Ep 521: How To Be Rich | Matt Fornito Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
Do you wanna know how to be rich? Well, I’m gonna tell you a story that I recently heard, and here’s how the story goes. Regardless to what amount of truth is to this story I think it’s a great example of something that we all need to hear and learn if you truly want to be rich. Now, I say that with bunny ear quotations because rich is a really relative term. If you live in the United States, then statistically speaking, you are already richer than most human beings on planet Earth. And if you make more than $50,000 a year, then you make more than most people worldwide. So there’s a relative term there. But if you wanna learn how to be successful, right, which I think is a part of what rich means, then this story should mean something to you. And this is a story about Warren Buffet and a conversation that he had with his pilot.
AJV (00:55):
And his pilot asked him, he said, Warren, will you teach me how to be rich? Will you teach me how to be successful like you and I think anyone in that your surroundings would’ve said, yes, teach me too. How did you do what you have done? And he said, okay, here’s what you wanna do. Get out a piece of paper and write down the 50 things that you want to accomplish. So he got out a piece of paper and he wrote down, here are 50 things that I wanna do, I wanna accomplish, right? He said, okay, now cut that down to 25. So narrow it down to what are the 25 most important things on that list. So he did. And then Warren said, okay, now cut that list down to 10. And the pilot did. He said, okay, well, I’m gonna cross this out and cross this out and cross this out.
AJV (01:46):
So he went from 50 to 25 to 10, and then Warren came back and he goes, all right, now I want you to cut that list of 10 in half. Again, I want you to narrow it down to what are the five things that are most important on that list. And the pilot at this point says, whoa, we started with 50. Now you’re all the way down to five. Like, that’s hard. These are all important, these are all significant. And then Warren said, but you asked, how do you be successful? How do you be rich? And if you’ve got more than five things that you’re chasing after that you’re doing, that you’re spending your time on, then it’s too many, right? And I, I, this is something we say at Brand Builders Group a lot, that diluted focus gets diluted results. And I think this is a great story that exemplifies what we’re talking about.
AJV (02:40):
And it’s like, you only have so much attention, right? We only have so many minutes in an hour, so many hours in a day, so many days in a year, and so many years in our life. And if we make this, you know, I hear people talk about this all the time. Here’s my bucket list item of things, right? And it’s like, then we’re kind of just like checking off whatever comes our way without a lot of intentionality. But if we want to really be quote unquote rich or really be successful, then what we need to do is have extreme focus, extreme intentionality into what are the five things, or are the three things. I’m not saying it has to be five, but what are the few things that you could go after with all of your focus, all of your might, all of your intention, all of your attention, all of your passion, all of your time, because that’s where you have success.
AJV (03:31):
You have success in the areas in which you spend the most time. You have the most expertise in the areas in which you spend the most time. You have the best relationships in the areas where you spend the most time, right? And that’s how you become rich,
AJV (04:28):
And if you think about the way you’re going about your day this doesn’t not apply to that, right? I look at my calendar right now somewhat sheepishly. I’m going, I need to take my own advice here because on any given day I might be doing 10, 12, 15 different types of tasks. And let me tell you how I end those days. I end them completely exhausted, completely overwhelmed, not enough energy to go and give my kids and my husband the love time energy that they deserve. Why? Because I’ve expended too much in too many different areas, doing too many different things. Not a an ounce to breathe and ounce to go to the bathroom without being on a phone call, eating lunch while I’m multitasking lunch sometimes, like, what is lunch? Right? That’s my chew, that’s my choosing. No one did that to me.
AJV (05:16):
I did that to myself and I did it because I had a lack of priority. But when I have priorities and I enter and I put all of my energy into those, I have better days, I have more energy left over I, I am more fulfilled and I get more done because I was able to go deeper in the areas that got the best of me. And that is true for life too, right? And it’s like, there’s just so many things that we can do, so many relationships that we can invest in so many tasks that we can complete so many, so many opportunities that we can say yes to. There is a limit.
AJV (05:56):
And, and I say there’s a limit if you wanna do them well, right? So how do you be rich? You narrow down where you’re investing your time, energy, focus, learning, expertise and you pick a few that you can be exceptional at, and that’s how you become rich.
Ep 520: Using AI to Increase Human Connection with Matt Fornito
AJV (00:02):
Hey, everybody, and welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast, AJ Vaden here, one of your co-hosts. And today I have a friend and a fellow BBG member that is our guest on the show today. And I’m so excited to introduce you guys to Matt Ferdo. We actually just had Matt come speak to our internal group at Brand Builders Group, all on the topic of ai, which, you know, that’s what we’re talking about today if you clicked on this episode. But before we get into this conversation of ai, I wanted to let you know why I invited Matt on the show, because we’ve had several other people in and out the last two years talking about ai. But I think one of the things that’s really interesting is, you know, Matt’s the founder of the AI Advisory Group. But one of the things that I recently learned is like, I think one of the things that our team, and I, and I had Matt on the show, because I know if our team struggles with it, and if we struggle with it, you likely struggle with it, which means your team struggle with it is they hear lots about it, they know lots about it, they test different things, but it really hasn’t become a routine way of creating efficiencies in the business, right?
AJV (01:14):
And so the conversation that I wanna have today is like, well, one, we’re gonna talk about what does the future look like with this? And not in a, a job scarcity mindset. That’s not what we’re talking about, how everyone’s jobs are being eliminated, because I don’t really believe that. But it’s more of like, Hey, how can we use these, these tools that are at our disposal to create efficiencies in the lives of our team members and our lives and daily routine tasks that seem to overwhelm us? Because if I hear one more entrepreneur tell me, there’s just not enough hours in the day, right? We, we’ve all said it. I’ve said it, I probably said it last week. And at the same token, it’s like, are we using the things all around us to help improve our schedules and daily lives? And so in having a conversation with Matt a few months ago, I was like, you know what?
AJV (02:01):
It’s time to bring this conversation back to the table, not on just what is the future gonna look like and sales and marketing, but more of like, how can we use this to better our daily lives, right? How do we become more efficient, thus more effective without having to add three, four, or five more working hours to our day every day? So if you were listening to this, that’s the conversation around AI that we’re gonna have today. Now I mentioned this earlier. Matt is the founder of the AI Advisory Group. He’s also been speaking and acting little known fact for more than three decades, 30 years. He’s also led leadership thought leadership C two o round tables different events. He’s on podcasts. He’s had new out news outlets like the CIO and CDO magazines. And I know him personally. So I know that the value that he’s gonna bring today is gonna be so helpful for anyone who is in business, no matter what your role is, entrepreneur, business owner, salesperson in marketing, operations or those, someone aspiring to do any of those things. So without further ado, Matt, welcome to the show,
MF (03:12):
And thank you so much for having me. Thank you for the, the kind words. And it was you know, an honor to have you approach me because when you actually said, you know, we would love to have you come speak internally, that’s the most important thing, right? That transformative mindset of how do we actually start moving the needle and how do we get to a place where we can create a competitive mode and be people first, AI driven to enable everyone in the organization to be more effective, more efficient, and spend more time doing the things they love.
AJV (03:42):
Yeah. And that’s really the conversation around this that I love. ’cause I, I love because I, I, you know, I’m just not one of those people who’s gonna look at anything as the, you know, glass is half empty, gloom and doom. This is gonna, you know, take over the need for humans. It’s like, nah, I don’t, I just, I just don’t believe that, right? I think that as a human species, we’re also, we’re always gonna be needed. So I think there is, if we, if we just can all agree on that for a second, then there’s a lot of power and how we can use some of these tools. So here’s my first question for you and I wanna help our audience get to know you a little bit. But before we talk about how you got into AI in the first place, what I would really love to hear from you, for everyone who’s listening, is when it comes to personal branding, right? This is a podcast all about building an influential personal brand. A lot of that is tied to, you know, the mi the mindset of entrepreneurship. But how does AI benefit you when you consider all the different things of building a personal brand and being an entrepreneur? Like, how, how does AI benefit you if you’re that person?
MF (04:47):
Well, and we, we can get into my, my backstory as to why this even came to fruition. But I think the, the reality is I wanted to create a lifestyle brand where everyone that’s a part of the team could actually have good and strong work-life balance. And that meant how do we do more with less? How do we use technology to our benefit? And so there’s me and one other person that are running the organization, and then we have former Fortune 500 CDOs on the team. And for us, it’s let’s eat our own dog food. What do we need to do? Where do we spend so much time? Where do we waste time where we could be having more efficient productivity, or we could be having more meaningful relationships? And so for, and like two examples on that of what we’ve built out.
MF (05:34):
One is a just an inbound prospecting engine. For those that reach out to me, we have an entire automation process that determines where does someone fit in the lifecycle in their maturity as well as are they an ideal customer? Because if they’re an ideal customer, then we wanna get a meeting set. And getting to that point has now all been automated, and that saves us about 30 hours per week just with that, just for one person, right? So if you have a sales team if you have a marketing team that’s highly multiplicative, and the same token in regards to me talking with a lot of boards of directors and c-suite, you need to do a lot of research to be prepared for those types of meetings, right? You can’t just wing it. And so we’ve created a, using LLMs, we’ve created a sales brief, like that goes right next to the calendar event. So we know everything that’s going on with the company in the news, based on their website the person that I’m meeting with, or the groups of people that I’m meeting with, and they’re likely pain points so that I can build a stronger, more trusting relationship faster. And I used AI to help augment doing that, but it was AI as a enablement tool, not AI as a replacement tool.
AJV (06:46):
Yeah, I, I, I love that term. It’s an enablement tool, not an a replacement tool, but those are two really good tangible things for everyone listening, if you didn’t pick up on that, is just, I mean, I’ve had these conversations with people, even in the brand builders group membership community of going, I just don’t have enough time to take all these calls myself anymore. And it’s like, well, tell me about the calls that you’re taking. It’s like every single discovery call. And what I hear you saying, it’s like, Nope, there’s opportunities for, you know, technology automation and some AI integration of, well, how do we help expedite that process so that every discovery call has actually already been qualified so that you’re actually taking the calls that you should be taking, routing the other ones in different directions. And then also research, right? The amounts of information that’s required to help keep you up to date that is exhaustive
AJV (07:41):
And so you know, just, I think those, those are really helpful tangible ways of like, in everyday interactions, both on a sales front and just like an operational front of like, man, like kind of need to be in the know to some degree of what’s happening in my space, in the market, in the economy. It’s like, to what degree everyone is different. But if you don’t wanna get consumed in the deep, dark, black hole that is news and media, then how can we use this to gimme the things I need to know that are pertinent to my role, my industry, my space without getting consumed in the masses? So I think those are two really great things right there.
MF (08:19):
Yeah. And that’s a great point, is that there’s so much noise in the industry today that people wonder where the heck do I start? And, and how do I actually create meaningful impact? And, you know, I spoke as to what we’re personally doing because we want to eat our own dog food so that we can evangelize that out as proof that you can use ai. The reality is that especially for entrepreneurs, unless you’re going for VC or PE funding, you have a lot of things on your plate. You have a lot of manual things that you do day in and day out, and it’s time consuming. My calendar’s booked in 15 minute blocks with task and I shouldn’t maybe use technology pitches. But reclaim AI is one I do use because it automates putting the task into empty slots on your calendar in regards to what needs to be done, right? But what we look to do, what was that
AJV (09:09):
Again? Say that one for so they can hear it.
