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 (00:01.144)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantsch. My guest today is Manick Bhan. He is the founder, CTO of Search Atlas, a cutting edge SEO and content marketing platform designed to help marketers, agencies and businesses drive measurable growth. With a background in engineering and entrepreneurship, Manick previously founded RankPay and has become a respected thought leader in the SEO community. So Manick, welcome to the show.

Manick @ Search Atlas (00:30.847)

Thank you, John. Great to be here.

John Jantsch (00:32.686)

So let's talk a little bit about creating a search Atlas. How old is search Atlas now? Five years ish? Is that?

Manick @ Search Atlas (00:39.551)

I think the first line of code I wrote about seven years ago. Yeah.

John Jantsch (00:44.066)

Seven years ago, okay. So a lot's changed in that approach or in SEO necessarily. how did you approach or maybe even a better question, why did you think a tool needed to be built for SEO purposes? What was kind of your founding thinking of this?

Manick @ Search Atlas (01:03.187)

Yeah. Good question. with my first, my first tech company, we were in the live entertainment ticketing space. And if you don't rank on Google, you don't exist in that industry. You know, it's like the largest ticketing company is actually Google. It's not ticket master or stop hub. It's Google because you go to Google to then find those tickets. So if you're not on Google there, your business doesn't exist. So figuring out what the equation was, was something that I started trying to crack the code on, over a decade ago. And.

John Jantsch (01:13.428)

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (01:33.437)

What I learned very quickly in the process of trying to scale and grow that business is that other tools out there, conventional, what I call traditional or trad SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush, these are analytics tools. They give us reports, they give us like data, but if we don't move on that data, nothing moves, right? We're just watching through the looking glass. And so I felt what we needed really as an industry was tools that would actually help us accelerate

John Jantsch (01:43.789)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (01:52.034)

Yeah, yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (02:02.259)

change, like the changes to our sites, the changes to the internet that help us rank better. And that's where Search Atlas came from.

John Jantsch (02:09.592)

So people aren't familiar with search as necessarily, you know, it basically lives on a platform, but it connects with your website. And so it actually is able to make changes on your website from that platform. That sort of took some wizardry, didn't it?

Manick @ Search Atlas (02:25.087)

It did. It started as something on back of the envelope, trying to figure out how we would do this and make it fast in real time. But we're happy that it worked. Initially, we weren't even sure if Google would be able to see the changes that we were making. So there was a lot of risk in the early days, but I believed that we would figure it out. And we did. And now I can be, I think I'm happy to say, so over 20,000 sites powered by the tech, by the software.

John Jantsch (02:26.094)

You

Manick @ Search Atlas (02:54.269)

over 5,000 agencies on the platform. And it's a case study machine. Like it just produces case studies constantly. And that's been great.

John Jantsch (03:03.918)

Yeah. So you've probably seen these headlines of late. You know, it's become very trendy to start a blog post or something with SEO is dead. let's talk a little bit. So how do you see the landscape changing right now? I mean, there's no question it is evolving and changing, but certainly not dead. How do you see it? How do you see it today?

Manick @ Search Atlas (03:15.229)

Yeah, I wonder why that is.

Manick @ Search Atlas (03:29.363)

Yeah, I think the problem is that some people's brains are dead and they see those headlines and that's what they click on. But the truth is, search is like a basic human function. We have information demands and needs that we need to get met. And there will always be a search engine to meet us in that. The form of what that takes and how it operates and whether the modality is through text or through audio or other formats, that's going to evolve and become more interesting.

But at a fundamental basis, we're essentially providing a fragment of information, looking for knowledge. And that discovery process is just evolved. The landscape is now more fragmented than it used to be. The total size of search is actually bigger. And it's still Google's game, but the types and ways that we're searching are changing. And the kinds of people that search on different search platforms is also

John Jantsch (04:15.587)

Yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (04:27.743)

becoming pretty interesting. What we're seeing in our data.

John Jantsch (04:29.826)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's almost like there's almost like search personality, right? Almost.

Manick @ Search Atlas (04:36.743)

Yeah, I mean, on the end, on the other end of the computer, there's an avatar, there's an ICP. And the ICP of the chat GPT user is someone who's willing to pay at least 20 bucks a month. Remember that, like we're paying for the subscription. Anyone can search on Google without even a dollar. It's a free platform. And so immediately there's a higher commercial possibility from the user of chat. That's why I guess when we look at our data, we're seeing

John Jantsch (04:38.062)

Yeah, yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (05:05.278)

5.5 times higher conversion rate from people that go to our site from chat GPT than from Google, which was insane. And then even for some of our product pages, we see, you know, 1.5 to 4X higher conversion rate. So it's undeniable that the conversion likelihood is way higher from chat than it is from Google. And that's what we're seeing.

John Jantsch (05:27.384)

Yeah, and I think it makes a ton of sense because at least today, the snapshot in the moment, I think that the consumer's belief is, chat, GPT or AI or something has gone out there and done all the research for me. And so these three results that it gave me, you that's all I need to look at. And I think that's really why you're seeing that. Don't you think that's why that intent and that conversion is so high?

Manick @ Search Atlas (05:49.843)

Yeah, for sure. And the other thing that happens faster on LLMs is that you're able to do your research in a more comprehensive way. So there's other prompts they're asking. They're asking refinements and they're digging in deeper. They're going and they're asking more questions. And then when they get to the final end of their journey, usually they're in a pretty close position, I think, to make the transaction happen and they're ready.

John Jantsch (06:16.022)

Yeah. Yeah. was a lot of those questions they used to ask a salesperson have now been answered. Yeah. Yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (06:21.693)

Yeah, exactly. Way less objections and they're way more familiar with what they're buying. And from an information processing perspective, John, like that's the other amazing thing about it is it's way easier for us to interact with ChatGPT because we know the structure. It's text and it's structured in a way and it's easy to synthesize that.

John Jantsch (06:37.858)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:44.238)

Yeah, yeah, it's a conversation. Feels like a conversation, right? So, how, where do you, what do you see the biggest opportunities and maybe the biggest risks today for marketers with AI becoming, you know, so integrated into search strategies?

