July 11, 2023 • 44 mins
Your mom told you honesty is the best policy, and guess what — she was right.
A long-term strategy of honesty is not only good business and good marketing… It's good for the soul. Today we talk with Anthony Butler, CEO, Chief Storyteller & Author of Primal
Storytelling at Can-Do Ideas, who shares his passion for connecting with his audience through the concept of primal storytelling, where social psychology, human emotion and storytelling come together. In all reality, technology and communication channels are evolving rapidly, but humans remain the same with our vestiges of emotions, urges and instincts that drive our behavior.
Join us as we discuss:
More information about Anthony Butler and today’s topics:
A long-term strategy of honesty is not only good business and good marketing… It's good for the soul. Today we talk with Anthony Butler, CEO, Chief Storyteller & Author of Primal
Storytelling at Can-Do Ideas, who shares his passion for connecting with his audience through the concept of primal storytelling, where social psychology, human emotion and storytelling come together. In all reality, technology and communication channels are evolving rapidly, but humans remain the same with our vestiges of emotions, urges and instincts that drive our behavior.
Join us as we discuss:
- What you need to know about evolutionary psychology and marketing
- How to meaningfully build relationships with your target audience
- Why it’s powerful to earn trust by connecting on an emotional level
- Why influence is NOT deceit or manipulation
- Why it’s important to acknowledge the humanity in your marketing efforts
More information about Anthony Butler and today’s topics:
- LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-butler-964b404/
- Company Website: https://www.primalstorytelling.com/
- Other Relevant Links: Darren Hardy; Fuji Sports
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:04):
The single most important thing you cando today is to create and deliver a
better experience for your customers. Learnhow sales, marketing and customer success experts
create internal alignment, achieve desired outcomes, and exceed customer expectations in a personal
and human way. This is theCustomer Experience Podcast. Here's your host,
(00:24):
Ethan Butte. How can marketers influencebehavior? Years of work and study on
that single question culminated in primal storytelling. Primal storytelling is where social psychology,
human emotion, and storytelling come togetherto help you meaningfully connect with your target
audience. Our guest today is theauthor of Primal Storytelling Marketing for Humans.
(00:49):
He's a graduate of West Point inthe US Army Rangers School, an entrepreneur
who started several companies, and thefounder and CEO of a HubSpot partner agency
dedicated to helping one hundred thousand businessesgrow through brand storytelling. Anthony Butler,
Welcome to the Customer Experience Podcast.Hey, thank you, and I think
I'm gonna steal that bio. Youwrote that. I didn't write that,
(01:11):
and it sounded better than one Ihave. Also, let's just summary I
do take I'm not even a pridefulperson in an unhealthy way. But I
do really enjoy putting together a reallyconcise open so we can just get off
and writing. There's enough context aboutwho you are, what you've done,
why you are the guy to havethis conversation with, and I'm really looking
forward to it. I enjoyed theread very much as we're talking before I
(01:34):
hit record. We have a lotof kinship on a lot of these themes
and ideas. Essentially what shockingly stillseems like an overlooked opportunity to tap into
evolutionary psychologies. We consider the decisionsthat are in front of us so that
we can do things that are connectwith other people more effectively. But that's
about three to five minutes away.We're going to start athany where we always
(01:56):
start on this show, which iscustomer experience. When I say that,
what does it mean to you?Well, to me, customer experience is
how you make actual, real peoplefeel about doing business with you in every
way, shape and form. Youknow, before and during your sales process,
and then when you're working with them, and then afterwards the results that
(02:16):
they get, you know, Andit's that totality of their connection with you.
In your business. That's what itis to me. I love it,
so we hear and I agree.I mean, when I teach the
basics of customer experience in some contextand the webinar or otherwise, I always
include that feeling element. But theinteresting layer that you and a lot of
(02:38):
people do when I ask that question, if I now asked it, well
over two hundred times, the interestinglayer that you added that is not heard
as common that I'd love for youto share more on you roped in the
results there. Customer success is veryclearly a part of customer experience. And
although a customer experience function is oftenhoused in the post sale organization, in
(02:59):
amer success team, I think alot of people overlook the idea that like,
really, all the good feelings don'tmatter, and or they come unraveled
if people don't get what they reallyneed out of the engagement. Well,
you know, I'm in marketing,and one of the problems about being in
marketing is there's so much hyperbole.There's just so many people who are just
(03:22):
streaming at the top of their lungs, and there's all these get rich quick
schemes on the internet, especially onInstagram and seems to just be a you
know, just an epidemic there.And I think that has jaded a lot
of people. And you know,they work with some of these companies and
they promise everything and they get lefthold in the bag and they did not
(03:45):
get what they promised, you know. And I think it's you see a
lot of flash in the pan companieswho make big promises. They got great
marketing on the upfront, but theydon't have anything to back it up.
And you know, that's just speaksfor a bad experience long term, you
know. And there's a somewhere outthere, there's a digital graveyard. It's
just filled to the brim of agenciesthat are out of business because they had
(04:09):
great marketing and couldn't deliver anything thatwas meaningful and healthful. Yeah, I
appreciate your use of the word epidemicthere. What you have me thinking about
as a conversation I had with someonethe other day about the current influencer situation.
I don't want to go too fardown this rabbit hole, but like
you know, I think it's easyto say traditional B to B sales and
marketing, the traditional playbook is tired. We're looking for new ways to engage.
(04:31):
I think that's one of the reasonswhy you're selling copies of your book,
is that this idea of you know, this exploration of what is AI
for, what is generative AI for, what's wrong with the traditional sales and
marketing playbook? All of these arevarious explorations of how do we actually connect
with and serve other human beings ina basic way. And I think the
newer influencer piece of this, whichtraditionally is associated with B two C.
(04:57):
But I could give you a bunchof B to B examples. I just
don't want to share aim anybody becauseI have some opinions about it. This
is now like it's either the influencerwho is leveraging renting their platform to people
in order to create some awareness anddrive some traffic. Generally, either they
don't come through the way they promised, and or they find themselves repping a
variety of people and half of themcan't deliver for their customers, which is
(05:20):
then a negative reflection on the influencerper se. And so there's just a
lot of pieces moving here. I'mactually gonna I'm not gonna pull it ahead
never mind, I'm gonna start whereI wanted to start. I want to
start into this concept. Then thisframework, it's not just a book,
it's a framework, not that abook is anything to minimize. Again,
enjoyed the read. The framework isaround social psychology, human emotion, and
(05:43):
storytelling. Talk about the path todevelop this system. What were you trying
to solve for yourself and or forother people that kind of brought these elements
together in a way that would thenallow you to encourage other people to leverage
some of the same basic human piecesthat we all should be leveraging. Yeah,
so I kind of had an oddcareer, you know, And I'm
(06:06):
I'm on my fifth my fifth careerhere, you know. And what happened
was I out of high school.I joined in the Army as a mechanic
and was enlisted for a few years, and then I moved I went to
West Point, and then afterwards Iwas in the entry So I didn't get
out of the Army until my thirties. So I had not worked like a
(06:26):
regular civilian job until then. AndI get out of the Army, I
don't know what I want to do. And I end up at this manufacturing
plant out in Connecticut and I'm fromMontana, and so I couldn't find a
job here and I ended up inthis basically the end of the world,
at this manufacturing plant and it wasjust the only job I could get.
My wife was pregnant and we reallyneeded money. And I get there and
(06:47):
just a few months in I realized, like, we're not making it,
Like I just wasn't earning enough money, and my wife was she's an electrial
engineer, and we decided to haveit. She came to me one day
and You're like, she's the oldschool Russian lady and she's like, don'ty
you need to make more money becauseI won't work. I was like,
what you know? And that kindof drove me to figure something out,
(07:13):
and I went. I went tobookstore, and I like, I was
like, somewhere in this bookstore isthe answer to my problem. I started
looking around, and actually it wasthat's when I found Dan Kennedy. You've
heard of Dan Kennedy's this old schoolmarketer, an old school business guy,
and he's been around for a millionyears. And I read in a book
in there with Dan was this thing. He's like a lot of direct sales
(07:36):
reps make more money than the CEO, and he has this whole thing on
why that is. And I didn'tknow anything about business at the time.
She's like, Okay, I'm goingto go into sales. And so I
went back to the manufacturing plant andI was like I went to this just
walked up to the CEO one day. I was like, hey, I
want to move to sales team.So I saw those guys and they are
all these fat, old guys.I was like, I can outwork them,
(07:58):
and he's like, do you wantto be in sales? No one
wants to be in sales. It'slike, why would you want to do
that? Well I didn't know itat the time, but it was a
life changing moment because he was kindto me. He sent me over there,
you let me apprentice, like withthis guy he'd had on he'd had
at the company. This guy hadbeen in the company for thirty five years
and he was just a few monthsbefore retirement. So my timing was good.
(08:20):
Well, eighteen months later I wasa director of inside sales, and
then about a year after that,I was the VP of sales and I
helped them scale okay significant, Sothen helped them scale in sales and I
got recruited to a tech startup inNew York City and I ended up going
to New York City. I hadnever even ridden the train before I went
(08:41):
there, and I just happened.I got on the ground floor. This
tech startup started with their sales team. I was like employee forty something,
and when I left there were hundredsof employees, and you know, it
was a nine figure exit. Fromthere, I went to another tech company
and they asked me to build insales and marketing team for them, and
I did. When I was inthose two kind of startup tech companies,
(09:05):
that's when I really started digging intothe Dan Kennedy stuff because every sales guy
once leads, and you know,neither company really had a strong marketing arm,
and so I knew I got toget leads, got to figure out
how do we market, how dowe brand? And that's when I just
became obsessed with it. A coupleof years in the second tech company,
their board appointed me CEO. Ihelped them grow, and then the company
(09:28):
was sold. And when that companywas sold, I was like, Okay,
I'm starting a marketing company. Andthat's when I started this company can
do ideas. It was just justabout nine years ago. And first six
months, you know, it wasthe honeymoon. It was awesome, and
we did over six figures in ourfirst six months. In our first year,
you know, we did like aquarter of a million dollars with one
employee. And eighteen months in,you know, I'm hiring. We're really
(09:52):
growing fast, like everything is goingreally good. And I get this call
and I was like, the worstcall you ever want, you know,
And it's this. It's the CEOof a company who we were doing a
lot of work for. They're payingus a lot of money every month,
and the work was on time.We're doing a really good job. And
he's like, hey, listen,you guys are great. I appreciate all
the work you're doing. But nothingis working, Like we're not getting any
(10:15):
leads, the SEO is not working, like nothing is happening. Like we're
publishing all this content, but nothingis happening. You're not moving the needle.
