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John Jantsch (00:00.866)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Sara Nay. Sara is the CEO of Duct Tape Marketing, where she spent over 15 years helping small businesses build strategy-first marketing systems that actually work. Now being my daughter, Sarah has lived the small business reality from every angle as a teenager, as a team member, as a fractional CMO, and now as the CEO. In her new book,

Unchained, she makes the case that traditional agency model is broken, both for the clients and agencies and lays out a practical AI enabled strategy first approach she calls the anti-agency model. We’re going to touch on that. Permission helps small business owners stop renting their marketing and start owning it. Unchained, breaking free from broken marketing models. So Sarah, welcome to the show.

Sara Nay (00:53.858)

Thanks for having me on.

John Jantsch (00:55.778)

So you and I have been talking about marketing models for a long time. Was there a time when you kind of said, you know what, the agency model is broken and I got to create something different?

Sara Nay (01:06.455)

Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned in the introduction, I’ve been part of the agency space for about 15 years. And in that journey, I’ve moved from intern to community manager, account manager, fractional CMO for our clients among other roles. And so I’ve really been in all the different areas of the agency space. And throughout that journey, there’s definitely been times where I’ve noticed things that didn’t quite feel right in the agency space. And even further than that,

there have been several moments over the last 15 years where I’ve been burnt out and on the brink of saying, does this make sense to pursue even more, even further? And so I’ve lived a lot of challenges along the way and there’s no secret in the challenges I’ve seen. think a lot of people experience this in the agency space. And so starting on that side, on the agency side of things, there’s challenges with meeting client demands and managing scope creep and scaling and maintaining profitability and

retaining great talent and those are a lot of the things that I’ve heard from other agency owners struggling with, but I’ve also experienced it myself. Also in my roles, I’ve been on in the sales side of our business for a while now. So I’ve spoken with hundreds of small business owners who have worked with different agencies or outsourced solutions over those years. And I have heard all of their stories of

things along the lines of marketing doesn’t work or I’m paying this agency for X and I have no idea if I’m getting results or if anything’s happening with my marketing efforts. And so there’s been a lot of this going on for years in the agency space. But I think it’s becoming more more heightened now with the evolution of AI.

John Jantsch (02:49.518)

So you actually use the term anti-agency model. Now know you’re not an agency hater. so, so what makes this anti or, and not just a better agency.

Sara Nay (03:02.379)

Yeah. So the whole play with the anti-agency model, as you identified, like obviously we’re not anti-agency. We’re an agency ourselves. We have been for 31 years. We love agencies. And so I do keep, I keep explaining that because I don’t want people to think this book is against agencies, but what it’s with the anti-agency, what it’s saying is the model is broken essentially for some of the points that I had highlighted just a second ago. So it’s anti-agency model specifically.

And so the way we have been doing and functioning for years as agencies were being forced in some ways to evolve because of the evolution of AI. so previously to AI, it made sense for agencies to hold onto things like marketing, execution, content, social, SEO, paid ads, all of the execution elements. But with the evolution of AI, I believe small businesses are able to take some of that stuff in-house.

They still need strategic leadership and direction, but they now have an opportunity to stay a little bit more lean with their in-house marketing team by layering in AI systems below them to help with the heavy lifting of execution. And so that’s the whole idea of stop renting your marketing and taking back ownership of your marketing. You still need strategy. You still need direction. You still need leadership.

But now you can build a marketing department or team that is a bit leaner because they’re overseeing orchestration of marketing, which is done by AI systems.

John Jantsch (04:39.086)

So one of the things you and I talk about a lot, cause I say it all the time is I, you know, I’ve been doing this 30 years and while a lot of new shiny things have come along, the fundamentals of marketing have not really changed or what we’re here to do as marketers has not really changed that much. What timeless principles do you think from, our system? As you know, it’s still worked today.

Sara Nay (04:59.085)

Yeah. And so that’s the second really section of the book we get into the timeless after the intro and all of that, we get into the timeless principles. And so some of the things that I touch on there are things like target market, identifying your clients on a very deep level. I think that’s becoming even more and more important with the evolution of AI, because what I see is a lot of small businesses bringing in something like a chat, GBT or a clod or whatever their tool of choices. And they’ll start just like,

creating content and so it’s all over the place. It’s not consistent. It’s not on on brand. And so in your original book duct tape marketing, you talked a lot about identifying your ideal client on a deep level, understanding them emotionally, what keeps them up at night, what drives them. And so with the evolution of AI, you still need to understand your clients on a very deep level. But then if you’re going to bring in an AI tool, you then need to train the chat, you’d be to your tool of your choice that you bring in.

on that information. So when you’re creating content moving forward, you’re creating content that speaks to your ideal client on a deep level and isn’t just generic. Another timeless foundational principle is core messaging. We talk a lot about that over the years. So identifying your core message or we’ve talked a lot about talking logo as well. And so that’s really identifying what makes you unique, but also what messaging resonates with that ideal client.

That is still incredibly important today, but it’s also important to take that messaging and train your AI tools of choice on that messaging as well. So again, you’re not creating generic content, you’re creating content that speaks to your ideal clients with the messaging you’ve identified is really important. And so those foundations are still the same, but the way we’re using them is evolving a bit because of the technology that’s now available.

John Jantsch (06:48.733)

So, you know, we’ve, we’re all seeing people run into AI and just like, look what it can do, makes life faster, better, cheaper. Um, where do you think the danger of this, that like eyes wide open, you know, jump in and start using the tools? What do you think the danger of that is for many small businesses?

Sara Nay (07:07.987)

It complicates things that causes confusion. causes inconsistency. It causes noise. It amplifies the chaos that’s already there. It causes so many issues for the internal team or the team using the program, but also for the clients and prospects that you’re putting out content to as well. And so it’s causing confusion in both of those areas. And so a lot of what I encourage small businesses to do is take a step back.

John Jantsch (07:12.916)

amplifies the chaos that’s already there, right? Yeah.

Sara Nay (07:33.767)

And if you’ve been following duct tape marketing for any period of time, you’ve heard us say strategy before tactics. But it’s now strategy before tactics and technology is the conversation we’re having with clients. And so if you’re thinking about, okay, we need to be using AI tools instead of just diving into tools first, take a step back and answer some very important questions as to what’s the business actually trying to accomplish? What’s the marketing strategy look like based on that?

What’s the team strategy or what’s our current team structure look like? And then you can say, okay, what tools can help us accomplish our goals? And then once you identify what the tools are, you then need to train the tools on your strategy that you would have created to then get to the point where you’re ready to execute on them efficiently. So don’t dive into tools, take a step back, create the strategy, and then answer the question of what tools are gonna help us get from where we are today to where we’re trying to go.

John Jantsch (08:30.936)

So, you know, the fractional CMO plus concept is a big part of our model. what do you tell that small business owner that’s got kind of a smaller budget and it’s thinking, I really just need somebody to do stuff rather than like, you know, I can’t really afford or I, or maybe I’m not big enough to even think about the idea of having fractional leadership. What do you say to that business as to why they need to maybe change their mindset?

Sara Nay (08:55.403)

Yeah, I mean, think, again, I keep going back to AI, but it’s causing small business owners or small businesses an opportunity that we haven’t had before. so, you previously, let’s think of traditional marketing org chart. You would have a CMO in a company and then you would have a lot of different executors under them, essentially. So you’d have like a paid specialist, an email marketing specialist, a social, you know, all of the different channels and categories. That’s never really been feasible to small businesses because

they wouldn’t even have a budget for a CMO, let alone all the other people that are involved in that story. And so I think the best opportunity that small businesses have is right now in terms of the org chart, because you can bring in a fractional CMO. So you’re not paying a full-time salary. You’re paying a set fee every single month. That fractional CMO is then tasked with creating the overall strategy, managing the budget, owning the metrics.

overseeing all of the marketing department essentially. And then under that fractional CMO, believe instead of, I don’t know if we’re quite there yet, but the direction I believe we’re going is instead of having a specialist in all the different channels, small businesses can have marketing executors that are familiar enough in writing great copy and understanding social media, but they’re really systems oriented and technology first people.

where you can bring in AI systems below them to help them execute at a higher level than they’ve ever been before. And so now you’re getting a marketing org chart with all of these different roles that you previously probably couldn’t even think about affording as a small business.

John Jantsch (10:35.832)

So going back to the theme of renting, mean, the opposite of renting is owning. and so to a large degree, you know, what you’re describing there is kind of that path towards owning your, your marketing, you know, as a business, as opposed to maybe it wasn’t even renting. was abdicating like going here, you do it. I don’t care what you’re doing over there, but how does that change the business owners mindset in terms of.

Sara Nay (10:54.124)

Yeah.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:05.262)

people in terms of structure, in terms of process, if they’re actually, you know, now they’re going to have those people in their organization or they’re going to have those functions in their organization. Who manages that? How do they hire for that? Are they, are they bringing in more overhead that makes sense for their business if they’re going to start thinking that way, or is this the ultimate path to, truly scaling a business?

Sara Nay (11:16.557)

It obviously depends on the business situation, revenue size, long-term growth goals. And so there’s a lot of factors that I would need to consider to answer that specifically. But for me, if you’re a small business and you’re looking to scale up,

when you’re doing a certain level of revenue, you’ve been in business for a few years, let’s say you’ve passed the 1 million revenue mark, I think it’s time to start considering you need marketing leadership of some extent. And so when small businesses scale up to a certain point, if they haven’t looked for marketing leadership, the CEO becomes the CMO and they either have marketing experience or they learn marketing. And now it’s this necessary evil that

they’re having to spend a lot of their time on where they never wanted to become a CMO in the first place. And so if you’re scaling up and you have high growth goals, looking for someone like a fractional CMO, I think makes a lot of sense because the whole idea is as the CEO or founder, you stay in your zone of genius. You stay focused on the why behind you building the business in the first place. then you… In selling, yeah.

John Jantsch (12:34.798)

or in selling, you know, stuff that actually is going to make money for the business rather than you having to figure out how to manage the technology.

Sara Nay (12:46.121)

Exactly. And then you bring in a fractional CMO or a marketing leader of some extent that then is tasked with what you identified earlier in terms of managing team, bringing in partners or hiring full-time team, running the technology, building the systems and processes, running the budget and the metrics. so the fractional CMO is really tasked with leading the marketing department and working alongside you to help you reach the specific business goals that you would have laid out.

John Jantsch (13:15.566)

You know, if somebody, whoever you’re working with is going to bring you strategy first, you know, as the first step, it doesn’t really matter what you call that person, right? What their role is, right? I mean, it’s really more the idea of thinking strategy first, isn’t

Sara Nay (13:21.901)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (13:31.137)

Yeah, absolutely. And so we’ll throw out all different terms. I mean, we talk a lot about fractional CMO, but if that feels like too elevated of a term, know, marketing leader, marketing strategist, marketing advisor, you know, the point is what they’re doing. They’re, leading the marketing initiatives and not just being an order taker.

John Jantsch (13:51.672)

So let’s flip to agencies that are listening, because I know we have agencies listening as well. How do they have to shift their mindset to really stay relevant? mean, I think in some agency, you look at some of these agencies that are providing SEO and content and social media, that’s their package, right, of done for you services. There might be a time in the very near future where that’s just not that relevant.

Sara Nay (14:19.372)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:19.423)

or people aren’t going to be willing to pay what you need to run a profitable business. So how do agencies need to shift their mindset?

Sara Nay (14:26.705)

Yeah, and there’s been a lot of stuff coming out there that I’ve seen on LinkedIn and different articles about how many agencies are going to shut down in the next few years. I think a lot of that stuff’s hard to predict, but I do think if you just keep offering execution, it’s a race to the bottom in a lot of cases because small businesses, even if they’re not doing it that effectively yet, they are bringing in AI solutions to cut costs in certain areas. And I think that marketing execution is one of those.

areas. And so, you know, I think if agencies keep offering execution as their core services, it’s going to be very challenging in the next few years moving forward, because AI is becoming more sophisticated. So you’re basically competing against AI in that scenario versus if agencies shift their offering and they step more into this leadership role, where they’re, you know, focusing on strategy.

they’re elevating team, it can be their own team or it can be internal team, but they’re elevating humans essentially with AI systems below them. Then they’re working alongside AI versus competing against it.

John Jantsch (15:35.64)

So if I’m a small business owner listening and.

Obviously picking up and reading the book is going to be step one. But what are a couple steps towards taking this ownership mentality that somebody could start this week? If you’re stuck in the old kind of way of thinking, here are a couple things you can do this week to start changing your mindset or maybe even changing your marketing.

Sara Nay (16:06.165)

Yeah, of course. There’s two things that come to mind right off the bat. One of the first things, and I talk about this in the book as well, is the marketing strategy pyramid. We talk a lot about it at Duck Tape Marketing, but it’s really taking a step back and answering some business strategic questions first. So really analyzing what are your business goals? What are your objectives? What’s your revenue? Where are you growing towards? What are your mission, vision, values? And so really analyzing some of those things.

And then thinking through what is your marketing strategy to help you move in the right direction. And then thinking through what is your team strategy. So you have to have those two bottom layers of the pyramid first to then think about team. But, know, to the question of how can businesses take back ownership when you’re analyzing your team structure, think through like, these internal roles? Are we relying on outsourced vendors? If we’re relying on outside outsourced vendors or solutions.

Do we have clarity and confidence and control or ownership as to what they are doing or are we kind of left in the dark? I if you’re left in the dark through some of your partnerships, that’s when it’s time to analyze, does it make sense to continue on with this partnership or is there a way where we can get more ownership and control? So that’s where I would start is kind of going back to the basics there and analyzing your current structure, your current relationships, your current team.

and making sure that you have clarity in what everyone is doing.

John Jantsch (17:35.672)

So I’m going to go a little in the weeds here on AI, mainly because it’s on everybody’s mind right now. There are a lot of some of these agencies that we’re talking about are shifting their whole model to being calling themselves AI agencies, where they want to come in and show you how to put in agents and how to automated this and automated that. How do you think small businesses should be looking at?

Sara Nay (17:51.703)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:02.806)

I mean, I don’t think we have to convince them that it’s not going away, but how do you think they should be looking at getting the most out of AI as really the end to end solution or the end to end assistant at this point that it can be rather than just looking at it as, here’s how I can automate stuff and or worse yet, here’s how I can fire people and do more with less.

Sara Nay (18:08.909)

Yeah, a big part of that I think is doing an analysis of who’s currently on your team and you’re not asking the question.

How can we get more work out of them or how can we get them to move faster or be more productive? What you’re answering is how can we elevate them to make more of an impact? And so one of the exercises that we’ve done with our team fairly recently, and this is also in the book as well, is we had everyone on our team analyze what skills are they doing on a regular basis. And then we basically had them identify what are human-led skills that they should continue to focus on, things that light them up, that they love.

And then we also had them identify what skills can be AI assisted and what skills and tasks could be executed by AI. And so we went through that exercise so people could essentially analyze their roles and think about how they could future proof their careers moving forward. And so I think that’s a really great exercise for anyone listening as a business leader or for your whole entire team is you should all be thinking about how can we future proof the business as a whole.

And that’s a lot of what you and I talk about when we talk about shifting our model in a new direction. But you also need to be considering everyone on your team. How can you help them elevate with AI instead of be replaced by it? And then how can you help them continue to grow and focus on the skills that are becoming more important because of the evolution of AI?

John Jantsch (19:54.414)

talking with Sarah Ney, the author of Unchained. Sarah, I appreciate you spending a few moments to talk about Unchained. Is there a place that you’d invite people to go to find out more about the work you do, of course, but then also the new book?

Sara Nay (20:08.269)

Absolutely, so unchainedmodel.com is the book’s website, so love for you to check that out and also connect with me on LinkedIn. Again, my name is Sarah Ney.

John Jantsch (20:18.23)

Awesome, well again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we’ll see you one of these days soon out there on the

Sara Nay (20:24.589)

Thank you.

John Jantsch (00:00.898)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Chris Ducker. He’s a serial entrepreneur, bestselling author and founder of Youpnur, a global personal brand business education company. He’s recognized for his candid actionable advice on entrepreneurship, business growth and personal brand leadership. He’s been on this show before with a couple of his other books, For Sure Rise of the Youpnur, I think.

shaped countless business owners to scale and lead. And we’re going to talk about his latest book, The Long-Haul Leader, How to Lead and Win in the Long Game of Business. So Chris, welcome to the show.

@ChrisDucker (00:39.814)

Yeah, thanks for having me back, John. Appreciate it.

John Jantsch (00:41.666)

So serial entrepreneur, know, my mind goes to like Frosted Flakes or something, is there a favorite serial in the UK that we don’t have over here maybe?

@ChrisDucker (00:53.01)

Boy, I don’t know. That’s a really good question to kick off the chat. I’m pretty sure that we’ve got everything you’ve got and you’ve probably got about another gazillion other serials that we don’t have, I would think.

John Jantsch (01:06.359)

You’ve certainly got something dry and drier and tastelesser.

@ChrisDucker (01:11.784)

I was going say we generally don’t do cereal in our house. I think the last time I had a bowl of cereal, was probably something bland and boring like cornflakes or something like that.

John Jantsch (01:22.094)

Okay. All right. So in the book, you take on something you call short-termism, which I guess is obviously the opposite of the long haul. Was there a time in your business? mean, a lot of authors are really just writing like from the insights they’ve had over, you know, growing their own businesses. When did you realize the long game? Was it, did you have to be in the long game to realize the long game’s value?

@ChrisDucker (01:39.335)

Yep.

@ChrisDucker (01:50.024)

That’s a question. I think that I probably felt it initially, probably maybe 10 years or so ago when we opened up the doors to Uprenur. At that point, I’d already had two other businesses that were both doing very, very well indeed. Funnily enough, both those businesses we’ve now exited and sold over recent years. So the only business that we run now day to day is Uprenur.

And we’ve niched that down now to serve business authors and help them not only write and market their books and launch their books, but also to build businesses around their books and the frameworks that live within them. And that’s going really, really well right now as well. So I believe that when we opened up the doors to Upino, there was a lot of kind of membership sites out there teaching you how to market and your business and grow your business, become a creator and all that kind of stuff. But for me,

John Jantsch (02:29.976)

Mm-hmm.

@ChrisDucker (02:48.584)

I remember saying, this is going to be probably like the next 10, 15 years of my life, I think. Like I felt really quite positive and confident on that fact. And the the real reason here is that the other factor here is I think that ultimately, particularly as an entrepreneur, like we’re kind of conditioned to go after those quick wins, right? Those fast wins, those shiny object wins, as I call them, but

John Jantsch (03:09.432)

Mm-hmm.

@ChrisDucker (03:13.85)

If you think about how short-term wins are quite loud, you go for something, you grab them, you celebrate it in a loud way, the way I look at long-term impact is really it whispers and whispers and whispers until it starts roaring. I’m all about the roar at this point. The real game should be patience and consistency and showing up even when it’s not sexy, doing the un…

the unflashy work behind the scenes and all that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, I think there’s certainly something to be said for hustle, right? And hustle culture. There’s nothing wrong with a little hustle every now and then. And you will hustle anyway, just naturally by being a business owner, a deadline, a project that you want to get out the door by a certain date or something along those lines. But generally speaking, it’s not sustainable to be in that hustle mindset for too long. In fact, hustle, if you think about it, is a season.

It’s not a lifestyle. I talk about that in the book, obviously.

John Jantsch (04:10.254)

Yeah. But help me a little bit. mean, I get this. I’ve been doing this 30 years, you know, so I get, you know, what happens is you, you develop muscles and you develop memory and that helps you with the long game. Like every year in our business, February is a terrible month. And it must have something to do with, you know, the cycle of, of, know, what people do in business. You know, it’s like everybody wants to close the year and, you know, big time. And then there’s like kind of this exhale.

And so younger members of my team are like, leads are way down, know, business is way down. What are we going to do? And I’m like, it’s always this way. You know, just, just wait for March. It’ll be fine. You know, but, that until you’ve been through it 10 times, you know, it’s hard to have that mindset. So how does a, how does a younger entrepreneur in this case, develop that long-term mindset without kind of the, benefit of, you hindsight.

@ChrisDucker (04:45.869)

Yeah. Yeah.

@ChrisDucker (05:02.982)

Yeah, I think, you know, particularly the younger generation, my daughter, Chloe, as I know your daughter’s with your company, Chloe’s been with us now for six years. She’s our COO at Upanose. She’s amazing, but she’s also quite kind of KPI and kind of target focused and she wants to kind of chase down the next goal quite a bit. And I, you know, I always say that first and foremost, leadership in general, leading the game in whatever niche you’re in is not about being

John Jantsch (05:17.474)

Yeah.

@ChrisDucker (05:32.11)

everywhere. Genuinely, it’s not. It’s about being where it really matters. So you don’t have to worry about being on every platform, chasing down every goal, every verification badge that you can get and all that kind of stuff. It’s about choosing your presence with intention and working from a place of non-insecurity or no insecurity. The other thing is that

John Jantsch (05:33.409)

Mm-hmm.

@ChrisDucker (05:59.654)

I kind of like the idea. Like I’ve been saying this a lot recently, particularly to younger people. My son is 16 now and he’s, he’s a big music fan and he’s kind of creating his own music and he’s putting it up on Spotify and YouTube and all these kinds of places. And he gets like really, that I just hit 200 subscribers and you know, it just hit a thousand streams and all this kind of stuff. And I keep saying, look, you don’t need more followers. You don’t need more followers. You just need more focus, right? You’ve got to like focus on the clarity.

Don’t worry about constant content out, know, da, da, da, da, da, know, every available opportunity, like build that focus, knock out something really good on a weekly or a monthly basis. And the momentum will follow plain and simple. And so I think overall, the question is, yes, I can respect people want quick wins and they want to chase down those, those goals, but ultimately any kind of suggest or rather any kind of success that kind of, or suggest that you’re, you know,

have bad health because of it or family or start doing it from a place of non-committal joy. That’s pure sacrifice right there. That’s not success. I want my kids to be successful just like I want all my clients to be successful as well.

John Jantsch (07:13.518)

Well, before we get too much further in the show, the book is built, I mean, as all good books, you give people a, it’s not just a concept, here’s a framework. Here’s actually the steps to do it. So you want to kind of as high level as you want to go unpack what the steps are in the framework.

@ChrisDucker (07:22.482)

Yep.

@ChrisDucker (07:28.456)

Yeah. So when I first started writing the book, so this all came about out of 2021, we were in the middle of pandemic. I had a burnout, a pretty bad burnout. I was actually diagnosed with anxiety, depression, which I didn’t see coming at all. And I had phase three adrenal failure, which basically meant that my adrenal glands, which are two little glands that sit on top of your kidneys, they create cortisol, which is your stress hormone, right?

They flatlined, they weren’t creating any cortisol, so I couldn’t handle stress. And the more stress it got, the worse it got and so on and so on. So I had to take a period of time off and kind of recoup and relook at things. And I noticed when I was writing notes down, and I was doing this mostly for me at this point, not for the book, but whenever I was writing notes down or listening to a podcast or watching a video or whatever it was, talking to somebody, I noticed that the…

The notes I was taking, the things I was taking away from these discussions kept landing in four very, very distinct buckets. And they were hobbies and pastimes, which was a big one out of left field. It didn’t see that coming at all. It was love and relationships. It was personal mastery, so upgrading yourself, et cetera. And then the work that you do, right? And so I sat down and I kind of…

worked through this and looked at how we could put this into a framework when we actually started planning the book. And that’s what we did. We basically put it into this four step, if you imagine a bit of a Venn diagram, it’s the only image in the entire book. There’s one image in the whole book and this is it. And we’ve called it the long haul leader life OS or operating system. Because my mindset was, well, if our phones have got an OS, our computers have got an OS, why can’t we have an OS as well?

And so if you imagine where personal mastery and hobbies and pastimes kind of overlap, the time that we spend doing those things represents the balance that we have between our self-improvement and obviously the activities that we enjoy doing. Where hobbies and relationships and love clash, memories, right, the actual memories that we create, they reflect those meaningful

John Jantsch (09:26.488)

Mm.