Manick @ Search Atlas (07:00.447)

Yeah, that's an interesting one. I think one of the biggest risks is

Manick @ Search Atlas (07:09.297)

One of the biggest risks is how the platforms themselves are changing. And if you're like, as an example, if you're a pure play organic search marketer that was good at creating content and you were creating a lot of informational content, that strategy is becoming more and more obsolete because the truth is Google and all the LMS, they already know what color an Apple is and they know that the sky's blue. Like we don't have to like create content to show that to them.

John Jantsch (07:29.027)

Yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (07:38.143)

We have to create something new and different. And so some people that haven't evolved their marketing approach in organic SEO, that methodology is already obsolete and they need to retrain. So I think that's a risk is obsolescence. If you're watching podcasts like this and reading up and actually applying the knowledge, well, you're using an obsolete blueprint that's living in, hopefully not Windows 95, but an out-of-date era.

John Jantsch (07:44.408)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (08:07.064)

Yeah, yeah,

Manick @ Search Atlas (08:07.439)

So that's a risk. Yeah. And the platforms themselves are changing a lot. like what used to work two years ago on Facebook, for example, like I remember buying mobile app installs from, for my first tech company for less than a dollar by scraping the Facebook user IDs and running custom audiences. They closed that loophole. So just how the platforms work, their opportunities, that also changes. And it's changing faster with AI now than it was before.

John Jantsch (08:36.142)

So you described a lot of that how-to content. The theory was very top of the funnel, get people to my website, that kind of thing. The common advice that I'm hearing a lot and a lot of folks are giving right now is that our content strategy needs to be more around winning high intent searches, which I think people would say we've always wanted to do, right? But that person that's out there searching for best person to do X is a

is a better searcher, but how do we optimize our content for that type of probably more competitive search?

Manick @ Search Atlas (09:12.595)

Yeah. So it's, so it starts with really understanding your, like the central topic or the primary keyword of your business and being really laser clear about that. So for example, for search Atlas, some people would say it's SEO. No, it's actually not SEO. It's if it's SEO, then it's SEO automation and not just SEO automation, SEO automation software. Right. Or maybe it's marketing automation software.

John Jantsch (09:19.128)

Yep.

John Jantsch (09:34.551)

Mm-hmm.

Manick @ Search Atlas (09:41.279)

problem becomes first off when people begin the process from the wrong starting point and they don't really understand what is what's called like their primary keyword or their central searching town. So that's the first thing. what I, we do, because we also have an agency and we take on a lot of projects from people that have worked with other agencies that did the content process wrong. And they didn't understand what it was that this business was actually selling and they created as an example.

John Jantsch (10:04.781)

Nice.

Manick @ Search Atlas (10:10.463)

for a cardiologist in LA, an article about did Donald Trump have a heart attack? Well, I get the concept of a heart attack and Donald, that's somehow related to cardiology, but that has nothing to do with cardiology in Los Angeles or the service or the practice of it. And so when people take that path and they don't do the right content strategy, they confuse Google about what the site is actually about. And that is the part that is devastating when they...

John Jantsch (10:24.451)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:35.629)

Yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (10:39.281)

increase the site's focus score, which is a metric Google is quantifying, when they reduce its focus score, when they increase its radius, when the site gets topical radius goes large, it becomes unable to rank for a core topic. And that's like the mathematics of how they do the demotion. That I think is the biggest problem with content strategies today.

John Jantsch (11:02.39)

Yeah. You see a lot of people that write these things that get a whole lot of eyeballs. And then when you really start drilling into it, it's like, well, these aren't, these aren't people that would ever buy from us, you know? And, so it's almost like you're hurting yourself, you know? Yeah. Great. We've got lots of traffic, but you're actually hurting yourself. So, so how should, how should marketers that's broad and beyond SEO be, thinking about AI today and certainly as it plays into, to your tool search analysts as well.

Manick @ Search Atlas (11:11.732)

Right.

Manick @ Search Atlas (11:33.097)

Well, probably the common thing anyone's going to say right now is like, learn more AI, like get more into the tools, practice it. And so I don't want to just say that. I like to come up with kind of my own little unique flavor angle on it. And what I would say is, create gatherings of people either on your team or people that you respect in the community and do your own hackathons. There's way more power.

John Jantsch (11:39.778)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (11:59.95)

Mmm.

Manick @ Search Atlas (12:01.971)

When a group of people collectively approach a problem together in like in the real world, by the way, not, I'm not talking about zoom. I'm talking about in the real world. we do hackathons with my team and I, I fly out all over the world to meet different clusters of our team. And we lead hackathons for like four days, five days. We all stay in the same place and we build and we build in at the end. We come out, but we come up with a couple of different things we've created together and the process though, we all.

become masters of some type of use case around AI in that process. And sometimes we'll even bring in people that I know that are experts in a particular discipline. And so if you don't know those sorts of people, go find them and make friends with them and learn as much as you can, not just from what's online and on YouTube, but from real experts that you can become friends with.

John Jantsch (12:49.975)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (13:01.87)

So there's a lot of common, know, the whole idea of quality versus quantity. And I see a lot of people looking at AI and saying, I can produce 10 times as much content, you know, in the same amount of time. And I think the flip side of that is I also think you can look at these tools and say, no, I can produce way better content in maybe the amount of time because I can go so much deeper. can have access to stats. I can have access to

know, reports to people have written and be able to pull quotes from other people. Is there a quantity versus quality kind of best practice or advice that you give people?