And basically he was just firing us. And I was like, what
you know, And I think that'swhen I first realized about that graveyard.
I was telling you about where allthese agencies go, and I was like
I gotta figure this out because I'venever been fired before. And you know,
(10:35):
now nine years in, I realizeis that there's always there's an expiration
date on clients, you know,and even my best clients. I have
clients that have been with me forseven years. At some point they'll sell
the company, or the owners arereal tire, or you know, something
will happen and that they'll move on, right, and so you have to
replace clients. But getting fired outof the blue, like that's the worst.
(11:00):
You're not going to stay in businesslong term. And I started trying
to compare clients. It's like,hey, why is it working for these
guys? But it's not for theseguys. And at first I couldn't put
my finger on it. And thenI went to a conference with Darren Hardy.
I don't know if you ever heardof him. He's like the self
development guy. He's really good somegood books. Darren puts on this kind
(11:22):
of business masterclass in San Diego everyyear, just a couple of them a
year. So I went down therefor three days with him. Day two,
he's up on stage and he's talkingabout marketing and I'm thinking, yeah,
I'm an expert in this I'm kindof hella half listening. But Darren
is a genius in just being ableto simplify. And one of the things
he said is something that everyone knows, everyone's heard. He's like, hey,
people buy emotionally and then they justifywith logic. Okay, And I
(11:46):
heard it before. But then Istarted thinking. I was like, okay,
well what are the emotions, like, what specific emotions? How many
emotions are there? What are theemotions I should be using in my marketing?
And that kind of deep dive.I started looking at research and looking
at okay, what does psychologists say? What does psychiatrists say? And I
discovered evolutionary psychology during the research.And what evolutionary psychology is it's this idea
(12:09):
that humans have vestiges of instincts.You know, so just like genetically coded
behavior that animals have. You know, the squirrels gather nuts in the winter
because the gather nuts in the winter. You know, geese fly south,
they don't go east to west,they don't go on vacation. You know,
we have free will, but thevestiges of our instincts still are alive
(12:31):
and they drive a lot of ourbehavior. And I think one of the
most one of those behaviors of themost is like our need to be with
our tribe, to be with ourpeople, be with our family, you
know, and the social signals thatwe send with everything we do. You
know, why do billionaires have gianthouses that cost millions and millions of dollars
(12:52):
versus Hey, I can buy atiny house for fifty grand. Well,
it's a social signal. It's it'sthe signal that I made it. It's
it's telling everyone that I'm at thehighest part of this tribe. That's where
I am, that's my place insociety. And I think a lot of
marketers miss the boat. They publishedinformation, they tell people about themselves,
(13:15):
they published data. You know.The subtitle of my book is marketing for
Humans, because I think a lotof businesses are still in the trap from
like technical SEO from fifteen years ago, where if you just wrote for the
search engines you could you could getorganic traffic. And I think Google's got
smarter and they've got better, andthe searches are better, and now you
(13:35):
have to have content that's really valuable. It just can't be marketing content.
You've got to have more than that. And it's got to be emotional,
it's got to connect, it's gotto speak to people's primal urges. And
that's where the book came from.And so as I was learning about primal
urges and psychology, I started thinkingto myself, Okay, as a sales
(14:00):
guy, as a pragmatic marketer,like someone who wants ROI like, what
would I do? What frameworks couldI create that anybody, if they just
followed this blueprint could make it work. And you know, I'm a blue
collar guy. I was in themtry. I was a mechanic, you
know, I'm not some super rocketscientists. I was like, this needs
to be step by step. Let'sput a checklist in there, let's make
(14:22):
it work. And so then Ijust tested different frameworks. And then I
looked at storytelling. I looked atall the different frameworks of storytelling from literature,
from movies. You know, whatstood the test of time? Like,
what are marketers doing that have stoodthe test of time. I have
this giant marketing library over here,and I have I have advertisements that go
(14:43):
back, you know, pre Civilwar. And you know what, the
structures pre civil war exactly the sameas they are now. Like nothing that's
changed. The one thing is changedis an old advertising. It was all
weight gain. The fitness industry wasall how to gain weight, how to
get big and strong, and therewas no such thing as weight loss.
And now it's flipped. It's allweight loss and how to get strong.
(15:07):
That's so funny. Thank you forthat arc. That's a really good arc.
And I like to call back tothe beginning, is like I need
this to be straightforward. I needit to work. I need to make
I need to figure out how tocreate more predictable results for my clients.
And it ultimately comes back to thisobservation. I'm gonna ask you kind of
in sequence over the next several minutesa couple of the big themes that I
really appreciated about the book, Ijust love to have you speak to them.
(15:28):
One of them is this idea thatyou know technology and you even mentioned
it with the Google reference, Likethere used to be a day when you
could just keyword stuff and you're ranked, you know, on the first page.
No problem. Now they're using humaninputs. How much time are we
spending on the page? Are westaying within the sight? And like,
is this actually serving humans not justis this serving the boss. So this
(15:50):
is a reflection of the fact thatlike technology, communication channels, all of
this stuff is evolving like super rapidly, and yet humans are all most in
a lot of ways the same aswe were millennia ago. You know again,
emotions, urges, instincts. Youmentioned the thousands of religions and the
thousands of deities that we've created,all kind of for the same purpose.
(16:12):
And even there's an evolutionary arc throughthat. You mentioned eighty five versions of
the Little Red Riding Hood story.Right, the storytelling structurally is about the
same. We're trying to reinforce thesame things. Connect to our tribe members,
preserve ourselves as members of the species, procreate. I think that's sort
of our most fundamental urges. Alot of the other things like roll up
(16:33):
to that, like we want toreproduce ourselves. Talk about that gap between
the pace of change around us intechnology, culture, society. I think
we fashion ourselves as like being superfast moving, but it's another level,
like deeper in this river, thecurrent is very very very slow. Is
that One of the reasons I guessto turn it into a question, is
(16:56):
that one of the reasons to quoteyou from page one seventeen that forgetting people
are marketing to humans is one ofthe most common mistakes you've found when auditing
B to B brand marketing. Likeis it that, like we're just so
caught up in the speed that weforget the deeper current. I think that's
part of it. I think peopleare working under the misconception that we have
(17:17):
changed. And you know, Iuse the example in the book my great
grandfather, Charles Butler, like heliterally was born at home in eighteen ninety
eight at a house with no electricity. Their indoor plumbing wasn't a thing when
he was born. You know,his dad dug an out house for them.
And I mean, this guy wehave ore his ninetieth birthday, has
(17:42):
a familiar union. And in hissingle life, he went from a house
made of earth and wood with basicallythe same technology they had during Roman times
to you know, the space shuttleand lasers and robots and all the rest
of it. And here's the thing. He was a simple guy. And
(18:03):
if I had taken him, ifI had a time machine and I went
back to the eighteen hundreds, andI put him in that time machine and
brought him forward okay, and hegrew up, everything would have been the
same for him as it is rightnow. You know, my kids grew
up with an iPad, you know, basically they popped out of my wife's
womb and you know, like iPad. But they're still the same. And
I think we as marketers have madethe mistake of thinking, and I mentioned
(18:30):
this in the book, is thatthe technology is the medium is the message.
It's just not true. It's justnot true. Is that the messages
are timeless. Okay, our emotions, our primal urges are timeless. The
communication, you know, kind ofthe media, whether it's social media or
a website or whatever. The nextsocial media is going to be maybe it's
(18:52):
going to be VR, maybe it'sgoing to be augmented reality or whatever.
But you know what, we're stillgoing to be the same people. We're
just kind of interacting in a differentway, you know, like Eve,
even like this conversation, you know, both of us have we've got digital
microphones and we've got video conferencing andyou know, it's it's really really amazing.
Well we didn't have that one hundredyears ago. But the structure of
(19:15):
the conversation and the stories that we'retalent are basically the same. I think
we thought that when the Internet wasinvented that that was changing everything about us
as humans, and it just hasn'tnot yet. You know, maybe when
we start implanting the internet inside ourbrains, maybe then it will change,
but so far that hasn't happened ina wise scale manner. And you know,
(19:38):
I think a focus on people isthe way to go. And the
misnomer about B to B it's oneof my pet pieves is that you know,
you go and you talk to theseguys and like, yeah, but
we're doing business with other businesses,you know, so all of our marketing
needs to be really dry and it'sgot to be formal and roi roi,
roi roi exactly exactly. And theythink that they're immune to using any kind
(20:06):
of any kind of emotion, anykind of primal urge in their marketing,
that it has to be this thisthing that they have in their head.
