John Jantsch (00:00): Today's episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by blissful prospecting, hosted by Jason bay and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network host Jason bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. Recently, they did a show on the four day work week. I'm a huge fan. I think everybody should be looking towards trying to create that, Hey, we get most of our work done in like two hours every day. Anyway, so let's try out the four day work week. All right, listen to blissful prospecting, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Dale Bertran. He has been an SEO specialist to fortune 500 companies and venture back startups around the world for two decades. He speaks in industry conferences, leads, corporate training events, and serves as entrepreneur in residence at the Harvard alumni entrepreneurs organization. So Dale, welcome to the show.

Dale Bertrand (01:15): Well, John, welcome to, well, thank you for having me. I must welcome you to your own show.

John Jantsch (01:21): well, I appreciate that. I don't think anybody's ever done that, so that that's awesome. so, you know, we're gonna talk about SEO. Uh, we're gonna specifically talk about maybe a brand or an evolution of SEO, but it's funny before we get into it, you know, a lot of people, you know, I bet you get this question a lot, you know, what are the big changes recently that, you know, in SEO and, you know, I think SEO's like a lot of things, it just kind of evolves, you know, like some of the big, like the, probably the biggest change, if there was one is, you know, rank brain, which really changed how SEO people need to think about SEO, but that's coming up on seven years ago. So I think a lot of, a lot of people wanna see like sudden change, but I think there's this evolution, but I'm gonna ask you anyway, what are some of the biggest changes in SEO that, that you are following?

Dale Bertrand (02:09): Well, thinking of it as an evolution is definitely the right way to think about it. When I started with SEO, believe it or not was in 1999 long time ago. And, um, even back then we knew where the puck was going. So to speak, like, you know, the metaphor like skate to where the puck is going. So we've known for a very long time that what Google's trying to do is help people find the right information, the answer to their question. So Google's just getting a lot better at it with, um, AI and, and all of the different algorithms that, that fall under the AI umbrella. So we, we call Google an AI based search engine now. And yeah, AI based search engines are just a lot better at choosing the right content for the query, giving you the right answer at scale than the rules based search engine, where, where Google started out

John Jantsch (02:58): Well. And I think, think you can test this for yourself. I mean, you start doing a search anymore and on nine times outta 10, they know what you're searching for before you finish. right. Yeah.

Dale Bertrand (03:08): Yeah. They've got the data. I mean, they process billions of searches a day and every time you interact with Google, every time you enter something into it or click on a result, it's watching you and Google's using that to, to basically serve up better rankings.

John Jantsch (03:22): Yeah. And it really, you know, a lot of times people look at SEO as a way to trick Google, I guess. I mean, and that's kind of how we used to look at it right. In some ways. And really the thing people forget is Google doesn't care about us or our SEO or our websites. I mean, they're trying to serve their customer, right?

Dale Bertrand (03:45): Yeah. That's really important. And I think how you frame SEO and how you think about it matters a lot. So if you understand that you are trying to help Google serve its audience, it's searchers, right. Help by giving Google the content that it needs. If you're writing, let's say you're writing a recipe for a Manhattan or any other bourbon drink, right? Like Google has already has access to thousands and thousands of recipes for Manhattans. So like you're just not giving it something useful. So that's one way to think about it. And then the other part of it

John Jantsch (04:16): Is, you know, it's only two, o'clock where I am Dale, but Manhattan sounds really good. I'm sorry, go ahead.

Dale Bertrand (04:21): I should a drink cocktail mixed box before this. So we could really have some fun and record it at the same time. So the other way people think about SEO is whether it's like a technical discipline. Like people think of, well, I'm optimizing my website, so I'm moving the HTML tags around or moving the elements around or, um, adding words like adding my keywords and, and that's, what's gonna make all the difference. And that's really the biggest change that we see with the evolution that Google's undergone as they switch to AI algorithms.

John Jantsch (04:54): So, so I taking this directly from something you've written the end of, uh, technical SEO. This doesn't mean SEO's dead. It means that your SEO resources are better spent optimizing for your customers, not Google's algorithm.

Dale Bertrand (05:08): Absolutely. So Google's algorithm is trained to find the right content to find the content that your customers are looking for when they're making a buying decision. So the better, you know, your customers, uh, the information they need, the questions they're asking and then how to answer those questions and give them the information they need to facilitate the purchase. Well, hopefully they buy from you , but the better you understand your customers and better, you'll be able to create content that Google serves because Google's doing like a damn good job of figuring it out nowadays

John Jantsch (05:41): Does do things like keywords in your titles and metadata and your URL to have a keyword. I mean, does that stuff not matter anymore because they it's know what it says.

Dale Bertrand (05:51): It's not that it doesn't matter. Like it it's just that it, it makes it harder and easier at the same time. Like it's simple, but it's hard to do like, you know, just creating the right content, creating the content that your, um, customers are looking for, but you can really boil it down to a three step process. Like the first one is building your platform. So making sure that there isn't anything very broken about your website that would prevent Google from calling your indexing, your content. So that doesn't mean you're optimizing for, to get the last millisecond of page feed on your site, but you're fixing big issues that would prevent Google from seeing your content. And then the second step would be keyword, visibility. What are the right keywords? Make sure they're in the right places. That's different from keyword stuffing or right.

You're even making sure that, you know, you, you have, you have misspellings or synonym and all of that. Like it, it's really more about the intent behind the keywords. You want people, you want purchased intent keywords. So yeah, whatever you sell, you wanna make sure these are keywords that people are typing in. When they're trying to decide, you know, what they're gonna buy in that category. And, and then the third step is really building targeted content and what I call multifactor authority. So the targeted content is the right type of content around the intent behind those keywords that you identified in the first step. And that could take a number of different forms, but it really depends on what you're selling and what your customers are looking for. So remember you need to know your customers. And then the other part, multifactor authority is proving to Google that you have the answer.

So if I'm writing about I'm making something up here, non-alcoholic drink recipes or something like that because I sell non-alcoholic, um, spirit. Then Google needs to believe that we are the brand. We're the website that that information should be coming from. And so that's back links, that's engagement with the site, reducing your bounce rate, making sure that when people come to your site, they stay, cuz Google will notice if they just bounce directly back to Google's, uh, search page and then the company you keep matters. So like if you were selling non-alcoholic drinks, you could imagine that there are a number of medical organizations or mothers against drunk driving that would care about the mission behind your product. And you wanna make sure that Google can see that you've got endorsements of all types. You could imagine from authoritative folks in your space.

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And I know the answer to this, but you know, I'm just gonna tee it up for you. Okay. So some might interpret what you just said is getting back links, but you're talking about something much deeper, aren't you?

Dale Bertrand (08:56): Yeah. So back links are still important and you know, we work to get white hat, you know, to sorry. We work to earn back links, um, on our projects. So that could be PR, but a lot of it is just making sure that you're running a good business. So you've got customers that are raving about you. You've got products worth writing about, and your business is making an impact with your customers or a community or something, uh, where Google can see that you're gaining traction. So, so that's why it goes beyond back links. Because if you think about it back links are really a proxy for something. There are proxy for endorsements in your space, in your market. The, if you're, maybe you're in the medical space and you've got the Mayo clinic, you know, writing about you, you might have a partnership with them. And an artifact of that is the fact that they're linking to you.

John Jantsch (09:42): Yeah.

Dale Bertrand (09:43): Yeah. So, so we wanna start on, we wanna start with the run, a good business, make good friends, you know, make you earn those endorsements. And then once, once we have that, then we're looking at ways to translate those into technical artifacts on the web that Google can see.

John Jantsch (09:58): And, and certainly one of the things that they can see better than ever is that they're the right links, right? There's they're links back links. That make sense. That would be logical, that would actually contribute to the conversation. , you know, as opposed to the, you know, round Robin directories that, you know, nobody ever actually sees and they have no authority at all. I mean, that, I think has been something that's been with us maybe at least five or six years, hasn't it?

Dale Bertrand (10:21): Oh, longer than that. So I, I should know because we, I mean, I was doing, I've been doing SEO for a very long time. So there used to be black hat techniques that worked and, and we did it because it worked nowadays. It just, they have to be natural links. Like you really do need to be building a community around your brand and, and content. A lot of it depends on whether you're B2C or B2B. If you're B2C, you wanna build a community, um, around your brand, get traction and make sure Google can see it. And then if your B2B, then the number of searches is gonna be lower is just gonna be lower volume, but still they're gonna be valuable. Organic traffic is valuable. But in that case, it's more that you want to make sure that Google can see the company you keep so that you're, you've got relationships with the industry, trade organizations and conferences. And if you're in the medical space, it's PhD, sorry, MDs or MD PhDs, which is even better and what, whatever works in your industry.

John Jantsch (11:15): So there's really a lot of elements here. I mean, there is the technical aspects of content of website that, that lead to SEO. There's the, the actual good deep content itself. But then in a way it's actually promotion of that content , you know, to the right audiences that, that then drives, you know, the right links or drives the right mentions or right. Traffic. So, I mean, do you see it that way as almost like three disciplines?

Dale Bertrand (11:44): I, I try. So, yes, but I try not to. So when it comes to like a, a successful SEO campaign, there's gonna be a lot of elements. Like you said, the technical platform, keyword research, the customer research, the content, and then the authority building. And then there's, you know, there's PR within that, there's a lot of dis disciplines within that, but it's really hard, especially for small business owners to think about, um, to, to even, you know, have the courage to do SEO when it requires so much. So instead. And, and I, I think I've learned about this, John sitting next to you at a dinner a long time ago, where you, you kind of helped me simplify some of my ideas, the way that I like to think about it. We, you have a purpose behind your SEO. And, uh, what I mean, when I say you have a purpose behind your SEO is that you've got a purpose behind your brand, a purpose behind your business. Yeah. And, and a quick example I'll give you is that we worked with a company that was a manufacturing company and what they manufactured was Velcro straps. It's, it's pretty darn boring. And I hope they're not listening to this cause they get excited about manufacturing. It's run by two engineers. And these Velcro straps are used by electricians. If you're installing bundles of wires into a big building, you need a lot of these Velcro straps to make sure that it's not spaghetti of wires everywhere.

John Jantsch (12:56): I got a few of 'em here with all my technology that hook up here.

Dale Bertrand (13:00): Perfect, perfect. And for them, we, they wanted to do SEO. They wanted to build content, but what were they gonna do? They gonna write 50 articles about Velcro. Like, Hey, Velcro's awesome. For all these reasons, we'll write one article about each reason. So you could do that, but it's not gonna help you build a community, build authority and have Google see that you're gaining traction. So what, what we realized when we were talking to them is one of the founders of this company was he was volunteering weekends at a technical high school near, near where, um, they're located. And so what we did was we put together a campaign. We called it the campaign to recruit the next generation of electricians. And basically it was, you know, they were going to identify, it was young people, help them pay for some exams, some licensure and, and also help them put a little bit of money towards their schooling.

And what we did was we promoted that campaign. We said, Hey, if you care, and we reached out to like-minded organizations like organizations that care about providing, you know, job opportunities for young people. And there was one that was about finding job opportunities for recently incarcerated people. And we told them like, we're looking for kids to help. Could you help promote this campaign? And basically when we look at it that way, and the reason why I call it purpose driven SEO, is because we wanna find something behind our brand that we can promote and build a campaign around. And then we get all of those other artifacts of SEO, the, the content, the technical platform, the traction, the links, the authority building the, the endorsements of like relationships with other organizations that are helping us promote our campaign. We get all of that by just focusing on this one purpose. So that, that's why I like to think of, uh, SEO campaigns as like purpose driven SEO campaigns. Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:44): And, and I love that. And before people think, oh, I have to learn this new, you know, tactic or this new technique. What you just described is what people like me were doing in the eighties. Right? Yeah. It was just PR and community building, but we pitched a newspaper, you know, or we went out to a nonprofit agency and got them, you know, to partner. What? So, so the more things changed, the more they say the same, I mean,

Dale Bertrand (15:09): Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (15:10): Human influence hasn't really changed or what people's desires are or what lights them up. Hasn't changed. We just have to figure out now they're on different journeys. They're, they're in different platforms, they're in different places. They get their information differently. And we just have to, we have to just remember those principles. Yeah. And then apply it to the technology. Don't we,

Dale Bertrand (15:30): And then also realized that there was a hiccup in the fabric of time in the marketing space. Yeah. Where all of a sudden these technical people, I have a technical background. I was a programmer before I started doing SEO, but technical people for all of a sudden had all this value because the web came along. Right. And if you could optimize a website just right, or get your programmer to do it, you would get tra traffic from Google. Yeah. And, and those days are, are really behind us. Yeah. Where like Google's AI has gotten to the point where it understands when a brand is building traction or, or if you like sell a B2B service or something like that. When you have endorsements in relationships with folks in your space that makes you worthy of organic traffic and rankings. Yeah. So now Google's getting like, just getting so good at what they do that we're reverting back to actually generating the, the right content that your customers are looking for and proving to Google that you're authoritative in your space.

John Jantsch (16:26): So that example that you gave you, you give that a name or at least a point of view, which I think people I'd love for you to kind of riff on this a little bit, because I think people need to acknowledge this and, and think about this more and you call it promoting the story, you know, not promoting your content or not promoting your products or your, you know, webpages or whatever, but promoting kind of the whole story, which to me was that was the technical, you know, school, you know, story that, that people got interested in and the byproduct was you got links and you got traffic and you got eyeballs.

Dale Bertrand (17:03): Yeah, exactly. That's what Google is, is looking for. So just think of it as like brands that are building traction or building like an audience. Yeah. And if you can show that initial uptick, then Google will give you the rest of the traffic and kind of have to help you go along that trajectory help you grow along that trajectory.

John Jantsch (17:21): So one of the elements of this kind of authority ideas is actually finding and activating influencers. I mean, people that you, you know, we all think about the, oh, you know, the top 10 names, every single person can name. Sure. We want them to talk about us and our stories and, uh, content. But you know, for that you're Velcro person, Gary V talking about, them's probably not gonna really do 'em much good. You know, how, how does the Velcro, you know, manufacturer go out there and find the right influencers to, to talk about their story.

Dale Bertrand (17:51): So what you would love is if it was your customers and it depends a lot of it depends on what you sell. So you could be in a consumer space where you're basically, um, you're basically incentivizing your customers to, to be brand evangelists and talk about the products, review the products, whatever you can do to get them to do that would work. It could be an ambassador program. And then in the B2B space, it, it might not be your customers. A another example I'll give is we work with a 3d printing company that sold, you know, multimillion dollar high-end 3d printers, but there's just not enough customers to really, you know, turn that into links and, and relationships that Google would see. So we focused on 3d printing hobbyists in order to generate content and build a community around the brand, even though what we were selling and making our money off was high end 3d printing machines that, that they could never afford. But we were able to build a community around the brand that Google saw and, and generated rankings and traffic.

John Jantsch (18:49): So I, I have kind of one final question that, and I'm just curious your opinion on this, cuz there's a lot of various opinions, you know, on, on SEO related sites, how valuable are signals in social media. So people linking from Twitter, people talking about your brand from a pure SEO standpoint, how valuable are those?

Dale Bertrand (19:11): So there's two answers, both are correct, which is the direct value of the links in the mention is not valuable. Yeah. But we still use social media as a tool for PR, which helps us build relationships, get back links on, on websites that Google can see stuff like that. And we know that it's not valuable cuz short version of the story, Bing had tried to use social media instead of back links because Google started out, you know, really focused on back links to determine authority in the best websites. And when Microsoft started its search engine, they said, ah, we're gonna do it better. We're gonna rely on social media and it just didn't work. Yeah. So they abandoned it. They went to links just like Google and now Google and, and Microsoft are both trying to figure out how to incorporate social signals. But uh, apparently what we see in the research is that it it's just not, it's just not good. Like it doesn't help them identify the best content, the same way back links, engagement, and these other artifacts of real world relationships do.

John Jantsch (20:15): So Dale tell people where they can find out more about fire and spark and uh, the work that you're uh, doing.

Dale Bertrand (20:21): Yeah. So we're at fire and spark.com all spelled out and you can email me directly Dale, D a L E fire and spark.com um, all spelled out. And um, always, I love talking about SEO. So if anybody has any SEO questions, I'm, I'm happy to hear it.

John Jantsch (20:37): Awesome. Well, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast and hopefully we'll see you out there on the road again, maybe in beautiful state of Maine.

