

Well, I guess my point is, is I agree with you. there’s nothing to come alongside. So why don’t you bring it to them?

Max Traylor (06:10.412)

Yes. And, so with a yes and, because I don’t think the, I don’t think your task is to bring marketing leadership. I think your task is to bring leadership and you should be prepared for the first time to facilitate a leadership planning session. So I think it’s one, I think you need to skip, or just recognize that you’re, you’re not just leading marketing as the person that

that owns that space, you’re also needing to facilitate probably for the first time, a decision making process, a planning cadence. And so you need to be well versed in the other departments in the business and you can’t, you can’t just assume that everything’s going to function the way you think it should function.

John Jantsch (06:57.113)

I think you should assume completely the opposite. Of course.

Max Traylor (06:59.662)

Yes, assume complete dysfunction. is the way. Sometimes I talk to smaller agencies and they believe that going up market, those clients are going to have their stuff together. You and I both know that it’s more chaotic the larger the organizations get, which makes it a lot easier to provide value in a strategic way because they’re so dysfunctional.

John Jantsch (07:12.773)

Yeah, yeah,

John Jantsch (07:24.391)

Yeah. Yeah. It’s just more meetings. It’s what I’ve found. Yeah. So let’s, let’s get to your favorite topic. Shall we? I know that you have been for some amount of time talking about this idea of here’s an idea. You’ve got a client already. Why don’t you get more business out of them? Scale the relationship that you already have. So talk a little bit about, and I know you’ve got some success stories you could talk about.

Max Traylor (07:27.95)

It is more meetings. That’s correct. Yeah. So you got to charge.

John Jantsch (07:52.699)

But talk a little bit about that mindset shift even.

Max Traylor (07:56.386)

Yeah, I mean, we want to make, we want to make revenue. Let’s start there. We can all agree. We’re at the, we’re at the fireplace. Cool. you get revenue from two sides of the business. You get new clients and you upsell cross sell to existing clients. That’s the only way to get revenue. That’s the only way to grow revenue. And all of the studies are showing a downward trend in the number of new meetings, a downward trend in the number of new logos coming on. is getting harder.

John Jantsch (08:24.005)

Mm.

Max Traylor (08:25.518)

person I was interviewing the other day had some study in his hand. all do. it was meetings are across the board down 30 % in 2024 and it’s only getting worse in 2025. The numbers are irrelevant. Just go ask people. You and I talked to enough people. New logos are getting harder. That’s the theme of 2023, 2024. Everything was sunshine and rainbows before that. So my question to everyone out there is when new logos are hard,

why can’t we look at upsell cross sell as a reliable revenue growth engine. And the reason is, no one’s paying attention to it. No one’s incentivizing for it. No one’s training for it. No one’s holding people accountable. We’re completely asleep at the wheel. It’s as if we hired a bunch of salespeople without incentivizing them or training them. And by the way, they’ve never worked in sales before. That’s what’s going on in the agency space.

John Jantsch (09:23.015)

All right, so let’s talk about mistakes on this, because that seems like a simple concept, but it also seems like there’s ways to screw it up. Because I’ve seen agencies that have business development folks, and they’re like, no, that’s my job. But they have no real relationship with the client, whereas the account manager or whoever, project manager, whatever you call them, is working with the client every day.

How do you see that working? Is it a business development function or is it train your account managers to look for opportunities?

Max Traylor (09:53.134)

I think that if it had to be a business account function, that would be better than it is today because I don’t see what you’ve just described where an account executive that is responsible for a revenue quota is going, okay, I could sell to new logos. Okay, my pipeline’s a little dry. What do we have for existing clients? Who can I upsell there? That is not the mindset because what typically happens is the principal assigns

And I say assigns in big sarcastic quotes, assigns upsell cross-sell client retention to the services side of the business. And it’s actually a no fly zone. It’s a no fly zone. It’s a don’t go there. It’s not your job. You won’t be incentivized for it. That’s the attitude towards the sales team in an effort to, make sure they focus on getting new logos.

And so honestly, if, if we just broke down the barriers and just admitted that our service people aren’t willing to aren’t willing or able at the moment to pull their weight and upsell clients and you just unleashed the sales team on existing clients, I think they’d get pretty far. I think they do pretty well. But it’s not happening.

John Jantsch (11:06.799)

Yeah. Yeah. How, how, are they going to identify the opportunities? mean, theoretically, the account executive is in there going over the way they should do this. We should do this. Here’s an opportunity. How does, how does the sales person can identify those?

Max Traylor (11:20.618)

I don’t care who it is, but to identify sales opportunities, you ask questions. And right now agencies are spending months, if not years, not asking questions at all. They’re delivering reports on clicks and whatever we think the client says is their business objectives, which they’re never, we’re never delivering against business objectives. We’re delivering some marketing metric.

John Jantsch (11:24.881)

Yeah, yeah.