MF (09:11):
Sure. It’s reclaim.ai, and so they’re a, they do task inhabit automation. So if we have a meeting set some or, or a meeting after this somebody wants to book, they can book that and the task will automatically get moved. So that way you’re not trying to figure out what to do, which takes a lot of cognitive load, right? Of trying to figure out like, what’s important, what should I focus on? What fires do I need to put out? Instead, you can go, okay, I know what’s important because I’ve already put it into my calendar and I can focus on the things that matter.
AJV (09:42):
Yeah. And I think those are like the, the subtle tools that we all should just, even if you choose not to use ’em, be aware of ’em, because right now it’s whether you’re doing it or you’re paying for someone else to do it, regardless of how that’s happening, this is an idea of something you could automate and repurpose that person’s time into something that’s more significant. Yeah. Right. Not, you know, what you said, not replace them but replace the task, right? Yep. What else could they be doing if they weren’t doing this very simple thing, right? A hundred
MF (10:14):
Percent.
AJV (10:15):
How did you get into this? Right? And I know we kind of, you know, jumped right in, but I, I do think it’s important for people to understand, you know, regardless of what you may think, it’s like AI isn’t entirely brand spanking new, right? Sure. It’s been an evolution process. And so how long did you, how long ago did you start using a AI in your life? How’d you get into it? What led you to here?
MF (10:40):
Yeah, I mean, so AI started the, we’ll say the majority of models started in the 1950s, right? And there’s been two winters that were general only due to compute, and I’m nerdy now, it’s not too much, but I, I love this space. And when I was in school, took through regular elementary, middle high school, through university, and even into my PhD, I took every, like, quantitative course because math had a, a, a beauty, a pattern, right? The same way that as a musician, I could look at that. And when I was finishing my master’s about to start my PhD my advisor and I actually had we’ll say difference of opinions because I was doing a lot of work with the, the Office of International Research Education Development, working with Third World like NGOs to help third world countries be more efficient and productive.
MF (11:32):
And one of the things that we found out in doing that research was that when looking at really small villages, the entire population only trusted the village chief. And so if they didn’t actually get the buy-in those NGOs, didn’t get the buy-in from the village chief, and nobody was going to do anything that was said. And, and so looking at, like, this was called social network analysis, but looking at these types of things was really, really important to me because it’s like the internal mechanisms of our attitudes, behaviors, cognitions and values are at least supported or proxied by data. And so it means that we can use data to help enable and improve behavioral change. And there’s so many ways that we can do that. We’re talking on the organizational level, but there’s also the, the personal level. There’s also the, the coaching level, there’s the therapy level.
MF (12:22):
And so when I was in my PhD, I left after my master’s was actually recruited out as a data scientist. I think it was one of the first data science titles out there. ’cause That came into fruition in 20 10, 20 11 officially. And and so I went to now Defunct Sports Authority and basically rolled up to the CEO and CMO and and then was a data scientist for quite a few years building important models. And sometimes like that impetus of feeling or thinking you’re important ’cause you’re helping drive change wasn’t always true either. Like the CEO of Dish had me build out all of these models for this 15 do billion dollars of spend that he had. And and it was for and FCC spectrum auction. And then the day of, he told me he’s just gonna go on his gut and that that hurts, right?
MF (13:13):
To hear like, you’ve spent months and months working on this, you know, it’s good. You’re proud of your work, and it wasn’t leveraged. And that painted a picture to me that we’re seeing in industry today, that 80 to 90% of AI models never make it into production. And a lot of that had to do with the tools and technologies of the past. But as I moved further, I had a, a data science consulting firm. I was very, very fortunate that some Nvidia leaders had seen me keynote and event back in 2015. And they brought my firm on one of seven service delivery partners worldwide for them. And then after a few years of running that, where I was working a hundred, 120 hours a week and killing myself and losing friends and family I, I knew I needed to back out of that.
MF (13:57):
And fortunately, they actually asked if I would join what’s called the VAR solution Integrator space. And so for those guys, they sell hardware, they sell software, and they have like implementation and managed services. And they asked me to build an AI practice for their top partner. And I thought, this is actually great because we can look at this at a system level of like, what is going on with the organization? And instead of focusing on like one little use case, what are we actually trying to do here holistically? And then figure out what you actually need from hardware, from software and from services. And so the, the company I was at as well as the next company, we ended up being number one and number three globally in sales worldwide with Nvidia top five, with like Dell, HPE, Cisco, along with a lot of the SaaS software companies.
MF (14:40):
And because for me it was about how do we enable people to have a strategic roadmap on where they want to go and how do we help drive and implement change? Because what I was really seeing was that people are still stuck in the mindset of the past of let’s be transactional, let’s focus on one small thing and let’s focus on technology. But the reality is, the gaps today are really in regards to people and processes. If you don’t have people that trust ai, that trust data, that want to leverage it to improve their lives, they’re never going to use it. And the same thing with processes. If you’re not assessing your ecosystem and identifying where are the gaps? Where are we spending so much time today that we could potentially automate a workflow or use AI for then what are we doing? And so, you know, we did a great job at those two companies.
MF (15:33):
The sales teams were absolutely phenomenal. And I still had a, a, a small last hint of an ego and and I said, I want to have a chief data officer role. So I took a role at a Goldman Sachs back company, and after six months the CEO and I decided to part ways. And it wasn’t that like either of us was wrong or that we didn’t respect one another or trust one another. It was that they wanted to build a platform with lots of dashboards and lots of data that people could try to like decipher. And I wanted to minimize everything so that we could actually implement behavior change. Because if you have a hundred metrics, yeah, nothing’s going to change. But if you have three things that you know are your weaknesses that you focus on, you’re going to exponentially improve those and see exponential growth within your company. And so that’s what really ultimately led to me creating the AI advisory group. We have fractional Yeah, go ahead.
AJV (16:31):
Because I think that’s, that what you just said is, I think, so valuable because I think so many times people go, they hear things like, data is your, is the new competitive advantage, or, you know, there there’s so many sayings like that, and I don’t disagree with that. Like I think data is vitally important. In fact, if you looked at our dashboards you’d throw up, they’re overwhelming. We have so many. And I think that’s sometimes the challenge. It’s like to even sit and review all of the dashboards could easily take hours daily. Mm-Hmm,
MF (17:17):
Well first you have to assess where your company is and where you think the weaknesses or gaps are, right? And so like if let’s just pick the, the sales side example, the, the BDRs SDRs make phone calls for, right? And and so you could potentially measure the number of phone calls, but that’s a proxy for everything because ultimately you’re just trying to get to conversions, right? You want customers to buy. And so maybe increasing phone calls will lead to that and, and very likely it will with diminishing returns. But what if marketing could better target the ICP and drive the right customers already into that funnel? Then you’re gonna see higher conversion rates. And then if you have processes for your sales reps that are systematic, so you can identify, do some people have weaknesses in a demo or do they not ask the right question?
MF (18:10):
Then you should see higher conversions on a per person level. And so being able to just like wonder where you’re struggling or where you have inefficiencies, where the gaps are, where you think that there’s problems, you as a subject matter expert, that’s what’s really important, right? It’s kind of the same thing. Whether you heard this in high school or college or not, was that ice cream and murders are highly correlated. So if you buy ice cream, you’re more likely to murder. But that’s correlational, not causational. It’s that summertime increases the likelihood that people are outdoors and increases the heat, which increases like frustration and angst. And so people buy more ice cream in the summer but there’s also a higher propensity for murders. And so like, if you’re not a subject matter expert and you just look at data and say, oh, these things are connected, then you could really be making uninformed decisions. But if you bring subject matter experts in that really understand sales, understand marketing, understand product or operations, finance, et cetera then you can identify like, where can we use data to help identify if our perspective is correct or if we have gaps in our thinking,
AJV (19:21):
Okay, this is so good, so we’re just gonna use me as a case study, for example. ’cause I think this is a really great tangible way that I haven’t even thought of how to use AI and data. And so I’d love to hear your thoughts as, you know, as people are listening to this going, wait, what? So one of the things that I heard you say is, and I, and I agree, it’s like, you know, I come from a sales background, which is why my ears pricked up. When you use that example of, you know, I was always told from, from the very beginnings of my sales career make more, make more calls, make more calls, work the numbers, work the numbers. And it’s like, and to some degree, yeah, like, you know, the numbers work themselves out. The more calls you make, naturally more sales you make, but not necessarily in a percentage base, right?
AJV (20:08):
Mm-Hmm.
MF (20:47):
With sales and marketing? Yeah. Well, so I, I think that what we’re seeing today, especially around the and I guess let’s clarify real quick for the audience on ai. AI has been created as this umbrella term now, right? Generally people use it now in regards to gen ai, gener generative AI like chat, GBT but there’s also the computer vision, deep learning, like self-driving cars. There’s machine learning, like what is the value of my house based on, you know, location, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, and but then there’s also even like basic things like rule base, right? Like if then statements. And and so when thinking about it for marketing, that’s been the we’ll say inflection area that people are using chat, GPT and or, or, or any of them, right? I, I, I have all of them.
MF (21:40):
And so I don’t just want say that chat, GP t’s the one because I love perplexity ai Claude’s very good emini is moving up. And so it, it doesn’t matter what flavor you choose, and you should probably play around with different ones to see what really resonates. But what’s really, really important is that and then I’ll get into your que actual question, is that the majority of material has been scraped from the web, right? And people tend to have, you know, repeat other people’s thinking. And so if you just use the base version of chat, GBT or any of the LLMs, then you’re going to get a very basic output, right? It’s not going to reflect your identity, your company’s brand identity. And so what’s really, really important is that you have to basically create an agent or a bot or an input prompt that really specifies on like who you are and what you’re trying to accomplish and how you want that done.
MF (22:36):
It’s my create framework, which we won’t go into today, and that will ultimately lead into better outputs. And so from the marketing side, we’re certainly seeing that as help me create an email campaign or help me with SEO optimization of my website. And we’re not really seeing it in regards to how do we increase more of the machine learning structure data? How do we increase conversion rates? How do we make sure we’re targeting the right ICP? So our cost per dollar cost per acquisition is much lower, right? And that’s where we need to go is augmenting the gen AI aspects of those campaigns with like feeding that language in into structured data model to say, oh, okay, when we use these terms, we get much higher conversions, right? And that’s like the nuance that we aren’t really tackling or organizations aren’t tackling today.
MF (23:28):
From the sales side, you can start rudimentarily at let’s look at all of our historic conversations, right? And say, what do I need to say next to progress this deal along? Because we want, you may not be able to read through, you know, tens, hundreds, thousands of emails and texts and brand scripts over the co over the course of a prospect, but it’s very, very easy for a large language model to do that. And so, because the, we’ll say foundationally, what you really want is to have these models help make decisions based on large chunks of data that you can’t really leverage. And so because that way you get faster time to value, you get more we’ll say a higher propensity or likelihood that you get to spend more time with that prospect, and Lord knows that you definitely increase conversion rates, the more time you actually spend talking with someone and messaging back and forth.