Dale Bertrand (20:46): Awesome, John, and thank you for the

John Jantsch (20:48): Opportunity. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It's called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That's just marketingassessment.co I'd love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): Today's episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by blissful prospecting, hosted by Jason bay and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network host Jason Bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. Recently, they did a show on the four day work week. I'm a huge fan. I think everybody should be looking towards trying to create that. Hey, we get most of our work done in like two hours every day. Anyway, so let's try out the four day work week. All right, listen to blissful, prospecting, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:46): Hey, hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and I am doing another solo show, just you and me and the radio, as they say, I guess somebody probably said, I'm gonna talk about something that I've been talking a lot about lately called the customer success, track little plug for my latest book, the ultimate marketing engine. I talk about it in depth in there, and there's all kinds of resources. And if you're listening to this show in August of 2022, you can pick up the Kindle version for 2 99. Okay. There's a commercial today. But if this topic resonates, go get the book because I go so deep in into it. So here's the basis premise behind this customer success track. Over the years, I started to recognize, and again, I didn't wake up on day one and say, this is how the world is over tons and tons of experience, years clients, prospects.

John Jantsch (01:45): I've started to realize that there are about five stages of marketing that many businesses go through. And some of them rush through them. Some of 'em hang out in one stage or the another for a long time, but I've been able to recognize the characteristics of a business in that stage based a lot on what's going on in their marketing or what's going on in, you know, increasingly in their online presence. I know what challenges they're probably facing at that point because of where they are. But I also know have been able to identify the milestones that we need to move them through and consequently, the tasks associated to each of those milestones. And if we do that, I mean, it's basically a task list of things that need to be accomplished. If we do that, we can also say, but here's the promise of moving through that stage.

John Jantsch (02:37): I'm gonna go into some depth from a marketing standpoint. So if you're a business owner out there thinking, okay, he's talking about me right now. Maybe it'll give you some clues to what you need to be looking at in your marketing. If you're a marketer, if you're a consultant listening to this and you work with folks on their marketing, this is a great way to start thinking about how you would retain clients for a longer time, because you've got a roadmap that you're working from. And again, as I said, the much, much more depth on this in the ultimate marketing engine and a lot of things that I've been writing about, but I thought I would bring it out today because I think what happens is a lot of times people can't really identify the problem or they think the solution is I just need more leads.

John Jantsch (03:19): Well, what I'm gonna share today is that's not always the challenge. There is sort of a linear order. to how things need to be done, how things need to be built, how your business will evolve. And I think to some degree you can start recognizing it's hard if you get stuck because a lot of businesses get to a certain point, frankly, and they've grown. They're doing some things that maybe now they're juggling a lot of balls dropping a few plates, but outwardly they appear to have succeeded some. And so they, a lot of times dig in and just try to do more where they are and what I wanna suggest through this idea of the customer's success track and the stages and the customer success track is there's certain things you as the owner, the founder, the head of marketing, whatever your role is, need to start doing differently at each of these stages.

John Jantsch (04:06): And I think sometimes that's what trips people up. There are a lot of people that, that they love tinkering. They love DIYing. They love getting in and digging under the hood and figuring things out. Even if it takes 'em all day long to do it. And that has to change. If in fact you wanna move through these stages. So that's a little bit of what, what I'm gonna talk about today. All right. So let's talk about the stages. I've given them names. There are five of them. I'm gonna go through the characteristics and I'm hopeful that you'll listen and go, oh, wait a minute. That's some of what I'm experiencing. So that must be where I am. All right. The stages are foundation level up, organize, stabilize, and scale. Now those are arbitrary names. That's just a name that we pinned to each of the stages.

John Jantsch (04:53): If you're thinking about developing something like this for your own practice or for your own offerings that you go out there, obviously five's even an arbitrary number, but we just found that who we worked with that was a good way to delineate. All right. So what are the characteristics of that foundation business quite often, sometimes, but not always. They're in a startup mode. They're very founder driven. All the sales are typically happening from the founder, going out there and knocking on doors. Almost. There's no website leads coming in. They've maybe built a website. It's kind of a brochure, but no leads coming in. They're talking about their company. They're talking about their products in most of their marketing. There's not a consistent online presence. I mean, we see this all the time. Maybe they've got a LinkedIn profile, they've got a, a, you know, Google business profile page and there's off branding off names off what they call it. I mean, there's just, it's a lot of inconsistencies. And typically it's because they've not attached any value to participating in social media. They're not using email in a consistent manner. Even if they're getting clients, they're not using email to nurture those leads, to nurture those clients, to actually get repeat business.

John Jantsch (06:05): Part of the reason, some of the challenges of being in this stage, marketing's changing quickly, or at least it really feels like it. I think it, we run into folks all the time and this part of their, and they just don't know where to invest. I mean, somebody tells me I need to buy this. Somebody tells me I need to be here. Social media in a lot of cases feels like a way, particularly when you use it the way you see so many people using it, repeat business is not coming your way. And frankly, you've got too many tasks.

John Jantsch (06:37): Any of that sound like you , those are the challenges. Now here's the payoff. If we can fix, if you can fix those challenges, if you can start addressing the fact that you have to look at your website, for example, in a much different way, you have to actually start telling stories. You have to actually start using email. You have to actually start understanding the problem you solve for your customers. Some of the strategic things that go into actually creating a consistent online presence. The promise of that is that you're now gonna have a website that's prepared to not only a attract leads, but convert them. You're gonna get traffic flow from the search engines because you're creating useful content that people want to find. People wanna read. You're addressing the problems they're trying to solve. You can start generating reviews, perhaps automatically using some of the tools that are available today. And you can start thinking about re-engaging past customers. That's the promise of getting just the foundational stage built.

John Jantsch (07:39): Now, obviously that may not make the phone ring that may not actually take you from a revenue standpoint where you want to go. So what's the next level of maturity. The next stage, we actually call that one level up. A lot of times people will get that website built that work with a marketer. I mean, they're starting to produce content that they're starting to optimize some of their assets out there, but they're not really converting any of that web traffic. I mean, I guess the first trick is to get some traffic there , but it's not converting. So, so frankly, if you get things out of order, let's say at this stage, you wanna start running ads. Well, you're gonna be wasting a lot of money because until you're converting traffic that comes to your website, there's no point sending or, or getting traffic that comes there.

John Jantsch (08:25): You're not getting into page one. You know, search engine results are on maps in for local businesses there. There's still okay. You've bought into social media, but there's no engagement, which is really the only thing that matters leads are coming in, but you don't have any real systematic way to follow up on them. You're starting to think about online advertising, but not really sure what to do. And then this is what another thing we commonly run into at this stage. There's no sales process, not one that's repeatable. Anyway, that just kind of happens as it happens. Now, again, part of the challenges of being in this stage is maybe you've got customers, maybe you're fulfilling orders, but you don't have enough time to produce content or at least the volume of content that marketers say you need today. You're not really sure what content to produce online.

John Jantsch (09:16): Advertising seems both complex and expensive. You're not converting enough leads. You're starting to have those conversations, but you're not really converting them into customers. And unfortunately at this stage in many cases, because there aren't systems built for fulfillment, you're not retaining those clients. So at this stage, what we're working on doing now is creating landing pages, creating and narrowing the focus of an ideal customer, creating ways in which we can make content for really, for all stages of the customer journey, creating trust on the website, creating an actual journey with calls to action and maybe some free downloads. So you can start capturing those leads that are, or that traffic that's coming to your website because they're interested in something you're putting out there. So if we can get that now we've got the foundation built and now we're starting to layer on conversion. I mean, we're starting to layer on, okay, we've got people coming now, what's gonna turn them into customers or what's gonna at least put them into our pipeline.

John Jantsch (10:19): So the promise there is that, that now first off you're gonna start attracting higher quality traffic and leads because that's one of the real challenges in that foundation mode is you might be attracting some leads, but they're the wrong leads. So you're gonna get more ideal client interactions at this phase. Search engines and maps are gonna start noticing you, you all, you will create because at this stage, you're now ready to create some automatic lead capture and follow up. You're going to create a solid sales process at this stage so that you can start to consistently converting leads that, and in those sales conversations that you're having,

John Jantsch (10:56): And now let's hear from a sponsor, running a small business means doing it all. You deserve an online marketing platform that does the same. Semrush is an all in one platform that will lighten the load handle SEO, social media, and advertising all in one place, attract new customers, save time and money on marketing and get ahead of the competition.

John Jantsch (11:15): If you need it online marketing, no problem. Some rush will get you started. If you're ready to grow online, try Semrush free @ Semrush.com/now that's Semrush.com/now,

John Jantsch (11:31): all right, now we've got somebody up and running. So, so you can see we're kind of building on this. So once we're up and running, we're gonna move into organized. Now what's happening here is okay. Now I'm starting to get leads. I'm starting to have sales conversations, but now I'm kind of a mess. now I'm not tracking client relationships. I'm not really fully tracking my marketing results because I'm running too fast. I'm not upselling. I'm not cross-selling, I'm not taking advantage now of the fact that if I just drove more traffic there, say through advertising, I'm really in a, in many cases, I'm still fighting that competitive dynamic. I'm not seen as a leader necessarily.

John Jantsch (12:11): Now again, the challenges that, that this stage brings quite often is that your lead cycles are really up and down. Sometimes it's busy. Sometimes it's slow. sometimes you can keep up. Sometimes you can't. I mean, marketing return is hard to understand. There's so many things that go into it. If you're not really accurately tracking, it's a challenge. Client acquisition seems really hard or maybe expensive sales processes still at this point are very manual and customer service now has become an issue and is in inconsistent. So what are we gonna go to work on here? This is a place where we certainly are gonna start talking about the need for a CRM. at this stage, you need to be using some of the tools that allow you to automate some of your marketing, to track some of your clients to segment who's coming to your website.

John Jantsch (13:03): We're gonna set up a dashboard. You know, at this stage, we want to know what's working. What's not working. We're gonna track calls. We're gonna track emails. We're gonna track ad spend. We are going to start thinking about campaigns now to retain customers campaigns, specifically, to sell more to existing customers. We're probably gonna start talking about referrals here. We are. Certainly at this point can take advantage of some of the online advertising, but we also have to really focus on what happens when somebody becomes a customer. This is the stage where we certainly could go to work earlier on this, but we find that this is where it becomes so crucial that we can make it a priority. And that's the customer experience, the onboarding, the follow up, the communication, the orientation. I mean, all those as set intentions that we can repeat, you know, time and time again.

John Jantsch (13:56): So we do this in this stage, and now we're gonna see a consistent lead flow. We're not gonna be wasting money on advertising because we're gonna understand what works, what doesn't, we're gonna automate some of the lead nurturing, not as a way to shield ourselves from having to talk to customers, but as a way to actually create a frictionless better experience for prospects and customers, we're gonna be converting the right customers. And we're gonna have much higher retention and referral. This is the place where a lot of businesses, I mean, getting to this space is really the goal. Many businesses don't even reach this stage, but also this is a place where now all of a sudden, if we're gonna go beyond this, we can't just add more revenue. We just can't add more sales because we're not gonna be able to handle it. We have to add team.

John Jantsch (14:44): We have to add delegate delegation. This is the place at which quite frankly, the marketer, the doer, the task doer, who has maybe moved to being task manager. This is the place where we need actually a real CEO. we need the head of the organization to form because this is the, you know, I don't know where the revenue is, but it's certainly when we're gonna go north of a million in revenue, obviously that's an arbitrary figure because types of businesses are different, but this is the one to 10 to 50 million range where short of a leadership team, short of, uh, you being a CEO and no longer being the marketing manager or the marketing doer has to happen. So what's happening here. You know, we're using the characteristics now are actually more positive because you're using a CRM for sales. You've established some marketing KPIs.

John Jantsch (15:40): Maybe now you're starting to get the room, the breathing room to think, Hey, we can develop new products, new offerings. We've got online advertising, working for us well enough. Maybe we're starting to feel like, Hey, we're a bigger player. We need to get more involved in the community, more involved in our industry. We need to start developing internal marketing roles. Now the challenge, of course, at this stage, that all those characteristics sound lovely, right? Profitability starts to vary at this stage. We maybe were really pumping in expenses cause we're buying advertising. We're adding team. So expenses are increasing rapidly.

John Jantsch (16:19): It's tough to maintain marketing momentum with the growth that's coming and even harder to maintain fulfillment. It's time to actually probably bring on a strategic marketing hire as well. And this is the point where a lot of founders actually have to start analyzing, am I the right person? to be in this seat to be the COO, do I need a COO? Do I need somebody? Who's actually not only running marketing, but to somebody who's actually running operations or at least creating the delegation and the systems and the processes for getting all the work done. So in many cases, this is where we'll definitely go to work on trying to automate things in an elegant way. Again, not to just shield the, the business from ever having to talk to anyone. This is where we'll make significant talk about making significant investments in both marketing spend.

John Jantsch (17:15): And then I guess a third one operations spend, if in some cases, this is the place, you know, for many of our consultants, for example, this is the place where they need to start adding account managers. They need to AC actually start adding managerial levels in, in, you know, several places because businesses there. But if it's going out the back door as fast as it's coming in the front door, you're not really gonna gain any traction, but the promise here, if we can get this done, if we can build systems for both marketing and for fulfillment here, we can start replicating what we're doing. We start replicating what you used to be doing maybe as the founder and the startup, and this is gonna actually lead to consistent lead conversion, which certainly is going to lead to consistent growth. This is where word of mouth and referral generation just starts happening.

John Jantsch (18:04): Steadily your business really becomes start starting at this point to become an asset to the owner of the business, because it's not as dependent on you. And frankly, if you ever wanna talk about exiting your business or selling your business, I mean, that's certainly one of the criteria. Somebody has to be able to see how this would run without you. You know, there are many businesses that get found by an individual grown by an individual. And really a lot of the relationships are with that individual as opposed to the systems and the framework of the business. All right, the last one as we call scale, and really this one, probably this stage, you know, probably fits somebody that is maybe, maybe thinking in terms of exiting the business or certainly of maybe exiting their role as a, you know, day to day CEO or something, you know, kind of moving to a board type of role.

John Jantsch (18:57): So what's going on here typically, is that again, more positive characteristics, but still same challenges. So lead flow is pretty consistent and predictable starting to build an internal marketing team. You're sales management driven, not just a couple sales people out there, right? There's an entire selling system. You're starting to become recognized as a leader or in your industry or in your town. There's a bit of financial mastery. So at this stage, while again, some people who are more financial oriented, you know, maybe start this in the first stage, but this is where profit and your cost of acquisition of new business. This is where you're starting to have capital needs. I mean, so financial mastery is, has become a much bigger piece of the puzzle for success here. And you've really almost built and established, uh, uh, an internal org chart of roles of management roles.

John Jantsch (19:53): Now, the challenges here of course, is anybody who's grown to this. I mean, we might be talking about 20, 30 people or more here. We might be talking about 10, 20, 30 million or more here. And so all of a sudden culture, the thing that maybe was a great thing, not only for those people that work there, but for your customers, um, rapid growth sometimes really comes with a deterioration of culture. There's staff turnover. There's no emphasis on employee branding. There's a challenge to innovate, to continue to grow that bring new products and service offerings can add a lot of stress at this stage. So in terms of many of the things that that I talked about as characteristics, I mean, now you're gonna go to work on you. You absolutely are gonna build team. You're gonna build leadership team here. You're going to formalize structure around people, operations.

John Jantsch (20:46): You're going to need to give more and more focus to fulfillment and more and more focus to innovation. In fact, a lot of leaders in this stage of business, actually their primary job is to innovate, becomes the, you know, you've got that operations higher in place that is that managing the people that you've got. Somebody that's focused on culture. You've got somebody that's focused on sales. You've got the finance piece figured out. So in many cases, the role of the leader at this stage is ideas is innovation is to figure out how you can get more market share. Again, the promise, the value of the business will continue to grow. Cash flow will be consistent if need be. You're gonna be set up in now to raise significant capital. A lot of folks go out and raise a whole bunch of capital based on money or I'm sorry, based on an idea, but a business that generates consistent cash flow can demonstrate an ability to grow is going to have a really easy, um, access to a lot of cash.

John Jantsch (21:49): Should they need it? And certainly this is that are seen as leaders have a much easier time attracting experienced talent to, to the organization as well. So all of that to say, you know, many companies, many businesses come to us say, I wanna grow, I want more business. I want more leads. And what we've discovered is certainly that's, we're gonna get there but first we're gonna develop more clarity. First, we're gonna develop more confidence in the systems, more control over what works and what doesn't work. And there is a linear process for this. But for us having this roadmap is such a, you know, becomes the mission, becomes taking folks from where they are to where they want to go. In terms of training, in terms of hiring, in terms of even sales messaging, being able to demonstrate that you have a path to build on for many particularly service businesses is a pretty compelling differentiator and a compelling offer for somebody who is just had so many people selling them the tactic of the week.