@ChrisDucker (09:42.212)

experiences that we create, right, while we’re pursuing these passions and nurturing these relationships and whatnot. And then going further, where love and relationships and the work that we do, or impactful work, as I talk about it in the book, where those actually overlap, then what we’re talking about here is like, showing how meaningful work ultimately enables personal freedom, but also strengthens the relationships both at work and away from work as well. And then finally,

the personal mastery side of things and how that clashes and overlaps with the work that we do. This kind of like excites me a lot is it all comes down to the clients and they reflect the value and the influence that we generate from the people that we work with and how we apply our own expertise into our work. it’s a business book. And it’s interesting with my publisher, we have a pretty long drawn out discussion over like, how do we position this? Is it a leadership book? Is it a self-help book?

John Jantsch (10:36.536)

Yeah.

@ChrisDucker (10:40.186)

Is it personal development? it business? We ended up sticking it into a leadership category, but ultimately it’s a little bit of all of those things. And I’m kind of joking a little bit when I talk to friends about it, saying when it’s kind of part memoir, part roadmap, and that’s kind of where we’re going.

John Jantsch (10:56.142)

Well, I’ve always said that I think entrepreneurship is probably the ultimate personal development. Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, I think you could rightly call personal development or self-help even because I mean, regardless if you’re running a business, mean, almost everybody has those four areas at some level in their life, even if they’re working for a company.

@ChrisDucker (11:04.04)

it totally is. If you want to do it right.

@ChrisDucker (11:21.01)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:24.758)

All good frameworks come with a way to measure. Are we making progress? Are we setting the right priorities? How do you suggest, especially when you start getting into things like hobbies, as you’ve mentioned, mean, how do you measure like, I doing it right?

@ChrisDucker (11:39.27)

Yeah, the hobbies thing, like I said, came out of left field. I didn’t see this one coming. I, through the research that we did through the book, the people that were interviewed for the book and things like that, it was pretty apparent to me that those entrepreneurs, very specifically entrepreneurs, as well as C-suite executives and things like that, but mostly entrepreneurs that we talked to, those that had hobbies were a heck of a lot productive and more successful in their work compared to people that did not have hobbies.

John Jantsch (11:42.445)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:46.072)

me

John Jantsch (12:00.056)

Thanks.

@ChrisDucker (12:09.16)

I started looking into this even further and I found that creative hobbies, very specifically things like painting or anything to do with music and that kind of stuff. I’m a watercolour, nature watercolour. Yeah. And I also do bonsai as well, which is quite creative as well. Got to keep the things alive first and foremost. So the horticulture side of things comes in the play first. But yeah, so what we found with the creative hobbies was really interesting. So

John Jantsch (12:10.958)

Okay.

John Jantsch (12:16.426)

Mm-hmm. And I think you do painting, don’t you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

John Jantsch (12:29.069)

Yeah.

Yeah.

@ChrisDucker (12:39.036)

I went down a rabbit hole and I started looking at like, there any famous people that are like in corporate America, corporate world who have got like creative hobbies? There’s one guy we found, David Solomon, who is the CEO of Goldman Sachs. David Solomon is also known as DJ D Sol. And he is one of the most sought after dance DJs in America. Everything he makes, he gives to charity because he doesn’t need the money, obviously.

John Jantsch (12:45.26)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (13:00.608)

funny.

@ChrisDucker (13:08.232)

But when you look at the statistic, and this came out of a Forbes survey, I believe, that if you engage in a creative hobby as an entrepreneur or a high level executive for a minimum of two hours a week, on average, you’re looking at about a 30 % boost on your performance at work, which is pretty telling. So the overall arching message here is go get a hobby and make it a creative one, ultimately.

John Jantsch (13:29.154)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:35.618)

I mean, did the research suggest why that is though? I mean, what does it rewire your brain? Is it like give you something else to think about? Yeah, yeah, yeah,

@ChrisDucker (13:39.24)

I think it comes down to prioritizing recovery fundamentally. It’s prioritizing recovery. And that is what I’ve personally seen as well in me stepping away from work more often. The work that I do now, Monday, because I don’t work Fridays, I haven’t worked Fridays for many, years. Monday to Friday, I work 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

So it’s not a lot of time quote unquote in the office, but I am more productive than I ever have been. And I go out on nature walks almost every day. I’m very blessed to live in the countryside here in England. So I’m out and about on nature and everything pretty regularly become a little bit of a birdwatcher. Actually, I’m the guy walking around with a big lens now in the morning, just in case something cool pops out of a bush somewhere. But on a very serious note, have noticed unreservedly noticed that

John Jantsch (14:21.048)

Mm-hmm.

@ChrisDucker (14:32.912)

I feel more confident in the work that I’m doing. I get more done. I’m hitting my KPIs. My to-do lists disappear almost on a daily, if not definitely a weekly basis. And my team started the follow suit as well. So we’re now a no work Friday company. And everybody loves that, obviously, a four day work week. And there is just something about prioritizing your recovery that allows you to become better at what you do at work.

John Jantsch (14:58.03)

I wonder sometimes too, if people like us that have their hands on a keyboard a lot of days and we’re staring into virtual cameras. I wonder if there’s also something, if we want to go down another rabbit hole to doing a hobby that uses your hands, that is analog, that really gets you away from a computer screen completely. I actually enjoy woodworking. I build furniture and things. I always say that all the time. I mean, there’s something.

about holding this thing that used to be alive, you know, this tree that used to be alive. And I think there is something physical as well as mental about that.

@ChrisDucker (15:37.224)

I went to a conference, fair. was the Global Bird Fair just last weekend. I’ll show you something on camera here. So if you’re listening on audio, sorry, you’re going to miss this. But I bought this. This is a little nut hatch. Yeah. And I paid, think probably the equivalent of about $90 US for it. But I didn’t necessarily buy it because I wanted this to sit on my desk, although it does look pretty cool.

John Jantsch (15:49.513)

yeah, yeah, a little carved nut touch, yeah.

@ChrisDucker (16:06.128)

I bought it because after talking with the sculptor for 30 minutes, I was invested in the journey. I was invested in what he was all about. This guy was retired, mid seventies, does about five hours a day in his workshop, pretty much seven days a week. Loves what he does and travels the country selling his woodwork and making a little money after retirement. But it was the joy.

John Jantsch (16:13.037)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (16:23.042)

Yeah.

@ChrisDucker (16:32.196)

in his face and his words when he spoke about doing what he did and what he loved. And there’s something to be said for that, you know?

John Jantsch (16:32.227)

haha

John Jantsch (16:38.798)

Yeah, 100%. Well, we could do a whole nother show on this. We better get back to another topic in the book that you cover a lot. And again, you use yourself, I think of stories of reinvention. there a particularly painful, people love painful stories, or is there a particularly painful one or maybe something that you got through because of maybe taking this long haul approach?

@ChrisDucker (16:43.549)

Ha

@ChrisDucker (17:06.408)

Well, I mean, it’s the burnout of 2021. know, that was, it was interesting because that year we had a phenomenal year business-wise. We made a whole bunch of money. We served probably well over 300 people within our UPINR programs, maybe even a little more actually. It was just a great year and all the work I was doing, like genuinely John, like I was loving it. Loving the work.

John Jantsch (17:08.492)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

@ChrisDucker (17:32.636)

love the people we’re working with, love doing the track, you know, everything that we were doing to kind of like, you know, turn up and train people and all the rest of it. was just a great year, but little did I know deep down, I was just wearing myself out further and further and further and further. And when you hit a rock bottom, like, like if you’d have asked me five, like seven, eight years ago, do you ever think you’ll be treated like clinically with drugs for depression, Chris? I would have called you mad, mad. Yeah. There I was.

John Jantsch (17:35.534)

you

John Jantsch (17:56.407)

Mmm, yeah.

@ChrisDucker (18:01.786)

on antidepressants for 18 months to bounce back from it. So it was very much a fish out of water situation for me. I didn’t really feel it coming all that much. And when it hit me, it hit me really, really, really hard. And I did what most kind of quite addictive personality type people do. And I kind of went all in on it. And I, you know, I went down, I went down the nutrition route, the

the whole kind of biohacking route. did a whole bunch of blood work. I started wearing a wearable to track everything from sleep and recovery and the heart rate and all the rest of it. know, red light therapy, cold plunges, saunas, PT sessions every other day, all that stuff. Because I’m like, I need to get better. Like I can’t, you know, yes, I can afford to take six months off, but my business can’t allow me to take six months off like this.

John Jantsch (18:31.97)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (18:49.933)

Yeah.

@ChrisDucker (18:57.84)

And so it was really, really, really tough. But the things that I talk about in the book are real. Double downing on things like recovering and enjoying hobbies more, spending more time with the people that you love and you respect and want to be around a lot more, focusing on learning new things as well and understanding that in order to lead, you have to continue to learn. You have to. And then really just like the…

focus of working with the right people. That was the big change that I made coming back out from it was that I was done working with the wrong type of people. When I started looking at things a lot more granularly, I realized, that guy’s a pain in the butt to deal with. This group I don’t want to work with anymore and so on so on and so on. And we fired a whole bunch of clients, hired a whole bunch of new ones and rejigged a whole bunch of different stuff that we were doing program-wise, messaging-wise.

John Jantsch (19:54.307)

Mm-hmm.

@ChrisDucker (19:54.812)

marketing language wise, everything. So that was the big, you know, the kind of the big painful story that now I’m happy to say is, you know, we’re in a much better spot than we’ve ever been.

John Jantsch (20:07.374)

So one of the things that I think this long haul approach is, and you talk about it in the book, it takes a lot of transparency. people realize that you’re in the long haul if you’re, I think you even call it leading out loud. You share the good things, you share the bad things, you share where we’re going, get everybody on the same page. How, especially for a leader, that that might feel like, wait, we don’t do that, do we?

We don’t share the books. don’t, you know, I mean, how do you get somebody to realize the value in doing that?

@ChrisDucker (20:34.279)

Yeah.

@ChrisDucker (20:40.882)

Here’s the thing, I didn’t do it either. I didn’t do it. Now, I didn’t do it mostly because I’m a stupid man and we have idiot brains, you know, most of us, but I mean, I think some of it was down to pride. You know, I’m the patriarch of my family, what, four children and an amazing family and they look up to me for pretty much everything. And I love that most days, right? And…

think part of it was that. The other part very clearly was business because people were coming to me to know how to build their business with balance and their business with profitability and purpose built in. And here I am burning out like there’s something broken here and I can’t let them know that I’m going through this. So I had to kind of almost power through it in a way. And actually it was last year when we were hanging out in Nashville.

John Jantsch (21:33.144)

Yep. Yeah.

@ChrisDucker (21:39.11)

with each other. was sitting down when our time together had finished and myself and my buddy Pat Flynn were hanging out. he and our families are very, very close families. We spent a lot of time with each other. And I hadn’t even told him. And we’re talking three years after the fact, after I was diagnosed and put on meds and all the rest of it. And when I was telling him about it, finally face to face properly that we hadn’t seen each other since the pandemic, he started tearing up and he was just like,

John Jantsch (21:53.806)

Hmm. Hmm.

@ChrisDucker (22:08.448)

believe you went through all this without telling me. Like it’s awesome that you’re on the other side of it, but like, bro, you should have told me kind of thing. know, like this is messed up. We’re supposed to be friends. So I kept it in, John, kept it all in for those two main reasons. And I’ve hated myself for it. And when I started writing the book, really got into it at around the beginning of last year, it wrapped up. We wrapped the editing up in around September last year.

John Jantsch (22:10.638)

Yes.

John Jantsch (22:20.876)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

@ChrisDucker (22:36.444)

But when I really got into the writing, was like, I can go two ways here. I can continue to kind of put a bit of a cloak and smoke and mirror style here in place and kind of just skate around the edges. Or I can really open the kimono up and just, you know, just, just, just be super vulnerable and, and just give it all, just put it all out there. And which is, that’s what I decided to do.

And the folks that I’ve spoken to about the book, are half a dozen or so folks that had like an advanced PDF version a few months back before we finalized everything. They were like, man, this is like, the fact that you’re doing this is huge because people in our industry just don’t do this. This has the opportunity of genuinely, like, hopefully changing some lives, like for real, not just business lives, but like lives, lives. And so I’m glad I made the decision to be a little bit more open about it all.

John Jantsch (23:30.222)

Well, awesome. Chris, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Anywhere you want to invite people to learn more about you, your work, obviously the long haul leader.

@ChrisDucker (23:38.728)

Yeah, I mean, if anybody does want to read the book, they can preorder it at longhaulleader.com. The official publication date is September 2. And if they preorder before that date, just send us a copy of your receipt. We’ll give you a load of bonuses. All the info is on that page. And if they want to connect on me, just chrisducker.com. Nice and easy.

John Jantsch (23:57.198)

Again, appreciate you dropping by and I look forward to seeing you in Nashville soon.

@ChrisDucker (24:03.91)

Yeah, right back at you, my friend.

John Jantsch (24:05.688)

Take care.

John Jantsch (00:00.898)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Chris Ducker. He’s a serial entrepreneur, bestselling author and founder of Youpnur, a global personal brand business education company. He’s recognized for his candid actionable advice on entrepreneurship, business growth and personal brand leadership. He’s been on this show before with a couple of his other books, For Sure Rise of the Youpnur, I think.

shaped countless business owners to scale and lead. And we’re going to talk about his latest book, The Long-Haul Leader, How to Lead and Win in the Long Game of Business. So Chris, welcome to the show.

@ChrisDucker (00:39.814)

Yeah, thanks for having me back, John. Appreciate it.

John Jantsch (00:41.666)

So serial entrepreneur, know, my mind goes to like Frosted Flakes or something, is there a favorite serial in the UK that we don’t have over here maybe?

@ChrisDucker (00:53.01)

Boy, I don’t know. That’s a really good question to kick off the chat. I’m pretty sure that we’ve got everything you’ve got and you’ve probably got about another gazillion other serials that we don’t have, I would think.

John Jantsch (01:06.359)

You’ve certainly got something dry and drier and tastelesser.

@ChrisDucker (01:11.784)

I was going say we generally don’t do cereal in our house. I think the last time I had a bowl of cereal, was probably something bland and boring like cornflakes or something like that.

John Jantsch (01:22.094)

Okay. All right. So in the book, you take on something you call short-termism, which I guess is obviously the opposite of the long haul. Was there a time in your business? mean, a lot of authors are really just writing like from the insights they’ve had over, you know, growing their own businesses. When did you realize the long game? Was it, did you have to be in the long game to realize the long game’s value?

@ChrisDucker (01:39.335)

Yep.

@ChrisDucker (01:50.024)

That’s a question. I think that I probably felt it initially, probably maybe 10 years or so ago when we opened up the doors to Uprenur. At that point, I’d already had two other businesses that were both doing very, very well indeed. Funnily enough, both those businesses we’ve now exited and sold over recent years. So the only business that we run now day to day is Uprenur.

And we’ve niched that down now to serve business authors and help them not only write and market their books and launch their books, but also to build businesses around their books and the frameworks that live within them. And that’s going really, really well right now as well. So I believe that when we opened up the doors to Upino, there was a lot of kind of membership sites out there teaching you how to market and your business and grow your business, become a creator and all that kind of stuff. But for me,

John Jantsch (02:29.976)

Mm-hmm.

@ChrisDucker (02:48.584)

I remember saying, this is going to be probably like the next 10, 15 years of my life, I think. Like I felt really quite positive and confident on that fact. And the the real reason here is that the other factor here is I think that ultimately, particularly as an entrepreneur, like we’re kind of conditioned to go after those quick wins, right? Those fast wins, those shiny object wins, as I call them, but

John Jantsch (03:09.432)

Mm-hmm.

@ChrisDucker (03:13.85)

If you think about how short-term wins are quite loud, you go for something, you grab them, you celebrate it in a loud way, the way I look at long-term impact is really it whispers and whispers and whispers until it starts roaring. I’m all about the roar at this point. The real game should be patience and consistency and showing up even when it’s not sexy, doing the un…

the unflashy work behind the scenes and all that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, I think there’s certainly something to be said for hustle, right? And hustle culture. There’s nothing wrong with a little hustle every now and then. And you will hustle anyway, just naturally by being a business owner, a deadline, a project that you want to get out the door by a certain date or something along those lines. But generally speaking, it’s not sustainable to be in that hustle mindset for too long. In fact, hustle, if you think about it, is a season.

It’s not a lifestyle. I talk about that in the book, obviously.

John Jantsch (04:10.254)

Yeah. But help me a little bit. mean, I get this. I’ve been doing this 30 years, you know, so I get, you know, what happens is you, you develop muscles and you develop memory and that helps you with the long game. Like every year in our business, February is a terrible month. And it must have something to do with, you know, the cycle of, of, know, what people do in business. You know, it’s like everybody wants to close the year and, you know, big time. And then there’s like kind of this exhale.

And so younger members of my team are like, leads are way down, know, business is way down. What are we going to do? And I’m like, it’s always this way. You know, just, just wait for March. It’ll be fine. You know, but, that until you’ve been through it 10 times, you know, it’s hard to have that mindset. So how does a, how does a younger entrepreneur in this case, develop that long-term mindset without kind of the, benefit of, you hindsight.

@ChrisDucker (04:45.869)

Yeah. Yeah.

@ChrisDucker (05:02.982)

Yeah, I think, you know, particularly the younger generation, my daughter, Chloe, as I know your daughter’s with your company, Chloe’s been with us now for six years. She’s our COO at Upanose. She’s amazing, but she’s also quite kind of KPI and kind of target focused and she wants to kind of chase down the next goal quite a bit. And I, you know, I always say that first and foremost, leadership in general, leading the game in whatever niche you’re in is not about being

John Jantsch (05:17.474)

Yeah.

@ChrisDucker (05:32.11)

everywhere. Genuinely, it’s not. It’s about being where it really matters. So you don’t have to worry about being on every platform, chasing down every goal, every verification badge that you can get and all that kind of stuff. It’s about choosing your presence with intention and working from a place of non-insecurity or no insecurity. The other thing is that

John Jantsch (05:33.409)

Mm-hmm.

@ChrisDucker (05:59.654)

I kind of like the idea. Like I’ve been saying this a lot recently, particularly to younger people. My son is 16 now and he’s, he’s a big music fan and he’s kind of creating his own music and he’s putting it up on Spotify and YouTube and all these kinds of places. And he gets like really, that I just hit 200 subscribers and you know, it just hit a thousand streams and all this kind of stuff. And I keep saying, look, you don’t need more followers. You don’t need more followers. You just need more focus, right? You’ve got to like focus on the clarity.

Don’t worry about constant content out, know, da, da, da, da, da, know, every available opportunity, like build that focus, knock out something really good on a weekly or a monthly basis. And the momentum will follow plain and simple. And so I think overall, the question is, yes, I can respect people want quick wins and they want to chase down those, those goals, but ultimately any kind of suggest or rather any kind of success that kind of, or suggest that you’re, you know,

have bad health because of it or family or start doing it from a place of non-committal joy. That’s pure sacrifice right there. That’s not success. I want my kids to be successful just like I want all my clients to be successful as well.

John Jantsch (07:13.518)

Well, before we get too much further in the show, the book is built, I mean, as all good books, you give people a, it’s not just a concept, here’s a framework. Here’s actually the steps to do it. So you want to kind of as high level as you want to go unpack what the steps are in the framework.

@ChrisDucker (07:22.482)

Yep.

@ChrisDucker (07:28.456)

Yeah. So when I first started writing the book, so this all came about out of 2021, we were in the middle of pandemic. I had a burnout, a pretty bad burnout. I was actually diagnosed with anxiety, depression, which I didn’t see coming at all. And I had phase three adrenal failure, which basically meant that my adrenal glands, which are two little glands that sit on top of your kidneys, they create cortisol, which is your stress hormone, right?

They flatlined, they weren’t creating any cortisol, so I couldn’t handle stress. And the more stress it got, the worse it got and so on and so on. So I had to take a period of time off and kind of recoup and relook at things. And I noticed when I was writing notes down, and I was doing this mostly for me at this point, not for the book, but whenever I was writing notes down or listening to a podcast or watching a video or whatever it was, talking to somebody, I noticed that the…

The notes I was taking, the things I was taking away from these discussions kept landing in four very, very distinct buckets. And they were hobbies and pastimes, which was a big one out of left field. It didn’t see that coming at all. It was love and relationships. It was personal mastery, so upgrading yourself, et cetera. And then the work that you do, right? And so I sat down and I kind of…

worked through this and looked at how we could put this into a framework when we actually started planning the book. And that’s what we did. We basically put it into this four step, if you imagine a bit of a Venn diagram, it’s the only image in the entire book. There’s one image in the whole book and this is it. And we’ve called it the long haul leader life OS or operating system. Because my mindset was, well, if our phones have got an OS, our computers have got an OS, why can’t we have an OS as well?

And so if you imagine where personal mastery and hobbies and pastimes kind of overlap, the time that we spend doing those things represents the balance that we have between our self-improvement and obviously the activities that we enjoy doing. Where hobbies and relationships and love clash, memories, right, the actual memories that we create, they reflect those meaningful

John Jantsch (09:26.488)

Mm.

@ChrisDucker (09:42.212)

experiences that we create, right, while we’re pursuing these passions and nurturing these relationships and whatnot. And then going further, where love and relationships and the work that we do, or impactful work, as I talk about it in the book, where those actually overlap, then what we’re talking about here is like, showing how meaningful work ultimately enables personal freedom, but also strengthens the relationships both at work and away from work as well. And then finally,

the personal mastery side of things and how that clashes and overlaps with the work that we do. This kind of like excites me a lot is it all comes down to the clients and they reflect the value and the influence that we generate from the people that we work with and how we apply our own expertise into our work. it’s a business book. And it’s interesting with my publisher, we have a pretty long drawn out discussion over like, how do we position this? Is it a leadership book? Is it a self-help book?

John Jantsch (10:36.536)

Yeah.

@ChrisDucker (10:40.186)

Is it personal development? it business? We ended up sticking it into a leadership category, but ultimately it’s a little bit of all of those things. And I’m kind of joking a little bit when I talk to friends about it, saying when it’s kind of part memoir, part roadmap, and that’s kind of where we’re going.

John Jantsch (10:56.142)

Well, I’ve always said that I think entrepreneurship is probably the ultimate personal development. Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, I think you could rightly call personal development or self-help even because I mean, regardless if you’re running a business, mean, almost everybody has those four areas at some level in their life, even if they’re working for a company.

@ChrisDucker (11:04.04)

it totally is. If you want to do it right.

@ChrisDucker (11:21.01)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:24.758)

All good frameworks come with a way to measure. Are we making progress? Are we setting the right priorities? How do you suggest, especially when you start getting into things like hobbies, as you’ve mentioned, mean, how do you measure like, I doing it right?

@ChrisDucker (11:39.27)

Yeah, the hobbies thing, like I said, came out of left field. I didn’t see this one coming. I, through the research that we did through the book, the people that were interviewed for the book and things like that, it was pretty apparent to me that those entrepreneurs, very specifically entrepreneurs, as well as C-suite executives and things like that, but mostly entrepreneurs that we talked to, those that had hobbies were a heck of a lot productive and more successful in their work compared to people that did not have hobbies.

John Jantsch (11:42.445)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:46.072)

me

John Jantsch (12:00.056)

Thanks.

@ChrisDucker (12:09.16)

I started looking into this even further and I found that creative hobbies, very specifically things like painting or anything to do with music and that kind of stuff. I’m a watercolour, nature watercolour. Yeah. And I also do bonsai as well, which is quite creative as well. Got to keep the things alive first and foremost. So the horticulture side of things comes in the play first. But yeah, so what we found with the creative hobbies was really interesting. So

John Jantsch (12:10.958)

Okay.

John Jantsch (12:16.426)

Mm-hmm. And I think you do painting, don’t you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

John Jantsch (12:29.069)

Yeah.

Yeah.

