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Transcript of When and How to Sell Your Business

Transcript of When and How to Sell Your Business written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by SEMrush. It is our go-to SEO tool for doing audits, for tracking position and ranking, for really getting ideas on how to get more organic traffic for our clients, competitive intelligence, backlinks and things like that, all the important SEO tools that you need for paid traffic, social media, PR and of course SEO. Check it out at semrush.com/partner/ducttapemarketing. And we’ll have that in the show notes.

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. And my guest today is Chad Peterson. He is the founder of Peterson Acquisitions and the author of Swinging Doors: A Guide to Selling Your Company. So, Chad, thanks for joining me.

Chad Peterson: Hey, thank you for having me, John.

John Jantsch: So, it’s not often I’ve speak to people… I interview people all over the world. My last guest was in Sydney, Australia. So, it’s kind of fun to interview somebody in Kansas City.

Chad Peterson: Yeah, we are local. We’re probably not 15 minutes away from one another but we’re broadcasting everywhere, and isn’t that phenomenal?

John Jantsch: It is pretty fun. So, let’s just get right to it. Should everybody who starts a company have the goal of selling it?

Chad Peterson: Absolutely. The problem is this. And I’ll be very concise with my answer. Absolutely, you should plan on selling it. Doesn’t mean you need to be working every day to make sure it’s sellable but you should have an exit strategy in mind because you’re not going to live there forever. There’s a chance you could but it’s a very small chance. It’s kind of like somebody buying a starter home. Are you really going to live in your starter home forever? Probably not. You’re probably going to move up. So, I think, yes, you’re going to move on. It happens all the time.

Chad Peterson: There are builders of businesses; and there are operators of businesses. I find that people that start businesses are more entrepreneurial; and I find that people that operate businesses are more managerial. And those that are looking to buy a business are more managerial, otherwise they would have started the business themselves to begin with.

John Jantsch: Great point. So, and you’ve probably seen, I know I have, people that toiled their whole life, maybe they paid for their house and they bought their food and stuff, but then they came to the end and it was just like, “Close the doors.” I mean, that’s pretty sad, isn’t it?

Chad Peterson: To me, it’s especially sad. I think it’s absolutely terrible if you’re not able to sell your business and walk away with a severance package, so to speak, as being self-employed. So yeah, it really puts a sour taste in my mouth whenever I see somebody’s business die on the vine and they just shut the doors. And really, I think most of the time, it’s because they had bad advice along the way because somebody could’ve stepped in and said, “Hey, this is how you do this,” and walked them to a strategy to get them out of their business with some compensation.

John Jantsch: So, I’m sure that most business owners think that their business is worth more than somebody will pay for it. How do you go about valuing a business? I mean, what are the just nuts and bolts in it?

Chad Peterson: Well, how you value a business, bottom line, is just the cash flow or what we call “seller’s discretionary earnings,” which is… Let’s just say there’s a river of money coming through the door of your business, and you stuck a net in that river. Whatever the owner can pull out of that river is seller’s discretionary earnings, and that comes in the way of salary or a pass-through earnings to the corporation, in distributions, your car, your car insurance, fuel, cell phone, meals, entertainment, 401(k), travel, things of that nature. Anything that your company does for you adds up to that seller’s discretionary earnings number. And we’re going to use that number to price it to make sure that it debt-services at the bank because there’s going to be a loan on it. And so, those numbers have to make sense from a banking perspective.

Chad Peterson: But more importantly, John, I would say whenever you want to go and sell your business, and I know you have a lot of business owners in your audience and many of them have probably built great businesses, but what I really try to drill into people is watch maybe less than the profitability of your company, watch the passion that you have for your business because when you start to lose passion is when it’s already over. The bell’s already been wrung and game’s over. It’s just you’re hanging around for no reason. So, when the passion’s gone, be quick to be ahead of that. So, if you think you might be losing passion for it, you probably already have. And a year from now is going to be more painful. And two years from now, it’ll be even more painful. And so, if your passion is waning, then it’s time to sell. Get out of your own way because without passion, there is no profit.

Chad Peterson: And if you wait too long, profits fade, the value of your business goes down. And so, that big payday, which is what you were talking about earlier, is whenever you just shut down the doors, is because the passion left the building three or four years ago. And now, your numbers are showing it. And now, nobody wants to buy it because the numbers aren’t there.

John Jantsch: How often do you find that businesses… It’s difficult to sell a business because the truth of the matter is the business is really the owner. I mean, that person’s relationships, their ability to sell. I mean, how big a problem is that when it comes time to sell?

Chad Peterson: You’re never going to hear [inaudible] answer [inaudible] another broker but I’ll tell you the answer. Anything above $120,000 in earnings, it doesn’t matter whether it’s owner-operated or not. And here’s the reason why. You can go get a job in corporate America, making 60, 70, $80,000 a year. You can’t, or you wouldn’t rather, go buy a business that’s only making $80,000 a year, and get a bank loan on that business to only go to work for yourself and make 80 grand a year and pay debt service on it.

Chad Peterson: The threshold that I see psychologically is $120,000. So, if you’re an owner-operator of your business and you’re making north of six figures, somebody will go buy that business. And what they’ll try to do is find the deficiencies in your business, thinking that they can, and most likely they can, build that business from there. In other words, if you’ve got a 12-rung ladder, if you’ve gotten it to the fourth or fifth rung, and you sell it, and let’s just say it’s [inaudible] 120 grand a year, you sell it, they’ll take it from there and they’ll try to make it to $250,000 a year. There are buyers out there like that. But if you’re an owner-operator and you’re making 80, $90,000 a year, it’s very hard to sell those types of companies.

John Jantsch: Sure, yeah. That makes sense. I’m sure a lot of people that you… business owners… I mean, is it just the balance sheet, the P&L, the tax returns? Or is there a way to get value out of, I don’t know, potential, or an asset like web traffic or something like that? Or is it really just come down to dollars and cents?

Chad Peterson: It really does come down to dollars and cents. The extenuating factor there would be if somebody’s really passionate about something and it brings them a lifestyle, then you can get more for it. The catch is always the bankability.

Chad Peterson: So, let’s just say, for instance, I’ve got a business that pays you $400,000 a year; you’ve got 23 employees; and you’re going to have to work it. And you’re going to own it but it’s going to own a piece of you too. Well, that’s worth X amount. But what if I said, “Hey, here’s $400,000 of income. Here’s a laptop. Here’s your login. And here’s your cell phone. And you can be in Australia or you can be a beach bum somewhere and you can run this business.” Well, that’s worth a different amount, right? So, those are both truths. I mean, they’re so far from one another, but really they’re bringing in the same value. But one has lifestyle potential and one doesn’t. Here’s the problem: The buck stops at the bank.

Chad Peterson: So, the bank is not going to put an exorbitant amount on lifestyle; they’re only going to put the amount that they will lend on the actual business, which sends us into a different stratosphere, “Well, we have to talk about, okay, if you want more for your business because it’s a lifestyle business, we have to find more of a cash buyer or somebody who has more money to put down on it.” Because a bank would say, “Well, okay, I see your value, but I’m only going to give 80% of that value.” Well, now we have to have a buyer that comes up with 20%, maybe even 30%, if the business is priced with a lifestyle component.

John Jantsch: Where do you see people who come to you and say, “I want to sell my business”? “I hear you’re a business broker.” I mean, where do you see that they… What are their challenges typically, when you… How do you have to get them in shape?

Chad Peterson: Well, are you talking about if they come to me and they’re just not really ready to sell yet? Like they’re not really ready for market [crosstalk 00:09:12]?

John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I’m sure a lot of people just think, “Oh, I just sell this thing. I’m done now.” I mean, and I’m sure you’ve learned that no, there’s some things you got to clean up. You’ve got to show, what, better cash flow, whatever it is.

Chad Peterson: Yeah. The biggest thing really… I’m going to go back to that passion subject because the main thing is that they wait too damn long to call me. And by the time they call me, they are so exhausted. They think it’s like a lemonade stand. “Oh hey, Chad, I’m ready to sell. Go ahead and get rid of it.” Okay, well that’s not how it works. You have to come to me; I have to put together a package; I have to understand your business; we have to market it to the right buyer, not just any buyer; I have to get that through a very rigorous process, called the SBA underwriting process, at a bank. I mean, this isn’t selling candy bars; this is selling a business. And so, that’s the first problem.

Chad Peterson: The second problem is they’re often not ready from a marketing and a management standpoint. I would say the three M’s, that everybody has a marketing problem, a messaging problem and a management problem. And those three things, marketing, message and management, within those three things, those three things have probably made them tired in the first place. And that’s probably why they’re calling me in the first place. If they had really strong, strategic marketing, they would probably be doing better. If they had a clear, bottled-up, concise message, a brand, that they could yell through a bullhorn and the market could hear them, they probably wouldn’t be getting tired. If they had a good management system in place where people were motivated rather than being managed, they probably wouldn’t be getting tired. So, it’s the three M’s. And that’s why they call me. So, I would say that number one is their passion and then the three M’s that I just mentioned.

John Jantsch: I’m sure different businesses, different industries are different, but are there kind of people… Should business owners be thinking about who they want to sell it to and maybe even start courting maybe existing employees or maybe a really good customer? Or are there things that business owners should be doing in that sense to kind of, before the thing is for sale even, start sort of courting or grooming somebody?

Chad Peterson: No, that’s the last thing they should do. An employee is never going to buy it. The reason is, most of the time, they don’t have the money. And people have their own dreams and passions. It kind of segways into another conversation, which is, “What about my son taking over? What about my daughter taking over?” That never happens either. Whatever a son or a daughter or, in this case you’ve mentioned an employee, they’ve seen the hell that you’ve had to go through to build that business and somehow, the sexiness has worn off of it. So, that doesn’t happen. As far as talking to competition, you don’t want to do that either. And all of those buyers are very unlikely.

Chad Peterson: What’s so counterintuitive about selling a business is that the most unlikely buyer is the one who’s going to buy it. Somebody who just walked out of corporate America; he’s got six or seven bosses; he’s miserable; he’s in a cubicle, that’s probably your buyer. And I have about 3,000 of them right now. And so, it would more than likely be somebody like that, much over competition or an in-house employee or a partner.

John Jantsch: So, let’s talk about the types of buyouts. I’m sure a lot of people just assume “somebody buys it from me, and they give me a check, and I go on my merry way.” But buyouts are not really structured that way, are they?

Chad Peterson: Well, are you talking about a buyout like a partner buyout? Or [crosstalk 00:12:54]?

John Jantsch: No, I just mean… not necessarily buyout. That’s probably the wrong term. But when somebody sells a business, are they sometimes on the hook to finance it? Are they sometimes on the hook to stay there and earn out what they’re going to buy? Or is it typically like I get a check and I go on my merry way?

Chad Peterson: Well, I would say maybe 10% of the time, maybe 15% of the time, somebody gets a check and they walk off into the sunset. But it’s very rare. The reason goes back to the subject of bankability. So, if the bank wants more security or collateral, then the bank can use that as human collateral. They can say, “Okay, We’ll do the deal but we want the seller to do a 10% seller carry.” So, let’s just say you were to sell your business for a million dollars, the bank might ask you to carry $100,000. In other words, at close, you’re not going to get 100 grand of your million. That’s a wonderful thing for all parties. It’s just that sellers clam up and get tight whenever they hear about that because they’re like, “Oh gosh, I’m not going to get my money.” But the truth of it is that it never fails. I’ve never seen one fail. Not only that, but it’s on a promissory note and it’s usually at a good interest rate.

Chad Peterson: Right now, if you were to do a seller carry, you’d get paid 8.5% on that money. And it’s mailbox money. So, you close the business and you’re getting mailbox money for the next 36 months. Every month, you get paid. So, it’s good for the seller. It’s good for the buyer because the buyer has a feel good on the whole deal because he knows that the seller is going to stick around and make sure it’s a smooth transition. And it’s good for the bank because they have the same mentality, that they want to have a good transition for success.

John Jantsch: How often is the seller contractually obligated to stay and run some aspect of a business? How often do you see that?

Chad Peterson: Well, everybody is required to stay for 90 days. And everybody is required to leave at 12 months. So, it’s mandatory 90 days transition. That’s standard. But with that being said, let’s just say it’s a business that doesn’t require a full 90 days. Then the language is written up, “Hey, for the first month, I need X amount of time; second month, this amount of time; and then for the last month, by phone, as needed.”

Chad Peterson: But let’s just say you sold the business and the seller is hanging around after the 12 months. After the 12th month, it’s actually a SBA violation because there’s a possible litigation matter there and the SBA can’t have it. So, everybody has to agree that after the 12 months, you got to be gone.

John Jantsch: All right, let’s flip the tables a little bit because you mentioned that you work with a lot of… you represent a lot of buyers of businesses. So, if a listener’s out there thinking, “Well, maybe I’ll just buy a business.” What should they be looking for?

Chad Peterson: Well, this is the truth of the matter. This is some real nitty-gritty stuff that nobody else is ever going to say to them. But I’m one of those brokers that’ll just hit you right between the eyes with it. I don’t have any time to give you any fluff. I want to give people the real deal. The truth of it is that if you want to be a buyer of a business, you have to get close to a broker. And you have to pay that broker.

Chad Peterson: Here’s an example. And John, this is good for your listeners because it’s so important and, like I said, they get wrong information. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. I’ve got 3,000 buyers right now. Let’s just say that a good business lands on my desk. Let’s just say that a business that’s making [inaudible] dollars a year. You can run it from a laptop and a phone, which I just got one of those today. As soon as I get it, as soon as I package this up and I send it out to 3,000 buyers, it’s like throwing a T-bone steak at a pack of walls. It’s going to be eaten up really quick. So, there’s a lot of people, and this is so important, there’s a lot of people that are out there calling brokers and saying, “Hey, what do you got?”

Chad Peterson: Buying a business is not like buying toothpaste. You can’t just see what’s on the shelf and go pick it out. If it were that easy, it would be that easy. And it’s not. So, this is the thing. If you wanted to come to me to buy a business, I’m going to evaluate how rare of an animal that you want me to go get for you. If it’s a rabbit, something that’s really common, I’m going to charge you $20,000. If it’s a deer, harder hunt but common, could be 40,000. If you want an elephant, I could charge you 75,000. If you want a elephant with pink feet and purple toenails, I could charge you 100,000.

Chad Peterson: It depends on what you’re going after because a lot of people will call me and they’ll say, “Chad, I want manufacturing and distribution. I want to be making $3 million a year. I want it to be in this region. I want this amount of employees. I want this amount of EBITDA. I want… ” It’s like, “Okay, great. Do you really think that I have that laying on my shelf right now?” Okay? And so, what they do is they waste their time. That would probably be like somebody calling you, John, and saying, “Hey John, get me to the top of Google. Can you do that tomorrow? Get me on the top of Google search rankings.” And you’re like, “Man, if it was that easy, it’d be that easy.”

John Jantsch: A lot of people do ask for that though. You’re absolutely right. So-

Chad Peterson: Right. And the truth of it is you have to pay.

John Jantsch: Is that the typical arrangement? The buyer pays your fee? Or is a typically a business broker compensated kind of like real estate agents? If you’re representing both parties or you’re representing one party, you get a commission? Or how is a business broker compensated?

Chad Peterson: Well, I represent the seller but… And in 95% of the case… and I don’t even want to give your audience that label. I don’t represent anybody, okay? I mean, that’s just the improper way to say it. But if we’re talking in legal terms, that’s how it’s positioned. But no, I get paid by the seller but I very much so hold the hands of the seller and the buyer, more so the buyer, and I get them to the bank. So, I’m working equally for both sides.

Chad Peterson: But in the scenario where somebody wants to go buy a particular type of business, I charge them to go hunt for that particular type of business. And then, that’s a different fee and it’s separate from the transaction. That’s simply a consulting fee. And then, I’ll arrange with the seller for the seller to pay me for the actual transaction for the seller.

John Jantsch: Got it. So, I get pitches every now and then from business brokers. And again, a lot of it’s just they’re just cold-calling. But if somebody’s listening and thinking, “You know, maybe I should go talk to a business broker,” are there certain things they should be looking for? And I realize you are a business broker, and a lot of the other business brokers out there don’t do some of the things you do, but if somebody’s considering, what’s kind of the checklist of things that they need to make sure that they check off?

Chad Peterson: Man, honestly… I know the question you’re asking and I’d like to answer it as you asked, but I’m going to answer it a little bit differently just because it’s the truth. You really don’t want to go with a business broker; you want to go with the owner of a brokerage. And the reason is because most brokerages… and I refuse to do it. By the way, I’ve employed over 1,000 people and there’s not enough Aspirin on the shelves for that much unemployment. So, I just don’t want the headaches. But a lot of these brokerages, what they do is they’re hiring people to simply call you. They’re hiring glorified telemarketers, so somebody else that actually knows what they’re doing inside those walls will then handle it.

Chad Peterson: So, if you’re getting cold-called by a broker or you’re searching for brokers to sell your business, I hate to be such a bad guest and bad-mouth my industry, but I don’t have the respect for the people in my industry. They don’t have the knowledge, the expertise, the intentionality. Most of these people in the brokerage business are just looking for a paycheck and you have to be careful with people that are in deals because they just need a paycheck. Now, I’m not saying that I don’t need to make money, because I’m not Jeff Bezos just yet, but I don’t need a paycheck. So, if you call me and you want to sell your business, I’m not doing it just to get paid; I’m doing it to do good work. And I can’t say that for a lot of people. Does that make sense to you?

John Jantsch: Absolutely. Great answer. So, Chad, tell me where people can find out more about you and maybe get a copy of Swinging Doors.

Chad Peterson: Oh yeah. Please contact me if you have any questions about selling your business. Please contact me at petersonacquisitions.com. And go to my site and get the free download of Swinging Doors. It explains step by step how to sell your business and any and all details of it. And my website has a lot of blogs too, full of information. But again, petersonacquisitions.com. I’m very responsive. And if you just leave your information there, I will get back to you.

John Jantsch: Yep. And we’ll have a link in the show notes, as we always do. So, Chad, it was great to visit with you and maybe we’ll bump into you here in town soon.

Chad Peterson: Okay. Thanks a lot for having me on, John.

Transcript of Investing in Small Businesses to Do Good for the Community

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John Jantsch: This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a platform that helps growth-focused eCommerce brands drive more sales with super-targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook and Instagram marketing.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Amanda Brinkman. She is the chief brand officer for Deluxe, and the host and producer of the very fun, Small Business Revolution TV series, which is in season four currently. So, Amanda, thanks for joining us.

Amanda Brinkman: Thank you so much for having me.

John Jantsch: So, start by setting up the premise of the show for people that are not familiar with what you’re doing.

Amanda Brinkman: So, the small business revolution main street is a docu series, where each season we revitalize a different small towns main street through its small businesses. We really believe in the thesis of the show is that if you have a strong, small business core that any community or town can thrive. So, each year we ask people to nominate their favorite small town. And then the Luxal invest half a million dollars in revitalizing that winning town’s main streets, and they’ll be featured in that season of the show.

John Jantsch: So, where can people tune in if they want to find both past seasons, and follow along with you right away?

Amanda Brinkman: Lots of different places. So, they can watch it on Hulu, or it’s on Amazon Prime Video. Amazon just picked it up, or it’s streams online @smallbusinessrevolution.org. So, if you don’t have Prime or you don’t have Hulu, you can watch it online for free @smallbusinessrevolution.org.`

John Jantsch: Awesome. So, let’s talk about the town. So, I love this concept of marrying the two things. Not only the small businesses, but just as you suggest, the impact that that has on the overall community. And some of these small towns are hurting, I think in that regard. So, talk about the process for choosing the town, because I know you get inundated with people that say, “Oh, come to our town.”

Amanda Brinkman: Yeah, exactly. Well, I think that’s because small towns are all struggling with the same thing, no matter where they are geographically. All small towns are struggling with… Big box retailers are moving down on the edge of town, which is putting pressure on their mom and pop shops. They’ve got online competition, which is a problem for small business and across the country, no matter what size community you’re in, you’ve got restaurant chains moving in.

Amanda Brinkman: It’s really hard for these small businesses to compete. And when you think about a small town, and when you tell someone to either visit your favorite small town, or where you’re from, you talk about the small businesses. Small businesses are what make a town or a unique, or a community, or a neighborhood, even in a large urban area, these small businesses are what make it unique. You talk about the barber shop, or your dad used to get his hair cut, and you got your first haircuts, or you talk about that diner where they know your order, or the local coffee shop where you see people that you know from the community.

Amanda Brinkman: You talk about these gathering places that small businesses are, and small businesses also give back to their communities in disproportionate ways. They are the ones who are spending their tax dollars are seeing within your community, they’re hiring employees from your community. They’re certainly the ones who are sponsoring the local little league team. And so we need to see these small businesses be successful in order for towns to thrive. Because again, that’s a differentiated small town is their individual small businesses.

John Jantsch: So, my father was a manufacturer’s representative. So, we’re talking about 50 years ago, and he would go to these small towns, and there he’d always have three or four clients on now on the square on every one of them. And my favorite was… I used to go with him sometimes when I was growing up on these trips, and my favorite was always the hardware store, with the worn wooden floors and everybody working there had worked there for 35 years, and they knew they had one of everything, and they knew where it was. Still, today there were a few of those around, aren’t there?

