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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban James Clear, Tory Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Henry Adaso, fueled by Coffee and Hip Hop. Henry is an award-winning marketing leader with over 15 years of experience, a former music journalist. He’s a natural storyteller and innovative marketer. He’s currently the head of marketing for CMEX USA and the author of three books, including his latest that we’re gonna talk about today, The Art of Messaging – Seven Principles of Remarkable Messages (Or How to Stand Out in a Noisy World). So, Henry, welcome to the show.

Henry Adaso (01:30): Thank you for having me, John.

John Jantsch (01:31): So going through your background, I feel like you have a very colorful journey to how you got to hear . You want to give us a little kind of what’s been your entrepreneurial journey? It kind of brought you to this point. I’d love to hear a little more about it.

Henry Adaso (01:46): Yeah, John, absolutely. Colorful is the right word. I call myself an accidental marketer because I didn’t know that I was going to end up in marketing when I was a young boy in high school. I was the kid who used to annoy all of his friends by making my own kind of handwritten newsletter and then forcing my friends to endure my newsletter. So I, I always thought I was going to become a publisher, but to somewhere along the line, I noticed that they were kicking publishers out of the building because of this thing called the internet. And so I pivoted to digital marketing, and what I quickly realized was that a lot of the same skills that I had developed writing my own book when I was a kid and writing newsletters translated to marketing because it’s ultimately about storytelling. And so today I work as a marketer and I love it.

John Jantsch (02:34): So, so, you know, messaging obviously is a key part, strategic element of marketing. I, I’m, I agree with you, but I’d love to hear your take on why you chose to call it the art of messaging. Why do you feel it it is elevated to the level of art?

Henry Adaso (02:52): That’s a great question. I think that people are intimidated by messaging it. It’s something that is often thought as a reserved for a select few copywriters, marketing gurus, great communicators. But it’s really an art. It’s an art in the science, but it’s primarily an art. And it can be taught, it can be learned. And what I realized looking at a lot of different brand messages is that they tend to have certain things in common. They have certain attributes in common. There’s a pattern that occurs. And if you study that pattern and try your best to recreate that in your product or service, if it works, it has to work. It’s not about something that doesn’t work. If you have a product that truly solves a problem, you can learn from the best brands on how to message in a way that truly resonates with your audience.

John Jantsch (03:45): Where, you know, if somebody comes to you and says, oh, we’ve got this company and we’ve got, you know, we’ve been around for X amount of years, and we just feel like we’re copying what everybody else in our industry does, I mean, where do you first send somebody to look for, like, where is your message? You know, like where is it hiding? You know, the secret sauce that’s gonna really make a difference.

Henry Adaso (04:04): There’s a great quote by Michelangelo that says, every block of stone has a sculpture in it, and it’s the job of the sculptor to find it. So every brand, no matter the industry, whether you’re B2B or B2C, there’s something that is interesting about your brand. And sometimes you may have to dig a little bit deeper, maybe do some research, talk to people who’ve been there a little bit longer. But you really have to try to understand the essence of your product or service or your brand. And that’s where I would begin. So for example, there’s a sock company called Bombas, and they sell socks, which, you know, could be consider the commodity, but they’re very successful because their product is tied to this idea that the, one of the most essential pieces of clothing that, that you really need is something that keeps you warm. So like socks, right? So every time you buy a pear, they gift one to, uh, somebody in need. So that’s a story, and that’s something that’s interesting that makes them, it kind of takes them beyond the idea of just being a soft company to now something bigger than that. And that’s really where you start. What is the essence of your brand? What is the thing that really makes you a little bit different from the others?

John Jantsch (05:17): You know, one of the things that I find is I think there are a lot of companies out there that they are unique. They are doing something different. Their customers, you know, stay with them because they are doing something different, but they still tend to talk about what they sell. How important is it to understand the problems? You’re, so you really solve for your customers, even if they’re the little things. I mean, I think that’s sometimes where people get caught up. They think of this messaging being this grand thing that’s gonna make us sound, you know, really important and amazing when their customers will say, well, yeah, but it’s, this is what you actually do for us. I mean, how important is it to understand the problems you’re solving?

Henry Adaso (05:58): I’m a marketer and I’ll be the first to admit, we love talking about ourselves. , we love talking about how great we are, how great the product is. It’s a very, it’s a comfortable space to be in to talk about how great the product is, but the customer is really interested in one thing. And that is, what can you do for me? So what we have to do is shift our messaging from a We Messages, which is focused on how many awards we’ve won, how great the company is, and shift it to a you messages, which is how do we talk about the customer? Every opportunity that we have, we need to be saying, let’s talk about you. What problems do you need solved? And the thing that resonates the most is if we can show the customer that there is a transformation on the other side of that conversation, on the other side of that interaction, we’re more likely to engage them and we’re more likely to be effective with our messaging.

John Jantsch (06:50): Yeah. And obviously with a Title seven principles, you know, we’re gonna break down a little bit of, of framework, but I’ll tell you a question I get all the time, and I’m sure you do as well when you talk about this topic, is the company that says you, you used bombass, you know, sells socks, which is a commodity. But you know, what if I sell just a really boring product, I don’t know, let’s say cement for example, know anybody who does any messaging for, you know, a product like that. I mean, how do you turn something kind of sexy maybe that just people don’t think is?

Henry Adaso (07:22): So I happen to know a thing or two about selling some given that’s primarily what we sell. And it, and I have to tell you, it’s one of the, just on, on the surface, it’s one of the most boring products. It’s literally just a gray powder, right? in, substitute the bags and it’ll look the same. So how do you make that interesting? A couple years ago we started this tradition, I’ll tell you a quick story. And we, at the end of the year, we would create a holiday newsletter and we would send out a holiday newsletter to our customers just as a, as an an expression of our gratitude for their business. Over the course of the year. The first time we did this, it was a very standard holiday newsletter. There was nothing special about it. It simply said, you know, happy holidays, it was beautifully designed, content was great, but we didn’t get much of a response.

(08:07): So we switched it up a little bit. And the next year what we did was we gathered all of our sales folks and we created this theme around football, and we had them hold up props. So footballs, helmets, trophies. And we also wrote in the newsletter, little fun facts about them. So this helped personalize our sales folks. And this newsletter had trading cards that you can tear out . And so if you’re a customer, you received this, it was, it’s not your usual cement newsletter, right? And then now you have something else to help you connect with that salesperson because they’re a person, right? That got a lot of great feedback from customers. The following year we did a similar theme, but this time with superheroes. And the same thing, dozens of customers wrote us asking for additional copies of our holiday newsletter, which is a marketing material, right? So, so here we are in a world where there’s so much noise and most customers are saying, I just get outta my inbox. I don’t wanna hear from you, but we have the reverse where they were saying, can you send me more copies of your marketing materials? All we did differently was tell a story. Mm-hmm. . And a story is something that always resonates. So I would say for something, someone who may be thinking, I have a boring product, I mean a niche space, just try to tell a story.

John Jantsch (09:28): Yeah. Yeah. So you, I have a framework that I think you probably refer to it as “best” because that’s what it’s spells, B E S T. So you wanna kinda unpack that. These are like the kind of some of the key elements. The good message has. You want to kind of go through that framework.

Henry Adaso (09:44): So I looked at about six years ago when I was working on the agency side, I looked at a, a lot of brands and they had, that had great me. And I started to study them to understand what they had in common, because I wanted to replicate that for my team. We had lots of clients that needed messaging. And what I realized was that all of them had these four attributes in common. They, it just kept coming up over. And the attributes are, they’re bold, remarkable, messaging is empathic, it’s specific, and it’s transformative. And so those four attributes spell out the word best, which makes it easier to remember. Mm-hmm. . And so a bold message is something that makes you stop and look. It’s something that earns your attention. It’s something that is engaging. And that’s the first question we have to ask is, in a noisy world, how do we make people stop and pay attention?

(10:42): An empathic message is simply something that incorporates a core human need in the messaging. So what is the emotional need that we’re solving for? Is it peace? Is it joy? Is it relief from pain? Is it I’ll help you make more money, spend more time with your family? What is that emotional driver? And then specificity is about understanding that nothing is for everyone. And we need to be clear about who the product is for and what it is as well. Because sometimes you’ll be driving and you see a billboard and you’re wondering what are they selling? Right? , at that point, you could have earned attention. So we have to be clear about what’s on offer and who it’s for. And then the last attribute transformation is really showing what the outcomes would be for the person. People don’t buy features and benefits. They buy the transformation. And so if you are, if you have something that helps people make more money, well the transformation is not that they’ll make more money, that might be a benefit. It’s what the money brings them. Mm-hmm. , it’s time with your family, it’s, Hey, maybe I’ll be able to pay off grandma’s mortgage or travel more. That is more likely to connect us.

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(13:30): So, you know, I’m imagining a group of folks sitting around saying, okay, yeah, this, that’s a really bold message. And we’re talking about like the transformation and you know, we spelled out exactly what we do, but then you take it out to the market and it’s like, I don’t get it. Right? I mean, how do you kind of test to the point where you’re like, yeah, this is, you know, how do you know? How do you know you’ve nailed it with, you know, the ideal client you’re trying to impact?

Henry Adaso (13:56): I encourage all marketers to take testing very seriously because the market knows best. And sometimes we will have, you may have a hunch or maybe you have some best practices based on experience, but when you test it, you might discover something different. So think testing is the first place I would go. And one easy way to test is through email marketing. So you could maybe test your headline and the way this works, most email platforms allow you to do this. You would have two different subject clients and then you would break your audience into two and send one subject line to one audience and the other to the other group. And you’ll study this over the course of two to four hours to see which subject line yields more opens. That’s how you pick a winner. So that’s one relatively affordable way to test. Uh, another one would be to run ads if you have, if you’re already running some ads, try different headlines and see which ones are generating more clicks.

John Jantsch (14:56): Yeah. Yeah. And increasingly, you know, some of these tools, particularly the tools that are trying to sell your ads, you know, will actually, you know, show you a winner. It’ll, you know, it’ll produce the winner for you because that’s the one that’s making them the most money. So consequently it’s the one they want to want you to land on.

Henry Adaso (15:13): Yes, yes, yes.

John Jantsch (15:15): How important is it for an organization to have kind of a central message or a core message? You know, something that really delivers the brand promise first. Obviously there’s messages for campaigns, for products, for divisions, for different types of clients, but how essential is it to have something that brings together, like, this is what we stand for?

Henry Adaso (15:35): Consistency is credibility. So it’s very important to be consistent with your messaging across all of your customer touchpoints within the organization. If you have sales and marketing and customer experience delivering different messages to the marketplace, that is a perfect recipe for market confusion, right? So we wanna mitigate that by creating a source of cohesion for our messaging. And this could be something as simple as having a value proposition matrix that is available to all of your touchpoints. What I propose in the book is a messaging menu. And so your messaging menu has different servings of your messaging, starting with the starters, which could be something like an elevator pitch or your smaller plates, which could be something like your social media posts or entrees as I call them, which are longer messages when you have a presentation, what is your messaging? But they’re all part of the same core message. They’re all part of your value proposition. And so over time, if you deliver the same message consistently, then it becomes clear what you stand for and what your brand is all about. And then when people are ready to make a purchasing decision, they know exactly to turn to you.

John Jantsch (16:54): So you have a couple, um, exercises, I guess you called it. Somebody could actually, again, as an organization, you know, go through the one, I might have this wrong, but the, is it messaging tower or is that how you refer to it?

Henry Adaso (17:05): Messaging tower. So the messaging tower. Tower, yes. So that that, that is a tool that allows you to extract the most effective messaging points, the most important attributes of your product or service. And the messaging tower essentially is saying that there is a hierarchy when it comes to messaging. So at the base of your messaging is going to be your features, and these are things like descriptive elements of your part. Mm-hmm. the service. So if we take a headphone for example, maybe it’s lightweight or the color or the base production, those are all features and they’re descriptive and features appeal to a technical audience. Then at in the middle of the tower, you have your benefits, which is what can it do for me? So for this sticking with the headphone example, it may be something like, hey, it’s portable or it has noise cancellation. So it allows me to have peace of mind when I’m on airplane. At the very top of your messaging tower is the transformation. And the transformation is the powerful why behind your product or service. It answers the question you,

John Jantsch (18:12): You’re just gonna look damn good. Right? Exactly. . So by talking about this in a hierarchy, I mean you’re kind of suggesting that like all these things, if you gotta have, you gotta understand the features and what, how those translate to benefit before you’re gonna get to correct. What may be the most important part, the transformation is that right?

Henry Adaso (18:32): Absolutely. Really the cream of the crop is the transformation. If you can get to the transformation, you have a better chance of connecting with your audience. The example that I always think about is Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. So I noticed that their messaging was, hear music the way your favorite artists hear music. Mm-hmm. . And that is a transformation because at the time there, there were no premium headphones that could do what Beats could do, so, so the messaging there was about you having that proxy experience to the celebrities that you like and look up to, right? Versus they didn’t talk about the features, they didn’t talk about the benefits, they simply went for the top of the messaging tower, which is a transformation. There are lots of brands that do this effectively and cite several examples in the book as well. But when you start, once you see this messaging tower, you start to see it all over the place. You see billboards that are doing this. You see commercials that are doing the same thing. That is the most powerful type of messaging, the messaging that says, Hey, here’s how your situation will be different after you buy this product or service. Great.

John Jantsch (19:41): Well, Henry, I wanna appre, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You want to tell people where they can find your work, your book, uh, connect with you in any way that you’d invite them to do?

Henry Adaso (19:51): Absolutely. You can find me on my website, henryadaso.com or on LinkedIn. It’s going to be Henry Adaso or Instagram at @henryadaso as well. John, thank you so much for having

John Jantsch (20:02): Me. You bet. No, I’m, again, I appreciate you taking the time and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Henry Adaso (20:09): Look forward to meeting you in person. Thank you so much.

John Jantsch (20:12): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

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March 24, 2023/by exposure

Redefining Strength: How Anxiety Can Be a Leadership Asset

Redefining Strength: How Anxiety Can Be a Leadership Asset written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Morra Aarons-Mele

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Morra Aarons-Mele. She is the host of The Anxious Achiever, a top-10 management podcast that helps people rethink the relationship between their mental health and their leadership. Morra founded Women Online and The Mission List, an award-winning digital-consulting firm and influencer marketing company dedicated to social change in 2010.

Her upcoming book is called The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Biggest Fears into Your Leadership Superpower where the mission is to normalize anxiety and leadership in today’s workplace.

Key Takeaway:

In today’s workplace, anxiety is a constant challenge that can hinder the potential for high performance, but it doesn’t have to be that way. There should be no separation between mental health and leadership, and mental health should be normalized in the workplace. Morra shows that anxiety is a part of life, in fact, it is fundamental to leadership, and with the right tools, you can take advantage of its power and turn it into a strength instead of a weakness.

Questions I ask Morra Aarons-Mele:

[01:29] So leadership and mental health in the same sentence, can you explain this idea that you’re putting those two topics together?
[03:29] What are you bringing to the conversation, that’s gonna help people see anxiety as a strength?
[04:43] Do you feel like there is more anxiety today, and if so, what’s causing it? Or are people just more freely talking about it?
[06:14] You talk about transforming anxiety from a weakness to a strength. So what’s the process that somebody might go through?
[12:06] I once read that if you’re not feeling a little stress, you know, you’re just not trying or you’re not pushing yourself enough. Is there any of that thought in the anxious achiever?
[12:53] What physical manifestations are people experiencing because they are not managing the anxiety or the stress?
[14:17] Do you think a true leader now should be coaching around mental health? Obviously not providing therapy, but somehow coaching or at least giving people opportunities to be coached?
[15:20] Many people in managerial positions who are like me age-wise, are managing much younger people. Is there a real challenge cross-generationally?
[18:00] Do you do any work inside organizations? Where would you go to help an organization that’s trying to maybe change its culture?

More About Morra Aarons-Mele:

https://morraam.com/
Listen to The Anxious Achiever
Connect on LinkedIn

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

Learn more about the Agency Certification Intensive Training here

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban James Clear, Tori Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:54): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Morra Aarons-Mele. She’s a host of The Anxious Achiever, a top-10 management podcast that helps people rethink the relationship between their mental health and their leadership. You might recall she was on this show for one of the best titles ever Hiding in the Bathroom . But she’s back with another book we’re gonna talk about today, The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Biggest Fears Into Your Leadership Superpower. So, Morra, welcome back.

Morra Aarons-Mele (01:28): Thanks, John. It’s good

John Jantsch (01:29): To be back. So leadership and mental health, uh, in the same sentence, I mean, is juxtaposed even, are we talking about a bit of an oxymoron here?

Morra Aarons-Mele (01:38): No, we’re talking about,

John Jantsch (01:41): I mean, people don’t typically think about those two things I know is the whole point of what your, what your work is about. But, so help me kind of work this idea that, that you’re putting those two type topics together, you know, intentionally.

Morra Aarons-Mele (01:55): Yeah. I don’t think that there should be any false separation between the discussion of leadership and mental health or to that matter, mental illness. Yeah. You know, it’s a part of life at anyone’s part of life. They will probably experience mental ill health and hopefully mental wellness. Right. It’s, it’s exists along the spectrum and we all go through it, and it’s part of our leadership and how we show up. Sure.

John Jantsch (02:18): I don’t disagree at all, but the fact that you’re having to talk about normalizing this in the workplace, there’s a lot of really built up angst about it, isn’t there? I mean, just the, you know, go back a generation and you never talked about mental health issues, right. It’s like that was, you know, that was taboo. And so a lot of people are dealing with that baggage, right?

Morra Aarons-Mele (02:39): I, I think so. Even today, you know, we, um, we conflate mental illness or ANGs or depression with weakness, right? We, we conflate it with characteristics that seem to go against what we want our leaders to be and stand for mm-hmm. . And so of course there’s no incentive for leaders to talk about their mental health because everyone is afraid that they’ll be judged. Right,

John Jantsch (03:00): Right, right.

Morra Aarons-Mele (03:02): And that’s the kind of stigmas they’re trying to break.

John Jantsch (03:04): Yeah. And I think when we use the term mental health, you know, obviously people go a lot of places with that, you’re narrowed in on this idea of anxiousness, you know, which mm-hmm. again, you talked about a spectrum could be in this, not a little of nothing. And the point that you’re making is that this is like, this can be a strength, right? I mean that this idea that you’re an achiever doing this, so, you know, it hasn’t always been seen as a good thing. So how, what, what are you bringing to the conversation? You know, that’s gonna help people see that as No, that’s a strength of yours.

Morra Aarons-Mele (03:36): I hope people understand that leadership and anxiety go together because , when you’re leading, you’re going into the uncertain. Yeah. And a lot of anxiety is about facing the uncertain and the uncomfortable, even scary feelings that we have around that. You know, what leader is an anxious Yeah. And indeed, when we think of our, our greatest leaders before battle, when we read history, we understand that they were full of fears and deep, deep insecurities before battle. The key is moving through it and being able to go into battle.

John Jantsch (04:09): Don’t you think though, a lot of those leaders that you mentioned, you know, this insecurity came like after the fact, or at least admission of the insecurity came after the fact, but they felt like, no, I’ve gotta put on the, I’ve gotta put on the face, you know, and don’t you think a lot of leaders take that? Like, I, you know, even though I’m dying inside, you know, I can’t let that show .

Morra Aarons-Mele (04:28): Some do, some don’t. I mean, when you read histories, for example, of Abraham Lincoln, he walked around with great melancholy and anxiety, and he didn’t hide it. In fact, he built a team around him of people who could take care of him even in his lowest hours.

John Jantsch (04:44): Do you feel like there is more anxiety today? Maybe this is just a guess , but more anxiety today? And if so, what’s causing it? Or are people just more freely talking about it in it appears that there’s more?

Morra Aarons-Mele (04:59): It’s, I mean, it’s hard for me to know. I’m not a right, I’m not a data scientist, but I do think that when you look statistically, the numbers of people reporting anxiety and depression in this country are overwhelming. And certainly among our young people, we’ve been through a period which has been really damaging to our mental health. Yeah. And I don’t see much that is making our mental health shore up right now. Certainly on a global scale. And even just from a macroeconomic perspective, things are very, very uncertain and scary. And that’s when we get

John Jantsch (05:31): Anxious. I mean, and, and we talked about like what we’ve gone through, but even now, as we continue home, I mean, is that actually making the issue, uh, worse or sustaining the issue? Uh,

Morra Aarons-Mele (05:40): It’s hard to know, right? I mean, I think the, the jury definitely is not out there. I think for a lot of people working from home makes their anxiety feel better because they may have less social anxiety. Yeah. Right. There may be fewer instances. On the other hand, anxiety loves a communications vacuum. And when we’re all, and we’re communicating on slack and strictly in audio, we may have more anxiety because we’re not clear on what our counterpart wants. We may feel the need to control and we’re micromanaging more. So it’s hard to know, but I think there are pros and cons. Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:14): So obviously you spend a great deal of time in the book, not just explaining the people have these anxieties, but transforming them, you know, to being from a, from a what was maybe at one time a weakness, uh, to a strength. So what’s, what’s the process that somebody might, uh, go through? Because I, you know, I’ve spent 10 years, uh, meditating just to get rid of stress and anxiety. Uh, and now you’re telling me, bring it on.

Morra Aarons-Mele (06:37): No, look, I’m not telling you bring it on. I mean, if, if, if you found a way to dissipate it, amazing. Good for you. Um, you probably have a lot to teach

John Jantsch (06:46):

Morra Aarons-Mele (06:47): Because ultimately what you’re doing when you’re meditating is you’re sitting with thoughts and you’re just sitting with them. You’re observing them, you’re noticing them, but you’re not holding onto them.

John Jantsch (06:59): Right? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Morra Aarons-Mele (07:02): And what has that process taught you?

John Jantsch (07:04): Uh, that reality is far less scary than than, than, uh, the, the assumed, uh, reality, which I feel like is the creation of a lot of anxiety.

Morra Aarons-Mele (07:16): That’s right. Anxiety is all about the assumed reality , right. Anxiety is our brain’s threat appraisal system going into high gear. On the other hand, our brain may sense a real threat or it may not. Right. And so many of us, myself included, spend so much time anticipating threats Yeah. That we almost forget how to calm down. Right. And then along the way that anxiety becomes our activating energy, it becomes our oxygen. Yeah. It pushes us forward. And we can’t separate what’s anxiety and what is our true drive for excellence. And it can really, really have intense consequences. And so in the book, I do a lot of what you probably do as a meditator, noticing when your anxiety pops up in what circumstance, how your body feels.

John Jantsch (08:04): Yeah. It probably gets a bit habituated Right. Too. Like we stop mm-hmm. noticing it becomes of when X happens, Y is going to occur in my body or in my head, . Um, and, and so you’re right. I, the first step probably is actually witnessing it to some extent, right?

