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John Jantsch (00:01.656)

So what if the copy on your website seems fine, but the real problem is that you wrote it before you ever talked to a customer?

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Joanna Wiebe. She’s the founder of Copy Hackers and the person a lot of copywriters call the original conversion copywriters. She spent 15 years teaching companies like AWS and Cowanley to write copy that sells instead of copy that just sounds nice. We’re going to talk about her new book, The Copy Selling System: Right to Sell with Secret Formula for

maximizing revenue. So Joe, welcome back to the show.

Jo! (00:43.121)

Thank you for having me back. What a delight.

John Jantsch (00:44.782)

All right. Did you write the the title and the subtitle to your book?

Jo! (00:48.975)

No, I did not. that was my publisher. So I don’t really talk about the secret formula from any things, but they do. but nonetheless, it is a bit of a formula. yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (00:57.166)

Okay, I was gonna beat you up over that a little bit, so I’m glad we got that out of the air because I was like, well, that’s probably kind of some of the hypey stuff you’re not really into. So

Jo! (01:09.083)

Don’t really do. Yeah. This was the least hypey one of all of them. I was like, okay, fine, we can do that.

John Jantsch (01:16.92)

So a big part of your system talks about, you know, thorough research. And I I don’t think anybody would disagree with that at all. I mean, getting voice of customer, and I mean, the more you can understand their fears and you know what drives them and all that kind of good stuff. But you know, a lot of business owners, especially small businesses, make up a lot of my my audience, don’t have the resources, the know-how, the time, maybe to do the right amount of research. So, how does, you know.

What is what is the amount or what is the approach that could get you just enough?

Jo! (01:50.491)

Well, it doesn’t have to be like a big ongoing job. What we recommend is two things. You need to interview about seven of your customers, and if time and money are really tight here.

then make sure they’re your most ideal customers. All we’re doing with research is trying to learn how to clone our best customers. And the way to clone them is to know what’s going on in their head and throw it on the page so everybody else who’s like them sees it when they’re on the page. Cool. That’s it. So you don’t have you interview seven customers, make them your best, the ones you most want more of.

And if you’re like, I only have two of those, fine, interview those two. Don’t worry about the other five. Don’t interview. Bad data is worse than no data. Get rid of anybody like you don’t want voice of customer from customers you don’t want. and the other one is thank you page surveys. We’ve been preaching this forever. so back when I was at conversion rate experts, which was at the time the largest conversion and most trusted conversion rate agency on the planet, this was 15 years ago.

when I was there, I worked on a special project on what the best sort of survey questions are to get the best voice of customer data out of your clients. I’ve since refined that further and further. The best question to ask, and you don’t have to ask it live, you can ask it in a type form, is what was going on in your life that brought you to blank today? You fill in the blank. You fill in the blank with either a very

Clear, like verb, what was going on in your life that brought you to sign up today, to start a trial today, to book an appointment today, or with an outcome. What was going on in your life that brought you to start thinking about losing weight today? Or book a call about your sales team today. Don’t mess with this wording. That don’t spend time on it. You don’t need to spend time on this. I already spent time for you. Just take that exact language.

John Jantsch (03:34.542)

Mm.

Jo! (03:56.337)

Put it in typeform, open up your typeform. You probably have a typeform account. If you don’t, there’s a free one you can use. Put that question in there with a long answer box below it. Not, people don’t fill that in. People fill that in. You want the raw voice of customer data. Then you embed that, that one question. You can duplicate it depending on because you’ll want to separate data across different people who are coming in at different times. So you’ve got this one core question.

And then you look for all of your confirmation pages that you have in your business. and so that could be an appointment booking page. Cool. They just booked an appointment. Where do you land them after they book the appointment? That’s where you want to put it. If you’re like, I land them in whatever Calendly built. No, put a new landing page together where you embed that one question, give them room. They will answer it. It’s a seducible moment, and that is the moment when they’ve just said yes to you for something.

John Jantsch (04:41.261)

Yeah.

Jo! (04:51.684)

We worry that we should back away now. Like, no, what if they regret this? No, lean in. They’re excited. They just said yes. They’re making progress. Embed that on Calendly, like or on the landing page after someone’s booked on a a lead gen. Some they just opted in to get a report, they just did some other thing. You’ve got lead gen out there. Yeah, exactly. Now you’ve got a confirmation page, embed that thing in there. Then very simple zap.

John Jantsch (05:12.322)

Signed up for a webinar. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jo! (05:20.75)

Make sure or I think you can even do this natively in typeform right now. Send those answers to different Slack channels. So create different Slack channels. That’s VOC New Webinar Leads. VOC New Trial Starts. VOC and then just pop their or pipe their answers right in there. Every time you go into Slack, I point over here because Slack is always open on this monitor from me. So every time I see a VOC channel light up, I can go in and look.

There’s obviously better ways to do this as well, like to automate making sure your team sees it as well. So putting it into a spreadsheet, you can do both, but it can be automated. You can do this fast in very little time.

John Jantsch (05:57.455)

Yeah, and I I I suspect people underestimate the value of having somebody who does take that action, sort of also psychologically kind of, you know, making that that micro move that that’s actually going to make them more engaged. So those people who do actually answer that and you’re not actually asking for their are you getting their information at that? No, you they you’ve already got their information. It’s not really connected to who that person is. It’s it’s sort of random anonymous data, right?

Jo! (06:17.956)

No, no. Yep.

Jo! (06:24.58)

Yeah, you don’t and people will be like, well, I’m just gonna also pipe in this, that, and the other thing. Fine. Who cares? That’s not the point. The point isn’t Jim from Colorado thinks this. It’s our prospect thinks this. Cool. Great. Yeah, exactly. That’s what we’re working with with voice of customer data. I’m not trying to get you to a point a point where you’re like everything’s super targeted and segmented and Jim only sees messages that Jim needs to see. I’m talking about like real marketing. We’re really doing the job here. You’re just trying to acquire the best information you have.

John Jantsch (06:34.626)

Yeah. Yeah. And somebody else probably does too then. Right.

Jo! (06:54.384)

about your best possible leads and customers.

John Jantsch (06:56.524)

You know, one of the things over the years that we’ve struggled with a little bit is when because we have done that for 30 years. We’ve interviewed clients and and that we use for their core messaging because a lot of times they know the problem you solve better than you do, and they’re actually more willing to identify it. whereas a lot of businesses are, you know, it’s like that’s it. We call them back on time, that’s what they’re excited about. And it’s like, well, you know, that’s the thing they’re not getting from somebody else.

Jo! (07:12.356)

Mm-hmm.

Jo! (07:22.799)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (07:23.574)

And they’re a little bit afraid to like lead with that because it seems so pedestrian. Do you fight that sometimes? Like voice of customers sometimes is a little raw.

Jo! (07:28.101)

Hmm.

Jo! (07:32.065)

yeah, voice of customer is rarely what the marketers want to put out. It’s not sexy, no. It’s like real language, and they’re like, can we make it sound better? Why? Like for what purpose? Who are you trying to impress here? You know what’s impressive? Getting more customers. Let’s do that. Let’s just use their exact language. You can worry about how your brand sounds once you have money.

John Jantsch (07:36.063)

It doesn’t sound cool.

John Jantsch (07:43.182)

Yeah.

Jo! (07:55.995)

First you need to get your business up and running and growing. And so don’t worry about don’t worry about making it sound good. That sounds like marketing. You know what people do to marketing? Tune that out. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:56.954)

Mm.

John Jantsch (08:04.398)

So you your book actually ends with the word system, the title does. So is there an easy way for you to kind of sketch out like what the message matrix and the system and all that is without without you having to like talk for twenty-five minutes or reveal the whole book, right?

Jo! (08:10.725)

Mm-hmm.

Jo! (08:20.088)

Open the book like here. so yeah, so the copy selling system, one it’s intentionally called copy selling, not copy writing. Stop thinking about it as writing, just stop. now we’re copy selling. Okay, good. So how do we actually move people to make good decisions that are a yes in our favor using the words on the page? And it often doesn’t start with the words on the page, so it starts with there’s

Multiple parts to it, but the actual copy selling system begins with constraint identification. Where what is the bottleneck in your business and your growth particularly? So I don’t talk product, I talk about like we’re marketing now, we’re trying to get people to say yes and very focused on growth and performance marketing. Where is the constraint right now? And you can go even narrower. Where’s the constraint in our email marketing? Let’s say you are an email marketing manager or that’s what you do in a small business. Where’s the constraint in our email marketing?

So we want to identify what that is, and then we want to implement ways to relieve that constraint. And that comes down to two parts. You’ve got a solution design based on the constraint. So that’s like a really clear, simple, straightforward document that you don’t fill in with AI. You sit down, it’s a page. You can do this. You sit down, you type in your thoughts on that constraint, on what the data is showing you.

And then you develop a solution to that constraint problem, which is here’s how we’re gonna solve it, and here’s how copy does and does not fit into that. So you’ve got that when there’s a copy solve here, when you’re like, okay, the constraint we’ve identified is we’re getting good leads onto our into our CRM, like they’re signing up, but after that first email, they’re not doing anything more. Like they open the first one and then they don’t open the second one, second one. Okay.

So the first email is probably presenting some form of constraint. We’ll go back and we’re gonna audit it and write that down in the solution design. What have we identified? it’s good, it’s targeted, they’ve opted in to say yes, and then why do they stop opening? Well, we could hypothesize that these three things were happening in that email. The from name was actually not a from name at all. It’s our email address, so it looks like it’s spam.

Jo! (10:36.672)

so we could fix that. That’s pretty good. the subject line, no one’s opening these emails. Okay, why aren’t they opening it? What could be going on? we’re using a spam word or something in it or something else, but we’re identifying the parts in the copy in this case that are busted or that are getting in the way. or they do open, they just don’t click through and they never come back. Okay, let’s read that email from the perspective of that prospect. What are we saying in there? What could possibly be causing that to happen?

Then when we’re coming to actually solving it, we reference voice of customer data, what we’ve just been talking about. So, but we don’t just want to like throw in random stuff. I know a lot of times we get really excited, like, I heard this really cool thing that a customer said, and I’m gonna use that language. Great, is it the right time to use that language? So we want to make sure we’re being systematic. We’re not just guessing. It’s so easy to guess, it’s also very expensive to guess. Far better for you to say.

Here is everything that our prospect needs to hear from us, the order they need to hear it in. And that’s what we call a message matrix. That’s where we’re taking old school ideas, which are proven of how people move through a customer journey towards saying yes to you, which is less about user experience and in this case more about the messages that they’re seeing. So they start in unaware and then they move through four key stages of awareness, which every copywriter in the room is already like, got it, know it.

They are problem aware, solution or category aware, product aware, and then most aware. And a purchase happens in late product and through most aware. So that’s where we want to get people. The message matrix is like, okay, we want to get them to product aware and to most aware. How? Good, good question. We want to move them through the stages that get them there. So you don’t just drop them in and go.

I’m pretty sure all of our leads know about like their problems and like the challenges in the category and why everything else sucks, right? We can just tell them our value prop and then that’s good. No, that’s bad. That’s why you’re not converting very well. So that’s okay though. It’s okay that you made that assumption. You didn’t know about the stages of awareness. So let’s back up. Let’s back up to the problem going on in their lives that brought them to us, which is why we asked that question. so what is that problem? Not problems with your software. A lot of people hear that and go like, yeah, our clients really complained about this. No, no, no.

Jo! (13:00.048)

Problems that they have in their lives or their business. We want to map that. That’s the message matrix. We take their voice of customer and we map that along this opening problem stage. Then and only once they’ve gone through all of that, so they feel their problems, they understand you’re on their side. Then and only then do we now get into category challenges. So you are a genius in your category. You know what sucks about the competition.

John Jantsch (13:02.166)

Right.

Jo! (13:28.666)

You know exactly why they su should switch to you. You know that you’ve just added this AI feature that is actually really good and everybody else’s is crappy AI and yours is real AI. You can do it so much better. They don’t know that. They don’t know the difference. Your job is to go, here’s the category landscape. Here’s what’s going on that you’ve probably interacted with, make it matter to them, and then move them through what’s challenging with the category, why it’s not their fault.

That this is going on. It’s the category’s fault. Look, look at all the crap that’s out there that you’re dealing with. So you’re on their side, you’re you’ve got empathy galore, you’re teaching them things they didn’t know in like a meaningful, useful way. And now they’re like, okay, so I have this bad problem, none of these solutions can solve it. What could I know what could our product? And then you get to get into that. So this is a more direct, like line by line, point-by-point system.

versus a very common thing with copywriting, which is just like, I read this great line. We should try something like that. and that’s where a lot of people go with their copywriting. God bless them, they mean well. They just didn’t know that that’s not the way to actually get results.

John Jantsch (14:32.31)

Mm.

John Jantsch (14:38.754)

You know, I’ve I’ve been preaching for a long time this idea of the customer journey, which, you know, goes beyond them saying yes. but you know, our job as marketers used to be to really guide that journey. And I feel like over the last five years we’ve lost control of that because how the buyer buys is what’s really changed the most. How has that impact what you teach then? Because, you know, especially in this age of AI, you know, there’s lots

Jo! (14:55.801)

Yeah. Yeah. Social. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:08.408)

whole lot of research and and discovery going on that we don’t know about.

Jo! (15:11.801)

Yeah. So you’re just training AI on that same system, right? And that’s fair. You’re still posting all of the things, you’re just posting them in a way that AI can collect that information and use it. Good. That’s it. If ChatGPT needs to know what your message matrix is in order for ChatGPT to recommend you for the right ICP for you, then you should still just be writing all of the articles and pieces and producing that content where it matters, which is why YouTube is so great for getting your message out there.

John Jantsch (15:14.22)

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Jo! (15:41.056)

In a deliberate manner. So if we’re saying there’s a system to it, you have to go through these steps, not just randomly, but through these steps. Walk your customer through them. You know what’s really good for that? Video. You can’t skip for you can, but you can also control a bit of that. You can move people through the messages they need to see. Both customers like that, and who else likes it? ChatGPT loves YouTube. So

This is a place where you can start training AI on your message matrix, knowing that it’s more about AI, knowing what to say about you, than it is about you saying that thing about you on your website anymore. Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:20.654)

Does it does does it change the depth of information that people need to provide? it it feels like people are going in and asking such specific questions now, right? The like hundred word prompt, you know, as opposed to the, you know, category search. So do we need to have pricing and do we need to tell them exactly how it works? And do we need to be putting every customer review and every case study, you know, in words that that all these AI things? I mean, do we need to go deeper?

Jo! (16:30.393)

Mm. Yeah.

Jo! (16:35.321)

Yeah. Yeah.

Jo! (16:47.843)

Yeah, I mean, I this is a podcast about one book called The Copy Selling System, but another book to read with it is They Ask You Answer. It’s exactly the same thing that we’ve heard in They Ask You Answer for fifteen, twelve, fifteen years. it’s just, keep doing the things that you used to do that were long form content and long tail content as well. That’s it. Yep, yep, definitely.

John Jantsch (17:10.552)

Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I kinda laugh about all the people freaking out about SEO right now. It’s like, you know, what what was what was actually good SEO is actually still good for for AI. Right.

Jo! (17:23.257)

Yep, yep. Not not the keyword stuffing. None of that stuff was ever good. You were just doing it because you didn’t know what else to do. But really having something to say and then saying it in detail. Keep doing that.

John Jantsch (17:37.017)

So let’s talk about the other side of AI. you know, certainly people are using it to create lots of content and lots of of web pages and stuff that they put you know everywhere. are there are there is there a good use for AI in in copy selling? and then I’ll let you just you know bat around the bad uses that you see as well.

Jo! (17:45.935)

Mm-hmm. Slop. Yes.

Jo! (17:57.722)

Yeah.

Jo! (18:02.369)

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. There is. I, you know, AI came to party and I think we should party. Like, let’s do this. But that means it has to come through for us too. We don’t just like blindly accept whatever it says. Like, stay active, stay involved. so we in the copy selling system, I mention explicitly like I’m not gonna walk you through how to prompt AI to do this stuff for you. By the time you’re reading this book, you already know how to make it do these things for you.

John Jantsch (18:09.459)

Yeah.

Jo! (18:29.609)

what I would like you to do is say, I’ve got all this voice of customer data out in the world. So people that I’m not actually speaking with, but who are out there and I should be listening to, but I can’t. You know who can? You know who’s really good at processing data? AI. So good. That’s a good use case. Get it to map your voice of customer data, which isn’t gonna be perfect, right? But again, we’re doing the best that we can. So obviously, AI can’t tell at this point.

John Jantsch (18:43.672)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jo! (18:59.295)

If it’s pulling a message from Reddit that’s kind of sorta from your ICP, if it really is or not, right? Like it’s not that good yet, but it’s something. So what we recommend is take, we have spreadsheets that are like the actual message matrix, like the real one you’re really gonna fill in. Grab that spreadsheet, throw it into ChatGPT or Claude. Claude’s actually really good for this as well. Or use the two together. You know what you use. Use that thing. and

Then get it to be to feed in and fill out your message matrix with clear voice of customer data. Just prompt it in such a way that you’re like, don’t make stuff up and don’t take what you’re hearing and summarize it. You’re only going to capture complete sections of voice of customer data, give it examples of what good is, what bad is. Like, I want this, I don’t want that. Are we clear?

and then have it fill that in, have it go through your Fathom notes. you’ve already got Fathom has all these all these integrations. So if you’re having sales calls, go and get AI to then say, here was interesting language. We’re gonna put it in your message matrix. This is where it belongs. And now, if it’s just a spreadsheet you have, which is what we recommend for your message matrix, you share that Google Sheet with your team. And when they’re writing an email that’s supposed to move a person from

John Jantsch (20:03.31)

Yeah.

Jo! (20:22.671)

High category aware to low product aware, like that’s what we would call beats on our message matrix. Let’s say you’re gonna move through six beats. They can go look at the message matrix that’s always being filled in by AI with new voice of customer data and use that to write the email that’s supposed to do that thing. But they write the email. Don’t let AI write that email. An email is not that hard to write. It’s and it’s worse if it sounds like AI wrote it and everybody.

John Jantsch (20:40.718)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:47.32)

Mm-hmm.

Jo! (20:52.285)

Everybody knows what AI copies sounds like right now. So it’s not and it’s not even I think it’s just like we’re all having like a visceral reaction to like, gross, you really couldn’t take the time to like actually send me an email. Why should I take the time to engage with your stuff at all then? So don’t let it write things, let it help you write better things.

John Jantsch (21:14.262)

You know, one of the things that I’ve I’ve noticed it too is is humans make mistakes in their writings. They do run on sentences, they they abbreviate things, they use slang, you know, and I don’t know that we’ll ever get AI to to figure, you know, out how to do that. And to me, that’s one of the most sort of easiest things to to actually, you know, spot and put into your writing. because people I I think good human writing is sounds like

Jo! (21:31.247)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:43.554)

human talking. and if you read some of the AI copy you were like, I would never speak like that.

Jo! (21:44.485)

Yeah.

Jo! (21:48.996)

No, I wouldn’t speak like that. And AI goes on endlessly. Like it just talks. And you’re just like, got it. Shorten that down now, please. And that’s just where you end up like, I think I’ve seen this with a lot of copywriters who’ve come to rely on AI as a partner in their work, which is good. but they get so like

John Jantsch (21:54.082)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:07.192)

Yeah.

Jo! (22:10.585)

brain dulled. Like I’m sure there’ll be a term that comes out soon around like how dull your brain feels when you’re reading through that thing that AI wrote for you and you’re like, forget it. I’ll just do it myself. Like I don’t even know what you’re talking about. How many times have I even today looked at Chat GPT and gone like, no, that’s not that’s not right. Don’t I don’t want that. and that’s what we go through, right? So and if you think you tell yourself like, but it’s gonna do a first draft and then I’ll make that better. Okay. Your email is like

John Jantsch (22:16.824)

Yeah.

Jo! (22:40.939)

A hundred words on a wordy day. We’re really going for about 60 words in that email that you’re supposed to send. You can write 60 words if you have voice of customer data sitting there that you can find a hook in and then you just know to use problem agitation solution or desire obstacle solution. If you and that’s easy, that’s covered. Read the book, listen to the book, it’s right there. You’ll know immediately. we don’t hide anything and say, go figure that out. You’ll know exactly what to do.

Then just do it. And then you’ve done it. And it sounds like a real person wrote it with real language. That’s actual voice of customer data embedded throughout it. So it really reads as real. It didn’t take you a long time. It was already the lazy way to write copy, just pulling in voice of customer data. Any lazier is gonna be shit. It just is.

John Jantsch (23:30.638)

I actually find it harder to edit than to just write it. Yeah, yeah. You find yourself contorting, you know, to try to make something stick or stay in there. you know the advice I give people all the time is I think we all still need to journal on paper with a pen.

Jo! (23:35.193)

Hard. It’s hard to edit AI. I just rewrite it. I’m like, forget it. I got it. Yeah. Yeah. Work. Yeah.

Jo! (23:48.389)

Mm, mm-hmm. I have a YouTube video that has about five hundred thousand views on how to think on paper. Cause people are dying to do that right now. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (23:55.202)

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, Joe, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tate Marketing Podcast. Is there any place you’d invite people to count to find out about the copy selling system and connect with you?

Jo! (24:08.313)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, as mentioned, we’re very active on YouTube these days, so go subscribe and you’ll get lots of great videos there on this kind of stuff. Instagram as well is another good place, and of course there’s always copysellingbook.com.

John Jantsch (24:25.71)

Awesome. Well again. Appreciate you stopping by and may hopefully we’ll run into you soon one of these days out there on the road.

Jo! (24:29.429)

thank you.

Love it. Sounds good. Thank you so much.

John Jantsch (00:01.656)

So what if the copy on your website seems fine, but the real problem is that you wrote it before you ever talked to a customer?

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Joanna Wiebe. She’s the founder of Copy Hackers and the person a lot of copywriters call the original conversion copywriters. She spent 15 years teaching companies like AWS and Cowanley to write copy that sells instead of copy that just sounds nice. We’re going to talk about her new book, The Copy Selling System: Right to Sell with Secret Formula for

maximizing revenue. So Joe, welcome back to the show.

Jo! (00:43.121)

Thank you for having me back. What a delight.

John Jantsch (00:44.782)

All right. Did you write the the title and the subtitle to your book?

Jo! (00:48.975)

No, I did not. that was my publisher. So I don’t really talk about the secret formula from any things, but they do. but nonetheless, it is a bit of a formula. yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (00:57.166)

Okay, I was gonna beat you up over that a little bit, so I’m glad we got that out of the air because I was like, well, that’s probably kind of some of the hypey stuff you’re not really into. So

Jo! (01:09.083)

Don’t really do. Yeah. This was the least hypey one of all of them. I was like, okay, fine, we can do that.

John Jantsch (01:16.92)

So a big part of your system talks about, you know, thorough research. And I I don’t think anybody would disagree with that at all. I mean, getting voice of customer, and I mean, the more you can understand their fears and you know what drives them and all that kind of good stuff. But you know, a lot of business owners, especially small businesses, make up a lot of my my audience, don’t have the resources, the know-how, the time, maybe to do the right amount of research. So, how does, you know.

What is what is the amount or what is the approach that could get you just enough?

Jo! (01:50.491)

Well, it doesn’t have to be like a big ongoing job. What we recommend is two things. You need to interview about seven of your customers, and if time and money are really tight here.

then make sure they’re your most ideal customers. All we’re doing with research is trying to learn how to clone our best customers. And the way to clone them is to know what’s going on in their head and throw it on the page so everybody else who’s like them sees it when they’re on the page. Cool. That’s it. So you don’t have you interview seven customers, make them your best, the ones you most want more of.

And if you’re like, I only have two of those, fine, interview those two. Don’t worry about the other five. Don’t interview. Bad data is worse than no data. Get rid of anybody like you don’t want voice of customer from customers you don’t want. and the other one is thank you page surveys. We’ve been preaching this forever. so back when I was at conversion rate experts, which was at the time the largest conversion and most trusted conversion rate agency on the planet, this was 15 years ago.

when I was there, I worked on a special project on what the best sort of survey questions are to get the best voice of customer data out of your clients. I’ve since refined that further and further. The best question to ask, and you don’t have to ask it live, you can ask it in a type form, is what was going on in your life that brought you to blank today? You fill in the blank. You fill in the blank with either a very

Clear, like verb, what was going on in your life that brought you to sign up today, to start a trial today, to book an appointment today, or with an outcome. What was going on in your life that brought you to start thinking about losing weight today? Or book a call about your sales team today. Don’t mess with this wording. That don’t spend time on it. You don’t need to spend time on this. I already spent time for you. Just take that exact language.

John Jantsch (03:34.542)

Mm.

Jo! (03:56.337)

Put it in typeform, open up your typeform. You probably have a typeform account. If you don’t, there’s a free one you can use. Put that question in there with a long answer box below it. Not, people don’t fill that in. People fill that in. You want the raw voice of customer data. Then you embed that, that one question. You can duplicate it depending on because you’ll want to separate data across different people who are coming in at different times. So you’ve got this one core question.