And I'm like, listen, thetruth is no business ever bought a single
thing because businesses aren't real. They'renot alive. They're just an idea that's
in our heads. Okay, realpeople in those companies bought something, you
know, so maybe maybe it's ifit's a big company, maybe it's a
(20:27):
fortune one thousand and there's a wholeteam around a table that's trying to make
a good decision and buy something.Okay, And if you've ever been in
one of those teams selling situations,guess what you need to have conversation with
everyone on the team. They allhave hopes and dreams, they all have
an internal dialogue. You know,someone on that table is thinking, Okay,
if I hire this guy, amI getting fired? You know,
(20:48):
And it's it's a personal it's apersonal decision. Maybe it has nothing to
do with the company. You know, maybe they're having a bad day and
they just don't want to listen towhat you have to say. It's all
personal, it's all internal dialogue andemotion. And the mistake marketers are making
is ignoring the humanity and their marketing. They're ignoring their audience. I would
(21:10):
argue that this entire bud Light controversy, it goes back down to one core
issue is the marketing manager running thecampaign. She didn't like her clients,
she didn't understand her audience at all. And after the controversy started, there's
even video of her making fun ofher core audience, like if you don't
(21:30):
love your clients, like, you'renever going to grow, Like it's just
impossible. And whether no matter whereyou fall on the spectrum of that conversation,
it doesn't matter. Like the lessonthat you can learn is you got
to know who you're marketing to andconnect a message with them that's meaningful to
them. You might not be themarket at all. Okay, you might
(21:52):
not be that market, you know, And so you've got to put away
your own thoughts and emotions and feelingsand have some empathy for them. And
I think empathy is the one thingthat you can do is connect with your
audience. Is I try to understandwhat they're going through and whether they care
about not what you care about.So good. It's such an important reminder.
And when I think about I've workedin a variety of marketing organizations over
(22:15):
the past two dozen years, andcertainly earlier in my career, I fell
into the trap that you're talking about. It is like do I like this?
Do I think this is good?Do I feel like like? But
I'm not the audience in this case. I'm thinking of Like when I was
working in broadcast television. The audiencewas probably twice my age on average,
and up to triple my age atthe time. And then the way that
it looks in a more contemporary settingis we have all of this customer data
(22:41):
and even perhaps some verbatim customer feedback. But if we didn't have that conversation,
and we're dealing with transcripts and typedout words and you know, AI
summaries of transcripts of conversations, thenwe're missing so much of the value and
the meaning. The empathy isn't inreading the report, because in that report,
(23:03):
we get to project everything we thinkand feel onto the information in front
of us, and we do thatfault, whereas in a conversations. One
of the reasons I advocate for videomessaging is you get to control the way
the information is received because we're sowonderfully adapt in a universal and innate fashion
to write emotions to our faces andto read them from other people's faces.
(23:25):
I love to call for empathy.There another thing I super and this was
like we had never connected, butI knew I appreciated and respected you very
much for variety of reasons, butfor this reason, in particular your repeated
calls for honesty as a cornerstone inthe work. At the end of every
chapter, you did like these reallynice summaries and like reminders and calls back
(23:48):
and kind of take this one thingaway breakout boxes. I didn't tallly them
up, but I guarantee there wereat least six mentions of things like exaggerated
claims, false urgency, click base, fear mongering, and all these other
things we try to do in aclumsy attempt to reach people's primal urges and
to motivate them. But it's fake. And so speak to why you drew
(24:12):
lines between things like influence and persuasionversus deceit and manipulation and some of these
other kind of false, empty selfishI'm just with you on all that.
I'd love to hear you speak towhy you hammered it like multiple times.
It's the difference between short term tacticalthinking and long term strategy. Okay,
(24:36):
And I'll give you a really goodexample. My eighteen year old son is
a brilliant kid, graduated high schoolis sixteen. He speaks three languages,
and he decided so he gets outof high school of sixteen he's like,
I'm not going to college, I'mgoing to start a business. And he's
a designer and he was creating agame that's going to come out on console,
so an Xbox you know Xbox kindof game somebody could play on a
(24:59):
console that type, and a horrorgame. And in the course of this
he did very well, and hecame out and he's like, you know,
I think I could start a courseand I could sell how to create
a game to other people. Andhe had a couple of games that came
out on iPhone and for mobile,and so he started to work on his
own marketing and I started to haveto ask him some really hard questions.
(25:22):
I was like, hey, listen, is everything you say in that video
you're making is that actually true?Can you prove it? Like like why
do you think that? And afew times he's like, oh, well,
it's it's marketing puffery, and it'sthis, and it is that,
And he was kind of tap dancingaround the Corus issue and I said to
him, I was like, listen, I'm a lot older than you,
and one of the reasons why I'vebeen able to do business with the same
(25:45):
people for decades is that when Isay something, they know that it's true
and they don't have to go andcheck up on me and see what it
was Tony exaggerating or was he thetelling a story because they know that's just
not something that I will do.It's just not part of what I do,
you know, And I did goto the military academy and they pound
(26:06):
into you this idea. You know, don't lie, cheat, or steel,
nor tolerate those who do. AndI believe those things. But it
goes deeper in that you can havea bad process that'll give you results in
the short term. So if youlie in your marketing, you absolutely can
get good results in the short term. You just can, and that's why
(26:27):
so many companies do it. Butit doesn't build long term relationships. It's
not a long term strategy for success. It just isn't. You know.
Your mom told you honesty is thebest policy. Guess what she was right.
But more than that, I thinkis that there's so much lying,
(26:47):
and there's so much exaggeration and hyperbole, and all the media that is just
corrupt on every side, you know, telling stories that just aren't true and
spins on things that are just ridiculous. Is that when you then discover someone
who's actually going to tell you thetruth. You know, one time,
I have this thing that I do. If you and I have a conversation
and I'm listening to how I mightbe able to help you, and I
(27:11):
realize, you know what, You'reprobably not a good fit for the service
that I provide, I'm not goingto do business with it. I'm going
to tell you know, Ethan,I don't think you guys are a great
fit for us. Maybe these guyswill help you, and I'll refer someone
to you. The first few timesI did that, companies were shocked.
They were shocked because it wasn't ahard sell, and I was like,
(27:32):
like, listen, I get alot of referrals. The reason I get
a lot of referrals is I'm choosingwho I work with. And so if
I work with someone and I knowI can help them, then the results
are gonna be good. They're gonnawant to tell everyone about me because everything
works. But if I take themfor short term money, and I take
their money and then I can't deliverbecause there weren't a good fit, well
(27:55):
yeah I got the money, butI don't get the back end. Referral.
I don't get all the good will. I'll tell you something. It's
just a funny story. I recentlysigned a new client down in Austin,
Texas, Okay, and I didn'tknow them at all, And it came
from a referral from a guy Idid business with eleven years ago. I
barely even talked to him over theeleven years, like we shared a couple
of messages on LinkedIn. But aftereleven years he remembered me from a business
(28:21):
ago wasn't even in this business Iwas doing, and he kind of had
followed me a little bit, andhe heard about the book and said,
hey, Tony, I think youcould be a really good fit for these
guys. I like what you're doing, and he referred me over to them.
Well, if eleven years ago hewas like that lion sob and he
promised the world and delivered nothing.Guess what, nothing would have come about
it. It wouldn't have born fruitdecades later, you know. And the
(28:45):
lesson I'm trying to help my sonunderstand is that long term strategy of honesty
is it's good business, it's goodmarketing, it's good for your soul.
Like you never have to try toremember what you said. You know,
it just is easy. It's easy. Yeah, that good for the soul
piece as you are communicating that.I was just thinking about having our team
members executing under our guidance things thatour borderline, false, slash, exaggerated,
(29:14):
or completely over the line, Likewhat does that do for your relationship
with your team? What does thatdo for the soul of the person who
is executing what you're asking them todo. That's right because you're paying them
to do it, but they knowthat it's wrong. It's like, there's
so much, There's so much there. It's so funny. When my son
was about two or two and ahalf, I wanted to devise a framework
(29:36):
that I could start introducing to him, and I knew he wouldn't, like
intellectually grasp it in full, butthat it would grow with him, and
it developed. Three. The threemost important things you can be are honest,
smart, and caring, And alleach of those has qualities underneath them.
You know, for example, curiositytucks under smart, Like smart isn't
just you know, scoring the best, it's it's a variety of things.
(29:57):
But honesty is the foundation for allof these things. I really appreciated that
calls so much. There are anumber of things I have on my conversation
outline that we're not going to havetime for today, So I want to
jump to one that I thought wassuper interesting and kind of doubles back into
this content marketing zone in particular becauseI think it's also counterintuitive for a lot
of people. You talked about theamazing results that you've gotten with clients in
(30:22):
B to B in particular publishing creatingand publishing semi relevant and non relevant content.
I also appreciate your call to longform content. You know, it's
not about the length of the content, it's who it's foreign, whether or
not it serves them, whether it'sshort or long. But I would love
for you just to break down thisidea of semi relevant and non relevant content
(30:44):
because I think it will be freshto a lot of people. So the
trap is everyone wants to talk aboutthemselves, and so the only content they
want to produce has to be abouttheir industry, what they do. Something
that is exactly about that. Okay, so if you're in construction, you're
only talking about construction. If youdo, you know, you build foundations,
you want to talk about foundations andeverything about foundations. Now, there's
(31:08):
nothing wrong with that, and everycompany has to talk about their products and
services at least somewhat. But tocreate a connection with someone, you have
the opportunity, and it requires investmentand acquires time and thinking, and you've
got to really be diligent in doingit. Is to create something that's just
for your audience, something that's helpfulfor them, and you know it may
(31:33):
or may not have anything to dowith what you do. So I'm a
primal storytelling guy. I talk aboutstorytelling, I talk about marketing. But
you know what some of the mostcommon questions I get is, hey,
Tony, you run multiple businesses?Yeah, well, how do you manage
your time? You know, howdo you stay so fit? You know,
I'm in my mid fifties and Iam a jiu jitsu black belt,
and I worked out a lot,and I'm very, very very fit compared
(31:59):
to most people my age, andI get lots and lots of questions from
entrepreneurs on, hey, how doyou manage your energy? How do you
manage your fitness? Like, whatdo you do to stay like that?