@ChrisDucker (12:39.036)

I went down a rabbit hole and I started looking at like, there any famous people that are like in corporate America, corporate world who have got like creative hobbies? There’s one guy we found, David Solomon, who is the CEO of Goldman Sachs. David Solomon is also known as DJ D Sol. And he is one of the most sought after dance DJs in America. Everything he makes, he gives to charity because he doesn’t need the money, obviously.

John Jantsch (12:45.26)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (13:00.608)

funny.

@ChrisDucker (13:08.232)

But when you look at the statistic, and this came out of a Forbes survey, I believe, that if you engage in a creative hobby as an entrepreneur or a high level executive for a minimum of two hours a week, on average, you’re looking at about a 30 % boost on your performance at work, which is pretty telling. So the overall arching message here is go get a hobby and make it a creative one, ultimately.

John Jantsch (13:29.154)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:35.618)

I mean, did the research suggest why that is though? I mean, what does it rewire your brain? Is it like give you something else to think about? Yeah, yeah, yeah,

@ChrisDucker (13:39.24)

I think it comes down to prioritizing recovery fundamentally. It’s prioritizing recovery. And that is what I’ve personally seen as well in me stepping away from work more often. The work that I do now, Monday, because I don’t work Fridays, I haven’t worked Fridays for many, years. Monday to Friday, I work 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

So it’s not a lot of time quote unquote in the office, but I am more productive than I ever have been. And I go out on nature walks almost every day. I’m very blessed to live in the countryside here in England. So I’m out and about on nature and everything pretty regularly become a little bit of a birdwatcher. Actually, I’m the guy walking around with a big lens now in the morning, just in case something cool pops out of a bush somewhere. But on a very serious note, have noticed unreservedly noticed that

John Jantsch (14:21.048)

Mm-hmm.

@ChrisDucker (14:32.912)

I feel more confident in the work that I’m doing. I get more done. I’m hitting my KPIs. My to-do lists disappear almost on a daily, if not definitely a weekly basis. And my team started the follow suit as well. So we’re now a no work Friday company. And everybody loves that, obviously, a four day work week. And there is just something about prioritizing your recovery that allows you to become better at what you do at work.

John Jantsch (14:58.03)

I wonder sometimes too, if people like us that have their hands on a keyboard a lot of days and we’re staring into virtual cameras. I wonder if there’s also something, if we want to go down another rabbit hole to doing a hobby that uses your hands, that is analog, that really gets you away from a computer screen completely. I actually enjoy woodworking. I build furniture and things. I always say that all the time. I mean, there’s something.

about holding this thing that used to be alive, you know, this tree that used to be alive. And I think there is something physical as well as mental about that.

@ChrisDucker (15:37.224)

I went to a conference, fair. was the Global Bird Fair just last weekend. I’ll show you something on camera here. So if you’re listening on audio, sorry, you’re going to miss this. But I bought this. This is a little nut hatch. Yeah. And I paid, think probably the equivalent of about $90 US for it. But I didn’t necessarily buy it because I wanted this to sit on my desk, although it does look pretty cool.

John Jantsch (15:49.513)

yeah, yeah, a little carved nut touch, yeah.

@ChrisDucker (16:06.128)

I bought it because after talking with the sculptor for 30 minutes, I was invested in the journey. I was invested in what he was all about. This guy was retired, mid seventies, does about five hours a day in his workshop, pretty much seven days a week. Loves what he does and travels the country selling his woodwork and making a little money after retirement. But it was the joy.

John Jantsch (16:13.037)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (16:23.042)

Yeah.

@ChrisDucker (16:32.196)

in his face and his words when he spoke about doing what he did and what he loved. And there’s something to be said for that, you know?

John Jantsch (16:32.227)

haha

John Jantsch (16:38.798)

Yeah, 100%. Well, we could do a whole nother show on this. We better get back to another topic in the book that you cover a lot. And again, you use yourself, I think of stories of reinvention. there a particularly painful, people love painful stories, or is there a particularly painful one or maybe something that you got through because of maybe taking this long haul approach?

@ChrisDucker (16:43.549)

Ha

@ChrisDucker (17:06.408)

Well, I mean, it’s the burnout of 2021. know, that was, it was interesting because that year we had a phenomenal year business-wise. We made a whole bunch of money. We served probably well over 300 people within our UPINR programs, maybe even a little more actually. It was just a great year and all the work I was doing, like genuinely John, like I was loving it. Loving the work.

John Jantsch (17:08.492)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

@ChrisDucker (17:32.636)

love the people we’re working with, love doing the track, you know, everything that we were doing to kind of like, you know, turn up and train people and all the rest of it. was just a great year, but little did I know deep down, I was just wearing myself out further and further and further and further. And when you hit a rock bottom, like, like if you’d have asked me five, like seven, eight years ago, do you ever think you’ll be treated like clinically with drugs for depression, Chris? I would have called you mad, mad. Yeah. There I was.

John Jantsch (17:35.534)

you

John Jantsch (17:56.407)

Mmm, yeah.

@ChrisDucker (18:01.786)

on antidepressants for 18 months to bounce back from it. So it was very much a fish out of water situation for me. I didn’t really feel it coming all that much. And when it hit me, it hit me really, really, really hard. And I did what most kind of quite addictive personality type people do. And I kind of went all in on it. And I, you know, I went down, I went down the nutrition route, the

the whole kind of biohacking route. did a whole bunch of blood work. I started wearing a wearable to track everything from sleep and recovery and the heart rate and all the rest of it. know, red light therapy, cold plunges, saunas, PT sessions every other day, all that stuff. Because I’m like, I need to get better. Like I can’t, you know, yes, I can afford to take six months off, but my business can’t allow me to take six months off like this.

John Jantsch (18:31.97)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (18:49.933)

Yeah.

@ChrisDucker (18:57.84)

And so it was really, really, really tough. But the things that I talk about in the book are real. Double downing on things like recovering and enjoying hobbies more, spending more time with the people that you love and you respect and want to be around a lot more, focusing on learning new things as well and understanding that in order to lead, you have to continue to learn. You have to. And then really just like the…

focus of working with the right people. That was the big change that I made coming back out from it was that I was done working with the wrong type of people. When I started looking at things a lot more granularly, I realized, that guy’s a pain in the butt to deal with. This group I don’t want to work with anymore and so on so on and so on. And we fired a whole bunch of clients, hired a whole bunch of new ones and rejigged a whole bunch of different stuff that we were doing program-wise, messaging-wise.

John Jantsch (19:54.307)

Mm-hmm.

@ChrisDucker (19:54.812)

marketing language wise, everything. So that was the big, you know, the kind of the big painful story that now I’m happy to say is, you know, we’re in a much better spot than we’ve ever been.

John Jantsch (20:07.374)

So one of the things that I think this long haul approach is, and you talk about it in the book, it takes a lot of transparency. people realize that you’re in the long haul if you’re, I think you even call it leading out loud. You share the good things, you share the bad things, you share where we’re going, get everybody on the same page. How, especially for a leader, that that might feel like, wait, we don’t do that, do we?

We don’t share the books. don’t, you know, I mean, how do you get somebody to realize the value in doing that?

@ChrisDucker (20:34.279)

Yeah.

@ChrisDucker (20:40.882)

Here’s the thing, I didn’t do it either. I didn’t do it. Now, I didn’t do it mostly because I’m a stupid man and we have idiot brains, you know, most of us, but I mean, I think some of it was down to pride. You know, I’m the patriarch of my family, what, four children and an amazing family and they look up to me for pretty much everything. And I love that most days, right? And…

think part of it was that. The other part very clearly was business because people were coming to me to know how to build their business with balance and their business with profitability and purpose built in. And here I am burning out like there’s something broken here and I can’t let them know that I’m going through this. So I had to kind of almost power through it in a way. And actually it was last year when we were hanging out in Nashville.

John Jantsch (21:33.144)

Yep. Yeah.

@ChrisDucker (21:39.11)

with each other. was sitting down when our time together had finished and myself and my buddy Pat Flynn were hanging out. he and our families are very, very close families. We spent a lot of time with each other. And I hadn’t even told him. And we’re talking three years after the fact, after I was diagnosed and put on meds and all the rest of it. And when I was telling him about it, finally face to face properly that we hadn’t seen each other since the pandemic, he started tearing up and he was just like,

John Jantsch (21:53.806)

Hmm. Hmm.

@ChrisDucker (22:08.448)

believe you went through all this without telling me. Like it’s awesome that you’re on the other side of it, but like, bro, you should have told me kind of thing. know, like this is messed up. We’re supposed to be friends. So I kept it in, John, kept it all in for those two main reasons. And I’ve hated myself for it. And when I started writing the book, really got into it at around the beginning of last year, it wrapped up. We wrapped the editing up in around September last year.

John Jantsch (22:10.638)

Yes.

John Jantsch (22:20.876)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

@ChrisDucker (22:36.444)

But when I really got into the writing, was like, I can go two ways here. I can continue to kind of put a bit of a cloak and smoke and mirror style here in place and kind of just skate around the edges. Or I can really open the kimono up and just, you know, just, just, just be super vulnerable and, and just give it all, just put it all out there. And which is, that’s what I decided to do.

And the folks that I’ve spoken to about the book, are half a dozen or so folks that had like an advanced PDF version a few months back before we finalized everything. They were like, man, this is like, the fact that you’re doing this is huge because people in our industry just don’t do this. This has the opportunity of genuinely, like, hopefully changing some lives, like for real, not just business lives, but like lives, lives. And so I’m glad I made the decision to be a little bit more open about it all.

John Jantsch (23:30.222)

Well, awesome. Chris, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Anywhere you want to invite people to learn more about you, your work, obviously the long haul leader.

@ChrisDucker (23:38.728)

Yeah, I mean, if anybody does want to read the book, they can preorder it at longhaulleader.com. The official publication date is September 2. And if they preorder before that date, just send us a copy of your receipt. We’ll give you a load of bonuses. All the info is on that page. And if they want to connect on me, just chrisducker.com. Nice and easy.

John Jantsch (23:57.198)

Again, appreciate you dropping by and I look forward to seeing you in Nashville soon.

@ChrisDucker (24:03.91)

Yeah, right back at you, my friend.

John Jantsch (24:05.688)

Take care.

John Jantsch (00:00.878)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Bill Shander. He’s a data communications expert, information designer and founder of Beehive Media. Over 25 years of experience, Bill has helped leading organizations, including United Nations, World Bank and Deloitte turn complex ideas into clear, actionable stories. We’re going to talk about his latest book today, Stakeholder Whispering, Uncover What People Need.

before doing what they ask. So Bill, welcome to the show.

Bill Shander (00:34.34)

Thank you, John. I’m really happy to be here.

John Jantsch (00:36.736)

So I just, sometimes people have things in their bios that I have to ask about. So what does a data communication expert do?

Bill Shander (00:45.654)

That’s a good question. So, you know, everybody these days has data, whether it’s your sales data, your marketing data, your HR data, everybody has data. We’re always packaging it up in PowerPoint presentations to present to our bosses or reports for the board or whoever. And people don’t really do a very good job of it either because they’re not really thinking about communicating ideas. They’re worried about shoving numbers at people. And so I help people.

John Jantsch (01:09.314)

Yeah. Right.

Bill Shander (01:12.216)

tell stories of data, as well as visualize that data in an impactful way.

John Jantsch (01:16.462)

Yeah. And I think there’s probably a lot of people, myself included, that I want to hear the story. Like, what does this data mean? you know, rather than just saying, look, we got this much traffic. Okay. Is that good? Is that bad? Yeah. So what inspired you to write the book? I mean, is there, is there something going on today, you know, in the business world that you think it makes this idea more critical?

Bill Shander (01:22.553)

Yeah.

Bill Shander (01:29.014)

Exactly. How many clicks is good? Are clicks even useful? We don’t know.

Bill Shander (01:44.378)

That’s a good question. I don’t know if today it’s more critical in that this has always been an issue, honestly. I’ve been looking at it for 30 years and took me a long time to realize that this is the thing. Like I’ve been thinking about doing a book for a long time and this was finally the idea of the nugget that said, yes, this must be done. It’s been an issue that’s been around forever. Is it more important today than ever? I would say maybe possibly because of AI. mean, okay, we’re already talking about AI, know, it’s 2025, of course you have to, but.

Honestly, when you ask AI to do something, it just does it. AI is an order taker. And we as humans, what can we do better than AI today? Maybe we can still discern, what really should be done? And maybe we can ask good follow-up questions on all the kinds of things that I talk about in the book that we have to do in order to make sure we’re delivering against the right tasks. AI is just going to do it. So it’s even more important for that reason.

John Jantsch (02:19.064)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:38.198)

Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. mean, I think you can make a case for being more important today and in some ways, because what you mentioned AI actually allows us to crunch a lot more data than we ever would have been able to in some cases. so we certainly have that even the smallest of companies have access now to big crunching. But I think also, I noticed a lot of people, stakeholders included, you know, have much shorter attention spans. And so,

Bill Shander (02:57.082)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:04.258)

You know, that 27 page PowerPoint deck, you know, can be condensed into a story or a metaphor. You know, that might actually be a better way to present the information.

Bill Shander (03:15.748)

Well, that’s it. so stakeholder whispering is, you the basic idea is your stakeholders ask you to do things based on their automated response. How do we usually do it? Well, usually we put it to 27 page PowerPoint deck together. And the problem is to what you said, you know, first of all, attention spans are shrinking a hundred other reasons why that may not be the best solution. But on top of that, like,

I mean, they don’t even know what they need. They’re just going to go with the automated response. And so our job as workers, and it doesn’t matter what role you’re in, if it’s marketing, great, but HR people need this, IT people, finance, et cetera. Whatever we’re working on, we need to question the ask, know, question that automated response. Maybe it is a PowerPoint deck that’s needed, or maybe not to your point.

John Jantsch (04:03.928)

So you mentioned the word order taking, know, I actually, ironically, somebody just said this to me the other day. We have to, you know, we have to sell them what they want so that we can get the trust to sell them what they need. You’ve probably heard that before and you’re kind of advocating for the idea that, no, we need to lead them to what they need and not, you know, and maybe use numbers to help do that. Talk a little more about that idea of beyond order taking.

Bill Shander (04:15.502)

Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Shander (04:28.738)

Yeah. And what you just said is also true, right? Like you do have to gain trust before you can lead them effectively. But yes, the fact is our stakeholders don’t know what they need and our job is to guide them. I often say it’s like therapy. I have a whole chapter in the book about how to conduct a therapy session because it is very much like therapy. Someone comes to a therapist because they have an issue and they need help. And the therapist doesn’t tell them what to do.

They ask them questions. say, well, how does that make you feel? Right? And the questions, right. And the questions allow you to look inside yourself and say, wait, yeah. How does that make me feel? And so in work, okay, you know, we’re launching a new product marketing, make us a brochure. Okay. You know, why would a brochure be better than an app or better than this, that, or the other? Huh? Yeah. Maybe, maybe we should do an app. that introspective opportunity is what guides us down the road towards maybe another option.

John Jantsch (04:56.406)

Yeah. Why do we want that?

Bill Shander (05:24.634)

you know, when you’re new, like you’re in a new role, new boss, whatever, you haven’t gained that trust yet, maybe all you do is you try one thing, one question, which is, the question could be, how do we measure success? How are we gonna know this is gonna, when this has worked, how are we gonna measure that? And just that one question, it’s not gonna get them all the way to some new way of thinking maybe.

but it’s an initial ask. It’s at least one step beyond overtaking. And then over time, you’ll gain more trust and you’ll be able to sort of expand on that guidance way of thinking about it.

John Jantsch (05:58.144)

You know, what I have found is, is that’s a, that’s an incredible technique in selling. you know, a lot of times people will come to us and say, want this, listen, this. and if, if we have the posture or the courage to back up and say what you said, how will that, how will we know that’s successful? What would success look like? How are we going to measure that? have you considered, I find a lot of times people will put their guard down then and like, we’re going to actually have a conversation about.

Bill Shander (06:04.793)

It is.

John Jantsch (06:26.764)

what we should be doing, I don’t have to pretend I know what to tell you to do. And I find it very disarming in a sales conversation. I mean, not to the level of being obnoxious, you know what I mean? But definitely to the level of saying, let’s think about insights instead of actions.

Bill Shander (06:30.658)

Right.

Bill Shander (06:36.42)

Totally, you’re building trust.

Bill Shander (06:40.9)

Yeah.

Bill Shander (06:45.806)

Yeah, you’re building trust the moment you do that, especially in the sales context when there’s, there’s that built in lack of trust in a way. And on top of that, you know, what, what I found in my career, the only success I’ve had in my career is because I was good at the skills, stakeholder whispering. And, know, part of that is no question. It’s the consultative approach. I’m not here.

to sell you widgets, I’m here to solve your problems. I’m here to actually help you succeed. And when you really honestly are doing that, then that includes, yeah, that asking questions like that, will lead to the right solution, not just a solution that puts dollars in my pocket.

John Jantsch (07:22.552)

So of course you’re implying that you have to actually care about getting them a result, right? Yeah. So we’ve covered one side of it, asking better questions, but what role does actually being a better listener play in this?

Bill Shander (07:26.818)

You do. You have to care and you have to be curious. Those are two things that go sort of hand in hand.

Bill Shander (07:41.848)

Yeah, active listening is something is a phrase people talk about. But do you really listen? know, and you know, what’s interesting is like, here we are, we’re having, of course, and like, you’re an interviewer in this context, and you have to do that, right? And like, when I’m talking to a client, I got to be taking notes, I got to be thinking about my next question, response, or you can’t avoid some some of that. But at the same time,

John Jantsch (07:49.07)

No, I’m thinking about the next question I’m going to ask.

Bill Shander (08:07.61)

What I encourage people to do is as best you can within that reality, you try to really listen. And a friend of mine just recently told me his phrase is, listen with your ears, not your brain. So really hear, and yeah, you’re gonna jot notes, you’re gonna notice a little trigger word, they said X, put a little circle on that, whatever, but don’t start formulating your next question as much as you can avoid it until they stop. Truly listen for that whole time.

John Jantsch (08:18.766)

Mm-hmm.

Bill Shander (08:35.354)

It’s really hard to do. None of us could do it perfectly, but we can strive towards that ideal.

John Jantsch (08:41.132)

I think it’s a little bit cultural too. think, you know, Americans are just like, we need noise. They’re like silence, you know, just kills us, right? I read a study the other day that said Americans, I think the average like silence before they become very uncomfortable is three seconds. And in Japan, it is very common for somebody to get asked a question and to literally wait for eight seconds before answering to give it thought and to give it, you know,

Bill Shander (08:50.702)

Yeah.

Bill Shander (09:04.536)

Wow.

John Jantsch (09:08.486)

emotion and I thought, you know, that’s probably I mean, most people if I sat here for eight seconds of dead air, people were like, what’s wrong? It’s pretty interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Shander (09:16.495)

Yeah.

So I have a chapter called Silence is Golden. And not only do I talk about that, but even the chapter, the book is put on the pages in a way that each page is just one sentence with silence all around it. Because it is that important, but it is uncomfortable, it’s true.

John Jantsch (09:29.42)

Yeah. Funny. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve taken I’ve do some public speaking and I’ve taken some training on that and frequently a coach or something will say no let that pause let that sit let the audience digest that boy when you’re up on stage it’s like can I do it. It’s really hard. It’s funny. So so what are the

Bill Shander (09:55.186)

It is, but yeah, good, Go ahead. No, I was just gonna say, yeah, that strategic performance, which includes pauses, silence, pacing. I can speak really quickly and I can slow it down. And that has an effect on your audience for sure. Whether it’s an audience of one stakeholder or a room full of people.

John Jantsch (09:59.084)

Go ahead and finish, sir.

John Jantsch (10:15.278)

Right. So what are, let’s go with the negative. What are the common mistakes that people make? They might get the essence of this book and then charge in. What are some of the things that you see are pitfalls?

Bill Shander (10:28.312)

I mean, you one of the biggest problems people face is that they think that their job is to do what their boss tells them to do. And like on paper, there’s some truth to that, but, clients, not just bosses, clients, investors, whoever your stakeholders are, there’s a broad range of them. Obviously your job is to execute on tasks for your organization, but it’s not just to be that order taker that we talked about. So you have to, the most important thing I’m hoping people remember after reading the book.

is that they just need to do this. Like, see the world in a new way. Your job is not to execute those tasks your boss tells you to do. Your job is to succeed and help your organization succeed. And that includes probing. know, just asking, is this the right thing to be doing? Is this the right way to be doing that thing? So, step number one, acknowledge that this is a thing and just try to do something about it.

Another challenge is that some people are less whisperable than others, right? Some bosses are not so even into having these long conversations, like, you know, just do what I said, right? And obviously that takes confidence to push back and really engage your stakeholders, which also of course takes trust like we talked about. And I would say one of the third things is that, you know, it’s challenging for

John Jantsch (11:33.614)

you

Bill Shander (11:53.004)

ourselves, just sort of acknowledge to ourselves that, you know, essentially we’re all walking around being driven by our subconscious. We’re like literally all of our lives is driven by our subconscious. Tons of research shows us that we’re not very good at reasoning. We’re not really very good at deliberative thinking. We’re just being driven by our subconscious. And so if we can just think about ways to tap into the subconscious, yes, even in work, it’s like therapy, then we’re all going to do a better job doing what we need to do for.

ourselves and our organizations. And it is for ourselves also, like you’re going to be promoted if you’re the one who actually challenges the status quo, brings strategic thinking to the table and delivers against that. know duct tape marketing, the basic idea, right, is be strategic, don’t just execute on tasks, right? And so it’s a very similar way of thinking.

John Jantsch (12:40.782)

So I’m curious, have you ever considered children to be stakeholders that we have to whisper to? As I heard you say that, just do what I said. was like, that’s probably not the most current way of thinking about parenting, it?

Bill Shander (12:46.382)

They certainly could be. Yeah. I mean, and that’s

Bill Shander (12:58.264)

Yeah. And actually brings up the fourth really important thing to be thinking about and a risk, you know, a problem with this is that we don’t recognize, acknowledge, define, and prioritize all of the stakeholders. Right? So my boss tells me to do something, I do it. I am thinking my one stakeholder is my boss. No.

Your boss asked you to do that because his boss asked him and his boss, her boss. And so it’s four chains deep. And by the way, the board of directors is going to show this to their investors. Like the stakeholder list is actually this long. And now you can’t worry about all of them, but which ones are the two or the three whose opinions and actual goals really matter the most. Really zoom in on those ones and really make sure you understand their actual needs.

Like if it’s ultimately about the investors, even though your boss has you do it, they’re the real stakeholder. So make sure you understand what they really need and make sure your boss understands that they’re his stakeholder. And so that they’re involved in that stakeholder whispering with them.

John Jantsch (14:01.176)

So that brings up an interesting quant. How do you balance the fact that the objective might be to create a better experience for the customer? However, what my boss is doing, my objective has to be to keep my job. And so now I’m kind of torn between that. This isn’t really the right approach for that stakeholder. But if I want to meet this objective, how do you balance that?

Bill Shander (14:26.49)

Yeah, it’s the million dollar question. It’s hard one, right? So like some bosses, some people are not going to be very whisperable. And yeah, you could jeopardize your job with that person theoretically. I would say long term, most of the time, if you serve the customer, you’re not going to jeopardize your job.

John Jantsch (14:31.598)

Yeah.

Bill Shander (14:47.884)

and everything’s going to be for the better. Like you’re going to be the one who gets promoted. You’re going to take your boss’s job, right? Essentially, because you’re going to really solve problems. Should. Occasionally it won’t. And you either are willing to face that risk for the potential reward and or if your boss isn’t whisperable, guess what? I say, find a new boss, right? Because that’s really honestly the answer. You don’t want to work in a culture like that.

John Jantsch (14:52.782)

should work that way, right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:07.362)

me. Right.

John Jantsch (15:13.09)

Like so many, I would put this book into a leadership category. Hopefully that jives a little bit with what you’re thinking. And it seems like most leadership ideas really start with the culture of the organization.

Bill Shander (15:22.51)

Yeah, definitely.

