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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the female startup club, hosted by Doone Roison, and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. If you're looking for a new podcast, the female startup club shares tips, tactics and strategies from the world's most successful female founders, entrepreneurs, and women in business to inspire you to take action and get what you want out of your career. One of my favorite episodes, who should be your first hire what's your funding plan, Dr. Lisa Cravin shares her top advice from building spotlight oral. Listen to the female startup club, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:49): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, my guest today's Steve Miller meetings and conventions magazines calls him the idea, man, for his unconventional edgy, no spin approach to marketing and branding. He's the author of the Amazon. Number one best seller UN copyable. How to create an unfair advantage over your competition. He speaks in, uh, his speaking and consulting clients have ranged from entrepreneurs to fortune 100 corporations, including Proctor and gamble, gray star, real estate, caterpillar, Boeing, airplane, Starbucks, Phillips electronics, and the prestigious Ted conference. Today. We're gonna talk about his latest book, stealing genius, the seven levels of adaptive innovation. So

Steve Miller (01:38): God, thank you for that. When having me on to talk about this, this is great. I, you know, I mean, I think I'm pretty sure no, this is how authors work, right. But my book went to number one, which was for a brief period of time. okay. You and I both on top of it again sure. That I knocked you off the best seller list for like two or three days, you know, then you immediately just jumped right back.

John Jantsch (02:07): Well, that is good to know. And then listeners won't won't know this, but this is our second attempt at this interview because we had a technology glitch. And so Steve was kind of kind enough to come back. There's I, and, and I, you know, if you were to listen to the other recording, just know that it would not be the exact same thing. I, I suspect because I never know what a questions I'm gonna ask. And I know Steve, has you

Steve Miller (02:29): No idea what Steve has no idea. I,

John Jantsch (02:34): So, so I do wanna start by unpacking the, just the ti the words or the, that you use in the title. So in two cases, the first one, stealing genius, maybe give us a definition of, of that

Steve Miller (02:45): Going well. This if, to try to unwrap it as quickly as possible that the Genesis of this is that too often, businesses doesn't matter what size business you could be, a, a single person, entrepreneur, you know, or, you know, a fortune 500 company too often. They get fall into the trap of paying too much attention to the competition, too much attention to the world within their world. Okay. And as, as such, you see an awful lot of dare. I say, incestuous behavior among companies, you know, they copy each other. They might try to improve upon somebody else's idea, but they kind, that's kind of how they come up with their future plans for, oh, we're just, we're gonna get better than the competition. We're gonna get better than the competition. Well, many years ago, my father, Ralph Miller and his cohort and crime bill Le of li jet, they got together and came up with this concept that they, they deemed the eight track tape player.

Steve Miller (03:54): Okay. So yes, my dad was part of that world. now the reason I bring that up is because while they were planning on building this product, ultimately after a lot of, of starts and stops and stuff like that in various locations, they ultimately ended up in Japan trying to build this product over there. Now this is back in the sixties. And when you think of the, when you think of made in Japan, back in the sixties, for the most part, it was kind, you know, they were known for those little umbrella straws, you know, things that would go into your drinks, you know, it would open and close. And they, and there was an American consultant who got in with Toyota and his name was w Edwards, ding and Deming was really the precursor or one of the guys that kind of got the total quality thing moving well.

Steve Miller (04:44): So, right. So my dad and bill Le knowing they had to build a quality product in Japan, they brought him in to be part of the team. So, and then my dad, who, now this, I don't wanna get into a discussion with my dad, but he decides that the way to spend quality time with his young teenage son is to drag me along and fly me to go to hang with these guys, right? Oh, that was a blast. And, but one of the things I remember was that DMing was very, this guy was really a pound the table, kind of a guy, right. When he got really, and, and the thing that he got really big about was benchmarking. Okay. Because that's essentially what we're talking about. When we say that, that we, as companies tend to look at our competition, we tend to look within our world.

Steve Miller (05:41): We are benchmarking is what we're doing. Okay. Now D ding called that intrinsic benchmarking where you were benchmarking in your industry, but he maintained that in order to think creatively, that was a mistake. You were not gonna come up with new ideas by just studying the competition. You were gonna come up with new ideas by going outside your world, outside of your natural, uh, environment and go study aliens. And he called it extrinsic benchmarking, and I call a call it stealing genius. So, so that's where, that's the Genesis of where it all came from. It all started hell of a long time ago.

John Jantsch (06:29): so, so, so let's, uh, unpack this other term then. So stealing genius really essentially comes down to looking for ideas that you can apply to your business, your industry in maybe unusual places. So then it's a matter of, and, and the book really then comes up with these seven levels of how to think about it, of adaptive innovation. So, so, and

Steve Miller (06:52): So an adaptive innovation is really a it's, it's really the how to do it of stealing genius is that you go out and, you know, like I say, I talk about seven different levels of, of Ben benchmarking, petty them. And you look for people, organizations, companies who are not part of your world. Right. And you go stuck. Geez, what are they really good at? Okay. And you look for the genius in those people, and then you ask yourself, okay, is that something I can actually steal? And that's where you, you're answering the question. Is that an innovative idea in my world that I can adapt? All right. Cause you know, I mean, you can go study, you know, companies and people in other industries and they'll have great ideas, but you'll never, you just won't be able to figure out a way to use them.

Steve Miller (07:41): So it has to be an innovative idea that you can adapt back into your industry. So, so to just say, you know, as just a simple example, like if you are in the high tech industry right now, then I would be telling you, go out and study the food industry, go out and study, you know, reader, industry, go detail, go out and study, you know, some AIAN high tech is using it, right? So at restaurants, you know, and ask yourself, is there something out there that we can steal and bring back to high tech? And nobody's UN copyable hard, nobody in high tech is approaching anything like that right now. And if you do it right, you can actually create a situation that, you know, from my previous book is, is hard to copy.

John Jantsch (08:25): And now let's hear from a sponsor, look, you've worked hard to grow your business and finding CRM software. You can trust to help grow it even more. It isn't easy, whether you're starting out or scaling up, HubSpot is here to help your business grow better with a CRM platform that helps put your customers first. And it's trusted by enterprises and entrepreneurs alike with easy to use marketing tools like drag and drop web page editors that require no custom code content strategy tools, where you can create topic clusters that automatically link supporting content back to your core pillar pages to ensure search engines can easily crawl your site and identify you as an expert on any given topic. HubSpot helps your business work smarter, not harder, learn how your business can grow [email protected] So, so one of the things that I think is probably difficult, I don't think anybody listening so far is like, oh, that's a dumb idea that, that, I mean, I think everybody pretty much agrees with yeah, that's, we've all seen that in our lives. Maybe you're in some business innovation where everybody was like, that's brilliant, but they really just brought it from somebody else who was doing it. So how do you advise people? I mean, I sure the first question a lot of people ask is, well, where do I look? You know, how do I get started?

Steve Miller (09:47): Well, you know, and with the Lev, the seven levels, you know, I try to take it from like the easiest way to start, you know, do I want to innovate right. And up to the most complicated and the easiest way to start is, first of all, is ask yourself just a question. Like, like, okay, what do I wanna, what I'll, I'll use an example of, uh, of, um, let you know, trade shows, for example, you know, one of the, one of the biggest issues with trade shows that the, the producers of trade shows, you know, they have to go out and they're finding exhibitors who are spending a lot of money to come in and buy these booth piles. Well, one of the biggest challenges for the build these booths and, and spend that money, and then they have to attract people to come to walk up and down the ERs is they want those people to walk every single aisle, right.

Steve Miller (10:35): Because they want them to get in, to go buy all those people who are spending money. So if you ask the question, how do we get people to walk the aisles? Right. Well, that's so let's say that's the project. That's, that's the question. So you ask, now the question you ask yourself is okay, who to that is not in the trade show. World is really good at forcing people walk and, and the number one example, the biggest example of all are supermarkets. Okay. It's the food industry, but supermarkets are brilliant. They are genius at forcing you to travel as many aisles as possible before they will let you out. okay. You get your cart. That's right. And, and like, just like the simple question, where is the milk in the supermarket? It's as far away from the front door as it possibly can be, because everybody's gonna, everybody's got milk on which means you have to go their list.

Steve Miller (11:44): Right? So, so they're gonna make you go as far away as possible. And they're, you know, up and down aisles or around the corner or some different stuff like that. So that is, and trade shows by default historically have always put the milk in the front of the front of the hall. When you go into a big trade show for the most part, the biggest exhibitors, the ones who are the destination ex they're, like anchor stores at a mall. Okay. They are making, they let you walk in and boom, you walk right in. Well, smart trade shows that, and I've consulted for a number of really big, you know, the top put the milk in the back of the hall hop shows in, in, in the country. You know, you finally get them to understand, no, you, you they're the milk, right. They're still gonna get every single person into their booth, but, but the people have to travel to get to them. So that's see, that's an example of it's where you start at that kind of level level one where you define, find the, define the objective, and then you go out and you ask yourself who is doing this. That is an alien in, in our world.

John Jantsch (12:54): Yeah. So I think that the key to that as I'm listening to you is it's not just a matter of going out and saying, oh, that's different. We could do that. It's really, I think first you have to look inward, you know, what is our industry doing? What does everybody do? What does common practice and really start then saying, how can we, you know, Zig let's go look for a Zig. That would make

Steve Miller (13:16): Sense. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've all heard. And I use the term map, the experience. I mean, you know, the customer journey, I mean, everything like that, but you know, those of us that are the consult, you know, we have these conversations with our clients and we talk about all these things. And then what I do is as we map the experience of the customer and go through all the touch points that they might have, then what I do is I, I, one by one, we go through the touch points. So we say, okay, is this something that we can change? You know, or do we have to just keep doing it the same way everybody else is doing it right now, if it's, you know, let's ask ourselves that question, you know, how do we make somebody travel? You know? And that might be the big question, but you do it with every, you know, every opportunity that you have, you look for a way to ask the question, is this something that we can do differently?

Steve Miller (14:05): You know, now, but even when you say, well, you know, you know, we, we could go look at companies and oh, look what they're doing. Well, that's actually one of the levels. Okay. But mm-hmm, before you get to, before you get to the point where you just go look at a company and say, gee, what are they really good at that, you know, you kind of wanna go through these other levels. So you get in your mind and you get yourself thinking in terms of what do they do, great that I can steal and use back in my

John Jantsch (14:31): Work. So one of the things that I, you know, a lot of pushback from companies, why they don't innovate is because will it work? Nobody else in our industry is doing it. You know, it's almost like a fear to try. So what are some of the ways that, that somebody can, this is probably two questions, but first know how something know that something's going to work is not gonna be a big risk. It's not gonna turn their customers off.

Steve Miller (14:55): Well, I think the first thing to ask yourself is do people buy from you because you're similar to the competition. and yeah.

John Jantsch (15:05): And yeah. And in fact, jump in, push back more. I would guess a lot of people would say, well, not necessarily because of that, but they have a certain expectation, you know, of how they're gonna be treated, say in

Steve Miller (15:17): The industry life. I know if their expectation for you is the same as for everybody else, you know, then, then we run into the problem and you, and I both know where this ends up, this ends up with, you know, first of all, everybody's product is quality. Everybody has high quality products today, everybody right. Says they have the best customer service on the planet. Everybody says that. Okay. Right. And if everybody has the best product and you know, and essentially in most industries there, it's, they're commoditizing now, you know, that's the way technology is working. And the second thing is, if everybody says they have the best customer service, well, the customer, no, you know, the customer never buys similarity. The customer always finds a difference. And if they can't find it between the product or the service, it comes down to price. And I I'm, I'm saying to people, if you wanna compete on price, then I'm not your consultant. no question about it.

John Jantsch (16:15): Yeah. Well, there'll always be somebody willing to go out of business faster.

Steve Miller (16:18): That's right. Chase that to the bottom. That's exactly right.

John Jantsch (16:21): do you have a couple examples of companies that you think are just routinely

Steve Miller (16:27): Good? Oh, well, you know, but the, and of course, yes, they they're, they're the obvious answers. Right. You know, the Disneys, you know, the, you know, the apples and, and groups like that. I mean, I love to look at companies that are not huge, that are doing things that are just wicked, you know, wicked different. I have a client who they build those, you know what, like if you go into a auto body shop or something, or a car auto shop and the technicians who are, and these guys are really good at what they do. Okay. And they own all of their own tools and they have those tools in a really nice toolbox. And it's usually like this huge toolbox standing up really tall and it's red. That's exactly right. Yeah. And, and one of my clients who is one of the suppliers to that, they, you know, he wanted to, you know, we were fighting over like, okay, how do we separate?

Steve Miller (17:26): How do we separate? You know? And you know, you try to get 'em to, oh, you can change color. But really what we're looking at is we're looking at what can we offer people that nobody else is gonna offer? And, you know, and he said, you know, they're all expensive. You know, at that level, they're very expensive. So how do you prove value to a customer? Cause I always say where value is clear, the decision is easy. And so he came up with this concept of, of not just a lifetime guarantee, but he came up with a, with a concept of a 55 year guarantee. And what he did with that was by, by taking a specific number like that, instead of saying lifetime, cuz lifetime is kind of one of those things, people, banner, you know, bandy about, you know, all, all over the place he said for, he says, if you call me within 55 years, I will give you a brand new, you know, you know, case, or I'll give you your money back.

Steve Miller (18:23): Okay. And then, and, but then he, you know, in the guarantee he also says, put, my kid is take, okay. We both know I'm not gonna be alive in 55 years. right. He's actually taking a long taking over the business. And so my kid will be, you know, taking care of the, so, so what he's doing is he's just essentially, you know, a lifetime guarantee and he' now spun it into language that people will remember. And that's what we're, that's what we gotta be cognizant of is that people do business, you know, with people, they like, they know they trust and they remember, okay. And that's the thing that it just for him, you know, it has separated from the crowd and man, and you know, and he is killing it.

John Jantsch (19:06): So Steve, tell me, tell people where they can find out more about obviously the book, a stealing genius or uneven.

Steve Miller (19:13): Well, you know, you can find out about him on Amazon,

John Jantsch (19:15): Find out more about your

Steve Miller (19:16): Work. You can absolutely do that. Yeah. But here's what here's, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna, I'm gonna give a gift to everybody because I love giving out books. And so what I'm gonna suggest is go to the website, be copyable dot. No, I'm sorry. Whoops. Back up. I started to say wrong, no stealing genius.com/do tape. Okay. And if you go to that site right now, here's what you do. You go buy stealing genius on Amazon. I don't care put, if you buy the Kindle, it doesn't bother me. Right. And then you go to that webpage and it asks you for your email address and you email address. And, and then I will follow up with you. And I will say, okay, now send me your mailing address. I will send you a free paperback copy of my book, UN copyable as my gift to you. And yes, I will even sign it because John, you and I both know how much more valuable that makes that book. Right. you know, don't personalize,

John Jantsch (20:20): Absolutely RA raises the price of my books, uh, by 50 cents on eBay when people are selling at least.

Steve Miller (20:27): Yes. Is it? Cause personalization actually drops the value of the book.

John Jantsch (20:32): That's right. That's right. No, no longer re well Steve, thanks again for, uh, taking the time, stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we will run into you again soon when

Steve Miller (20:41): Hope so. Can't wait. See your next book either. Thanks.

John Jantsch (20:43): Thanks Steve. 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 [email protected] 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.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the female startup club, hosted by Doone Roisin, and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. If you're looking for a new podcast, the female startup club shares tips, tactics and strategies from the world's most successful female founders, entrepreneurs, and women in business to inspire you to take action and get what you want out of your career. One of my favorite episodes who should be your first hire, what's your funding plan, Dr. Lisa Cravin shares her top advice from building spotlight oral. Listen to the female startup club, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:47): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jan and my guest today's Paul Roetzer. He's the founder and CEO of marketing AI Institute, founder of PR 2020 HubSpot's first partner, agency HubSpots and sponsor of this show. As many of you know, he's also the author of the marketing performance blueprint, the marketing agency blueprint and creator of the marketing AI conference Macon. So guess what, we're gonna talk about AI, but he's also got a new book coming out co-author of marketing, artificial intelligence, AI marketing in the future of business. So Paul, welcome back.

Paul Roetzer (01:27): It's so good to be back together, John. It's good to see you.

John Jantsch (01:30): So, so we've been, we were laughing before we started the show. We've been talking about AI and now maybe for five or seven years, but I still think there's a lot of, like, what is that, you know, is that Hollywood? Is that, is that sci-fi, you know, how do you, when somebody just asks you, what is AI? Is there a simple answer?

Paul Roetzer (01:44): The definition I always give is the science of making machine smart and actually comes from de SaaS. Who's the co-founder and CEO of Google deep mind. And what I love about the simplicity of the definition is the software we use every day, as marketers, as consumers, the hardware we use the phones like your iPhone, they're incapable of doing things on their own, unless they're told how to do them. So machines being software and hardware with AI, those machines get human bilities to understand language, to generate language, to see, you know, with computer vision. And so that's really what they're doing, and they're able to learn from data and get smarter on their own. And so we'll talk, I'm sure we'll talk about some use case, some examples. Yeah, but that's the key is rather than just software, that's all human rules based AI enables vendors to build software that learns and evolves and makes predictions and recommendations to you to augment what you're capable of as a marketer.

John Jantsch (02:44): So let's start with the dystopian view, sure, uh, of, of, you know, which I'm sure you hear all the time, right. That, you know, it's taking over, there's no thinking there's no feeling, you know, like, you know, content marketers are, you know, like, yeah. I just put in a couple keywords and boom, I've got great content. You know, I don't have to hire anybody anymore. Uh, where does that view intersect with reality?

Paul Roetzer (03:08): AI's not that smart. So I think the key is there's definitely this nature one, you think it's abstract and it's, it is just the sci-fi thing. You're not actually using it. Two is it can seem overwhelming and highly technical. The reality is that AI isn't that advanced today. What, what happens is it's trying to do these very specific tasks at, at a very high level. And it's normally applied to things that are repetitive and data driven for us as marketers, things that we don't want to have to do a bunch of times anyway. Yeah. So you kind of look at these things in your daily life where it's repetitive, there's a defined process for it. That's a lot of times where AI being applied, it's augmenting what you do. It's intelligently automating pieces of it is not taking your job away. It's not replacing you as a writer. It's just there to be an it's easiest to think of it as an assistant. And so that's in the book we go into like these different levels of intelligent automation, and we're not going from zero to fully autonomous. We're just trying to get that little bit of support from the machine.

John Jantsch (04:05): Yeah. And I think some people can make a case for it actually frees you to do the creative work. And I think the argument probably 25 years ago when robots came around was, oh, it's taken, you know, these people's jobs, but like, do you really wanna put that bolt in 3 million times? , you know, over the next two weeks, is that a really satisfying job? Right. So that's a lot of what you're saying is it takes the repetitive stuff out. And, and so clearly if, if you're counting on having a job, that's based on repetition, I mean, you're probably, you probably are looking about at being replaced, aren't you?

Paul Roetzer (04:36): Yeah. I mean, the way I explain it is if your job is simply to AB test landing pages that is fundamentally all you do 40 hours a week, then yes, it will replace you like you. That is not gonna be something humans need to do. If you are looking at data and trying to figure out audience targeting for media buying AI is really good at that. It's really good at finding patterns and like being able to predict, you know, behaviors and outcomes. So it's just tasks. But if your entire being is doing those repetitive tasks, then yes, it would be a good time to start looking for other areas where there's uniquely human traits needed, like strategy, creativity, empathy, like those relationship building, those are machines not doing those things really. Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:17): So, so how, how are you talking to marketers specifically about the impact of this in their jobs? We, you kind of almost touched on it right there a little bit. Yeah. But how are, you know, how does it really, how will it, uh, impact the marketing

Paul Roetzer (05:31): Profession? So at a high level, we talk about this intelligent automation. We're under the working assumption that within three to five years, at least 80% of what marketers do will be intelligently automated to some degree, meaning tools, software you're using is going to have AI in them, but that's not unlike your consumer life. So you don't think about AI all the all day long, but every time you use Netflix and it's recommending shows and movies, Spotify learns, you know, your music and predict shows, Google maps routing you from a to B in the, in the fastest way. Anytime you talk to a, a virtual assistant like a Google or Siri, all of that is AI. And so your life is made more convenient, more personalized by AI. And that's, what's gonna happen in business, whether you're in advertising or email or communications or SEO, AI is going to be infused into the software and make it smarter. And in many cases, you're not even gonna notice it or even care. Yeah. But we're not there yet. And so what we tell marketers is you can get there now though, you can go find smarter tools to do what you do. It's not about buying AI. It's about buying smarter tech. You already buy this tech find tools that are getting better and making you better at your job.

John Jantsch (06:43): Yeah. And I think one of the, well, let me back up a little bit, cuz you, you alluded to a point I was gonna ask about is I think the AI's been with us a lot longer than people realize and it's in everyday stuff that we, you know, we don't realize. I, I wrote my last book exclusively in, uh, Google, uh, docs at somewhere along two, three years ago, you know, they started adding AI to Google docs to where it's actually, I could start writing a sentence and go, oh, I wasn't gonna say that. But that's pretty good. I mean, it would actually, you know, and I don't know if it's purely learning one to one with me or if it's just saying, oh, people commonly finish sentences with this word that start that way. So, so talk a little bit about some of the really everyday uses you started talking a little bit about 'em, but going to some examples of everyday uses that people are experiencing AI and, and maybe don't know it.

