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Tim Grahl (00:00): Books go places you can’t go by yourself. And so they have a way of going out into the world and touching people that you could never get to on your own.

John Jantsch (00:10): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Tim Grahl. He is the CEO and publisher of Story Grid where he oversees marketing and operations for the story grid universe and story grid publishing. Under Tim’s leadership Story Grid has become a valuable resource for authors seeking to refine their craft and successfully navigate the publishing landscape. We are going to talk about a number of books, first thousand copies, book Launch Blueprint, but Tim’s also got a new book, a novel called The Shithead, a novel for N 50 songs, which depend upon when you’re listening to this comes out in September of 2024. There. I just ruined my G rating. Dang it, Tim.

Tim Grahl (00:53): Yeah, I’ve already had a couple people say the book had a lot of language in it. I’m like, if you did

John Jantsch (01:00): You the Bible, my first book, duct Tape Marketing was published by Thomas Nelson. They were just getting into business publishing, but they had to date it had been a Christian publisher. They still give the imprints still around. They sold the business part to Harper. But Thomas Nelson is the biggest publisher of Bibles.

Testimonial (01:17): And

John Jantsch (01:17): So in my manuscript, when I turned it in, the only word they made me take out was crap, the word crap. So we’ve come a long way, haven’t we? Yeah.

Tim Grahl (01:27): Now we’re just putting it on the cover.

John Jantsch (01:29): So explain what Story Grid is for those who haven’t discovered it.

Tim Grahl (01:35): Yeah, so my partner, Sean Coyne, has been in publishing since 1991, mainly as an editor, but also as a writer and story researcher. And he wanted to develop a way to analyze books to find out what’s wrong and fix them. And so he came up with what is now called the Story Grid, which is so we can give really clear, specific feedback on people’s writing from the sentence all the way up to the full novel or full book. And it’s a really systematic approach that’s based on feedback and a rubric that we can actually help people become a better writer in a very short period of time. And so I came on, we started the podcast nine years ago, and I was the Guinea pig. And so I would write in public and share it on the podcast, and he would give me feedback and just rip it apart live on the podcast. And now I’m the CEO. So I run all the marketing and operations and everything, and I’m kind of the main Guinea pig still. So that’s why my book’s coming out, and it’s a proof of concept of what we can do at Story Grid.

John Jantsch (02:37): So it is funny that you talk about it having a rubric and being very systematic. I remember one of my first editors read through the first kind of chunk of the book that I gave them, and he said one of his notes on the paper, I felt like it was an eighth grade English teacher wrote on the paper and said, you do a lot of throat clearing here. And that was one of my favorite pieces of feedback. Get to the point. Damn it.

Tim Grahl (03:00): Yeah. So that’s what we focus on is helping writers level up their craft so they can write a book that they’re proud of that leaves a

John Jantsch (03:07): Legacy. Do you find that one genre, it works better than another? I mean, obviously business books or nonfiction books are much different than fiction. Does it not matter

Tim Grahl (03:18): As far as the writing or the marketing side,

John Jantsch (03:20): Or No, really, as far as the story grid approach?

Tim Grahl (03:23): Oh yeah. So we’re on fiction and anything narrative driven. So we do memoir, we like a lot of Malcolm Gladwell books. I write nonfiction and I write business books. But it’s a different approach than a narrative driven book.

John Jantsch (03:41): Yeah, yeah. Okay. So talk a little bit about, you mentioned the, I think we were on, I think we’re here, we’re recording. I’ve been doing too many interviews today. Sorry. But the idea of doing interviews for this, so in fact, you at some point did 600 one-on-one calls with your audience. First off, that sounds incredibly painful, but you clearly learned something from the nature of it.

Tim Grahl (04:07): Yeah, so almost two years ago, back in November, 2022, the business kind of hit a wall. And I realized through just things when it’s just this gut feeling of things are not working well, and this is not going to grow, I don’t know what’s going on, something’s wrong. And so a friend of mine, she was like, Hey, she started asking me questions about our audience, and I couldn’t answer them. And she’s like, you need to get to know your audience better. She’s like, you need to start doing just phone calls with your audience. And what she didn’t know about me at the time is I’m like a fucking train. So you tell me to do something and I just start doing it and I don’t stop. And so I started doing calls in January, 2023, and now I’ve done probably now 650 one-on-one calls with people, and I’m now scaling back from that. But it’s one of those macro level, it was painful, but it’s calls with people that are trying to be writers. Most of them are pretty

John Jantsch (05:11): Fun.

Tim Grahl (05:12): I like those people. But now I know my audience really well. I know why they write. I know how old they are. I know when they began writing, I just know them so deeply and well and changed the whole approach to marketing, and we figured out what we should be doing in the company in the process. So about a year ago, I had a really big breakthrough again, after I’d done probably the first two or 300, and now we’re up 29.2% in the business this year, over in the previous three years, we had been flat for three years. And so we figured it out and now we’re going to grow. But it was just really, I just needed to get to know my people. And so I started talking to ’em one at a time.

John Jantsch (05:59): So it’s funny, for years we have developed marketing strategy for clients, and a lot of how we develop messaging is by interviewing their clients because their clients talk about the problems that they get solved by that company. And quite often it has nothing to do with the actual product. It’s stuff they’re not getting in other parts of their life even. It’s pretty crazy. And some of the verbatim statements that people have said, I was like, well, there’s your core message.

Tim Grahl (06:24): Yeah, it was for too much of, well, one of the things I realized was we kept talking about writing a book that’ll sell well and writing your bestseller.

(06:33): After I’d done the first almost a hundred calls, I went back through all my notes and just read through. Not one person talked to me about wanting to write a bestselling book. They want to leave a legacy. They want to leave something behind for their family to read. They want their kids, their grandkids to be proud of them. And I’m like, oh gosh, I just pulled all of that stuff out of our marketing, and it’s all about legacy, being proud of doing the thing you’ve wanted to do since you were 14 years old. And I didn’t know that it made sense after the fact, but I didn’t know before I just talked to everybody.

John Jantsch (07:09): Writing is weird, isn’t it? A lot of people, even if they say, I’m a terrible writer, I would never do that, or I’m certainly not going to make the time to do that secretly, doesn’t everybody want to write a book?

Tim Grahl (07:18): As far as I can tell, I mean, I hang out with a lot of writers, but I think what it is, we all want to leave something behind that takes everything we’ve learned. We’ve all been through really shitty stuff. We’ve all learned really hard lessons, and we want to leave it behind for other people. And the seemingly most accessible way to do that is to write a book. It’s hard to make a movie you can paint. I don’t think that gets the point across. So a book seems to be the way to do that, and it does it really well. And I actually think fiction is a better form than nonfiction because if I start telling you, John, this is what you need to do and here’s what you need to think, it’s like I start arguing with you or thinking, but if you just tell me a story, it changes my mind without much effort. So that’s what I’ve really dedicated myself to is being somebody that can write something great. The shithead is the outcome of that. The early reviews of it have been really good. People love it, and it’s having the kind of people are emailing me saying, I’m going to therapy after reading your book. So it’s

John Jantsch (08:31): Pretty gratifying, isn’t it? I mean, to realize that you can have that impact and you won’t hear from a lot of people. But I mean, wrote Duct Tape Marketing 17, 18 years ago, and it just floors me that people today are like, I built my business on that. I was really trying to came out, I was just trying to feed my family. I had no idea.

Tim Grahl (08:56): Yeah, I mean, I read it when it first came out. I remember buying it at my Barnes and Noble when I lived in Lynchburg, Virginia, and I was trying to get my business off the ground, and I was like, this guy knows what he’s talking about. It was like the first time I felt like I read something that was something I could do. It wasn’t some high-minded way of doing it. Oh yeah, for sure. So writing and books go places. You can’t go by

John Jantsch (09:22): Yourself.

Tim Grahl (09:23): And so they have a way of going out into the world and touching people that you could never get to on your own.

John Jantsch (09:30): So I’ll start basic and start peeling into the actual stuff. But when somebody comes to you and says, oh, Tim, I really want to write a book, what should I do?

Tim Grahl (09:39): Yeah, I mean, the first thing I try to do is talk ’em out of it. It’s cliche at this point, but it’s like writing book. And it depends on how you’re approaching it. Writing a nonfiction like a business book, and again, I’ve written a few of these, so I love them. That’s a different thing than trying to write fiction. Fiction is really hard to do Well,

John Jantsch (10:05): And

Tim Grahl (10:06): I have, yeah. So anyway, if somebody wants to learn how to write, the first thing they need to do is just start writing short pieces. We’re a big fan on the fiction side or the memoir side of writing one scene. Can you write one scene that gets somebody excited to read the next scene? If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t be trying to write an entire book because it’s setting out for a road trip from LA to New York, and you don’t even know how to drive a car. You’re going to put it in the ditch before you get out of the neighborhood. And so with business books, I find that they’re easier because you’re usually talking in your own voice, especially if it’s from your expertise. So you’re used to consulting, you’re used to coaching, so writing in your own voice is a little easier. But the biggest thing is, can you write a blog post that people want to read? If you write a white paper and you send it to 10 people, do they interact with it? Do they email you back? Do they like it? Was it helpful? And sitting down to write a book first can be really daunting. And if you don’t have a good guide walking you through it and you’ve never done it before, it’ll probably not be very good.

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(12:43): And that to me is what I always find is that you take the note cards and you rearrange ’em all, or how do you do that?

Tim Grahl (12:51): Yeah, it depends on how you go about it, but the way that we’ve found works the best is you start with your theme, which is how you want the reader to change as a result of reading your book. Right? Right.

John Jantsch (13:04): That’s totally true of any good book, right?

Tim Grahl (13:05): Yeah. So it’s like what’s the one if one change they make? So for my book, the Shithead, it was like, I want to move people from feeling like they’re broken pieces of shit to they’re perfect and have everything they need. I really truly believe that about people. I believe that if that one change could happen across the globe, it would solve 95% of our problems.

Testimonial (13:28): And

Tim Grahl (13:28): So I believe that. So then it’s like, okay, now I start crafting a story that will, you can watch somebody descend into hell of believing they’re a piece of shit and then come out of it at the end, right?