Bill Shander (15:29.166)

They definitely do. Yeah. And I have a chapter at the end, which is called some love for my stakeholders or some love for the stakeholders. And I talk about the fact is first of all, I do, I love my stakeholders and it’s not just like blowing smoke. I’ve really enjoyed the work that I’ve done for the last 30 plus years. I’ve enjoyed working with the vast majority of my clients and I really, am curious and I do care and I want to help them. And so.

When I think, when I talk to them in the book, I say, first of all, thank you for teaching me for all these years how to do what I do. But then I also do turn the page a little bit on them and say, okay, now you may be reading this because you’re a middle manager. Guess what? You’re somebody else’s boss, aren’t you? Also, you are somebody’s stakeholder today, even though you’re thinking of as the order taker. So how whisperable are you? And so companies need to develop the culture where they create.

know, cultures of whisperability. And I have some clients who have amazing cultures where they, listen to me, they listen to their employees. It’s not about hierarchy or anything else. And I’ve worked for, you know, as a vendor for some companies that were really not whisperable at all. And I didn’t work for them for, for very long for a variety of reasons, but it’s really hard to be in that type of environment.

John Jantsch (16:45.262)

You have a chapter about, I mean, so many people are working either hybrid or remote or does that change kind of the framework at all or the structure or does it just add kind of another layer of complexity?

Bill Shander (17:01.978)

think it adds another layer complexity for sure because communications is harder, right? Like right now, I’m not looking at you, I’m looking at my camera, but the viewer is looking at my eyes. So at least there’s some eye contact it feels like happening. And so, you know, when it’s all on Zoom, it’s harder to have that real, really productive conversation, certainly better, you know, the body language and all kinds of other things disappear. So there’s definitely that added complexity.

But the process is still the same. You’ve got to have conversations. You’ve got to ask good questions. And something we didn’t talk about, but there’s a key part to the question asking, which is when I ask my stakeholders questions, I’m not doing it to learn the answers. It’s actually the other way around. It’s more of a Socratic dialogue. I’m asking them questions so that they can learn the answers. I want them to figure out what they actually need from me. I’m not trying to guide them. I’m not trying to tell them. I want them to figure it out. It’s like therapy.

John Jantsch (17:44.483)

Yes.

Bill Shander (17:58.848)

Once they figure it out, then I’ll do that. And so the question asking is a very, it’s a two-way street for sure, but the goal is really to help them learn as much as to help me learn.

John Jantsch (18:11.406)

Yeah, you you call it therapy, but it really strikes me. It’s a lot like coaching in some ways. mean, you’re almost coaching people to think about things that maybe haven’t even considered. know, one of my favorite phrases or least favorite phrases is, that’s the way we’ve always done it. Or that’s the way everybody in our industry does it. And, you know, just to even say, anybody ask why? So we’ve always done it that way. It’s amazing how often people will go, you know, I don’t know.

Bill Shander (18:16.591)

Yeah.

Bill Shander (18:28.515)

Right.

Yeah.

Bill Shander (18:36.697)

you

Bill Shander (18:41.55)

Yeah, it’s true.

John Jantsch (18:41.586)

the answer to that. So do you have any in the book or anything you want to anybody you’ve worked with clients that you’ve worked with kind of a real story or example where you know stakeholder whispering has really led to a far better outcome.

Bill Shander (18:58.99)

Yeah, I I tell one story in the book and it’s funny on the surface. It’s a really boring story. It’s not the most dynamic anecdote in the history of the world at all, but it’s one of the most, the moment when this happened was like really eyeopening for me. so was working on project. was doing this data dashboard essentially for this client and we’re having this conversation about whether we should show the rank position.

of countries on this one metric being measured. So this country is number one, two, three, four, five, or should we show the actual score they got on this measurement? So let’s imagine it’s about web analytics. Should we show the number of clicks they got or just the ranking in terms of clicks? And their argument was the way this type of data usually works, the way it’s always been done, is we always just show the rank because people care if their country ahead or behind their favorite country that they want to compete against. But the scores…

John Jantsch (19:37.526)

Thank

Bill Shander (19:55.364)

were universally really, really high. Very few countries had a low score. So you might’ve been ranked 150th. That looks terrible, that sounds awful. But guess what? You had a super high score, just like everybody else. Only a few countries were actually bad. And so was trying to make the case that maybe we should show the actual score because the fact that this country was ranked low didn’t mean they had an actual problem. And so the data…

John Jantsch (20:17.184)

Yeah, they could close 50 places pretty easily.

Bill Shander (20:20.886)

Exactly. They could close it easily and it didn’t matter where they were anyways, as long as they were above X score. And so, you know, I’m asking all these questions. We’re having this really long debate and she almost convinced me five times. I almost convinced her five times. But the point was, you know, it was a very open ended conversation, mostly each of us asking each other questions. and in the end, you know, there was this one moment where she said just literally, she said the word something to the effect of, I never saw it that way before.

John Jantsch (20:24.59)

Yeah.

Bill Shander (20:50.446)

You’re right. And it wasn’t gratifying because I was right, although that’s nice, you know, but it was really because there was this moment of just incredible open-mindedness to your point. Like, why have we always done it that way? Who the hell knows? Like, well, why should we do it that way? Maybe we should consider, maybe we won’t change it, but maybe we should at least look at doing it this other way. And even that I consider a win.

John Jantsch (20:50.819)

Thanks.

John Jantsch (21:15.222)

Yeah, awesome. Well, Bill, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the show. You want to invite people to connect with you somewhere, find out more about your work, obviously find out more about stakeholder risk.

Bill Shander (21:26.136)

Yeah, you can always find me on my website, BillShander.com. And I’m always happy to connect with people on LinkedIn as well.

John Jantsch (21:32.3)

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

Bill Shander (21:36.794)

Thank you very much, John. Nice talking to you.

John Jantsch (00:00.878)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Bill Shander. He’s a data communications expert, information designer and founder of Beehive Media. Over 25 years of experience, Bill has helped leading organizations, including United Nations, World Bank and Deloitte turn complex ideas into clear, actionable stories. We’re going to talk about his latest book today, Stakeholder Whispering, Uncover What People Need.

before doing what they ask. So Bill, welcome to the show.

Bill Shander (00:34.34)

Thank you, John. I’m really happy to be here.

John Jantsch (00:36.736)

So I just, sometimes people have things in their bios that I have to ask about. So what does a data communication expert do?

Bill Shander (00:45.654)

That’s a good question. So, you know, everybody these days has data, whether it’s your sales data, your marketing data, your HR data, everybody has data. We’re always packaging it up in PowerPoint presentations to present to our bosses or reports for the board or whoever. And people don’t really do a very good job of it either because they’re not really thinking about communicating ideas. They’re worried about shoving numbers at people. And so I help people.

John Jantsch (01:09.314)

Yeah. Right.

Bill Shander (01:12.216)

tell stories of data, as well as visualize that data in an impactful way.

John Jantsch (01:16.462)

Yeah. And I think there’s probably a lot of people, myself included, that I want to hear the story. Like, what does this data mean? you know, rather than just saying, look, we got this much traffic. Okay. Is that good? Is that bad? Yeah. So what inspired you to write the book? I mean, is there, is there something going on today, you know, in the business world that you think it makes this idea more critical?

Bill Shander (01:22.553)

Yeah.

Bill Shander (01:29.014)

Exactly. How many clicks is good? Are clicks even useful? We don’t know.

Bill Shander (01:44.378)

That’s a good question. I don’t know if today it’s more critical in that this has always been an issue, honestly. I’ve been looking at it for 30 years and took me a long time to realize that this is the thing. Like I’ve been thinking about doing a book for a long time and this was finally the idea of the nugget that said, yes, this must be done. It’s been an issue that’s been around forever. Is it more important today than ever? I would say maybe possibly because of AI. mean, okay, we’re already talking about AI, know, it’s 2025, of course you have to, but.

Honestly, when you ask AI to do something, it just does it. AI is an order taker. And we as humans, what can we do better than AI today? Maybe we can still discern, what really should be done? And maybe we can ask good follow-up questions on all the kinds of things that I talk about in the book that we have to do in order to make sure we’re delivering against the right tasks. AI is just going to do it. So it’s even more important for that reason.

John Jantsch (02:19.064)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:38.198)

Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. mean, I think you can make a case for being more important today and in some ways, because what you mentioned AI actually allows us to crunch a lot more data than we ever would have been able to in some cases. so we certainly have that even the smallest of companies have access now to big crunching. But I think also, I noticed a lot of people, stakeholders included, you know, have much shorter attention spans. And so,

Bill Shander (02:57.082)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:04.258)

You know, that 27 page PowerPoint deck, you know, can be condensed into a story or a metaphor. You know, that might actually be a better way to present the information.

Bill Shander (03:15.748)

Well, that’s it. so stakeholder whispering is, you the basic idea is your stakeholders ask you to do things based on their automated response. How do we usually do it? Well, usually we put it to 27 page PowerPoint deck together. And the problem is to what you said, you know, first of all, attention spans are shrinking a hundred other reasons why that may not be the best solution. But on top of that, like,

I mean, they don’t even know what they need. They’re just going to go with the automated response. And so our job as workers, and it doesn’t matter what role you’re in, if it’s marketing, great, but HR people need this, IT people, finance, et cetera. Whatever we’re working on, we need to question the ask, know, question that automated response. Maybe it is a PowerPoint deck that’s needed, or maybe not to your point.

John Jantsch (04:03.928)

So you mentioned the word order taking, know, I actually, ironically, somebody just said this to me the other day. We have to, you know, we have to sell them what they want so that we can get the trust to sell them what they need. You’ve probably heard that before and you’re kind of advocating for the idea that, no, we need to lead them to what they need and not, you know, and maybe use numbers to help do that. Talk a little more about that idea of beyond order taking.

Bill Shander (04:15.502)

Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Shander (04:28.738)

Yeah. And what you just said is also true, right? Like you do have to gain trust before you can lead them effectively. But yes, the fact is our stakeholders don’t know what they need and our job is to guide them. I often say it’s like therapy. I have a whole chapter in the book about how to conduct a therapy session because it is very much like therapy. Someone comes to a therapist because they have an issue and they need help. And the therapist doesn’t tell them what to do.

They ask them questions. say, well, how does that make you feel? Right? And the questions, right. And the questions allow you to look inside yourself and say, wait, yeah. How does that make me feel? And so in work, okay, you know, we’re launching a new product marketing, make us a brochure. Okay. You know, why would a brochure be better than an app or better than this, that, or the other? Huh? Yeah. Maybe, maybe we should do an app. that introspective opportunity is what guides us down the road towards maybe another option.

John Jantsch (04:56.406)

Yeah. Why do we want that?

Bill Shander (05:24.634)

you know, when you’re new, like you’re in a new role, new boss, whatever, you haven’t gained that trust yet, maybe all you do is you try one thing, one question, which is, the question could be, how do we measure success? How are we gonna know this is gonna, when this has worked, how are we gonna measure that? And just that one question, it’s not gonna get them all the way to some new way of thinking maybe.

but it’s an initial ask. It’s at least one step beyond overtaking. And then over time, you’ll gain more trust and you’ll be able to sort of expand on that guidance way of thinking about it.

John Jantsch (05:58.144)

You know, what I have found is, is that’s a, that’s an incredible technique in selling. you know, a lot of times people will come to us and say, want this, listen, this. and if, if we have the posture or the courage to back up and say what you said, how will that, how will we know that’s successful? What would success look like? How are we going to measure that? have you considered, I find a lot of times people will put their guard down then and like, we’re going to actually have a conversation about.

Bill Shander (06:04.793)

It is.

John Jantsch (06:26.764)

what we should be doing, I don’t have to pretend I know what to tell you to do. And I find it very disarming in a sales conversation. I mean, not to the level of being obnoxious, you know what I mean? But definitely to the level of saying, let’s think about insights instead of actions.

Bill Shander (06:30.658)

Right.

Bill Shander (06:36.42)

Totally, you’re building trust.

Bill Shander (06:40.9)

Yeah.

Bill Shander (06:45.806)

Yeah, you’re building trust the moment you do that, especially in the sales context when there’s, there’s that built in lack of trust in a way. And on top of that, you know, what, what I found in my career, the only success I’ve had in my career is because I was good at the skills, stakeholder whispering. And, know, part of that is no question. It’s the consultative approach. I’m not here.

to sell you widgets, I’m here to solve your problems. I’m here to actually help you succeed. And when you really honestly are doing that, then that includes, yeah, that asking questions like that, will lead to the right solution, not just a solution that puts dollars in my pocket.

John Jantsch (07:22.552)

So of course you’re implying that you have to actually care about getting them a result, right? Yeah. So we’ve covered one side of it, asking better questions, but what role does actually being a better listener play in this?

Bill Shander (07:26.818)

You do. You have to care and you have to be curious. Those are two things that go sort of hand in hand.

Bill Shander (07:41.848)

Yeah, active listening is something is a phrase people talk about. But do you really listen? know, and you know, what’s interesting is like, here we are, we’re having, of course, and like, you’re an interviewer in this context, and you have to do that, right? And like, when I’m talking to a client, I got to be taking notes, I got to be thinking about my next question, response, or you can’t avoid some some of that. But at the same time,

John Jantsch (07:49.07)

No, I’m thinking about the next question I’m going to ask.

Bill Shander (08:07.61)

What I encourage people to do is as best you can within that reality, you try to really listen. And a friend of mine just recently told me his phrase is, listen with your ears, not your brain. So really hear, and yeah, you’re gonna jot notes, you’re gonna notice a little trigger word, they said X, put a little circle on that, whatever, but don’t start formulating your next question as much as you can avoid it until they stop. Truly listen for that whole time.

John Jantsch (08:18.766)

Mm-hmm.

Bill Shander (08:35.354)

It’s really hard to do. None of us could do it perfectly, but we can strive towards that ideal.

John Jantsch (08:41.132)

I think it’s a little bit cultural too. think, you know, Americans are just like, we need noise. They’re like silence, you know, just kills us, right? I read a study the other day that said Americans, I think the average like silence before they become very uncomfortable is three seconds. And in Japan, it is very common for somebody to get asked a question and to literally wait for eight seconds before answering to give it thought and to give it, you know,

Bill Shander (08:50.702)

Yeah.

Bill Shander (09:04.536)

Wow.

John Jantsch (09:08.486)

emotion and I thought, you know, that’s probably I mean, most people if I sat here for eight seconds of dead air, people were like, what’s wrong? It’s pretty interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Shander (09:16.495)

Yeah.

So I have a chapter called Silence is Golden. And not only do I talk about that, but even the chapter, the book is put on the pages in a way that each page is just one sentence with silence all around it. Because it is that important, but it is uncomfortable, it’s true.

John Jantsch (09:29.42)

Yeah. Funny. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve taken I’ve do some public speaking and I’ve taken some training on that and frequently a coach or something will say no let that pause let that sit let the audience digest that boy when you’re up on stage it’s like can I do it. It’s really hard. It’s funny. So so what are the

Bill Shander (09:55.186)

It is, but yeah, good, Go ahead. No, I was just gonna say, yeah, that strategic performance, which includes pauses, silence, pacing. I can speak really quickly and I can slow it down. And that has an effect on your audience for sure. Whether it’s an audience of one stakeholder or a room full of people.

John Jantsch (09:59.084)

Go ahead and finish, sir.

John Jantsch (10:15.278)

Right. So what are, let’s go with the negative. What are the common mistakes that people make? They might get the essence of this book and then charge in. What are some of the things that you see are pitfalls?

Bill Shander (10:28.312)

I mean, you one of the biggest problems people face is that they think that their job is to do what their boss tells them to do. And like on paper, there’s some truth to that, but, clients, not just bosses, clients, investors, whoever your stakeholders are, there’s a broad range of them. Obviously your job is to execute on tasks for your organization, but it’s not just to be that order taker that we talked about. So you have to, the most important thing I’m hoping people remember after reading the book.

is that they just need to do this. Like, see the world in a new way. Your job is not to execute those tasks your boss tells you to do. Your job is to succeed and help your organization succeed. And that includes probing. know, just asking, is this the right thing to be doing? Is this the right way to be doing that thing? So, step number one, acknowledge that this is a thing and just try to do something about it.

Another challenge is that some people are less whisperable than others, right? Some bosses are not so even into having these long conversations, like, you know, just do what I said, right? And obviously that takes confidence to push back and really engage your stakeholders, which also of course takes trust like we talked about. And I would say one of the third things is that, you know, it’s challenging for

John Jantsch (11:33.614)

you

Bill Shander (11:53.004)

ourselves, just sort of acknowledge to ourselves that, you know, essentially we’re all walking around being driven by our subconscious. We’re like literally all of our lives is driven by our subconscious. Tons of research shows us that we’re not very good at reasoning. We’re not really very good at deliberative thinking. We’re just being driven by our subconscious. And so if we can just think about ways to tap into the subconscious, yes, even in work, it’s like therapy, then we’re all going to do a better job doing what we need to do for.

ourselves and our organizations. And it is for ourselves also, like you’re going to be promoted if you’re the one who actually challenges the status quo, brings strategic thinking to the table and delivers against that. know duct tape marketing, the basic idea, right, is be strategic, don’t just execute on tasks, right? And so it’s a very similar way of thinking.

John Jantsch (12:40.782)

So I’m curious, have you ever considered children to be stakeholders that we have to whisper to? As I heard you say that, just do what I said. was like, that’s probably not the most current way of thinking about parenting, it?

Bill Shander (12:46.382)

They certainly could be. Yeah. I mean, and that’s

Bill Shander (12:58.264)

Yeah. And actually brings up the fourth really important thing to be thinking about and a risk, you know, a problem with this is that we don’t recognize, acknowledge, define, and prioritize all of the stakeholders. Right? So my boss tells me to do something, I do it. I am thinking my one stakeholder is my boss. No.

Your boss asked you to do that because his boss asked him and his boss, her boss. And so it’s four chains deep. And by the way, the board of directors is going to show this to their investors. Like the stakeholder list is actually this long. And now you can’t worry about all of them, but which ones are the two or the three whose opinions and actual goals really matter the most. Really zoom in on those ones and really make sure you understand their actual needs.

Like if it’s ultimately about the investors, even though your boss has you do it, they’re the real stakeholder. So make sure you understand what they really need and make sure your boss understands that they’re his stakeholder. And so that they’re involved in that stakeholder whispering with them.

John Jantsch (14:01.176)

So that brings up an interesting quant. How do you balance the fact that the objective might be to create a better experience for the customer? However, what my boss is doing, my objective has to be to keep my job. And so now I’m kind of torn between that. This isn’t really the right approach for that stakeholder. But if I want to meet this objective, how do you balance that?

Bill Shander (14:26.49)

Yeah, it’s the million dollar question. It’s hard one, right? So like some bosses, some people are not going to be very whisperable. And yeah, you could jeopardize your job with that person theoretically. I would say long term, most of the time, if you serve the customer, you’re not going to jeopardize your job.

John Jantsch (14:31.598)

Yeah.

Bill Shander (14:47.884)

and everything’s going to be for the better. Like you’re going to be the one who gets promoted. You’re going to take your boss’s job, right? Essentially, because you’re going to really solve problems. Should. Occasionally it won’t. And you either are willing to face that risk for the potential reward and or if your boss isn’t whisperable, guess what? I say, find a new boss, right? Because that’s really honestly the answer. You don’t want to work in a culture like that.

John Jantsch (14:52.782)

should work that way, right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:07.362)

me. Right.

John Jantsch (15:13.09)

Like so many, I would put this book into a leadership category. Hopefully that jives a little bit with what you’re thinking. And it seems like most leadership ideas really start with the culture of the organization.

Bill Shander (15:22.51)

Yeah, definitely.

Bill Shander (15:29.166)

They definitely do. Yeah. And I have a chapter at the end, which is called some love for my stakeholders or some love for the stakeholders. And I talk about the fact is first of all, I do, I love my stakeholders and it’s not just like blowing smoke. I’ve really enjoyed the work that I’ve done for the last 30 plus years. I’ve enjoyed working with the vast majority of my clients and I really, am curious and I do care and I want to help them. And so.

When I think, when I talk to them in the book, I say, first of all, thank you for teaching me for all these years how to do what I do. But then I also do turn the page a little bit on them and say, okay, now you may be reading this because you’re a middle manager. Guess what? You’re somebody else’s boss, aren’t you? Also, you are somebody’s stakeholder today, even though you’re thinking of as the order taker. So how whisperable are you? And so companies need to develop the culture where they create.

know, cultures of whisperability. And I have some clients who have amazing cultures where they, listen to me, they listen to their employees. It’s not about hierarchy or anything else. And I’ve worked for, you know, as a vendor for some companies that were really not whisperable at all. And I didn’t work for them for, for very long for a variety of reasons, but it’s really hard to be in that type of environment.

John Jantsch (16:45.262)

You have a chapter about, I mean, so many people are working either hybrid or remote or does that change kind of the framework at all or the structure or does it just add kind of another layer of complexity?

Bill Shander (17:01.978)

think it adds another layer complexity for sure because communications is harder, right? Like right now, I’m not looking at you, I’m looking at my camera, but the viewer is looking at my eyes. So at least there’s some eye contact it feels like happening. And so, you know, when it’s all on Zoom, it’s harder to have that real, really productive conversation, certainly better, you know, the body language and all kinds of other things disappear. So there’s definitely that added complexity.

But the process is still the same. You’ve got to have conversations. You’ve got to ask good questions. And something we didn’t talk about, but there’s a key part to the question asking, which is when I ask my stakeholders questions, I’m not doing it to learn the answers. It’s actually the other way around. It’s more of a Socratic dialogue. I’m asking them questions so that they can learn the answers. I want them to figure out what they actually need from me. I’m not trying to guide them. I’m not trying to tell them. I want them to figure it out. It’s like therapy.

John Jantsch (17:44.483)

Yes.

Bill Shander (17:58.848)

Once they figure it out, then I’ll do that. And so the question asking is a very, it’s a two-way street for sure, but the goal is really to help them learn as much as to help me learn.

John Jantsch (18:11.406)

Yeah, you you call it therapy, but it really strikes me. It’s a lot like coaching in some ways. mean, you’re almost coaching people to think about things that maybe haven’t even considered. know, one of my favorite phrases or least favorite phrases is, that’s the way we’ve always done it. Or that’s the way everybody in our industry does it. And, you know, just to even say, anybody ask why? So we’ve always done it that way. It’s amazing how often people will go, you know, I don’t know.

Bill Shander (18:16.591)

Yeah.

Bill Shander (18:28.515)

Right.

Yeah.

Bill Shander (18:36.697)

you

Bill Shander (18:41.55)

Yeah, it’s true.

John Jantsch (18:41.586)

the answer to that. So do you have any in the book or anything you want to anybody you’ve worked with clients that you’ve worked with kind of a real story or example where you know stakeholder whispering has really led to a far better outcome.

Bill Shander (18:58.99)

Yeah, I I tell one story in the book and it’s funny on the surface. It’s a really boring story. It’s not the most dynamic anecdote in the history of the world at all, but it’s one of the most, the moment when this happened was like really eyeopening for me. so was working on project. was doing this data dashboard essentially for this client and we’re having this conversation about whether we should show the rank position.

of countries on this one metric being measured. So this country is number one, two, three, four, five, or should we show the actual score they got on this measurement? So let’s imagine it’s about web analytics. Should we show the number of clicks they got or just the ranking in terms of clicks? And their argument was the way this type of data usually works, the way it’s always been done, is we always just show the rank because people care if their country ahead or behind their favorite country that they want to compete against. But the scores…

John Jantsch (19:37.526)

Thank

Bill Shander (19:55.364)

were universally really, really high. Very few countries had a low score. So you might’ve been ranked 150th. That looks terrible, that sounds awful. But guess what? You had a super high score, just like everybody else. Only a few countries were actually bad. And so was trying to make the case that maybe we should show the actual score because the fact that this country was ranked low didn’t mean they had an actual problem. And so the data…

John Jantsch (20:17.184)

Yeah, they could close 50 places pretty easily.