Max Traylor (11:43.722)

We’re talking about the things that we have delivered. We haven’t had a business conversation since the sales process. That’s the reality for most clients. So I don’t care who does it. I don’t care what dress you put on it. I don’t care if you bring in a third party. If it’s sales, you come in and you say, hey, I want to ask you some questions about your business. What are you? What are you? What initiatives are you investing in across the board? Let’s talk about sales. Let’s talk about product. Let’s talk about.

finance, let’s talk about anything that’s not marketing. Like let’s, let’s just, let’s talk about real stuff here. You ask questions, you understand what they’re spending money on. And then you say, Hmm, how can I add value, to those business objectives? Like that’s what sale that sales. So that’s what we got to do.

John Jantsch (12:27.399)

Yeah. So a lot of agencies structure their fees around retainers. I know how you feel about this. So I’m just going to let you have this one. What about, what do you tell that agency says, well, we’re locked into this retainer. I, I, I’m, I’ll set you up. think you think retainers are not the right way.

Max Traylor (12:38.766)

Did I say that before? I don’t know.

Max Traylor (12:52.182)

Well, like, you know, when you go bowling and there’s the people with the bumpers? Yeah, yeah. Or or or you’re riding a bike and there’s training wheels. Yeah. Retainers are for the non confident. Retainers are a trade off. First of all, we all know that any retainer relationship is going to get less profitable as time goes on because the client is incentivized to get more and more from you for what they’re paying. Great. So profitability goes down.

John Jantsch (12:58.95)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:19.111)

Yeah.

Max Traylor (13:22.104)

The other challenge is it’s nearly impossible to grow or expand that account when you’re on retainer, because the whole point is we’re on retainer and you get whatever you need from us. So there’s no upsell. Retainer also breeds this sort of complacency throughout the entire account team. And all they’re thinking about is how do I hang on to this? It’s a very defensive posture. Ultimately, the client starts to gain control. They start to set

scope and tell agency what to do. You’ve lost control, you’re done, you’re going to lose that account. So you see a lot of agencies that are not confident in their upsell motion go after retainers. And honestly, I think it’s a false sense of security because if a client is going to cancel after month three, they’re going to cancel. The fact that you have a contract that lasts a year is completely irrelevant. They could berate you across the internet and you’ll be begging to get out

track. So let’s be real. What is much more profitable and naturally breeds upsell is projects. Everybody hates projects because you have to keep selling them. There is a middle ground. I always tell agencies, look, you want to have that long term conversation. You want to create a roadmap that aligns with their business objectives for the course of the year, because that’s when they decide how much budget is going to be allocated to say marketing.

John Jantsch (14:23.377)

Yeah.

Max Traylor (14:47.538)

But what I wouldn’t do is say, OK, here’s exactly what I’m to do with that budget for the course of the year. I’m going to say, look, we as as an as your new marketing leader and I know organization that you don’t have a cadence, but as your new marketing leader, I suggest that once a quarter we as a leadership team get together and decide how this budget will be allocated. Will create a plan that says here the goals here are the roles, the timeline, the budget considerations.

John Jantsch (15:08.817)

Yeah.

Max Traylor (15:17.27)

And what that does is it gives you the benefit of a project because you can scope that out very defined. So you maintain your margins and you maintain control of the client account, but it also forces the leadership team, the budget holding decision makers to come to the table once a quarter and you sit and you listen.

John Jantsch (15:33.574)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (15:40.241)

So this sort of relates to that. We work with a lot of, end up, I have ended up having a lot of conversations with agencies that feel like they, you know, they can’t get what they’re worth or what, you know, they’re always in this competitive environment. How do you, a lot of times it’s just, they won’t charge what they’re worth. You know, because they’re afraid they won’t get the work.

Max Traylor (15:59.446)

Yeah, honestly, step one, you don’t even have to you don’t have to pay me you don’t have to pay john just raise your prices like you’ll it’s a sobering exercise. There’s there’s someone there’s somewhere in between what you’re charging today, and what you’re worth and you got to find that but yes, that’s that’s step one for many people.

John Jantsch (16:05.221)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (16:17.575)

Seth Godin in his last book, and I never heard this put so succinctly. said, you know, pricing is how you pick your clients and how you pick your competitors. And I was like, yeah, that’s, that’s very real.

Max Traylor (16:31.212)

Yeah, yeah, my dad always said, you know, if you get a yes, that all you’ve learned is that you didn’t charge enough. No is the beginning of getting to the price that they’re willing to pay.

John Jantsch (16:38.627)

Right.

John Jantsch (16:45.243)

We went through a period and I don’t know if we’re out of it or still in it, know, where a lot of agencies were very much trying to productize their approach, you know, package their approach, their deliverables, you know, that they could say, well, if we charge this for this deliverable, we know what our margin is. Where do you fall on that type of approach? I still see a lot of it. It seems like it’s waning a little. Where do you fall on that?