And then you look for all of your confirmation pages that you have in your business. and so that could be an appointment booking page. Cool. They just booked an appointment. Where do you land them after they book the appointment? That’s where you want to put it. If you’re like, I land them in whatever Calendly built. No, put a new landing page together where you embed that one question, give them room. They will answer it. It’s a seducible moment, and that is the moment when they’ve just said yes to you for something.

John Jantsch (04:41.261)

Yeah.

Jo! (04:51.684)

We worry that we should back away now. Like, no, what if they regret this? No, lean in. They’re excited. They just said yes. They’re making progress. Embed that on Calendly, like or on the landing page after someone’s booked on a a lead gen. Some they just opted in to get a report, they just did some other thing. You’ve got lead gen out there. Yeah, exactly. Now you’ve got a confirmation page, embed that thing in there. Then very simple zap.

John Jantsch (05:12.322)

Signed up for a webinar. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jo! (05:20.75)

Make sure or I think you can even do this natively in typeform right now. Send those answers to different Slack channels. So create different Slack channels. That’s VOC New Webinar Leads. VOC New Trial Starts. VOC and then just pop their or pipe their answers right in there. Every time you go into Slack, I point over here because Slack is always open on this monitor from me. So every time I see a VOC channel light up, I can go in and look.

There’s obviously better ways to do this as well, like to automate making sure your team sees it as well. So putting it into a spreadsheet, you can do both, but it can be automated. You can do this fast in very little time.

John Jantsch (05:57.455)

Yeah, and I I I suspect people underestimate the value of having somebody who does take that action, sort of also psychologically kind of, you know, making that that micro move that that’s actually going to make them more engaged. So those people who do actually answer that and you’re not actually asking for their are you getting their information at that? No, you they you’ve already got their information. It’s not really connected to who that person is. It’s it’s sort of random anonymous data, right?

Jo! (06:17.956)

No, no. Yep.

Jo! (06:24.58)

Yeah, you don’t and people will be like, well, I’m just gonna also pipe in this, that, and the other thing. Fine. Who cares? That’s not the point. The point isn’t Jim from Colorado thinks this. It’s our prospect thinks this. Cool. Great. Yeah, exactly. That’s what we’re working with with voice of customer data. I’m not trying to get you to a point a point where you’re like everything’s super targeted and segmented and Jim only sees messages that Jim needs to see. I’m talking about like real marketing. We’re really doing the job here. You’re just trying to acquire the best information you have.

John Jantsch (06:34.626)

Yeah. Yeah. And somebody else probably does too then. Right.

Jo! (06:54.384)

about your best possible leads and customers.

John Jantsch (06:56.524)

You know, one of the things over the years that we’ve struggled with a little bit is when because we have done that for 30 years. We’ve interviewed clients and and that we use for their core messaging because a lot of times they know the problem you solve better than you do, and they’re actually more willing to identify it. whereas a lot of businesses are, you know, it’s like that’s it. We call them back on time, that’s what they’re excited about. And it’s like, well, you know, that’s the thing they’re not getting from somebody else.

Jo! (07:12.356)

Mm-hmm.

Jo! (07:22.799)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (07:23.574)

And they’re a little bit afraid to like lead with that because it seems so pedestrian. Do you fight that sometimes? Like voice of customers sometimes is a little raw.

Jo! (07:28.101)

Hmm.

Jo! (07:32.065)

yeah, voice of customer is rarely what the marketers want to put out. It’s not sexy, no. It’s like real language, and they’re like, can we make it sound better? Why? Like for what purpose? Who are you trying to impress here? You know what’s impressive? Getting more customers. Let’s do that. Let’s just use their exact language. You can worry about how your brand sounds once you have money.

John Jantsch (07:36.063)

It doesn’t sound cool.

John Jantsch (07:43.182)

Yeah.

Jo! (07:55.995)

First you need to get your business up and running and growing. And so don’t worry about don’t worry about making it sound good. That sounds like marketing. You know what people do to marketing? Tune that out. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:56.954)

Mm.

John Jantsch (08:04.398)

So you your book actually ends with the word system, the title does. So is there an easy way for you to kind of sketch out like what the message matrix and the system and all that is without without you having to like talk for twenty-five minutes or reveal the whole book, right?

Jo! (08:10.725)

Mm-hmm.

Jo! (08:20.088)

Open the book like here. so yeah, so the copy selling system, one it’s intentionally called copy selling, not copy writing. Stop thinking about it as writing, just stop. now we’re copy selling. Okay, good. So how do we actually move people to make good decisions that are a yes in our favor using the words on the page? And it often doesn’t start with the words on the page, so it starts with there’s

Multiple parts to it, but the actual copy selling system begins with constraint identification. Where what is the bottleneck in your business and your growth particularly? So I don’t talk product, I talk about like we’re marketing now, we’re trying to get people to say yes and very focused on growth and performance marketing. Where is the constraint right now? And you can go even narrower. Where’s the constraint in our email marketing? Let’s say you are an email marketing manager or that’s what you do in a small business. Where’s the constraint in our email marketing?

So we want to identify what that is, and then we want to implement ways to relieve that constraint. And that comes down to two parts. You’ve got a solution design based on the constraint. So that’s like a really clear, simple, straightforward document that you don’t fill in with AI. You sit down, it’s a page. You can do this. You sit down, you type in your thoughts on that constraint, on what the data is showing you.

And then you develop a solution to that constraint problem, which is here’s how we’re gonna solve it, and here’s how copy does and does not fit into that. So you’ve got that when there’s a copy solve here, when you’re like, okay, the constraint we’ve identified is we’re getting good leads onto our into our CRM, like they’re signing up, but after that first email, they’re not doing anything more. Like they open the first one and then they don’t open the second one, second one. Okay.

So the first email is probably presenting some form of constraint. We’ll go back and we’re gonna audit it and write that down in the solution design. What have we identified? it’s good, it’s targeted, they’ve opted in to say yes, and then why do they stop opening? Well, we could hypothesize that these three things were happening in that email. The from name was actually not a from name at all. It’s our email address, so it looks like it’s spam.

Jo! (10:36.672)

so we could fix that. That’s pretty good. the subject line, no one’s opening these emails. Okay, why aren’t they opening it? What could be going on? we’re using a spam word or something in it or something else, but we’re identifying the parts in the copy in this case that are busted or that are getting in the way. or they do open, they just don’t click through and they never come back. Okay, let’s read that email from the perspective of that prospect. What are we saying in there? What could possibly be causing that to happen?

Then when we’re coming to actually solving it, we reference voice of customer data, what we’ve just been talking about. So, but we don’t just want to like throw in random stuff. I know a lot of times we get really excited, like, I heard this really cool thing that a customer said, and I’m gonna use that language. Great, is it the right time to use that language? So we want to make sure we’re being systematic. We’re not just guessing. It’s so easy to guess, it’s also very expensive to guess. Far better for you to say.

Here is everything that our prospect needs to hear from us, the order they need to hear it in. And that’s what we call a message matrix. That’s where we’re taking old school ideas, which are proven of how people move through a customer journey towards saying yes to you, which is less about user experience and in this case more about the messages that they’re seeing. So they start in unaware and then they move through four key stages of awareness, which every copywriter in the room is already like, got it, know it.

They are problem aware, solution or category aware, product aware, and then most aware. And a purchase happens in late product and through most aware. So that’s where we want to get people. The message matrix is like, okay, we want to get them to product aware and to most aware. How? Good, good question. We want to move them through the stages that get them there. So you don’t just drop them in and go.

I’m pretty sure all of our leads know about like their problems and like the challenges in the category and why everything else sucks, right? We can just tell them our value prop and then that’s good. No, that’s bad. That’s why you’re not converting very well. So that’s okay though. It’s okay that you made that assumption. You didn’t know about the stages of awareness. So let’s back up. Let’s back up to the problem going on in their lives that brought them to us, which is why we asked that question. so what is that problem? Not problems with your software. A lot of people hear that and go like, yeah, our clients really complained about this. No, no, no.

Jo! (13:00.048)

Problems that they have in their lives or their business. We want to map that. That’s the message matrix. We take their voice of customer and we map that along this opening problem stage. Then and only once they’ve gone through all of that, so they feel their problems, they understand you’re on their side. Then and only then do we now get into category challenges. So you are a genius in your category. You know what sucks about the competition.

John Jantsch (13:02.166)

Right.

Jo! (13:28.666)

You know exactly why they su should switch to you. You know that you’ve just added this AI feature that is actually really good and everybody else’s is crappy AI and yours is real AI. You can do it so much better. They don’t know that. They don’t know the difference. Your job is to go, here’s the category landscape. Here’s what’s going on that you’ve probably interacted with, make it matter to them, and then move them through what’s challenging with the category, why it’s not their fault.

That this is going on. It’s the category’s fault. Look, look at all the crap that’s out there that you’re dealing with. So you’re on their side, you’re you’ve got empathy galore, you’re teaching them things they didn’t know in like a meaningful, useful way. And now they’re like, okay, so I have this bad problem, none of these solutions can solve it. What could I know what could our product? And then you get to get into that. So this is a more direct, like line by line, point-by-point system.

versus a very common thing with copywriting, which is just like, I read this great line. We should try something like that. and that’s where a lot of people go with their copywriting. God bless them, they mean well. They just didn’t know that that’s not the way to actually get results.

John Jantsch (14:32.31)

Mm.

John Jantsch (14:38.754)

You know, I’ve I’ve been preaching for a long time this idea of the customer journey, which, you know, goes beyond them saying yes. but you know, our job as marketers used to be to really guide that journey. And I feel like over the last five years we’ve lost control of that because how the buyer buys is what’s really changed the most. How has that impact what you teach then? Because, you know, especially in this age of AI, you know, there’s lots

Jo! (14:55.801)

Yeah. Yeah. Social. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:08.408)

whole lot of research and and discovery going on that we don’t know about.

Jo! (15:11.801)

Yeah. So you’re just training AI on that same system, right? And that’s fair. You’re still posting all of the things, you’re just posting them in a way that AI can collect that information and use it. Good. That’s it. If ChatGPT needs to know what your message matrix is in order for ChatGPT to recommend you for the right ICP for you, then you should still just be writing all of the articles and pieces and producing that content where it matters, which is why YouTube is so great for getting your message out there.

John Jantsch (15:14.22)

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Jo! (15:41.056)

In a deliberate manner. So if we’re saying there’s a system to it, you have to go through these steps, not just randomly, but through these steps. Walk your customer through them. You know what’s really good for that? Video. You can’t skip for you can, but you can also control a bit of that. You can move people through the messages they need to see. Both customers like that, and who else likes it? ChatGPT loves YouTube. So

This is a place where you can start training AI on your message matrix, knowing that it’s more about AI, knowing what to say about you, than it is about you saying that thing about you on your website anymore. Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:20.654)

Does it does does it change the depth of information that people need to provide? it it feels like people are going in and asking such specific questions now, right? The like hundred word prompt, you know, as opposed to the, you know, category search. So do we need to have pricing and do we need to tell them exactly how it works? And do we need to be putting every customer review and every case study, you know, in words that that all these AI things? I mean, do we need to go deeper?

Jo! (16:30.393)

Mm. Yeah.

Jo! (16:35.321)

Yeah. Yeah.

Jo! (16:47.843)

Yeah, I mean, I this is a podcast about one book called The Copy Selling System, but another book to read with it is They Ask You Answer. It’s exactly the same thing that we’ve heard in They Ask You Answer for fifteen, twelve, fifteen years. it’s just, keep doing the things that you used to do that were long form content and long tail content as well. That’s it. Yep, yep, definitely.

John Jantsch (17:10.552)

Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I kinda laugh about all the people freaking out about SEO right now. It’s like, you know, what what was what was actually good SEO is actually still good for for AI. Right.

Jo! (17:23.257)

Yep, yep. Not not the keyword stuffing. None of that stuff was ever good. You were just doing it because you didn’t know what else to do. But really having something to say and then saying it in detail. Keep doing that.

John Jantsch (17:37.017)

So let’s talk about the other side of AI. you know, certainly people are using it to create lots of content and lots of of web pages and stuff that they put you know everywhere. are there are there is there a good use for AI in in copy selling? and then I’ll let you just you know bat around the bad uses that you see as well.

Jo! (17:45.935)

Mm-hmm. Slop. Yes.

Jo! (17:57.722)

Yeah.

Jo! (18:02.369)

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. There is. I, you know, AI came to party and I think we should party. Like, let’s do this. But that means it has to come through for us too. We don’t just like blindly accept whatever it says. Like, stay active, stay involved. so we in the copy selling system, I mention explicitly like I’m not gonna walk you through how to prompt AI to do this stuff for you. By the time you’re reading this book, you already know how to make it do these things for you.

John Jantsch (18:09.459)

Yeah.

Jo! (18:29.609)

what I would like you to do is say, I’ve got all this voice of customer data out in the world. So people that I’m not actually speaking with, but who are out there and I should be listening to, but I can’t. You know who can? You know who’s really good at processing data? AI. So good. That’s a good use case. Get it to map your voice of customer data, which isn’t gonna be perfect, right? But again, we’re doing the best that we can. So obviously, AI can’t tell at this point.

John Jantsch (18:43.672)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jo! (18:59.295)

If it’s pulling a message from Reddit that’s kind of sorta from your ICP, if it really is or not, right? Like it’s not that good yet, but it’s something. So what we recommend is take, we have spreadsheets that are like the actual message matrix, like the real one you’re really gonna fill in. Grab that spreadsheet, throw it into ChatGPT or Claude. Claude’s actually really good for this as well. Or use the two together. You know what you use. Use that thing. and

Then get it to be to feed in and fill out your message matrix with clear voice of customer data. Just prompt it in such a way that you’re like, don’t make stuff up and don’t take what you’re hearing and summarize it. You’re only going to capture complete sections of voice of customer data, give it examples of what good is, what bad is. Like, I want this, I don’t want that. Are we clear?

and then have it fill that in, have it go through your Fathom notes. you’ve already got Fathom has all these all these integrations. So if you’re having sales calls, go and get AI to then say, here was interesting language. We’re gonna put it in your message matrix. This is where it belongs. And now, if it’s just a spreadsheet you have, which is what we recommend for your message matrix, you share that Google Sheet with your team. And when they’re writing an email that’s supposed to move a person from

John Jantsch (20:03.31)

Yeah.

Jo! (20:22.671)

High category aware to low product aware, like that’s what we would call beats on our message matrix. Let’s say you’re gonna move through six beats. They can go look at the message matrix that’s always being filled in by AI with new voice of customer data and use that to write the email that’s supposed to do that thing. But they write the email. Don’t let AI write that email. An email is not that hard to write. It’s and it’s worse if it sounds like AI wrote it and everybody.

John Jantsch (20:40.718)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:47.32)

Mm-hmm.

Jo! (20:52.285)

Everybody knows what AI copies sounds like right now. So it’s not and it’s not even I think it’s just like we’re all having like a visceral reaction to like, gross, you really couldn’t take the time to like actually send me an email. Why should I take the time to engage with your stuff at all then? So don’t let it write things, let it help you write better things.

John Jantsch (21:14.262)

You know, one of the things that I’ve I’ve noticed it too is is humans make mistakes in their writings. They do run on sentences, they they abbreviate things, they use slang, you know, and I don’t know that we’ll ever get AI to to figure, you know, out how to do that. And to me, that’s one of the most sort of easiest things to to actually, you know, spot and put into your writing. because people I I think good human writing is sounds like

Jo! (21:31.247)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:43.554)

human talking. and if you read some of the AI copy you were like, I would never speak like that.

Jo! (21:44.485)

Yeah.

Jo! (21:48.996)

No, I wouldn’t speak like that. And AI goes on endlessly. Like it just talks. And you’re just like, got it. Shorten that down now, please. And that’s just where you end up like, I think I’ve seen this with a lot of copywriters who’ve come to rely on AI as a partner in their work, which is good. but they get so like

John Jantsch (21:54.082)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:07.192)

Yeah.

Jo! (22:10.585)

brain dulled. Like I’m sure there’ll be a term that comes out soon around like how dull your brain feels when you’re reading through that thing that AI wrote for you and you’re like, forget it. I’ll just do it myself. Like I don’t even know what you’re talking about. How many times have I even today looked at Chat GPT and gone like, no, that’s not that’s not right. Don’t I don’t want that. and that’s what we go through, right? So and if you think you tell yourself like, but it’s gonna do a first draft and then I’ll make that better. Okay. Your email is like

John Jantsch (22:16.824)

Yeah.

Jo! (22:40.939)

A hundred words on a wordy day. We’re really going for about 60 words in that email that you’re supposed to send. You can write 60 words if you have voice of customer data sitting there that you can find a hook in and then you just know to use problem agitation solution or desire obstacle solution. If you and that’s easy, that’s covered. Read the book, listen to the book, it’s right there. You’ll know immediately. we don’t hide anything and say, go figure that out. You’ll know exactly what to do.

Then just do it. And then you’ve done it. And it sounds like a real person wrote it with real language. That’s actual voice of customer data embedded throughout it. So it really reads as real. It didn’t take you a long time. It was already the lazy way to write copy, just pulling in voice of customer data. Any lazier is gonna be shit. It just is.

John Jantsch (23:30.638)

I actually find it harder to edit than to just write it. Yeah, yeah. You find yourself contorting, you know, to try to make something stick or stay in there. you know the advice I give people all the time is I think we all still need to journal on paper with a pen.

Jo! (23:35.193)

Hard. It’s hard to edit AI. I just rewrite it. I’m like, forget it. I got it. Yeah. Yeah. Work. Yeah.

Jo! (23:48.389)

Mm, mm-hmm. I have a YouTube video that has about five hundred thousand views on how to think on paper. Cause people are dying to do that right now. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (23:55.202)

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, Joe, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tate Marketing Podcast. Is there any place you’d invite people to count to find out about the copy selling system and connect with you?

Jo! (24:08.313)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, as mentioned, we’re very active on YouTube these days, so go subscribe and you’ll get lots of great videos there on this kind of stuff. Instagram as well is another good place, and of course there’s always copysellingbook.com.

John Jantsch (24:25.71)

Awesome. Well again. Appreciate you stopping by and may hopefully we’ll run into you soon one of these days out there on the road.

Jo! (24:29.429)

thank you.

Love it. Sounds good. Thank you so much.

John Jantsch (00:01.57)

So everybody knows by now AI can write, I don’t know, a thousand warm sounding messages before breakfast. People can feel the difference though between a message, I don’t know what it is, that that came from AI. No matter how well that AI is trained, you can generally feel that that that it came from a prompt. the businesses that pull ahead over the next few years will use AI to remember more people, perhaps, and still bring their own judgment to what they say to each one of those people. Hello and welcome.

To another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Zvi Band. He is the founder of Contextually. in fact, I think he was on this show many years ago. when he founded that, the personal CRM that helped thousands of professionals stay in touch with people who mattered before he sold that business to a compass to Compass in 2019. he wrote the the book Success is in your sphere: leveraging the power of relationships to achieve your business growth. And he spent

years really ever since building relatable, a new AI powered personal CRM built on a simple idea that let AI remember people and bring your own judgment to how you show up for them. So Z V, welcome back to the show.

Zvi Band (01:16.305)

Thanks, John. It’s been a number of years. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen you in person here in D C, but it’s been a few years since our show. So great to be back here.

John Jantsch (01:24.684)

So remind me again if I got this wrong. Don’t people just call you Z?

Zvi Band (01:29.279)

You know, honestly, like some people care about the pronunciation of their first name, but anything with a Z or an S in my general direction, I’ll respond. So you could have called introduced me a Zivy and I wouldn’t have corrected you.

John Jantsch (01:35.31)

Yeah.

Well, I wouldn’t have gone there, but how how do you actually say is spelled Z V I?

Zvi Band (01:47.441)

It’s it’s spelled ZVI. in American it’s pronounced ZV, but the people but people who speak Hebrew and know the proper pronunciation will have c will call me ZV, like T S V I. but that’s not how my great great grandfather spelled it.

John Jantsch (02:01.07)

C. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (02:05.71)

So so I I’m assuming that can’t that’s like an Exodus name or something.

Zvi Band (02:11.184)

Yeah, exactly. Like nowadays it’s like it’s mainly used by i by Israelis, but I was born in Boston, which is obviously even more confusing. but yeah, it’s my great grandfather’s name.

John Jantsch (02:16.962)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Awesome. Well, so everybody knows relationships matter in business. I don’t think you can find too many people that would that would argue with that idea. so what’s what’s changed in the last year or two in your in your mind that kind of makes this conversation about relatable and about relationships feel more urgent?

Zvi Band (02:43.068)

Yeah, it’s a great question. I I think about this a lot because on one end, you know, there’s, you know, Jeff Bezos has this line of like always focusing on what won’t change. And yes, we are deeply social creatures and we will always rely on human beings and human relationships for various different aspects of our life. What I what I think what has changed to your point is everything else, right?

So, case in point, you know, if you and I were to open up LinkedIn, we are no longer seeing, you know, individual posts by people that we know and trust. But two things have happened. One, algorithms gotten have gotten better at feeding us information that we think is going to be better and more relevant for us. So we’re no longer seeing what John’s posting. Instead, we’re seeing what Zve thinks.

What they think ZV will want to see, which includes like other stuff and ads and everything like that. But then the other thing that’s happened is to your point around AI generated content, the sheer amount of content and information and signal being thrown at us is more overwhelming than ever. And we are having a hard time discerning what’s human, what’s not. And unfortunately, I think what more and more of us are doing.

John Jantsch (03:57.923)

Yeah.

Zvi Band (04:06.822)

Is we’re just choose choosing to shut off the signal, right? If we’re getting s inundated with so much noise, we’re saying, Hey, how can I unsubscribe from this channel in general? And what comes in? Relationships.

John Jantsch (04:20.204)

Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, th there are even devices that are are now like promoting themselves as we’ll block out all the other stuff that, you know, there was a commercial. I was watching a football game last time. There was a commercial and this woman was having coffee with a friend, obviously, and they had all these like other you know distractions like outside the coffee shop coming and but she was able to just block them out with her phone, you know, some setting on her phone. And I think that

You know, what I’m getting at is I mean, I think we’re actually now having to use devices, you know, to to to really shut all that that noise out as well.

Zvi Band (04:56.86)

Yeah. And I think as part of that, that’s why I think, you know, there’s, you know, and I think about this from a marketing perspective too. I think one of two things are going to happen. we will rely on relationships, or we’re simply gonna go to an algorithm to get the exact information we want or need, right? Like why, for example, would I search a recipe blog and go through pages and pages of ads, for example.

John Jantsch (04:58.222)

Please.

John Jantsch (05:17.718)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Zvi Band (05:25.714)

when I can just, you know, ask ChatGPT for a recipe. Or if John says, hey, make this, I’ll, I’ll make what John has. And there’s so many examples. So I think we’re either going to rely entirely on on AI for answers. And then on the other side, we’re going to rely on relationships as well.

John Jantsch (05:33.942)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:44.628)

So contractually contextually, sorry, that was almost forty in a way. was built really on a framework of kind of social capital, but in the end it was it was kind of about, you know, your warm leads, you know, and and nurturing them and and I I get the sense that relatable’s built around a little different starting point or different philosophy. Would that be accurate?

Zvi Band (06:09.66)

Yeah, you know, so I I think that the core idea of both products, both contacts, which we sold and now relatable, is this idea of mind share that we all have people in our lives that we know, like, and trust and want to make sure that those people know, like, and trust us continuously. However, you know, we only can retain a certain amount of information in our head. And so if we

John Jantsch (06:11.48)

Yeah.

Zvi Band (06:37.128)

Can’t remember who we what we had for breakfast two weeks ago, we’re not also going to remember like the people that we met. So I think the core of that is still the same. contaction, obviously being built back in 2012, had relied on the technology that we had nowadays had back then and the tools. What I’m eager and what I’ve been really diving into with relatable over the past few years is how can AI actually help us be more and more human?

and take a lot of the admin burden of building maintaining relationships off our plate so we can do what we do best, which is building relationships.

John Jantsch (07:19.96)

So y you know, I think that this theme, I mean, a lot of people are saying, you know, that that what you just say that I’ve I’ve heard from numerous people that have been on this show. You know, it’s gonna free us up to you know to be more human. but you still have to have the caring part of being human, right? and and I think that still a lot of people treat relationships as

transactional or I’m going to, you know, keep this relationship going because I think at some point you can send me business. so how do you how can a AI make can AI or can it not you know help us with that part of of actually caring?

Zvi Band (08:07.868)

Yeah, absolutely. the way I think about it is I think the more, you know, in two ways. One is the more burden AI can take off our plate, the more cognitive capacity we have to care. So, like one of my favorite examples is I’m a huge fan of meeting recorders. I have a meeting recorder join every one of my meetings. I have it joy drop into my notes.

John Jantsch (08:22.849)

Right. Yeah.

Zvi Band (08:34.354)

My notepad, I have it drop into relatable and extract the personal details. Like for example, that John, like, yo, you take four day weekends. and all those details become really helpful because that means that the next time I’m on a call with you, I could be hands off. I’m not like I’m not writing down a bunch of notes. I can be fully present and focused on you and not thinking in my head, okay, like let me write these notes, let me write these details, let me think about these follow-ups.