Amanda Brinkman: Oh absolutely. And you know, what’s so special about small businesses is that they often say to us, “How do I compete with online pressure? I can’t compete with those online prices or their distribution.” It’s like, no, you can’t. But what you can compete on is that personalized customer service. The fact that when you go into those local hardware shops, they know how to fix the thing you’re trying to fix, and they’re going to spend time with you getting to know exactly what that challenge is, or that problem is that you’re trying to solve.

Amanda Brinkman: And big box stores can try and emulate that same service experience. But when you’re not from that community, or you’re not the owner of that business, it’s just hard to get the average employee to treat the customers at that same level of personalization. And so, we always tell small business, compete on what you can be differentiated around. And that is that service, and knowing your customers, and knowing their unique needs.

John Jantsch: All right, so you roll into town, you’ve chosen a city, and you have a fun way because you reveal it. They don’t know they got picked. So, you’re all in, you pick that town. How do you pick the individual businesses in that town then? Because, obviously there’s a whole lot of people that would love help.

Amanda Brinkman: Absolutely. So, each year we get about 200 businesses that apply to be one of the six businesses we feature each season. And we do work with all of the small businesses within the community, Deluxe hosts, marketing seminars, and financial seminars. So, we go door to door and help the small businesses. So, we can really only feature in depth, six of them within each season of the show. And so, a couple of things we’re looking for is, through the series we’re really trying to show them what a difference marketing can make for small businesses. And so we’re looking for a business where maybe marketing is a challenge for them, and where we think it will make the biggest difference. We’re looking for businesses where people-

John Jantsch: So, basically every business.

Amanda Brinkman: You know it, that’s true. So, you can help us narrow it down. We’re all set. And so we also are looking for business owner stories that are going to resonate with the audience. And because the whole part… One of the main reasons we do this show is because there’s something about that affirmation.

Amanda Brinkman: So, the large base of our fans are other entrepreneurs and small businesses because they want to learn from what we do in the show. But we also are striving to affirm the viewer that the things that you’re struggling with as a small business owner, aren’t unique to you that other people are struggling with this too. Because, it can be very lonely to be a business owner. And wonder if other businesses are struggling with the same thing, and why don’t you have the answers. And so, we want to find stories where the viewers can see themselves in those struggles, and see themselves in the stories.

Amanda Brinkman: And the whole reason again, is a seriousness because through that story time we’re also trying to inspire non-small business owners to support small businesses. So, when you hear a family story, and why they run the business, you put a face to the business, you want to go out and support them. So, we’re trying to find stories that resonate both in a business level, as well as a personal level. We’re also trying to show a great diversity of businesses, not just diversity in the business owners, but that’s a very important factor for us throughout the seasons. But also diversity of the kind of category or vertical of business.

Amanda Brinkman: So we don’t want to just do a restaurant makeover shore, or just retail, we want to show very niche businesses too. So, in past seasons we’ve featured a dog groomer, or a boxing jim, or a barber shop, a daycare center. We want to show as many different kinds of business too, to make sure that the advice that we give in the series is as applicable to as many kinds of businesses as possible.

John Jantsch: Now you have a co-host on the show, and first couple of seasons it was Robert, oh gosh, I’m forgetting his last name.

Amanda Brinkman: Robert Herjavec.

John Jantsch: There, Herjavec there we go.

Amanda Brinkman: From Shark Tank.

John Jantsch: And now you have Ty Pennington on the show with you. And I will say, you’re a much sharper dresser than he is.

Amanda Brinkman: [inaudible] I got to tell you, I don’t mind you saying that.

John Jantsch: So, tell me this, what are some of the universe… You already mentioned it, marketing, but what are some of the kind of universal problems that you see, that you walk in, you go, [inaudible] here we are again.

Amanda Brinkman: The two things we seem to struggle with the most, are the marketing. Not understanding how to use marketing to grow and differentiate their business. And the second thing is their finances. So, not necessarily having a handle on their numbers, or what the numbers are telling them. And so that is why those are the two things we focused on most in the show, because those are the two things you need to have a handle on, to really run your business and those are two things that most business owners start their business to get into. They don’t come naturally to a lot of people for good reason.

Amanda Brinkman: People start a bakery because they love to bake, not because they can’t wait to build a website, or to figure out what the heck SEO is, or to balance their books at the end of the month. But none of the important factors of the success of your business. So, every episode and in real life, we just come in to walk alongside those businesses and help them with the resources, so that they can get back to doing what they love about their business. We never have to invent the passion for this business. We never have to convince them to try a different kind of bakery. And they’ve got those pieces of their business nailed. We just try and help them with the things that don’t come naturally, because we want them to be successful.

John Jantsch: I want to remind you that this episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo helps you build meaningful customer relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers. And it allows you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages. There’s powerful segmentation, email autoresponder that are ready to go. Great reporting. You want to learn a little bit about the secret to building customer relationships. They’ve got a really fun series called Klaviyo’s beyond black Friday. It’s a docu-series, a lot of fun, quick lessons. Just head on over to klaviyo.com/beyondBF, beyond black Friday.

John Jantsch: Some of the shows have some drama. There are tears, and there’s joy, and there’s anger and frustration. What’s been the most touching story for you?

Amanda Brinkman: Oh my. I think this season it’s hard, because we in real life are so close with all these businesses, and I think all of their stories have such emotional elements. So, I think that one of the stories that we’re seeing really resonate with people, and certainly did with my team and I if Whilma’s Filipino Restaurant, it’s episode two of season four. The [Forgosa] family is from the Philippines. And so, Whilma who owns the restaurant, and her husband moved their family from the Philippines to Searcy, Arkansas. It’s the great American dream with literally $100 and two suitcases. And they moved their four children who are all under, I believe the age of 10 at the time. All in pursuit of creating what they perceived to be a better life for their children, or more opportunities for them.

Amanda Brinkman: And how brave to not only do that, so she as apparent on how sacrificial, and then also to them start a business and being a business owner from the most briefings you can do. And we saw her be… What I talked about before. She has a passion for cooking. She’s an amazing cook. She has this incredible sense of hospitality, which is inherent to not just her Filipino culture, but just her as a person. But things like cost of goods and marketing, and interior decor, and some of these other things we’re seeing in her way of actually being a profitable business. So who should have been in business about 10 years and had barely paid herself and some years maybe not at all. And working that hard, you want to see people be able to… There’s nothing wrong with making money from the business when a business is meant to do and provide for the family.

Amanda Brinkman: And so we were just so proud to see what marketing and the publicity of the show, and helping her with some of those operational things like quantity sizes of menu pricing, and some of those less fun things to talk about, but how they could really impact your bottom line. And so that was a very emotional, I think probably because she just sat in such a space of gratitude throughout the entire process. And it’s always wonderful to see a family come together and move themselves forward. It’s very rewarding.

John Jantsch: So, I’m freely will admit, I’m a fan of the Queer Eye series and there is a little bit of that for business. It feels like there’s a lot of hope you’re focused on businesses as opposed to individuals, but there’s a bit of a makeover aspect to it, isn’t there?

Amanda Brinkman: There really is. And I think the other thing we have in common with Queer and they wish more shows for following this is. This is really a makeover show with heart. We aren’t there to make the business owners look stupid, or to look like we’re the saviors we’ve certainly had distribution partners, not the existing ones, but others that we’ve talked to that want to dial up drama,or different things like we’re not just not going to do that. Yo don’t need to invent drama. When you run a small business to be antagonists is, in a business like that there is no need to pretend or dial that up. We’re truly just there to help, and there are certainly dramatic moments in every episode that come out just naturally, because that is the nature again of being an entrepreneur.

John Jantsch: It’s very personal. So, you’ve got a few seasons under your belt now. I suspect you’ve probably checked back in with some of your folks from past seasons. Have you seen real impact in bottom line impact? They have a different business now?

Amanda Brinkman: Absolutely. Every business is certainly far more profitable. Some of the greatest success stories are a season two Annabella Italian restaurant and Bristol borough has tripled their sales, and hired a few more people. Ellen’s dress and bridal from Wabash, Indiana season one went from being $100,000 in debt, and never paying herself to certainly paying herself in doing well.

Amanda Brinkman: Well first of all, the fact that all 24 businesses are still in business, is actually a statistical anomaly in terms of business. Seeing this is being able to stay open and those open rates. But no, they’re all doing extremely well and in different ways. Some have more work life balance, which was a goal for them. They’re all more profitable. Some of them would be able to hire people, which was a goal. So, all of them had certain goals going into it and those have been met.

Amanda Brinkman: And the funny thing that we do is, each season we actually kick off the season with a return to episode from the previous season. So, we did a return to all [inaudible] a few weeks before we just launched season four, which is in Searcy, Arkansas. And it’s so fun to see impact on the whole community. Some of that half a million dollar investment from Deluxe also goes to the town. We gave aesthetic improvements to the main street, and invest in different things within the town as well. And it’s just fun to see the ripple effect. It’s more than just those six businesses. The whole town is really on a different trajectory on the other side of the small business revolution.

John Jantsch: So, your publicity team, when they were lining up this interview said that you were going to use this occasion to announce season five’s winner.

Amanda Brinkman: Well, that was very preempted on themselves. Here’s where we’re at actually in the process. So we’re actually, [inaudible]

John Jantsch: I was going to stay silent there as long as you needed.

Amanda Brinkman: We’re actually in the process of narrowing down the season five nominations. So, over the course of the five years, we’ve received 35,000 nominations accounts. So, every year we get thousands and thousands of towns nominated. So, we’re not even close to announcing that, because what we do is, we narrow down to the top 10, we go out and visit them, boots on the ground, and then we announced the top five, which we’ll announce on January 14th, and then it is up to the public, the public votes, where we actually end up going. And once we identify the five, it’s out of Deluxe is hand sending it up to the American public to vote. And then I’ll pop out on someone’s stage. I believe it’s scenery 28th.

John Jantsch: Okay, awesome. So, your title is chief brand officer. I’m guessing there’s a day job beyond the show involved in that?

Amanda Brinkman: Yes, there is. Over the years, it’s been nice that I’ve been able to focus more and more in the series producing and hosting, and show running a series is an all consuming full time job. And so my team and I are quite focused on the series itself, but we’re very proud at Deluxe that we not only do the small business revolution, but it’s truly our brand purpose turned into a brand action. And so we very much as a company look at this as the leading efforts that we do to really get our brand out there. And it’s making a difference beyond just selling small businesses, marketing services. We’re actually going out and putting our money where our mouth is, and helping these communities and businesses. And so, much of what I do is focused on that brand pieces is how this is leading us as a company.

John Jantsch: And really this is going to sound like a commercial for Deluxe, but here it goes. Deluxe is such a great example of one of these companies that is a very old company that was in a very old industry, that was very entrenched in a very old industry that said, “Wait a minute, at some point people are going to stop buying checks. Maybe we’re going to have to do something else.” And I think a lot of companies died because the golden calf was there and they hung onto it.

John Jantsch: I think Deluxe probably earlier than a lot of companies pivoted to,”Hey, we have to be something else to our customers.” And we got into marketing. You were one of the first companies to really get into content, as a lot of us marketers started talking about it 15 years ago, and now maybe just briefly. What are, what are the offerings at Deluxe look like for small business?

Amanda Brinkman: So, we can help a small business with anything they need to market their business. So, whether it is designing your logo, building your website, securing your domain, email marketing, promotional items, apparel, business cards, email marketing, the list is long. Anything you need to really market your business. And we’re really the only company that can do all of those things for small businesses. We certainly have a lot of competitors that just focus on email marketing, or just business cards, or just domains. But it’s really nice to work with one company that not only has the heart that Deluxe does, but that can do all of those things for you, because it’s just easier than having to try and go and work with a different company for [inaudible] marketing needs.

Amanda Brinkman: And again, we really do it because we recognize that marketing just isn’t something that comes naturally to small businesses, and we want them to be able to focus on what comes naturally to them. So, why not work with a company that can walk alongside you in an affordable way where you can focus on what you want to do in money in your business, rather than trying to figure it out, some of these marketing things that keep evolving and changing over time.

John Jantsch: Speaking with Amanda Brinkman, she is the host and producer of the Small Business Revolution Main Street, currently in season four of that you can find on Hulu and Amazon prime, and Amanda, tell folks where they might also find more information about the work at Deluxe and the show itself.

Amanda Brinkman: So, we encourage people to either visit Deluxe.com, or smallbusinessrevolution.org, and smallbusinessrevolution.org is a really great resource to hear more behind the scenes of what we work with the businesses on. So, especially if you’ve seen an episode maybe on a different platform like Hulu or Prime, it’s a great place to go and find out more about how we built out that website, or why we recommended a certain marketing solution, or a certain financial solution, gives a little bit more in depth. Because as you can imagine, needs to be scenes that ended up being about three minutes in an episode or actually, two hour conversation. So, we really want to provide small businesses with the resources to understand the strategies that we recommend.

John Jantsch:  Awesome. Thanks so much for showing up, and sharing your time and information with us, and hopefully we Will run into you soon out there on the road.

Amanda Brinkman: Thank you so much.

Transcript of How Leaders Can Create Inclusive Cultures

Transcript of How Leaders Can Create Inclusive Cultures written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jennifer Brown. She is a leading diversity and inclusion expert, keynote speaker, author, and host of The Will To Change Podcast. We’re going to talk about her book today called How to Be an Inclusive Leader: Your Role in Creating Cultures of Belonging Where Everyone Can Thrive.

John Jantsch: So Jennifer, thanks for joining me.

Jennifer Brown: Thanks John.

John Jantsch: So really inclusiveness belonging has always been important, but sure seems like there’s a heck of a lot of emphasis on it these days. So has something changed? Why now?

Jennifer Brown: By now, I’m grateful that we’re actually there is… something has changed and the energy I’m getting back is palpably different than it used to be. I think there’s a bunch of reasons for it. There’s more awareness that there is a problem, there’s inequity in the workplace, there’s a lack of representation of really in the workplace it’s a lack of the representation of the diversity of the world that businesses do business in.

Jennifer Brown: So that’s like essentially the business case. We talk about the fact that really, in order to know a market and to sell into that market with cultural competency and respect, you need to understand that market inherently inside the company. And when you have a workforce that doesn’t look like that world, you’re in at a lot of risk of falling behind and kind of losing that edge and you don’t want to make mistakes.

Jennifer Brown: You don’t want to put out a PR campaign that gets pulled because you offended people. Yeah, so there is a lot of change. Millennials and generationZ, which is coming up behind them of course are also bringing that valuing of inclusion into the workplace in a very, I think louder way than generations before. And saying, look, I want to bring my full self to work and these are all the pieces of my full self and I expect them to be seen and heard and valued and hey, I love that attitude. I wish I had had that attitude. I’m not sure if you ever really felt that you could do that, but boy, if they are able to do that, that will bring a sea change from a demographics perspective.

John Jantsch: So a lot of organizations are taking this approach of, okay, yeah, this is important. We’re going to create an officer of that and we’re going to have a department of that. Is that really the way to handle it or does that just turn into a really hard job?

Jennifer Brown: It is a really hard job. It is honestly one of the hardest. If you don’t have a team or a person or a team, if you’re lucky enough to have a team, unfortunately, we say what gets measured gets done. And that team is really there to educate, to inform to, they certainly can’t hold accountable necessarily because they’re kind of a support function. But they can definitely inform that accountability and driving this and keeping it top of mind.

Jennifer Brown: I think without a team it is difficult to continue to make it a priority to help people understand how important it is that needs to be something measured just like every other business initiative as measured. And so, yeah, so I think without a team it falls off the radar and I think that’s actually kind of more dangerous. But there’s other unintended consequences of having a team.

John Jantsch: There have been, I have noticed it, this initiative or this movement is creating a lot of creative job titles though, isn’t it?

Jennifer Brown: Oh my goodness, yes. We have the office of innovation and belonging. We have all sorts of interesting… people are really-

John Jantsch: Head of hugging.

Jennifer Brown: Yeah.

John Jantsch: Exactly.

Jennifer Brown: Yeah. Yes, yes it is. But it’s good though because-

John Jantsch: Absolutely.

Jennifer Brown: … belonging is a very, I think it’s a word we can all and a concept we can all relate to that takes it beyond perhaps those negative associations that the word diversity might have for some people. It’s something we can say, look, belonging at work is the ultimate. If we had people that felt they belonged, they would do their best work, they would be so comfortable that it would be like, I have tons of creative energy.

Jennifer Brown: I have a lot of problem solving energy and sort of bandwidth to dedicate and not just that I want to dedicate it because I feel comfortable and valued and seen. And I think that’s the gap we’ve got to fix so that we can get workforces that actually feel that way about being at work, which would, boy, would that be a change.

John Jantsch: So, so a lot of organizations of course are approaching this idea because they feel it’s the right thing. But what are sort of the unexpected benefits that you’re seeing companies are actually deriving by taking this seriously?

Jennifer Brown: Well, I think it’s an argument for recruitment, honestly, in the war for talent. Our unemployment is an all time low. We really need to think outside the box about attracting talent. And we have so many open jobs. So I think it’s a prerogative of our companies to say like, look, I’ve got to attract the best and brightest and not just bring them in by the way but keep them, which is a whole different equation.

Jennifer Brown: Because the question of retention is more about the workplace culture and it’s very expensive to bring people in only to lose them two years later because they don’t see anyone that looks like them or shares their identity. They feel like the only lonely and the company’s not talking about anything related to belonging or inclusion. So I think it’s an imperative that companies take this seriously and invest in it.

Jennifer Brown: And I think they know that losing people is dangerous. It’s bad for their reputation, it’s bad for their brand, and they’re also going to make mistakes if they don’t have the right people at the table being listened to when they make marketing decisions, product development decisions. And, and it’s very difficult these days to come back from an embarrassing release.

Jennifer Brown: An embarrassing communication, a leak, a statistic that’s all of a sudden public about your gender pay gap or the fact that you’re enduring a class action suit because you have sort of systemic inequalities in your company. So these days are very transparent and it’s important that we do the right things on the inside because that’s very transparent to the outside world.

John Jantsch: So let me ask you about your job as a diversity and inclusion expert. Obviously, when you put that in your title, certain things are expected of you. Does your credibility ever get stereotyped? Does anyone ever say, “Well, you don’t look like diversity?”

Jennifer Brown: Well, interestingly, yes. I make a joke in my keynotes that I walk on stage and at some point I say to the audience, “I know what you were thinking when I walked up on the stage. They were like, what is this woman going to possibly teach us about this topic?” But I have some challenge around a few of my identities which I share on stage.

Jennifer Brown: Being a woman in business continues to be difficult and I don’t need to go into that unless you want me to. But also being a member of the LGBTQ community since I was 22 so several decades ago, it’s still been a journey for me of being out and bringing my full self to my brand, my audience, my corporate executive clients who may be in parts of the country or industries where this is a really rare thing.

Jennifer Brown: So it’s important for me to share those things on keynote stages. I like to say, even if I’m uncomfortable talking about them, it’s important that I do because it’s part of the normalizing effort, which is to say, hey, I have a diversity story. You made assumptions about who I am based on what I look like.

John Jantsch: Which is really perfect. I mean, right.

Jennifer Brown: Yeah, I know, I know. But we also suffer from identifying ourselves too because that triggers stereotypes, bias. It impacts our credibility in front of certain audiences. And so I still, I think I still navigate a really careful line to make sure that my credibility is strong. That my expertise is solid, that I’m kind of more perhaps formal than I might be normally because I need to be taken seriously.

Jennifer Brown: But that’s exhausting for me. And it’s exhausting for a lot of other people who are kind of doing this double work of not only being great at what you do and really belonging in that room, but sort of stressing out about whether you’re going to be heard for all the expertise that you have.

John Jantsch: So some of the rooms that you end up walking in, especially at the highest level where people are saying, hey, we need to make change, but we got here a certain way. And so how much unconscious bias really… what’s the role of that first and foremost?

Jennifer Brown: Yeah, it still permeates organizations at every level in every function I would say. I mean from the resumes that get screened out, to the interview slate that we put in front of candidates, to the promotion and advancement process where you might have slates that are being evaluated that have no diversity on them and nobody’s even noticed.

Jennifer Brown: So, and this is still a common occurrence and if there’s not a woman or say a person of color in that room, usually the topic doesn’t even get addressed or brought up because nobody notices it. So anyway, it’s everywhere. It’s really difficult to figure out like. It’s 15 ways I would tackle it, if I had a magic wand, but all of those… if we could fix all of those and turn people into inclusive leaders who are sort of on the lookout for this in themselves and in others, we can actually interrupt it as it happens.

Jennifer Brown: We could stop ourselves or call somebody on a comment or a decision that’s made. And we could through all of our efforts together kind of change the culture. But it’s difficult because it’s so pervasive.

John Jantsch: So I don’t think anybody sets out to create a toxic culture. I mean obviously they exist and, and certainly there are exceptions. There are people that are just not nice people. But I think it kind of happens sort of in this insidious way. So, and I don’t… as you just talked about it, I think people don’t even see it happening.