Morra Aarons-Mele (08:20): Yes. And anxiety’s tricky. I spoke with someone the other day and, and he said, you know, my anxiety shows up as vertigo, huh. And I was like, wow, that’s unexpected. You know, there’s a detective work process that you have to go through sometimes because we think that we know an anxiety hits and it’s that classic sort of fight or flight and our heart starts racing. Right. But always like that. Right. And, um, the thing that’s interesting about work is it gives us a lack. We can pick up a lot of patterns for our anxiety going off mm-hmm. if we pay attention

John Jantsch (08:49): Mm-hmm. . So do you have a framework, if we wanna call it that, to to, to that you’re actually can coach you through, you know, here’s, I didn’t know every individual’s front, but do you have, at least for how somebody might go through this transformation to turn it into, as you said, a I think a I think even superpower somewhere,

Morra Aarons-Mele (09:07): , I mean, in this book, I’m not a, I’m not a clinician or psychologist, but I draw on many different schools of psychology and research and you know, I mean, I think that the general consensus, like you said, is that when you feel like your anxiety is getting in the way, the first step is to notice it. Yeah. Really understand how it’s showing up, what it’s feeling like in your body, naming it, I’m anxious, I’m really anxious before this negotiation, what’s going on? And then doing the work to understand it, right? I mean, that is the work that we all do, but it can be really, really illustrative. And in the book, we look at everything from your childhood hurts mm-hmm. , those patterns that mo may go very, very deep to recent job experiences to, again, habits that you get stuck in. You know, so many of us get stuck in what I call thought traps. Mm-hmm. , right? Those negative instant thoughts. When we feel anxious specifically about something that we feel might shame us, our brain goes to a place of, I’m not worth it, I’m stupid, I’m gonna fail. Right? And that becomes a comfortable habit. Perfectionism is the same thing. And so it’s really about understanding and playing detective, and then trying to figure out what’s motivating the anxiety.

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(11:56): There was a book a few years ago, and I don’t remember if it was really even very good , but the title got my attention was called Stress for Success. And the main point that the author made was that if you’re not feeling a little stress, you know, you’re just not trying or you’re not pushing yourself enough. Um, I mean, is there any of that, um, thought, uh, process, uh, in anxious achiever?

Morra Aarons-Mele (12:21): Yeah. I mean, the neuroscience will will show that, right? I mean, we need anxiety. It keeps us alive. So if you are, um, faced with something that you really care about, that you feel might be a test, um, that you feel you really want to take a leap forward mm-hmm. , and there’s a risk of failure, of course you’re gonna feel anxious. You need to feel anxious.

John Jantsch (12:42): So what, what is the right word? But the, again, a lot of scientific research is really going in body connection. You know, what physical manifestations, you know, are, you know, are people experiencing because they are not managing the anxiety or the stress?

Morra Aarons-Mele (13:03): Well, we like to get into habits, right? Mm-hmm. . And, um, our brain creates habits as a way of hoping to dissipate the anxiety. So a lot of us, when we’re anxious, we may go into familiar behaviors, right? A lot of us may reach for a drink, we may reach for Netflix, we may reach for TikTok mm-hmm. , right? Mm-hmm. , we may exercise. Some of our coping mechanisms are what’s called adaptive. Mm-hmm. , they help us and some are maladaptive mm-hmm. at work. We also have anxiety habits. We may get into micromanaging. When you’re anxious, you feel out of control. It feels really good to try to reassert some control. And that could mean calling your team and bothering them . Right. It could be overwork. And so the important thing is to see how you’re reacting to the anxiety and ask yourself, is this really, is this serving me? And that’s where the mindfulness comes in again.

John Jantsch (13:56): Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Yeah. Is

Morra Aarons-Mele (13:57): This serving me? And sometimes you might say, yes, I am anxious right now. This is serving me.

John Jantsch (14:03): Yeah. So when it comes to, you talk about leadership and obviously typical leader, you know, manages people. So in some cases, teams or multiple teams. Are we at a point where, you know, a true leader now should be coaching around mental health, even though, you know, obviously not providing, you know, therapy, but somehow coaching or at least giving people opportunities to be coached around it.

Morra Aarons-Mele (14:30): I mean, this is a pretty controversial topic as you can imagine. Yeah. And it’s new, it’s really evolving, you know, in the field of workplace mental health. I, I say that, um, n no manager or colleague should ever feel like they need to be someone’s therapist. You know, that is not your job. There are a lot of programs that are helping, especially managers become conversant Yeah. In talking about mental health. Right. So that you can at least there. But you know, in part of the research for the book, and in my podcast I’ve interviewed many HR leaders and you know, their general consensus is your job as a manager is to listen and facilitate. So you wanna be someone who’s safe to listen to. You don’t need to solve an employee who’s having a mental health challenge. Right. That’s not your job. You can facilitate where they need to go next. Yeah. And I think that that is sort of maybe can help managers relax a little bit. It’s not your job to be the therapist.

John Jantsch (15:20): Many people in managerial positions are, you know, look a lot like me age-wise, um, and, uh, they are managing people who look a lot like my kids. Is there a a real challenge, you know, cross generationally? It’s

Morra Aarons-Mele (15:35): So funny, every time I say yes, I get people writing into me saying, no, it is not about generation. , you know, I think it’s really, really individual. Yeah. There are many people of certain ages who’ve been through a tremendous amount of therapy and their own healing journeys. Yeah. And another thing that’s interesting that I have heard anecdotally is that people who are, who have power tend to be more open and more willing to talk about things like mental health. Mm. And people in the start of their careers as well. It’s the people in the middle. Yeah. The people who are just holding on for dear life. Right.

John Jantsch (16:12): And this is just like another black marker possibly. Right. Well,

Morra Aarons-Mele (16:15): This is just something they just, they just feel overwhelmed by because they’re in the climbing phase of their career. They probably have a very busy home life.

John Jantsch (16:22): Yeah. Yeah. I have just anecdotally maybe millennials, maybe Gen Z, you know, tend to just be much more open about it. I mean, so the stigma appears to be gone of saying, you know, on, on Facebook, you know, my therapist said, you know, which Oh yeah. 20 years ago, you know, would’ve been somewhat, you know, it would’ve been with your girlfriend and a couple glasses of wine maybe. But that’s about it. Right. Um, so is that, is that just a social change or is that, you know, a positive change for, for good in, in the entire issue?

Morra Aarons-Mele (16:55): I think it’s hugely positive. I mean, I wish everyone could have a therapist. I think it’s a truly remarkable experience. And obviously there are a lot of barriers to getting good mental healthcare in this country. Yeah. Um, but I love, I love when people are open to talking about the road to self-awareness the same way they would as developing any other skill. Because what this comes down to is self-awareness as a leader. Yeah. And self-awareness is one of the most sought after an elusive leadership characteristics. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:25): I’ve often said, I think it’s the, it’s the, you know, super powerful leadership. I think, you know, because that, you know, where people really, when when people struggle with that, you know, then they give people answers and they , you know, they try to hold on to power themselves and you know, not, you know, not give it out. I mean, the most self-aware leaders wanna rise everybody up and they want, you know, they wanna share, you know, with the team, which are all I think very positive, you know, types of things.

Morra Aarons-Mele (17:52): Yeah, yeah. For sure. So

John Jantsch (17:55): If, if, if somebody reads this book and they’re a leader and they say Morra, we’d love to work with you. Do you do any work inside of organizations? Um, because this is, this might be hr, has certainly might be leadership, it’s definitely culture side of organizations. So where would you go to help an organization that’s trying to maybe change the culture, not just an individual leader who’s trying to get better?

Morra Aarons-Mele (18:22): I mean, this is really about culture change, you know, and I think the good news is as leaders change, culture changes, I don’t think that this kind of reduction of stigma around mental health in the, in the workplace should be seen as a perk or a nice to have or something we’re doing for the Gen Zs to keep them happy.

John Jantsch (18:38): It’s an AppRight or something, right? . It

Morra Aarons-Mele (18:41): Is actually foundationally about working better mentally healthy workplaces Sure. Work better. Absolutely. Where people, you know, have boundaries and treat each other kindly and can have open communications. I mean, it’s kind of the, the shangrila that we’re all looking for. So all of this stuff is actually foundational to anything you’d learn in a basic leadership or seminar. Right.

John Jantsch (19:02): But as you just pointed out, particularly when it comes to culture, that’s not something that you put on a plaque. I mean that, you know, that’s gotta be, you know, that’s gotta be lived and it’s gotta be lived a lot and it’s gotta be repeated and um, you know, before people believe it. Especially if you’re trying to make a change. You know, I mean, I think that’s the hardest part. You know, you’ve grown to 200 people and you know, they have accepted the organizations a certain way. Um, you know, changing that, you know, is really difficult, isn’t it?

Morra Aarons-Mele (19:32): It’s absolutely. I mean, that’s the thing we’re all working on. That’s why podcasts like ours exist. Yeah. Yeah. . But, you know, I’m not, I’m not saying that change has to start with a single person because we all live in systems, but I do think if you’re feeling anxious at work and it’s getting in your way it’s worth looking at. It will lead you to a path of discovery.

John Jantsch (19:51): Yeah. If nothing else, you’ll be happier. Right? ,

Morra Aarons-Mele (19:54): That’s, well, there you go. .

John Jantsch (19:56): Well, Morra, it was great having you back on the show. You wanna invite people where they can find, I know the book will be available everywhere, but, uh, where they might connect with you as well.

Morra Aarons-Mele (20:04): Absolutely. I’d love it if you listen to my podcast, The Anxious Achiever, wherever you get your podcast. And, um, if you have a question for me, reach out on LinkedIn and I’ll write back. Just send me a message.

John Jantsch (20:14): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days soon out there on the road.

(20:19): Thanks.

(20:20): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before Tex? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

March 23, 2023/by exposure

How To Scale Your B2B Marketing Strategy

How To Scale Your B2B Marketing Strategy written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Louis Gudema

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Louis Gudema. Louis is a fractional CMO for B2B companies, and mentors startups at MIT. Previously he founded and grew a marketing agency, and pivoted it into a SaaS company, growing it into one of the top three or four companies in its national market before a successful exit. The first edition of Bullseye Marketing was named One of the Best Marketing Plan Books of All Time by Book Authority. He also has a side hustle as a ghostwriter of business and marketing books.

His upcoming book is a second edition of Bullseye Marketing where he teaches how to develop, launch, and scale a successful marketing strategy for B2B companies.

Key Takeaway:

This second edition of Bullseye Marketing focuses on B2B marketing exclusively and highlights examples of how creativity can be implemented in B2B marketing strategies. Louis emphasizes the importance of the third phase of the Bullseye Marketing approach, which is to create mental availability and build up brand awareness so that you are top of mind for your customers and make your short-term marketing more effective.

Questions I ask Louis Gudema:

[02:11] Why’d you write a second edition? What was needed? What’s new?
[07:37] You talk a lot about conversion rate optimization, so tell me a little bit of your thinking on what you’ve seen when you’ve got people to focus on that.
[09:24] What are the significant like channel differences even, or approaches to a B2B marketer as opposed to a B2C marketer?
[12:44] Regarding brand marketing, how can I invest in that when I really can’t measure it?
[18:45] What’s your take on AI in marketing these days?
[21:53] You are an author of a great book: Bullseye Marketing, but you also write books with, and for other folks, I suppose, as a ghostwriter. Can you talk about your decision to do that?

More About Louis Gudema:

https://louisgudema.com/
Connect on LinkedIn
Follow on Twitter
Contact Louis

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

Learn more about the Agency Certification Intensive Training here

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Duct Tape Transcript

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Louis Gudema. He is a fractional CMO for B2B companies and mentors, startups at MIT. Previously, he founded and grew a marketing agency and pivoted into a SaaS company, growing it into one of the top three or four companies in the national market before a successful exit. The first edition of Bullseye Marketing was named one of the best marketing plan books of all time by book Authority. He also does a little side hustle as ghostwriter of business and marketing books. But we’re gonna talk today about the second edition of Bullseye Marketing. So Louis, welcome back to the show.

Louis Gudema (01:38): Hi, John. Great to be back. Good to see you

John Jantsch (01:41): Again. So every time I have an author on, oh by the way, I also should have should point out because I’m certain he’s listening that Douglas Burnett wrote the Forward for this new edition with the, uh, marketing book podcast. I, he tells me I’ve been on like six times. He’s better about that stuff than me keeping track of. But whenever I have second,

Louis Gudema (01:59): He’s telling me that you were, uh, very close neck and neck for his most, his champion for most

John Jantsch (02:04): Episode, his most episodes by one author. So I always ask second edition books, authors, why’d you write a Second Edition? What was needed? What’s new , you know what? Because obviously that it’s a lot of work to do and to update a book. So there had to be some compelling reason, I’m guessing, that you felt it needed an update.

Louis Gudema (02:25): Yeah, it turned out to be more work than I expected. So the reason I wrote, and Douglas was very encouraging, even two or three years ago, he was like, you should do a second edition. So I’ll have to ask him someday why he thought it needed improving . But first of all, the first edition was B2B and B2C, and this edition is exclusively B2B. And I, that’s really my expertise. That’s where I do, you know, almost all my work. That’s where most of my experience is. And so I really wanted to focus on that. One of the things, and I have two or three others I’ll quickly say, but one of the things is that I think B2B marketing especially lacks creativity compared to B2C. So I populate the book and tried to make a real effort to show how people, and give a lot of examples from a lot of companies of kind of really creative and excellent B2B marketing.

John Jantsch (03:13): Yeah. And I actually wanna dig in, dig into some of those differences a little bit. But uh, go ahead.

Louis Gudema (03:18): Yeah, so another thing is that I laid out in the first book that the three phases of the Bullseye Marketing approach, you know, and the first is to take advantage of your existing marketing assets for fast, inexpensive results. Secondly, use intent marketing. And thirdly, I called cast of white or net and I renamed it a more accurate scientific correct phase, which is build your brand and grow your mental availability. Because what I’ve learned between the two additions is much more of the research that it turned out really validated by bullseye approach and the real importance in the long term of the third phase of building mental availability. And I can explain what that is. Yes. And it’s something that in this era of short-termism that, that so many marketers are focused on, what can we do with this campaign? What can we do this quarter that they’ve, they miss out on the long-term growth that can be achieved through those phase three programs, which is equal to, or even greater than the, those short-term

John Jantsch (04:32): Programs. I, I was gonna bring up the phase approach cuz it’s one of the things I really liked from the first edition. I know it’s back in this and I think that I’ve been, you know, for many years talking about, you know, I call it the customer success track in my last book. That, you know, there are there certain things that have to be done first, can be done first. Maybe it’s the low hanging fruit or it’s the foundation, you know, but it’s then what’s the promise of what’s next and the promise of what’s next. And I think you maybe don’t call it the same thing, but I think there’s a little bit of that same idea. The long game, you know, goes on while the short game is played as well.

Louis Gudema (05:05): Yeah. And I realize, you know, the first edition I thought was kind of focused on people who weren’t really experienced marketers. And then it turned out some very experienced marketers like were saying this is really great and very helpful. And so there the first phase is both a foundation for success in the second and third phases, but it’s also, you know, in and of itself, it can produce a tremendous result just in three or six months.

John Jantsch (05:34): Yeah, yeah. Like here’s an idea, send an email occasionally to your 1,237 customers that haven’t heard from you. Right.

Louis Gudema (05:42): , well it, that was, so bullseye marketing grew originally from the fact that I was working with companies, you know, as a fractional CMO and things that were supposed to be like the best, you know, like inbound marketing or social media posts or other things, you know, they wouldn’t produce results in in three or six months. No. And I thought, well, what really does produce results? And that’s when, you know, bullseye Marketing grew out of that. And also from my experience as you know, I’m sure you’ve had work, I would start to work with the new client and I’d say, oh, how many email addresses, you know, do you have? And they’d say, oh, we have 12,000 or, you know, whatever the number might be, right? And I’d say, oh, how often do you, you know, email them? And they’d say, oh, around the holidays,

John Jantsch (06:31): ,

Louis Gudema (06:31): And, you know, email is marketing is such a tremendously powerful, you know, and almost free tool. And yet they weren’t taking advantage of it. And so that’s where the idea of the marketing assets that were kinda like money that people had in the shoebox under the bed, you know, and they just had to use it better.

John Jantsch (06:50): I had a client one time that, that we were doing a monthly newsletter and he was like, you know, that’s just a pain. Let’s just kill that. I just, you know, I don’t wanna do that anymore. And I was able to show him spikes in web traffic, spikes in conversions, , you know, every single time that thing went out. He was like, okay, I get it. I get it. . Yeah. So it’s awesome. Hey, you know, speaking of conversions, I also like your thinking on this. You know, a lot of times I have said before on stages that, you know, if you dropped me into your business and you said, look, you’ve got, you know, a couple weeks, what’s like the one area you would work on? And I always say it’s sales or conversion , you know, rate optimization. Cuz you, most of the time nobody really focuses on that. You like tweak the dial one half a percent and sometimes, and it can really drop to the bottom line. Can it, so you have, you talk a lot about conversion rate optimization. So tell me a little bit of your thinking on what you’ve seen when you’ve got people to focus on that.

Louis Gudema (07:46): Oh yeah, I mean it just makes a huge difference. You know, it, it’s just the idea is so simple is it’s way easier to double your conversion rate with the existing amount of traffic than it is to double the amount of traffic with the existing rate of conversion. And it, when you double your conversion rate, which you know can, it’s one of those, another one of those almost free things. Yeah. You know, you’re not only getting twice as many leads or sales or whatever your conversion is, you’re cutting the cost per conversion in half. And, and sometimes it’s, it’s really obvious stuff. Yeah. And so, you know, I I like to say that if you start to ramp up your marketing without first optimizing your for conversions, yeah. It’s like trying to full a buck fill a bucket that’s full of holes, you know, you’re just wasting a huge amount of your time and effort.

John Jantsch (08:42): Yeah. And I’ll throw one more variable in there. You get lead conversion cranked up, raise your prices , and you know, it may cut into conversions a little bit, but you know, it’s pure profit in many cases. So, you know, it’s worth the take worth taking a look at both of those, I think in a combination.

Louis Gudema (09:01): Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:03): Te tell me a little bit in your experience, um, the, what you see as the significant marketing differences between, you started already alluding a lot of B2B businesses, you know, the marketing’s very boring and because they feel like, oh, it has to be very professional or something. But talk about just the significant differences between B2B, not talking about like the tone or the messaging, but the, you know, the significant like channel differences even or approaches to, you know, a B2B marketer as opposed to a B2C marketer.

Louis Gudema (09:33): Well, and I’m gonna talk about the leading B2C companies, the p and gs and those Yeah. Right, right. Cause they, yeah, they do it so well. And there are some great B2B markers like Salesforce, you know, which really gets it also, and I give other examples in the book. But what they realize is that you have to build this idea, uh, of mental availability first of all. And that means that customers, it starts with the recognition that 95% of your market is not interested in buying from you today. Right? So it doesn’t matter what you say or what you offer, you know, they bought it six months ago, or they have a vendor they’re happy with or they, or it may be a, you know, if a, a firm has an accountant, a law firm, you know, some other, uh, service provider that they’re very happy with, they’re just got not gonna switch.

(10:28): If they bought a new crm, you know, two years ago, you know, they’d have to be really upset to switch, you know, and that’s true just of many things. The typical consumer insurance customer stays with the same company like Progressive or Geico for 11 or 12 years. And you know, and that’s the case in the B2B world too. So mental availability is building up awareness so that you are top of mind when they do want to actually buy something in your category. Because the short list is often very short. And one, sometimes just two companies, you know, I, I have in there a study in the book where someone, an analyst was surveyed their customers, their clients who had just bought new digital asset management systems. These are big enterprise expensive software system. A majority of the clients had looked at one vendor, they had done no competitive bake off at all.

(11:27): And I hear that all the time from small company, you know, companies that are selling to SMBs, you know, that they are, you know, someone hears good things about the MailChimp or about HubSpot or about Constant Contact and they’re like, they look at it, yeah, looks good, let’s go with it. And they don’t spend, you know, three months doing a competitive bake off. And if you aren’t, if you don’t haven’t built up that mental availability over the previous months and years, you don’t know about that opportunity. All the search marketing in the world and email marketing in the world will not make you aware of that opportunity cuz they’re just not gonna talk to anyone. They’ve already settled before they bought it. And so you wanna get yourself, and this is what, you know, this is why p and g and companies like that, you know, you look at the Today Show and they do their 15 second ads and it’s just to constantly be, you know, maintain that aware that mental availability, which is more than awareness, so that when you are ready to buy, when you are ready to switch, you are the one they’re thinking of.

John Jantsch (12:31): You know, I can already hear listeners saying, well, that’s great, p and g has billions, you know, somewhere, you know, how can I afford, you know, how can I invest in that type of, you know what, maybe people would’ve called brand marketing or something at one point. How can I invest in that when I really can’t measure it, you know, scientifically,

Louis Gudema (12:53): Well, I compare it, I like to make this comparison, John, brand marketing and building awareness is like exercise, you know, it’s well documented that people are healthier and live longer and live healthier, right. If they exercise, you know, five times a week, right. You know, half an hour a day, not a huge investment, but you know, if they do that they will be much healthier and live longer. And that’s like brand marketing. You know, it’s not with exercise where you can say, you know, last Tuesday I ran a 5K and that’s what made me healthy, or I got X return from it . Right. You know, it’s the doing it constantly over and over again at the same time, you know, in terms of medicine, you know, when you got an emergency, you get a, you know, chemotherapy, you get surgery, you get your covid shot, you know, those have great short-term effects. They may even save your life, but they don’t produce long-term health and wellness. And so you need ’em both. And what the researchers, what the studies show is that optimally you have a roughly 50 50 balance and spend between brand and lead generation.

John Jantsch (14:04): Yeah. And I can attest to the fact that having that long-term approach, whatever it is, however, you know, shows up, doesn’t, it’s not always running ads, you know, on the Today Show that having that brand mental availability, brand awareness out there actually makes your marketing your short-term marketing more effective. I have found. So in other words, you know, we’ve invested for years in inbound. That’s just part of what we do. I produce content, we’re on social media, I speak on stages, I do webinars. You know, those are all kind of things that in many cases are just kind of getting the name, keeping the name out there when we then decide there’s something we wanna promote and we put ads behind it. I can tell you anecdotally, but I, you know, probably could go do better than that, that we have people all the time saying, yeah, I read Tape Marketing eight years ago and then I saw your ad and it just reminded me how awesome it . You know, I mean, it, it, you know, I, again, I th I I think it’s really testament to the fact that they support each other. I think it’s not just like for the long term someday.