Paul Roetzer (07:35): Yeah. So the, we talk at a high level categorically and there's, I think it's chapter two of the book is, is broken into language, vision and prediction. And so it talks like these parent categories of different applications of AI. So language in particular is of interest to all marketers, right? And that is mainly around the understanding and generation of language. And so that's like what you're talking about Grammarly is a great example of AI embedded within a tool that many people use every day. Um, so zoom is another, like they use outer.ai to transcribe audio, right? So speech to text, text, text to speech is another one language generation with any, whether it's video or audio or written. So like all these Twitter out there, like copy.ai and Jasper and hyper write. And you know, you hear all these names, you probably see the ads for, and what they're doing is using a, the tool called G PT three or an underlining platform called G P T three, which is made by open AI.

Paul Roetzer (08:27): And that is a language generation it's using, what's called a large language model to generate language in all these different disciplines. And so you can go in and give it a sample website and say, okay, write me ad copy, or write me social media shares based on this. And it's doing it now. You're not gonna grab it and hit publish. But as a social media pro or an ad person or a blog post writer, you're going to take these almost as drafts and improve on them and then publish them. And so I think again, anywhere where you write, you're seeing it all over and that's gonna continue to become a part of your life. And then again, you just go disciplined by discipline, whether again, your communications, SEO, and just find ways where there's repetitive processes, predictions being made or language being read or generated.

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John Jantsch (09:57): So if somebody came to you and said, yeah, we we're an agency digital agency and we know about AI, but we haven't really been aggressively or intentionally trying to bring it to our clients. Where would you say, well, here's the starting point. Here are the five things that every digital agency should be diving into that it's gonna give them AI or it's at least gonna give 'em some advantages using AI.

Paul Roetzer (10:18): Yeah. So there's two ways we teach it. It's called the piloting. AI is that there's a chapter dedicated to this, too. What I tell people is take a spreadsheet, make a list of all the activities, the tasks that you do individually, or as a team each week, each month make a comment that says how many hours a month you spend doing it, uh, what software you use for it and how much that software costs per month. So you're basically getting a cost structure for each activity and then just apply of simple rating and says, well, how valuable would it be to intelligently automate this task? And so let's say you're a content strategist and you spend 10 hours a month on the editorial calendar, figuring out what to write, looking at past posts, trying to predict what work, what you should republish, what you should create new.

Paul Roetzer (10:58): Then that might be an area where you could say, wow, if AI could help me do this and cut it 80% of the time spent on it and be better at predicting, what's gonna work. That would be huge for me as a content strategist. There you go, AI for content strategy, go Google it, find three tools that do it, go demo those tools. So I always tell people is start where you're already spending time, where you can make a business case for the value it could create for you. And you're gonna know real quickly whether it's working or not. Cuz at the end of the day, AI is just designed to make you better at your job and make it cost less to do the job. And if it's not doing that in improving performance, then it's a waste of time.

John Jantsch (11:38): Yeah. I think that's a really great point too, because I think a lot of people look at this and say, oh, we can do new things and maybe start by by just getting efficiencies. Yes. I mean you could probably generate a tremendous amount of profit to the bottom line by just get, I mean, everybody that, by getting more efficient. So if you looked at these as efficiency tools alone, that would be a great start, wouldn't

Paul Roetzer (11:58): It? Yeah. And I know of companies that have, I have friends whose jobs and companies is to try and reduce the need for 15 new headcount down to five. Yeah. And they're basically just looking at not, they're not their job isn't to fire people, but it is to say, as we scale, how do we do it without having to hire more? And so they're looking at inefficiencies and work productivity and they're finding things that AI can do to at least some degree without the need for human involvement or minimal human involvement,

John Jantsch (12:25): Who are some companies that you think are doing this really well. I mean that are maybe kind of ahead of the curve and, and it might just be in their own operations or in their own marketing.

Paul Roetzer (12:33): Yeah. Most of as big enterprises, they don't talk about it much. But when you look at retail eCommerce or huge ones, just go to the top 10 eCommerce companies, top 10 retailers, um, CPG financial services. Those are healthcare. What you look for is companies and industries that have a lot of data and a, and a huge need for personalization. And there's a really good chance they've been doing this stuff for five to 10 years, not if not in marketing and sales and service across other areas of the company. But I mean, just like Mike, my co-author just put one on LinkedIn last week about like 15 retailers that are doing awesome things with AI. And it was the obvious ones. Walmart Starbucks McDonald's bought, bought AI com like they're buying AI companies, they bought one to customize the drive through screen for you based on the weather data and based on behavioral data of like what people are ordering that day. So it actually tailors what you're seeing. So I mean, it's just, retail was a huge one that, yeah, there's just tons on.

John Jantsch (13:29): So that's why that pumpkin spice shows up that day. Huh?

Paul Roetzer (13:32): Yeah. Well if it's in the middle of the summer. Yes. Because otherwise it just shows up in the winter, but yeah,

John Jantsch (13:38): That, yeah. So, so taking this back to non-enterprise yeah. Level companies, uh, which a great deal of our listeners are what's the, what's been the stumbling block. What's been the hard part, you know, of doing this.

Paul Roetzer (13:53): So we asked that question in our state of the industry survey we did with drift, like what are the obstacles to adoption? Number one far and away with 70% of people said, lack of education and training. They just didn't know where to go to get the information. And then in the 40 percentiles you had like lack of awareness, lack of team, right? Like talent, lack of strategy, lack of vision. My base assumption is the vast majority of marketers still have no idea what it is. So they can't explain it to you. They, if like, let's say you're at a, you know, a 30 person agency and you listen to this and you're like, this is kind of cool. And you're gonna walk into the CEO's office and say, I think we should start doing more AI. And the CEO says, why you're gonna say, I don't know, just, it sounds like we're just really cool. Like

John Jantsch (14:32): Everybody else is.

Paul Roetzer (14:33): Yeah. If they really say, well, what would be the business case for it? What exactly is it like most marketers can't give a basic definition and they don't know the main use cases for it. So I think it, it is just a lack of understanding across the industry. That's slowing adoption rates down,

John Jantsch (14:47): You know, I loved one of the filters. I think that you used for this, you know, when a lot of new social media platforms would come around and you know, clients would be saying, should we be doing that? You know, should we get on Twitter, this, you know, circa 2007 or something like that. Um, and, and I always did use the filter. Uh, would this help you serve your existing clients better? You know, if you make a case for that, then go all in and we'll get crazy with it. But, and I think that's probably a great starting place for looking at AI. Isn't it?

Paul Roetzer (15:15): Yeah, no doubt. I, I actually published something recently that wasn't in the book and it sort of came to me, uh, little later on, but the, what I think's gonna end up happening is, and again, keep in mind, I owned an agency for 16 years before I sold it. Right. So I, I live in the agency world and we work with lots of companies. So SMBs all the way up to, you know, fortune 500 companies. Um, I think in the not too distant future, there's three types of organizations. There's AI native. So they don't exist without AI, they're in an industry and they find a smarter way to do that industry, do the products and services in that industry. And they build from day one as an AI company, then there's AI emergent. Those are companies that exist today that look to the future and say, while there's smarter ways to do product and services, marketing sales, and then there's obsolete.

Paul Roetzer (15:58): And, and I don't think there's anything in between. So the way I look at it is AI is going to be so essential to the operations of every business. And so intertwined into the marketing sales and customer service, that if you don't find ways to adapt and evolve, someone else is going to build a smarter version of, of your business. That is way more efficient than you are without AI. And over time, I'm not saying like three years from now, we're all done. Like if you don't evolve saying, but over the next decade, like it's going, you're just gonna become less and less relevant if you don't find a way to become more efficient at what you do and deliver better results.

John Jantsch (16:34): Yeah. And I think some of that's very consumer driven too. You know, one of the things people always point to is Amazon changed the game because consumers got used to yeah. The way what they got to experience there and everybody else had to up their game or, you know, get left behind. And you know, what ways are you seeing consumer behavior change? Because whether they know it or not, they're being served this way.

Paul Roetzer (16:57): Yeah. I, I think the key for me is as consumers of consumer products, but also in our B2B world, you come to expect convenience and personalization. Like if I'm, let's say I'm shopping for new social media management software and I'm the entrepreneur of a five person company, or a 20 person agent, whatever it is, there's a good chance. I'm not doing that at 10:00 AM on a Thursday. There's a much better chance I'm doing it at 10:00 PM on a Friday after my kids go to bed. And I finally have a minute to look at that thing. That's not critical to my business, but is important to the future. So if I'm on a website for social media management software and it's like call us between Monday and Friday from nine to five, and there's no intelligent chat out there that actually helps me get what I'm looking for or understands that I've been on the site previously and kind of can predict my behavior and my intent, like I want personalization and convenience in my shopping experience, whether I'm on Amazon or I'm on some social media management software site. And so I think as consumers, we just come to expect convenience and personalization, and there is no way to do personalization at scale, without AI in the future. Like I've heard software CEOs talk about personalization as though AI, or as though it can happen without AI. It can't, like, we're not that good as humanist writing rules that apply to thousands of people.

John Jantsch (18:17): Right. Right, right, right. Right. So, so let's talk about the relationship between AI and your data, because I think that's what you're really in a lot of ways where, where people are starting to personalize without AI is because I know customer X has bought this product and I can cookie him or her. And so then I can serve a more relevant, personal experience perhaps, or relevant email newsletter perhaps. But where does, where do you see AI then? You know, must be applied. You know, if we can use these JavaScripts and we can use our own data, you know, where does AI come into play with that scenario?

Paul Roetzer (18:55): Yeah. So data is the foundation of AI. It's what it gives its predictive abilities, cuz that, that you almost every case AI is just making predictions about behaviors and outcomes. That's what machine learning is. So you hear machine learning thrown around is like synonymous with AI. Sometimes it's a subset of AI, but machine learning is all about the machine learning from data to improve its predictions and actions. And so that's what the data does is it gives you the ability to actually build these predictive models about customer retention, customer growth, churn rates, lead scoring, to predict who's likely to be a new customer. Who's gonna open emails. Who's gonna click on it's all predictions. And so data is at the foundation of that. Now you can be a small business. You don't have to have, you know, hundreds of thousands of records because what you can do is benefit from anonymized data. So if you're a HubSpot customer, they have 150,000 customers over money. They have, they can anonymize all that data targeted like, okay, this is a lump of cohorts. That's in this specific industry or this specific size company. And they can anonymize that data to improve your predictive ability. I'm not saying they're doing that, but that's what's happening. MailChimp is a good example. Hundreds of millions of records. They can use all that anonymized data to predict when you should send your emails, who you send 'em to subject lines, you should use things like that.

John Jantsch (20:07): Yeah. So let's, let's end by talking a little bit about future careers. If you were talking and you probably get asked to, to a group of college students that were in marketing, uh, what would you be? I know when I talk to 'em, I, I tell, 'em look, forget all the stuff you've been learning. This is what you actually should be focusing on. You know, what are you, what would you tell, uh, a group of folks that are just now getting into marketing, where they should be putting their attention?

Paul Roetzer (20:31): One, I think it's an incredible time to come into the profession because as you said so much of what got the rest of us, where we are, is going to evolve in the near future. yeah. And so the ideas to, to, to drive digital transformation, to evolve an organization, to, to do smarter marketing, that saves time and money and produces better outputs. It can come from the interns because a lot of executives don't understand this stuff and they're maybe even a bit intimidated by it because they don't understand and they think it's gonna be really hard to learn. So they just kind of avoid learning it, keep putting it off. Yeah. So I think that the people who take the initiative to go learn it and don't go and try and sell AI and machine learning like you, if you walk into the CMOs office as an intern and say, I think we're gonna, we do some machine learning.

Paul Roetzer (21:17): We could cut a hundred hours a month of productivity and like get outta my office. Like I . But if you go in and say, Hey, listen, I analyzed our email marketing activities and we spent a hundred hours last month doing these five things. I think there's a way to shave 50% of the time off and actually produce twice as much quality work now. Oh, talk to me about that. What is that? Okay. Well there's these two tools I've been testing and here's what they do. You don't ever even have to say AI. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, to go find smarter tools to do the thing and you identify opportunities to drive efficiency cuz you understand what it's capable of doing.

John Jantsch (21:51): All right. I lied. I'm not gonna end yet. Tell me where tell me, tell me where, what are you can need to say? Well, here are my favorite places to find AI tools or here are a handful of my favorite AI tools, either one, either way. You want to answer that.

Paul Roetzer (22:03): So in, in the book, there's 10 chapters in the middle that are piloting AI chapters and it's AI for advertising AI for communications. Each of those chapters just follow the same pattern. It explains the opportunity with that category of marketing. It goes into tech and then it goes into sample use cases or vice versa, use cases and tech. So there's about 70 different vendors featured in the book that are a good starting point on the marketing AI Institute blog. We regularly published lists of vendors across different categories and different things. Like we did 36 tools for AI co or for copywriting last week that, that sort of stuff. So yeah, we just follow along the newsletter or, you know, grab a copy of the book.

John Jantsch (22:39): And the, the fun thing is that like everybody's copy of the book will be different. Right.

Paul Roetzer (22:44): That would be awesome.

John Jantsch (22:46):

Paul Roetzer (22:47): There, there are a lot of things we tried to do with AI to do the book, but personalized copies for everybody. I don't think the publisher would've let me get away with

John Jantsch (22:56): That. No, no, that's a tough one. So speaking of an industry that, uh, maybe needs to come into the future, sorry. Uh, sorry. I'm not picking on your publisher,

Paul Roetzer (23:04): But my publisher's very open minded. I actually love what they're thinking of. We're doing some cool stuff with synthetic voice potentially. We may actually

John Jantsch (23:11): Do some stuff, so. Oh cool. Awesome. We'll tell people, you've mentioned a few things, but if you wanna invite people where they could connect with you and obviously the book will be available everywhere.

Paul Roetzer (23:20): Yeah. And so marketing, I institute.com. You can get to the book site from there. There's gonna be, uh, there's a couple of free downloads that actually the piling AI workbook that we talked about of how to figure out what to start with, that's gonna be a free download as part of the book. So you can go there and actually get that spreadsheet. And then there's a guide that has about 30 sample questions to ask AI vendors. So to help you assess them, it it's kind of a cool guide. So those will both be available there. So yeah, marketing institute.com is best and I'm really good on, uh, LinkedIn and Twitter. If you wanna reach out to me personally, I'm, I'm really responsive on both of those platforms. I am not a Instagram TikTok or Facebook guy. And if I'm missing anything else, I don't really do those either too much.

John Jantsch (23:56): gotta stay focused. Right. Awesome. Paul, it was a great catch up for you. I appreciate your stopping by the duct tape marketing podcast. Hopefully you will see you, uh, soon, one of these days out there

Paul Roetzer (24:05): On the road. Thanks so much, John.

John Jantsch (24:06): 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 create 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.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the female startup club, hosted by Doone Roison, and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. If you're looking for a new podcast, the female startup club shares tips, tactics and strategies from the world's most successful female founders, entrepreneurs, and women in business to inspire you to take action and get what you want out of your career. One of my favorite episodes who should be your first hire, what's your funding plan, Dr. Lisa Cravin shares her top advice from building spotlight oral. Listen to the female startup club, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:49): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Jack McGuinness. He is a management consultant with over 35 years in the business. After serving with the us Army's 10th mountain division. He helped build a successful boutique management consulting firm where he served as the chief operating office served for 13 years in 2009. He co-founded a new firm with west point with his west point classmate called relationship impact a consulting firm focused on working with CEOs to unleash the potential of their leadership teams. And today we're gonna talk about is newest book called building great leadership teams, a practical approach to unleashing the full potential of your teams. So Jack, welcome to the show.

Jack McGuinness (01:36): Thanks so much for having me, John. It's good to see you again.

John Jantsch (01:39): So the 10th mountain division, did you learn to ski when you were, uh, yeah,

Jack McGuinness (01:43): No, it was roughly cold. I, we were, it was an upstate New York on the foot of lake Ontario or tip of lake Ontario. And it was people from the sixth infantry division used to come in for, for cold weather training. It was that cold, but it used to used to be in Colorado

John Jantsch (01:58): And, well, that's what I was gonna say. That's in fact, there's a whole system of huts and things that they've kept up in the mountains and refurbished, and now you can, you know, cross country ski and hiked to 'em and, and ran 'em out in the winter. And, and I just BEC I've gone to a couple of them and I read a pretty fascinating account about the, that division's, uh, role in world war II and heck pretty fascinating.

Jack McGuinness (02:18): Pretty fast. Yeah. In, in Italy, I think they have

John Jantsch (02:21): Yeah, exactly.

Jack McGuinness (02:21): A big role. Yeah. And they played a huge role in, in the first Gulf war too. Is that right? For sure. Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:28): So I have to start on the cynical side first from a questioning standpoint, there are a lot of leadership books of late. It seems like more and more of late for dysfunction of a team who moved my cheese, you know, turn the ship around. You can all these kind of pop titles that are out there. So I I'll let you tell me why does a world need another leadership book? What, what is this book gonna bring to, to the genre if you will. That makes it significant.

Jack McGuinness (02:55): You know, I think the reason I actually wrote it, cause I agree with you. There's a lot of good stuff out there too. It's not just flaky stuff. There's some flaky stuff too, but there's some really good stuff out there. There's not a lot on building leadership teams. There's a lot on teams. There's a lot on, you know, leadership in general, but on building leadership teams, not so much. And so that's really why I, I, I, I felt like I had something to say after doing this for 14 years,

John Jantsch (03:25): You know, a lot of entrepreneurs, uh, start a business and with an idea and then it grows up and all of a sudden they find themselves being a manager leader right. Without maybe without any desire to be so yeah, but also, you know, kinda realizing that's the only way to make this thing bigger. So why for particularly for that group of people, is this such a challenge?

Jack McGuinness (03:47): Yeah. So, so it's, it is a challenge for them. No question about it for, for a lot of them, but it's what, what I found is that it's a challenge for those that have, you know, started in a managing training program and grown up the ranks in a mid-size company and building a leadership team is hard. And it's, it's, you can't just throw a group of talented individual players that are good at their individual function, sales, marketing, CFO, operations, you can throw 'em together. And that's what most firm companies do. And some have a lot of success with it. And others often struggle with the dysfunction that re results from not stepping back and really thinking through what does a leadership team need to be doing for this organization at this time in its journey?

John Jantsch (04:44): Well, I imagine one of the challenges is that as a comp, particularly as a company grows and they start having teams plural, it, it really, you know, it's not like somebody sat out and said, let's poof build a team, right? I mean, a team sort of assembles and doesn't that make it, doesn't that dynamic alone, make it difficult to have everybody get along. so much

Jack McGuinness (05:04): It does. It, it, it absolutely does. And that, and thus the premise behind the book is very much leadership teams are critical for the health and productivity about an organization, because everyone looks up to the leaders in the organization to see how well they're working together and holding each other accountable, not so much how much they like each other, but how they're holding each other accountable. Right. And in order to do that, well, you have to have a good structural foundation for your team, like blah, the blocking and tackling things that are elemental for, you know, running a meeting. Well, for example, a bit, you know, the most basic of things that often are, is not well done. And you have to really set up the right relational dynamics and just step back and say, Hey, look, all of us are different. We've all come from different places, journeys.

Jack McGuinness (06:00): And that's great, but what do we need from each other at this particular juncture in this organization's journey? And, and if you don't step back and do that, you put structure in place that sometimes causes some relational strife, right? We'll put, you know, and, and, and not necessarily intentionally even, but we'll put structure in place like that. We'll define roles. And we'll assume that everyone knows what the marketing Del, you know, delivery focus folks are supposed to do. And the sales folks are supposed to do. And it's the gray areas between those roles that gets teams in trouble and then bleeds down to the rest of the organization as well sometimes. And so it's really that Def helping, you know, build the right structure and just talk about what the structure should look like. It, it, it, it saves so much pain on the back end because we're not pointing fingers at as much at, at each other for stupid things. Look, people are gonna argue, people are gonna, you know, get into confrontations. And that's a good thing if they're fighting about the right stuff.

John Jantsch (07:17): So one of the very first steps, of course, which makes a ton of sense, but probably people don't think about it enough is a lot of times we think in terms of, oh, we have to fill this function or this job on the team, as opposed to who would be the right person.

Jack McGuinness (07:31): That's right.

John Jantsch (07:32): So, so how, you know, how do you, and I'm, I'm guessing it's different for every company cuz every culture's different, but you know, how do you start looking at who should be on the team?

Jack McGuinness (07:43): Well, of course, you know, the functional business unit leaders are, you know, are the natural, you know, people that people, you know, that CEOs point to. Right, right. And that's fine. It's a great starting point. The challenge is we have to step back and say, what are the unique capabilities that these individuals need to have to be a really good leadership team member? Things like the ability to think beyond today to, to think beyond today's problem or the next three months and help the organization help the team think a little further out than that. And not, I'm not talking about a strategic planning effort. I'm talking about just the foresight necessary to how you know, what's going on in my environment. That's gonna, you know, gonna impact how we're operating today. It's things like managing complexity, you know, can do we have the ability to deal with all this stuff that comes with rising in an organization.

Jack McGuinness (08:43): And now I'm not just a functional player, but I have more things thrown at me, more discussions I'm having about broader issues. Can I take that, those things in and deal with the complexity and make sense of it and more importantly, help the folks under me make sense of it and perhaps more important than anything is, do I have the innate capability to have a, an organization focus or what we call a greater good focus rather than a functional focus. Right? And so we, we know that not every leader has those innate characteristics to start, right, but identifying that they need to have some development on those characteristics is very important and it's a missed opportunity. We find often.