John Jantsch (22:52): So while I just went through kind of our customer stages and I could do a whole nother show on every milestone involved in accomplishing moving people through there, but my feeling is that just about any business I've done marketing here, right? But just about any business that sells to other businesses, maybe even individuals could develop this idea of stage growth of staged evolution or maturity. So that's what I wanted to share today. As I said, if you pick up the ultimate marketing engine, you can pick that up. Wherever books are sold, all the electronic book. If you're listening to this in August of 2022 is on sale now for $2 and 99 cents. So when you get the book, you'll actually the entire show that I went through has a, has this roadmap in a form. So when you get the book, you'll actually get all the forms and tools that are shown in the book as well.

John Jantsch (23:43): So that's it for today. Hopefully we'll run into one of these days out there on the road. 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 it 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): Today's episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by blissful prospecting, hosted by Jason bay and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network host Jason bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. Recently, they did a show on the four day work week. I'm a huge fan. I think everybody should be looking towards trying to create that, Hey, we get most of our work done in like two hours every day. Anyway, so let's try out the four day work week. All right, listen to blissful, prospecting, 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 is Matt Dixon. He's a founding partner of DCM insights, the customer understanding lab. He is also a frequent contributor to Harvard business review with more than 20. And that's probably gone up since then printed online articles to his credit, his first book, which he came on the show for the challenger sale sold more than a million copies worldwide was the number one, Amazon N wall street journal bestseller, but he's got a new book out to, depending upon when you're listening to this, it'll be out in September of 2022. It's called the jolt effect. How high performers overcome customer indecision. So Matt, welcome back to the show.

Matt Dixon (01:28): Hey John, great to talk to you again. It's been a long time, but I'll be back with you.

John Jantsch (01:33): So I do recall of the challenger sale. You did exhaustive research to come to a somewhat counterintuitive conclusion. I think you've done that again in this, in this book. Can you talk a little bit about the research that you did to prepare for the Jo effect?

Matt Dixon (01:48): Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, one of the things is you remember John and listeners may familiar with the, the research that went into the challenger sale was based on survey data. We did a large scale global survey. Now I'm a bit of a research geek and I've always been kind of jealous of what professor Neil rackum did way back in the day. Remember he, when he did his spin selling research, he and his team traveled the world and they sat in on like 30,000 sales calls and I could never get anybody to wanna foot the bill for that. so I, so, and you know, because the problem with studying sales conversations as professor Rakin found out is that the really important ones always took place in the customer's office, but that all changed in March of 20 20 20 when the pandemic rolled around and sales went virtual literally overnight.

Matt Dixon (02:36): I mean, we were all doing some zoom and teams and WebEx calls, but it flipped to a hundred percent virtual overnight. So we actually partnered up with several dozen companies and collected about two and a half million recorded sales calls starting in spring of 2020, and then using machine learning platform from a company called tether to do the, a analysis of that data. And we'll talk more in this show about what we found, but that was, I think, think I, I saw this as an opportunity. I said, this is the one time I'm gonna get to study sales the way it's meant to be studied where the rubber hits the road.

John Jantsch (03:06): Yeah. That's fascinating not to get too off track. I wonder if we'll that behavioral stick.

Matt Dixon (03:12): Yeah, yeah. I think it will somewhat. I, so I, you know, pre 2020, I think if I were to guess, I would say, you know, for some companies, they were already a hundred percent virtual selling like a, you know, startup sta SAS businesses that, you know, armies of headset wearing, you know, young sales people, they were already selling on zoom for the rest of us. I think we were also doing some calls and some interactions over zoom and WebEx, but it was probably to the tune of maybe 30%, 40% of the sales process. It went to a hundred percent overnight. Where will it settle to your question? I don't know. I'm guessing it's gonna be probably around 70 to 80% because I think customers actually like it too. It's quite a convenient way to engage with suppliers and vendors and it's actually, you know, quite a productive way to sell too. But I think sales leaders know, and sales people know that, you know, some of those critical interactions still better to be face to face if you can make it happen.

John Jantsch (04:06): Yeah. So in this book, based on the subtitle, and of course in your previous work as well, you don't take on closing, you take on attacking indecision. And in fact, you go as far as calling indecision, you know, dangerous, I mean, why for you is indecision such an important sales topic?

Matt Dixon (04:21): Yeah. So one of the things that we've been monitoring over the years, you know, when we wrote the challenger sale, the big problem we were writing about was this phenomenon of customers learning on their own, you know, and boxing the boxing, the sales person out and forcing them to compete on price. We wrote the challenger customer that was about the problem of consensus buying, you know, more and more people showing up at the buying committee and having to forge that consensus, which would be very, really difficult around complex purchases. This the store, the problem we're writing about in the jolt effect is about this problem of indecision or, or sales people. I think call it no decision losses. What we found in our study is that anywhere between 40 and 60% of all opportunities are lost to no decision. Now, what's really fascinating is why that is and how that breaks down. But if you just think about that number, if you're a salesperson listening, if you're a leader running a team or a CEO, or, you know, somebody running an organization that is a massive productivity loss for all of us to pursue deals, and these are deals to be clear where the customer will go through the entire purchase process only to do nothing. So just a huge time suck in loss for our organizations.

John Jantsch (05:31): I remember the sort of classic work from David Sandler. You know, it was like quick, no, right. You, the indecision was the worst place to be. Oh yeah. It was like, I want a yes or I want no, so I can move on. Right.

Matt Dixon (05:41): And agree more that's fast. No is what we all should aspire to. Yeah,

John Jantsch (05:44): Yeah. Yeah. So, so it used to mean, and I say used to, because you're going to suggest otherwise that the customer just doesn't have enough information. They can't decide on the value or they haven't equated the value they're gonna receive with the cost. And so we had a whole set of tools to overcome that, but you're gonna suggest that maybe is not the, your research I guess, is gonna suggest that might not be the most productive approach.

Matt Dixon (06:08): Yeah. You know, so what we found and I think sales people around the world are very familiar with this idea of, you know, beating the customer status quo. And I think if you read any sales book, and by the way, I would include the sales books, we've written of the challenger sale. And otherwise a as well as all the great work that's been done over the years has all been centered around this idea that if the customer gets cold feet, if they start showing signs of winding up in that wasteland of no decision, it's the only possible reason is that you either haven't proven to them that what they do today is suboptimal. Right? Right. It's not good enough. You haven't created that burning platform. You haven't, or you haven't demonstrated the value of your solution relative to what they do today. So they don't see enough daylight maybe may, might mean that.

Matt Dixon (06:53): They say, Hey, your solution, John, your solution's great, but it's not that much better than what we do today. What we do today is good enough. Or it might be that the change journey is too difficult. Right. I, I totally see the daylight, but life is short and we have other priorities in correct. We just don't have the time and resources. But so it's always been taught that it's gotta be that you did not put the status quo to bed. You know, the customer is still in the grips of the status quo or their preference for the status quo. What we found in our research is that is a big reason. Deals are lost to no decision, but it turns out it's the lesser of two reasons. The second reason actually has nothing to do with the customer's preference for their status quo. It's their own inability to make a decision which we call customer in decision, which itself is driven by three things.

Matt Dixon (07:39): The first is the customer not knowing what to pick. We call those valuation problems. Like if we think about all the different configurations of our solutions, and we think about all the options, the partner integrations, the roadmap items, all these things we put in front of the customer, it's the customer looking at all those options and saying, they all look good and I'm not a hundred percent sure if I pick option a maybe I should have picked B or C and that might become a irreversible decision. The second source of indecision is a lack of information, or this is really the customer seeking more information feeling like I haven't done enough homework. There's so much information out there. You know, so many white papers, so many webinars, so many podcasts to listen to so many experts to consult. And I just am not smart enough about this decision.

Matt Dixon (08:20): And it's a big decision, right? And then the third source of indecision is what we call outcome uncertainty. This is where the customer feels like they might be left holding the bag. I've got no assurance that this is all gonna work out for me. And yeah, your ROI projections look great on paper. And the demo was awesome. And the proof of concept was great. But if this thing goes sideways, you know, heads are gonna roll. And it's usually gonna be the person whose heads rolls first is the person whose name is on the contract. And that's me. So those now those things, you know, I don't know what to pick. I haven't done enough homework. I might be left holding in the bag, have nothing to do with a preference for the status quo. It's a different set of things that the customer struggles with, that we as salespeople need to learn to deal with and to manage through.

John Jantsch (09:02): Okay. One of the challenges as I listened to you, describe that is, it sounds like indecision looks a lot like status quo. right. I mean, it's like, because otherwise I'm admitting, I'm afraid

Matt Dixon (09:14): A hundred percent. You are, you nailed it. So the problem with peeling, these things apart is they end up in the same outcome, which is the customer does nothing. Yeah. But I think, again, we've always assumed the customer does nothing cuz you haven't proven the math of like, you know, the ROI or that the, what the pain of same as we talk about in the challenger sale, but that other set of things, the customer will get wrapped around the axle around. And what we found was, again, this is the bigger source of no decision losses is these indecision drivers, customers are not comfortable talking about this stuff. You know, no customer in the history of customers, certainly not in the two and a half million calls we analyzed, there were exam. There were exactly zero customers who said, Hey, you know what, John, I gotta tell you, I'm a really indecisive person.

Matt Dixon (09:55): Like I can't pick what to watch on Netflix. I don't know what to order for dinner. You know, like nobody says stuff like that because these are concerns that are personal. And you know, what it's rooted in is a fear of failure. That is very personal. It's a worry that I might be sold on the a, to B that the status quo stinks in your solutions, better in the change journey is worth it, but I'm still worried that I'm gonna make a mistake. And you know, what we found is it, the psychological research which we delved into pretty deeply, as you know, is pretty clear here that customers at the end of the day, fear messing up more than they fear missing out. And so many times salespeople will go back and they'll try to dial up the paint of same and paint this picture for the customer of what they would stand to lose if they do nothing.

Matt Dixon (10:37): But what they don't realize is the stuff that's keeping the customer from moving forward is their fear. Not of doing nothing but of actually doing something and making a big mistake in the process. And that is not stuff that customers are comfortable talking about. So, so a big part of the book is actually, how do we learn how to listen for those signs? So signals of indecision. And then when the customer's not giving anything to us, what are the ways we can elicit the responses from the customer for us to gauge that? Or as we say in the book, judge, the level of indecision

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John Jantsch (11:38): So you and you obviously the book presents a methodology. I shouldn't say obviously, but all good books do. And so a lot of what I'm hearing you say is part of getting past indecision is figuring out how to dial down fear, the fear purchasing.

Matt Dixon (11:52): Yeah, you're absolutely right. We, the shorthand we used in, in the book was this, your, the fear award is key here. So when we talk about beating the status quo, which again, just to be very clear, no salesperson's gonna sell a thing. If they don't beat the status quo, it's like passing, go in collecting $200 in sales. Like you have to do it. If you don't do it, you're not going anywhere. The indecision is a secondary problem, right? If you don't beat the customer status quo, but after you beat the SaaS quo, what starts to creep into their mind are these fears of making a mistake. And what, the way we describe this is that sales people have always been taught to believe that they only need one playbook, just beat that customer status quo. And what we're saying is you need two playbooks. You've gotta beat the SaaS quo, but you also have to overcome in decision.

Matt Dixon (12:33): And the difference between those playbooks is this beating the status quo is all about dialing up the fear of not purchasing. So here's what you stand to lose by not acting. And salespeople have been taught by many great trainers and writers and speakers for many years on, uh, all the techniques to do that. So keep doing that. But after you do that, the second thing you need to do is overcoming decision. And that playbook is all about dialing down the fear of purchasing and that's really different. Right? And it's exactly what you said. It's about dealing with those fears, which are kind of the butterflies in the stomach, the voices in the back of the customer's head saying, boy, nobody ever got fired for maintaining the status quo. But a lot of times people do get fired for changing it. If it doesn't work out right.

John Jantsch (13:17): They'll forget it. They'll forget all about it if it works out. Right, right. so it's almost like the new, and you say this specifically is one of the steps in the jolt method is you almost have to be able to figure out a person's ability to make a decision

Matt Dixon (13:34): A hundred percent. Yeah, you're right. In as sales people, we've always been taught, you know, we all know great sales people, don't chase garbage trucks. And your point about what Sandler said, you'll get that early. No, you know, disqualified those bad fit opportunities right away. But I don't think we realize until now that great sales people will qualify and disqualify on the, of course, on the customer's ability to buy, use case fit, industry, attractiveness, things like that, but not always or not until now, do we appreciate, they will disqualify not just on the ability to buy, but ability to decide. And that comes down to a few things. One is it's understanding this person as a decision maker and are they displaying tendencies that are associated with indecisiveness? And so we, in the book, we talk all about those markers, what they look like, what they sound like in a sales call.

Matt Dixon (14:22): Second, where is that indecision coming from? So not just this person, but what specifically are they worried about? Are they worried about making the wrong choice? Not having done enough homework? Are they worried about being, not having no assurance of success? What's the source of the indecision. And then third, are there amplifiers out there, right? Is this a, is there time pressure? Is this a really big decision relative to other decisions this person or this company has made in the past that, that amplify, that latent in decision, all of this stuff is gonna tell us, how do we apply our jot playbook, our overcoming indecision playbook? You know, in what way do we deploy it second? How do we forecast this opportunity? Third, should we disqualify this opportunity? Is it worth our time?

John Jantsch (15:03): Does this particularly in this step, does do we run the risk of kind of the cliche, like trial closes of, you know, if we were able to come to decision could next Tuesday, could you know that kind of, I mean, is that what we're advocating here?

Matt Dixon (15:16): Yeah, I think it's, I think it's a bit more nuanced than that, but I would, I think the parallel I would draw is, you know, because of what you said before, which I think is spot on that indecision is not a thing that people are comfortable talking about. Right? It's personal and our customers are people and they're not comfortable talking about it either. And they lose face when they talk about how they struggle to make decisions. And they're feeling a lot of pressure. And gosh, I, I don't, what if I get fired if I sign this contract? And so we've gotta do a good job. We talk, we talk about this kind of, uh, sonar metaphor, which is if you're a Boda on the surface of the water and you know, there's a submarine lurking down below, we've got two ways to go find that summary.

Matt Dixon (15:53): And one is we can passively listen for it to make noise, right? We can. So that's all about listening and trying to pick up on those cues that the customer's showing behavior associated or emotions associated with indecision, but sometimes the customer's gonna play it close to the vest. And when that happens, we've gotta engage active sonar, which is sending out pings, right. And listening for those echoes. And the way we might do that is, and this is the parallel of what you said, John it through kind of what we call is powerful articulations of what we think is going on in the customer's head. So it may not be, Hey, can we get this done on Tuesday next week? But rather, you know, John, my sense is this is a really big decision for you. And you're not feeling completely confident that we've we've, you know, eliminated all the other options and you were settled on the right package or I'm just, I'm feeling like you don't think you've done enough research here and you're a little bit in the dark still. Can you confirm, am I misreading the situation? Yeah. So it's a little bit different, right. But it's designed to articulate what we think is going on in the customer's head and then get them to respond to that and have a

John Jantsch (16:52): Conversation. Yeah. So, and in fact, instead of pressuring a decision, it's more like I'm gonna invite some empathy.

Matt Dixon (16:57): You're saying. Yeah. Well, well said.

John Jantsch (16:59): Yeah. So, so as I listened to you talk about the reason, some of the reasons one of them would suggest that maybe we should slim our options down. Like here's you want a, or B you know, and not put all the bells and whistles and all the possibilities is that, are you advocating for that as well?

Matt Dixon (17:15): Yeah, we're sort of working our way through the playbook with the Jay. We just talked about a little bit, was judging the level of indecision. What the second one is the O what you're talking about is offer recommendation. And, you know, this is a double edged sword because I think having lots of options feels really good for our customer. And it feels really good for us as sales people and as marketers and, you know, there's product, people love it. It's just, there's a time and a place in the sale for a thousand flowers and let them bloom. And you know, the world is the customer's oyster and it's exciting, right? You go to your website, you come buy the demo, buy the booth of the trade show in those first demos, talking about all the possibilities. It's really exciting. But what is exciting early on can actually end up leading to the customer, ringing their hands about what seemed like equally attractive options, right?

Matt Dixon (18:00): And so best sales people know there's a time from, to shift from asking the customer what they wanna buy and throwing all these options out there to actually telling them what they should buy and making a firm and personal recommendation saying, you know, John, we've talked about a lot of options, but based on what I know about your company in other organizations like you, I think you're gonna be really happy with this package. We can always add those other options later, but I don't want to, I don't wanna waste your money. And I don't wanna waste your time thinking about things that I know having seen this movie many times before are not gonna pay off for you guys. So let's focus in on this, forget the other stuff, and let's move forward. And that is a really powerful technique to get the customer through that, that struggle to have of like, I've got 10 options and they all seem awesome. You know, which one should I pick?

