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John Jantsch (00:01.276)

So AI can write your emails, run your ads, clone the sound of your voice, even. But at least for now, it cannot fake a hug, a hand-tied knot, or the crack in your voice on a hard sales call. The entrepreneurs with the biggest edge over the next decade are the ones who find what technology can’t touch and build their whole business around it. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Ryan Levesque. He is a seven-time

Inc. 500 CEO who’s built and exited two companies worth more than $100 million combined. He’s the number one national best-selling author of Ask, named Inc.’s marketing book of the year and founder of the Ask Method. His new book we’re going to talk about today, Return to Real, the last human advantage in an age of artificial everything, argues the same thing your body and spirit are starving for is exactly what your market will pay a premium for. So, Ryan, welcome to the show.

Ryan Levesque (00:59.832)

John, it’s great to be here and it’s great to reconnect.

John Jantsch (01:02.896)

Yeah, so I would suggest that this is a different book than Ask. however, I I’ve gotta believe that there’s a thread of your work in Ask and the work you did with the company that sort of informs this book, but I’ll let you speak to that if that’s accurate at all.

Ryan Levesque (01:22.018)

Yeah, you know, great questions. My first book Ask was all about figuring out what your market wants and giving it to them. And and I think it I remain proud of that work to this day. It’s a methodology to listen to the voice of your customer and use that to inform your messaging, your marketing and your products and services, so on and so forth. But what that book failed to explain and explore is how to listen to the most important voice of them all.

Which is what I describe as the voice inside or the contrarian voice of your heart. And I think the age that we live in here today is one where, and there’s tremendous evidence to suggest this, we are drowning in artificial everything, from the food we eat to the content we consume. And Adam Maseri of Instagram, I think said it best when he said, We spent the last decade trying to figure out what makes something perfect. We’re gonna spend the next decade figuring out what makes something real.

John Jantsch (02:20.08)

Yeah. So yeah, you know, I I think the entrepreneurial world though is sort of naturally I I don’t want to say it’s against that, but it’s you can eat it’s easy to see why people get pulled in directions. It’s like, there’s an opportunity over here. I you know, AI is a great example. you know, I can make my agency an AI agency so that I can go in and like take advantage of what’s there, even if it’s not in your heart. I mean, how do you guard against that?

Ryan Levesque (02:20.908)

And I that’s what the world is craving is real.

Ryan Levesque (02:47.32)

Well, what I would say is this, look, I am not like I’m not one of these AI, anti-AI you know, apostles. I use AI on a daily basis. We use AI in my company. I I think the the truth is in the tension, the devil’s in the details. And I’ll give you a few examples. So I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make with AI is they use AI to abdicate parts of their business that touch the customer.

John Jantsch (02:52.241)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (03:12.07)

Yeah.

Ryan Levesque (03:12.896)

Instead, what we should be doing is thinking about the proverbial back office of our business, the parts that are furthest away from what touches the customer, and use AI to automate those pieces of the business. Not to automate the email sequence that we send to our customers or to write the social media posts that’s the first point of contact with our brand, or to use AI to replicate your voice and create some sort of AI avatar that you’re trying to pass off as you, but the reality is it’s just a machine.

And when someone figures that out, they feel foolish for having been humiliated and they associate that with your brand forevermore. So I think it’s not about being anti AI or being pro AI, it’s about finding the right places to put AI into your business.

John Jantsch (03:57.201)

Yeah, it’s funny. I th I think you know, a lot of people are starting to say, you know, the businesses are gonna win are the ones that are more human or that put that human element out there. And I think that there’s a double-edged sword on that, in that I think some people are saying, okay, I’ll put my human avatar out there. And I think you actually get whacked twice for that. It’s like you were trying to be human and you were actually less human, you know, for doing that. Yeah.

Ryan Levesque (04:19.626)

It’s the hypocrisy of humanization. It’s a hypocrisy of humanization. It’s people are giving lip service to it, but they’re not willing to do the things that it really means. Like when you first came into the business world, you probably remember an era where having a website was a new and novel thing. Like it was a competitive advantage to be on the internet. That was a big deal. Now everybody’s on the internet. The pendulum is swung in the opposite direction. Now it’s actually a big deal. When you pick up the phone and call customer service,

John Jantsch (04:26.343)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:35.909)

yeah.

John Jantsch (04:39.548)

Yeah. Yep.

Ryan Levesque (04:48.652)

And you actually get an English speaking human being who picks up the phone on the other side and you say, my gosh, like are you, are you AI? Are you a robot? Are you an automated message? No, I’m a real human being. That is where the zig has become the zag.

John Jantsch (05:04.668)

So you I I think I read it with the figure was seventy million dollars, a deal to sell your company fell apart. not long after that, you moved to where I assume you are sitting today on the two hundred year old farm in Vermont. w w are those two connected? Like did you have a moment where you said, I gotta get out of here, I gotta point at something different.

Ryan Levesque (05:11.086)

Sure. Yep.

Ryan Levesque (05:27.916)

Very much connected. So spent the a better part of a decade building and scaling a company. literally started it, you know, with a laptop and an internet connection, kitchen table story. Seven timing 5000, fastest growing company, and had this moment where I I looked at this photograph of my two boys, and at the time they were three and five years old, my sons, they were wearing rain boots, holding hands and a path ahead of me. The boots were way too big for them. And I just remembered to take a photo of that moment. And

Fast forward seven years later, and I had a similar experience where my two boys were walking down the path. They’re much further ahead of me now. They were not holding hands. and they were teenagers at the time. And it was like a heartbeat between those two moments. And I recognized that I had maybe just a few years left with my two boys at home before they grew up and they were gone. And I kind of asked myself, after we’d tried to sell the company twice, took the company to market, had a deal.

John Jantsch (06:05.138)

Yes.

Ryan Levesque (06:27.306)

Ended at the 11th hour, took the company to market again, had a $70 million offer, collapsed at the last minute. do I want to spend another decade or even half decade in this mode? Or do I want to maybe reoptimize my life for something else? And and the answer was very clear. I want to suck the marrow out of this season of life while my boys are at home. And and on that journey, when my boys were away at summer camp one summer, I decided to do something that was pulling at my heart. And I decided to.

take take some time to live and and work on a farm in the Mad River Valley of Vermont, literally living in a tent, bathing in a pond, learning how to raise and grow food with my own hands. And John, it was on that farm that I had this awakening that I just felt like in this next chapter of life, this is where I was meant to be. And then that sparked a whole grand adventure that led to me exiting the company and starting this farm and moving my family and

Crazy, crazy family adventure.