AJV (24:32):
Hmm. Yeah. That’s, so I think that’s so good. ’cause That’s like, yeah, it’s like, I think tons of people talk about, you know, chat GTP, chat GPT in terms of writing email copy or marketing copy or a landing page, but I haven’t heard anyone really talk about how are we using it to make sure that we increase conversion, that we’re targeting the right people in the right way, that allow us to have more targeted conversations, better conversations, longer conversations with our ideal prospect. So I think that’s really insightful for anyone who’s listening of going like, Hey, it’s one thing to generate a lot of calls or any calls. Yeah, it’s a whole nother thing to generate calls with your ideal prospect, right? And I think that’s a very big deal of, Hey, if we’re gonna be on the call, let’s make sure it’s with the right person talking about the right thing.
AJV (25:25):
So how can we be more targeted upfront? I think that’s really helpful. The other thing as you were talking made me think about is in terms of using like large chunks of data, like one of the things that we ask, you know, our, you know, sales director is, Hey, I want you auditing calls every month as spot checks. Yeah. And it’s a very time consuming, lengthy commitment, but I’m always like, where’s your report? Where’s your report? What’d you do? What’d you do? Right?
AJV (26:10):
And it’s like, I’m constantly kind of battling like, where, where are we supposed to find time to do that with everything else we’re doing? And what I also hear is like, well, there’s the potential of using, you know, recording transcripts, uploading those and using the right prompts in GPT to give initial rounds of evaluations that just shortens maybe perhaps the time in review so that there’s highlights that are pulled out so then I can spend more time in conversation training versus, versus all the time just listening. So I think about it when I used to have a team, it’s like I would spend an hour listening to the call in order to only get like 10 to 15 minutes of feedback. Whereas if I have 10 to 15 minutes of review and 45 minutes on training and feedback, how different would the outcome be?
MF (26:58):
Well, and, and when I was at revenue io was where I was the chief data officer, right? And that’s what we were doing was it had embedded sales coaching from a botter agent that says, okay, you’re monologuing too long, or you’re talking too fast. But those transcripts would also populate into the platform. And so, you know, it was really just at the time, it was the video and the transcript, right? Like Fathom has, right? But where I think we can go in the market is twofold. One is a, an individual can say, how did I do on this call? Maybe that’s according to medic or med pick framework or Challenger, whatever the heck you’re using. But is there anything I could have done better? Right? And it’s the same thing even for your, your team, right? Are they are they coaching effectively? But then you can also look long. So a, a sales coach then could like go in and see, you know, the weaknesses or strengths of that individual call, but then we could take that further and go, let’s look on a individual level across all of their calls and feed all of that in at one time and say, what patterns does this individual need work on? Right? What are, what are the problems that they consistently have because we know that’s going to move the needle if they fix those major problems.
AJV (28:14):
How would you do that?
MF (28:17):
You just feed all of the transcripts in from all of their calls
AJV (28:20):
All at the same time. Mm-Hmm.
MF (28:21):
AJV (28:22):
Say, this is why I’m just going mind blown
MF (28:25):
And mind, mind, mind you, like like chat GPT, they have something called token limits. So chat, GPT can’t do all of them, but there’s other ones that can
AJV (28:35):
Like, so what would be some, so that’s another great question is let’s talk about some of the, the tools and platforms that you have found that are highly helpful, effective and, and just user friendly, I would say. So or the novice out there, right? Who’s listening, who’s going like, okay, okay, like, maybe I could see some really good value. It’s like, and I think about the number of, you know, not to harp on this topic, sales teams that I’ve been a part of training where it’s like, part of my job was to just sit in call centers all day long doing call audits and reviews. And it’s like, I know my time could have been more efficient if there had been tools like this, you know, 10 years ago, and that was my job. But so what are some of these platforms and tools that you highly recommend?
MF (29:22):
So I guess we’ll start in a few different areas, and I might have to pull up a tab on mine, that’s the other ones that I use. So on, on that sales side, you have like revenue io, chorus.ai, and gong, and all of those are like rev ops sales type coaching, right? So if you have a team, those are all very valid, useful tools to leverage in that playground. When we talk about like task automation, we use you know, Asana as our project manager and task manager, and then we feed those into reclaim AI so that we don’t have to make decisions on what the heck we’re doing each day. It’s automatically prioritized and scheduled into our calendar. Outside of that, you know, I think there’s, there’s also like the, the we’ll say crawl, walk, run approach with technology. And so beautiful AI is a phenomenal like PowerPoint type creator.
MF (30:17):
And and so very intuitive, very easy to use. If you’re better with technology, I’d say go to Canva. If you’re very, very good with technology, then you go to like the Adobe suite, right? And so, you know, there’s, there’s more of a threshold to learn those types of things. The PowerPoint creators today are not good
MF (31:03):
And so we’re not there yet in regards to that. In regards to art creation, mid journey is probably the defacto standard. There’s also stable diffusion, and they are not good at creating like frameworks, right? And so if we’re talking about brand builders clients you’re going to have to manually create those, sorry. Canva has tons of great designs and Vato element has lots of great designs. So you can use those and then fill out your own process or framework. But in regards to automatically creating those, we’re not there yet either. But in regards to, you want, you want a picture of a, a monkey astronaut eating a banana on top of a spaceship, it can do that, right? And so if, like, if you want something like that for a blog post, it’s, it’s phenomenal, right? If you want something to really resonate visually, you can do that.
MF (31:56):
And I, I have pheno like art, I could have never created, I was a musician and a singer growing up, but you know, I could doodle but I could not go further than that. And so to see things come to life that, like you envision in your head, and maybe it’s not quite the vision you have, but like to see that come to fruition is so invigorating because the same thing with there’s there’s two music creator studios out there right now for generative music, and they’re getting better and better every single day. And like, they can’t, I can’t extract it. I don’t know if this shows up, but my like soundboard like, like I can’t extract it into Ableton, which is another not AI tool. It’s a sound mixing tool. I can’t extract it into there and have all the different instruments, right? But we’re likely going to get there in the next year. And that means that if you are a producer or want to be a musician, but maybe you can never play an instrument or you couldn’t mix now, you’ll be able to do that. And that, like, that really resonates with me that people will be able to like really help build up their own creative side as opposed to us just trying to say, rewrite this email for me.
AJV (33:07):
Yeah. You know what’s so interesting is like, I live in Nashville, Tennessee, so clearly I have at least a couple of friends that are singer songwriters. But one of my friends is a very good singer songwriter, and I was having lunch with her the other day, and she was talking about how there’s several artists now that only wanna hear songs and their voices. So she’s able to take all of her songs that she’s writing, use ai to use their voices. So when they hear the song, they’re like, this is how it would sound if I was singing it. And she goes, the effectiveness of that is mind blowingly successful when they go, man, I like the way I sound singing that
AJV (34:06):
So I thought that was like a very cool use case of something that’s not taking anything away from what she’s not replacing. It’s enabling her to enhance what she’s doing for someone else. And, and as you were talking about like mid journey and stuff, like, one of the things that we toyed around with, and this is just like a, a tangible customer service or customer experience case study for anyone who’s like, well, how do I use some of these if like, it’s not gonna do graphics for me, or it’s not gonna do PowerPoints? And it’s like, no, but so if you think about it in a customer experience environment, like one of the things that we’re trying to do is, you know, during different life moments and these could be personal professional, but you know, we help a lot of people with book launches.
AJV (34:50):
And so, you know, it’s like, well, we’ll use different AI tools of them holding their own book that hasn’t even been created yet. Yeah. You know, or like somebody’s going through a really, you know, hard personal times and we’ll put them in what they would look like as a superhero, right? With like an encouraging note and message. So upload their picture and say, turn this into a superhero. And just you, you know, those are just like little, little ways that you could use some of this in a customer experience way where it takes minutes, minutes, literally minutes, no money of going, you said you joined Brand elders group ’cause you wanted to write that book. We’re so excited to be a part of the journey, and then we include the picture of them with their book. That hasn’t even happened yet, right? So I think it’s like part of, of it, it’s gonna require all of us to use our human brain to go, how do I use this to make it work for whatever I do? And I think a lot of people struggle with a lot of what I struggle with, which is, okay, I don’t have a lot of time to go learn all of these different platforms. ’cause Already it’s like I jotted down, you listed like nine, I’m like, already, that’s like, I don’t have time to learn all those, right? And so I would be,
MF (36:03):
Which which, which we could say like a simplified way of approaching that is going to any of the chat GBT or LLMs and saying, I’m trying to use generative AI to accomplish X task. Are there any tools or name the tools that can do that? Right? And then you at least have a short list of like, what you’re trying to accomplish. Because the, the biggest issue with technology today outside of nothing talking to one another, is that people are trying to round peg square hole. Yeah. But it’s like, you should figure out what your problem is first instead of trying to find a cool tool that maybe can solve one or two of your problems. Oh.
AJV (36:33):
So that’s good. So just use these generative AI tools to figure out what generative AI tools you should use
MF (36:42):
And with what you said too, you know, thinking about I’ve known Gigi since I think oh 6, 0 7. And and, and you know, he was always so keen on wow experiences and I think he was only at a hundred countries instead of every country in the world when we first met. And, and that wow experience thing really resonated with me because I worked at Disney, I worked at Target, which emulated Disney and that aspect of caring about the customer, putting them first, but delivering something that’s a little more impactful than anyone else would do, really, really stands out. Right? And I had a a client of mine who one of their sales reps, this was 15, 20 years ago now, but he would take somebody’s LinkedIn headshot, he would send it to Japan, they would make a bobblehead, he would get it sent to the, like the CEO’s office and ask for a meeting. And he had about a 95% conversion rate in regards to getting a meeting scheduled. And it’s because nobody does that, right? They just send out these campaigns to 40,000 people and hope that they get some hits. But people are tired of that. They really want, like, I wanna feel special, I want people I work with who feel special and we treat them special.
AJV (37:59):
Hmm. Yeah. And this is a way you can do it in a really short amount of time without a lot of cost because that’s so prohibitive in some ways. But it’s like, man, you could do the similar things that really do make that impact without, you know, all the added costs with just using some creativity. The other, the other thing that I think would be, you know, really interesting, and you mentioned this earlier, and I wanna kind of come back to it. ’cause I think collectively what I, I wanna have this conversation be around is things that are universally applicable. And I think that universally everyone struggles with time management. I don’t care who you are, right? It’s like we struggle with the amount of things that we add to our plate, whether that’s our fault or whatever. I hear people say stuff like, you know, the the B word, right?
AJV (38:44):
I, I try not to say it the busy word. I think that a lot of people go, there’s just not enough hours in the day. And it’s like, well, yeah, I can see that, except for maybe you’re just doing too many tasks that you shouldn’t be doing
MF (39:39):
Ai. Yep.