John Jantsch (18:42): It's probably a bit of a trust builder, too. Particularly if you are steering somebody to an option that's less complex, maybe less expensive, but right. Yeah. Should be quite a trust builder. Right. This is a little simple example, but I remember when I first got started in my marketing agency, and one of the things we would do a lot of times with a new client is design or redesign a logo that was such a classic thing. And so, you know, first off, I'd start off with six variations and we got nowhere cause they just, you know, so then finally learned is like, here's a, and here's B and here's why a is so much better than B . I was like, OK, we're done.

Matt Dixon (19:16): Yeah. Learn through experience. This is the thing. I mean, you know, people who've been out there. I mean, they look back on that every time I tell people about there's like, oh, that's why I do that. But it, you know, the research here is really clear that again, options are cut both ways. They can be great upfront, but they can crate the customer. And cause this, this indecision, this Val, these valuation problems later, and it is about providing a limited set and providing that personal seal of approval to make that customer feel like, okay, this is where I should go. And you hit on something really important underpinning. All of this stuff is the ability of the salesperson to overcome the agency dilemma, right? Because they've gotta be trusted. And one of the things you pointed out is key. Sometimes making a recommendation that's cheaper than the one, the customer wants is a phenomenal way to, to build that trust and that credibility with the customer.

John Jantsch (20:03): So, so we are working through J O L T. And so I think we're up to L and I think that's limiting the ability for them to have to go out and research, I guess. So unpack. Yeah.

Matt Dixon (20:13): Limiting the exploration is the L and this one, again, back to that, you know, overcoming that natural distrust that often exists between customers and sales people. You know, last I checked Jedi, mind tricks still don't work in sales, but so the likelihood of customer who's, who could say to us, our salesperson could say to a customer who is, you know, swimming in information and wants to read every white paper and wants to wait for the next Gardner magic quadrant report to come out and all this stuff and talk to their LinkedIn network and all this stuff. The last thing a salesperson can pull off is saying, you know, you don't need to consume that information. That's not any, I have all the answers. They've gotta build that trust, but they've also gotta demonstrate subject matter expertise. And I think this is where in our analysis, we find a lot of average sales people go wrong.

Matt Dixon (20:55): You know, they tend to bring in other people to do the demos. They tend to, you know, they, they act as almost glorified admins and what best sales people do is they try to own that conversation as far down the path as possible. Now, look, they don't get over the tips of their skis. If they need to rely on somebody else to provide an answer, they'll do it. They'll bring in their head of product. They'll bring in the solutions engineer, but they carefully orchestrate that call. So it doesn't turn into a, you know, Hey, I brought John's our head of engineering, John, take it away because by the way, John hates, when you do that, first of all, cause he's not the sales guy. And second of all, it diminishes your credibility as a seller. So, you know, things like that. We also talk about anticipating listening between the lines, when you rebut an objection, the customer has the way they respond, looking for those signs of implicit non-acceptance and proactively suggesting objections to the customer.

Matt Dixon (21:46): They haven't even articulated yet. Which again, instilled that confidence that, okay, I'm talking to somebody I can trust, but also somebody who really knows their stuff, you know? So I don't need to be an expert. I can put my myself in the hands of this person. It's almost like if you or I were to go plan a trip to an exotic location where we had never been, think about the confidence you have talking to a great travel advisor or travel agent who's planned a thousand phenomenal trips for people, just like you to say, you know what? I know enough about what you're looking for. Here's the itinerary I recommend. It's like, boy, that is awesome.

John Jantsch (22:19): Yeah. It's an interesting analogy because I certainly would rather go that route as long as I trust that they understand what I want. Right. And once I, yeah, once I know they get me, then it's like, I'm gonna take your recommendation. So great analogy. The, the last one, since we've been talking about fear and fail, you know, I'm gonna fail T is to actually give them a bit of a safety net. Right. So now is that something that you're gonna go in selling? You're gonna realize, Hey, they're gonna want this assurance or is that a sort of a last ditch thing?

Matt Dixon (22:48): You know, it, it's interesting because I just had this conversation with, with the sales leader recently. And I think this one, you're just based on our analysis, this concern about outcome uncertainty, you know, I trust you put myself in your hands, I'm with you, but there's still this voice saying like, what if it doesn't work out? Like what if I, we don't get the ROI they're projecting? And what we found is that a lot of this stuff creeps up late in the game. It's like I described it as the distance between the tip of the customer's pen and the contract, and that's made up of outcome uncertainty. Right? And it'll, so it'll manifest it rears its head late, but there are ways we can get ahead of it. We can get ahead of it by not, you know, not duping the customer with like GDI ROI projections, but instead setting reasonable expectations and then saying, Hey, anything beyond that, which we've seen before is gravy, but I want you to be focused on this cuz if we're focused on this and build the business case around that, I know you're gonna look like a hero.

Matt Dixon (23:41): And by the way, I'm pretty sure we're now perform things that you see high performers doing early on, but then late, you know, when the customer's like, boy, this is a huge John, this is a huge decision for our company. I just, what if something goes wrong? There are creative confidence givers we can provide as well. Everything from, you know, on the formal end, I'll give you one example. A company that I spoke to recently sells high sales, highend robotics to manufacturing companies. And a lot of these companies are going through automation, shifting from manual work to automated lines, you know, for the first time. And one of their big concerns is buying expensive robotic equipment. And then having folks on the factory floor, you know, break it. And so they created an insurance policy that you can buy with your robots, that for, you know, small percentage of the total contract value, you know, for a low deductible, if something goes wrong, you're not gonna have to buy another a hundred or $200,000 robot.

Matt Dixon (24:31): You can for a thousand bucks, get it replaced. And so that's a formal version of taking risk off the table, but there are lots of informal ones too, showing our customer the rollout plan that we've used with other customers, the milestones, the KPIs, the dos and the dons that show them. But you guys have, you've done this before. You know what you're doing? You know, where the bodies are buried and the landlines are, and the pitfalls are, this is great. But also things like executive sponsors. I mean, this can be a really powerful tool to use in certain instances where you can say, Hey, my CEO personally takes on 10 new customers a year and I would like to nominate you to be one of those accounts. And if so, he's gonna be he, or she's gonna be on the QBR. They're gonna, you can have that person's mobile number. You can call 'em day or night and they will swarm the problem. So like things like that make the customer feel like, okay, I'm not jumping out of a plane without a parachute here. I you've got my back.

John Jantsch (25:20): Yeah. Awesome. Speaking with Matthew Dixon about the Joel effect and Matt, but you wanna tell people where they can catch up with you. And obviously I know the book will be available anywhere that books are sold.

Matt Dixon (25:32): Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Check out the jolt effect.com and we've got lots of free resources on there. Events we're running different ways. You can learn about putting some of these ideas into practice in your own organization and continue the learning journey. But you're right. Wherever book books are sold, you can, uh, you can pick up the book and then if you do, if you did, pre-order the book, please send us your receipt at pre-orders at JOL de fact.com. And I will invite you to a special event we're hosting in early October with some guests. So

John Jantsch (25:58): Awesome. And as always, we'll have the links in the show notes. So great catching up with you again, Matt. And hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road soon.

Matt Dixon (26:06): Perfect. Thank you, John.

John Jantsch (26:08): 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 (00:02): Today's episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by blissful prospecting, hosted by Jason bay and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network host Jason bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. Recently, they did a show on the four day work week. I'm a huge fan. I think everybody should be looking towards trying to create that, Hey, we get most of our work done in like two hours every day. Anyway, so let's try out the four day work week. All right, listen to blissful prospecting, 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 and my guest today is Brooke Sellas. She's the CEO and founder of B squared media and award-winning digital marketing agency focusing on social media management, advertising, and social led customer care. She teaches a digital marketing course at the university of California in Irvine, and is also the author of a new book. We're gonna talk about today, conversations that connect how to connect, converse, and convert through social media, listening and social led customer care. So Brooke, welcome to the show.

Brooke Sellas (01:27): Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to chat with you today.

John Jantsch (01:32): So part of the, part of the subtitle, I guess, is actually there's two terms in the subtitle I really wanna get into, but the first one is let's just jump right into, you know, how do you define social listening?

Brooke Sellas (01:44): Oh, that's a great question. So for me, social listening is using tools which essentially those tools then use artificial intelligence and machine learning to look for keywords, right? It's really just that simple. You put in keywords about your brand, your industry, your competitors, your products, and the social listening tool goes out there into the worldwide web and on social media channels and listens for those terms that you've put in and then brings all of the information back to you on what's being said about those terms. So it's, you know, if we were to do it manually without the tools and without the artificial intelligence, it would be like trying to drink through a fire hose.

John Jantsch (02:30): Yeah. So, so the most basic tool, I mean, I've had a Google alert set up for my name, I don't know, 20 years. Right. So what are some of the new what's the, some of the new tool set you've mentioned, you know, machine learning AI. So what are some of the new tools?

Brooke Sellas (02:44): Yeah, so Google's actually great. And I say that like, look, you could set up a Google alert, you put your, you know, your company name or your name into Google with quotations. It's going to bring back, you know, instances of when that keyword is found. But we use at B square media, we use sprout social mm-hmm, which is a social media marketing tool. They provide a suite of different types of tools for social media marketing, but there's a lot of them out there there's mention.com. Yeah. Right. And mention, allows, I think for one free listener. So if you wanna dig, dip your toe in the water, check out, mention.com. They'll let you set up one, but there's other ones too. Talk walkers, another one, sprinkler. There's a lot of different tools that now offer this service. My advice, if you're just getting into social listening, know what you want to do first and then ask as you're demoing these tools to be shown. Right. Show me, don't just tell me how your tool can help me accomplish this thing that I'm trying to do.

John Jantsch (03:43): Yeah. Yeah. That sounds like a hard task. Know what I want to do first? Right? You introduce fairly early in the book, something you call social penetration theory and I'm have to tell you that that sounds painful actually

Brooke Sellas (03:56): Terrible name. I know, obviously not named by marketers

John Jantsch (03:59): so, so at the base, you know, what you're talking about with this idea is that, you know, you think about, I think you use the analogy of the onion, you know, you get to the core. So I guess I'll let you explain in your own words, you know, what is it and how do, how should we be thinking to use it?

Brooke Sellas (04:17): Yeah. So if we jump in our hot tub time machine and go back a few years, I was looking to complete an undergraduate thesis and I was really into Facebook at the time. I kind of saw that there was like a business case for Facebook. So what I did was I looked at this social penetration theory, also known as the onion theory, which says as human beings, the way we form relationships is through self disclosure. So if I like you and I meet you, Hey John, how's it going? You know, that's cliche, that's number one. And I say, what do you do for a living? And you say, I'm a marketer. That's a fact, right? That's two, but we're not really building a relationship with cliches and facts, right? It's very surface level. It's like the breath it's going around the outside of the onion. We would appeal that onion back through the layers and get to the core of who someone is. So if we start to share opinions and feelings, those third and fourth level disclosures, that's where we start to build trust, move the relationship forward, become loyal to someone. And what I looked at in my thesis is does this theory apply to social media? Can brands use this, you know, opinions and feelings type content to better connect, converse and convert their audiences? And what I found was yes, because humans are still humans. ,

John Jantsch (05:49): You know, and so much of what applies in social media where we're not face to face, I think applies if you're at a cocktail party, right. I mean, people use that analogy all the time. And I will say that, you know, if I'm at a networking event or something and somebody I've not met, uh, walks up to me and says something like, so what's your favorite food to eat? You know? Or just something that like, sort of random, but too personal, you know, or just like really wants to like dive into, you know, what are you working on? That's exciting for you today. I mean, you know, people do that kinda stuff. They're just like, yeah. Ooh, I, I don't know. We gotta get through like the fact stage or something. Right? Yeah. So how do you balance that idea of sure. Be vulnerable show, you know, show your core. I mean, that's how people want to, but not do too soon.

Brooke Sellas (06:39): right. That's a great point that you bring up and nobody's brought this up yet. So I'm glad that you did. It's always looking at breadth, you know, around the surface of the onion and depth at all times. Yeah. Because when we think about social media and specifically we're constantly hopefully building our audience. So we've got people who may have been with us all 10 years. We've been in business who follow are followers of, of the page and engage with us. But we may have people who been with us a year or we may have people who joined us today. So we constantly have to get that media mix of our content. Right. And I think what's so amazing is that if for the new people, if you already have that opinions and feelings, content, you're already having those conversations with those people, who've been with you for a long time. It actually takes them less time to get to depth, right. It takes them a little less time to kind of jump in because they already see that you're warm, you're welcoming, you're having these back and forth conversations and it just makes it easier for them to then supply their own opinions of feelings.

John Jantsch (07:42): One of the, this, you might actually say, this is the underlying story or plot for the entire book. Is this, I, this notion of thinking conversations, not campaigns. And particularly in this day and age, when everybody sees social as a channel, a marketing channel, and that they're building teams that they're giving tasks to do social media. I mean, how do you get that? I mean, it's almost culture, right? Yeah. Ingrained as opposed to, you know, people thinking, no, I have a task. I, my task is to meet business objectives by using social media.

Brooke Sellas (08:15): Right. Yeah. And I think the big thing that I try to help marketers understand is if you are having these opinion and feelings, conversation, it's so much easier for you to bring back home a voice of the customer data, which then helps you that much more easily meet those goals that you have, right? Those business goals that you're trying to meet, right? Because everything that we do, if we're gathering these really good opinions and feelings from our customers and would be customers can drive product packaging can drive sales messaging can drive more social content, can drive, you know, our advertising copy. So it really goes well beyond social media, even though we're using that medium to collect this information.

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John Jantsch (09:46): in your opinion, or in your research. What percentage of social media posts, content, et cetera, is total unmitigated crap.

Brooke Sellas (09:57): 99.9, 9%. I'm sorry. I really feel badly letting people down, but yeah, I mean truly, and we know this, right. We can go take a look right now and we would find it most content lives in cliches and facts, which is not good.

John Jantsch (10:13): And don't, let's not forget the well worn quota host.

Brooke Sellas (10:17): Oh, we,

John Jantsch (10:18): Yes, I don't. Where does that

Brooke Sellas (10:19): Fit? I cliche. I would, you know, I would probably label that as cliche. You know, it, here's an interesting little homework assignment for anybody who's listening and does use social listening start labeling your content. Be honest with yourself, start labeling your outbound, social media content with your social media listening tool as cliche fact opinion and feeling, and then you can start to collect data points for yourself. Oh my God. 99.9, 9% of our content is cliches in facts. We need to try to do more opinion and feeling type content.

John Jantsch (10:52): Is there a place for some of that that we're kind of laughing about? Like sometimes I will be snarky about people posting quotes and then I'll get a lot of people that go, no, I love those. You know, so, I mean, is there a place for like some amount of that?

Brooke Sellas (11:05): I think there is, but that's, I would never be the decision maker on that. I would let the voice of the customer tell me. So if I, if we, you know, try those quote posts and we put those out and we label it as, you know, cliche, but we see that we're getting the engagement and the conversation, right. Not just engagement. I want to converse mm-hmm because we have to connect. Then we can converse. Then hopefully we can convert, but just the smashing the like button, that's not gonna do it for me. But if we see that people are commenting on those quotes and they're like, oh my God, John, you're amazing. I love when you post these, keep doing it, the customer's telling you to do it. They're telling you what you're want, what they want and you give it to them. And that usually ends up pretty good.

John Jantsch (11:49): So this is not a very useful part of the segment of the show. I'm warning you right now, but let's just, let's just get the trolls out of the way right now.

Brooke Sellas (11:57): Ugh. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's just a fact of being in social media, right? It used to be like, oh, well, if you have to deal with the troll, I think it has now shifted to well, when you have to deal with troll, right. And especially when we're talking about being vulnerable and posting opinions and feelings as a brand, or, you know, trying to align your audience with your own brand values, there will be trolls

John Jantsch (12:25): And well, I guess in some ways you're expressing opinions by doing that and that's just gonna attract trolls. Right.

Brooke Sellas (12:30): Exactly right. And that's okay. They're dissent is allowed. That is part of the conversation. Dissolution is also allowed. We want to align more with the people who are, you know, like us similar to us and align with our brand values. So if someone doesn't align and leaves, that's fine. If someone gives dissent in a conversation, they're sharing their opinions. That's fine. Yeah. You have to decide with your troll policy. When does it cross from dissent into, you know, actual trolling and then what are your rules and regulations around dealing with those types of people? Because guess what, as I say in the book, some of those people are, you're paying customers. So what do you do then? It's not as easy as like, oh, just ban them, block them, delete what they said. It's it. Doesn't, it's just not that easy. It's much more nuanced than that.