John Jantsch (07:27.539)

So I’m getting a throw vibe all of a sudden.

Ryan Levesque (07:31.662)

Throw is is referenced in the book. Throw is one of my heroes as a young man and and as a as a much older man today.

John Jantsch (07:40.455)

Yeah. So one of the things you write about is contrarian shifts. And the first thing is that the best things in life don’t scale. That sort of runs counter to like traditional business advice. I think a lot of people get that. I don’t think many people would actually argue, but like the whole deal is to scale, right? I mean, so how do you balance that?

Ryan Levesque (07:57.987)

Yeah. Well, look, I I think it’s again, truth is in the tension. I think there’s a modern exception exception with scale. Whenever I bring up the ideas behind return to to real, the inevitable objection that comes up is but does it scale? How do you scale that? And the the argument that I make is look, the best things in life don’t scale. You know, a hug with your kid, a sunset with your sweetheart, these things don’t scale. but we somehow think that the rules in business are immune to that universal truth.

John Jantsch (08:02.641)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:13.799)

This is

Ryan Levesque (08:27.746)

So the question isn’t do I create a business that doesn’t scale? It’s what are the parts of my business do I do in spite of the fact that they don’t scale? Because what doesn’t scale for you also will not scale for your competitor. And therein lies the competitive advantage. Doing the things that your competitor will not be willing to do. It’s sending a personal voice memo to every new customer, yourself.

Not using some AI, 11 lab software or an assistant that’s doing it for you. It’s you. It’s it’s handwriting a welcome note to everyone who becomes a client. It’s not doing all the things, but it’s picking and choosing these moments that demonstrate to your market, to your customers, to your clients that wow, you really care. You really, really care about who it is that you’re serving.

John Jantsch (09:24.006)

So if there’s a listener out there that’s saying, look, I I’m I’ve got this business and I’m feeling the tension and I want to make some change, but I’m kind of shackled with a few things, right. I can’t just like, you know, take off tomorrow and and ch blow up everything. So what’s a small real version of, you know, returning to real that somebody could make?

Ryan Levesque (09:32.59)

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Levesque (09:45.987)

Yeah, so I’ll give a personal one and then I’ll give a a business one. So on a on a personal level, there’s a practice that I learned to adopt from a colleague of mine. And it’s the simplest thing in the world, and it’s something that I would encourage you to try yourself. The idea is this when you wake up in the morning, first thing, touch earth before touching a screen.

So instead of doing what you normally do, where you check your phone, you check your messages, you check your email, whatever, put your device far away from you, walk outside your front door, find the first piece of actual bare earth, not pavement, not concrete, but grass or dirt or something in front of you. Take your shoes off, your socks off. And whatever time you wake up, I don’t care how cold it is, I do this in the winter in Vermont, you step outside, bare feet, you touch the ground just for a moment, take the deepest breath that you can, and just remind yourself that you are.

A biophysical being in a biophysical world. And before you get sucked into dashboards and dopamine loops and all the demands of the day, that you are human and you’re deeply connected to the natural world. It’s a super small thing, like it’ll only take you 30 seconds to do this. But what it does is it sets the tone for the rest of the day. Like you become calmer, you become kinder, you take all the fires that show up in your business in stride, you put things in perspective in a way that’s sort of unlike anything else.

so that’s a super simple personal move. Professionally.

John Jantsch (11:08.658)

Well, and that that that could actually be enough for some people. Yeah.

Ryan Levesque (11:12.122)

And that absolutely can be enough. That can be the bite-sized version of Return to Real to just before I get sucked into the digital vortex of the day and social media scrolling and all the things. It’s like I’ve got this moment and it’s 30 seconds. I do it at at sunrise. Or I stare off into the sunrise in the mountains in the distance on our farm. And I just take this moment. And for me, it’s like it just sets the tone for the whole day. so that’s the personal side. Professional side, I would combine that.

With a principle that I describe in the book as create before you consume. There is a tendency, first thing in the morning, that we get into consumption mode. We open up our emails and we consume the emails that are sent our way. Or we go on social media and we read the headlines. We actually are consuming what’s showing up in our world. I would challenge you to use that moment in the day when the chalkboard in your brain is clean. There’s nothing on it. It’s just a clean slate. You use those precious moments to create.

For me, I use that time to write email. I will write an email to my audience with a clear head based on what it is that I’m thinking, what’s showing up in my heart, the ideas that I’m thinking about, how it relates to my market, but I do it with a clear mind. And when you combine those two simple practices, touch earth before you touch screen, and create before you consume, it’ll shift your day, which will shift your week, which will shift your month, which will shift your year.

John Jantsch (12:38.546)

Okay, this is a perfect segue to a questi or a a a a thing that you have talked about. you told your own list that team of writers had ghostwritten your content under your name for seven na years.

What did it feel like to send that confession emailed to your list?

Ryan Levesque (12:57.15)

Yeah.

it was not easy. because I felt like in some ways, even though this is standard practice in the industry, you have a team of writers. If you’re the CEO of your company, it’s not uncommon that you’ve got a team of writers that are writing content in your name, they’re ghostwriting that content, and they’re signing that content with your name. And for me, it became this sort of this death by a thousand paper cuts, where at first I was reviewing every email that went out with by my name.

And then of course there’s a time where things get a little too busy and you’re like, all right, it’s probably fine. And then you get into the habit of you don’t even review anything. And then one day I remember waking up and I opened up my laptop and I read an email that we sent out that was in it was in it was we positioned it as it was something that I wrote and it came from me. And I was so disgusted with what we put up, I slammed the laptop shut. And I think for me that was the breaking point where I said, no more, this is not happening.

and so on a whim, I wrote this email. I titled it The Embarrassing Confession and basically said what you described. I have an embarrassing confession to make. this may come as a shock, but every single email that you have read with my name signed to it has not actually been written by me, but it’s been written by a team of writers and more recently written by AI. and this has been true for the last seven years. I’m not proud of this fact, but it’s the truth. And I basically said, what I’ve realized is that

What the world is craving is what I describe as the freshly squeezed version of orange juice that you get at Sunday brunch in a world where everybody else is serving the watered-down stuff that comes in a can. Can you feel the difference between what’s real and what’s not? Can you feel that this was written by a real human being with a real beating heart? Can you feel it? And when I sent that email out, I had no idea what was gonna happen, John. I got

Ryan Levesque (14:51.38)

More response from that email than anything that I’d sent in probably months, as long as I can remember. And it was the full range. Some people applauded it. Good for you. That’s amazing. I want to do this. some people used it as a way to blackmail me, you know. Hey, well, if that’s the case, then I want a refund for everything that I’ve ever bought, you know, years and years into the past, like crazy things like that. People said some things that I’m not gonna repeat out loud.