And then later on, you know, because that brain now has all the information, all the connections that I’ve ever had, it can say, Hey, you know, I I met someone who’s actually thinking about taking Fridays off, but is really worried about the jump. maybe John would actually be like a great person to meet, right? and so that’s where I think it can actually extend our cognitive capacity and allow us to care as much as

John Jantsch (09:28.981)

Mm.

Zvi Band (09:31.836)

I think we’d like but oftentimes fall short.

John Jantsch (09:35.083)

Yeah, and and a and you’re saying AI’s doing a lot of that because it’s it may be capturing things that you wouldn’t even necessarily note, and then is able to cross reference those, in a lot of ways. Is that is that kind of how you’re describing that? Yeah.

Zvi Band (09:48.213)

Exactly. That that’s that’s one that’s one of the perfect examples. Now to build on that though, I think this is where because the admin burden is taken off, like we you and I don’t have to be sitting there like court court scenographers, like taking every like word that happened in a conversation. We can then not only be more present, but like actually allow ourselves to really start noting things that wouldn’t necessarily pop up otherwise. Like

John Jantsch (09:59.257)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (10:03.884)

Right.

Zvi Band (10:17.862)

I find myself on calls these days actually like focusing more on like, do I like this person? You know, do is there some kind of connection? Do I see that person smile when they’re talking to me? and AI can obviously take the transcript and can have the details, but it’s not going to pick up those little bits and pieces that I think only a human can. So I actually think like the the the soft skills are gonna matter even more.

John Jantsch (10:25.166)

Mm.

Zvi Band (10:46.808)

because of course, you know, anyone can get on a call and, you know, have a note taker, but it takes like some you know, someone with real skills to get on a call and ask the right questions and to go into the right detail and really tell, like, is there a something here?

John Jantsch (11:03.394)

Yeah, I heard somebody say one one time that, you know, we don’t need I mean, we don’t need IQ anymore because you know, we’ve got we’ve got the world’s IQ, right? at our fingertips and that that EQ is actually, as you sort of mentioned, the soft skills i is actually going to be the differentiator. and I think that you I think what you just hit on is a very sort of practic practical application of that.

Zvi Band (11:29.0)

Absolutely. And that’s why I think like in you know, what I spend a lot of time talking and speaking about now is things like instead of, you know, recording notes and then like how to log in into your database, just assume that’s gonna happen. And instead it comes more down to like the soft skills, like how to have a conversation. You know, even just what you and I did where you open up a call, not asking, Hey, how’s your day? How’s the weather? How’s traffic? Blah, blah, blah, but actually like

John Jantsch (11:48.802)

Mm-hmm.

Zvi Band (11:58.515)

what’s been the highlight every week so far. Cause that completely changes the direction of a conversation and like creates a much more deeper personal relationship. and that’s I think gonna matter even more in the coming years.

John Jantsch (12:00.749)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:12.748)

So a lot of my listeners are solo consultants, solo practitioners, maybe they run the whole show at their at at their business. how does a tool like I mean, is is it say is is it how do you character characterize your tools? Is it an AI assisted relationship tool? Is it a personal assistant? I mean, how how would you characterize it? And and then really my my question is, you know, what would the best way for that solo, you know, entrepreneur who’s

you know, running a business use relatable.

Zvi Band (12:45.104)

Yeah, absolutely. And so the the way that relatable is built, it’s built as a relationship OS, which means it can prov has all the components you need to build and maintain deep relationships. and yes, I’m a solopreneur myself. So I have to maintain a lot of different relationships for you know for my business and my interests and all the investments I make and everything like that. what

You know, at a core, what it does is it brings in all of your relationships from all sorts of different places and helps you stay organized. And then every day gives you actions that you can take to be able to better maintain those relationships. and John, I think the real switch behind it, and I think this is what I coach a lot of people into, is I think you and I, and I think everyone knows and agrees, and this is what you said at the top of the call that relationships are really important.

John Jantsch (13:22.114)

Mm.

Zvi Band (13:39.881)

But very few make the jump from being it being like a New Year’s resolution to it being like something I strategically execute on a regular basis and have a system behind. And so the way I think about it is relatable is the scaffolding to help you start treating your relationships as more of a system rather than like a I should get to it tomorrow kind of thing.

John Jantsch (13:46.828)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:05.783)

Well yeah, or even in my case, you know, a lot of times I’ll say, I’ve got I’ve got an hour today. I’m gonna I you know, I need to reach out to some people. You know, I haven’t talked to you for a l and and I then I sit there and say, But like who? Do I wanna go through my entire you know, entire you know, contact list and try to figure it out? And I and I’m guessing that relatable actually has some strategic

or ability to be strategic about, hey, here’s who you should be. Or if you tell me what you’re trying to do or what kind of relationships you’re trying to further, you know, here’s who you should be talking to. i is it is w is it safe to say it can go that far?

Zvi Band (14:42.748)

Exactly. And I think it’s purpose built for the exact thing that you have that you brought up, where like you have the desire for and the energy to be able to build relationships, but what should I do right now? Right. The three questions we always help make sure that we, our software, can answer is who do I know? Who should I talk to today? And what should I do to nurture that relationship? And so we can help surface things like

Hey, you know, here are some past clients that you really like who you haven’t spoken to in three months. Here’s an email that we can help you draft that you can reach out to them today. if you’re traveling to Dallas, you say, Hey, who are the people that I know and like in Dallas that I haven’t spoken to in a year? we can help you answer those questions. you can say, all right, who are the digital marketers that I know and then I have a really good relationship with? Great. Let me go ahead and email all of them a

John Jantsch (15:13.335)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:27.303)

Mm. Yeah.

Zvi Band (15:37.758)

question if I wanted to. So for all the things around your relationships and all the goals and jobs to be done you have, it oftentimes comes down to like, well, who do I know and how do I reach out to them? And that’s what we’ve really spent all this time like really trying to answer.

John Jantsch (15:55.946)

What do you what do you surmise? And maybe you actually have data that could prove this, the decay rate of a relationship is. I mean, like a I I mean, there are different kinds of relationships, but like somebody that you you want to make sure that they think of you when like that perfect opportunity, you know, presents itself. you know, what what would you say what I’m really getting at is do I need to contact you three times a year? Do I, you know, what what have you seen?

Zvi Band (16:23.794)

Yeah, it’s a it’s a really interesting thing. And there’s I would say there’s a a key input for that, which is how unique are you, right? You know, if you are the only person who does what you do, right? You know, and you’ve not only are good at that, but you’ve also been great at building rapport with people. I’ve seen people reach out, you know, sometimes like you know, 10 plus years later because

John Jantsch (16:39.98)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:53.313)

Yeah.

Zvi Band (16:53.67)

You are known as that person. For most people who let’s face it like yo, have some type of whether some kind of competition, or you know that like the per people in your network oftentimes know multiple people, like let’s say a realtor, the magic kind of line I’ve seen is around six months. Right. You know, that once you go past six months, especially these days, they are it’s and it’s no fault of you or for them, but just.

John Jantsch (17:06.593)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (17:12.545)

Yeah, okay.

Zvi Band (17:21.64)

We are being inundated with so many people and so much messaging and marketing. So again, I can’t remember what I had for breakfast, you know, last week, let alone, you know, the people in my network. So yeah, if someone asks me, like, yo, hey, do you know a a really great realtor? I’m like, I probably do, but I just kind of go by the last person that I had coffee with.

John Jantsch (17:23.137)

Yeah. It’s just

John Jantsch (17:29.485)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:40.161)

Yeah, yeah.

Yep. Yep. Yep. So when you’ve seen somebody say, I’m you know, the new use resolution idea, you know, I’m gonna start taking this seriously, you know, I’m gonna jump in with both feet, I’m gonna, you know, sign up for relatable, I’m gonna do all the things, where do they typically go wrong?

Zvi Band (18:01.286)

Yeah. You know, honestly, I I would say it’s usually one of the first steps because I think, you know, listen, you and I are nerds. Like we tend to like say, like, like what what’s a cool tool I can use or a cool prompt I can try or something like that. I actually find that oftentimes one of the first things they do to get tripped up is not have a clear why in mind. Like we all know relationships are important, but why are relationships important for you today?

John Jantsch (18:22.167)

Yeah.

Zvi Band (18:28.796)

So, for example, when I was building up contactually, I very clearly knew that my network was critical for me to help get more funding for a company, to stay in touch with key hires, to stay in touch with our key customers and prospects and the people that I wanted to work with, you know, months or years down the line. Since selling it, obviously my priorities have changed. Now I find myself wanting to.

Stay in touch with other founders, stay in touch with people who inspire me, stay in touch with people that I generally just like and I like want on the entrepreneurial journey with me. And so, because those are different whys, obviously the the types of relationships that I put proactive time and effort, those shift over time. So, my guidance for people is first and foremost, have that clear why.

John Jantsch (19:24.001)

Mm-hmm.

Zvi Band (19:24.796)

And once you have that clear reason, like why is this worth my time? Why is this worth money? Why is this worth all the time what I could be spending with my family or elsewhere in my business? Once they have that why, then like the other aspects tend to fall in place very quickly.

John Jantsch (19:42.904)

So if if listeners are a little like me, I probably have contacts in a lot of places. you know, so and and worse than that, I’ve got contacts on LinkedIn that eighty percent of I don’t know why I’m in contact with or you know, a relationship or or follower or whatever it is. how does somebody start sort of organizing that chaos?

Zvi Band (20:04.722)

Yeah, it’s a great question. so the first thing that you need to do is get all of your contacts into one place, whether you’re using relatable or another CRM, or even just like exporting all of your contacts out of your email and Google contacts and LinkedIn and putting them on a spreadsheet, whatever. then make a habit of every day going through a few contacts. and I say make a habit of it is because

John Jantsch (20:14.381)

Mm-hmm.

Zvi Band (20:34.042)

One of the other tripwires that I’ve seen people fall into, John, is every like that some people will spend, like, for example, all Sunday, you know, six hours organizing their database. And they’re going like, good, I did it. Thousands of contacts. And then what happens next morning? Someone emails them. Right. And all of a sudden, like, you know, that database is out of date. And so I find it’s actually really helpful from the very beginning to establish a regular routine of just every day.

John Jantsch (20:46.303)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:50.156)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:53.535)

Ha ha ha.

Yeah.

Zvi Band (21:04.114)

you know, working on your database, just like gardening, just like a little bit on a regular basis. It’s an it’s a task that will never end. But that’s the great thing because if you do, you know, three contacts a day, you know, over the course of a year, you’ve gone through a thousand contacts. Whereas if you spend a weekend on it and you go through a hundred, you’re exhausted and you never want to do it again. And then all of a sudden you you’ve lost touch with people.

John Jantsch (21:06.677)

Mm, mm. Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:27.375)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we we actually are are getting close to needing to wrap up. Why don’t you give me the kind of the if somebody said, Well, you’ve been talking about relatable, but like what is it actually?

Zvi Band (21:44.198)

yeah, sure. So relatable is a personal relationship OS. Think of it as a CRM with a lot more in it that is built around helping you build and maintain the relationships that are most important for you. you can sign up at bemoreelatable.com, but the key idea here is that if relationships are important for you, then it’s time to put real systems in place, not just tools like relatable, but actual like

structures and habits and processes to build and maintain relationships.

John Jantsch (22:16.501)

Awesome. Well, Zavee, it was great having you stop by the Ductate Marketing Podcast again. is there on top of where you mentioned where relatable is, is there anywhere else you’d invite people to connect with you or find out more about your work?

Zvi Band (22:30.632)

yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, my name’s V Band. so far there’s only one Zv Band out there that I know of, and that’s me. So you can search for Z band and find all the different projects and connect with me on LinkedIn, et cetera. and then if you are also interested in learning more about the tactics and mindset around building relationships, I have a sub stack called Your Network Starts With You that you can easily look up.

John Jantsch (22:55.085)

Awesome. Well again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Zvi Band (23:01.513)

Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (00:01.57)

So everybody knows by now AI can write, I don’t know, a thousand warm sounding messages before breakfast. People can feel the difference though between a message, I don’t know what it is, that that came from AI. No matter how well that AI is trained, you can generally feel that that that it came from a prompt. the businesses that pull ahead over the next few years will use AI to remember more people, perhaps, and still bring their own judgment to what they say to each one of those people. Hello and welcome.

To another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Zvi Band. He is the founder of Contextually. in fact, I think he was on this show many years ago. when he founded that, the personal CRM that helped thousands of professionals stay in touch with people who mattered before he sold that business to a compass to Compass in 2019. he wrote the the book Success is in your sphere: leveraging the power of relationships to achieve your business growth. And he spent

years really ever since building relatable, a new AI powered personal CRM built on a simple idea that let AI remember people and bring your own judgment to how you show up for them. So Z V, welcome back to the show.

Zvi Band (01:16.305)

Thanks, John. It’s been a number of years. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen you in person here in D C, but it’s been a few years since our show. So great to be back here.

John Jantsch (01:24.684)

So remind me again if I got this wrong. Don’t people just call you Z?

Zvi Band (01:29.279)

You know, honestly, like some people care about the pronunciation of their first name, but anything with a Z or an S in my general direction, I’ll respond. So you could have called introduced me a Zivy and I wouldn’t have corrected you.

John Jantsch (01:35.31)

Yeah.

Well, I wouldn’t have gone there, but how how do you actually say is spelled Z V I?

Zvi Band (01:47.441)

It’s it’s spelled ZVI. in American it’s pronounced ZV, but the people but people who speak Hebrew and know the proper pronunciation will have c will call me ZV, like T S V I. but that’s not how my great great grandfather spelled it.

John Jantsch (02:01.07)

C. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (02:05.71)

So so I I’m assuming that can’t that’s like an Exodus name or something.

Zvi Band (02:11.184)

Yeah, exactly. Like nowadays it’s like it’s mainly used by i by Israelis, but I was born in Boston, which is obviously even more confusing. but yeah, it’s my great grandfather’s name.

John Jantsch (02:16.962)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Awesome. Well, so everybody knows relationships matter in business. I don’t think you can find too many people that would that would argue with that idea. so what’s what’s changed in the last year or two in your in your mind that kind of makes this conversation about relatable and about relationships feel more urgent?

Zvi Band (02:43.068)

Yeah, it’s a great question. I I think about this a lot because on one end, you know, there’s, you know, Jeff Bezos has this line of like always focusing on what won’t change. And yes, we are deeply social creatures and we will always rely on human beings and human relationships for various different aspects of our life. What I what I think what has changed to your point is everything else, right?

So, case in point, you know, if you and I were to open up LinkedIn, we are no longer seeing, you know, individual posts by people that we know and trust. But two things have happened. One, algorithms gotten have gotten better at feeding us information that we think is going to be better and more relevant for us. So we’re no longer seeing what John’s posting. Instead, we’re seeing what Zve thinks.

What they think ZV will want to see, which includes like other stuff and ads and everything like that. But then the other thing that’s happened is to your point around AI generated content, the sheer amount of content and information and signal being thrown at us is more overwhelming than ever. And we are having a hard time discerning what’s human, what’s not. And unfortunately, I think what more and more of us are doing.

John Jantsch (03:57.923)

Yeah.

Zvi Band (04:06.822)

Is we’re just choose choosing to shut off the signal, right? If we’re getting s inundated with so much noise, we’re saying, Hey, how can I unsubscribe from this channel in general? And what comes in? Relationships.

John Jantsch (04:20.204)

Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, th there are even devices that are are now like promoting themselves as we’ll block out all the other stuff that, you know, there was a commercial. I was watching a football game last time. There was a commercial and this woman was having coffee with a friend, obviously, and they had all these like other you know distractions like outside the coffee shop coming and but she was able to just block them out with her phone, you know, some setting on her phone. And I think that

You know, what I’m getting at is I mean, I think we’re actually now having to use devices, you know, to to to really shut all that that noise out as well.

Zvi Band (04:56.86)

Yeah. And I think as part of that, that’s why I think, you know, there’s, you know, and I think about this from a marketing perspective too. I think one of two things are going to happen. we will rely on relationships, or we’re simply gonna go to an algorithm to get the exact information we want or need, right? Like why, for example, would I search a recipe blog and go through pages and pages of ads, for example.

John Jantsch (04:58.222)

Please.

John Jantsch (05:17.718)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Zvi Band (05:25.714)

when I can just, you know, ask ChatGPT for a recipe. Or if John says, hey, make this, I’ll, I’ll make what John has. And there’s so many examples. So I think we’re either going to rely entirely on on AI for answers. And then on the other side, we’re going to rely on relationships as well.

John Jantsch (05:33.942)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:44.628)

So contractually contextually, sorry, that was almost forty in a way. was built really on a framework of kind of social capital, but in the end it was it was kind of about, you know, your warm leads, you know, and and nurturing them and and I I get the sense that relatable’s built around a little different starting point or different philosophy. Would that be accurate?

Zvi Band (06:09.66)

Yeah, you know, so I I think that the core idea of both products, both contacts, which we sold and now relatable, is this idea of mind share that we all have people in our lives that we know, like, and trust and want to make sure that those people know, like, and trust us continuously. However, you know, we only can retain a certain amount of information in our head. And so if we

John Jantsch (06:11.48)

Yeah.

Zvi Band (06:37.128)

Can’t remember who we what we had for breakfast two weeks ago, we’re not also going to remember like the people that we met. So I think the core of that is still the same. contaction, obviously being built back in 2012, had relied on the technology that we had nowadays had back then and the tools. What I’m eager and what I’ve been really diving into with relatable over the past few years is how can AI actually help us be more and more human?

and take a lot of the admin burden of building maintaining relationships off our plate so we can do what we do best, which is building relationships.

John Jantsch (07:19.96)

So y you know, I think that this theme, I mean, a lot of people are saying, you know, that that what you just say that I’ve I’ve heard from numerous people that have been on this show. You know, it’s gonna free us up to you know to be more human. but you still have to have the caring part of being human, right? and and I think that still a lot of people treat relationships as

transactional or I’m going to, you know, keep this relationship going because I think at some point you can send me business. so how do you how can a AI make can AI or can it not you know help us with that part of of actually caring?

Zvi Band (08:07.868)

Yeah, absolutely. the way I think about it is I think the more, you know, in two ways. One is the more burden AI can take off our plate, the more cognitive capacity we have to care. So, like one of my favorite examples is I’m a huge fan of meeting recorders. I have a meeting recorder join every one of my meetings. I have it joy drop into my notes.

John Jantsch (08:22.849)

Right. Yeah.

Zvi Band (08:34.354)

My notepad, I have it drop into relatable and extract the personal details. Like for example, that John, like, yo, you take four day weekends. and all those details become really helpful because that means that the next time I’m on a call with you, I could be hands off. I’m not like I’m not writing down a bunch of notes. I can be fully present and focused on you and not thinking in my head, okay, like let me write these notes, let me write these details, let me think about these follow-ups.

And then later on, you know, because that brain now has all the information, all the connections that I’ve ever had, it can say, Hey, you know, I I met someone who’s actually thinking about taking Fridays off, but is really worried about the jump. maybe John would actually be like a great person to meet, right? and so that’s where I think it can actually extend our cognitive capacity and allow us to care as much as

John Jantsch (09:28.981)

Mm.

Zvi Band (09:31.836)

I think we’d like but oftentimes fall short.

John Jantsch (09:35.083)

Yeah, and and a and you’re saying AI’s doing a lot of that because it’s it may be capturing things that you wouldn’t even necessarily note, and then is able to cross reference those, in a lot of ways. Is that is that kind of how you’re describing that? Yeah.

Zvi Band (09:48.213)

Exactly. That that’s that’s one that’s one of the perfect examples. Now to build on that though, I think this is where because the admin burden is taken off, like we you and I don’t have to be sitting there like court court scenographers, like taking every like word that happened in a conversation. We can then not only be more present, but like actually allow ourselves to really start noting things that wouldn’t necessarily pop up otherwise. Like

John Jantsch (09:59.257)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (10:03.884)

Right.

Zvi Band (10:17.862)

I find myself on calls these days actually like focusing more on like, do I like this person? You know, do is there some kind of connection? Do I see that person smile when they’re talking to me? and AI can obviously take the transcript and can have the details, but it’s not going to pick up those little bits and pieces that I think only a human can. So I actually think like the the the soft skills are gonna matter even more.

John Jantsch (10:25.166)

Mm.

Zvi Band (10:46.808)

because of course, you know, anyone can get on a call and, you know, have a note taker, but it takes like some you know, someone with real skills to get on a call and ask the right questions and to go into the right detail and really tell, like, is there a something here?

John Jantsch (11:03.394)

Yeah, I heard somebody say one one time that, you know, we don’t need I mean, we don’t need IQ anymore because you know, we’ve got we’ve got the world’s IQ, right? at our fingertips and that that EQ is actually, as you sort of mentioned, the soft skills i is actually going to be the differentiator. and I think that you I think what you just hit on is a very sort of practic practical application of that.

Zvi Band (11:29.0)

Absolutely. And that’s why I think like in you know, what I spend a lot of time talking and speaking about now is things like instead of, you know, recording notes and then like how to log in into your database, just assume that’s gonna happen. And instead it comes more down to like the soft skills, like how to have a conversation. You know, even just what you and I did where you open up a call, not asking, Hey, how’s your day? How’s the weather? How’s traffic? Blah, blah, blah, but actually like

John Jantsch (11:48.802)

Mm-hmm.

Zvi Band (11:58.515)

what’s been the highlight every week so far. Cause that completely changes the direction of a conversation and like creates a much more deeper personal relationship. and that’s I think gonna matter even more in the coming years.

John Jantsch (12:00.749)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:12.748)

So a lot of my listeners are solo consultants, solo practitioners, maybe they run the whole show at their at at their business. how does a tool like I mean, is is it say is is it how do you character characterize your tools? Is it an AI assisted relationship tool? Is it a personal assistant? I mean, how how would you characterize it? And and then really my my question is, you know, what would the best way for that solo, you know, entrepreneur who’s

you know, running a business use relatable.

Zvi Band (12:45.104)

Yeah, absolutely. And so the the way that relatable is built, it’s built as a relationship OS, which means it can prov has all the components you need to build and maintain deep relationships. and yes, I’m a solopreneur myself. So I have to maintain a lot of different relationships for you know for my business and my interests and all the investments I make and everything like that. what

You know, at a core, what it does is it brings in all of your relationships from all sorts of different places and helps you stay organized. And then every day gives you actions that you can take to be able to better maintain those relationships. and John, I think the real switch behind it, and I think this is what I coach a lot of people into, is I think you and I, and I think everyone knows and agrees, and this is what you said at the top of the call that relationships are really important.

John Jantsch (13:22.114)

Mm.

Zvi Band (13:39.881)

But very few make the jump from being it being like a New Year’s resolution to it being like something I strategically execute on a regular basis and have a system behind. And so the way I think about it is relatable is the scaffolding to help you start treating your relationships as more of a system rather than like a I should get to it tomorrow kind of thing.

John Jantsch (13:46.828)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:05.783)

Well yeah, or even in my case, you know, a lot of times I’ll say, I’ve got I’ve got an hour today. I’m gonna I you know, I need to reach out to some people. You know, I haven’t talked to you for a l and and I then I sit there and say, But like who? Do I wanna go through my entire you know, entire you know, contact list and try to figure it out? And I and I’m guessing that relatable actually has some strategic

or ability to be strategic about, hey, here’s who you should be. Or if you tell me what you’re trying to do or what kind of relationships you’re trying to further, you know, here’s who you should be talking to. i is it is w is it safe to say it can go that far?

Zvi Band (14:42.748)

Exactly. And I think it’s purpose built for the exact thing that you have that you brought up, where like you have the desire for and the energy to be able to build relationships, but what should I do right now? Right. The three questions we always help make sure that we, our software, can answer is who do I know? Who should I talk to today? And what should I do to nurture that relationship? And so we can help surface things like

Hey, you know, here are some past clients that you really like who you haven’t spoken to in three months. Here’s an email that we can help you draft that you can reach out to them today. if you’re traveling to Dallas, you say, Hey, who are the people that I know and like in Dallas that I haven’t spoken to in a year? we can help you answer those questions. you can say, all right, who are the digital marketers that I know and then I have a really good relationship with? Great. Let me go ahead and email all of them a

John Jantsch (15:13.335)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:27.303)

Mm. Yeah.

Zvi Band (15:37.758)

question if I wanted to. So for all the things around your relationships and all the goals and jobs to be done you have, it oftentimes comes down to like, well, who do I know and how do I reach out to them? And that’s what we’ve really spent all this time like really trying to answer.

John Jantsch (15:55.946)

What do you what do you surmise? And maybe you actually have data that could prove this, the decay rate of a relationship is. I mean, like a I I mean, there are different kinds of relationships, but like somebody that you you want to make sure that they think of you when like that perfect opportunity, you know, presents itself. you know, what what would you say what I’m really getting at is do I need to contact you three times a year? Do I, you know, what what have you seen?