AJV (39:40):
Oh, ai, right? See, that’s why I’m asking
MF (40:05):
Yeah, I mean, I, I think I almost want to take a step back, right? Because with what we do with the AI advisor group is most people go right to tactics and they don’t take a step back and start at strategy, right? And so then you’re always putting out fires, you’re always chasing shiny objects, and it becomes really problematic and it happens with executives along with everyone down the line. And so for me, just so
AJV (40:30):
You know, I completely understand because everyone comes to us and wants to build the funnel, build the website, and I’m like, you don’t even know what your business is. We, we, we can’t do that
MF (40:42):
And so coming from that perspective is like, you know, to the point of that my calendar’s fully booked with tasks this week from like 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM But if I just said and, and go back to like Pareto’s principle of the, the 20% rule leading to 80% of outputs and that’s largely due to a severe concussion I had that lasted 10 months. I could take away my task manager and just go, these are the five things that are most important. And it goes back to a story on Warren Buffett talking to his pilot, whether it’s real or false. And Pilot said, I want to be rich like you. Can you teach me how to be rich and be successful? Warren Buffett says, sure, write a list of the, the 50 things that you’re trying to accomplish. And he writes 50 things down and he goes, okay cut that down to 20 and he cuts it down to 20.
MF (41:39):
He goes, okay, cut it down to 10. And he cuts it down again. He says, okay, cut it down to five. And he goes, this is hard. Like, I don’t know what’s important. He goes, you gotta cut it down to five. And he cuts it down to five. And he says, if you focus on anything outside of this, it’s a distraction and noise. It’s not leading to the outcomes that you want. And so one of the things that I want to push or sh share with the audience is that don’t be busy for busy’s sake. Make sure you are doing things that actually move the needle that lead to the life that you want to have that lead to the company you want to have. And so these tools are going to either be an enabler of that and make sure we’re more efficient and productive, or you’re going to be an additional noise that just makes us check off more checklist, but we don’t actually drive innovation or success.
MF (42:36):
And I want to ensure that people are thinking of this in the right way because it’s not just AI and automation are great and amazing, and I, and I strongly believe it’s true, I’m already at 50 hours saved per week. Personally, we’re likely going to have 120 to 200 hours per employee saved, right? Which is a three to five x multiplier. But that means we’re doing that because we wanna focus on the things that are important. And if you’re filling your calendar with things that aren’t just to stay busy or appear busy, then you’re not approaching it the right way.
AJV (43:09):
Well, that is such a better answer than the question that I ask
MF (44:06):
And I just read a report yesterday that said 90% of all executives, not just entrepreneurs 90% of executives spend an hour or less on strategy a month. And that’s mind blowing to me, right? To not take the time to ensure that you’re going in the right direction and focusing on what’s important. It’s why so many companies struggle. Like they, they don’t do that. They don’t look at product market fit. They don’t identify an ICP, like all the things that actually matter. And brand builders covers all of it. So thank you guys on top. But if you’re not doing the basics, then you don’t know who your customer is, you don’t know their pains, needs and wants, then who are you selling to and why are you trying to create a product or service offering or someone that you’ve never even talked to or don’t understand?
AJV (44:49):
Mm-Hmm.
MF (45:23):
Well, and, and I think it’s a great point. I, I know I shared it with your team, but the, like PRCV of pain, repetition, cost, and value, it’s like, yes. So you need to identify what are pains, right? Not what’s interesting or cool ’cause that’s the shiny object syndrome, but what are actual pains and is it repetitive? Right? The, I mean, I talked with my COO yesterday and I’m like, oh, this kind of stinks. And he goes, oh, well we could automate that. But it’s probably gonna be really complex. And I go, yeah, let’s not, it, it takes me, it was literally in regards to actually just putting task into Asana, right? We actually built it out so you could just do it in Slack. So it’s really technically easier. I was looking for an, I was considering an easier way to do it, but I’m like, if I map out the actual task that I might need to do for the day at the end of the day or whatever I need to accomplish, it takes me maybe two to five minutes, right?
MF (46:15):
Like, we don’t need to automate that. That’s not a big pain. But if we talk about 30 to 60 minutes of researching each prospect and we look at that over the course of a year, that’s hundreds of hours saved, right? That’s, that’s meaningful. And that’s where I want people to look at, like what does it actually cost to build this? And what’s the actual value? And then you can really ascertain is this worthwhile to pursue? Is it just something that, okay, I’ll do it, whatever. It’s obnoxious. And ensuring too that we don’t end up filling that extra time with more noise and more just ask. But we focus on what’s actually meaningful, which usually means a better product, a better service, more customer engagement and interactions, more engagements with your team to build a strong culture that’s aligned. All of those things are what really create a fantastic business and everything else is noise.
AJV (47:07):
Mm. So, so good. Matt, this has been so helpful, so awesome in so many different ways. If people wanna stay in touch with you, get to know about more about you and your company, where should they go?
MF (47:19):
We can do two ways. We’ll do, my email is Matt for Nito, F-O-R-N-I-T-O, at the a i a g.com. And and otherwise if you want to reach me on LinkedIn I certainly post a ton of content on psychology, ai, business and leadership. And so feel free to connect with me on there, happy to chat with anyone.
AJV (47:41):
And we will put those as just Matt for Nito as the LinkedIn name. We’ll put that in the show notes and the fact that you gave out your email address email address, I’m flabbergasted
MF (47:56):
That we have a little bit of that
AJV (48:00):
Thank you so much. And the fact that you would even give your email addresses super kind and generous. So if you’ve got questions curious about what he does, how he integrates into companies, how he helps them streamline operations with AI and strategy email him. He just gave it to you so clearly he’s got a plan for handling all that. But then check him out on LinkedIn posting all kinds of good content. Matt, thank you so much for being on the show. Appreciate you so much. And everybody else, stay tuned for the recap episode, which will be coming up next on the influential personal brand.
MF (48:35):
Thanks, AJ
Ep 519: Our Entire Digital Marketing Strategy | Sean Cannell Episode Recap
RV (00:06):
Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is the place where we help mission-driven messengers, just like you learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden, and I’m the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. And this show is to help experts learn how to become more wealthy and well known. I know you’re gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started. Yeah. I can teach you my entire content marketing strategy in five minutes. So it starts really simple. My entire philosophy is teach everything you know for free in small bite-sized chunks and all random miscellaneous order. And the reason why you can do this, and people don’t believe this, and they’re scared about it, right as they go, well, Rory, why would I teach everything I know for free?
RV (01:01):
Then why would anybody pay me for something? Like if the point of my personal brand or the point of content is to get people to hire me and I just teach everything for free, then why would they do that? And the answer is because you gotta understand something is people don’t pay for information. They pay for organization and application. What they actually are hiring you to do is not to teach them the information, it’s to help them apply it to their life, to apply it to their business. So you can teach everything you know, for free. Like literally give it away. Now, we usually do it in random order because part of what people pay for is organization. That’s part of what helps them apply it to their life, is just going like, here’s everything, you know, in sequence. And that’s what they usually have to pay for.
RV (01:50):
But you can, that’s, that’s the whole strategy. Now, when you look at tactically, how does that roll out or functionally, how do you, how do you translate that into what we actually do every day? Well, when we make content, pretty much every piece of content, we just ask about the, the three Es. We call ’em the three s. And you just gotta decide which of these three E’s do you really focus on, or at least are you focusing on for like that specific piece of content. So the three E’s, super simple, entertainment, encouragement or education, entertainment, encouragement or education. So you go, is this content meant to entertain people to, you know, make them laugh, to make them, make them cry to, uh, you know, just entertain them and keep them occupied? That if you are funny or if you are very charismatic or dramatic, then maybe it is entertainment.
RV (02:48):
And maybe you’re good at that, right? And these are like all the viral videos, the pranks and the, and the sweet puppy dogs and the, you know, penguins playing with each other. Like whatever. It’s, it’s entertaining stuff. And that stuff tends to go viral, right? Or it’s really, really funny. So if you’ve got personality, then bring that into what you’re doing. For me, I tend to live in the other two E’s, which are encouragement and education. So what is encouragement? It’s, it’s exactly that. It’s, it’s, you turn on the camera, push record and encourage the people who are on the other side, right? Like, pretend, don’t, don’t think of it as like you’re looking at a camera, talking to a camera. Pretend. And think about it as if you’re talking to a person who’s on the other side of that camera and just talking to that person.
RV (03:36):
If they were discouraged, what do they need to hear, right? If they’re beat up emotionally, if they’re struggling in their mental health, if, if they’re, you know, wanting to quit, if they’re frustrated, if they’re upset, if they’re mad, if they’re sad, what would you tell them? Whatever you would say to that person, say it to the camera. And that is encouraging and that is some of the best content. And, and it’s that simple. And then the last one is probably the, the most straightforward and universally applicable to all of us, which is educate, you know, education. So teach me something. So what do you, what knowledge do you have that about something that you can teach people? Whatever that is, is what you should share. That’s why we, we say all the time, you’re most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. Why?
RV (04:30):
Because you know exactly what that person is going through on the other end. You know exactly what they need to learn, and you have learned it. That’s how you got to where you are. So reach back and talk to them, teach them, show them the way, share, share with them everything you know, and that’s a great content marketing strategy. So in terms of the philosophy, it’s simple. I teach everything I know for free, small bite-sized chunks. In all random order. In terms of the content marketing strategy, it’s one of the three E’s. Is this entertaining? Is it encouraging or is it educational? Probably some combination of the three. And then in terms of how we like functionally produce and distribute the content, that’s a process that we use called the content diamond, which is really simple. You start with one main asset, which is typically a video, usually five to 10 minutes.
RV (05:28):
And then we’re just gonna take that main asset and we’re gonna break it apart into a bunch of mini or micro assets. And the reason we call it a diamond is ’cause we think we’re gonna, we’re gonna create a bunch of assets that are like text and imagery, and then a bunch of assets that are video and audio. So when you create the text and imagery assets, what you do is you start with the video, you get it transcribed, and there’s all these tools you can use to, to do that. You get it transcribed, and then you have someone edit the transcription of your actual words and they turn it into a full length article. They’re then gonna post that full length article on like, you know, LinkedIn pulse, their blogging platform. You can post it on medium, you can post it anywhere their other full length articles appear.
RV (06:16):
You can have you or your editor just go through and highlight like two or three catch phrases, like two of your most powerful points. We call ’em pillar points. And just highlight those and turn them into image quotes. Or you can turn it into a carousel or you can, you know, put some animation behind it, some nature and a little music. And now you have a reel. Um, you can also post those images on Pinterest. And so now you’re, you have all these image assets that are coming from the text simultaneously while that’s happening, you take the video and you are going to edit it for YouTube, right? You, you put some B roll in there, you put some royalty free music underneath, have some onscreen texts, right? Like things flying in and popping up, um, a little bit of lower thirds to introduce yourself.
RV (07:02):
Maybe you have a, a little fancy sizzle reel. You drop that in there. And now you have this nice full length edited video for YouTube. Also jump cuts right in and outside, inside back. Um, just to split up the visual appeal. Now you’ve got that video on YouTube, strip that audio, that final edited audio, strip that audio off of that, and you’re gonna post that as a short form podcast. And now you’re a podcaster and didn’t even know it, right? So now you’re podcasting. And then take that, that nice, you know, full length YouTube video and cut it down into some 62nd clips. And that’s what you’re gonna put on. You’re gonna throw it on TikTok and reels and Instagram and YouTube shorts and um, wherever else. And so those are all your video and audio assets. And then you take all your text and imagery assets that we all created from this main video.