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John Jantsch (10:40): I should just ask you this, but I know the answer to it already, but yeah, when you see teams break down, uh, what, what is the, what's the single greatest factor?

Jack McGuinness (10:51): Oh, it's the, the greatest factor is the inability to have tough conversations about or productive conversations about the most important things that they're facing, not about trivial crap focus on what's most important. And what that means is that we have to disagree with each other sometimes because we come at things in from different perspectives and the

John Jantsch (11:15): It's, it's tough to, it's tough to disagree if you don't trust. I mean, that's what I was really,

Jack McGuinness (11:19): You know, so, and so the relational dynamics here are really important is do we trust each other enough where we can have those tough conversations without being judged, without being shut down without having my colleague go talk to the CEO after the meeting and tell 'em how, what a stupid idea it was. And then ultimately, you know, we've never really gotten to this, but we aspire every team we work with. We, our aspiration is that they are able to hold each other accountable without just the power accountability in their room. Now that's a heavy lift. That's a hard thing to get to for any team, but when you can move towards and move the needle towards it and even be spastic as you're getting towards it, that progress really helps build the fibers amongst the team members.

John Jantsch (12:11): Do you think that it's a good idea for teams to intentionally seek diversity? And I'm not just necessarily talking about race or ethnicity, but I mean, diversity of ideas, diversity of backgrounds. I mean, do you think that plays a role or does that make it harder?

Jack McGuinness (12:26): I, I, it makes it harder. It makes it harder for sure. No question about it, but it it's absolutely crucial. Like we, we see often CEOs that will hire people or promote people that are just like them. Right. You know, she grew up in the organization very similar to I did and a sales role and then went to a marketing role and she's got a very, you know, people oriented approach to her. So I'm gonna put, I'm gonna bring her up and that's great, but not everyone can have the same or shouldn't have the same way of thinking. Look, it happens. And, and that's fine, but you have to compensate for it. You have to ask yourself questions. Like, what are we missing here? Because we all think about this the same way. Right, right. It's just, it's the step back type of things you have to do.

John Jantsch (13:20): So the hiring environment, even retention environment right now of employees is, is as we, we all know is, you know, a much top talked about topic in the news. So how do you, I mean, is what you're talking about is much a retention tool and a recruitment tool as it is a productivity tool.

Jack McGuinness (13:40): Well, I think, you know, there's no question about it because a look, the CEO's job is a big one and it doesn't matter what size of the organization. Obviously it gets more complex and more, you know, as the bigger you get and the more span of control you have, but the CEO's job is really to create the conditions for his or her team to build a productive and healthy organization. And those things are always, not always, but often in conflict with each other. And, you know, and, and it's a hard job, but when you do that, well, the downstream effects on the people that are mid-level managers and below is dramatic because they're like, look, the leadership, team's not perfect, but man are, they are really, they got our backs and they're pushing us. They're pushing whole, I'm working with a bank right now started by a construction guy about 17 years ago.

Jack McGuinness (14:46): And it's, you know, it's grown like crazy. The, this is a great place to work and it's not perfect. There's chaos. They, you know, they attack problems with, with vigor and it leaves a trail of dust behind them sometimes, but they're able to repair because the intentions are there that they're trying to build something really cool. And while they're doing it, they do take care of their people. It might be after the fact, but they do take care of their people. And, uh, I think that balance of PR product productivity and health is really important.

John Jantsch (15:22): Most teams of some sort of a, maybe it's a rotating, but it's an appointed leader. W would the analogy of a sports team kind of be the same where the, the leader of a team's job really is maybe more like a coach? Or let me just ask you directly, what is the leader's job of a team?

Jack McGuinness (15:40): Yeah. I mean, ultimately, um, ultimately, and if you, if you go back to the, the, my aspiration, our aspiration of the teams, we work with that they hold each other accountable. When you're working towards that CEOs naturally evolved to be being more coaching oriented than directing oriented and much more oriented to be working with the, their leadership team to set the picture, to set the foundation, to identify what the most important priorities are, and then let people go now, again, that's a Nirvana state too, you know, no question about it, but if you're aspiring to get to something like that, much more likely to have greater success. So the CEO, you know, we started this thing again 14 years ago and our aspiration was like, you know, teams are really leadership teams are so important that it shouldn't matter what the CEO's role is on a team.

Jack McGuinness (16:45): And boy were we abused of that, that notion, you know, it's critical, it's absolutely critical the role they play. They have to model a whole bunch of stuff like the values that are espoused, the, you know, the, how the, he, or she wants the team to operate. And they have to have a strong role in set in, in establishing directing direction. And sometimes they have to play a heavy hand role, but most often what they have to do is push back when the lobbying happens. And I know that sounds like a trivial issue, but we see it all the time. Like you'll have a great meaning, see, meeting a seemingly great meeting about an important issue. And then the CEOs getting calls, getting knocks on his door, telling him or her why those ideas were such bad ideas and why these ideas are good ones. And so, and the ability to say, Hey, wait a minute, we had this conversation, go talk to Jerry, go talk to Bob, go talk to Sue and figure this stuff out, and then let's have a conversation about it, but I need you guys to figure this stuff out. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:50): So if I'm, uh, a leader or I'm on a team, maybe even, and I'm thinking, I need to pick up this book, what am I gonna, is there a road? Is what am I gonna find in the book? Is it gonna be a roadmap, you know, start here, do then do this UN unpack it in the two yeah. Two minutes or so we have

Jack McGuinness (18:06): A few things it's it really does. I think it does a pretty good job of talking about why a leadership team is so important in the impact it has on an organization. Number two, it talks, um, a lot about the structural and relational foundation necessary to build a good team mm-hmm and then it get, it does provide a bit of a roadmap on what are the things you need to do to either repair or to build. And, you know, I'm pretty proud of that. Part of it. It's pretty practical. There are a lot of other books out there there that are, that I believe are really good and inspired me in the work that I do. But I think what we did was got into another level of how do you do this? Yeah. And why is it so important?

John Jantsch (18:55): Much, much needed. So tell people where they can find, uh, the book and find out more about your work, Jack.

Jack McGuinness (19:00): Yeah. So, so relationship impact.com is my website for my firm, but, uh, great leadership team. book.com is the books, companion website that I stole from you. I stole the model and this is my first book. So I've never done this before. And I was like, wow, I gotta get one of those companion sites.

John Jantsch (19:23): awesome. Well, jacket was great catching up with you. And, uh, hopefully, uh, we can run into each other one of these, uh, days out there on the road. Next time you're visiting your son in, in Colorado.

Jack McGuinness (19:33): I will do that, John. No, no question, Matt, thank you so much for, for the opportunity. I appreciate it.

John Jantsch (19:38): 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 - dot 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.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the female startup club, hosted by dune Roen, and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. If you're looking for a new podcast, the female startup club shares tips, tactics and strategies from the world's most successful female founders, entrepreneurs, and women in business to inspire you to take action and get what you want out of your career. One of my favorite episodes who should be your first hire, what's your funding plan? Dr. Lisa Keven shares her top advice from building spotlight oral. Listen to the female startup club, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:49): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Edward Sullivan. He's been coaching in advising startup founders, fortune 10 executives and heads of state for over 15 years. His clients include executives from Google, Salesforce, slack, and dozens of other fast growth companies. He holds an MBA from Wharton and an M PA from the Harvard Kennedy school. He's a CEO and president of the renowned executive coaching consultancy velocity. And he's also the co-author of a book. We're gonna talk about today leading with heart five conversations that unlock creativity, purpose, and results. So Edward, welcome to the show.

Edward Sullivan (01:31): Thanks so much great to be here.

John Jantsch (01:33): So let's start with leading with heart as opposed to leading with what's the opposite.

Edward Sullivan (01:41): Well, leading with heart is when you're being open and curious, and I guess it's leading with fear leading with ego is how a lot of people go about it, unfortunately.

John Jantsch (01:50): Yeah. And in your research, of course, I'm, I'm guessing that unfortunately that's how a lot of people were taught or that's how a lot of people have been led. Isn't it?

Edward Sullivan (01:57): Well, you know, I think a lot of people when they don't know better, yeah. They go back to maybe what they saw when they were coming up. And I think a lot of leaders today came up in the eighties and nineties and a lot of high pressure environments. And they were led by people who led by fear, who led with ego and they've learned to do the same. So our research indicated that the leaders who actually get the best results out of their employees lead with heart. And we explored that in the book,

John Jantsch (02:28): You know, a lot of entrepreneurs maybe didn't go through any kind of formal leadership program or were mentored or . I mean, they just started a business and like, poof, now you have to lead people, right? I mean, what does it, what does it take for that person to start saying, oh, I'm a leader now, what do I do? Yeah,

Edward Sullivan (02:45): You're right. A lot of our, our clients come to us because they're really good developers. They're good engineers, right? They're good product designers. And they built something. People liked it. And now suddenly they have to build a company around it and they never took that class at school. You know, the how to lead people class. And the first in instinct is to try to control everything. Yeah. When you're the founder, this is your baby. You know, you wanna control everything from the font to the color, to the, how people talk about it, to potential customers. And we've learned that people need a little bit more freedom than that. They need to feel some, some sense of owner. Should they need to be able to show up as themselves at work. And it's really incumbent upon leaders of these firms to give people that freedom and give people that support. So they do feel themselves.

John Jantsch (03:37): Yeah. And I tell you just personal experience as a leader, it's exhausting trying to hold onto everything. You're trying to think you have all the answers. Right. And so I, I think it could be very freeing once people go, oh, they actually did it better. Or nobody died here. Right. I mean, so exactly it really. So, so tell me, I mean, leadership books, that's a huge category of books, probably growing every year. You did some pretty exhaustive research to come to the conclusions you came to. You wanna explain that research process a little bit?

Edward Sullivan (04:05): Sure, sure. So my business partner and I are practitioners, we're executive coaches. We run velocity, it's a firm with 25 coaches around the world. We've got hundreds of clients. And over our combined 40 years of, uh, working with top executives, we were kind of performing the research on along the way. Right. We didn't even know it. So our research process was actually going back through our notes, going back through files and saying, what is it that really ties all these great leaders together? What's that common? We're not journalists, we're not researchers by trade. We're more practitioners who backed into doing some research about this. And we found that there are five core conversations that great leaders are having, that enable them to lead with heart that enable them to have these connected conversations. And they're conversations that we're not used to having in the office. Yeah. Right. Because they're about what do we need as people? What do we need to feel creative and resourceful? What fears might be holding us back, right. It's about what are the, uh, desires that we have that really motivate us, but can also derail us if we take them a little bit too far,

John Jantsch (05:10): We also talked about, I was just gonna say, I wanna unpack those each or the five conversations I, I kind of wanted to, I wanted to frame it a little bit though, in, in what's what's very topical right now is, you know, we're calling it all kinds of things, a great resignation and whatnot. I mean, is that a bit of a, is that a bit of a, an indictment on leadership? I mean, are people leaving because they're not getting these things or because they're not getting, you know, even basic respect.

Edward Sullivan (05:36): I mean, that is exactly right. And research has been done recently that showed that we think people are leaving because they want more freedom or they want more money. They want more equity, but 10 times more important is that they're leaving toxic work cultures. Yeah. Right. They feel burned out. They feel unappreciated. They feel unseen. Obviously doing all of our work over zoom. Hasn't helped much in the last couple of years. Right. But there are things that leaders can be doing to create this, these connections with people, even over zoom. And they're simply not doing them. We get on a call and we say, great, what do we have to talk about today? Let's do our work. Okay. Enough. And then we get off the call as quickly as possible. Right? Yeah. We're not creating that connective tissue anymore. And that's what people are missing.

John Jantsch (06:22): Yeah. I, uh, we have a client that, you know, like a lot of people are trying to hire people and, and trying everything, you know, running ads in all the places. And, you know, we just, we actually we're testing ads and they add that. We ran that today for two years now has been by far and away the winner, it just, the, the title just says respect wow. And then it says, are you getting, you know, are you getting the respect you deserve in your current career? And I, we can't beat that ad you know, so it really does say something doesn't

Edward Sullivan (06:50): I'm gonna write that one down here

John Jantsch (06:52): Do, go for it. So, so you started to unpack the five conversations and you talked about, you used words, like what people need, the fears that are holding them back. We're gonna get to the P word purpose eventually. Yeah. Here's the thing that not enough people say is that I don't think you can do those things as a leader until you clean up your own house. I mean, you get rid of your own fears. You get, you understand your own purpose. Right. And I think a lot of books try to a lot of books, try to say, here's the roadmap, you know, but not enough say, uh, self, it starts with self-awareness. So, you know, how do you balance that, that thought? Or maybe you disagree with it?

Edward Sullivan (07:27): No, don't I, I don't disagree at all. I fatally agree. Yeah. In fact, we, we call the book basically a, a 250 page coaching conversation with one of us, right. With both of us, because really in Le in reading the book, we're asking you these questions, you need to do all the work yourself. Yeah. And be comfortable answering these questions yourself with your employees, to be able to have those conversations. You can't just go into it into a room with someone and say like, what are you afraid of? right. that doesn't really make someone want to open up. But if you start the conversation and say, you know, I don't know about you, but I've been feeling a little bit triggered into some fear recently. There's a lot of uncertainty in the market. Things are happening abroad where, you know, we're the country, the world's at war right now. Yeah. Um, times of uncertainty make me feel a little uncertain, make me feel fearful. What's coming up for you. Right? Yeah. Suddenly the leader has opened up themselves, created that vulnerability, the V word, right? Yeah. That allows other people to feel comfortable being vulnerable as well.

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John Jantsch (09:15): So let's, let's just pretend that the person that's reading this book has, uh, dealt with that themselves. You know, just give me maybe gimme the 32nd. Here are the five, and then we can kind of come back and go, well, how do you do that?

Edward Sullivan (09:27): Yeah. Yeah. So the five questions that we found in our research and you've, you've outlined them as well are around needs. What do you need to be resourceful and creative? Yeah. Fears, what fears might be holding you back desires. And this is like, what do you really want out of life? And how could those core desires potentially derail you? We also talk a lot about gifts. What are the gifts you have that are unrealized or unexpressed in this current role? And then once we've had those four conversations, we're ready to have the conversation around purpose.

John Jantsch (10:00): Yeah. O obviously I shouldn't say obviously in many cases, uh, people have had that relationship. Maybe somebody's been there for a long time. I mean, they just know each other they've unpacked over the years, but a lot of times somebody's just, you know, managing somebody, they do, they get their 30 minutes a week, you know, with them. I mean, how do you really start getting into areas that maybe both parties are uncomfortable with, but probably the, you know, the superior, you know, perhaps seen as the superiors less uncomfortable with, I mean, you know, how do you start? How do you start creating a culture, I guess, of this openness that has maybe if it hasn't existed.

Edward Sullivan (10:37): Yeah. You know, we talk a lot about culture and our work and in the book and it is, it is a great challenge. And it's also an incredible opportunity. Yeah. Um, if you have a culture that's really shut down where people don't share anything about their personal lives coming out suddenly and talking about everything you're fearful of yeah. Will be, will come as a shock, right? Yeah. You need to build up some, some trust there, right? Yeah. You need to approach some of these topics slowly. You need to build an environment of safety where people feel like we're starting to connect to human beings as opposed to colleagues. And that feels pretty cool. Right. And it's that connecting that, learning about each other, where you come from, what have you done, what's going on at home? Do you have siblings, all those basic questions that we kind of take for granted with our friends, we often don't know anything aside from like the names of spouses and maybe the names of children with our, our colleagues. Right? Yeah. We start having those baseline conversations, then we can go, go a few layers deeper. Yeah. We can start getting into what are you really? Maybe what you're fearful of. Right. It builds upon itself. Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:40): Yeah. Trust is what we're talking about. Really trust .

Edward Sullivan (11:43): Yeah. I mean, yeah. It all comes down to trust when people say like, what's the two second summary of this book, it's how to build trust in a work environment. Exactly.

John Jantsch (11:51): So, so do you advocate making, you know, like a lot of people will hear this and they'll go, okay. Uh, we got 25 minutes, I'm gonna spend five minutes asking you about yourself and then we're gonna get into it. I mean, is that the approach or do you actually want to have like, let's have a company lunch once a month and we're not gonna talk about work. I mean, which approach is better

Edward Sullivan (12:13): In your, uh, it's actually both, right? Yeah. You need that regular drip of like connecting, uh, just like, Hey, what's been going on. Yeah. And as opposed to just like the cursory what'd you do this weekend, right. We also want people to be giving the giving each other, some praise. Yeah. Like, so we start in our company, we start all of our meetings with shout outs. Mm-hmm and we say like, does anyone have anything great to say on anyone else on the call? You know? And it's like, I really wanna thank Mike for, you know, in this meeting we had last week, he did this. That was great. Public praise makes people feel good. Yeah. We don't get enough of it. Right? Yeah. We might get praise, um, privately or over email, but you really wanna be sharing that praise in real time. And as, as much as you can in front of other people,

John Jantsch (12:59): How much of the work, like, I, I, I would venture to say that if we filled a room up with 50 people and said, please explain your purpose, you know, about, yeah. Two of them, you know, could come up with anything that they thought really resonated. So how do we actually help people understand what their needs are, what their fears are, because I think that's a lot of the challenges they don't know. We could ask somebody, what, what are your fears? But they don't know.

Edward Sullivan (13:26): They don't know you're right. You know, we try to explore some different themes in the book of needs that we've seen. Our clients have fears. We've seen our clients have to give people a language, but it's really through the conversation that we start exploring. I don't even know what I might be fearful of. Yeah. Right. You know, do I get to say that I'm fearful in this office environment hate to say it, but like men especially are trained to be fearless. They can't show any fear and to work in a, in, in a, in a tough work environment, women then show up and think that they can't show any fear either. And it's this creates this really negative feedback system. So we're trying to break that by saying, it's actually, it's not just okay to have these conversations. It's better if you do right. You actually get better results. If you're able to talk about these things and have that connection,

John Jantsch (14:20): How, how could you bring this work earlier, uh, into somebody? So somebody joins an organization. Could this be part of the hiring process to some degree, or is it just too hard to do that? Because there's no relationship because you know, when you start talking about people's desires and gifts, mm-hmm

Edward Sullivan (14:36): ,

John Jantsch (14:37): That might actually direct the path , you know, that, that they would go or the role that they would fill, you know, how could you do this without, you know, the relationship part? Or can you,

Edward Sullivan (14:47): Yeah. I mean, some environments, some organizations have a culture where as soon as you walk in the door, you feel at ease. Yeah. You feel relaxed. You can tell people genuinely like each other. Yeah. Right. And in those companies, and we, we, we're lucky enough to advise a handful of 'em that are like that you sit down for the interview and you already feel at ease with this person. You already it's like, we, we we've been friends for a long time. Right? Yeah. So the people who are just coming in are almost inculturated into this idea of it's cool to just be yourself. It's cool to show up as you are and bring your gifts to the table, bring your needs and fears to the table and we'll work with that. Right. Cause it's very human to have needs. It's human to have other environments you walk in and it feels cold. It feels like, you know, they're giving you like an intimidation interview. I don't know if you've ever had ever interviewed at McKinsey, like they're famous for the intimidation interview where they try to see how you respond when someone's almost really rude to you in an interview situation because the client might be rude to you someday. Yeah. Yeah. That's fine. And all, but how about have that conversation about, you need to steal up and be ready for people to be an asshole towards you rather than just be that way towards them in the interview.

John Jantsch (16:04): So talk a little bit about some of the tools, because obviously you do this work with organizations, you teach people, you give them tools to, to train the, you know, folks inside their organization. So talk a little bit about the work, I guess that is that, you know, that's more than just, you know, five conversations it's daily work.

Edward Sullivan (16:22): Right. Right. I mean, our work is predominantly one on one conversations, like coaching conversations. And then we facilitate a lot of conversations for our clients. So you might, uh, not be surprised that right now with everyone starting to go back to the office and COVID feels like it's mostly over, everybody wants to have a team offsite. So we're just completely booked out through the summer in dozens of team offsite for people who wanna have these conversations. Right. They're they wanna buy the book and have everyone that will have a workshop about the book or they just wanna get together and have a joyful experience of learning about each other. They're they learned half of our employees. No one's even met before. Cause we hired them in the middle of COVID. Yeah. What's your name? You know, don't tell me what you need yet. Just tell me what your name is. and in, in those facilitated experiences that we engage with clients, that's where the real work happens, right? Yeah. It's one thing to like play the games and do the trust falls and these kinds of things. It's another thing to have a facilitated, really hard open conversation that gets people cracked wide open and gets them sharing things that they never thought they'd be able to share, let alone, I mean, with their friends, let alone in an office environment and suddenly it feels very natural.

John Jantsch (17:39): I suspect one of the tricks to this work is that, you know, even though you've got a nice tidy framework, you know, people are, people are all different. Sure. Some people respond differently. Some people love to talk about how they feel. some people, some people that's like the worst thing that could, you know, that could be involved in the day. Exactly. So, you know how what's the art or what's the balance of being able to use the framework, but use it appropriately, I guess. Yeah.