Zvi Band (16:23.794)

Yeah, it’s a it’s a really interesting thing. And there’s I would say there’s a a key input for that, which is how unique are you, right? You know, if you are the only person who does what you do, right? You know, and you’ve not only are good at that, but you’ve also been great at building rapport with people. I’ve seen people reach out, you know, sometimes like you know, 10 plus years later because

John Jantsch (16:39.98)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:53.313)

Yeah.

Zvi Band (16:53.67)

You are known as that person. For most people who let’s face it like yo, have some type of whether some kind of competition, or you know that like the per people in your network oftentimes know multiple people, like let’s say a realtor, the magic kind of line I’ve seen is around six months. Right. You know, that once you go past six months, especially these days, they are it’s and it’s no fault of you or for them, but just.

John Jantsch (17:06.593)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (17:12.545)

Yeah, okay.

Zvi Band (17:21.64)

We are being inundated with so many people and so much messaging and marketing. So again, I can’t remember what I had for breakfast, you know, last week, let alone, you know, the people in my network. So yeah, if someone asks me, like, yo, hey, do you know a a really great realtor? I’m like, I probably do, but I just kind of go by the last person that I had coffee with.

John Jantsch (17:23.137)

Yeah. It’s just

John Jantsch (17:29.485)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:40.161)

Yeah, yeah.

Yep. Yep. Yep. So when you’ve seen somebody say, I’m you know, the new use resolution idea, you know, I’m gonna start taking this seriously, you know, I’m gonna jump in with both feet, I’m gonna, you know, sign up for relatable, I’m gonna do all the things, where do they typically go wrong?

Zvi Band (18:01.286)

Yeah. You know, honestly, I I would say it’s usually one of the first steps because I think, you know, listen, you and I are nerds. Like we tend to like say, like, like what what’s a cool tool I can use or a cool prompt I can try or something like that. I actually find that oftentimes one of the first things they do to get tripped up is not have a clear why in mind. Like we all know relationships are important, but why are relationships important for you today?

John Jantsch (18:22.167)

Yeah.

Zvi Band (18:28.796)

So, for example, when I was building up contactually, I very clearly knew that my network was critical for me to help get more funding for a company, to stay in touch with key hires, to stay in touch with our key customers and prospects and the people that I wanted to work with, you know, months or years down the line. Since selling it, obviously my priorities have changed. Now I find myself wanting to.

Stay in touch with other founders, stay in touch with people who inspire me, stay in touch with people that I generally just like and I like want on the entrepreneurial journey with me. And so, because those are different whys, obviously the the types of relationships that I put proactive time and effort, those shift over time. So, my guidance for people is first and foremost, have that clear why.

John Jantsch (19:24.001)

Mm-hmm.

Zvi Band (19:24.796)

And once you have that clear reason, like why is this worth my time? Why is this worth money? Why is this worth all the time what I could be spending with my family or elsewhere in my business? Once they have that why, then like the other aspects tend to fall in place very quickly.

John Jantsch (19:42.904)

So if if listeners are a little like me, I probably have contacts in a lot of places. you know, so and and worse than that, I’ve got contacts on LinkedIn that eighty percent of I don’t know why I’m in contact with or you know, a relationship or or follower or whatever it is. how does somebody start sort of organizing that chaos?

Zvi Band (20:04.722)

Yeah, it’s a great question. so the first thing that you need to do is get all of your contacts into one place, whether you’re using relatable or another CRM, or even just like exporting all of your contacts out of your email and Google contacts and LinkedIn and putting them on a spreadsheet, whatever. then make a habit of every day going through a few contacts. and I say make a habit of it is because

John Jantsch (20:14.381)

Mm-hmm.

Zvi Band (20:34.042)

One of the other tripwires that I’ve seen people fall into, John, is every like that some people will spend, like, for example, all Sunday, you know, six hours organizing their database. And they’re going like, good, I did it. Thousands of contacts. And then what happens next morning? Someone emails them. Right. And all of a sudden, like, you know, that database is out of date. And so I find it’s actually really helpful from the very beginning to establish a regular routine of just every day.

John Jantsch (20:46.303)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:50.156)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:53.535)

Ha ha ha.

Yeah.

Zvi Band (21:04.114)

you know, working on your database, just like gardening, just like a little bit on a regular basis. It’s an it’s a task that will never end. But that’s the great thing because if you do, you know, three contacts a day, you know, over the course of a year, you’ve gone through a thousand contacts. Whereas if you spend a weekend on it and you go through a hundred, you’re exhausted and you never want to do it again. And then all of a sudden you you’ve lost touch with people.

John Jantsch (21:06.677)

Mm, mm. Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:27.375)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we we actually are are getting close to needing to wrap up. Why don’t you give me the kind of the if somebody said, Well, you’ve been talking about relatable, but like what is it actually?

Zvi Band (21:44.198)

yeah, sure. So relatable is a personal relationship OS. Think of it as a CRM with a lot more in it that is built around helping you build and maintain the relationships that are most important for you. you can sign up at bemoreelatable.com, but the key idea here is that if relationships are important for you, then it’s time to put real systems in place, not just tools like relatable, but actual like

structures and habits and processes to build and maintain relationships.

John Jantsch (22:16.501)

Awesome. Well, Zavee, it was great having you stop by the Ductate Marketing Podcast again. is there on top of where you mentioned where relatable is, is there anywhere else you’d invite people to connect with you or find out more about your work?

Zvi Band (22:30.632)

yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, my name’s V Band. so far there’s only one Zv Band out there that I know of, and that’s me. So you can search for Z band and find all the different projects and connect with me on LinkedIn, et cetera. and then if you are also interested in learning more about the tactics and mindset around building relationships, I have a sub stack called Your Network Starts With You that you can easily look up.

John Jantsch (22:55.085)

Awesome. Well again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Zvi Band (23:01.513)

Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (00:01.038)

So some people walk into a room with more credentials, more data, more experience maybe, than anyone else there and still get ignored. Somebody else with less of all three changes minds instead. And the difference always comes down to who knew how to tell a better story. Hello and welcome to the Ductape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Don Yeager, a repeat guest, National Speaker’s Hall of Fame inductee, 13 time New York Times.

Best selling author and longtime associate editor at Sports Illustrated. And I can go on and on about all books about some of our famous sports sport sports stars. But well for for the purpose of this show, we’re gonna talk about his latest book, The Business of Storytelling, Inspire Action, Build Trust, and Drive Results Through Stories. So welcome back, Don.

Don Yaeger (00:38.984)

Just makes me sound old. Yeah.

Don Yaeger (00:53.778)

Hey, thanks, John. I always appreciate the opportunity to spend a little time with you.

John Jantsch (00:56.782)

Well, so let’s dive right into the book. you have some universal truths in this book. it’s kind of four f based al around that or structured around that. and this is the one that I this is the one I wanted to test. It says no formula governs a great story, but then you give us like 10 elements to build a great story. So how do you square those two things?

Don Yaeger (01:22.814)

But but the ten elements are not a formula. The formula is plus dot you know, you know, insert hero here, insert challenge there, and out comes transformation. these are elements that amount that allow a great story to come together. And I just I just know these elements to be true and they and you cannot really tell a great story without without covering that waterfront.

John Jantsch (01:30.37)

Yeah, yeah.

Right, right, right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:49.805)

Now you, occupational hazard, let’s call it that, you know, have interviewed thousands of people. you’ve heard thousands of stories, and some of your the people that you’ve chronicled books are amazing storytellers. so how do you translate that to the person that maybe, you know, certainly doesn’t have that background, but but maybe, you know, doesn’t have a communications team, you know, is really just kind of trying to

Be more authentic in a world of AI. I mean, how do you translate that to them?

Don Yaeger (02:23.069)

Well, first off, thanks for saying those words because I think that’s a real driver in all of it, right? I mean, I think there are so many people that think I’m gonna seed that s I’m gonna I’m gonna ask AI to tell my story for me. and the one thing I will promise you is that the one is that AI cannot tell your story for you. in fact if you lean into it, y you may or may not have any control about what your story shows up to be when when you’re when you’re suddenly introduced. AI

John Jantsch (02:25.358)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (02:33.869)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:49.422)

Sure.

Don Yaeger (02:53.179)

as we know, likes to make things up. But on top of that, it also has it has weaknesses that that remain and will probably always remain. The one thing AI can’t do is is is bring heart to the to the equation, right? obviously it’s very, very not very insightful of me to say, but that a computer can’t bring heart to the equation. But that’s what a great story does, right? A great story takes statistics and numbers and everything else and it and it and it wraps them

John Jantsch (02:56.27)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (03:22.959)

in a heart and that ability to kind of humanize a good story belongs to us.

John Jantsch (03:32.633)

So you know, I think there are two ends of this because I have listeners that need to pull a story out of somebody. and certainly I have people that have a story they need to tell. particularly thinking about the person that needs to pull a story. when you start when you start interviewing somebody, you know

I’m I’m guessing there are some people that just get right to the heart of it. I’m sure there are also some people that put up a mask and it’s like here’s the story I w Okay Here’s the story I want you to hear. I mean, how do you actually get to the real story when when you or or do you just realize, hey, they’re not gonna tell me anything, I’m done.

Don Yaeger (03:58.942)

Most most put at the mask. Yeah. Right.

Don Yaeger (04:10.963)

So I don’t give up on it. one thing I one thing you know, if you do the right prep work, right? You’re listening to somebody, or you’re reading stories with someone’s interview involved. one thing that happens is you become really clear, like these are the stories they’re just used to telling, right? These are the ones that it’s like, you know, they they pull up pull a little cord and then you know, it just spews out. and at the end of the day, what I’m always trying to do is,

John Jantsch (04:12.323)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (04:27.66)

Yeah, right, right.

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (04:38.375)

be aware of those stories so that if they start going there, I can immediately kind of start to shift it in another direction. I do not want the story everybody else gets when they’re in conversation with John Jatch, right? I’m I’m looking for something that I can pull from you that that you may not have wanted to say when this conversation began. I have lots of experience doing that, but I think the real key is you have to know what you don’t want.

John Jantsch (04:57.975)

Mm.

Don Yaeger (05:06.619)

in order to really start beginning to drive people to where you hope to get. And so research is an enormous part of what I do when I’m trying to pull a good story from someone. I’ve

John Jantsch (05:20.492)

You you you are you gonna try to get me to cry, Don? Is that the is that the goal? So so let me push back just a moment because I mean you’re interviewing, you know, Deion Sanders, Walter Payton. there’s a lot out there about them. I mean, you can find all the stuff, but what about the CEO of a small, you know, private company? there’s not a lot maybe out there.

Don Yaeger (05:23.411)

I I i it will not be long, brother. I’m gonna have I’m gonna make that happen. So get ready. Get the tissues out. I will make it happen.

John Jantsch (05:49.154)

How do you do that research and prepare when there’s not much to know?

Don Yaeger (05:54.43)

So first off, I I would I would disagree with you that in today’s day and age, there is almost in today’s day and age, there are so many places you can go. I did I did an interview this morning or I I I was on with someone this morning in which I actually I shared with her, hey, you know, I saw in classmates, and you may not even know what classmates actually shows you the yearbooks of people you know, dating back a hundred years.

John Jantsch (05:56.866)

Okay. Well that’s true. You know what they ate for lunch, right? Yeah.

Right.

John Jantsch (06:17.452)

Mm-hmm. Sure.

Don Yaeger (06:24.407)

And I said, hey, I I was looking at Georgia Christian co Georgia Christian High School, where you graduated in 2005. I saw the the the yearbook and I noticed that you were not just a three-sport athlete, you were also a homecoming queen. And like she was blown away. It was an but it was a simple website. you know, that that’s not a difficult one to get to, not a difficult one to track. It wasn’t stalking. It’s a yearbook. The yearbooks are available in libraries.

John Jantsch (06:43.054)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (06:47.375)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (06:52.639)

so she just understood that I had taken time to learn something about her, that sh that that she wasn’t she wasn’t even aware other people might know. And and it gave me an opportunity to talk about being a three sport athlete myself. And, you know, I was not homecoming queen, but I, you know, and then between that, suddenly we go from I know something about her, I’ve now connected to her because we both have something in common, and then it allows me to go into different places.

John Jantsch (07:09.113)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:14.521)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (07:21.807)

in the interview process. So the idea of actually finding there are unique websites out there. Almost any one of these CEOs is on a charity board. There’s amazing things you’ll find about them in the charity board website that most people won’t go to look.

John Jantsch (07:31.533)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (07:36.333)

Yeah, they put per personal details down there sometimes, right? Yeah.

Don Yaeger (07:39.666)

Right. And about the things that they’ve done for the charity that might be really inspirational. And if I can know that, again, it’s very public knowledge. I’m not finding stuff that isn’t available to everyone else. I’m just doing it well enough that at the end of the day they they realize I’ve cared for them by check by learning about them.

John Jantsch (07:43.512)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (08:00.633)

So let’s get back to the to the to the book, but but one one more stop. Let’s unpack a little bit in your mind why storytelling is so effective. you know, the neuroscience actually even you know, behind it, not just as a tool, but but really as a as a you know, I mean just part of our human nature.

Don Yaeger (08:21.191)

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, think about it. It is the it is the the the one thing that’s been true over the history of mankind is that we relay knowledge through story. We relay history through story. We relay we build relationship through story. And I mean, you you go to the caves, you know, you you you walk into the crypts.

John Jantsch (08:32.857)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (08:45.805)

And you you see things that that will blow your mind because you’ll understand that this was the way history was recorded. It’s just as true today. the way that I want you to to to understand me is through story. The way I hope I can relate to you is through story. And some people might argue that they don’t need to know how to do this, that it’s just a nice to have. I argue that it’s a it’s a it’s an imperative. In today’s day and age,

Revenue changes hand money changes hands over storytelling.

John Jantsch (09:23.449)

Well and j and just just the human connection. I mean, you know, obviously storytelling in the boardroom, storytelling, you know, on a on a you know, reporting, you know, call of the numbers and whatnot are factor, but just even like making a connection in a sales call. You know, my my dad you know, was an old kind of bag carrying salesperson and he’d walk in the office, first thing he did is like

There’s Walter Payton’s jersey, you got three kids, you got, you know, there’s Muhammad Ali. It’s like I know how to connect with you now because I’ll f I find that common thing and you know, it’s corny as it and contrived, maybe as it can sound, you know, it just it speeds up the process of connection so much. Yeah.

Don Yaeger (10:04.665)

Absolutely. And what happens? So, you know, sometimes we love to say people like to buy from people, you know, like them. People like people like them, right? So how do you make sure that they know that you’re like them? You understand who they are, and then you try to draw that point of connection. So it’s not just again, this it’s it’s funny. I started several years ago as I was really I I had been working for years to become known as a good storyteller.

John Jantsch (10:16.588)

Yeah, right, right, right.

John Jantsch (10:20.973)

Mm-hmm.

Don Yaeger (10:34.013)

Great storyteller. I’ve been fortunate. The likes of Simon Sinek, the likes of John Maxwell, people that I value greatly refer to me in that way, and that’s awesome. But one of the things I started asking people is: would you be better as a salesperson if you could tell better stories? Would you be a better leader if you could tell better stories? would you be a better parent if you could tell better stories? And the truth is.

John Jantsch (10:54.223)

Mm-hmm.

Don Yaeger (11:01.277)

There almost is there’s not a question I could ask you where you would say no. There is this is a skill that if mastered makes you better across the board.

John Jantsch (11:04.879)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:16.419)

So let’s get to I we we kind of flirted with them a little bit, but maybe you could pack, unpack, you don’t have to do do them all, but just the book is based on these universal truths. So maybe kind of cover the range of those and maybe you can pick I always like to to to ask authors to pick their favorite.

Don Yaeger (11:37.568)

well, the universal truths, there are four of them, and there are 10 elements. But four the four universal truths, the first one’s extra. I mean, it’s just the first one we would have to agree on between each other because I know it, I know you know it to be true. That’s that the best stories are always human. I could tell you a story about our productivity. I could tell you a story about how many more widgets we are producing today than we’ve ever produced before. But if I tell you

John Jantsch (11:41.177)

Right.

Don Yaeger (12:05.447)

How those widgets are changing lives for one family or for for for a for a user of our product or or how producing more widgets is making more of our employees wealthy enough to be able to rise to pull themselves out of poverty. If I can use if I can build the story around people, it always remains more memorable.

John Jantsch (12:31.555)

Well, I you know, just just go look at a dozen Google reviews of say like a I don’t know, a furnace company or something. And I will tell you that none of the five star reviews will say this is the best company. They will say rusty fixed our boiler. And he was, you know, he closed the door and he was so kind to my children. I mean, that’s I mean that that that proves your point, doesn’t it? I mean, that’s what people connected with.

Don Yaeger (12:46.536)

Yes.

Don Yaeger (12:50.803)

Right.

Right. And and it it is. It’s the every s every great story is human, right? That’s so that’s that’s first and foremost. The second of the universal truths is that it is the story behind the story that is the story. You know, many people think, I can I’m gonna tell you my story about my life and and often it’s very linear, but it’s the things that made that happen that that absolutely that’s the real story. The story is what what is what’s

John Jantsch (12:57.295)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:06.031)

Mm-hmm.

Don Yaeger (13:23.217)

behind the curtain. And so you have to start asking you the questions of, you know, why, what, how, who was involved in the, in the, in, in the, and as you’re telling the story and you start bringing some of those questions to the fore, you start finding the deeper story, the deeper story about why what you’re doing matters and who it matters to. the third of the universal truths is that we argue all the time that that there’s money in storytelling.

John Jantsch (13:52.322)

This is

Don Yaeger (13:52.926)

That is not and and there’s and and we use a number of examples, but one that I love is a couple of journalists, a couple of researchers several years ago decided to take on a project and they took, they bought a hundred items off eBay, right? Hundred chotkis, little things worth nothing. never paid more than never paid more than three dollars for a single item. then they distributed those hundred items to guys like you and me, right? Storytellers.

And so but they they they picked some really great ones. And and in the distribution, they asked each person to take their tchotchke and create a story about its significance to them as the seller. And then they put them back on the on on eBay, and while they spent $193.50 to start, they put them back on eBay, and the second go round, they they earned $8,000.

John Jantsch (14:52.354)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (14:52.935)

Hundred ninety three turned into eight thousand dollars in four days because stories suddenly made this no longer was it a you know, a car key. It was the key to the most amazing vehicle I’ve ever owned in my life. And I had to sell the vehicle. I kept the key because it meant something to me. Now it’s now it’s at a place in my life where I I’d I’d love if you happen to be a fan of Maserati, I’d love for you to own this key so that you too anyway.

John Jantsch (15:21.744)

Well wait a minute though. That that made made me my first bubble, thought bubble that went off in my head is did the stories have to be true? Yeah, yeah.

Don Yaeger (15:21.863)

You get it, right? And if

Don Yaeger (15:30.449)

No, they did in this particular case, they actually note in each story this story was created for this item by author Doug Dorst or you know, whoever it is. And but they make it clear. Now, I argue that the good stories we want to tell have to be true. Right. Now, could there occasionally be some embellishment for the terms for the for the value of speeding something along? Yes. but you know, we’re not.

John Jantsch (15:37.168)

How funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:48.42)

Well of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (15:57.52)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (16:00.146)

We’re we we are in the we’re in the process of developing true stories.

John Jantsch (16:05.785)

So I I’m not sure we got through all four truths, but I I I want to circle back to one thing. all the best stories, like you said, are human, but also they’re probably personal for some people. and I some people are it’s hard for them to tell them. They don’t think anybody wants to know that part. they’re afraid it’ll make them look bad. but but but my guess is sort of the deeper or the more deeply personal, the more

Probably engagement. Yeah.

Don Yaeger (16:37.649)

Without question, because well, a couple of things happen. Number one, there’s probably as you’re telling the story, there’s some piece of it that they have lived too, right? So in some way they are on the journey with you as you’re telling your story. But secondly, they get a chance to know they know something about you that they didn’t know when the conversation began. And in the process, a connection is built, right? And we and we’ve already discussed it a couple different times. commerce occurs when connection is built.

John Jantsch (16:52.75)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:06.265)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Don Yaeger (17:07.313)

Right. And so if we can make sure that we are we’re finding ways to to become in relationship and sometimes my my ability to share my cancer journey, especially if I know that you’ve been on if you’ve had dealt with cancer, right? it will allow the two of us to w we we have that moment together. And and yes, a pr every great story has to have you in it in some way.

John Jantsch (17:37.391)

Yeah, and I think from a business standpoint too, you know, a lot of times when somebody encounters a business, all they see is, wow, this is a great business. but the story behind it is the struggle that actually made it. So I think has real value, doesn’t it? Yeah.

Don Yaeger (17:52.07)

Absolutely. It’s never you know, there are a lot of people like to look at you, me, people and say, wow, what how how incredible that success is. But that grinding that occurred 20 years ago when we were struggling to try to figure out how we were gonna pay that week’s that week’s grocery bill, that’s a that’s that’s it’s lost on most because we’re so busy assuming that everything has always been that way for John Jance or Don Yeager, right?

John Jantsch (18:11.471)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:21.199)

Right. So for particularly for a small business, do do you and I know you don’t necessarily consult on, you know, with small business owners in that way, but certainly the book covers information for them. do you is are there like three or four core stories that every business needs to have and be able to tell kind of at the drop of a hat?

Don Yaeger (18:43.603)

Completely. I would say number one, you know, we all would agree the origin story. You came together to solve, to, to, to, to cre to patch a hole in the universe. What was the whole? And what made you understand the whole? Like what was so so when I say the story behind the story, don’t tell me what you came along to solve. Tell me why you came along to solve it. what was it that made that happen? Number one. Number two,

John Jantsch (18:55.971)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (19:11.789)

there’s always a great story about some customer whose life you changed by doing really well at what you do. Tell me the story about one of your customers. Number three, tell me the story about one of your employees, right? It this so many of these stories they don’t have to, they don’t have to be about you, the owner. They’re they’re often more effective if they’re about the people that you have been that have been part of the journey with you.

John Jantsch (19:16.345)

Mm.

John Jantsch (19:26.829)

Right.

Don Yaeger (19:39.752)

And if you could tell me the story about one of your employees and how one of the things I mean, I I did some work the other day for a company that regularly they do call centers, they’re working with people in life insurance, and they were so taken by trying to deal with a man who was struggling with the with the loss of his wife, and he was just trying to figure out what the policy looked like. the person on the on the phone just realized, you know what, I want to send something extra to this guy. And so went online to Harry and David, sent some pairs.

To the man. The man writes a note to the CEO of the insurance company and says, there’s no way she could have known this, but pears were my wife’s favorite fruit. And that your employee was able to do something like that. That’s a story the CEO now gets to tell. And it what it says is this is how we care for the people that we consider our policy holders, right? The people that are our stakeholders. And this is the freedom I give my employees to care for them.

John Jantsch (20:18.892)

Mm.

John Jantsch (20:26.008)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (20:37.863)

There’s so much in that story that will make you attracted to his company, more so than one of the others, that it gives him a competitive advantage when he tells it.

John Jantsch (20:49.293)

Well and and certainly goes way beyond any kind of words on a website, you know, of we we care, we’re the carrying company, right? Trust us.

Don Yaeger (20:57.437)

We’re the carrying company. Let me give you our slogan and in fact let me show you the per the posters which which explain all of our core values, all twenty eight of our core values, right? none of which your employees can re can recite.

John Jantsch (21:10.925)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a lot of small business owners, I I and and I wonder if you could just we could wrap this up with you just kind of giving them advice. don’t like to talk about themselves, don’t think they have a story. so how does if you were going to advise somebody whose job it was to create those core stories that the company should have, what do you think is the best way for them to get at that when there’s really not any ready access to it?

Don Yaeger (21:40.538)

So, I mean one of the things you might want to do is just literally there are lots of right now, there are lots of unemployed writers in the world, right? There are a lot of writers looking for jobs because newspapers are closing, magazines are closing. There are a lot of people who understand how to how to take stories and help them. So there’s plenty probably of access to talent. You can go to Fiverr and you can find all kinds of people. But more importantly, understand the story doesn’t have to be about you. If that’s your if that’s your place of discomfort, make the story about your customers.

John Jantsch (21:48.377)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (22:04.397)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (22:09.809)

Make that story about your employees. As I said, make that story about the moment that this that it became apparent that this company needed to exist. And yes, you might be included in the story, but it’s not about you. And if that’s a point of discomfort for you, there are plenty of ways to let the world know how special you are without pumping yourself up.

John Jantsch (22:34.637)

Well Don, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by is there some place you’d invite people to find out more about your work and certainly pick up a copy of the business of storytelling?

Don Yaeger (22:42.855)

Well, business storytelling is, as I love to say, available anywhere that that good books are sold. so if you go there and it’s not there, it’s not a good bookstore. but yeah, Amazon is a is a big is a big part of our our strategy. but they can also I’d love if they’re if they’re a friend of yours, reach out to me. I’m at Don Yeager dot com. And and I and I own all spellings of my last name so you can butcher it.

John Jantsch (22:50.219)

Yeah, yeah.

Don Yaeger (23:12.135)

And you will probably still end up at my website, but it’s Don Y-A-E-G-E-R dot com.