(13:41): And so it really is about, the hardest thing is when you’re writing a business book, you just put on the page the truth. Here, do this. And there you go with the fiction title. You have to just tell the story and trust the reader to get the message that you’re trying to give them. And it’s all about you being able to write a story that infers everything to the reader. So that’s the hard part. But when you’re at a restaurant and you’re people watching and you see that couple across and you’re like, oh my God, they’re fighting

John Jantsch (14:16): And

Tim Grahl (14:17): You didn’t hear anything. You didn’t hear them fighting, but you can just see in the way they’re interacting. So with writing a fiction book, you have to just show what I can observe and let the reader pick up on the fact that they’re fighting. I don’t want to tell the reader they’re fighting. So if I’m a good writer, I should be able to describe it in such a way where they know what’s going on. That’s one of the harder things about writing fiction, is you have to just tell the story. You have to have the theme clearly locked in your head, but you don’t put the theme on the page. You just let the reader figure it out.

John Jantsch (14:52): I wonder, I often wonder that it’s like an actor in a play. I mean, they become obsessed with the character. When you’re writing a book like this, does every conversation, everything you see the couple of next, they become characters or fodder, at least for characters.

Tim Grahl (15:07): Well, again, I think this is different depending on the writer. So this book was, I took what happened to me and some stuff that happened to me, and I built a novel around it. So it was a very personal story. So it’s definitely not a true story. Some pretty rough stuff in there that didn’t happen to me. But it’s more about, it’s almost like looking back, so you’re like, all right, I need something like this, or I need a character that did this. And you just start pulling stuff from other movies, other books, stuff that’s happened to you,

(15:46): Just different things of, but you have to be like, all right, I’m building this story and I need something like this here. I need a character. So I get really firmly planted, and I’m usually pulling from my life, so I’m like, oh, I’m, this character is that person, so I’m going to write that person into the book and just try to make them bigger than life. So it’s a little bit of both, but I try to shut it off because it’s not good if I’m out to dinner with my wife and I’m thinking about writing. Yeah,

John Jantsch (16:17): Yeah. Well, I suspect that’s a great place for people to start, especially for a first book because they have a lot of firsthand knowledge. And you become James Patterson. You can go start hiring people to research stuff for you. But that first book, I’m sure. So do you have any tips for I, one of the things most people that are writing, many people that are writing fiction, it is not their day job. It is something that they’re doing kind of on the side to try to finish. So do you have any tips for like, okay, it’s going to be 58,000 words. How do I get that done?

Tim Grahl (16:53): Well, so the one thing I try to get people not to do is try to write a novel at the beginning, because novels are really hard to put together, and there’s too many things happening. And this is one of the things I have a stack of soapbox, and this is one of ’em, right? So people don’t understand that writing is a skill just like any other complex skill. So if I have never played the guitar before, you play the guitar, right?

John Jantsch (17:21): I do.

Tim Grahl (17:22): So if I’ve never played the guitar before and you said, Hey, Tim, just sit down and play Led Zeppelin, man, come on. And I’m like, no, I can’t know how.

John Jantsch (17:32): So

Tim Grahl (17:32): When people say, I’m going to sit down and write a novel, it’s like you don’t know how. Just because how to type words doesn’t mean you know how to tell a story. And there’s basic skills. Just like if I want to learn to play the guitar, I got to learn my scales. I got to learn how to play chords. I got to learn how to learn how to even tune the guitar, and I have to learn all of these skills. And then I learn how to put ’em all together, and now I can go perform, see, again, guitar, you separate practice and performance. Same thing with woodworking. I practice cutting cheap pieces of pine before I cut the $80 piece of oak and writing. We just smush ’em together and we’re like, I’m going to learn how to write while writing something I want to publish. That doesn’t make any sense. And the way that you get better at something is deliberate practice, which includes short feedback loops. Well, you can’t short feedback loop an 80,000 word novel.

(18:26): So the biggest thing I want people to do is focus on one scene. Can you write 1000 word scene that is really good? And when you send it to 10 people, they write back and say, Hey, what happens next? Probably not. So let’s focus on writing scenes first. And then once you’re consistently writing great scenes, then we start building up from there. And so that is the number one mistake writers make. And I made that mistake for over a decade of just like, oh, this novel didn’t work. Let me try another one. Let try another one. Let me try. And it was that, again, like I said earlier, it’s setting out for a road trip and I don’t even know how to drive. And so I want people to separate practice and performance, understand their skill development first. And then once you have the skills, you can go write whatever you want.

(19:17): Just like once I’m really good at playing the guitar, I can go play whatever song I want, and now I can get good at playing those songs. But every fucking guitarist, whether they’re playing rock or they’re playing country or whatever, got to learn the acorn and got to learn how to strum. They all have to learn the same basic skills and then they can start going in a direction they want to go. And so I wish more writers understood it is a skill development process, and if you just focus on the skills first, it makes everything so much easier in the long run. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:52): So where do you come down on and disclaimer, you guys offer workshops, so where do you come down on that kind of public writers’ groups, workshops as a way to get that feedback, but it also could be a little soul crushing, right?

Tim Grahl (20:08): Yeah. Well, okay. Yeah. This was my big breakthrough as the CEO of the company is about a year ago I started looking around. I’m like, we are running seminars and trainings and all these kind of things, and I’m like, nobody’s actually getting better. What is going on?

John Jantsch (20:24): And

Tim Grahl (20:24): I’m like, oh, they’re getting better here in this one program we’re running. And then I got better. What do those have in common? I’m like, it’s the expert feedback. So even in Masters of Creative Writing programs, your feedback comes from your peers, which is the stupidest fucking thing I can imagine. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t you giving me advice on my writing, and I don’t want to give you advice on yours. I don’t know what I’m talking about either. And so expert feedback, and it’s like, well, that’s why we run the workshops. It’s so hard to get expert feedback that’s objective and not subjective. And it’s like, well, I also have a coach I pay in jujitsu and a coach I pay in CrossFit and everything else because it’s like to get better at something, I need to try it. Have a coach look at me, tell me what I did right and wrong, and then go try again. And so I think this is what holds writers back for literally decades,

John Jantsch (21:24): Is

Tim Grahl (21:25): They’re in an echo chamber of their own head or other peers that don’t know what they’re talking about. And that’s why nobody’s getting better. And that’s what held me back for years and years too. I’m 43, but I’ve been trying to write fiction since I was in my early twenties, and it’s not until the last five years that I was able to quickly get better because I was getting that expert feedback.

John Jantsch (21:49): Alright, last question. Who’s your favorite author,

Tim Grahl (21:52): Right? The last, well, okay, I’m going to give two you. I’m going to cheat. So Ann Tyler is one of my favorite. I think she’s a master of making boring things. Really interesting, right?

John Jantsch (22:04): Yeah.

Tim Grahl (22:05): Her books are not thrillers, they’re about just married couples and stuff.

John Jantsch (22:08): They’re

Tim Grahl (22:08): Just so good.

John Jantsch (22:10): The

Tim Grahl (22:10): Other one that nobody So accidental Taurus is my favorite one of hers. And then this guy named Carlos Ruez, Fon, Z-A-F-O-N, wrote a book called The Shadow of the Wind, and it is one of the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read. It’s so good. It’s like a mystery and a coming of age and a love story all wrapped in one. And that book, I have more highlights on my Kindle than any other book I’ve ever read. It’s just so beautifully written. And he has a whole series of books called The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, something like that. But the first one, the Shadow of the Wind is just wonderful.

John Jantsch (22:48): Yeah. Alright, well, do I get to share? You want to know? Yeah, of

Tim Grahl (22:52): Course.

John Jantsch (22:53): So Cormick McCarthy, I just absolutely love. The Road has probably become his most famous because of the movie, but the whole border trilogy, I mean, he just gets inside of people’s head. The inner dialogue is unbelievable. And then Tom Robbins Still Life with Woodpecker. That’s kind of an old one, but the whole story is so absurd, but he just makes it believable.

Tim Grahl (23:12): Tom Robbins?

John Jantsch (23:13): Yeah, he’s written a handful of books, but that’s my favorite one of his. Awesome. Well, Tim, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Tell people where they can find out about the workshops that you do and Story Grid in general, and obviously find a copy of the

Tim Grahl (23:26): Shithead. Yeah, so story grid.com. But really, if you want to know what we do, go to just look up Story Grid on YouTube. I’ve got about a hundred videos on there, and that’s the best way to really dig into who we are and what we do. We run the workshops every month. I highly recommend those. And then shitheads available@storygrid.com, Amazon, all the places you buy books.

John Jantsch (23:48): Awesome. Again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you soon. One of these days out there on the road, Tim,

Testimonial (24:03): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients, it’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever

John Jantsch (24:19): Made. What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash Scale.

Charge More With The Power of Pure Motive Service

Charge More With The Power of Pure Motive Service written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Joe Crisara

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Joe Crisara, author of What Should We Do? How to Win Clients, Double Profit, and Grow Your Home Service Sales. He shares his journey from struggling home service contractor to helping thousands of contractors increase their revenue.

Joe’s “don’t worry about it” mentality, is rooted in his blue-collar upbringing where his father often provided services for free, and once nearly led him to bankruptcy. Initially, Joe believed that cutting costs and lowering prices would build client loyalty, but he learned that true service isn’t about slashing prices. Instead, it’s about offering high-quality, long-term solutions that anticipate future problems. Now, through his ‘Pure Motive Service’ approach, Joe provides options that cater to different needs and budgets while ensuring excellence and proactively preventing issues.

Joe’s ‘Pure Motive Service’ involves providing solutions that prioritize:

Quality
Reliability
Safety
Health

He also discusses the significance of managing opportunities and anticipating future needs, offering practical advice for service professionals, and highlighting the role of marketing in delivering exceptional service.

Key Takeaways

Providing high-quality service and multiple options can significantly increase revenue for home service contractors.
The concept of ‘pure motive service’ involves providing solutions prioritizing quality, reliability, safety, and health.
Managing opportunities and anticipating future needs are crucial for delivering exceptional service.
Marketing plays a vital role in communicating the value of a service and building trust with customers.