You know, but way the way I describe it is people will confuse vulnerability with weakness and they will weaponize shame and guilt to coerce you to crumble. They will try to get you to fold. Oftentimes because it’s because it’s something that they’re dealing with internally themselves.

John Jantsch (15:37.658)

I was gonna I was gonna say my mom used to always say, Well, that’s probably more their problem than yours.

Ryan Levesque (15:42.683)

It’s very perceptive. When you’re in that moment, though, it is still hard when you’re people are telling you to crawl in a hole and die for what it is that you’re doing. but I’ll tell you, it was the mo the most liberating thing that I’ve done. And this was all almost two and a half years ago. And every single week since then, without missing a single week, I’ve personally written by hand myself an email, often two to four thousand words, deeply researched, very transparent, that’s come directly from me.

And I’ve had more opportunity come from doing just that one thing than anything else I’ve done in my business in the last 20 years.

John Jantsch (16:19.899)

So back back to the book. the book’s core claim is that the market will pay a premium for real. but I can hear a lot of business owners say, Okay, that’s great. What’s the mechanism? Like, you know, real’s a word that everybody banters around, but like what’s the mechanism? You know, is it trust? Is it scarcity? Is it something else?

Ryan Levesque (16:39.202)

Yeah, there are a few different dimensions at play. And we’ve got look, we’ve got a short amount of time, and I want to try to unpack this as much as I can. I’ll give you one thing to really anchor around. It’s a concept that I describe in the book as the provenance premium. So provenance is a fancy word that comes from the art world. It basically is a way to trace back a piece of work to the creator of that work. And there’s a story I tell in the book about a painting called Salvador Mundi, which was purchased at an estate sale by a consortium of art dealers for something like $10,000.

They did a bunch of research on the piece of art and found out that it was actually created by Leonardo da Vinci. And a few years later, they brought it to auction at Christie’s. And the same piece of art that they bought for $10,000 from an anonymous artist, once it was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, sold for $450 million. And I that’s an extreme example, but it illustrates the point and hopefully is a memorable story that you’ll remember after this conversation.

That when you can attribute the work that you’re doing to a real life that’s actually been lived and work that’s gone into it, it elevates the value of that work. It’s in part the reason why Steinway pianos sell for the what they sell for. Because Steinway has done a fantastic job, not only creating a great product, but documenting. There’s a whole documentary that Steinway put out where you can see what goes into making the piano. And you think, well, gosh, it’s, it’s, it’s, of course it’s worth that.

It’s why people will pay a premium for food that’s raised by actual farmers down the road as opposed to buying it at the grocery store. Because they know the farmers, they know the farm, they know the story behind it. So the practical move here for all of us, no matter what type of work you’re in, if you’re in a white-collar profession, a blue collar profession, if you do work with your hands, if you do work with your mind, is to build in public, to document your process, to document your thinking about what you’re actually thinking about. Because people care not just about the what that it is that you’re selling.

They care about the how in terms of how it’s made and the who. Who is the person behind that? And by telling the right story and sharing this, divulging this, taking people behind the scenes, people will pay a premium for that thing. In my book, I’ll give you one last example. I decided to hand illustrate every illustration inside the book. And I know that some people were gonna doubt that I actually hand illustrated the book. And here’s just a like a page inside the book with some of the quotes.

John Jantsch (19:01.527)

Mm. Beautiful.

Ryan Levesque (19:02.732)

And so what I did is I put a camera over my desk and I did a time-lapse video of drawing every illustration by hand. When people see that, it just is a proxy, an indicator that care and love and attention went into the making of this thing. And just that data point alone, doesn’t it make you believe that wow, a lot of effort went into creating this? And people value that.

John Jantsch (19:10.854)

Yes.

Ryan Levesque (19:29.518)

So when people see the provenance where something comes from, they will pay a premium for that product. So ask yourself, how can you document your process? How can you take people behind the scenes what it is that you do? How can you show the parts that nobody else, no other competitor of yours, shows how the sausage is made, so to speak? So people see the value in what it is that they’re actually getting.

John Jantsch (19:51.826)

All right, I’ve got one final question. This one’s more of a personal interest question. And this doesn’t really show up in your book, but I suspect you have an opinion on this. How important do you believe it is, particularly for entrepreneurs that might spend eight, nine hours a day just on a computer, you know, in the digital world, you know, doing all the stuff that we do today in businesses? How important do you think it is for them to have an analog outlet to do something with their hands to

you know, build furniture to whatever, play the guitar, whatever it is that that that is is more analog thought.

Ryan Levesque (20:27.596)

Yeah, it’s Rabbi Heschel has this line that if you work with your mind, Sabbath with your hands.

John Jantsch (20:38.363)

Yeah.

Ryan Levesque (20:39.852)

And I think for those of us who are knowledge workers, for those of us who spend time in front of a computer, we have to find an outlet that reconnects us to our body, that reconnects us to the analog, that reconnects us to the physical world, because that’s exactly what we’re losing. as I write in the book, there are trillion dollar technology companies that will not stop until every moment of human attention has been consumed and monetized, including yours.

John Jantsch (21:04.517)

Yeah. Yeah, I I I marvel at the aggressiveness of Facebook to try to get me to come back to the platform. I mean it’s unbelievable. and it’s yeah, I’m glad they’re I’m glad they’re facing some some blowback. we’ll see we’ll see if it, you know, does anything or if they’ll find another way around that.

Well, Ryan, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. is there any place you’d invite people to connect you to connect with you or to certainly to find out more about Return to Real?

Ryan Levesque (21:37.154)

Yeah, the the best place to learn more about the book, Return to Real, is return to RealBook.com. when you go there, you’ll see all the different formats and cool bonuses that you get access to. And I’m excited to share this with the world. I think it’s an incredibly practical book for anybody who’s sort of been in this tension of how much of my business do I abdicate to AI? What do I keep real? How does this affect my personal life? How does this affect my kids?

And how does this affect my business and the work that I’m putting out into the world?

John Jantsch (22:12.721)

Well we I look forward to depending upon when you’re listening to this, the book will be out and available everywhere. We we have ordered copies ourselves to give give to my team. Awesome. Well I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Ryan Levesque (22:28.151)

Awesome. Thanks, Sean.