John Jantsch (23:17.143)

Yeah. Probably a lot of E’s before the A. Certainly. Well, and I would Well just like I own D D U C K marketing, as po a as well, ’cause a lot of people you still use that erroneously, so it directs to the right place. But and I would also encourage folks you know, if especially if you’re a fan of of good sports writing, certainly Don’s entire catalog.

Don Yaeger (23:20.049)

There is a lot of that.

And I own that site. I own that site too, by the way.

Don Yaeger (23:36.669)

Right. That’s right.

John Jantsch (23:46.228)

of of books would would have something for you there too. So well Don, it was great for you taking a moment to stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you again soon out there on the road.

Don Yaeger (23:54.362)

Always. Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (00:01.038)

So some people walk into a room with more credentials, more data, more experience maybe, than anyone else there and still get ignored. Somebody else with less of all three changes minds instead. And the difference always comes down to who knew how to tell a better story. Hello and welcome to the Ductape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Don Yeager, a repeat guest, National Speaker’s Hall of Fame inductee, 13 time New York Times.

Best selling author and longtime associate editor at Sports Illustrated. And I can go on and on about all books about some of our famous sports sport sports stars. But well for for the purpose of this show, we’re gonna talk about his latest book, The Business of Storytelling, Inspire Action, Build Trust, and Drive Results Through Stories. So welcome back, Don.

Don Yaeger (00:38.984)

Just makes me sound old. Yeah.

Don Yaeger (00:53.778)

Hey, thanks, John. I always appreciate the opportunity to spend a little time with you.

John Jantsch (00:56.782)

Well, so let’s dive right into the book. you have some universal truths in this book. it’s kind of four f based al around that or structured around that. and this is the one that I this is the one I wanted to test. It says no formula governs a great story, but then you give us like 10 elements to build a great story. So how do you square those two things?

Don Yaeger (01:22.814)

But but the ten elements are not a formula. The formula is plus dot you know, you know, insert hero here, insert challenge there, and out comes transformation. these are elements that amount that allow a great story to come together. And I just I just know these elements to be true and they and you cannot really tell a great story without without covering that waterfront.

John Jantsch (01:30.37)

Yeah, yeah.

Right, right, right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:49.805)

Now you, occupational hazard, let’s call it that, you know, have interviewed thousands of people. you’ve heard thousands of stories, and some of your the people that you’ve chronicled books are amazing storytellers. so how do you translate that to the person that maybe, you know, certainly doesn’t have that background, but but maybe, you know, doesn’t have a communications team, you know, is really just kind of trying to

Be more authentic in a world of AI. I mean, how do you translate that to them?

Don Yaeger (02:23.069)

Well, first off, thanks for saying those words because I think that’s a real driver in all of it, right? I mean, I think there are so many people that think I’m gonna seed that s I’m gonna I’m gonna ask AI to tell my story for me. and the one thing I will promise you is that the one is that AI cannot tell your story for you. in fact if you lean into it, y you may or may not have any control about what your story shows up to be when when you’re when you’re suddenly introduced. AI

John Jantsch (02:25.358)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (02:33.869)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:49.422)

Sure.

Don Yaeger (02:53.179)

as we know, likes to make things up. But on top of that, it also has it has weaknesses that that remain and will probably always remain. The one thing AI can’t do is is is bring heart to the to the equation, right? obviously it’s very, very not very insightful of me to say, but that a computer can’t bring heart to the equation. But that’s what a great story does, right? A great story takes statistics and numbers and everything else and it and it and it wraps them

John Jantsch (02:56.27)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (03:22.959)

in a heart and that ability to kind of humanize a good story belongs to us.

John Jantsch (03:32.633)

So you know, I think there are two ends of this because I have listeners that need to pull a story out of somebody. and certainly I have people that have a story they need to tell. particularly thinking about the person that needs to pull a story. when you start when you start interviewing somebody, you know

I’m I’m guessing there are some people that just get right to the heart of it. I’m sure there are also some people that put up a mask and it’s like here’s the story I w Okay Here’s the story I want you to hear. I mean, how do you actually get to the real story when when you or or do you just realize, hey, they’re not gonna tell me anything, I’m done.

Don Yaeger (03:58.942)

Most most put at the mask. Yeah. Right.

Don Yaeger (04:10.963)

So I don’t give up on it. one thing I one thing you know, if you do the right prep work, right? You’re listening to somebody, or you’re reading stories with someone’s interview involved. one thing that happens is you become really clear, like these are the stories they’re just used to telling, right? These are the ones that it’s like, you know, they they pull up pull a little cord and then you know, it just spews out. and at the end of the day, what I’m always trying to do is,

John Jantsch (04:12.323)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (04:27.66)

Yeah, right, right.

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (04:38.375)

be aware of those stories so that if they start going there, I can immediately kind of start to shift it in another direction. I do not want the story everybody else gets when they’re in conversation with John Jatch, right? I’m I’m looking for something that I can pull from you that that you may not have wanted to say when this conversation began. I have lots of experience doing that, but I think the real key is you have to know what you don’t want.

John Jantsch (04:57.975)

Mm.

Don Yaeger (05:06.619)

in order to really start beginning to drive people to where you hope to get. And so research is an enormous part of what I do when I’m trying to pull a good story from someone. I’ve

John Jantsch (05:20.492)

You you you are you gonna try to get me to cry, Don? Is that the is that the goal? So so let me push back just a moment because I mean you’re interviewing, you know, Deion Sanders, Walter Payton. there’s a lot out there about them. I mean, you can find all the stuff, but what about the CEO of a small, you know, private company? there’s not a lot maybe out there.

Don Yaeger (05:23.411)

I I i it will not be long, brother. I’m gonna have I’m gonna make that happen. So get ready. Get the tissues out. I will make it happen.

John Jantsch (05:49.154)

How do you do that research and prepare when there’s not much to know?

Don Yaeger (05:54.43)

So first off, I I would I would disagree with you that in today’s day and age, there is almost in today’s day and age, there are so many places you can go. I did I did an interview this morning or I I I was on with someone this morning in which I actually I shared with her, hey, you know, I saw in classmates, and you may not even know what classmates actually shows you the yearbooks of people you know, dating back a hundred years.

John Jantsch (05:56.866)

Okay. Well that’s true. You know what they ate for lunch, right? Yeah.

Right.

John Jantsch (06:17.452)

Mm-hmm. Sure.

Don Yaeger (06:24.407)

And I said, hey, I I was looking at Georgia Christian co Georgia Christian High School, where you graduated in 2005. I saw the the the yearbook and I noticed that you were not just a three-sport athlete, you were also a homecoming queen. And like she was blown away. It was an but it was a simple website. you know, that that’s not a difficult one to get to, not a difficult one to track. It wasn’t stalking. It’s a yearbook. The yearbooks are available in libraries.

John Jantsch (06:43.054)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (06:47.375)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (06:52.639)

so she just understood that I had taken time to learn something about her, that sh that that she wasn’t she wasn’t even aware other people might know. And and it gave me an opportunity to talk about being a three sport athlete myself. And, you know, I was not homecoming queen, but I, you know, and then between that, suddenly we go from I know something about her, I’ve now connected to her because we both have something in common, and then it allows me to go into different places.

John Jantsch (07:09.113)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:14.521)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (07:21.807)

in the interview process. So the idea of actually finding there are unique websites out there. Almost any one of these CEOs is on a charity board. There’s amazing things you’ll find about them in the charity board website that most people won’t go to look.

John Jantsch (07:31.533)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (07:36.333)

Yeah, they put per personal details down there sometimes, right? Yeah.

Don Yaeger (07:39.666)

Right. And about the things that they’ve done for the charity that might be really inspirational. And if I can know that, again, it’s very public knowledge. I’m not finding stuff that isn’t available to everyone else. I’m just doing it well enough that at the end of the day they they realize I’ve cared for them by check by learning about them.

John Jantsch (07:43.512)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (08:00.633)

So let’s get back to the to the to the book, but but one one more stop. Let’s unpack a little bit in your mind why storytelling is so effective. you know, the neuroscience actually even you know, behind it, not just as a tool, but but really as a as a you know, I mean just part of our human nature.

Don Yaeger (08:21.191)

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, think about it. It is the it is the the the one thing that’s been true over the history of mankind is that we relay knowledge through story. We relay history through story. We relay we build relationship through story. And I mean, you you go to the caves, you know, you you you walk into the crypts.

John Jantsch (08:32.857)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (08:45.805)

And you you see things that that will blow your mind because you’ll understand that this was the way history was recorded. It’s just as true today. the way that I want you to to to understand me is through story. The way I hope I can relate to you is through story. And some people might argue that they don’t need to know how to do this, that it’s just a nice to have. I argue that it’s a it’s a it’s an imperative. In today’s day and age,

Revenue changes hand money changes hands over storytelling.

John Jantsch (09:23.449)

Well and j and just just the human connection. I mean, you know, obviously storytelling in the boardroom, storytelling, you know, on a on a you know, reporting, you know, call of the numbers and whatnot are factor, but just even like making a connection in a sales call. You know, my my dad you know, was an old kind of bag carrying salesperson and he’d walk in the office, first thing he did is like

There’s Walter Payton’s jersey, you got three kids, you got, you know, there’s Muhammad Ali. It’s like I know how to connect with you now because I’ll f I find that common thing and you know, it’s corny as it and contrived, maybe as it can sound, you know, it just it speeds up the process of connection so much. Yeah.

Don Yaeger (10:04.665)

Absolutely. And what happens? So, you know, sometimes we love to say people like to buy from people, you know, like them. People like people like them, right? So how do you make sure that they know that you’re like them? You understand who they are, and then you try to draw that point of connection. So it’s not just again, this it’s it’s funny. I started several years ago as I was really I I had been working for years to become known as a good storyteller.

John Jantsch (10:16.588)

Yeah, right, right, right.

John Jantsch (10:20.973)

Mm-hmm.

Don Yaeger (10:34.013)

Great storyteller. I’ve been fortunate. The likes of Simon Sinek, the likes of John Maxwell, people that I value greatly refer to me in that way, and that’s awesome. But one of the things I started asking people is: would you be better as a salesperson if you could tell better stories? Would you be a better leader if you could tell better stories? would you be a better parent if you could tell better stories? And the truth is.

John Jantsch (10:54.223)

Mm-hmm.

Don Yaeger (11:01.277)

There almost is there’s not a question I could ask you where you would say no. There is this is a skill that if mastered makes you better across the board.

John Jantsch (11:04.879)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:16.419)

So let’s get to I we we kind of flirted with them a little bit, but maybe you could pack, unpack, you don’t have to do do them all, but just the book is based on these universal truths. So maybe kind of cover the range of those and maybe you can pick I always like to to to ask authors to pick their favorite.

Don Yaeger (11:37.568)

well, the universal truths, there are four of them, and there are 10 elements. But four the four universal truths, the first one’s extra. I mean, it’s just the first one we would have to agree on between each other because I know it, I know you know it to be true. That’s that the best stories are always human. I could tell you a story about our productivity. I could tell you a story about how many more widgets we are producing today than we’ve ever produced before. But if I tell you

John Jantsch (11:41.177)

Right.

Don Yaeger (12:05.447)

How those widgets are changing lives for one family or for for for a for a user of our product or or how producing more widgets is making more of our employees wealthy enough to be able to rise to pull themselves out of poverty. If I can use if I can build the story around people, it always remains more memorable.

John Jantsch (12:31.555)

Well, I you know, just just go look at a dozen Google reviews of say like a I don’t know, a furnace company or something. And I will tell you that none of the five star reviews will say this is the best company. They will say rusty fixed our boiler. And he was, you know, he closed the door and he was so kind to my children. I mean, that’s I mean that that that proves your point, doesn’t it? I mean, that’s what people connected with.

Don Yaeger (12:46.536)

Yes.

Don Yaeger (12:50.803)

Right.

Right. And and it it is. It’s the every s every great story is human, right? That’s so that’s that’s first and foremost. The second of the universal truths is that it is the story behind the story that is the story. You know, many people think, I can I’m gonna tell you my story about my life and and often it’s very linear, but it’s the things that made that happen that that absolutely that’s the real story. The story is what what is what’s

John Jantsch (12:57.295)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:06.031)

Mm-hmm.

Don Yaeger (13:23.217)

behind the curtain. And so you have to start asking you the questions of, you know, why, what, how, who was involved in the, in the, in, in the, and as you’re telling the story and you start bringing some of those questions to the fore, you start finding the deeper story, the deeper story about why what you’re doing matters and who it matters to. the third of the universal truths is that we argue all the time that that there’s money in storytelling.

John Jantsch (13:52.322)

This is

Don Yaeger (13:52.926)

That is not and and there’s and and we use a number of examples, but one that I love is a couple of journalists, a couple of researchers several years ago decided to take on a project and they took, they bought a hundred items off eBay, right? Hundred chotkis, little things worth nothing. never paid more than never paid more than three dollars for a single item. then they distributed those hundred items to guys like you and me, right? Storytellers.

And so but they they they picked some really great ones. And and in the distribution, they asked each person to take their tchotchke and create a story about its significance to them as the seller. And then they put them back on the on on eBay, and while they spent $193.50 to start, they put them back on eBay, and the second go round, they they earned $8,000.

John Jantsch (14:52.354)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (14:52.935)

Hundred ninety three turned into eight thousand dollars in four days because stories suddenly made this no longer was it a you know, a car key. It was the key to the most amazing vehicle I’ve ever owned in my life. And I had to sell the vehicle. I kept the key because it meant something to me. Now it’s now it’s at a place in my life where I I’d I’d love if you happen to be a fan of Maserati, I’d love for you to own this key so that you too anyway.

John Jantsch (15:21.744)

Well wait a minute though. That that made made me my first bubble, thought bubble that went off in my head is did the stories have to be true? Yeah, yeah.

Don Yaeger (15:21.863)

You get it, right? And if

Don Yaeger (15:30.449)

No, they did in this particular case, they actually note in each story this story was created for this item by author Doug Dorst or you know, whoever it is. And but they make it clear. Now, I argue that the good stories we want to tell have to be true. Right. Now, could there occasionally be some embellishment for the terms for the for the value of speeding something along? Yes. but you know, we’re not.

John Jantsch (15:37.168)

How funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:48.42)

Well of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (15:57.52)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (16:00.146)

We’re we we are in the we’re in the process of developing true stories.

John Jantsch (16:05.785)

So I I’m not sure we got through all four truths, but I I I want to circle back to one thing. all the best stories, like you said, are human, but also they’re probably personal for some people. and I some people are it’s hard for them to tell them. They don’t think anybody wants to know that part. they’re afraid it’ll make them look bad. but but but my guess is sort of the deeper or the more deeply personal, the more

Probably engagement. Yeah.

Don Yaeger (16:37.649)

Without question, because well, a couple of things happen. Number one, there’s probably as you’re telling the story, there’s some piece of it that they have lived too, right? So in some way they are on the journey with you as you’re telling your story. But secondly, they get a chance to know they know something about you that they didn’t know when the conversation began. And in the process, a connection is built, right? And we and we’ve already discussed it a couple different times. commerce occurs when connection is built.

John Jantsch (16:52.75)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:06.265)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Don Yaeger (17:07.313)

Right. And so if we can make sure that we are we’re finding ways to to become in relationship and sometimes my my ability to share my cancer journey, especially if I know that you’ve been on if you’ve had dealt with cancer, right? it will allow the two of us to w we we have that moment together. And and yes, a pr every great story has to have you in it in some way.

John Jantsch (17:37.391)

Yeah, and I think from a business standpoint too, you know, a lot of times when somebody encounters a business, all they see is, wow, this is a great business. but the story behind it is the struggle that actually made it. So I think has real value, doesn’t it? Yeah.

Don Yaeger (17:52.07)

Absolutely. It’s never you know, there are a lot of people like to look at you, me, people and say, wow, what how how incredible that success is. But that grinding that occurred 20 years ago when we were struggling to try to figure out how we were gonna pay that week’s that week’s grocery bill, that’s a that’s that’s it’s lost on most because we’re so busy assuming that everything has always been that way for John Jance or Don Yeager, right?

John Jantsch (18:11.471)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:21.199)

Right. So for particularly for a small business, do do you and I know you don’t necessarily consult on, you know, with small business owners in that way, but certainly the book covers information for them. do you is are there like three or four core stories that every business needs to have and be able to tell kind of at the drop of a hat?

Don Yaeger (18:43.603)

Completely. I would say number one, you know, we all would agree the origin story. You came together to solve, to, to, to, to cre to patch a hole in the universe. What was the whole? And what made you understand the whole? Like what was so so when I say the story behind the story, don’t tell me what you came along to solve. Tell me why you came along to solve it. what was it that made that happen? Number one. Number two,

John Jantsch (18:55.971)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (19:11.789)

there’s always a great story about some customer whose life you changed by doing really well at what you do. Tell me the story about one of your customers. Number three, tell me the story about one of your employees, right? It this so many of these stories they don’t have to, they don’t have to be about you, the owner. They’re they’re often more effective if they’re about the people that you have been that have been part of the journey with you.

John Jantsch (19:16.345)

Mm.

John Jantsch (19:26.829)

Right.

Don Yaeger (19:39.752)

And if you could tell me the story about one of your employees and how one of the things I mean, I I did some work the other day for a company that regularly they do call centers, they’re working with people in life insurance, and they were so taken by trying to deal with a man who was struggling with the with the loss of his wife, and he was just trying to figure out what the policy looked like. the person on the on the phone just realized, you know what, I want to send something extra to this guy. And so went online to Harry and David, sent some pairs.

To the man. The man writes a note to the CEO of the insurance company and says, there’s no way she could have known this, but pears were my wife’s favorite fruit. And that your employee was able to do something like that. That’s a story the CEO now gets to tell. And it what it says is this is how we care for the people that we consider our policy holders, right? The people that are our stakeholders. And this is the freedom I give my employees to care for them.

John Jantsch (20:18.892)

Mm.

John Jantsch (20:26.008)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (20:37.863)

There’s so much in that story that will make you attracted to his company, more so than one of the others, that it gives him a competitive advantage when he tells it.

John Jantsch (20:49.293)

Well and and certainly goes way beyond any kind of words on a website, you know, of we we care, we’re the carrying company, right? Trust us.

Don Yaeger (20:57.437)

We’re the carrying company. Let me give you our slogan and in fact let me show you the per the posters which which explain all of our core values, all twenty eight of our core values, right? none of which your employees can re can recite.

John Jantsch (21:10.925)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a lot of small business owners, I I and and I wonder if you could just we could wrap this up with you just kind of giving them advice. don’t like to talk about themselves, don’t think they have a story. so how does if you were going to advise somebody whose job it was to create those core stories that the company should have, what do you think is the best way for them to get at that when there’s really not any ready access to it?

Don Yaeger (21:40.538)

So, I mean one of the things you might want to do is just literally there are lots of right now, there are lots of unemployed writers in the world, right? There are a lot of writers looking for jobs because newspapers are closing, magazines are closing. There are a lot of people who understand how to how to take stories and help them. So there’s plenty probably of access to talent. You can go to Fiverr and you can find all kinds of people. But more importantly, understand the story doesn’t have to be about you. If that’s your if that’s your place of discomfort, make the story about your customers.

John Jantsch (21:48.377)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (22:04.397)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (22:09.809)

Make that story about your employees. As I said, make that story about the moment that this that it became apparent that this company needed to exist. And yes, you might be included in the story, but it’s not about you. And if that’s a point of discomfort for you, there are plenty of ways to let the world know how special you are without pumping yourself up.

John Jantsch (22:34.637)

Well Don, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by is there some place you’d invite people to find out more about your work and certainly pick up a copy of the business of storytelling?

Don Yaeger (22:42.855)

Well, business storytelling is, as I love to say, available anywhere that that good books are sold. so if you go there and it’s not there, it’s not a good bookstore. but yeah, Amazon is a is a big is a big part of our our strategy. but they can also I’d love if they’re if they’re a friend of yours, reach out to me. I’m at Don Yeager dot com. And and I and I own all spellings of my last name so you can butcher it.

John Jantsch (22:50.219)

Yeah, yeah.

Don Yaeger (23:12.135)

And you will probably still end up at my website, but it’s Don Y-A-E-G-E-R dot com.

John Jantsch (23:17.143)

Yeah. Probably a lot of E’s before the A. Certainly. Well, and I would Well just like I own D D U C K marketing, as po a as well, ’cause a lot of people you still use that erroneously, so it directs to the right place. But and I would also encourage folks you know, if especially if you’re a fan of of good sports writing, certainly Don’s entire catalog.

Don Yaeger (23:20.049)

There is a lot of that.

And I own that site. I own that site too, by the way.

Don Yaeger (23:36.669)

Right. That’s right.

John Jantsch (23:46.228)

of of books would would have something for you there too. So well Don, it was great for you taking a moment to stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you again soon out there on the road.

Don Yaeger (23:54.362)

Always. Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (00:01.122)

So most consultants build a business around what they’re good at. A smaller number build one that they can actually sell. The difference between those two paths shows up probably pretty quickly, long before anyone’s shopping for a buyer, that is. And usually it’s invisible to the person living it. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, my guest today. I have two guests: Beth.

Mazza and Victoria Sivrais. They’re serial entrepreneurs, collective moms of nine, who built and exited two successful professional service firms that advise SP leaders through make or break decisions, equal parts, boardroom powerhouses, and chaos managers. They’re now on a mission to help 10,000 women build seven-figure businesses. So, Beth and Victoria, welcome to the show.

Beth (00:50.765)

Thanks. We’re happy to be here, John. Thank you. No.

Victoria Sivrais (00:51.513)

Thanks so much.

John Jantsch (00:52.834)

Did did I butcher either one of your names? I ch I I hopefully not. Good, good, good. Awesome. Well, so I have to start by telling you that I have nine siblings, if that counts for anything. So so so I do I do have a sense of and there was only f 14 years between the ten of us, so I do have a sense of a little bit of what you guys are going through. Right. I only have four kids of my own, but but the the ten ten f

Victoria Sivrais (00:56.239)

You got it. I’m impressed.

Beth (01:03.416)

Hmm.

Victoria Sivrais (01:04.303)

Really?

Beth (01:12.05)

Whoa. So you kept chaos.

Victoria Sivrais (01:13.187)

That’s incredible.

Beth (01:19.289)

So do I.

John Jantsch (01:21.304)

10 member family was quite something. So let’s jump into I I want to start with this may feel like a challenge, but I I know you guys have the answer to this. but I want to start with this sort of disconnect for me. As I read your bio and you know, S P five hundred, you know, make or break decisions. and then I look at the the title of the book, which I actually I forgot I forgot wasn’t in the in the bio, so I’ll

Beth (01:25.293)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:50.999)

Read it out right now. entrepreneur like a mother. Build a company that buys your freedom and not one that owns your life. And, you know, that sounds a little more like a lifestyle business book that maybe is different from you know what what I read in your bios. So help our listeners understand where where where I’m getting that wrong.

Beth (02:13.767)

yeah, that no, that’s a fair question. So two things. One is side hustles don’t give you financial freedom. They don’t pay for your kids’ college. They don’t pay for your house. They don’t pay for you to retire at the age as we did. So our number one premise behind this book is you gotta build a business where you get financial freedom. And you can do that if you choose the right business model and you set some of the right barriers from day one of your business. And

John Jantsch (02:22.221)

Right.

Beth (02:40.801)

Literally the entire book is about when we did that successfully, which we did a lot, and when we did that unsuccessfully, which also was a lot.

John Jantsch (02:48.44)

Sure, sure. Well, that’s the only way you learn one from the other, right? so so a lot of what you talk about is the idea of of building your your first business, planning to sell it. and I think a lot of people, I I I can’t imagine there are too many people that that’s not the dream. however, you know, you get sort of stuck in the day-to-day and it’s like, no, I’m just trying to pay the bills or pay myself, and it turns into a job, not a business even. So how did you

How did you make that decision? What did you do that changed, you know, how you went to business that that you know, in into business that that really made that happen for you?

Victoria Sivrais (03:26.979)

Yeah. So I I think from our perspective, sales became the center of everything we did from day one. So I think when you are trying to create a lifestyle business or one that just kind of is a replacement to your corporate salary, I think there is a a slowness of it sometimes. Maybe take your time. It was never our mentality. From day one, it is

How can you get more clients? How can you build our brand? And how can you expand to a point where you have a scalable business that then becomes attractive to a buyer? So I think that that was number one. Now, where I what I personally fell short, somewhere in the middle of that, was I couldn’t give up control about some of the more mundane tasks that were necessary to run the b business forward. So I was lucky enough to have a business partner.

John Jantsch (04:13.133)

Mm.

Victoria Sivrais (04:20.205)

That was, hey, it’s time to, it’s time to take invoicing off your plate. It’s time to take HR. It’s time to hire the HR manager. It’s time to hire someone that can actually run the office on a day to day basis. And that is, I think, what became the difference of we were creating a lifestyle business to a scalable business that that we could sell one day.