Chapters

[00:00] Introduction and Background

[01:20] The Pivotal “Aha” Moment

[04:31] Offering Multiple Options and Pricing Strategies

[07:57] Pure Motive Service and Anticipating Needs

[11:53] Articulating Solutions and Selling Premium Options

[18:08] The Role of Marketing in Delivering Exceptional Service

More About Joe Crisara:

Add Service MVP on LinkedIn
Check out his Website
Grab a copy of What Should We Do?: How to Win Clients, Double Profit & Grow Your Home Service Sales

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

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

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

Oracle

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Duct Tape Transcript

Joe Crisara (00:00): If the client has to ask you for a solution, it’s too late, but you should have thought about a solution before you did that. Great service providers don’t just solve a problem. 15% of what they do solves today’s problem. About 85% of what they do solves the problems in the future. When you express those things, quality, reliability, safety, health, these are the reasons when somebody says, can you lower the price? And I always say, well, you know what? I wouldn’t be doing a good service if I were to cut corners on that

John Jantsch (00:28): Out. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Joe Crisara. Once a struggling home service contractor transformed his failing business through a pivotal aha moment that I think we’re going to get into today. And now he helps thousands of contractors increase their revenue by three to five times with his Pure Motive service system. He’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today. What should we do, how to Win Clients, double Profit and Grow Your Home Service Sales. So Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe Crisara (01:04): Well, John, thank you. First, lemme start by saying though, I want everybody to know this, that John Jantsch, I’m talking to the OG here, this dude, he changed my life. He didn’t even realize it, but the Duct Tape Marketing book and just, I did have a small mention in that book when I was first starting was we had our website that had the content we delivered and I was mentioned in the book, what an honor, I almost melted when I saw my name in print. But definitely John, it’s been the service you provided. It’s an honor to be here, an honor to help the home service professionals and any other service professional doctors and anybody else who needs to create higher value when they communicate their solution to the clients.

John Jantsch (01:42): Well, I appreciate that, Joe. I can’t decide when people call me the OG of marketing if that really just stands for old, but I’ll take it, I’ll take it. So I mentioned in your intro the idea of the pivotal aha moment. You talk about it in the book, and I know you’ve shared this millions of times, but why don’t you share that kind of what set you on this path?

Joe Crisara (02:05): It’s actually right in the very beginning of the book, which is that I used to think, John, that as a home service professional, I grew up from a blue collar background. My dad was a plumber and stuff like that. And so we were always doing everything ourself. We never hired a service even though my dad was in the service business, and so I was always trying to save people money on things. It was my paradigm that I looked at the world as a service provider. How can I do things a little for less money to help the consumer out in a way? Because I witnessed my father doing that. He’d go through our church and he would help fix all their plumbing problems in their homes without, and they’d offer him money. He’d be like, no, don’t worry about it. So I grew up with that kind of give service and don’t worry about it kind of mentality.

(02:48): Don, it almost drove me into bankruptcy and there was an aha moment I had where it was and I was trying to save a client money and I lowered my price. I wanted to keep them as loyal clients. I figured the best to do that, to show my love is to lower the price for them. And I realized that they didn’t go with me. They went with another company and I was like, huh, what happened? And then I went to a contractor meeting and it turns out one of my best friends had a competing competitive company, but we were good friends from going to trade school. He said he got the job and I said, well, what did you sell it for? How could your price be lower than mine? I already dropped the price by like 700 bucks. And he said, no, Joe, I charged because I dropped my price from 2,500 down to 1800.

(03:28): He said, no, Joe, I charged $9,857. I’m like, holy crap, let me see. So he had it in his briefcase. He showed me that the customer didn’t go with me and the reason they didn’t go with me, I simply did not offer enough service. I tried to lower the price and cut corners on the service figuring how could I find a way to do it for less money to help the consumer? And it turns out I wasn’t helping the consumer. And then since that moment in 1991 and 1992 was I learned that people are motivated by a better service and they will pay more money voluntarily without trying to suggest that they do. So as you can tell by that first story, I’m not a really great salesperson, but what I am good at doing is providing an environment where the customer can buy without selling them. Does that make sense, sir John?

John Jantsch (04:16): Yeah, a hundred percent. And I know you talk about offering multiple options to customers that there might be the here’s the basic package, but here’s what’s going to make your water heater perform for years if we do these kind of add-ons. And a lot of times letting people choose really helps. It’s a great way to more profitability, isn’t it?

Joe Crisara (04:35): Well, it’s like great customer service in the trust funnel that you have so wisely helped us develop and articulate very simply. And simplicity is one of my greatest values. And I feel like by looking at what you created in that we fit right into that trust funnel perfectly. Because if you think about it, it’s not just a water heater, it’s the things that go around the water heater. You can say, well, the doctor does surgery on me. The surgery doesn’t cost hardly anything. It’s the hospital, the surroundings, the environment, everything else that the serene room where it’s completely sterilized from top to bottom, that costs more money than the doctor truthfully. And so I think that we don’t realize that when you get Starbucks, you’re paying for a cup and you’re paying for everything, the real estate to find the Starbucks. And the same thing is true for plumbers or landscapers or anybody who does roofing and things like that.

(05:30): They don’t realize that the part that they do is only about 15% of it. But there’s other things like if you’re doing a water heater, well, how was the main shutoff valve? If it’s not working properly, let’s replace that to give options. Now, of course you did mention start the bottom working way up. Now here’s the truth there. Here’s the science of pricing, which is in the book. So I definitely recommend that if you wanted to read the book, it’s going to go over the science of pricing and it goes over giving one price and what statistics behind that, if you only give price, you’re going to have the lowest conversion rate and the lowest revenue and cutting corners on the work, you’re going to have low quality work. You’re only giving because which price are we going to choose? We’re going to choose the cheapest one, and then we’re going to say the next one is good, better, best, which is starting at the bottom and then trying to upsell people.

(06:12): The best way to do it though it’s found out because that will give you 40% people upgrading if I start at the bottom and say, here’s a better water here, here’s a tankless or whatever, and here’s the one that has more protection and warranties and stuff like that. So that would be the 40% upgrade, but you would have an 80% upgrade if you started with the premium option first and then tiered yourself down to the next one and then finished with the economy one. So if I was doing a plumber, I would say the top option would be endless hot water purification. You’d have a wifi connected shutoff valve to shut the water off in this house if there was ever a flood when you’re on vacation, things that go with it, a 12 year warranty. And the bottom option would be go to Home Depot and buy a tank and I’ll put it in for 1200 bucks or whatever.

(06:57): So the top option, and then also I believe in the monthly payment aspect, the teaching service professionals that not only should you make it the premium mid-range economy like I talk about, but also let’s make those prices affordable by anticipating that nobody’s got, if I did that thing with the endless hot water and the whole thing I mentioned there, it’s probably going to be $15,000. Some homes could be $20,000. So I can’t expect people to be pulling $20,000 out of their wallet when they just have no hot water, but I can ask ’em to do 1 97 a month for 10 years. Does that make sense? So definitely that’s everything. That’s all the things that we all those 47 years of the crashing this way, John, they have about 24 years of crash and burns and I got about 24 years of figuring out the right way of doing it. But the crash and burns are very impactful and they leave scars, and those are reminders of what to do the right way as opposed to do it the wrong way. Makes sense, John? Yeah,

John Jantsch (07:51): Absolutely. If you don’t learn anything, it was just a mistake. That

Joe Crisara (07:55): Was it. That’s it.

John Jantsch (07:56): Yeah, and it’s interesting too because I think we make a lot of assumptions like, oh, I don’t want to charge ’em 30,000 or whatever it is. They’ll never pay that. Well, we don’t know that. And it’s not even that they won’t pay that. It’s that they want the level of what that’ll bring them. When you gave that initial example, they may have actually not gone with you because they thought, well, how good could it be, right for that cheaper price?

Joe Crisara (08:21): That’s right. It’s like he’s lowering the price on me. He’s giving me a discount deal when it comes to heating my family. I don’t want comfort of my family, I don’t want discount, I want done. And I think that’s something about it. I think we all innately, I always make a thing, if I went to Paris, France or whatever, and I couldn’t even speak French, but I saw how many euros, if I saw a menu in front of the restaurant, it said 75 euros for this one and five euros for the one at the bottom, I would probably say, well, I’m hungry. I want to get the one that’s 50 to 75. I can’t even read French, but I do know it probably going to get more and it’s going to be better if I spend more, right? So I think innately we don’t give consumers enough credit for doing that. But one thing I will, and I have some golden nuggets reserved everybody to not only do that but make it successful. There’s a couple I call small bigs that I can share on this podcast. I’m going to give you some golden nuggets that if you do want to do a premium mid-range and economy choice, that there’s some key things that are going to make that pop even better, which I definitely can’t wait to share with you guys.

John Jantsch (09:21): AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It’s storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. Buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power. So how do you compete without cost spiraling out of control? It’s time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud infrastructure or O-C-I-O-C-I is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds offers one consistent price instead of a variable regional pricing. And of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half of the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less like Uber eight by eight and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive@ociatoracle.com slash duct tape.

(10:19): That’s oracle.com/duct tape oracle.com/duct tape. Hey, digital marketers, this one’s for you. I’ve got 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things that you can do in 30 seconds or less when you manage projects on Wix Studio. Work in sync with your team all on one canvas, reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites. Alright, time’s up, but the list keeps going. Why don’t you step into Wix studio to see more. I want you to unpack the concept of pure motive service because when you gave your intro, you were talking, or early on you were talking about how you just wanted to serve, you wanted to help people and that led you to almost going out of business. There’s an element of that in pure motive service. So tell me how that’s different than going out of business.

Joe Crisara (11:25): Well, I think everybody already has, certainly John Jantsch has pure motive service in his heart. I’ve witnessed it so I know what it is and I can define it very clearly. What it is this, it’s basically how can I provide a service that is, gives people a range of the quality and reliability that I can give them. There’s the highest quality and then there’s the lowest quality to let people have a choice at all that say, here’s the best way to do it and here’s the cheapest way to do it and here’s the way in the middle, more professional. And then I have one that’s a higher safety and health that has not just a water heater, but water purification, maybe flood protection. So we don’t have any safety issues in the home. Then we have the best service. The top option will have a 12 year warranty on it with no, can’t write a check for anything.