John Jantsch: So in your view, how do you get people to actually see that it exists first? I guess is going to be… I’ve got a second part to this question, but I want you to answer the first part.

Jennifer Brown: Yeah. Well, I think data really helps, especially for our left brain business world. So I often show data from like McKinsey and Deloitte and Pew Research about climate experience in the workplace for different communities of identity. I think the big aha moment for people is, wow, I might be comfortable in this work environment, feeling like the deck isn’t stacked against me.

Jennifer Brown: And I’m comfortable and I work with my friends who also I hang out with socially. It’s kind of my world. I think when you realize and you’re shown the kind of focus group data we collect from the very same workplace and sometimes in your same exact team, somebody may having a very different experience. It’s one of those aha moments where you’re like, well wait a second, am I a part of creating that culture and environment where that person that I really am fond of it doesn’t feel comfortable. Was that my doing?

Jennifer Brown: And I think if you can set up that cognitive dissonance, most people their empathy will be stirred or they will see the data and say, well the data is undeniable, so I need to act on this. And the other piece I want to bring up is, we are all very well-intended, there’s a huge difference between intent versus impact. And so I can be very intended to be gender progressive on how women experience in organization.

Jennifer Brown: And I can say I have daughters, of course I get gender equity, but that’s not enough actually. It’s actually cultures are created to be inclusive and if we don’t do anything they will kind of slide back into that unaware world. So I just, I’m like, okay, I appreciate your well-intended, but the thing is this is about action and this is about impact and I hope that sort of stir people’s motivation in that way.

John Jantsch: So I am a white male baby boomer who has four daughters.

Jennifer Brown: Oh my gosh. So you know something about that.

John Jantsch: Well, I’m attuned. Am I good, I don’t know.

Jennifer Brown: Yeah, yeah. Read the book. [crosstalk 00:00:12:31].

John Jantsch: So that’s really I was so interested in having you on today because this is a topic that I’m behind.

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John Jantsch: So I want to give you two push backs that I suspect you get a lot and again mainly so that you can deal with them. One, I’m sure you hear all the time, is that the pushback from people that don’t believe in embracing a diversity is, oh, so we’re just going to have quotas and we’re just going to take somebody because they are X.

Jennifer Brown: Yeah, I hear that a ton. You’re right. Yeah, that’s probably the A, number one. It’s the meritocracy argument. I honestly, first of all, I don’t think it’s ever really been a meritocracy. I honestly think that people have hired and referred for jobs, people from their networks. That if you know someone, if you went to the same school, I’m vouching for you.

Jennifer Brown: So that honestly kind of wasn’t a meritocracy. It was really kind of grab your points of contact and fill that job quickly with somebody you trust who went to the right school and who somebody else knows and by the way, you may golf with on the weekends. So anyway. So to apply that then to now is not really true. It’s just not accurate.

Jennifer Brown: I would say the other thing is when you look at your workplace and you’re like, wow, were out of kilter with the world, meaning that our demographics are not reflective of that world, we’ve got to sort of, I think over-correct for awhile and introduce some targets in terms of really being proactive about rebalancing because it’s been out of balance actually.

Jennifer Brown: And it gets more out of balance the higher up you get in an organization to the point where it’s mostly white and male at the top of organizations. And mostly it’s largely there’s gender parity at the bottom and there’s also a ton of different ethnicities and represented. But then it all kind of winnows out as people move up the pipeline. So what we’ve got to do to rebalance or even bring some sense of balance to this because we’re out of balance now, is we’ve got to, I think, and this is a bit radical, but we’ve got to be really mindful of who are we bringing in the job interview filter in the promotion pipeline.

Jennifer Brown: How can we be extra mindful because it’s not going to be enough to just include one woman in the candidate pool. That’s not actually going to change the demographics of your organization fast enough. And she’s, by the way, she’s going to feel like a token. So that’s not that comfortable to feel like you’re being sort of identified as the one, and people are checking a box with you basically. So that’s I think the business case of wanting to reflect the world you do business in and also to be able to attract talent who literally look up and say, I don’t see anyone that looks like me. What’s up with this company? They’re not going to stay… they may not come, and if they come they may not stay.

John Jantsch: The other argument then is the sort of, well this was the best person for the job. I hire based on resume or experience. I’m a big fan of Tom Peters, I don’t know if you’ve… he’s a management consultant, a little couple of decades ago, really was his heyday. And I remember reading one of his books and he wrote a lot of these kind of short, very impactful things at 47 things.

Jennifer Brown: Yeah, I know he loves the lists.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And one of them that always attracted me and again, this isn’t probably the most sensitive term these days, but he used to talk about hiring freaks. And really his whole point was that he was saying diversity really. And he meant it in a very caring, loving way. But the thing that I think really gets lost on hire the best person for the job is I don’t think we can determine the best person for the job because diversity brings so much innovation and so much creativity and so much different thinking that it kind of tips the whole best person for the job argument.

Jennifer Brown: You just gave me a great talking point. I love it.

John Jantsch: Sorry, I answered your question.

Jennifer Brown: No, no, it’s… yeah, you did. And that’s a beautiful answer though. You’re right, because one of the things we’re really encouraging people to think about is outside the box of the job description even. How many years do you really need to have spent in a job that prepares you for this job when the world, when the nature of work is changing so fast. What you really need is agile thinkers, thinkers who don’t have a conventional background for the role.

Jennifer Brown: Because you’ve got to see around corners that you’ve never had to see around before. And so how are you going to do that with the same old, same old people with the same education and the sort of group think and the homogeneity. That’s dangerous. We joke and we say maybe if it had been Lehman Sisters or there had been a few more Lehman sisters, we wouldn’t have had a Lehman Brothers scenario.

Jennifer Brown: And it’s tongue in cheek, but there was a collective blind spot in the financial crisis. So you’re right. I think that we really have to, we’ve got to expand our criteria. We’ve got to make ourselves uncomfortable as often as possible because that’s a sign that you’re actually growing and you’re doing things differently. And honestly, try not to hire folks that look like you because that’s just.. if you’re in the quote unquote majority group.

Jennifer Brown: If you’re not, then I think you’re probably many women and people of color, but not all are on the lookout for hiring decisions through their lens. And they tend to hire more diverse talent perhaps because they understand the value. So innately of doing that, but we’ve got to help all of us to kind of think outside the box on that. So thank you for that point.

John Jantsch: So let’s talk very specifically about some of the practical aspects of the book. We’ve been talking really very maybe globally why this is important, but now a company says, hey, I need to do something about this. You talk about stages of you don’t do this overnight. There are stages to doing this. You have an assessment tool to help companies do this. So kind of unpack your stages so that somebody gets maybe a sense of the progress of this.

Jennifer Brown: Yeah, I just thought when I wrote it and developed the model, I thought people really crave knowing where they are. And I think it particularly in times of fear and hesitation, which honestly is the world we’re living in right now about saying the wrong thing and intruding and not being welcome and being called out potentially publicly for making a mistake.

Jennifer Brown: So I really had that in mind because I think that we can’t afford to lose people from this conversation make now more than ever. So it’s a four-part model, the first stage is unaware, the second stage is aware, third stage is active and the fourth stage is advocate. So unaware is, I don’t see the problem. I don’t think there’s a problem. This what this sounds like might be, oh women love working here. There would be no difference if I asked this whole group of people like how they feel from an engagement perspective.

Jennifer Brown: There would be no difference at all. Like that kind of that is unawareness because usually there is a difference, I can tell you because I’ve been looking at this data forever. So there’s not a problem or the diversity team is taking care of that. So I just need to send everybody to unconscious bias training and then I’m done for the year.

Jennifer Brown: So that is like a total unawareness. And I think it’s unaware to say, I know nothing about diversity. This is not my job. So we moved from unaware to aware, which is the second phase, which is, okay, now I know there’s a problem, there’s a challenge, there’s a gap. I know that now I want to know the hard truth. Like I want to know the facts.

Jennifer Brown: And, and in aware, the goal is to learn, it’s to yourself into positions where you’re maybe the only one so that you can do a lot of listening about different cultural experiences, different identities that lead to covering behaviors in the workplace. They break that belonging piece, so that awareness is like, I know what I don’t know and I’m going to go pursue that.

Jennifer Brown: And I think that these are kind of stage one and stage two are kind of private. And then for active stage three, it’s really that next step with awareness to say, well, now that I’ve learned it, how do I practice it? How do I start to use my voice? How do I… what do I say when I have the microphone? How do I bring attention to the things that I’ve learned?

Jennifer Brown: And this stage is really one of, I might make mistakes, I need to experiment, I’m going to have to apologize. I’m probably going to use the wrong language and I’m going to yet I’m still going to persist. I’m still going to take that feedback and I’m going to come back again and I’m going to try again.

Jennifer Brown: And this becomes more public. So I think that the reason you said earlier, like this should take a while, you don’t want to jump into the deep end when you haven’t been taking your swimming lessons. You don’t want to run a marathon without having trained with shorter runs for six months. Otherwise, you’re going to injure yourself. And injuring in the corporate in the workplace context means that you may get criticized, you may get questioned, and that may happen in front of a room full of people as you try to exercise your voice.

Jennifer Brown: So get feedback, prepare yourself, build your muscle, practice in small private settings first. Get the go ahead from people you trust that have your back and then as you start to use your voice, you become more comfortable, even more fluent. And you won’t kind of pay a cost to not doing it wrong, to doing it wrong. Sorry, you won’t kind of damage the trust that you want to have because you want to be an inclusive leader.

Jennifer Brown: But you’re not going to do it perfectly. I can tell you this. And then the fourth stage is advocate, which is literally the person who’s done all the stages, they’re like, I’m bold, I’m brave, I’m going to use my voice. I’m fearless. I’m not going to ask for permission. And I know where to target my efforts. This is powerful. There’s not a ton of advocate level folks. I mean I know a bunch of them, but I think if we could sort of pull people up this model, we could see more.

Jennifer Brown: And I’m literally at this stage asking why do we do it this way? Why is this happening over and over again? Why haven’t we changed that policy or that process so that this bias doesn’t happen in hiring, et cetera. So I’m asking kind of these systems questions that are deeper questions and often I have the power to ask those questions because I’m maybe a C-suite executive or I’m somebody that has identities that sort of protect me. And so I’m an insider and if I’m using my inside status to challenge the status quo, I would say that’s very much advocate level. So those are the four stages.

John Jantsch: There’s a term that was new to me. It may be a commonly used term, but it was new to me that I’d love for you to explain and that’s understanding diversity dimensions.

Jennifer Brown: Yes. So there are so many diversity dimensions that I define as making up all of who we are. So, and many of them we hide in the workplace, so that could be military background, a disability, it could be a cultural difference. It literally could be introversion and extroversion. If you’re an introvert on an extrovert’s team, you know the unique pain of that diversity dimension because you’re freaking exhausted at the end of every day.

Jennifer Brown: You have to behave as if you want to hang out with everybody endlessly at the bar, but you really don’t like you’re really depleted, but you may hide that. And then there’s of course, gender identity. In the LGBTQ community, you are deeply in the closet. 50% of us are closeted in the workplace. So we are wrestling with that diversity dimension in terms of how it’s going to trigger stereotype and bias and literally hurt our careers. And by the way, we can still get fired in 30 States for being LGBTQ because there’s no federal protections.

John Jantsch: Yeah. So it’s not just a matter of saying, okay, we’ve got this inclusive program. Look, we’re diverse. It also has to be a culture that allows those dimensions to come through.

Jennifer Brown: Exactly, because if I have Brown skin, you can put me in a community and you might actually wrongly identify me, but you at least can see that you can see my gender. Although you may be seeing the way I express my gender, you may not be seeing my true gender. And then you can kind of guess my age, but there’s so many other… in fact, there’s many more dimensions I’d say under the waterline as if we are icebergs.

Jennifer Brown: There’s so many under there and I think that the role of leadership is to think about where do I set that waterline at work for my iceberg and is it serving me to do that? Is it or am I kind of managing, downplaying, hiding who I am, how much energy is that taking? And then also am I depriving others that are looking to me to maybe see themselves.

Jennifer Brown: And meanwhile I’m an executive who’s doesn’t talk about most of my personal life or the difficulty I’m going through with a kid who’s struggling with addiction or I’m struggling with mental health and depression, or I’m a caregiver and I can’t, I’m really struggling with somebody called it, not just the sandwich generation, caring for elderly parents and kids, but they called it the club sandwich generation because there’s literally so many layers going on it’s just, I loved that.

Jennifer Brown: And so anyway, we’re all wrestling with something and that’s a commonality that we have and we all kind of deeply sense when things are not accepted or going to be celebrated in our workplace. And therefore we put tons of energy towards not talking about it and not getting what we need in the workplace. And that is what’s causing people to leave because they are so exhausted from doing this every day.

Jennifer Brown: Maybe they’re the only black person in a team or in a business unit or they are closeted and tired and they want to go work for a company that’s really pro equality and inclusion. So people make decisions and they leave because they’re tired and they’re not feeling supported and it’s never talked about and they don’t see anyone that looks like them and they just feel the bias sort of they or microaggressions.

Jennifer Brown: It isn’t even sometimes overt like concrete bias. It’s honestly a lot of those little microaggressions that they hear. And I could go into a lot of those. So there’s a lot of examples of those in the book. But those add up to, I say it’s like death by a thousand cuts.

John Jantsch: Speaking with Jennifer Brown, the author of How to Be an Inclusive Leader. So Jennifer, where can people find out more about you and your work in the book?

Jennifer Brown: Yeah, thanks for asking. So this is my second book. It’s called How to Be an Inclusive Leader. It’s on Amazon and in independent booksellers all over. I’m getting a ton of orders from bookstores, which I’m really excited about. My first book was called Inclusion from a couple of years ago and it’s also a good read if you want to understand the why.

Jennifer Brown: So [inaudible] identify which one they might want to start with. I’m on Twitter @jenniferbrown. I’m on Instagram at @jenniferbrownspeaks and then Jennifer Brown Consulting is the name of my company. We’re on LinkedIn and Facebook and as you mentioned, I have a podcast called The Will to Change. And I also encourage folks, if you can put this in the show notes, John, the assessment that goes along with the book.

Jennifer Brown: You can find it at inclusiveleaderthebook.com and you can just put in your info and get right into the assessment and you’ll get a PDF report. And I honestly think you could either take it before or after or even during your reading of the book. It’s all helpful and there’s no right answer for it. But please do take the assessments so you can kind of understand where you are in your learning journey. I think it will really help.

John Jantsch: Awesome. Thanks, Jennifer. Hopefully, we’ll run into you out there on the road somebody soon.

Jennifer Brown: I hope so. Thanks for this opportunity.

Transcript of Building a Personalized Connection to Win Ideal Clients

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John Jantsch: This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a platform that helps growth-focused eCommerce brands drive more sales with super-targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook and Instagram marketing.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Bill Cates. He is an internationally recognized expert and keynote speaker, author of Get More Referrals Now. And a book we’re going to talk about today, Radical Relevance: Sharpen Your Marketing Message, Cut Through the Noise, Win More Ideal Clients. Bill, welcome back.

Bill Cates: Hey. Great to be back with you, John. I have so much respect for the work that you do, so it’s an honor.

John Jantsch: Thanks. That’s kind of you to say.

Bill Cates: You bet.

John Jantsch: I’m going to read one sentence, and then I can probably shut up for 20 minutes and you can just talk. Radical Relevance is about bringing the right value proposition to the right market, communicated with the right message through the right medium at just the right time. That was a mouthful.

Bill Cates: Yep.

John Jantsch: I really do think we can break each of those ideas down. But give me kind of the overview of that, what the meaning of that is.

Bill Cates: Yeah, sure. I wrote the book because there’s really three challenges that we all face in trying to grow our business. And one is the fact that everyone is experiencing marketing message overload, right? The wonderful internet, all it’s done is pollute all our brains and minds with all kinds of stuff coming at us all the time. And the brain doesn’t like that. I have a chapter in a book on the neuroscience of all of this. There’s so much noise out there. So, how do we cut through all that?

Bill Cates: That’s one of the challenges. Another challenge is because it’s so easy to gather information on people, all the big data that’s out there, and people are listed on all types of platforms. Our prospects are really expecting us to come with a more relevant message. They’re expecting us to know a little bit about them and have empathy for their situation, and not come at them cold. And then the final challenge is this concept of inertia. That’s one of our biggest obstacles and objections that we get in a sales mode, is how do we move someone to look at something differently and move in a different direction than where they’re moving at the time? And so the key of course is to be as relevant as one can possibly be with a message with the target market, with the bullseye, that persona within that market, from a strategic standpoint and a tactical standpoint.

John Jantsch: Does that necessarily mean that we have to greatly narrow our focus? Obviously the more relevant we get, we’re going to be less relevant to a lot of other people. Is that kind of the message?

Bill Cates: Yeah, it is. The mistake a lot of business folks make … Not everybody, but a lot of people, they don’t want to exclude people. They say, “Well, let’s make the tent a little bigger. Let’s word this headline and website or whatever, just a little bit so we don’t exclude some people.” And of course, what that does is it weakens the message.

Bill Cates: We can have more than one target market. We can also have more than one bullseye within a market. I have three bullseyes, or personas as it’s often called. What we want to do is make sure we send the right message to the right person, as you said at the right time and the right method. How does this person want to consume it? And what do we say to this person that’s going to resonate with them? And it may resonate differently with someone else. It’s sometimes dividing our market up into a few different personas and not trying to put a global message out to everybody. That weakens everything.

John Jantsch: I think it’s almost gotten to the point where if you’re going to do that, you have to then steer people or guide people to, “Oh, you’re this kind of person, you have this kind of need, you go this way. Here’s what we’ve built for you over here.” We almost have to kind of segment, don’t we?

Bill Cates: We do have to segment. One of the simplest ways to think of this is … And when I do my coaching consulting with folks, it’s often we start with a website. It’s more than the website, but that’s not a bad place to start because it gives me at least a sense of what they think about their value and how they communicate it.

Bill Cates: And so on my website, there’s three different personas. If you are an individual looking for our online video coaching, whatever, click here. And then all the pages that follow are related to that individual. If you’re an executive with a corporation and you’re looking for something, then click here. If you’re looking to hire a speaker for a conference then click here. Those are our three main personas so people come to the website. Rather than trying to create a message that’s broad and will strike everybody, which is almost impossible. Yeah, so segmentation is key these days. Critical.

John Jantsch: So we’ve been talking for a long time about the idea of a value proposition. That’s not a new concept. However, I still find very few people nail that.

Bill Cates: Yeah.

John Jantsch: How do you really get … And again, not one that sounds good, but one that actually is appealing to your ideal client.

Bill Cates: Yeah. There’s a lot to talk about here, but real quick. First of all, I don’t believe a value proposition is that elevator pitch, that short thing that we say. We need to have short ways to talk about what we do, don’t get me wrong. I believe the value proposition is really the totality of what we bring to the market, what the value we bring to our prospects, our clients, our suppliers and resources. Everybody, you name it.

Bill Cates: And then the elevator pitch, or what I like to call a value positioning statement, just reflects that, reflects some of that value proposition. And in developing this value positioning statement, we have to understand how the brain works. There’s a chapter in my book about the neuroscience of relevance and what the brain is looking for. Well, one thing we know is that, and Antonio Damasio approved this with this technology called magnetic resonance tomography. Say that three times fast, MRT. But with the subject, the part of the brain was damaged that feels emotion. They couldn’t make decisions. No ability to feel emotion, no ability to make decisions.

Bill Cates: And so that demonstrates what a lot of us have already known, at the heart of every decision is an emotional response. Now, it doesn’t mean the facts and statistics and all those things don’t play a role. Of course they do. And then ultimately what they do is they elicit an emotional response, which then leads to someone taking action. So with all that said is the preamble. I have a formula in the book I talk about, I call it the miracle formula. But it’s essentially my expertise is in, where I am an expert in and my expertise is in. I work with who want to, For example, let me break that down. I don’t like to have people start off with their title, their formal title. “I’m a financial advisor, I’m an accountant, I’m a whatever.” Because people have preconceived notions about that, and you don’t want to feed into that.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’ve had one of those before. I don’t need another one of those.

Bill Cates: Yeah, exactly! Or maybe I’ve got one, I don’t need to talk to you. Or you say I’m a financial advisor, they’re thinking, “Oh, I’m getting another Bernie Madoff.” Who knows what their context is. Right? Relevance is all about context. And so I work with, what that does is define your market. You work mostly with B2B business owners. You can get more narrow than that if you want.

Bill Cates: And what do they want? Whatever they want is the benefit you bring. So it’s a very short, succinct way to communicate a lot. And then you always want to have that for example, which brings the rest to life. There’s usually a story there, a short one. People listen, the brain listens to a story differently than it does the left brain stuff. It’s a nice little formula. I work with who want to, for example.

John Jantsch: So let’s jump to another one. We know who our target market is, and we’ve got that value proposition, the right medium. I think that one of the things that’s caused the greatest amount of stress right now with particularly small business owners is like where … It’s online, it’s on the platform here. I still need to network at this event. How do we decide where we can spend our precious time?