Edward Sullivan (18:07): I mean, the important thing with all of this work is to start where people are, right. We can't have forced vulnerability. Yeah. You know, people need to feel safe. It needs to feel natural. And it should often, it often comes after the leader has created an opening for it. You know, the leader who calls a meeting and says, great, everyone's gonna share their most painful childhood story. starting with you. Right. Doesn't really work. Yeah. Right. But if over time we're building rapport, we're making people feel safe. And the leader is the one who is handing out praise, making people feel good, making them feel psychologically safe. Yeah. Right. And that's definitely a term of art in that when people give feedback, when they have ideas, when they push back against the conversation and what we're doing, and the leader says, that's really interesting. Tell me more. Yeah. You know, so really creates

John Jantsch (19:04): So really in a lot of ways, you're, it's not, there's actually a risk in proclaiming. This is how we're gonna do it or mandating, this is what we're gonna do now, as opposed to just doing it.

Edward Sullivan (19:13): Yeah. Sometimes you just do it. Yeah. And you say, there's no obligation to join the conversation. There's no obligation to share something. You don't feel comfortable sharing, but we've learned in this organization, whether it's through the book or through it's following the research that teams and organizations that share what's really going on for them. Yeah. Build trust. And then ultimately have more honest conversations about the work itself. Yeah. Right. It's this virtuous cycle. If you tell me what's really going on for you and I build trust, then when I push back against you on an idea when we're debating, you know, we're really trying to get to the truth of the matter. Or we're trying to get to the best idea. If I can't push back against you, we might ship a flawed product. Right. I mean the, the, the challenger exploded because a scientist wasn't able to say, oh, this O ring might be bad. Right. Things go wrong because people don't feel safe pushing back. And I

John Jantsch (20:09): Think this

Edward Sullivan (20:10): Whole artist is about up in the build that safety.

John Jantsch (20:14): Yeah. I was gonna say, I think you make a really great point. I mean, some of the best organizations are ones where people feel, uh, enough trust that they can argue that they can, you know, debate things like that. Yeah. Yeah. As opposed to feeling like, oh, well doesn't matter, you know, , I'm just gonna go. Exactly. Can you repair trust? Do you think? Because I'm thinking there are a lot of organizations out there that they just were, the leader was being who they were being and, you know, woke up one day and realize this isn't working, you know, is that something that you can repair or is it again, just one of those things where you've gotta demonstrate through your actions, that things have changed,

Edward Sullivan (20:49): You know, they say trust comes in on two feet and leaves on a horse. Yeah. Right. So it is something that is earned slowly and can easily be destroyed. That said humans are naturally forgiving people. Right. We can always earn trust back. We just have to do the work. Yeah. And we have to be consistent.

John Jantsch (21:11): Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Lots of work for lots of us to do so, Edward, thanks for, so by the duct tape marketing, uh, podcast, you wanna tell people where they can find out more about your work or anything else you wanna share.

Edward Sullivan (21:22): Absolutely. The book [email protected] and thank you so much for the opportunity.

John Jantsch (21:29): Yeah. Well, again, as, as I said, thanks for stopping by, and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Edward Sullivan (21:34): Hope so. Thank you much.

John Jantsch (21:37): 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 dot 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.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the female startup club, hosted by Doone Roison, and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. If you're looking for a new podcast, the female startup club shares tips, tactics and strategies from the world's most successful female founders, entrepreneurs, and women in business to inspire you to take action and get what you want out of your career. One of my favorite episodes who should be your first hire, what's your funding plan, Dr. Lisa Cravin shares her top advice from building spotlight oral. Listen to the female startup club, wherever you get your podcast. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast.

John Jantsch (00:51): This is John chance and my guest today is Brennan Dunn. He's a co-founder of right founder of write message. He writes a weekly at create and sell, and he's working on a new book, all about personalized marketing, which by the way, is what we're gonna talk about today. So Brennan, welcome to the show.

Brennan Dunn (01:11): Yeah. Thanks for having you, John.

John Jantsch (01:13): So tell me about the book. Is it, is this one of these things where you get some spare time and you go right on it for a while, or is it, is its publication imminent?

Brennan Dunn (01:22): It's somewhere in between. I've gotten much more structured than I was early on. So I am, I do have dedicated writing blocks that I try to keep. Yeah. And the, the finish line is coming up. So I'm aiming for about a midjune finalization, if you will, the manuscript and, uh, we'll go

John Jantsch (01:36): From there. So, so as I said, we're gonna talk about personalized marketing. So personalization in your emails and, you know, in your segmentation and your website, of course, and, and the technology there, you know, now, you know, makes that to something that if you put a little effort is really simple to do, I would suggest it's probably becoming necessary to do I think, in the environment we're in. But before we get into that, I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey because you and I have spoken briefly, we were at a, a conference, uh, together recently, and I kind of got the sense that you've got your hands in a few things, or at least have had your hands in a few things, you know, leading up to right. Message.

Brennan Dunn (02:15): Yeah. Yeah. So about a decade and, and change ago, I used to run a web agency. So that kind of got my experience with, or that, that built up my experience with kind of needing to sell big ticket projects, built that up to 11 people. And I think the, the big core thing that I, the big takeaway I got from that experience was how important things like dropping relevant examples were. And if somebody's a technical person talking technical with em, if they're just a marketing person, not talking technical, for instance, and, and so on. So I did that for a while. I got bit by the software bug, we were building apps for other people I wanted to build my own. So I built a little, a software company called plan scope. And in 2011, sold that in 20 15, 20 16, somewhere around then, right at the end of the year.

Brennan Dunn (03:00): And then I kind of started up or kind of came serious about this company called double year freelancing, which is the thing that I frankly did the best at with all these things. And that's now a community of, well north, almost about 60,000 freelancers and agencies. And it was fun. Like we, you know, I did conferences, I had a podcast, I did the whole like bunches of courses, ebook, like info product, kind of Emporium there. And that's really got where I got my start with personalization because as we started to get kind of broader in terms of our audience, we had copywriters, we had marketers, we had designers, developers, and really every Stripe of freelancer you could think of. Right. And the developer me thought, well, what if a copywriter is on a sales page? And they see copywriter testimonials, and what if a developer sees developer testimonials and, you know, that kind of opened up this Pandora's box that I've been, uh, continuing to open ever since on what's possible, given who somebody is, what their relationship is with you.

Brennan Dunn (04:03): So are they new on your website? They just appeared from Google or are they your most, you know, die hard customer? What kind of work do they do? What stage of their business are they at? And yeah, that, that kinda led me to eventually getting approached by a few key investors saying, we see what you've been doing on your own site. Can you extract that technology into a product that we can pay for? And they were willing to kind of fund the development of that. So that's how right message came to be. And that was about 20 17, 20 18, right around then that we kind of launched it.

John Jantsch (04:36): So at the time, were you just doing that with JavaScript coding or something? Or how were you making that happen?

Brennan Dunn (04:42): Yeah, so what I was doing is back then, I was using, I switched from infusion soft, which is now keep to drip back then. Sure. And drip had a really nice JavaScript library that you could put on your website that would allow you, if you knew how to write JavaScript to query and say, Hey, is the current person on my website? Are they on my list? And if so, how are they tagged and what custom fields do they have? So it was really just a matter of writing, a lot of, yeah, custom JavaScript where I'd say, okay, if they're a subscriber and they're tagged customer, let's show this thing instead of that thing. And, and it just became a lot of, kind of very brittle, very manual coding, right. Which really lent itself to building a web-based interface to set it all up.

John Jantsch (05:28): So I was gonna ask you what the biggest mistake you see marketers making today, I'm really just teeing up the non personalization, or just treating everybody that visits the website, just as you said, as the same person with the same desires, the same, you know, method of buying the same journey, all those. So let's talk a little bit about, you know, that idea of the customer journey. Mm-hmm , I think that's something I spend a lot of time talking about the stages of and how people make, you know, decisions today. In fact, I, you know, frequently say the thing that's changed the most in marketing is how people choose to become customers. You know, not necessarily, you know, the platforms and the technology. So how does this role, I mean, thinking in terms of how people buy today, they go, they visit, they see if they like you, they see if they trust, you know, they dig deeper. Mm-hmm . I mean, how does the idea of personalization play into the customer journey for you?

Brennan Dunn (06:19): I think for me, and, and what I typically recommend, a lot of people do, especially those of us who are trying to do kind of email first, where right. You know, instead of pushing somebody to buy or trying to get them on our list and then over time, build up trust and then get them to buy later. I think the thing that as being on the consumer end, always frustrates me is if I'm on an email list of a brand, let's say, and I get their, you know, their latest email and drives me me back to their website, then I'm hit with a giant popup asking for my email address. Not only is it a bit annoying because you know, they presumably know that since they just E you know, they just email me , but a marketer me thinks that's a missed opportunity. I mean, that, that's a perfect opportunity to say, Hey, you're on my list.

Brennan Dunn (07:03): You're kind of already a little further down the funnel. Why not present a product, an entry level product you haven't yet bought. And then if they've bought that entry level thing, let's now put onsite called actions for maybe the more premium product or right. You know, the, the, the crazy mastermind in Cabo, San Lucas, five figure thing, if you're the super customer, right. Like, I mean, that's the kind of thing that I think a lot of us, I think are doing that over email with campaigns that are saying like, you know, for different cohorts of subscribers, we wanna send different marketing messages. But I think considering that most of us are bringing people back to the website, whether it be to listen to the latest podcast episode or to read at the latest blog post, or just to look at a sales page. I think having that interplay back and forth is something that most of us should be doing. It's just, it's one of these things that it's a little challenging to figure out how to do, which is one of the things I've been trying to help ease.

John Jantsch (07:56): Yeah. I think a real obvious use case. You talk about the popups that, you know, version one, everybody saw it every time , you know, it's like, get outta here, get outta the way. So we were constantly just slapping him away. Then they got a little smarter, oh, you've been here before your, in the last two weeks. So I'm not gonna show it to you, but like you said, the ultimate is I know everything, or I know a great deal about you and our relationship already. So I may have one of eight things that I would show you, obviously that's next level, isn't it?

Brennan Dunn (08:28): Yeah. Yeah. And doing that, but also doing, um, more horizontal things, like, depending on maybe the industry somebody's in or the job role that they're in, or their goal, maybe offering different products or different recommendations to them showing different messages. I already mentioned the testimonial example of yeah. Depending on somebody's kind of business, they run, what kind of case studies and testimonials should they see even things like one of the, one of the most rewarding, if you will. Things that I tested that that has worked consistently is I have, for one of my courses, a free email course that feeds people to the paid course. Yeah. And what I did is I simply asked people when they joined the free course, which of the following three things are you trying to solve with this course? Cause the course is on pricing and the three options would be, I want to get an idea of how to price in general, I went to start pricing on value, or I went to learn how to write proposals better.

Brennan Dunn (09:18): And those were kind of the three things I uncovered were why people kept joining the email course. So all I simply did was I said, well, okay. They tell me this upfront, what I'll do is when the email course completes and I then start to pitch the paid thing, the paid thing relates to the email core, the free course. Yeah. So let's just say, if they said they're struggling with proposals, make the focus of the course and why they buy it to help you with proposals. Right. Yeah. Right. And it's things like that I think are kind of a no brainer when you think it through. I mean, it's any, anything like if I was trying to sell you over the phone on something I would, and, and you said, you know, you, you signaled something to me that allowed me to mentally segment you into this is John's pain point. You, I, a good salesperson is gonna right. Keep playing off that. Right. So it's the same, same thing just in a more scalable, um, more high volume, medium, if you will.

John Jantsch (10:13): Well, and I think that that approach of narrowing, you know, the focus, because I think a lot of times what we do as marketers is we default to, well, here are the five things we know are the reasons people buy this. So we're gonna tell you those are all the benefits. Yeah, exactly. You know, so then consequently, we're like, well, one of those matters to me, the other's just like more clutter that I have to read about. And now I'm just confused. Yeah. And I think that idea of being able to zero in on something, they told you, I mean, they basically said here's how to sell me. Right. right.

Brennan Dunn (10:42): Yeah, exactly. And, and I mean, this plays out, I think in a lot of more impactful ways, like I mentioned, the first software company that I sold, it was a project management tool called plan scope. So think of task management, normal kind of stuff like that time tracking. And I, I sold to freelancers and agencies cuz really the only difference with an agency was they had multiple seats and every functionally was the same thing. But I remember I, I got on a call. This is, would've been like 2013. So you know, quite a while ago in internet time, at least I, I got on a call with an agency owner and I was talking with them and I was showing them our website and kind of figuring out like what was holding them back from moving forward. And their objection was anything that works for a freelancer couldn't work for our agency.

Brennan Dunn (11:24): And you know, it was kind of this weird. I struggled at the time as the person who knew the product inside out thinking the only logistic differences is maybe some things on the reporting end, but also the fact that there's like multiple contributors and stuff to a, you know, a, a project rather than a single contributor. But it just kind of, it floored me thinking like, is this a very, is this a common shared thing? You know, that there's this bias of teams think solo people don't have anything in common with them. Yeah. And maybe convert vice versa. So anyway, that was a, uh, for me that would've been like a prime. I, I was even thinking at the time maybe I spin off like plan scope, premium or plan scope pro.com make it completely separate marketing site, make it all about agencies. And just say, if you're an agency, you go to this site. Yeah. This lead magnet, whatever freelancers, get that one. But really the, I think the beauty of personalization is you can have the same products. You can have the same marketing site, you can have the same marketing and you just kind of dynamically alter bits and pieces. So you can get around those core objections in a and really elegant way.

John Jantsch (12:31): Yeah. And I think one of the things that I, I hear a lot of times, you know, sales people complaining that I got multiple stakeholders to sell, you know, the sales manager cares about vastly different things than the CEO does. And so I think that idea of job title, you know yeah. In your database is really crucial because I mean, case studies you could deliver that are different. I mean every benefits, all of your messaging can be different. Yeah. And sell those multiple stakeholders came.

Brennan Dunn (12:57): Yeah.

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John Jantsch (13:54): We've already talked about a lot of the ways I think people can use this. Tell, tell me a little bit about the technology. I mean, how, how, without getting to a level that you have to be a coder to understand what you're saying, you know, how does this work?

Brennan Dunn (14:06): Yeah. So what, we're the way we've modeled. This is you integrate with your email database. So that could be, you know, convert kit, HubSpot, drip, whatever. Yep. Active campaign, different things like that. And the, the way we look at it is that should that record about somebody. So Brennan's record in John's active campaign database is the single source of truth about what we know about Brennan. So presumably you segment me when I buy from you, you know, Stripe does its thing. You then tag me as a customer. You, I buy something else. I get another tag and so on. So it's really just extending that to say, well, can we also sync up to that record attributes about, you know, industry chal current focus, whatever it might be. And then what we do is we say when one of two things happens, if somebody opts into your list, we basically kind of do a little think of it as a bit of a hijack, if you will saying, okay, a record was just added to active campaign for this browser.

Brennan Dunn (15:12): So when it comes back active, campaign's gonna say, Hey, we created a record and its internal ID is 1, 2, 3, and then all right message says is great. We're gonna drop a cookie on the browser saying this is active campaign record 1, 2, 3. So then from that on out until they clear their cookies, we just query and say, what do we know about 1, 2, 3, and, and get back that, that data. So then we can pull that data down, but also push shade up. So if we learn something new about this person, like they change their focus or they change industries, that data can then be synced to that single source of truth. So what we're basically creating a bridge, if you will, between the website and a specific record in your email database and then pulling data down and pushing data up and we pull data down and we can say, when this data's present, so when they're tagged customer, don't show the sign up form at the top of the website and the hero show, the upgrade button or something.

Brennan Dunn (16:07): Yeah. Right. And being able to do interesting stuff like that. And that's really what we're trying to do is we're, we're trying to really help people. And it's difficult because it's a bit of a challenge strategically to think it all through, but we're trying to help people create more holistic end, end ex and end experiences where, you know, you're getting personalized emails, you're getting emails that are targeting just customers. But then when you go back to the site, you're not treating, you're not being treated as an anonymous person. You're being treated as that customer too.

John Jantsch (16:33): You know, CRM, maintenance and updating is, you know, is the bane of a lot of people's existence. And to some degree, you know, this is automating a great deal of that. Mm-hmm for people. I mean, it's making your CRM smarter without you having to do a lot of effort once you get it in place. I think,

Brennan Dunn (16:48): Yeah. It's just feeding. I mean, you obviously need to set up the different surveys right. And quizzes or whatever else, but yeah. It's enriching. And I like to think of it as, especially those of us who are focus focused on low touch email stuff. Yeah. So you've got the lead magnet, the most we know about most of our people on our list is their first name and email address. Yeah. That's pretty much it, which again, isn't the end of the world. But I think if you can find out a bit more about why is they downloaded the lead magnet and what are they currently struggling with and what best describes their situation. And obviously the questions change depending on the business, the underlying business and stuff. Um, yeah. I mean a good example that we, that we like to reference a lot is we have a customer that's in the health and fitness space and they do what you would expect, which is they ask like, what are your current goals?

Brennan Dunn (17:35): Do you wanna build muscle lose, you know, lose fat, whatever. And they're able to then just dial in on both the products offered, but also the stories told over their marketing emails to just resonate better. I mean, it allows us to, I think all of us know that niche websites typically outperform generic. And the reason for that is they just, they had their messaging dialed in to one, one type of person with one type of need. And, um, but there's no reason you need a niche, the entire business. Right. You know, it, it can be done. It's like when I used to write proposals for my agency, we did web mobile apps for all different types of companies. When I wrote a proposal, I was effectively nicheing down our business to fit their unique need. And that's all we're talking about doing is just a, a way of doing that kind of dynamically.

John Jantsch (18:21): You know, what's interesting about this, you know, you've, we've all gone to that, uh, to get that free download and presented with, you know, 18 fields of data that they want. And we're reluctant to fill that in because I, I, I feel typically we don't trust that company enough yet or, you know, whatever it is that we want to really give them that much information. Plus I think it, it feels like I'm giving you this information for your benefit. Right. And one of the things I like about this approach of asking people, I think it's very easy to get a lot more data because it's positioned or you can position it as, Hey, this is, this is so I can send you the right stuff. You know, this is so you get only what you care about. And I think that positioning really dramatically changes, you know, how much willingness people have to give you and trust that you develop. But I'm wondering if you have any data to back that up.

Brennan Dunn (19:14): I do. Yeah. So we used to be really pushing people. And I think you and I talked about this kind of recently where we used to push people to do a lot of upfront data collection. So pre optin get industry job role, all that stuff. Right. We've and the calculus was always, well, if we got more data about somebody could then show them a personalized optin. So if I knew you were in this industry with this problem, instead of join my newsletter, I can say, join my newsletter, you know, focused on helping, you know, marketing coaches with X, you know what I mean? Like just being able to make that really dialed in. And, and there's some like that can sometimes work better, but if it's tricky, so what I recommend most people do at this point is get that data post optin. So do your usual normal optin stuff.

Brennan Dunn (20:02): And then I like using the confirmation page. So the thank you page that usually says, Hey, thanks, go check your email goodbye. Instead, use that as an opportunity to say, Hey, so, you know, thanks for joining. If you can spare a minute or two, I'd love to just find out a bit more about how I can make sure you get exactly the content you need and nothing more. So this is something that, you know, we do, I do, but also many of our customers do. And on average, we're getting usually it's about 80 to 85% of all new opt-ins end up going through that process. I mean, assuming it's not a thousand questions, if it's, you know, four or five things that are multiple choice questions, most people are willing to kind of click through that because you're positioning it as exactly that you're not doing this to say we wanna put together a, a slide deck to investors showing the composition of our audience, give us data.

Brennan Dunn (20:51): Instead it's positioned as if I can find out why you're here and what you need. I can reduce the amount of noise I send you. Yeah. I can make sure that I'm giving you exactly what you need. And people tend to agree with that and like that. So, yeah, I mean, we're, I'm getting four outta five people who join giving me more than just a name and email. I know in my case what their current email marketing objective is, what email provider they use. If they have one, how comfortable they are with it, what they've done with it, if they haven't, why haven't they signed up yet? So for me, I'm like, well, I can go and say, send an email right now to everyone on my list, who does not use an email marketing platform and maybe they've struggled. Maybe they haven't done it cuz they're not sure which one. Yeah. Well, I just came up with this great, uh, review video I put together and I really pushed the affiliate thing that I, you know, for the platform I, I recommend. And that's how I could target that for, right. Yeah. So I can do like so many interesting things once you have, uh, that data in your database.

John Jantsch (21:49): Yeah. So, so let's wrap up on, uh, the idea of creating personalized messages on your website. I think a lot of what we've talked about implies that I've got that data. So now I can send better email, but a lot of us out there myself included have segments, different, unique segments that we sell mm-hmm and wouldn't it be amazing if on the homepage , you know, when they came there, they saw case studies and testimonials that were only related or were specifically related to that segment. And so talk a little bit about the idea that using this tool and using this data that we collect, we can actually now have the website say different stuff.

Brennan Dunn (22:25): Yeah. So the way, the way we do it with the right message is we allow you to quickly like click on a headline. So what you could do is you could go into our tool within the tool, go to your homepage, let's say, and then click on the headline, like, you know, your main headline mm-hmm and then toggle between all the different segments you've defined. So if you've defined, um, segment a segment B and segment C, you could say go to a, change the headline to a B change this, click on this picture, change it to the picture of the Panda for people in a change it to, you know, change this, change that. And it's really just kind of very, if you've ever used a tool like Optimizly or VWO, it's very similar in that respect where it's point and click. So that that's how we've designed that.