(12:12): The bottom option will have no warranty. You got it at Home Depot, I can’t warranty something like that. And then the ones in the middle will be five, seven years. So you see the warranty is expressed by how many years? I’m going to back it up and you could price, by the way, the warranty and service is a profit center that will be 38% to 42% revenue at an 80% gross profit for any service professional that’s out there. Whether you’re, I mean, landscapers definitely would need a service membership to keep track of what’s going on at the property. Really any kind of a service business needs to continue the service and anticipate what’s next and that’s the service there. But here’s the big, here’s the thing I was talking about this the golden nugget. When you express those things, quality, reliability, safety, health, these are the reasons when somebody says, can you lower the price?

(12:57): And I always say, well, you know what? I wouldn’t be doing a good service if I were to cut corners on that option. Now we do have other options that are lower if you want to choose that. So it’s kind of anticipating that people are going to negotiate. And so we’re kind of already built the negotiation into our options. So they look at the top one and they go, Joe, that’s a lot. You’re asking me for water purification, everything like that. Can we do anything less than that? So yeah, we could just go without the water purification. That would bring the price down to this. Okay, but I like the water purification, right? Yeah. So once you introduce, see Americans and everybody in the world when you introduce a solution to them that’s right for ’em. Now here’s the key word. I’m going to give you the golden nugget.

(13:37): Here it is. You arrived here and your question was perfectly designed to do this. I didn’t know if you knew that or not, but here it is. It’s the word because, so if you can’t articulate the reason why you included water purification by using the word, because you can say, Joe, I just added the water purification in because of your daughter, Amy, when you told me she had eczema. I just felt like that would be the better way to go with the solution. And Joe, I also did the 12 year warranty because you told me you work as an accountant and a bookkeeper. I don’t want to make sure you can focus on your job. Let me focus on the water heater for 12 years and you focus on your family and focus on your job. So you have to have the reason why, and that’s where our training comes in, is that how do we teach people to articulate the pure motives in a way that is really quality, reliability, safety, health, customer service, defined by your actions, by putting it into your solutions and not just lip service, I call it John, where people talk like, oh yeah, we’re a high quality company.

(14:37): Really prove it by putting it in your prices and make it relevant to the customer. That’s the word. Because that’s one of the pure motives is to say, not only do you got to do all that, but all that has to be customized and relevant. So it doesn’t look like the plumbers just, or some of the service guy, the HVAC guy or electrician or whoever it is, even the accountant or a divorce attorney. It could be anybody. You’re not just throwing stuff in to fluff it up. You’re putting stuff in there because you can draw a line to anticipating what’s going to happen and preventing that before we run into a problem, I would say this, great service providers don’t just solve a problem. About 15% of what they do solves today’s problem, but 85% of what they do solves the problems in the future. Does that make sense, Sarah? Yeah,

John Jantsch (15:24): Absolutely. And that’s not going to be for everybody, but the percentage of the market that wants you to anticipate and appreciate you anticipating the problem, they’re more than willing to pay a premium, right?

Joe Crisara (15:35): Well, it’s close to a hundred percent of the people will see the benefit. But here’s the thing about it. Now they may not be able to afford the benefit or that’s the thing about, so what we’re trying to do is get our consumer to say something like this. So instead of saying, this is a ripoff, get out of my house, we don’t want that to happen. So what we’re trying to get a hundred percent of the people to say, if they don’t want it, if they want it, we want ’em to say pick an option and there’s the words, what should we do? Which one do you like? What should we do? And so here’s the options, what should we do? And then the customer’s like, man, I just didn’t know it would cost this much. And I’d be like, I understand it’s a high investment, but it’s an investment in your family, so what should we do?

(16:11): And they’re like, Joe, is it okay if I don’t buy this from you? See now that’s a little different tone rather than get out of my house is the rip off. So it’s much better if they say something like, Joe, I think I’m going to have to go with my brother-in-law who’s less money. And number one, I appreciate your effort and nobody ever presented anything. I feel amazed that you did all this for me. They see the effort that you’re putting into the thoughtfulness behind the solution, and nobody is going to insult you when they see that you made a customized relevant solutions for them. They may say, you know what? I already signed a contract for my brother-in-Law or something like that. So the ones we usually lose are people who already had plan B firmly in place and there was nothing we could have done really.

(16:56): But they’re calling, that’s a lot of people called to see if they can find a cheap price on their brother-in-Law so they can go back and tell the brother-in-Law, there’s a guy cheaper. But what they aren’t expecting is somebody who’s way better than their brother-in-Law and they’re kind of conflicted. So what we’re trying to achieve is happy customers who not only use the solution but refer it because they say nobody’s going to take care of, if I had my mother, I would give her a peer motive service provider. I know I won’t have to keep dealing with this and my mother won’t have to keep calling me. This guy’s going to take care of the thing today and also make sure she has grab a cyst bars, she’s got a knee replacement. So he’s going to think about those things, not just wait for the client to ask us for it.

(17:36): The key thing I believe, John, if the client has to ask you for a solution, it’s too late, but you should have thought about a solution before you did that. If you’re teaching marketing, I would say, well, here’s how we do it. I thought about, you’re probably going to ask me who’s going to do these funnels or whatever. Well, here are some providers I have chosen that would be a great person for you. So you anticipate the next step because if you’re lost, I don’t know who’s going to do the marketing funnel. And it’s like, thanks John for creating another problem for me. In a way it makes sense there. So I think every service needs to think if I am successful with my service, then there’s going to be something else they’re going to need that goes with it. Am I going to provide it or am I going to provide a sister company or somebody to help with that?

(18:16): Because when that funnel gets stopped, it doesn’t usually get stopped by the consumer, it’s stopped by the service provider who failed to keep doing the next step that the referral step or the step in that funnel. So I think we are the ones service MVP and the book is the thing that drives consumers through that funnel that doesn’t just matriculate without an accident by gravity. It does it because a great service provider is moving people on a conveyor belt that moves ’em through that funnel and keeps moving it through the funnel on the referral step and the action step. And that’s why I think what we do fits so perfectly together because it’s like people like you are some of the guiding lights behind. It’s just up to the standards of guys like David Fry, you might remember him and sure guys like you, I had to live up to that standard.

(19:09): If it doesn’t hit that standard, I’m like, it can’t be in the peer motives. So there’s six peer motives and definitely it’s defined very clearly in the book and I think it’s something you can give. You can be the cool part about it. It can be transparent with the client and say, I did this for you. I made these options and the reason I made ’em is this higher quality on the top option and I give you a range of other quality and you can be as transparent with the consumer. And there’s people right now who advertise, ask us about our pure mode of service in the marketing. So they actually use that as a marketing tag. I have some companies that say, where we always give you premium mid-range economy options or the call is free if we don’t do that. So they actually promise that in the marketing now. So it does kind of feather into that. We’re not a marketing company, but definitely the actions that the experience that we provide people in the field or in their home is definitely facilitated and amplified by the actions of people like you who help broadcast at the consumer.

John Jantsch (20:06): Well, anytime, I’ve always said this, anytime your business is coming into contact with a customer in any way, shape or form, there is a marketing function being performed.

Joe Crisara (20:16): Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s where marketing comes to life. You’re promising before the doorbell rings and we’re executing that promise after the doorbell rings because if your marketing is promising something, I think that’s where a lot of market people, when they do marketing fall short, they can’t think of the USP or something that we’re going to do. The reason is their company doesn’t operate better in differently. So the key to getting that selling position where it is unique is by doing service that’s unique. We call do magic moments, which is praise the effort of the people in the home to get through victories and challenges, diagnose the people, diagnose the system, make premium mid-range economy options, and then manage the opportunity to get the job done or reschedule it. Because if you leave an opportunity behind, it’s not the customer’s fault that you forgot about it, you just emailed it and that’s it guys, that’s what a hundred percent of people are doing.

(21:12): 90% of ’em are just emailing the quote and leaving, I don’t do that. I’m like, dude, let’s email the quote, but let’s also make an appointment to follow through and make a choice on this thing. If you don’t want to make a choice, let me withdraw the bid. I always tell people, because I’m not here to sell you, I’m just here to make sure I manage this opportunity to help you. I always say that if the service provider can’t manage that opportunity when they’re selecting solutions, how are they supposed to manage the entire job they’re doing or whatever they’re kind of trying to do. So I always say this is a demonstration of the work you’re going to do by managing the opportunity in the home. I think that’s why I really feel like it was so honored to be on this podcast. I was like, duck marketing is a cloak that fits around. We’re in the middle of that thing and this is like a cloak of comfort I feel right now being on the show with you.

John Jantsch (22:00): Well, Joe, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by. Where would you invite people to connect with you and to find out more about what should we do? I know you work with a lot of home services, but this really applies to services. This just applies to businesses, a lot of what you’re talking about. So I’d love

Joe Crisara (22:17): It if people, it does connect with anybody who really, every business is a service business. I always look at it, even if you’re stuff, you’re creating a service to provide stuff to people. So we have our website called service mvp.com. If you go to that or if you wanted to email me at joe@servicemvp.com, we actually have a link. The book is on Amazon, it’s $25 and 95 cents, or if you get an audible, I think it’s 1995, but if you want to, I can’t do anything about the audible, but I can do something. We have a book funnel that if you email me, I’d be happy to send you the link to the funnel where you, all you got to do is pay for shipping for eight 90. We’ve sold over 10,000 books right now at this point. So we really, it’s off to a good start.

(22:59): We released it in March and this is our trust funnel. Use the material for such a very little amount of money that’s ridiculous and make more money first. And then if you want to examine what we can do for you to help your team and yourself succeed, and whether you’re a startup, there’s no better way to start than to make sure you create trust with you as the first prototype employee. Or if you’re a big company, which we have a lot of people, right? Remember you used to be living in Kansas City, I think right back in the old days. I did. May was one of our clients over there. You had one of our big clients. So definitely we have a lot of big companies and small companies that use this over 33,000 companies that use this. So definitely I would recommend doing that, Joe@servicemvp.com or just go to service service mvp com and get a free course and just try that. Make sense?