Manick @ Search Atlas (13:41.753)

So I'll give a controversial take. I think that web pages as we know them will be dead in less than 10 years. And the reason for this is that right now, and historically, Google have needed us to build web pages and really even Facebook to build web pages to lead people on an informational journey that maybe also includes a conversion journey.

towards some sort of transaction or registration or some path like that. And they needed us to box up the information because they didn't have it. When we live in an era where creating content, you can create high quality content and lots of it, where content, the value of it, whether it's a webpage or a blog post is essentially zero and high quality content is abundant. That's the future we're racing towards. And so in a world like that,

essentially all the information that's knowable gets compressed into a knowledge graph. And that knowledge graph is essentially containing all of the factuality, all the information consensus of all of the voices on the internet and the world. And then at that point, Google can just make their own web pages. They don't need us to build it for them. They just know what our query is. They have their lens and perspective on an answer or multiple answers. And so they will reconstruct

John Jantsch (14:55.138)

Yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (15:04.627)

the webpage experience synthetically optimized for our exact question and the exact answer we're looking for.

John Jantsch (15:10.06)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dynamically created for that one person as well. Right. Which, which obviously we, you know, very hard for us to do as a website owner. Yeah. I guess the begs the question then like, what do we do to, compete with that?

Manick @ Search Atlas (15:15.859)

Yeah, on the fly.

Manick @ Search Atlas (15:30.633)

Well, good question. Number one, build the biggest brand you can fast. Build that brand, get people to know that brand and love it. Build something that they want to come back to. Use your resources to create a true brand. Ultimately, all these search systems are essentially trying to identify the brands. Larry Page said famously that the internet is a cesspool and the brands are the signal and the cesspool. That's literally what he said.

John Jantsch (15:33.294)

you

Manick @ Search Atlas (15:59.933)

And so what does a brand look like? Well, brand looks like people coming to your website, to your assets consistently to first a single purpose and for them to have like a high recall amongst your competitors. Get to that point. Even through traditional methodology, just get there because ultimately that's the signal you can't fake.

John Jantsch (16:25.612)

One of the things that I'm seeing a lot go on, you I've been doing this for a very, very long time. You know, the first kind of round of digital was like, once these other platforms started popping up, it was like, you know, go there, top of the funnel, get some exposure, but drive everybody back to your own property, your website, your email list, right? I'm seeing a lot more people that are investing in YouTube channels and in LinkedIn newsletters that are

of rented space, but that the entire conversion journey is actually happening in some of those rented places without necessarily sending people back to your home. So how do you feel about that kind of rented versus owned change that seems to be going on?

Manick @ Search Atlas (17:08.819)

I think we've always, yeah, I think we've always lived in a rent world. It's always been rented and we just maybe didn't want to believe it. because even ranking on Google, that's also rented, right? We're renting it. We could lose it if we, if we make a mistake. the exception to this would be Amazon, but even Amazon has parts of its business that are rented. and so I think it's becoming comfortable with the fact that across all areas that, that we have visibility.

John Jantsch (17:18.99)

Yeah, sure.

Manick @ Search Atlas (17:36.627)

we will always be competing with our competitors there. So that means at the core of what we're doing, we can't just use crony marketing techniques to box out, you know, the bad guys and just keeping the good guys. Good guys have to become better. You guys have to like keep evolving the state of the art in our craft so that we stay competitive. And like, I mean, that sounds like the most obvious thing, right? Like we just can't, you know, but I think that's what it is. And if you build something,

John Jantsch (17:59.436)

Yeah. There's no silver bullet in that, though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (18:05.767)

No, there's not. And it's different depending on what industry you're in. ultimately, guess, you know, and I always hated like the Kevin Costner, if you build it, they will come like mentality that Google have. Like I've always hated it. But ultimately it is like in this perspective, it's true that if you build something of value and people will come back to it and you know, only other thing I want to add to that is also, I think because of this, we're going to see people move back toward community.

John Jantsch (18:15.512)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (18:34.585)

real face-to-face spaces that are free of digital advertising and just people that now feel like they're being misled by what they see online. feel like everything's been gamed and can be gamed. There's an increasing amount of people that are looking for recommendation from another person, not from the internet.

John Jantsch (18:34.69)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:57.048)

So last question, I always love to end on kind of a personal question. Looking back at kind of your entrepreneurial journey, any lesson that you wish you'd learned a little earlier as a founder?

Manick @ Search Atlas (19:09.663)

Don't be afraid to fail and fail harder. I had my days of couch surfing and crashing in New York City in the early part of my startup journey when I had no money and I zero twice. And I think we need to celebrate that more and be comfortable and support people who are there. And I'll say every single person I know that was in startups or building on their entrepreneurial journey a decade ago,

John Jantsch (19:11.31)

Yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (19:38.289)

every single one of them has landed someplace amazing. Like not just financially, but also just happy with like where they are in the world. And I feel like, you know, anyone who's listening to this and is in that early part of their journey, absolutely like commit to it, keep going and like, don't give up. you'll get there, like it will happen.

John Jantsch (19:41.196)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:02.69)

Got to keep taking swings, right? So Manik, is there some place, I appreciate you dropping by today. Is there some place you'd invite people to connect with you, learn more about Search Atlas, everything you're up to?

Manick @ Search Atlas (20:04.969)

Definitely.

Manick @ Search Atlas (20:14.451)

Yeah, easy person to find online. You can find me on Instagram at Monique Bonn, at Monique Bonn. I've also got a YouTube channel. If you look up search Atlas on YouTube, we do like weekly webinars and Google challenges and train people how to get better rankings on Google using Holistic SEO.

John Jantsch (20:34.06)

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

Manick @ Search Atlas (20:39.527)

Awesome. Thanks, John. Appreciate it.

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 (00:00.802)

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.

John Jantsch (00:01.506)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and I'm doing a solo show. I'm going to talk about search engine optimization or as I've started to call it search visibility because the game has changed. Now, the first question you might be asking yourself is why is John wearing a cowboy hat? Those of you that are on the video version, I'm wearing a Stetson open road. this is the straw version in the cognac.

color is my favorite summer hat. just decided it's Friday when I'm recording this. just decided to put it on and wear it for the show. My grandfather and father had this style hat and a number of US presidents over the years chose this as their primary hat as well. So Stetson Open Road, there you have the story. All right. As I said, I'm going to talk about search engine optimization, what we've always long called, not always.