John Jantsch (13:23): I mean, I think you're, you would say, would you agree that it goes far as saying if you're not getting some descent, maybe you're not pushing it.

Brooke Sellas (13:31): yes. My real from the heart answer is yes. My marketing answer is I know how scary this is. You know, when we've, I've been talking about the book now for about a month and every person I've talked to is like, you're what you're telling us to do is so scary. Hmm. So I get how scary it is, but at the same time, it's beautiful. I mean, think about your own personal relationships. I hope you have lots of different people in your life and they all have different backgrounds and different viewpoints and you learn from those things. And I think it's no different with, you know, the brand to audience or community or customer relationship. We want to learn from all of those opinions as long as they're constructive and not hurtful.

John Jantsch (14:20): So, because we've been talking a lot about opinions, there are a lot of very strong, personal opinions out there circulating in the world right now.

Brooke Sellas (14:27): Very,

John Jantsch (14:28): Is there a place for that under your brand umbrella? I mean, obviously you can make a case for be true to who you are, but you can also make a case for does anybody who is buying your product really care, what your personal opinion is on X?

Brooke Sellas (14:46): Yeah. I think that's a great question. And I think, you know, more research is needed around that, right? We need more brands who are willing to take the risk, and then we need to study that because I've seen it both ways. I've seen brands post about black lives matter or pride, right. And have PE people in their community really latch on and appreciate that. I've also seen those same brands push people away because they've really stood their ground with a certain opinion. So, you know, I think one of the examples that I give that kind of falls along with this isn't in the book is Nike. When they started working with Colin Kaepernick mm-hmm and people were out there burning their Nike shoes. That was the marketing story, right. That that's the story that we all heard. But the true story is that, you know, the campaigns that they did with Kaepernick had millions upon millions of views, millions upon millions of positive comments and over, you know, the next few months after they partnered with Kaepernick, they, their stock prices, rose people bought more. So I think the people who moved away from Nike, and again, I understand this is a huge brand that can take these kinds of risks, but the people who moved away and decided to burn their shoes and never buy again by that's okay. Because the people who, you know, aligned with that value and aligned with Nike's opinions and feelings bought more, and we saw that in their stock prices.

John Jantsch (16:16): Yeah. Probably every one of those videos that got posted burning shoes sold about eight pairs. Right. I mean, they were probably like burn baby burn. Right. right.

Brooke Sellas (16:24): And also like, you know, from the other end of that, like, just from the consumerism point of that, Nike's like, well, yeah, I already gave us your money. So do what you will with the

John Jantsch (16:33): Product. Good point. So I guess the, I guess I'll ask you the really big, giant question that you probably get asked all the time. And I know there's an, it depends answer as part of this, but what should I be posting?

Brooke Sellas (16:46): Ah, I, you know, I think more opinions and feelings, content, and it doesn't have to be risky. It doesn't have to be black lives matter or pride. It could literally be, you know, if I'm assuming a lot of marketers listen to this podcast, you know, how do you feel about Instagram's latest update. We already know, right. We've seen it. The conversation been happening all around, but that's a layup. That's a layup question that allows you to get that voice of the customer data back opinions back. And then you could say, here's how we feel. You know, you are gonna align with some of those people or, you know, maybe lose the others. And it, they could be little easy layups like that with the book I just published, I was using cover art all throughout publishing. And then as I'm writing, I'm like, oh, you know, I should probably ask my customers what cover they wanna see.

Brooke Sellas (17:39): So I created kind of two throwaway covers because I assumed the cover I was using was going to be the one they chose and they didn't. So I actually went to print with the cover. Most people chose because that's what voice of the customer does. It allows us to see what the customer wants, see what they align with. Right. And that was that there was nothing risky in that. I mean, I could have, if I really wanted to gone to print with the cover I wanted, but why would I would be going against my own advice at that point?

John Jantsch (18:09): Yeah. And I will say on that topic, because there is a picture of the post that you did, that you have a lot of great examples and pictures and that I think will, that are helpful to drive home some of your points. So let's, I, I started the show by talking about the first idea in the subtitle of a, of social media listening. And I want to end really giving you a chance to unpack the second topic in that is, you know, explain what social led customer care is.

Brooke Sellas (18:40): Yes. So most people, I know brands won't wanna hear that but most people don't follow brands on social because they wanna see those like fun kitty and puppy memes or, you know, facts about the next product release. They actually, over 70% of people use and follow use social media to follow brands, to ask a support question. And customer care is actually a little bit deceiving, even though that's the technical term for it, because it eludes that we're just talking to customers. We're just talking about support and retention. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So somebody's already purchased and post-purchase, they come to us on social for a question or a complaint that does happen a lot. But I think what a lot of people miss about customer care is acquisition. And so I'll give you this example too, if you're using social listening, one of the very first labels or tags, you know, they call it labeling or tagging depending on your tool, I'd set up our acquisition and retention tags.

Brooke Sellas (19:49): And we did this fun little project actually, while I was writing the book, we went to all of our customer care clients. And we said, how much of your social chatter, you know, coming into the brand, do you think is acquisition? And how much do you think is retention? And every single customer said, oh, acquisitions probably like zero to 5%, it's all retention. So we started tagging all of these conversations as such. And what we found was that every single client had over 20% acquisition tags. And that means customers who aren't yet customers coming in and

John Jantsch (20:26): Asking like presale questions. Yeah,

Brooke Sellas (20:27): Yeah, yeah. Three purchase questions. In the buying moment, we had one brand who literally has four product lines that month, over month have somewhere between 60 and 80% acquisition, mind blowing mm-hmm . So now we're working with their sales team to create more, you know, nurture content for the types of questions that we're getting were actually getting retail values put into the conversation amount. So I'll give you an example, July, they had 70% acquisition on one of their product lines. We attributed the retail value of the products mentioned in that conversation to about 1.2 million in revenue. Now, imagine, which is, this is the next step we're going to be doing with them. If they gave us links that were attributed to the social media team, and we were able to capture 20% of that 1.2 million. Now we're talking about a $240, $240,000 in revenue attributed to organic social. And then what happens when that happens? The C-suite starts to say, oh, wait, social media is valuable. because I still don't think they quite get that yet. Right. Because customer care again is, has this whole like myth around it that it's only about the customer and it's not

John Jantsch (21:47): All right. I'm gonna ask you a, a question that is a fairly specific use case. And it's it's because I want to know the answer to this myself. sorry, listeners. Hopefully this applies.

Brooke Sellas (21:58): No shoot. I love this. I love it. It's exciting. It's like a game

John Jantsch (22:01): exactly. So imagine I'm a brand who does not sell direct to consumer. So I have a channel of retailers or distributors or something. How could I use this to actually, I don't know. Sometimes people use the term pull sales or push sales, you know, so push 'em into the dealers, you know, build more brand affinity so that when somebody walks into the dealer or Walmart or wherever they ask for my product,

Brooke Sellas (22:26): I love that question. And that's a great, that's a great segue into social listening beyond, you know, customer care because you can use, remember we talked about social listening, being keywords. So like, let's just use, say you're working with a company that doesn't sell direct. It sells through retailers, but it's printers, right? Let's just pretend it's printers Uhhuh. You could put the keyword into social listening best all in one printer. Right. That keyword phrase, as we go on with this example, and then again, the artificial intelligence is gonna bring you back. All the instances of people online, talking about best all in one printers. If you then could go into those conversations and make the recommendation for the dealer or the reseller or the retailer.

John Jantsch (23:16): Yeah.

Brooke Sellas (23:16): You could then still close that business. I mean, it's the same kind of project. It's just not warm. Right? It's not inbound. It's outbound. So it's a little bit colder, social selling, but I still bet you would capture some percentage of that conversation towards revenue.

John Jantsch (23:34): All right. One last question. I'm going longer than I usually do sometimes, but I want to give people the chance, get this question all the time. How do I get first off and then use, you know, we used to call it user generated content. Certainly you could talk about it as customer care content and you know, how do we get our customers to produce? So some really authentic social content for us. And I'm not meaning like, how do we get them to just do the job? But it's like, how do we get them enthusiastically wanting to participate in that way?

Brooke Sellas (24:05): It's so interesting because I, this is the same answer I give when people talk about community, how do I know if I can build a community or if I have a community. And I always say community happens in the conversation, not in the, not with the content. It happens in the conversation. So does U GC are user generated content. If you're having those opinion and feelings, content, and John says something spectacular about my product, I then say, and we're conversing, right? So we're already having this back and forth. So there's a little bit of like trust there. Yeah. I could say to John, I cannot, like, I couldn't have described our product better. Would you be willing to create a post? You know, that says that, or can I snip this conversation and use this in one of our own posts and more than likely, I mean, going off of experience here nine times outta 10. Sure. John says, yes.

John Jantsch (24:54): Yeah. Cuz I'm a fan. Why wouldn't I? Yeah.

Brooke Sellas (24:56): Right. You know, you already have

John Jantsch (24:57): That. I did it voluntarily. Right. right.

Brooke Sellas (24:59): You already given us the information and we are kind of coming back to you and going, oh my gosh, you're a rock. This is amazing. Can we use this? And John, because most of us are like, oh, give me the limelight. Yes, please. It's going to say yes. And then other people might chime in and see that right. Community audience and see our conversation and say, well, I think you're amazing too. It, we are built as human. Right? It's all about psychology. We learn by mirroring one another. It's all about reciprocity. All these same psych psychological concepts happen on social. It's just a different medium.

John Jantsch (25:38): Well, and it circles very directly back to your social listening too. Right. Because I bet you that we're missing those like golden moments that our customers are out there actually sharing because we're not listening.

Brooke Sellas (25:49): Right? Yes. Yes. You'd be surprised, you know, people tag brands or mention brands just fine. But a lot of

John Jantsch (25:56): Times I do it all the time. You're

Brooke Sellas (25:57): Not being mentioned. Yes.

John Jantsch (25:59): Well I do it and I tag them and I like never hear from 'em too. You know? So you man, in my

Brooke Sellas (26:04): Way, I wanna help those people.

John Jantsch (26:06): exactly. Yeah. Our awesome Brooke. Well, thanks so much for stopping by the duct tape marketing podcast. Uh, we've been talking about conversations that connect you and tell people where they can connect with you or, and certainly find out more about the book.

Brooke Sellas (26:19): Definitely. So if you visit our website, it's just B squared.media. So it's our business name B squared media. But with a.media, you can find out all about our services, the book me, or you can just literally Google Brook sells. I think I'm the only one so far and all of our sites will pop up. You can connect with me directly through social. Twitter's my favorite platform. So if you wanna come talk with me there, happy to have a conversation with you.

John Jantsch (26:48): Awesome. Well, Brooke, again, thanks for taking the time out today. And hopefully we'll run into you one of these days, soon out there on the road. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It's called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not .com .co, check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That's just marketingassessment.co I'd love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): Today's episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by blissful prospecting, hosted by Jason bay and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network host Jason bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. Recently, they did a show on the four day work week. I'm a huge fan. I think everybody should be looking towards trying to create that. Hey, we get most of our work done in like two hours every day. Anyway, so let's try out the four day work week. All right, listen to blissful, prospecting, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:47): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Janssen today. I'm doing a solo show, just me, nobody in the other screen. All right. I wanna talk about websites, but more importantly, I wanna talk about what I think are the 10 essential elements that every small business website, particularly the homepage needs to have today. And here's the reason, the question that causes the reason for so many elements being necessary. The question is what's the purpose of a website today? I know many people would say it's to get customers or it's to track leads, but I'm gonna suggest that your website has many jobs to do. And that's part of the challenge, I think, with trying to figure out what goes on there. What doesn't go on there. What do people need to see if you think about your website being the hub, maybe, or at least the starting point for a lot of your customers, for a lot of the decisions that are made about doing business for you.

John Jantsch (01:45): It's part of the journey. We wanna find people that we can know and like, and trust as I've talked about for years. And I think that the website does a lot of that filtering both attracting and repelling. I suppose, those who come to your website. So it's not simply just, I gotta have a website so that people can find me and buy from me. I mean, 87% of potential customers won't consider a business with low ratings. So it's not just that your site has to be there and be findable. People have to get there and they have to build some trust. You have to prove there has to be social proof. There has to be reviews. There have to be things that can make people say, yeah, okay. I checked that box. 64% of consumers say watching a video on Facebook has influenced a purchase decision.

John Jantsch (02:32): So part of the journey is that may be where they come to find out about you. But now they're looking for more of that same type of content on your website. 86% of buyers will pay more for a better experience. I know I have I mean, 86% is most of us. So a lot of times our analysis is, does the site load quickly do the forms fill out? Does it look intuitive? Does it look like what I think it should look like for this industry? I mean, we all have gone to that website that looked like it was built 20 years ago and we're out of there. And I think that's a big part of a job that our website's going to do. It's going to start the experience of what it's gonna be like to work with you. And then finally, and I think this one points to the need for all of these elements that I'm gonna talk about today, probably more than anything, 92% of consumers will visit a Bo a brand's website for reasons other than making a purchase.

John Jantsch (03:31): So what are those other 92%? And by the way, that's not just prospects and buyers. That's also potential employees because really when we talk about all these changes in marketing, the thing that's changed the most, I think is really how people choose, get to choose, to become customers and employees and the kind of straight line suggestion of the funnel approach to marketing of get some people to know you push a few small few through that to small end of the funnel. I mean, that journey, that linear journey is really doesn't exist today. And that, that many of the ways in which people decide about a company that they're gonna do business with might be considered out of our hands out of our control in some ways. And our job really then is to guide people along this journey. But let me give you one last biggie for why your website needs to look a certain way, act a certain way, provide a certain journey for people, your website.

John Jantsch (04:28): I believe because it is such an important part of the journey gives you the greatest ability to increase something that I came across it in Harvard business review talking about enterprise companies, but something called WTP, which is willingness to pay. And I think that in the sea of options that people have out there, if you can increase your worthiness, if you can increase the experience from your website, you're going to increase, somebody's willingness to pay. All right? So let's get in quickly to the 10 things. So the first thing your website needs to do is make a promise to solve your ideal. Customer's greatest problem. So many websites today that I go to you go there. First thing you see above the fold is we are this business or we're this kind of business, or we've been in this business for X amount of years.

John Jantsch (05:22): Typically the person that's visiting the site knows what business you're in, because that's why they found you. That's what they're looking for. But what they wanna see is do you get me? Do you understand? I mean, is there something that you're doing that's different? In fact, if you can communicate the problem, a lot of times people don't really even know the problem they're trying to solve necessarily. They know, for example, I'm a marketing firm. They know, for example, somebody's a remodeling contractor. And so they go to a remodeling contractor, but what problem now? I mean, people don't wanna buy marketing services. They don't really even wanna buy remodeling services. They want an incredible kitchen with an incredible experience. They want quick wins, long term growth, hassles. They want great communication. I mean, those are the problems that people are trying to solve quite frankly, through looking at our businesses as a way to do that.

John Jantsch (06:11): So what problem can you promise to solve that needs to be above the fold? And frankly, I'm starting to actually see websites to Google this sometime problems we solve. And you're gonna see some websites that are actually dedicating entire pages to a list of problems that they solve. You know, for example, in, in marketing, most of the problems we encounter are actually strategy problems, but nobody goes, I'm gonna go find me to buy some strategy today. but they, that they've, they wanna know why they can't charge a premium for their services or worse, why they're always having to offer discounts. And so that's a problem that can be solved with strategy, but we have to identify the problem. The thing that they're actually experiencing is they can't charge enough. We're gonna fix that with strategy, but it won't. We have to articulate that problem first before they'll listen to our solution about strategy calls to action.

John Jantsch (07:04): If somebody, you know, how today is so popular, so common to get these long scrolling home pages. Well, if somebody comes to your website and they're starting to engage and they're starting to scroll down and say, oh, who do they serve? You know, who are their case studies? They start looking for things. We wanna have the ability for somebody to click, to take an action, to do something that's CTAs calls to action above the fold, right under your core message. There are people that are, that actually are just looking to contact you. So make it easy for them to do that. But the vast majority of people are looking for a price, quote, an evaluation, a free report. That's going to tell them how to do X, Y, and Z. Sprinkle those throughout your homepage, sprinkle those throughout your website.

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John Jantsch (08:34): Tell me very specifically who your ideal customer is. Don't tell me that you serve homeowners. Tell me that you serve homeowners in a very specific area of town with a very specific challenge with a very specific need. I mean, identify as clearly as possible show pictures of, you know, maybe you have three or four segments, but don't just leave this open to where somebody says, well, I own a home.