John Jantsch (04:44.782)

Well, and I think you aptly refer to that as a kitchen cabinet idea, or at least that that to have like, you know, a champion, a compensator, and a connector. is that something that can be one person that has three personalities? Does that definitely need to be outside people? you know, that like I have this skill set, you have that skill set. is that something you decide from day really early on? Or when you decided you wanted to change this business at least?

Beth (05:07.971)

Yeah, I think

I think there’s no way we as moms, unless we had a cabinet, could do this, right? Cause we needed cheerleading, we needed like people to pick up our kids when we were our flight was delayed. But then we also needed really, really big thinkers. We built a software product. Like we needed a big software guy that we didn’t know anything about. So we did it very methodically, which is how we’ve we’ve written it in Hunterprel Like a Mother. Three types, champions, connectors, compensators, and we built it.

Over a few years, and we did as much asking of favors as we did giving of favors, and we paid it as much for it as possible. But I mean, two members of our kitchen cabinet, one saved us from signing a very bad deal to sell our company, two did. And at least two to three of them made the introductions for the clients that paid us a lot of money, especially in a post-COVID world where those were not coming very quickly.

John Jantsch (05:43.053)

Mm-hmm.

Beth (06:09.781)

So it’s it is a long term, it is many people that you keep up with, that you spend twenty minutes a day with with, but it’s also what you do from day one of the business. You’re always thinking about building that.

John Jantsch (06:23.446)

D do you think that that you had or do you think that it takes a different sort of investment mindset in in the business than most people have? Cause again, a lot of people get in, they get a client and then they want the next client and then it’s like, you know, we’re we’re just trying to keep this thing going, you know, hustle work. Did did you have a different investment mentality than that?

Victoria Sivrais (06:45.019)

a hundred percent we did. So, like, I mean, yes, it was about building clients in and building revenues in the early days. but it then became how are we gonna have an expense structure? Cause our our goal from the get-go was to run 30% margins, which is very attractive in a professional services business. And so our investments what were centered around

not only driving growth at the top line, but maintaining and expanding that margin that was, you know, break even in the early days to to the the goal of the 30% margin. So like as a result, like our power move three is make the money moves that matter. And that is all about the financial non negotiables, not only personally as a as a woman raising a family and building a business, but also within the business, what are you willing to do?

John Jantsch (07:24.567)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (07:36.586)

Achieve your goals. So, like a couple of our goals were we only paid out at net 45 to our vendors, but we were pretty slavish to collecting it net 30. So we had a nice cash cushion in between. You know, we never had our expense line go above our retained revenues because half of our business was project revenues, but we never took that expense structure over our retained revenues. So we knew we had the flexibility for investment in later, and we only took on debt.

John Jantsch (07:57.654)

Mm.

Victoria Sivrais (08:05.291)

if we knew we had an identif identifiable return on that investment. It was just those were three of our non-negotiables that we always had.

Beth (08:14.423)

And the one other thing we did is we invested in sales and marketing. When we were two people, we were putting 10% of what we made into sales and marketing. We put out really good thought leadership that we wanted SP 500, 1,000 CEOs to read. We figured out real early we could not get it read if we just sent them emails. And we invested in marketing. We were very early on SEO. We did all that to get the marketing out to make sure that.

the influencer to the CEO or the CEO himself saw our thought leadership, which as a really small firm, we had some really big bills, but that was a total investment. And we by the time we sold 50% of our business came from that effort. Come there were calls in from that effort.

John Jantsch (08:59.172)

Okay.

S so so in the eight minutes and or nine minutes now and four seconds we’ve been talking, you’ve actually demonstrated more business savvy than most people have, let’s face it. So what how do you translate that in your book to somebody who maybe hasn’t you know, really some of the things you’re throwing out hasn’t even considered?

Victoria Sivrais (09:22.509)

You you know, we we put it in the framework of these five power moves. And honestly, we really, we really, I people would say we dumbed it down. We didn’t. We actually brought it down to a level that we needed when we were learning ourselves. And we tried to be as explicit and as prescriptive as we possibly can. So, like power move one is all about whether or not it’s a passion project or actually a really viable business idea. So we start with what is your total addressable math.

Market, how do you figure out what your total addressable market is? And how do you figure out how you’re going to capture a portion of that that makes it a seven-figure business? Then we start to talk about, you know, build the network with your kitchen cabinet. Like where, you know, most entrepreneurs tend to be control freaks, a, you know, type A people that think they’re great at everything. The skinny is you’re not. So like figure out what you’re not good at and figure out where you can kind of support that.

John Jantsch (10:09.646)

Sure.

Victoria Sivrais (10:18.713)

Then we talk about the money moves that matter. Then we talk about, which is honestly a favorite of both of ours, is respect the pivot. Like understand that when things aren’t going the right way, you gotta be able to dodge and weave as quickly as you possibly can. And then the last piece is really once you have a business that is moving, now how do you scale it? And I think that those are the pieces. And again, depending on where you’re at in your business, you can pick up in any one of those places.

And I think that that is the beauty of this framework that we’ve created, is that you can jump in wherever you’re at with your business.

Beth (10:52.621)

I mean, this this book is intentionally so prescriptive. You literally have your pen and you’re writing this stuff down. There are worksheets, there are questions. We give our real world examples. Times we did great things and terrible things, and it’s all in there so that not only do you know what to do, but you can also feel better that two idiots figured out a way to make it work too.

John Jantsch (11:15.98)

All right, so you can smack me for this question if you want, later at least. is could can men read this book.

Beth (11:24.397)

My God. Do you know how many female mavericks are men? Like we never talk about that. So many of them are men.

Victoria Sivrais (11:24.409)

Hundred percent. I mean a hundred percent. I mean

Victoria Sivrais (11:32.976)

Can we also talk about that between the two of us, we have six brothers? Like we are the two women and a lot of men in our life. And so like it’s not meant. We wrote it in the idea, because I think a lot of times women, particularly women who want to be mothers, are told that they can either be a business owner or they can be a mother. And the point is, is you can do both. Like we’re sick of that myth and we’re trying to break the break the glass on that myth.

John Jantsch (11:38.131)

Ha ha

Beth (11:39.811)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:50.304)

Mm-hmm. Right.

Victoria Sivrais (11:59.746)

Men doing the same thing, and especially now, men versus like when my parents were growing up and you know there was no mom out in the workplace, like dads are just as involved with the kids versus where they used to be. And so, like, my husband is a hundred percent partner of mine. He is, I mean, we were just negotiating who’s picking up kids this afternoon because I had this podcast. So, like, I mean, those business owners, well, and even honestly.

John Jantsch (12:08.579)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:17.411)

Yeah. Right.

Victoria Sivrais (12:26.667)

ambitious men and women within corporate America. I think there’s a lot of pieces that you can take out of this, particularly around the the building of the kitchen cabin and respecting a pivot. Like those are just clear things that help you drive your business forward, whether or not corporate or entrepreneur.

Beth (12:44.771)

But men should pay full price for it. Women think it’s just men should pay just for everything you put us through through the generations.

John Jantsch (12:45.197)

So yeah. Hey, I think it’s fair. so there one concept you talk about is expertise dependent businesses versus system dependent businesses. talk a little bit about what that looks like and why that’s an important concept.

Victoria Sivrais (12:46.873)

For sure. We’ll give the ladies a discount. Yeah.

Beth (12:54.819)

Ha ha.

Beth (13:10.029)

Yeah, I think this is a big one. We as women, we only want to do the things that we’re best at. So we tend to, I think, begin expertise driven businesses, which is what Victoria and I did as well. But expertise driven businesses, unless you are in like some amazing area where you can charge 50,000 an hour, you are maxed, right? You are maxed how much you can make. And and you’re you’re also giving up like so much of your life in in being the go to person.

What we learned, because we scaled twice, right? And so we we learned a lot, is unless you can put your expertise into some kind of a system, and then you can hire, retain, train, support, empower a team of people that can do almost what you can do, you can’t scale. It doesn’t matter if you have AI, it doesn’t matter what you have, you cannot scale. You have high-profile people that want to talk to a human being that’s competent. So

We really learned in that second business. And some of that was driven by our own employees saying, You’re not even giving us a shot on goal. You’re not even letting us get a shot to talk to a CEO. You haven’t trained us. And we both really stepped back and we really invested there. And we turned out selling the company with seven or eight people that could do what we did. They all got a small piece of the business. They all have great careers. But I mean, that was a big investment from us. So, like if you want to be bigger, you want

John Jantsch (14:17.439)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:30.819)

Yeah. Yeah.

Beth (14:34.273)

Your kids not to have college debt, you’ve got to figure out a system driven business.

John Jantsch (14:38.967)

Yeah, I am. you know, I w we work with a lot of business owners and I mean the the one thing I counsel them on all the time is, you know, until you’re no longer the rainmaker, you know, you’re stuck. And I think that’s really to me, that’s the really the big one. If you know if that’s if you’re the only person that can sell the big deal, then you’re you’re never gonna get out of this thing. So what one of the things that I read that

Victoria Sivrais (14:44.319)

Mm.

Victoria Sivrais (14:50.115)

No

Victoria Sivrais (15:00.367)

Agreed.

John Jantsch (15:05.495)

the seventy-five percent of your cash w went into cold outreach from day one. that’s almost taboo for like consulting, you know, type businesses. It’s like, no, you build your network of trust and you get referrals. And so so talk a little bit about that math for a high touch advisory firm.

Victoria Sivrais (15:24.023)

I mean, you d we call it in the book, we call it caveman marketing. Cause I mean, it really was. I mean, it was a numbers game in the beginning, in terms of the cold outreach. For every ten calls we made, we got one meeting, you know, or every a hundred calls we made, we got 10 meetings, we got one close. Like it just it was what it was. What I think we did very interestingly to support that was not just the cold calling. It was up front, we made a ton of investment in that thought leadership that Beth talked about a little bit ago, which was

John Jantsch (15:28.099)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (15:53.302)

Not cold emails selling our services. It was it was expanding and sharing our expertise around areas that mattered to the C-suite and the board of directors of these large public companies. And we never asked for anything from it. We honestly just would share as much as they listen to it. And honestly, in in COVID is where it really, really took off because you know, that March date, March 16th.

All of our public companies just stopped paying us. All of our huge pipeline just stopped responding to us. No one knew. We were working a hundred hours a week trying to assuage all the concerns on Wall Street that every public company was going belly up. Like we didn’t have anything to do except for just kind of maintain our client base. So in our spare time, which we had so much of it, we just wrote about what was happening out in the market. And we just kept on sending out

John Jantsch (16:24.319)

Mm-hmm. Right.

John Jantsch (16:44.046)

Mm.

John Jantsch (16:48.771)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (16:49.775)

Thought leadership after thought leadership, we did really basic roundups of by industry, how people are talking about financial position, cash on hand, investments, all of those things. And that drove our SEO, which became us the number one ranking in both our core business, which was investor relations, and our growth business, which was ESG communications consulting. And so when the world started to slowly open back up that summer.

John Jantsch (17:04.441)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (17:17.827)

They said, okay, there’s all these mandates that we have to do. Who should we call? you know, those ladies that never stop emailing us about all the things that are happening. And it opened the floodgates. And so it didn’t stop us from our cold outreach. We still did that. But when we got there, we had built such great brand recognition that they picked up the phone when we called.

John Jantsch (17:24.431)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (17:36.11)

Yeah.

All while homeschooling at the same time, right?

Victoria Sivrais (17:41.347)

For sure. For sure. My

Beth (17:42.027)

okay, we can’t. We’re like BTSD. I mean. But I mean, the one thing I want to add on to that is that SEO was super expensive. We invested a lot. AI is not the ability to be found on AI is a different game. And we always talk about, my God, how much higher would our margins have been if we have AI and figured it out?

Victoria Sivrais (17:48.868)

Bye.

John Jantsch (17:54.201)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:07.874)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no question. Did

Victoria Sivrais (18:09.081)

Totally.

Beth (18:11.021)

And you can be so super localized with AI too that it’s for smaller or very localized businesses too.

John Jantsch (18:15.616)

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I’m curious, did either one of you have entrepreneurial upbringings?

Beth (18:22.393)

We both did. My we both did. My my dad is a serial entrepreneur, my biggest supporter. Both my brothers are entrepreneurs, Victoria.

Victoria Sivrais (18:23.855)

You got.

John Jantsch (18:24.97)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (18:34.425)

Yep, my dad’s an entrepreneur and and his dad, who I actually never had the luxury of meeting, had I can’t even count the number of businesses that they’ve told me he’s had. And my brothers followed in the same footstep too. So like it it is there. So maybe it is a little bit in our blood.

Beth (18:50.719)

And like at my family dinner is if you had to admit that you worked for someone else, everyone was like, For shame, you know, so you didn’t have that.

John Jantsch (18:56.586)

Yeah. So I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by and and share some of the insights here. But if somebody’s listening runs a business whether alone or they have a team, what would be the first thing you call them power moves? What would be maybe the first power move you would say? Obviously you don’t know who these businesses are or what they’re doing, but but what do you typically find like this is the first hole to plug?

Beth (19:23.223)

It’s always the money moves. It’s always that we look at the PL and go, what are you paying an executive coach for? Or if you increased your prices five percent, my God, this would change your take. So we want it to be softer than that, but God, it’s always that make the money moves that matter.

Victoria Sivrais (19:24.918)

Always.

Victoria Sivrais (19:41.027)

I mean, we talk to business owners all the time, and almost I would say one out of every four, they’re telling me, yeah, we’re I’m making a ton of money. Like blah, blah, blah. Okay. So less your expenses, how much are you taking home? well, nothing. And okay. So you’re not actually making money. Like, I mean, it is pretty basic like that, I think. And honest to God, like in the early days of Claremont.

John Jantsch (19:58.499)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:02.606)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (20:09.943)

it was something that I didn’t know. Like it like pure cash I knew a profit and loss statement, but pure cash management about paying a vendor after you’ve been paid by your clients. It never had occurred to me, to be honest. Like I I figured I just want to stay on top of my bills. Like there are real basics of of building Yeah, totally.

John Jantsch (20:22.478)

Right.

John Jantsch (20:28.354)

Yeah, it’s it’s check checkbook finance. Right. Yeah, that’s funny.

Beth (20:32.899)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (20:35.011)

So I mean it’s so I I go back to the that the money moves that matter every day of the week. And I think secondarily the building the kitchen cabinet, knowing what you’re good at and what you’re not, and how to supplement where your weakness is is critically important too.

John Jantsch (20:39.822)

Yeah, yeah, awesome.

John Jantsch (20:51.232)

Awesome. Well again, Beth Victoria, I appreciate you stopping by and talking about Entrepreneur Like a Mother. is there anywhere you would invite people to connect with you, find out more about the book?

Beth (21:02.583)

Yeah, for sure. So it is available for pre order on Amazon. But if you go through female mavericks dot com, you actually get the course as well, which is pretty cool. And if you only have ten minute increments or ten minutes of tolerance for us a day, that’s another way to do it.

John Jantsch (21:15.246)

Mm-hmm.

Victoria Sivrais (21:17.325)

And we’ll share a code for a ten percent discount on the book as well as the code through our website.

John Jantsch (21:22.158)

Okay, awesome. We’ll do that quickly ’cause we’re gonna publish the show and it within gosh to get it out around launch time, depending upon when you guys are listening to this show. It comes out in September, but it will be available after September twenty second. We’ll have a link in the show notes as well. So again, appreciate it and hopefully we’ll run into you one or both of you somewhere out there on the road.

Victoria Sivrais (21:30.884)

Yeah.

Beth (21:44.675)

Thanks, John. Bye.

Victoria Sivrais (21:44.717)

Awesome. Thank you so much, John.

John Jantsch (00:01.122)

So most consultants build a business around what they’re good at. A smaller number build one that they can actually sell. The difference between those two paths shows up probably pretty quickly, long before anyone’s shopping for a buyer, that is. And usually it’s invisible to the person living it. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, my guest today. I have two guests: Beth.

Mazza and Victoria Sivrais. They’re serial entrepreneurs, collective moms of nine, who built and exited two successful professional service firms that advise SP leaders through make or break decisions, equal parts, boardroom powerhouses, and chaos managers. They’re now on a mission to help 10,000 women build seven-figure businesses. So, Beth and Victoria, welcome to the show.

Beth (00:50.765)

Thanks. We’re happy to be here, John. Thank you. No.

Victoria Sivrais (00:51.513)

Thanks so much.

John Jantsch (00:52.834)

Did did I butcher either one of your names? I ch I I hopefully not. Good, good, good. Awesome. Well, so I have to start by telling you that I have nine siblings, if that counts for anything. So so so I do I do have a sense of and there was only f 14 years between the ten of us, so I do have a sense of a little bit of what you guys are going through. Right. I only have four kids of my own, but but the the ten ten f

Victoria Sivrais (00:56.239)

You got it. I’m impressed.

Beth (01:03.416)

Hmm.

Victoria Sivrais (01:04.303)

Really?

Beth (01:12.05)

Whoa. So you kept chaos.

Victoria Sivrais (01:13.187)

That’s incredible.

Beth (01:19.289)

So do I.

John Jantsch (01:21.304)

10 member family was quite something. So let’s jump into I I want to start with this may feel like a challenge, but I I know you guys have the answer to this. but I want to start with this sort of disconnect for me. As I read your bio and you know, S P five hundred, you know, make or break decisions. and then I look at the the title of the book, which I actually I forgot I forgot wasn’t in the in the bio, so I’ll

Beth (01:25.293)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:50.999)

Read it out right now. entrepreneur like a mother. Build a company that buys your freedom and not one that owns your life. And, you know, that sounds a little more like a lifestyle business book that maybe is different from you know what what I read in your bios. So help our listeners understand where where where I’m getting that wrong.

Beth (02:13.767)

yeah, that no, that’s a fair question. So two things. One is side hustles don’t give you financial freedom. They don’t pay for your kids’ college. They don’t pay for your house. They don’t pay for you to retire at the age as we did. So our number one premise behind this book is you gotta build a business where you get financial freedom. And you can do that if you choose the right business model and you set some of the right barriers from day one of your business. And

John Jantsch (02:22.221)

Right.

Beth (02:40.801)

Literally the entire book is about when we did that successfully, which we did a lot, and when we did that unsuccessfully, which also was a lot.

John Jantsch (02:48.44)

Sure, sure. Well, that’s the only way you learn one from the other, right? so so a lot of what you talk about is the idea of of building your your first business, planning to sell it. and I think a lot of people, I I I can’t imagine there are too many people that that’s not the dream. however, you know, you get sort of stuck in the day-to-day and it’s like, no, I’m just trying to pay the bills or pay myself, and it turns into a job, not a business even. So how did you

How did you make that decision? What did you do that changed, you know, how you went to business that that you know, in into business that that really made that happen for you?

Victoria Sivrais (03:26.979)

Yeah. So I I think from our perspective, sales became the center of everything we did from day one. So I think when you are trying to create a lifestyle business or one that just kind of is a replacement to your corporate salary, I think there is a a slowness of it sometimes. Maybe take your time. It was never our mentality. From day one, it is

How can you get more clients? How can you build our brand? And how can you expand to a point where you have a scalable business that then becomes attractive to a buyer? So I think that that was number one. Now, where I what I personally fell short, somewhere in the middle of that, was I couldn’t give up control about some of the more mundane tasks that were necessary to run the b business forward. So I was lucky enough to have a business partner.

John Jantsch (04:13.133)

Mm.

Victoria Sivrais (04:20.205)

That was, hey, it’s time to, it’s time to take invoicing off your plate. It’s time to take HR. It’s time to hire the HR manager. It’s time to hire someone that can actually run the office on a day to day basis. And that is, I think, what became the difference of we were creating a lifestyle business to a scalable business that that we could sell one day.

John Jantsch (04:44.782)

Well, and I think you aptly refer to that as a kitchen cabinet idea, or at least that that to have like, you know, a champion, a compensator, and a connector. is that something that can be one person that has three personalities? Does that definitely need to be outside people? you know, that like I have this skill set, you have that skill set. is that something you decide from day really early on? Or when you decided you wanted to change this business at least?

Beth (05:07.971)

Yeah, I think

I think there’s no way we as moms, unless we had a cabinet, could do this, right? Cause we needed cheerleading, we needed like people to pick up our kids when we were our flight was delayed. But then we also needed really, really big thinkers. We built a software product. Like we needed a big software guy that we didn’t know anything about. So we did it very methodically, which is how we’ve we’ve written it in Hunterprel Like a Mother. Three types, champions, connectors, compensators, and we built it.

Over a few years, and we did as much asking of favors as we did giving of favors, and we paid it as much for it as possible. But I mean, two members of our kitchen cabinet, one saved us from signing a very bad deal to sell our company, two did. And at least two to three of them made the introductions for the clients that paid us a lot of money, especially in a post-COVID world where those were not coming very quickly.

John Jantsch (05:43.053)

Mm-hmm.

Beth (06:09.781)

So it’s it is a long term, it is many people that you keep up with, that you spend twenty minutes a day with with, but it’s also what you do from day one of the business. You’re always thinking about building that.

John Jantsch (06:23.446)

D do you think that that you had or do you think that it takes a different sort of investment mindset in in the business than most people have? Cause again, a lot of people get in, they get a client and then they want the next client and then it’s like, you know, we’re we’re just trying to keep this thing going, you know, hustle work. Did did you have a different investment mentality than that?

Victoria Sivrais (06:45.019)

a hundred percent we did. So, like, I mean, yes, it was about building clients in and building revenues in the early days. but it then became how are we gonna have an expense structure? Cause our our goal from the get-go was to run 30% margins, which is very attractive in a professional services business. And so our investments what were centered around

not only driving growth at the top line, but maintaining and expanding that margin that was, you know, break even in the early days to to the the goal of the 30% margin. So like as a result, like our power move three is make the money moves that matter. And that is all about the financial non negotiables, not only personally as a as a woman raising a family and building a business, but also within the business, what are you willing to do?

John Jantsch (07:24.567)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (07:36.586)

Achieve your goals. So, like a couple of our goals were we only paid out at net 45 to our vendors, but we were pretty slavish to collecting it net 30. So we had a nice cash cushion in between. You know, we never had our expense line go above our retained revenues because half of our business was project revenues, but we never took that expense structure over our retained revenues. So we knew we had the flexibility for investment in later, and we only took on debt.

John Jantsch (07:57.654)

Mm.

Victoria Sivrais (08:05.291)

if we knew we had an identif identifiable return on that investment. It was just those were three of our non-negotiables that we always had.

Beth (08:14.423)

And the one other thing we did is we invested in sales and marketing. When we were two people, we were putting 10% of what we made into sales and marketing. We put out really good thought leadership that we wanted SP 500, 1,000 CEOs to read. We figured out real early we could not get it read if we just sent them emails. And we invested in marketing. We were very early on SEO. We did all that to get the marketing out to make sure that.

the influencer to the CEO or the CEO himself saw our thought leadership, which as a really small firm, we had some really big bills, but that was a total investment. And we by the time we sold 50% of our business came from that effort. Come there were calls in from that effort.

John Jantsch (08:59.172)

Okay.

S so so in the eight minutes and or nine minutes now and four seconds we’ve been talking, you’ve actually demonstrated more business savvy than most people have, let’s face it. So what how do you translate that in your book to somebody who maybe hasn’t you know, really some of the things you’re throwing out hasn’t even considered?

Victoria Sivrais (09:22.509)

You you know, we we put it in the framework of these five power moves. And honestly, we really, we really, I people would say we dumbed it down. We didn’t. We actually brought it down to a level that we needed when we were learning ourselves. And we tried to be as explicit and as prescriptive as we possibly can. So, like power move one is all about whether or not it’s a passion project or actually a really viable business idea. So we start with what is your total addressable math.

Market, how do you figure out what your total addressable market is? And how do you figure out how you’re going to capture a portion of that that makes it a seven-figure business? Then we start to talk about, you know, build the network with your kitchen cabinet. Like where, you know, most entrepreneurs tend to be control freaks, a, you know, type A people that think they’re great at everything. The skinny is you’re not. So like figure out what you’re not good at and figure out where you can kind of support that.

John Jantsch (10:09.646)

Sure.

Victoria Sivrais (10:18.713)

Then we talk about the money moves that matter. Then we talk about, which is honestly a favorite of both of ours, is respect the pivot. Like understand that when things aren’t going the right way, you gotta be able to dodge and weave as quickly as you possibly can. And then the last piece is really once you have a business that is moving, now how do you scale it? And I think that those are the pieces. And again, depending on where you’re at in your business, you can pick up in any one of those places.

And I think that that is the beauty of this framework that we’ve created, is that you can jump in wherever you’re at with your business.

Beth (10:52.621)

I mean, this this book is intentionally so prescriptive. You literally have your pen and you’re writing this stuff down. There are worksheets, there are questions. We give our real world examples. Times we did great things and terrible things, and it’s all in there so that not only do you know what to do, but you can also feel better that two idiots figured out a way to make it work too.

John Jantsch (11:15.98)

All right, so you can smack me for this question if you want, later at least. is could can men read this book.

Beth (11:24.397)

My God. Do you know how many female mavericks are men? Like we never talk about that. So many of them are men.