That has nothing to do with mycore business of marketing. But what it
does is it kind of puts ahuman spin and I can tell guys,
hey, listen, here's a fewsmall things that you could do that will
(32:22):
change your entrepreneurial life. So whynot try it? And those kinds of
content. I sprinkle that in onmy LinkedIn and some of my other places
like Instagram. It's a shock.The non relevant, non storytelling, non
marketing posts sometimes have gotten me morebusiness and way more reactions and grown my
audience than the marketing stuff. Youknow. My most one of my most
(32:45):
viral posts is I posted up acompletely unplanned post about an argument I had
with my fourteen year old son.He was on a swim team and he
signed up. He's a really goodswimmer, really talented, and he signed
up for summer swim team, youknow, and so with a long course.
And so they're getting up early inthe morning during the summer and they're
going and doing these really hard practices, you know, they're swimming, you
(33:07):
know, five six thousand meters ina single practice. And one morning I
go and I wake him up andit's it's five thirty in the morning.
He's like, oh, I'm notgoing to practice, And I'm like yeah,
you're going to practice. You committedto go to practice. You gotta
get out of bed and go topractice. And so this, this this
argument with my teenager. It culminatedwith him yelling at me that he hates
me and I'm a bad dad becauseI'm making him go to practice. Right,
(33:30):
So, if you had any teenagers, you know this this happens.
So I just posted a little bitabout that conversation up on LinkedIn, and
I asked the question, what doyou think should I have made him go
to practice? Or am I justbeing a hard ass? And oh,
my gosh, you would think,I mean, you can't buy that kind
of marketing. It's it's like Ibought ads like hundreds. I mean,
(33:51):
I'm not joking. Hundreds of peopleliked it, shared it, had a
comment about it, and then mydms blew up about this. And you
know, there are a few peoplewho didn't like the fact that I made
him do something, but I wouldsay overall people are like, yes,
I think sometimes when you commit tosomething and you need to keep your word
and do what you say you're gonnado. I wouldn't let him quit in
(34:14):
the middle of the season. Itold him, you can go to the
end the end of season. Youdon't have to continue if you don't want
to, but you committed to start, you're going to finish. And my
point being completely non relevant to mybusiness, it actually helped my business.
My audience grew just from that onepost. I bet you I got one
hundred new followers from it, maybemore just in a couple of days.
(34:34):
Just bam. Yeah. If youwant to instill discipline in yourself or in
your kids, swim team is athing. I was up at four thirty
to get to practice by five amevery day, and in the middle of
winter, oh yeah, over theholiday break, the Christmas in the new
year, I think we could pickone or two practices to skip, but
(34:54):
otherwise it was two a day's right, you know all break like is there's
a lot of discipline involved there,and I appreciate the call to like and
I think a lot of folks thatuse social in general, but LinkedIn in
particular have probably observed similar even ifthey haven't executed it the way that you
do. And I also loved inthe book there were some examples of like
(35:15):
reports that you've created that really servethis thing adjacent to your business that is
more important to your audience than itis necessarily to the core of your business.
And the goal is simply to exactlyis that post example you shared is
generate conversation, offers something that's ofinterest that they can engage with, and
(35:35):
then that continues on into some kindof a conversation. I wanted to do
a quick drive by at the riskof going a little bit long, although
I think we both need to beout by the top of the hour.
HubSpot. You're a HubSpot agency partner. I think when we talk about brands,
brand, storytelling, content, generallyspeaking cream of the crop, I
think there a go to example ora case study for a variety of different
(36:00):
themes and topics. Talk a littlebit about that brand. You know what
that partnership is like and how that'sbeen a value to you. Yeah.
So I've been a HubSpot partner forthe whole time my agency has been around.
It's interesting. So when I firstapplied to the partner program, they
rejected me because I wasn't an agencyat the time, and I was I
(36:21):
thought I would just be a HubSpotsupport company. That's how we started.
I didn't start with content and whathappened was I signed a big financial company
and then a few months in theirCEO contacted me and it's like, hey,
we love HubSpot. The CRM isreally good, the automation, and
you know, they liked a lotof the features of it. They're like,
but we need more content. Canyou help us with that? And
(36:43):
that's how I really got started.And I think as HubSpot has grown and
the platform has just really really addeda lot of features and functions, is
that it's I think of it aslike a doctor, where you need the
minimum dose of medicine, the minimumdose of technology that you need to do
your marketing. So HubSpot is alot of things for different companies, and
(37:07):
there's a lot of different kinds ofuse use cases for it. Whether you're
a startup and you just need totrack leads, well, the HubSpot CRM
is free all the way up toyou know I did. I audited some
really giant HubSpot deployments with you know, a million plus contacts and every feature
being utilized in a way that youknow most marketers are just not able to
(37:30):
do. Is that it's the eighthundred pound guerrilla out there because of what
it can bring to the table interms of analytics and data and just trying
to derive insight from the data.You know, they're one of their founders,
Darmes Shaw. I mean, theguy is a crazy genius. And
every time you turn around, HubSpotis rolling out something new, and most
(37:52):
of the time there something new.If it's part of your subscription, you
just get it for free. SoI've really appreciated that and obviously the HubSpot
Academy, and you know, theseare the guys that came up with inbound
marketing and there are the reasons I'vebeen thinking about content for nine years.
And I think primal storytelling builds onthe whole inbound theme and that I give
(38:17):
inbound a framework. That's what primalstorytelling does, you know, and when
you think of it from a storytellingstandpoint, and if you have huspot deployed,
primal storytelling just literally lives right ontop of hufspot. So that's kind
of goes hand in hand with thatawesome love it And again this kind of
(38:37):
goes back to the ear opening responseon my opening question, which was,
you know, your exploration of whydoes some of this work for people and
some of it doesn't. We're publishingthe same amount of content for both,
and so I see exactly how thislayers on so much stuff we didn't get
to just for folks listening. Ifyou've enjoyed this conversation, you know I
didn't ask about the four types ofbrand stories, origin stories, vision stories,
(38:59):
transformations stores, brand value stories.Really good stuff there. The idea
of personifying the brand, which Ihave a lot of thoughts and questions with
regard to using more video not justin your messages but in your blog posts
and in your social et cetera.Kind of humanize and personify the brand,
put a face on it. Somereally great quotes from other people that you
(39:20):
leveraged in the book that I sharedone of them on social already myself,
but really enjoyed it. So thebook is primal storytelling marketing for Humans.
A couple other episodes that we've donehere, I've had I think four proper
hubspotters on the show. The oneI'm going to prop up here is Dan
Tire, who does a lot ofsales teaching for them. I had them
on episode forty a couple of yearsago now, A few years ago now,
(39:43):
Episode forty with Dan Tyre from HubSpotthe biggest transformation and prospecting in thirty
years is what we called that.By the way, that transformation is video
messaging. And then more recently episodeone forty eight video messaging in the next
normal. So those are two episodeswith Dan Tire from HubSpot. Then also
another one that came to mind forme was episode one thirty seven with Gabrielle
(40:04):
Dolan, who wrote a book onbrand's storytelling as well. I called that
one enhancing ex and CX through brandstorytelling. So if you're interested in these
themes and topics, we're talking aboutthem regularly. Is one of the reasons
I was so excited to a readyour book and be have this conversation with
you. Before I let you go, I'd love for you to think or
mention someone who's had a positive impacton your life or career. Well,
(40:27):
I mentioned him already, Darren Hardy. You know, I got to be
in his business masterclass and he's theone that challenged me to write a book.
And I actually came up with theidea for primal storytelling while I was
at his conference in San Diego andjust kind of taking a sabbatical from my
life and just thinking deeply about mybusiness, and yeah, I've made a
(40:49):
giant impact on me in every level. Love it. It makes me think
about like, you know, you'restanding back and I'm not even going to
presume what your motivations were for,but I can imagine for myself when I
look at an opportunity like that,I'm like, what's the ticket cost,
what's the flight cost, what arethe dates? What am I going to
have to give up or move aroundon my calendar to make this thing happen.
It's all this calculated stuff, butdeep underneath, you knew you should
(41:10):
be there and here it is,this dramatically transformative experience in your life.
As was looking to move into sales, which started with a little bit of
a calculation, but you know,the intangible benefits should not be underestimated as
we make decisions. How about anot or a shout out to accompany your
brand that you personally appreciate for theexperience they give you as a customer.
(41:31):
You know it's it's actually from myother business, Jiu Jitsu. I love
Fuji Sports, so they are themaker. They make all the geese that
I buy from my gym, andthey're awesome and they're always on time.
Those guys have helped me over theyears. And you know, I think
the sport of jiu jitsu, it'sthe fastest growing sport in the world and
now it's taking over the US andnow there's in every town pretty much in
(41:53):
America there's a jiu jitsu school,or if there's not one, there's one
nearby. And I think they reallymade it easy for a lot of gem
owners to connect with their audience andgrow their kids programs. And yeah,
that's been great, awesome. Okay, if someone stuck with us here to
the very very end, they maywant to connect with you. They may
want to learn about the book,learn more about any of your businesses.
(42:15):
Where would you send folks who arelistening right now that maybe want to continue
the relationship a little bit, Soyou can go to Primal Storytelling dot com
forward slash podcast and there's a freegift there with some bonuses, and I
think it's a quick start way ifyou wanted to use storytelling in your business
and you're not quite sure how,it's a good way to get it done.
(42:35):
Love it Primal Storytelling dot com slashpodcast. I'll link that up in
the episode description. We write allof these up and drop in video highlights
at bombomb dot com slash podcast.I've enjoyed this so much. Congratulations on
the book. Thank you for spendingthis time with me and continued success with
it. Thank you, I appreciateit. Every single day you're entrusting some
(42:57):
of your most important and most valuablemessages is to plain black text on a
plain white screen, to faceless,typed out text. It doesn't differentiate you,
it doesn't build trust and rapport,and it doesn't convey feelings, thoughts,
arguments, ideas, or details nearlyas well as you do. As
a result, your customer experience,employee experience, and business outcomes suffer.