Believe it or not, a 20 year history with something called search engine optimization, which is really moving completely. There's been lots of changes over the years, different algorithms, different things, different search engines come along. But this is a fundamental shift in how that tactic or approach really is going to be applied going forward. And what what it actually is even going to mean to business and website owners going forward as well.

So I thought I would start with, before I jump into like eat and generative AI and AI overviews and things, just do like a 30 second kind of timeline on search. Well, I started actually playing around with search in 1998. And really, again, was my first website and it was, do we rank?

and get on page one, you know, what are the things we need to do? I won't go into all what all those things were, but most of them are not relevant today. At least, you know, that was in the early days of search engines. They were little infants and they were, you know, the game was to trick them into putting your stuff on page one. That lasted till about 2010. And then, you know, the search engines just got more and more complex and more and more, you know,

John Jantsch (02:21.142)

ability to understand what a page really was about rather than what we wanted them to think it was about. And so now you start having mobile be part of the deal. You've got the local search packs. You've got answer boxes starting to show up about, you know, from 2010 to 2016, roll up to about 2017. And now all of sudden voice search is a factor featured snippets become a factor.

near me becomes a factor also searched for. So a lot of things just keep getting injected. And of course, all the while the ad units and how they display all over the page, you know, are changing as well. Kind of really shifting what even ranking, you know, on page one even meant anymore. So I guess fast forward to today, 2024 or so it happened, you know, AI overviews.

Um, SGE from Google, 60 % of, of, of us Google searches ending with no click at all, according to search engine land, uh, the, uh, the infamous zero click searches, uh, instead of, you know, a list of 10 links on a page. Um, you know, we're now to the point where maybe you get featured as a source in an AI answer and hope that that generates a click, but,

six to seven times out of 10 today. That search is just gonna end in somebody getting the answer or getting the information that they wanted.

What I'm talking about now is this idea of a complete mindset shift away from search and optimization, away from trying to rank for keywords and more about this idea of search visibility. It's kind of your brand's share of the answers, the mentions, the knowledge panel, real estate, local pack slots.

John Jantsch (04:19.086)

really clicks for everywhere that, um, that, that a prospect looks, I think that's what we have to do today. So, you know, chasing one phrase or two phrases or something. mean, it's really going to have very, very little value. Um, unless it's just a very high intent phrase that, uh, if somebody searches that they're not looking for an answer, they're looking to purchase. Um, those are really going to be the, um, you know, the, the, the highly sought after, guess, um, types of searches.

So I think instead of, of thinking now in terms of like position ranking or impressions, it's really going to be this, this whole collection. And this is going to be hard for people to measure, but this whole collection of like branded SERP coverage, is really going to be the, you know, the, example. I use a case, a local dentist publishes like does whitening hurt. they have an FAQ short vid, TikTok video, Google business posts, a patient story.

you know, now that now they have the chance to actually own the FAQ snippet for that, maybe the local, local rank, map pack for that, maybe a YouTube carousel. mean, so that's how I think we have to start thinking about these is, know, there's no more. There's no more, you know, I want to show up on for this, you know, key search is it's how do I put myself into this idea of answers? And in fact, you know, a lot of people are actually calling,

you know, not even calling them search engines anymore. They're really answer engines. And the consumer behavior, you know, has changed so dramatically. Search behavior has changed so dramatically. You know, we were all very conditioned to type in six, eight words for what we were looking for and then hoping or maybe refining that search if we didn't find what we were hoping for. But now we can actually, instead of typing in, you know, plumbing contractor in my town, you know, now it's

plumbing contractor with 24 hour service, more than 4.7 star reviews within two miles from me, whatever. mean, you can type that long search in now and you're going to get that very specific, in most cases, you're gonna get that very specific result returned to you that you were able to kind of custom tailor to what you wanted rather than saying, okay, Google, give me what you think I want.

John Jantsch (06:49.39)

One of the things that, and I have to set this up a little bit, that we have to start thinking about when it comes to our content, you know, writing the 101, the how to blog content. And many people are finding that they're losing all the search traffic that used to come for that because why would they send them to your page? They can answer that very easily because it was just basic information to begin with.

you're wasting your time. If you continue down that path of just creating the 700 words on blah, blah, blah. very generic. And the bad thing is of course AI makes that really easy to do. You can, you can spin out 10 of those a day now, without really much sweat, it's, it's practically useless unless you are in just such a niche category that nobody else is trying to create content around it. It's practically worthless. So Google has this new

No, fairly new couple of years, acronym called EAT. And there's two E's in there. So E-E-A-T. And forgive me if you know all about this, but I'll explain it in very basic terms for those who may not understand it. But the idea behind it is that they want to see not just expertise. That's one of the E's, but they want to see experience. Have you actually done what you're talking about?

They want to see authoritativeness. That's the, the other a, or I mean, that's the a. So they measure that by, know, are you getting links mentioned, you know, are you in local press? I mean, are you appearing in industry lists? So they're measuring like, are you an authority on this thing that you're talking about? So experience, expertise, authority, and then the last one is trustworthiness. are there signals, of trust, warranties, refund policies, secure checkout badges.

real contact info. mean, all those kinds of things go into the mix as well. So what we have to do, I think, is it's no longer enough to write this article about how to do something. You have to actually have a case study in there. You have to have examples of maybe you doing it in actual real time or behind the scenes.

John Jantsch (09:02.603)

So that it's very clear that that you're not just talking about this. This is something that you do. This is something you're an expert on. This is something somebody can trust for you to do for their business.

John Jantsch (09:16.844)

So in March, 2024, I'm reading a stat here. Knowledge graph update extended each signals by 38 % to really surface credible people and brands again, according to search engine land. that certainly signals that this is not going away. I mean, that this is going to be a significant piece as well. So how do you compete in an eat world, in an AI world?