John Jantsch (00:01.276)

So AI can write your emails, run your ads, clone the sound of your voice, even. But at least for now, it cannot fake a hug, a hand-tied knot, or the crack in your voice on a hard sales call. The entrepreneurs with the biggest edge over the next decade are the ones who find what technology can’t touch and build their whole business around it. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Ryan Levesque. He is a seven-time

Inc. 500 CEO who’s built and exited two companies worth more than $100 million combined. He’s the number one national best-selling author of Ask, named Inc.’s marketing book of the year and founder of the Ask Method. His new book we’re going to talk about today, Return to Real, the last human advantage in an age of artificial everything, argues the same thing your body and spirit are starving for is exactly what your market will pay a premium for. So, Ryan, welcome to the show.

Ryan Levesque (00:59.832)

John, it’s great to be here and it’s great to reconnect.

John Jantsch (01:02.896)

Yeah, so I would suggest that this is a different book than Ask. however, I I’ve gotta believe that there’s a thread of your work in Ask and the work you did with the company that sort of informs this book, but I’ll let you speak to that if that’s accurate at all.

Ryan Levesque (01:22.018)

Yeah, you know, great questions. My first book Ask was all about figuring out what your market wants and giving it to them. And and I think it I remain proud of that work to this day. It’s a methodology to listen to the voice of your customer and use that to inform your messaging, your marketing and your products and services, so on and so forth. But what that book failed to explain and explore is how to listen to the most important voice of them all.

Which is what I describe as the voice inside or the contrarian voice of your heart. And I think the age that we live in here today is one where, and there’s tremendous evidence to suggest this, we are drowning in artificial everything, from the food we eat to the content we consume. And Adam Maseri of Instagram, I think said it best when he said, We spent the last decade trying to figure out what makes something perfect. We’re gonna spend the next decade figuring out what makes something real.

John Jantsch (02:20.08)

Yeah. So yeah, you know, I I think the entrepreneurial world though is sort of naturally I I don’t want to say it’s against that, but it’s you can eat it’s easy to see why people get pulled in directions. It’s like, there’s an opportunity over here. I you know, AI is a great example. you know, I can make my agency an AI agency so that I can go in and like take advantage of what’s there, even if it’s not in your heart. I mean, how do you guard against that?

Ryan Levesque (02:20.908)

And I that’s what the world is craving is real.

Ryan Levesque (02:47.32)

Well, what I would say is this, look, I am not like I’m not one of these AI, anti-AI you know, apostles. I use AI on a daily basis. We use AI in my company. I I think the the truth is in the tension, the devil’s in the details. And I’ll give you a few examples. So I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make with AI is they use AI to abdicate parts of their business that touch the customer.

John Jantsch (02:52.241)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (03:12.07)

Yeah.

Ryan Levesque (03:12.896)

Instead, what we should be doing is thinking about the proverbial back office of our business, the parts that are furthest away from what touches the customer, and use AI to automate those pieces of the business. Not to automate the email sequence that we send to our customers or to write the social media posts that’s the first point of contact with our brand, or to use AI to replicate your voice and create some sort of AI avatar that you’re trying to pass off as you, but the reality is it’s just a machine.

And when someone figures that out, they feel foolish for having been humiliated and they associate that with your brand forevermore. So I think it’s not about being anti AI or being pro AI, it’s about finding the right places to put AI into your business.

John Jantsch (03:57.201)

Yeah, it’s funny. I th I think you know, a lot of people are starting to say, you know, the businesses are gonna win are the ones that are more human or that put that human element out there. And I think that there’s a double-edged sword on that, in that I think some people are saying, okay, I’ll put my human avatar out there. And I think you actually get whacked twice for that. It’s like you were trying to be human and you were actually less human, you know, for doing that. Yeah.

Ryan Levesque (04:19.626)

It’s the hypocrisy of humanization. It’s a hypocrisy of humanization. It’s people are giving lip service to it, but they’re not willing to do the things that it really means. Like when you first came into the business world, you probably remember an era where having a website was a new and novel thing. Like it was a competitive advantage to be on the internet. That was a big deal. Now everybody’s on the internet. The pendulum is swung in the opposite direction. Now it’s actually a big deal. When you pick up the phone and call customer service,

John Jantsch (04:26.343)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:35.909)

yeah.

John Jantsch (04:39.548)

Yeah. Yep.

Ryan Levesque (04:48.652)

And you actually get an English speaking human being who picks up the phone on the other side and you say, my gosh, like are you, are you AI? Are you a robot? Are you an automated message? No, I’m a real human being. That is where the zig has become the zag.

John Jantsch (05:04.668)

So you I I think I read it with the figure was seventy million dollars, a deal to sell your company fell apart. not long after that, you moved to where I assume you are sitting today on the two hundred year old farm in Vermont. w w are those two connected? Like did you have a moment where you said, I gotta get out of here, I gotta point at something different.

Ryan Levesque (05:11.086)

Sure. Yep.

Ryan Levesque (05:27.916)

Very much connected. So spent the a better part of a decade building and scaling a company. literally started it, you know, with a laptop and an internet connection, kitchen table story. Seven timing 5000, fastest growing company, and had this moment where I I looked at this photograph of my two boys, and at the time they were three and five years old, my sons, they were wearing rain boots, holding hands and a path ahead of me. The boots were way too big for them. And I just remembered to take a photo of that moment. And

Fast forward seven years later, and I had a similar experience where my two boys were walking down the path. They’re much further ahead of me now. They were not holding hands. and they were teenagers at the time. And it was like a heartbeat between those two moments. And I recognized that I had maybe just a few years left with my two boys at home before they grew up and they were gone. And I kind of asked myself, after we’d tried to sell the company twice, took the company to market, had a deal.

John Jantsch (06:05.138)

Yes.

Ryan Levesque (06:27.306)

Ended at the 11th hour, took the company to market again, had a $70 million offer, collapsed at the last minute. do I want to spend another decade or even half decade in this mode? Or do I want to maybe reoptimize my life for something else? And and the answer was very clear. I want to suck the marrow out of this season of life while my boys are at home. And and on that journey, when my boys were away at summer camp one summer, I decided to do something that was pulling at my heart. And I decided to.

take take some time to live and and work on a farm in the Mad River Valley of Vermont, literally living in a tent, bathing in a pond, learning how to raise and grow food with my own hands. And John, it was on that farm that I had this awakening that I just felt like in this next chapter of life, this is where I was meant to be. And then that sparked a whole grand adventure that led to me exiting the company and starting this farm and moving my family and

Crazy, crazy family adventure.

John Jantsch (07:27.539)

So I’m getting a throw vibe all of a sudden.