RV (07:56):
And now we have all these mini, mini assets or these micro assets. And then you just pull them together and you throw ’em up on your blog. And if you go to rory veda blog.com, you can see we do this every single week. So the one place, if you wanna get all things Rory Vaden, and you want to get it first and you want to get it for free, and you want to get it in all formats, the video, the audio, the, the carousel post, the short, the short, you know, reels, and then the full length article text so that you can scan. And if you wanna be able to ask me questions, you drop ’em right there in the comments. You drop all of that on your blog. And then we’re just using all the mini assets to, to redirect people back to that location to where we can communicate and have that conversation. But then my blog is the home, the home base of my personal brand where I can meet people and I’m just giving away content for free, for free, for free until they trust us enough to hire me. And that’s it. That’s the, that’s the whole strategy. That’s, that’s the whole big picture. That’s all you gotta do.
Ep 518: How to Build a Huge YouTube Channel with Sean Cannell
RV (00:02):
There’s people that I learned from, and then there’s people that I do life with. And Sean Cannell is someone that is both of those. I like to think anyways this man is so brilliant and he is touched by God. And I really believe that he is somebody worth following, not only professionally but personally. And the more I’ve gotten to know him, the more that I have loved him and believed in him, and also learned from him. He is without a doubt, one of the world’s leading authorities on YouTube strategy growing with video. He is the og, like one of the OGs in this space. He’s the CEO of Think Media, the host of the Think Media podcast. His mission is to help 10,000 purpose-driven people, create a full-time living with YouTube. Right? It’s a very clear, specific niche. Sean’s YouTube channels have over two and a half million subscribers.
RV (00:55):
His videos have been viewed 150 million plus times. He has been featured in a number of places as one of the top YouTubers. He has an event this year. He, he does an event every few years he’s had Alex Hermo come, he’s had Dave Ramsey come. He is got Cody Sanchez come in this year. Like Gary Vaynerchuk, a main, this guy owns his space. It’s such a great example. And so I thought, this is crazy. We have to have him on to hear his story and also for me to get some free YouTube strategy coaching at the same time. So, Sean, welcome to the show, brother.
SC (01:32):
Rory. So grateful to be here and to be hanging out with you and your community and so grateful for you in general throughout the years, your frameworks, your knowledge, your insights have really shaped my career and been such a blessing to me. You be guesting on our podcast has been a huge blessing to our community, and so super grateful to be able to hang out with you today. Yeah.
RV (01:53):
Well, thanks brother. And I wanna, I want to hear the story of how you got started. You were, it was, this is your youth pastor and I want to just hear like, when did you get into the YouTube game? How did you get into the YouTube game? Why did you get into the YouTube game? Because I know that it was not back then what it is now and what it’s becoming.
SC (02:15):
Yeah, so for me, I actually got started in video in 2003, volunteering at my local church. And what had happened, I actually got expelled from Christian High School. I went very prodigal and partying and doing raves and rave drugs and all this stuff. And, and eventually I kind of hit rock bottom. So I went to Bible college for a year. Never would’ve thought I would wanted to do that, but I want, I knew I needed to do something different and get out of kind of a toxic friend group and a toxic cycle. Wow. Study the Bible for myself. And so when I came home, I didn’t want to get into trouble. I think about the biblical story of David being on his porch, seeing Bathsheba naked when he should have been at war. And knowing that lesson, I was like, let me just, let me just get busy and do something.
SC (03:00):
So sight unseen, my parents actually went to a new church and I had never been there, but during, before summer started, I called ahead and was like, can you see if they have an internship? And they didn’t. But they made a spot for me in the youth ministry, like, okay, somebody wants to come and work for free. And so I volunteered at a youth ministry that had like eight kids at it an hour north of Seattle. And the youth pastor handed me a video camera, Canon HV 30 with mini DV tapes. Nice. and Adobe Premier, like 1.0 on a bunch of cd r CD rom, you know, and a very slow computer old school. And so this is 2003, you know, 20 years ago that I start doing video. And of course, Roy, these videos are terrible. You know, people are, they, they wanna start creating content.
SC (03:45):
Like, what if my first videos are bad? They will be like, what if my first videos are embarrassing? That’s part of the process. Like for me, I was doing it before social platforms even existed, but I was learning discipline because I made a video announcement video every single week for the youth ministry that’s like 52 videos a year. So I was like, you have a weekly podcast, like a weekly show. Like I was doing that before social and kind of doing the repetitions. And then in 2007, so weird. ’cause Again, churches are usually 10 years behind. And not only that, we were not, we’re in a rural church, we weren’t in like a cool hip, like cutting edge. But our pastor went to a few cool conferences and he learned about Twitter, started thinking more about social media. So we actually started a mini reality show, like a behind the scenes vlog.
SC (04:34):
Again, it was just terrible. But we shot, so we started a YouTube channel in 2007 and started posting content, and not even really the sermons necessarily, because there was like a time limit and you’d have to chop them up. There was a 15 minute time limit on YouTube at the time. Mm. And we just started posting random videos. And so fast forward to today, I’ve been doing video for 20 years, YouTube for 17 years. And my journey took me on all kinds of paths of starting my own freelance business, wedding videos, hip hop music videos, videos for like the YMCA helping pastors and leaders that were authors and speakers being their channel managers, filming videos for them, helping them on social media. Eventually going to Vegas to be a director of communications, doing some paid ads, helping a pastor named Benny Perez kind of on his personal brand plus the church brand.
SC (05:25):
And so I clocked not just 10,000 hours, probably 30,000 hours Wow. In just video and everything about it and YouTube and social platforms between 2003 and about 2015 when I launched out to start our company today. So growth was pretty rapid, but it’s one of those things where like how deep the foundation is compared to once you start building the tower, how deep the roots go, and to how tall and strong the tree is. So all this leadership, teamwork lessons, mistakes I made really positioned us for the company of about 30 people, multimillion dollar budget, running big events. All of that was really in the local church and in small business over the years.
RV (06:08):
That’s awesome, man. What, what, what a ride. So like, so YouTube Secrets that’s the book that you wrote was like, again, like just one of the mainstays in that space is sold, you know, into the six figures of copies sold. Everybody wants to create, right? They wanna start, where do we start? How do we start, what do we doing wrong? What do we need to know? Like what, you know, how much does the camera matter like today? And, and actually even before that, I wanna address the, is it too late to start, right? Because you started in 2003, really like 2016, 17, got into it. And I think it’s like, I even have this fear on YouTube, right? Like, I’ve been speaking, I’ve been writing books, we’ve been building companies, but like, I still really haven’t started on YouTube. Like, I have put some stuff up there, but like, I haven’t really focused on YouTube and you know, I have to admit, like even myself, I struggle with like, eh, is it like, you know, all the, all the, you know, stars have already come and hit like, did I miss the wave?
RV (07:17):
Or like, talk to me about that.
SC (07:20):
Yeah. Well it’s not too late and I’ve got data to back it up. One Goldman Sachs research talked about the creator economy that’s bigger than YouTube, but that specifically speaks to these social platforms. And many listening to this probably wouldn’t even fit inside of the creator economy, although there’s a lot of overlap. ’cause In the creator economy, it would be the businesses like Adobe and Cap Cut providing software. And it would be creators who are kind of the new breed of self-employed entrepreneurs that make money directly off these platforms, right? What happens is business owners like yourself, small business owners, personal brands that are maybe authors and speakers, they wouldn’t really get lumped into that. But eventually they think, okay, what about, what if I start creating content, not just to promote my offers and get leads and prospects, but also to get a new revenue stream that in and of itself, building my influence could amplify what I’m already doing, but create new opportunities.
SC (08:17):
So the creator economy, that’s sort of what we’re trying to define there. And Goldman Sachs research said that in the next three years, it’s gonna double that. The total addressable market wow, is about 250 billion. And it’s gonna be a half a trillion industry by 2027. So we see number one, a massive expansion. Two, we actually see the users and consumption of YouTube continuing to go up right now. So if we look at the dictionary definition of saturation, it’s actually impossible for YouTube to be saturated so long as it’s still expanding. Now at some point in the arc of anything, there might be it flat lines plus more people keep expanding and how much content’s being created. And there’s maybe a crossover, but that has not happened. And as we see technology still go around the world, new people are still joining the internet every day.
SC (09:05):
Youtube is getting becoming more global. The internet’s becoming more global. Internet speeds are going up and adoption of the platform overall, it just continues to expand. We’re still in that right now. So it’s still a good time to ride that expansion wave. There’s also some fascinating data about baby boomers and Gen X. It’s something like 80% of baby baby boomers are watching YouTube. Wow. I think that shouldn’t that’s crazy and it shouldn’t surprise us. ’cause If you think it’s free and smart TVs are now common and affordable, so you can turn on YouTube and follow things you’re interested in and watch video podcasts or history shows or learn solve problems. And so, and then that just trickles down the, the, the core audience is gonna be that 25 to 35. But look at the numbers for baby boomers. It’s basically all generations. And again, as more people get used to the utility, even of YouTube video podcasts are there, you know, if we take a slight side quest on video podcasts, YouTube is the number one podcasting platform.
SC (10:05):
It’s bigger than Apple and Spotify. It has been more podcasts are consumed on YouTube. They just added RSS feeds. Youtube, Google Podcast is absorbed into YouTube music. And now when you do a video podcast, go YouTube music is making a play at Spotify and making a play at Apple and owned by Google, this company is not gonna slow down or not go for the absolute cutthroat attack of every other brand and platform if we think about these platform wars. But all that to say is betting on YouTube is a really good bet and it’s still a good time to get in. Let’s talk about some of the cons, Rory, from my perspective and what I’m seeing with the data is there is rising competition and there’s a lot of competition. Yeah. And competition is highest for mediocre content. And competition is highest for low effort content.
SC (11:00):
So getting into YouTube is, I would argue not for the faint of heart. We’re living in a world now where just throwing some stuff out there is not gonna bring a, a great return. There was a time where maybe some lower effort content because of supply and demand could actually be helpful. But you, you, I think you gotta take it seriously and people are upping their game. I’m not saying it’s out of reach for people just starting. I’m not saying that you need any necessarily fancy equipment, but you do need strategy, you need a plan. And it’s gonna, it’s gonna take some level of energy. And I would say it’s gonna take energy from the principal person, the key person, the idea that, Hey, can I just outsource YouTube to somebody you should hire or, or delegate or leverage ai. But it’s just gonna take, I think it’s gonna take some thought and strategy.
SC (11:57):
So it’s it’s like the biblical passage of Jesus said, Hey, count the cost before building the tower. You know, it’s like reverse engineering. And, and that would be my next thing to say to you. Say, what do you do next? I think you asked some questions. Does it appeal to you to, to have a YouTube channel? Do you wanna be Oprah? Like legitimately, like, not if you catch my meaning. Like do you wanna show, do you, do you like the idea of having actually a video podcast? Do you, not just a podcast, but being on video and interviewing people. Do you, like, would you wanna have a solo show and for the love of serving people in that format or the love of creating content, I’d say that’s a really good first foundation. Yes, there’s maybe other ambitions I’d, I would love to have a show impact people change lives.