Bill Cates: Sure. A couple of decisions here. First of all, how would your next great client or customer, the perfect fit customer or client prefer to meet you? What is their preferred method of meeting you? And as you know in a book that you’ve written and the several books I’ve written, it’s a referral or an introduction from someone else they trust. I’m a huge believer in making sure that the first thing we do is build that referral culture within our company. Because the straightest line to relevance with someone, the straightest line through all the noise is an introduction from someone else they already trust. So certainly we don’t want to see referrals and introductions as icing on the cake. For a lot of businesses, they really are the cake, and people need to double down on that and not just see it as an afterthought.

Bill Cates: And beyond that, where do your ideal customers congregate? And when I say congregate, it could be in person, it could be in industry trade show events. It could be a networking event, it could be Facebook, it could be LinkedIn, it could be Instagram. Where do they congregate? And of course, that’s where you want to reach out, and that’s where your message is best sent. And then we shouldn’t overlook the mail, because it’s amazing how few businesses are using that in combination with the digital.

Bill Cates: I call it tradigital. It’s like traditional and digital together. And we found that when we mix together, when we mail, we call, we mail, we promote through an email, LinkedIn, that variety of methodology. And usually our target market, we can usually identify one or two mediums that seem to work the best. But we also want to create a bit of variety, because you never know exactly where someone’s going to hit. Where do they congregate is the best way to think.

John Jantsch: And I think for some folks, some get this, some don’t, that even referrals have become more complex. I totally agree with you, that introduction. Especially high trust services, like you mentioned the financial advisor or an accountant or somebody. You’re really going to go out there and look for that somebody you trust to make an introduction. But there are a lot of businesses that, yeah, they want an introduction, but it’s not life or death on who they choose for that. And I think today they are going online and checking us out. Even when you get that referral today, I think a lot of people underestimate how much access to information people have, and that we’ve got to clean that information up too.

Bill Cates: Oh. Yeah, there’s no question. Quite often it’s your LinkedIn profile is the first thing that shows up, if not your website. And there’s got to be congruency there. So as an example, I was interviewing a financial advisor who decided to double down really in his commitment to the optometry industry. He’s the financial advisor to optometrists.

Bill Cates: And quite often when I see that, I’ll see maybe their website reflects that, but their LinkedIn profile doesn’t or the other things they do. But he’s totally congruent through all of that, sending the right message to the right people in the right way, where they get that. And you know as a marketer, that one of the most powerful dynamics or energies in marketing is empathy. People want to know that we have a sense of who they are. And when we narrow our focus and we target and then we bring in the right message to the right people in the right way, then we create that empathy. They get a sense that we have a sense of them through the questions we ask and the things that we teach, and that’s what creates that resonance where we earn the right to their attention.

John Jantsch: I want to remind you that this episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo helps you build meaningful customer relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers, and this allows you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages. There’s powerful segmentation email autoresponders that are ready to go. Great reporting.

John Jantsch: You want to learn a little bit about the secret to building customer relationships? They’ve got a really fun series called Klaviyo’s Beyond Black Friday. It’s a docu-series, a lot of fun, quick lessons. Just head on over to klaviyo.com/beyondbf, beyond black Friday.

John Jantsch: So, there are a lot of salespeople particularly that work for organizations that maybe haven’t gotten around to this notion of radical relevance in their marketing. Do you believe an individual salesperson could take this upon themselves to become radically relevant to the market they’re trying to serve, irrespective of the company?

Bill Cates: Absolutely. I’ll give you a couple for examples. In our book, I talk about strategic relevance and tactical relevance. And so even the sales person could have some impact on the strategic relevance. So for instance, I know a printing company that has 11 different salespeople, and each one of them is going after a different vertical market, a target market.

Bill Cates: I’m consulting with a CPA firm in the Washington DC area, and they have six vertical markets. And so we’re working on how they talk about their value, and how they reach out to these people and communicate to these people in each individual market. It’s going to be different for each one. It’s much more effective when they’re targeted. So that’s the strategic side. But then the tactical side, there’s too many easy ways to make sure you can learn a little bit about that person before you reach out to them.

Bill Cates: And gosh, how many people, John, do we get contacting us thinking they have the solution to our problems? They don’t even know who we are, and they don’t know what we do and they have no clue. If someone says, “I read your blog post or I read your book, or I saw that you went to the university of Maryland,” all of a sudden now I’ll pay attention because they at least took the time to get a sense of who I am.

Bill Cates: Here’s the way I look at it. From a tactical standpoint with salespeople, if in retail the keywords are location, location, location, the tactical side of relevance for salesperson is personalization, personalization, personalization. That we have to tailor to those specific people, and not be lazy and take those extra few minutes.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I get so frustrated myself. Every day, I get a reach out on LinkedIn or something that says, “I’d like to get on the phone with you for five minutes and learn about your business.” And I’m like, “If you can’t do one search and learn more than anybody should know about my business, then you’re not trying.”

Bill Cates: Exactly. They even ask a question like, “What’s your biggest challenge?” Well, if you knew a little something about my industry, you might be able to guess, and even that would be better. It’s taking the time, it’s not being lazy. Part of it is knowing the value and what a difference that makes.

Bill Cates: I’m using a tool now where I’ll send a video email out to people, and I just sent one to a guy I’ve been trying to reach for a long time. Finally sent him a 52 second video, and I just heard back from him. He says he’s interested in working with me. That’s a personalized way of reaching out to people. In fact, he says, “I’ll open up the email right now.” He says, “Very well done on grabbing my attention.” When you personalize, people appreciate it and you get complimented for doing it.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’m a big fan of one to one videos, I’m calling that. Maybe a year from now people will be like, “Oh, I hate getting those personalized videos,” but right now it does allow you to stand out. So I totally agree. One of the things that I’ve been saying for for a while, and I think you say in this book, maybe in a little different manner. Is I think a lot of times we focus on what it is we sell, what solution we have as a company.

John Jantsch: And really the only thing that the buyer cares about is solving their problems. Half the time they wish they didn’t have to buy what we sell, but they’re just trying to solve their problems. I think if we started realizing, I think part of our relevance can be, “Hey, we can communicate what your problem is. We get your problem.” I see a lot of marketers start talking. Basically their entire marketing message starts when the person’s actually considering buying. And I think we have to actually start before they even know how to solve their problem. They just know it hurts.

Bill Cates: Yeah. And I think it also depends on where you reach them in the cycle, because context is everything when it comes to being relevant. If they come to you, they may be a little further along. They’ve done some research, you’ve got to find out what research have they done, where are they, what brought them to us? And so we gain context. On the other hand, if we’re reaching out to people, we don’t know where they are. The brain wants to solve problems. The brain wants to be safe. The brain is scanning six times a second. Am I safe? Where am I? Am I safe? Where am I? Am I safe? Three times a second it’s scanning, is there an opportunity? So the brain loves an opportunity. The brain loves to take action, but only when it feels safe.

Bill Cates: Guess what? When we start our message focusing a little bit on the problems, the mistakes people make or problems they might have, the brain resonates with that a little better. Then we can move on to the opportunities, because the brain likes that. And if we present ourselves as someone who knows their problem, can solve their problem, we’re making the brain happy, which is a very unconscious, subtle thing. But it’s very important.

Bill Cates: That’s how we display the empathy. Sometimes it’s through the questions we ask. Are you finding this the challenge, or how are you handling this? And that displays that we understand their world a little bit, and the brain wants to take action if it feels safe. The brain, by the way, I’ve got a chapter on neuroscience of relevance. One of the other things is the brain’s purpose is to keep the organism alive, and to expend less energy or the least energy as it possibly can.

Bill Cates: And so when we get too creative and we come up with messaging that we think is kind of clever and cute and we put a couple of words together that don’t really belong together and all that, all we’re going to do is confuse the brain and the brain is going to be off on something else. It doesn’t want to work very hard to understand our message. We want to start with concepts that the brain understands first before we introduce anything that might be a little bit more clever or complicated.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I see that all the time. And I’ve been guilty of it, probably. You think, “Oh, well, let’s offer him three different versions because then they can decide.” And all they end up doing is shutting down because they don’t want to decide.

Bill Cates: I’ll tell you. Donald Miller, who’s a master at this part of the clarity part, says, “If you confuse, you lose.” And it’s true, and there’s physiological evidence around that for why that happens. And so I’ll tell you this whole concept of clarity, John. If you can help people get clear on where they are, what their context is, and where they want to be related to what you do and how they’re going to get there.

Bill Cates: Just that clarity of where they are, they’re here, they’re there and what it’s going to take to get there. That is so valuable and so rich in building trust. And then you also want to make sure that you’re clear on how to work with you. You can’t make it hard or complicated. There’s a concept called cognitive fluency. Look it up. It’s very interesting. If how you explain things or navigating your website or anything that you put out there is complicated and the brain doesn’t grasp it intuitively quickly, it automatically assumes that working with you is going to be complicated. Many people will abandon, so that whole concept of clarity is huge.

John Jantsch: Bill, tell people where they can find out more about your work. And of course, pick up a copy of Radical Relevance.

Bill Cates: Sure. Oh, I appreciate that. Well certainly Amazon has all my books, amazon.com or wherever you may be in the world. It has Radical Relevance. It’s paperback, it’s Kindle and it’s an audio book. And then my website is referralcoach.com. I’m not leaving the world of teaching people how to get more referrals and introductions. I’m just expanding part of the toolkit that one needs to bring in more clients. So, referral coach.com

John Jantsch: And relevance obviously is just as crucial in the world of referrals as it is in an email marketing campaign. So, absolutely necessary.

Bill Cates: Yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: Yeah. All right, Bill, great catching up with you. Hopefully we will see you soon someday out there on the road.

Bill Cates: Sounds good, John. Thanks.

Transcript Of Managing Your Modern Marketing Efforts with the Right Software

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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Josh Slone. He is the product marketer for get Gist, which is an all in one software platform for stuff like live chat and email marketing automation, forms, knowledge-based, all the tools that we need to use today. So Josh, thanks for joining me. Welcome.

Josh Slone: Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: So as I started talking about all the tools that are involved, I can already hear listeners thinking, “Gosh, do we really need all of these ways to communicate today?”

Josh Slone: Yeah, it’s very important to both be where your customers are, but then also have all those things in the easiest to understand format for business owners and marketers.

John Jantsch: I guess the point of my question is, I think a lot of small business owners, marketers, are overwhelmed by the fact that, “Okay, I’m monitoring social media, I’ve got email, now I’ve got chat and now I’m putting all these forms and things that I have to react to on my website.” I mean, how do you wrangle all of this into a manageable… It’s like you’ve got customers everywhere, how do you keep control of things?

Josh Slone: Well, there’s a couple of different ways. One of the ways is to integrate all your tools together. So say if you had a meeting scheduler app to book appointments, or if you had live chat software that was bringing in communication from your website, and then of course you got Facebook messenger and Twitter and all of these social platforms. So you can either integrate them all together, or what’s become more popular is there’s several tools out there that offer the all in one approach and just really tries to harness that and they… For that reason, we’ve created a conversations tool that not just gets live chat from your website, but we also integrate directly with Twitter messaging and Facebook Messenger to bring all of those under one dashboard that you can answer from one place instead of having to log into different accounts all day long.

John Jantsch: So the really common practice for many, many years was drive people to your website to offer them something of value in exchange for an email address, and then just put them into a campaign that follows up and hopefully gets them more and more interested in your products and services. But buyers, first off, we’ve become, I think a little fatigued with that approach but also have just gotten a lot more sophisticated, have a lot, I think a lot higher expectations because people are certainly personalizing their experience based on behavior. The classic one is always Amazon, knows what we buy and how we think and is offering those things to us. So how does the small business owner take that level of sophistication really tapping into behavior? Because obviously that sounds like a lot more work, doesn’t it?

Josh Slone: Yeah, it definitely does. And if you’re talking about the level of complexity that Amazon and their algorithm gives you, it can seem overwhelming. But I think just about every business owner can identify two to three activities or behaviors or events that they want leads to do. And then, basically if you can identify those two or three things and then react to those behaviors when they happen, it’s a more personalized experience for the user and it’s more effective to move people down that marketing funnel.

John Jantsch: Okay. So let’s say that one of my things is I sell marketing services. A lot of people are looking for SEO services. So for example, maybe I’ve written a blog post and it offers a free SEO checklist and that’s what I want people to do is download that piece of content. Now, how could I actually make that a better experience based on behavior?

Josh Slone: Okay. Yeah, definitely. So if they downloaded your checklist, that would obviously be one behavior, and then following up with those particular services. So if it is SEO, if you send them emails specifically more towards the SEO, instead of say pay per click advertising or web design, it’d be more tailored personal experience. That’d be a simple way of doing it. But you could also see if that guide or that checklist sends them to your SEO services page. Like most agencies would have a page that outlines their SEO services, lays out expectations and things like that. So if they download your SEO checklist, and then they visit your SEO service page that explains your services, that’s going to highlight to you that they’re more interested than say someone who just downloaded the guide and forgot about it.

John Jantsch: Right? So you’re suggesting I can now segment that person maybe for a whole nother kind of campaign?

Josh Slone: Right. And then, yeah, you can actually put them in a Facebook custom audience. So that way they’re seeing, use us for SEO ads instead of just general ads, things like that.

John Jantsch: So let me give you another example that I run into a lot of times. A lot of companies sell a variety of services or products and they don’t necessarily… There’s totally different segment of the market that wants those different services. So typically we will build pages for those services. Or if you’re this kind of business go here. How could somebody use behavioral activity like that to really then tailor a better experience for that person because they visited certain pages I guess on a website? Is there something we can start doing that to say, Oh, you must be interested in these things. Let’s send you that kind of content?

Josh Slone: Actually, Gist does something very similar to this. We ask people for what industry they’re in. So we’ve put people into seven different industries, whether it be business services and marketing agencies, software companies, more home services like plumbers and electricians. We have seven different industries. And then, when they indicate which industry they’re in, we actually have specific content that we can send to them that helps them use automation better. Because a lot of people, they see Gist, we offer nine different tools, they get overwhelmed. And not only that, some people aren’t going to use all of them. So we focus on the the top three to five tools that say an electrician would use. And not only that we explained specifically why an electrician would want to start using them. And so, it really helps us to understand their industry and it helps us to tailor the content experience from there.

John Jantsch: So let’s say somebody does download a piece of content and you start sending them some emails based on that. We all know that… I don’t know what the percentage is, maybe let’s be conservative. 60, 70% of them never open it, never do anything with it. So that other 30% that open it, and then maybe click on something or then go visit something else. Are there ways in which we can actually take that group and say, okay, these are our most engaged folks, let’s do something special for them?

Josh Slone: Absolutely. I won’t get too deep into it, but one of the most important things for Gist is to install just onto your website so that way you can use it. And we actually use both the positive and negative behavior to tailor that experience. So if someone has installed our WordPress plugin or our script on their website, then they move into a different sort of automation. And if they haven’t, then of course we want them to install that script. So that’s going to be our primary focus there. So separating both the people who do perform that action and the people who don’t is very important, in terms of like getting more people engaged.

John Jantsch: So the script you’re talking about is actually—that just allows you to say “This person is on your email list and they did X on your website?”

Josh Slone: Yes. And it could be, like if you’re a marketing agency and you have a webinar, a prerecorded webinar, if someone watched that webinar, well then that could be the people who perform that action. The people who didn’t watch the webinar, maybe you follow up with a piece of written content or maybe a podcast to get their preferred form of content and catch as many people as you can.

John Jantsch: So obviously a lot of this takes doing, it takes learning. It takes building the assets that you might need. What are some folks that are coming to this, like all they’ve been doing is, sign up for our newsletter, kind of lead capture. What are some of the first things that they should start doing that are not going to necessarily overwhelm them?

Josh Slone: Yeah, it could be as easy as tracking those who open your emails. That’s probably one of the ones. And if you want to take it a little step further you can, you probably know that every email should have a link in it, a call to action. So I’m sure you’ve definitely said that. So that call to action, that button clicked or that link clicked can be a behavior and that would be the easiest way to get started.

John Jantsch: And now a little word from our sponsor. Intercom once more of the nice people visiting your website to give you money. So they took a little chat bubble in the corner of a website and packed it with conversational bots, product tours, NPS surveys, all sorts of things that amplify your team and help you reach more nice people. Intercom Customer Unity got 45% more loyal users with Intercom in just 12 months. Go to intercom.com/podcast to start making money from realtime chat. Then see everything else Intercom can do. That’s intercom.com/podcast.

John Jantsch: So let’s talk about that group. So what would be a simple thing that or just maybe an obvious thing to do? Let’s say I send out, I don’t know, a number, a thousand emails and 300 people open them. Is there something I should do immediately to those 300 that open it to try to get them even more engaged? Are there just kind of obvious steps?

Josh Slone: So for the people who have opened your email, it depends on what the content of the email would be, but you definitely want to continue that conversation with them. And the next thing would be, what did they open? What was the email that they opened? So they open an email like we were talking about, about your SEO services. The next email, maybe not necessarily a sales pitch or a or a call to action as far as like in terms of like getting them to buy, but it could definitely be something that helps their SEO a little bit further. So if they open an email that just talks about an SEO blog post that you just wrote, let’s talk about SEO, excuse me, and they opened it. The next email wouldn’t just be a generic email. It could be like, Hey, here’s our SEO checklist that you haven’t downloaded yet. Here’s another piece of content that’s particular to SEO. You’d want it to be more personalized to what they actually opened in most cases.

John Jantsch: How easy is it to use a tool like Gist, obviously there are other ones out there as well, to automate some of these things? Because you want to send out an email, you don’t necessarily want to have to then go, okay, let’s see who opened it. Now, let’s do this far. How easy is it to create these workflows and automations?

Josh Slone: Obviously there is going to be a learning curve with any of these tools, especially if like you said, the only thing that you’ve done is you’ve had a newsletter and you’ve hooked it up to, say like a AWeber or something like that. But with our visual workflow builder, you can see how your contacts are going to move through, and we have dozens of pre-created properties like last email, our marketing email opened, last marketing email clicked that are already preset, so you don’t actually have to create those events. You don’t have to set those up. You don’t have to know how to code.

Josh Slone: It’s if you send an email and you can say, if someone clicks in this email, I want them to move over here based on… And you can actually set decisions like, yes, they did or no they didn’t. It might take you an afternoon, but within an afternoon you could have a fairly complex marketing automation system. And we just actually last week rolled out a few dozen done-for-you templates that include the email draft in there that you can edit as well. So we actually have some prebuilt for you, specifically for those business owners who are trying to either bootstrap or their [solar preneur 00:12:18] kind of situations.

John Jantsch: One of the things that comes with a tool like this, obviously, in terms of power and complexity, also comes price. Let’s say somebody has been collecting email addresses for a while and they’ve been using MailChimp or something, it’s pretty low cost. If they wanted to bring a pretty good size list over, how would they justify… They might be talking about $500 a month now of a cost to use a tool like this at that kind of volume. Is there a way for somebody to sort of selectively bring people over that…? Because I think everybody’s got… Anybody who’s collected generic email addresses for years probably has a lot of email addresses on there that really aren’t worth spending money on necessarily. They probably should almost be weeded out but, but if somebody was trying to make the move to a tool like yours and they did have say a 10 or 20 or 30,000 person list, what would be the best way to bring something like that over in a cost effective manner?

Josh Slone: You could absolutely test it. We have a 21-day trial that’s the full version of Gist. You see everything that has to offer. You could segment a portion of your list and you could send emails to them. You could test out the marketing flow for a full three weeks to see if your conversions increase and things like that. And then, if you decided that you wanted to move that full list over, we actually migrate for our users. So you would contact our team and we would get, not only your contacts over, but we would recreate your emails and even your automations that you have through any other provider. And then, before we turn it on, we show it to you, we walk you through it and then you can complete the move.

John Jantsch: So I want to circle back to something we were talking about early on and that’s idea of having the ability for somebody to sort of self select their segments, so to speak and that you had like your seven different areas. Do you think that’s something that if somebody comes to your website or maybe they found you by way of a particular blog post that ranked pretty highly, is that something that should in your opinion, should be offered to them right away or is that something that as they get into your funnel or one of your workflows, that should just be something that comes as a natural step of nurturing to get to know them better?

Josh Slone: For us when we really start our marketing, when someone signs up either for a free version of Gist or the free trial, so we ask it from the get go to use that as a qualifier for leads. How serious are they, how much they fill out of our onboarding process? But for someone like a marketing agency where someone’s going to find you either through word of mouth or, like you said, through a blog post, it can definitely happen naturally. And they don’t even have to self identify. If they’re only researching SEO, if they’re only checking out your SEO blog posts and reading your SEO content, you can apply a tag to them and you identify them instead of them self-identifying. So it can happen way more naturally over time.

John Jantsch: I see. Or even if they visited a certain page, a certain service page or a certain segment of the audience, you could actually then say, well they must be interested in.. Or at least make that assumption.