John Jantsch (08:58): So I guess I can call them be very specific where somebody says, oh my goodness, you serve me. You're talking about me. And I'd like to use the word who we get results for rather than who our customers are, who we sell to getting results as what people are after in a lot of ways, that's a problem, uh, that, that you're trying to demonstrate that you can solve. And one of the things about that approach to who we get results, it's sort of implied who we don't get results for or who we can't work for. Again, using my business. As an example, if somebody just comes to me and says, I want leads, I on Facebook ads and, you know, go, I mean, we get results for people who actually wanna build a long term strategy that allows them to dominate their market and not just have a quick event that is maybe going to make the phone ring.

John Jantsch (09:45): Maybe not. We talk about strategy incessantly because that's really, in fact, that's really the only way to engage my firm. And so we want to chase people away. We don't want people who are like, oh, I don't need that strategy stuff. We want them to know that's not who we're gonna get a result for number four, our core offerings. So there's so many businesses that sell, have the ability to sell. I should say 27 things. But when we really dig in, what we find is that there are three things they do that generate 80% of their profits, 80% of their business, really their ideal engagements. And yet they list everything they could do. What I want you to think about doing is saying here's the three things at the most that we do, and we do them better than anyone. Now, if you get a customer and you, you have a great relationship, you start working with them.

John Jantsch (10:38): It doesn't mean you can't sell them the other 27 things. But when it comes to actually getting that ideal customer, you want to, you want that profitable customer. You want them to know that the service that you sell, whatever it is, it, you are better than anyone else at doing it. That you're the obvious choice for doing that. The fifth thing I wanna hear a little bit about is your process. If you have a process for getting me your result, I mean, it might be the ordering process. It might be your onboarding process. It might be your 37 step process to make sure that the job site is cleaned up after you're done. Processes are amazing marketing materials because they prove that first off you have a professional approach. You have thought out how to get me a result, put those on, on, you know, tell me what's going to happen next.

John Jantsch (11:24): I mean, you could even have a process that says, look, if you fill out this form, here's, what's going to happen next. You know, if you're trying to get a quote, tell them the steps in the process, tell them what to expect team, you know, for, I read thousands of Google reviews and I will tell you that for most small businesses, when a customer is happy, they're happy with the person they worked with. Not necessarily the company, the person they worked with, the technician, the person that delivered the service, you know, to them, that's the brand. And so let's feature our team. Let's show. 'em what our culture is all about. Have videos of all of your staff saying their favorite meal on their birthday or something goofy like that. Just make sure that you're featuring everybody, that person's going to be working with the client.

John Jantsch (12:11): That person's gonna be the person that shows up at the door. Let's have pictures. Let's have videos. In fact, what's great about those is if you have salespeople, if you have technicians, send those out, here's who here's, who's coming to see you. Great way to, you know, to really open the door, to really build trust, to create an experience. I feel like I've met that person now, before they show up, trust my customer journey. You've heard me talk about it forever. No, like trust, try by repeat and refer. I think trust today, especially when you think about somebody who's just going out there surfing, or maybe somebody told 'em in a Facebook group, oh, you need to check out this company or this website. They're making a lot of decisions about whether or not they even wanna pick up the phone or fill out a form or engage you in any way, shape or form based on what they see right away.

John Jantsch (12:59): Kind of first impression. I mean, that's how we do it today. We won't move forward. unless we feel like, okay, I like what I'm seeing. There's proof that they've worked with other people, oh, they've got these three people as customers. I know who they are. Oh, they've their content has shown up in this publication. That must mean something. Oh, they have 108,000 Twitter followers. Again, all the ways in which we show proof that we're a real business, that other people trust us, that we can get results. I love case studies to show that we've gotten results for people. Number eight, generically video video is for a percentage of the market out there is how they want to consume content. I, I mean, I can decide all the statistics about YouTube and frankly, even TikTok. And some of those other places that are very video centric, people love video, but it's also a great way to build trust.

John Jantsch (13:48): It's a great way for you to show your customers, your happy customers. There's, you know, you read that testimonial that says they were great, Betty from Memphis. Well, how about Betty from Memphis? gushing about how great they are. Show us how your product's made. Show us behind the scenes. Again, I already talked about your technicians, your designers, your sales people ought to have videos. You're seeing more and more videos. And again, this doesn't have to be high quality stuff. This can be pick up an iPhone. Let people start talking. I saw a great video the other day about, you know, an actual patient. This was not a like deep medical thing. I think it was a dermatologist or something that was had a patient was actually asking them a few, you know, very frequently asked questions and the doctor was answering those questions as part of the video, there was no, I don't think HIPAA issues or anything with what was going on there, but I just thought it looked very real.

John Jantsch (14:39): It was in the office. It looked like an actual patient. Maybe it wasn't , maybe it was, there was the technician. And, but it looked very much like an experience that somebody going to that office would have increasingly segmentation. If you have several types of customers, several types of markets, completely different markets. You know, I always use the real estate agent as an example. They want home buyers and they want home sellers. totally different needs, totally different questions, totally different objectives. So how do you talk to them? Well, today we've gotta start using technology. And one of the simplest technologies is to have a path. Are you this? Or are you that go here for the best content for this go here for the best content for this. Maybe you can actually have, you know, you've probably gone to a website that has these popups, that, that are actually asking questions.

John Jantsch (15:31): I think we used to think of those popups as being really intrusive. And yeah, sometimes if I'm really trying to find something specific on a website, you feel like they're intrusive, but if I'm coming to a website for the first time, and I'm trying to understand, like where do I find the answers? I'm very willing to answer a question. If the proposition is tell us, you know, which tell us who you are. tell us what you're looking for so that we can actually make sure you get the right content. I think we'll give people that shot. I mean, we actually want that more personalized journey. The technology is there today and you've got competitors out there that are completely personalizing for, you know, who people are once they get in their CRM and you come back to my website, you know, I should be able to tell you, heck I should.

John Jantsch (16:19): I should say, I should actually know a lot about you and not bother you with the free report that I know you got the first time you came here. So those are things that people are expecting today because the technology makes it possible. Give me lots of ways to contact you like it or not. Text messaging in a lot of industries is the preferred method. If you're under 40, there's a good chance. Or I should say if your customer's prospects are under 40, there's a good chance that they are going to in many industries want that type of communication. And I'm not talking about the spammy like bomb people with, oh, we have 10% off today kind of stuff. But for appointment reminders, for review request for things that, that, you know, shipping details. I mean, those are things that people now expect to have the ability to get a text or an email, or, you know, a chat bot.

John Jantsch (17:13): I mean, we've just gotta give people, you know, all the ways in which they prefer their preferred methods, like years ago, we used to talk about, do you take checks and credit cards well and cash. Well, now it's SMS and it's chat bots and it's, you know, real time response. I mean, that's really what people are expecting. I know it's harder, but I think we've gotta give people the options to communicate the way they wanna communicate. And then the last one, this is actually number 11, if you were keeping track kind of a bonus, really, but you know, we've been talking about for years, this idea of mobile first, we've absolutely got to think in terms of what our website looks like and how it acts and how people can respond using mobile devices because let's face it. They are. I mean, I, I almost every single one of our clients is well over 50% in terms of traffic to their website coming on a mobile device or a tablet.

John Jantsch (18:09): So most designers, I shouldn't say most, a lot of designers still, or a lot of these, you know, way webpage builders today. People are designing for that big, giant screen they have in front of them. You've got to design for a mobile device and then make it work on a bigger screen. And so if you start thinking about that functionality too, I want click to call because I sure as heck don't wanna have to like, look at your phone number, go, and now I wanna call you. So I have to go to my phone, the phone app component or text app component. And now I have to put that number in and then I have to come back and forth cuz I can't remember. So click to call texting, chat on mobile, you know, easy like your hours directions. I mean all the things that people on a mobile device quite often are looking for immediately and expecting in the experience, but certainly make sure that you're, we've all seen them.

John Jantsch (18:59): You know, the sites that, that, you know, the content was designed for a big screen, you put it on that mobile and all of a sudden the responsive element of the website just makes the, a mess out of the content. So that's it, that's the 10 things. I hope that you enjoyed those today. If you come to duct tape, marking.com, if you Google website essentials, you know, you'll find, uh, some of this in a, you know, in a video format, in a text format, we actually even have forms a workbook that you know, for, you know, working on your website. So check out some of the resources at ducttapemarketing.com. All right, that's it for today. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It's called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it@marketingassessment.co not .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That's just marketingassessment.co I'd love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:01): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by business made simple hosted by Donald Miller and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network business made simple, takes the mystery out of growing your business. A long time, listeners will know that Donald Miller's been on this show at least a couple times. There's a recent episode. I wanna point out how to make money with your current products, man, such an important lesson about leveraging what you've already done to get more from it. Listen to business made simple 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. My guest today is Richie Norton. He's an award-winning author and serial entrepreneur, an executive coach to CEOs he's featured in Forbes, Bloomberg business week, Inc entrepreneur and Huffington post Pacific business news recognized Richie as one of the top 40 under 40 best and brightest young businessmen in Hawaii. We're gonna talk about a new book by Richie called anti time management, reclaim your time and revolutionize your results with the power of time tipping. So Richie, welcome to the show.

Richie Norton (01:25): Thanks so much. I'm excited to be here. This is gonna be so much fun.

John Jantsch (01:29): So I do have to warn people that the book starts with a missile attack. Yes. So may maybe you can briefly tell that story and then tell me why that made it into the book.

Richie Norton (01:39): Well, some people may know of this, but if you don't. Yeah,

John Jantsch (01:43): I recall. I recall

Richie Norton (01:45): It. Yeah, it has a good ending, you know, like spoiler alert, but I actually was in, I live in Hawaii. I was on a business trip in, in Tennessee. And while I was there, I get this text message saying ballistic missile attack in Hawaii. And it followed up with this is not a test. And so therefore it was not a test. This was happening. This is from our government, you know, telling us this and I'm freaking out. It's easy. It's easy to tell a story now, like when was happening, I mean, this was, it was real. It was real. I mean, there were people in Hawaii that reportedly were jumping into manhole, you know, so they could like take cover, like it was real. So I call, I have, you know, my, my three boys are at home. My, my wife's home, I'm calling each one of 'em, nobody answers.

Richie Norton (02:33): And you know, the lines get crossed, you know, when there's a disaster happening. Anyways, my one of my sons calls back and I think he was 13 at the time. And it was crazy. He said his goodbyes, you know, he is, I love you dad. And he was just weeping. And I re I remember when that happened, I just started thinking like, oh my gosh, my whole world is about to get destroyed. My family, my home, everything I've known the whole Hawaiian island chain, uh, like who knows what's gonna happen here. And it was an interesting experience in addition to what was happening at the time, because I've had a number of, of tragedies and I'll list them without getting too emotional here. But I had a brother-in-law pass away at 21 and his sleep. I had a son pass away as a baby. Uh, he caught pertussis, also known as whooping cough.

Richie Norton (03:23): My wife had a stroke and lost her memory. We've had three foster kids that we thought we were gonna adopt come and go. After two years, taking care of them, which was so hard. And I had my, I had a son get hit by a car and he crossing the street and he shouldn't be here, but he is. But so in this moment, while there's this missile attack, I had the strangest feeling. In addition to all the emotions, I thought, at least we didn't live without, you know, at least we didn't live with regret. We lived without regret. We did all the things we thought we could do. We tried our hardest, we did our best. We've experienced tragedy after tragedy and we've gotten back up and it was just this weird, surreal moment. And of course, then later we get this text saying that it was a mistake, you know, and life goes back to normal. So here we are

John Jantsch (04:13): Pretty, pretty crazy. So how does that doesn't really anchor the book, but uses the launching off point. How does that story kinda launch what you're trying to say in anti time management?

Richie Norton (04:24): You know, at times people will, I'm kind of stuttering cause there's so many different ideas in my head right now. but when people start thinking about their lives, one of the first things they do is they work towards managing their time better. And the moment they do that, they, whether they realize it or not, cuz fish are the last to realize that there's this thing called water, right? They don't even know what's going on. We don't even realize that there's this thing that's been actually controlling our entire lives until we start looking at it. And we don't realize that time management was actually designed specifically not to give us freedom, but to control every aspect of our lives at work and eventually into our homes. It's not about controlling time. It's about who owns your time, who controls your time and time management was specifically designed that someone else would.

Richie Norton (05:13): So this is important because as soon as we start realizing, oh my gosh, time is limited. Life is short. I know it's cliche. We immediately create a priority and we instinctively put that priority last on a timeline. It wasn't an instinct. It was taught to us in kindergarten to do that. Here's how you set goals. And so I, I truly believe that, you know, goals from experience are tasks, goals, outside experience are growth, and there is a way to work from the goal instead of endlessly toward it. And when you have these experiences in life, you start realizing what really matters. And is there a way to make our work, support it as opposed to working toward it and never having it happen?

John Jantsch (05:57): Yeah. There's a lot to unpack from what you just said there, but I want to get to give you a chance to say like in two minutes then what is anti time management?

Richie Norton (06:06): Anti time management is like a value centered approach. So stop timing your values and start valuing your time. Right? People will like bake a cake without sugar and expect it to be sweet. I know you can put other things in it, make it sweet. I get it. But just go with the analogy for a second. That's like trying to live a life saying you have values in one day, you'll live them and expect it to be a life lived on value. It's not possible. But when you bake in freedom of time and autonomy and the things you want, even inside of an entrepreneurial business from the start, it actually expands. It creates it. So all these entrepreneurs, I'm gonna start a business to get my time and freedom back only to lose their time and freedom to the business, why they created that world for themselves. They didn't know any other way. They learned it from corporate.

John Jantsch (06:52): So your solution of course, to, to getting a hold of this is something you call time tipping. Mm-hmm . So because that's in the title as well. Let's juxtapose that with anti time management.

Richie Norton (07:04): So anti time management, like the idea of time management, they control you anti time management. You get to control what you're doing. Time tipping is kind of this framework that kind of goes along with this methodology. So the concept here I'll make it super specific. If you are a college kid or whatever you are, you're an entrepreneur, you're an executive. The first thing you do when you wanna change your life in a lot of ways is you decide how you're gonna get paid. But it, the instant you decide that you're gonna move to the city to get paid. You made the decision to have a city life you did. And you decided that everything you do revolves around that world. So someone will get paid in a way they don't like living. And they'll do that for a really long time, maybe forever. Whereas someone who wants to live by a lake in Montana could go to Montana, live by a lake and make the same money or more and live the lifestyle they wanted from the start.

Richie Norton (07:59): So in time tipping, we reverse it. What's the goal of the goal. What's the job of the goal. What's the reason I'm getting paid. And we go, we move beyond that. So we start with purpose, create projects around that purpose. And eventually we create a model that allows us to get paid that way. That doesn't mean we get paid last. We can still get paid first. I'm a huge fan of getting paid first. And just saying, all of a sudden your work is in alignment with autonomy, with availability, with ability with actual productivity, as opposed to lying to ourselves and pretending that it one day will.

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John Jantsch (09:13): So for years, you know, one of, one of the mantras always was, you know, to have this balance work, life balance. And obviously most entrepreneurs know that's a fallacy, but you take it on pretty head on. I mean, why is balance really the wrong goal? Even,

Richie Norton (09:27): You know, it's like the word has got, or the term work life balance has gotten messed up with the meaning. Yeah. So, so they'll say like, I want balance say, no, you don't wanna sleep for eight hours and play for eight hours on work for eight hours. Maybe one day, you know, like not every day. What you want is these, the essence of that is that you want the availability ability and autonomy to do what you wanna do when you wanna do it balance itself. It's a weird word because balance itself in physics means motionless. It doesn't move. Nobody wants a life that is motionless. It doesn't move. You actually wanna unbalance or imbalance your life in the direction you want it to go. So you're able to create things and set things in motion, not just do it all yourself. So I, you know, I even work life flexibility is a better term, but even that term misses the point because work life flexibility has become a perk at corporations at the moment. It's a perk. Get a corporation is not a benefit to the worker anymore. It's used as another way to control you. So I'm a fan of this concept of time tipping. Cause we need a new language to talk about the things we actually want because it's not there.

John Jantsch (10:38): So this is slowly changing this sort of industrial age, you know, management, you know, era is changing. I mean my parents and my wife's parents could never really understand what I do right, right. Because it didn't fit into what they understood is a job. And you know, increasingly of course I was doing it 30 years ago, increasingly that, you know, my kids are like, no, that's how I'm, you know, that's like, that's normal, right? That's normal. I'm gonna have freedom. That's right. I can work from home. I can do anything I want, you know? And so it is changing, but there still are a lot of people that are just very ingrained in that idea of if I'm not busy, if I'm not filling by my day, if I'm not sitting at a desk from nine to five, then I'm not working. I mean, how do we get outta that?