Louis Gudema (15:05): Oh, sure. So are you familiar with Gusto? The Oh, okay,

John Jantsch (15:08): Sure, sure. Actually, my, my, my daughter has done a lot of marketing with them or my daughter’s firm. Yeah.

Louis Gudema (15:14): Okay. So I quote the former CMO of Gusto, she was the CMO when they grew from 500 to 50,000 in customers. Yeah. So hugely successful. Now she’s the ceo. That’s what you get when you go from 500 to 50,000. You get to be CEO next time. Yeah. And of Mutiny a marketing AI firm. Ah, and she says that at Gusto, she found that whenever she turned off the brand marketing, six months later, their customer acquisition costs, their CAC went through the roof and their conversion rates tanked. And, you know, she tried it. She ran the, this experiment and other companies, Adidas found the same thing in B2C, you know, six or seven years ago, they said, oh, we’re just gonna do this, you know, digital lead gens, you know, online sales stuff, we don’t need the brand marketing. We’ll leave that to Nike. And after about three or four years, they said, oops, you know, they found out. So a lot of companies have found out in a lot of different industries that just exactly what you said, brand supports LeadGen, and you need ’em both, you know, hand in hand.

John Jantsch (16:30): This is a

Louis Gudema (16:30): Say, just one other thing, and they are fundamentally different. Yeah. Yeah. And you might even need different people or different agencies doing them because the brand is all about creative and emotion and characters and humor

John Jantsch (16:44): Message. Yeah. And

Louis Gudema (16:44): The lead gen is all about rational, 10% off sign up for our webinar conversion optimization stuff. So they are very different skills. And you may need different, you know, groups of people doing them.

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(18:35): If this next question were part of a drinking game and you had to drink every time somebody asks a question about this right now, if we all wouldn’t be getting much done, but where are you, where, what’s your take on AI in marketing these days?

Louis Gudema (18:49): Uh, I think it’s very new and I think it’s gonna have a huge impact. I actually was sitting, you know, I, until last month, I headed up a group in Boston that you’ve spoken to sales and marketing innovators. And we had a speaker today on AI in marketing, and he was making a point. So first, all the writing I see from AI today, I think is very bland and mm-hmm. Undistinguished. Yep. But who knows what it’ll be like in two or three years. But he was saying that, you know, what AI does is it brings in a huge amount of internet content and, you know, and then it generates new things from that. Now, LinkedIn itself, the LinkedIn B2B Institute says that 75% of the ads on LinkedIn are in a, and as we’ve been talking about, most B2B ads are not very good. So if you’re using an AI that’s taking in all the mediocre stuff that’s being done today and creating new things based on that, I don’t think that’s what you want. I, you know, and I think that to the degree that AI is valuable, marketers have to be better than AI or, or we won’t have jobs.

John Jantsch (20:01): Well, you know, at least what I’m telling people right now is it’s an efficiency tool. It’s a research tool. So, you know, you may ask it’s something and get 20 ideas where you would’ve thought of 10 or something. You know, I’m with you. I mean, it’s certainly not at the cut and paste stage by, by any means. Boy, I tell you, it does a good job of outlining things. It does a good job. Metadata is a perfect example. I mean, you know, for SEO purposes, keyword research for SEO purposes, it just speeds. You know, it gives us a lot of speed and efficiency in doing some of those routine tasks. And I think that’s how, if we use it that way and free up sort of those, the mental capacity, you know, to think strategically, I think it, it certainly has a place today.

Louis Gudema (20:44): Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, it’s great for brain, you know, brainstorming and you might get, you know, 15 or 20 ideas and you say, yeah, that one, you know that that might be a good topic. Although I heard, uh, I saw on Twitter, this guy at this agency said that they were doing a branding campaign and they asked Chad g p t and it came up with, you know, like 10 15. And then, so they immediately tossed all those out as being the obvious banal things. And their job then was to find the new innovative approach that something like ChatGPT wouldn’t come up with.

John Jantsch (21:22): Yeah. Yeah. We’ve been using it a lot for some strategic research too. You know, you develop a persona and then say, you know, what are the 20 concerns that, you know, this persona might have when buying X Service or considering X Service? And, you know, I have to say it, you know, it, it is probably the common stuff, but it just, you know, it’s, it create create in that particular case, it creates a nice framework for, you know, maybe we ought to be messaging around a few of these. Yeah. So let me shift gears a little bit. You are an author of a great book, bullseye Marketing, but you also write books with and for other folks, really, truly for, I suppose, as a ghostwriter, you, you wanna talk a little bit about your decision to do that? I find it difficult because it’s so much work to write a book. I can’t imagine writing somebody else’s book.

Louis Gudema (22:11): . Well, you know, they have to pay you to do it

John Jantsch (22:15): .

Louis Gudema (22:16): So I can help you on that part of it. So yeah, after I wrote Bullseye Marketing, I contacted a few publishers, and the thing is, I’ve been a, a ghostwriter, if you wanna call it that. Well, that’s for my entire career. Right, right. I’ve written for, you know, I’ve written for CEOs, I’ve written for clients, you know, campaigns, I’ve a hundred page manuals and videos and, you know, I’ve written for clients my entire career. So this is just a, a different form of writing.

John Jantsch (22:42): Different package, huh? Yeah. A different package. Yeah.

Louis Gudema (22:46): Yeah. And so I, I let a few publishers know, and last year one of them contacted me and said, yeah, we do need someone to write a marketing book. And it was an interesting topic. It was B2B, but it was not an area I had done a lot of work in. So it was kind of interesting. And I, I could learn the author and I got along very well. He liked, you know, what I wrote, and that helped us get along well. Right. . Um, so now in that case, I did not have a credit, and now I’m, you know, talking with a, another author who, where I would be a co-author on the book. So yeah, I am interested in doing that. And as I said, it’s kind of a, you know, it’s something I’ve done for a long time.

John Jantsch (23:28): Well, you know, ChatGPT, they’re, you know, just have it spin out books for you and then they’ll be very profitable. Right?

Louis Gudema (23:35): I think so , I think if I can just have ChatGPT write it all in the background, it’ll, you know, and I can do about 20 or 50 at a time.

John Jantsch (23:44): Yeah. , like who are some of those people? Patterson, James Patterson, that spins out, you know, like eight books a year. But I guess he’s, I guess he’s just hired an army of people that can work inside of his sort of framework model and write. Oh, is that what he does? Yeah. Yeah. Apparently. So that’s why he, that’s why he’s so prolific.

Louis Gudema (24:03): Well, Stephen King does is outrageously prolific with his novels. Yeah. I think he ha does something like, I, I read his book on writing. I think he has a goal of something like 2000 words a day.

John Jantsch (24:16): Oh, wow.

Louis Gudema (24:17): And so, you know, he sits down every morning, writes his 2000 words, and, you know, that’s,

John Jantsch (24:23): That’s how

Louis Gudema (24:24): You, he has another very

John Jantsch (24:25): Long, how to say that that’s how you get to eight, 800 pages. Right.

Louis Gudema (24:29): Yeah. .

John Jantsch (24:30): Although I will say Bullseye Marketing is no thin work there either. It’s, uh, I think you’re with the index, you’re over 400 pages and in that book and it’s really, you know, I don’t know if you see this as a compliment or not, but I think it’s a, I think it’d be an amazing textbook just because you cover so much ground and you do it in, I think in very practical ways.

Louis Gudema (24:49): Well, thank you. I have, I had a, a one reader in their Amazon review of the first edition called it an encyclopedia. Yeah, yeah. Of marketing. It’s, you know, when I kind of picked it up to do the second edition, I was like, this is ridiculously ambitious . But it’s funny you mentioned that cuz when Douglas Burett interviewed me, you know, five years ago on the Marketing Book podcast, he started off by saying, so I weighed this and it weighed 1.5 pounds. So I were you, it wasn’t what I thought was the most notable, but apparently it is longer than those

John Jantsch (25:28): Books on top of pages. You, I don’t know who, you know, Wedgewood Press got the paper from, but I just think it’s, I think it’s just a bulky, heavy book in general compared to a lot of other 400 page books. So it has something to do with the weight of the paper. I think even,

Louis Gudema (25:43): Well it’s got over a hundred full color illustrations.

John Jantsch (25:47): Well that too. Yeah. Did the first tradition, I’m forgetting, did the first tradition have color? Oh, okay.

Louis Gudema (25:52): And so, you know, wanted high quality paper.

John Jantsch (25:55): Yeah, yeah. Well you accomplished that. Well Lewis, thanks again for taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You wanna invite people to connect with you and find out more about Bullseye Marketing in its various forms.

Louis Gudema (26:07): Yeah, so, so the book will launch on May 2nd. I’m not sure when this will drop, but either, you know, right. Presumably

John Jantsch (26:17): It’s May 2nd, 2023 I should say. Cuz people listen to this show years later.

Louis Gudema (26:22): That’s true. May 2nd, 2023, the ebook can be advanced ordered, but the physical book for some reason cannot. But you can buy it May 2nd and you can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter or louisgudema@gmail and would love to, you know, communicate with any of your, uh, listeners.

John Jantsch (26:42): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you again soon. One of these days out there on the road, Lu. Thank you, John. Be well. Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

March 18, 2023/by exposure

Success as a Wonderful Hell

Success as a Wonderful Hell written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Laura Gassner Otting

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Washington Post Best Selling Author and Motivational Keynote Speaker, Laura Gassner Otting. A frequent contributor to Good Morning America, the TODAY Show, Harvard Business Review, and Oprah Daily. Laura’s 30-year experience is defined by her entrepreneurial edge. She served as a Presidential Appointee in Bill Clinton’s White House, helping shape AmeriCorps.

Her forthcoming book, Wonderhell, reimagines the stories we tell ourselves about success bringing you happiness, and shows how mixed emotions like fear, uncertainty, and stress accompany success.

Key Takeaway:

Success is the ultimate goal for most people, we feel a series of positive emotions and desire to reach more every time we succeed. But it is also exhausting, anxiety-provoking, self-sabotaging, etc.…it’s hell. Laura uses the analogy of an amusement park with different towns and rides that represent the various emotions and challenges that come with pursuing success. She explains the roadmap to achieving success and accepting that there is only a finite limit to your growth.

Questions I ask Laura Gassner Otting:

[03:27] Could you describe the amusement park theme that you build the book around?
[05:01] How did you come up with the visual thought of being in an amusement park?
[06:55] Can you explain the stress of the impostor syndrome?
[10:56] Can you break down the Ferris wheel ride concept?
[13:36] Why is the concept of hustle porn bad advice?
[19:40] How the idea of success doesn’t feel the way it should because the destination doesn’t feel right?
[21:34] Where are you on the different paths you describe in your book?
[23:39] The concept of the Zen Buddhist Philosophy

More About Laura Gassner Otting:

lauragassnerotting.com
Social Networks: @heylgo
Pre-order Wonderhell: https://www.wonderhellbook.com

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

Learn more about the Agency Certification Intensive Training here

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban James Clear, Tori Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Laura Gassner Otting. She is the author of Limitless. You may recall she was on the show previously. She’s got a new book out coming out, I should say, Wonderhell, why Success doesn’t feel like it should and what to do about it. So Laura, welcome to the show.

Laura Gassner Otting (01:16): Hey, John, it’s so good to be back.

John Jantsch (01:19): So I know we’re gonna dig into this, but let’s just talk a little bit about pitching this idea and this title to a publisher. , it must have actually been a little hard for them to understand what you were trying to accomplish.

Laura Gassner Otting (01:33): Yeah, you know, as you know, I wrote Limitless with Idea Press, which is a hybrid publisher and did not have any expectation of anything happening with that. I just wanted to write it because when I was speaking on stages, I noticed people who were making real money had books. So I was like, I gotta get me one of them. Yeah. So I wrote Limitless with a hybrid publisher, and then I was like, well, that actually was a Washington Post bestseller, and I was in the Today Show, good Morning America and all these amazing things. I’m gonna go get one of those big five New York houses, I’m gonna do it. And then I called a bunch of the big five New York houses and a bunch of the agents who sell books to the big houses, and they were like, yeah, you’re nobody. I don’t get this idea.

(02:12): The title’s a little, I don’t know, edgy, I’m not so sure. Like I could sell it, but maybe not to one of the big houses. And then I had a conversation with Amy Cuddy, who you, who I’m sure you know also mm-hmm. . And she basically said, listen, people go with big houses because they need credibility, they want speaking events, and they wanna make a list. And she’s like, you’ve got that. So it’s a terrible business model for you. So as a serial entrepreneur, of course I heard those words, my ears perked up and I was like, you know what? I idea press was great. I had a terrific experience, I’m just gonna go back and do it myself again. And so, you know, Rohit at Idea Press, not only was he not questioning the book title when I first wrote the Facebook screen right after Limitless came out and I was like, oh my God, I didn’t expect it. But also in this moment I realized that I made for more, I’m not, I don’t know where I am, but I’m on this plane and I’m 1200 miles from where I’m going and 1200 miles from you know, where I need to be. And I, the space of minute right now is Wonderhell. And Rohit actually commented on that Facebook page, not for Nothing, but that would make a great title of your next book,

John Jantsch (03:22): . So

Laura Gassner Otting (03:22): It really always should have been at home with Id press in the first place, .

John Jantsch (03:27): So I should have you describe it because somebody’s gonna have to get into the book to understand. But I’d love to hear your thinking on the sort of the visual amusement park theme that you Yes. Kind of build the book around. So, so first you’re probably better describe it.

Laura Gassner Otting (03:41): Okay, so John, you know those moments where you’ve accomplished something, you could have sold your first business, or maybe you just sold your first contract, your first consulting crowd contract, your first two ballistic whatever. And in that moment you were like, that’s amazing, it’s exciting, it’s humbling, it’s wonderful. Yes. But also you see this vision of yourself like, maybe I could sell another one, or maybe I could build something even bigger, or maybe I could do even more. And I’m not sure. But wow, there’s a possibility out there. There’s a potential that I see in myself that I didn’t even know existed last week, last month, last year. And suddenly it’s not just wonderful, but it’s also anxiety-provoking, it’s stress-inducing, it’s identity questioning. It’s kind of hell. So it’s wonderful, but it’s also hell, it’s Wonderhell and Wonderhell, dear listeners, is where the burden of your potential walks in and goes, Hey man, what you got for me? What are you gonna do with this newfound potential? And that’s when we have to make that decision of who we are. And I mean, you know, anybody who’s ever been in business, been an entrepreneur, you know, done something for themselves, recognizes this moment when you’re like, yay. Oh hmm huh . And then it all settles on your shoulders.

John Jantsch (05:01): So how did you come to the visual though? That I was getting at the amusement park, the theme

Laura Gassner Otting (05:06): Park? Yes. Yes. So I was actually talking to RAAF Har Fu, who is a great friend of mine who she wrote Hustle and Float. And we were having this conversation and I’m like, you know, like we all think success is gonna be so much fun, it’s gonna be so amazing, it’s gonna be easy, it’s gonna be exciting. And then we get there and it’s actually harder than we thought. It actually kind of sucks because in that moment, if you have this bigger, this bigger hunger, this faster pace, and you wanna go, but should you, what does that mean? What is it gonna feel like? What are the sacrifices? What’s the opportunity? How do we figure it out? And she’s like, it’s kind of like an amusement park. Like you think it’s gonna be super fun and then you’re sitting in line, you know it’s three o’clock in the afternoon and it’s hot and your sunburned and that corn dog in your stomach is like threatening to go out one end or the other.

(05:50): When you get on that rollercoaster and you’re like, I thought this was gonna be fun, everyone told me it’s gonna be fun. Why isn’t it fun? She’s like, you do it and make it an amusement park because, and they have like a map like you are here and just like an amusement park, you can like pick which town you wanna go to in a different order. So in the book there’s Imposter Town, there’s Dotsville, there’s Burnout City, and in each one of the towns there are the five rides. So the 15 rides in total that represent the tsunami of emotions that are gonna come at you in all of these moments. And just like an amusement park, you can walk through the book in any order that you want in those rides, depending on where in the journey you are.

John Jantsch (06:30): So let’s visit Imposter Town. The first one, I struggle with this one because I never felt like an imposter. I see people posting these things on Facebook all the time of having imposter syndrome and I just don’t get it because I mean, all we’re really doing is learning as how I viewed as like, yeah, I haven’t done this before, but I’m not an imposter. I’m learning how to do it. Is how I always viewed that. So when people really talk about all the stress of imposter syndrome, I just, I help me understand that. I don’t get it.

Laura Gassner Otting (07:02): Well, you’re one of the rare people who don’t have imposter syndrome. I mean, when I, when the reason that I wrote this book is when Limitless came out and you know more than three people, my mother, my father, and my sister bought it, I suddenly was like, oh wow, that’s pretty cool. And I had this stress that I wanted to do more, be bigger, create something that was worthy of this potential that I saw out there. And, and so I talked to a lot of people who were further ahead of me in the path, right? Like I think everybody should have a mentor who’s further ahead of them on the actual path they wanna walk on, as opposed to all these like, I’m gonna run a mastermind type people , right? It’s like, I wanna have t-shirts printed out there like, before you tell me what to do, show me what you’ve done in the back.

(07:43): It’s like hashtag give me the p and l, right? Like I wanna know. And what was interesting is that I talked to Olympic medalists, startup unicorns, I talked to Glass ceiling shatters, I talked to people who ran big banks and then, you know, were running $2 billion companies and every one of them at every age and every stage had this moment where they were like, well I did that, but can I do the next thing? I don’t know. What if people find me out? What if I don’t belong? What if I’m not good enough in that moment? And so you’re one of the rare people, but I think it’s because, and I’ve known you long enough to know this, that you do see everything as this learning opportunity. And that’s a gift. You know, there is a voice inside of our head whenever we’re uncertain that goes, oh my God, you haven’t done this before.

(08:27): And the way to get rid of the imposter syndrome is to change how we think about, you know, that voice, right? How do we think about that voice and turn it into an, oh my gosh, you haven’t done this before. Which gives us the opportunity to say, we don’t need to be perfect, but instead we just need to be learning at every step of the way. Because of course you’re an imposter. I mean like what, what great news, right? Like think, just think about the term imposter syndrome. You’re an imposter. There’s something wrong with you y it’s a syndrome, you’re sick, , maybe you should sit down, right? Like it’s actually kind of an offensive term, but I wanna be in rooms where I’m an imposter because it means that I’ve never been in that room before. Because yeah, who wants to do the same puzzle over and over? Like we should all strive to be imposters. How lucky is that?

John Jantsch (09:16): Yeah. And I guess that’s May, it’s just maybe semantics, but I just, I have insatiable curiosity and so I want to go to see new things. And if I don’t know how they work, then the, I get very excited to find out how they work

Laura Gassner Otting (09:29): . Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, and here’s the thing, you have enough confidence in the successes you’ve had to date that you can say, I know I’ve had successes in these areas, which means that even though I don’t know stuff in those areas, I think I can probably figure it out, right? There’s a story I tell about Dory Clark, again, another mutual friend who decided she wanted to completely change her. She, her career, she wants to go into figuring out how to score Broadway musicals. It’s like her side passion. Cuz you know, Dori has enough brains for, you know, 15 different careers at once. And when she walked into this room, all the other people were like, well, I’ve scored 16 musicals and I’ve got, you know, when Emmy from you know, on Broadway and she’s like, I’ve written three songs, . But it didn’t stop her, even though she felt like an imposter. She’s still in that moment said, I have confidence from other things that I’ve done in, you know, my leadership and my, in my thinking and my entrepreneurship work that I know that I, even though I haven’t done this yet, I know that I have the skills to be able to get better at this thing.

John Jantsch (10:30): Yeah, yeah, you’re absolutely right about that. I mean, just even having experience and staying in the game long enough, you realize, oh, this is how this is gonna turn out. Just like endure ,

Laura Gassner Otting (10:40): Right? Yes. Well it’s funny, a lot of times like my, I’ve got two, you know, an 18 year old and a 20 year old, so their friends sometimes come to me for their advice and they’re like, how do you know so much? And I’m like, I’m just old , I’ve just been in the game a long time.

John Jantsch (10:56): So probably my favorite, if I can have a favorite ride in your book is the Ferris Wheel. Hmm. Unpack that one for me.

Laura Gassner Otting (11:04): So the Ferris wheel is also one of my favorites. In fact, I’m pitching that to Good Morning America for the, like, we’re gonna do one ride for the book launch. And here’s what I like about the Ferris wheel. Whenever we accomplish something, our view of ourselves changes, but we also find ourselves rising to new heights or to a different latitude. And in that, you know, new latitude, we, we have a different view of the world, we have a different view of the world and we have a different view of the people that are in it. And so there are a lot of people in our lives who are like, Hmm, I don’t know, do you think you should do that? And maybe you’re flying too close to the sun, and who do you think you are? And you know, we run into them in the coffee shop and they’re like, oh, I don’t know, that seems too scary. You shouldn’t do that. Well, what they really mean is, I’m too scared, I shouldn’t do that. But we had these people who have been in our lives because they’ve always been in our lives and they may not be the people who should continue in our lives going forward just like that. We had

John Jantsch (11:59): Wait, but they’re my family.

Laura Gassner Otting (12:00): Well, and it’s very funny because I talk about this a lot and I’m like, there are people who love you and they don’t want you get hurt. Right? Right. So like the last time I lived in the same house as my parents, I was 17 years old and I used to put the, I used to put the milk back in the refrigerator empty, but I would, and the car back in the garage empty, right? But the stereo turned up on full. And when I, throughout my career would tell them things like, I’m gonna drop out of law school to join this presidential campaign, or I’m gonna leave the White House to go like do executive search, or I’m gonna leave this big firm to start my own business, or I’m gonna sell that business and I don’t know, write a book. They were like, what are you doing?

(12:36): Are you sure you should do that? I’m not so sure, because the last time they knew me on a day-to-day basis, I didn’t have a frontal lobe , right? . So they wanna give me advice because they love me and that’s fine, they can stay in my life, they can be at the amusement park, but they don’t, they’re not gonna be in the car with me heading back up to the Ferris wheel. And so I think there are people in our lives who love us, there are people in our lives who are jealous of us, the ones who only see our rise through the lens of their own stagnation, smiles in the front and knives in the back. And then there are the people who are just afraid, or maybe they’re giving us bad advice because they’re giving us advice from where they’ve been, which isn’t where we’re going. And I’m not saying we have to like, you know, cut all ties and get rid of them. There is a part in the book where I do talk about the benefit of burning bridges when it is time to do that. But I think it’s a matter of deciding who gets to give you sort of close contact advice and who you just sort of like, that’s great, thanks. I’ll keep it in mind. See you later, , then you keep moving on.

John Jantsch (13:36): Speaking of bad advice, one that I have railed a against for some time now. Hustle porn.