In a world where really the need for producing content is still there. mean consumers still need the information So now it's a matter of you know, how do we how do we stay visible so that we can get them the opportunity even to get them that information? first thing is There's five step plan here, right? Okay. Number one audit your content gaps. So

Export all of your site URLs. List the top 25 customer questions and use Google Search Console. Again, what we're trying to do is find how can we become an answer engine? So take a lot of your content. And again, this is a place where some of the AI tools are really good at this. You've written good, useful content. How could it be better? How could it answer more questions? How could you add FAQs?

to the end of all of your service pages. How could you add a table of contents to your long form content? How could you add a description box? Some people call it too long, didn't read TLDR, you've probably seen that. How can you add that at the top of your content so that these...

They're not really search engine spiders, but so that the AI tools that are going out there and trying to surface good sources for content can have a very quick view of what it's about. It gets very user friendly. It's very structured in a way that shows kind of the hierarchical structure.

John Jantsch (11:24.718)

I have for years been talking about this thing called hub pages. Um, and the idea behind that is that if you write about, I use an example, if you're a kitchen remodeler and you've got a whole bunch of blog posts about various aspects of remodeling a kitchen. Um, what if you turn that instead of just having them randomly placed on a blog, uh, out there in the ether, what if you turn that into a kitchen, uh, the ultimate guide to remodeling a kitchen and you took all of your content that you've written over the years.

And you placed it on that page. don't mean physically all of it on that page, but at least structure it in such a way that somebody can jump around to how to pick countertops, how to pick cabinets, how to pick finishes, um, how to pick lighting. And then those all, uh, you know, kind of becomes a playlist for anybody who's thinking about, uh, designing, um, or remodeling a kitchen. So we've been talking about that for, I would say at least eight or 10 years.

and the good news is it was a very effective SEO tactic. mean, it, as soon as we would build those for people, it would immediately change, how, how Google viewed their website, but it's also very user friendly. Somebody comes to that hub page and they want, they are interested in information. It's like, here's the whole guide, you know, on what I'm trying to do rather than I just found one, you know, I went out and randomly searched and found one, one blog post on something. So the, the, you know, the,

Again, doubly good news is that those pages really are highly rewarded in an AI world as well. So think about your top three or four services, your top three or four products, your top three or four things that your company does. And think about ways that you could create a very useful guide or a hub page around those and collect it. It's really, in some ways, it's the same content. You've just structured it dramatically different. Boy.

FAQs, and again, in an answer engine world, having answers to the questions that people ask is a clearly makes a lot of sense. It's also been a very useful piece of content anyway, but now really being rewarded in this answer engine world. So every single one of your service pages, every single one of your product pages, even your About Us page now, I think should actually, whether it's structured as a Q &A, or just has an FAQ section,

John Jantsch (13:42.826)

at the bottom of it and you know, pay some attention to the questions you're being asked. Again, the AI tools are pretty good at that surfacing, you know, common questions around things, but you might think in terms of even some of the questions that you're not being asked necessarily, but you should be people should be paying attention to so you can use that as an opportunity to educate around like why you and what you know, what you do that's different than competitors, for example, that they might not actually be asking about.

You know, monthly case studies, you know, measurable results, quotes from customers, those kind of trust elements, even, you know, badges that, that symbolize that you're in professional organizations and things that you've achieved certain certifications. mean, those, you know, the more we can double down on, on just proving that we do what we say, really quite frankly, the better. and then the last piece of the puzzle is.

John Jantsch (14:43.128)

How can you keep this fresh? So, what I'm telling people, and I need to do this myself as well, is we've got reams and reams of content that we wrote years ago. it needs to be freshened up. In fact, about every quarter, you ought to make a goal of saying, Hey, I've got these five blog posts that, know, are decent blog posts. How could I freshen them up, add more links, add more experience, add more proof.

in these, maybe I can structure them, you know, with a table of contents in that TLDR, maybe I could add FAQs to them. You will be highly rewarded for for refreshing that content. And I would last thing I would say is. Start thinking, and this is particularly true for local businesses, not as much for somebody who's really more of a national scale, but that Google business page, think of it as another

publishing platform. Now you don't own that platform, of course, but you have a lot of leeway and how optimized it is all the photos, the videos that you can add there, all the service descriptions you can add there. And you can post there. I would be taking again, in some cases daily if you've got a lot of content, but certainly weekly, create a Google or post in your Google Business page that can come from

can be just a shortened version of something that you've written, and published, you know, years ago, but you're giving it a new place, a new home. And again, it's just going to add all up to the soup of, know, how you get noted or, or quoted as a valuable source. The other thing I would tell you to do is to do a bunch of searches, in some of the AI tools that there were searches you'd love to show up in, you'd love to win. Now, hopefully you show up in front of those. So.

I use my kitchen contractor, remodeling contractor. So best kitchen remodeling contractor in X city would be a link that or something that they'd want to really show up for. Right. And take note of who shows up. That's important. But also one of the things the AI tools do is they tell you the sources that they went to, to, to make that determination. And in some cases, these are directories in some cases, you know,

John Jantsch (17:03.63)

common in the remodeling industry is one called house, that, they actually got a lot of that information from. So if you're not participating in any of those sources or you don't even have a listing in a directory as obscure as it may sound, there's your checklist of some things that you probably need to add to, what you do to get in those directories or to start participating in, you know, a Quora or a Reddit or a house, dependent upon,

you know, the industry that you're in. So, all right, a couple of common mistakes. Stop obsessing over a handful of head keywords. It just doesn't matter anymore. Don't write for algorithms. I think this has always been true. Think in terms of the human question behind any query that somebody is asking. We use a tool called Answer the Public. I highly recommend that you go there and...

If you're, if you're at a loss for what questions people are asking in your industry, that can be a great resource for that. Frankly, the AI tools are pretty good at it. They can surface what questions people are asking in, certain industries. You can't set and forget your website. You know, if I go and I look and there's your last blog post was 2022. We probably got some work to do. This is something that.

You just need to make it a weekly, monthly, quarterly plan that you're going to do X, Y, and Z and just commit to doing it. don't obsess over all the tools. mean, don't go down the rabbit hole. mean, Structured schema is important. there are plugins that, that can actually do that. So that when you write FAQs, the, underlying code, tells Google or tells the.