Josh Slone: Absolutely. And the number of times too, if someone visits the SEO service page four or five times in the last 30 days, that’s definitely a indicator.

John Jantsch: So tell us a little more about where people can find out about Gist and, as you said, potentially sign up for a free trial.

Josh Slone: I would definitely suggest the homepage, getgist.com. Right there it just says get started for free and you can either sign up for a free version of Gist or you can see the full version by signing up for a free 21-day trial.

John Jantsch: So tell me, are there any… I know that you have a number of tools, the knowledge base, the forms of email marketing, live chat, meetings, scheduling. Are there any kind of big things that you feel like you’re missing but they’re on the roadmap?

Josh Slone: Yes. The one thing that we get asked about the most and people integrate with the most, is a CRM. And that is, that is something that’s on the roadmap. It’s been in development for quite some time. And we’ve been releasing like visual workflows is our biggest release that we’ve had this year and that rolled out a few months ago. So we’re definitely working on it and that’s the one thing that we hear most often is missing from Gist.

John Jantsch: Well, Josh, thanks so much for stopping by, and hopefully we’ll run into you out there on the road. We’ll have all these links, the link and the things we talked about today in our show notes.

Josh Slone: Thanks again for having me.

Transcript of Eliminating the Distractions of Modern Life

Transcript of Eliminating the Distractions of Modern Life written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Nir Eyal. He is an Israeli-born American author, lecturer and investor, known for his bestselling book, Hooked. But today we’re going to talk about a new book, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. So Nir, thanks for joining me.

Nir Eyal: My pleasure, John. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: So as I stated, your first book, which I was a huge fan of called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, I’m probably not the first person to suggest that there is now some irony in the fact that you’ve written a book to teach us how to get off of these habit forming products. Is that an accurate statement?

Nir Eyal: Yeah, yeah. I know there’s definitely something there and I did this intentionally, right? The books are kind of the same color and I wanted them to rhyme a little bit. There’s some similar features and of course that’s part of my journey. And the idea was that we can use habit forming technology for good. We can get people hooked to saving money, to exercising, to being more productive at work. That’s the kind of clients I work with. But then you know, the Indistractable is a little bit of a whistleblower book in that I’m revealing the inner workings of how to stop being so distracted by some of these products that use some of these similar psychological tactics to get you engaged.

Nir Eyal: So my clients don’t include the gaming companies or the cigarette companies. I don’t work for any of those companies. I never will. My intention was always to democratize these techniques so that we can use them for good, but then also become aware of how we can overuse these products sometimes and how we can put them in their place.

Nir Eyal: But I want to make sure it’s very clear. Distraction is much, much bigger than just tech. Tech is just the latest gadget in our hands, but we have always had potential distractions. Right? You know, whether it’s working too much, whether it’s drinking too much, whether it’s watching too much TV. But there’s a thing called news junkies that read too much news. I mean, there’s endless distractions in this world and it’s not a new problem. Socrates talked about it literally 2,500 years ago. Socrates talked about Akrasia, the tendency that we had to do things against our better interests. So distraction is not a new problem. What is new is that if you are looking for distraction, well then it’s easier than ever to find.

John Jantsch: Yeah. One of the things I really like about the fact that you did say, “It’s not just tech.” I mean that’s just an excuse. That’s just like the nearest, easiest thing in our pocket I suppose to distract us. But I guess we can sum the whole book up a lot of ways in the three kind of categories, internal triggers, you mentioned traction, and external triggers. And so let’s spend a little time kind of breaking that down a little bit of what an internal trigger is, the traction steps that you suggested, and then obviously the external triggers.

John Jantsch: But I think in some ways, the internal triggers, I think a lot of people, whether they realize they happen to them, I think they’re pretty easy to identify. Sometimes it’s just the stuff we react to, isn’t it?

Nir Eyal: Well, so this is where I think I want to break some myths here. I think most people think about distraction, they just think about the pings, the dings, the rings, all of these things that prompt you to distraction. That’s the kindergarten stuff, right? The changing your notification settings and turning off your apps or whatever. Come on, that’s basic. You don’t need a whole book just to tell you that. That’s ridiculous. What-

John Jantsch: Well, yeah, there’s a lot of people have suggested these detox things that everybody’s goes on, just don’t-

Nir Eyal: Yeah, and it-

John Jantsch: They don’t stay.

Nir Eyal: They never work. Of course they don’t work. The same reason that 30-day diet doesn’t work. People diet to get into their wedding dress or into get into their wedding suit or whatever, and then we know what happens after the wedding and then the weight comes back when you have these temporary, arbitrary goals. And the same happens with our digital distractions. So the digital stuff is not the root cause. It’s the proximal cause. It’s very convenient, it’s called motivated reasoning. We want to believe that distraction is caused by these technologies and it’s just not true. There’s always a root cause, whether the root cause has to do with why our kids are constantly on their devices. Why work seems to constantly be a distraction. When you dig into what is the root cause, you have to start with what is the root cause of all human behavior.

Nir Eyal: Not just why do we do things against our better interest. Why do we do everything and anything? And the answer is it’s not what most people think. You know, most people think that motivation is about carrots and sticks. This is called Freud’s pleasure principle, that all behavior is motivated by desire to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Neurologically speaking, that is not true. That is not what’s happening in the brain. What’s happening in the brain is one thing and that is that all behavior is prompted by a desire to escape discomfort. That’s it. It’s pain all the way down. Everything we do is about the need for homeostasis, meaning to restore psychological balance. And we know this to be true physically, right? When we’re hot, we… Sorry, when we’re cold, we put on a jacket. When we’re hot, we take the jacket off. We know that physiologically when we feel discomfort, that’s how the brain gets us to do stuff.

Nir Eyal: And the same goes for psychological discomfort. When we’re lonely, we check Facebook. When we’re uncertain, we Google. When we’re bored, we check stock prices or ESPN or Pinterest or you name it, all kinds of things out there to relieve boredom.

Nir Eyal: So this is really, really important because it turns out that the number one source of distraction are the distractions that start from within. That we have to understand the fact that if all behavior is prompted by desire to escape discomfort, that means that time management is pain management. So all the life hacks and all the gurus’ techniques of how to manage your time will not work unless you first master your internal triggers. We have to spend some time understanding what exactly are we looking to escape from? What is the emotional itch that we are looking to scratch with some kind of distraction?

Nir Eyal: Let me tell you, if you can’t sit at the table with your family, without checking your phone, it ain’t about your phone. If you can’t sit down at work and focus on one task at a time without constantly checking Slack or email or whatever, it’s not about Slack and email. There’s something going on inside of you that unless you can cope with that discomfort, and by the way, I’m patient zero here. I wrote this book for me more than anyone else. What I wanted to do was to help people deal with these triggers in a healthy manner so that we don’t have to rely on self-control and willpower. I am tired of people telling us self-control and willpower, self-control and willpower, does not work. You have to have a system in place in order to make sure you do what you say you’re going to do.

John Jantsch: But are some of these behaviors, and maybe you’re going to suggest, well that’s just an internal trigger, but are some of them just habitual? I mean, we don’t even know why we’re doing it, or nothing triggers it. It’s just that’s what we do.

Nir Eyal: Well, the definition of a habit is an impulse to do, behave with little or no conscious thought and a habit is just a learned behavior. So why did we learn that behavior? Every behavior is learned because the brain… What the brain does really, really well, the primary function of this three and a half pounds of fat we carry inside our skulls everyday, our brain, what it does really well is pattern match. And so if the brain learns cause and effect between what the source of discomfort and whatever alleviates that discomfort, that’s what we come to again and again.

John Jantsch: And so then we no longer have to think about it. Is that what you’re saying?

Nir Eyal: Exactly. And that’s where the habit is formed. Right? And sometimes we can have very healthy habits, right? And sometimes we can have unhealthy habits. So the way to break these unhealthy habits, particularly when it comes to distraction, is to start with what is the source of the discomfort that we are looking to escape from. That’s the first step.

John Jantsch: And in some cases it may have nothing to do with what you’re doing or your job, or it could be something really deep-seated.

Nir Eyal: Well, yeah. So there’s only two answers to that problem. And so the answer number one is to fix the source of the discomfort, to figure out what’s going on in your life. Is it a crappy work environment? Is it that you have problems with your marriage? Is it that something else is going on in your life that you need to fix? Or many problems in life can’t be fixed. Look, it’s part of being human is that we feel boredom, uncertainty, stress, fatigue, loneliness. This is part of being a a person. And so in those cases, what we need to do are learn strategies to cope with that discomfort in a healthier manner. Because remember, the opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. Both words come from the same Latin root [Latin 00:00:08:46], which means to pull and they both end in the same six letter word, action, A-C-T-I-O-N.

Nir Eyal: So traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do in life. Things that you do with intent. The opposite of traction is distraction. Any action that pulls you away from what you want to do in life. So this is incredibly important because this leads us to the second step in terms of the four parts of becoming indistractible. Step one is to master the internal triggers.

Nir Eyal: Step two is to make time for traction. So here’s the thing, you can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. Two-thirds of people in America do not keep a calendar. Well, if you leave lots of white space in your day, you know what’s going to happen. Your boss is going to take up that time. The news is going to take at that time. Facebook is going to take up… Somebody is going to claim that time unless you decide what you want to do with it.

Nir Eyal: Very basic step. It’s something you see across the board with C-level executives. They do it forever. I have never met a C-level executive that doesn’t do this already. Either they’re carrying around some kind of piece of paper with their daily schedule or it’s in their phone. So we have to start. This is no longer a luxury. Living in the 21st century means you have to plan your day and you have to synchronize your schedule with the important stakeholders in your life. With your family, with your colleagues, with your boss. It’s critical to getting done what you want to get done every day and living the life you want to live.

John Jantsch: You have a couple of really compelling… And actually I’m going to jump backwards a little bit and then come back to this value idea, but you kind of glossed over pain management. So I just want to touch on that a little bit. You actually have a title of a chapter called, I don’t know, I don’t have it written down, but something about turning time management is really pain management. So you went by that pretty quickly. And I wonder if you could maybe just unpack that thought.

Nir Eyal: Sure, so this idea that all behavior is prompted by a desire to escape discomfort. So if everything we do is about relieving psychological or physical discomfort, that means that time management is pain management, right? All behavior is a desire to escape discomfort. So that means we can either fix the source of the problem or learn tactics to cope with it in a healthier manner. So that those internal triggers, that psychological discomfort leads us towards traction as opposed to distraction, feeling bad. One of the things I hate about the self-help industry that I think the self-help industry has sold us this lie that we are always supposed to be happy. And if you’re not happy and satisfied with your life, something’s wrong with you. Nothing could be further from the truth. Evolutionarily we are designed for dissatisfaction and that’s good. That’s what kept our species striving and trying and inventing and working towards improvement. So we can channel that uncomfortable sensation towards traction, towards things we want to do that are consistent with our values and we have to be careful about making sure they don’t lead us towards distraction.

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John Jantsch: So the other chapter then that I want to jump to that was extremely compelling for me at least, was this idea of turning values into time.

Nir Eyal: Right. Right. So this has to do with this idea if you ask people what their values are, they’ll talk a good game. And I certainly did. “Oh what’s valuable to me in my life? Oh my health, my health is very, very important. Oh, my friends and my family, these things are very, very important to me.”

Nir Eyal: Are they though? Really? I mean, here’s the thing. You can tell someone’s values by looking at two things. Their bank ledger, how they spend their money and their calendar, how they spend their time. And so if these things are really important to us, we have to make time for them in our day. They don’t just happen. Having good relationships. You know, there’s a loneliness epidemic in this country that we know, the psychologists tell us, that loneliness is as detrimental to our health as smoking and obesity. But we can’t form these relationships with people unless we make time for them and we are fully present.

Nir Eyal: Same goes in the workplace. We can’t do our best work unless we make time for the hard stuff. Time to focus, time to think. We are so busy reacting all day between meetings and emails, we have no time for reflection. But reflection and concentrated thought, this is where the best ideas come from. This is where we produce the most important work output, is that time to think. And then of course with our health, we all know how to get healthy. We don’t need to buy a diet book or an exercise… We know what to do. Everybody knows what to do, right? We all know chocolate cake isn’t as healthy for you as a healthful salad. Why don’t we eat the right stuff? Why don’t we take care of our bodies? Well because a big part of it is that we haven’t turned our values into time. It’s got to be on your calendar or it’s just not going to happen these days.

John Jantsch: Yeah. So give us a practical… I mean, you already mentioned the idea that people don’t have calendars, which I find amazing, but you know-

Nir Eyal: Well it’s more than just calendars. It’s time box calendars. So I think that we have to plan for every minute of our day. And it sounds very rigid and people boohoo. “What do you mean? I want to do, I don’t want to plan my whole day.” Too bad. The reality of living in the 21st century, you don’t have to kill your own food. You don’t have to chop your own wood. I’m asking you to make a calendar. Okay. And that calendar, and I’ll give you a link for the show notes, very simple to make. So it takes about 30 minutes. And what we want to do is… It’s not good enough just to make that calendar right. We also have to synchronize that schedule. It’s called schedule syncing. We’re doing that with the important stakeholders in our life. With our domestic partners, with our boss. So that for the first time we coordinate how our time will be spent.

Nir Eyal: So many managers, they just lob over tasks, without constraints, right. Our only input as knowledge workers is our time. And so it’s critical that we sync this. We do this practice of schedule sinking with our managers so that there’s a realistic expectation of what can and can’t get done based on the time we have in our day.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And I think that’s a great point though. I mean, I’m guilty of lobbing tasks over and over and I think that this idea that it’s a two way street. Would you call that an an element of culture or is that just something that takes practice itself?

Nir Eyal: So a huge part of this culture. So half the book is about things that you can do yourself, but the fact is, there’s only so much that you can do yourself. So the other half of the book is about the environments we live in. So there’s a section on how to make an indistractable workplace, how to raise indistractable kids, and how to have an indistractable relationship. Because the fact is, I can tell you the four steps of how to be indistractible. We only went through two of them so far. I can tell you those four steps and you can follow them to a T. But if your boss decides to call you up at 7:00 on a Friday and says, “Oh, I need you to check email right now, there’s something we need to work on.” Is it the email and the phone that’s at fault? Is it the technology at fault or is it your crappy boss?

Nir Eyal: And so a big part of this is company culture. Now, if that’s what you sign up for, I’ve got no problem with that. If you want to work on Wall Street, you want to work at a startup, I get it. I’ve been there. Go for it. If you know you’re getting into a 60 hour a week type job, I’m not going to tell you not to. However, there is a bait and switch that goes on in many companies. They say, “Oh yeah, we’re a 40 hour work week kind of place.” But then you get there and you say, “Oh, 40 hours is how much you want me in the office, but actually you want me to do real work on nights and weekends and now it’s a 60-80 hour work week.” That’s not fair. That’s a bait and switch. And so that’s the kind of stuff where company culture comes into play.

Nir Eyal: The good news is, and I profile several companies who have made the switch and they find that not only do employees do better work, they dramatically reduce employee turnover and they actually can find out that once they start this discussion around distraction in the workplace, all of these other skeletons in the closet come out. And so I profiled the Boston consulting group and a few other companies on how they’ve made this transition and it’s remarkable. It benefits all types of the metrics in terms of their organization, improve once people start having this conversation around distraction.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I think that if you were able to do some sort of research on most companies, you would find how much time is actually wasted.

Nir Eyal: Oh my God.

John Jantsch: And that actually doing what you’re talking about doing with a focus would actually give so much time back anyway.

Nir Eyal: It’s so true. So that’s why we only got to the first two steps of mastering internal triggers, make time for traction. The third step is to hack back the external triggers and that’s where I talk about hacking back meetings. How much time do we waste in stupid superfluous meetings? Email, right. You know so much of our day… There’s study done that showed that between those two things, meetings and email, the average knowledge worker only has an hour and a half for everything else that isn’t meetings and email. And so where does real work get done? It gets done on nights and weekends and our health pays the price. Our families pay the price, our friends pay the price. And so that’s the kind of discussion we need to have is we can taper down on these stupid meetings we don’t need to have. And these emails that get spreed. The Harvard Business Review found that 25% of the emails the average knowledge workers sends didn’t need to be sent and 25% of the emails they received didn’t need to be received. So we are wasting a tremendous amount of time.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I can’t tell you how often… I work in a pretty lean organization, but we do have some sponsors that have an agency that has this component that comes and 18 people want to meet four times to talk about something that would have taken about two seconds. [crosstalk] And we cancel.

Nir Eyal: We have meetings to discuss when we’re going to have meetings.

John Jantsch: Yes.

Nir Eyal: It’s ridiculous. And so I show you exactly how to hack a back all of these external triggers. External triggers are the pings, the dings, the rings, all of these things that lead us towards distraction, can lead us towards distraction. And so I talk about these eight different environments, group chat, meetings, email, cell phone, your desktop, all of these places where we can hack back these external triggers. And it is possible, I mean some people who have read the book, Shane Snow is another author, said he reduced the time he spent on email by 90% after using these methodologies.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And I think on the surface an individual, I think could look at this book and say, “Well this is a book about habits.” But I think a company could look at this and say, “This is a book about leadership and about management.” Couldn’t they?

Nir Eyal: Yeah, I mean there is an element of breaking bad habits, not so much building habits. That was more about what Hooked was about. My first book was about how to build habits facilitated by technology. But absolutely I think to expect it to just be on the employee is a little bit narrow. I think there needs to be something to be said for company culture that plays a huge component into how to help people be their best. And in fact we know that there is [inaudible] that literally drive us crazy. I’m not being figurative here.

Nir Eyal: The work of Stansfeld and Candy found that when a work environment has two conditions… You know, you think about, okay, what type of work environments lead to depression, anxiety disorder? If you say, okay, where is there the most correlation between the kind of jobs that lead to anxiety and depression disorder? You would think it’d be like a sad job, right? A mortician or somebody who works in a slaughterhouse. No, no, no. It’s not what you do. It’s the environment you do it in. Turns out that companies that have a work environment where people have high expectations coupled with low control, this is the type of workplace that literally leads to depression, anxiety disorder. You don’t have to have both by the way. If you have high expectations and high control, you’re fine. It’s when you have this work environment of high expectations and low control, that’s when things go off the rails.

Nir Eyal: And here’s what’s so frustrating about those types of environments. What do people do when they don’t feel in control? Psychological agency is incredibly important. It’s one of these core things that we need for psychological wellbeing and flourishing. We have to feel agency and control over what we do. When people don’t feel in control, you know what they do? They call stupid meetings. They send stupid emails that don’t need to be sent. Why? Because they are grasping for control and agency and it makes the problem worse, not only for them, for everyone else as well.

John Jantsch: So let’s bring these three things together and to the fourth part.

Nir Eyal: Yeah. So the fourth part is about preventing distraction with pacts. So the third step was about keeping the external triggers out. This is about keeping yourself in. And so this is where we make what’s called a pre-commitment. It’s where we make some kind of pact with ourselves or with someone else.

Nir Eyal: There are three types of these pre-commitments. An effort pact, a price pact, and an identity pact that we can use to make sure that we can keep ourselves in. And so a lot of what we can do here leverages technology, ironically enough, to prevent distraction from technology.

John Jantsch: So we’ve talked a lot about companies, but I’m envisioning families taking this on.

Nir Eyal: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. So my favorite section of the book and where I learned the most, I have an 11-year-old little girl who some of her first words, I’m not kidding, some of her first words I think after dada was iPad time, iPad time. So now she’s 11 and the challenges have certainly changed, but this is a very important skill.

Nir Eyal: If you think the world is distracting now, just wait a few years. Virtual reality, augmented reality, you know the world is not going to become less distracting. It’s going to become more potentially distracting. So if we don’t teach our kids how to become indistractable, they’re going to be in big trouble. I think this is going to be the skill of the century that kids who can focus, who use the power of becoming indistractable to do what they think is important in life, these are the kids who are going to have a huge competitive advantage over the kids who let their lives just be controlled by other people.

John Jantsch: I wonder if there’s going to be a time when they’re teaching this in schools.

Nir Eyal: Oh man. From your mouth to God’s ears. I hope so. I really hope so. And you know, the thing is, I’m not one of these Luddites that says, “Oh, technology is so evil. It’s so bad. Just get rid of the technology.” No, that doesn’t solve our problem. We can’t do that. To not be tech literate… It’s very difficult to succeed without understanding how to use these tools. So I believe that we can get the best out of technology without letting it get the best of us.

Nir Eyal: And if we’re rational about it… Look, I’m a tech insider. I know how these tools are built and I can tell you where these tactics work and where they don’t. What the Achilles heel is for how we can regain our attention and control our lives. It’s actually not all that hard. We just have to understand the root causes as opposed to the proximal causes. Because there’s a lot of motivated reasoning here. We want to blame technology, and especially us parents. We love blaming. My generation it was Super Mario Brothers and before that it was heavy metal music. And before that it was comic books. I mean every generation of parents, we love to blame something that helps us deflect responsibility. But it turns out those are never the root causes. There’s something else going on and that’s what we have to deal with first and foremost.

John Jantsch: Speaking with Nir Eyal, the author of Indistractable. So Nir, tell people, and of course we’ll have the show notes, but tell people where they can find out more, and I think you actually have some resources related to the book as well.