SC (12:48):
I do actually, I do. I don’t want you to force me on video. Anybody can improve and get better on camera and whatnot. And I, if you’re afraid, I’m not saying that’s a sign you shouldn’t do it. But if you look ahead a few years and say, man, I think that’s something I would enjoy doing, and I think I would love to do that, and I want to change people in that video format, and let’s go bigger than YouTube. I, I just recently talked to Dave Ramsey about, he’s like, we’re platform agnostic. We, we just wanna change lives. We were on radio, now we’re on video, we’re happy to be there, but we’re on Rumble, we’re on YouTube, we’re on x Elon’s taking X seriously. Amazon Prime has got offerings. So I would actually just go bigger. Do you want a show? Do you want to be in the video game?
SC (13:34):
Because if you do, then there’s massive opportunity. Youtube is a foundation and a pillar. But once you create these video assets, there’s a lot of distribution opportunities. And if you would say yes then because it’s not too late, it’s not gonna be easy. But it is possible. And one of the biggest mistakes I think people make is they, they look at it as a tactic. Like, I want to get some leads, maybe some more sales. I’m on other platforms. Can I kick it to my team to chop up some stuff of me and get a little stuff? It’s not that that couldn’t produce some results. I think it’s gonna work best for the person who actually doesn’t treat it as a tactic, but in a way they treat it as a lifestyle, like content creation as a lifestyle and a habit. That’s not always easy.
SC (14:18):
I don’t always love doing it, but it’s something I enjoy. I, I, I love doing what I do. I enjoy my video podcast probably most of all. And there’s stressful weeks, but I look forward to it. And I want to change lives and I want to craft that content and I want to shoot great interviews and I want the results and the money is great too. And all that is great too. But I would do it anyways. And if, if that sparks, if you’re listening to this and that kind of gets a little fire in you, then I would say dive in because there’s massive opportunity to be seized right now. Te tell me then.
RV (14:49):
So I love that and I thi I I can, I can vouch for it doesn’t really take off as a dabbling thing. Like the, the days of dabbling on it and having it take off. I think those days are pretty well past us. Because, because because there are so many people on there that are taking it serious, right? Yes. And, and we’ve been just basically dabbling in social media in general. ’cause We’ve been building the company and now we’re starting to take like Instagram serious and we’re seeing results and, and is realizing to go, okay, like, you know, what if we took YouTube more serious? ’cause It could be the flagship and Instagram can roll, roll more out of that. So if, if I wanna step in and I go, yeah, I do wanna show, I I do wanna impact people, I’m fine with this being a part of my lifestyle.
RV (15:35):
Like I, it’s not something I just wanna like do for a season, but like I go, I think it would be fun. And, and, but knowing I have to take it serious, like I love what you said about the, you know, the competition is highest for the mediocre low effort content. So what do I need to focus on to go, all right, if you’re gonna step in and play, like if I’m gonna get on the field and really like, be in the game, what’s the, what, what is re what’s, what’s the requirement? Like what’s the price of admission to, to, what does that look like in terms of equipment? I need to have team strategy, frequency of posting, length of content, you know. Yeah. That kind of stuff.
SC (16:22):
Well, interestingly enough, I think step one is to go really deep in your content and really dial in who you are in your messaging. Let’s assume that stuff is dialed in. But that would be found like things like classic business principles, like a USP, what is your unique selling position? The powerful aspects of a personal brand are also amplifying your unique anyways. So starting to think through. So you start thinking through, is this gonna be a personal brand channel first and last name? Is this gonna be a channel that has a clear niche cooking with Karen, name plus niche? Is it gonna be kind, kind of a media company? Think media is the name of my channel. I coach a lot of real estate agents. And so sometimes it’s their brokerage. I think the personal brand is much more powerful. Or is, is it, is it living in Nashville? Nashville,
RV (17:17):
Yeah. Lack living in Nashville.
SC (17:18):
Yeah. That living in Nashville is an option or your personal name and, and then Sean Cannell, Nashville real estate tips, different things. So I think kind of getting clear and then of course getting clear on what is it you’re trying to achieve. And in some cases that that amount of clarity already is in a way all you need. Then you add a smartphone to it, a content schedule, and start creating content. Meaning if you are a local real estate agent, the amount of opportunity still in a 2024 world is, is shocking because it’s about executions. It’s not a lot of people that are either A, doing it, B doing it consistently A doing it at all, B doing it consistently. So I think there, that’s, that’s thing one, I think. Then what do you start with? I think in, you know, I think for everyone who’s listening to this that wants to get in the video game, I think you start with vertical video really, because it’s, it’s, at least if you are like, I don’t really, I’m not comfortable on camera yet.
SC (18:18):
I I don’t really know what to say yet. I think especially for educators, people that solve problems, entrepreneurs that listen to this, I would say, what are the top 10 to 20 most asked questions and should ask questions on you YouTube though. You’re saying like a vertical video on frequently asked questions? Well, yeah, and then I would, I would so let’s, again, let’s work out the real estate thing. So is now a good time to buy a house? So I’d pop in your car, I hope you already have a GPS holder on your, on your vent for your phone, a little phone holder. ’cause You know, pop your phone up there. You could buy a $20 mic off of Amazon, but even if you don’t, you can film anywhere. But your cart is such a good a, when you close the door, it makes such great audio.
SC (19:01):
If you got like a cool moon roof or something, you gotta look to it. And you sit there and you look at the camera, hit record. Is now a good time to buy a house or not? Here’s three things to consider if you’re thinking about buying a house and deliver that content. Be brief, be bright, be fun and be done. Keep it under 60 seconds. Rory. The power of this for everybody listening, ’cause I know I’m the YouTube guide, but now I’m gonna take that vertical video asset and I’m going to, on my YouTube channel, upload it as a YouTube short, but I’m also gonna upload that as an Instagram reel. Sure. I’ll probably throw it on TikTok so long as you know, until it’s fully banned. And then I’ll throw it over on, when I put it on Instagram, it’s gonna be connected to my Facebook fan page.
SC (19:43):
And, and as meta it just auto posts over there. I think cap cut is my favorite app and software. It’s very user friendly. It’s worth 10 bucks a year or whatever to pay. It has great captions. If you wanna put a little what we’re using, yeah, if you wanna put a headline on it or something that’s kind of a hook point, the white bars or whatever at the top it says is, is now a good time to buy a house in Nashville? Question mark. And then you’re delivering the content so you can spice it up a little bit and just get comfortable. You’re on break, you’re in between meetings, film that in your car, edit it on your phone, start distributing it to the platforms. The reason I, there’s multiple reasons I’d say doing that. The, the ROI that could start coming your way from all the platforms, dms, conversation, sales leads is extremely high.
SC (20:33):
Probably higher, not on YouTube at first because YouTube is a longer game and it’s a marathon and not a sprint. But one of the other reasons I want you to do this is just because of getting the reps in, of communicating. Whenever you’re inspired that you have a client conversation or a conversation that you’re like, man, that’d make a great video, film that and, and start building your content creation muscles. Because as soon as we step into horizon, horizontal, longer form content, you asked how long? Eight minutes, 10 minutes, 12 minutes. If you want a secret that is publicly observable, you can see that some of the top entertainment YouTubers like Ryan Trahan or Mr. Beast, their videos are 24 minutes. That’s not by accident. It’s because people, YouTube wants time on platform. So if a video is good and entertaining and holds attention and is longer, it will out.
SC (21:24):
24 minutes is better than 12 because it’s keeping people on the platform longer. The algorithm will push it further for that very reason. Getting stuck in that could derail listeners. ’cause We’re getting very technical now. Well then I need to force it to 24. It’s not what I’m saying. Eight’s fine. But as soon as you get into horizontal, if we, if we look at a Cody Sanchez or Alex Hermo, you gotta admit, these are some in entrepreneur space, these are people we’re competing with and they’ve got staffs teams, explosions, creative hooks, openers, B roll, and longer form if you want that real professional edge, couple thousand bucks, you know, a thousand to get a can. Some light. Yeah. 2000 to build like a nice setup. What the pros are using, they’re spending five or 6,000. And what the pros are doing in the entrepreneur space is hiring a shredder at some point.
SC (22:20):
Usually someone in person that’s a producer, shooter, editor, if their team is lean, that would mean not just a videographer, but if, if you could get it all in one. Somebody who also kind of like, is like, Hey, let’s shoot the intro again. We want to grab attention, let’s hit that hook, right? Hey, let’s make sure we get everything and has a little creative edge. And if they’re producer, shooter, editor, they’re kind of thinking concept to completion, they might also edit it, upload it. If there was a dream hire, it would be somebody that you could pay 60, 70, 80,000 a year. And over time, perhaps you know, a hundred grand, but it’d be worth it to kind of maybe one other admin person to be that generator that puts out that high qual quality content for you. So someone says, Sean, I don’t have the money.
SC (23:03):
Well then do it yourself. But then it’s the learning curve is of course you learn to edit your video shoot cameras. We have a lot, we have a whole free college called Think Media on YouTube that will train you in all of that. So you can solve the problem from either direction. And one little tip there too is you might involve someone in the vision and say, Hey, listen, I’m gonna give you half the, the channel revenue for so long as you work for me. As you help me build this and maybe cast some incentive and some vision, like that day one it’s zero and day a hundred, it’s probably still zero. But if they’re bought in, then you could grow together. And this would go all the way back to like, you wanna build a content empire, you know, you want to build you, you see the power of personal brand Elon Musk, you see the power of personal brand Warren Buffet. You see the power. And so you’re like, I wanna build Cody Sanchez. I wanna build a personal brand. And YouTube is perhaps the greatest place to do it. But those that are doing it at a high level are are putting out high quality content with, you know, thousands of dollars of year.
RV (24:02):
Yeah. They’re not doing it accidentally. And it is that way. Like it, you know, it it, it blows my mind. Like, you know, when people, people ask me all the time, can they, can I get ’em on Lewis’ show or Ed’s show? And it’s like what they’re looking at more than anything is their YouTube followers, right? Mm-Hmm
SC (25:01):
That’s just something I would pitch to the individual if you wanted to growth hack it more and get them to have buy-in. Yeah, there’s a few agencies that do channel management. There’s individuals that do channel management. You’re just wrestling with the tension. The same for paid ads. Do you bring a paid ads person in-house, a media buyer? Or do you work with an agency? Pros and cons and maybe one thing is right on one season and one or the other and you might back and forth, who knows? So generally if I would say building your own media team would be ideal but if you found the right agency that would, that would work too. What you start looking at is the, the YouTube pipeline. In fact, what is actually fascinating was Patrick Ben-David recently revealed his like, podcast workflow. I’ll come back to it when you ask the next question ’cause you’ll probably be fascinated, but, and by the way, I wanna hear that it’s like how many staff members it is?
SC (26:01):
I’ll, I’ll look it up. It’s like, it’s like 10 positions. Wow. And so what you start thinking about is you start going back to, okay somebody at the start is definitely gonna wear a lot of hats. And if it’s just you at the start, you’re wearing all the hats. And the idea of YouTube would be let’s, let’s break it down. Who’s, who’s the shooter? You set the camera up, you could just at least get the lighting right? I can, I’m in my home office, I can create content by myself. I’m the shot composition. I set the lighting up here. I’ve got, you know, these details. I think about the details and the bit, a lot of stuff that would stress people out. So I’m the shooter, I also am the researcher. So I would research not just plan out my podcast, but I’m good at research.