Laura Gassner Otting (13:43): Oh yes, . Oh yes. You know, the thing that I loved most about your self-reliant entrepreneur book was that it just, it was this moment where you just sort of stop every day and you read the passage and you just kind of reflect and it, that book is like, it is the opposite of hustle porn to me in so many ways, and I just loved it. And when we think about hustle porn, it’s this like bigger, better, faster, more like great. Like, you know, you got the job, when are you gonna get the promotion? You got the promotion. When are you got the corner office? You got the corner office, when are you kicking off the boss at the window and taking his job? Right? So I think that, I mean, look, I will speak as a woman. I think that we can have it all.

(14:25): But I think that there are lots of opportunities, at least you know, for me and my life, and this may be with you, with kids, with grandkids, where there may be moments where you’re like, you know, I could hustle really hard for this work right now and make more money, but I’m making enough in this moment. So maybe I’ll throttle back the work part and I’ll throttle up the parent part. Right? Or maybe you wanna like travel around the world. You know, I, I could have put this book out a year ago, but my eldest was going off to college and I thought, you know, this book’s kind of evergreen, but he’s not, and maybe this is the moment where I wanna spend a little more time just kind of just being around and not being on my office clothes with my face and a computer the whole time. And so I think we have to think about, you know, do we wanna ride the rollercoaster or do we wanna just be on the merry-go-round right now because that’s okay, we’re just gonna keep coming back around.

John Jantsch (15:16): Yeah, I think the trap, you know, of the hustle porn as you’re calling it too, is that it assumes everybody should want the same thing,

Laura Gassner Otting (15:23): Right?

John Jantsch (15:24): , right? Right. And I think that’s, you know, where people really get off track. It’s like, I can’t have it all, but wait a minute, do I really even want it all

Laura Gassner Otting (15:31): Or how do I define All right? I mean, as you know and limitless, I talk a lot about this where, you know, I learned in 20 years of executive search that you know, there are eight motivating factors that will pretty much convince anybody at any time as a head hunter to talk to me. And there are things like, what’s the mission of the organization and will I be inspired by the leader and how big is the impact? How many, what kinds of skills am I gonna learn? How prestigious will it look on my resume? How much money am I gonna make, right? There’s all sorts of things like that. But every one of us will, will put that list in a different order. We prioritize that list differently. And so there are moments in my life where I put money at the top and there are moments in my life where I put money somewhere in the middle, right?

(16:10): It’s going to change. So like mm-hmm there, every one of us has two numbers. We have a like, what’s the want to make number and what’s the need to make numbers? Like the need to make numbers. Like what’s the, what are you, what’s the base number that you gotta make to pay your bills, right? Whatever those bills are. And then what’s the want to make numbers is like, okay, so you wanna take two vacations a year, do you wanna go camping or you wanna stay at the four Seasons, right? Like what does that look like? And in between those two numbers are the puts and takes of what else you wanna sacrifice in our life. So you know, your all is gonna be very different than my all, but also each of our all is also different at different ages and different stages. So I would argue that probably 10 years ago what you wanted was different than what you want now and 10 years from now it’ll be different. And so this idea of hustle porn that like you gotta drive the Ferrari and you know, wear the Hugo Boss suit and you gotta have the like model on your arm and you like, I don’t know, that’s not that interesting to me .

(17:05): But it might be very interesting for some of your listeners and that’s awesome, right? For some people success is the cherry red rot Maserati. For some people success is curing cancer, right? It’s some, for some people success is just having dinner with your family every night. Like every one of us is gonna define it differently. And the great thing about it is that we’re all right.

John Jantsch (17:24): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process it. It’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You could license this entire system for your agency by participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification. And now word from our sponsor, are you ready to get out of spreadsheets? Look with HubSpot crm, get realtime data at your fingertips so your teams stay in sync across the customer journey, build better content, generate more conversions, and get the content you need to create amazing experiences for your teams and your customers at scale.

(18:33): All from one powerful platform. It’s why more than 150,000 companies already use HubSpot’s CRM to run their businesses better. Plus, HubSpot’s user friendly interface sets you up for success from day one. So you can spend less time managing software and more time on what matters your customers. There’s no better time to get organized. Get started for free @hubspot.com today. So you mentioned my book, the Self-Reliant Entrepreneur. I actually wrote that book at a time when I just really wanted to do something different. And one of the entries in there, I started by saying that, you know, everyone wants to tell you how to get to the top of the mountain, but no one tells you how to get back down. And I read a very interesting statistic that more people die descending Everest than ascending. And I think that, I think this book speaks a little bit to the heart of that. You know, everybody’s like trying so hard to get to the top of this thing and then when they get there they’re like, no, I wanna be back there . And I really think that, you know, for what it’s worth, I’m not sure there’s a question in what I just stated there, , but I think that’s a lot of what your book is about. The idea that success doesn’t feel like it should because the destination doesn’t feel like it should.

Laura Gassner Otting (19:47): Well, and I think it’s also because the destination continues to change. So you know, when we say I’ll be happy when I have success, that defines success as a finite place, as an end point. But what I learned in writing this book is that in fact, success is just a way point. It’s a portal to what else we can do. So you know, when you are climbing a mountain, if you’re at the base of the mountain and you look at the top of the mountain and you’re like, I wanna go there, cool. But then you get halfway up the mountain and you look at one of those pretty vistas and maybe you’re stopping for your little picnic lunch and you look out and what do you see? You see the top of your mountain, but all the other mountains in the distance. So suddenly the view changes.

(20:25): So then you’re like, maybe I wanna go even further. How much food do I have? How much sunlight is left? How much water do I have? So suddenly you have to figure out, well what is my new definition? And so my book, I’m not trying to say like, you should always keep going and it should always be more and more that I’m saying. There may be moments where you say, actually I don’t wanna go there. I’ve now seen enough, I saw a pretty view, I’m gonna go down. Or maybe it changes. But uh, what, what I had always thought growing up that when I was successful, I’d be successful period. And everything would be easy and I’d be all done like easy money, everything’s great. But I was totally shocked to find out that at every moment, every stage where I had success, it never got easier.

(21:06): It actually got harder. And so when I sat down to talk to those hundred people, I talked about it earlier, I was like, one of them has to have an answer. One of ’em has to have a way for me to get through this. And what I learned was that on the other side of this Wonderhell is just the next one and the next one. And if we’re lucky, the next one after that. And it’s all about renegotiating our relationship with the emotions that we have towards it. So for example, it’s not I’m an imposter, but it’s wow, what an opportunity to learn.

John Jantsch (21:34): So there is a bit of a, even though it might be cyclical, there is a bit of a sort of path through this book. And so I won’t be the last one to ask you this question, where are you on the path

Laura Gassner Otting (21:45): ? You know?

John Jantsch (21:46): And the reason I asked you though is because you start the book out actually with some sort of raw sharing of your experiences in those like places. And so I wonder like how is, where are you in this and how you feel like you’re progressing?

Laura Gassner Otting (22:03): You know, I’ve wrote the book as this idea that you are in Imposter Town and then maybe you’re in Burn Dotsville and then maybe you end up in Burnout City and then as soon as you figure out how to get through that, you’re right back to Imposter Town again. But I gotta say, I think I might be a little bit in all of them right now, , and I’ll tell you why the book comes out in a couple of weeks. And the process of putting out a book as you know, is a lot of, there’s a lot of hurry, hurry. You’ve gotta like put everything together, put all the collateral together, start sending it out. You ask people to pre-order it and then you sit there and you wait and you’re like, did anybody buy it today? Does anyone like it? You get an email from somebody that says, I read your book and you’re like, should I open it?

(22:42): I’m not sure I’m scared. I you, you know, like, I don’t know. And then, you know, you’ll get these great reviews for the most part. Sometimes you get a like, yeah, it didn’t work for me, right? But I’m, I’ve been getting these amazing emails and at the same time as I’m getting amazing emails from some of my early readers from my newsletter list, I’m also pitching, you know, good Morning America and the D Today Show and all the big shows and I’m like, oh please like me. So, you know, I feel I’m full of doubt. I’m perennially exhausted, but I’m also excited about it. And I, no matter how many times I walk out on the set of a national TV show, I’m still like, oh my God, is this the time I’m gonna barf like ? So, but I’m also, even though there’s the hell in that, it’s also so incredibly exciting and wonderful. So, you know, I’m just in Wonderhell about Wonderhell.

John Jantsch (23:33): So as Omnis as the title sounds, I find that you come full circle towards the end and you basically, you basically explain Zen Buddhist philosophy. So yes, so there is a happy place in in coming full circle to adopting beginner’s mind, which is probably in some ways you should have saved us all kinds of time. And put that in the first chapter

Laura Gassner Otting (23:57): ,

John Jantsch (23:59): Because it’s the best piece of advice. ,

Laura Gassner Otting (24:02): Well, I don’t know, maybe I’m saving it for last. Maybe I should just written a pamphlet and not a book . I’m not sure I’m, I think that, I think that, I think that probably hit you because that’s where you are in your journey, right? Yeah. So I think that everybody reading the book, like, I mean I just, I had a reader who actually I had something on a newsletter list who sent me an email and she’s like, look, I love you, I love reading your newsletter. I’ve been on your list for four years. I read it every single week. And I loved Limitless, but I don’t think, I don’t think Wonderhell’s for me cause I’m not sure I’ve had that kind of success yet. And I sent her, I was like, you know what? I’m like, gimme your address, I’m gonna send you an early book.

(24:37): And I did. And she sent me an email last week and she’s like, okay, I have to admit I was wrong, , I was wrong. And it’s not just about people who’ve already had success, it’s people who know that they’re made for more. And she’s like, and everything in the first chapter about feeling like, I don’t belong and I’m an imposter. She’s like, I feel like you were sitting on my couch talking to me. So I think everybody reading the book well, a chapter that resonates with them more, right? Yeah. Than others. But you know, in terms of like the Zen Buddhist philosophy, yeah, I mean that’s the thing, each time we think we’ve gotten there, every ceiling is just tomorrow’s floor, which is kind of amazing to think about, right? Yeah. What an opportunity that gives us every single time. And you know, to further into the Buddhist philosophy, there’s a storytelling, the conclusion about running a marathon.

(25:24): And in that marathon where I’m like, oh my God, I’m working as hard as I possibly can to finish this marathon in like five hours. Like it is hard. I’m exhausted, everything hurts. I’m chasing in all the wrong places, even though I don’t know if it’s only right places to Cha . And I get like, I get like halfway through the marathon and a friend of mine’s like basically tells me that the winner has just finished the race and it’s 92 degrees and I’m so hot, I don’t even know my own name. And all I can think of is I’m only halfway through . And later what I realized was, even though I was working as hard as I possibly could, like I could see myself finishing a marathon, first marathon ever. He cheated around my shoulder, meddle around my neck like I’m a superhero. I had to work as hard as I possibly could.

(26:05): I was at the very depth of my pain cave to get there. What I realized was, you know what the winner probably was too. And his pain cave and my pain cave probably felt exactly the same. His was just far deeper than mine. , he could just, his was much more impressive. But like going a hundred percent is still going a hundred percent and it probably still feels the same way. And so that, you know, that idea that, you know, pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. Like you have that choice in it. And so you know, there, yes, it is scary and is difficult when things get harder when you find success, that’s the hell. But also what an opportunity to live into the wonder.

John Jantsch (26:45): Well I think many people are gonna read this book and just as you said, they’ll find a chapter that really resonates where they are at the moment. But I also think that one of the reassuring things about this book is you’re gonna have help. A whole lot of people say, oh, that’s why I’m feeling how I’m feeling right now. Yes. And that will be reassuring I think very much

Laura Gassner Otting (27:01): For, yeah, because you know, none of us can complain like, oh boohoo things are going well. Like, who wants to hear about that? Right? . So I’ve had so many people that are like, yes, I, there’s finally a word for this feeling that I’ve had. Thank you. I feel so seen .

John Jantsch (27:17): Well Laura, thanks so much for taking Moment to Stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. I know wonder how it’ll be available pretty much anywhere people buy books, you want to invite people anywhere else to connect with you?

Laura Gassner Otting (27:28): Yeah, so you can find me @lauragassnerotting.com and I’m on all the socials @heylgo, so people can find me there and wonderhell.com is where you can pre-order the book right now.

John Jantsch (27:39): Awesome. Again, thanks for taking the moment to stop by the show and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Laura Gassner Otting (27:46): Thanks so much.

John Jantsch (27:46): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co not.com. Co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

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March 9, 2023/by exposure

Fractional CMO: Reinventing Marketing Strategies

Fractional CMO: Reinventing Marketing Strategies written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I’m doing a solo show, and I’m gonna talk about how Fractional CMOs are becoming increasingly popular among business owners and marketing agencies.

Key Takeaway:

Strategy is one of the most essential elements to running a successful business today. Whether you are a business owner or a consultant, who doesn’t understand why your marketing is not working the way it should, the Fractional CMO model could change your business.

Fractional CMOs help companies and business owners develop strategic marketing plans in a more cost-effective solution as they are not full-time employees, but they have the expertise of a seasoned marketing executive. They will develop the marketing activities through strategic planning that could improve the relationship companies have with their clients, as they are able to understand better how to guide the perfect customer journey.

Topics I Cover:

[01:15] Introduction to the trend of Fractional CMOs
[04:34] Why hiring Fractional CMOs is an appealing idea?
[05:28] The role of a CMO in an organization
[05:50] Comparing the cost of hiring a full-time CMO and a fractional CMO
[08:55] How fractional CMOs focus on developing strategy
[10:41] The importance of the Customer Journey

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

Learn more about the Agency Certification Intensive Training here

Take The Marketing Assessment:

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Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban, James Clear, Tori Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:53): Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and I’m going to do a solo show. It’s been a while since I’ve done one. So there’s a couple topics I want to get off my chest. So I might do a couple shows in a row. Who knows? This first topic I wanna talk about today is a trend, I guess definitely a trend that I’m seeing, and it applies to anybody in the marketing consulting agency world as well as frankly to anyone who owns a business in terms of how to get your marketing done, how to think about your marketing more strategically, and that’s the trend of what I will call the fractional CMO, Chief Marketing Officer. This idea of fractional whatever, titles, accountants, fractional management consultants, fractional hiring consultants. I think that this idea has really taken on a life of its own recently, probably like so many things here in the beginning of 2023, very influenced by the pandemic.

(02:01): But what I’ve seen is many, many business owners over the years really are looking for a marketing agency, a marketing consultant, somebody to get the tactical things done. They quite frankly, rarely hire unless they’re from a marketing background. They rarely hire strategic marketing folks internally because quite frankly, when you bring somebody in at a really high level to do marketing in your business as an employee, and you’re the owner of that business and don’t feel like you know that much about marketing or how to direct really a strategic marketing, dare I say, CMO type of role in your business, it can be a little intimidating. And I’ve experienced that over the years. A lot of times I’ve been hired, my firm’s been hired because, you know, there’s something easier about saying, Hey, this isn’t working out. You know, it’s not an employee, it’s, it’s a vendor almost.

(02:49): And so they can part ways, but I think what’s happened over the last few years is people have dramatically increased their understanding and and desire to really start with strategy. I mean, I’ve been my kind of my mantra for 20 years strategy before tactics. But I think a, I think people are finally getting it right, . And so this idea that they would hire a a a C-suite type of role where the implication is that that person’s going to be strategic, that person’s not gonna write copy necessarily or do social media posts. They’re going to really develop the grand plan for, you know, how you’re gonna go from where you’re today to where you want to be, certainly from a marketing standpoint, but they’re gonna get involved in the dollars and cents of it, the objectives overall for the organization, maybe a little deeper relationship then you would think of your traditional marketing agency.

(03:41): But we are finding that, uh, both business owners are, are really embracing this idea of hiring, you know, us or somebody as a fractional CMO. And certainly a lot of consultants, agencies, coach, implementers, you know, I’m finding are really drawn to this idea of maybe having a handful of clients that they are very deeply involved with and, you know, have a seat at the table , you know, for making or helping make big decisions. And obviously orchestrating the tactics to implementation. Maybe in some cases the team that’s already been assembled. So just the textbook definition, what is a fractional CMO? It’s a marketing strategist brought into an organization on a part-time basis to help set strategic direction and orchestrate marketing implementation using internal and external resources. So I spent the last 10 minutes just talking about what , what I just described there. But, but again, this role, this idea really has a lot of, I think a lot of appeal to business owners because it is a necessary piece that I think that, that you can acquire, or at least the idea you can acquire for much less.

(04:53): I mean, look at Google trends if you ever do that. The term fractional CMO is definitely on the rise. And I think a lot of it has to do with, I think people are tired of the tactic of the week of no real direction. Um, you know, everybody says they want customers, but, but a lot of the CEO’s, business owners that I talk to, what they really need is some clarity first, and the confidence that they’re making the right decisions and some control over their marketing. And I think that that’s a, that’s a big part of what you get by at least taking this strategy approach and, and by bringing in somebody that is very strategic to help you get those customers. And you know, the, the role of a typical CMO in an organization is strategic planning, brand management, you know, obviously the marketing campaigns, analyzing data, helping develop and use a budget and, and maybe even managing team players.

(05:43): And frankly, what most people do is they hire somebody just to do marketing campaigns and all those other things are left by the, the wayside. The reason I think this model works and why business owners should be really addressing it, looking at it, understanding it better, and certainly agency folks or consultants ought to be positioning themselves this way because typical, or I should say the average salary for a chief marketing officer, according to salary.com, this last year was between 208,000-375,000. And that really doesn’t include any kind of implementation or, you know, other people that you might hire to, to actually supplement that typical, average fractional CMO probably costs somebody 60 to $75,000 a year, plus a lot of the implementation now is done kind of on demand. It doesn’t, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to hire those people as full-time people.

(06:38): You’re gonna, your CMO, fractional CMOs gonna bring them in as needed, you know, from a consultant or an agency standpoint, you know, if you do the math on, on what the average is, you know, you working with five or six clients that can be at the top, the absolute top of the CMO chain. So, you know, it really works for both parties as far as I’m concerned. Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that’s going to allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel?

(07:33): Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today. Check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification. And now, word from our sponsor, are you ready to get out of spreadsheets? Look with HubSpot crm, get realtime data at your fingertips so your teams stay in sync across the customer journey, build better content, generate more conversions, and get the context you need to create amazing experiences for your teams and your customers at scale. All from one powerful platform. It’s why more than 150,000 companies already use HubSpot’s CRM to run their businesses better. Plus, HubSpot’s user-friendly interface sets you up for success from day one so you can spend less time managing software and more time on what matters your customers. There’s no better time to get organized. Get started for free @hubspot.com today.

(08:37): And so what the typical sort of agency project based path looks like. You know, you put out free content as a marketer, you get a sales meeting as a business owner, you, you then ask for a proposal project gets worked on, or maybe a handful of projects get worked on, and then, you know, everybody starts over again. And, you know, I think the fractional CMO approach is more that the very first thing you do for 30, 60 days is that you’re going to actually develop strategy first. And, and what that’s going to mean is you’re going to really drill into the ideal client. Who is the ideal client you should be attracting, you know, what is the core difference that your business makes out there in the market? And it’s not what you sell , it’s the problems that you solve for your ideal customers. You know, what is your customer journey look like? What should it look like?

(09:23): What could it look like? What’s a, what’s a content or editorial content approach going to look like? What are the near term priorities that you need to be looking at? I mean, those stopping and taking the time to develop that allows you to then month by month, look at, look, here’s what we’re doing this quarter, the next quarter, the next quarter. Because we’re, we’re going to evolve our marketing. It’s going to grow. We’re not going to simply just throw, you know, another tactic at everything and see if it works. Some of these concepts, the, the idea of developing strategy, in fact, we have a, we have a set, I’ve done th a strategy as I’ve described it here, probably in the neighborhood of a thousand times with businesses. I have taught hundreds of agencies and consultants how to do our product, if you will, called Strategy First.

(10:12): It’s really how we start every engagement. And as far as I’m concerned, if you are buying marketing services, you should actually be engaging somebody who is going to demand that you do strategy first. And as a consultant agency, that ought to be the way that in my mind, that you lead with every engagement strategy has become more important, quite frankly, than ever. It is the way that you not only differentiate your business, it is the way that you actually charge a premium for what you do, because you are able to understand how to guide the perfect customer journey. You’ve heard me talk about things like the marketing hourglass for, you know, years, our, our approach to the customer journey. That that has seven stages, no, like trust, try by repeat and refer. Just understanding what you need to move people through those stages that are essentially marketing, sales, and service or success is how you build long-term growth, focusing intentionally, focusing on those stages.

(11:14): This is a tool that I’ve seen it change dramatically change businesses in the way they view marketing. But then secondly, this approach to marketing, uh, hiring a fractional CMO who is going to become a senior. They, they’re not, you’re not gonna pay them as such. They’re not going to be there on-premise every day, but you can view them as a senior strategic hire in your organization. Even if you have people doing various marketing tasks, is an absolute game changer for most of the businesses that, that really can address or engage or embrace this idea. So that’s all I had for today. I wanted to introduce this idea of fractional CMO. Whether you are a business owner who doesn’t understand why marketing’s not working the way it should , or you are a coach or a consultant who doesn’t understand, you know, why you’re always getting beat up on price and getting tired of just doing, you know, the tactics that are demanded of you lead with strategy and that will change completely change the relationship you have with your clients.

(12:16): So if you’re either one of those a business owner or somebody who is in marketing consulting world, and you want to see how this fractional CMO model could change your business, just visit duct tape marketing.com. You’ll see at the very top there, you’ll pick your flavor. I’m a business owner, or I’m an agency that wants to license this fractional CMO approach. We’d love to talk with either one of you. Have an amazing day, week, month, quarter whenever you’re listening to this, and thanks for tuning in to the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

(12:51): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co not.com. Co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

This Duct Tape Marketing Podcast episode is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals seeking the best education and inspiration to grow a business.

March 3, 2023/by exposure

A New Generation of AI: ChatGPT

A New Generation of AI: ChatGPT written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I’m doing a solo show, and I’m gonna talk about a trend that has gotten so high in the past few months, ChatGPT.

Key Takeaway:

Nowadays, we look for tools that let us be more productive and help us save an immense amount of time. AI is a really hot trend now and accessible to make some of our tasks easier. The newest trend in AI is ChatGPT, a tool that will change how we work and become smarter in how we collect useful information and data for our businesses in order to create smarter strategies. In this episode, I teach you how ChatGPT will be shaking up the way we do things and gain knowledge.