(43:23):
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bombomb dot com. Thanks for listeningto the Customer Experience Podcast. Remember the
single most important thing you can dotoday is to create and deliver a better
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(44:29):
now in your favorite podcast player,or visit bombomb dot com slash podcasts
The single most important thing you cando today is to create and deliver a
better experience for your customers. Learnhow sales, marketing and customer success experts
create internal alignment, achieve desired outcomes, and exceed customer expectations in a personal
and human way. This is theCustomer Experience Podcast. Here's your host,
(00:24):
Ethan Butte. How can marketers influencebehavior? Years of work and study on
that single question culminated in primal storytelling. Primal storytelling is where social psychology,
human emotion, and storytelling come togetherto help you meaningfully connect with your target
audience. Our guest today is theauthor of Primal Storytelling Marketing for Humans.
(00:49):
He's a graduate of West Point inthe US Army Rangers School, an entrepreneur
who started several companies, and thefounder and CEO of a HubSpot partner agency
dedicated to helping one hundred thousand businessesgrow through brand storytelling. Anthony Butler,
Welcome to the Customer Experience Podcast.Hey, thank you, and I think
I'm gonna steal that bio. Youwrote that. I didn't write that,
(01:11):
and it sounded better than one Ihave. Also, let's just summary I
do take I'm not even a pridefulperson in an unhealthy way. But I
do really enjoy putting together a reallyconcise open so we can just get off
and writing. There's enough context aboutwho you are, what you've done,
why you are the guy to havethis conversation with, and I'm really looking
forward to it. I enjoyed theread very much as we're talking before I
(01:34):
hit record. We have a lotof kinship on a lot of these themes
and ideas. Essentially what shockingly stillseems like an overlooked opportunity to tap into
evolutionary psychologies. We consider the decisionsthat are in front of us so that
we can do things that are connectwith other people more effectively. But that's
about three to five minutes away.We're going to start athany where we always
(01:56):
start on this show, which iscustomer experience. When I say that,
what does it mean to you?Well, to me, customer experience is
how you make actual, real peoplefeel about doing business with you in every
way, shape and form. Youknow, before and during your sales process,
and then when you're working with them, and then afterwards the results that
(02:16):
they get, you know, Andit's that totality of their connection with you.
In your business. That's what itis to me. I love it,
so we hear and I agree.I mean, when I teach the
basics of customer experience in some contextand the webinar or otherwise, I always
include that feeling element. But theinteresting layer that you and a lot of
(02:38):
people do when I ask that question, if I now asked it, well
over two hundred times, the interestinglayer that you added that is not heard
as common that I'd love for youto share more on you roped in the
results there. Customer success is veryclearly a part of customer experience. And
although a customer experience function is oftenhoused in the post sale organization, in
(02:59):
amer success team, I think alot of people overlook the idea that like,
really, all the good feelings don'tmatter, and or they come unraveled
if people don't get what they reallyneed out of the engagement. Well,
you know, I'm in marketing,and one of the problems about being in
marketing is there's so much hyperbole.There's just so many people who are just
(03:22):
streaming at the top of their lungs, and there's all these get rich quick
schemes on the internet, especially onInstagram and seems to just be a you
know, just an epidemic there.And I think that has jaded a lot
of people. And you know,they work with some of these companies and
they promise everything and they get lefthold in the bag and they did not
(03:45):
get what they promised, you know. And I think it's you see a
lot of flash in the pan companieswho make big promises. They got great
marketing on the upfront, but theydon't have anything to back it up.
And you know, that's just speaksfor a bad experience long term, you
know. And there's a somewhere outthere, there's a digital graveyard. It's
just filled to the brim of agenciesthat are out of business because they had
(04:09):
great marketing and couldn't deliver anything thatwas meaningful and healthful. Yeah, I
appreciate your use of the word epidemicthere. What you have me thinking about
as a conversation I had with someonethe other day about the current influencer situation.
I don't want to go too fardown this rabbit hole, but like
you know, I think it's easyto say traditional B to B sales and
marketing, the traditional playbook is tired. We're looking for new ways to engage.
(04:31):
I think that's one of the reasonswhy you're selling copies of your book,
is that this idea of you know, this exploration of what is AI
for, what is generative AI for, what's wrong with the traditional sales and
marketing playbook? All of these arevarious explorations of how do we actually connect
with and serve other human beings ina basic way. And I think the
newer influencer piece of this, whichtraditionally is associated with B two C.
(04:57):
But I could give you a bunchof B to B examples. I just
don't want to share aim anybody becauseI have some opinions about it. This
is now like it's either the influencerwho is leveraging renting their platform to people
in order to create some awareness anddrive some traffic. Generally, either they
don't come through the way they promised, and or they find themselves repping a
variety of people and half of themcan't deliver for their customers, which is
(05:20):
then a negative reflection on the influencerper se. And so there's just a
lot of pieces moving here. I'mactually gonna I'm not gonna pull it ahead
never mind, I'm gonna start whereI wanted to start. I want to
start into this concept. Then thisframework, it's not just a book,
it's a framework, not that abook is anything to minimize. Again,
enjoyed the read. The framework isaround social psychology, human emotion, and
(05:43):
storytelling. Talk about the path todevelop this system. What were you trying
to solve for yourself and or forother people that kind of brought these elements
together in a way that would thenallow you to encourage other people to leverage
some of the same basic human piecesthat we all should be leveraging. Yeah,
so I kind of had an oddcareer, you know, And I'm
(06:06):
I'm on my fifth my fifth careerhere, you know. And what happened
was I out of high school.I joined in the Army as a mechanic
and was enlisted for a few years, and then I moved I went to
West Point, and then afterwards Iwas in the entry So I didn't get
out of the Army until my thirties. So I had not worked like a
(06:26):
regular civilian job until then. AndI get out of the Army, I
don't know what I want to do. And I end up at this manufacturing
plant out in Connecticut and I'm fromMontana, and so I couldn't find a
job here and I ended up inthis basically the end of the world,
at this manufacturing plant and it wasjust the only job I could get.
My wife was pregnant and we reallyneeded money. And I get there and
(06:47):
just a few months in I realized, like, we're not making it,
Like I just wasn't earning enough money, and my wife was she's an electrial
engineer, and we decided to haveit. She came to me one day
and You're like, she's the oldschool Russian lady and she's like, don'ty
you need to make more money becauseI won't work. I was like,
what you know? And that kindof drove me to figure something out,
(07:13):
and I went. I went tobookstore, and I like, I was
like, somewhere in this bookstore isthe answer to my problem. I started
looking around, and actually it wasthat's when I found Dan Kennedy. You've
heard of Dan Kennedy's this old schoolmarketer, an old school business guy,
and he's been around for a millionyears. And I read in a book
in there with Dan was this thing. He's like a lot of direct sales
(07:36):
reps make more money than the CEO, and he has this whole thing on
why that is. And I didn'tknow anything about business at the time.
She's like, Okay, I'm goingto go into sales. And so I
went back to the manufacturing plant andI was like I went to this just
walked up to the CEO one day. I was like, hey, I
want to move to sales team.So I saw those guys and they are
all these fat, old guys.I was like, I can outwork them,
(07:58):
and he's like, do you wantto be in sales? No one
wants to be in sales. It'slike, why would you want to do
that? Well I didn't know itat the time, but it was a
life changing moment because he was kindto me. He sent me over there,
you let me apprentice, like withthis guy he'd had on he'd had
at the company. This guy hadbeen in the company for thirty five years
and he was just a few monthsbefore retirement. So my timing was good.
(08:20):
Well, eighteen months later I wasa director of inside sales, and
then about a year after that,I was the VP of sales and I
helped them scale okay significant, Sothen helped them scale in sales and I
got recruited to a tech startup inNew York City and I ended up going
to New York City. I hadnever even ridden the train before I went
(08:41):
there, and I just happened.I got on the ground floor. This
tech startup started with their sales team. I was like employee forty something,
and when I left there were hundredsof employees, and you know, it
was a nine figure exit. Fromthere, I went to another tech company
and they asked me to build insales and marketing team for them, and
I did. When I was inthose two kind of startup tech companies,
(09:05):
that's when I really started digging intothe Dan Kennedy stuff because every sales guy
once leads, and you know,neither company really had a strong marketing arm,
and so I knew I got toget leads, got to figure out
how do we market, how dowe brand? And that's when I just
became obsessed with it. A coupleof years in the second tech company,
their board appointed me CEO. Ihelped them grow, and then the company
(09:28):
was sold. And when that companywas sold, I was like, Okay,
I'm starting a marketing company. Andthat's when I started this company can
do ideas. It was just justabout nine years ago. And first six
months, you know, it wasthe honeymoon. It was awesome, and
we did over six figures in ourfirst six months. In our first year,
you know, we did like aquarter of a million dollars with one
employee. And eighteen months in,you know, I'm hiring. We're really
(09:52):
growing fast, like everything is goingreally good. And I get this call
and I was like, the worstcall you ever want, you know,
And it's this. It's the CEOof a company who we were doing a
lot of work for. They're payingus a lot of money every month,
and the work was on time.We're doing a really good job. And
he's like, hey, listen,you guys are great. I appreciate all
the work you're doing. But nothingis working, Like we're not getting any
(10:15):
leads, the SEO is not working, like nothing is happening. Like we're
publishing all this content, but nothingis happening. You're not moving the needle.
And basically he was just firing us. And I was like, what
you know, And I think that'swhen I first realized about that graveyard.