Nir Eyal: Absolutely. Yeah, so my website is Nirandfar. Nir, spelled like my first name, so it’s N-I-R and far.com. Nirandfar.com. And at indistractable.com you can get a an 80-page workbook we couldn’t fit into the print edition, so that’s available there. It’s a complimentary workbook as well as a free video course and all that is at indistractable.com. It’s spelled I-N, the word distract, A-B-L-E. So indistractible.com.

John Jantsch: Nir, thanks so much for stopping by the podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you soon out there on the road.

Nir Eyal: My pleasure. Thanks so much, John.

Transcript of What Small Businesses Need to Know About Google Ads

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John Jantsch: This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a platform that helps growth-focused eCommerce brands drive more sales with super-targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook and Instagram marketing.

John Jantsch: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Kim Spalding. She is the Product Leader and General Manager, Ads for Small Business and Emerging Markets at Google. So, Kim, thanks for joining me.

Kim Spalding: Oh, thank you, John. Glad to be here.

John Jantsch: So, you know, LinkedIn tells me you’ve been at Google for about four years. Here’s the key question I need to know. How long did it take you to stop calling it Ad Words?

Kim Spalding: Hopefully I won’t do it on this call.

John Jantsch: I’m the same way. It’s very hard for me to not write that, but we’re getting there.

John Jantsch: So, you know, we talked about you being in ads for small business, and that’s one of the tools that Google offers for small business, but there’s just an array of them. Probably, in some ways, many of them are missed by small businesses. If wonder if, maybe, you could touch on a couple of your favorite tools that you think small businesses maybe should be more aware than they are? I lovingly refer to it as the Googleverse. What are some of the tools that you think might be a little under the radar?

Kim Spalding: Yeah, you got it. You know, our mission is to help small to medium businesses get online and grow. You know, as you know, small businesses are the backbone of our local economies. I love knowing that every time I spend $1 on a small business in my local, in my town or in my city, that 67 cents of that dollar stays local, which is really cool.

Kim Spalding: However, we see that so many small businesses, you know, don’t have all the digital tools that they need to reach customers. 51% of small businesses in the US don’t have a website, which means that when users try to come and find them online, they miss the opportunity to connect.

Kim Spalding: So, one of the first things I wanted to mention was a new site that we launched in June of this year, called Google for Small Business. You know, Google for Small Business is an easy and streamlined way for businesses to find the solutions they need. You enter a couple of easy pieces of information about your business, like the type of products and services you offer, and your goals, and the website produces a step-by-step plan that’s customized for you. That’s just a really easy and great way to get started, and get a sense of what are the first easy steps you can take to take advantage of Google and the Internet to grow your business.

John Jantsch: So, what are some examples of things that it would suggest? If it doesn’t find a Google My Business page for you, or something, that might be one of the suggestions?

Kim Spalding: That’s exactly right. You know, my wish is that 100% of businesses in the US would have a website, and would claim their free listing on Google My Business. It’s a completely free tool, it’s really simple and easy to use, and it allows you to claim and really tailor your listing on Google Search and Google Maps.

Kim Spalding: Google My Business tool is definitely something I want every small business to either claim their listing if they haven’t done that yet, or if they have, really make your profile your own. Upload more pictures, respond to reviews, make sure all your unique products and services are captured there. Post offers, right? All of those things make your listing really come to life, and grab customers when they find you online.

John Jantsch: Well, I’ve been doing this long enough that I was urging Google Places, which was the first local directory. Then, moved to Google Plus. Now, we’re really all in on Google My Business. I’ve been saying for a while, it seems like Google is serious about this one. That this is here to stay, and that, you know, it seems like almost weekly some new feature, or now you can do Click to Call and text, and schedule appointments, and get quotes. I have been all in on telling people just what you just said, not only claim it, but go in there and look at all the things that you can actually do there.

John Jantsch: In addition to the insights, the data, search terms, zip codes that people are asking for directions. When you really get under the hood, it’s a treasure trove of information.

Kim Spalding: That is totally right. You can even see what kinds of searches are most likely to trigger your business, which gives you really useful information about what kinds of customers are interested in you, and what they’re searching for, which is really great.

John Jantsch: Okay. Now that I just gave you this ad for Google My Business, I’m going to give you one pushback that I hear. It does appear that there’s a move by Google to place a search farther away from our website. In other words, now, if I find you on maps listing, I have to click a button to go to another page, to then get the website. Or, maybe even through the Featured snippets, I don’t even have to leave the SERPs to find the information that I’m looking for. Talk to me a little bit about that, because that’s a frustration with some small business owners. They’ve invested all this in their website, and it feels more like Google is just taking the data, but keeping people in the SERPs.

Kim Spalding: It’s interesting, because we actually find that often times that benefits small businesses. I mean, you know, having exactly the right information in exactly the right place in your website, and making sure it’s mobile and fast loading is not always consistent across our smallest businesses. So, making sure the information that users need is right there, and well structured, and easy to get to, and consistent helps users engage with businesses faster, which actually tends to benefits small businesses.

John Jantsch: All right. Let’s talk about advertising. Do you see, because I’m guessing you plug into what’s going on, and all of the information you’re able to hone from your initiatives, do you see some definite small business trends when it comes to advertising? I guess, I’m really not necessarily talking about things they’re doing, I’m probably talking about things they’re doing that are working.

Kim Spalding: Yes. I mean, the first trend, which I know you talk about a lot that we see from small businesses, is they’re just really busy. I know this from my personal experiences as a small business owner. There’s just never enough time to learn and do everything that I needed to do. We hear that small business owners are really, really busy. At the same time, we hear the number one challenge that small businesses face is finding new customers. Those are the two things that we hear most consistently, which is why we spend so much time working on our Smart campaign solutions for small businesses, trying to make that product just as simple and easy to use as we possibly can. So that small business owners can quickly get ads up and running, and get the best of Google with a lot of ease.

John Jantsch: I want to remind you that this episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo helps you build meaningful customer relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers. This allows you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages. There’s powerful segmentation, email auto responders that are ready to go, great reporting.

If you want to learn a bit about the secret to building customer relationships, they’ve got a really fun series called, Klaviyo’s Beyond Black Friday. It’s a docu-series, it’s a lot of fun, quick lessons. Just head on over to Klaviyo.com/BeyondBF, Beyond Black Friday.

John Jantsch: Well, let me ask you a question, then. How do you balance, sometimes, the need to make it easy with, I think sometimes, doing that causes you to create some compromises in making it the most useful? What I mean by that is, you know, I manage a lot of … Our agency manages a lot of campaigns for small businesses, and when you really get in there and customize, and tweak them, and test them to the enth degree, a lot of times you make changes that certainly wouldn’t be the default settings. Obviously, in your need to make it easy, you have to have as many click here, click here. So, how do you balance that, knowing that sometimes ease is a compromise?

Kim Spalding: The way we think about it is that, the simpler we can make the setup, the faster we can get you into doing the work that only you can do. Like what you just described, right? Making sure that you’ve uploaded your very best pictures, continuing to work on your creative so that … I used to run a winery. I needed to make sure that my winery comes to life with the best phrases, and giving Google Ads a bunch of different phrases so we can test and optimize.

Kim Spalding: Then, helping you look at, hey, here’s the search phrases you searched on. Let us know if there’s any of these that you don’t feel like you’re as relevant to your business, so we can optimize those.

Kim Spalding: I feel if we make things easy, we can actually help you more quickly get to those key things, which is making sure the creatives are great, the use of your products are coming forward, and making sure that all of the phrases and keywords are tuned.

John Jantsch: Talk to me a little about Local Service Ads. Certainly, they seem to be picking up steam from Google’s end. How are you finding the usefulness of that ad unit?

John Jantsch: Maybe I should describe it a little bit. Or, maybe I should let you describe it a little bit? But I know that more and more people, more and more industries, more and more geography, the local service ad is becoming a prominent ad unit. Certainly, from a real estate standpoint on the search screen. Is there a future pronouncement about how far we’re going to go with that?

Kim Spalding: You know, Local Service Ads is a product that we designed specifically for some of our local service verticals, like home services. Like, if you need a plumber, or a locksmith, or a house cleaner, that we felt like had some specific … Both the users who are looking for those services, and the businesses that are trying to grow those businesses had some specific needs. It’s a structured ad unit that sits at the top of search. A lot of users notice right away that there’s a Google guarantee, which helps users have confidence, and quickly reach out to, and book a lot of small businesses online. Which, we really like how well that helps businesses convert, users convert with new businesses.

Kim Spalding: Yeah, so Local Services has grown. We’ve actually seen, you know, 5X the number of businesses sign up. You know, I’m originally from Dallas, and one of the businesses on Local Services is called Gmaids, which, of course, we like. We talk about things that start with G a lot here at Google. You know, it’s just a nice example of a local business in Dallas that has been able to use Local Services to really help grow their business and reach new customers.

John Jantsch: Do you see … I mean, this is a question for a lot of people in a lot of industries. Do you see the expansion of Local Services into pretty much anything? You know, retail, flower shop. Do you see it going beyond what has been, today, mostly the home services?

Kim Spalding: We’re always testing verticals. Really more focused on service businesses, businesses that come to your home, or your business, or provide a really specific service. Those businesses tend to be very small, very small in nature, so a really structured ad unit is useful, both to users and businesses, and really focuses on phone calls, messaging, booking. Getting right into those direct connections between consumers and businesses.

Kim Spalding: Local Services charges for leads, which makes it nice. You don’t have to worry about, you know, what’s the value of a click or anything like that, it’s just a really clean and easy way to understand what value you’re getting from your ads.

John Jantsch: So, lets talk about Voice Search. That’s obviously become a growing area, you know, where somebody has got Alexa, or Siri, or something, and they say, blah, blah, blah, find me this, or how do I do that, and they get the answers. Do you see ad units somehow working their way into Voice Search?

Kim Spalding: For right now, we mostly see voice search coming into mobile phones, and our mobile search results coming back. There’s kind of a nice interplay between how the user expresses their input in voice, but often reading their responses on their phone in the traditional way.

John Jantsch: So, you’re saying that it would almost … On a mobile device, you’re just going to return as though they had typed that search in, so the ad units and everything will be there?

Kim Spalding: I think there’s a ton of innovation and change in this space, it’s really early days. We’re mostly focused on just making sure our mobile search results are really great, both from an ads and organic perspective.

John Jantsch: Right. So, I’ll ask it again, just because I’m really curious. Do you see a day, and you can speculate on this, you don’t have to tell me Google is doing this … Do you see a day when I go, “Hey, Alexa, what’s the closet hair salon?” And the first result of that is going to be an ad?

Kim Spalding: You know, I don’t work in that space directly, so I’m probably the best person to opine on the future of voice search, so I might hand it over to one of my colleagues to answer that question. We can follow up.

John Jantsch: Okay. I’ll let you off the hook, then. How important are agencies in Google’s ad product world? I mean, obviously they’re important because they bring a lot of clients and things, but how do you view agencies in building out dashboards, and products and things for them?

Kim Spalding: We think agencies are incredibly important. When I think specifically about small businesses, agencies are incredible partners, both to us, and to businesses.

Kim Spalding: While our team works really hard to make sure we’ve got really simple and easy to use products so that a small business of any size, with any level of digital savvy can hop and use them, at the same time we know that a lot of small businesses want to go to an agency and have a one-stop shop for digital marketing, which is great. One of the things that I find when talking to agencies, especially those that serve SMBs is, you know, they have some of the same needs that small businesses do, right? They’ve got a large portfolio of clients, and they want tools that are really powerful, and really simple and easy to use, so that they can focus their work to their clients on those same things. Make sure that they’ve got great creative, they’ve got offers that really bring their specific business to life, and their getting those creatives really well tailored.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I do think, speaking as one of the audience that I just addressed, I do think the more management tools, the better. So, being able to manage multiple Google My Business accounts, Google Search Console accounts, Ad Words accounts, Analytics accounts, that’s really, obviously, the key to not pulling your hair out as an agency.

Kim Spalding: Absolutely.

John Jantsch: So, what’s one … I’m going to give you an opportunity to introduce one awesome tutorial, or tool, or upcoming thing that you think we ought to know about, or be paying attention to from the world of Google.

Kim Spalding: Across the whole world of Google? Wow.

Kim Spalding: Well, I’ll just stay focused on small businesses. I think, you know, Google My Business continues to offer and introduce new features, so keep an eye out there. One of the new features that was added recently was the ability for users, consumers, to follow businesses and maps, which I think is really, really cool.

Kim Spalding: I go back to Google for Small Business. We’ve worked really hard to just put everything in one place. I hear over and over again, from small businesses who just say, “Look, there’s so much out there in the world of digital advertising, and even in the world of Google. Can you just put it all in one place, and give me a step-by-step guide?” We will continue to invest in that tool, to help more and more small businesses have a place to go, and it’s easy to get started, and take advantage of our tools to get online and grow their business.

John Jantsch: Yeah. We will, of course, have a link to Google for Small Business in the show notes.

John Jantsch: Kim, always great to hear what’s going on at Google. Appreciate you stopping by and sharing your insights. Hopefully, we’ll run into you someday out there on the road.

Kim Spalding: Look forward to it. Thanks, John.

Transcript of Getting the Meeting with Contact Marketing

Transcript of Getting the Meeting with Contact Marketing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: When you work for a big brand, run your own small business, do freelance work, doesn’t matter, getting traffic to your website is always an issue. It’s why I love tools like Ahrefs. It’s an all-in-one SEO tool set that’ll help you solve that problem, and they have a seven-day trial for only $7. Head over to ahrefs.com to sign up.

John Jantsch: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Stu Heinecke. He’s a marketer, a Wall Street Journal cartoonist, a bestselling author, and the founder of cartoonists.org. But he’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today called Get the Meeting: An Illustrative Content … Nope, contact. And I’m glad I messed that up, because it gives me a chance to highlight the difference … Contact Marketing Playbook. So Stu, thanks for joining me.

Stu Heinecke: Hey, thank you so much. Thanks for flubbing that up because that’s exactly what we need to do.

John Jantsch: Before we get into the book itself, are you still doing the cart … How do you say that? Cartooning? Is that how you’d say that?

Stu Heinecke: Yeah. I’m deeply, deeply involved in cartooning, not only as a cartoonist, I mean, I’m still submitting to the Wall Street Journal, but also I and a group of New Yorker and Wall Street Journal … I should put it the other way around. Wall Street Journal and New Yorker cartoonists have founded this new thing called cartoonists.org, so we’re using our cartoon art to help charities raise funds.

John Jantsch: So you take something that was maybe published and sell the original in a blown up fashion or something like that?

Stu Heinecke: Well, not yet.

John Jantsch: But that’s the plan?

Stu Heinecke: It’s sort of the … Yeah, it’s sort of that … We’re taking cartoons that they might’ve been published or they might not have been. We’re really choosing them based on, well, who would buy this cartoon? Where would they put it into their home? Because now we’re talking about framed, or at least, hanging art. So what cartoons would make sense in what rooms? Cartoons about cooking in the kitchen, of course, and maybe maybe a cartoon about a dinner party going off the rails would be great in the dining room, that kind of stuff. So that’s what it is. They’re all prints at this point, hand-signed prints, but not originals.

John Jantsch: Okay. But also you’ve done a lot of business ones. I could see a lot of office art coming out of some of your ones that have appeared in the Journal.

Stu Heinecke: Yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: And giving back a little bit, helping some charitable organizations. So Get the Meeting is really a companion, so we probably should start there, to How to Get a Meeting with Anyone. And those of you that are long time listeners will remember that Stu was on when that book came out, so maybe go back and re-listen to that, but we’ll talk a little bit about it today. So I guess we first should start with the description or definition of contact marketing. What is it?

Stu Heinecke: Well, yeah. I’m glad you asked, and glad you mixed it up a little bit with content marketing in the beginning because it’s not content marketing and it’s a good thing to emphasize that. But contact marketing is a, it’s a fusion of marketing and selling. That’s important because so often in bigger companies, I know your audience is actually smaller companies, but still it seems like those two functions within companies, maybe even within the people’s minds, too, are just highly siloed. And so one doesn’t talk to the other, one doesn’t really interact with the other very well. There’s a lot of friction between marketing and sales. But here, it’s a combination of marketing and selling using micro-focused campaigns to help a sales rep break through to someone of great importance, so really these are top accounts, not prospects.

John Jantsch: So maybe kind of illustrate that. No pun intended because your illustrative book, but kind of illustrate what one, like here’s a couple typical steps in a contact marketing plan.

Stu Heinecke: Well, probably the easiest one to talk about is what I do, what my campaigns look like, but there are many, many others, lots of ways to do this. But as you mentioned, I’m one of the Wall Street Journal cartoonists. So I use my cartoons to break through. Typically what that looks like is I produce something I call a big board. It’s an 18 by 24 inch quarter inch thick foam core board. Actually, it’s Gator Board. It’s just like indoor signage material.

Stu Heinecke: And on one side there’s a cartoon about the recipient, what that cartoon says, and what the humor is, is really, really, really critical to all this as you might imagine. But if it’s on target, then it’s something that they want to keep in their offices, really, the rest of their careers. So there’s that cartoon on one side about the recipient and on the other is all the branding and messaging from the sender to the recipient explaining who they are, what value they want to bring to them and why they want to meet, and then what the next steps are to meet or connect in some way.

Stu Heinecke: And that gets sent in a really cool packet, some corrugated packaging that has cartoon art printed all over it. It’s something that you can’t ignore. When it comes in and when it arrives from FedEx, it’s something you just can’t ignore. It looks like something’s coming in from maybe a cartoon art gallery, perhaps something like that. But the thing that’s really fun about this is that is that usually I’m reaching out to people who have executive assistants, dreaded executive assistant.

Stu Heinecke: But actually, I love assistants. I’m a fan of executive assistants. They’re generally some of the smartest, sharpest people in the organizations. If you think about the executive assistant to the CEO of a company, that person is actually just like any other member of the C suite because she or he reports to the CEO just like the CMO does and the CFO and so on. They’re just incredibly sharp people. So they want to know when you call in that do have something relevant and of importance for their executive to pay attention to. So they’re really a lot like talent scouts.

Stu Heinecke: And so what I have been advocating, and that comes from a lot of gathering of information from what a lot of people have done to break through, is that you don’t want to circumvent these people. You want to include them in your campaign. So the way that I do that in the cartoon campaign is that I … or say any of the reps from any of my clients will call up and they’ll say, “Hi, my name is so-and-so.” I’ll just use my name now, so, “Hi, I’m Stu Heinecke. I’m one of the Wall Street Journal cartoonists, and I have a print of one of my cartoons, and it’s about your boss, that I’m sending.”

Stu Heinecke: Usually, by that time they’re saying, “Wait, what? Really?” And the rest of it is, “Look, I want it to be a surprise to your boss, but not to you. Would you mind if I send you an email with the details? And that way you’ll have my contact information.” Usually, the response is, “Yeah, of course. Sure. Here’s my email address.” So an email goes out and it’s a, “Thank you so much for your help, and here’s what I was saying. As soon as I have FedEx tracking information, I’ll get that to you.” So then, when the tracking information is available, you send that.

Stu Heinecke: In the meantime, you send a card. We usually send a card with a personalized cartoon for the executive assistant as well, so that they can keep it on their desk if they want to, or that’s generally what happens. They get it, they’re thrilled with it. And, “Oh my gosh, thank you for my cartoon too.” So there are four touch points before the big board even arrives. By the time it arrives, and certainly by the time the sender calls for the target executive, a lot of things have warmed up. That’s a pretty good example of what one version of a contact marketing campaign might look like. But certainly that’s not to say that you have to be a cartoonist to do this.

John Jantsch: Yeah, so there were elements of that that were probably universal in the way that you handled that, but what would be some other ideas that … I mean, obviously the cartoon works for you. You can execute on that. That really works. What are some other ideas you’ve seen that would substitute for the cartoon that people have been effective using that same kind of approach?

Stu Heinecke: Well, I think the thing that we want to do always is we want to be getting in touch with something that provides instant value. And then also, and this is the thing that I think we really need to do, is that it ought to be done so well that the person on the other end of this, they’re saying, “Oh my God, I love the way this person thinks.” So you can see that in the cartoon. That happens, but then consider, let’s say, I think you probably know Dan Waldschmidt?

John Jantsch: Yes. Yeah.

Stu Heinecke: Yeah. So Dan is, as you and I know, but he’s the author of Edgy Conversations, both the blog and the book, and he’s a top blogger in the sales space. But what he does for a living is he’s a turnaround specialist, and he has this really interesting way of getting in touch with the CEOs of companies that are in trouble. What he does then is he starts the day by reading the business news, looking for stories of missing earnings estimates. And when he finds one, he has this beautiful sword made up. And, John, that sword is like, it’s a full size sword. It’s made by the prop maker who made the swords for all of the movie Gladiator, if you remember that. They’re really beautiful and ultra realistic. They’re not sharpened, by the way. That’s a good thing.