Bill Shander (20:20.886)

Exactly. They could close it easily and it didn’t matter where they were anyways, as long as they were above X score. And so, you know, I’m asking all these questions. We’re having this really long debate and she almost convinced me five times. I almost convinced her five times. But the point was, you know, it was a very open ended conversation, mostly each of us asking each other questions. and in the end, you know, there was this one moment where she said just literally, she said the word something to the effect of, I never saw it that way before.

John Jantsch (20:24.59)

Yeah.

Bill Shander (20:50.446)

You’re right. And it wasn’t gratifying because I was right, although that’s nice, you know, but it was really because there was this moment of just incredible open-mindedness to your point. Like, why have we always done it that way? Who the hell knows? Like, well, why should we do it that way? Maybe we should consider, maybe we won’t change it, but maybe we should at least look at doing it this other way. And even that I consider a win.

John Jantsch (20:50.819)

Thanks.

John Jantsch (21:15.222)

Yeah, awesome. Well, Bill, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the show. You want to invite people to connect with you somewhere, find out more about your work, obviously find out more about stakeholder risk.

Bill Shander (21:26.136)

Yeah, you can always find me on my website, BillShander.com. And I’m always happy to connect with people on LinkedIn as well.

John Jantsch (21:32.3)

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

Bill Shander (21:36.794)

Thank you very much, John. Nice talking to you.

John Jantsch (00:00.878)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Bill Shander. He’s a data communications expert, information designer and founder of Beehive Media. Over 25 years of experience, Bill has helped leading organizations, including United Nations, World Bank and Deloitte turn complex ideas into clear, actionable stories. We’re going to talk about his latest book today, Stakeholder Whispering, Uncover What People Need.

before doing what they ask. So Bill, welcome to the show.

Bill Shander (00:34.34)

Thank you, John. I’m really happy to be here.

John Jantsch (00:36.736)

So I just, sometimes people have things in their bios that I have to ask about. So what does a data communication expert do?

Bill Shander (00:45.654)

That’s a good question. So, you know, everybody these days has data, whether it’s your sales data, your marketing data, your HR data, everybody has data. We’re always packaging it up in PowerPoint presentations to present to our bosses or reports for the board or whoever. And people don’t really do a very good job of it either because they’re not really thinking about communicating ideas. They’re worried about shoving numbers at people. And so I help people.

John Jantsch (01:09.314)

Yeah. Right.

Bill Shander (01:12.216)

tell stories of data, as well as visualize that data in an impactful way.

John Jantsch (01:16.462)

Yeah. And I think there’s probably a lot of people, myself included, that I want to hear the story. Like, what does this data mean? you know, rather than just saying, look, we got this much traffic. Okay. Is that good? Is that bad? Yeah. So what inspired you to write the book? I mean, is there, is there something going on today, you know, in the business world that you think it makes this idea more critical?

Bill Shander (01:22.553)

Yeah.

Bill Shander (01:29.014)

Exactly. How many clicks is good? Are clicks even useful? We don’t know.

Bill Shander (01:44.378)

That’s a good question. I don’t know if today it’s more critical in that this has always been an issue, honestly. I’ve been looking at it for 30 years and took me a long time to realize that this is the thing. Like I’ve been thinking about doing a book for a long time and this was finally the idea of the nugget that said, yes, this must be done. It’s been an issue that’s been around forever. Is it more important today than ever? I would say maybe possibly because of AI. mean, okay, we’re already talking about AI, know, it’s 2025, of course you have to, but.

Honestly, when you ask AI to do something, it just does it. AI is an order taker. And we as humans, what can we do better than AI today? Maybe we can still discern, what really should be done? And maybe we can ask good follow-up questions on all the kinds of things that I talk about in the book that we have to do in order to make sure we’re delivering against the right tasks. AI is just going to do it. So it’s even more important for that reason.

John Jantsch (02:19.064)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:38.198)

Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. mean, I think you can make a case for being more important today and in some ways, because what you mentioned AI actually allows us to crunch a lot more data than we ever would have been able to in some cases. so we certainly have that even the smallest of companies have access now to big crunching. But I think also, I noticed a lot of people, stakeholders included, you know, have much shorter attention spans. And so,

Bill Shander (02:57.082)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:04.258)

You know, that 27 page PowerPoint deck, you know, can be condensed into a story or a metaphor. You know, that might actually be a better way to present the information.

Bill Shander (03:15.748)

Well, that’s it. so stakeholder whispering is, you the basic idea is your stakeholders ask you to do things based on their automated response. How do we usually do it? Well, usually we put it to 27 page PowerPoint deck together. And the problem is to what you said, you know, first of all, attention spans are shrinking a hundred other reasons why that may not be the best solution. But on top of that, like,

I mean, they don’t even know what they need. They’re just going to go with the automated response. And so our job as workers, and it doesn’t matter what role you’re in, if it’s marketing, great, but HR people need this, IT people, finance, et cetera. Whatever we’re working on, we need to question the ask, know, question that automated response. Maybe it is a PowerPoint deck that’s needed, or maybe not to your point.

John Jantsch (04:03.928)

So you mentioned the word order taking, know, I actually, ironically, somebody just said this to me the other day. We have to, you know, we have to sell them what they want so that we can get the trust to sell them what they need. You’ve probably heard that before and you’re kind of advocating for the idea that, no, we need to lead them to what they need and not, you know, and maybe use numbers to help do that. Talk a little more about that idea of beyond order taking.

Bill Shander (04:15.502)

Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Shander (04:28.738)

Yeah. And what you just said is also true, right? Like you do have to gain trust before you can lead them effectively. But yes, the fact is our stakeholders don’t know what they need and our job is to guide them. I often say it’s like therapy. I have a whole chapter in the book about how to conduct a therapy session because it is very much like therapy. Someone comes to a therapist because they have an issue and they need help. And the therapist doesn’t tell them what to do.

They ask them questions. say, well, how does that make you feel? Right? And the questions, right. And the questions allow you to look inside yourself and say, wait, yeah. How does that make me feel? And so in work, okay, you know, we’re launching a new product marketing, make us a brochure. Okay. You know, why would a brochure be better than an app or better than this, that, or the other? Huh? Yeah. Maybe, maybe we should do an app. that introspective opportunity is what guides us down the road towards maybe another option.

John Jantsch (04:56.406)

Yeah. Why do we want that?

Bill Shander (05:24.634)

you know, when you’re new, like you’re in a new role, new boss, whatever, you haven’t gained that trust yet, maybe all you do is you try one thing, one question, which is, the question could be, how do we measure success? How are we gonna know this is gonna, when this has worked, how are we gonna measure that? And just that one question, it’s not gonna get them all the way to some new way of thinking maybe.

but it’s an initial ask. It’s at least one step beyond overtaking. And then over time, you’ll gain more trust and you’ll be able to sort of expand on that guidance way of thinking about it.

John Jantsch (05:58.144)

You know, what I have found is, is that’s a, that’s an incredible technique in selling. you know, a lot of times people will come to us and say, want this, listen, this. and if, if we have the posture or the courage to back up and say what you said, how will that, how will we know that’s successful? What would success look like? How are we going to measure that? have you considered, I find a lot of times people will put their guard down then and like, we’re going to actually have a conversation about.

Bill Shander (06:04.793)

It is.

John Jantsch (06:26.764)

what we should be doing, I don’t have to pretend I know what to tell you to do. And I find it very disarming in a sales conversation. I mean, not to the level of being obnoxious, you know what I mean? But definitely to the level of saying, let’s think about insights instead of actions.

Bill Shander (06:30.658)

Right.

Bill Shander (06:36.42)

Totally, you’re building trust.

Bill Shander (06:40.9)

Yeah.

Bill Shander (06:45.806)

Yeah, you’re building trust the moment you do that, especially in the sales context when there’s, there’s that built in lack of trust in a way. And on top of that, you know, what, what I found in my career, the only success I’ve had in my career is because I was good at the skills, stakeholder whispering. And, know, part of that is no question. It’s the consultative approach. I’m not here.

to sell you widgets, I’m here to solve your problems. I’m here to actually help you succeed. And when you really honestly are doing that, then that includes, yeah, that asking questions like that, will lead to the right solution, not just a solution that puts dollars in my pocket.

John Jantsch (07:22.552)

So of course you’re implying that you have to actually care about getting them a result, right? Yeah. So we’ve covered one side of it, asking better questions, but what role does actually being a better listener play in this?

Bill Shander (07:26.818)

You do. You have to care and you have to be curious. Those are two things that go sort of hand in hand.

Bill Shander (07:41.848)

Yeah, active listening is something is a phrase people talk about. But do you really listen? know, and you know, what’s interesting is like, here we are, we’re having, of course, and like, you’re an interviewer in this context, and you have to do that, right? And like, when I’m talking to a client, I got to be taking notes, I got to be thinking about my next question, response, or you can’t avoid some some of that. But at the same time,

John Jantsch (07:49.07)

No, I’m thinking about the next question I’m going to ask.

Bill Shander (08:07.61)

What I encourage people to do is as best you can within that reality, you try to really listen. And a friend of mine just recently told me his phrase is, listen with your ears, not your brain. So really hear, and yeah, you’re gonna jot notes, you’re gonna notice a little trigger word, they said X, put a little circle on that, whatever, but don’t start formulating your next question as much as you can avoid it until they stop. Truly listen for that whole time.

John Jantsch (08:18.766)

Mm-hmm.

Bill Shander (08:35.354)

It’s really hard to do. None of us could do it perfectly, but we can strive towards that ideal.

John Jantsch (08:41.132)

I think it’s a little bit cultural too. think, you know, Americans are just like, we need noise. They’re like silence, you know, just kills us, right? I read a study the other day that said Americans, I think the average like silence before they become very uncomfortable is three seconds. And in Japan, it is very common for somebody to get asked a question and to literally wait for eight seconds before answering to give it thought and to give it, you know,

Bill Shander (08:50.702)

Yeah.

Bill Shander (09:04.536)

Wow.

John Jantsch (09:08.486)

emotion and I thought, you know, that’s probably I mean, most people if I sat here for eight seconds of dead air, people were like, what’s wrong? It’s pretty interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Shander (09:16.495)

Yeah.

So I have a chapter called Silence is Golden. And not only do I talk about that, but even the chapter, the book is put on the pages in a way that each page is just one sentence with silence all around it. Because it is that important, but it is uncomfortable, it’s true.

John Jantsch (09:29.42)

Yeah. Funny. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve taken I’ve do some public speaking and I’ve taken some training on that and frequently a coach or something will say no let that pause let that sit let the audience digest that boy when you’re up on stage it’s like can I do it. It’s really hard. It’s funny. So so what are the

Bill Shander (09:55.186)

It is, but yeah, good, Go ahead. No, I was just gonna say, yeah, that strategic performance, which includes pauses, silence, pacing. I can speak really quickly and I can slow it down. And that has an effect on your audience for sure. Whether it’s an audience of one stakeholder or a room full of people.

John Jantsch (09:59.084)

Go ahead and finish, sir.

John Jantsch (10:15.278)

Right. So what are, let’s go with the negative. What are the common mistakes that people make? They might get the essence of this book and then charge in. What are some of the things that you see are pitfalls?

Bill Shander (10:28.312)

I mean, you one of the biggest problems people face is that they think that their job is to do what their boss tells them to do. And like on paper, there’s some truth to that, but, clients, not just bosses, clients, investors, whoever your stakeholders are, there’s a broad range of them. Obviously your job is to execute on tasks for your organization, but it’s not just to be that order taker that we talked about. So you have to, the most important thing I’m hoping people remember after reading the book.

is that they just need to do this. Like, see the world in a new way. Your job is not to execute those tasks your boss tells you to do. Your job is to succeed and help your organization succeed. And that includes probing. know, just asking, is this the right thing to be doing? Is this the right way to be doing that thing? So, step number one, acknowledge that this is a thing and just try to do something about it.

Another challenge is that some people are less whisperable than others, right? Some bosses are not so even into having these long conversations, like, you know, just do what I said, right? And obviously that takes confidence to push back and really engage your stakeholders, which also of course takes trust like we talked about. And I would say one of the third things is that, you know, it’s challenging for

John Jantsch (11:33.614)

you

Bill Shander (11:53.004)

ourselves, just sort of acknowledge to ourselves that, you know, essentially we’re all walking around being driven by our subconscious. We’re like literally all of our lives is driven by our subconscious. Tons of research shows us that we’re not very good at reasoning. We’re not really very good at deliberative thinking. We’re just being driven by our subconscious. And so if we can just think about ways to tap into the subconscious, yes, even in work, it’s like therapy, then we’re all going to do a better job doing what we need to do for.

ourselves and our organizations. And it is for ourselves also, like you’re going to be promoted if you’re the one who actually challenges the status quo, brings strategic thinking to the table and delivers against that. know duct tape marketing, the basic idea, right, is be strategic, don’t just execute on tasks, right? And so it’s a very similar way of thinking.

John Jantsch (12:40.782)

So I’m curious, have you ever considered children to be stakeholders that we have to whisper to? As I heard you say that, just do what I said. was like, that’s probably not the most current way of thinking about parenting, it?

Bill Shander (12:46.382)

They certainly could be. Yeah. I mean, and that’s

Bill Shander (12:58.264)

Yeah. And actually brings up the fourth really important thing to be thinking about and a risk, you know, a problem with this is that we don’t recognize, acknowledge, define, and prioritize all of the stakeholders. Right? So my boss tells me to do something, I do it. I am thinking my one stakeholder is my boss. No.

Your boss asked you to do that because his boss asked him and his boss, her boss. And so it’s four chains deep. And by the way, the board of directors is going to show this to their investors. Like the stakeholder list is actually this long. And now you can’t worry about all of them, but which ones are the two or the three whose opinions and actual goals really matter the most. Really zoom in on those ones and really make sure you understand their actual needs.

Like if it’s ultimately about the investors, even though your boss has you do it, they’re the real stakeholder. So make sure you understand what they really need and make sure your boss understands that they’re his stakeholder. And so that they’re involved in that stakeholder whispering with them.

John Jantsch (14:01.176)

So that brings up an interesting quant. How do you balance the fact that the objective might be to create a better experience for the customer? However, what my boss is doing, my objective has to be to keep my job. And so now I’m kind of torn between that. This isn’t really the right approach for that stakeholder. But if I want to meet this objective, how do you balance that?

Bill Shander (14:26.49)

Yeah, it’s the million dollar question. It’s hard one, right? So like some bosses, some people are not going to be very whisperable. And yeah, you could jeopardize your job with that person theoretically. I would say long term, most of the time, if you serve the customer, you’re not going to jeopardize your job.

John Jantsch (14:31.598)

Yeah.

Bill Shander (14:47.884)

and everything’s going to be for the better. Like you’re going to be the one who gets promoted. You’re going to take your boss’s job, right? Essentially, because you’re going to really solve problems. Should. Occasionally it won’t. And you either are willing to face that risk for the potential reward and or if your boss isn’t whisperable, guess what? I say, find a new boss, right? Because that’s really honestly the answer. You don’t want to work in a culture like that.

John Jantsch (14:52.782)

should work that way, right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:07.362)

me. Right.

John Jantsch (15:13.09)

Like so many, I would put this book into a leadership category. Hopefully that jives a little bit with what you’re thinking. And it seems like most leadership ideas really start with the culture of the organization.

Bill Shander (15:22.51)

Yeah, definitely.

Bill Shander (15:29.166)

They definitely do. Yeah. And I have a chapter at the end, which is called some love for my stakeholders or some love for the stakeholders. And I talk about the fact is first of all, I do, I love my stakeholders and it’s not just like blowing smoke. I’ve really enjoyed the work that I’ve done for the last 30 plus years. I’ve enjoyed working with the vast majority of my clients and I really, am curious and I do care and I want to help them. And so.

When I think, when I talk to them in the book, I say, first of all, thank you for teaching me for all these years how to do what I do. But then I also do turn the page a little bit on them and say, okay, now you may be reading this because you’re a middle manager. Guess what? You’re somebody else’s boss, aren’t you? Also, you are somebody’s stakeholder today, even though you’re thinking of as the order taker. So how whisperable are you? And so companies need to develop the culture where they create.

know, cultures of whisperability. And I have some clients who have amazing cultures where they, listen to me, they listen to their employees. It’s not about hierarchy or anything else. And I’ve worked for, you know, as a vendor for some companies that were really not whisperable at all. And I didn’t work for them for, for very long for a variety of reasons, but it’s really hard to be in that type of environment.

John Jantsch (16:45.262)

You have a chapter about, I mean, so many people are working either hybrid or remote or does that change kind of the framework at all or the structure or does it just add kind of another layer of complexity?

Bill Shander (17:01.978)

think it adds another layer complexity for sure because communications is harder, right? Like right now, I’m not looking at you, I’m looking at my camera, but the viewer is looking at my eyes. So at least there’s some eye contact it feels like happening. And so, you know, when it’s all on Zoom, it’s harder to have that real, really productive conversation, certainly better, you know, the body language and all kinds of other things disappear. So there’s definitely that added complexity.

But the process is still the same. You’ve got to have conversations. You’ve got to ask good questions. And something we didn’t talk about, but there’s a key part to the question asking, which is when I ask my stakeholders questions, I’m not doing it to learn the answers. It’s actually the other way around. It’s more of a Socratic dialogue. I’m asking them questions so that they can learn the answers. I want them to figure out what they actually need from me. I’m not trying to guide them. I’m not trying to tell them. I want them to figure it out. It’s like therapy.

John Jantsch (17:44.483)

Yes.

Bill Shander (17:58.848)

Once they figure it out, then I’ll do that. And so the question asking is a very, it’s a two-way street for sure, but the goal is really to help them learn as much as to help me learn.

John Jantsch (18:11.406)

Yeah, you you call it therapy, but it really strikes me. It’s a lot like coaching in some ways. mean, you’re almost coaching people to think about things that maybe haven’t even considered. know, one of my favorite phrases or least favorite phrases is, that’s the way we’ve always done it. Or that’s the way everybody in our industry does it. And, you know, just to even say, anybody ask why? So we’ve always done it that way. It’s amazing how often people will go, you know, I don’t know.

Bill Shander (18:16.591)

Yeah.

Bill Shander (18:28.515)

Right.

Yeah.

Bill Shander (18:36.697)

you

Bill Shander (18:41.55)

Yeah, it’s true.

John Jantsch (18:41.586)

the answer to that. So do you have any in the book or anything you want to anybody you’ve worked with clients that you’ve worked with kind of a real story or example where you know stakeholder whispering has really led to a far better outcome.

Bill Shander (18:58.99)

Yeah, I I tell one story in the book and it’s funny on the surface. It’s a really boring story. It’s not the most dynamic anecdote in the history of the world at all, but it’s one of the most, the moment when this happened was like really eyeopening for me. so was working on project. was doing this data dashboard essentially for this client and we’re having this conversation about whether we should show the rank position.

of countries on this one metric being measured. So this country is number one, two, three, four, five, or should we show the actual score they got on this measurement? So let’s imagine it’s about web analytics. Should we show the number of clicks they got or just the ranking in terms of clicks? And their argument was the way this type of data usually works, the way it’s always been done, is we always just show the rank because people care if their country ahead or behind their favorite country that they want to compete against. But the scores…

John Jantsch (19:37.526)

Thank

Bill Shander (19:55.364)

were universally really, really high. Very few countries had a low score. So you might’ve been ranked 150th. That looks terrible, that sounds awful. But guess what? You had a super high score, just like everybody else. Only a few countries were actually bad. And so was trying to make the case that maybe we should show the actual score because the fact that this country was ranked low didn’t mean they had an actual problem. And so the data…

John Jantsch (20:17.184)

Yeah, they could close 50 places pretty easily.

Bill Shander (20:20.886)

Exactly. They could close it easily and it didn’t matter where they were anyways, as long as they were above X score. And so, you know, I’m asking all these questions. We’re having this really long debate and she almost convinced me five times. I almost convinced her five times. But the point was, you know, it was a very open ended conversation, mostly each of us asking each other questions. and in the end, you know, there was this one moment where she said just literally, she said the word something to the effect of, I never saw it that way before.

John Jantsch (20:24.59)

Yeah.

Bill Shander (20:50.446)

You’re right. And it wasn’t gratifying because I was right, although that’s nice, you know, but it was really because there was this moment of just incredible open-mindedness to your point. Like, why have we always done it that way? Who the hell knows? Like, well, why should we do it that way? Maybe we should consider, maybe we won’t change it, but maybe we should at least look at doing it this other way. And even that I consider a win.

John Jantsch (20:50.819)

Thanks.

John Jantsch (21:15.222)

Yeah, awesome. Well, Bill, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the show. You want to invite people to connect with you somewhere, find out more about your work, obviously find out more about stakeholder risk.

Bill Shander (21:26.136)

Yeah, you can always find me on my website, BillShander.com. And I’m always happy to connect with people on LinkedIn as well.

John Jantsch (21:32.3)

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

Bill Shander (21:36.794)

Thank you very much, John. Nice talking to you.

John Jantsch (00:01.006)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Chance. My guest today is Alex Goldfein. He’s a three-time Wall Street Journal bestselling author, one of the most sought after sales speakers in the world. He’s the CEO of the Revenue Growth Consultancy, one of the top grossing solo consulting firms in America, generating 7.5 million annually. His clients, primarily B2B organizations, implement simple, proactive actions that drive 15 to 30 % sales growth.

every year and we’re gonna talk about his latest book out grow how to expand market share and outsell your competition. So welcome to show Alex.

Alex Goldfayn (00:39.721)

Hi John, thank you sir. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (00:42.06)

I want to unpack one of the core themes of the book. You talk about transforming reactive companies into proactive ones. Tell me little bit about that thinking.

Alex Goldfayn (00:52.91)

Well, I think, you know, over 415 clients over about 22 years that I’ve done these outgrow revenue growth initiatives with, what I’ve realized is about 95 % of all companies and also 95 % of all salespeople are generally reactive, meaning we take what’s in coming. and when you take what’s in coming and most companies that have been around.

some history are very good at this, like world class, right? When I arrive at an organization, usually they are world class at this reactive work, which is basically customer service work. Well, the only way to really grow in terms of volume growth, not inflationary growth, not acquisitive growth, but organic volume sales growth, the only way to do that is we have to take market share.

We have to, uh, take business from another company that already has the business. And the only way to compete for and take market share is to be pro active. You cannot react your way to market share growth. You can’t do it. You’re just, when you’re reactive, you’re just, you know, a rising tide lifts all ships, sinking tide sinks all ships. Uh, and you’re just moving with the current. You go where the economy takes you.

And that is 95 % of all companies and 95 % of all salespeople. And that’s actually good news because it means that it’s really easy to stand out in that crowd. It’s really easy to do better. And as a result, it’s really, really easy, John, to grow.

John Jantsch (02:45.806)

Yeah, and you know, in this particular moment in time, starting the third quarter of 2025, as we record this, I’m seeing a lot of companies that it’s even worse because they’re not even even if they’re unhappy right now, they’re like not reaching out because there’s a lot of uncertainty. And it’s like, I’m just gonna stay put. So I mean, I would suggest that your proactive is probably even more necessary because there’s probably less incoming right now.

Alex Goldfayn (03:11.62)

Not only is it more necessary, it works better now because of exactly what you said, because literally nobody’s reaching out now. So outgrow proactivity works really, really well in good economies because people have money to spend and we can go to them and say, hey, what are you spending your money on? May I help you with that? I’d love an opportunity to help. But in a bad economy, John, because of exactly what you said, people sit around and your competition is like, I’m not gonna call them.

John Jantsch (03:15.202)

Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (03:40.506)

now, especially now, I’m not going to pitch them, you know, for more products or more services now in this economy. I’m telling you, when you call a customer and say, I was thinking about you, how’s your family? What are you working on that I can help you with? Or perhaps what are you doing with my competition that I can help you with? And this is somebody, you know, does somebody have a nice relationship with? when you call somebody like that, John, you’re the only one in that person’s life.

John Jantsch (03:59.16)

Thank

John Jantsch (04:03.0)

Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (04:09.943)

doing that. Nobody else is doing it, especially now. So talk about standing out from the crowd and how easy it is. Just show up because nobody is.