John Jantsch (23:48): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we will run into you one of these days out there on the road.

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(Un)Limiting Beliefs

(Un)Limiting Beliefs written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I aim to stir the pot in yet another solo show by sharing a distinct and uncommon point of view (or five) in marketing.

I’ve never really understood the insane popularity of Simon Sinek’s ‘Find your why notion.‘ I mean, it’s been said before, right? Maybe even better. My why is: Why is that particular video so popular?!

Regardless, Marketers often make marketing too complicated anyway. Fun fact: complexity in marketing is just disguised incompetence. Chasing trends is a recipe for failure, and you shouldn’t just repurpose your content but make it purposeful.

I also draw special attention to the significance of customer experience as the true differentiator and the importance of measuring marketing effectiveness. Stick around for 10 minutes of me crossing the line between fact and opinion as I share all I learned in my experience in the industry in a few words of wisdom, all in one belief system that you can adopt to run your agency better.

Key Takeaways (Or What I Believe)

Share a distinct and uncommon point of view about your business and its offerings to differentiate yourself in the market.
Focus on solving your ideal client’s problems rather than just promoting your products or services.
Create purposeful content and use marketing automation to personalize your interactions with customers.
Build long-term relationships with customers and prioritize customer experience as the true differentiator.
Measure the effectiveness of your marketing activities to avoid wasting time and money.
Use data to gain insights and make informed decisions.
Avoid unnecessary complexity in marketing and strive for simplicity and clarity.

Chapters

[00:00] Introduction and the Need for a Distinct Point of View
[03:25] Solving Problems and Building Relationships
[05:48] The True Differentiator: Customer Experience
[06:45] Measuring Marketing Effectiveness and the Importance of Data
[07:44] Avoiding Complexity in Marketing

This episode was brought to you by:

Oracle

Wix

work in sync with your team all on one canvas, and reuse templates, widgets, and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best-in-class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites.

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00): Complexity in marketing is just disguised incompetence. I believe that marketers make marketing too complicated and that chasing trends is a recipe for failure that no one cares about our products or services. They care about their problems getting those problems solved.

(00:20): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guest again today. As you can see on the screen, if you’re watching the videos, just me solo podcast. So let’s call this one What I believe that’s the name of this episode. I was listening to a presentation on strategy and authority the other day, and really no surprise, that old chestnut of finding your why was mentioned as part of strategy and authority building. They talked about something that I think is a needed twist in this conversation. As a side note, I’ve never really understood the insane popularity of Simon Sinek’s Find Your Why Notion.

(01:01): I mean, other people had said that, hadn’t they? I mean, why is that particular video so popular? But I digress, and frankly, it’s mostly jealousy. So let’s move on. Alright, so finding your why that conversation mostly centers around purpose and beliefs. Sharing with the world that you believe, I don’t know, cats and dogs both deserve love or that the use or not use of the wildly divisive Oxford comma hurts no one. Or maybe even that you believe something universal. We should all love our neighbors. I mean, none of that is a bad thing, but I think those are things that might attract your ideal client, but I think they’re kind of nice to have when somebody’s considering buying from you. I mean, obviously the opposite. I hate kittens. That’s not a, that’s actually going to drive things away. But again, I think that those are, a lot of people focus there and that’s great.

(02:02): Having core beliefs inside of a business I think are great. But I think that there’s incredible brand value in sharing what you believe, especially, or in additionally when you share the distinct and perhaps not so common point of view about what your business does, how it’s different. I mean, it’s the unique value and say it in ways that are beliefs that are really kind of attacking an enemy almost so that some percentage of the market’s out there going, yeah, I not only believe that, but I hate it when people do X. So I think this is how you can start to differentiate your business in ways that addresses the problems that your ideal clients are trying to solve. So with that in mind, I’m going to give you an example, but I also hope to start some fights. I hope that I hear from listeners on this who either agree or wildly disagree with these ideas because I think that there is value in both of those.

(03:06): I’m not saying that I intentionally believe we should all create fights or that we should all create division or polarize markets, but I do think that if there’s not a tinge of, Hey, I believe that, or Hey, I don’t believe that there’s not a tinge of emotion in what you say to people about what you do and why you do it, then we’re probably missing the mark. Hey, digital marketers, this one’s for you. I’ve got 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things that you can do in 30 seconds or less when you manage projects on Wix Studio. Work in sync with your team all on one canvas, reuse templates, widgets, and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites.

(04:00): Alright, time’s up, but the list keeps going. Why don’t you step into Wix studio to see more AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It’s storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power. So how do you compete without cost spiraling out of control? It’s time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud infrastructure or O-C-I-O-C-I is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds offers one consistent price instead of a variable regional pricing. And of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half of the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less like Uber eight by eight and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive@ociatoracle.com slash duct tape.

(05:07): That’s oracle.com/duct tape oracle.com/duct tape. So here I go. We sell marketing strategy. People hire us to create a marketing strategy to implement that plan in many cases and to help them build a brand, help them grow that brand, help them create more customer loyalty and retention. But I would like to believe that everything we do comes with the following point of view. I believe that marketers make marketing too complicated and that chasing trends is a recipe for failure that no one cares about our products or services. They care about their problems and getting those problems solved. Creativity without strategy is art. Sorry, graphic designers. But without strategy. It’s not marketing content without purpose is just noise. And boy, are we seeing a lot of noise these days. AI is making it very easy to create content without purpose. Marketing. Automation without personalization is spam. I’m guilty of this.

(06:14): I understand that it’s wrong. It’s just hard. So a lot of what we try to focus on is not just using these tools. How can we use them to personalize long-term? Relationships matter so much more than quick wins. So you stay in business for any amount of time and you will come to really appreciate that. One. Engagement without conversion is vanity. You see so many people just trying to build up their Facebook profile. I’ve got so many likes, so many followers. So there’s a place for all of that. But without conversion or without at least the thought of why we’re doing this for conversion, it’s simply vanity. Customer experience to me is the only true differentiator. So what I mean by that is so many people are out there trying to find their difference, their unique thing. We’re the purple people or we deliver faster than anyone else, whatever their kind of thing, that can be a competitive advantage.

(07:13): But what we sometimes forget is how the customer experiences. That differentiator is what actually makes it valuable. What actually makes it a true differentiator? If you’re not measuring, you’re guessing, sorry, another one that’s hard. But if we’re not measuring the effectiveness of all of our marketing activity, we are just guessing. Sometimes we guess, right? But sometimes we guess horribly wrong and don’t realize it wastes tons and tons of money. Tons and tons of time. And last one, ending on a data note. Data without insights is useless. How many marketing firms just throw out a report monthly report because they said they would to their clients? And without any kind of insight into why any of this matters, does any of this lead to or to us meeting our business objectives? Pretty useless. And then finally, I’m going to end on a harsh one. Complexity in marketing is just disguised incompetence.

(08:10): I think in a lot of cases there are marketers out there that want marketing to seem odd, SEO to be this really strange science that nobody can understand, and some of that really has to do with the fact that they can get away with murder when they do it’s disguised incompetence. So those are some of our whys. Those are some of what goes into those beliefs inform pretty much everything we do. At least I hope they do. It’s not perfect, but it’s the goal. It’s how we fulfill our unique point of view that marketing is simple when marketing is a system. So I’m going to leave you with the words of the well-known brand strategist, Dolly Parton. Here’s our job. Find out who you are and go be it. So I hope that I stirred the pot a little bit here. I hope to hear from you, John, at duct tape marketing.com. Obviously, if you’re somebody who owns a business out there and you’re thinking, Hey, that all made sense to me, maybe I should talk to them about how we can get our marketing system, reach out, john@ducttapemarketing.com. All right, take care out there. Hopefully we’ll see you one day soon. Out there on the road.

Testimonial (09:33): I was like, I founded. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made.

John Jantsch (09:49): What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM.world/scale to book your free advisory. Call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM.World/Scale.

Why Leadership Requires a Conscience: The Shift CEOs Can’t Ignore

Why Leadership Requires a Conscience: The Shift CEOs Can’t Ignore written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Andrew C.M. Cooper

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed: Andrew C. M. Cooper, author of ‘The Ethical Imperative: Leading with Consciousness to Shape the Future of Business,’.

We discuss the importance of ethical leadership and the impact of the pandemic on business practices. He emphasizes the need for companies to care about their employees and the issues that their employees care about. Andrew Cooper also explores the concept of turning in business and the cyclical nature of societal challenges. He suggests that companies should authentically align their actions with their values and navigate the balance between doing the right thing and the potential cost. Cooper also discusses virtual and mixed reality’s educational potential in understanding complex societal issues.

Key Takeaways

Ethical leadership is crucial in shaping the future of business
Companies need to care about their employees and the issues that their employees care about
Authenticity is key in balancing the potential cost of doing the right thing
Virtual reality and mixed reality have educational potential in understanding complex societal issues

Chapters

[00:00] Introduction: Andrew C. M. Cooper and ‘The Ethical Imperative’
[02:32] Leading with Consciousness: The Ethical Imperative
[05:17] The Impact of the Pandemic on Business Practices
[10:12] Navigating the Balance: Doing the Right Thing vs. Cost
[17:27] Exploring Complex Societal Issues through Virtual Reality
[20:36] Conclusion: Connect with Andrew C. M. Cooper

More About Andrew C.M. Cooper:

Add Andrew Cooper on LinkedIn
Check out his Website
Grab a copy of The Ethical Imperative: Leading with Conscience to Shape the Future of Business

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

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

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

Oracle

Wix

work in sync with your team all on one canvas, reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites.

Duct Tape Transcript

Andrew Cooper & John Jantsch (00:00): Herbert Dow over Dow Chemical. He said the most effective way of working is to care for our employees and to see that they are happy and contented. That is a very different than if you fast forward post 1970 and you look at a CEO like Albert Dunlap. At Sunbeam, Albert said, employees don’t matter. The only thing that matters is shareholder value, which I think more often reflects a modern kind of pre 20th century view than what I previously described.