I was telling you about where allthese agencies go, and I was like
I gotta figure this out because I'venever been fired before. And you know,
(10:35):
now nine years in, I realizeis that there's always there's an expiration
date on clients, you know,and even my best clients. I have
clients that have been with me forseven years. At some point they'll sell
the company, or the owners arereal tire, or you know, something
will happen and that they'll move on, right, and so you have to
replace clients. But getting fired outof the blue, like that's the worst.
(11:00):
You're not going to stay in businesslong term. And I started trying
to compare clients. It's like,hey, why is it working for these
guys? But it's not for theseguys. And at first I couldn't put
my finger on it. And thenI went to a conference with Darren Hardy.
I don't know if you ever heardof him. He's like the self
development guy. He's really good somegood books. Darren puts on this kind
(11:22):
of business masterclass in San Diego everyyear, just a couple of them a
year. So I went down therefor three days with him. Day two,
he's up on stage and he's talkingabout marketing and I'm thinking, yeah,
I'm an expert in this I'm kindof hella half listening. But Darren
is a genius in just being ableto simplify. And one of the things
he said is something that everyone knows, everyone's heard. He's like, hey,
people buy emotionally and then they justifywith logic. Okay, And I
(11:46):
heard it before. But then Istarted thinking. I was like, okay,
well what are the emotions, like, what specific emotions? How many
emotions are there? What are theemotions I should be using in my marketing?
And that kind of deep dive.I started looking at research and looking
at okay, what does psychologists say? What does psychiatrists say? And I
discovered evolutionary psychology during the research.And what evolutionary psychology is it's this idea
(12:09):
that humans have vestiges of instincts.You know, so just like genetically coded
behavior that animals have. You know, the squirrels gather nuts in the winter
because the gather nuts in the winter. You know, geese fly south,
they don't go east to west,they don't go on vacation. You know,
we have free will, but thevestiges of our instincts still are alive
(12:31):
and they drive a lot of ourbehavior. And I think one of the
most one of those behaviors of themost is like our need to be with
our tribe, to be with ourpeople, be with our family, you
know, and the social signals thatwe send with everything we do. You
know, why do billionaires have gianthouses that cost millions and millions of dollars
(12:52):
versus Hey, I can buy atiny house for fifty grand. Well,
it's a social signal. It's it'sthe signal that I made it. It's
it's telling everyone that I'm at thehighest part of this tribe. That's where
I am, that's my place insociety. And I think a lot of
marketers miss the boat. They publishedinformation, they tell people about themselves,
(13:15):
they published data. You know.The subtitle of my book is marketing for
Humans, because I think a lotof businesses are still in the trap from
like technical SEO from fifteen years ago, where if you just wrote for the
search engines you could you could getorganic traffic. And I think Google's got
smarter and they've got better, andthe searches are better, and now you
(13:35):
have to have content that's really valuable. It just can't be marketing content.
You've got to have more than that. And it's got to be emotional,
it's got to connect, it's gotto speak to people's primal urges. And
that's where the book came from.And so as I was learning about primal
urges and psychology, I started thinkingto myself, Okay, as a sales
(14:00):
guy, as a pragmatic marketer,like someone who wants ROI like, what
would I do? What frameworks couldI create that anybody, if they just
followed this blueprint could make it work. And you know, I'm a blue
collar guy. I was in themtry. I was a mechanic, you
know, I'm not some super rocketscientists. I was like, this needs
to be step by step. Let'sput a checklist in there, let's make
(14:22):
it work. And so then Ijust tested different frameworks. And then I
looked at storytelling. I looked atall the different frameworks of storytelling from literature,
from movies. You know, whatstood the test of time? Like,
what are marketers doing that have stoodthe test of time. I have
this giant marketing library over here,and I have I have advertisements that go
(14:43):
back, you know, pre Civilwar. And you know what, the
structures pre civil war exactly the sameas they are now. Like nothing that's
changed. The one thing is changedis an old advertising. It was all
weight gain. The fitness industry wasall how to gain weight, how to
get big and strong, and therewas no such thing as weight loss.
And now it's flipped. It's allweight loss and how to get strong.
(15:07):
That's so funny. Thank you forthat arc. That's a really good arc.
And I like to call back tothe beginning, is like I need
this to be straightforward. I needit to work. I need to make
I need to figure out how tocreate more predictable results for my clients.
And it ultimately comes back to thisobservation. I'm gonna ask you kind of
in sequence over the next several minutesa couple of the big themes that I
really appreciated about the book, Ijust love to have you speak to them.
(15:28):
One of them is this idea thatyou know technology and you even mentioned
it with the Google reference, Likethere used to be a day when you
could just keyword stuff and you're ranked, you know, on the first page.
No problem. Now they're using humaninputs. How much time are we
spending on the page? Are westaying within the sight? And like,
is this actually serving humans not justis this serving the boss. So this
(15:50):
is a reflection of the fact thatlike technology, communication channels, all of
this stuff is evolving like super rapidly, and yet humans are all most in
a lot of ways the same aswe were millennia ago. You know again,
emotions, urges, instincts. Youmentioned the thousands of religions and the
thousands of deities that we've created,all kind of for the same purpose.
(16:12):
And even there's an evolutionary arc throughthat. You mentioned eighty five versions of
the Little Red Riding Hood story.Right, the storytelling structurally is about the
same. We're trying to reinforce thesame things. Connect to our tribe members,
preserve ourselves as members of the species, procreate. I think that's sort
of our most fundamental urges. Alot of the other things like roll up
(16:33):
to that, like we want toreproduce ourselves. Talk about that gap between
the pace of change around us intechnology, culture, society. I think
we fashion ourselves as like being superfast moving, but it's another level,
like deeper in this river, thecurrent is very very very slow. Is
that One of the reasons I guessto turn it into a question, is
(16:56):
that one of the reasons to quoteyou from page one seventeen that forgetting people
are marketing to humans is one ofthe most common mistakes you've found when auditing
B to B brand marketing. Likeis it that, like we're just so
caught up in the speed that weforget the deeper current. I think that's
part of it. I think peopleare working under the misconception that we have
(17:17):
changed. And you know, Iuse the example in the book my great
grandfather, Charles Butler, like heliterally was born at home in eighteen ninety
eight at a house with no electricity. Their indoor plumbing wasn't a thing when
he was born. You know,his dad dug an out house for them.
And I mean, this guy wehave ore his ninetieth birthday, has
(17:42):
a familiar union. And in hissingle life, he went from a house
made of earth and wood with basicallythe same technology they had during Roman times
to you know, the space shuttleand lasers and robots and all the rest
of it. And here's the thing. He was a simple guy. And
(18:03):
if I had taken him, ifI had a time machine and I went
back to the eighteen hundreds, andI put him in that time machine and
brought him forward okay, and hegrew up, everything would have been the
same for him as it is rightnow. You know, my kids grew
up with an iPad, you know, basically they popped out of my wife's
womb and you know, like iPad. But they're still the same. And
I think we as marketers have madethe mistake of thinking, and I mentioned
(18:30):
this in the book, is thatthe technology is the medium is the message.
It's just not true. It's justnot true. Is that the messages
are timeless. Okay, our emotions, our primal urges are timeless. The
communication, you know, kind ofthe media, whether it's social media or
a website or whatever. The nextsocial media is going to be maybe it's
(18:52):
going to be VR, maybe it'sgoing to be augmented reality or whatever.
But you know what, we're stillgoing to be the same people. We're
just kind of interacting in a differentway, you know, like Eve,
even like this conversation, you know, both of us have we've got digital
microphones and we've got video conferencing andyou know, it's it's really really amazing.
Well we didn't have that one hundredyears ago. But the structure of
(19:15):
the conversation and the stories that we'retalent are basically the same. I think
we thought that when the Internet wasinvented that that was changing everything about us
as humans, and it just hasn'tnot yet. You know, maybe when
we start implanting the internet inside ourbrains, maybe then it will change,
but so far that hasn't happened ina wise scale manner. And you know,
(19:38):
I think a focus on people isthe way to go. And the
misnomer about B to B it's oneof my pet pieves is that you know,
you go and you talk to theseguys and like, yeah, but
we're doing business with other businesses,you know, so all of our marketing
needs to be really dry and it'sgot to be formal and roi roi,
roi roi exactly exactly. And theythink that they're immune to using any kind
(20:06):
of any kind of emotion, anykind of primal urge in their marketing,
that it has to be this thisthing that they have in their head.
And I'm like, listen, thetruth is no business ever bought a single
thing because businesses aren't real. They'renot alive. They're just an idea that's
in our heads. Okay, realpeople in those companies bought something, you
know, so maybe maybe it's ifit's a big company, maybe it's a
(20:27):
fortune one thousand and there's a wholeteam around a table that's trying to make
a good decision and buy something.Okay, And if you've ever been in
one of those teams selling situations,guess what you need to have conversation with
everyone on the team. They allhave hopes and dreams, they all have
an internal dialogue. You know,someone on that table is thinking, Okay,
if I hire this guy, amI getting fired? You know,
(20:48):
And it's it's a personal it's apersonal decision. Maybe it has nothing to
do with the company. You know, maybe they're having a bad day and
they just don't want to listen towhat you have to say. It's all
personal, it's all internal dialogue andemotion. And the mistake marketers are making
is ignoring the humanity and their marketing. They're ignoring their audience. I would
(21:10):
argue that this entire bud Light controversy, it goes back down to one core
issue is the marketing manager running thecampaign. She didn't like her clients,
she didn't understand her audience at all. And after the controversy started, there's
even video of her making fun ofher core audience, like if you don't
(21:30):
love your clients, like, you'renever going to grow, Like it's just
impossible. And whether no matter whereyou fall on the spectrum of that conversation,
it doesn't matter. Like the lessonthat you can learn is you got
to know who you're marketing to andconnect a message with them that's meaningful to
them. You might not be themarket at all. Okay, you might
(21:52):
not be that market, you know, And so you've got to put away
your own thoughts and emotions and feelingsand have some empathy for them. And
I think empathy is the one thingthat you can do is connect with your
audience. Is I try to understandwhat they're going through and whether they care
about not what you care about.So good. It's such an important reminder.