Topics I Cover:

[01:51] What is ChatGPT?
[03:38] Why use this tool?
[04:32] The process of using AI
[06:49] How to use AI to create Hubpages for your business
[08:43] Discover what your ideal customer needs or wants
[11:51] How to use ChatGPT to create online content

Resources I mention:

Send John an email

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

Learn more about the Agency Certification Intensive Training here

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay, and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals host Jason Bay, dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. In a recent episode called Quick Hacks to Personalize Your Outreach, he speaks with Ethan Parker about how to personalize your outreach in a more repeatable way. Something every single one of us has to do it. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:49): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and I’m gonna do another solo show. If you listen to my last show, I started off by saying I wanna talk about a trend. I guess today I’m gonna talk about a really hot trend . It’s one that you’re hearing a ton about and so much so that I’ve been talking about it for a couple years, but the hype level on this trend has gotten so high that I wanna come in and do what hopefully you appreciate from me. Dear listener, , I wanna calm down some of the hype and talk about the real ways in which you can use this. You’ve probably guessed by now I’m talking about ai, artificial intelligence, this new set of tools, it’s been around for quite a while. In fact, I would suggest that whether you know it or not, you’re using AI every day.

(01:34): If you ever use Google Maps and it gets you to around traffic jams and gets you to where you’re going at the fastest route possible at that given time, that is a pretty common use of AI in our everyday life. Frankly, you know, the series and those kind of tools that are that, that have been around on iPhones are using ai, but a new generation of AI has jumped to the forefront. Something called GPT, which was essentially just a way to programmatically, systematically teach some AI tools, everything , all the content that’s out there, consuming it on certain topics, you know, up to a certain date. That’s the easy, simple way, probably to, and so what has happened is these tools have gotten smarter because they have, they’re basically just processing lots of language, lots of data. They can take that now and say, oh, okay, here’s how to write something based on that.

(02:27): Data tools have gotten better. Let’s face it. There’s no question. I think that while there are some tools like Jasper and Write, Sonic Market Muse that have been around for a while, I think the real game changer came when OpenAI ChatGPT, I’m sure you’ve, if you’re not using it, I’m sure you’ve heard people talk about it because it has really opened up the white hot topic of ai and it’s, you know, when that type of thing happens, you get so much chatter out there that it’s really hard to kind of cut through. I remember, this is going way back, so hang on cuz I’m gonna do a grandpa thing, almost internet grandpa. Anyway, you know when Twitter came around finally, I don’t know what year it was, 2008, 2009, it is. It’s like, if you’re not on Twitter, you know, you’re just like not cool.

(03:19): And I think that’s kind of where we are with AI to some degree, but let me just tell you, it is an amazing tool, not because it, well, if you’re a student out there, maybe it’s writing your essays, but as marketers, you’re not u going to use this tool today to create all of your content. You’re gonna use this today as a tool to get smarter about your customers, to get smarter about the industry, to get smarter about your competition, to create plans, content, no question. And to do a lot of mundane tasks, to get ideas, to get research. So that’s the way that, that, I’m not saying that we won’t get there one day where you just push a button and it’s writing, you know, your webpages for you. But what it’s doing right now, think of it right now as a a, a time saving efficiency tool that’s gonna save you some brain cells , quite frankly, because there are things that maybe if you sat around for a while, you’d brainstorm and you’d come up with a list of, you know, FAQs or something in your industry, but this is just gonna give you 20 of ’em.

(04:20): You’re gonna go, oh yeah, five of those are good. I didn’t have to use any brain power to get to those. So that’s how I tell people to really start thinking about it. Now, I wanna spend a little time talking about the process of using ai. So if you use a tool, the, you know, the, probably the reason ChatGPT has become so popular is because the interface is so easy to understand. If you use a tool, you know, essentially what you’re doing is you’re putting in what’s called a prompt. You’re telling it to create something based on something that you give it. Now you can give it a simple keyword phrase and it won’t really know what to do with that, but it’ll probably still spit something out. Or you can give, you can go as detail and deep as you want to tell exactly the tone that you want to write it in.

(05:07): First person to use statistics. I mean, those are all basically part of your prompts. So like many things, garbage in, garbage out. So if you put in a great prompt, if you keep refining your prompt to get to what you want, you’re probably going to get a lot better output. I’m gonna talk before we’re done today about what I would say is the top 10 ways you ought to be using these tools pretty much every single days, just from a use standpoint. Again, a lot of times I will start with kind of global ideas. You know, I wanna, I wanna start brainstorming a big idea. I’ll let it drill down to subcategories. You know, when I’m working with a client for, to create ideas, we definitely wanna plug in what are their strengths. You know, for example, I work with remodeling contractors. Well, you know, one, a very big remodeling contractor we work with is specializes in design build or design remodeler, because they have the designers and architect on staff.

(06:02): So we wanna play to their strengths. So that’s gonna, we’re gonna definitely use that as a way to create a differentiator inside of tools like ChatGPT. All right, let me just spend the rest of our time together today giving you a list. I said 10, I’m, I’ll probably go more than that. I’m just going to throw out a list of the types of output that you should be getting out of ChatGPT or whatever tool you use. Again, shout out to Jasper is another great tool. Shout out to write Sonic, like the word write Sonic is a great tool, but you know, whatever tool you use, these are the types of things that, that you can do. It’s not just writing content. For example, something that we have specialized in the last decade or so is, you know, with our clients, we create something that are called HubPages.

(06:51): Blogs are totally out. Stop calling it a blog, stop putting blog in your, in your, uh, main navigation. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to read a blog. We want got good content, but we want it structured in a way we could find it. And frankly, the way most people see blogs is it’s kind of chronological content. You, you put in a blog post to today and you put in another one tomorrow and when you wrote yesterday is gone. And so what we do is we take all that great content and we structure it around the outline of a big hub topic. So again, for example, I use the remodeling contractor. If they remodel construction or uh, kitchens, you know, we might create the ultimate guide to remodeling your kitchen in whatever city that you’re in. That would be the starting point. And then we would actually use, you could use a tool.

(07:37): In fact, you could type that exact prompt in to ChatGPT and it will give you a outline. Here are all the major chunks. It’s, you know, planning, it’s budgeting, it’s design, it’s construction, it’s, you know, it’s choosing appliances. I mean, basically all the kind of subcategories that go into a kitchen, major kitchen remodel, and it creates the outline for you. It even suggests steps all the way down to, yeah, that would actually be a good blog post. Why remodel Your kitchen probably would come up in that outline. , you know, the benefits of it would probably come up in that outline and, and that would make a great blog topic. So what it does is it kind of gives you like, hey, here’s, you know, in instead of just like, what should we write on Monday? It gives you kind of the whole outline for like, Hey, we ought to be doing something in each of these categories for the next six months and we’ll create this page that, that will really be a great resource.

(08:30): Instead of just telling somebody, go read our blog and maybe you’ll find something I can, I, in fact, I’ve probably done shows on that topic. But if not just Google HubPages Duct Tape Marketing, you’ll get a very thorough description of what I’m talking about there. Another kind of fun use for this tool is wouldn’t it be great to know what your ideal customer lays awake in bed at night worrying about when it comes to making a purchase of whatever it is you sell ? Well, you can actually tell these tools something along the lines of, you know, create a list of the top 20 concerns that a homeowner might have when it comes to remodeling their kitchen. Use first person and be very dramatic in your answers. Oh, and as a bonus, go ahead and write the responses that a marketing company for this remodeling contractor might write.

(09:24): So that sounds like a lot that can all go in one prompt. And then you are going to get a, a list of course of not just concerns, but actually sad in the way that a homeowner might say, you know, to deal with noise and budget and on time and you know all the things that you should be then addressing in your marketing. Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel?

(10:23): Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification. So you can use these tools not just to produce content, but to actually produce strategy. In fact, another strategic use. Take all of your Google reviews, you can just copy ’em, paste them in there, and tell the tool to actually go through the above reviews that you just pasted in and create a sentiment analysis, which is just another way of saying what are some of the key themes, , that keep coming up positive and negative? We can take core messages right out of those themes now. All right, let’s go to another step. Once it gives you that output and says, here are the three themes that keep coming up the most, here are the three problems people keep mentioning the most.

(11:20): You could take those in a continuation, put those in and say, okay, create a core marketing message addressing these themes that keep coming up. And so all of a sudden now it’s gonna get creative with you. So think in terms of research for strategy to do things much, much faster. Maybe to give some insights that you don’t have today. You could take three of your competitors and put them in there. And the same thing. What are people say about them that’s positive? What did they say about them that’s negative? You can create how-to, cause it certainly shines at that. Tell it to write a 1000 word article describing the five benefits of doing X, Y, and Z, and it will produce something that’s not bad. I, in fact, I kind of use the sole, the formula of, you know, 20 60, 20, like you give it 20% of the great ideas, let it spit out 60% of the content, and then you actually polish it the final 20%.

(12:18): And you might actually get some decent content written that way. You can take that content that it writes and say, okay, now give me a two minute YouTube video script based on this content. Franka. You can do that with actually any content you’ve written. Let’s see, you have some amazing content on your website already that was professionally handwritten, bespoke, just for you. You could take it to these tools and say, give me 25 uh, tweets based on this content. Give me a two minute video script based on this content. Repurpose this content for a LinkedIn article. And you are gonna get all those things that you could probably create all on your own. In fact, you could do a great job creating those on your own, but you’ve now saved yourself, I don’t know, five hours maybe to actually have it. And there are things that, that, that don’t require brain power.

(13:10): In fact, they just require somebody who understands how to do it. And these tools understand how I how to do it. Great example of that, writing metadata. So, you know, the titles and descriptions, you’ve probably heard every SEO person in the world talk about how important that is as an on page ranking factor. But it’s also, if you’ve got 10 blog posts, it’s also a bit mind numbing to create these tools. Not only create it, they create it in the way that Google wants to see it. They create it certainly SEO optimized. So even if you know how to do that, if you don’t really know how to do that, this is a great aid. But even if you know how to create something like that, this is a tool that will just save you an immense amount of time. I, I can tell you that, you know, companies that produce articles today, and this won’t be 100%, but a lot of companies that produce articles today, a lot of companies that do SEO work, a lot of people that do podcast transcripts, I mean those are all going to be produced by AI if they’re not mostly being produced by AI today.

(14:09): Google loves question and answers. FAQs have always been great content. There are certain types of people that they just want to go and find the one question they have and get it answered. So every single one of your service pages, if you offer different services or you offer different products or solutions, should, should have a list of FAQs, not just for the company in general. Yeah, maybe you have one of those that talks about how you work or about your process. But every one of your products and services should have cues. But you know, they take time, like everything they take brain power to, to produce. You can use these tools to get a head start on an, on what questions people are asking and the answers that obviously you’re gonna want to sprinkle your own magic on those, those answers, but it just allows you to do things much more efficiently. Do things that you’re probably not getting to today either because of cost or because of just time and you actually get it done quickly and rolled out. In fact, you know, just the very start of of keyword research, you know, just putting in a couple terms and letting a tool, an AI tool give you, I mean there are tools out there that do this, but the AI tool, since you’re using it can give you a list of, you know, the keyword word phrases that people are searching for companies or businesses like yours.

(15:25): You can tell the, you know, I already mentioned the idea of social posts. It’s great at writing four specific Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. I mean, one of the things that’s sort of banding about social media is has a way to differentiate themselves. Each platform now has their own way they wanna see content and what kind of content and what style of content works and what shape the images are. And so using a tool like this to actually write for specific platforms, just take some of the work out of that. You can actually, let’s say you, you wanna make sure that you’ve got a marketing assistant that’s writing content for email newsletter every month for social posts, every month for blog posts every month. You can tell these tools, you can give it the key themes and say create a monthly editorial calendar. If you’re an agency, you can certainly do that for a client and it, and you may not execute on the thing for 12 months.

(16:16): But if you’re an agency or a coach or a consultant and you’re able to show in a proposal to a client, here’s what 12 months would look like, a typical sort of proposed 12 months editorial would look like. It’s a great sales tool. You know, again, like do you execute on every single thing that’s on there, you know, nine months from now, maybe not, but it actually is a great differentiator and is very efficient to produce. Speaking of efficiency, one of the things I’ve learned about advertising or ads, digital ads is you can sit around in a room and guess all you want and some people are probably better at it than others. Which ad, which headline, which picture, which uh, description, which call to action is actually going to be the best. But experience tells me that the only real data that you can rely on is data that you test.

(17:06): So testing your headlines, testing hundreds of variations for ads is how you really get to the winners. Obviously you’ve gotta track and you’ve gotta analyze and you’ve gotta have, you know, your audience variables, right? I mean, there’s lots of variables, but I do know that when it comes to creating lots of variations that you can test, these tools are super fast at doing that. And sometimes you just have to have a lot of volume in order to start testing. So let me ask you this. If you’ve listened to this far, ping me, just send me a note, john@ducttapemarketing.com. Say, I would love it if you would actually demo kind of a working session on, you know, a ChatGPT type of tool. Be happy to do that. So just write that, send me a note, leave me a review. We always love those.

(17:53): Tell other people to subscribe. , what else can I ask you to do? All right, lots to learn. Lots more to come on this. This is actually going to evolve immensely. There will be so many ways that people find to use these tools, but there are very many practical ways that you should be using them today and hopefully this helped sort some of those out for you. All right, take care and hopefully we’ll run into you listener one of these days out there on the road.

(18:21): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

This Duct Tape Marketing Podcast episode is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals seeking the best education and inspiration to grow a business.

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March 2, 2023/by exposure

Growing Your Business Quickly And Effectively Like A Weed

Growing Your Business Quickly And Effectively Like A Weed written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Stu Heinecke

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Stu Heinecke. Stu is a bestselling business author, marketer, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist. His first book, How to Get a Meeting with Anyone, introduced the concept of Contact Marketing and was named one of the top 64 sales books of all time. His latest release, How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed, lays out a complete model for explosive business growth, based on the strategies, attributes, and tools weeds use to grow, expand, dominate and defend their turf. He is a twice-nominated hall of fame marketer, Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center author-in-residence, and was named the “Father of Contact Marketing” by the American Marketing Association. He lives on a beautiful island in Puget Sound, Washington.

Key Takeaway:

Anyone can grow their business into something resilient and unstoppable — just like weeds do. In this episode, best-selling author, Stu Heinecke, shares his model for business growth by using the successful strategies that ordinary weeds use to spread and prosper in almost any situation. We dive into the weed-based attributes you can use to get the job done quickly and effectively and increase your market share, prominence, and customer base.

Questions I ask Stu Heinecke:

[1:46] Why did you want to use the analogy of a weed and what was your thought process behind it?
[3:14] Why is a weed different than a prize-winning flower?
[4:27] The big premise of using the weed metaphor is really to tap into what you’re calling a weed mindset — can you unpack that idea for us?
[5:32] What are the unfair advantages that you think adopting this weed mindset gives a business?
[7:39] Can you break down the weed model for us?
[14:17] How do you apply this model to taking that next step and getting to the next level with your business?
[17:41] How do you win a weed award?
[19:27] Where can people buy your book and learn more about your work?

More About Stu Heinecke:

His book — How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed: A Complete Strategy for Unstoppable Growth
StuHeinecke.com

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Duct Tape Transcript

(00:49): 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 best-selling business author, marketer and Wall Street Journal cartoonist. His first book, how to Get a Meeting With Anyone, introduce Concept of Contact Marketing, was named one of the top 64 sales books of All Time. We’re gonna talk about his latest book, how to Grow Your Business Like a Weed, which lays out a model for explosive business growth based on the strategies, attributes, and tools weeds used to grow and expand, dominate, and defend their turfs. So Stu, welcome to the show.

Stu Heinecke (01:32): Thank you so much. What a, what a pleasure. And as I’m listening to it, I’m thinking, what the hell is he talking ? What must this guy be talking about

John Jantsch (01:42): ? Well, I’m certain that the first question that many people have given our sort of negative view, typically negative view of weeds is like, wait a minute. You know, that’s like how to smell like a skunk, isn’t it? I mean, why ? You know, why do I wanna use the analogy of weeds? So help helps first go there.

Stu Heinecke (02:02): Sure. Well, you know, by the way, I think the first thing they think of is, you mean this kind of weed, the ki kind of weed you smoke? No, it’s not that kind. That’s not what we’re talking about. But yeah, I mean, well, we all know what it means to grow like a weed. So the fact is that all of this whole logic is already built into our experience. We know what it looks like, we know what it means to grow like a weed. We also know what it looks like because you see it every spring and actually not just through through the spring, but you see what they do all the way through the summer and you see that they, you know, while a lot of the plants have maybe a single season of growth, dandelions, for example, just keep doing it, they keep running that process over and over again so that they are always running these unfair advantages, which is kind of a big part of the whole strategy. Oh, weed strategy.

John Jantsch (02:48): You know, it’s funny, I, I really, I’m, I love all plants, I love all animals, I love trees . So, you know, a lot of times I kinda laugh and say, what weeds are just flowers with bad PR firms? I mean, he is like, what? I know why we call some things weeds, their nature of taking over and for whatever reason they don’t look like what we want our yard to look like or something. But, you know, who gets to call something a weed? I mean, why is a weed different than a prizewinning flower?

Stu Heinecke (03:16): Well, you know, I guess the fact is that, well, if you look at let’s the, it’s full of contradictions because if you look at, let’s say the state flower of California, it is a weed, you know, it’s the California poppy. So they are beautiful. I don’t think it’s really a necessarily a function of beauty, but just are they, are they doing things that we don’t want them to do? Are they showing up where they’re not invited? And so dandelions are probably the great ex example. Everyone experiences them. And you, we, you know, if you have lawns, you see them show up in your lawn. And by the way, if you see one, then you see, you look up and you see hundreds of them. So they’re really, they’re tough to deal with. They’re formidable. And so I guess wheat is probably just, I don’t know, just a, a nasty name for a plant. It’s a plant that some gardeners say it was just a plant outta place. But that’s true only to a certain point because there are some weeds that seem like they’ve come from another planet. They’re just incredibly aggressive and noxious and we don’t really want them around.

John Jantsch (04:16): Yeah. And they’ll take out native species and things like that that, you know, because of their ability to grow and spread. Talk a little bit, of course the, you know, the big premise of the book or a big premise of using the weed metaphor is really to tap into what you’re calling a weed mindset. So yeah, maybe unpack that idea for us.

Stu Heinecke (04:35): Sure. Well, you know, you would, if you think about weed having a mindset, well, first of all, to have a mindset, I guess you probably should have a brain and weeds don’t have brains, so how could that even be possible? But if you watch weeds at all, if you see what they do, if you see how they operate, then you can certainly, you can certainly see that there is some presence there that looks like a mindset because they’re aggressive and resilient and adaptive. And when you, when they’re mowed down, they go right back to where building right back up again, they don’t stop. And, and so they have really admirable qualities that I guess in our experience are expressed as mindset. So that’s where the mindset, the weed mindset comes from.

John Jantsch (05:17): So one of the things I’ve talked about a long time is that having a real point of differentiation, one that matters to the client, can be a way to almost make your, make competition irrelevant. You call it an unfair advantage. So, you know, what are the unfair advantages that, that you think this mi weed mindset or adopting this weed mindset gives a business?

Stu Heinecke (05:37): Well, I would say that for, if we’re, well, so the really, the weeds model goes beyond just mindset, but it’s leveraging a fierce mindset. Mindset and unfair advantages against collective scale and running it against a process. But I would say really, if you’re using any element of wheat strategy, you’re already cre creating unfair advantages for yourself. And when we’re looking at, let’s say the, let’s say the situation of many small businesses, the ones that have no unfair advantages are not gonna survive. So you have to have, right, and I guess we could call them a lot of other things though, certainly one is a differentiator. So, and one of the Wall Street Journal cartoonists that helps me when my cartoons show up in the journal, they reach an audience of a little over 2 million readers. That’s real. You know, no one’s, how is anyone gonna compete with that as a way to cause people to become aware of you and maybe, you know, say, well, you know what, I know about stew’s use of weeds cuz I use weeds to help sales teams break through.

(06:31): It’s like my day job. So when I get to have my my my, you know, my my cartoons show up like that, then it’s just an advantage. That is really tough to, to me. But an an advantage could be a, a location, it could be, it could be a partner that you have. We’re gonna start up a, a new, a new award based on the book called the Total Weed Award. And my new partner in this is the NASDAQ Entrepreneurial Center. That’s an unfair advantage. So it’s all sorts of, all manners of, of unfair advantages from ways to get a lot more, uh, a lot more Boer to help with getting exposure. Kind of like this is a seed pod strategy that we’re executing right here. You’re my seed pod, essentially I’m reaching your audience and you’re multiplying the, the reach of my seeds of these impressions that I get to create from the book and from interviews and talking about the book. And it goes all the way down through, through Thorn strategy and segmentation strategy and rosette and vying and soil and root strategies. All of these are levels of strategies that help us gain unfair advantages.

John Jantsch (07:37): So I think you kind of were just doing it there, but I’m gonna ask you to kind of back up and say, and hopefully you can do justice in a couple minutes. You know, the weed model itself, I think you were ticking off elements of it there, but maybe kind of put it together for us.

Stu Heinecke (07:52): Yeah, well, so there are eight levels of strategy in that weeds in the Weeds model, which is an acronym for weed inspired Enterprise Expansion of Domination Strategies. So that’s , that’s what it is, it’s an acronym, but what it really is standing for are eight levels of strategy. So the, and it really corresponds with the pieces of the, or elements of the weed plants themselves. So there’s seed strategy, which is analogous to anything that causes people to become aware of you and, and form the intent to transact with you. Hearing me on your podcast might hap that might cause people to say, I want to go buy the book or maybe I don’t, what else? I dunno, I’d like to have stu consult with me or something else. I don’t know. But, and seed pod strategy, seed pods, we see those in, for example, dandy lines, those geo geodesic domes of seeds are held up in the air. Those seeds are so magnificently mobile, I mean they just, they fly all over the place. They probe every possible opportunity to take route. So holding them up in the air like that actually gives them a greater chance to travel and spread. So, and then,

John Jantsch (08:53): Yeah, and get a couple, like get a couple five year olds and pull a few of those out and blow ’em too. That really makes ’em

Stu Heinecke (08:59): Explosive. That’s true. , that’s true. They love to, they look, they’re kind of seat buds and, but then Thorn strategy is interesting because that’s using all legal protections, for example, to protect your ip and really your turf, you’re really protecting your turf. And the weeds do that. And we certainly need to do that in business as well. But not all of us do that or are oriented in that way. And then there’s segmentation strategy, which might, we could probably talk the rest of the, our time together on segmentation strategy because that’s, that is the, when you go out and you find a weed in your yard, you might have found some of these that you’ll pull on it and all you get is you get a handful of stuff, but you didn’t get the plant, you certainly didn’t pull it up by the roots. And so that’s actually a defensive strategy.