John Jantsch (04:20.974)

I think I know the answer to this, but tell me a little bit about the term outgrow. What are you trying to project with that?

Alex Goldfayn (04:29.292)

Yeah, well, we want to outgrow the market. We want to outgrow the competition. We want to outgrow the average. We want to outgrow the company’s own history year to year, you know, in terms of growth. And again, the way to do that is through taking market share. And the way to take market share is to be proactive.

John Jantsch (04:50.484)

So looking a little bit back to one of your very first things as saying that, 90 % of the folks just wait around. I mean, is that another way of saying that 90 % of salespeople are lazy?

Alex Goldfayn (05:02.198)

No, it’s another way of saying that 90 or 95 % of salespeople have tremendous discomfort and fear with communicating with customers and prospects when nothing is wrong, which is my definition of proactivity. If somebody says, what do you mean by proactive? I mean, when nothing is wrong, when the price isn’t going up, which is when salespeople call, when you need the payment, which is when customers hear from salespeople.

John Jantsch (05:20.225)

Yes.

Alex Goldfayn (05:31.258)

When you can’t get them the order on time, which is when customers hear from salespeople, right? People only hear from people when something rises to the level of urgency to make the call. And so this communication, this proactive communication is when nothing is wrong. So that’s my definition of productivity. And it’s not laziness. It’s intense and severe discomfort with bothering the customer, annoying the customer, taking their time and probably hovering above all of that, even higher.

is discomfort and fear of rejection. Fear of rejection. If I call them about this other offering, they might tell me no into my ear hole. And that’s an intense personal rejection, right? And that’s what we’re trying to avoid. We humans, and you and I are too, we will do anything possible to avoid that kind of rejection.

including going out and asking for the business.

John Jantsch (06:32.428)

Yeah. You know, back, back when I was just getting started, I had a routine on, Fridays. I would just pick up the phone and call five people. I was not trying to sell anything. I was not trying to do anything. And I can’t tell you, I used to laugh. In I wrote a big blog post about this, that about half the time one or two of those phone calls, would, would start with, I was just meaning to call you. And it was like, okay.

Alex Goldfayn (06:57.027)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:00.162)

Get out my order pad. It was amazing.

Alex Goldfayn (07:02.201)

That’s it. That’s it. When you show up when nothing is wrong, you are saving the customer from having to think about it again. Whatever is in their head, whatever the need might be. If you don’t call them like you just shared, they’re going to have to think about it more, probably repeatedly, because once usually doesn’t do it. You don’t think about something and then do it typically. You think about something many times and then you might do it, but you might not. And it’s incredibly valuable.

John Jantsch (07:06.35)

Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (07:30.819)

to do what you just described. And that’s why my clients, and I’ve had tens of thousands of salespeople go through this and run these processes that we’re talking about. We constantly hear from people, why will I have you? Or I’m so glad you called, can you please check on this for me? Product, service, whatever it is.

John Jantsch (07:52.227)

Yeah. Yeah. So would you say that this is just a, like, this is a habit, this is a system or is it cultural in an organization or is it all the above? Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (08:04.407)

Yeah, you need both. So I say that outgrow is two thirds mindset work because, you know, behavior always follows thinking and we can’t outsell our mindset. So if we think we’re bothering the customer, we’re going to sell accordingly. But if we think it’s our obligation to help the customer and they want our help because they’re better off with us than with the competition who isn’t as good as us, then we sell that way. We sell as though

John Jantsch (08:20.792)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (08:32.289)

we have a lot more value for the customer. So it’s two thirds mindset work. In Outgrow, we have an acronym called COPE, John, COPE, confidence, optimism, positivity, and enthusiasm. And we need those mindsets because we have to bring them to the salespeople that we work with. We have to bring them to the organization. So culturally, in Outgrow organization that runs Outgrow,

becomes more cope, becomes more confident, more optimistic, more positive, more enthusiastic. And when you are those things, it’s much easier to make proactive calls, to offer additional products, to follow up on quotes and proposals, and to ask people what else.

John Jantsch (09:17.55)

How, how ready does this, does a person using this system need to be for, if I start with a call with, just want to see if there’s anything I could help you with. I sell widgets, but the guy tells me, you know what, we just fired our accounting firm. We’re really screwed. How prepared do I have to be to say, you know what, I think I can help you with somebody, you know, unrelated to me, I’m not going to make any money off of this, but I think I can help you. mean, how prepared or, or, or how much of your system do you think?

relies on just being the person who solves problems.

Alex Goldfayn (09:50.988)

think people just want to help people. And I also think our starting position is people just want to be helped. You’re calling your customers, your prospects. People just want to be helped. That’s starting point number one. Then when we are showing up, we are simply offering to help people, which is what they want. John?

Over a hundred million outgrow actions, log, tracked and analyzed over 23 years by over 400 clients. So we log our activities and then we see the, you know, with the responses, the results, the outcomes. Um, not one time, not once has any customer ever said, I’d rather you not make my life easier today. Has it happened once people just want to be helped. if you’re calling to sell a product and somebody has a need that you don’t provide.

Well, then try to help them. Common sense, you know, human relationship stuff. in fact, I would argue that already happens. You know, if you’re watching this right now, how many times does one of your customers ask you for something that you don’t offer them? And you went and found a way to get it for them. Maybe you connected them to your competition. Even maybe you went to your competition and got what they needed for them. That happens all the time. And when you do that, the customer remembers it.

forever.

John Jantsch (11:17.774)

Well, and, and, know, once you’ve, I’ve, I’ve seen this all the time. Once I’ve, once I’ve got that trust, um, you know, I want to keep it. Um, and I keep it by just not, not allowing them to call anybody else, right. I’m the only one that they would call regardless of what their problem is. And, and either it takes a little extra work sometimes, you know, your stuff, you’re not going to get paid for directly, but, um, as you’ve seen in, your research, uh, pays off time and time again, speaking of, uh, research.

how would a company set up?

measuring this, you know, because you might make 10 of those calls and nothing really happens today. you know, so now the sales person’s like, you know, that’s, that’s not really paying off. you know, is there a way to measure you talk about them actions? think, I think that’s what you called them. you know, you know, these actions, is there a way to then turn them into a system of KPIs so to speak that, that, you know, that doubt do kind of motivate people to say, this works.

Alex Goldfayn (12:08.0)

Yeah, yeah, outgrow actions. Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (12:15.754)

Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (12:20.342)

Yeah, so in the book, there are scorecards and metrics that we use all over at examples. And I don’t know if you can see our video right now. You can see a couple of baseball bats behind me and we call it swinging the bat. So we don’t track the hits and outgrow. We track the swings because we know what the batting averages are. So we are simply asking outgrow participants who we call out growers.

John Jantsch (12:23.746)

Yes.

Alex Goldfayn (12:48.854)

We are asking this. These are people who face customers for you. We’re asking them to try to take our act to take our actions because we know, you know, in baseball you can hit the ball exactly right, dead on, and it flies right out of the fender and it’s an out. And sales is the same way. You can do everything right and hit the ball perfectly. And then, you know, getting the win is largely out of our control. You can’t really control if the customer is in a good mood.

You can’t really control if the customer has an itch when you’re calling to scratch. can control making my call, but I can’t control if they need it in that moment. can’t control the timing. the other thing we know is we need eight or nine nos for every yes that we got in sales. you, if you win 10 to 20 % of the time in sales, you’re one of the best. baseball, you can fail 70 % of the time and go to the hall of fame.

In our work, we fail more than that.

John Jantsch (13:47.118)

Yeah, I don’t know as good as pitching is these days, Alex. I’m going to say it’s, you know, seven and a half times now.

Alex Goldfayn (13:53.955)

I know it’s dropping, isn’t it? I know. These days, 250 is a good batting average, right, in baseball? We were both baseball fans. We were chatting about that before we started our conversation here. Anyway, we do track the efforts because we know what the success rates are. You know, I’ll give you an example. We have a technique called the did you know question, and we have another technique called the reverse did you know question. Both of these are detailed in the book.

John Jantsch (14:13.422)

Yep.

John Jantsch (14:19.853)

Mm-hmm.

Alex Goldfayn (14:23.394)

So the did you know question or DYK, did you know, is you suggesting an additional product or service to your customer that they don’t already buy from you. They probably buy it somewhere else. They probably need it. They probably buy it from your competition, service or product. And so what we know statistically is that 20 % of those close, 20 % become a new line item. So if I say to you, hey, John, did you know I do keynote speeches? What about longer workshops? How about one-on-one coaching?

Of course, I work with organizations. I ask you five of those, and it’s going to take me 20 seconds, maybe, one will close and turn into a new line for us to work on. And so let’s say somebody listening to us has 10 salespeople. And each one of those 10 asks five digital questions and they’re tracked. We do enter them into a system. We have an outgrow tracking form. a simple web form. You enter it in and at the end of the week, you get data back from us. We send the data back to you. It’s all automated.

Um, 10 people ask five digital questions a day. That’s 50 a day, 250 a week, a thousand a month, 12,000 a year. If my math is right, that’s top of my head. 12,000 digital questions a year. If we can get 10 people to give us 20 seconds a day.

20 % of 12,000, that’s the success rate, is 2,400 new line items. That’s a fact. It’s not, I hope they’ll add 2,400 new line items. If they can get five Did You Know questions in 20 seconds from 10 people a day, every day, that’s where the complexity comes. That’s the hard part. Not asking the Did Knows, it’s the choreography. It’s doing it all the time, every day, they will get 2,400 new.

John Jantsch (16:07.726)

Yeah

Alex Goldfayn (16:12.032)

line items, then the question becomes how much money per line item and how many times a year will that new thing be purchased? Cause many people sell things repeatedly. It could be monthly, could be quarterly. It could be twice a year. You do the math almost always five digital questions a day gets you to millions of dollars in new revenue as a fact, statistically for sure. If you can get five digital questions a day.

John Jantsch (16:13.634)

me.

John Jantsch (16:37.356)

And I bet you every salesperson listening has had an experience where they walked into a client’s office and the client said, yeah, we just did this new thing over here. And then they said, did you know that we do that? Right.

Alex Goldfayn (16:48.792)

And then you know what you hear is you hear, do that? I didn’t know you did that. And you’re like, dude, I just told you that I do that like two weeks ago. I know it was you because we were talking to each other just like we are now. And you had the exact same reaction two weeks ago. I didn’t know you did that. Now I’m telling you again, two weeks later, you still don’t know. So the takeaway for us salespeople is just because you tell somebody something doesn’t mean they know. It means you told them doesn’t mean a register doesn’t mean they remember.

John Jantsch (17:05.518)

me.

John Jantsch (17:18.616)

So this is a good segue to non-sales department folks, right? I mean, how can they contribute to this kind of proactive sales culture? Sounds like they could be asking did you know?

Alex Goldfayn (17:22.615)

Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (17:28.096)

A hundred percent. mean, we’re constantly working with customer service people, managers, frontline people. what, what it develops, you know, clients have called it a non-traditional sales force. even people like project managers, if you’re in construction, client execs or, or, you know, engineers and architects who are like, didn’t become an engineer to be a used car salesman. Alex, thanks dude. But that’s not for me. And again, mindset work. You’re not selling, you’re helping.

John Jantsch (17:43.672)

Mm-hmm.

Alex Goldfayn (17:57.762)

People need more help from you. So yes, it is for anybody who faces customers, who can ask a, did you know question or two on the calls, even that are incoming, you know, proactive calls are a big part of our work. But if they come to you, if you have a counter operation or a sales floor of some kind, or if you’re just customer service picking up the phone all day, you can say, do you need this? How are you on that?

We just got some of this in and ask your DigiNose.

John Jantsch (18:30.531)

So does that need to be in an SOP somewhere so that everybody’s trained on it? Or is it more of a look for moments of truth?

Alex Goldfayn (18:39.751)

It’s more change the mindset, make them confident and optimistic and positive and enthusiastic, and then say to them, please ask five a day because that’s what we’re doing now. does, you know, it’s, it’s warm and fuzzy above all it’s positive work because we’re helping customers more, but it needs tracking and accountability or else it stops. It doesn’t keep going. It stops.

John Jantsch (19:09.528)

So how do you get this ingrained into an organization? Because I’m guessing, you know, they can come to one Alex’s amazing workshops, get all the good ideas, and then go back to back to the shop. And it’s like, we do it for a week. mean, how do you make it a habit?

Alex Goldfayn (19:19.989)

Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (19:25.045)

Right. Well, we, you know, you just said the key word habit. we say outgrow sales doing not sales training, because as you just said, sales training, don’t grow revenue. Sales training tells people stuff probably that they already know. And then they go back to their reactive life. And you know, in sales, we have to do things to make money. We can’t know stuff. We have to do stuff to make money.

John Jantsch (19:29.774)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:43.682)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:52.93)

Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (19:53.88)

There are some professions that can make money by knowing things. We’re not one of them. We have to do stuff that we know. So, you we engage with clients for typically three to five years, And so we have a launch year where the work begins. It takes us about 90 days to create their proactive program. Then we teach it. It’s a one-day workshop typically just for that client, just for that client’s people. It’s not open. It’s just theirs. So it’s a private.

John Jantsch (19:58.606)

the

John Jantsch (20:06.99)

Yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (20:23.287)

engagement. And then they begin this weekly cadence of the leader of the effort literally asks for or prescribes some target actions for the week. For example, this week, please give me five proactive phone calls to people that you haven’t talked to in six months or more. That’s specific. Five, did you know questions and five quote follow ups. It’s three sets of actions, 15 things for the week. Then people go do it.

Step two, step three is they log it into our system. Step four is we put out data and we show them the scorecard. Just tracking efforts. Who tried and who didn’t? Who cares and who doesn’t? And then we put out success stories. We put out wins, we tell the wins, we tell the success stories in the words of the people who submitted them. That’s five step sort of feedback loop that happens every week. Next week, they make a new assignment of actions.

John Jantsch (21:17.89)

you

Alex Goldfayn (21:22.259)

At 30, 60, and 90 days, we visit with them and do web meetings to review the data, to tell success stories to the group verbally. People actually speak their stories to each other, ask each other questions. Then we follow up with them in the next six months as well. So over a nine month period in the launch year, we are with them seven times. nobody cares what the consultant wants. The salespeople don’t care.

John Jantsch (21:36.866)

Yeah.

Mm.

Alex Goldfayn (21:50.732)

what the outside advisor wants. They only care what their leadership wants. People only do what they think is important to their boss. So this work, as much as anything, is about, we coach the leaders. The leaders then have to do the accountability and the implementation and the buy-in work and the maintaining of energy with the people who are taking the swings and doing the outgrow work.

John Jantsch (22:17.996)

Yeah. I, know, that, getting them telling stories to each other, that sort of peer pressure almost that that puts on is probably a really powerful aspect.

Alex Goldfayn (22:28.215)

It does a few things. know, and all the research shows, John, that recognition is a more effective tool to make change with, to change behavior with than money is. Recognition is more powerful than giving somebody some money in private. The reason is that one, the person feels proud. You know, they’re being recognized, they get to tell their story. Two, other people, it makes it impossible for them to say, this doesn’t work here.

John Jantsch (22:33.87)

Yeah. Right.

John Jantsch (22:56.278)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Alex Goldfayn (22:56.683)

Cause here’s stories about it working here. Three, those people aspire to be recognized next. Four, and the last thing, it teaches the work. It teaches what works, right? In the words of the happy salespeople, the successful people, it’s education, peer to peer, not from the top down, peer to peer education.

John Jantsch (23:02.286)

Yep.

John Jantsch (23:07.31)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (23:19.736)

Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, Alex, I appreciate you taking a few moments to drop by the duct tape marketing podcast. Is there anywhere you’d invite somebody to connect with you, learn about your work, obviously, learn about the book.

Alex Goldfayn (23:32.245)

Yeah, thank you, John. They can get the book on Amazon or wherever they buy books. Barnes and Noble has it. Books A Million has it. Anywhere books are sold. Actually launched as the number two best selling business book in America behind only Atomic Habits. I was able to outsell everybody except for Atomic Habits, of course.

John Jantsch (23:51.022)

That’s only been number one for what, like six, seven years?

Alex Goldfayn (23:54.281)

Right. Well, it’s good company, I guess. And then if you want to learn more about Outgrow and the revenue growth that we do, please visit runoutgrow.com.

John Jantsch (24:12.046)

Well, again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you out there at Wrigley field or something.

Alex Goldfayn (24:18.572)

Thank you so much for having me go Cubs. appreciate that, John. Thanks for the Cubs. out.

John Jantsch (00:01.346)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Andy Crestodina. He’s a recognized authority in digital marketing, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Orbit Media Studios and an influential voice on content strategy, SEO and website optimization. With two decades of hands-on experience, Andy is known for breaking down complex marketing tactics into practical, actionable steps, my kind of guy.

He’s a sought after speaker and the author of content chemistry and a regular contributor to leading industry publications. So Andy, welcome to the show.

Andy Crestodina (00:38.136)

Thanks for having me, John. Glad to be here.

John Jantsch (00:39.438)

We have known each other about each other, whatever the definition is for many years. and I just discovered this the first time you’ve been on my show. So why don’t you come back like weekly now.

Andy Crestodina (00:45.259)

Mm-hmm.

Andy Crestodina (00:51.896)

I would never say no. I’d hang out with you all day, John, if I could.

John Jantsch (00:56.469)

So let’s, let’s jump into AI. mean, what the heck? What are we 41 seconds in? Where do you see it making the biggest real world impact for marketers today? I know that’s a pretty big question.

Andy Crestodina (01:02.583)

Mm-hmm.

Andy Crestodina (01:10.924)

No, I think about it a lot. I think that probably the future of marketing is lowering risk and cost by building synthetic members of a target audience and then testing content, pages, calls to action strategies with that AI persona. So, Sims, like running little, making a thing and getting feedback on it before you put it in the market, because I think it’s likely, it seems to me that we’ll look back at this era and say,

Wow, super primitive. You used to just make a thing and make it live and hope for the best and check it later. Probably not in the future. We’ll do it in a bit more sophisticated way.

John Jantsch (01:50.894)

That’s really interesting. You know, I hadn’t really thought about that, that idea, because I think so many people are focused on automations and efficiencies and getting rid of people, you know, even. But, I mean, you’re obviously, I mean, I, I’m really of the camp that it’s going to change some things around in terms of people, but I think it also is, you know, they’re already seeing it creating some demand in some areas for people.

Andy Crestodina (02:03.186)

No. Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:18.946)

that didn’t exist before. is the concern that, was it Sam Altman that said like 95 % of marketing or white collar jobs will be gone in five years?

Andy Crestodina (02:25.953)

Yeah.

You

Andy Crestodina (02:33.066)

Yeah, I think there’s, I’m going to stay out of the prediction game and wondering, but, I’ll tell you what I’m here for and have been from the beginning and you too, it’s, don’t, I don’t wake up in the morning hoping to save 10 minutes or half an hour. I want to do great work. I want to see the performance of that work. I want to know that I’m, that I’m doing quality work. I want to see the, the feedback and the performance of everything in the data.

So really everything I’ve ever done with AI, and this is hundreds of experiments, half by day on Saturday was building a custom GPT and testing it. But everything that I’ve done is really just been about trying to improve quality. And if it turns out to be faster, that’s lovely. But what we’re all trying to do is to drive an outcome. So I think a lot of marketers are overemphasizing efficiency and speed.

John Jantsch (03:09.026)

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina (03:30.641)

and missing big opportunities to use it to push performance.

John Jantsch (03:36.002)

Yeah. one of the, ironically, one of the, think one of the enemies of quality is that we got so much on our plate, right? And I think that even quality relationships, I mean, I’m finding that if there’s a lot of stuff that had to be done, but let’s face it, it was grunt work, you know, that had to be done. And I do think that some people are feeling like, Hey, if I get that off my plate, it kind of frees my head up. And, know, even like I say, for, for more relationship building and

I think that’s where quality is gonna come from, isn’t it?

Andy Crestodina (04:06.762)

Absolutely. So it will give you a free hand to work harder on those, you know, the conversations you’re having, prioritizing offline experiences, being part of communities, you know, just taking care of the people around you. But the one thing that I’ve been doing with a lot, and this was my very last call, talking to a client.

looking for opportunities to make these pages better, stronger, faster, more detailed and comprehensive. It’s for a higher ed program. And we just gave Chad to PT the persona and gave it the page and said, we’re looking to make this a more comprehensive page. Give us ideas. The very first idea was fantastic. It’s like, which program is right for you. What? Wait, how? And the meeting sort of paused. Like everyone kind of held their breath for a second and asked, like, did we not?

do that? Wait, we didn’t do that. Why didn’t we do that? And there were several others, like three or four things. Yeah, so AI-powered gap analysis is one of my favorite things, but they’re always best discovered through relationships and real-world human conversation.

John Jantsch (05:10.221)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:17.304)

So a lot of orbit media’s work is or has been designed or at least design was an element of it. How do you feel about the design creative process right now? I think there’s a lot of people trying to create tools that can automate a lot of things in that space. Where do you, do you, do you feel like, mean, there’s, there’s some really awful stuff coming out through that. mean, how do you feel about that space right now, where it is today and where you see it going?

Andy Crestodina (05:23.522)

Mm-hmm.

Andy Crestodina (05:40.792)

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina (05:48.226)

Well, design for interactive is a kind of a turning point happening now because these tools like Figma, where you’re designing it somehow in a context where it’s already responsive and the front end programming for things that web teams are building is sort of half done. Now, kind of like writing or image generation, the code generated by AI still requires a lot of review. No one’s just grabbing it and assuming it’s all

perfect, it’s not. So there’s a big gain there in the handoff between designers and programmers, but not, you know, there’s still plenty of work to do. The other one I think is in design. What do you hire? What do you get when you hire a web company? Partly you want service, you want someone to listen to you, you want accountability, you want a thought partner and you want pixel perfection. I don’t think AI is there. don’t think that if you, brands big and small.

want to work with designers to get the thing to look just like they want it to look. The state of AI for UX, it all feels like these long shot prompts. It’s just like, hope something good comes back and you can’t really ask it to fine tune. It’s just creating another one each time. don’t know. So design for simple things, design direction, great, but not for pixel perfection.

John Jantsch (07:19.054)

I’m going to question how much of the market actually wants or understands pixel perfection. mean, aren’t there isn’t there a significant amount of the market that’s like, that’s good enough.

Andy Crestodina (07:29.836)

I’m sure there is. It’s not mostly our audience. I had a 40 minute call with a client about how this circle, the brand is everything. And the edge of the circle needs to be a little bit closer to the edge of the box on both mobile and desktop. There are still lots of people who want their fingerprints on their design. I understand that. I don’t think that.

John Jantsch (07:30.894)

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina (07:56.094)

Visitors care that much about the number of pixels between the circle and the edge of the box but so yeah, if you’re looking for good enough or a great start or here’s the You know a giant step in the in a good direction. It’s awesome but but people really do like service and there’s a Special thing that happens like you said about relationships, you know when creative teams work together to solve problems with clients and and leaders

John Jantsch (08:26.348)

Yeah, I I personally, again, I wouldn’t put myself out there as being on the front line of image creation or whatnot with some of the tools, but some of the stuff I’ve done with it, I mean, every now and then it’s like, yeah, that’s okay. And then every now and then it’s just like, that’s like, that person has no face. How can I use that?

Andy Crestodina (08:43.96)

It’s changing fast. It’s changing fast. Image generation. I sort of wish I could go back and I would have put in the same prompt every month just to sort of see the evolution of it because it’s improving quickly. But yeah, don’t look too closely at hands. Text is still a problem. It’s getting much, much better. But halfway through here at 2025, there are long shot prompts, let’s be honest.

John Jantsch (09:00.696)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:11.618)

Yeah. Yeah. So speaking of maybe that’s good enough, let’s talk about content creation. I think a lot of people, that was probably the first use case for many people is, look, this can write this blog post for me. I think a lot of people are starting to find out that that’s just not going to cut it. In fact, there, you know, I won’t go as far as saying the old Google penalty thing, but I think that they’re being penalized in the eyes of everything that’s reading the content today.