Brennan Dunn (23:07): But what I usually tell people is even if they don't want to go that far one easy fix, it's not the most elegant fix, but it's an easy fix would be, let's say you're promoting a new product or course, and duplicate your sales page like two or three times and make those tweaks. And then just within your email platform, when you're writing the emails, have some conditions, let's say if they're in this segment, point them to landing page a. If they're in this segment, go to line page B and, and obviously it's not the nicest way of doing it, especially when you consider that one benefit of a platform like right messages, we can do multivariate personalization. So you can say, you know, these benefits are here because they're in this job role, this headlines, because they're in this industry, this testimonial is because they're struggling with this pain point and that can yield. If you just do simple math, it can yield, you know, 10 industries, times 10 job roles. You already have to have a hundred variations, which would be untenable if you were to duplicate it a hundred times. Yeah,

John Jantsch (24:08): Yeah, yeah. And is it, does it work with the various page builders that are out there now because you you're just putting in blocks of HTML or something

Brennan Dunn (24:15): That's right. So all we're doing the easiest way to think about it is we're effectively, post-procesing the page. So you put our script on the site. What we do is your page builder sends up the wire the final page. And we're just saying, even though the server says, we should be showing the headline that says ABCs, we see their tech customers. So before they even see the page, we're gonna change it out to X, Y, Z. So it's just a, kind of a, the benefit there for us is it's, it's agnostic in terms of what you put it on, it'll work on anything that allows you to just run our JavaScript on

John Jantsch (24:46): It. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Brendan, thanks for taking time to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. You, you wanna send people obviously we'll have a link to right message. But do you want anywhere else you wanna send people to connect with you?

Brennan Dunn (24:57): Yeah. I mean the, the, you know, besides right message. I, I do write weekly, like you mentioned, at create and sell.co and there, I just write about everything from, you know, tagging versus custom fields to what I've talked about recently.

John Jantsch (25:11): A lot of email stuff,

Brennan Dunn (25:13): Just email, like, you know, should you have design emails versus simple text? Yeah. I mean just a lot of emailing, things like that.

John Jantsch (25:19): Awesome. Well, again, uh, thanks for sub by and hopefully, uh, we'll run into you, uh, one of these days again, out there on the road.

Brennan Dunn (25:26): Absolutely. Thanks John. Hey,

John Jantsch (25:28): 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 dot com.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.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the female startup club, hosted by Doone Roison, and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. If you're looking for a new podcast, the Female Startup Club shares tips, tactics and strategies from the world's most successful female founders, entrepreneurs, and women in business to inspire you to take action and get what you want out of your career. One of my favorite episodes who should be your first hire, what's your funding plan, Dr. Lisa Cravin shares her top advice from building spotlight oral. Listen to the female startup club, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:48): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guests today are Todd and Laure Fisher, their husband and wife co-founders of Call Tracking Metrics company. They found in 2011 in their basement, and together have grown it into an Inc 500 rated top ranked conversion analytics software serving over 30,000 businesses around the world. So Todd and Laure, I don't often have multiple guests, so I'll try to not fumble my questions to, to either, or you just take your turns. Whoever's whoever wants to jump in next, go from there. So welcome to the show.

Laure Fisher (01:26): Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Todd Fisher (01:27): Yeah. Thank

John Jantsch (01:28): You. So, so I'd love to hear about your journey. You know, every entrepreneur has some unique, uh, journey that brought into this point. I do know in looking at a little bit of your background, you're not software engineers, you didn't grow up in, in that necessarily. Um, you came from other professions, so I'd love to hear what led you, uh, to where we are today.

Laure Fisher (01:46): Well, that Todd has a, his is more technical

Todd Fisher (01:49): I was gonna say, I have a technical software engineering background. Lori does not.

John Jantsch (01:53): Ah,

Todd Fisher (01:54): Okay. So, but that's part of what I think made it work really well for the two of us. So Lori has a, a business background. I have a, an engineering background and so the two of us together, we can also kind of split what we focus on, uh, which I think also avoids conflict, uh, which is good.

John Jantsch (02:09): Oh, it absolutely awesome. You kind of have your strengths that you bring and your balance yeah. Was the idea to create the company one that you said, gosh, there's this huge need out here and, and a gap in the market, we should create it. Or were you trying to do this in your own careers? And couldn't find the right tool.

Todd Fisher (02:29): I think I'll take that one, Laurie. So, so I think that it wasn't sort of something we sought out to do. It was more of Laurie and I were both sort of running it. I'll say I'll call it a fledgling consulting company. We were trying to make things for our customers or provide AdWords support, SEO support. Okay. And a handful of them. I think two, we were very explicit and they would not take our business unless we could track and compound that with the fact that we were just coming out of that really nasty recession and, you know, still sort of, it was very raw, right. That, you know, people, after you finished a job for them, maybe we built a website and then they would be like, sorry, I can't pay for, you know, that website cuz uh, we're going outta business. So we dealt with a lot of that.

Todd Fisher (03:09): Right. And then, you know, so part of it was also like, Hey, the appeal of really sort of the appeal of having a, a, a software business that we could charge upfront. And we could also focus our energy instead of it being spread, you know, from one project to the next being completely unrelated from each other. Yeah, sure. There are things lessons you can carry forward, right. With what you, you know, suffered in, you know, learning for one customer to the next. Right. But it's not, doesn't compound as effectively as, Hey, it's one software platform. Right. And we're still kind of consulting, but we're doing it in the context of one platform. So it's has a much, it, it works better.

John Jantsch (03:47): Yeah. I've been throwing call tracking out here and, and call tracking metrics the name of your company, but we're probably ought to back up just a little bit. And you know, a lot of listeners of course, are very savvy, understand what that is, or at least have experienced in some fashion, but maybe give an overview of, you know, what call tracking is and how, you know, marketers use it.

Todd Fisher (04:07): Sure. Yeah. Do you wanna take, do you wanna, I can. Okay. Uh, so, so call tracking, you know, the early days started out with here's a phone number, put this phone number on your billboard and we'll measure how many times that phone number is called. And that must mean that billboard is worth X, right. And it sort of evolved with Google ads to, you know, okay, now somebody clicked on an ad and if they made a phone call, can you tie that phone call back to that particular ad in a particular, but over time, I'd say the real value is that now we can help you answer the question of not just which phone number, uh, and which click, but was there a sale, right? Yeah. Was there meaningful conversion that occurred? And if there was, well, let's make sure we can communicate that back to Facebook, Google, whatever ad platform you might be using.

Todd Fisher (04:53): Right. And to me, that's more of the, the value story here. Right. And, um, and then the mere fact that we're handling this phone call means that now we have a call recording, we have speech intelligence. Right. So we, we could say, Hey, somebody was pretty angry on that call. You might wanna work on that aspect of your business as well. Right. So it really kind of is interesting that it, you know, sort of all started with wanting to answer the simple question of how many people, how effective is this ad. Yeah. And it sort of trickles into all of the impacts that, that one ad and that led with all the customer interactions that occur right back to

John Jantsch (05:30): Yeah. And I, I think it really, it does kind of answer that like, uh, the phone companies used to talk about the, the last mile, you know, question was that there was a whole lot of data we had, but we couldn't really understand. I mean, it allowed us to weed out stuff that just totally didn't work, but we really couldn't refine what was bringing us revenue necessarily. And I think that that's, you know, for a lot of marketers, obviously, you know, the old joke kind of about, I, you know, some of my marketing works, I just dunno which, you know, part it. And I think a lot of marketers still take that approach of if I throw enough stuff out there and, you know, I think the thing that's really missing from that approach, of course, you could be very successful and grow a business. But if you knew that 20%, that was really working, you just double, triple, quadruple down on that and you'd really have a business wouldn't you

Laure Fisher (06:15): Mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm I know. And now we started with it being about phone calls, but now it's all these other communication channels. Right. Keep getting invented. Right. And so we've, we have to keep kind of weaving in all of these other channels and it really, it, you know, companies had all these different platforms for all these different channels. You know, they had like their email service, they had their, you know, text message platform. They had their chat platform. And now it's really about bringing those all together so that you can see that journey all the way through all of the different, you know, mediums that people are communicating through.

John Jantsch (06:47): Yeah. Well, in forms even, I mean, I, we have clients that half half of their contacts, phones calls, and half of them are, you know, consultation form fills, you know, so I mean, being, you really do need, uh, to bring many of those things to together. You, you we've kind of talked about it, but maybe you could cite a few examples. I mean, the obvious one is, you know, are my ads working or paying, but what are some other uses or maybe what you would call best uses for, for this type of tracking?

Laure Fisher (07:14): I would say one thing is what's happening on the phone calls is really interesting. A lot of, a lot of companies think they kind of, they know what's happening on the calls because their team tells them. But when you actually hear the calls and listen to them in person, you know, you learn a lot. And then also you can use machine learning and to have, you know, a system like ours, listen to the calls in a way and scan them for patterns. So you could figure out, you know, what words keep getting mentioned in the call, you know, where does your salesperson have to say no, you know, we don't do that. What are the trends that you're seeing in terms of, you know, voice tones in their voice and when they might be getting angry. And there's just so much you can learn from actually what's happening in the call when you actually hear it directly in the call versus relying on interpretation from someone else telling you

John Jantsch (08:00): Well, and I would, I would also say, I mean, we have clients that most of their phone calls seem to come on Monday, Tuesday . And that really has some decision making, you know, about what we better have, you know, ready on Monday, Tuesday, right? Yeah.

Laure Fisher (08:13): Yes, yeah. Yes. Like which agents are performing, you know, you see all sorts of interesting information about who answers their phone really quick and whose phone calls last forever, but the calls don't seem to go that well, right. You know, you can see all sorts of interesting performance data and also understanding when you run an ad, how quickly do the phone calls happen. Right. So what should you be thinking about in terms of budgeting for advertising and how that translates into communications coming into to your call center?

John Jantsch (08:39): So, so we are, you know, my agency and the training that I do. I mean, we are big proponents of this for a lot of the reasons we've already talked about, but for those agencies out there listening, this is an amazing way for you to prove your worth. And I think a lot of people forget that, you know, they're given reports with traffic on them and, you know, with, uh, keyword rankings and whatnot. But you know, when the client says, well, yeah, we're not getting any more business. And then I go listen to five calls that just don't get answered, or they go to voicemail or, you know, whatever it is. I mean, it's pretty easy to say we're doing our job , you know, but you're not. But then O obviously, you know, the better scenario that is that, that, you know, you're very, is very easy then to connect all the analytics together, to show, you know, this phone call was actually worth, you know, $12,473 this month, or, you know, or these group of phone calls. So it's a great tool to, you know, to prove why you're charging what you're charging.

Laure Fisher (09:31): Yeah. It's and it's interesting. Cause a lot of times CU customers will say, they thought they're surprised by some of the things that, you know, they might an ad, a particular ad channel might be driving. A lot of traffic might be driving a lot of phone calls. But when you look at like what types of phone calls is driving and what the long term value of those customers are, it's surprising to people sometimes, you know, they yeah. Have all sorts of learnings around like organic versus paid and, you know, social media and what really is the value of that. So it allows them to just, you know, really kind of understand even further, like, was this really a good lead? You know, was this really worth it? You know, this channel that we invested in

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John Jantsch (10:59): So a lot of channels, email specifically, and certainly on social, uh, media and Google's making some adjustments about, you know, tracking has actually become an evil word in, in some service, right. See, except for, uh, mailing lists, you can, you know, you can buy a mailing list that, that has anything you want on it. send it to anybody you want for

Laure Fisher (11:20): Everybody lives, drive it over to their house. Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:23): You can know what diseases they have, what medications they're taking. Right. But let's get back to the, what we can talk about, you know, tracking in the, you know, in the email world in the digital world is coming under a lot of scrutiny. So how are you preparing for that? Or what do you have to say about, you know, the person that's saying, oh, but we're not supposed to track.

Todd Fisher (11:42): Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, I think there's a lot of misconceptions out there around this, but you know, it is what it is. You know, first of all, one of the things that we say is, Hey, listen, like we're, it's first party tracking. Not only that, but somebody clicked on this paid ad. That was a very expensive, uh, thing for that business to, to put out all the businesses really asking is to understand whether or not that expensive paid ad is having some value. Right. So that they can better focus their effort for the next time. Right. And so I, I, I really think that if, if you, you know, it can explain to somebody, Hey, you know, for example, we, we had a, I think it was like a lawyer who was explaining to me, he's like, you know, my, my ads cost $50 a click.

Todd Fisher (12:19): Right. I was just like, wow. So he's like, you absolutely need to, I don't wanna know unless these are turning into phone calls sure. Is what he told me. That was our, one of our first customers. Yep. And I remember being like, okay, well, that's, uh, really important. Let's make sure we, you know, we can answer that question for you. So, you know, often I hear is, you know, you know, people go down, the path of tracking is evil and then they start dropping words like deep state and, you know, you know, you know, foreign actors and all this kind of stuff. And I'm like, well, wait a second. Who are we talking about here? Cause the plumber down the street, when you click on their ad, I think it's gonna be okay. Right. So what are we actually doing there to prepare for that? So, so first of all, um, there's things that are just happening, right? So Google, um, has been forced to change how they track Google ads, right? So there's something called GBRA w braid and only just recently were the APIs available for us to actually pass those tokens back to Google for conversions. But you know, we work with Google's ecosystem, we'll collect those tokens and we'll pass them to Google in, in response to conversion events. Yeah. What else

Laure Fisher (13:22): Also giving customers tools to manage the data that they collect. Yes. You know, so whatever provider they're using, they need to have the tools to get rid of things they don't need control so that they're collecting just what they need, delete things they don't need. So a lot of it, I find even with service providers, we use, you know, that it's, it's all about the cus us being able to control what it is that we're collecting. Cause a lot of times people find that they're collecting all this information. They don't even need half of it. So get smart about, you know, what it is that you're collecting. It's true. Also when you look at GDPR compliance as well, that you really need to be able to justify what you're collecting and, and have a good handle over how you're securing it and how to get rid of it, you know, when you're done with it.

John Jantsch (14:02): And does your tool provide, you know, things like HIPAA compliance, you know, for people that obviously in that medical area that one's probably touchier than GDPR for a lot of people,

Todd Fisher (14:13): It's funny. It is. Yeah. But in a different way, GDPR and and HIPAA kind of have different kind of edges to them. So, but we cater HIPAA both.

John Jantsch (14:21): Mm-hmm, one of the things that is becoming increasingly popular maybe because the technology is caught up to make it increasingly easier to do is segmenting customers and leads and people that are on your list already, not on your list already. How does call tracking play into that, maybe that kind of personal segmenting journey.

Todd Fisher (14:41): Um, so yeah, so, so we have a lot of a attribution that we can apply to the contact. So one of the things we do is when you make a phone call into our system, we actually create two records. It's the, the call activity. And then if it's not already created the contact record, and then as that user kind of interacts with you, we collect additional information on that contact record. And one of the, one of the big use cases, I like to kind of say, Hey, is, this is good, right? Um, is let's say you're driving and to get ahold of, you know, business X, Y, or Z, you know, unfortunately you did have to go through a rather complicated voice venue, right? Your first time you've ever called them. Right. Right. You had press one and you had to listen, press two and maybe listen, press four or something.

Todd Fisher (15:23): Now you're finally talking to a person who's really able to help you. Right. You're in your car though. The kids are screaming in the back drive under a bridge and the call drops, right. This is like tragic situation. Right? Well, if, if that business had known who you were and in our system set up a rule that just said, Hey, if it's within, let's say 24 hours, skip all the voicemail stuff and just go directly to the, the, the last agent who you were talking to. Right. Well then imagine how much better this would be when like 10 seconds later you come outta the bridge or outta the tunnel and you call back and well, wow. You're talking to the same person again. Right.

John Jantsch (16:03): What's interesting. I think even just knowing that somebody is a customer or somebody is not a customer, you know, that just that designation could certainly trigger different behavior, couldn't it?

Todd Fisher (16:15): Yes. Yeah. And that's been a big part of our product is just helping to cater to those kinds of use cases where it's a repeat call. It's an, you know, we know that this person was inquiring about product X, Y, or Z, right. Cause of the lead form that they filled out. Yeah. So now instead of routing them to a general queue, maybe we're gonna route 'em to a specialist queue. And so in this case, you know, you can say, Hey, you know, tracking really gave you a better experience. Right? Yeah. Maybe it took some of the frustration of your day out of your day. Right? Yeah. That's the way I try to position it is, Hey, there's lots of friction points here. You know, when you call that business, you really feel like entitled so that they should know everything about you. Well, that's part of what tracking helps do, right. Is give you that kind of white glove treatment.

John Jantsch (16:56): Well, and, and I think the, the beauty of what you just said is if it's working well, you didn't even know it did it. Yes. And that, of course that's the frustrating thing for somebody that sits there and codes all day. Right. that's right. You know how hard it is to actually make it

Todd Fisher (17:11): . Yes.

John Jantsch (17:12): Yes. So, so if somebody was looking at you and there are other players out there that, that do call tracking and whatnot as well, and you know, what would you say, Hey, but here's our, here's how we're different or here's, you know, here's our super feature that nobody else has.

Todd Fisher (17:25): Sure. Um, what do you think Laura? I mean, I think what we really do and shine in our space is that we really bring multiple facets of the space together in almost the hub fashion, where we have other, we, so in, in a way, I'd say we have competitors in many different industries because we kind of bring many different industries into one platform. And that's really our specialty is that we've brought these things together. So you don't have to say, I want my call tracking company. I want my contact center software. I want my CRM software, you know, you can kind of just pull them all together into one place and it integrates better this way. Right. I'd say in our space, we, we are friends with everyone because we integrate with everyone, but, but we can also provide the, the feature as well. So you kind of get choice in that way.

John Jantsch (18:08): You, you know, one channel, I guess, that we haven't even talked about that I meant to, because so many businesses, some businesses are using for outbound marketing, but I don't think that's really the true use. A lot of businesses are using SMS as a true customer service tool. Your point is coming up or, you know, it's time to reorder, you know, whatever to just kind of, and people are expecting that and appreciate the text that way. How does, how does a call tracking tool play into that? Well,

Laure Fisher (18:31): You can, you can tie text message campaigns to, you know, a person and their pattern of interaction. So, you know, maybe they have filled out a form that, you know, they're interested in a certain product, they clicked on an ad. They've talked to someone, you know, about that phone call, what happened in the phone call. You can now target your text message information to them in a whole different way. Obviously you need to have permission to text them, but you've, you're able to segment them right. And target the communication. The other thing that I think is really important in text messaging, a lot of people think about when, you know, the, the blast text blast. Right. But what I think is really interesting is the conversational texting where you can actually have just a one-on-one conversation, whether it's for service or a sales interaction, the, you know, the people are so much more likely to respond to a text message and open a text message. And especially if it's easy, you know, schedule, appointment via text, or, you know, have like, I actually have like a conversation with a salesperson via text without having get on the phone with 'em. So that I think is really interesting. And, and something, I think a lot of companies are just starting to kind of scratch the surface on, maybe they've done their like text blast with their promo codes and all of that, but really figuring out how do we create kind of meaningful interactions with customers over text messaging.

John Jantsch (19:43): Yeah, absolutely. So Todd, Lori, thanks for, so by the duct tape marketing podcast, uh, tell us a little more about call tracking. Tell us, give us kind of the 32nd commercial or anywhere you wanna send people to find out more specifically about call tracking metrics.

Laure Fisher (19:58): Yeah. I would go to call tracking metrics.com. That's the best place to go. And you'll see that we've got three different plans you can sign up right on our website. We have an amazing support team, amazing professional services team. That'll help you implement the service as well. So, you know, definitely feel free to call our sales team, have a demo, or you can sign up right on the website and get started.

John Jantsch (20:18): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for sound by the duct tape marketing podcast, and hopefully we'll run into you both, uh, somewhere out there on the road.

Laure Fisher (20:24): Thank you.

John Jantsch (20:36): One final. 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 [email protected] 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.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the salesman podcast, hosted by will Barron and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. Look, if you work in sales, wanna learn how to sell, and frankly who doesn't check out the salesman podcast, where host will Barron helps sales professionals learn how to find buyers and win big business ineffective and ethical ways. And if you wanna start someplace, I recommend the four step process to influencing buying decisions. Listen to the salesman podcast, wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:44): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and I'm gonna do a solo show today. It's actually been a while, but I wanna cover a topic that is very high on a lot of business owners' minds. And that's the idea of retention of internal team members, internal customers, whatever you wanna call them, employees, staff, team members. This has been a really hot topic of the last year, and I think it's not going away. There's a lot of pressure for a lot of reasons on this. So I wanna talk about it as the subject that it is, obviously it turns into production issue or fulfillment or capacity issue for a lot of organizations, but it's really a marketing problem, or at least can be solved I think, with a marketing solution. So that's what I'm going to present.

John Jantsch (01:34): Hey, I also wanted to let you know that I have been working very hard on a unique marketing strategy assessment. A lot of people have these, uh, marketing assessments out there that that really are just measuring your tactic approach. What you're using, what you're doing. I've created something that really is heart and soul to the idea of strategy before tactics marketing as a system. And I'd love for you to check it out. Uh, the URL is marketingassessment.co. So it's marketing assessment.co go on over there and, uh, check it out to go through. It takes about, I don't know, five minutes to answer the 20 questions and, and the report that you get at the end of it, frankly, is, is enough gold to, to have you actually, uh, improve or find area of for improvement in your, in your marketing strategy. So, uh, check it out, marketing assessment dot C.