(09:40): It’s there to prevent or let’s say mitigate loss. Well, in business we have the same things happening. We have disruptions that occur all the time. One of those that co that occurs every, was this a regular cycle of years is recessions. And a lot of us are still caught un unguarded for recessions. We just sort of dread when they show up and we don’t really have much of, a, much of a much of a strategy for dealing it. But what if you’re dealing with those things, there are ways to mitigate them and that’s, we’re gonna be doing that probably soon if the press is correct because they’re sort of beating the drum about recession again. And anyway, there are strategies to deal with that. And then rosette’s strategies, really, I put that into the model because I wanted rots are those that, well, in the example of dandelions, that radial fan of leaves, that spreads out across the lawn.

(10:31): If you come over it with a, it seems like they evolved just to duck the mowers. It’s not really where it came from. But what they’re really doing is they’re covering the ground and they are denying the critical resources that plants around them need. The grass around them needs to grow and really just to live so sunlight and water. And so how can we create those kinds of, it’s really about cultivating unfair advantages, looking for those and finding new ones that we can add. A lot of times we can add those by the partnerships and associations that we create. And that’s mine strategies. So borrowing the infrastructure of others to, to gain dominant access to the sort of warm sunshine of sales and, and all the things that we’re looking for, just sales and exposure and so forth. And then finally there’s root strategy and the plant is the seed of all life force, but in business it’s all of the, it’s where all of the value of the business is sort of stored and curated and maximized.

(11:25): So there are strategies for doing that. And then finally, soil strategy. So seeds are rather, yeah, well the weeds, they don’t get to, they don’t get to change the soil quality that they’re in. They just sort of, they just, wherever they land, they make a go of it. But we have the ability to change the substrate in which we grow our businesses. So the cultures within our businesses and with outside of our businesses, our communities and movements are really interesting. If we can grab of or start movements, those are amazing things to help change the sort of soil strategy or the conditions for us to grow in. So that’s the model op, that’s the weeds model for creating unfair advantages.

John Jantsch (12:04): And now word from our sponsor. Look, if you’re anything like me or every other entrepreneur out there, you’re 2023 is probably off to a rock and start. And as a leader it could be challenging to align your teams on a shared mission and goals for the new year. But with HubSpot’s crm, you can keep your marketing, sales, operations and service teams in sync on one powerful platform that grows with your business and leaves your competition in the dust capture leads, boost sales and engage customers all from one powerful platform. Tools like a unified contact record, help desk, automation and customizable reporting make it easy to unite your team around a single source of truth, which means you can spend less time managing your software and more time connecting with your customers. Learn how HubSpot can make your business grow better@hubspot.com. Yeah, it’s funny, you’ll be driving down the road and there’ll be, you know, a, a weed growing up, you know, between cracks in in pavement and and things like that. I think it really kind of points to the tenacious nature of ’em. But when I hear you talk about the soil, I’m think I’m thinking very much in terms of like creating community and creating value for clients that they want to go out and and refer you as the idea of soil, isn’t it?

Stu Heinecke (13:26): Yeah, absolutely. Yes, it’s all those, cuz all of those create conditions that are much more favorable for our growth.

John Jantsch (13:34): So how then do we take that model and if somebody goes through their business today and says, oh, I’m, you know, I can add this or I could add this, or I could be better at this one. And so we get maybe our weed strategy put together, you know, what’s whatever, what many people want to do then is really scale, grow that business beyond them or grow that business certainly from beyond where it is to today. So how do you apply this then to, to taking that next step, going the next level with the business?

Stu Heinecke (14:01): Well, I think in fact, one of the first things that we can do to grow our businesses, I we gotta be looking at them and making sure they’re viable. If there’s something that’s not viable about it, fix it. But assuming everything is viable and you’ve got a great concept, then one of the first things we can do to grow our business is to root out one-to-one leverage and then jump to either multi-channel or collective scale is for the ultimate, is collective scale. I should explain what that is though. Yeah, we’re sure from just from early childhood, we’re all taught to become self-reliant and sort of self-sufficient. I guess that sort of happens when we, I the first time we played musical chairs and you got left without a chair, you say, well wait a minute, where’s my chair? You know, I’m not gonna let that happen again.

(14:41): And I think that maybe it’s, maybe that’s the first time we get it’s get it instilled in our heads that we’re in a competitive world and you need to be proactive and you need to get things done. You need to be able to rely on yourself to get things done. Then it continues when we’re told then to we go to school and get good grades, study hard, then you’ll get into a great college and from there you’ll get a great job, maybe a really well paying job. But here’s the problem, the all of that is wonderful. We need to be self-reliant. And I would say that the entrepreneurs around us are probably some of the most self-reliant people there are, but, but we can’t do it alone. And that’s the big realization. We, and, and I think probably the more self-reliant and the mortal talented, the more easily you learn things, the harder it is for you to learn to let go and say, well, some of this stuff I’ve just gotta let go of this and that somebody who’s either more better rated toward it or better at it than I am, just let them do it for me so that I can move on to other things.

(15:38): And I would say one of the big telltale signs is if your labor is directly involved in your deliverables, you are at one-to-one leverage. And or, and let’s say if you discover that it’s really hard to take a vacation because the bus, the business stops because you’re not there, that’s one-to-one leverage and you need to root that out really quickly. So you do that I think by jumping to multi-channel leverage. And that really means just forming partnerships with, with people who could bring you to, to other, to new clients, let’s say, or open up new sales channels. I was inviting you to, to, to join a group that I started a group of authors and I guess in a way that’s multi-channel leverage because we get together, we formulate ideas, we bring things together and, and, and you know, that you, that’s the way we’ve gotta, we’ve gotta find ways to collaborate with people as much as possible. I guess that’s really the one of the big messages of we just, that the more we collaborate, the stronger we become.

John Jantsch (16:33): So with an example of that, say a consultant or coach who is doing a lot of that one-to-one work would be building a course or bringing, building a community or doing group work or having, as you said, strategic partners who are going to, you know, send business his or her way. I mean, is that at, at a very simple example what we’re talking about?

Stu Heinecke (16:53): Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think productizing what you do as a consultant mm-hmm. and turning that into a course is a great way to do that because once you’ve built it, and of course you’re promoting it, but other people could promote it. You can go on vacation, you can make money while you sleep. All those wonderful things that happen when you’re not right. When you’re not the factory and you shouldn’t be the factory. Yeah,

John Jantsch (17:13): Yeah. All right, so here’s the burning question, and I’m certain people are listening right now and on the edge of their seats. How do you win a weed award?

Stu Heinecke (17:22): , you have to be, well actually a total weed award , you have to be a

John Jantsch (17:28): Total, total award.

Stu Heinecke (17:29): Yeah. You have to be absolutely audacious in, in the way that you, that you approach your market and create unfair advantages and create scale. And you obviously you need to be an example to the rest of us, but an example of weed like growth.

John Jantsch (17:45): Yeah. So I’ve been, uh, doing interviews, you know, for years and over the last few years, one of the things I’ve seen is title explosion in the C-suite. You know, you’ve got your chief people officer, you’ve got your Chief revenue officer, and now I think you are probably going to introduce a Chief weed officer.

Stu Heinecke (18:03): I am, I’m proposing one more . That’s right. the Chief Weed officer. I don’t know if you, do you know Dan Walch?

John Jantsch (18:09): I do, yeah, I do know Dan. Yeah, he’s on the show before

Stu Heinecke (18:11): He, yeah, Dan is, he’s an amazing guy. He’s, he has the blog Edgy Conversations, I think he has a book out by the same name. And, and he’s a turnaround specialist. Anyway, I interviewed him for the book and he, he gave a quote, by the way, the book has all these, I’m so proud of these quotes at the beginning of the book because they were, when I looked to research for the book, there were no positive quotes about weeds. So everybody I was interviewing, I was asking them, okay, could you share some sort of like, now that we’ve talked about weeds as a positive, what thoughts come to mind? Yeah. And so Dan said, if you don’t have a Chief Weed Officer, you lose . I was his quote

John Jantsch (18:46): .

Stu Heinecke (18:47): Um, and yeah, I think that there will be Chief weed officers, I don’t know if they’ll be called that, maybe they’ll be called Chief Strategy officers or weed strategy officers, but there will be people who will be responsible for growth of the company through the execution of weed strategy that we can watch all around us.

John Jantsch (19:05): Yeah. Awesome. Well, Stu, I appreciate you taking time to Stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You wanna tell people where they can find out more about your work and obviously pick up a copy of the book?

Stu Heinecke (19:15): Sure. Well, you can buy the book anywhere, anywhere. Books are sold now it, it launches of course June 1st, but that actually, well, yeah. Can I start that over? Yeah, of course. Do it. Okay. Yeah, you can buy the book anywhere that books are sold, Amazon, of course, and Bo Barnes and Noble, bam and all that, perhaps at the airport soon. You can come and visit me at my author site, that’s stu hynek.com. And when you come there, then one of the things you might wanna do is join my weed, my my Weed bootcamp, sorry, my boot, my Weed Mindset bootcamp. And you can join that from, from my site as well. So yeah, and LinkedIn mention that, that you heard John and my and myself talking on the, on the Duct Tape Podcast. Duct Tape Marketing podcast. And I will be happy to connect with you there.

John Jantsch (20:02): Awesome. Well, we’ll have all those links in the show notes as well. And Stu, congrats on the new book and again, appreciate you taking the time out to, to share with our listeners and hopefully we’ll run into you again soon, one of these days out there on the road.

Stu Heinecke (20:15): I would love that, John. Thanks for having me on the show.

John Jantsch (20:18): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it@marketingassessment.co not.com. Co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

February 24, 2023/by exposure

What To Say To Get Your Way

What To Say To Get Your Way written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Jonah Berger

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Jonah Berger. Jonah is a Wharton School professor and internationally bestselling author of Contagious, Invisible Influence, and The Catalyst. He has a new book we’re going to talk about — Magic Words: What to Say to Get Your Way.

Key Takeaway:

Words are crucial to almost everything we do, including communicating, persuading, and connecting. In this episode, Jonah Berger joins me to discuss the science of language and how certain words have a more significant impact than others. You’ll learn practical tips on how to use those magic words to make a real difference.

Questions I ask Jonah Berger:

[1:14] Would you say there’s kind of a theme or a thread that’s run through your work?
[2:12] Would you go as far as saying that you are advising people to be scientifically intentional about the words they choose when they’re influencing?
[3:56] What was the research that you did like to compile the six types of words that can increase impact in every area of your life?
[7:21] At what point does the concept you’re talking about become a negative influence?
[9:05] What have you noticed in what the example you use in the book, Donald Trump, has done that has actually influenced people, you know, regardless of how you feel about it?
[15:58] What role does listening play in this universe?
[18:21] Can you unpack the language of beer?
[20:20] Where can people connect with you and learn more about your work?

More About Jonah Berger:

JonahBerger.com
Magic Words: What to Say to Get Your Way

Learn More About The Agency Intensive Certification:

Learn more

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals host Jason Bay, dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. In a recent episode called Quick Hacks to Personalize Your Outreach, he speaks with Ethan Parker about how to personalize your outreach in a more repeatable way. Something every single one of us has to do it. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jonah Berger. He is a Wharton school professor and internationally known, best-selling author of books like Contagious, invisible Influence, and The Catalyst. And we’re gonna talk about his latest book today, magic Words, what to Say To Get Your Way. So welcome back to the show Jonah.

Jonah Berger (01:13): Thanks so much for having me back.

John Jantsch (01:15): So before we get into your current book, w just looking at the, your titles there as I read them off, would you say there’s kind of a theme or a thread that’s run through your work

Jonah Berger (01:23): There? There is. I would certainly say it relates a lot to influence and think about how influence works, whether it’s seeing others through word of mouth, which is what Contagious was all about, influencing others through traditional social influence. We’re doing the same thing. We’re doing something different and how others motivate us or demotivate us using influence to drive change, which is very much behind the catalyst. But along the way I realized that a lot of what was behind influence was the language we’re using, right? When we’re sharing word of mouth, we’re not only trying to get people to talk about us, we’re trying to get them to say certain things. When we’re trying to change others, we’re not just trying to get them to change. Using broad strategies, certain particular words are quite impactful. And so for the last decade or so, a lot of the work I’ve been doing is involving natural language processing or insight from textual language data. And so it finally was to the point where I thought it was ready for a book on the topic.

John Jantsch (02:12): So, so would you go as far as saying that you are advising people to be, uh, let’s see, scientifically intentional about the words they choose when they’re influencing?

Jonah Berger (02:21): You know, I think about language a lot like math, right? You can break down interpersonal interactions into a series of things that are more and less likely to work and to drive action, right? And what’s so neat is, you know, the amazing amount of data now that we have out there on language, you know, you and I are having a conversation right now. It may end up being transcribed when we call customer service. It’s recorded when we post our opinions online, we leave them in our language, in digital form, we can mine all this data for insight and we can use a rich set of new computational tools to extract that insight. And so we’re really living in a time where we can learn a lot about what type of language increases

John Jantsch (02:58): Our impact. Yeah. You know, one thing, we do a lot of work with companies to help develop strategy and I find that a lot of comes out of what their customers are saying about them. Yes. Like here’s the value you really provide. So we’ve just been taking all their reviews, chucking it into ai and it’s saying, here’s the stuff that people really value about what you do. And I, I think that’s, you know, it’s pretty scary how fast we could process that amount of data now.

Jonah Berger (03:21): Yeah. But you can almost think about, we’re talking about a sort of social listening. You can almost think about people leaving breadcrumbs right behind about their opinions and attitudes. And sure, one person’s opinion or attitude may just be one person’s opinion, right? But if tan a hundred, a thousand, 10,000 people are saying the same things, you can learn a lot both about where your brand should be, what problems your customers are having, who your competitors are, and what strategies might be useful in, in the future. And so it’s amazing to see both how we can use language to influence others, but also how we can learn from the language people leave behind and be better marketers as a

John Jantsch (03:55): Result. So coming from your world of academia, I’m, I’d love if you share a little bit about the research that you actually did to compile. Think you, you have six types of words that can increase impact in every area of your life as you claim. So what, describe the research that went into Sure. Boiling that down.

Jonah Berger (04:14): Yeah, so let’s just take a step back. You talk about six key types of words and I often talk about them in a framework called the speak framework. And that’s S P E A with two C’s at the end rather than a K. I’m not clever enough to figure out how to make it have a K, but the S is for

John Jantsch (04:27): The language is the toughest letter in Scrabble. It really is

Jonah Berger (04:31): . That’s good to know. I will try to avoid it in future frameworks. But the S is for language that evokes similarity. The P is for the language that helps us pose questions. The E is for language of emotion. A is for language of agency and identity. The C’s are for concreteness and confidence. And lemme just give you one example. So often when we’re trying to get others to, to do something, we often use verbs. And what do I mean by that? Well, if we’re asking for help, we say, can you help me? Or if we were a nonprofit, for example, trying to get people to, to turn out and vote, we might say, can you go vote? Right? We use verbs to encourage people to take that desired action. But the study was done at Stanford University a number of years ago where they saw whether a small subtle shift in language and they actually two letters could increase the impact of a request.

(05:16): So rather than asking some students to help, for example, clean up a classroom, they asked some to help and they asked some to be a helper. Now helper is the word help with two letters on the end. Er, very small difference. Only two letters yet led to a 30% increase in the percentage of people who helped it. And you might say, well that’s students and a classroom. Does that really work in the real world? Well, some similar scientists wondering, could we use this to actually change the number of people that turn out to vote? So they sent out tens of thousands of mailers to voters. Some people they said, Hey, could you go vote? And others they say, well hey, would you be willing to be a voter and go vote. Now voter and vote are only one letter difference, but there it led to a 15% increase in turnout.

(05:59): The reason why is quite simple, right? People like actions, but they really wanna hold desirable identities. We all wanna see ourselves as smart and helpful and interesting in all those various things. But turning actions, verbs, helping voting into identities, being a helper is a way to encourage people to claim those desired identities. Right? Voting is fine, but if voting is a way to show I’m a voter, well now I’m more likely to do it. Similarly, losing is bad, but being a loser would be even worse, right? Cheating is bad, but being a cheater would be even worse. And so research shows that framing undesired actions as undesired identities is more likely to get people to avoid them. Cuz no one wants to be a loser. Right? And so a, a great way to encourage people to do something is not by using actions, but by turning those actions into a,

John Jantsch (06:45): It’s actually like you’re almost getting them to join the team.

Jonah Berger (06:48): Yeah. You’re a team. It’s a question of which team it is. Yes. But Right, right, right. It can be different teams. And the same thing is true even with talking about yourself or colleagues, right? You wanna make someone look good, don’t say they’re hardworking, say they’re a hard worker, . Now it seems more persistent, right? If you call someone a runner, it seems like they run more often than if you just said, well they run. And so calling someone a creator rather than they’re creative, calling someone an innovative rather than they’re innovative. All of these things make them seem more like persistent, true aspects of self and makes other people see them more favorable.

John Jantsch (07:21): I won’t be the first or the last person to go here on this, but you know, at what point does that become negative influence? Like somebody responds to being called a runner, but they don’t really like to run that much, but they just kind of like the association. So you can actually trick them , you know, by giving them the association.

Jonah Berger (07:41): Yeah. You know what’s challenging about influence and tools in general is the tools themselves are neither good nor bad. Yeah. Yeah. So take a hammer, right? A hammer’s not a good thing or a bad thing. It can be used for some great things. It can help us build buildings. It can also be used to hurt someone. A hammer itself is neutral. The way we use it is positive or negative. And so if you said, Hey, you know Jonah, can we use these tools to get people to turn out to vote and help them exercise more and encourage ’em to be better to the world around them? We’d say, this is fantastic, right? If you said, well it’s gonna encourage people to buy junk and hurt people and do bad things, we’d say, well let’s not use these tools. And so it’s not about the tools themselves, it’s really about how we use them.

John Jantsch (08:18): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process. It, it’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You could license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive. Look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create and can have ’em today. Check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s DTM world slash certification. This is a perfect segue to your name checking of Donald Trump in the book. But you use that example I think to illustrate that, you know, influence for good or bad depending upon, you know, where you stand on that. So, so talk a little bit about what you’ve noticed in what he has done that has actually influenced people, you know, regardless of how you feel about

Jonah Berger (09:25): It. Yeah. And so I don’t want to get into politics cuz some of your listeners may hate Donald Trump and some of them may love Donald Trump. Regardless of whether you like him or not. What you can agree with is he’s done an amazing job of motivating some set of people to action. Right? Even if you hate his policies and hate his ideas and hate him as a person, you can’t sit there and go, well he hasn’t had an effect. He’s clearly had an impact. And so even if you hate him, I think it would be a good idea to figure out why he has such an impact. And if you look at what he does, the same thing that startup founders and gurus and individuals we think are quite really good speakers often do, which is they exude confidence. They speak with a great deal of certainty, right?

(10:02): He doesn’t say something might happen, he doesn’t say this could work. He says, this will definitely happen, it will be amazing and everyone will love it. Right? He speaks with a great degree of certainty and compare that with most academics. And I’ll throw myself in the bucket here, right? We often say things like, well I, I think this is a good strategy, this might work. Or you know, as a consultant I often do this, right? I say, oh yeah, you know, I think this will be a good idea, this should work. Or you know, this is probably the best course of action. And what we’re doing there is two things. One, we’re sharing our opinions, but we’re also subtly undermining their impact. Because using hedges, the language I, you know, I think might, could possibly, all those are examples of hedges. Hedges undermine our impact cuz they make us seem less certain, right?

(10:45): They make observers think we’re less certain about what we’re saying and because of that they’re less likely to follow our advice. And so does that mean we should never hedge? No, they’re certainly cases where we should, but one don’t just hedge cuz it’s convenient and two, certain hedges are more impactful than others. So saying for example, it seems to me rather than it seems, suggests you’re willing to stand behind that opinion. Mm-hmm. . And it actually makes you seem relatively more confident rather than less and makes you relatively more persuasive compared to saying just it, it seems. And so I’m not saying pretend like everything is true all the time, but we need to be careful about the language you use and use it in a way that helps us rather

John Jantsch (11:23): Sense. Yeah. You know, one of the things to I think that comes from a book like this is that, you know, even if you don’t take all of this and run with it yourself, I think maybe it makes you a little more aware of how you’re being influenced. You know, if that makes sense. I know I had Robert Shield on the show author of, you know, one of the original books on Influence. Yeah. Called Influence. And he said he originally wrote that book because he saw a lot of really negative bad things happening to people because they were being influenced. He wanted them to understand yes. Why it was happening.

Jonah Berger (11:51): . Yeah. And I wanna be careful here, you know, I know the subtitle, this book is What to Say to Get Your Way. And so it may seem like an influence book. I don’t love the subtitle, I like that it rhymes. I like that it’s clear about one of the things you can do with language, an alternate title was, you know what to say to build social connection, persuade others, hold attention, be more creative, stick to your goals. And that was like this long and it just didn’t, it didn’t work. And so there’s certainly some things in the book about how to use language to, to increase your impact. There are also things about how to be more creative, right? Mm-hmm , rather than saying what, think about what you should do, think about what you could do. Switching one word makes you a better problem solver. There’s language of how to deepen social connection by asking the right types of questions. Follow ups rather than other types can make you have closer relationships with the people that you care about. And so this isn’t just an influence book, how do we get people to do what we want? It’s really how we can use language to increase our impact in all domains of life.

John Jantsch (12:46): You went over it very briefly. I wanna come back to that idea of asking questions because I find that one sort of intriguing when we think about magic words, we think about us telling people declaring things, right? Yeah. And this idea of being more impactful by asking the right questions I think is really interesting. I wonder if you’d go into that.

Jonah Berger (13:05): Yeah. You know, the more I’ve learned and studied questions, the more rich and and powerful they are. They do so many different things. We think about questions as ways to collect information, but they shape how others perceive us. They shape the type of information we collect, they shape a variety of outcomes. So take something as simple as asking for advice, right? Most of us think it’s a bad idea. Why? Well one, we don’t wanna bother someone, but two, we don’t wanna seem like we don’t know what we’re doing, right? Mm-hmm. , you know, if we ask a client for advice, we ask a boss for advice, they’ll think less of us because we assume that we should know the answer ourselves. That’s actually quite misguided intuition because what the research finds is people actually think you’re more competent, you’re smarter, you’re better when you ask for advice.

(13:48): And the reason why is very simple. People are egocentric. Everybody thinks they give great advice, right? They have useful things to say. And so they assume if people are asking them for their advice, well that person must be smart cuz they’re smart enough to ask me for what I think. And so advice giving makes us seem asking seems better rather than worse or something like follow up questions is also fascinating. Mm-hmm. too often we, we use questions at the beginning of a conversation or collect information, but we don’t always follow up. Someone says, oh, you know, I had a tough day, or That meeting was really difficult. We say something like, I’m sorry to hear that. But we could also say something like, oh, tell me more about why. Or you know, oh, what made it so difficult? Or that’s interesting, why did they react that way? Those type of questions not only show that we paid attention, but that we understood and we care enough to follow up and it makes people like us more as a result. And so questions don’t just allow us to collect information. They shape a variety of different aspects of our lives.