Andy Crestodina (09:39.762)

Yeah, I don’t see a reason to write an article, to publish an article if AI can create it because your target audience can write that same prompt and get that same article. That’s in fact the last thing you should publish. So for the duct tape marketing audience and fans of yours and people who read my stuff, I think it should be obvious that the difference between AI generated, just garbage and

John Jantsch (09:45.356)

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina (10:05.72)

quickly made stuff in medium quality or the boring taste like water articles. And strong points of view, original research, deep content, like taking a stand, collaborative formats like we’re doing now. This stuff is going to be even more different in the future. I think that content strategy is going to have a great moment here as the tide goes out and all these marketers just look like it becomes really clear.

No one’s ever going to read that again. Whoever’s byline that was just lost reputation. So yeah, strong opinion, original research, collaborative formats, highly visual content. These will feel more different than ever. So it’s like influencers and video. These things will be, I think, more effective in the future than even they are today.

John Jantsch (11:00.76)

So as I listen to describe that, you know, the old game used to be, I mean, content and SEO or search visibility, certainly we’re very married together. And as I listen to you describe that, mean, it really, I mean, is keyword ranking just not really a thing anymore? It’s not important anymore?

Andy Crestodina (11:21.353)

Thank you for asking that. I’m seeing so much about this and I’m really excited to give this answer. Everyone needs to separate in their minds these two types of key phrases. People looking for answers are looking for articles. AI overviews will kind of give that person the answer. Click through rates to content marketing for search optimized articles will decline forever. It has been for five years anyway. commercial intent key phrases, what the buyer searches for.

Visit website intent key phrases. There’s still tons of them. Separate in your analytics blog posts from your sales pages and then check the changes to traffic and then check the changes to rankings and click through rates and engagement because people who are making big decisions want to look at a website. They’re going to click through it no matter what Google puts in their way.

John Jantsch (12:10.06)

Yeah, I think one of the pieces of that puzzle is that they’re still getting, in many cases, even this long drawn out, you know, long tail phrase is still being provided in increasingly AI overviews. And so the game then becomes like, okay, I’ve already filtered. I’m not going to go look 10 places. I’m going to maybe pick one or two of these. So, so the game then becomes showing up in those AI overviews or whatever that looks like. is there a different approach to that?

Andy Crestodina (12:29.464)

For sure. Again, perfect question, John. I love this conversation. There’s more to content than search. I see these posts. I don’t have time to respond to them all. I’m not in it to like start a food fight, but content marketing is dead.

Because of SEO, that was your only channel. Is that all you ever thought it was about? So this is my number one B2B marketing strategy for content today is of course the LinkedIn newsletter. It was, okay, I’ve been doing it like now for like five years, but the visibility of my content is literally 10 times what it ever was before. How’s that possible? Because I decided it was, you know, a sensible time to build on rented land, you know, because I, I saw this, the, the change is coming and adapted my strategy.

Because I’m now partnering with Big Tech, Google is not in business to help SEOs. But LinkedIn is in business to help content creators and publishers grow an audience on their platform. So no, our typical articles now get literally 10 times the visibility that they ever got before, even though click-through rates from search are down and declining. it doesn’t bother me a bit.

John Jantsch (13:49.346)

Yeah, of course, anyone who’s not familiar with your work, will say that part of, I think part of the reason, of course, consistency that you’ve provided, but also, mean, your articles go in, I mean, they’re basically master classes. And so, you know, I think that that certainly has something to do with the reason that you’re getting so much exposure is it’s just terribly valuable.

Andy Crestodina (14:12.588)

That means so much to me coming from you. Thank you, John. But hopefully then that reinforces the point about writing things by hand. I I include contributor quotes in every article. There’s almost no scroll depth at any article in which you can’t see something like a visual or screenshot or video. I do lots of original research. They’re carefully constructed, like very, very structured pieces with bullet lists and subheads and internal linking and…

And I’ve learned from people like you, like going way back to like, just be super direct and concise and get right to the point and eliminate, you know, omit needless words. You get it.

John Jantsch (14:52.62)

Well, I haven’t mastered that one yet, but ask, ask anyone who’s edited my, well, I had an editor one time that, on one of my books that said, you know, chapter is great, but it starts with a whole lot of throat clearing. I always remembered that one of my favorite quotes. So you do have been doing a lot. And I think that you just, you enjoy this, the getting into the data. You’ve been doing a lot with analytics.

Andy Crestodina (15:07.448)

I’ve been there. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:21.886)

and you know, maybe even suggesting that new ways to look at data, new, key indicators that maybe we haven’t been taught to look at what’s, what are some of your favorite kind of new ways that you think we ought to be looking at the data? Should we be able to unearth it?

Andy Crestodina (15:40.578)

Well, some of the most important insights waiting for you, literally sitting there just a few clicks away in GA4 are not the most visible. Like you got to go kind of build the thing. Yeah, it takes a minute. Some examples of useful metrics. What is it, or questions to ask and find the answer, then form hypotheses and take action. What is the click through rate on the call to action?

John Jantsch (15:50.166)

Right. Nothing’s very visible in JFR.

John Jantsch (16:04.888)

Right.

Andy Crestodina (16:10.624)

on your most on your key pages. You gotta make a path exploration, takes a few minutes. You gotta learn how to do that. That’s fine. How does embedding video change the engagement rate on articles? Are there URLs on your website that load with page not found as the title tag? What is the difference in conversion rates for visitors on mobile versus desktop?

John Jantsch (16:29.902)

Thank

Andy Crestodina (16:38.934)

Which of your articles is inspiring visitors to subscribe to your newsletter? Which URLs on your site have declining search traffic? We said a second ago. Are they sales pages? Are they everything? Or is it mostly just your content and articles and guides? These are all extremely useful things to know that can guide strategy and budgets. What’s the output from those calories burned? It’ll tell you.

But you got to know where to look. I don’t do almost any reporting in Google Analytics. I don’t build dashboards. I don’t just go look at it for its own sake, but I do analysis every day.

John Jantsch (17:19.734)

How much are you taking what might be raw data or at least what you can get out of GA4 and just taking it to AI and say, ask me questions?

Andy Crestodina (17:30.986)

there’s one or two use cases that you almost can’t do without AI. For example, if you make a report that shows traffic to your thank you pages and then add a secondary dimension for date plus time, export that and AI will make a chart for you showing which day of week people become leads. There is no Tuesday in GA4, but if you give that report to AI, it’ll show you. You can have it make a heat map matrix that show what time of day and day of week.

In a colorful little chart, people become leads, people subscribe to your newsletter, people watch videos, anything, any action, any event. So date plus time was useless to me before AI.

John Jantsch (18:12.13)

Yeah, that’s interesting. The, the, one of the things that I think AI is quite good at, you know, it’s basically a mathematician, right? So I think it’s quite good at, at analytics and finding stuff that you’re, I mean, it also sometimes makes huge mistakes. But I think that stuff you couldn’t even see with your own eyes, I think it really can, can surface pretty quickly, can it?

Andy Crestodina (18:34.828)

Yeah. And then John, the next step. you know, find for me the campaigns that had the highest engagement rates. Okay. It looks at 200 campaigns and finds these ones had highest engagement rates. Now craft 10 new campaigns based on those. The next step after the analysis, that’s why AI is really special. It’s because, you you could just immediately go from insight to action, or at least brainstorming.

John Jantsch (18:55.052)

Mm. Right.

John Jantsch (19:03.414)

Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. So where’s the noise that you think people ought to be tuning out? The buzzwords, the whatever agentic of the day is.

Andy Crestodina (19:14.968)

So in analytics, I’m exhausted by reporting and love analysis. In SEO, I’m exhausted by the SEO is dead or content is dead, but I love being discovered for commercial intent key phrases. In AI,

John Jantsch (19:25.421)

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina (19:41.826)

Boy, that’s a really just, you’re asking a really fun question. I believe that the responses are not nearly as good unless you have really like a conversation with it, that you’re chatting with it, that you give it lots more inputs, including personas, and that you are not just having it make stuff for you. I’m exhausted by the write this thing for me. I’m really excited by and motivated by the, what are the gaps in this?

What else could this do? Give me 10 ideas. How could this be better? So I think there’s shifts in every category and that there’s, you know, do this stuff long enough and you realize like, actually the fun stuff’s right over there.

John Jantsch (20:25.39)

So I know you don’t want, or you mentioned that you didn’t really want to be seen as like the crystal ball, but on, some of this stuff, but how far away are we from the idea where a client or a prospect is going to take an action on our website. And that’s going to trigger for agents to do certain things on our behalf and, know, maybe even have a conversation with that person and, and really

You know, there’s an element of removing humans from the entire interaction. I how far away are we from that? Or do you think that buyer behavior will dictate that we never go there?

Andy Crestodina (20:57.462)

Hmm.

Andy Crestodina (21:06.84)

I can easily imagine a CRM set up where when there’s a new lead that it goes and researches this person and brand and then takes the first step toward potentially disqualifying them and then handling some kind of automated conversation saying like, thanks for reaching out. We probably don’t fit, know, but maybe check out these other things instead. Here’s some alternatives. Here’s some, you know, possible providers.

But if the, but the sort of lead scoring thing, if it works, then it builds a whole guide. It does a bunch of research for you. looks at Dun & Bradstreet or checks out their LinkedIn profile. And then the rep gets this sort of like little coaching session with AI on how to talk to this prospect. And so again, that’s exactly what you said a few minutes ago, where is it going to make us more efficient in it by setting aside like these low quality leads and help us prioritize relationships?

John Jantsch (21:49.294)

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina (22:05.324)

by helping us really prep for this really high stakes conversation. there’s a bunch of little uses for AI in there, but yeah, probably every lead should have an appended little sales guide that goes with it with the six questions you should likely ask based on what’s happened with them in the news and who you’re talking to and what likely challenges are.

John Jantsch (22:24.876)

Yeah. And I think that that’s really going to be the key is we’ll remove friction where clients want friction removed, right? They want to do their own research. Maybe they want to get their own pricing, you know, things like that. We’ll remove that friction, but then we’ll get really smart at where do they, where do they actually crave human interaction? You know, not necessarily need it, but, want it. and I think it’s that sort of beautiful combination that is going to always be the tight wires.

Andy Crestodina (22:42.328)

and move around.

Andy Crestodina (22:51.944)

I think so. think that’s making people feel special, listening, showing them you care. I said it about design a bit ago, certainly in service. I’m not, I’m never going to stop caring and talking to people in my days like today. Eight meetings back to back. Love it. I’ll take it. I don’t mind a bit. I’m energized by these and conversations just like this one, John.

John Jantsch (23:02.616)

Yeah, awesome.

John Jantsch (23:17.506)

Well, awesome. Well, let’s not make it 20 years to the next time. Let’s have you back much sooner than that. Again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to drop by. Is there anywhere you want to invite people to connect with you, find out more about your work?

Andy Crestodina (23:30.516)

LinkedIn, the blue button says follow, but if you find the menu and go to connect with me and just say, Hey, heard you on duct tape. I’d be more than happy to connect. And then we can, have an interaction and we can prioritize relationships and take care of each other. And that’s what this is about.

John Jantsch (23:48.462)

Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you soon out there on the road.

Andy Crestodina (23:54.21)

Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (00:01.346)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Andy Crestodina. He’s a recognized authority in digital marketing, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Orbit Media Studios and an influential voice on content strategy, SEO and website optimization. With two decades of hands-on experience, Andy is known for breaking down complex marketing tactics into practical, actionable steps, my kind of guy.

He’s a sought after speaker and the author of content chemistry and a regular contributor to leading industry publications. So Andy, welcome to the show.

Andy Crestodina (00:38.136)

Thanks for having me, John. Glad to be here.

John Jantsch (00:39.438)

We have known each other about each other, whatever the definition is for many years. and I just discovered this the first time you’ve been on my show. So why don’t you come back like weekly now.

Andy Crestodina (00:45.259)

Mm-hmm.

Andy Crestodina (00:51.896)

I would never say no. I’d hang out with you all day, John, if I could.

John Jantsch (00:56.469)

So let’s, let’s jump into AI. mean, what the heck? What are we 41 seconds in? Where do you see it making the biggest real world impact for marketers today? I know that’s a pretty big question.

Andy Crestodina (01:02.583)

Mm-hmm.

Andy Crestodina (01:10.924)

No, I think about it a lot. I think that probably the future of marketing is lowering risk and cost by building synthetic members of a target audience and then testing content, pages, calls to action strategies with that AI persona. So, Sims, like running little, making a thing and getting feedback on it before you put it in the market, because I think it’s likely, it seems to me that we’ll look back at this era and say,

Wow, super primitive. You used to just make a thing and make it live and hope for the best and check it later. Probably not in the future. We’ll do it in a bit more sophisticated way.

John Jantsch (01:50.894)

That’s really interesting. You know, I hadn’t really thought about that, that idea, because I think so many people are focused on automations and efficiencies and getting rid of people, you know, even. But, I mean, you’re obviously, I mean, I, I’m really of the camp that it’s going to change some things around in terms of people, but I think it also is, you know, they’re already seeing it creating some demand in some areas for people.

Andy Crestodina (02:03.186)

No. Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:18.946)

that didn’t exist before. is the concern that, was it Sam Altman that said like 95 % of marketing or white collar jobs will be gone in five years?

Andy Crestodina (02:25.953)

Yeah.

You

Andy Crestodina (02:33.066)

Yeah, I think there’s, I’m going to stay out of the prediction game and wondering, but, I’ll tell you what I’m here for and have been from the beginning and you too, it’s, don’t, I don’t wake up in the morning hoping to save 10 minutes or half an hour. I want to do great work. I want to see the performance of that work. I want to know that I’m, that I’m doing quality work. I want to see the, the feedback and the performance of everything in the data.

So really everything I’ve ever done with AI, and this is hundreds of experiments, half by day on Saturday was building a custom GPT and testing it. But everything that I’ve done is really just been about trying to improve quality. And if it turns out to be faster, that’s lovely. But what we’re all trying to do is to drive an outcome. So I think a lot of marketers are overemphasizing efficiency and speed.

John Jantsch (03:09.026)

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina (03:30.641)

and missing big opportunities to use it to push performance.

John Jantsch (03:36.002)

Yeah. one of the, ironically, one of the, think one of the enemies of quality is that we got so much on our plate, right? And I think that even quality relationships, I mean, I’m finding that if there’s a lot of stuff that had to be done, but let’s face it, it was grunt work, you know, that had to be done. And I do think that some people are feeling like, Hey, if I get that off my plate, it kind of frees my head up. And, know, even like I say, for, for more relationship building and

I think that’s where quality is gonna come from, isn’t it?

Andy Crestodina (04:06.762)

Absolutely. So it will give you a free hand to work harder on those, you know, the conversations you’re having, prioritizing offline experiences, being part of communities, you know, just taking care of the people around you. But the one thing that I’ve been doing with a lot, and this was my very last call, talking to a client.

looking for opportunities to make these pages better, stronger, faster, more detailed and comprehensive. It’s for a higher ed program. And we just gave Chad to PT the persona and gave it the page and said, we’re looking to make this a more comprehensive page. Give us ideas. The very first idea was fantastic. It’s like, which program is right for you. What? Wait, how? And the meeting sort of paused. Like everyone kind of held their breath for a second and asked, like, did we not?

do that? Wait, we didn’t do that. Why didn’t we do that? And there were several others, like three or four things. Yeah, so AI-powered gap analysis is one of my favorite things, but they’re always best discovered through relationships and real-world human conversation.

John Jantsch (05:10.221)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:17.304)

So a lot of orbit media’s work is or has been designed or at least design was an element of it. How do you feel about the design creative process right now? I think there’s a lot of people trying to create tools that can automate a lot of things in that space. Where do you, do you, do you feel like, mean, there’s, there’s some really awful stuff coming out through that. mean, how do you feel about that space right now, where it is today and where you see it going?

Andy Crestodina (05:23.522)

Mm-hmm.

Andy Crestodina (05:40.792)

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina (05:48.226)

Well, design for interactive is a kind of a turning point happening now because these tools like Figma, where you’re designing it somehow in a context where it’s already responsive and the front end programming for things that web teams are building is sort of half done. Now, kind of like writing or image generation, the code generated by AI still requires a lot of review. No one’s just grabbing it and assuming it’s all

perfect, it’s not. So there’s a big gain there in the handoff between designers and programmers, but not, you know, there’s still plenty of work to do. The other one I think is in design. What do you hire? What do you get when you hire a web company? Partly you want service, you want someone to listen to you, you want accountability, you want a thought partner and you want pixel perfection. I don’t think AI is there. don’t think that if you, brands big and small.

want to work with designers to get the thing to look just like they want it to look. The state of AI for UX, it all feels like these long shot prompts. It’s just like, hope something good comes back and you can’t really ask it to fine tune. It’s just creating another one each time. don’t know. So design for simple things, design direction, great, but not for pixel perfection.

John Jantsch (07:19.054)

I’m going to question how much of the market actually wants or understands pixel perfection. mean, aren’t there isn’t there a significant amount of the market that’s like, that’s good enough.

Andy Crestodina (07:29.836)

I’m sure there is. It’s not mostly our audience. I had a 40 minute call with a client about how this circle, the brand is everything. And the edge of the circle needs to be a little bit closer to the edge of the box on both mobile and desktop. There are still lots of people who want their fingerprints on their design. I understand that. I don’t think that.

John Jantsch (07:30.894)

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina (07:56.094)

Visitors care that much about the number of pixels between the circle and the edge of the box but so yeah, if you’re looking for good enough or a great start or here’s the You know a giant step in the in a good direction. It’s awesome but but people really do like service and there’s a Special thing that happens like you said about relationships, you know when creative teams work together to solve problems with clients and and leaders

John Jantsch (08:26.348)

Yeah, I I personally, again, I wouldn’t put myself out there as being on the front line of image creation or whatnot with some of the tools, but some of the stuff I’ve done with it, I mean, every now and then it’s like, yeah, that’s okay. And then every now and then it’s just like, that’s like, that person has no face. How can I use that?

Andy Crestodina (08:43.96)

It’s changing fast. It’s changing fast. Image generation. I sort of wish I could go back and I would have put in the same prompt every month just to sort of see the evolution of it because it’s improving quickly. But yeah, don’t look too closely at hands. Text is still a problem. It’s getting much, much better. But halfway through here at 2025, there are long shot prompts, let’s be honest.

John Jantsch (09:00.696)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:11.618)

Yeah. Yeah. So speaking of maybe that’s good enough, let’s talk about content creation. I think a lot of people, that was probably the first use case for many people is, look, this can write this blog post for me. I think a lot of people are starting to find out that that’s just not going to cut it. In fact, there, you know, I won’t go as far as saying the old Google penalty thing, but I think that they’re being penalized in the eyes of everything that’s reading the content today.

Andy Crestodina (09:39.762)

Yeah, I don’t see a reason to write an article, to publish an article if AI can create it because your target audience can write that same prompt and get that same article. That’s in fact the last thing you should publish. So for the duct tape marketing audience and fans of yours and people who read my stuff, I think it should be obvious that the difference between AI generated, just garbage and

John Jantsch (09:45.356)

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina (10:05.72)

quickly made stuff in medium quality or the boring taste like water articles. And strong points of view, original research, deep content, like taking a stand, collaborative formats like we’re doing now. This stuff is going to be even more different in the future. I think that content strategy is going to have a great moment here as the tide goes out and all these marketers just look like it becomes really clear.

No one’s ever going to read that again. Whoever’s byline that was just lost reputation. So yeah, strong opinion, original research, collaborative formats, highly visual content. These will feel more different than ever. So it’s like influencers and video. These things will be, I think, more effective in the future than even they are today.

John Jantsch (11:00.76)

So as I listen to describe that, you know, the old game used to be, I mean, content and SEO or search visibility, certainly we’re very married together. And as I listen to you describe that, mean, it really, I mean, is keyword ranking just not really a thing anymore? It’s not important anymore?

Andy Crestodina (11:21.353)

Thank you for asking that. I’m seeing so much about this and I’m really excited to give this answer. Everyone needs to separate in their minds these two types of key phrases. People looking for answers are looking for articles. AI overviews will kind of give that person the answer. Click through rates to content marketing for search optimized articles will decline forever. It has been for five years anyway. commercial intent key phrases, what the buyer searches for.

Visit website intent key phrases. There’s still tons of them. Separate in your analytics blog posts from your sales pages and then check the changes to traffic and then check the changes to rankings and click through rates and engagement because people who are making big decisions want to look at a website. They’re going to click through it no matter what Google puts in their way.

John Jantsch (12:10.06)

Yeah, I think one of the pieces of that puzzle is that they’re still getting, in many cases, even this long drawn out, you know, long tail phrase is still being provided in increasingly AI overviews. And so the game then becomes like, okay, I’ve already filtered. I’m not going to go look 10 places. I’m going to maybe pick one or two of these. So, so the game then becomes showing up in those AI overviews or whatever that looks like. is there a different approach to that?

Andy Crestodina (12:29.464)

For sure. Again, perfect question, John. I love this conversation. There’s more to content than search. I see these posts. I don’t have time to respond to them all. I’m not in it to like start a food fight, but content marketing is dead.

Because of SEO, that was your only channel. Is that all you ever thought it was about? So this is my number one B2B marketing strategy for content today is of course the LinkedIn newsletter. It was, okay, I’ve been doing it like now for like five years, but the visibility of my content is literally 10 times what it ever was before. How’s that possible? Because I decided it was, you know, a sensible time to build on rented land, you know, because I, I saw this, the, the change is coming and adapted my strategy.

Because I’m now partnering with Big Tech, Google is not in business to help SEOs. But LinkedIn is in business to help content creators and publishers grow an audience on their platform. So no, our typical articles now get literally 10 times the visibility that they ever got before, even though click-through rates from search are down and declining. it doesn’t bother me a bit.

John Jantsch (13:49.346)

Yeah, of course, anyone who’s not familiar with your work, will say that part of, I think part of the reason, of course, consistency that you’ve provided, but also, mean, your articles go in, I mean, they’re basically master classes. And so, you know, I think that that certainly has something to do with the reason that you’re getting so much exposure is it’s just terribly valuable.

Andy Crestodina (14:12.588)

That means so much to me coming from you. Thank you, John. But hopefully then that reinforces the point about writing things by hand. I I include contributor quotes in every article. There’s almost no scroll depth at any article in which you can’t see something like a visual or screenshot or video. I do lots of original research. They’re carefully constructed, like very, very structured pieces with bullet lists and subheads and internal linking and…

And I’ve learned from people like you, like going way back to like, just be super direct and concise and get right to the point and eliminate, you know, omit needless words. You get it.

John Jantsch (14:52.62)

Well, I haven’t mastered that one yet, but ask, ask anyone who’s edited my, well, I had an editor one time that, on one of my books that said, you know, chapter is great, but it starts with a whole lot of throat clearing. I always remembered that one of my favorite quotes. So you do have been doing a lot. And I think that you just, you enjoy this, the getting into the data. You’ve been doing a lot with analytics.

Andy Crestodina (15:07.448)

I’ve been there. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:21.886)

and you know, maybe even suggesting that new ways to look at data, new, key indicators that maybe we haven’t been taught to look at what’s, what are some of your favorite kind of new ways that you think we ought to be looking at the data? Should we be able to unearth it?

Andy Crestodina (15:40.578)

Well, some of the most important insights waiting for you, literally sitting there just a few clicks away in GA4 are not the most visible. Like you got to go kind of build the thing. Yeah, it takes a minute. Some examples of useful metrics. What is it, or questions to ask and find the answer, then form hypotheses and take action. What is the click through rate on the call to action?

John Jantsch (15:50.166)

Right. Nothing’s very visible in JFR.

John Jantsch (16:04.888)

Right.

Andy Crestodina (16:10.624)

on your most on your key pages. You gotta make a path exploration, takes a few minutes. You gotta learn how to do that. That’s fine. How does embedding video change the engagement rate on articles? Are there URLs on your website that load with page not found as the title tag? What is the difference in conversion rates for visitors on mobile versus desktop?