Victoria Sivrais (11:24.409)

Hundred percent. I mean a hundred percent. I mean

Victoria Sivrais (11:32.976)

Can we also talk about that between the two of us, we have six brothers? Like we are the two women and a lot of men in our life. And so like it’s not meant. We wrote it in the idea, because I think a lot of times women, particularly women who want to be mothers, are told that they can either be a business owner or they can be a mother. And the point is, is you can do both. Like we’re sick of that myth and we’re trying to break the break the glass on that myth.

John Jantsch (11:38.131)

Ha ha

Beth (11:39.811)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:50.304)

Mm-hmm. Right.

Victoria Sivrais (11:59.746)

Men doing the same thing, and especially now, men versus like when my parents were growing up and you know there was no mom out in the workplace, like dads are just as involved with the kids versus where they used to be. And so, like, my husband is a hundred percent partner of mine. He is, I mean, we were just negotiating who’s picking up kids this afternoon because I had this podcast. So, like, I mean, those business owners, well, and even honestly.

John Jantsch (12:08.579)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:17.411)

Yeah. Right.

Victoria Sivrais (12:26.667)

ambitious men and women within corporate America. I think there’s a lot of pieces that you can take out of this, particularly around the the building of the kitchen cabin and respecting a pivot. Like those are just clear things that help you drive your business forward, whether or not corporate or entrepreneur.

Beth (12:44.771)

But men should pay full price for it. Women think it’s just men should pay just for everything you put us through through the generations.

John Jantsch (12:45.197)

So yeah. Hey, I think it’s fair. so there one concept you talk about is expertise dependent businesses versus system dependent businesses. talk a little bit about what that looks like and why that’s an important concept.

Victoria Sivrais (12:46.873)

For sure. We’ll give the ladies a discount. Yeah.

Beth (12:54.819)

Ha ha.

Beth (13:10.029)

Yeah, I think this is a big one. We as women, we only want to do the things that we’re best at. So we tend to, I think, begin expertise driven businesses, which is what Victoria and I did as well. But expertise driven businesses, unless you are in like some amazing area where you can charge 50,000 an hour, you are maxed, right? You are maxed how much you can make. And and you’re you’re also giving up like so much of your life in in being the go to person.

What we learned, because we scaled twice, right? And so we we learned a lot, is unless you can put your expertise into some kind of a system, and then you can hire, retain, train, support, empower a team of people that can do almost what you can do, you can’t scale. It doesn’t matter if you have AI, it doesn’t matter what you have, you cannot scale. You have high-profile people that want to talk to a human being that’s competent. So

We really learned in that second business. And some of that was driven by our own employees saying, You’re not even giving us a shot on goal. You’re not even letting us get a shot to talk to a CEO. You haven’t trained us. And we both really stepped back and we really invested there. And we turned out selling the company with seven or eight people that could do what we did. They all got a small piece of the business. They all have great careers. But I mean, that was a big investment from us. So, like if you want to be bigger, you want

John Jantsch (14:17.439)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:30.819)

Yeah. Yeah.

Beth (14:34.273)

Your kids not to have college debt, you’ve got to figure out a system driven business.

John Jantsch (14:38.967)

Yeah, I am. you know, I w we work with a lot of business owners and I mean the the one thing I counsel them on all the time is, you know, until you’re no longer the rainmaker, you know, you’re stuck. And I think that’s really to me, that’s the really the big one. If you know if that’s if you’re the only person that can sell the big deal, then you’re you’re never gonna get out of this thing. So what one of the things that I read that

Victoria Sivrais (14:44.319)

Mm.

Victoria Sivrais (14:50.115)

No

Victoria Sivrais (15:00.367)

Agreed.

John Jantsch (15:05.495)

the seventy-five percent of your cash w went into cold outreach from day one. that’s almost taboo for like consulting, you know, type businesses. It’s like, no, you build your network of trust and you get referrals. And so so talk a little bit about that math for a high touch advisory firm.

Victoria Sivrais (15:24.023)

I mean, you d we call it in the book, we call it caveman marketing. Cause I mean, it really was. I mean, it was a numbers game in the beginning, in terms of the cold outreach. For every ten calls we made, we got one meeting, you know, or every a hundred calls we made, we got 10 meetings, we got one close. Like it just it was what it was. What I think we did very interestingly to support that was not just the cold calling. It was up front, we made a ton of investment in that thought leadership that Beth talked about a little bit ago, which was

John Jantsch (15:28.099)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (15:53.302)

Not cold emails selling our services. It was it was expanding and sharing our expertise around areas that mattered to the C-suite and the board of directors of these large public companies. And we never asked for anything from it. We honestly just would share as much as they listen to it. And honestly, in in COVID is where it really, really took off because you know, that March date, March 16th.

All of our public companies just stopped paying us. All of our huge pipeline just stopped responding to us. No one knew. We were working a hundred hours a week trying to assuage all the concerns on Wall Street that every public company was going belly up. Like we didn’t have anything to do except for just kind of maintain our client base. So in our spare time, which we had so much of it, we just wrote about what was happening out in the market. And we just kept on sending out

John Jantsch (16:24.319)

Mm-hmm. Right.

John Jantsch (16:44.046)

Mm.

John Jantsch (16:48.771)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (16:49.775)

Thought leadership after thought leadership, we did really basic roundups of by industry, how people are talking about financial position, cash on hand, investments, all of those things. And that drove our SEO, which became us the number one ranking in both our core business, which was investor relations, and our growth business, which was ESG communications consulting. And so when the world started to slowly open back up that summer.

John Jantsch (17:04.441)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (17:17.827)

They said, okay, there’s all these mandates that we have to do. Who should we call? you know, those ladies that never stop emailing us about all the things that are happening. And it opened the floodgates. And so it didn’t stop us from our cold outreach. We still did that. But when we got there, we had built such great brand recognition that they picked up the phone when we called.

John Jantsch (17:24.431)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (17:36.11)

Yeah.

All while homeschooling at the same time, right?

Victoria Sivrais (17:41.347)

For sure. For sure. My

Beth (17:42.027)

okay, we can’t. We’re like BTSD. I mean. But I mean, the one thing I want to add on to that is that SEO was super expensive. We invested a lot. AI is not the ability to be found on AI is a different game. And we always talk about, my God, how much higher would our margins have been if we have AI and figured it out?

Victoria Sivrais (17:48.868)

Bye.

John Jantsch (17:54.201)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:07.874)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no question. Did

Victoria Sivrais (18:09.081)

Totally.

Beth (18:11.021)

And you can be so super localized with AI too that it’s for smaller or very localized businesses too.

John Jantsch (18:15.616)

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I’m curious, did either one of you have entrepreneurial upbringings?

Beth (18:22.393)

We both did. My we both did. My my dad is a serial entrepreneur, my biggest supporter. Both my brothers are entrepreneurs, Victoria.

Victoria Sivrais (18:23.855)

You got.

John Jantsch (18:24.97)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (18:34.425)

Yep, my dad’s an entrepreneur and and his dad, who I actually never had the luxury of meeting, had I can’t even count the number of businesses that they’ve told me he’s had. And my brothers followed in the same footstep too. So like it it is there. So maybe it is a little bit in our blood.

Beth (18:50.719)

And like at my family dinner is if you had to admit that you worked for someone else, everyone was like, For shame, you know, so you didn’t have that.

John Jantsch (18:56.586)

Yeah. So I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by and and share some of the insights here. But if somebody’s listening runs a business whether alone or they have a team, what would be the first thing you call them power moves? What would be maybe the first power move you would say? Obviously you don’t know who these businesses are or what they’re doing, but but what do you typically find like this is the first hole to plug?

Beth (19:23.223)

It’s always the money moves. It’s always that we look at the PL and go, what are you paying an executive coach for? Or if you increased your prices five percent, my God, this would change your take. So we want it to be softer than that, but God, it’s always that make the money moves that matter.

Victoria Sivrais (19:24.918)

Always.

Victoria Sivrais (19:41.027)

I mean, we talk to business owners all the time, and almost I would say one out of every four, they’re telling me, yeah, we’re I’m making a ton of money. Like blah, blah, blah. Okay. So less your expenses, how much are you taking home? well, nothing. And okay. So you’re not actually making money. Like, I mean, it is pretty basic like that, I think. And honest to God, like in the early days of Claremont.

John Jantsch (19:58.499)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:02.606)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (20:09.943)

it was something that I didn’t know. Like it like pure cash I knew a profit and loss statement, but pure cash management about paying a vendor after you’ve been paid by your clients. It never had occurred to me, to be honest. Like I I figured I just want to stay on top of my bills. Like there are real basics of of building Yeah, totally.

John Jantsch (20:22.478)

Right.

John Jantsch (20:28.354)

Yeah, it’s it’s check checkbook finance. Right. Yeah, that’s funny.

Beth (20:32.899)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (20:35.011)

So I mean it’s so I I go back to the that the money moves that matter every day of the week. And I think secondarily the building the kitchen cabinet, knowing what you’re good at and what you’re not, and how to supplement where your weakness is is critically important too.

John Jantsch (20:39.822)

Yeah, yeah, awesome.

John Jantsch (20:51.232)

Awesome. Well again, Beth Victoria, I appreciate you stopping by and talking about Entrepreneur Like a Mother. is there anywhere you would invite people to connect with you, find out more about the book?

Beth (21:02.583)

Yeah, for sure. So it is available for pre order on Amazon. But if you go through female mavericks dot com, you actually get the course as well, which is pretty cool. And if you only have ten minute increments or ten minutes of tolerance for us a day, that’s another way to do it.

John Jantsch (21:15.246)

Mm-hmm.

Victoria Sivrais (21:17.325)

And we’ll share a code for a ten percent discount on the book as well as the code through our website.

John Jantsch (21:22.158)

Okay, awesome. We’ll do that quickly ’cause we’re gonna publish the show and it within gosh to get it out around launch time, depending upon when you guys are listening to this show. It comes out in September, but it will be available after September twenty second. We’ll have a link in the show notes as well. So again, appreciate it and hopefully we’ll run into you one or both of you somewhere out there on the road.

Victoria Sivrais (21:30.884)

Yeah.

Beth (21:44.675)

Thanks, John. Bye.

Victoria Sivrais (21:44.717)

Awesome. Thank you so much, John.

John Jantsch (00:01.122)

So most consultants build a business around what they’re good at. A smaller number build one that they can actually sell. The difference between those two paths shows up probably pretty quickly, long before anyone’s shopping for a buyer, that is. And usually it’s invisible to the person living it. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, my guest today. I have two guests: Beth.

Mazza and Victoria Sivrais. They’re serial entrepreneurs, collective moms of nine, who built and exited two successful professional service firms that advise SP leaders through make or break decisions, equal parts, boardroom powerhouses, and chaos managers. They’re now on a mission to help 10,000 women build seven-figure businesses. So, Beth and Victoria, welcome to the show.

Beth (00:50.765)

Thanks. We’re happy to be here, John. Thank you. No.

Victoria Sivrais (00:51.513)

Thanks so much.

John Jantsch (00:52.834)

Did did I butcher either one of your names? I ch I I hopefully not. Good, good, good. Awesome. Well, so I have to start by telling you that I have nine siblings, if that counts for anything. So so so I do I do have a sense of and there was only f 14 years between the ten of us, so I do have a sense of a little bit of what you guys are going through. Right. I only have four kids of my own, but but the the ten ten f

Victoria Sivrais (00:56.239)

You got it. I’m impressed.

Beth (01:03.416)

Hmm.

Victoria Sivrais (01:04.303)

Really?

Beth (01:12.05)

Whoa. So you kept chaos.

Victoria Sivrais (01:13.187)

That’s incredible.

Beth (01:19.289)

So do I.

John Jantsch (01:21.304)

10 member family was quite something. So let’s jump into I I want to start with this may feel like a challenge, but I I know you guys have the answer to this. but I want to start with this sort of disconnect for me. As I read your bio and you know, S P five hundred, you know, make or break decisions. and then I look at the the title of the book, which I actually I forgot I forgot wasn’t in the in the bio, so I’ll

Beth (01:25.293)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:50.999)

Read it out right now. entrepreneur like a mother. Build a company that buys your freedom and not one that owns your life. And, you know, that sounds a little more like a lifestyle business book that maybe is different from you know what what I read in your bios. So help our listeners understand where where where I’m getting that wrong.

Beth (02:13.767)

yeah, that no, that’s a fair question. So two things. One is side hustles don’t give you financial freedom. They don’t pay for your kids’ college. They don’t pay for your house. They don’t pay for you to retire at the age as we did. So our number one premise behind this book is you gotta build a business where you get financial freedom. And you can do that if you choose the right business model and you set some of the right barriers from day one of your business. And

John Jantsch (02:22.221)

Right.

Beth (02:40.801)

Literally the entire book is about when we did that successfully, which we did a lot, and when we did that unsuccessfully, which also was a lot.

John Jantsch (02:48.44)

Sure, sure. Well, that’s the only way you learn one from the other, right? so so a lot of what you talk about is the idea of of building your your first business, planning to sell it. and I think a lot of people, I I I can’t imagine there are too many people that that’s not the dream. however, you know, you get sort of stuck in the day-to-day and it’s like, no, I’m just trying to pay the bills or pay myself, and it turns into a job, not a business even. So how did you

How did you make that decision? What did you do that changed, you know, how you went to business that that you know, in into business that that really made that happen for you?

Victoria Sivrais (03:26.979)

Yeah. So I I think from our perspective, sales became the center of everything we did from day one. So I think when you are trying to create a lifestyle business or one that just kind of is a replacement to your corporate salary, I think there is a a slowness of it sometimes. Maybe take your time. It was never our mentality. From day one, it is

How can you get more clients? How can you build our brand? And how can you expand to a point where you have a scalable business that then becomes attractive to a buyer? So I think that that was number one. Now, where I what I personally fell short, somewhere in the middle of that, was I couldn’t give up control about some of the more mundane tasks that were necessary to run the b business forward. So I was lucky enough to have a business partner.

John Jantsch (04:13.133)

Mm.

Victoria Sivrais (04:20.205)

That was, hey, it’s time to, it’s time to take invoicing off your plate. It’s time to take HR. It’s time to hire the HR manager. It’s time to hire someone that can actually run the office on a day to day basis. And that is, I think, what became the difference of we were creating a lifestyle business to a scalable business that that we could sell one day.

John Jantsch (04:44.782)

Well, and I think you aptly refer to that as a kitchen cabinet idea, or at least that that to have like, you know, a champion, a compensator, and a connector. is that something that can be one person that has three personalities? Does that definitely need to be outside people? you know, that like I have this skill set, you have that skill set. is that something you decide from day really early on? Or when you decided you wanted to change this business at least?

Beth (05:07.971)

Yeah, I think

I think there’s no way we as moms, unless we had a cabinet, could do this, right? Cause we needed cheerleading, we needed like people to pick up our kids when we were our flight was delayed. But then we also needed really, really big thinkers. We built a software product. Like we needed a big software guy that we didn’t know anything about. So we did it very methodically, which is how we’ve we’ve written it in Hunterprel Like a Mother. Three types, champions, connectors, compensators, and we built it.

Over a few years, and we did as much asking of favors as we did giving of favors, and we paid it as much for it as possible. But I mean, two members of our kitchen cabinet, one saved us from signing a very bad deal to sell our company, two did. And at least two to three of them made the introductions for the clients that paid us a lot of money, especially in a post-COVID world where those were not coming very quickly.

John Jantsch (05:43.053)

Mm-hmm.

Beth (06:09.781)

So it’s it is a long term, it is many people that you keep up with, that you spend twenty minutes a day with with, but it’s also what you do from day one of the business. You’re always thinking about building that.

John Jantsch (06:23.446)

D do you think that that you had or do you think that it takes a different sort of investment mindset in in the business than most people have? Cause again, a lot of people get in, they get a client and then they want the next client and then it’s like, you know, we’re we’re just trying to keep this thing going, you know, hustle work. Did did you have a different investment mentality than that?

Victoria Sivrais (06:45.019)

a hundred percent we did. So, like, I mean, yes, it was about building clients in and building revenues in the early days. but it then became how are we gonna have an expense structure? Cause our our goal from the get-go was to run 30% margins, which is very attractive in a professional services business. And so our investments what were centered around

not only driving growth at the top line, but maintaining and expanding that margin that was, you know, break even in the early days to to the the goal of the 30% margin. So like as a result, like our power move three is make the money moves that matter. And that is all about the financial non negotiables, not only personally as a as a woman raising a family and building a business, but also within the business, what are you willing to do?

John Jantsch (07:24.567)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (07:36.586)

Achieve your goals. So, like a couple of our goals were we only paid out at net 45 to our vendors, but we were pretty slavish to collecting it net 30. So we had a nice cash cushion in between. You know, we never had our expense line go above our retained revenues because half of our business was project revenues, but we never took that expense structure over our retained revenues. So we knew we had the flexibility for investment in later, and we only took on debt.

John Jantsch (07:57.654)

Mm.

Victoria Sivrais (08:05.291)

if we knew we had an identif identifiable return on that investment. It was just those were three of our non-negotiables that we always had.

Beth (08:14.423)

And the one other thing we did is we invested in sales and marketing. When we were two people, we were putting 10% of what we made into sales and marketing. We put out really good thought leadership that we wanted SP 500, 1,000 CEOs to read. We figured out real early we could not get it read if we just sent them emails. And we invested in marketing. We were very early on SEO. We did all that to get the marketing out to make sure that.

the influencer to the CEO or the CEO himself saw our thought leadership, which as a really small firm, we had some really big bills, but that was a total investment. And we by the time we sold 50% of our business came from that effort. Come there were calls in from that effort.

John Jantsch (08:59.172)

Okay.

S so so in the eight minutes and or nine minutes now and four seconds we’ve been talking, you’ve actually demonstrated more business savvy than most people have, let’s face it. So what how do you translate that in your book to somebody who maybe hasn’t you know, really some of the things you’re throwing out hasn’t even considered?

Victoria Sivrais (09:22.509)

You you know, we we put it in the framework of these five power moves. And honestly, we really, we really, I people would say we dumbed it down. We didn’t. We actually brought it down to a level that we needed when we were learning ourselves. And we tried to be as explicit and as prescriptive as we possibly can. So, like power move one is all about whether or not it’s a passion project or actually a really viable business idea. So we start with what is your total addressable math.

Market, how do you figure out what your total addressable market is? And how do you figure out how you’re going to capture a portion of that that makes it a seven-figure business? Then we start to talk about, you know, build the network with your kitchen cabinet. Like where, you know, most entrepreneurs tend to be control freaks, a, you know, type A people that think they’re great at everything. The skinny is you’re not. So like figure out what you’re not good at and figure out where you can kind of support that.

John Jantsch (10:09.646)

Sure.

Victoria Sivrais (10:18.713)

Then we talk about the money moves that matter. Then we talk about, which is honestly a favorite of both of ours, is respect the pivot. Like understand that when things aren’t going the right way, you gotta be able to dodge and weave as quickly as you possibly can. And then the last piece is really once you have a business that is moving, now how do you scale it? And I think that those are the pieces. And again, depending on where you’re at in your business, you can pick up in any one of those places.

And I think that that is the beauty of this framework that we’ve created, is that you can jump in wherever you’re at with your business.

Beth (10:52.621)

I mean, this this book is intentionally so prescriptive. You literally have your pen and you’re writing this stuff down. There are worksheets, there are questions. We give our real world examples. Times we did great things and terrible things, and it’s all in there so that not only do you know what to do, but you can also feel better that two idiots figured out a way to make it work too.

John Jantsch (11:15.98)

All right, so you can smack me for this question if you want, later at least. is could can men read this book.

Beth (11:24.397)

My God. Do you know how many female mavericks are men? Like we never talk about that. So many of them are men.

Victoria Sivrais (11:24.409)

Hundred percent. I mean a hundred percent. I mean

Victoria Sivrais (11:32.976)

Can we also talk about that between the two of us, we have six brothers? Like we are the two women and a lot of men in our life. And so like it’s not meant. We wrote it in the idea, because I think a lot of times women, particularly women who want to be mothers, are told that they can either be a business owner or they can be a mother. And the point is, is you can do both. Like we’re sick of that myth and we’re trying to break the break the glass on that myth.

John Jantsch (11:38.131)

Ha ha

Beth (11:39.811)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:50.304)

Mm-hmm. Right.

Victoria Sivrais (11:59.746)

Men doing the same thing, and especially now, men versus like when my parents were growing up and you know there was no mom out in the workplace, like dads are just as involved with the kids versus where they used to be. And so, like, my husband is a hundred percent partner of mine. He is, I mean, we were just negotiating who’s picking up kids this afternoon because I had this podcast. So, like, I mean, those business owners, well, and even honestly.

John Jantsch (12:08.579)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:17.411)

Yeah. Right.

Victoria Sivrais (12:26.667)

ambitious men and women within corporate America. I think there’s a lot of pieces that you can take out of this, particularly around the the building of the kitchen cabin and respecting a pivot. Like those are just clear things that help you drive your business forward, whether or not corporate or entrepreneur.

Beth (12:44.771)

But men should pay full price for it. Women think it’s just men should pay just for everything you put us through through the generations.

John Jantsch (12:45.197)

So yeah. Hey, I think it’s fair. so there one concept you talk about is expertise dependent businesses versus system dependent businesses. talk a little bit about what that looks like and why that’s an important concept.

Victoria Sivrais (12:46.873)

For sure. We’ll give the ladies a discount. Yeah.

Beth (12:54.819)

Ha ha.

Beth (13:10.029)

Yeah, I think this is a big one. We as women, we only want to do the things that we’re best at. So we tend to, I think, begin expertise driven businesses, which is what Victoria and I did as well. But expertise driven businesses, unless you are in like some amazing area where you can charge 50,000 an hour, you are maxed, right? You are maxed how much you can make. And and you’re you’re also giving up like so much of your life in in being the go to person.

What we learned, because we scaled twice, right? And so we we learned a lot, is unless you can put your expertise into some kind of a system, and then you can hire, retain, train, support, empower a team of people that can do almost what you can do, you can’t scale. It doesn’t matter if you have AI, it doesn’t matter what you have, you cannot scale. You have high-profile people that want to talk to a human being that’s competent. So

We really learned in that second business. And some of that was driven by our own employees saying, You’re not even giving us a shot on goal. You’re not even letting us get a shot to talk to a CEO. You haven’t trained us. And we both really stepped back and we really invested there. And we turned out selling the company with seven or eight people that could do what we did. They all got a small piece of the business. They all have great careers. But I mean, that was a big investment from us. So, like if you want to be bigger, you want

John Jantsch (14:17.439)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:30.819)

Yeah. Yeah.

Beth (14:34.273)

Your kids not to have college debt, you’ve got to figure out a system driven business.

John Jantsch (14:38.967)

Yeah, I am. you know, I w we work with a lot of business owners and I mean the the one thing I counsel them on all the time is, you know, until you’re no longer the rainmaker, you know, you’re stuck. And I think that’s really to me, that’s the really the big one. If you know if that’s if you’re the only person that can sell the big deal, then you’re you’re never gonna get out of this thing. So what one of the things that I read that

Victoria Sivrais (14:44.319)

Mm.

Victoria Sivrais (14:50.115)

No

Victoria Sivrais (15:00.367)

Agreed.

John Jantsch (15:05.495)

the seventy-five percent of your cash w went into cold outreach from day one. that’s almost taboo for like consulting, you know, type businesses. It’s like, no, you build your network of trust and you get referrals. And so so talk a little bit about that math for a high touch advisory firm.

Victoria Sivrais (15:24.023)

I mean, you d we call it in the book, we call it caveman marketing. Cause I mean, it really was. I mean, it was a numbers game in the beginning, in terms of the cold outreach. For every ten calls we made, we got one meeting, you know, or every a hundred calls we made, we got 10 meetings, we got one close. Like it just it was what it was. What I think we did very interestingly to support that was not just the cold calling. It was up front, we made a ton of investment in that thought leadership that Beth talked about a little bit ago, which was

John Jantsch (15:28.099)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (15:53.302)

Not cold emails selling our services. It was it was expanding and sharing our expertise around areas that mattered to the C-suite and the board of directors of these large public companies. And we never asked for anything from it. We honestly just would share as much as they listen to it. And honestly, in in COVID is where it really, really took off because you know, that March date, March 16th.

All of our public companies just stopped paying us. All of our huge pipeline just stopped responding to us. No one knew. We were working a hundred hours a week trying to assuage all the concerns on Wall Street that every public company was going belly up. Like we didn’t have anything to do except for just kind of maintain our client base. So in our spare time, which we had so much of it, we just wrote about what was happening out in the market. And we just kept on sending out

John Jantsch (16:24.319)

Mm-hmm. Right.

John Jantsch (16:44.046)

Mm.

John Jantsch (16:48.771)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (16:49.775)

Thought leadership after thought leadership, we did really basic roundups of by industry, how people are talking about financial position, cash on hand, investments, all of those things. And that drove our SEO, which became us the number one ranking in both our core business, which was investor relations, and our growth business, which was ESG communications consulting. And so when the world started to slowly open back up that summer.