Ryan Levesque (07:31.662)

Throw is is referenced in the book. Throw is one of my heroes as a young man and and as a as a much older man today.

John Jantsch (07:40.455)

Yeah. So one of the things you write about is contrarian shifts. And the first thing is that the best things in life don’t scale. That sort of runs counter to like traditional business advice. I think a lot of people get that. I don’t think many people would actually argue, but like the whole deal is to scale, right? I mean, so how do you balance that?

Ryan Levesque (07:57.987)

Yeah. Well, look, I I think it’s again, truth is in the tension. I think there’s a modern exception exception with scale. Whenever I bring up the ideas behind return to to real, the inevitable objection that comes up is but does it scale? How do you scale that? And the the argument that I make is look, the best things in life don’t scale. You know, a hug with your kid, a sunset with your sweetheart, these things don’t scale. but we somehow think that the rules in business are immune to that universal truth.

John Jantsch (08:02.641)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:13.799)

This is

Ryan Levesque (08:27.746)

So the question isn’t do I create a business that doesn’t scale? It’s what are the parts of my business do I do in spite of the fact that they don’t scale? Because what doesn’t scale for you also will not scale for your competitor. And therein lies the competitive advantage. Doing the things that your competitor will not be willing to do. It’s sending a personal voice memo to every new customer, yourself.

Not using some AI, 11 lab software or an assistant that’s doing it for you. It’s you. It’s it’s handwriting a welcome note to everyone who becomes a client. It’s not doing all the things, but it’s picking and choosing these moments that demonstrate to your market, to your customers, to your clients that wow, you really care. You really, really care about who it is that you’re serving.

John Jantsch (09:24.006)

So if there’s a listener out there that’s saying, look, I I’m I’ve got this business and I’m feeling the tension and I want to make some change, but I’m kind of shackled with a few things, right. I can’t just like, you know, take off tomorrow and and ch blow up everything. So what’s a small real version of, you know, returning to real that somebody could make?

Ryan Levesque (09:32.59)

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Levesque (09:45.987)

Yeah, so I’ll give a personal one and then I’ll give a a business one. So on a on a personal level, there’s a practice that I learned to adopt from a colleague of mine. And it’s the simplest thing in the world, and it’s something that I would encourage you to try yourself. The idea is this when you wake up in the morning, first thing, touch earth before touching a screen.

So instead of doing what you normally do, where you check your phone, you check your messages, you check your email, whatever, put your device far away from you, walk outside your front door, find the first piece of actual bare earth, not pavement, not concrete, but grass or dirt or something in front of you. Take your shoes off, your socks off. And whatever time you wake up, I don’t care how cold it is, I do this in the winter in Vermont, you step outside, bare feet, you touch the ground just for a moment, take the deepest breath that you can, and just remind yourself that you are.

A biophysical being in a biophysical world. And before you get sucked into dashboards and dopamine loops and all the demands of the day, that you are human and you’re deeply connected to the natural world. It’s a super small thing, like it’ll only take you 30 seconds to do this. But what it does is it sets the tone for the rest of the day. Like you become calmer, you become kinder, you take all the fires that show up in your business in stride, you put things in perspective in a way that’s sort of unlike anything else.

so that’s a super simple personal move. Professionally.

John Jantsch (11:08.658)

Well, and that that that could actually be enough for some people. Yeah.

Ryan Levesque (11:12.122)

And that absolutely can be enough. That can be the bite-sized version of Return to Real to just before I get sucked into the digital vortex of the day and social media scrolling and all the things. It’s like I’ve got this moment and it’s 30 seconds. I do it at at sunrise. Or I stare off into the sunrise in the mountains in the distance on our farm. And I just take this moment. And for me, it’s like it just sets the tone for the whole day. so that’s the personal side. Professional side, I would combine that.

With a principle that I describe in the book as create before you consume. There is a tendency, first thing in the morning, that we get into consumption mode. We open up our emails and we consume the emails that are sent our way. Or we go on social media and we read the headlines. We actually are consuming what’s showing up in our world. I would challenge you to use that moment in the day when the chalkboard in your brain is clean. There’s nothing on it. It’s just a clean slate. You use those precious moments to create.

For me, I use that time to write email. I will write an email to my audience with a clear head based on what it is that I’m thinking, what’s showing up in my heart, the ideas that I’m thinking about, how it relates to my market, but I do it with a clear mind. And when you combine those two simple practices, touch earth before you touch screen, and create before you consume, it’ll shift your day, which will shift your week, which will shift your month, which will shift your year.

John Jantsch (12:38.546)

Okay, this is a perfect segue to a questi or a a a a thing that you have talked about. you told your own list that team of writers had ghostwritten your content under your name for seven na years.

What did it feel like to send that confession emailed to your list?

Ryan Levesque (12:57.15)

Yeah.

it was not easy. because I felt like in some ways, even though this is standard practice in the industry, you have a team of writers. If you’re the CEO of your company, it’s not uncommon that you’ve got a team of writers that are writing content in your name, they’re ghostwriting that content, and they’re signing that content with your name. And for me, it became this sort of this death by a thousand paper cuts, where at first I was reviewing every email that went out with by my name.

And then of course there’s a time where things get a little too busy and you’re like, all right, it’s probably fine. And then you get into the habit of you don’t even review anything. And then one day I remember waking up and I opened up my laptop and I read an email that we sent out that was in it was in it was we positioned it as it was something that I wrote and it came from me. And I was so disgusted with what we put up, I slammed the laptop shut. And I think for me that was the breaking point where I said, no more, this is not happening.

and so on a whim, I wrote this email. I titled it The Embarrassing Confession and basically said what you described. I have an embarrassing confession to make. this may come as a shock, but every single email that you have read with my name signed to it has not actually been written by me, but it’s been written by a team of writers and more recently written by AI. and this has been true for the last seven years. I’m not proud of this fact, but it’s the truth. And I basically said, what I’ve realized is that

What the world is craving is what I describe as the freshly squeezed version of orange juice that you get at Sunday brunch in a world where everybody else is serving the watered-down stuff that comes in a can. Can you feel the difference between what’s real and what’s not? Can you feel that this was written by a real human being with a real beating heart? Can you feel it? And when I sent that email out, I had no idea what was gonna happen, John. I got

Ryan Levesque (14:51.38)

More response from that email than anything that I’d sent in probably months, as long as I can remember. And it was the full range. Some people applauded it. Good for you. That’s amazing. I want to do this. some people used it as a way to blackmail me, you know. Hey, well, if that’s the case, then I want a refund for everything that I’ve ever bought, you know, years and years into the past, like crazy things like that. People said some things that I’m not gonna repeat out loud.