(00:32): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Andrew CM Cooper. He’s a Fortune 500 executive attorney, inventor, lecturer, writer, and board director. Couldn’t decide on what clear he wanted, I guess. He’s currently the Associate General Counsel for Strategic Transactions and Mergers and Acquisitions at Meta Platforms Inc. He’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, the Ethical Imperative, leading With Conscious to Shape the Future of Business.

(01:04): So Andrew, welcome to the show. Hey, John, thanks for having me. So I don’t want to get too sidetracked here, but I can’t help notice the saxophone in the background and the word inventor in your bio. So can you share what inventor, how that label got applied? Sure. Yeah. Like he said, sometimes I don’t think I can decide on a specific career path, so I try to embrace ’em all right. Actually, I helped to invent a method for landing unmanned aerial systems. So UAVs on top of UPS package cars, which matured into a US patent along with two other inventors. My primary vocation is a patent lawyer, so that’s kind of where the inventor came in. And then the saxophone, that thing is collecting dust over there in the corner is, I haven’t picked it up since maybe a few years now, but I played alto saxophone and band in school and just kept it around.

(02:00): I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, and we liked to play Charlie Parker as our favorite son, but I think he used to play there a lot. I don’t know, did you see in my bio that I used to work out in Kansas City? No, I didn’t. You’re right. My very first law firm was ARDI and Bacon. Oh, sure. Of course. Out in Kansas City, Missouri. And my wife and I, we lived in Raytown. You probably know Raytown not far from there. Course, of course. Yeah. That’s great. Well, I’ve just completely upended up the topic for the show here. We better get into your book. So the title, ethical Impairment with Consciousness to Shape the Future of Business certainly is a topic that is, I would say has evolved, feels like there’s a whole lot more intentional information about this concept. Would you say that there is a generational aspect that is kind of driving that evolution?

(02:48): Without a doubt. I think the number of executives come from the old school School of thought. We have Milton Friedman approach to business. The only thing that matters is making profit, and that just doesn’t resonate these days with younger executives. And honestly, that is the reason I’ve wrote this book about every other show I do. I blame something else on the pandemic. Would you say that you actually refer to it as a pivotal event in kind of bringing this consciousness to the forefront, would you say Maybe it was happening, but that certainly accelerated it my entire career avoiding weighty issues like death, but the Pandemic brought it right to my doorstep. I was sitting in my office one day and I get a phone call and I pick it up and someone says, Hey, we’d like to get some services from you guys. I’m like, okay, this is a totally normal call, but why are you calling the legal department?

(03:39): I shouldn’t be talking to our marketing and sales guys. They’re like, yeah, no, you don’t understand what we need are refrigerated containers to hold dead bodies because our morgues are overflowing. And in an instant, my world was turned upside down to really start thinking about things like death. I had members on my team that suffered multiple deaths, one after the other, taking care of human beings became the primary concern during the, I think most executives will know during that period of time. And the truth is, I began journaling about what my team was going through, and that kind of matured into for earliest parts of the book. But the truth is the pandemic though it was a pivotal event, it didn’t change the way business was being done, that what really changed is who we were as people, what we cared about. There was one question that I think came to the top of everyone’s mind during the pandemic and is it’s, do you care about me?

(04:39): And that really put work in perspective for a lot of people. The relationship between work and worker changed, and because of that, our considerations as leaders to regain performance has to change as well. So you mentioned care about me, but is there also an aspect of do you also care about the things I care about, right, the dream, the planet, not like it’s disposable. I mean, would you say that, so I can have all the nice fess the show you care about me, but I also care about a lot of things out there. I mean, what element does that role in? It’s an enormous element. So I grew up in a small rural town in South Carolina called Walterboro, South Carolina on the wrong side of the train tracks. And my neighborhood was literally dirt easements. There were no paved roads. And I grew up in a single wide trailer, and I talk about the death of the Walterboro economy in my book.

(05:35): That was a result of the loss of industry. It was a real economic catastrophe, similar but not as deadly as the death of East Palestine, the railroad industry in East Palestine, Ohio, which recently had a catastrophic event. But what ends up happening when you grow up on the wrong side of the train tracks is that you realize that there are people over there that need help. And the first chapter of my book, it’s about forgotten towns. The second chapter is about forgotten people. And these are two groups, two things that organizations and leaders need to really focus on if they are to survive that tomorrow’s economy. I read recently some statistics that 84% of millennials give to charity, and that has only been going up by generation. Gen Z is right behind them on that. And in addition to giving, they want know, they want to work for organizations that they know care about, those issues that they care about.

(06:40): So it’s two things that, hey, where are the resources going? Where’s my money going? And then where is my time going? And I want to align my future with those two things because that’s where I see real value. That’s where I see care and concern. I wonder if you could unpack a concept because you talk about it as you have actually called it an existential challenge, the idea or the concept of turning in business. Yeah. So we are adding a generational junction. I really enjoy the book by Neil Howe, the For Turning, and I highly recommend it to the listeners. But the idea is that we are, there are some things that happen over and over again, their cyclical and a lot of ways. In a lot of ways we can look at the period that we’re in as businesses and as an economy similar to those who were to businesses pre 1970.

(07:38): So if you go back between 1920 and 1970, what you find are a generation of people. So you’ve got the silent and you’ve got the greatest generation working in businesses and organization, and they are navigating through what was a generation defining event. So you had the World War Wars, world War ii, and then just before 19 20, 19, 17 time period, you had a similar pandemic like event. And when you look at what CEOs cared about, you look at guys for example, like Thomas Watson at IBM or David Packard at hp. They were on record saying things like, to build a business that lasts, we must treat employees with the same care, respect and consideration that we give our best customers. That came from Thomas Watson, Herbert Dow over at Dow Chemical. He said The most effective way of working is to care for our employees and to see that they are happy and contented.

(08:37): That is a very different than if you fast forward post 1970 and you look at a CEO like Albert Dunlap at Sunbeam, he was famous for tearing companies apart. And Albert said, employees don’t matter. The only thing that matters is shareholder value, which I think more often reflects a modern kind of pre 20th century view than what I previously described. But the experiences that we’re having now in 2020, and for the next 50 years between 2020 and 2070 ish, we’re going to be experiencing a generation of people that are looking to reinvest in humans. Despite all the things you see on news about AI and technology taking over, there is going to be a re-engagement with humanity and the human condition to address the issues that were at the forefront back in the 1920s, in the 1930s and the 1940s, there is a new crusaded business, and my hope is that with this turning, executives will lean into conscientious behavior and conduct.

(09:49): Hey, digital marketers, this one’s for you. I’ve got 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things that you can do in 30 seconds or less when you manage projects on Wix Studio. Work in sync with your team all on one canvas, reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites. Alright, time’s up, but the list keeps going. Why don’t you step into Wix studio to see more AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It’s storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power. So how do you compete without cost spiraling out of control? It’s time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud.

(10:48): Oracle Cloud infrastructure or O-C-I-O-C-I is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds offers one consistent price instead of a variable regional pricing. And of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half of the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less like Uber eight by eight and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive@ociatoracle.com slash duct tape. That’s oracle.com/duct tape oracle.com/duct tape. So one of the concepts of that book, I also read that a few years ago was this idea of cycles. Of course it’s turning and that there was a bottoming out that had to happen. Have we had fun? Have we bottomed down? I hope so. I hope so.

(11:49): We have seen, and I talk about this in the book, we’ve seen enormous challenges in the economy. If you just look at the banking sector, for example, and the number of bank failures that happened in rapid succession, if you look at all of the indicators of late stage capitalism where food prices are in some ways unmoored from their fundamentals. There was a time during this in post covid inflationary period where we were spending almost $8 for a carton of eggs and no one could really point to even after the supply chain issues were addressed. And I happen to know something about supply chain UPS for so many years that even after those issues were resolved, we saw heightened elevated costs. And so I think the consumer, and we’re seeing that ve out in a number of indices. It’s not just economically speaking where consumption is starting to soften, but we’re also seeing it in indices like social indices.

(12:51): So our politics has never been more and more raw and angry. And then if you look at things like how people are doing emotionally, I recently saw that male depression is an all time high male suicide is at an all time high. So when we look at various indicators, there are indicators that suggest we are close to bottoming out. My hope is that it’s a small implosion rather than an explosion. It’s funny as we talk about the cycles, of course, you and I have only experienced this one. I suspect there was a bottoming out in 1863 or 1864, the Civil War. That was probably a similar time. Right? So you mentioned along of your book, of course, is about the idea of leading with conscious. There are some companies right now that are trying to leave you conscious and it’s costing no dearly, it’s actually become, it’s entered a vernacular to Bud Light companies for doing what they think is the right thing.

(13:54): Right? So how do companies who are definitely afraid of that, maybe they have shareholders that are going to actually make them hold the light on them. How does somebody balance that very real potential cost with doing the right thing? Yeah, let me take one step back and just describe the book is the subtitles leading with conscience. And then I raise up the example of an archetypal executive, someone I call the conscientious executive. Conscientiousness and conscience are two different words, but they have the same root. The Latin root cia, which means knowledge of oneself, a sense of right, or a moral having a moral sense. And so in a way, they’re linked both words or by morality. The only difference is that conscience is the why we do a thing. It’s the normative question. And conscientiousness is more of the how we do a thing. If you look at in it’s considered a normal trait, one of the big five normal traits, and it generally relates to how someone shows up, how timely they are, et cetera.

(15:00): So it’s more of the how. So when I talk about leading with conscience, I’m really talking about the two prims of the words. So companies need to understand why they are doing a thing and they need to understand the appropriate way to do a thing, how they should do it. And to your point, there have been companies that struggle in navigating those two prisons. They may do one not the other. They may say, well, we believe in this principle, insert whatever principle trust. But then when it comes to the how, actually doing the thing, they score very lowly on trust. They don’t trust their employees, they don’t empower frontline managers. They go through cell checkout and you’ve got 10 cameras on you. It’s like, well, okay, I understand you save you trust, but you don’t demonstrate it in your actions. So in the book, I talk about a number of companies that have navigated that particular question.