And when I think about I've workedin a variety of marketing organizations over
(22:15):
the past two dozen years, andcertainly earlier in my career, I fell
into the trap that you're talking about. It is like do I like this?
Do I think this is good?Do I feel like like? But
I'm not the audience in this case. I'm thinking of Like when I was
working in broadcast television. The audiencewas probably twice my age on average,
and up to triple my age atthe time. And then the way that
it looks in a more contemporary settingis we have all of this customer data
(22:41):
and even perhaps some verbatim customer feedback. But if we didn't have that conversation,
and we're dealing with transcripts and typedout words and you know, AI
summaries of transcripts of conversations, thenwe're missing so much of the value and
the meaning. The empathy isn't inreading the report, because in that report,
(23:03):
we get to project everything we thinkand feel onto the information in front
of us, and we do thatfault, whereas in a conversations. One
of the reasons I advocate for videomessaging is you get to control the way
the information is received because we're sowonderfully adapt in a universal and innate fashion
to write emotions to our faces andto read them from other people's faces.
(23:25):
I love to call for empathy.There another thing I super and this was
like we had never connected, butI knew I appreciated and respected you very
much for variety of reasons, butfor this reason, in particular your repeated
calls for honesty as a cornerstone inthe work. At the end of every
chapter, you did like these reallynice summaries and like reminders and calls back
(23:48):
and kind of take this one thingaway breakout boxes. I didn't tallly them
up, but I guarantee there wereat least six mentions of things like exaggerated
claims, false urgency, click base, fear mongering, and all these other
things we try to do in aclumsy attempt to reach people's primal urges and
to motivate them. But it's fake. And so speak to why you drew
(24:12):
lines between things like influence and persuasionversus deceit and manipulation and some of these
other kind of false, empty selfishI'm just with you on all that.
I'd love to hear you speak towhy you hammered it like multiple times.
It's the difference between short term tacticalthinking and long term strategy. Okay,
(24:36):
And I'll give you a really goodexample. My eighteen year old son is
a brilliant kid, graduated high schoolis sixteen. He speaks three languages,
and he decided so he gets outof high school of sixteen he's like,
I'm not going to college, I'mgoing to start a business. And he's
a designer and he was creating agame that's going to come out on console,
so an Xbox you know Xbox kindof game somebody could play on a
(24:59):
console that type, and a horrorgame. And in the course of this
he did very well, and hecame out and he's like, you know,
I think I could start a courseand I could sell how to create
a game to other people. Andhe had a couple of games that came
out on iPhone and for mobile,and so he started to work on his
own marketing and I started to haveto ask him some really hard questions.
(25:22):
I was like, hey, listen, is everything you say in that video
you're making is that actually true?Can you prove it? Like like why
do you think that? And afew times he's like, oh, well,
it's it's marketing puffery, and it'sthis, and it is that,
And he was kind of tap dancingaround the Corus issue and I said to
him, I was like, listen, I'm a lot older than you,
and one of the reasons why I'vebeen able to do business with the same
(25:45):
people for decades is that when Isay something, they know that it's true
and they don't have to go andcheck up on me and see what it
was Tony exaggerating or was he thetelling a story because they know that's just
not something that I will do.It's just not part of what I do,
you know, And I did goto the military academy and they pound
(26:06):
into you this idea. You know, don't lie, cheat, or steel,
nor tolerate those who do. AndI believe those things. But it
goes deeper in that you can havea bad process that'll give you results in
the short term. So if youlie in your marketing, you absolutely can
get good results in the short term. You just can, and that's why
(26:27):
so many companies do it. Butit doesn't build long term relationships. It's
not a long term strategy for success. It just isn't. You know.
Your mom told you honesty is thebest policy. Guess what she was right.
But more than that, I thinkis that there's so much lying,
(26:47):
and there's so much exaggeration and hyperbole, and all the media that is just
corrupt on every side, you know, telling stories that just aren't true and
spins on things that are just ridiculous. Is that when you then discover someone
who's actually going to tell you thetruth. You know, one time,
I have this thing that I do. If you and I have a conversation
and I'm listening to how I mightbe able to help you, and I
(27:11):
realize, you know what, You'reprobably not a good fit for the service
that I provide, I'm not goingto do business with it. I'm going
to tell you know, Ethan,I don't think you guys are a great
fit for us. Maybe these guyswill help you, and I'll refer someone
to you. The first few timesI did that, companies were shocked.
They were shocked because it wasn't ahard sell, and I was like,
(27:32):
like, listen, I get alot of referrals. The reason I get
a lot of referrals is I'm choosingwho I work with. And so if
I work with someone and I knowI can help them, then the results
are gonna be good. They're gonnawant to tell everyone about me because everything
works. But if I take themfor short term money, and I take
their money and then I can't deliverbecause there weren't a good fit, well
(27:55):
yeah I got the money, butI don't get the back end. Referral.
I don't get all the good will. I'll tell you something. It's
just a funny story. I recentlysigned a new client down in Austin,
Texas, Okay, and I didn'tknow them at all, And it came
from a referral from a guy Idid business with eleven years ago. I
barely even talked to him over theeleven years, like we shared a couple
of messages on LinkedIn. But aftereleven years he remembered me from a business
(28:21):
ago wasn't even in this business Iwas doing, and he kind of had
followed me a little bit, andhe heard about the book and said,
hey, Tony, I think youcould be a really good fit for these
guys. I like what you're doing, and he referred me over to them.
Well, if eleven years ago hewas like that lion sob and he
promised the world and delivered nothing.Guess what, nothing would have come about
it. It wouldn't have born fruitdecades later, you know. And the
(28:45):
lesson I'm trying to help my sonunderstand is that long term strategy of honesty
is it's good business, it's goodmarketing, it's good for your soul.
Like you never have to try toremember what you said. You know,
it just is easy. It's easy. Yeah, that good for the soul
piece as you are communicating that.I was just thinking about having our team
members executing under our guidance things thatour borderline, false, slash, exaggerated,
(29:14):
or completely over the line, Likewhat does that do for your relationship
with your team? What does thatdo for the soul of the person who
is executing what you're asking them todo. That's right because you're paying them
to do it, but they knowthat it's wrong. It's like, there's
so much, There's so much there. It's so funny. When my son
was about two or two and ahalf, I wanted to devise a framework
(29:36):
that I could start introducing to him, and I knew he wouldn't, like
intellectually grasp it in full, butthat it would grow with him, and
it developed. Three. The threemost important things you can be are honest,
smart, and caring, And alleach of those has qualities underneath them.
You know, for example, curiositytucks under smart, Like smart isn't
just you know, scoring the best, it's it's a variety of things.
(29:57):
But honesty is the foundation for allof these things. I really appreciated that
calls so much. There are anumber of things I have on my conversation
outline that we're not going to havetime for today, So I want to
jump to one that I thought wassuper interesting and kind of doubles back into
this content marketing zone in particular becauseI think it's also counterintuitive for a lot
of people. You talked about theamazing results that you've gotten with clients in
(30:22):
B to B in particular publishing creatingand publishing semi relevant and non relevant content.
I also appreciate your call to longform content. You know, it's
not about the length of the content, it's who it's foreign, whether or
not it serves them, whether it'sshort or long. But I would love
for you just to break down thisidea of semi relevant and non relevant content
(30:44):
because I think it will be freshto a lot of people. So the
trap is everyone wants to talk aboutthemselves, and so the only content they
want to produce has to be abouttheir industry, what they do. Something
that is exactly about that. Okay, so if you're in construction, you're
only talking about construction. If youdo, you know, you build foundations,
you want to talk about foundations andeverything about foundations. Now, there's
(31:08):
nothing wrong with that, and everycompany has to talk about their products and
services at least somewhat. But tocreate a connection with someone, you have
the opportunity, and it requires investmentand acquires time and thinking, and you've
got to really be diligent in doingit. Is to create something that's just
for your audience, something that's helpfulfor them, and you know it may
(31:33):
or may not have anything to dowith what you do. So I'm a
primal storytelling guy. I talk aboutstorytelling, I talk about marketing. But
you know what some of the mostcommon questions I get is, hey,
Tony, you run multiple businesses?Yeah, well, how do you manage
your time? You know, howdo you stay so fit? You know,
I'm in my mid fifties and Iam a jiu jitsu black belt,
and I worked out a lot,and I'm very, very very fit compared
(31:59):
to most people my age, andI get lots and lots of questions from
entrepreneurs on, hey, how doyou manage your energy? How do you
manage your fitness? Like, whatdo you do to stay like that?
That has nothing to do with mycore business of marketing. But what it
does is it kind of puts ahuman spin and I can tell guys,
hey, listen, here's a fewsmall things that you could do that will
(32:22):
change your entrepreneurial life. So whynot try it? And those kinds of
content. I sprinkle that in onmy LinkedIn and some of my other places
like Instagram. It's a shock.The non relevant, non storytelling, non
marketing posts sometimes have gotten me morebusiness and way more reactions and grown my
audience than the marketing stuff. Youknow. My most one of my most
(32:45):
viral posts is I posted up acompletely unplanned post about an argument I had
with my fourteen year old son.He was on a swim team and he
signed up. He's a really goodswimmer, really talented, and he signed
up for summer swim team, youknow, and so with a long course.
And so they're getting up early inthe morning during the summer and they're
going and doing these really hard practices, you know, they're swimming, you
(33:07):
know, five six thousand meters ina single practice. And one morning I
go and I wake him up andit's it's five thirty in the morning.