You know, but way the way I describe it is people will confuse vulnerability with weakness and they will weaponize shame and guilt to coerce you to crumble. They will try to get you to fold. Oftentimes because it’s because it’s something that they’re dealing with internally themselves.

John Jantsch (15:37.658)

I was gonna I was gonna say my mom used to always say, Well, that’s probably more their problem than yours.

Ryan Levesque (15:42.683)

It’s very perceptive. When you’re in that moment, though, it is still hard when you’re people are telling you to crawl in a hole and die for what it is that you’re doing. but I’ll tell you, it was the mo the most liberating thing that I’ve done. And this was all almost two and a half years ago. And every single week since then, without missing a single week, I’ve personally written by hand myself an email, often two to four thousand words, deeply researched, very transparent, that’s come directly from me.

And I’ve had more opportunity come from doing just that one thing than anything else I’ve done in my business in the last 20 years.

John Jantsch (16:19.899)

So back back to the book. the book’s core claim is that the market will pay a premium for real. but I can hear a lot of business owners say, Okay, that’s great. What’s the mechanism? Like, you know, real’s a word that everybody banters around, but like what’s the mechanism? You know, is it trust? Is it scarcity? Is it something else?

Ryan Levesque (16:39.202)

Yeah, there are a few different dimensions at play. And we’ve got look, we’ve got a short amount of time, and I want to try to unpack this as much as I can. I’ll give you one thing to really anchor around. It’s a concept that I describe in the book as the provenance premium. So provenance is a fancy word that comes from the art world. It basically is a way to trace back a piece of work to the creator of that work. And there’s a story I tell in the book about a painting called Salvador Mundi, which was purchased at an estate sale by a consortium of art dealers for something like $10,000.

They did a bunch of research on the piece of art and found out that it was actually created by Leonardo da Vinci. And a few years later, they brought it to auction at Christie’s. And the same piece of art that they bought for $10,000 from an anonymous artist, once it was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, sold for $450 million. And I that’s an extreme example, but it illustrates the point and hopefully is a memorable story that you’ll remember after this conversation.

That when you can attribute the work that you’re doing to a real life that’s actually been lived and work that’s gone into it, it elevates the value of that work. It’s in part the reason why Steinway pianos sell for the what they sell for. Because Steinway has done a fantastic job, not only creating a great product, but documenting. There’s a whole documentary that Steinway put out where you can see what goes into making the piano. And you think, well, gosh, it’s, it’s, it’s, of course it’s worth that.

It’s why people will pay a premium for food that’s raised by actual farmers down the road as opposed to buying it at the grocery store. Because they know the farmers, they know the farm, they know the story behind it. So the practical move here for all of us, no matter what type of work you’re in, if you’re in a white-collar profession, a blue collar profession, if you do work with your hands, if you do work with your mind, is to build in public, to document your process, to document your thinking about what you’re actually thinking about. Because people care not just about the what that it is that you’re selling.

They care about the how in terms of how it’s made and the who. Who is the person behind that? And by telling the right story and sharing this, divulging this, taking people behind the scenes, people will pay a premium for that thing. In my book, I’ll give you one last example. I decided to hand illustrate every illustration inside the book. And I know that some people were gonna doubt that I actually hand illustrated the book. And here’s just a like a page inside the book with some of the quotes.

John Jantsch (19:01.527)

Mm. Beautiful.

Ryan Levesque (19:02.732)

And so what I did is I put a camera over my desk and I did a time-lapse video of drawing every illustration by hand. When people see that, it just is a proxy, an indicator that care and love and attention went into the making of this thing. And just that data point alone, doesn’t it make you believe that wow, a lot of effort went into creating this? And people value that.

John Jantsch (19:10.854)

Yes.

Ryan Levesque (19:29.518)

So when people see the provenance where something comes from, they will pay a premium for that product. So ask yourself, how can you document your process? How can you take people behind the scenes what it is that you do? How can you show the parts that nobody else, no other competitor of yours, shows how the sausage is made, so to speak? So people see the value in what it is that they’re actually getting.

John Jantsch (19:51.826)

All right, I’ve got one final question. This one’s more of a personal interest question. And this doesn’t really show up in your book, but I suspect you have an opinion on this. How important do you believe it is, particularly for entrepreneurs that might spend eight, nine hours a day just on a computer, you know, in the digital world, you know, doing all the stuff that we do today in businesses? How important do you think it is for them to have an analog outlet to do something with their hands to

you know, build furniture to whatever, play the guitar, whatever it is that that that is is more analog thought.

Ryan Levesque (20:27.596)

Yeah, it’s Rabbi Heschel has this line that if you work with your mind, Sabbath with your hands.

John Jantsch (20:38.363)

Yeah.

Ryan Levesque (20:39.852)

And I think for those of us who are knowledge workers, for those of us who spend time in front of a computer, we have to find an outlet that reconnects us to our body, that reconnects us to the analog, that reconnects us to the physical world, because that’s exactly what we’re losing. as I write in the book, there are trillion dollar technology companies that will not stop until every moment of human attention has been consumed and monetized, including yours.

John Jantsch (21:04.517)

Yeah. Yeah, I I I marvel at the aggressiveness of Facebook to try to get me to come back to the platform. I mean it’s unbelievable. and it’s yeah, I’m glad they’re I’m glad they’re facing some some blowback. we’ll see we’ll see if it, you know, does anything or if they’ll find another way around that.

Well, Ryan, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. is there any place you’d invite people to connect you to connect with you or to certainly to find out more about Return to Real?

Ryan Levesque (21:37.154)

Yeah, the the best place to learn more about the book, Return to Real, is return to RealBook.com. when you go there, you’ll see all the different formats and cool bonuses that you get access to. And I’m excited to share this with the world. I think it’s an incredibly practical book for anybody who’s sort of been in this tension of how much of my business do I abdicate to AI? What do I keep real? How does this affect my personal life? How does this affect my kids?

And how does this affect my business and the work that I’m putting out into the world?

John Jantsch (22:12.721)

Well we I look forward to depending upon when you’re listening to this, the book will be out and available everywhere. We we have ordered copies ourselves to give give to my team. Awesome. Well I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Ryan Levesque (22:28.151)

Awesome. Thanks, Sean.

John Jantsch (00:02.021)

So, you know, most small businesses think they’re using AI the moment they open Chat GPT at their desk. And that’s a tool habit, not a business model. The gap between the two shows up in the results long before anyone can explain why. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Jeremy Jerry. He’s a chief marketing officer at Book.