SC (26:45):
I’ll pull up different articles. I’m pulling that in. I’ll outline my video. I’m doing a paid brand real deal right now. So it’s a scripted video. The script is getting approved by the brand you are then the talent on camera, once it’s captured, are you then the editor, you’ve got, you edit it all together. And is it just basic editing that is becoming easier even with ai? Or is it next level editing? Then once the video is exported, you upload it and now it needs to be optimized. So you have the title. It’s many top YouTubers are famous for not just taking their thumbnails seriously, but paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars for one thumbnail. You can find circles on Twitter x of full-time thumbnail designers that just get hired by top YouTubers that just create insane thumbnails. We’re talking about a very small piece of real estate, you know, like a very, but thumbnails being that serious.
SC (27:38):
So you can also do pretty good thumbnails with Canva templates, but are you gonna learn that and tweak those and get some photography done if you’re in the thumbnail? So then it’s a thumbnail. It’s writing a great title, similar to like a blog headline or an email subject headline. You want people to click, you wanna describe it. You maybe want some search based aspects to it. You want some human psychology based aspects to it. You wanna optimize the description, not so much because that’s gonna move the needle on the video itself. It’s the content itself that’s really gonna perform. But you want the call to actions to be right. If you’re driving business results, you want clickable link above the fold in the description. And then understanding how YouTube works. You maybe put in a playlist, you got an end card on the video. You, you don’t just make one video, you create a series.
SC (28:24):
So as the video ends, the way you communicate leads into other videos. And then you want a pipeline. So that, that, that somewhat simplistic overview of the steps can quickly break down into, you know, on our team we have Slack and monday.com and we do things like, we probably debate certain titles. We’ll write 10 to 20 to 30. Wow. And we debate ’em and we vote on ’em and we might switch them later. I interviewed Graham Stefan, who’s is pretty known for being a one man shop. He’s added a few people since then, but he likes to, he’s actually hired an editor and gone back to editing himself. He researches for about three hours. He writes a script for about a day. He then films it for three, four hours. He then edits him himself. He does outsource the thumbnail. He’s pre-written a few titles, and he is pulling hundreds of thousands of views. Personal finance, niche. He’s got some help selling brand deals, working with agencies. So I know you’re listening to this. Someone’s like, okay, I, I I was pumped. I did want to be Oprah, but I don’t know if I want to be like, like, so it, it’s, it gets real pretty
RV (29:33):
Fast. Oprah had a team. I mean, it’s there, there’s like, it, it’s helpful to see this because I think it’s, doing all this stuff is not wasting time. What’s wasting time is dabbling without doing this stuff, thinking it is gonna work. Mm-Hmm. And then it doesn’t. That’s what’s wasting time. Like either doing this stuff and knowing you have to do it and creating a plan and getting it done, or deciding, yeah, I’m not gonna do any of this. Both of those are good decisions. The the crappy decision, I think is like dipping your toe into it and then not really like having any sort of strategy.
SC (30:06):
If you’re in the mediocre middle, you’d be frustrated because you’re, you’re still taking time, but the results aren’t there. And then committing to it for a long enough time to get the flywheel effect going. Okay, so I found it. So here’s how to structure your podcast team from Patrick. Be David. Nine roles. According to him, executive producer oversees the entire production, sets the strategic direction of the content, and manages the budget. Podcast producer hand handles the day-to-day operations, coordinates with guests manage schedules, ensures these episode aligns with your vision. He’s sometimes having two, three people on. He just had Candace Owens and Chris Cuomo like, I think on an episode. So they have a, and that’s three a week, three episodes, like they’re pumping out shows and big numbers now, hundreds of thousands of concurrence on and when they live stream, the show number three, technical producer, audio engineer, responsible for the technical quality of the product they handle. Recording, mixing, sound editing, videographer, cinematographer captures high quality video responsible for camera operation, lighting and onset capture video editor edits the video content, integrates visuals and ensures the fi o product is polished and engaging. Copywriter and content writer develops scripts, interview questions and promotional content for each episode. Diary of a CEO split tests. A hundred thumbnails per episode. Three different phases with 25 quotes that are pulled out.
RV (31:25):
Again, they split test what? They split test how many thumbs? A
SC (31:28):
Hundred different thumbnails per episode. What? So Steve Bartlett, right? Diary of a CEO. And they have a research group that deeply gets into the psychology of not just the interview questions. They should ask a particular guest that’ll most resonate with the audience, but also how to front load those. So, ’cause YouTube, and I’ve, I know I’ve talked to Lewis, we’ve mastermind around YouTube about changing the whole front of his show compared to old school where like, welcome to the podcast, to like cutting to the chase. No fluff at the beginning, like cutting right into it at his level. You also start thinking maybe a little difference between the audio and the video, even though it’s a video podcast. But this whole copywriter content writer is a luxury, by the way, at number six here. But developing scripts, interview questions, promotional content for each episode.
SC (32:21):
Number seven, graphic designer creates visuals for the podcast, thumbnails, social media graphics. Once the episode’s out there is something about YouTube itself being where you’re gonna get the most views. ’cause The algorithm makes it take off. But then we also will do using like ManyChat, a custom vertical video. Comment the word podcast, DM people the link, get some more juice around it. That’s only on Instagram though. That’s not YouTube. That’s only on Instagram. But just thinking like the graphic designer. Really the only graphics you need is the actual thumbnail. But social media graphics might be promoting carousel post or something like carousel. There’s a community tab, which is a lot of people don’t know about on YouTube. It’s like a feed number eight distribution specialist. Digital marketing manager distributes the podcast across various platforms, handles SEO marketing strategies and audio. It’s growth. And number nine, social media coordinator engages with the audience on social platforms, promotes new episodes and builds community around the podcast.
SC (33:16):
Rory, that’s not where we’re at. That was just Pbds list that he shared with me. There’s nine staff positions, but he is an a one podcast now with hundreds of millions of views. That’s not an exaggeration. Over a hundred million views a month across the PBD podcast, the Valuetainment clips. And then you chop it up. I mean, you, you start getting to, I think it was a billion in two months ’cause TikTok clips are going viral and other clips because a video podcast can be chopped up. So that’s a lot. I I think we were already, I knocked the wind out of our listeners, including myself, and now we just, that was total knockout, you know, but this, thinking about that is what people are scaling up to. What I would say is an interesting story is, you know, you’re very familiar with Ramsey and we were just there.
SC (34:04):
Mm-Hmm.
SC (34:56):
Like if you had, and that this list doesn’t say you need that, you need a person who definitely can manage the three cameras. So all that to say is Kyle shoots or sets up the studio, sets up the lighting, sets up the camera, sets up the audio, sets up backup audio. ’cause We have had audio crash before and, and then kicks, uploads it online and sends it out. And I would say I’m the executive producer, I’m the podcast producer. I have an assistant to book people, but like I I also do solo rounds. So I oversee the entire production. I, you know, set the strategic direction. So all that to say is hybriding. That process is, you can start super lean and mean. You could shoot a sh a we’re on Zoom. I mean, what are we talking about? Like, we’re on Zoom. You could record this, kick this to an editor. You can start a lean process. And I think you should, I think 99% of people listening to this, putting a video podcast on YouTube and keeping it super lean at the start is smart. And then thinking about how do you scale it up? And then how do you let your team also start with the greatest level of simplicity, but then challenge yourself to get 1% better with every upload. The last thing I’ll add is I was talking to like hala to, to ha right? Who is, is yeah,
RV (36:15):
We just had her on the show a couple like fairly recently.
SC (36:18):
Yeah. And, and, and she had kind of like her video podcast on YouTube. And one of the big pivots she made was investing and having her team really chop up a powerful hook bump bubu this quote, no, no, no, this cliffhanger, a little bit of b-roll. A little bit of the stock market arrows going down. A little bit of drama. And, and that would be one of those. So even this episode recorded on Zoom recorded simply, you could just upload it. You hooked it at the beginning. If you’re as an interviewer, you could also realize I’m just starting when I start, so I need to hook it at the beginning. I’m gonna like, I’ll do that a lot of times. Like I’ll pre-write three or four bullets. And so you could keep it lean and, and do best practices and get traction. But what I would say is then over time, no reason why you can’t start doing better hooks.
SC (37:09):
And like maybe at month six month 10 little monetization coming in. How do we improve the show? Eventually you build a new house, rent a studio batch, produce four episodes in person, intermix those into things. You don’t have to go from zero to a hundred, nor do I think you would even have the, the character infrastructure, the technical infrastructure to become a diary of a CEO or PBD podcast overnight. They didn’t, they had to grow into it. But I think start simple and, and scale up as you go. And, and there’s a lot that goes into it for a world class level.
RV (37:44):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean it’s, this is, it’s it’s a lot, but it’s like, this is starting a business. It’s, it’s a show. Like, just like you start a business as a solopreneur. You’re doing the marketing, you’re doing the sales, you’re doing the delivery, you’re doing the customer service, you do the accounting, and then you hire a person to help part-time, and then you reinvest to the next person the next. It’s like, I think that’s the menta the mindset of going, like, you’re starting a show, you’re not Mm-Hmm.
SC (38:40):
Yeah. So thanks again for having me. I think I’m Sean Cannel, your Guide to Building a Profitable YouTube channel. And you can Google me anywhere. S-E-A-N-C-A-N-N-E-L-L think media. But we also do have a free class and I think we sent you a link to that you could share with people. So if you wanna look over my shoulder and spend an hour together and we can, I’ll share as much as I can here specifically around that optimization stuff, specifically around some really tactical stuff you say, I wanna get into YouTube, I’d love to know how to jumpstart simply then we had to have a free hour long masterclass that we could link to. I’d say that’s the best next step for people that are wanting to explore this. To watch.
RV (39:21):
Yeah. Why don’t we do this? So we’ll, we’ll link to [email protected] slash think media brand builders group.com/think media. And then we will make sure that that tags and re we will get that redirected over to Sean’s place where you can watch that masterclass and go just through some of the tactics. I mean the, the, the part that’s powerful here is like, like anything, excellence is never an accident, right? This isn’t an accident, but it’s doable. And I think the other part, it’s been super clarifying for me to be like, yeah, it’s not saturated. ’cause It’s still expanding. Mm-Hmm.
RV (40:16):
And that is really hitting me hard as we have this conversation to go. You would never ask that, right? It, it, and you, you would also never say like, is, are Mexican restaurants too saturated? Like, well, if I had Mexican one day, I’m gonna have it again and again and again in different, I wanna try different restaurants. Like, so I think if you’re making, if you’re making good food and you’re making good content, there’s always gonna be a market for it if you do it right. And if, you know, if you follow some simple steps, like, yeah, there’s a number of things, but they’re all fairly simple. Like, you’re gonna, you’re gonna win. So, and and Sean is one of the guys that I’m looking to, to help, help us figure out how to do that. And I think you should too. So brother, thank you for being here. Thanks for what you do and, and how you do it in the world and what you stand for. We believe in you. I’m so honored to be your buddy and yeah, keep kicking butt man.