John Jantsch (16:29.902)

Thank

Andy Crestodina (16:38.934)

Which of your articles is inspiring visitors to subscribe to your newsletter? Which URLs on your site have declining search traffic? We said a second ago. Are they sales pages? Are they everything? Or is it mostly just your content and articles and guides? These are all extremely useful things to know that can guide strategy and budgets. What’s the output from those calories burned? It’ll tell you.

But you got to know where to look. I don’t do almost any reporting in Google Analytics. I don’t build dashboards. I don’t just go look at it for its own sake, but I do analysis every day.

John Jantsch (17:19.734)

How much are you taking what might be raw data or at least what you can get out of GA4 and just taking it to AI and say, ask me questions?

Andy Crestodina (17:30.986)

there’s one or two use cases that you almost can’t do without AI. For example, if you make a report that shows traffic to your thank you pages and then add a secondary dimension for date plus time, export that and AI will make a chart for you showing which day of week people become leads. There is no Tuesday in GA4, but if you give that report to AI, it’ll show you. You can have it make a heat map matrix that show what time of day and day of week.

In a colorful little chart, people become leads, people subscribe to your newsletter, people watch videos, anything, any action, any event. So date plus time was useless to me before AI.

John Jantsch (18:12.13)

Yeah, that’s interesting. The, the, one of the things that I think AI is quite good at, you know, it’s basically a mathematician, right? So I think it’s quite good at, at analytics and finding stuff that you’re, I mean, it also sometimes makes huge mistakes. But I think that stuff you couldn’t even see with your own eyes, I think it really can, can surface pretty quickly, can it?

Andy Crestodina (18:34.828)

Yeah. And then John, the next step. you know, find for me the campaigns that had the highest engagement rates. Okay. It looks at 200 campaigns and finds these ones had highest engagement rates. Now craft 10 new campaigns based on those. The next step after the analysis, that’s why AI is really special. It’s because, you you could just immediately go from insight to action, or at least brainstorming.

John Jantsch (18:55.052)

Mm. Right.

John Jantsch (19:03.414)

Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. So where’s the noise that you think people ought to be tuning out? The buzzwords, the whatever agentic of the day is.

Andy Crestodina (19:14.968)

So in analytics, I’m exhausted by reporting and love analysis. In SEO, I’m exhausted by the SEO is dead or content is dead, but I love being discovered for commercial intent key phrases. In AI,

John Jantsch (19:25.421)

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina (19:41.826)

Boy, that’s a really just, you’re asking a really fun question. I believe that the responses are not nearly as good unless you have really like a conversation with it, that you’re chatting with it, that you give it lots more inputs, including personas, and that you are not just having it make stuff for you. I’m exhausted by the write this thing for me. I’m really excited by and motivated by the, what are the gaps in this?

What else could this do? Give me 10 ideas. How could this be better? So I think there’s shifts in every category and that there’s, you know, do this stuff long enough and you realize like, actually the fun stuff’s right over there.

John Jantsch (20:25.39)

So I know you don’t want, or you mentioned that you didn’t really want to be seen as like the crystal ball, but on, some of this stuff, but how far away are we from the idea where a client or a prospect is going to take an action on our website. And that’s going to trigger for agents to do certain things on our behalf and, know, maybe even have a conversation with that person and, and really

You know, there’s an element of removing humans from the entire interaction. I how far away are we from that? Or do you think that buyer behavior will dictate that we never go there?

Andy Crestodina (20:57.462)

Hmm.

Andy Crestodina (21:06.84)

I can easily imagine a CRM set up where when there’s a new lead that it goes and researches this person and brand and then takes the first step toward potentially disqualifying them and then handling some kind of automated conversation saying like, thanks for reaching out. We probably don’t fit, know, but maybe check out these other things instead. Here’s some alternatives. Here’s some, you know, possible providers.

But if the, but the sort of lead scoring thing, if it works, then it builds a whole guide. It does a bunch of research for you. looks at Dun & Bradstreet or checks out their LinkedIn profile. And then the rep gets this sort of like little coaching session with AI on how to talk to this prospect. And so again, that’s exactly what you said a few minutes ago, where is it going to make us more efficient in it by setting aside like these low quality leads and help us prioritize relationships?

John Jantsch (21:49.294)

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina (22:05.324)

by helping us really prep for this really high stakes conversation. there’s a bunch of little uses for AI in there, but yeah, probably every lead should have an appended little sales guide that goes with it with the six questions you should likely ask based on what’s happened with them in the news and who you’re talking to and what likely challenges are.

John Jantsch (22:24.876)

Yeah. And I think that that’s really going to be the key is we’ll remove friction where clients want friction removed, right? They want to do their own research. Maybe they want to get their own pricing, you know, things like that. We’ll remove that friction, but then we’ll get really smart at where do they, where do they actually crave human interaction? You know, not necessarily need it, but, want it. and I think it’s that sort of beautiful combination that is going to always be the tight wires.

Andy Crestodina (22:42.328)

and move around.

Andy Crestodina (22:51.944)

I think so. think that’s making people feel special, listening, showing them you care. I said it about design a bit ago, certainly in service. I’m not, I’m never going to stop caring and talking to people in my days like today. Eight meetings back to back. Love it. I’ll take it. I don’t mind a bit. I’m energized by these and conversations just like this one, John.

John Jantsch (23:02.616)

Yeah, awesome.

John Jantsch (23:17.506)

Well, awesome. Well, let’s not make it 20 years to the next time. Let’s have you back much sooner than that. Again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to drop by. Is there anywhere you want to invite people to connect with you, find out more about your work?

Andy Crestodina (23:30.516)

LinkedIn, the blue button says follow, but if you find the menu and go to connect with me and just say, Hey, heard you on duct tape. I’d be more than happy to connect. And then we can, have an interaction and we can prioritize relationships and take care of each other. And that’s what this is about.

John Jantsch (23:48.462)

Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you soon out there on the road.

Andy Crestodina (23:54.21)

Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (00:00.802)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Blair Enns. He’s a leading voice in the creative and consulting agency world, best known as the founder of Win Without Pitching. Over two decades, he’s helped thousands of agencies move from pitching and price haggling to confidently leading client engagements and charging for their expertise. We’re going to talk about his latest book, The Four Conversations, a new model for selling expertise.

Book distills decades of hard won wisdom into a practical roadmap for navigating the most crucial moments in every client relationship. So Blair, welcome to the show.

Blair Enns (00:40.337)

Thank you, John.

John Jantsch (00:42.85)

So let’s get some leverage. How much in your estimation do you think, what do you think the real cost day to day when agencies let clients run the show instead of leading the conversation?

Blair Enns (00:55.611)

What’s the real cost of letting clients run the conversation?

John Jantsch (00:58.734)

Yeah, I mean, instead of us, you know, a lot about the four conversations is really providing leadership in the conversation. So I see a lot of agencies that show up and say, what do need? Sure, we do that. And I think that’s what really leads to this price haggling, doesn’t it?

Blair Enns (01:16.091)

Yeah. So if I start to, I’ve never contemplated the total cost here, but we could do some math on the fly. The typical agency has a closing ratio of about 25%. I can actually be more specific than that. It’s oddly specific at 26%, which seems to be a universal number across all B2B sales. Now that’s when we measure it. It’s 26%. Self-declared, it’s closer to 33%. So an agency will tell you we close one in three proposals.

when we crack open the CRM and look at it, they close one in four. I think the threshold of respectability in a closing ratio is 40%. You should strive to be over 50%. So if you’re closing less than 50%, A, you’re probably writing too many proposals, B, you’re probably doing something wrong in the proposals. So let’s say you’re closing half as many proposals as you should. So there’s a starting point. And then there’s pricing. Are you getting, are you commanding,

your fair share of the value that you’re helping to create in the typical agency is not. I can’t give you a percentage on that, but I would guess it’s another 20 % across the board. The typical agency could probably increase their prices by 20%. Now with existing clients, not necessarily. They can raise prices with existing clients on average. It’s difficult with larger agencies. We’re dealing with procurement.

But if you draw a line in time, this is after today, after you’ve absorbed this information, you start to sell this way, your average proposal value should climb by 20 % easily. take the size of your firm, add 20 % to the top line, double your closing ratio. That’s the cost of poor selling.

John Jantsch (03:05.014)

So how much of that, I might leave myself right into a trap here, but how much of that is marketing and how much of that is sales? So in other words, you and I have written books that comes with, in some cases, perceived trust and perceived authority, expect to pay a premium in a lot of cases. So how much of that is done on the front end and how much of that is done in the sales conversation?

Blair Enns (03:09.383)

Ha ha ha.

Blair Enns (03:28.829)

Well, most of what I just talked about is what happens in the sales conversation, which to me is after the initial interaction. So if we’re talking about marketing is to generate leads, that’s a whole other ball of wax. Now, depending on who you are in the organization, how it thinks about sales and marketing, in some organizations, some agencies, lead generation can be seen as a sales function.

And in others, it’s seen as a marketing function. Typically, it’s seen as a bit of both or a specific combination of both in the average firm. The better your marketing goes the saying, the less selling you have to do. But that’s an interpretation of that statement. It’s really about seeing that statement views selling as lead generation. But there’s all this stuff that I just referenced, which is what happens after you begin the conversation with the lead. So there’s a whole other

area of improvement to be had under the banner of marketing.

John Jantsch (04:28.942)

Yeah, and it’s probably the combination just amplifies everything, right? The combination of both of those being effective amplifies everything. So let’s just go right to the title of the book. What are the four conversations and why do they keep happening no matter how seasoned somebody is?

Blair Enns (04:45.349)

Yeah, so the four conversations, this is a model. A model is a view of the world, a way of organizing complexity. All models are wrong. Some are useful. The book opens with that quote. So I’m not saying the sale always happens in a series of four linear and discrete conversations, but it is helpful to think of it that way. So the four conversations and their objective are the probative conversation, where your goal is to prove your expertise to the client and move in their mind from a position of a vendor to the expert.

That’s the conversation that happens without your president. Your marketing would be under the domain of the probative conversation. It’s a conversation in construct only. It happens through your agents of thought leadership, referral, referrers, and your marketing. And then you have the three person to person conversation that happened after that, which you would think of as the sales conversations. There’s the qualifying conversation, which is the vetting conversation. You’re vetting the lead to see if this is something worth spending your time on.

There’s the value conversation where you’re uncovering the value to be created and the share of that value you might command in the form of fees. So you’re starting to set not price, but pricing guidance, rough approximate pricing guidance based on the value to be created rather than the cost of your solutions. And then the final conversation is the closing conversation where you help the client commit and select, select and commit to a path forward.

John Jantsch (06:11.224)

You know what I love about as I listen to you talk about all four of those conversations, they’re not about like manipulating or getting this thing that you want done. They’re really about creating value for both parties, right?

Blair Enns (06:23.109)

Yeah, I’m a big believer in the idea that selling is not talking people into things. I think, you know, we make this distinction or we I make the distinction in the book, you know, between expert and vendor. And you think of your expert self, the way you operate as an expert, you’re in your relationships with your clients. So after sale, the way you show up, you’re kind of you’re an advisor. You facilitate choice. You point out the pros and cons of decisions.

John Jantsch (06:28.59)

Right.

Blair Enns (06:52.061)

You give the client some decisions to make, you point out the pros and cons of those decisions, and I think that’s how you should navigate the sale as well.

John Jantsch (06:59.63)

I talked to a lot of agencies that I’m sure you’ve heard this quite often as well. They feel like they’re giving away their expertise, pitching for free, giving consultations to show that they know what they’re talking about and really all along the way kind of giving it away. do you get people out of that place of being stuck?

Blair Enns (07:19.121)

Well, there’s no short answer to the question of how you get people out of that. You write a book on a model, you get them to read the book and implement the guidance in the book is the short one. But as you point out, it’s hard. I myself, I struggle with this a lot. I’ve for years, it’s been the hardest thing for me to go from seeing myself as the person with the answers, the subject matter expert, to the person with the questions. So if you think of how a typical marketer shows up in the sale,

John Jantsch (07:45.294)

Mm.

Blair Enns (07:47.655)

They wanna prove their brilliance. And yeah, we do that in the probative conversation, but that’s the conversation that happens without you present. Once you’re in a conversation with an individual, instead of trying to prove your brilliance, you should arm yourself with a set of questions. And so in our model of the four conversations, each conversation has a framework or set of frameworks, has a specific objective, which I shared with you, and then a framework or set of frameworks.

for navigating to that objective. Now those frameworks are almost all questions. So the short answer to how is you go from statements about yourself to questions about the client.

John Jantsch (08:29.058)

Well, and those statements often are not just about yourself. They might actually be offering solutions, right? Yeah. Yeah. number two, qualifying. I know that this is not your take on this, but I know a lot of people hear that qualifying and they’re thinking, it comes off more like I’m going to see if you qualify to work with me. you know, and it can actually be a little off putting if not done.

Blair Enns (08:35.377)

Free advice, yeah.

John Jantsch (08:56.91)

How do you approach making sure that the client doesn’t feel like they’re being evaluated?

Blair Enns (09:04.283)

Yeah, I think some people do overplay that idea. So you can take this idea of qualifying and you can put on a spectrum. At one end, there’s the client qualifying you. At the other end, there’s you qualifying the client. And most of these qualifying conversations, the typical listener wouldn’t think of them as a qualifying conversation. They would think of them as a credentials conversation or a credentials meeting. So what does that mean if we put it back into this context of qualifying? It means you’re trying to qualify for the client.

The assumption is this is a good fit for you. Now you’re trying to prove to them that they’re a good fit. And you have to do that and there’s a way to do that, but the conversation is all about you first making sure that they are a good fit for you. That implies that you’ve actually thought about who is a good fit for you. What is your ideal client profile? Who do you want to do business with? Who will you not do business with? How much money do you need somebody to spend? And so,

John Jantsch (09:52.046)

Yeah, yeah.

Blair Enns (10:00.305)

You can have a very business-like conversation using a framework to organize questions around that without coming across like an ass. But in the wrong hands, somebody can overplay that idea and they can make the client feel uncomfortable.

John Jantsch (10:08.257)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:16.151)

You know, one of the things over the years that I’ve liked to use as a qualifier is there are certain behaviors that the client has or what they believe in terms of what value is and how a solution gets done. And in some cases, we get very good or most people get very good at understanding, this is a problem I can fix well. I know I could do this one. So where does that come into the qualifying, those types of considerations?

Blair Enns (10:43.239)

Well, you have to guard against that. so qualifying is the vetting conversation. There’s a tone in the qualifying conversation. It’s a tone of discernment. So you’re professional, you’re clinical, you’re, if you’re getting really enthusiastic about the opportunity, you’re just suppressing that for the time being. And then once you ask your questions and you determine that there is, this is a good fit for you, then you move to the next conversation, the value conversation. You can, your tone of discernment can move to a tone of deep interest. You decide,

John Jantsch (10:51.106)

Yeah.

Blair Enns (11:13.245)

You ask your questions, you get your answers, and you decide, you know what, this is a good fit. And you would say to the client, on the surface, I think this is a really good fit. I can see my team getting very excited about this. I’m not saying I’m getting excited about it. I’m still trying to moderate my enthusiasm to make sure my enthusiasm for the project or the client does not exceed their enthusiasm for me.

John Jantsch (11:23.374)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:36.347)

Can we stick on that for a minute? Why is that an issue?

Blair Enns (11:40.113)

Well, I have in the book what I consider to be the first principle of selling expertise. It’s a formula P equals DB over D. I printed on the back of coffee mugs. P stands for your power in the sale. Your power in the sale is a function of your desirability, DB, being greater than your own desire, D. Otherwise stated, whoever wants it the most has the least power in the buy-sell relationship.

You don’t extrapolate that to the nth degree and say, therefore, I should seek to maximize my desirability. That’s true. That part’s true. But you could also infer that to mean I should seek to minimize my expression of desire for the client. that, yeah, no. Yeah, you show up as aloof, disinterested. You don’t want that. I’m just saying pay attention to the power dynamics in the relationship and make sure, especially early on,

John Jantsch (12:24.29)

Yeah. Yeah. I don’t really, I don’t really need this sale. I take it or leave it. Right.

Blair Enns (12:38.713)

actually, throughout, there’s no especially early on, but just make sure that your own expression, allow your enthusiasm for the opportunity to rise as high as the clients and try not to exceed it. Because when you exceed it, you clearly give all your power away, your power to do your best work, to command the most profit, to command high prices. Your cost of sale will go up too as your power goes away.

John Jantsch (13:06.604)

Interesting. So let’s move to number three. guess it is. You use the phrase value to be created. Is that right? Value to be created. that. Yeah. But, but less about fees and more about the value to be created as part of the equation. So, so do I hear you saying, what we’re going to fix for this client is worth a million dollars. That’s the value it’s going to create for them. So do we base our fee on that? Or do we base our fee on the fact that we know how to do this and we do it

Blair Enns (13:14.129)

the value conversation.

John Jantsch (13:36.28)

officially.

Blair Enns (13:37.277)

So you can base your fee, I’m getting softer on this as the years go by. My previous book, which came out in 2018, is on pricing. It’s called Pricing Creativity. And I was probably a bit more of a hard, was pushing harder for value-based pricing. Today, I don’t really care how you price. I care if you have a value conversation. A value conversation begins the pricing discussion based on the value to be created. So you come to me or your…

John Jantsch (13:55.694)

Mm-hmm.

Blair Enns (14:03.601)

prospective client and I’m walking you through the simple four-step framework. What do you want John? You tell me what your vision of your desired future state is, what success looks like in the future. And I say this is a great vision. So now I’m leaning in, I’m enthusiastic. Okay, what are the metrics that will measure to prove that you’ve achieved what you want? And we talk about some KPIs, you give them to me or I pull them out of you. And I say to you, okay, I know what you want, I know what the KPIs are that we’ll measure.

John Jantsch (14:17.304)

Mm-hmm.

Blair Enns (14:32.741)

If we hit these metrics, what’s the value of that? So if we just keep it to economic value, you give me some numbers, we top line or revenue gains or cost reductions, we translate that into profit. And I say, all right, so if your vision comes true, you hit these metrics, we’re gonna create a million dollars a year and net new profit, is that right? And you say, yeah, that sounds about right if everything goes well. Now the fourth and final step is setting pricing guidance. At this point, I haven’t thought.

about what I’m actually gonna do. I haven’t talked to you about specific solutions. Even if you may have come to me with a specific solution in mind, I put it aside and I’ve put you into your desired future state. And I’ve asked you to describe success. And obviously there’s a framework around this. And I say to you, if I could help you create this million dollars a year and that new recurring profit, would you pay me X? And in that moment, I’m gonna pull a number out of my nether regions. And I want the number to be so high that you won’t pay it, that you walk it down.

And there’s some psychology, it’s called the anchoring effect and why I do this. But at some point, so if I say, would you pay me a half a million dollars? And you respond with, well, that depends, what would you do for a half a million dollars? I might say, I don’t know, I haven’t thought about solutions yet. But if I could help you create this million dollars in net new recurring profit, would you pay half a million in one time fees? And that’s.

Whether you say yes or no, we’re in a conversation on pricing and that conversation has started high. The price is tied to the value to be created is not tied to my solutions. From there, the price can go down. At the end of the day, when I come back with a proposal in the closing conversation, I can price however I want. The important thing is we have started the pricing discussion based on the value to be created, not based on the cost of my solutions.

John Jantsch (16:26.158)

Yeah, and I think that’s certainly the path towards getting a prospect or a client to think, I’m investing this money as opposed to I’m spending this money, isn’t

Blair Enns (16:36.551)

Correct.

John Jantsch (16:38.668)

So let’s talk about the money conversation. I would say that, I mean, you talked to millions of salespeople probably over the years. Isn’t that the place that they have the most issue with?

Blair Enns (16:51.325)

I think the value conversation is a pivotal conversation because we are starting to, the client, we uncover a budget if there is one in the qualifying conversation, then we transcend that budget while still acknowledging as part of the framework that the client has a budget and agreeing that we’ll come back with a range of solutions and a range of price points. We basically agree on a trade.

I’ll show you what I can do for your budget. You allow me to think creatively and expansively about what’s the most we can do to help you create this value. And it’s going to be a big price. So that’s, I love this framework for talking about money. It doesn’t make it easy, but when you understand that it’s okay for the first number to be so high that the client chokes on it or pushes back and you do this a few times, you realize everybody will survive.

This is not an existential threat. This is just part of the conversation. By the time the conversation ends, you’re in agreement that the client will consider options in a certain range. Even if the client says, listen, I don’t have the authority to spend, let’s say I anchored at 500 and we ended up at 250 and then you said, well, my budget’s 50. So I’ve got a range of 50 to 250. Even if you don’t have the authority to spend 250 in that moment.

I’ll extract from you an understanding that, okay, I’m gonna put some options in front of you that are gonna be beyond your budget. And if you’re really excited about them, it’s your prerogative. But then I would invite you to invite the other people to the table who would be required to fund this. you are always in, you the buyer, you’re always in control. You’ve stated to me that you have a budget. I’ve shown what I’m going to do for that budget. In exchange, you’re letting me push you to think bigger, to think about investing more.

And that’s a pretty fair trade. You practice this a few times, it becomes fairly intuitive to you.

John Jantsch (18:47.628)

You know, it’s been come, see very commonplace. seems like the last few years for agencies to kind of offer package services. So this much deliverable for this price. it sounds to me, when I hear you say that conversation, you’re really getting completely out of that, mold and really the idea of, of, I’m going to actually bring you something really innovative that you hadn’t even thought about when you developed your budget. Automatically you’re providing leadership instead of just.

execution, right?

Blair Enns (19:18.845)

That’s true, but it’s not antithetical to productizing your services either. So in my last two books, I’ve talked about productization and in pricing creativity, I was pretty strongly anti-productizing for agencies. When I wrote the four conversations, which I finished last year,

John Jantsch (19:38.828)

Mm-hmm.

Blair Enns (19:46.969)

I was pretty neutral on it. And I have a pretty good framework in the book for deciding, you standardize or customize your delivery model, package your services or customize and your pricing? What I mean by that is if you have packages, do you price the packages or do you price the client? And as time goes on, I’m actually increasingly in favor of product standardizing your delivery. So you have packages, but reserving the right to price the client, which is the first rule.

of in my book, Pricing Creativity, price the client, not the product, not the service.

John Jantsch (20:23.448)

So I know from many conversations I’ve had this, know, anytime I say the same thing of you want to move from vendor to trusted advisor, you know, a lot of lights go on, right? It’s like, yes, that’s exactly what I want to do. So for the listeners who are stuck in that mindset right now, is there, is there a shift or a daily habit that you would recommend that might make, help people make that leap or at least make it stick?

Blair Enns (20:47.285)

it’s a great question. there is in the book, there’s I guess it’s a principle, but it’s really a framework for getting into the experts mindset. It’s called the experts mantra. And it’s a four line statement that you repeat to yourself before you log into the conversation, before you show up for the whether it’s done remotely or in person before you enter the conversation. Just four statements that you repeat yourself.

They can benefit from a little customization, but I’ll give them to you here. I am the expert, I am the prize. I’m on a mission to help. I can only do that if you let me lead. All will not follow and that’s okay. And we can unpack each of those four sentences and they’re all rooted in something, but it’s like, I am the expert, I’m the prize to be won here. I’m on a mission to lead. If you don’t let me lead in the sale, you will not let me lead in the engagement. So this is a test of whether or not we can work together.

Yeah, and then the last one of all will not follow is just letting go of the outcomes and focusing on the process.

John Jantsch (21:48.781)

Yes.

John Jantsch (21:52.27)

Yeah,

Yeah, I love that. love that. Well, Blair, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there some place for you to invite people to find out more about your work and obviously your books or connect with you?

Blair Enns (22:07.089)

Yeah, thanks John, I’ve enjoyed it. They can reach me in all of my work at winwithoutpitching.com.

John Jantsch (22:13.611)

Again, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Blair Enns (22:18.685)

Thank you.