John Jantsch (14:44): And it’s funny, I have had numerous prospective clients over the years that I would just, they would say something and say, tell me more about that. Yeah, tell me more about that. Tell me more about that. In about 30 minutes of me doing that, they’re like, you’re brilliant .

Jonah Berger (14:58): I was like, yes. Oh yeah,

John Jantsch (14:59): , all I did was it’s

Jonah Berger (15:00): Also good. And what I love about that point though right? Is it’s easy to say just ask questions. And that’s actually, I don’t think what you were saying or what I’m saying. Yeah. It’s asking the right questions, right? Almost like a psychiatrist would. Right. Helping pull out. And that’s what great consultants and great leaders do. They pull out things by asking the right questions, by knowing when to ask questions, how to ask them the right one to ask. They really encourage people to, to figure out their own answers. It’s also powerful strategy with kids. Right? Too often I think when it reads kids’ book, we’re like, where you say here are the words in the books, rather than saying, what do you see? What do you think? Why does that cat character feel that way? Yeah. By asking them questions, we really help them be more involved in the journey and and learn more as

John Jantsch (15:41): Yeah. Plus you get some really interesting look into , a very creative mind .

Jonah Berger (15:49): Yes. Yeah. What do they see? They might see quite different things than

John Jantsch (15:52): You do. Quite different. Yes. I go guarantee you they haven’t been in that programmed yet. So, so this may seem counterintuitive to a book about word. What role does listening play in this universe?

Jonah Berger (16:03): That’s also a really interesting question. And uh, talk about that. Uh, based on an experience I had. So a few years ago I was, uh, coming back from a consulting assignment. I was on my way to the airport, I get a text that, you know, every traveler dreads saying my, my, my flight has been delayed and they’ve re-booked me. So I call customer service and you know, they very nicely re-booked me on a connecting flight the next day rather than a direct flight I’ve had. And obviously I’m quite frustrated just hoping to get home to the family and, you know, I get off this interaction with a barely better outcome, but quite frustrated the very nice Uber driver’s like, oh, you know, I heard you talking to customer service. I’m musing about how difficult it must be to have that job because people just are frustrated all day.

(16:42): He goes, oh, not really. You know, my daughter’s in customer service, she loves it and she’s so good at it that they now ask her to train other people. And so I’m sitting there going, what does she do that makes her so good at this and training others? And so we actually worked with a, a couple different companies, got hundreds of customer service calls and analyzed them to look at the language that makes ’em go better. Now obviously in a flight situation, we all want a, you know, a direct flight leaving right away. We all want them to find our bags. We, you know, we all want the good stuff, the problems to be solved, but could the language we use in those interactions matter? And what we found quite interestingly is that concrete language was really powerful. What do I mean by that? Rather than saying, oh, I can help you with that saying I can go find you a placement flight rather than saying, we’ll refund you soon, your money will be there tomorrow.

(17:26): Right. Using more specific concrete language increases customer satisfaction and it makes people more likely to buy from the brand in the future. Why? Because it makes people feel like that representative listened, right? Yeah. It’s so easy in these situations just to use kind of Swiss army language, right? I can help you with that. I can solve your problem cuz it works for any problem. Right? And as, as leaders, we often do the same thing. We say, oh, I I care about that, I’ll take care of that. But using concrete language shows that we listened, right? It shows that we paid attention, it shows that we heard them and as a result has a variety of positive downstream effects.

John Jantsch (18:00): Yeah. The one I hate is how is your Monday going? Yeah, right.

Jonah Berger (18:04): Well you sit on hold and they say, oh, they sit on hold and they’re like, your call is valuable to us. And you’re like, yeah, that’s why I’ve been on hold for 50 minutes because your call must, my call must be really valuable. And so, you know, the intentions are good. Yeah. They want a signal that they care, but actually doing the work requires understanding the language to, to get there. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:21): Let’s wrap up today on, um, one of my favorite topics, the language of beer. So, so, so unpack that one for

Jonah Berger (18:27): Us. Yeah. So someone did a really interesting study looking at how language changes over time and they did the study in the language of beer groups online. So imagine you write a review of a beer and then you come back next week and you write another review of a beer and they look at what happens over time and they find that sort of the new members that come into this community end up adopting the language for the most part of other members of that community. But how well they do in an enculturating sort of join the community predicts whether they’re gonna stick around or leave. And I think this is neat in, in beer, I don’t know a lot about beer, but you see people adopting the language of beer. Yeah. But subsequent work is found the same thing is true in an organizational setting.

(19:07): Yeah. So I can predict, they can predict whether you’re going to get promoted, whether you’re going to get fired or whether you’re even gonna choose to leave the company based on the language you use in your email. Right. When you join a company, your language is different from your peers, but eventually it sort of comes to meet your peers, right? It becomes more similar to other folks in the organization. If it never does, you end up being fired more likely to be fired. It suggests he didn’t really enculturate to the firm. Mm-hmm. . But once you’ve kind of gotten there, you’ve shown that you can be part of the group. It’s interesting, some people stay part of the group and some people’s language diverges and that divergence predicts whether they’re gonna stick around, right? Some people can learn to fit in, but they end up deciding to leave for greener pastures elsewhere and their language reveals it even if they didn’t tell people. Right. The fact that they’re no longer trying as much to fit in with their colleagues linguistically is a good predictor of whether they’re gonna leave.

John Jantsch (19:58): It’s really interesting, I read a book, recent book called, and that was really one of the conclusions that probably the biggest conclusion of that, that language was one of the biggest tools that were used for good or for evil, or certainly made somebody feel like they were more a part of a community. There were certain words and phrases Yeah. That were unique to them. So pretty fascinating. It’s

Jonah Berger (20:19): A great marker of identity. Yeah,

John Jantsch (20:20): No question. Well, so John, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. You wanna tell people where they can connect with you? I know they can find, uh, magic words pretty much anywhere you buy books. Yeah.

Jonah Berger (20:29): So first of all, thank you again for having me. Great to be back on. There’s a bunch of information about me, the book, but also a whole bunch of free resources. Uh, one pager with the framework, some guides to apply the ideas on my website, which is just jonah burger uh.com. And you can find me on social media at J one Burger on Twitter or on LinkedIn as

John Jantsch (20:46): Well. Awesome. Well, again, thanks for supp by and uh, hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Thanks so much for having me. Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it@ marketingassessment.co not.com dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals seeking the best education and inspiration to grow a business.

February 23, 2023/by exposure

The Dos And Don’ts Of Selling Your Business

The Dos And Don’ts Of Selling Your Business written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with David Barnett

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview David Barnett. David is an Author, Speaker, Educator, Consultant, and Business Buy/Sell Process Coach who works with people to help them prepare and sell their businesses privately or buy a business privately or via a business broker.

Questions I ask David Barnett:

[1:38] What are the steps someone needs to take to get their business ready to sell?
[3:57] If I’m that solo owner and I’ve been paying myself a nice salary and there’s maybe 10% profit at the end of it – is that considered cash flow or is that considered an expense of the business?
[6:34] Would you say that is very common for business owners to overvalue their business?
[8:56] What are some of the common ways that you’ve seen people structure deals?
[13:03] What do you think about the deals that are structured with certain targets and percentages?
[14:27] Are there some dos and don’ts when it comes to the transition once your business?
[15:47] Do you write clauses in for when new people come in and when people leave the business?
[18:54] What’s marketing look like for selling a business?
[20:48] Where can people learn more about you and your business?

More About David Barnett:

DavidBarnett.com
Subscribe to David’s YouTube channel

Learn More About The Agency Intensive Certification:

Learn more

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Duct Tape Transcript

(00:49): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is David Barnett. He’s an author, speaker, educator, consultant, business buy, sell process coach who works with people to help them prepare and sell their businesses privately or buy a business privately or via business broker. So we’re gonna talk about selling your business. So if you’re one of those business owners out there that you think maybe someday you wanna do that, listen in today. So welcome David. Hey, thanks for having me, John. So let’s just start with that, you know, business owner who has the notion, gosh, I think I wanna sell my business. What are really some of the steps when somebody comes to you maybe and says that, what are some of the steps you have to say, well, hang on a second, we need to do X, Y, and Z to get your business ready.

(01:38): Yeah, sure. So basically it’s a giant exercise in empathy and understanding the position of the buyer . Yeah. Just like every business thinks about their customers and what their customer wants, when you wanna sell your business, you are basically entering the same kind of world, but instead of your product or service, it’s your business. Now that is the item of objective inventory, if you will, that you’re trying to, you know, promote and sell to the buyer. And so what that feature is that makes somebody wanna buy the business is the cash flow that the business produces. And so people are gonna look at that cash flow and they’re going to, they’re gonna use all kinds of different methods and there’s many different ways to do this, but they’re gonna figure out what that cash flow is worth to them. That’s the very first thing. So the business produces, you know, $200,000 of earnings for its owner every year.

(02:28): That’s the cash flow, and they’ll pay some multiple upon that. And it’s all based on the perception of risk in the industry. So the multiple paid for the septic pumping company is gonna be a much higher multiple than the multiple paid for a restaurant. Mm-hmm. , just because the two industries have a different risk profile, you know, but restaurants, you know, more a discretionary type of service, you know, fewer barriers to entry, lots of competition, you know, new entrance into the market, that septic pumping company, you know, you’ve gotta invest a lot in equipment to get into that trade. You have licensing issues, there’s very little competition. People call you infrequently, but whether they need you and no one can remember quite what they paid three years ago, the last time they called you. So if you, the price is 10% higher, they may not even know.

(03:17): Right. And so a lot of those different features make the cash flow from the septic pumping business worth more to a buyer than the one from the restaurant. And that’s just a quick example that I think people can appreciate easily. The value is one thing, the next thing that the buyer’s gonna think about is, will this cash flow continue under my stewardship? And that’s when you open the Pandora’s box of getting into process, procedure, methodology is the, you know, everything in the business running through that owner is the owner, got his hands on, you know, every deal, every sale. That’s when you get into all that other, you know, e-myth stuff, you know, system. Yeah. So we could go, we could spend the rest of our time talking about valuation. Right. , but, uh, couple things I’m, I’m sure that a lot of people wanna know.

(04:04): So if I’m that solo owner and I’ve been paying myself a nice salary and there’s maybe 10% profit at the end of it, I mean, is that what I’ve been paying myself? I mean, is that considered cash flow or is that considered an expense of the business? So, that’s a great question. So small businesses, and I use, I don’t like the term small business because different groups have different ways of defining it. The government, for example, often defines small business by the number of employees. Banks are gonna have different sets of definitions. So I like the term main Street. Mm-hmm. , because a main street business creates the connotation in our head of that small mom and pop kind of business, maybe with a few employees. And so these businesses tend to sell for a function of seller’s discretionary earnings, which is the profit of the business and the owner’s salary.

(04:51): And the reason why they sell for this type of function is because most of the time the buyers of these businesses are going to similarly be looking for both an investment and a job at the same time. Mm-hmm. , because they’ll come into the business and take over the owner’s position and role, and they’ll start to manage the business. So they’re asking themselves, if I invest my money to buy this business, how much do I get? And they’re kind of mixing the value of their labor and the return on investment in the business together. When you get up to bigger businesses, people are more, uh, you know, they look at it in sort of a more formalized kind of business format. They’re gonna separate out that leader’s role, the salary, and they’re gonna say, you know, that’s a separate kind of expense for the leadership position, and they’re gonna look at EBITDA cash flow.

(05:37): But for that small business that you described, we’re looking at discretionary earnings. And there will be some people that will criticize this and say, you know, why would somebody buy a job? But the reality is that there are a lot of people out there that would like to buy a job because the job they have, they don’t like, or they don’t have a job, or there’s some barrier to entering the labor market that makes them unable to get a job that they might like to have. And so willing to make an investment to, to secure that income. That’s interesting you say that because there are some, you know, let’s say some small business owner’s been paying themselves a quarter million dollars. Well, somebody might look at that and say, well, I can find somebody just as talented as you to do that for a hundred thousand dollars.

(06:15): And so it’s like, I’m gonna actually discount, you know, that, you know, piece of it or you know, as part of the, the cashflow puzzle. So I’m sure you deal with a lot of bi, I’m certain of this because I own a business and I know I’m emotionally attached. You know, a lot of business owners certainly wanna sell their business. But also, would you say that it is very common for them to overvalue what, you know, the market is going to, you know, probably come to the table with when I find deals in the wild, and I describe in the wild being someone who’s not working with a business broker or anyone with a lot of experience of business valuations, it’s typical to find businesses overpriced by two to 300%. Yeah. So that’s two to three times what they’re really worth. And there’s all kinds of ways that people rationalize how they get to the number.

(07:02): They’ll hear things or they’ll read articles and they’ll misapply what they read. They might read that a small business might sell for 2.2 times discretionary earnings, and they’ll do that and then they’ll add on the value of their equipment and inventory and all this other kind of stuff. And, but that’s not how that methodology works, right? Yeah. And so again, it gets back to empathy because if you think about the buyer, you know, if you look at your business, look at the cash flow, look at the money you want, and then say, well, who is the buyer likely to be? Is it likely to be an individual person? And what kind of money would they have available? So maybe they would have some home equity they could pull out or some savings. They’re probably gonna put, you know, some kind of down payment, maybe let’s say 20%.

(07:47): Well, where are they gonna get the rest of the money and what’s that gonna cost them? What’s the debt service gonna be like? You can very quickly find out if there’s enough cash flow in your business to be able to satisfy that scenario. And you can’t put, you can’t have the buyer putting the last nickel of cash flow into debt service because we all know that there’s ups and downs to cash flow. And the only reason that the buyer wants to pay you for the business, what, why they’ll be willing to pay you an amount of money greater than the value of the business’s assets. Now, that’s what goodwill is. The reason people pay for goodwill is to avoid the danger and risk of a startup. Mm-hmm. that that initial period where you don’t make money. And so for somebody to get into business in the first place, there needs to be some kind of return for them.

(08:34): There needs to be a benefit, which means you’ve gotta leave some meat on the bone. There has to be some detectable amount of profit that this person is gonna enjoy beyond the value of the time they put in after they’ve made all the payments to the bank. They need to have some extra bit of profit there that’s going to make this whole endeavor worthwhile to them. Let’s talk about some of the deal structures you’ve seen. So, you know, it’s really common for somebody to, you know, you talked about will this business, can I operate this business without that owner? Well, it’s very common, isn’t it, for there to be a transition period or an earnout even of parts of, so talk about a little bit about some of the common ways that you’ve seen people structure deals that, you know, maybe get the B, maybe get the seller a little more money, but they have to, you know, put a little more effort in.

(09:23): Sure. So we’re gonna assume we’re talking about a good, successful, profitable business here because right, the rules change when you, when those conditions aren’t there. So in general, buyers are terrified that there’s something wrong with the books or the business or something’s not being disclosed to them, et cetera, et cetera. Right? So if you pay cash for a small business, and there are limits to the ability that a buyer has to do due diligence because certain information just isn’t available in a lot of small businesses. So they’re fearful. And if they’re fearful, what they will do is they will discount every possible negative outcome into their offer. So the way that a seller gets a reasonable price for their business is by putting a warranty on it. Mm-hmm. . And the way that you do this is by being willing to accept part of your money over time.

(10:12): So we, this is called a seller note or a vendor takeback, there’s different terms for it. If we want to take an example, you know, you’re gonna buy, sell your business for a hundred thousand dollars and you’re willing to accept, you know, a third of it or 25% of it over time and that seller note. So on closing day, you might get 75,000 in cash. And then there’s a note, just like a car note when you borrow to buy a car and it says you’re gonna pay this amount per month over this many years. But that note often has an offset clause. It’ll say something like this note subject to offset in the case of a material misrepresentation or an undiscovered or undeclared lien or liability. And so what that means is that if something should arise in the business after the handover that costs the buyer money because you didn’t fully disclose, or your books were incorrect, or you know, yeah, I’ve seen all kinds of things.

(11:05): Like a big customer told you they were gonna move their business someplace else, but you didn’t tell the buyer that would be a material misrepresentation. Right? Because most of these buyers are gonna use a disclosure document that’s gonna have a big open question saying, is there anything important you haven’t yet told me about this business . Right? So, so that would be something you would need to put in there. I know that customer X, Y, Z is going to leave, right? Mm-hmm. , it’s gonna materially affect the business. So what would then happen is the buyer can then offset their loss against that note and the seller won’t get the full amount. And so what it does though is it gives the buyer confidence that what the seller is showing them is accurate. And here’s the other big thing, John, is it aligns the interest of the buyer and the seller because now in order for the seller to collect all the money for the business, they need the buyer to be successful.

(11:52): Mm-hmm. , which means they need to choose a buyer who’s got the right capacity, capability, aptitude, et cetera, to be successful. So they’re going to be more choosy about who they do this with. And so they’re gonna pick someone who’s better and they’re gonna be more willing to advise coach and help that buyer to make sure they get off to a good start. Because that’s how they’re going to get paid, is through the buyer’s success. Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days, or your money back sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that’s going to allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel?

(12:49): Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create, and you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s DTM world slash certification. How about, and I’ve seen deals that, that are structured this way where they said, here’s, you know, here’s the totaled package. You know, here’s how much you get at closing. You have to agree to stay here for two, three years, whatever it is. Mm-hmm. and that, and by the way, if we hit this target and this target you get, you know, even you get a hundred percent of the deal or you get, you know, less if we don’t hit targets. Yeah. So, so what you’re describing is you’re describing a scenario where maybe the business is very dependent on the owner. Yeah. So the buyer, they can’t buy the business without, you know, sort of inden the seller to be part of the whole thing.

(13:39): Right. That, that you have to sign a term of service kind of mm-hmm. , you know, and, and so we see that a lot in businesses that are very driven by an individual professional service firms, you know, accounting practice. Yeah. Uh, architecture firm, marketing agency. When, when I sold my business brokerage, that was the kind of deal that we had where basically I was getting a percentage of all the files I had opened while I was the owner of the business from the buyer. And so they were buying this catalog of inventory of businesses I had for sale, but they knew j all of the different things that could happen to cause a business not to close. Right. And so my payment was contingent upon the deals actually closing. So, alright. Let’s say that, let’s say we’ve got that, you know, we’ve got the deal done, you know, we’ve signed all the things.

(14:34): I mean, are there some dos and don’ts when it comes to transition, you know, to make it very smooth? Or is it just kind of every deal’s different based on the relationship of the buyer seller? Yeah, I, it depends on the experience of the buyer, because if they are someone who comes from the industry, they’re gonna have a pretty good idea of what is going on in the business already. I always suggest that the seller is the one that should be creating the transition plan because they know the things that need to be transferred as far as knowledge from the buyer’s point of view. I always point out that, you know, that transition period is a great time to be bringing in some process and procedure and documentation into the business if it’s not there the way you like to see it. I’ve had examples before where buyers have, and this is easy now, the day of cell day and age of cell phones, making videos of the seller doing different things, explaining different things.

(15:28): And those videos can be referred to help the buyer, but then they also become part of the training catalog available for when the buyer wants to then hand that thing off to an employee to delegate. Right. You know, you’ve got that person who knows it really well, who sort of gave the training script and now it’s been recorded. Right. Stand on transition, you know, so we’ve got 10, 15 employees, they love David, David’s like, been a dad to that new person comes in and they’re like, I’m outta here. You know, that kind of materially changes the deal possibly. Do people write clauses in for that or is that just a Hey, you know, if it happens? Well it, it’s interesting you should say that because the call just before this one, I was talking about that with one of my clients who’s a buyer and he’s worried about that.

(16:13): And so there’s a few different ways to do to handle this. I mean, obviously we don’t own people, right? I mean, anyone can get sick, you know, fall in love with someone in the next city over or decide to quit. In my experience, most employees need their job. And so even though they may not be happy to hear the news that there’s been a changeover, most employees can’t afford to just up and quit. And so they’re going to give the new person a chance. They’re going to, they’re gonna see how it goes. Right? One of the, you know, the client that I was talking with earlier, he’s buying a business that is a very technically oriented business and there’s estimators and foreman and people that run a shop floor and things like this. And he identified four key people and he is like, if one of these four leaves, this is gonna be really bad.

(16:57): So here are some of the suggestions is that in the transition agreement with the seller, if one of those four people quits within the first year, the buyer has the ability to get the seller to come back and help hire and train someone new. So that’s something the seller can agree to and the seller is qualified to do the, and if sellers don’t want to do that, the only other thing you can come up with is, well then if one of these four people quits in the first year, I want some kind of offset against the note. Yeah. Because I could face some kind of financial hardship trying to replace them or trying to run the shop without them while I fiddle around trying to figure out how to do their job. And that’s gonna cost me money. So, you know, if I get to, if I knock 50 grand off what I owe you, then I should be just about square.

(17:47): And of course sellers don’t want that. Want to collect all their money. Sure. And so it’s, you know, that’s one of the best ways that, that I’ve come up with of how to do that. The understanding, the depth and the breadth of the labor market can be important. There was, uh, this time I was, had a business for sale. They were in the forestry products industry. They had a very high end computerized molding router. They could run miles of wood through that and make all these different kind of, you know, quarter round and window trims and all this kind of thing. And so the buyer asked the question, you know, who’s qualified to run this thing? And the owner said, you know what, this is the most sophisticated piece of machinery around here. There’s a community college that has a class every year of people that are in the millwright trade, and they come here on a co-op stint for a couple weeks to play with our machine.

(18:37): And so any of those people potentially could become a new operator. And of course the manufacturer has a whole training thing set up for that. And so that buyer then became satisfied that if the person left, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. There would be some way to, to keep operations going. So let’s talk about, we’re doing this out of order maybe a little bit, but you know, we’ve got their business ready and you think, yeah, we’ve got the price nailed and we think we know, you know, who we’re going after. You know, what’s marketing look like for, you know, a business to get? I mean, cuz theoretically you want the most buyers potentially, or most people that have a, maybe even a strategic reason to buy the business. So you’ve gotta get that word out. Is it, is it really any different than a traditional marketing campaign?

(19:20): Oh, it’s very different because you have to keep it secret. Ah. So the last thing you want is for people to find out the businesses for sale. Because if people find out your business is for sale, the business can be destroyed. Ah. And there’s all different stakeholders that are gonna worry and freak out potentially from employees to suppliers to customers, you know, the whole gamut. Your banker, you know, I’ve seen lots of bad things happen when word got out that a business was for sale. So we want to keep it secret. So this is why if you go onto one of the big marketplace websites where they advertise businesses for sale, you’re gonna find things like family friendly restaurant franchise in southwest Wisconsin. You know, it’s gonna be very broad, but what you should see is you should see the annual revenue number and the cash flow.