Stu Heinecke: And the blade is engraved with the CEO’s name, and then one of Dan’s favorite inscriptions, “If you’re not all in, you’re not in at all.” And so that gets put in this wooden box, beautiful wooden box, with a handwritten note that says, “Hey, dear so and so, business is war and I noticed you lost a battle recently. I just want to let you know, if you ever need a few extra hands in battle, we’ve got your back.” And he signs it, and I don’t know if he even puts a business card in there. It’s not done on letterhead, and it’s all handwritten.

Stu Heinecke: Dan reports that he gets 100% percent response rate to this campaign. That’s amazing. And we’re both marketers so we know that … I used to hear all the time at where I started out in direct mail and direct marketing that if you get a 1% response rate, you’re doing really well. That’s kind of a typical response rate. And of course, there’s no such number, but that’s a 1% response rate. Most click-through rates are fractions of a percent. So these numbers are miraculous, I think, actually.

John Jantsch: Well, I think something that we need to point out is probably the key to this is you said it was something of value, it was hard to ignore, it was personalized. It clearly wasn’t something that somebody sat around and said, “Oh yeah, a thousand people got this today.” I think that for a lot of us, six, seven, eight, more appointments a month would make life beautiful. We don’t necessarily need thousands, right?

Stu Heinecke: That’s right. And if you get in with the right people, then they … Think about everything that’s changed in our lives, and particularly in our business lives. It’s changed because we made contact with someone who changed everything. So six or seven of those a year could do a lot for your business.

John Jantsch: Well, and even obviously, you can take it to the million dollar appointment kind of thing. But if you are a small business owner, I’m a marketing consultant, I train a lot of marketing consultants. Really, six or eight $50,000 clients a year is, for an independent marketing consultant, is a nice piece of business. Because I’m thinking people out there might be going, “Oh, well, that’s a lot of work, and look at the investment in that.” But again, 100% response means you send six of these out and you’re going to get six meetings.

Stu Heinecke: Yeah, no. Yeah, that’s kind of an interesting point because Dan gets 100% response rate. It gets 100% to his piece. But that’s not … How do I put it? It’s not typical. However, in the new book I also explored a completely new model. The current model or, I hesitate to call it the old model, but we’ll call it that for now. The old model is you send something that just knocks their socks off or you do something. Podcasts are a great contact device. Getting interviews with the people you’d like to do business with is a great way to connect with them.

John Jantsch: I’ve said that for years. I tell people, “You ought to be calling your prospects because they’ll return your call if you’re calling to interview them.”

Stu Heinecke: Yeah, and it’s a bonding process when you do the interview and so on. It’s a great thing to do.

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Stu Heinecke: So the thing is, though, as long as you … Well, I guess I should say that that’s very effective, and as I just mentioned, Dan’s response rate is already 100%. For some of my clients, some of my actually Fortune 1000 clients, gets them way up into let’s say the 70% response range and 50% meeting range. That’s huge. That’s really huge. But the thing that bothered me was, if we’re using account based marketing, let’s say if we’ve identified the companies that we want to connect with and do business with, and particularly at the highest level, I always think in terms of the highest level anyway.

Stu Heinecke: But if we get a 70% response rate to a campaign, it’s a miraculous number. But it started to bother me that we were also leaving 30% on the table and what could we do about them? And there’s really no reason we shouldn’t be able to connect with them. So the new model also includes a new digital persistence campaign using remarketing, really, to supplement what should be a natural cadence of persistence anyway. But when you have that going on in the background …

Stu Heinecke: If I wanted to reach out to you, John, and we know that Terminus does this and RollWorks does this, but if I wanted to reach out to you and really get your attention, what would be ideal is to start running ads for my books, probably. So get the meeting and then a headline, one meeting can change everything, and then a link to go buy it at Amazon. If I started running those ads to you on the Google ad network, which means really that it would just follow you around no matter where you went, you’d start to get the sense that, “Wow, who wrote this book?” At first you’d ignore it maybe, and then it starts to grow on you.

Stu Heinecke: And by the time two weeks have gone by, that frequency and exposure has gotten you saying, “Man, this must be a big deal because it looks like Amazon’s actually advertising it, but this must be a big deal.” And then all of a sudden, boom, I call you. That effect can continue on from pre-contact through contact through the entire sales cycle so that perhaps we do more than just get a 100% response rate to the contact campaign. We actually start bringing up the sales hit rate as well. But I think now, based on this new contact marketing model, that we should be resetting the baseline for response at a really kind of insane level, at 100%.

John Jantsch:: Well, another key we haven’t really talked about is by thinking of small numbers, smaller numbers, we’re also probably doing a better job targeting, right? A lot of times direct mail campaigns don’t work or Facebook ad campaigns don’t work that well because 90% of the people shouldn’t even be in the campaign.

Stu Heinecke: Yeah. A lot of them aren’t there. Yeah. For many reasons, you’re just going to have a really lossy sort of …

John Jantsch:: Yeah. It’s so cheap, so I’ll throw them in there. But I think when you’re going to send somebody a sword, they probably better be pretty targeted.

Stu Heinecke: Yeah, well, that costs Dan $1,000 every time he puts one of those out, which is also kind of … Yeah. So yeah, it ought to be right on target. But of course his process is to use a trigger event, the missed earnings report, so they are really well targeted and obviously they’re well targeted because he’s getting not that kind of a response rate.

John Jantsch:: Yeah, I’ll bet in his case, and of course this would just be anecdotal, but I bet you people talk about it too, which maybe increases and introduces him to some people that maybe he didn’t even target.

Stu Heinecke: That’s a great point. Actually the highest response rate I’ve seen now to a contact marketing campaign is now 300%. And you might say, “Well, wait a minute. 300%?” But it’s exactly what you just described. They’re so clever, they’re so interesting and compelling, that they get shown off to other people and it’s, “Oh, can I get that guy’s number?” So you send one piece out, it gets shown around, and you get three responses back.

John Jantsch:: In Get the Meeting, you also … You’ve shared a couple examples, but you have, I think you told me something like 60 case studies with pictures and, really, that’s the illustrative aspect of this that kind of shows somebody, walks people through exactly how to do it, don’t you?

Stu Heinecke: I do. In the first book, in How to Get a Meeting with Anyone, I identified 20 categories of contact marketing campaign types. The one I just described with Dan is he’s using a visual metaphor, so they’re visual metaphors and gifts and all sorts of really interesting uses of media exposure. We just talked about podcasts, for example, and video, [inaudible] and so on. There’s all kinds of ways to do this.

Stu Heinecke: As soon as I finished that book, I started hearing from people saying, “Well, you should have interviewed me because, look, this is the way I do it.” [inaudible] There’s a whole lot more to cover. One of the things that I had heard from people who read How to Get a Meeting with Anyone was, “I loved the book, but I really wished that I could have seen what these campaigns looked like.” So this time I wanted to make sure that I honored that. So there are a lot of photographs of these campaigns in there and, yeah, I think it fills it out really nicely that way.

Speaker 1: You also introduce a new form of contact marketing that you’re calling a pocket campaign. Do you want to explain that one?

Stu Heinecke: Sure, yeah. Well, some of the times, because this is about connecting with the people who, in my mind, it’s about connecting with the people who can change the scale of your business or your career. You want to be ready, and sometimes we meet these people in person and you want to be ready with a campaign there too. So the interesting thing for me was that there’s something about business cards that’s not working and it’s bothered me for a long time that we go through these sort of hoops of …

Stu Heinecke: Well, sometimes, go through hoops of producing cards that are pretty expensive, and they’re pretty fancy in the way that they’re produced. It could be embossed or or foil stamped or, maybe it’s laser engraved on on metal or carbon fiber or wood or something like that. They can get pretty exotic, but they still do the same thing, which is they try to make us look important. Of course, here’s my contact details, but it’s all meant to impress the person receiving it, and that’s not happening. I don’t think anyone’s impressed anymore. Usually those cards just get thrown away or put in a box or something.

Stu Heinecke: And I did a really quick informal … I couldn’t even call it a study or a questionnaire, but I just asked on LinkedIn for people to respond, “Who’s using business cards? Who’s not? If you’re not using business cards, what are you using instead? And if you are using business cards, what does it look like? Show us. What makes it special?” And so what I found was about half of the people aren’t using business cards. They’re saying, “Well, what I do is if I’m at a networking event or something like that, we’ll just swap phones and type our details into each other’s address book or we’ll just agree to … Or not agree to. We’ll just connect on LinkedIn right there.” And I think all of those are missed opportunities.

Stu Heinecke: So I started by just looking at what … I know that I’ve gotten a handful of cards in my career that I’ve gotten them, and you’ve gotten them too, we’ve all gotten them. You look at it and go, “Oh my God, wow. I didn’t even know a card could be like that. That’s really cool.” You save it and it doesn’t get the same treatment. And what I realized is that, by and large, what those cards are is they’re engagement devices, which is totally different from what business cards are. Business cards are showing off. It’s plumage. I don’t know, it’s fluff. But these are invitations to play or to use it in some way.

Stu Heinecke: So a couple of examples. One of the cards was for the owner of a bike repair shop. The card is stamped out of metal and it’s, it’s a multi tool, so [inaudible 00:22:43]. It’s a wrench, different sizes of nuts that can be put in there, and it also will tighten spokes and so on.

John Jantsch: Probably open a beer too, I imagine.

Stu Heinecke: I’m pretty sure it had a bottle opener. Yeah. Because what are you going to do? And it’s wallet size, well, I mean, actually, it’s credit card size. You can put it in your wallet. Now that card gets carried everywhere. And it’s not adorned with a special … Obviously, there’s no foil stamping or anything like that. It’s just his name. It’s just stamped into the thing. It doesn’t have to be fancy. I mean, his name and his contact details.

Stu Heinecke: There was one other one that that really, really, really stood out to me. This was a card that was printed on a piece of sheet rubber and they stretched it on a jig, though, before they printed it. So then they printed it with the person’s name and what they do and their phone number and then when the ink cures and dries, they take it off the jig. Now it returns to its original shape and all those details are squeezed together, kind of like a balloon that’s been deflated.

Stu Heinecke: So, naturally, when he hands that out, people will stretch it. They just grab it at both ends and stretch it. And he would tell me that if he’d give it out at a, let’s say he’s at a pub somewhere and he’s just talking, there’s a conversation and, “What do you do?” “What do you do?” “Well, here’s my card.” “Here’s mine.” Well, when he whips out this floppy little thing, it’s like an ambush, really. And the person takes it, they stretch it, and the funny thing is when they do that, it reveals it’s Paul Nielsen’s card. He’s a fitness trainer. And guess what? He has you exercising. So they take that to the office, they show it around. He’s the one who gets more than 300% response. Actually, he gets three or four new clients every time he hands one of those out.

Stu Heinecke: So I wanted to combine that with and integrate it with the digital persistence track of the new model. So what happens is each of these involvement devices needs to have an offer that leads to a page where we can then pixel the person who’s received it. So if you think about the example of the multi-tool card, if that card was, let’s say it had a lot of cutouts but they weren’t labeled, but what it was labeled with was was the fellow’s name and contact details and then also a URL to go view a video to see how it works, just to see how to use it.

Stu Heinecke: Well, then you’ll follow up, you’ll go, and I’m sure he pointed that out, “Hey, go to this site and just take a look. There’s a little video there. It’ll show you how it works.” Well, the recipient will go to that site and view the video, and then a pixel has been set, a tracking pixel, and from that point on then that person starts seeing the digital persistence campaign and draws them in even further. So the combination of these things, we’ve already seen it.

Stu Heinecke: Some of my consulting clients are, or really mastermind clients, are using big … I’m sorry, not big boards, but pocket campaigns right now, and they’re getting sales directly from these devices, which is exactly what I want. So that instead of handing out something that’s inert that’s probably going to get thrown away or tossed to the side into a box, they’re actually handing out a campaign that still launches from their pocket.

Stu Heinecke: But it plies the recipients with persistence and with probably just continued value and certainly continued reminders of who they met, who this was, and even just the involvement device, engagement devices handed out. It’s resulting in sales, which means it’s resulting in ROI and response rates. You can actually maybe test them, one out of one pocket, the other one out of the other or something.

John Jantsch: I’m visiting with Stu Heinecke. He is the author of Get the Meeting. Stu, tell folks where they can find out more about you and your work.

Stu Heinecke: Sure. Well, I guess probably the easiest way to find me is either on LinkedIn, Stu Heinecke, S-T-U H-E-I-N-E-C-K-E. You can come to my other site, same thing, stuheinecke.com, and get a free preview of Get the Meeting, actually. And those are probably the two best ways to get in touch.

John Jantsch: Well, Stu, thanks for joining us and another great book. Looking forward to diving into it deeper myself, and hopefully we’ll see you someday soon out there on the road.

Stu Heinecke: John, what a pleasure to join you. Thanks so much for having me on.

Transcript of Bringing Marketing and Product Development Together

Transcript of Bringing Marketing and Product Development Together written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a platform that helps growth-focused eCommerce brands drive more sales with super-targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook and Instagram marketing.

John Jantsch: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jill Soley. She is a Silicon Valley based strategic product and marketing executive, happens to be the Chief Product Officer at a project management tool called Obo. And, today we’re going to talk about a book that she’s a co-author on called Beyond Product: How Exceptional Founders Embrace Marketing to Create and Capture Value for Their Business. So Jill, thanks for joining me.

Jill Soley: Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.

John Jantsch: So as as we were deciding on the topic for today’s show, you suggested marketing for non marketers. And, I guess it just makes me as a marketer want to know what’s the difference between non-marketing marketers, or marketing for non marketers and just, I don’t know, marketing?

Jill Soley: Specifically, I’m interested and I wrote a book about marketing. And, its audience is really startup founders, small business leaders, anyone launching new products and new businesses, who doesn’t come from a deep marketing background. And, that’s why I suggested the topic, that what I’ve seen is that most founders don’t come from a marketing background, and it’s, I think, obviously super important to the success of their business to understand.

Jill Soley: So, the idea behind the book is that, particularly here in Silicon Valley, there are lots of technical founders, who they have an idea for a company, they start a company, and they have deep expertise in the domain. They have deep expertise in the technology. They’re focused on building product. Maybe they’re sales people. But, most of them aren’t marketing people.

Jill Soley: And, what happens as a result is there’s … Well, there are a bunch of different sort of scenarios. But, many of them, and most of them, lead to companies that aren’t that successful, because there’s often this belief that if you build it, they will come, right? I’ve got the best product, so of course it’s going to be successful. Or they make mistakes that perhaps wouldn’t happen, and they have to do with hiring or mismatched expectations, et cetera, that lead to major points of failure.

John Jantsch: Do you statistics on startups? I mean, I know a lot of people talk about … When I started working primarily with small business, it was like 50% of all small businesses failed in the first three years. I don’t know if that’s statistics accurate or not. But, particularly when it comes to kind of the work you’ve seen with product startup folks, is there kind of a number that people use that … You talked about it not being as successful. But, I mean, is there a number for down outright failure?

Jill Soley: I’ve seen a few different studies that basically sort of are all kind of centered somewhere around this 80% number. I’ve seen some that go as high as saying 95% of startups fail, and some that are a little lower, closer to 70%. But, the upshot is more than half of … It’s not just startups. But, it’s new products in general. So that’s new products in large businesses fail.

John Jantsch: Yeah. Let’s talk about products and product marketers. I mean, you talked about in some cases that this was a scientist or an engineer or something that had a good idea, thought the world needed it, brought it to the market. Is that really much different than say the person that learned how to do accounting, that started in an accounting firm? And, do you see differences between kind of that service and that product in terms of really even what the go to market is?

Jill Soley: Well, differences in terms of the challenges that they face, or difference in terms of the go to market that they need, approaches that they-

John Jantsch: Yeah. I mean, probably the challenges are somewhat similar. But, in terms of the kind of the mentality of how they’re going to go out there and get clients and market the business.

Jill Soley: At the core, I think it’s pretty consistent, right? At the core, the approach is really figure out who your customer is. Figure out what their pain points are. Figure out what their needs are. Speak to those, right? Make sure you’re solving a problem for them. I mean, the fundamentals of marketing are actually pretty consistent. It’s depending on who that customer is, the approach is going to be wildly different. Are you selling to teenagers who live on their phones? Are you selling to moms or elderly people or you name it? These other demographics who may spend time, business people who are at conferences or whatever, right? Where and how you market may be different as a result, but the fundamentals are very much the same.

John Jantsch: Would you say also, I guess, another dynamic that’s at play here when we’re talking about product companies is that a lot of times … I’ll go back to my example of the accounting firm. I mean, there’s already a market established for I got to get my taxes done. I have to have X, Y, Z done. Maybe now I’m just looking for somebody to fill that need for me. Whereas occasionally, or maybe the majority of the time, somebody who’s creating a product that maybe fills a need for something that didn’t exist before, that they actually have to maybe even educate people as to what problem this solves. I mean, would you say that that’s sort of an inherent challenge with a product company?

Jill Soley: I would say those are … But, both of those companies have big, major challenges. But, they’re very different challenges. And, I’ve done both, right? I ran marketing for a company that sold customer support software, right? Very crowded market. And, the challenge is how do you rise above the fray? How do you show that you’re different and get people to pay attention to you versus I’ve done category creation where nobody is looking specifically for that product that you’re selling, and you have to educate them on what it is, and why they needed, and how you could help them and support them. But, I mean, both are inherently hard. They’re just hard in different ways.

John Jantsch: Because you have the word beyond product in the topic, I’m guessing that a big piece of your work and your education is to teach people that it’s not enough to just have a good product. So, how do you have to go beyond that? Or how do you begin to move beyond the fact that maybe you do have a good idea or a good product, I should say?

Jill Soley: Yeah. And, that’s really one of the common problems that I saw was that first stage of a startup, right? Is very much founders get very focused in on the product, building out that product and get the blinders on to the other things that they need to do, right? There’s a lot of stuff that you need to do, that you should be doing early on, and you could be getting benefit from sort of the work you’re doing early on, hopefully with discovery and testing with customers and stuff, that isn’t happening because they’re so focused on product. But, what happens is then all of a sudden that they deem that they have a product that’s ready to go to market, and they haven’t done all the other stuff that they need to do. And so, that launch doesn’t do so well, et cetera.

John Jantsch: Yeah. How important do you think it is to actually develop a product with an ideal customer in mind, or maybe even with feedback from an ideal customer to … So, instead of you’re just doing something in a laboratory, you’re actually doing something that somebody validates while you’re doing it.

Jill Soley: Oh! I believe it’s absolutely essential.

John Jantsch: I mean, is that a step that you see quite often gets completely skipped?

Jill Soley: Yes. I am surprised how often it gets skipped actually. Or there’s not sort of true validation. It’s, “Let me test this with friendly people, right? My buddies, et cetera, who are of course going to support me,” or who the product doesn’t have the … The founders aren’t truly focused on a segment, and they’re sort of trying to meet the needs of too large a segment. And so, they can’t really meet anybody’s needs super well, right? Because you only have so much bandwidth, right? There are bunch of challenges in there if you’re not really sort of focused on an ideal customer.

John Jantsch: I want to remind you that this episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo helps you build meaningful customer relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers. And, this allows you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages. There’s powerful segmentation, email auto-responders that are ready to go, great reporting. You want to learn a little bit about the secret to building customer relationships, they’ve got a really fun series called Klaviyo’s Beyond Black Friday. It’s a docu-series, a lot of fun, quick lessons. Just head on over to klaviyo.com/BeyondBF, Beyond Black Friday.

John Jantsch: A lot of, I mean, you see it in the media occasionally. Somebody has an idea, creates a product, it’s a huge hit and they cash out, and exit do. And then obviously, there are people that that build a product, and then they decide they want to grow the category, and maybe they want to add more products, and maybe they want to have impact in a different way. Is there a completely different path to how you would develop those two companies? If I had the goal of, “I want to get in. Cash out on this thing as fast as possible.” As opposed to, “I want to mature this product or this company.” I mean, are are you going to go about building those companies in different ways?

Jill Soley: Potentially. If you’re really trying to get a quick win, and you’re going to cash out, and you aren’t really trying to solve a problem, sort of really solve a problem and be there long term to kind of build it out and support it and so forth, then I guess maybe you cut corners and stuff such that you make it look good and seem good up front, but it doesn’t really scale, et cetera, ongoing. Maybe you can hear my voice the skepticism around that strategy. And, maybe that’s my own personal bias around … I’m pretty mission-driven, right? I mean, this book is mission driven. I’m trying to solve a problem that I’m seeing, right? All this waste products that are failing for the wrong reasons, right? I mean, you don’t make money on a book, right?

Jill Soley: I didn’t write the book to make money. I wrote Beyond Product because I’m trying to actually help people, offer some, some painful lessons learned, right? That I’ve learned, and that other people have learned along the way, to people who I think can benefit from it. So, I think if you’re really trying to go and build something that actually makes an impact, then you go out and really figure out what the problem is, right? What’s a real problem in the market? And then, work towards really solving it, right? Which isn’t going to be an overnight thing probably.

John Jantsch: If somebody came to you, and they really had what seemed like a pretty good idea, they’d done some research, they’d done some discovery, what would be kind of your five things that you need to make sure you do?