Richie Norton (11:23): It's true. And I, I think what's amazing is this is one of the first times I think in history, cuz a lot of the, I, you know, I work with corporations. I work with executives. I work with entrepreneurs. I work with the everyday person. But when you talk about it from like retaining talent, you know, you know, point of view, things start changing because you realize that someone is only in a job for on average in America, 4.6 years, that means you're turning over at least every five years, more or less. And when that happens, you have a new opportunity. Look, you as an entrepreneur, you can change projects or careers every day. Right? Right. Yeah. But if you're in one place one time and everybody's changing every five years and you realize that leaving a job and getting a new one will get you a higher pay raise than staying for the three or 4%.

Richie Norton (12:05): They're gonna give you every year. Right. Changes the dynamics. So what happens is this is the first generation. I mean generation now, I don't just mean what age group in generation. Now everyone who's living. This is the first time that everyone realizes they actually have everyone in quotes. Right. Everyone realizes they have a choice in the matter. Yeah. Yeah. Whether they do something or not is different, but the switching costs are so low to do something new. Whereas in the nineties, even in the two thousands, it was pretty hard. And before that almost impossible today. So they go, wow, it's so hard to keep these kids on the, on here that work, is it? Or do they just want, do they just know they can do something else and make more money for in, in less time and they're actually more productive and you wish you could do that too. And you're jealous. Like what are we talking about here? but what's cool is our parents, grandparents, they set us up for this. This is the success that they were working towards. So those who don't wanna take advantage of it, I think it's an awareness thing. And then those who want take it advantage of it, the opportunities now it's, it's never been more readily available.

John Jantsch (13:07): So one of the things that I think trips, a lot of people up is especially, well, people that are bought into what you're preaching is that there are a lot of things that want to take your time. yes. So, so how do you get better at protecting? You know, you could set up like, here's my flex, here's my lifestyle I'm gonna live. And then everybody just like starts piling on.

Richie Norton (13:26): Now that that's a great question. And it's, what's funny about that is like, it's the same thing with money. When someone realizes you have money that people are like, Hey, I need some money too. Can I have some money? Right. So I like to believe in this concept that I call time flow there's cash flow and there's time flow. And you're right. The people who are the most productive are rewarded with more work. So instead of getting things done, you know, from nine to five and they can get it done in between, you know, nine and 12 or whatever, they don't get to go home early, early, they just get more work. So then we, everyone starts saying, nevermind, let's all be average. Let's all just do the same thing. Let's spread out day, the exact time, you know . And so here we are.

Richie Norton (14:05): But for people who are trying to like figure out what to do at their time, I straight up, I have to help many people free up their time. They do it on their own, just sharing their principles. And a lot of times they go right back to doing more work. So there's no judgment of how you fill your time. You're gonna do it however you want. But there is a way to make one small move that allows one. It makes lots of decisions that you would've made disappear. And on the other hand, it creates a number of different opportunities and possibilities. But to answer, it's like more of a bigger picture question, Aristotle called it a final cause. So like an acorn becomes an Oak tree. So a lot of times we're planting things that aren't acorns, but we expect them to become Oak trees.

Richie Norton (14:46): So the moment you realize that, then you can go back and make your work aligned with what you wanna do. Like someone says, I'm not making money. And I say, when's the last time you asked someone to pay you? Oh no, I've been working so hard. Well, if work to you means you're gonna get paid. Don't you think you should ask someone to pay you cuz you haven't worked a day in your life. If you're defining work as getting paid, now you don't have to define work as getting paid. But if you do, you should be asking people to pay you that's aligned work. So when it comes to like how you make your decisions, Aristotle called a final cause. And the idea was an acorn becomes an Oak tree. So academics will use an example of like a table and they'll say so I need wood.

Richie Norton (15:22): And I need to be able to have a design of how to make it. And I need someone to put it together and voila it's done well. What's the goal of the table. If it was to have like an heirloom for your family forever. Cool. If it's because you have some nice people coming over, some business people, some family, and you wanna have a nice dinner. You there's Uber eats, man. You can go down the street and go get a taco anywhere. You, you know that there's a food truck of every flavor everywhere. So when you realize it's not the dinner, it's not the table, it's not the wood. It's the experience. Well then you can change what you're doing. The idea is stop focusing on means and focus on ends. Covey didn't say begin with means in mind, he said begin with the end in mind. And so I think we've made goals, habits and strengths. We've turned those into means, sorry, we've turned. Those means into ends into themselves. So then we lose all of our time and things that don't lead us anywhere. Even though we think they are, instead of just saying, you know what, if I just did the thing, all this stuff would go away. I'd have more time.

John Jantsch (16:24): Well and how much stuff do we do in the name of being busy? That doesn't really go anywhere, right? Yeah. So one of the, you have the book broken up into sections. One of the sections is ultimately some practices, you know, for implementing your methodology. So I jotted down a couple that I'd love to hear you explain a little more project stacking for the first

Richie Norton (16:43): One. Oh man, that's such a good one. it's such a good one. The concept is how it's not multitasking. It would be super single tasking. Where one thing you do impacts all of your other companies, whether you like the guy or not. Elon Musk is a master at this thing. You know, his one company will affect all of the others. So you know, space X and you got the solar thing and you got Tesla, they're using similar technology. They're using similar resources. One thing impacts the other, you got this boring companies. Now these cars can go underneath. So that's the idea is you might say, I wanna do all these different things and I'm not saying it to do 'em all at the same time. Maybe you will. Maybe you won't. But if you can look at your projects and instead of putting them linearly, turn 'em over and stack 'em, it's almost like this alignment allows you to say, Hey, I wanna make this decision. And this decision makes these different things in my life happen. I can give you more examples, but is that a good, is that, yeah,

John Jantsch (17:44): That's a great example. And I'll actually take it. If some people are thinking, oh Teslas, blah, blah, blah. You know, but I mean you write a hundred blog posts over a hundred days. You turn that into a hundred pieces of audio content that turns into a book. I mean that, you know, that's another way of kind of looking at it on a real simple term, isn't it?

Richie Norton (18:00): Oh absolutely. You know, every time we share an example, just leave, have a super example. It becomes like, whoa, like, so for me, yeah, I was an entrepreneur. I still am. People ask me questions. So I wrote a book about it. This is an alignment. The book. I mean the other book I'm referring to is the power of starting something stupid. That book turned into coaching consulting, online courses. All these things can happen with the same client that turned into me creating a product based business, where we make over a hundred different products at any given time for entrepreneurs all over the world. And now I'm making yoga pants and I'm making tiny houses in the same breath. And then I'll be like, wait, what are you talking about? Like, yeah, it's one decision. And it all came because of the book, the mindset. And now I have an editing company for people and people go like, what are you doing? How you do so many things. So I don't, my job is to get people their time back. And if there's a way I can do that in a way that also gives me my time back. Why wouldn't I?

John Jantsch (18:51): Yeah. And it leads to another practice expert sourcing.

Richie Norton (18:55): This is, so this one's so important. Expert sourcing is so important because what most people do, you know this, we all do it. We all do it like, oh, I need to delegate or I need to outsource or I need to hire an employee. So what they do is they go and find someone that's as cheap as possible. But with that choice, it is not about money. They could be the same price. Just depends on what's going on. But they intentionally go into it saying, I'm gonna teach this person how to do what I do. And they intentionally from the start have set up themselves instead of having zero jobs, they now have at least two or three jobs.

John Jantsch (19:30): that's why it's so hard to do. Right. That's why people don't

Richie Norton (19:33): It. It's like I'm gonna hire this person. I'm gonna teach them how to do it. They're gonna do it wrong. And then I'm gonna do it myself. . But in, in inherently in the word expert, I'm inferring, they know how to do it better than you. Right. There is zero training in expert sourcing. Sure. There's little things about, I like this. I like it done by then. And here's how, you know, we work, but this person should be able to teach you how it's done. And in that sense, everything changes.

John Jantsch (20:03): Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome way to look at it. Let's wrap up today talking about something you've hinted at, but I want you to hit this dead on because I think it's in a lot of ways. I think it's the essence of the book change, how you get paid,

Richie Norton (20:15): How you get paid dramatically impacts your life in every way. And I don't mean how much you get paid. I get that. You need to make a certain amount and I get the more the merrier you and I both know millionaires. Maybe even some billionaires that have no time and they hate their lives. They'll say they'll even say money is easy. Time is hard. How you get paid, decides how you live your life. So if I am making a ton of money, but I've decided I have to work in a swivel chair, I will stay in that swivel chair spinning around all day long. When I told myself I wanted to work from my cell phone, this is before Facebook. This was before Facebook, when phones folded it was a decision cuz I knew that would force me to have to think, wow, I can't be in an office.

Richie Norton (21:05): How am I gonna get this done? I can't necessarily have people all around. How am I gonna get this done? So it allows you to be creative, these positive constraints. We've ended up just being on the road for six months at a time with our kids, screaming in the back of the car, doing whatever we want. Not that we had all the money in the world, we're making money on the road while we're good, just like we would anywhere else. So the idea is when you can create an environment that allows you to live the way you want, then you can also get paid to support that environment. And it's a very different way of thinking, but it works like magic.

John Jantsch (21:37): Well, and it's kinda like the end in mind of thinking too, that you just mentioned too, is if you start there , you know, then all the decisions you make, you know, should support that. And just, as you said, in some cases, they force you to make certain decisions. Don't

Richie Norton (21:51): They, they do. It's a forcing function. And so that's why with small moves, you can reclaim your time. You can be as productive as you already are. I'm not saying get rid of things that you, that are good that you like. I'm just saying, don't lie to yourself when it's not working, let's just work on something that's in alignment. And here's how to do it in a way that creates time for you and your family and for others.

John Jantsch (22:13): And, and I guess we could spend a whole nother show talking about how you actually figure out what alignment means, but there you go. That's for another day, right? the Richie. Thanks so much for stopping by the duct marketing podcast. You wanna tell people where they can connect with you. Obviously the book will be available wherever you buy books.

Richie Norton (22:28): Yeah. Go to Richie norton.com. And if you go to Richie norton.com/time, I have a 90 day action plan that helps walk you through this. So you can find your alignment and make these things happen now, you know, and it's really powerful. So, but honestly, John, I'm just so grateful to be on your show. Thank you so much. This has been so, so good to me

John Jantsch (22:45): Now. You, you bet great book again. I appreciate it. And hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Richie Norton (22:51): Definitely. I'll see

John Jantsch (22:53): Ya. 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 dot co .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 business made simple hosted by Donald Miller and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network business made simple, takes the mystery out of growing your business. A long time, listeners will know that Donald Miller's been on this show at least a couple times. There's a recent episode. I wanna point out how to make money with your current products, man, such an important lesson about leveraging what you've already done to get more from it. Listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:45): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Daniel Pink. He is the author of five New York times, best sellers, including his latest, the power of regret, how looking backward moves us forward. His other books include the New York times best sellers win and a whole new mind, as well as the number one New York times, best sellers drive and to sell is human. His books have won multiple awards have been translated into 42 languages and have sold millions of copies around the world. He lives in DC with his family. So welcome to the show, Dan, I should say

Daniel Pink (01:23): Welcome back. Yeah, no I don't. How many times is this now? John? It's like five

John Jantsch (01:27): Or five. I'm go. I'm gonna, yeah, at least. I mean, like, I didn't mention Johnny Bunco, but you know, you were

Daniel Pink (01:31): . That was, yeah. I was thinking as I, as I was look putting together my to-do list for the day and like what kind of appointments I had, I was thinking, geez, Louis, I think this is like the fifth time I've been on Jan's show. So yeah, I think the sixth time I get a free bagel. Isn't how it works

John Jantsch (01:45): With you. That's actually let's I like that idea. Let's not talk about your book then let's just talk about politics in DC right now for the whole show.

Daniel Pink (01:52): Uh, I, Hey, go for it. Go for it. It is, you know, if you wanna bring tears to your audience's eyes, that's fine with me. It's your show. Yeah,

John Jantsch (01:59): No, I will forego that, but some people may not know that you spent some time in politics and did some speech writing for at least one president, if not two.

Daniel Pink (02:09): Well, I have, I, I worked in the reason I live in Washington is that my wife and I came here as a very young people. I worked in politics. I sort of fell into becoming a speech writer. My wife was a litigator for the justice department, and then we both left those jobs, but we didn't leave DC and ended up raising, um, ended up raising three kids here. DC is a lovely place to live. And the truth of the matter is that day to day, it is far less obsessed with politics and most people outside of the beltway think.

John Jantsch (02:37): Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. So let's, let's get into the book regret, the power of regret you for most of your projects, you do a lot of research and you did something called the American regret project. I think you, I think I heard you talk about how does one really conduct research on regret?

Daniel Pink (02:53): Well, it's a great question. And so actually there's sort of three legs on which this book stands. One of them them is I looked at about 50 years of research that scientists did on this emotion of regret. And this is research done by developmental psychologists, uh, by social psychologists, by neuroscientists, by cognitive scientists and others. I also did, as you mentioned, the American regret project, which is just a gigantic public opinion survey, the largest public opinion survey of American attitudes about regret ever conducted to try to get some insights about this profoundly misunderstood emotion and then, but wait, there's more. I also did a third piece of research, which is called the world regret survey, where I collected lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of regrets from all over the world. And so that, so I wanted, so that's how I came out there. A lot of work involved trying to crack the code of this deeply misunderstood emotion.

John Jantsch (03:45): I'm curious, and you don't have to answer this necessarily. I'm curious if there were differences between the world product and the American product. It's an

Daniel Pink (03:52): Interesting question. And the answer is maybe yeah, and here's why there, there are two different kinds of surveys. The American regret project was a public opinion survey. And so I can make very safe claims about, you know, are in America, are there demographic differences in regret? What are the sorts of things that people regret, et cetera, et cetera in the world, regret survey, it wasn't a random sample. I just invited people around the world to submit a regret. Now I ended up with a lot of them. We now have a database of over 21,000 of them and my hunch. And I just wanna emphasize that it's a hunch I'm willing to make certain claims about the American regret project and demographic differences and other things about American attitudes on regret, my hunch. And it's just that is that looking at the 109 countries that were represented in the third piece of it, these regrets are pretty universal. Yeah. These regrets are pretty, a lot of 'em are pretty universal. Moral regrets are a little bit more complex because people have different notions about what it means to be moral. But overall there's a kind of a stunning amount of universality to these regrets.

John Jantsch (04:53): Yeah. The human condition is the human condition. Yeah. Right.

Daniel Pink (04:55): Exactly. Exactly.

John Jantsch (04:57): So let's get this out of the way. There are posters and tattoos around the world. that say no regrets. So like how is this a positive thing?

Daniel Pink (05:06): Well, I mean, no regrets is no regrets as a philosophy of life is not a particularly good idea for at least two reasons. I mean, truly one is that you you're leaving a lot of capacity on the table and two you're kidding yourself. Otherwise is a great idea. Cause because, because here's what we know. Here's what we know again, going to that first leg of this stool. Here's what we know about regret from 50 years of of research. Everybody has regrets. It's a universal emotion that, that everybody has regrets. Uh, truly the only people who don't have regrets are people with some kind of problem, uh, sociopaths or people with brain damage or gen degenerative diseases or brain lesions that is like not having regrets is a sign of a disorder. Or it's also a sign of that. You could be five years old too, cuz your brain hasn't developed.

Daniel Pink (05:47): But the point is that not having regrets is a sign of a brain that isn't fully mature and isn't working properly. So that's kind of weird, right? Cause I don't, you know, you were joking around about, Hey, let's have this fun conversation about regret and here's the thing I don't like regret. It doesn't feel good. Yeah. I don't like it. But here's the thing. This unpleasant emotion is everywhere. It's ubiquitous. It's one of the most common emotions that human beings have. And so the question then becomes if something that's so widespread, why you have this unpleasant thing, that's widespread why and the answer is cause it's useful if we treat it right and we haven't been treating it. Right. And when we treat it right, not ignoring our regrets, like those ridiculous, no regrets posters and not wallowing in our regrets, but confronting 'em there's evidence that confronting your regrets properly can help you become a better negotiator, a better strategist, uh, think more clearly avoid cognitive biases, find greater meaning in life, solve problems, faster, solve problems, more elegantly. There's a whole array of benefits if we treat it right.