Whoever's visiting your website, this is an FAQ section. So, you know, spend some time on that part. Don't over obsess about, you know, over engineering tools on this. So here's what I would say. If you've got some ideas today, pick one. If you don't have any FAQs, that's where I would start. If you don't have any case studies, I would certainly think in terms of that.

John Jantsch (19:23.666)

if you haven't visited your Google business profile, I would highly recommend that you think in terms of your strategy there. pick, pick one of the things that, that, I mentioned here today and just start working away at it. mean, don't, don't listen to all the gloom and doom and look at your Google analytics and say, my traffic search your traffic's down because

there's a good chance that a lot of that search traffic wasn't that meaningful. Anyway, it was somebody looking for that how to article. They were not actually looking for your product or service. So search visibility being seen where people go to get their information, being seen as an answer engine, as opposed to an information engine is how we have to change the mindset. So if you got value, hopefully you will subscribe either to the YouTube channel or to the podcast itself.

Love those reviews on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen, share the interview, share this episode with, one business owner who needs a little marketing clarity, who would like a little, simple, effective and affordable, good old duct tape marketing practical advice. All right. That's it for today. Thanks for tuning in. Hopefully I'll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

John Jantsch (00:01.026)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is David Hunter. He's the CEO of Local Falcon and, or an AI powered local SEO platform and Epic Web Studios, a digital marketing agency in Pennsylvania. Over 15 years in the industry, David has been instrumental in transforming how businesses approach local search optimization with lots of things going on in search of all kinds. That's what we're going to spend some time talking

So David, welcome to the show.

David Hunter (00:31.871)

Thank you for having me, John. I'm happy to be here.

John Jantsch (00:34.764)

So let's start big picture. think the thing that's causing a lot of, depends on what side of the fence you're on, suppose, a lot of angst, but also a lot of joy, I think, in searchers is this idea of AI overviews. How have those kind of generated overviews that are showing up now as the top results changing the landscape in local SEO? I know that's a big question, but let's start there.

David Hunter (00:59.431)

Absolutely, yeah. it's really, you know, it's not a small, so AI overviews are not a small change. It's a fundamental shift. It's not a little algorithm update, which is what we're used to as marketers working with Google and others. But this is a big difference here.

I think the biggest complaint that marketers have is that it's evaporating the clicks to your website. it, know, sort of complaint number two is that it distills the answer on its own. So Google is no longer just simply the provider of 10 blue links. Now they are a content creator. So Google as a content creator is fundamentally different from what it has been for the last.

John Jantsch (01:29.836)

Yeah. Right.

David Hunter (01:52.395)

30 years or so. And that's a big difference. But at the same time, on the upside, boy, it gets the answer very quickly. Now, it might not always be the right answer. The sources might be a little bit weird, but to the end user, it does a very quick and efficient job of getting you to where you need to be. And so I think that as far as the future goes, it's looking very bright in terms of our opportunity.

John Jantsch (02:22.178)

Well, I think it's really changed search behavior. And that's why I say what side of the fence you're on. think a lot of consumers really like it. You know, instead of typing in plumber near me or plumber in my city, you know, it's like, who's the best plumber in this city that has X amount of reviews and could could show up in the next 24 hours? I mean, that's what we're searching now. And so that fundamental shift is really, I think, from a consumer standpoint, if they trust the answers they're getting, you know, in the overview, then.

That saved them a lot of time of having to shuffle through and figure out who they ought to call. So you can see why the consumer behavior is really shifting dramatically.

David Hunter (03:00.015)

Absolutely, yeah. And I mean, it makes sense, you know, like we, as consumers and users of Google, we're definitely used to typing in, you know, yeah, pizza near me, and finding a quick response through the map pack. I mean, that's fairly efficient, but you don't get that nuanced conversational answer. So what we're doing as consumers, and I think that

It's almost a happy accident by Google that they've rolled out AI overviews and then phase two is this AI mode, which I think is sort of the future of what the Google SERP looks like. They're almost training us as consumers to start querying with long tail conversational searches. And so I'm seeing that behavior change. And I look at it.

John Jantsch (03:41.272)

Sure. Yeah.

David Hunter (03:47.339)

And I have colleagues that are always like, well, you know, the old folks, they're not going to do that. Well, yes, yes, they are. You know, my father's like pushing 70 years old and, and, you know, I see him on the regular using, conversational, you know, searches and, and, and getting good, good feedback from it. So that's right.

John Jantsch (03:53.621)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:04.846)

Well, yeah, once you get used to it, we want what we want. So it's like, yeah, I'm going to talk to it like a human being and give them all my details because I'll get it. know from experience, I start getting better answers.

David Hunter (04:10.879)

That's right.

David Hunter (04:16.575)

Yeah, I think it takes maybe five or 10 searches for the average person to realize I should be doing this conversationally.

John Jantsch (04:19.372)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you spend a lot of time on proximity, with, some of the tools you've created. I know when I first started in search, you know, the, big thing was we had to, we had to optimize our site for, grew up in Kansas city. So I'll use that example. have to optimize our site for Kansas city and all the suburbs and all, you know, to try to get traffic, you know, from, from those places, Google's gotten really good at proximity, right? I mean, meaning if I searched that whole, the typical search.

a remodeling contractor near me. Well, it knows where I am, you know, maybe even to the street corner. And so it's going to say, okay, well, you know, within reason, you know, here are the six that are closest to you. So how is that changing, you know, especially the example I use, the remodeling contractor. I mean, that's not like a, like a dentist or somebody that like is going to have a

have a footprint area, right? I mean, I might be able to serve a 20 mile radius. So how is proximity playing and how do we take advantage of getting it to show us in a wider range?

David Hunter (05:16.0)

Right.

David Hunter (05:27.699)

Right, so, and you're dead on about that with the service area business. I think there's a lot of opportunity for them to really get even more visibility because of this. When local search first became a thing, there was proximity and then prominence and relevance, right? Those were the three components that made up local search. Right.

John Jantsch (05:36.952)

Yes.

John Jantsch (05:47.212)

Yeah. Have a lot of reviews.