Max Traylor (17:06.956)

Yeah, I mean, my first book was how to productize your consulting services. I mean, I think the term productize gets confused a lot. What I really mean is be an adult responsible service provider. Like you can’t just say it’s chaos. You can’t say it’s different for every client. No, grow up. You need a service process. Of course, clients are going to get, you know, different deliverables and things, but you have to decide these are the companies I’m working with.

John Jantsch (17:10.041)

Right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:14.789)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (17:23.675)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Max Traylor (17:35.362)

this is the process we’re going to use to deliver the value and you have to make some decisions on on what you know, piece of the value proposition that you want to contribute to. So I for years, there’s been a general lack of decision making on positioning and on service process. It’s been complete chaos. So yes, I’ve used that term product ties just to say you deliver the same thing to the same people for the same price or you don’t have a business. have operational chaos. what I’ve, what I,

John Jantsch (18:00.945)

Yeah, yeah.

Max Traylor (18:03.35)

I guess what I’ve seen is yes, more and more companies have done that. let’s say 10 years ago, sales consultancy world was very mature in this area. The world did not need another sales methodology, right? There was 25 million books on this is the sales methodology and clients got tired of that. They were like, look, I don’t care what, I don’t care what your methodology is. Just what are you going to do for me? Marketing was about 10 years behind. had 10 years of taking chaos into these named.

John Jantsch (18:17.339)

Mm-hmm.

Max Traylor (18:33.07)

methodologies and this is our inbound thing. Now every buzzword in the English language has been claimed. Clients are fatigued. Yes, I think there’s no longer this. we have this proprietary named thing. So no, I don’t think there’s that there’s that lure to it from a sales standpoint, but you still need to create that product mindset within your services team to get

to get repeatable operations, to be able to set and meet expectations with clients. You still have to do it. It’s just not like, it’s not, you’re not putting it in bright lights and going, look at what we can do. It’s like, yeah, I look AI can tell me that too.

John Jantsch (19:13.37)

Right.

All right. So your answer may be don’t, but if somebody were listening to this and saying, I’m going to start a consulting agency today, how, would you tell them? Where would you tell them to go? What would you tell them they had to have to be thinking about? What would you tell them they possibly, you know, can’t possibly do?

Max Traylor (19:40.642)

Well, the first thing I would do is ask myself, where do I have experience? My grandfather always said, you have to know the territory. And the worst thing that people do, like you have perfectly capable business owners out there that start agencies, but they go through this phase of, we’re going to see what works. And, you know, they ask for some referrals and they’ll spend years in chaos, not really developing an identity for themselves and whatever identity they do develop.

completely tactical, replaceable, marginalized by people in decision making seats. So they have to just look at their career and say, what business acumen do I have? Okay, I’m going to do that. And they have to make that scary decision. And when they make that scary decision, you got to spend the first year talking to as many people as you can in that space, figure out what they need, do that for them. Those are those are the basics that I just don’t see.

people, people do. I think you can develop an incredibly successful business if you A, choose your target market and B, are relentless about speaking to them, understanding what their needs are. those two things. I think you’re good. think, I think agency is in a great place. but not for most given the mindset that I encounter, you know, day in and day out.

John Jantsch (20:54.748)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:02.053)

Yeah, I said a billion times, people don’t care, don’t want what we sell. They want their problem solved. I think that’s what, that’s what we have to continue to focus on. Yeah.

Max Traylor (21:10.188)

Yeah, so you are you are problem finders. So you got to your thing, you got to go figure out what their problem is. And then you got to help them solve the problem. I would I would still say that, you know, there are are two steps to solving a problem. It’s helping the client understand how to solve that problem. That I think is where the money is. That’s selling knowledge that’s selling expertise. Then there’s the doing of that thing. That’s the commoditized area that’s either going to be my AI or, you know, shark.

John Jantsch (21:27.463)

Yeah.

Max Traylor (21:39.278)

Price chopped chum water with.

whatever generation is entering the market now, I can’t keep track of it. But those guys, those people.

John Jantsch (21:47.431)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Max Traylor (21:55.197)

Uh-huh. But they’re out there cutting prices is what they’re doing.

Max Traylor (22:09.046)

As a great new social network, LinkedIn. Yeah. Max trailer, LinkedIn. I’m always saying opinionated things and posting videos.

John Jantsch (22:11.717)

Yeah, okay. Yeah, that’s

John Jantsch (22:17.605)

Yeah. No, your, your feed is, is, lively and interesting. How’s that? That was a tough one. Okay. That’s how it was, man, as well. Again, thanks for stopping by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Max Traylor (22:23.458)

Thank you.

Max Traylor (22:26.978)

Yes, I took it as such.

Max Traylor (22:35.054)

Cheers.