John Jantsch (02:29): All right. So let's talk today about rethinking the recruitment journey. You know, one of the things that I think that certainly I've said this many times to anyone that will listen, one of the things that I think the pandemic and, and a great deal of what went on with the, the, the chaos of the last couple years is that, you know, a lot of businesses do pretty well in good times just by being in the right place at the right time. A lot of businesses during the pandemic learn that, but boy, in tough times, growth comes from being important in the lives of your customers and your employees. And it's a constant, uh, battle. It's constant shifting there's the leverage changes, you know, so to today we work with a lot of folks that are saying, Hey, I don't need more customers. I need more people.

John Jantsch (03:12): So the leverages in many cases is, has gone squarely to the employee. And I think that changing dynamic, I think does have a tendency to allow people or, or to get people in the habit of thinking, oh, this is just a vending machine approach, need more customers, put some money in run, some ads, run a funnel and create more customers, oh, need more employees just go run. Some ads, go to the job boards, put in some and voila pops up some new employees. And I, I wanna share, I'm gonna rifle through. 'em pretty quickly a few statistics that should shed some light on how we have to be thinking about this in a much different way than the vending machine or the funnel approach. Apparently less than 15% of the, of every job that's advertised on those job boards, you know, monster indeed, et cetera, gets filled by candidates who actually apply through the job board.

John Jantsch (04:07): So we're spending a whole bunch of money there, and it's not really producing the results. 50% of candidates say they wouldn't work for a company with a bad reputation, even for a pay increase S true of customers coming to us. Why wouldn't it be true? Of course of employees as well, 79% of candidates use social media in their job search. We have to be where they are. That's, that's true. Again for customers as certainly as much as it is for staff. 92% of consumers will visit a brand's website a first time for reasons other than making a purchase, guess who is visiting your website for reasons other than making a purchase people you might hire, or you might wanna hire 71% of employees say that they would accept a pay cut for a better working experience. A flip side of that is I know I've paid more or a product or a service when I got, or was expecting to get a better experience.

John Jantsch (05:05): I think it's just the flip side of that exact same thing. 89% of employers think employees leave for more money. That's why everybody defaults to more money. That's why everybody defaults to lowering their prices when, uh, they're trying to attract new customers. It, again, it's the flip side of the exact same thing, but according to a very large gala poll, only 12% of employees actually leave for money. And I think the thing that, the point that I'm really trying to drive home here, in fact, if you're really in a hurry, just take note of this idea and, and you'll have the essence of where I'm gonna go with this, uh, today. People really aren't candidates or consumers. They're both, there's no distinction. I mean, people are just people. So the vending machine approach of let's put money in and get more customers, put money in, get more employees, lower prices, you know, advertise bonuses, you know, for getting employees.

John Jantsch (06:05): I mean that, that approach will draw some people, I suppose to you, but you know, people who come to you for a price increase or price decrease, or employees that come to you because they get a dollar, two more, an hour are gonna leave for the exact same reason. So when I talk about the customer journey and the employee journey, or how somebody, uh, comes to, to join an organization, it, it it's really in a lot of ways, it's not even a marketing issue. It, it is a strategy issue that I think can be solved with of the marketing approach. So here's the three steps for creating the perfect recruitment strategy. First one is to know who you're trying to recruit. And I know everybody says that, but what people forget to say is that you probably already have some ideal employees in your organization.

John Jantsch (06:51): Just like I talk about narrowing your focus to the top 20% of your customers, look at your team. You can do the same thing. What is it about your highest performing, uh, folks, the people that thrive in your organization? What is it about them that you need to understand? What behavior, what characteristics, what objectives, what problem can you promise to solve as an organization? That's always been true from a, an attraction standpoint for a, a differentiator for your customers is going to be true, certainly for employees. So how can you create an end to end customer journey? Think in terms of employee recruitment pipeline, it's something that doesn't, it isn't meant to be an event. Oh, I have a position to fill. We need to do X that's. What gets people in, in the mindset of, oh, I have to offer more money. That's the only way to get more people or I have to spend more money on the job boards.

John Jantsch (07:45): That's the only way to get more people. It has to be something that becomes part of the DNA of, of all of your marketing. So look to your current employees and I'm gonna give you four questions and you might come back to this, uh, part of the recording. I'm gonna give you four questions. If you need to write these down to, to try to either think about, or even even ask your employees sometimes asking is tough because it's the boss ask asking. And it's like, is my answer really gonna ? Is it gonna be used for good or bad? But here, your question to ponder, what does their current work life situation look like? You'll find that they probably have certain goals or in a certain point in their life that they, you know, have certain values. Now that doesn't, I, this is not an appeal to say everybody in your organization needs to think and look alike.

John Jantsch (08:35): It's just that there are gonna be certain situations that I think might be keys or might be signals to, you know, what you're looking for, or, or at least what you start promoting. If you find that many, uh, folks in your organization enjoy a certain type of work or a certain type of environment, they Excel in, then you wanna start talking about that. That that's what we do here. All right. Second question. What do they enjoy? What frustrates them in what work environment do they Excel? Number three, and number four, what factors were involved in them making a decision to come to your organization? If you could start to understand doesn't mean you have to have all the answers, but if you can start to at least think about the answers to those questions, you're gonna have a better idea of the message you need to take out there to the world and start talking about why your place is a great place to work.

John Jantsch (09:25): And speaking of that, one of the greatest marketing messages, this is to attract customers is to talk about your people is talk about how exceptional your place is to be an employee. In fact, we've actually moved many of the marketing messages to be, you know, for example, a remodeling contractor, our people make your remodeling experience exceptional. That is a very positive, attractive message for the people that want to remodel their kitchen, because maybe they've were worked with not such so exceptional people, but it's also a great message for the potential employee. You're leading, talking about the fact that your people are exceptional. Hey, I wanna work there now. Also, don't forget. As I reminded you many times, don't forget about Google reviews. If you're getting some amount of Google reviews, pour over those word for word first off, what you're probably going to see is that if your people are truly exceptional, your customers are going to be noting that they're going to be actually naming them by name.

John Jantsch (10:29): In fact, they might not even name your company, but they might name somebody who works at your company. So start understanding what they about your people, about the experience that they're having. Those are some real cues to what maybe you ought to be saying. The promise that you ought to start making, uh, to, to demonstrate that you can deliver a better experience. You know, customers don't actually change comp I mean companies, I mean, I don't think we want to jump around and say, well, that didn't work outs, or maybe it did work out, but I'm gonna go look for a new one. Uh, I think we want to stay with companies. And so we don't really leave them. We leave the experience that we're having with them. And now let's hear from our sponsor. Look, if you're tired of slowing down your teams with clunky software processes and marketing that is difficult to scale, HubSpot is here to help you and, and your business grow better with collaboration tools and built in SEO optimizations.

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John Jantsch (11:52): are the third component of this strategy idea is that is, is to think about this end to end journey. You know, a lot of handing these days about all the things that have changed in, in, in marketing and in business. But, you know, I think the thing that doesn't get talked about enough, the thing that's changed the most is how P people choose to become customers and employees. They have so many options today and how they decide on the company that they're going to, to hire is, is all about the research that they do.

John Jantsch (12:24): And they go out there and, and in a lot of ways are making a decision, you know, before we even know that they're looking at our organization and this, this is certainly true of some be coming to be hired as, as an employee. So we have to think about the marketing hourglass as we apply it to the employee journey. And so, uh, as a reminder, I know I talk about this all the time, but the marketing hourglass for us is, has seven stages. They are no like trust, try by repeat and refer. And so what I'm asking you to consider is what is, what are you doing to intentionally guide somebody to come to know about you and, and start to think, Hey, this is a place I might wanna work, but then as they start to dig in, you know, what message are they seeing as in terms of a story, are, are they connecting with your values?

John Jantsch (13:10): Who do they meet first? Is it easy to find out more information? If for me, how often people will have a, Hey, come, you know, we're hiring and then you click on a button. And before you ever find anything out about the company, you have a, a five and a half page application to fill out. That's like going from, Hey, you know about us now, I wanna buy you wanna buy and, you know, skipping the steps of trust, building that, that really make you, you, the obvious choice, obviously reviews, employee stories, your values and actions mentions in the media. Those are all things that are part of the employee journey today. And in fact, as I started to say, I think the, the beauty of this idea of branding your organization is a great place to work is it's a killer marketing message. I mean, how could that possibly be a, for anybody who wants to hire you or, or buy your products and services?

John Jantsch (13:59): So promoting, uh, part of your content strategy ought to be in fact, a huge part of your content strategy ought to be, to promote things that your employees, your team members are doing, how they're advancing, the fun that you're having at your organization. I mean, these are things that go in many cases in the early part of the journey, they go a lot farther than the benefits that I'm gonna actually receive, because I think people, uh, more and more are, are leaving organizations maybe even for pay cuts or, or certainly not staying at organizations because the 401k is the bonus is great. If the environment is not great, if the experience of being an employee there is not great, then none of that really matters. So then if we slip over to the try and buy and, and obviously substitute higher for buy, if you like, , it's not a real stretch in my mind.

John Jantsch (14:53): So the try process, what, what is that application process look like? The phone screening, you have so many, and again, what happens is a lot of organizations don't have an HR department, don't have a professional who's charged with the hiring experience. It's the manager or the VP of something that actually has another job, and this is just something they are doing. And so the follow up and the experience, and, you know, once they come on board, the onboarding, the who, who their manager is, you know, how they interact with current employees. I mean, all of that, their training plan that's laid up. The statistics are pretty crazy about when people leave organizations within the first night days. It's because there was, there was no onboarding. It's true of customers. You know, you've heard me talk about Joey. Coleman's great book, how to keep, I can't remember now the title, but how to keep an employee no, how to keep a customer for life.

John Jantsch (15:43): Although he is actually working on the employee one too, he tells me, but the idea behind it is make the first 90 to a hundred days an amazing experie. And you will not have the turnover that many organizations, uh, experience today. And speaking of that, you know, just like keeping customers is, is a far better way to grow a business. Keeping your employees is a far better way to grow, not just your team, but your organization. You know, the number one, uh, reason people are citing now for leaving organizations is a lack of respect, a, of a growth path or any kind of personal development. I mean, pay and benefits certainly shows up on the list, but it's way down from things like respect and, and personal development. And then finally refer, I work with a lot of organizations that have happy, happy employees and happy customers.

John Jantsch (16:30): And, and we always scratch our heads say, well, why aren't they referring us? And most of the time, it just comes down to the process. The, you know, it's almost with, with employees, a lot of organizations almost treat it like, uh, you know, an expectation, a part of the job, you know, they offer a bonus. So it just becomes part of the pay. But the biggest reason people don't make recommendations or referrals, both as customers. And it lawyers is they don't understand or worse don't trust the process. Maybe the hiring process for them was kind of wonky. Hey, they like being there now. but the, uh, the process itself was a little bit stressful. Do they wanna put their friend or, or neighbor, you know, through that kind of thing. And last thing about retention people don't change jobs. I mean, they change about, so the, again, a lot of it has to do with the experience that they're having, you know, maybe with the person they're directly reporting to, and not necessarily with the organization, I've been running recruiting ads, a skilled labor positions for a number of years, and we test different headlines in different approaches.

John Jantsch (17:32): And the number one recruiting a for the past two years simply just says, respect with a question, mark, you know, do you feel like a respected member, uh, of a team in your current, uh, position? And it beats everything else. We try, you know, time and time again, because that is the, that is what's missing for a lot of people in the, uh, positions. And I don't care what type of job it is. I think that's, uh, the piece that's really missing. So think in terms of this idea of the marketing hourglass and, and applying that journey to the recruiting process, intentionally helping move people through the stages of no, like trust, try higher retained and refer. All right, that's it for me today. Um, again, I wanted to remind you to check out the new assessment that, uh, I built it is a marketing strategy assessment.

John Jantsch (18:24): You can find it @ marketingassessment.co - not.com - marketingassessment.co. All right. Take care.

John Jantsch (18:32): All right. So that wraps up another episode. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in and, you know, we love those reviews and comments. And just generally tell me what you think also did you know that you could offer the duct tape marketing system, our system to your clients, and build a complete marketing consulting coaching business, or maybe level up an agency with some additional services. That's right. Check out the duct tape marketing consultant network. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that offer our system to your clients tab.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the female startup club, hosted by Doone Roisin and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. If you're looking for a new podcast, the female startup club shares tips, tactics and strategies from the world's most successful female founders, entrepreneurs, and women in business to inspire you to, to action and get what you want out of your career. One of my favorite episodes who should be your first hire, what's your funding plan, Dr. Lisa Cravin shares her top advice from building spotlight oral. Listen to the female startup club, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:48): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Cameron Herald. He is the founder of the COO Alliance, the world's leading network for Second in Command, and he is also the host of the second in command, the chief behind the chief podcast, where he interviews COOs and other seconds to share their insights with his listeners. He's also the author of five books and a top rated international speaker having spoken on all seven continents. Probably not too many people can say that. So Cameron, welcome to the, the show.

Cameron Herold (01:22): Hey John, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

John Jantsch (01:25): So you are a little beyond the 800 got junk story. You've done a lot of stuff since then, but that was, that's been a pretty good calling card. Hasn't it?

Cameron Herold (01:34): It's been a great calling card. It's funny. I was speaking with guy Kawasaki a few years ago and I said, you know, do you ever get tired of, of speaking with, uh, about apple? And he, he said, do you ever get tired of speaking about 100, got junk? I'm like, no, it was just such a, a passionate thing. But yeah, it was 15 years ago. I think it was 15 years ago next week that I left.

John Jantsch (01:52): Oh, wow. Well, I moved four years ago or bought a house in Colorado about four years ago and slowly moved. And I can say we, we had to use the services of one 800 got, uh, junk because we'd been in this for about 30 years. awesome. So it's still out there working, I guess.

Cameron Herold (02:08): Well, my, yeah, my youngest son got to work in the trucks last summer for the first time. So he is kinda excited about that.

John Jantsch (02:14): So, so that was early in your career in a lot of ways. And in reading your story, you know, that was a, you were when you showed up as a youngster, so to speak and in that role, that was kind of a stretch or a new role for you. So are there some things in those early days of kind of figuring operations out, I guess, that, that really stuck with you?

Cameron Herold (02:35): Uh, something changed. So one under God junk was actually the third company that I'd helped scale. So I helped build void auto body and Gerber auto collision and then a private currency company prior to that. And then I'd been involved in another group called college pro painters, which was the world's largest residential house painting company. So I actually joined wing hundred Gott junk as their COO when I was 35. So for me, for the first four years, it was actually a little bit like, you know, I already had the expertise. I knew what to do. Let's just crank through this. What really started to hit me was two things. One when scale started to kick in, when we hit the, you know, 200 employees at the head office, 2000 employees system wide, it started to get complex and a little bit outside of my sandbox. And then secondly was the text. I started to appear where we started to leverage or talk about technology and automations and optimization. And that was, you know, 2004, 2005 was, I was realizing that it was no longer about working harder. It was about working smarter. And then it was also about optimizing and automation that we could, you know, really scale.

John Jantsch (03:38): So the role or the title, job title, COO, how would you define that now? Because it's certainly changed dramatically, hasn't

Cameron Herold (03:45): It it's changed in a few ways. So 20 years ago to be the COO, you had to be a major player at a major company. And I think we've had title inflation now where, you know, you can have a 12 person company. Sure. And they've given everyone a C level title. So I think there's been a little bit of title in inflation. The CEO is really the second in command to the CEO. They're the person that should be running the business. If the CEO was sick for six months and couldn't come in, they tend to be the one that has kind of a bit more multidisciplinary, um, subject matter expertise. They could probably run marketing, they could probably run ops. They could probably run chart. You know, they could probably run some areas of the business, but they don't necessarily have the pure domain expertise to be a chief marketing officer or a chief technology officer in a similar size company. So they tend to have, you know, good operational chops, um, and very strong people skills. But yeah, I think there's been title inflation. What used to be a director of ops or a VP of ops has often become as COO. And then you still have the Cheryl Sandberg who's, you know, been COO of Facebook for 15 years with the same title. So just a little bit of confusion.

John Jantsch (04:49): Well, and I would say the other way around too, I think some larger organizations there's been maybe title fragmentation . I mean, you've got people, chiefs, happiness, chiefs, revenue chiefs, you know, I mean, so where, you know, how does the COO or second in command orient themselves then in, in that world? Or are you saying that the fortune 500 companies still needs or maybe needs all of those positions? And the operations job is maybe more limited in a hundred person, 200 person organization, like who you were talking about at home office. The, the CEO really is running the company.

Cameron Herold (05:24): Yeah. If you look at, in any size organization, the COO and CEO are almost in the same box, it's almost the yin and yang where those two coupled together are overseeing the entire arc of the operations. And then you'll have titles, whether it be VPs or co C level that are running the independent, you know, business areas, whether you've got people or finance or it, and then there has been some of that, you know, movement, like, you know, the head of sales used to be a VP of sales, but they didn't get a C level. So now it's the chief revenue officer, right. Instead of the chief sales officer , but yeah, there's pretty much running the functional areas. If you're a, you know, if you're a 10,000 person company or, or larger, you know, a true enterprise level, you probably like I was coaching the CEO and the second command at sprint for about a year and a half. I think they had 42 executives that were senior VP executive VP level. Right. So they, they had a very seasoned C-suite, um, you know, they had multiple division presidents and it's, it's just more about roles and responsibilities in org chart and clarity. That really needs to be clear when you get to that size.

John Jantsch (06:27): Well, and maybe to, to where I was really headed with this, maybe the second in command, um, is more descriptive of the job title than CEO. So I mean, how we know that. Yeah.

Cameron Herold (06:36): I didn't, I said now for the last year or so, I started the COO Alliance six years ago and I said, if I was to retitle it, right, it would be more around the second in command than the COO cuz we have members from 17 countries that we've got president titles, VP ops titles, CTO, titles, but they're truly the second in command to the CEO.

John Jantsch (06:55): Yeah. So, so in a maybe a smaller, more nimble organization that doesn't have that giant C-suite what is the second in command? How, how would you describe the second in command's role? I mean, uh, I know you, you know, you know, ver Harish and, and the EOS folks and that, that whole integrator, you know, approach. Yeah. I mean, is it really almost a point of view, more than a, a job title?

Cameron Herold (07:19): It's funny. I was at a Verne har event about 14 years ago and I came off stage speaking and someone came up to me said, oh my gosh, you're Cameron. And I said, yeah, he said, everyone's been running around the conference saying, I need a Cameron. He said, I thought you were a saying, I thought you were like a BHAG or a vivid vision. I'm like, no, it's just me. And he goes, well, everybody wants what Brian, when Gina Rickman wrote traction and then wrote rocket fuel with Mark Winters, they talked about the integrator. That tends to be the role title or their title for usually kind of the 10 to maybe 50 or 60 person company. And then you really need to get into the more mature titles where you you're back into that real COO title. Again, they have slightly different thoughts around the, the role as being the tiebreaker where I would disagree on that. I think the CEO is the tiebreaker. I, I don't think the CEO really defers the operational decision making to anyone in the organization. It, it really has to unfortunately stop with them.

John Jantsch (08:14): It, at that point, it's, it's really strategy more than pure execution. Isn't it? Yeah. So, and, and maybe you can expand the range. I'm gonna give you a couple scenarios that, that I'm guessing that you run into because you work with people in all sizes, you know, coming and going um, what is that organization that comes to realization? I need a CEO. I mean, I'm sure you run into a lot of companies that are still founder driven, very good at selling and they've grown. So, so what does that organization need to be thinking about?

Cameron Herold (08:46): Well, and there's a few different reasons why you may end up needing a COO or that second in command. One is that the roles and responsibilities that are on the entrepreneur or the CEO's plate, or just too many, and they need to kind of divide and conquer. So they need that partner, right. Or maybe it's that you've got a really key player in the organization that if you don't handcuff them to the company, they're gonna leave. So it's a title. It's like an MVP, it's that title where you know that you're gonna lock them up because of that, it may be a change in agent, right? It may be somebody who you just know intuitively like I'm a 60 year old CEO of a company. And now we've got technology coming in. I need a change agent to come in and take us from the way we always did it to an optimization and automation and remote workforce.

Cameron Herold (09:30): And we don't have that skill internally. We need that expert to come in from the outside. They're the change age. So there's often a number of different types of roles that the COO can play. It may be somewhere where the CEO has built the company and now they want to step away a little bit and let someone run their business. So they have, you know, the reason we start companies in the first place is to give us cash, to give us free time or to say that we did it right. So once we've done it, once we got a enough cash coming in, how do we get more free time? It's to let someone run our business for us? Yeah. So there's often different reasons for that COO role. It's confusing.

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John Jantsch (10:57): I'm guessing I'm gonna throw out the other scenario that you also have people that come to you and say, I have a CEO. Oh, but we've outgrown them. You know, or how do we level up

Cameron Herold (11:08): That was me. So, you know, 15 years ago, next week, my best friend, Brian, who was the CEO and founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK. We were actually supposed to go for dinner tomorrow night, 15 years ago. He me aside on Thursday morning at the Vancouver club. And he said, I think we're done. I, I think you've hit the end of your six and a half years. You're not the guy to take us to a billion. I took him from 2 million to 106 million, but he was right. I was not the guy to go to the billion. And I was the sixth member of our sixth member leadership team to get replaced. You know, we replaced every other leader of the leadership team. I was the last one and they needed the next group of true seasoned leaders. So Brian replaced me 12 months later with the former president of Starbucks, us and Lonnie walked in and said, what a cute little company. And meanwhile, I'm pulling my hair up going, oh my God, it's so big. And she's like, this is cute. What a cute little business yeah. At some point the business can outpace the skillset or the yeah. Or really the life cycle of, of that person. For sure.