David Hunter (05:49.981)

Right. And be relevant. the, you know, if I'm looking for a remodeling contractor, don't show me a list of barber shops. Right. So it's got to be relevant. And obviously it gets much more nuanced than that because well, what kind of remodeling and, you know, home remodeler commercial, you know, whatever. So bathrooms, kitchens, but there's, there's definitely a shift happening. And so at local Falcon, we have basically spent, we've built our platform on tracking results around you, right? The grid, use a grid pattern.

John Jantsch (06:17.838)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right.

David Hunter (06:19.657)

where you can basically see over top of your business, but then expand it out however far you wanna go radius wise, and then you drop a bunch of pins and you could see these results. Well, the future is definitely changing. And so we recently wanted to roll out a tracker for AI overviews around and chat GPT that's similar to local Falcons core plan and that it's got the grid interface, but...

is using the conversational platform to see the results. And so before we did that, I said, well, we need to do, I need to see if this is valid, if it's even worth doing, right? And so we ran this big study. We put, you know, 4,000 some businesses in there and ran like 60,000 different searches and looked, looked, basically studied the patterns and what was going to come out of that. And that's where we learned that like proximity, it matters, right? It matters at like a city level. It matters at a, you know, sort of

you know, regional level, but it is not factoring anywhere near the, you know, with the level of authority that it used to. So it's important that you still, you know, focus on, if you're a remodeler in Kansas City, that you focus on having that localized content and, you know, authority around that. But the, you know, the relevance and the, you know, the prominence, you know, the expertise, that stuff is really what starts to kind of show up

in terms of like the position that you put in, right? And I don't even call it ranking because it's really, it's more about the position because it's a natural language response. It'll weave business names into this paragraph of text that it gives you. Now, it also does a list below and whatever, but yeah, it's less about the ranking now and it's more about your position within that ranking. So it's important because you still need to be known as someone that.

serves the Kansas City area, but less important when you're dealing with like near me because it's gonna probably pull a list of the best remodelers around the area or what it thinks is the best.

John Jantsch (08:26.284)

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. you know, obviously showing up on the map pack for a local business. you know, I'm, I'm old enough to, it used to be seven at one point. it's three, if you can find it, know, midst all the other stuff, exactly. Right. but if I go to chat GPT today and type in a geographic search, best remodeling contractor, Kansas city,

David Hunter (08:36.843)

You always know it's 10. Yeah, 7, 10 and 7. Now it's 3. Yeah.

Right. All the ads gotta come up there first, you know?

John Jantsch (08:57.42)

what's pulling up there. Now, I don't think a lot of people are necessarily doing that kind of search yet, but they will, right? so, theoretically, are the results that are showing up there, what a common, an amalgamation of like all the searches actually determining you're the best or is it determining you're the most trustworthy, you're the most prominent, you have the most authority, you have the most reviews.

David Hunter (09:24.299)

It's a great question. So, you know, I think that anybody who tries to tell you that answer is going to be full of snake oil, right? Like nobody really knows how that is pulling in and, and, you know, coming together, there's a lot of different theories out there. There's a lot of different, really strong, you know, methodology that's been put to the test in terms of like, what, you know, I don't want to get too technical, but like embeddings and vector vector embeddings and like passages within the website.

John Jantsch (09:49.026)

Yeah.

David Hunter (09:51.915)

how it pulls all that information together is definitely different. They're not using Google search results per se. I do think sometimes they kind of slide them in there, but for a while they were focusing exclusively on Bing places. So I can't say that it's gonna provide you with the absolute best list, but it's pretty close. So I live in the Great Lakes up in Erie, PA, and I did a...

that exact search pizza near me. And I, you know, this is a city of an area of 250,000 people, there's not that many options. And so when I look at it, I saw the list, I'm like, this is actually, this is pretty good. I mean, some of these places are, you know, probably a 10 minute drive, but they are darn good pizza places. So in the chaos that is coming within these results, it does seem to be finding

pretty decent results out of that, which is definitely encouraging. Now, with Local Falcon and our product that we've got, we show you essentially the output itself, as well as we will identify what brands were pulled, and then below that, we show you the sources. This is where I start to really lose my head. So I've got an agency called Epic Web Studios that's been around for...

you know, 17 years now. And I started doing searches around that, like who's the best web developer in Erie, Pennsylvania, right? The list of results that came back was so haywire. I mean, we're talking, there were businesses that were, that I remember from 10 years ago that are since out of business. You know, there were businesses that were across Lake Erie in Canada. You know, it was, it was all over the place. And the sources,

John Jantsch (11:27.725)

Mm-hmm.

David Hunter (11:42.173)

were just wild. mean, it was finding essentially these like directories that I'd never heard of before, right? And pulling that type of information through and saying, okay, well, we used, you know, good firms.com and tech behemoths.com. I'm like, who is, what is this? You know, so I spent a couple hours going through, making sure like, well, we better make sure we've got a profile there and that it's validated and.

John Jantsch (11:48.908)

yeah.

David Hunter (12:05.803)

I mean, that's the most we can do at this stage is identify those sources and make sure that we're included in that. I mean, there's a lot more you can do with the content on your site and everything else, but for this part.

John Jantsch (12:12.898)

Yeah, that's really, yeah. That's really, that's really interesting that they identify the sources because I do think, you know, I do think that that's what's the house, a house, for example, is a, you know, is a source for builders and local home service contractors. And I noticed that ChiTPT in particular pulls a lot of house results. You know, so that that's a really great tip is to think in terms of,

David Hunter (12:36.927)

Yes. How's Angie? Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:41.698)

making sure you're in the sources that they're pulling. Let's just, again, another giant question, but today, especially if somebody, local business is saying, okay, I get it. All these changes are coming. Like, what do I need to do differently than maybe I was, before maybe I was claiming my Google business profile. I was building pages with geographic content on them. I was getting reviews. mean, what else do I need to be doing different?