Jill Soley: If they’re at the really early stage, certainly, I would look into the kind of research they’d done, and try and just really understand it, and make sure that they had kind of dug in deeply, and they weren’t sort of suffering from confirmation bias, if you will, right? Which is common. The early research is either with people I know or I’m listening for things that confirm my beliefs instead of that refute it.

Jill Soley: And so, once I’ve kind of dug into that, and have some level … Either have a level of confidence or kind of send them back to do some additional research. And then, sort of as they get to that next stage, where they’re trying to sort of really define, “Well, what is that solution now, right?” I’d try and get them to segment among those early customers who they talk to, right? Who are you really solving for? Get a really clear picture. Maybe try and find some of those people who will be early beta testers.

Jill Soley: And then, figure out kind of what are some of the smallest … What’s that smallest thing that they could provide that might solve a problem? And, begin to do quick iterations maybe. I mean, they don’t even have to be product at that point. They could potentially be paper prototypes, et cetera. What can you put in front of people to really kind of test out your ideas in a cheap and quick way to iterate before you spend a lot of money to build out your solution?

John Jantsch: Are there some folks that you think have done this particularly well, maybe they learned while they were doing it, but in the end, they came out and did a really great job with what you think is a great way to go beyond product?

Jill Soley: I think there are certainly lots of startups that do this. I’m trying to … I mean, you can go back to something like a Salesforce even, right? I mean, their initial product wasn’t really much to speak of, right? I mean, at the end of the day, that’s a marketing company. They have done a phenomenal job of marketing. But, what they did early on is they saw a pain point in the market, right? They saw that there were these segment, these parts of companies, right? These departments and all whose needs weren’t being met, and they weren’t going to be met by this big enterprise product that was there, right?

Jill Soley: So, they went in with a smaller cloud-based product that these departments could implement, and they could get benefit from. And then, they built out their product. And then, they expanded, and they built a platform, and so on, and so on, until they became the Salesforce that we know today, right?

John Jantsch: Yeah. Then, they became the big enterprise product.

Jill Soley: Exactly. We argue about whether it’s a great product today or not, and so forth. But, I mean, if you’re looking at sort of a model for this, I thought that’s a pretty good one. There’s certainly lots of startups as well that are doing this today as well as the ones who are perhaps not.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I think HubSpot actually probably copied that model to some degree. I mean, they were voracious marketers as they were building out the product. And, I think a lot of people, a lot of HubSpot fans, I don’t know how familiar you are with them and their product, but early on, it was a pretty clunky product. And now, they’ve really continued to invest and enhance it. But, they were voracious marketers.

Jill Soley: Well, and one of the things … They got the marketing right. And, there are some interesting sort of marketing strategy that they did really well. And, one of the things that they in particular did is, I think, early on, as I understand it, they had some internal debates about who their customer was. And, Brian Halligan has actually written about this online that they eventually kind of had a heart to heart as a company, right? Internally, they sat down and kind of forced that decision. And, as I understand it from people there, right? It was forcing that decision and picking a very specific target market that really helped their business be successful.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I would agree with that. Let’s talk a little bit about Obo. Are you, as a Chief Product Officer at Obo, are you bringing kind of what you’ve learned? And certainly, anytime you write a book, and then you’re in this position, I think there’s going to be some people pointing to you, “Are we practicing what we’re preaching in the real world?”

Jill Soley: Yep. And, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do there. I mean, right now I’m actually … I’ve come in. Product isn’t out in the market yet. But, we’re close. But, I’m coming in, and I’m actually going back, and just validating some of what has been decided, in terms of strategy to, frankly, make sure that I buy into it, and to figure out sort of where we go from here.

Jill Soley: Its mission, and sort of where it started, was this idea of market first product, right? Focusing in on a market need and understanding the market as opposed to product out, right? Product first. And, there are expert market researchers as part of the team and so forth, right? And, that really, really believe this, inherently, and are looking at sort of how we include that in our process as well as include it in our product, right? That’s exactly what I’m trying to do at Obo.

John Jantsch: Jill, where can people find out more about your work, get the book obviously, particularly if you’re a product person out there listening, and really anywhere else you want to send people to find out more?

Jill Soley: Sure. You can learn more about Beyond Product at beyondproduct.co. Dot CO, not COM. And of course, it’s available on amazon.com and any of your favorite bookstores. I can also be found at jillsoley.com. And, if you’re interested in software for product managers, Obo is at obo.pm. OBO dot PM. Lots of places to find me.

John Jantsch: Awesome. Well Jill, thanks for taking the time to stop by today, and hopefully we’ll run into you when I’m out there on the road.

Jill Soley: Awesome. Well, thanks John. This was fun.

Transcript of How to Take Your Business from Distinct to Iconic

Transcript of How to Take Your Business from Distinct to Iconic written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Scott McKain. He is a hall of fame speaker and author of a book we’re going to talk about today, ICONIC: How Organizations and Leaders Attain, Sustain, and Regain the Ultimate Level of Distinction. Scott, thanks for joining me.

Scott McKain: John, it’s great to be with you. Thanks for having me, and I really appreciate the chance to bat some ideas around with you today.

John Jantsch: I guess we better get the definition out there. What is an iconic organization? I think that’s the name of the first chapter, too, but let’s get a baseline here.

Scott McKain: You bet. It’s kind of a funny story. I was doing some work with Fairmont Hotels, and I was having lunch with the CEO/GM of the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess. They had gone through all the steps of my previous book, which was Create Distinction, that talked about how you stand out from your competitors in your marketplace. He asked a question I’d never, ever thought of. He said, “Okay, we’re distinctive. What’s next?” Well, I haven’t gotten that far. He jokingly said, “Well, next we’ll be iconic.” It was like the light bulb went on over my head. What it really occurred to me is there are some businesses that are distinctive. The definition of that, to me, is that you stand out from your competitors in your specific marketplace. But there’s a higher level that we all know.

Scott McKain: Iconic means that you’re so good at what you do, you transcend your own respective discipline or your own respective industry. You become an example that we could all look up to and that we could all follow. There’s things that you’re doing in your business that, no matter what I’m doing in mine, I could learn from how you’ve separated yourself from the competition. To me, that’s the ultimate level of distinction, when your model not only for how something in your specific industry should be, but it transcends that so you become a model of how all of us could create a better culture, a better customer experience, or better marketing, or whatever it might be.

John Jantsch: Well, and would you say that there are a lot of businesses out there that, and we’re going to talk about the elements, I suppose, when we get farther in here, but would you say there are a lot of businesses out there that they’re great businesses? They’re run great. They have great products, great services, great revenue model, but they don’t necessarily have the raving fans that go along with iconic. Or I should’ve asked that the other way. Is that an element that really takes you to the iconic level?

Scott McKain: Yeah, I think so. It’s hard to think of an iconic business that their customer base is lukewarm. When we think of iconic companies, yeah, the raving fans analogy, I think, is spot-on because there’s something about what they do that inspires passion from their customers, which, obviously, the end result of that is repeat business and referral business, which is all critical.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I would say another element, of course, is they generally are not the low price leader either, are they?

Scott McKain: Yeah, it’s hard to find an iconic business that got there by stacking them deep and selling them cheap. You know? That’s one of the things that I certainly learned. Interestingly enough, it’s partly because that status has separated them from the competition and enables them to charge a premium price. Here, recently, Apple just announced the new line of iPhones. It’ll be covered on network news. Well, goodness, wouldn’t we love to have that? One of the things I tried to do in the book is use examples other than Apple, and Starbucks, and Southwest, and all of those, but it’s kind of a universal example. They’ve separated themselves from the competition to such a degree that we all joke about the Apple tax. There is a premium that you pay for what they do.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I was actually going to ask you that. I mean, can a small, local business be iconic?

Scott McKain: Yes. Oh, absolutely. I think so. For example, a couple of the examples I use in the book is a chimney sweep in Nashville that has built a multi-million dollar business that it was recently featured on CNBC in a series they did called Blue Collar Millionaires. I looked at how he became iconic as a chimney sweep. There’s a restaurant in Indianapolis, St. Elmo’s, that I use as an example. It’s not just the restaurant you’d like to be if you were in that business in Indianapolis. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing. You can learn from and model your business after St. Elmo’s because they’re truly iconic in that area. We can talk about some of the things that they have done to stand out, but they are truly… They’ve transcended their own industry to become just legendary in those local communities.

John Jantsch: So, really, step number one, I mean, you have to have this huge differentiator, I think. I mean, that’s probably step number one. But is the differentiator, in your opinion, that takes somebody to the next level, not just that they do it better, or that they have a funny name, or something that people talk about, is there an element where they’ve somehow changed the context, maybe, even of their entire industry?

Scott McKain: That’s a great question. Yeah, I think so. That’s part of why I’ve really focused on the word distinction. I don’t think that different is better. If I slap every customer in the face, I’m different. Right? I think many times, when we look at smaller businesses, and you say to them… I mean, this is one of the things that I do to program it, that I help sponsor every year, called the Ultimate Business Summit. We bring in small business people and, okay, so what makes you different? They say things like, “Our logo is red.” Or, “We really treat our customers great.” Well, like your competition isn’t that clear differentiating factor has to be something that has traction in the marketplace. To me, distinction is a higher level of that. It is something that is of value to your customers first, which is what drives the equity in your business.

John Jantsch: Let’s talk about the cornerstones of distinction, which are a part of your iconic framework: clarity, creativity. You can list the others.

Scott McKain: Yeah, communication and a customer experience focus are the four cornerstones of distinction based on the earlier work. You know, John, I bet you would find the same in your experience, and that is that people think they’re clear, and they’re a long way from being clear.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I mean, when I read this, on my notes here for people that don’t realize I actually do make notes for, I just don’t make up these questions, is that I really think those are marketing strategies. Aren’t they? I mean having clarity, and creativity, and… I mean, that’s the essence of a marketing strategy. Isn’t it?

Scott McKain: Yeah, it truly is, but I would also suggest that I think that’s one of the things that good marketing, and that’s why I’m such a fan of your work, is that the elements of good marketing are, certainly, the elements of good leadership. They’re the elements of building a good culture in your business. The congruency of what you market and what you execute is what establishes, to me, the integrity of the business. Yeah, it’s so true. I mean, no one is loyal to a generic. You know? But yet so many times, we do that too. I get it. My parents had a small business, and you didn’t want to turn any customer away. You want to be of service, and it’s coming from the right place. I mean, it’s coming from a sincere desire to serve and a desire to succeed. But so many times, we try to be all things to all people, that… Clarity is not just being precise about what you are. It’s being equally as exact about what you are not. I think that’s where many businesses miss the boat, is they’re not willing to put their flag in the ground and say, “This is what we do, and this is what we do not do as well.”

John Jantsch: The way I kind of like to frame that up is that I know when somebody comes to me, I can instantly, I’ve been doing this long enough, I can instantly see I can add a lot of value very fast. But I also have people that come to me and then it’s like, “Yeah, okay, I can take your money, but I’m not sure I can really help you.” I think that that is a great way to look at this idea of clarity is understanding who you really can help, and who you can’t help, and not just take everybody’s money.

Scott McKain: Gosh, that is such an important point, John because when I first started my speaking business, people would say, “What do you talk about?” I said, “About an hour.” You know? I mean, whatever you needed, I’d be there. Right? Time management? Sure. I’ll have to figure that out to write the speech. I was a mile wide and an inch deep. Did I get booked? Yeah. I did okay, but I wasn’t known for anything. It wasn’t until I was willing to say, “This is what I do.” You know what else happens that I think we often overlook? When you say, “Oh, I’m not your best choice for that,” the credibility that you gain at that point, because that way the prospect or customers knows that when you do say, “Oh, this is what I do. Yes, that’s in my wheelhouse.” Man, now the integrity that you have and the credibility that you have, it just grows exponentially when you’re willing to say that you’re not the right fit for other things.

John Jantsch: Well, I usually say I’m not the right fit unless you’re willing to pay this much, and then I might be. Does that not pass the integrity test yet?

Scott McKain: Well, I mean, if somebody asks for heart surgery, I don’t care how much they’re willing to pay. I’m probably not the right choice. Right? But, I mean, there is an element to it as well that they admire your insight. They want to you to stretch, and if they make it worth your while, then it’s good to do that. But at the end of the day, it’s that core, it’s that essence that people want. If you’re not clear about what that is, then how in the world are they going to be attracted to you to begin with?

Scott McKain: Years ago, the late, great Jim Rohn used to say that success is something that you attract, not something you pursue, but the kind of person that you become. I thought, “You know, there’s a business corollary to that, and I believe the customers that we attract are going to be more valuable to our businesses over the long haul than the customers we’ve had to pursue.” Right? I mean, how do they get attracted to us? They’re not attracted to generics wondering generalities. You know? They’re attracted because there’s something that you do that you’re the go-to business or you’re the go-to person. If you’re not willing to be clear about that, I don’t know how you get attracted.

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John Jantsch: So let’s dig into a couple of the specifics because you just teed this one up. One of the things I know you talk about is a factor in iconic performance is that you need to stop selling. So I’m sure a lot of listeners would say, “Wait a minute. How am I going to survive if I stop selling?” How does that work in making us distinct?

Scott McKain: Well, you know it occurred to me and our mutual friend Scott Stratten with his book, UnSelling, was one of the inspirations of this. One of the things that I’ve realized, and that’s where the attraction factors comes into play, is that Apple isn’t out there all the time. I’m using that because that’s an example that everybody realizes, but it’s true with the chimney sweep, and it’s true with St. Elmo’s. I mean, they’re not out there all the time, pushing you to sell. It struck me that words have meaning. Right? If you have a personal tragedy, you seek closure. Yet isn’t it interesting that we use that as the final step in selling? You know? So much of this, and John, you pointed this out before, we’ve moved from a transactional economy to a subscription economy. We want people to subscribe, and be ongoing, and repeat, and refer, yet we’re still using the old selling model of transactions. Certainly, we want to conclude deals to get the process going or to keep the process moving, but we have to change our thinking. We have to think about how do we gain relationships? How do we develop subscriptions as opposed to the old saw of let’s close the deal.

Scott McKain: Years ago, when I first started doing this, I did sales training for a company. One of the lines that we… We had an overhead that we used on the projector, and it said, “Service is the first step for the next sale.” People wrote that down, and that was assumed to be true. Now, I think, “Gosh, that’s a lie.” I mean, service is a part of prospecting. It’s an integral part of the first sale. If you can’t take care of me from the beginning as a prospect, why would I trust that you’ll take care of me as a customer? So when we get into this mode of looking at long-term value, and building ongoing relationships, and thinking subscription rather than transaction, that’s what I mean by stop selling. I realize, “Hey, I’ve got to book things for my business to survive, for any business to survive.” But how we approach and the mindset we have about that, I think, is critically important to our future and our success.

John Jantsch: Okay, I’ll give you another one to tee up. Excuse me. You used a couple examples where you cite the factor as being going negative. Again, another pretty counter-intuitive thought.

Scott McKain: John, I have to be… I try to be a positive person. When I was doing the research for the book, it just kept coming up over and over again. It was like I had to change my thinking. But what I realized is this: The iconic businesses are obsessed with finding out negative information. One of the things I uncovered was a study done at Texas A & M University on SWOT analysis. We all know the old strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. In many organizations, how those have become beyond useless because managers view people that bring negative information as being negative employees. There was one, to your field and your specialty, there was one part of the study at Texas A & M that a company recognized they had poor brand image. They put that as an opportunity because we can change it.

Scott McKain:  No. It’s a weakness. If your brand image is poor, you have to say, “Here’s an area where we are weak,” but their inability to view a problem as a problem and to view it… See, what happens with so many organizations? A customers has a problem. Something has gone wrong. The knee-jerk reaction is let’s make that customer happy. We’ll discount this, or we’ll put so many miles on your frequent flyer account, or we’ll do… We placate the customer, but they refuse to go negative enough to figure out where in the process is something messed up that created this negative experience for the first place. Iconic companies are obsessed with where is the problem. What could go wrong so that they can prevent that. It’s almost a positive negativity. Right?

John Jantsch: Well, and to foot that as sort of a competitive thing, one of the things we do all the time is we will look at the reviews of competitors, so a business we’re working with, their competitors. Those become opportunities. If a competitor’s constantly getting negative reviews about some aspect of their business, we solve that problem or we look to solve that problem. Sometimes that’s another way to look at negatives.

Scott McKain: Totally. Gosh, we’ve never had as much access to what customers think about us as we do today.

John Jantsch: Yeah. YouTube channels dedicated to our businesses.

Scott McKain: Absolutely.

John Jantsch: Right, yeah.

Scott McKain: Yeah, but yet I see some organizations that… I’ll ask the CEO or the company owner, “When was the last time you looked at your Yelp reviews?” Well, somebody else does that. Really? I don’t get that. I mean, to me that… Kind of off topic, but it’s still in the… I think one of the saddest television programs on today is Undercover Boss because the boss is so blissfully unaware of what’s happening on the front lines. Every show’s the same. The boss discovers, “Oh my goodness. I had no idea that my customers were facing this. I had no idea my employees were doing that.” Really? If we don’t know what’s happening on the front lines, I don’t care how big your business is. If you don’t know what’s happening with customers on the front line, how in the world do you create the kinds of experiences that those customers want to repeat?

John Jantsch: So in general terms, maybe you’ll be specific, I don’t know, but what… If somebody said, “Scott, what does an iconic business look like?” I mean, are there elements that are common that come all the way through everything they do with their customers, with their people, with their leadership? I mean, are there a set of things that you would look to to try to measure an iconic company?

Scott McKain: You know, yeah. Great question. For one thing, I would look at what’s your percentage of customer retention. Are you retaining customers? Growth, for any business, is the combination of both acquisition and retention, but yet people say they want to grow their business so they put all the effort into going out and getting new customers. We’ve seen so many business, John, you and I, that once they get you in the tent, they can’t keep you in. So they’ve got to go out, and they’ve got to do these huge acquisition programs to keep people in the funnel because they’re losing so many out the back door. Well, close the back door is the first step. What is your level of customer retention? What is the level of referral?

Scott McKain: Part of what I talked about in the book is some problems I have with the would you refer us to your friends question. Good question. Maybe not the best question. But are your current customers, is the experience that they have with you compelling enough that not only they repeat their business, but they’re willing to tell others about it? That, then, drives us into iconic organizations exceed not only industry standard. They exceed any industry in terms of employee retention and employee engagement because you can’t create that level of customer experience without engaged employees.

Scott McKain: Quick example. St. Elmo’s in Indianapolis, it’s a restaurant. That’s an industry known for incredible turnover. They have practically zero turnover at that restaurant. So how does that happen? They create an incredible culture for their organization. Every waiter has a business card. Waiters are incentivized in terms of repeat dining from customers. Every year, they have a program where the waiters get a bottle of wine, the vintage of which is the year that they started work for the company. One of the joking things that Steve Huse, the CEO, mentioned to me, Steve and Craig Huse that runs St. Elmo’s, is that it’s getting to be a hell of an expense right now when you got a guy that came to work in ’97 and giving him his annual bottle of wine. But they look at it as how do we engage with you? How do we make it a career? How do we help those of you with families to get off on the days that you want with your kids? How do we incentivize single people who aren’t necessarily doing that to work it now? All of the things it takes to create this incredible culture then gets transmitted to their customers.

Scott McKain: My buddy, Dr. Michael LeBoeuf wrote a book many years ago called, Greatest Management Principle. Simply, was behavior rewarded is behavior repeated. But yet, we don’t think often enough about what we reward. Incentivizing waiters not just in terms of tips, how did I do this performance, but in terms of are people coming back and are they asking for you. You give them your card so that when they call to make a reservation, they want to sit at John’s table or at Scott’s table. Those kinds of things make an incredible difference. Now, to me, that’s not just good restaurant management. That’s great leadership. That’s how I’m defining iconic is what organization couldn’t be better served by doing those kinds of things.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I love that example, too, because as you mentioned, that’s an industry that doesn’t often treat its employees as professionals. To really bring that level, and you see examples of it all the time, but, unfortunately, 90% of the time, you see bad examples of it. So I’m visiting with Scott McKain. He is the author of, ICONIC. Scott, tell folks where they might find… Obviously, the book’s available everywhere, but where they might find out more about you, and your work, and even the courses and programs that you have around it?

Scott McKain:  Oh, I appreciate that, John. I, too, have a podcast. It’s called Project Distinct. It’s available everywhere podcasts are. John, you’re guest hosting for me, and I’m really looking forward to that, so thank you for doing that. The podcast is there. My website is just scottmckain.com. By the way, it’s M-C-K-A-I-N. A little different spelling than you might think. Then we also have a site called distinctionnation.com. There, I’ve provided free resources. It’s kind of an entry-level place if people are interested in this. There’s free workbooks, free eBooks, even a free audio program that they can download that is kind of the entry level into what does it take to create distinction and separate yourself in the marketplace.

John Jantsch:  Well, thanks so much, Scott, for dropping by. If this whole speaking, and authoring, and consulting thing doesn’t work out, you could probably have a career in radio.