(15:59): I juxtapose Chick-fil-A and Nike, two companies that are on different planets when it comes to their social position. And even some of their customers might be antagonistic to each other, right? If you buy Nike shoes, you may not eat a Chick-fil-A sandwich. But the truth is that both companies do a pretty good job of meeting both prisms of the conscientiousness test. They lean into who they authentically are, and then they also put their money where their mouth is in doing so. And I mean, I happily patronize both companies. I think that they’re both great, but really navigating to your question, navigating the challenge is going to be showing fidelity to those two things. And anytime a consumer detects that you are not being truthful to both of those things, they will sense the inauthenticity, they will sniff a mile away. And that’s where you’ve run into problems.

(16:54): The authentic word, even though it gets bantered around a lot these days. I mean, I think you’re absolutely right that companies that get in trouble is when they decide this is a good thing, this wouldn’t look good. We should put some solar panels on the building, as opposed to You’re absolutely right, as opposed to really being part of their DNA, right? That’s right. That’s right. That’s all about culture. And so I’m looking above your head in this image of listeners won’t be able to hear it, but I see an Oculus box up there. And I wanted to talk a little bit about, do you feel that there’s a way to, in some of these simulators, in some of these video games that are very real world, do you feel like there’s a way for people to experience or to understand complex societal issues using these two?

(17:39): I do. There are some studies out that validate the educational use case for virtual reality and mixed reality. One study that comes to mind, they examined students, children in primary school and their retention of information in two different contexts. The first context, they gave them a VHF video. And then after watching a video, it was like of marine biology, someone scuba diving and looking at fish. They were asked questions about what they saw and the kids in the brief discussion and answer session, the kids asked questions like, well, what does it take to be a marine biologist? How much did they make? What was that fish? Very surface level questions. But then when they did it again in the virtual reality context and immersive environment, the kids asked more questions that were topographically important to the subject matter. So they were asking things like how fish were related and how the marine life got understood certain interactions with other species of fish in the environment and what the equipment, how it functioned that the marine scuba divers were using. So there is some anecdotal and empirical evidence that suggests there can be greater learning in these environments. However, and I put a big, however, there we are entering into a time where it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not.

(19:09): I think it’s important to resist the urge to over index on technology over human connection. Technology has this interesting thing about it, and I say this as a technologist, right? As a patent lawyer, technology makes us more connected and disconnected at the same time. And it is very easy to engage in going down rabbit holes and losing yourself and to, especially with video games, for example, I’m also a gamer. I talk about that in the book. That’s easy to lose yourself in virtual games and then ignore those things which are real right in front of you. So on both scores, as a father, I have a daughter. I allow her access to technology and screen time in those use cases that make sense, and then I pull back in those that don’t. And I encourage every parent to do the same. Well, Andrew, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there some place you would invite people to connect with you and obviously learn more about the ethical imperative? Oh, absolutely. The Ethical Imperative is available anywhere. Good books are sold to Barnes EDOs, Amazon, you name it. I have a website, andrew cooper.com. It’s andrew cooper.com. Happy to connect there or even on LinkedIn, just type in Andrew Cooper and Ethical Imperative and you should be able to find me. Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there. I

Testimonial (20:42): Was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly, it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made.

Andrew Cooper & John Jantsch (20:58): What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit dtm.world/scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash Scale.

Are DMs the new Cold Calls?

Are DMs the new Cold Calls? written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Sean Malone, a leading expert in the sales industry and a pioneer in leveraging direct messaging (DM) as a powerful tool for high-conversion sales. With the shift in consumer behavior and the increasing saturation of traditional sales channels, Sean Malone sheds light on why DMs are quickly becoming the new cold calls and how sales teams can harness this untapped powerhouse to drive better results. He explains that integrating DMs into your sales-management strategy could be the key to unlocking more personalized, efficient, and successful sales processes.

Key Takeaways

We’ve all experienced the declining effectiveness of traditional cold calls, but have we explored the potential of DMs as a high-conversion sales tool?

DMs might just be the final frontier for your business sales strategy. Sean Malone and I discuss DMs, which are emerging as a critical component of modern sales-management strategies. As DMs continue to be a sacred place for most people online, he emphasizes the importance of understanding the nuances of DM communication, including personalization, timing, and the art of crafting a compelling message that resonates with potential clients—not just anybody.

You want a potential client, a lead, not just a dead end, so perhaps don’t pitch until the 5th DM. Incorporating DMs into your sales-management toolkit is a strategic approach that balances automation with a human touch. He explains the benefits of DMs in building stronger customer relationships, increasing engagement, and ultimately driving higher conversion rates. In this episode, you’ll learn how to optimize your sales-management practices with DMs, why they’re becoming an essential sales tool, and how to leverage this approach for your agency’s success.

Questions I ask Sean Malone:

[01:29] I noticed you’ve built eight companies while reading your bio. Were any ventures that didn’t go as planned, or did they all succeed?

[03:56] Mastering sales has been a consistent theme throughout your journey. Would you agree that sales expertise has significantly impacted your success?

[06:13] You and your partner, Chris, developed a prospecting system now integrated into your software. Could you walk us through the critical elements of this system?

[12:10] With your use of technology, tasks that once took hours can be completed much faster. Do you find DM conversations more effective than traditional cold outreach methods? What makes DMs stand out?

[14:16] You’ve mentioned that the key is getting the conversation started, whether it’s through phone, email, or DMs. Are DMs particularly effective at initiating these conversations, even if there’s a risk of miscommunication later on?

[17:57] Where can our listeners connect with you and learn more about Flowchat?

More About Sean Malone:

Add Sean Malone on LinkedIn
Check out his Website
Subscribe to Flow Chat’s Youtube channel

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

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

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

Oracle

Wix

Duct Tape Transcript

Sean Malone (00:00): The one thing that’s different about dms, and actually the numbers prove it, is that when somebody sends you a dm, if it’s good messaging, you don’t discard it. What do you do? You click on that person’s profile and you creep on them a little bit on social. Make sure that they’re real, and then if they’re real and you like their stuff, then you come back and you respond. This is why dms have a high response rate way higher than anything else. And then if you’re not a clown, when you’re actually chatting in dms and you do it well, then you can start actually converting higher than any of the other methods of communication.

John Jantsch (00:32): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Is this John Jantsch My guest today is Sean Malone. He’s the co-founder and CMO of flowchat.com, a software tech company that is refined how people use dms for business agency owners and founders Turn to Flow Chat to set up an effective social selling system using dms seeking automation and one click power. Sean’s built eight companies. It’s first to achieve multiple six figures annually. The next four reached multiple seven figures, and the last two exceeded 10 million sales a year is aims for Flow Chat to become his first $100 million company. So Sean, welcome to the show.

Sean Malone (01:12): Hey, John, thank you so much for having me. I’m so grateful to be here, man, you’re a legend, obviously you writing the books that you’ve written in, so I’m really honored and humbled just to be here and chatted with you today. So thanks for the time.

John Jantsch (01:23): Well, I appreciate those kind words. So when I was reading your bio, I built eight companies. I kept wanting to hear about the total bomb. Was there not a total bomb in there?

Sean Malone (01:34): There’s plenty of bombs in there, I think. Yeah, for sure. Where do we start? Holy cow. This takes me back into when I was 15, I was pushing the shop room for my dad and I was learning, I was watching him. He had immigrated from South Africa to America when I was a young kid, and he just had this work ethic that I still haven’t seen rivaled Today. He was working like 120 plus hours a week, I guess maybe he had to because we moved here with little to nothing. And so he just started to just building stuff on his own. He’s a metal just by trade. He ended up, he was selling metal as a day job, and then he started a small business on the end, which was a import export cookware business. And so that’s where I really kind of started to learn entrepreneurship and I just kind of saw what it took to actually do it.

(02:24): And so then I went off into college and I started my own little auto detailing company. I would say that one kind of bombed. I got it to the point where I was doing work for the city and I was cleaning cop cars and some of those types of vehicles. And then my college career kind of came to an end and I didn’t know what to do. And so I just kind of gave the business away, even though it was making some pretty healthy money. It was, I don’t know, I’d say it’s probably making about 15,000 a month, but when you’re a college kid, that’s a lot of cash. So after that, I started selling as a manufacturer’s rep. I did pretty good, made a bunch of commission, ended up buying my first electronics manufacturing company, and that one I started, I think I negated a lot of failure in the early part of it because I always had somebody that was kind of in the game that knew how not to fail.

(03:15): And so I think it goes a long way to talk about mentorship. But that business, I grew that one from about 250,000 a month in revenue to, well, we were doing about 8 million a year, so that was almost, it was, it’s probably like 650 to, yeah. So I basically doubled that, tripled that business in about a couple of years, and that one got sold out from underneath me without me knowing. I was actually on a sales trip in California and my business partner called me back. He’s like, emergency, and I come back and there was no emergency. He just ended up selling a company without telling me in two weeks, which kind of hurts. Well,

John Jantsch (03:50): I was halfway kidding. But I mean, obviously you learned a lot from every one of those experiences. One of the things that seems to me that was a through line through all of your experience, your journey, including where you’re today, is mastering sales. Would you say there’s an element of that in that? So in fact, I think I saw another interview where you talked about being kind of a sales training junkie along the way. So I talked about Flow Chat being a software tech company, but would you say that at its heart it’s really a selling enablement tool?

Sean Malone (04:26): Yeah, definitely. Tech, sales, enablement, tech, I call us a communications organization. I’d say that’s probably better fit genre than anything else that we want. And like you said, yes, so I learned a tremendous amount of, throughout my journey was all sales related stuff. So I came out of college and I said, Hey dad, how do I make a boatload of cash? And he said, there’s three options. First option, are you a CEO? No, I’m 21. I don’t know what those letters mean. He’s like, are you an entertainer? No, I can’t sing or dance. He’s like, well, you better go and learn sales.

John Jantsch (05:03): Oh, he forgot another one. Can you throw a hundred mile an hour change up with your left hand? That would’ve been another good one.