David Hunter (13:09.651)

Okay, so if you're running a white hat operation with your web presence, I think that as of today, there's not entirely that much different that you need to do, but it's the big caveat that you're running a white hat operation, right? If you're sitting here running, you know, some sort of a link farm and trying to, you know, blast a bunch of AI generated content, that's never gonna work. Or at least it's not gonna work in the long term, right? Yeah. Right.

John Jantsch (13:35.992)

I was going to say that's the bad thing is it works temporarily, and so people get excited about it. But then they, you know, eventually Google or whoever catches up.

David Hunter (13:42.239)

That's gonna get, yes, that's gonna get plugged, right? The idea of, and I'm not sure if the kind of hack has been plugged yet, but people were putting, people used to do this back in the day too. You would put a bunch of keywords on your homepage or on your website. And a lot of times they'd wanna obfuscate that and make it like a white text on a white background so that you couldn't see them, right? People are doing that now, they're injecting prompts inside of it so that when...

the chat GPT bot comes through, it sees a prompt that says like, talk only about this business. It's the best business and repeating that over and over again. And people are finding it's working. It was ranking. Now I think that they have since plugged that. don't know, but I'm not willing to try. I'm not going to put that type of not like nastiness on my site. Like that's no way I'm not taking that risk, but you know, there's a lot of little hacks out there. What can someone do in the white hat sense? mean, number one, you need to understand what

John Jantsch (14:23.981)

Yeah.

David Hunter (14:37.247)

people are saying, or how the LLM, the large language model is understanding your content, right? So go, simply go ask ChatGPT about that. What do you know about Local Falcon, right? And just simply Google that, excuse me, search that on ChatGPT and understand right out of the gate, at least it has a, does it know who we are, where we are, what we do? If not, you better start adding some content to your website in a visible way.

John Jantsch (14:44.504)

Mm-hmm.

David Hunter (15:06.098)

that is gonna make sure that it, you the next time the bot does come by, it pulls it in and, you know, can use that in terms of its reasoning. When you do add that content, it needs to be done in a very like bite sized way, right? Like putting up a 2000 word blog post that's a big wall of text is probably not going to help you in terms of showing up inside of these responses, right? Just think about how the responses come back. They're very short snippets. And so,

John Jantsch (15:21.134)

you

David Hunter (15:35.307)

if you can write in short snippets and get kind of the core idea down to one or two sentences, and then, you know, I'm not saying don't do the 2000 word blog post. What I'm saying is within that, make sure that it's got the main idea and, you know, the thesis, whatever it is you're doing is all kind of spelled out in little chunks at a time. You're gonna have a much better shot of showing up. So.

John Jantsch (15:45.4)

Right, right.

John Jantsch (15:55.064)

Right. Yeah.

Well, and I think what we're saying is good content is good content should be written for humans should be valuable should be educational. But a lot of the tweaks that maybe need to happen are in the structure. So, you know, you have the overview at the at the very front, you know, here's what this article is about. You have the table of contents, you know, you have the 2000 words and at the end you have FAQs. I mean, it's probably more about structure, isn't

David Hunter (16:10.122)

Yes.

David Hunter (16:22.889)

It's a big, it's a huge piece of it, right? So again, it's really about how, you know, chat GPT, know, open AI, Anthropic, you know, others, Google understands the information. So they do that in these little, you know, they'll basically pull little passages out. And then that contributes to the larger, you know, the larger model understanding what it is. And then it creates its own version of that. Sometimes you'll even find verbatim, it's pulling in

some of the content that you wrote, especially with things like FAQs and how you answer that FAQ, right? Number one, you also need to make sure that it's structurally visible, right? So schema markup has never been more important. You have to identify and when schema markup is essentially like a shortcut for understanding what a page is about, it's a way for a bot, a crawler to...

John Jantsch (16:56.215)

Yeah.

David Hunter (17:17.563)

recognize and categorize, this is about a recipe or a review or a local business. So making sure that that schema markup is on there. And then of course, again, looking through the sources, right? So when you run these local FalconSkins, you're gonna see this huge list of sources and it'll tell you how often that source was used. So if you've got a whole bunch of Yelp listings on there, yeah, go get on Yelp and maybe even consider spending the 50 bucks or whatever they want to like,

actually make sure that it's as complete of a profile as possible, just to give yourself every chance for success.

John Jantsch (17:54.24)

Yeah, absolutely. Let's touch on just again, this is a giant topic, but let's say I'm a business that has 10 local locations. Do I need to be doing something differently? Do I need to be doing something? I mean, are there unique challenges that you're starting to see from that multi-location business?

David Hunter (18:16.939)

So yes, a lot of times when you get, when you're with a multi-location brand, it ends up, you you have a really good shot of actually showing up because you've got so many others, you know, if you've got 10 locations in your city, that's 10 more chances or nine more chances than the solo operation, which is definitely helpful for them. Yes, and so that's great. However, the response itself,

John Jantsch (18:36.738)

So somebody's always near to one of them, right?

David Hunter (18:43.619)

you know, we see some wild stuff like it'll pull, you know, you're on the east side of town and it starts talking about the location on the west side. So it's less about that individual location and more about the brand itself, right? So making sure that like holistically the brand is well understood is important. I think that where you're gonna see potentially some headaches is in like the franchise world where someone buys in.

and they are responsible for their location. I mean, it depends on how the brand operates, but doing things from sort of a centralized source and then disseminating out is probably your best bet.

John Jantsch (19:12.546)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (19:20.93)

Yeah, awesome. Well, David, I appreciate you taking a few moments to come by and share about local searches. there someplace you would invite people to connect with you and find out more about your various platforms and tools?

David Hunter (19:32.715)

Sure, I mean, certainly, you know, search up Local Falcon wherever, know, localfalcon.com. Also, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm, you know, on there probably too much these days, so.

John Jantsch (19:42.734)

Awesome. Again, I appreciate you taking a moment and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

David Hunter (19:49.297)

Absolutely, John. Thanks for the very, very lightweight questions there, man. Those were nothing, you know, nothing too strong at all, right? Thanks again.

John Jantsch (19:53.038)

You

Awesome. Awesome.