(20:06): Remember that the valuations based on the cash flow. So anyone who’s looking for a restaurant in Wisconsin is gonna see that ad and they’ll say, Hey, that might suit me. They reach out to the broker or the seller and then they’re probably gonna be asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Right. And it’s critical for buyers to understand that this sellers want to keep this confidential and so should you. Yeah. Right. Here’s why you’re gonna be valuable thing you’re trying to buy. Right, . Yeah. If you really hate your job or if you’re trying to grow your business by buying other businesses, this business could be the solution to your problem. The last thing you want to do is upset it in any way. Yeah. Because it won’t serve your needs ultimately. So. So David, as we wrap up, I appreciate you coming by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

(20:52): Tell, I’d invite you to tell people where they can learn more about what you’re up to and connect with you. Yeah, sure. So the easiest place to find me is at my blog site, David c barnett.com. And there’s links there to all the stuff I do about a YouTube channel and podcast. And I’ve written books and I have some online courses and stuff, all kinds of information on there. There’s over 500 videos that I’ve done. So if you wanna learn about buying or selling small and medium sized businesses, there’s all kinds of content there for you to learn. And I’d love for everyone to come and be my guest. Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a little time out of your day and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Thanks John.

(21:29): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to c reating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals seeking the best education and inspiration to grow a business.

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February 17, 2023/by exposure

Revolutionizing Design with AI: Exploring the World of Generative Design

Revolutionizing Design with AI: Exploring the World of Generative Design written by Kyndall Ramirez read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Russ Perry

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Russ Perry. Russ, the founder, and CEO of Design Pickle, is a seasoned creative leader, entrepreneur, author, and thought leader. As a former agency owner, Perry intimately understands the challenges associated with all aspects of creative work and has transformed the creative process through Design Pickle.

Key Takeaway:

AI is a hot topic right now and will continue to be. But what role does AI play in design? Russ Perry joins me to talk about how AI is totally shaking up the world of design. We dive into “generative design,” a fancy term for using computer programs to create really complex designs and make them better in certain ways (like cheaper, lighter, or more efficient).

Questions I ask Russ Perry:

[2:18] How do you define this idea of generative design?
[7:11] If someone wants to use AI in the design process in a commercial or corporate setting, what does that look like today?
[11:27] Does AI in design mean the cost of acquiring design should go down dramatically?
[14:56] How are you incorporating AI at Design Pickle?
[17:57] Do you see this tool set helping people reach their goals faster and being a better option?
[19:51] How has your job changed?
[22:53] Where can people connect with you and learn more about your work?

More About Russ Perry:

Design Pickle
Connect with Russ on LinkedIn

Learn More About The Agency Intensive Certification:

Learn more

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Duct Tape Transcript

(00:48): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Russ Perry. He’s the founder and c e o of Design Pickle. He’s a seasoned creative leader, entrepreneur, author, and I already said leader. So he’s also a thought leader and a creative leader. It’s amazing. Used to own an agency. He intimately understands the challenges associated with all aspects of creative work and has transformed the creative process through Design Pickle. So actually I get to say welcome back, Ross.

Russ Perry (01:20): Thank you. Is this my second or third time? I feel like I’ve, this is a good, I love being back

John Jantsch (01:25): . It might actually be a third time. So in, in your intro we kind of outlined it, but in, in past shows, if we’ll link to those past shows, so you can go see how Russ’s voice has changed. I don’t think we were doing videos, but No. Like Beard,

Russ Perry (01:38): Gray, more gray hair for sure. .

John Jantsch (01:41): But, uh, you know, essentially Design Pickle is a, you know, design platform that you can buy on a subscription basis. You could probably do a better job of explaining it than I just did, but we’ll get into the components of that. But today I specifically wanna focus on a very trendy topic, and design circles. And that’s ai. I mean, obviously AI’s been around for a while, but it seems like now that people have found this chat, G p T thing, you know, everything is ai, right? And everybody’s talking about ai, but of course, like all things in the creative space, you guys tend to refer to it not as like AI design, but generative design or generative creation. Mm-hmm. . So let’s start there, you know, how does that, how do you define that term if somebody comes to you and starts saying, are you guys using ai? How do you da? How do you dive into this idea of generative design?

Russ Perry (02:29): Yeah, well let me take it super high level cuz I assume there’s probably a few people who have no idea what we’re talking about. And I wanna make sure that, you know, even if you haven’t heard the trend, you can still catch up with us.

John Jantsch (02:40): Yeah. There’s a good chance that I have no idea what we’re talking about .

Russ Perry (02:43): So, so you’re right. You nailed it. This has actually been around a while. And basically what it is, computer algorithms that are trained on data sets that then learn how to create visuals. Words actually space, not a lot of people have been talking about, but it’s been, it’s, it’s been part of this space for a long time is 3D printing and actually like 3D modeling type work. There’s a lot of generative design, but effectively you create a, create an algorithm through a bunch of data, a bunch of rules, and then you give it a prompt and based off of this data and rules and outputs and visual words, whatever, then you train the model, you say, yes, this is what I was looking for, or No, this is way off. And it’s, it’s through neural networks and the way the technology is built, it gets smarter and it gets more accurate for receiving inputs and output and giving you an output that’s practical.

(03:33): So this is just really hit the mainstream, you know, the, the most, the biggest player right now that’s leading the way publicly. There’s a, like all the big tech companies are working on it, but the ones that you and I can access today is from open ai. And they have a visual tool called Dolly, and they have a copy content tool called Chat G p T. Right. And, and it’s mind blown. I mean really, like, there’s really nothing you can, no lighter way to describe it with you use these tools where you can go in, I mean, we could say, Hey, let’s have a, a photo of us writing a dragon through Niagara Falls and then all of a sudden we have a photo realistic photo of you and I writing a dragon through Niagara Falls. So it’s been super buzzy. Everyone’s really excited about it.

(04:12): But I think a lot of people aren’t having the conversation on like, well how does this actually, how do you use it? Right? How do you use it practically? What is the use case for it? And, and, and this was actually something that I’ve been thinking a lot about because there’s been so many evolutions in the creative process and the creation process over the last 30, 40 years from just the digitization of it, which was, um, ear, like a little before my career started. But it was, you know, when people were like, Hey, we can actually use computers to u to design. And then obviously tooling side has evolved with cloud tooling and how we distribute content and how we access content and be inspired and just the,

John Jantsch (04:53): The bandwidth and the size of storage , you know, that’s got so I mean all

Russ Perry (04:57): That. Yeah, exactly. And then, I mean, you can even be as basic as say like video, you know, like video wasn’t a thing 20 years ago. It, it wasn’t where it was at. So what we’re really witnessing right now is just another evolution in the creative process. And I wanna touch on this term generative design because it’s actually a term that is how design already works without computers . So if I design something for you, or Design Pickle creates something for you, John, you’re like, nah, I’m not, I’m not, so I’m not so hot, like I want something else. And what do you do? You provide feedback and then you get a better output and you go through this generative process. All that these tools are doing is doing that almost instantaneously and you can iterate almost instantaneously. So rather than having to wait for a designer to come back to you with the revisions, you can go through in this pretty quick.

(05:51): Um, so it’s kind of fun. And there’s all sorts. I mean, we can go in tons of directions, legality. Yeah. Tech, how it’s built, how it’s used. But I think a lot of people are actually hyping it up a little too much. It’s kind of just like, well hey, I used to draw with a pencil and now I have a computer that can automatically do what I need to do. And that’s kind of the same way I’m looking at this is like used to take me three or four days to get ideas and concepts. Now I can do it instantaneously. Think about how much of an advantage you have. Yeah, yeah. And time saved inside of these tools. And for me, any creative who’s not thinking about how to start using them into their workflows is similar to the creative who is like computers, nah. Like yeah. Don’t think this is gonna be a thing.

John Jantsch (06:37): . Well, yeah, I mean you could say cars, you know, aren’t gonna be a thing. Right? The internet, you know, that’s the stupid thing for, you know, these people, right? So we’ve seen this before , you know? Exactly. Yeah. And I’m 100% with you that, that I think a lot of people are looking futuristic beyond what the actual capabilities of AI are and maybe ever be. And they’re ringing their hands about that. Where is it today? Like if somebody came to you and said, you know, we want to use AI in the design process, you know, of doing X, Y, z. You know, how would you say, okay, it’s here to this point. You already mentioned a little bit the efficiencies and the speed, but what about like in commercial use? Corporate use, you know,

Russ Perry (07:18): Right.

John Jantsch (07:18): Where is it? Where does it sit?

Russ Perry (07:21): So like everything can change overnight, right? Like, so these tools, they have more advanced versions of them that we don’t have access to. So, you know, today, and this again tomorrow, I could be wrong, but today the commercial use is pretty minimal. And here’s a great analogy that I use. Like, I love cooking, I love food, I love cooking shows, I love reading cookbooks and stuff. There’s actually, you know, random, I just saw this super dark documentary on HR mockumentary, I mean on H B O called the menu, which is really funny and dark, kind of making fun of food culture. Anyway, random. But a chef has all the pieces in a kitchen and all the people that they need to make the meals. And right now that’s how I look at design, right? And creativity in general, whether it’s verbal, visual, video, you have the visual elements, the copy elements, you have the business case, like what is this?

(08:12): What is this intention? What do I need this to do? What’s the call to action? Is it a click? Is it an ad? You have the audience that you need to consider. And if you think about cooking, it’s similar, right? You have the food elements, you have the spices, you have the genre of the restaurant, why people are coming to you. You have the specific customers that all want different things. And, and right now what we’re seeing is we’re seeing the cost of the elements go to almost zero. So this would be like in a kitchen, all of a sudden my vegetables and my spices are immediate and instantaneous and cost me nothing. You still have to make the meal. And so that’s really what I see these tools doing. They’re creating the pieces and really raw like photos, images, graphics, content, copy. But that alone isn’t gonna accomplish a business’s goals at this stage.

(09:02): Most of the visual tools can’t lay out copy and content into their designs. It looks like some mutated, you know, there that you can’t say I wanna fly or that says this, which to a regular designer is very easy to do. But these tools can’t, cannot do that yet. And I’m, and I know they’ll get there. And so when you think about today, it’s like, wow, my elements of design are becoming more immediate. Yeah. And they’re becoming cheaper or free, which this just in turn speeds up your creative process. And what I’m bullish on, and this is goes for all AI and technology is humans will always exist to close the gap. So wherever the tool effectiveness stops, that’s where humans come in to then assemble the meal plate, the spices, you know, do the fancy things and get it out the door to the table.

(09:53): And so that’s the same with design. Design will require people to take these elements to understand the context which the technology can do to create the content in a way and guide it and use it in a way that’s like achieving the goal and speaking to the audience that we’re speaking to. And I think that’s exciting. Like I think for creatives it’s like, wow, I don’t have to spend half a day coming up with concepts. I can use these tools and learn how to use these tools well. And then now I can send immediate concepts to my clients and then they can pick and then I take the one they like and I fine tune it and do my special sauce. And I just like, for me, that seems awesome, right? Instead of growing your tomatoes over three months, you could just go get the tomatoes for free.

John Jantsch (10:41): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process. It’s going to allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s DTM world slash certification. Well, so in listening to that thread, does that mean that the price or what it will cost somebody to acquire design should go down dramatically?

Russ Perry (11:37): Yeah, and I, I think it, I think there’s two parts of design. I mean, food is an easier analogy to answer that question cuz you have hard costs of foods and things. But I even, I’ll continue that thread, A fine dining restaurant, what you’re really paying for is the experience you’re not paying for. Yeah. They might have some gold flakes on something and that added up some, you know, caviar on your, you know, oyster or whatever. But I think what will still maintain prices is the ability for people to go deeper, to do more, to provide a better quality product because they are able to spend more time on the parts that matter. And this could be research, this could be more in depth, you know, like details of how they execute these items. But the raw elements are gonna go down. Like if you’re a stock photography site right now, you’re just like freaking out. Yeah. And because cuz now people can generate pretty much anything they want on demand. Now are photographers going on gonna go out of business? I don’t think so. I think there’s gonna always be a premium for the skillsets that people have to create very hyper-specific things. Cuz these tools, one of their drawbacks is they’re not very repeatable. Right? Right. So if I want the same output over and over, they cannot do that. I can put the same prompt and it’s gonna gimme something different every time.

John Jantsch (13:01): Yeah. You’re not gonna get your family of illustrations, you know, that you’re gonna use in the exact same

Russ Perry (13:06): Style. Exactly. That’s on brand that matches your stuff. But that’s where the designers and the creatives come in, is they take the thing that you want and then they build it out on spec. On demand.

John Jantsch (13:16): Yeah. I personally, you know, I, I just play with it, but I personally have not been able to get very good images. I get great content , I’ve got that down. I cannot get images worth a darn, you know, they, they’ve like my, the face is always melting or something.

Russ Perry (13:30): . Yeah, yeah. Well and it is, and it’s similar to, you know, imagine for whatever reason I was watching the original 1984 Steve Jobs keynote where he launched the Mac and you look at the visual tools that were groundbreaking. Well, every artist in the crowd was like, this looks like crap. It’s so pixelated, it doesn’t actually work. I could do so much better and we’re gonna just see that again. You know? Yeah. And I think things will evolve. Yeah. Um, I do believe creatives will need to learn a new skillset. I think there’s going to be an AI prompt manager, you know, someone who understands the algorithms, understands how to put in the inputs, understands how to get into outputs. And you know, that might be its own design career. I don’t actually use tools of traditional design. I’m able to design using all of these algorithms and I’m an expert in that.

John Jantsch (14:19): That’s a really interesting point. I mean, because theoretically if you have a library of conventions of prompts, right? Mm-hmm. , you could produce a family of output.

Russ Perry (14:30): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. And how, you know that and how you know, to manipulate and how you understand the algorithms. A great example in our spaces would be like SEO optimization experts. You know, they, they don’t have the exact, you know, the formula down that Google and other algorithms are using, but they know if I do this, it gets this result. If I do this, it gets this result. These are the best practices. Yeah. So I think there’ll be a whole new career opening up around how these are managed and used.

John Jantsch (14:56): How is it, how are you incorporating it at Design Pickle, if you are at all?

Russ Perry (15:01): Yeah. So my product team will kill me if I make too many promises. But here’s what I know is true , what we’re really looking at first, and this is the fir, you know, we actually have AI and a lot of things in inside our technology that, that optimizes the system every day that clients don’t see.

John Jantsch (15:17): Yeah. But I tell people all the time, you know, Google Maps is basically ai, you knows like exactly, that’s ai. Okay, it’s

Russ Perry (15:24): There. But where we’re looking at first is how do we shorten the creative cycle, which really comes down to less revisions, right? Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm . Like if I’m able to understand what you’re wanting and deliver that straightaway and that’s pretty close, then you might have some fine tuning or a round of revision, but then you get your end product faster, that’s great for us because we can work on the next project That’s great for you. Cuz then you can get your items outside market, whatever you’re doing. So what we really believe is the first stop for these tools is gonna be for creatives and clients to better communicate visually and do it instantaneously. So if a client is creating a design brief, they can say, Hey, these are the, you know, use these tools to create example images, mockups, layouts. Mm-hmm. , you know, and they may be really off brand, they may not be exactly what they want. There may be some melted faces on there or whatever. But like the point is the creative can receive that and they’re now, instead of like 20% clear of what the designer wants, they’re like 70% clear. And from then they can start their design process. And vice versa, if a client’s unwilling or just not really wanting to spend time on their brief and send things in the creative can use these tools to quickly spin up ideas and send those to the client and get to that like

John Jantsch (16:41): Eliminate a bunch of ideas. Yeah, exactly. What’s the old joke in the design industry? It’s like keep, you know, keep sending me revisions, I’ll know it when I see it, right? I mean, it’s like now Yeah, I’ll know it when I see it. It’s like, well pick from these hundred and like tell me .

Russ Perry (16:55): Yeah. Yeah. And there is a bit of psychology in the design process. You know, I’m gonna let, I’m gonna let all of you out there listening who work with creatives. Sometimes creatives just are trying to maximize for what you, they think you’ll like, not necessarily what might be the best design in their opinion. And so, because it really is about, the creative process is very emotional, it’s about often you’re reflecting a brand someone cares a lot about. So if we’re able to guide the, the preference, you know, path faster as a creative, we can land on something that’s gonna be, that you’re gonna be happier with quicker, which means everyone wins. We get done faster. Now, is that good or bad? I don’t know. But I do know creatives do it every day. And I think for me it’s like, I think it’s not just about the design, it’s about the copy, it’s about the audience. It’s about the call to action. So there’s just so much more that goes into it that makes an effective design. And sometimes people just get so wrapped up in the visuals that if we can shorten that, then that’s helpful. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:57): Well, so I was gonna go there. Where will this tool set? Because it can crunch data, you know, differently as part of the design process. Do you see it actually saying, look, this is your best choice , you know? Yeah. In other words saying, you know this for the goals and the objectives of what this is supposed to do. This is your best option.

Russ Perry (18:17): So we’re seeing those tools. So those tools have existed actually as well. And I’m a little, I’m a little torn on these tools because think about this from a real logical example. If I have a data set of, let’s just say Instagram ads, right? And I’m evaluating all the highest click through rates on Instagram ads, and then I give that tool to the masses and I said, Hey, use this tool and it’s gonna tell you what designs are best. It’s gonna obviously start optimizing and recommending certain types of designs to everybody. Well, now what happens if everybody’s using these design recommendations and floods the market with the same thing, all of the sudden now what was innovative and driving action is now commonplace and it’s not catching eyeballs anymore. So I think these tools are, I don’t know, I haven’t seen any that are st we’ve tested them in the past.

(19:09): Um, but I do think these models kind of somewhat of an answer to your question, will start to be able to learn your style and start to be able to design for what your needs are. And intuitively that should be based off of what’s the best for your client, for your audiences and things like that. Yeah. Um, so I think it will, I think there will be optimization in the sense that it’s gonna be able, these algorithms and the tools will advance in a sense that they can start understanding more than just these broad data sets. They can start understanding audiences and intent products, you know, industries and create accordingly. So personalizing outside of that. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:50): Personalizing. Personalizing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I wanna finish up with one totally not related design question to, since we talked last. How has your job changed ?

Russ Perry (19:59): Yeah, . So my job has gotten so much cooler and harder since we’ve last chatted because I think the early days of Design Pickle we’re just like, Hey, let’s help people work with flat rate creatives. And that’s the core. A thousand bucks a month, you get designer working fear one or two hours a day every business day of the week. It’s unbeatable and it’s super solid. But we saw so many other problems in the creative process beyond finding the designer. How do you manage files? How do you collaborate, how do you integrate these AI tools and use them properly? Because it is, you know, good John, if you’re just sitting in the, in your office downloading assets to your desktop. So what, you still have to do things with them, you know? And so that’s where we’re starting to think, and I love this type of problem solving, but man, it boggles my mind sometimes because really like we’re trying to do what, there are single companies that are huge companies that are just doing file management. Mm-hmm. , there are big companies that are just doing revisions and collaboration. There’re single companies that are integrating AI tools into their and building them. And we’re trying to do it all. And we’re trying to create the most streamlined, efficient, scalable, creative process for our clients. So I definitely have a lot of sleepless nights, that’s for sure.

John Jantsch (21:10): . Well the, you know, the one element of course that would add a lot to anybody’s plate is just the size of team that your team has grown to.

Russ Perry (21:18): Yeah. Yeah. We’ll break a hundred people this year, full-time employees and, you know, six, 700 creatives and support teams around the world. So it’s a big group.

John Jantsch (21:27): Yeah. Just the comings and goings of that amount of people, you know, adds a whole nother level of complexity. Yeah. Do you feel there’s gonna be a point where the role will outgrow you? The company will outgrow you, your ability to keep up? Because you’re obviously, you know, making stuff up on the fly right now,

Russ Perry (21:42): ,

John Jantsch (21:43): I very positive and just actual practical way. I mean, that’s just a

Russ Perry (21:47): Real, so it already has like, like here’s the deal, John. It already has. But here’s what I’ve learned as we’ve grown, I just start to get narrow, more narrowly focused into my areas of expertise. And I hire really smart people who are much better around me. And so I love to be a leader. I love to be a visionary, and I think that will never outgrow me. I, my ideas are still too big for this company. Sometimes some of the things that I come up with, but of course I’m not running our p and l anymore. Yeah, of course. I’m not doing our forecasting. I’m not running our product roadmap meeting. So we have incredible team members there. But, you know, at the end of the day there is a, a strategy for Design Pickle to, to grow big and have a huge transaction and, you know, support the team members that we have who have a piece of the pie and everyone else who’s supported of us. So depends on, you know, if Adobe buys us, maybe I’ll keep on going with them. If it’s boring, outsourced company from, you know, some no name part of the world, then I may not wanna go forward with them anymore. .

John Jantsch (22:48): Well, Russ, I certainly appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by and update us here on the Duct Tech Marketing podcast. Do you wanna I do. Where do you want to invite people to check some stuff out?

Russ Perry (22:57): Yeah, so I, I want, I’ll answer that, but I have one more little quick words of wisdom for everybody. Check me out on LinkedIn just in slash Russ Perry. That’s where you can find me. This technology is gonna be, at some point, it’s gonna be like email, web protocol. Mm-hmm. , it’s gonna be very standardized and very universal or almost free. The technology, the way that people will use this technology is how do they customize it for their use cases? How do they customize it with their own data and how do they really use it in a specific way? So it’s the early days, but if anyone’s listening about this, you, no one’s gonna out chat, g p t chat, g p t so far ahead with tens of billions of dollars. But they’re opening that up in innovative ways for you to use it and customize it and build on it. So that’s what I would leave everyone with is this is gonna be so commonplace in 3, 4, 5 years. What will you then create on top of it and how will you leverage it? That’s what gets me excited.

John Jantsch (23:56): I, I would throw in, I think the next obvious sort of opportunity is to niche this down to industries. Yeah. Um, and make it, you know, for them, personalized for them. Because you can now very easily. And then I would say, you know, beyond that, it’s really the mass personalization is now possible.

Russ Perry (24:13): Absolutely.

John Jantsch (24:14): Everybody gets a different email, everybody gets a different webpage when they visit. I mean, that’s possible.

Russ Perry (24:19): Yeah. Yeah. Cool, John, well thanks for having me back. Let’s get it, let’s get it together again. Once everything changes, once again,

John Jantsch (24:26): . That’s right. We’ll have to explore it. So talking with Russ Perry, founder of Design Pickle. It’s just design pickle.com as I recall to check ’em out.

Russ Perry (24:34): All right. Take care.

John Jantsch (24:35): Yeah, take care. And hopefully we’ll run into you again soon. One of these days out there on the road

Russ Perry (24:40): Or in virtual AI environments, . Exactly.

John Jantsch (24:43): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it@ marketingassessment.co not.com. Co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.