BookKeepy, a SaaS platform millions of small businesses use for invoicing and day-to-day admin. Over the past year, Jerry built or rebuilt his own marketing team at BookKeepy around AI from the ground up and wrote about what actually looked like for Entrepreneur Magazine. So, Jeremy, welcome to the show.

Jeremy Jarry (00:51.086)

Thank you, John. It’s a pleasure to to be with you today.

John Jantsch (00:55.195)

So you as I mentioned in your intro, you spent the last year rewiring your own marketing team around AI. wha what was the moment maybe that that that you kind of took that stand that hey, maybe more tools wasn’t the same thing as actually using AI?

Jeremy Jarry (01:11.83)

Yeah, so about a year and a half ago, we saw how AI was developing and all the possibilities that AI could provide to a marketing team. And like a lot of businesses, we started using Chat GPT Claude to proofread our emails, look at the different possibilities that we could use AI for. And we thought, what if we actually rethink

how our processes are actually working and can we rewire completely our marketing team to become more AI native?

John Jantsch (01:54.726)

So let’s start with that term first off. I mean, what’s the like what’s the real difference between using AI tools and being AI native?

Jeremy Jarry (02:04.332)

Yes, so I think AI native is also a buzzword. So it is important for us to really define it. And internally we’ve had a lot of conversations about what it means and what we actually wanted from AI and how we could use AI to redefine the processes. So the way we see it is instead of just stacking AI tools.

John Jantsch (02:09.285)

Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Jarry (02:32.226)

And thinking, we’re using AI to its fullest. We thought we have some processes. What if today we were redesigning these processes from scratch and using all the capabilities that AI is providing to actually have an AI-native process? So it’s becoming a big difference for us as being a mindset change more than just.

Adding AI to the workflows that we had.

John Jantsch (03:04.773)

So how do you get started on that? I’m I’m thinking that a lot of my listeners are four or five person shops. and so the idea of, hey, we barely have processes, certainly barely have them documented, and now you’re telling me I have to tear all down. I mean, how did you get started with that? Because especially a business that’s been around for a while, maybe that there’s a lot of things that they’ve done for years and they seem to work.

But but you’re right, they were never designed with AI in mind. They’re they’re sort of AI sort of being inserted into them. So so how do you get started on that I that that process itself of of tearing things down and and starting over again?

Jeremy Jarry (03:45.281)

Yeah, so we at Book Epi consider ourselves as a small business. we do have a small marketing team. and so it’s definitely something that we’re looking for also our customers, our small business customers, where it’s not always easy to have all the capabilities within the organization to compete with large companies. And

John Jantsch (03:50.469)

Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Jarry (04:12.994)

The way I would look at it for a small business is look at your calendar. Look at what is actually taking a lot of time. Look at what you don’t like doing and see if you can integrate AI within it. For small teams like ours, the way we we saw it was it’s about people and it’s about making sure that people are actually embracing AI.

the way we do and the way we would want them to do. And so the way we did it, we started with one individual within the team, and we wanted to show results. And we wanted to show that it’s actually giving more time to the marketer to be more creative, to be more strategic. I don’t know many marketers that like to create reports, for example. And this is where we started by.

John Jantsch (05:04.699)

Right.

Jeremy Jarry (05:08.214)

Automating and then adding AI to have better reporting. It doesn’t mean that the person is not looking at the report and it’s just these are the numbers. No, now the person is explaining the report and has more time. Instead of just gathering the data, then the marketer is actually able to build on top of the data all the reasoning behind it. And we see this for small businesses as well.

for our customers. if you let’s say you’re a plumber, you’re repairing a sink and your phone rings, you need to answer that second customer, but you’re not. So you’re just gonna keep your phone in your pocket, wait until you finish the job to call back the customer. What if you had an AI receptionist that can answer the phone for you and look at your calendar automatically and book your next job?

I don’t know again a lot of plumbers who like to book jobs themselves, they prefer just repairing the leak that their customers have in their bathroom. And this is how we suggest our customers to use AI and to incorporate within the way they work and within their operations how they can actually get the fullest of AI for their business.

John Jantsch (06:34.211)

So how does somebody go about, especially a a firm that doesn’t maybe have people that feel like they’re very tech savvy or, you know, kind of on the cutting edge? somebody’s got to redesign some of these processes. Somebody has to show, you know, how this AI is going to integrate in it. Is that should they is that a different person? Like do they need to go out and hire somebody new, hire some third party you know, resources or consultants to actually come and install it? And

So that’s half the question. And the other half though is there’s a whole lot of people out there selling, you know, run your business with AI. you know, and and so, you know, how does a small business owner, first off, get that outside expertise and how they know that they’re not just being sold, you know, the latest, greatest get rich scheme.

Jeremy Jarry (07:23.19)

Yes, so I think that there are really different ways of approaching it and looking at how AI can actually help your business. And it’s not necessarily you need to be AI native, you need to have AI agents for your business. It’s really about if you don’t have the knowledge, and we actually did a survey to

Over 2,000 of our customers and we asked them, Do you use AI in your business? And if not, why don’t you use AI in your business? And we thought all the small businesses are are gonna tell us it’s because of the cost, right? It there’s a lot of cost pressure at the moment. And we thought this is gonna be the biggest answer on why they’re not using AI. And it was actually not. It was actually a knowledge gap. And our customers told us it’s

John Jantsch (08:06.587)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (08:17.99)

Yeah.

Jeremy Jarry (08:20.202)

It’s scary, it’s intimidating to see all the changes that are currently happening with AI, and it’s hard to keep up to date with it. And we provide some AI-powered tools. So we know a lot of small business owners want to change their website, for example. And so we give them a tool that is powered by AI to actually change their business. But we also understand that for small businesses.

John Jantsch (08:26.298)

Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Jarry (08:49.194)

And small business owners, it’s not they don’t really care if we use AI or not in that. They care about the results. They care about is it actually saving them time? And again, for a website, we know a lot of small businesses are looking at their website and thinking, I need to change it. I just don’t have the time. But AI is actually helping them to change it faster. For your second part of the question, and

John Jantsch (08:57.628)

Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Jarry (09:18.634)

Also, a bit of the the first part. should they hire AI consultants? if it’s what they need? Yes, sure. But I think there’s a lot of tools out there that are very easy to get a grip on and that can introduce you to AI and where you can understand the different possibilities that AI can offer your business. And it’s also very easy to

Write an email now with AI. And it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t write what you should say. If I tell ChatGPT or Claude, write an email for John. An email about what? So we still need to tell AI this is what I want. This is what I want you to, the outcome I want. And then I get AI to actually help me to go faster or to

John Jantsch (10:00.891)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (10:14.372)

Okay.