John Jantsch (12:07): Well, that's interesting then is the simple answer. You replaced them with somebody or can you actually level that person up? Can they gain this? The, the skills You have to be there?

Cameron Herold (12:17): I've talked to a few people about this. So Ben HTZ and I have spoken about this, who wrote the book called the hard thing about hard things. And then clay mask, who is the founder of, of infusion saw he and I have spoken clay, and I have said that it really a, a senior leader can go through two doubles in the size of the company before it gets very hard for them to do the third double. Right? So let's say that you go from 5 million to 10 from 10 to 20. It's very hard for that leader to be running a 40 million company let alone 80. Well, we did six consecutive years of a hundred percent revenue growth. So I was clearly by that year six, I should have been replaced. And then the, in Horowitz said, it's one triple that if you go from 10 million to 30, it's hard to take it to 90.

Cameron Herold (12:58): Right? And I think you can level up, you can work with them on their situational leadership and their coaching and time management and project and EQ and all the skills. But the business is different. You know, when I was leaving, we had 13 operational businesses operating in four countries, 3,100 employees, systemwide 330 cities. It was just big. And I didn't have the depth anymore to slow down, to consider cross-functional matrix decision making. Like I was hearing terms, I'm like, I don't even know what these mean, let alone how to operate within them. And then, you know, that's all

John Jantsch (13:34): I was gonna say. So is it simply a matter of somebody else has been there? and that's what they bring to the table or is it a different skillset? Uh, different personality.

Cameron Herold (13:43): It's a combination of both. I think it's not only the person has been there it's that the person has taken a company there. Mm. Cause really what Brian didn't want was someone who had run a billion dollar company. He needed someone who had grown a hundred million company and made it bigger. And then he needed a new cultural fit that fit the size of the organization. So strangely that, that woman, he brought in didn't work, he ended up getting rid of her, but he's then replaced her with a friend of mine who I've known for 35 years. We co-founded a fraternity together in Ottawa in 1987. I was president the first year he was president the second year of that fraternity. Now he's the COO. He, Eric, would've been a horrible COO in the first six years as I would've been horrible in his tenure, but he's just done 10 years as COO and has taken the company to 450 million. He's the perfect DNA for the size organization. It is now and a cultural culturally really strong of it with Brian. The trust is really strong.

John Jantsch (14:39): So I had culture written down. I mean, how much of, how much of the job is directing or forming or creating or nurturing the culture?

Cameron Herold (14:50): Oh, a lot of it, you know, I, I believe that the culture kind of permeates from within, so it starts with the C-suite, it starts with an obsession for core values and mm-hmm, obsession for vision. And, um, you know, really understanding that our people, our employees come first and our customers come second and really obsessing what employee engagement and then they'll obsess about customer engagement. It's really, it, it's all those tenants that have to be kind of first and foremost, and then understanding that if you focus on that, the numbers come from there, you know, I think that's where the truly great organizations almost build that cult-like environment while they're obsessing about the, you know, the business processes and, you know, the, the KPI and the metrics and that kinda stuff as well.

John Jantsch (15:34): So you've talked about what it takes when we're really growing that company, but for somebody that is out looking for COO role, or maybe looking to replace somebody, what, what, what do you see are some common mistakes, uh, that, that are that crop up

Cameron Herold (15:50): The most common one is that they assume, and I'm actually working on a book about the co relationship that'll come out in about six months, but it's the, the most common one is that they assume that if the person has had the role before they can come into my company and do the same role and they can't because the company is very different, you know, not unlike having a spouse or a partner in a relationship if I've been married, just because that woman was my wife doesn't mean she'd be a good wife for someone else, nor would I be a good husband for it, right. There needs to be a sync with core values and culture. And you know, if I love cooking, I probably want somebody who likes to clean. If I like somebody who, you know, you need to find the similarities and the commonality. And then also the fact that we don't wanna get into each other's lanes. So, you know, Brian did not need someone to run finance in it cuz he liked finance in it. Whereas I have members of the COO Alliance that two of their core areas that they run are finance in it. Right. So because their CEO doesn't of those areas. So it's very, it's a misfit when they just assume, oh, they've been a COO, there'll be a great one for me. Not necessarily.

John Jantsch (17:01): Well. So in some ways, are you saying a CEO should be looking for somebody that like for, in my case, I'm really, I'm not a system process finish line, kind of person, I'm a starting line, you know, think up the ideas kind of. So, so am I looking for somebody that's going to shore up where I have weaknesses, so to speak?

Cameron Herold (17:22): Yeah. You're looking for someone who's your yin and yang, right? Who's the match to like you're Sarah is your second in command and, and correct. She is amazing at systems, amazing at process she's very kind of inward facing and the organization. She didn't even love being on my second command podcast because she doesn't talk to the media much, whereas you're always on stage and you're the marketing person. And so she's the yin to your yang, right? The trust is very high. The relationship is very strong. Those are all what you're looking for.

John Jantsch (17:50): Yeah. Um, there seem to be a lot of organizations built around this idea of scale and helping people, you know, coaching people on that kind of growth. There's not a whole lot of people that are doing, I think what you're doing exactly. And that's working with the second in command. So tell me a little bit about COO Alliance and, and you know, what somebody would expect if they, uh, came to look at that.

Cameron Herold (18:14): Yeah. You know, you, you mentioned I've been paid to speak on all seven continents. I've done a lot of work with entrepreneurial organizations around the world. So I've worked with Y P O in 10 countries. I've worked with the entrepreneurs organization in 26 countries. I've done large scale speaking events for Vista and 17 cities. And then there's all these other groups for entrepreneurs like genius network and Maverick and baby bathwater and GoBundance and war room, amazing events. But those are all for the CEO and then there's organizations for marketers and for lawyers and for dentists and doc, but there was never an organization for the second command. And I really wanted a place where the CEOs could go and spend two full days talking about interviewing and hiring and onboarding of people. Whereas if you put, you know, a hundred entrepreneurs in a room, they can only talk about recruiting for 10 minutes before they need to switch subjects. So we need, we needed a place for them to geek out on the stuff that's more COO like, and as the whole impetus, we're starting it. Do

John Jantsch (19:12): You feel like you are actually shaping the role as it exists today by doing obviously you, you have a fairly large reach. I know you're, there are lots, the world is a big place, but do you feel like you're giving some modern shape to the role in general?

Cameron Herold (19:27): I'd never thought about that. I guess I would like to now that you, you, I, I think that Gina WMAN and Mark Winters have done a really good job with getting the integr or the integrator brand for traction, and they've done a good job with shaping it at the smaller level. I think Nathan Benton, Steven Miles have done a really good job in their book. Um, writing shotgun and an article they wrote for Harvard years ago about the role the COO. But yeah, I think there's been a gap in having a community for second in commands. And I don't want to be their thought leader. You know, if, if we had a spokesperson for COOs, it should be Cheryl Sandberg, not Cameron herd. I just want to create an organization where they can learn from each other and be with each other. And so I, I guess, yeah, it would be cool if we could.

John Jantsch (20:11): So, so tell us a little bit of just about all the ways that people can engage, you know, your organization, cuz I mean it's everything down to a self-study uh, program all the way through some high level coaching, right?

Cameron Herold (20:22): Yeah. So the invest in your leaders course is the self-study program. It's the 12 core leadership skills that all managers and leaders need to get better at. So it's called invest in your leaders. The C O Alliance is the clear one we've been talking about. We've got members from 17 countries. You need to do at least 5 million in revenue just to qualify. And then you have to be the second in command of the CEO. And that's 12 events, uh, every year online and we do two in-person events a year as well. And then we have the second in command podcast and that's just one that everybody should listen to where we never interview the entrepreneur. We only interview the second in command. Right? So I, I love you. I think your work's amazing, but we could never have you as a guest, but Sarah, your second in command was a great guest.

John Jantsch (21:01): Awesome. Well, she enjoyed being on the show and I've great have, have gotten great feedback because you do have a, a large audience of pretty focused folks that listen to it. Well, Cameron, it was great having you on this show. I can't believe it took this long, but I appreciate you stopping by and I do you wanna send anybody? I know we've been talking in generalities, but do you wanna send anybody to a website or anything that uh, they can learn more?

Cameron Herold (21:24): Yeah. If they go to COO alliance.com, they'll find it everything. And then all five of my books are available on Amazon, audible and iTunes. Thank you. I just wanted to be there for your audience.

John Jantsch (21:32): Oh, well I appreciate it. And uh, hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Cameron Herold (21:37): Thanks John. Appreciate it.

John Jantsch (21:38): 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 in, 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 strategy today. That's just marketingassessment.co I'd love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the salesman podcast, hosted by will Barron and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. Look, if you work in sales, wanna learn how to sell, and frankly who doesn't check out the salesman podcast, where host will Barron helps sales professionals learn how to find buyers and win big business ineffective and ethical ways. And if you wanna start someplace, I recommend the four step process to influencing buying decisions. Listen to the salesman podcast, wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:44): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and I'm gonna do a solo show today. It's actually been a while, but I wanna cover a topic that is very high on a lot of business owners' minds. And that's the idea of retention of internal team members, internal customers, whatever you wanna call them, employees, staff, team members. This has been a really hot topic of the last year, and I think it's not going away. There's a lot of pressure for a lot of reasons on this. So I wanna talk about it as the subject that it is, obviously it turns into production issue or fulfillment or capacity issue for a lot of organizations, but it's really a marketing problem, or at least can be solved I think, with a marketing solution. So that's what I'm going to present.

John Jantsch (01:34): Hey, I also wanted to let you know that I have been working very hard on a unique marketing strategy assessment. A lot of people have these, uh, marketing assessments out there that that really are just measuring your tactic approach. What you're using, what you're doing. I've created something that really is heart and soul to the idea of strategy before tactics marketing as a system. And I'd love for you to check it out. Uh, the URL is marketingassessment.co. So it's marketing assessment.co go on over there and, uh, check it out to go through. It takes about, I don't know, five minutes to answer the 20 questions and, and the report that you get at the end of it, frankly, is, is enough gold to, to have you actually, uh, improve or find area of for improvement in your, in your marketing strategy. So, uh, check it out, marketing assessment dot C.

John Jantsch (02:29): All right. So let's talk today about rethinking the recruitment journey. You know, one of the things that I think that certainly I've said this many times to anyone that will listen, one of the things that I think the pandemic and, and a great deal of what went on with the, the, the chaos of the last couple years is that, you know, a lot of businesses do pretty well in good times just by being in the right place at the right time. A lot of businesses during the pandemic learn that, but boy, in tough times, growth comes from being important in the lives of your customers and your employees. And it's a constant, uh, battle. It's constant shifting there's the leverage changes, you know, so to today we work with a lot of folks that are saying, Hey, I don't need more customers. I need more people.

John Jantsch (03:12): So the leverages in many cases is, has gone squarely to the employee. And I think that changing dynamic, I think does have a tendency to allow people or, or to get people in the habit of thinking, oh, this is just a vending machine approach, need more customers, put some money in run, some ads, run a funnel and create more customers, oh, need more employees just go run. Some ads, go to the job boards, put in some and voila pops up some new employees. And I, I wanna share, I'm gonna rifle through. 'em pretty quickly a few statistics that should shed some light on how we have to be thinking about this in a much different way than the vending machine or the funnel approach. Apparently less than 15% of the, of every job that's advertised on those job boards, you know, monster indeed, et cetera, gets filled by candidates who actually apply through the job board.

John Jantsch (04:07): So we're spending a whole bunch of money there, and it's not really producing the results. 50% of candidates say they wouldn't work for a company with a bad reputation, even for a pay increase S true of customers coming to us. Why wouldn't it be true? Of course of employees as well, 79% of candidates use social media in their job search. We have to be where they are. That's, that's true. Again for customers as certainly as much as it is for staff. 92% of consumers will visit a brand's website a first time for reasons other than making a purchase, guess who is visiting your website for reasons other than making a purchase people you might hire, or you might wanna hire 71% of employees say that they would accept a pay cut for a better working experience. A flip side of that is I know I've paid more or a product or a service when I got, or was expecting to get a better experience.

John Jantsch (05:05): I think it's just the flip side of that exact same thing. 89% of employers think employees leave for more money. That's why everybody defaults to more money. That's why everybody defaults to lowering their prices when, uh, they're trying to attract new customers. It, again, it's the flip side of the exact same thing, but according to a very large gala poll, only 12% of employees actually leave for money. And I think the thing that, the point that I'm really trying to drive home here, in fact, if you're really in a hurry, just take note of this idea and, and you'll have the essence of where I'm gonna go with this, uh, today. People really aren't candidates or consumers. They're both, there's no distinction. I mean, people are just people. So the vending machine approach of let's put money in and get more customers, put money in, get more employees, lower prices, you know, advertise bonuses, you know, for getting employees.

John Jantsch (06:05): I mean that, that approach will draw some people, I suppose to you, but you know, people who come to you for a price increase or price decrease, or employees that come to you because they get a dollar, two more, an hour are gonna leave for the exact same reason. So when I talk about the customer journey and the employee journey, or how somebody, uh, comes to, to join an organization, it, it it's really in a lot of ways, it's not even a marketing issue. It, it is a strategy issue that I think can be solved with of the marketing approach. So here's the three steps for creating the perfect recruitment strategy. First one is to know who you're trying to recruit. And I know everybody says that, but what people forget to say is that you probably already have some ideal employees in your organization.

John Jantsch (06:51): Just like I talk about narrowing your focus to the top 20% of your customers, look at your team. You can do the same thing. What is it about your highest performing, uh, folks, the people that thrive in your organization? What is it about them that you need to understand? What behavior, what characteristics, what objectives, what problem can you promise to solve as an organization? That's always been true from a, an attraction standpoint for a, a differentiator for your customers is going to be true, certainly for employees. So how can you create an end to end customer journey? Think in terms of employee recruitment pipeline, it's something that doesn't, it isn't meant to be an event. Oh, I have a position to fill. We need to do X that's. What gets people in, in the mindset of, oh, I have to offer more money. That's the only way to get more people or I have to spend more money on the job boards.

John Jantsch (07:45): That's the only way to get more people. It has to be something that becomes part of the DNA of, of all of your marketing. So look to your current employees and I'm gonna give you four questions and you might come back to this, uh, part of the recording. I'm gonna give you four questions. If you need to write these down to, to try to either think about, or even even ask your employees sometimes asking is tough because it's the boss ask asking. And it's like, is my answer really gonna ? Is it gonna be used for good or bad? But here, your question to ponder, what does their current work life situation look like? You'll find that they probably have certain goals or in a certain point in their life that they, you know, have certain values. Now that doesn't, I, this is not an appeal to say everybody in your organization needs to think and look alike.

John Jantsch (08:35): It's just that there are gonna be certain situations that I think might be keys or might be signals to, you know, what you're looking for, or, or at least what you start promoting. If you find that many, uh, folks in your organization enjoy a certain type of work or a certain type of environment, they Excel in, then you wanna start talking about that. That that's what we do here. All right. Second question. What do they enjoy? What frustrates them in what work environment do they Excel? Number three, and number four, what factors were involved in them making a decision to come to your organization? If you could start to understand doesn't mean you have to have all the answers, but if you can start to at least think about the answers to those questions, you're gonna have a better idea of the message you need to take out there to the world and start talking about why your place is a great place to work.

John Jantsch (09:25): And speaking of that, one of the greatest marketing messages, this is to attract customers is to talk about your people is talk about how exceptional your place is to be an employee. In fact, we've actually moved many of the marketing messages to be, you know, for example, a remodeling contractor, our people make your remodeling experience exceptional. That is a very positive, attractive message for the people that want to remodel their kitchen, because maybe they've were worked with not such so exceptional people, but it's also a great message for the potential employee. You're leading, talking about the fact that your people are exceptional. Hey, I wanna work there now. Also, don't forget. As I reminded you many times, don't forget about Google reviews. If you're getting some amount of Google reviews, pour over those word for word first off, what you're probably going to see is that if your people are truly exceptional, your customers are going to be noting that they're going to be actually naming them by name.

John Jantsch (10:29): In fact, they might not even name your company, but they might name somebody who works at your company. So start understanding what they about your people, about the experience that they're having. Those are some real cues to what maybe you ought to be saying. The promise that you ought to start making, uh, to, to demonstrate that you can deliver a better experience. You know, customers don't actually change comp I mean companies, I mean, I don't think we want to jump around and say, well, that didn't work outs, or maybe it did work out, but I'm gonna go look for a new one. Uh, I think we want to stay with companies. And so we don't really leave them. We leave the experience that we're having with them. And now let's hear from our sponsor. Look, if you're tired of slowing down your teams with clunky software processes and marketing that is difficult to scale, HubSpot is here to help you and, and your business grow better with collaboration tools and built in SEO optimizations.

John Jantsch (11:23): A HubSpot CRM platform is tailor made to help you scale your marketing with ease, integrated calendars, tasks, and commenting, help hybrid teams stay connected while automated SEO recommendations, intuitively optimize your webpage content for increased organic traffic ditch, the difficult and dial up your marketing with tools that are easy to use and easy to scale learn how your business can grow better @ hubspot.com.

John Jantsch (11:52): are the third component of this strategy idea is that is, is to think about this end to end journey. You know, a lot of handing these days about all the things that have changed in, in, in marketing and in business. But, you know, I think the thing that doesn't get talked about enough, the thing that's changed the most is how P people choose to become customers and employees. They have so many options today and how they decide on the company that they're going to, to hire is, is all about the research that they do.

John Jantsch (12:24): And they go out there and, and in a lot of ways are making a decision, you know, before we even know that they're looking at our organization and this, this is certainly true of some be coming to be hired as, as an employee. So we have to think about the marketing hourglass as we apply it to the employee journey. And so, uh, as a reminder, I know I talk about this all the time, but the marketing hourglass for us is, has seven stages. They are no like trust, try by repeat and refer. And so what I'm asking you to consider is what is, what are you doing to intentionally guide somebody to come to know about you and, and start to think, Hey, this is a place I might wanna work, but then as they start to dig in, you know, what message are they seeing as in terms of a story, are, are they connecting with your values?

John Jantsch (13:10): Who do they meet first? Is it easy to find out more information? If for me, how often people will have a, Hey, come, you know, we're hiring and then you click on a button. And before you ever find anything out about the company, you have a, a five and a half page application to fill out. That's like going from, Hey, you know about us now, I wanna buy you wanna buy and, you know, skipping the steps of trust, building that, that really make you, you, the obvious choice, obviously reviews, employee stories, your values and actions mentions in the media. Those are all things that are part of the employee journey today. And in fact, as I started to say, I think the, the beauty of this idea of branding your organization is a great place to work is it's a killer marketing message. I mean, how could that possibly be a, for anybody who wants to hire you or, or buy your products and services?

John Jantsch (13:59): So promoting, uh, part of your content strategy ought to be in fact, a huge part of your content strategy ought to be, to promote things that your employees, your team members are doing, how they're advancing, the fun that you're having at your organization. I mean, these are things that go in many cases in the early part of the journey, they go a lot farther than the benefits that I'm gonna actually receive, because I think people, uh, more and more are, are leaving organizations maybe even for pay cuts or, or certainly not staying at organizations because the 401k is the bonus is great. If the environment is not great, if the experience of being an employee there is not great, then none of that really matters. So then if we slip over to the try and buy and, and obviously substitute higher for buy, if you like, , it's not a real stretch in my mind.

John Jantsch (14:53): So the try process, what, what is that application process look like? The phone screening, you have so many, and again, what happens is a lot of organizations don't have an HR department, don't have a professional who's charged with the hiring experience. It's the manager or the VP of something that actually has another job, and this is just something they are doing. And so the follow up and the experience, and, you know, once they come on board, the onboarding, the who, who their manager is, you know, how they interact with current employees. I mean, all of that, their training plan that's laid up. The statistics are pretty crazy about when people leave organizations within the first night days. It's because there was, there was no onboarding. It's true of customers. You know, you've heard me talk about Joey. Coleman's great book, how to keep, I can't remember now the title, but how to keep an employee no, how to keep a customer for life.

John Jantsch (15:43): Although he is actually working on the employee one too, he tells me, but the idea behind it is make the first 90 to a hundred days an amazing experie. And you will not have the turnover that many organizations, uh, experience today. And speaking of that, you know, just like keeping customers is, is a far better way to grow a business. Keeping your employees is a far better way to grow, not just your team, but your organization. You know, the number one, uh, reason people are citing now for leaving organizations is a lack of respect, a, of a growth path or any kind of personal development. I mean, pay and benefits certainly shows up on the list, but it's way down from things like respect and, and personal development. And then finally refer, I work with a lot of organizations that have happy, happy employees and happy customers.