He's like, oh, I'm notgoing to practice, And I'm like yeah,
you're going to practice. You committedto go to practice. You gotta
get out of bed and go topractice. And so this, this this
argument with my teenager. It culminatedwith him yelling at me that he hates
me and I'm a bad dad becauseI'm making him go to practice. Right,
(33:30):
So, if you had any teenagers, you know this this happens.
So I just posted a little bitabout that conversation up on LinkedIn, and
I asked the question, what doyou think should I have made him go
to practice? Or am I justbeing a hard ass? And oh,
my gosh, you would think,I mean, you can't buy that kind
of marketing. It's it's like Ibought ads like hundreds. I mean,
(33:51):
I'm not joking. Hundreds of peopleliked it, shared it, had a
comment about it, and then mydms blew up about this. And you
know, there are a few peoplewho didn't like the fact that I made
him do something, but I wouldsay overall people are like, yes,
I think sometimes when you commit tosomething and you need to keep your word
and do what you say you're gonnado. I wouldn't let him quit in
(34:14):
the middle of the season. Itold him, you can go to the
end the end of season. Youdon't have to continue if you don't want
to, but you committed to start, you're going to finish. And my
point being completely non relevant to mybusiness, it actually helped my business.
My audience grew just from that onepost. I bet you I got one
hundred new followers from it, maybemore just in a couple of days.
(34:34):
Just bam. Yeah. If youwant to instill discipline in yourself or in
your kids, swim team is athing. I was up at four thirty
to get to practice by five amevery day, and in the middle of
winter, oh yeah, over theholiday break, the Christmas in the new
year, I think we could pickone or two practices to skip, but
(34:54):
otherwise it was two a day's right, you know all break like is there's
a lot of discipline involved there,and I appreciate the call to like and
I think a lot of folks thatuse social in general, but LinkedIn in
particular have probably observed similar even ifthey haven't executed it the way that you
do. And I also loved inthe book there were some examples of like
(35:15):
reports that you've created that really servethis thing adjacent to your business that is
more important to your audience than itis necessarily to the core of your business.
And the goal is simply to exactlyis that post example you shared is
generate conversation, offers something that's ofinterest that they can engage with, and
(35:35):
then that continues on into some kindof a conversation. I wanted to do
a quick drive by at the riskof going a little bit long, although
I think we both need to beout by the top of the hour.
HubSpot. You're a HubSpot agency partner. I think when we talk about brands,
brand, storytelling, content, generallyspeaking cream of the crop, I
think there a go to example ora case study for a variety of different
(36:00):
themes and topics. Talk a littlebit about that brand. You know what
that partnership is like and how that'sbeen a value to you. Yeah.
So I've been a HubSpot partner forthe whole time my agency has been around.
It's interesting. So when I firstapplied to the partner program, they
rejected me because I wasn't an agencyat the time, and I was I
(36:21):
thought I would just be a HubSpotsupport company. That's how we started.
I didn't start with content and whathappened was I signed a big financial company
and then a few months in theirCEO contacted me and it's like, hey,
we love HubSpot. The CRM isreally good, the automation, and
you know, they liked a lotof the features of it. They're like,
but we need more content. Canyou help us with that? And
(36:43):
that's how I really got started.And I think as HubSpot has grown and
the platform has just really really addeda lot of features and functions, is
that it's I think of it aslike a doctor, where you need the
minimum dose of medicine, the minimumdose of technology that you need to do
your marketing. So HubSpot is alot of things for different companies, and
(37:07):
there's a lot of different kinds ofuse use cases for it. Whether you're
a startup and you just need totrack leads, well, the HubSpot CRM
is free all the way up toyou know I did. I audited some
really giant HubSpot deployments with you know, a million plus contacts and every feature
being utilized in a way that youknow most marketers are just not able to
(37:30):
do. Is that it's the eighthundred pound guerrilla out there because of what
it can bring to the table interms of analytics and data and just trying
to derive insight from the data.You know, they're one of their founders,
Darmes Shaw. I mean, theguy is a crazy genius. And
every time you turn around, HubSpotis rolling out something new, and most
(37:52):
of the time there something new.If it's part of your subscription, you
just get it for free. SoI've really appreciated that and obviously the HubSpot
Academy, and you know, theseare the guys that came up with inbound
marketing and there are the reasons I'vebeen thinking about content for nine years.
And I think primal storytelling builds onthe whole inbound theme and that I give
(38:17):
inbound a framework. That's what primalstorytelling does, you know, and when
you think of it from a storytellingstandpoint, and if you have huspot deployed,
primal storytelling just literally lives right ontop of hufspot. So that's kind
of goes hand in hand with thatawesome love it And again this kind of
(38:37):
goes back to the ear opening responseon my opening question, which was,
you know, your exploration of whydoes some of this work for people and
some of it doesn't. We're publishingthe same amount of content for both,
and so I see exactly how thislayers on so much stuff we didn't get
to just for folks listening. Ifyou've enjoyed this conversation, you know I
didn't ask about the four types ofbrand stories, origin stories, vision stories,
(38:59):
transformations stores, brand value stories.Really good stuff there. The idea
of personifying the brand, which Ihave a lot of thoughts and questions with
regard to using more video not justin your messages but in your blog posts
and in your social et cetera.Kind of humanize and personify the brand,
put a face on it. Somereally great quotes from other people that you
(39:20):
leveraged in the book that I sharedone of them on social already myself,
but really enjoyed it. So thebook is primal storytelling marketing for Humans.
A couple other episodes that we've donehere, I've had I think four proper
hubspotters on the show. The oneI'm going to prop up here is Dan
Tire, who does a lot ofsales teaching for them. I had them
on episode forty a couple of yearsago now, A few years ago now,
(39:43):
Episode forty with Dan Tyre from HubSpotthe biggest transformation and prospecting in thirty
years is what we called that.By the way, that transformation is video
messaging. And then more recently episodeone forty eight video messaging in the next
normal. So those are two episodeswith Dan Tire from HubSpot. Then also
another one that came to mind forme was episode one thirty seven with Gabrielle
(40:04):
Dolan, who wrote a book onbrand's storytelling as well. I called that
one enhancing ex and CX through brandstorytelling. So if you're interested in these
themes and topics, we're talking aboutthem regularly. Is one of the reasons
I was so excited to a readyour book and be have this conversation with
you. Before I let you go, I'd love for you to think or
mention someone who's had a positive impacton your life or career. Well,
(40:27):
I mentioned him already, Darren Hardy. You know, I got to be
in his business masterclass and he's theone that challenged me to write a book.
And I actually came up with theidea for primal storytelling while I was
at his conference in San Diego andjust kind of taking a sabbatical from my
life and just thinking deeply about mybusiness, and yeah, I've made a
(40:49):
giant impact on me in every level. Love it. It makes me think
about like, you know, you'restanding back and I'm not even going to
presume what your motivations were for,but I can imagine for myself when I
look at an opportunity like that,I'm like, what's the ticket cost,
what's the flight cost, what arethe dates? What am I going to
have to give up or move aroundon my calendar to make this thing happen.
It's all this calculated stuff, butdeep underneath, you knew you should
(41:10):
be there and here it is,this dramatically transformative experience in your life.
As was looking to move into sales, which started with a little bit of
a calculation, but you know,the intangible benefits should not be underestimated as
we make decisions. How about anot or a shout out to accompany your
brand that you personally appreciate for theexperience they give you as a customer.
(41:31):
You know it's it's actually from myother business, Jiu Jitsu. I love
Fuji Sports, so they are themaker. They make all the geese that
I buy from my gym, andthey're awesome and they're always on time.
Those guys have helped me over theyears. And you know, I think
the sport of jiu jitsu, it'sthe fastest growing sport in the world and
now it's taking over the US andnow there's in every town pretty much in
(41:53):
America there's a jiu jitsu school,or if there's not one, there's one
nearby. And I think they reallymade it easy for a lot of gem
owners to connect with their audience andgrow their kids programs. And yeah,
that's been great, awesome. Okay, if someone stuck with us here to
the very very end, they maywant to connect with you. They may
want to learn about the book,learn more about any of your businesses.
(42:15):
Where would you send folks who arelistening right now that maybe want to continue
the relationship a little bit, Soyou can go to Primal Storytelling dot com
forward slash podcast and there's a freegift there with some bonuses, and I
think it's a quick start way ifyou wanted to use storytelling in your business
and you're not quite sure how,it's a good way to get it done.
(42:35):
Love it Primal Storytelling dot com slashpodcast. I'll link that up in
the episode description. We write allof these up and drop in video highlights
at bombomb dot com slash podcast.I've enjoyed this so much. Congratulations on
the book. Thank you for spendingthis time with me and continued success with
it. Thank you, I appreciateit. Every single day you're entrusting some
(42:57):
of your most important and most valuablemessages is to plain black text on a
plain white screen, to faceless,typed out text. It doesn't differentiate you,
it doesn't build trust and rapport,and it doesn't convey feelings, thoughts,
arguments, ideas, or details nearlyas well as you do. As
a result, your customer experience,employee experience, and business outcomes suffer.
(43:23):
So it's time to put you backinto your digital communication. It's time to
restore human connection across the digital dividewith bombomb video messages. They have the
clarity and richness of in person meetingsand video calls, and the convenience of
asynchronous emails, text messages, LinkedInmessages, and Slack messages. For clearer
(43:46):
communication, human connection, and higherconversion, try bomb bomb record, screen
record, send and track videos inGmail Outlook, linked In Salesforce Outreach,
Zendesk, iPhone, Android, andbeyond. Try Bombomb absolutely free or learn
(44:07):
how it works for your team oryour entire company. Check it out at
bombomb dot com. Thanks for listeningto the Customer Experience Podcast. Remember the
single most important thing you can dotoday is to create and deliver a better
experience for your customers. Continue learningthe latest strategies and tactics by subscribing right
(44:29):
now in your favorite podcast player,or visit bombomb dot com slash podcasts
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