Sean Malone (05:08): That would’ve been another great question. And the answer to that is also no, but yeah, and so then he said, you better go learn sales. So I was like, okay, great. So I took a job sales so I could learn sales, and I was terrible. I think that was probably my biggest bomb. I made 2,400 cold calls and I never booked a single appointment. That’s really bad. That’s like 80 calls a day for six weeks straight. And I was about done with it. I was like, this sales thing is stupid. I’m done. And I told my dad and my dad was like, don’t quit. I was going to quit. And he was like, go to the library and read a book. Okay, cool. Well, I went to the library, I picked up a Tom Hopkins, how to master the artist selling stuff book. And I was like, oh, there’s a theory. I can get really good at this. I was good at theories in school. I can definitely do that here again. And so that’s really where I started my junkie, I guess down the path. And 500 K later in my own investments of learning every selling system you could think of, I really distilled it down to there’s five to seven things you have to do in every sales situation, and if you do those things consistently, you’ll always win. That’s kind of the idea.

John Jantsch (06:14): So you and your partner, Chris, developed a prospecting system that you use today and have really built into this software. Can you give us the high level? You kind of mentioned five things. I suspect that the five things are in it.

Sean Malone (06:29): So the last start of prospecting is one side and then high ticket sales is on the other side or sales, I guess I should say. And so here’s how it came to be. So we had our software company that completely burned me out, the first one, and I almost took my own life because I was in a very dark place, and we could go really deep on that story anytime you want, but I’ll skip over that for the highlight of where we at. So at that time, my coach, Russell Brunson says, because like, what do we do? We just sold this software company that was doing lots and lots and we were doing 10 million plus a year. We ended up selling it, and we were like, what do we do now? We didn’t even know. And he said, well, what are you good at? And we said, sales.

(07:06): And he said, all these online entrepreneurs, all these agency owners, these SaaS founders, they don’t like to do sales. Like, oh, cool. So we called ’em up, Hey, do you not like to do sales? Yeah, every one of ’em like, yeah, we don’t want to do sales anymore, Sean, fix it. And we’re like, well, we know how to hire on board and train sales teams. You want us to do that for you? And boom, our agency was born. So we find five clients, showed ’em how to hire onboard and train sales teams, and then we showed ’em how to close deals in their warm market. We were doing sales training, and then about five months in, they had big gains in those first couple of months we were actually closing deals with them. And then five months in, they come back and they’re like, Sean and Chris, thank you for the sales team, but now I can’t sleep at night because I don’t know how to put more leads in front of the salespeople that you just built for me.

(07:55): And we’re like, oh, well, we have a system for that that we’re using even before the internet existed. Just put this in your business. It’s direct conversation. One-to-one at scale. Here’s the system how to work. Every one of ’em hit a home run. After about six months of that, Chris and I looked at each other, we’re like, that is more important than all the other stuff that we were doing in the first place. And so how do we do that at scale? And then one of our friends was like, you should do a mastermind. And so then we launched a mastermind and we did a $25,000 three months of put this in your business, nine months of advanced sales coaching to close the deals that the system created had 83% success rate of the dozens of businesses going through the system. And about two years into 18 months into that, one of our clients is like, you guys need a software.

(08:37): And so it was like, okay. We ended up, our messaging ran into our CTO’s messaging and what do you do? I have a software, but I have no clients. What do you guys do? We have hundreds of clients, but we have no software. What if we just did that? And so that was what happened in 2020. We kind of merged, acquired, did the whole thing, redressed the whole thing, and then we brought a hundred clients into this thing and saw how it worked and everything broke, whatever. It was great. And then we put another a hundred clients in, more stuff broke, and eventually we got the machine just ripping. And so now we’ve been into it four years. And really what it does at a high level is it allows anybody at any time to go anywhere and find, connect, nurture, and close deals through dms, personal messenger, dms, and it does it just more than one or two platforms.

(09:23): We actually work on 14 of them. The idea is based on three principles. First one universally importing or extracting what we call suspects. Then we have a qualifier, turns ’em into prospects, and then we take them through basically. So universally importing from anywhere on social at any time, go to a Facebook group, whichever one, click one button and click the whole group list. Go to your post that has thousands of comments, reactions and engagements. Click one button, get ’em all right. That was the idea. Second one was Pipeline view or Kanban Trello style board, but we built it for personal dms and as soon as we launched it, everyone copied it, which is great validation. And then the last principle was that of reporting, because anyone does anything organic, their reporting is usually really messy. So that’s really in a high level of what Flow Chat does. It sits in front of A CRM. It allows you to filter out all the bad and only put the really good into a system like a HubSpot or Salesforce or a pipe driver, a go high level or anything like that.

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(11:24): That’s oracle.com/duct tape oracle.com/duct tape. Hey, digital marketers, this one’s for you. I’ve got 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things that you can do in 30 seconds or less when you manage projects on Wix Studio, work in sync with your team all on one canvas, reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites. Alright, time’s up, but the list keeps going. Why don’t you step into Wix studio to see more? Do you find that, I mean you’ve really built, obviously you’re using technology to do some things that used to take hours to do, right? And do you find though that DM conversations in particular are more effective, different, say because there’s tons of people doing cold outreach, similar sort of approach. So what have you found has been really the driver of, or why you’ve really leaned into dms?

Sean Malone (12:36): So great question, and it kind of goes along the case of your book. You find your ICP and you speak with them in the right way, you’re going to have the right thing. So we just made it so that you can do that at scale. And I think if you look at the methods of communication, there’s usually there’s five, but I’ll say the main four are phone calls. So if you have phone calls, you get spam risk, you don’t even answer, you get a text message, you still don’t know who it is from, unless the words are dead on perfect, you’re probably not going to respond to the text, even though text has highest open rates, has a very low response rate because of that reason. Then you’ve got email marketing, which is you’ve got CAN SPAM and GDPR and A two P and all this other stuff that’s happening now, deliverability down, you’ve got MPP from Apple, there’s all this stuff that’s happening there.

(13:22): So email is a source, right? So you’ve got phone, text, email, but then you have dms. And the one thing that’s different about dms is that it’s better than I think all of them. And actually the numbers prove it is that when somebody sends you a dm, if it’s good messaging, you don’t discard it. What do you do? You click on that person’s profile and you creep on them a little bit on social to make sure that they’re real. And then if they’re real and you like their stuff, then you come back and you respond. This is why dms have a high response rate way higher than anything else. Open rates similar to text, but response rates for dms are the highest. And then if you’re not a clown, when you’re actually chatting in dms and you do it well, then you can start actually converting higher than any of the other methods of communication. I’ve just seen this over the course of almost 30 years in the sales games, like one-to-one communication, if you can do it at scale is pound for pound the best.

John Jantsch (14:16): So really the trick, if you will, is getting the conversation that’s whether it’s on the phone or email or whatever it is. And what you’re suggesting is that the dms have been more effective at getting the conversation. You can still fumble the ball, but you’re not even in the game if you don’t get the conversation.

Sean Malone (14:34): Yeah, I mean, just from a sure volumes perspective, if we looked at, let’s say a hundred is the number, if you’ve cold call a hundred people, you might get two to answer. Just statistically, if you text a hundred people, you’re usually going to get about, I’d say 75 of those people will open your text, but you’re only going to have about six or eight of ’em that respond. Emails send a hundred emails, you’re getting five opens. Maybe two people actually read it, but the dms is different. If you send a hundred dms and you’re really good, you’ll probably get 50 or so people to open those dms. But if your profile is in alignment, you’ll get 30 to 40 responses. So if you’re actually looking at the stuff that truly matters, this is why dms I think is just superior to everything else that’s out there.

John Jantsch (15:27): And maybe the day will come, especially with the success of a platform like yours. But do you find that there’s some people that get angry about a text or get angry about an unsolicited email? Do you find that dms will eventually fall into that category?

Sean Malone (15:44): Yeah, I mean, people will throw shade at any which way that you market to them or sell to them at any time, and dms are no different. But the thing is about dms or text message or any form of communication, if you do it wrong, everyone’s going to hate on you. But if you do it well, then it’s okay. And there’s a few strategies that work really well and for whatever reason, completely unbeknownst to me, when people get into the dms, they just try to just vomit verbally on everybody and sell them everything from one single message. When you can’t do that, it’s like if you go to a live event, you don’t walk up to John Jans and say, Hey, man, do you want to buy my stuff? It’s really amazing. You’d be like, get out of my face. But most people speak that way in dms, which is really unfortunate.

John Jantsch (16:32): Have you found that certain types of businesses do better or this is more suited, or do you feel like this is something that used correctly, could be used by just about any type of business?

Sean Malone (16:43): I think used correctly could be used by any type of business, but there are a few niches and verticals that really hit pretty well. I think business to business and then a lot of business to consumer. If it’s brick and mortar, that’s really a really suited very well for this type of technology because all we’re doing is the same thing that we would be doing anyways. In the old days, you’d get a phone book and a bunch of numbers, right? Today you have technology like ours where you can just go to a Facebook group and collect the whole list. That’s like getting a phone book. And so now you was like, oh yeah, I got the phone book. Let’s use some automation to just filter it down to the ones that I really want to start speaking with. And then you don’t even go, you keep going. Another filtering mechanism is like, let’s send out a series of our first messages to get some responses, and that’s the big key. When you’re DMing, remember, we don’t try to sell in our first message. We don’t even try in our second or third or fourth message. Usually you don’t even ask for anything like a call until message is six, seven, eight, nine. They say 80% of sales deals are closed at 13 touch points. Well, getting engagement usually takes four to six of ’em, right? So it’s like if you design it right, it works really well. Awesome.

John Jantsch (17:53): Well, Sean, I appreciate you taking a few moments to drop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you’d want to invite people to connect with you and learn more about Flow Chat?

Sean Malone (18:01): Yeah, so just flowchat.com. Fl O-W-C-H-A t.com. Go check out the site and then if you want to talk directly with me, just look me up on Facebook and say that John sent you my way. We’ll take care of you nicely. Awesome. Yes.

John Jantsch (18:15): Again, I appreciate you dropping by and hopefully we’ll run into you soon. I usually say on the road, but you’re just down the road, so we ought to get together soon. Anyway,

Sean Malone (18:24): Let’s go have a lunch. I would love it. Love it, love it.