John Jantsch (17:04.441)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (17:17.827)

They said, okay, there’s all these mandates that we have to do. Who should we call? you know, those ladies that never stop emailing us about all the things that are happening. And it opened the floodgates. And so it didn’t stop us from our cold outreach. We still did that. But when we got there, we had built such great brand recognition that they picked up the phone when we called.

John Jantsch (17:24.431)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (17:36.11)

Yeah.

All while homeschooling at the same time, right?

Victoria Sivrais (17:41.347)

For sure. For sure. My

Beth (17:42.027)

okay, we can’t. We’re like BTSD. I mean. But I mean, the one thing I want to add on to that is that SEO was super expensive. We invested a lot. AI is not the ability to be found on AI is a different game. And we always talk about, my God, how much higher would our margins have been if we have AI and figured it out?

Victoria Sivrais (17:48.868)

Bye.

John Jantsch (17:54.201)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:07.874)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no question. Did

Victoria Sivrais (18:09.081)

Totally.

Beth (18:11.021)

And you can be so super localized with AI too that it’s for smaller or very localized businesses too.

John Jantsch (18:15.616)

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I’m curious, did either one of you have entrepreneurial upbringings?

Beth (18:22.393)

We both did. My we both did. My my dad is a serial entrepreneur, my biggest supporter. Both my brothers are entrepreneurs, Victoria.

Victoria Sivrais (18:23.855)

You got.

John Jantsch (18:24.97)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (18:34.425)

Yep, my dad’s an entrepreneur and and his dad, who I actually never had the luxury of meeting, had I can’t even count the number of businesses that they’ve told me he’s had. And my brothers followed in the same footstep too. So like it it is there. So maybe it is a little bit in our blood.

Beth (18:50.719)

And like at my family dinner is if you had to admit that you worked for someone else, everyone was like, For shame, you know, so you didn’t have that.

John Jantsch (18:56.586)

Yeah. So I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by and and share some of the insights here. But if somebody’s listening runs a business whether alone or they have a team, what would be the first thing you call them power moves? What would be maybe the first power move you would say? Obviously you don’t know who these businesses are or what they’re doing, but but what do you typically find like this is the first hole to plug?

Beth (19:23.223)

It’s always the money moves. It’s always that we look at the PL and go, what are you paying an executive coach for? Or if you increased your prices five percent, my God, this would change your take. So we want it to be softer than that, but God, it’s always that make the money moves that matter.

Victoria Sivrais (19:24.918)

Always.

Victoria Sivrais (19:41.027)

I mean, we talk to business owners all the time, and almost I would say one out of every four, they’re telling me, yeah, we’re I’m making a ton of money. Like blah, blah, blah. Okay. So less your expenses, how much are you taking home? well, nothing. And okay. So you’re not actually making money. Like, I mean, it is pretty basic like that, I think. And honest to God, like in the early days of Claremont.

John Jantsch (19:58.499)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:02.606)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (20:09.943)

it was something that I didn’t know. Like it like pure cash I knew a profit and loss statement, but pure cash management about paying a vendor after you’ve been paid by your clients. It never had occurred to me, to be honest. Like I I figured I just want to stay on top of my bills. Like there are real basics of of building Yeah, totally.

John Jantsch (20:22.478)

Right.

John Jantsch (20:28.354)

Yeah, it’s it’s check checkbook finance. Right. Yeah, that’s funny.

Beth (20:32.899)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (20:35.011)

So I mean it’s so I I go back to the that the money moves that matter every day of the week. And I think secondarily the building the kitchen cabinet, knowing what you’re good at and what you’re not, and how to supplement where your weakness is is critically important too.

John Jantsch (20:39.822)

Yeah, yeah, awesome.

John Jantsch (20:51.232)

Awesome. Well again, Beth Victoria, I appreciate you stopping by and talking about Entrepreneur Like a Mother. is there anywhere you would invite people to connect with you, find out more about the book?

Beth (21:02.583)

Yeah, for sure. So it is available for pre order on Amazon. But if you go through female mavericks dot com, you actually get the course as well, which is pretty cool. And if you only have ten minute increments or ten minutes of tolerance for us a day, that’s another way to do it.

John Jantsch (21:15.246)

Mm-hmm.

Victoria Sivrais (21:17.325)

And we’ll share a code for a ten percent discount on the book as well as the code through our website.

John Jantsch (21:22.158)

Okay, awesome. We’ll do that quickly ’cause we’re gonna publish the show and it within gosh to get it out around launch time, depending upon when you guys are listening to this show. It comes out in September, but it will be available after September twenty second. We’ll have a link in the show notes as well. So again, appreciate it and hopefully we’ll run into you one or both of you somewhere out there on the road.

Victoria Sivrais (21:30.884)

Yeah.

Beth (21:44.675)

Thanks, John. Bye.

Victoria Sivrais (21:44.717)

Awesome. Thank you so much, John.

John Jantsch (00:01.24)

So, what if the same people that taught millions of businesses to build marketing funnels to generate inbound leads admitted maybe some of that’s dead because they’re the ones that killed it? Their own traffic dropped 80% almost overnight, but revenue kept climbing anyway. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Kipp Bodnar. He’s the CMO at HubSpot.

Where he spent over 15 years since company had a little less than 10 million in revenue at that time. He also co-hosts the podcast Marketing Against the Green and serves on the board of Gusto and Similar Web. We’re gonna talk about his new book, co-written with Kieran Flanagan, as called Loop. Outlearn, outmarket, and outgrow. So Kip, welcome to the show.

Kipp Bodnar (00:50.602)

John, thanks so much for having me. Pleasure to be here.

John Jantsch (00:52.332)

So so so when I read your co-author’s name, I just immediately go into this Irish accent, which is terrible. But I’m I’m sh well, I’m afraid that people get very tired of that, but it’s just it’s such an Irish name. So I I mentioned the idea of HubSpot’s traffic numbers going down. was there a like a time period? I mean, HubSpot’s not loaned.

Kipp Bodnar (00:58.334)

I love it. Please. He he has a great Irish accent accent. Do the whole show in it if you want.

Kipp Bodnar (01:06.932)

completely.

John Jantsch (01:21.932)

A lot you guys had just done such a good Yeah, I was gonna say, you guys had just done such a good job of building a lot of organic traffic. was there like a day when somebody said, This is a problem. I mean we we actually we need to do something about this?

Kipp Bodnar (01:22.88)

Tons tons of people have.

Kipp Bodnar (01:36.821)

There’s a couple things. One before this all happened, we knew it was going to be a risk for the future. So we bought a company called The Hustle. We we diversified well well beyond the blog, but we lost 140 million visits over the course of a year. And so what happened was between the rise of AI and Google doing a bunch of algorithm updates, you saw a pretty dramatic. Like at the start of that, it wasn’t like you lose a little bit of visits and then it got

John Jantsch (02:04.216)

Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (02:06.88)

gradually worse. It’s like it dropped off pretty good, pretty quickly. And it’s like, gosh, there has to be a better way. And if this is happening to us, I’m sure it’s happening to others and will like or will likely happen to others. And we need to get ahead of all of this.

John Jantsch (02:19.234)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (02:23.138)

Just from my own experience, our traffic is probably down 50% from its, you know, from its high. But we pr pretty quickly realized it was a lot of garbage traffic. you know, it yeah. Yeah. I mean, and you guys did, you know, you had the listicles. I mean, you had all the stuff that that drove eyeballs that probably wasn’t very high value traffic. So, you know, in some ways are we better off, you know, well, you know, not having to try to chase that.

Kipp Bodnar (02:32.116)

Lot of it was garbage traffic. It’s a key insight for everyone.

Kipp Bodnar (02:39.37)

Yeah, of course. Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (02:54.354)

look, I think we’re better and worse off at the same time. I think I think the ability to bring people to a site that you owned and you controlled and you could really shape their interactions versus being more reliant on podcasts and YouTube and TikTok and reels and everything else that’s out there, you know, which you’re limited to those platforms and their guardrails and their rules, that’s probably the tough trade off.

John Jantsch (02:56.962)

Yeah, okay.

John Jantsch (03:03.79)

Right, right, right.

John Jantsch (03:12.374)

LinkedIn, even yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (03:21.834)

Are we better off for maybe not wasting as much time and effort on people who are never gonna buy our products? Also, probably a good thing. So I think like everything in life, there’s good and bad.

John Jantsch (03:28.472)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one of the things you talk about in the book is the idea of the marketing funnel being dead. what’s something that loop does that the funnel maybe structurally didn’t or couldn’t?

Kipp Bodnar (03:45.109)

Yeah, so if if I think about Loop, Loop is our framework for how you actually do marketing in this post AI world. And the reason for that, it you have to optimize for learning. AI, what it actually does is it enables you to scale your brains, your taste, all the things that make you and your company really good. And allows you to do a lot more, but you can also do a bunch of crap. And you can also fail to learn and compel in those lessons. So what Loop does is it gives you a playbook to

John Jantsch (04:01.762)

Yeah, yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (04:14.208)

Kind of do any marketing tactic or campaign that you want. And there’s kind of four simple steps to it. First is you work with AI to express your ideas and your and get them into content that’s really remarkable and personal to your audience because AI can bring all that context together, your customer interviews, what people are saying you about online, conversation your sales teams are having, and make that and turn all of that into really great content with you based on your insights and your perspective. Then

The other thing we found that AI is really good at is helping you tailor the second part of the framework to make that content deeply personal on an individual basis. Then AI has opened up new distribution channels, and that’s the third step amplification. Those are things like answer engine optimization, working with influencers. AI has transformed advertising. It’s made advertising far more scalable than I think it was in the pre-AI world. And the fourth step is evolve. The one thing that AI

John Jantsch (05:00.95)

Mm-hmm.

Kipp Bodnar (05:13.492)

has really does well that nobody’s really taken on yet is it helps you codify your learnings and put them into systems that keep getting smarter every time you use them. And so that’s what we set out to do. We wanted to answer the question, like every market I talk to is getting yelled at by their CEO. Well, why is our traffic down and how do we do AI in this AI world? Like what the heck do we do? And we wanted to, I wanted to write something that I could hand to anybody who asks me that question and give them a real concrete answer.

John Jantsch (05:43.117)

Yeah, in fact I I just started playing with it today. It may come out earlier in the week, but Claude just introduced a anthropic just introduced a skill builder that it basically just follows you around. It’s like, you know, if you’re gonna do a process, you’re gonna go on Slack for this, you’re gonna go here, you’re gonna go here, and it and then it’s like, okay, I’ll build a skill that does that. so that that idea of codifying is just getting easier and easier and easier, isn’t it?

Kipp Bodnar (05:53.92)

Mm-hmm.

Kipp Bodnar (06:09.539)

I i the thing it’s a perfect example.

John Jantsch (06:11.414)

Yeah. So you talk about something called a taste profile. I wonder if you could walk me through the solo entrepreneur, you know, who doesn’t have an entire marketing team, how do they build a taste profile?

Kipp Bodnar (06:15.243)

Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (06:20.012)

Yeah.

Well, see, this is the fun part, is that the taste profile I think is most beneficial to like the small, small team or the solopreneur, right? Because all a taste profile is, is spending a few hours to make the decisions that you know, but haven’t like had the exercise to clarify all of them, so that you can actually then give those decisions to AI and AI knows what you want to achieve and has all the context around what you want to achieve. And so it’s essentially two parts. The first is

John Jantsch (06:31.362)

Yeah, yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (06:52.011)

Customer taste and might be a s we give you a list of questions to go have AI do research for you. Even so if you’re a solopreneur, you use those questions, you go do the research, and you kind of understand what the market and the customer thinks your category and how your product might fit into there. The second part of this is like brand taste. So like what do you think about? Like, why does your company exist? What does your product solve in the world? You know.

What do you what do you believe about the world that’s unique and differentiated? Like how do you think about your thought leadership? And we give you very specific questions to kind of go through and get to clarity on those. And then once you have all that together, you put that in any AI tool. I do it all the time. I’ll do a blank version and then I’ll do a taste profile version. And my taste profile version is always way better. I actually built like an independent grader to C. And I’m normally like a C with generic AI and like I’m an A with a taste profile. And it’s one simple thing that

It takes you a couple hours to do once and then you probably need to update it, you know, a couple of times a year, depending on how your your business changes.

John Jantsch (07:53.154)

Yeah, I mean we run across that all the time. You know, that that we because we’re the same way. We’re like, look, you gotta put all this stuff together. It’s a little work in the beginning, but it will save you so much time and and so much better output, right? In the end. and and people want to skip that. It’s like, I don’t want to sit down here and answer all these questions, but I’m yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (08:12.287)

It’s hard. You have to make the hard choices. You know, like that’s the like this is real marketing though. Marketing is the I I had David Epstein on the marketing Instagram podcast recently. And he’s like, Look, the people who are succeeding in this new world are brain first, tool second versus tool first, brain second, right? And that’s that’s what this is all about.

John Jantsch (08:27.35)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s another vote for a good liberal arts degree, isn’t it? So you talk about something in the book called the AI buyer sim. and you go as far as saying I think that it can predict customer reactions with ninety percent accuracy. first off, that’s amazing. we ought to all be using that right, but

Kipp Bodnar (08:34.277)

Yeah, g exactly right.

Kipp Bodnar (08:52.575)

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch (08:56.77)

What is the I’m I’m gonna go go the opposite side of you of of that idea. What is the risk of kind of relying on that type of data and being wrong?

Kipp Bodnar (09:08.289)

I like this question. here’s the risk. marketing, I I think of marketing as this interesting relationship. And it and I see everything in like frameworks and graphs and charts and two by twos. And the two by two here is like how predictable the results you’ll get from it, and then how high or what’s the magnitude of those results, right? And so when you’re trying to simulate your results and predict your results so that they’re really predictable, the risk of that.

John Jantsch (09:19.383)

Yep.

Kipp Bodnar (09:36.8)

Is that you’re gonna do what everybody else is doing. And when you do what everybody else is doing, you’re gonna get an average result. So you’re gonna get something that’s highly predictable, but the magnitude is gonna be kind of low or average. And so what you’re leaving on the table is like the crazy thing that might fail a bunch of times, but when it hits, hits really big. And that’s the biggest risk in taking taking that. And so you should use the taste profile for things that you know, or excuse me, you should use the BIOSIM for things you know, like kind of.

John Jantsch (09:46.926)

Mm-hmm.

Kipp Bodnar (10:03.861)

I know how this is gonna work. I I have this tried and true, but for new things I wanna go outside of that and really do some wild tests.

John Jantsch (10:12.685)

So one of the things that I think a lot of people are suffering from i is this, you know, even though organic traffic is way down, people are still producing, you know, stuff that AI sameness, I think you call it. A lot of people have called it that. so so what’s the sort of what’s the marker that says, no, this is actually above all of that? This is better quality, this is you know, this is done I mean, is it just the amount of time you spend, the amount of research, the amount of

Kipp Bodnar (10:25.58)

Yes.

Kipp Bodnar (10:35.671)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:41.429)

Citations, you know, I mean what is it that makes it get out of that sameness?

Kipp Bodnar (10:46.231)

So I think this is what’s interesting. Pre AI, you could just be prolific. Right? You could just, hey, I’m gonna outgrind, I’m going to write some stuff. The stuff doesn’t have to be great.

John Jantsch (10:50.859)

Yes. Right.

John Jantsch (10:55.795)

I remember I remember people I remember people asking me all the time when I’d talk about blogging, how many words does it have to be? You know, like like that was the yeah that was the marker.

Kipp Bodnar (11:04.233)

yeah, that was a that was a topic for years. Yeah. And and so, and now now it’s not good enough to be prolific. Like I call this kind of like the Taylor Swift problem. Like you have to be prolific like she is, but you also have to be great. Like the things you have to do have to be great. And you’re asking me the questions like what makes great content in a world where somebody can type something into a chat GPT, a Claude, and get any information they want. And what I what I found is that.

John Jantsch (11:17.761)

Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (11:34.004)

It is the things that make your that are unique to you or your business. And so that is, do you have unique data? You I know you have unique customers, and those customers have unique stories. You yourself, if you’re a solopreneur, have a unique history and framing and life story that you have to bring to the table. There is there is a level of like research and rigor and putting things together in clever ways that people wouldn’t expect.

John Jantsch (11:39.521)

Yeah. Yeah it’s

Kipp Bodnar (12:02.975)

I think those are some of the key highlights that make if you just go around and pay attention to what you think is good and interesting, you’ll find that those are kind of the backbone of most of most of the things.

John Jantsch (12:14.377)

Yeah, I tell people all the time. It’s like, what’s the only thing what’s the thing that only you could write about? Nobody else in the world could. You know, and they they they start thinking about that and they’re like, okay, I could add that. Like you said, customer stories, you know, is is an easy one because everybody should everybody should have those. Yeah. So talk a little bit about you mentioned already, I think, answer engine optimization. how does that go beyond just writing FAQs?

Kipp Bodnar (12:18.761)

Yes. I love that.

Kipp Bodnar (12:28.927)

One hundred percent. Everybody has that.

Kipp Bodnar (12:37.718)

Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (12:41.877)

Yeah, so answer engine optimization is a very interesting topic. It’s something that everybody’s obsessed with. Like, what does ChatGPT, G Google Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, what do all these things say about me and how do they talk about me? And the first thing you need to do is understand like how visible you are on those answer engines. So what’s your visibility? And that comes in two terms: mentions and citations. Mentions are just like, do they talk about you and do they talk about you positively or negatively?

John Jantsch (12:47.553)

Right.

John Jantsch (12:50.869)

Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (13:11.105)

Then citations are like, do they link back back to you? And something you you you have to say. And you’re right that FAQ pages are one way to do that. The three most cited resources on Chat GPT and Claude, for example, though, and Gemini, for example, though, are YouTube, LinkedIn, and Reddit. So if you’re not involved in YouTube, LinkedIn, or Reddit, you’re probably less likely to get mentioned on the topics that are relevant to your business.

John Jantsch (13:13.877)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (13:32.577)

Yeah, yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (13:39.489)

The other thing you have to do for content you do own, like your website, it’s not just FAQs. The way I like to explain it is we spent the last 20 years writing for machines who were trying to parse information like humans. Right? It’s like you had all this deep meta description, keyword density, all these things. Now we have machines who act like exactly like humans. And so you need to write exactly like you’re writing to a human, but simple, plain spoken.

John Jantsch (13:58.348)

Right. Schema, yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (14:08.694)

non you know, non-jargon framed in easy chunked segments so that this machine who re who acts exactly like a human can pick those couple sentences up. Like if you go to our CRM page, right, there’s a what is the CRM box and it’s three sentences and it’s very in plain English explaining to you what a CRM is.

John Jantsch (14:30.197)

I think in your particular case, like all SaaS offerings, you know, there’s typically pricing, you know, has been on your pages forever. but but but for a lot of businesses, that’s a new idea, or just even the fact that, you know, their whole goal was to get somebody on a phone call so that they could then explain how everything worked. How how do we have to now start thinking about the fact that that the buyer journey is going to go a lot farther?

Kipp Bodnar (14:36.47)

Yeah. for for sure.

John Jantsch (14:57.356)

you know, bef maybe before we get that phone call and that we need to reveal a lot of information that maybe we wanted to hide because we didn’t want our competitors to have it.

Kipp Bodnar (15:08.088)

So the reality is the interesting things, good and bad, about LLMs is they will give you an answer. Right? It will always give you an answer. So if somebody asks what your price is, one, if it had if there’s just no information on the internet about it, it will make something up. If there is information your customers are talking about it on Reddit or G2.com or some of these places, it’ll aggregate that. And what I have found is it’s often wrong.

John Jantsch (15:13.931)

You’re right. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:25.337)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:29.877)

Right, right,

John Jantsch (15:35.533)

Yeah. Yes, yes, yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (15:36.225)

And it’s often misanchors me. It’s like, I think this thing’s gonna be $50. And it turns out it’s $500. And like, wow, I was that I I don’t want that thing. I was expecting it was gonna cost a very different amount. So I look at this as like, you have to provide that information because if you don’t, you’re gonna have buyers who are gonna get an answer anyway, and it’s not an answer you want them to get. And so you’re gonna have to operate more transparently than I think that you want. And by the way.

I think that’s a good thing. I think you’re probably likely going to attract more people by doing that than by hiding it.

John Jantsch (16:06.636)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:12.373)

So one of the steps you mentioned was evolve. what does that look like day to day for a marketer?

Kipp Bodnar (16:15.286)

Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (16:21.152)

Yeah, so the way I think about the evolution of marketing and what it means to evolve is like it used to be, let’s say I had a I have a Google AdWords campaign on. I maybe I’ve run a Google AdWords campaign, I run a weekly email campaign. It used to be, well, all right, like once a month, maybe once every couple weeks, I’ll look and see how that’s going. Right? And I’ll look and I’ll make make a few little tweaks. Now it’s like I can, you know, at HubSpot, we have our Breeze assistant, like our version of Claude inside HubSpot’s like,

You can ask any of it any of these insights anytime you want and get instant learnings and change much faster, right? And be like, not only do I can I get this information, I can get recommendations from this thing that’s really smart and knows my business, right? And then I can actually change way more rapidly. The other part of what Evolve means is you have some system. You run your business off systems. And in this AI world, there are

John Jantsch (16:59.393)

Yeah, yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (17:19.756)

You know, agents, there’s skills, there’s workflows. You can actually have AI update your systems based on what you learn. And that’s the big unlock. Before AI, you couldn’t do that. You would have to remember, I need to go make this change to my system based on this thing I learned. Exactly. It’s in eight places. my cousin Tim actually set this up for me, so I gotta wait till he’s back from vacation so that he can update it for me. Now you can just.

John Jantsch (17:28.095)

Mm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (17:35.341)

And it and by the way, it’s in eight places.

Kipp Bodnar (17:47.523)

have it do it in the background and like run a recurring task. And that is transformative because we all know the power of compounding, right? Like you you do that, you add have an update a smart learning every week, you know, half a year in, you’re like getting massively better results.

John Jantsch (18:01.46)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. With with real data. All right, here’s the here’s the big question, you ready? Is is inbound marketing dead?

Kipp Bodnar (18:05.75)

With real data.

Kipp Bodnar (18:10.7)

I’m ready, please.

Kipp Bodnar (18:15.372)

I think inbound marketing as we know it is dead because it was predicated on a world where information was scarce. And and and and knowledge was scarce. Now knowledge is abundant and actions and attention are more scarce. And so I think the loop loop framework as well as all the work that everybody’s doing in the marketing world today is trying to go beyond that old world and help companies thrive in in this new one.

John Jantsch (18:25.025)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (18:43.936)

Did did you have to actually be the one to tell Brian and Dormash that that that finding?

Kipp Bodnar (18:47.032)

We had a we had a nice debate. You know, so the the loop book that that everybody’s gonna read on September twenty second started as like a ten page memo that I wrote. And the name of that memo was In Bell Marking is Dead. And it it wasn’t even called Loop at the time, but it was all the these observations that you and I are talking about. But this was, you know, eighteen months ago, you know, a long time ago.

John Jantsch (18:58.18)

okay.

John Jantsch (19:02.56)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (19:12.128)

Yeah, awesome. All right. So if a small business owner, this is always the hard question, actually. Small business owner reads reads the book. What’s the one page they should act on this week? You don’t have to cite a page number. As a as an author also, I I know when people ask me that, I’m like, I don’t know. I wrote that 18 months ago. But what’s the one concept? How’s that that they should act on this week?

Kipp Bodnar (19:16.002)

Yeah. Yeah, let’s do it.

Kipp Bodnar (19:26.206)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (19:36.672)

Yeah, we talked about it earlier in the show. I think you should do fill out your taste profile. It’s it’s it’s it’s on it’s i early on in the book, because that way your your AI tools have all the context of you, your business, and your taste, and they will just make far better decisions. Even if you don’t know it, it will happen.

John Jantsch (19:58.112)

Do you one thing that we’ve we’ve found s like if I tell somebody you need to fill out your taste profile, they sit there and they go, I can’t answer all these. But if I actually ask them the questions, interview them, th all of a sudden they’ll talk for hours. so th that’s that’s a tip you might give people. Yeah. Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (20:08.759)

Yes.

One hundred percent.

well first of all I love that and second of all if you’re listening to this show and you’re feeling that way, have a friend, have your spouse, have somebody just, you know, open the book, write down the questions separately and just record you. And then by the way, you can just upload that video to AI and you won’t have to ever type or write anything and it will take care of it all for you.

John Jantsch (20:25.004)

Yes, exactly.

John Jantsch (20:33.024)

Plus it sort of automatically gets your voice and tone and how you speak and all that kind of stuff. I love. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Kip, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there some place you’d invite people to connect with you, find out more about Loop and everything else you’re up to?

Kipp Bodnar (20:35.724)

Yeah, exactly. That’s a that’s a great point.

Kipp Bodnar (20:49.0)

Yes. So you can obviously learn more about Hubswata Hubs dot com. You can find the book at loopmarketing dot com. And then for me, you can find me on Marketing Against the Grain, on YouTube and wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (21:01.908)

Awesome. Well again, appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Kipp Bodnar (21:06.462)

Awesome. Thanks, John. Appreciate you having me.