John Jantsch (16:30): And, and we always scratch our heads say, well, why aren't they referring us? And most of the time, it just comes down to the process. The, you know, it's almost with, with employees, a lot of organizations almost treat it like, uh, you know, an expectation, a part of the job, you know, they offer a bonus. So it just becomes part of the pay. But the biggest reason people don't make recommendations or referrals, both as customers. And it lawyers is they don't understand or worse don't trust the process. Maybe the hiring process for them was kind of wonky. Hey, they like being there now. but the, uh, the process itself was a little bit stressful. Do they wanna put their friend or, or neighbor, you know, through that kind of thing. And last thing about retention people don't change jobs. I mean, they change about, so the, again, a lot of it has to do with the experience that they're having, you know, maybe with the person they're directly reporting to, and not necessarily with the organization, I've been running recruiting ads, a skilled labor positions for a number of years, and we test different headlines in different approaches.

John Jantsch (17:32): And the number one recruiting a for the past two years simply just says, respect with a question, mark, you know, do you feel like a respected member, uh, of a team in your current, uh, position? And it beats everything else. We try, you know, time and time again, because that is the, that is what's missing for a lot of people in the, uh, positions. And I don't care what type of job it is. I think that's, uh, the piece that's really missing. So think in terms of this idea of the marketing hourglass and, and applying that journey to the recruiting process, intentionally helping move people through the stages of no, like trust, try higher retained and refer. All right, that's it for me today. Um, again, I wanted to remind you to check out the new assessment that, uh, I built it is a marketing strategy assessment.

John Jantsch (18:24): You can find it @ marketingassessment.co - not.com - marketingassessment.co. All right. Take care.

John Jantsch (18:32): All right. So that wraps up another episode. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in and, you know, we love those reviews and comments. And just generally tell me what you think also did you know that you could offer the duct tape marketing system, our system to your clients, and build a complete marketing consulting coaching business, or maybe level up an agency with some additional services. That's right. Check out the duct tape marketing consultant network. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that offer our system to your clients tab.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the salesman podcast, hosted by will Barron and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. Look, if you work in sales, wanna learn how to sell, and frankly who doesn't check out the salesman podcast, where host will Barron helps sales professionals learn how to find buyers and win big business ineffective and ethical ways. And if you wanna start someplace, I recommend the four step process to influencing buying decisions. Listen to the salesman podcast, wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:44): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is John Cantarella. He's a VP of community and impact partnerships at Facebook prior to joining Facebook, he was the president of digital of the news business and sports properties at time, Inc, where we are versa saw time.com, CNN money.com, fortune.com, si.com and golf.com. He also spent a number of years at the New York times company at NYT, I guess it's NY times dot com, running strategy, marketing, and operations. He was a part of the management team instrumental in launching NY times dot coms, first paid product and the acquisition of about.com. So John, welcome to the show,

John Cantarella (01:30): John, thanks so much for having me just hearing that a while it goes back a bunch of years too, but I really appreciate you having me, uh, on, on your podcast.

John Jantsch (01:38): You, you bet about.com is really a blast from the past. You actually, of course, people are listening to this. You don't look old enough for, to have, uh, been involved in that they, the about.com. There was a, a guide. I think that's what they called them in my community. That was, you know, interviewed me a number of times. So about, this was like around 2000 ish, I think, or something like that. But

John Cantarella (02:00): You probably remember it was called the mining company before it was about.com and it was kind of an early community platform, you know, with those guys who are really building it.

John Jantsch (02:08): Yeah. Very early on. And it it's kind of been absorbed into something else now hasn't it?

John Cantarella (02:13): It has, I think the New York times ended up selling it to, to Barry DI's company interactive core, I think.

John Jantsch (02:20): Yeah. Yeah. All right. So let's go. Not quite that far back, uh, but let's start at about 2008, which was probably the date that Facebook really became a business tool or started the journey becoming a business tools. So could you give us a quick, in your view, you know, how business use of Facebook has evolved kind of from those early days to where we are today?

John Cantarella (02:43): Yeah, I know it's a really interesting question. You know, what I, I wasn't around in 2008, but you know, early days, I mean, you know, Facebook was really an effective, you know, marketing platform, particularly in the early days, really focused much more on, you know, customer acquisition, which is still obviously a large part yeah. Of our business, but because it was one of the early platforms to allow, you know, self-serve, it really built, you know, a huge ecosystem of small businesses. Yeah. And, and, and, and it helps scale the platform really quickly. I think, you know, this company has gone through so many transformation. I mean, you think back in 2008, you think about early advertising and banner ads. And, you know, I could remember, I remember all the different formats, but, you know, in those days, Facebook really pioneered, you know, and didn't use traditional ad formats like the, you know, 300 by two 50 and, and really started, you know, you know, running ads and feed, and then obvious, you know, mobile happened, the company transformed and pivoted very quickly towards mobile. And I think you've seen that we've innovated on, on formats over the years from, you know, feed ads to ads in stories. And, you know, and now you're starting to see, you know, ads and things like reals. I, I think that the thing that's, you know, what we hear a overall is that I think about it in terms of economic opportunity. When I think about the millions of small businesses that use Facebook and, you know, it's an incredible platform to drive people, to, you know, take action for your business.

John Jantsch (04:15): So going back to my early use and it, I mean, it was such a great place in the early days to get exposure for your content, because again, the way the feed was first off, it wasn't as, as busy, but also the way the feed was as you, anybody who followed you saw your stuff. And, and obviously as it became so many more users and so many more, so much more functionality, you know, adding Instagram now and, and other purchases it's really in a lot of ways is it's become much more complex. Hasn't it?

John Cantarella (04:44): I think it is complex from a, from a, you know, you have to be somewhat skilled in knowing how to reach an audience. And I think that's why we have a large ecosystem of partners that, that help you. But, you know, if you're a small business, you know, you can't necessarily hire a third party. I think where they've innovated really well is, you know, to your earlier point, you know, obviously we have Facebook, we have Instagram, there's WhatsApp, and, you know, you know, within, within quest, you know, you can run an ad and there's so many tools in business manager that allow you to place an ad that it'll optimize for you. It up, you know, you can put some basic things in there and the, and that system will take care of the rest for you, like continually optimize the audience across platforms. So really trying to simplify it that said, you know, if you're a sophisticated organization, you know, you could really be very specific in who you're trying to target.

John Jantsch (05:40): So a lot of small business owners certainly use the ad, you know, functionality and dependent upon types of businesses have done really well. I've also seen, uh, a lot of small businesses in a non-paid environment, the groups that, you know, creating communities for various reasons. So

John Jantsch (05:56): Why do you think, I mean, there are a lot of tools now that you can create groups and communities. I mean, HEC slack, you know, this is one that a lot of people will attempt to do that. Why do you feel like Facebook, uh, has such a hold on? I mean, obviously part of it's just sheer numbers. There's so many people on Facebook already, but it, it feels to me like, you know, the group functionality at FA on, on the Facebook platform is, feels far superior to a lot of other, you know, options out there of kind of doing it on your own.

John Cantarella (06:23): You know, it's a, it's a great point. I would say, fundamentally, you know, we talk about product market fit. The product works incredibly well. And we have an unbelievable product team who, you know, over the last year is literally launching new features based on what the community's telling, what they need on a weekly and monthly basis to really ensure that people can manage and grow their community or their groups. I mean, to your point, like, so we call them groups, but to be honest, you know, fundamentally our mission as a company is to give people the power, to build community, to bring people closer together. And, and Mike to team specifically works with people that build communities. So we know there are over 70 million people, um, that are managing groups. There are over 1.8 billion people, monthly in groups. And, you know, with that's your scale, you know, these are ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

John Cantarella (07:13): And we like to think about them as communities. And, you know, you wrote about this in one of your books. You know, a lot, lot of these folks are purpose driven. And there are a collection of people that receive a sense of belonging through the connection, and frankly, a feeling of safety and trust that they invest in over time. And when we see small businesses or even larger businesses use, uh, Facebook groups, we see it because they're driven by a purpose and, and something they want, um, they're consumers to have around a short interest or a goal or an attitude. You know, they're not looking them as just a as capital, right. They're looking at it for purpose.

John Jantsch (07:49): So I think a lot of people get the idea of, of say putting clients or members or, you know, whatever we wanna call them into a group. I mean, that's quite obvious what are some other place along the customer journey that you think groups or communities fit that maybe people aren't thinking of?

John Cantarella (08:06): So the, the thing that we're seeing you think there's a stat out there that 80% of small businesses have used digital tools in the past month, you know, for advertising and communication. And overall, you know, you know this, and you've been doing this for years and consulting for companies. I, I think gone are the days when one way communication is gonna work. You can't speak at your audience anymore. And so, you know, what we're seeing is, is that companies that are purpose driven, small business that are purpose driven, you know, are finding real value when they're building a group. Right? So they're looking at for multiple things. So, you know, we call it and I, I have to give all credit to a woman. My name milita tub was an early investor in communities and started the community fund. You know, she calls it C C ROI community return on investment.

John Cantarella (08:55): And when we think about that, there, there are three things that we're seeing, small businesses and businesses get out of community. One is, you know, potentially revenue. There's a real lifetime value when people are, are in your group, because they're your best customers. Secondly, you know, from an operational standpoint, you know, it could be a customer support tool where your community, it's making your operations easier because people are talking to each other to help solve problems. And, and that third piece is really the insights piece. You know, we're seeing multiple companies use it for product development and they're, they're using what they're hearing in their communities to make their product better and have a, a continuous conversation with, with a customer. And there's so many great examples of that.

John Jantsch (09:40): Well, and I, I think you missed one that I'm seeing a lot of is peop it's actually become a top of the funnel, you know, tool for a lot of people where they're building these free communities, where people get a taste of what it's like to be in that community, or to be coached by that person or whatever is before they really even go into the true sort of sales funnel.

John Cantarella (10:00): It it's a great point. And we, we hear this from a lot of small businesses. I have an example. There is a founder called Priscilla side. She started a, a beauty company called Coco kind. And, you know, it was all started out of a need. She really wanted to have a clean, deep brand. She felt a lot of the beauty brands out there weren't aspirational for her because she suffered from, you know, pretty bad skin. And she, you know, didn't relate to a lot of what she was seeing out there. So she started this beauty company called Coco kind. And as she started this company, she started to interact through Instagram and direct message with customers to really understand, like, what formulas do they like? What, what is the packaging, what the colors that they like really finding that they're educated consumers. And then as her community on Instagram grew larger, she started to do polls that you get things like she gets things like 30,000 responses from her community through this, what she calls her Coco kind lab. And then she also started a Facebook group called skin positivity because, you know, these folks really love the products that she produces, but they also wanna connect with others around, you know, tips and tricks and to support each other. And to your point, you know, this becomes an organic top of funnel, as opposed to, you know, if you, if she doesn't remain true to permission of skin positivity, you know, people can see right through that.

John Jantsch (11:22): And now let's hear from our sponsor. Look, if you're tired of slowing down your teams with clunky software processes and marketing that is difficult to scale, HubSpot is here to help you and your business grow better with collaboration tools and built in SEO optimizations. A HubSpot CRM platform is tailor made to help you scale your marketing with ease, integrated calendars, tasks, and commenting, help hybrid teams stay connected while automated SEO recommendations, intuitively optimize your webpage content for increased organic traffic ditch, the difficult and dial up your marketing with tools that are easy to use and easy to scale learn how your business can grow better @ hubspot.com.

John Jantsch (12:09): Yeah. So you really hit on kind of where I was gonna gonna go next. You know, are there some, I, I hate the term best practice. It implies that there's no better practices, but are there some best practices to really stimulate and grow and, and keep this very engaged community? Cuz you know, I see all kinds of people I get invited to 'em all the time, these groups that you go there and it's like a ghost town, you know, so what are some, if somebody's really one to do this, what do they have to, what what's their investment gonna be?

John Cantarella (12:37): It's a really important point. And it's an important point because you know, everyone, not everyone, but, but most companies have someone who's their marketer and they have someone who's their social media manager, community management is none of those. Yeah. And you know, we've seen cases of large companies starting communities and then quickly losing control of it because they don't have a clear mission of what they're doing. And you know, we've spent a lot of time to make sure that our ecosystem of community builders really have the resources that they need. So first of all, we have everything from a community management certification program to a playbook for small business or any business to really figure out how to get started to use, you know, Facebook groups and also just figure out like what community platform works best for you. So I think number one, we'd like to say why like identify what your community objective is, right?

John Cantarella (13:29): You know, it, it, your community objectives should number one, be I just want more customers. Right? And then once, you know, oh, your why it's really, how do I list the right person to, to manage that community and then really develop a strategy to support your desired outcomes. And then once you're there, then you start to build the guiding principles and you start to engage the community. And what you see is, you know, these communities start to grow pretty pretty quickly. Uh, and I'll give you an example. One of our, our partners is, is a young woman called DEHA Kennedy. She started a community called broke black girl. And, and her mission was really to provide culturally relevant financial information to African American women. I mean, she, I love it. She called herself at a five financial activist, right? And so she started this community to help women save money and it quickly became 80,000 people wrong.

John Cantarella (14:17): And you know, she was a community first leader because of an issue she was having to really find better financial, um, literacy and information to manage finances from that, she started getting people in our community, asking her to consult for them. And it's gotten to the point now where Dasia could no longer do one-to-one consultation. So she started to build old small business where she's offering seminars, she's offering templates. And it's your point? It's, you know, she's like, look, I can't look at them as capital. I look at them as people and I'm providing value and if they want to migrate to my website and buy one of my courses great. But I, you know, it is topless funnel for her, but it's organic.

John Jantsch (14:55): So you touched just briefly, maybe unintentionally on a another point that I know, uh, sometimes comes up. So I build this 80,000 person community, great tools, great community, but I don't really, oh it, um, it's on somebody else's platform. I'm sure you hear that all the time. What, you know, how do you address that? Sometimes very real concern.

John Cantarella (15:21): So I, I like to think of it in terms of, we are nothing without these individuals. And what I've found is both when I speak with small businesses and I work with these community builders, they are enormously grateful for the impact that they are able to make, right. With the tools that we provide them. And so, you know, we manage multiple, I mean, I would say not multiple thousands of community builders who are some of the most engaged on that platforms. And we spend a lot of time with them getting their feedback and, you know, and putting them in front of our product leadership to make sure that we can build all the tools that they want. And, you know, we call it our top pain points or people problems, you know, what are the product enhancements that we need to build to support them on the flip side, you know, our team is very focused programmatically to capacity, build individual to make sure, you know, when these communities grown in a certain size, they immediately see that it becomes a challenge. So we wanna make sure how can we make your community sustainable by launching monetization products? How can we support you in your leadership journey? Cuz you need to build a team to support the work that you're doing. And so if you look at the tools over the last year that we've launched, they've really been in response to these individuals, being able to, you know, feel more ownership over their communities. Overall,

John Jantsch (16:44): I know on my show, there's a lot of businesses that are, are traditional local businesses. You know, how would they go about looking at this cuz because obviously they have real geographic constraints just by nature of the model of their business. And obviously social media has oh, geographic constraints. So, you know, what are there ways that, that you've seen local businesses use this? Not, not just to build numbers, but to do something that might effectively, uh, drive revenue.

John Cantarella (17:13): I have, I mean, here's the thing, you know, I just saw the sta this week, it was in the New York times, which is really frankly upsetting and frightening is that with more companies settling into permanent hybrid work from home in New York city, specifically the average office worker is predicted to reduce their annual spending by nearly $6,700 pre pandemic. They were almost $14,000 around their office areas. And if you go down the list, that's a New York city with, you know, largest metropolitan area in, in the us, you know, Los Angeles and San Francisco. It's a $5,000, um, reduction in spend that is terrifying. And the thing that I think is so important for small businesses and this is at the local level, right? Most people, you know, think about small businesses at the local level. You know, during the pandemic, we launched multiple things to support small businesses, not only grants for them, as well as you know, in, in communities, but even on Instagram, you could, you can still launch a sticker today that is, is linking to your local small businesses to make sure that, that you can support them locally.

John Cantarella (18:17): So, so local is fundamentally, you know, when I think about community, that's what I think about. Secondly, I say is that it's so important for small businesses to have the digital for front door and a digital front door is not only a social media presence, but also, you know, the people that off by your store every single day, they are your community. And sometimes small businesses don't realize that. And so I would always encourage these small businesses to really engage with their customers. And you know, this is the beauty, I mean, community has redefined itself. We always think about community in real life. And so, you know, now it's both, how do you make sure you can bridge the people that walk by your store every day with this digital front door to make sure they can connect with you? Right. So my local restaurant of the street noodle pudding here in Brooklyn, New York, you know, I follow my Instagram. I would love for them to have a I'd love for them to have a group. You know, they post their menu every single I wanna support them. So it's really important for these small businesses to put that digital shingle out there in as many ways as possible.

John Jantsch (19:20): So this is a big question. I don't know if we can end up on this or not just give us a glimpse of what's maybe next for businesses on Facebook, but obviously community as well.

John Cantarella (19:29): So I think there are multiple things and I, I think, yeah, you are an early evangels of evangels to this, from what I can tell, you know, I think it's so important. We talked about this community return on investment, but to me, the other piece that's so important is the purpose and the social value. You're bringing to people in the sense of belonging. That's why I feel so strongly that businesses, that build community in the future, you know, you, any young person today wants a company that shares their values, whether it's around sustainability, like colo kind or, you know, focus on social justice, they wanna know what you stand for. And they're not gonna find that out. If you don't talk about it and engage them on it. I also think that community is not going to be a marketing function. We're gonna start to see the biggest companies have a chief community officer, and there's gonna be a whole new industry trained up around people being certified in community management.

John Cantarella (20:24): We're already seeing a bunch of third party companies start to build metrics and tools so they can start to measure the value of community overall. And you know, the better we're able to support our partners in being able to measure the value of their community. The stronger they'll be. I'll give you an example. There's a, an incredible startup cold tonal. They're a home startup and they have a home exercise machine and we've been working with them on a case study because they have this toll community on Facebook. And if you go on there, you see these people who are so dedicated to the exercise, but we also found that their most active community members work out with the product more than the average user and they are, are more and they're much more significantly likely to recommend to tool brand. They also get feedback every Friday, it's hashtag feedback Friday on how to improve their product.

John Cantarella (21:17): And they filter it back into the brand. You know, it it's the full circle. So I think you're gonna see more companies like to like Airbnb, like Coco kind and, and broke black girl invest in community and set themselves apart from everyone else. And I, it, you know, it wouldn't be right if I didn't, uh, mention the metaverse, you know, as we're building, uh, virtual reality, we're obviously making a really big investment there, you know, and part of what we're gonna do is really help define what community will look like in the virtual world, which is gonna be fundamentally important. You know, if you can't be there in person, you can be there with your avatar and hopefully get a sense of, what's like to be a part of a community.

John Jantsch (21:56): You know, you mentioned obviously hybrid workplaces, distributed workplaces, you know, are, are certainly they've been going on for a long time. But I think that they just got a jolt , you know, from what we've done in the last few years, what role would a tool like, um, like your community groups play in retention of employees? You know, I think that's a, that's a pretty hot idea right now because, uh, so many people, I don't know where they are working now, but so many people have left to go, uh, pursue other careers. And so retention and recruitment have become, you know, really hot right now for a lot of our organizations. What role can community play in that since we don't have the natural sort of meeting community place?

John Cantarella (22:38): I think it's so important to think about that. And, you know, and again, you've written about this. I think if you don't start by building community with your company, it's gonna be really hard for you to create an authentic community outside of your company for your customers. I think the beauty of working company look, I've worked, I worked in media for years and I've been at MEA for seven and a half years now. And we, you, you have a version of Facebook internally, cold workplace, and, you know, beyond the groups that we've created to collaborate. So you might have a group that you're collaborating on a, around one project. We also have a lot of groups within our company that are just really fun. You know, it could be sad work from home meals, it could be, you know, you know, people at, at meta that are over 40, you know, they're really fun and they help you build community overall with people within your organization when you can't be in real life.

John Cantarella (23:36): And that really sustained a lot of people in our organization and in companies, not only, you know, communities, but even, you know, even tools like zoom or chats, you know, we have a chat for it's a Peloton chat for folks on my team, and it's a great way that we all just, you know, support each other and build a community around a shared interest. So I think that using digital tools is really important, but it can't completely supplant, you know, in real life. And I think that combination of the two is really being thoughtful about how you bring the digital platform and the in real life potluck all together is really important.

John Jantsch (24:14): So John, tell me, you mentioned the playbook. That might be a good place to start, but if there are any other resources you wanna mention or draw our attention to,

John Cantarella (24:21): We do, and I'll send you the, I'll send you the URLs and you can add it to the site, but we, if you go to fb.me/business/community, I know that's a mouthful, but we have a playbook. We have all kinds of resources for people that are building community. You know, I like to say to, to the team, it's, you know, we, we are trying to be as colloquial and as sufficient price, as you know, know, I think that's, again, you know, as possible where it's like, how do you break it down? So that it's really easy. Step one, step two, step three. So that it's really easy for people to onboard. And the beauty of our tools too, the way they've been built is that there's a lot of automation involved so that, you know, you don't have to be air dust 24 hours a day, but, but you do have to be there to tend, you know, it's like being a gardener, you know, make sure you head to it.

John Jantsch (25:08): Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, John, thanks so much for stopping by the duct tape marketing podcast and hopefully we'll see you one of these days out there on the road,

John Cantarella (25:15): John, I really appreciate your time and, and thank you so much for having me.

John Jantsch (25:19): All right. So that wraps up another episode. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in and you know, we love those reviews and comments and just, I generally tell me what you think also did you know that you could offer the duct tape marketing system, our system to your clients and build a complete marketing consulting coaching business, or maybe level up an agency with some additional services. That's right. Check out the duct tape marketing consultant network. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that offer our system to your client's tab.