John Jantsch (06:49): Well, so in some ways you're saying it's like mistakes, did we learn from it? Right. I mean, is that kind of what

Daniel Pink (06:56): We're saying? Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, so, but did, but let's push that a little bit further. Okay. So what we want, you know, everybody makes mistakes, errors has failures. The question then becomes what do you do with them? And the idea that in the face of bad choices, in the face of stupid decisions and indecisions, you should simply never look backward. Ah, it's in the past, it doesn't matter or say, I don't wanna deal with that. Cuz that makes me feel bad. And I only wanna be positive. That's a bad idea. What we know is that if we treat a regret systematically, we can learn and grow. And so what's perverse yeah. About this no regrets philosophy. And you mentioned people with tattoos that say no regrets, no one, but you might as well get a tattoo. This is no learning. no growth, no progress. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:42): Yeah. So I want to veer here for a minute. I'm curious how you, I mean you've written a pretty eclectic set of books. I'm kind of curious how you find a topic that you say I'm gonna write a book about this and then how you landed on this particular topic.

Daniel Pink (07:57): Well, in general, I have to be really interested in the topic that was really, you know, this, you know, this John writing a book is a giant pain in the ass. You know, this it's hard, it's hard. Okay. It's really hard. So you gotta pick something that you really are interested in and really care about deeply. And that is truly not most things. I mean, truly it's like it's most things I do writing a book about. It would be like a form of punishment for a white collar crime, you know, so, so, so what happened in this book was that I had regrets and I was at a point in my life where I was in and someone was trying to reckon with them. I was at a point in my life at the very least where, to my surprise, I had room to look back.

Daniel Pink (08:42): You know, I'd always thought of myself as this like young guy. And all of a sudden I realized I've been doing this for TW this book writing thing for 20 years, I had kids graduating from college, like what the hell's going on. And so I had room to look back and, and as I look back, as many people do, I said, ah, if only I had done that or if only I hadn't done that and I realized I'd made some screws and mistakes and things and I wanted to make sense of it. And the curious thing though, was when I came back and started, when I very sheep started talking to people about these, my regrets, instead of people recoiling in the way that I kind of expected people leaned in, they wanted to talk about it and that's, and that was, it was very intriguing.

Daniel Pink (09:21): And so what I ended up doing to your question about books, I was actually working on a totally different book at the time when I started think, when I started encountering this, I was working on, I had a contract for an entirely different book, a book that had nothing to do with this. And I put it aside for nearly two months and I started doing some basic research on regret and ended up writing a brand new, maybe 30 page book proposal for an entirely new book and went to my editor and publisher and said, Hey, I know I've contractually obligated to write a book about X, but I think this book about Y that is regret is way better. And let me try to make the case to you that this is a better book. This is a book that I'm, that I like, I feel in some ways compelled to write

John Jantsch (10:07): And, and you of course said, can I keep the advance on the other book for a while too? well,

Daniel Pink (10:11): Yeah, what

John Jantsch (10:12): We did, we just swapped

Daniel Pink (10:13): It out, swapped it out, you know? Yeah, yeah. We just swapped it out. We just said, okay, so don't do book, don't do that original book, do this book. And you know, as long as you give us words in English that we can put on pages, we'll be reasonably happy.

John Jantsch (10:27): It'll all come out in the wash.

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John Jantsch (11:14): I mean, there's no coding. I mean, there's 4,000, I think apps that, that they now support and that can, you can get to talk to each other, look, see for yourself, why teams at air table, Dropbox, HubSpot Zend desks, thousands of other companies use Zapier every day to automate their business. And you can try it for free today. It's that zapier.com/dtm that's Zapier, which is Z a P I E r.com/dtm. Check it out.

John Jantsch (11:44): I bet you, some people struggle with like, what is regret. Exactly. Yeah. And I know I've had the advantage of hearing you talk about this book at, at a conference I attended and it was, I thought, thought it was interesting that you talked about disappointment and guilt and that's not regret. And so I wonder if we could kind of sum that up for us.

Daniel Pink (12:00): Yeah. But that's an important, that's important. It's important to understand what this emotion is. So let's talk about, let's talk about difference between regret and disappointment. What make triggers regret, what makes an emotion regret and not something else is typically, well, there's a few things, but at the core of it is agency. That is regret is your fault. Regret is your fault. I'll give you an example. All right. I li as you mentioned, I live here in Washington, DC. And as we speak here on a very overcast and steamy July day here in the nation's capital are base. I'm a sports fan and I'm a Washington sports fan. The Washington nationals baseball team have the worst record in the major leagues. The Washington BA Washington nationals have won 32% of their games this season. I mean, in baseball. That's unbelievable. All right. Okay. So can I, so, and I'm a fan, do I re I'm disappointed about that?

Daniel Pink (12:54): Right? Because I care. Okay. For whatever weird reason I care, whether the nationals win or lose, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. The nationals aren't gonna care, but if nationals lose, I feel bad. Right. But I can't feel regret about that, cuz I'm not playing. I'm not managing the team. I don't own the team. All right. So it's not my fault. And so regret is our fault. Now let's talk about guilt. Cause I think that's another really good one. And let's even talk about shame while we're at it. Okay. So guilt to me is a subset of regret. Guilt is a guilt is your fault. I did something wrong and I have people in my database. I bullied somebody. I cheated on my spouse. I swindled a business partner and I feel guilty about that. All right. So guilt is a form of regret.

Daniel Pink (13:35): It's a subset of regret. It's essentially a moral regret typically from an action. But shame is very different. Shame is guilt is I did a bad thing. Shame is I'm a bad person. And shame is pretty debilitating, right? If you know, if you make a, if you do something and this is a big problem, why people shy away from regret? It's like when we make a mistake, we say, oh, I screwed up that decision over there. Therefore I'm an complete idiot. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm the worst person in the world. We make these universe. We make these sort of broad lifetime attribution based on a single action. So, so shame is very debilitating. Guilt is a form of regret and disappointment is simply feeling bad about something. That's not your fault. I mean, again, I'll give you an even simpler example. Okay.

Daniel Pink (14:17): So it looks like, so I was, um, so I was thinking about my exercise plan for the rest of the day. And it turns out here in Washington, DC, it at about five o'clock there's a 100% chance of thunderstorms. Okay. So here's the thing I could be. I can't regret that it's going to rain. Right? If it's five o'clock and I wanna go outside and exercise, I can't say, oh, I regret that it's raining. All right. I can be disappointed in that. But if I have to go to the walk to the grocery store and I don't bring an, and I forget to bring an umbrella, I can regret that. Cuz that's my fault.

John Jantsch (14:45): well, you can also regret that you didn't go running at 7:00 AM this morning when you knew it was gonna rain. Right?

Daniel Pink (14:51): Yeah. You know what? I can't run that early in the morning.

John Jantsch (14:54): So it's interesting is I heard you talk about the debilitating aspect of shame. I can see people regretting that they made a poor business decision and that shaming them to the point where they won't ever go out on a limb and make a decision again.

Daniel Pink (15:09): They're exactly right. You're absolutely right. And this is the, then this is, and that's because people don't know how to contend with that regret. Right? So, so they go the opposite direction of the no regrets, the no regrets brigade, they wallow in it. They ruminate over it. What you have to do is you have to the initial step here when you make a mistake or screw up is that you there's a whole process that you can go through. But it really begins with something called self compassion, which is treating yourself with kindness rather than contempt. The person you're describing there will often say to him or herself, their self talk will be brutal. You know, swearing it themselves, lacerating themselves. Don't do, they would never talk to anybody else that way. So don't talk to yourself that way. You don't have to treat yourself better than anybody else, but you don't need to treat yourself worse than anybody else. There's no evidence that let lacerating self-criticism is in a, is a performance enhancer. Seriously, none. Zero zilch. Yeah. What you wanna do is treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt recognize that mistakes are part of the human condition. And as we were talking about earlier, that it's a moment in your life, not the full measure of your life. And when we do that, we can open the way to making sense of our regrets and drawing lessons from them.

John Jantsch (16:17): So, so for all those people that have the poster or the tattoo we could, we can still be no regrets, just no regrets. I'm wallowing in. How's that?

Daniel Pink (16:25): Okay. That's fair. That's fair. Yeah. That's fair. I mean that's, that's actually a good, that's a good way to, that's a good way to do it again. What we have here is what we have here is this kind of performative courage of no regrets. We think that, I mean, people do it in this very assertive, bold way, right? They say no regrets. They announce it. They proclaim it. They enshrined it on their bodies as a show of courage. But that's not what courage is John. I mean, courage is looking your regrets in the eye and doing something about that. Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:52): Yeah. Turns out there are categories of regret and you can talk about the types foundation, boldness moral and connection. But I have a favorite can I have, is it okay to have a favorite kind? So, and you can unpack what each of those are if you wish. But my favorite is boldness. I mean, I think,

Daniel Pink (17:07): Well, no surprise. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:09): You know, so, so maybe, maybe give us a really quick definition of those four types and then we can get into yeah.

Daniel Pink (17:14): Yeah. So

John Jantsch (17:15): We talked diving into boldness.

Daniel Pink (17:17): We talked about moral regret are if only had done the right thing, right? So you're at a juncture. You can do the right thing. You can do the wrong thing. You do the wrong thing. Most of us regret it because most of us are good and want to be good connection. Regrets have only had reached out. These are regrets about relationships that come apart. People want to do something, but they don't. And it drifts apart. Even more foundation regrets are small decisions early in life that accumulate to nasty consequences. Later in life, I spent too much in save too little. I didn't take care of my health. I didn't work hard enough in school. And then finally boldness regrets, which are you're at, at a juncture. You can play it safe. You can take the chance. And when people don't take the chance, not always, but a lot of the time they regret it and it doesn't matter the domain of life, but it could be asking somebody out on a date, it could be traveling. It could be speaking up or, and why I'm not surprised this comes into your world. Is it not starting a business?

John Jantsch (18:09): Yeah, yeah. Or not, you know, not taking a bold move. I mean, I look at my business and I can clearly think about maybe this is in comparison. You know, some other people that maybe started when I did or do a similar thing that, that I look at and go, wow, if I'd have like gone for it in a certain way, I'd be there too. But I have where I will say I have no regrets. I love where I am but I also do. I do also recognize sometimes when I could have been Boulder,

Daniel Pink (18:35): I think we all do. And I think that's healthy. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing. So the question is John, what do you do with that? Okay. This is perfect example. I feel exactly the same way. Yeah. All right. So I, there were so many times in my life when I could have been Boulder. So here's what I can do. I can go back there and say, you know what? There were times in my life when I couldn't have been Boulder and thinking about that right now makes me a little uncomfortable. So I'm gonna plug my ears and never con consider it again. Bad idea. Or I can say, as we were talking about earlier, oh my God. There were times when I could have been Boulder. I'm such an idiot. I'm a moron. I just don't know what I'm doing. That's a bad idea too. What I should do is say, huh? What's that telling me? That's telling me, well, it's telling me a few things. Number one. It's or let's say you and I similarly situated what it's telling us, John is this one we value boldness. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Not everybody has to value boldness, but you it's clarifying what we value and it's instructing us and it's instructing us to say, Hey, you know what, next time around, go

John Jantsch (19:34): For it. Take a bigger shot. yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because you have demographic information on the research. Do older people have different regrets, bigger regrets than younger people.

Daniel Pink (19:46): This is a B. Okay. So, so in the quantitative survey, the American the public opinion survey, I had a very large sample in order to try to make determinations like this. Do men have different regrets than women do?

John Jantsch (19:57): Right?

Daniel Pink (19:58): People with lots of formal education have different regrets from people with less formal etcetera, et cetera. There were not that many demographic differences except on this dimension, which is age. And it's a huge difference. And it's this, when we are young, we tend to have equal numbers of regrets, of action and inaction, equal numbers of regrets about what we did and what we didn't do. But as we age and not even age that much mm-hmm thirties is to start to take over in the thirties, forties, and then certainly fifties and beyond regrets of inaction, swamp, regrets of action. When you get to be I'm in my fifties, when you get to be my age, it's like two to one, sometimes three to one regrets of inaction versus action, which goes to your boldness point. Yeah. It suggests that what we're gonna, we're gonna over time, we are, are gonna regret the things we didn't do. Not asking that person out on a date, not taking that trip, not speaking up, not starting that business, not reaching out to a friend. Those are the things that stick with us and bug us for a long time.

John Jantsch (21:03): Yeah. I think it's EE comings line. I sort of remembering is we regret the sins of omission rather than the sins of commission, you know, as we get older, , you know, that did, but not didn't do.

Daniel Pink (21:14): Yeah. But the thing about that is that's not only, you know, that's like, that might make intuitive sense for people, but we have a, but I have data from my own survey showing this very clearly. It's basically the only demographic difference that I'm willing to like go to the ramp arts to defend because the finding was so strong, but it's also very consistent with what 50 years, the 50 years of existing research are shown us. But

John Jantsch (21:35): I think it probably comes down to, we start thinking and I'm running out of time. right. I mean, whereas when we're in our twenties, we're like, eh, I got, I'll get another shot at that. Right.

Daniel Pink (21:44): That could be, I think that's part of it. I think the other thing is that action regrets. We can resolve over time in some way. So we can say, so if I bullied somebody or if I hurt somebody or, you know, cheated somebody, I can go and like apologize or make amends or make restitution. There are times where you can take some of the psychological sting out of a regret by finding the silver lining in it. So it's so if I said, I mean, this is, you know, I said, you know, one point in my life, I thought about moving to California. I don't regret not doing that. But suppose that I did, I, I said, if only I moved to California, right. And I can say, well, I lived in Washington. Well, at least I was able to send my kids to a great school. You know, I can find a silver lining in, I can find a silver lining in that, but in action regrets, you can't undo. You can't find a silver lining. That's why they nod us. Whereas one poet says they lay eggs under our skin, which I think is a lovely and somewhat creepy way to put it. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:41): Yeah. so at the beginning you were talking about research that was done in all these various fields that have some relationship to mental health. And I, you know, do you have an opinion or a view from the work you've done and now all the talks you've given and conversations you've had with individuals, how big of a mental health problem is this?

Daniel Pink (23:01): It's an interesting question. Okay. So I think there's some new, I think there's some nuance to it. Yeah. Okay. So I think that the, I think mental health is a pretty significant issue. However, this is my view. Okay. And I just wanna emphasize I'm not a physician, right? I think that it is a little bit less of a medical issue than we make it out to be. And what I mean by that is that what I think the big issue here is that we haven't taught people how to deal with negative emotions. Yeah. What we've sold them, a bill of goods we've said you should always be positive. And we don't, and our lives are not uniformly positive and negative emotions have a place. We just haven't taught people to deal with them. And so I think that we have a mental health crisis, perhaps even a me, you know, medical problem when people get so consumed by their regrets and their negative emotions that they, it ends up metastasizing to anxiety, depression, or something that is actually a medical ailment.

Daniel Pink (24:03): But, you know, but I don't think that that every negative emotion is not a mental health crisis. It can become a mental health crisis. If we don't tell people the truth, that negative emotions are part of life. That negative emotions are instructive. That negative emotions are in fact, in some ways more instructive than positive emotions and that we can deal with them in a systematic way. And when we deal with them in a systematic way, we can live better and work smarter. And so I, I think that among the young people, among younger people that this mental health problems we're seeing in younger people are because they've somehow gotten the message from us that they need to be positive all the time. Yeah. And then, because they're human beings, they sometimes don't feel positive. They feel sad. They feel regret. They feel fear. They feel these negative emotions and they look around and say, oh my God, everybody else is so perfect. There must be something wrong with me. And I don't know what to do with this feeling. And I think that's the problem. We need to equip people to deal with negative emotions, harness them as a force for progress.

John Jantsch (25:04): So I regret that I didn't lean in a lot harder to my baseball career, but it sounds to me like, uh, maybe I could still get a tryout with the NATS.

Daniel Pink (25:11): Well, yeah. This year you could, and you know, this year, this year you could, but that's an interesting, that's an interesting thing that, you know, it's like the question then becomes like, what do you do with that kind of regret? Cuz that's not an uncommon regret. Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of sports related regrets, actually, John. And so, so the things like, okay, are you going to get an MLB contract? Probably not. Okay. But the question is like, what is it about that that you regret not leaning into? So you felt like, okay, I didn't push myself to the hardest I could push myself. You know, I didn't take a, I didn't take a big shot and there are plenty of time and plenty of other realms in which you can push yourself hard and you can take a, you can take a big shot.

John Jantsch (25:47): Awesome. Always great catching up with you. Dan tell people where they can connect with you and the ways that you want to. And obviously the books are available everywhere you

Daniel Pink (25:55): Buy books. Yeah. The best other starting point is my website, which is Dan pink.com, D a N P I nnk.com. And there's a newsletter. There are a lot of free resources, all the books, all, you know, unicorns, rainbows, cotton candy for everyone, all kinds of good stuff

John Jantsch (26:10): And no regrets posters. I can touch you. Dan. Thanks again. Uh, always great to catch up and uh, hopefully we'll see you one of these days there on the road.

Daniel Pink (26:20): All right, John. Thanks for having me back. Look forward to my bagel next time. Hey,

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