Jeremy Jarry (10:14.688)

write something, for example, that is without spelling mistakes, where you know you’re on the go on your phone, it’s easy to make spelling mistakes, use AI, and it’s a lot easier to actually do it this way.

John Jantsch (10:28.294)

So when you were going through this process and reworking some of the things on your own, where where did it break down? I mean, where did you find people that just reverted back to the kind of the the habit, so to speak, of just using the tools, but not really changing anything?

Jeremy Jarry (10:44.95)

Yes, so we knew when we started that it would be a long process. So first when we started doing it, we gave ourselves and to the team a lot of time to really embrace AI, make changes, and we did it step by step. We also hired the team to help us to teach us AI, but also to help us rewire all our processes.

And we saw that some people were very quick and very happy about using AI. Well, then there were other people that would take more time, and we actually gave them the time and we’ve let them go back to their process, understand that maybe the results were lower than when they were using AI, or that they were doing things at a lower pace than when they were using AI.

And I think everyone by themselves understood, but if I do this, I can be like my teammate, I can actually spend more time doing things that I like. In the marketing team, we have very talented people who are very creative, but spending half or more than half of their times building a report, writing a slide, it’s not really what they want and what they like. And they saw that.

Other people in the company were actually being super creative and they had a lot of time to do that. And so, bit by bits, I think every team member actually got into using more AI. And even today, we can see that we have some team members who are managing a fleet of agents while some other people are more using AI here and there to actually get better results or go faster, but not necessarily.

Building AI agents themselves or managing AI agents.

John Jantsch (12:43.899)

Yeah. So it’s it’s become pretty common, whether anybody knows what this means or not, it’s become pretty common advice to keep a human in the loop. you know, that’s actually like you know, you pretty much can’t read anything that talks about using AI that doesn’t have that as somewhere as part of the advice. What does that actually mean? you know, for for you guys.

Jeremy Jarry (13:09.804)

Yes, so the way we’ve designed AI and and our AI infrastructure is we have all the data and all the knowledge from the marketing team that is centralized. And so we’re asking AI every time it has to complete a task that we’re asking to go and ask this central base of knowledge to

make sure that it’s not gonna be drifting from our brand guidelines, from our tone of voice. But it will. And there is a risk. And so we always need to have some steps where we mitigate that risk, but also where we check. I wouldn’t let AI publish a campaign without the team members actually looking over and understanding.

John Jantsch (13:44.059)

Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Jarry (14:06.048)

making sure every asset is actually pixel perfect on what we launch. And it’s the same in any department in Boukepi, where we wouldn’t let AI do things that are risky for the business.

John Jantsch (14:22.917)

Did you have any speaking of that, I guess, did you have any processes that you rolled out, you revamped and then you had to kind of take back? Like once you started measuring it and measuring maybe how it impacted potential customer interaction? were there any that you decided, hey, we need to we need to lessen the role of AI in this and maybe re up the the role of the human?

Jeremy Jarry (14:46.306)

Yes, and for us using AI is about results. it’s I think at the beginning it was very exciting and we started building a lot of agents. And we were measuring the results by the number of agents that we would build on a specific week. But we saw very rapidly that didn’t really equate to the number of hours that were saved for the company. Or

John Jantsch (14:51.087)

Yep.

John Jantsch (14:56.707)

Right. Yeah.

Jeremy Jarry (15:14.326)

that we were seeing some increases in the revenue that we were generating. And so definitely we saw some processes that we had where we were going way too far with AI and we couldn’t see actually that it was saving time. Building an agent and having, as we spoke about, a human in the loop. We need to make sure that the time that the human is actually gonna spend.

To review the campaign is actually less than the time it would take them to actually create a campaign from scratch themselves. So definitely we’ve had these issues and we fell into that. And for some of the processes, we had to tone back and rethink again the process for having humans actually building the whole thing.

John Jantsch (15:51.675)

For sure. Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:10.031)

You know, one of things that that I think is probably a little frustrating for some people is the change, the pace of change in AI. and so we build all these processes and then really the the way the tools work or you know what they integrate with now maybe eliminates the need for other tools, things like that. How do you is there a rhythm for kind of staying on top of the the fact that you’re never done?

Jeremy Jarry (16:35.638)

Yes, it it is very daunting. and the pace is is definitely very high. the way we see it is do we always need to be on the complete cutting edge of all the technology? most of the times we do not. we actually do have some automations and some AI agents giving us, you know.

John Jantsch (16:36.677)

Yeah.

Jeremy Jarry (17:04.386)

These are the latest models, these are the latest tools that exist. But that that doesn’t mean that we actually need them. And that doesn’t mean that we would actually integrating them do a better job. So the way we see it is: are we satisfied with the process? Do we have another process that we actually need to change with AI? And for that new process, would it make sense to add a different tool or

removing one of the tools that we have. But you’re right, it’s very difficult to keep up the pace with all the different things.

John Jantsch (17:39.279)

Yeah, yeah. So so tell us a little bit, how does bookkeeping work with small business owners? Give us kind of the the overview of of basically what you do and how you provide value to small business owners.

Jeremy Jarry (17:55.044)

Yeah, so we started a few years ago with invoicing. our founder was a tradie himself, and he understood that it was difficult for him to just invoice his customers all the time, at soon as he would finish the job. So he built an invoicing app. And that was actually the beginning of the end of the process where you do have.

John Jantsch (18:03.301)

Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Jarry (18:24.665)

To invoice your customers, but also you need to get new customers. So, how do I get new customers? I’m I’m a Tyler and it’s not my strength to actually acquire new customers. So step by step, we actually built products around invoice. And so we now have a lot of different tools to help small businesses from

Building a website, sending a proposal, creating a contract, sending an NDA, following all the processes within your CRM, sending an invoice and then getting paid.

John Jantsch (19:07.703)

Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, Jeremy. Is there some place you’d invite people to find out more about bookkeeping and and connect with you?

Jeremy Jarry (19:19.053)

Yes, they can go on our website at pukeep.com. and they can follow me on Twitter or on LinkedIn and I would encourage them also to listen to the Ductate podcast.

John Jantsch (19:34.523)

I I second that. Jeremy again, I appreciate you stopping by and I know it’s you’re you’re in a different time zone than me, so I pr hopefully hopefully I didn’t keep you up too get you up too early or keep you up too late.

Jeremy Jarry (19:37.263)

Yeah.

Jeremy Jarry (19:48.118)

It was a pleasure being with you, 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.

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.