SC (41:10):
Rory, I appreciate you so much and thank you so much for having me on the podcast.
Ep 517: 6 Traits of a Great Salesperson | Dr. Cindy Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
All right, we’re talking about sales today, and it’s not something that I talk about a ton. But today we’re gonna talk about it. And this is a little no saver. I love talking about sales. I love sales. I love learning about sales. I love doing sales. I love being a salesperson. I think this is just something that we should all embrace a little bit more in our daily lives in and outside of work. And so I just had Dr. Cindy, who’s a bestselling author and founder of Orange Leaf Consulting, and she was on the influential personal podcast. And I thought this would be a great opportunity to talk a little bit about some of the things that we had in that interview that I kind of just pulled out as some really important things that set apart this sales mindset from, from not.
AJV (00:53):
And I think one of the things that I would love for you guys to kind of pick up on is do you even consider yourself a salesperson? And I bet most people that I engage with say no. They say, I am, you know, insert any title. I’m an author, I’m a speaker, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m a coach, I’m a consultant. I’m a dentist. I’m an attorney. I’m a CPA. But even when you’re in sales most people don’t go, Hey, I’m a salesperson. I think that’s, that’s very, very rare that we would do that. And so I wanna talk about some of the things that I think make a great salesperson, even if you don’t identify with being in sales, because the truth is, you, you are, you are in sales, surprise. You are a salesperson. And that’s in and outside of work.
AJV (01:43):
And as a parent all day long, I’m negotiating, right? It’s just, who’s the better salesperson today? Me or them in my marriage, right? I’m selling all the time. Why this place? Why that thing? You know, why this restaurant? Like, there, there’s a sale always taking place as someone who recruits interviews and hires for our company. Like the entire interview process is just them selling me and me selling them products and services, podcasts listening to content, right? I think one of the things you have to realize is like, in order to have really great content, you can be a really great salesperson. You gotta sell. Why, why this is important. What problem is this solving? Why should I keep your attention with the 99 other things going on at this exact second? Like, that’s a sale. These are all micro sales. We are salespeople by nature, innately, right?
AJV (02:33):
It’s like that, that happens from a very, very young age of learning how to ask for what you want, the persistence in doing it, not giving up. And at some point, but that deteriorates over time. But we were innately equipped with this concept of selling, right? Which is, how do you get the things that you want, right? And, and I believe a lot of that is in service of other people. But, and often, right? It’s like as, as kids, it’s, it’s in service of yourself, right? It’s like, I’m gonna ask for this toy that I saw at Target 100 times, right? There is an immense level of persistence and determination in a five-year-old that finds the ninja turtle that they must have. Where does that disappear? Along the lines, when we get into business and adulthood, right? Something happened along the lines where we no longer do those things that we used to do.
AJV (03:26):
We’ve been taught not to we’ve gotten rejected too often. We’ve lost the passion, lost the persistence. The list goes on. And this isn’t a, a psychological, a psychological video today. But I do think there’s a few things that I wanna highlight that innately, regardless of what level of sales, if you are truly a sales professional or you’re just involved in communication, IE sales that are really important for you to kind of grasp. So these are in no particular order, but just a few things. Six to be exact. Six characteristics, six traits of something that I wonder if you would identify with on this path to acknowledging that you are in sales and that you are a salesperson on a daily basis. Number one is we all have to be ready for the opportunity. I think any great sale happens at the intersection of someone who has a need and someone who can solve that need, right?
AJV (04:26):
It’s the person who has a, a need or a want and intersecting with the person who can actually give them that want or fulfill that need. So step one is we have to be ready for the opportunity. What does that mean? That means we have to be aware. That means we have to be listening, engaging, communicating, participating, right? It’s some of the best relationships that I have ever developed happened on. And these are business relationships on the bleachers of a softball field, listening to someone behind me talk about some of the struggles of their sales team. I happened to be reading a book. I turned around and just said, Hey, I, I didn’t mean to be eavesdropping, but I was reading this book. And just by being aware, he was like, oh, yeah, I’ve actually read that book. What do you think? Started a conversation.
AJV (05:20):
And I said, well, I’m actually a, a sales consultant. I heard you talking. And, and we just struck up a conversation that ended up being a multi six figure client of mine in former life, and a multi-year long contract. Not to mention just a really great friend. Some of the other best relationships I’ve developed happened at different cookouts or social events or, or sporting events or in some regards restaurants. Like literally just being aware and ready for the opportunity. That is first and foremost, which means you have to know what is the problem or the need that
AJV (05:57):
You solve, right? That that’s step one. And when you hear other people have it, it gives you the opportunity to engage. But you gotta be ready, right? You gotta be aware of the opportunity and you’ve gotta be ready to engage. Number two, we have got to have the courage to ask, right? So you’ve gotta be ready and you gotta have courage. You have to have the courage to engage. You have to have the courage to ask. And a part of that is not being afraid of being told. No, it’s not being afraid of rejection not taking it personally, but generally speaking, it’s just the courage to engage. There is so much of our business that happens behind a computer screen, like right now that when we actually have the opportunity to opportunity to engage, we don’t, ’cause we don’t know how.
AJV (06:42):
Right? And a part of it is just being like getting engaged. Dunno where it’s gonna go. But I heard something that we have in common, so I’m gonna have the courage to ask about it. Not necessarily even ask for the business, just ask about what it is. What do they do? Where are they from? Just like I did. Hey, I don’t mean to be eavesdropping, but I heard something and I’m reading this book. I’m just aware, I’m ready. And I have the courage to ask. I have the courage to be curious. I have the courage to engage at number three would be being okay with accepting a no. Right? And I think that has a lot to do with just confidence and self-esteem of going, like, they’re not saying no to me as a person. They might be saying no to the timing.
AJV (07:29):
They might be saying no to the product or service. They might be saying no to my company, but more often than not, they are not saying no to me as a a person. Why They don’t know me, right? They don’t know me as a mom, a wife AJ Vaden. They know me as the representative of, you know, brand builders group or this product or service as the salesperson, as the person on the other line. But it’s not personal. 99% of the time. 1% of the time. Maybe it is. But you gotta be okay with that. It’s 1% of the time. And you’ve gotta just be okay with accepting the no, but also using it as research. And I think that’s the real takeaway here is one of the things that makes nos more acceptable to me, that makes my ability to tolerate them better. ’cause I don’t like hearing no, just like anyone else in the world. But what makes it better for me is when I then have the ability to go, this is research, right? This is recon, right? If I got a no, I wanna understand why. And this a little bit comes back to the one before this, which is the courage to ask. So if someone’s going to say no, give you a no, then you have got to have enough resilience and enough courage to go, Hey, I understand. Can you please let me know why?
AJV (08:51):
And then pause, right? And if they go, yeah, you know, it just, it is just the wrong time. Be like, well, is it the wrong time for this particular product? Was it, is it the wrong time for this in your budget? Like, I’m not trying to sell you here. I’m just, I truly wanna understand so that I can better myself. And so often it’s amazing the gift that you’ll receive in that feedback, right? But it, it does take courage to ask for feedback. But what I know is that you’re gonna be way more equipped if you go that one step further when you get a no and considerate research to go totally understand. Thank you for giving me a clear answer. Would you please help me understand why? And then take it, receive it, and do something with it. Improve your self pre presentation and improve your questions, improve the timing.
AJV (09:46):
Whatever it is you can influence and control. But take it, receive it, and then do something with that awesome feedback. Also acknowledge when to move on. In the interview with Dr. Cindy, I talked about how early in my sales career I would, I loved hearing maybe, right? I was like, there’s hope. They might say yes. And I would fill my calendars with a whole bunch of maybes. And you know what it did? I would follow up with the same people over and over and over and over and over again and never find new ones. And I was limiting my potential. I was limiting my ability to work with other people, serve other people who really needed and wanted what I had because I felt more comfortable stalking the people that had already talked to. And you know what, most of those people never bought.
AJV (10:32):
A few of them did likely to, you know, have me stop following up. The point being is that there is a, there is a blessing in the know that allows you the ability to learn, but also the freedom to move on to find the person who really does need what you have, who really does want to work with you. And if you follow up with the same set of people all the time, you’re, you’re missing out on an enormous part of the population that could bless you and vice versa. But then also have gratitude for the yes, right? Acknowledge the no, but be so grateful for the yes. Don’t take ’em for granted. People are not numbers, they’re not quotas, they’re not revenue, they’re not profit, they’re people. So be so utterly grateful for the people that give you the opportunity to allow them to work with you and vice versa.
AJV (11:19):
It’s like, be grateful for it. And then last but definitely not least is be diligent in follow up. Be diligent in follow up with the people who seriously said, let me think about it. Send me the thing. Sometimes that’s not real. Sometimes it is. So be discerning and diligent in the follow up. But also be diligent in the follow up with the people who who said, no, not right now. ’cause It was a bad time schedule it just because they said no today doesn’t mean they’re gonna say no in the future. Be diligent
AJV (11:52):
In the follow up of the, the very high likely potentials, diligent in the nos for the timing, not right now. And be diligent for the yeses. Be diligent in your follow up for the people who did give you the yes, because you need to build relationships with them. These are your clients. It is not. Hey, wham, bam, thank you ma’am. Got the sale. Moving on. Don’t be that person. Be the person who said, I’m so grateful that you have said yes. I’m so excited that you are joining our company, product, service, whatever. And be diligent and touching base with them, staying in touch with them, building those relationships. Because y’all, that’s how business is done today. Regardless of what you hear on the internet or in videos like this, it’s like, I still believe that the majority of business is still done by word of mouth and referrals. And where do those stem from relationships, how do you build ’em? You get to know people. You stay in touch with them. You engage in relation, you engage in community. So be diligent in the follow up with the yeses just as much as with your prospects. That is what it means to be great at sales. And that is within all of us in any role that we have. So embrace that inner salesperson love the sale because we’re all making ’em all day long.
Ep 516: Why Everyone Is In Sales with Dr. Cindy
AJV (00:01):
Hey everybody, and welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast, AJ Vaden here. And I’m so excited to introduce you guys to a, a newer friend of mine. We got connected through a mutual friend of ours, but I’m most excited to introduce you to our guest today because we share a similar passion of sales. And what we’re gonna talk about today and why you need to stick around is why you are in sales, even if you don’t know it, and why you need to also become passionate about sales. No matter what your role is, no matter what your job is, no matter if your customer facing or internal facing, you’re a solopreneur, entrepreneur, small business owner, executive, or anything in between that I didn’t mention, having sales skills is one of the most important skill that you can have in life. And so we’re gonna talk about why that is.
AJV (00:54):
How do you develop ’em? How do you use ’em, and why these are important to you. And if none of that sounded appealing enough for you to stick around to the very end, then how about this? Knowing how to be great at sales is what makes you a great entrepreneur. It’s also what makes you a great parent. It’s what makes you a great negotiator, which if you are a parent, you know, is a very important skill set to have. So, like I said, these are life skills. And so we’re gonna jump right in. I’m gonna formally introduce you to Dr. Cindy, who is a two times bestselling author. She’s got two books on sales and we’re gonna put all of these in the show notes for you. But her first book is, every Job is a Sales Job, how To Use The Art of Selling to Win At Work.
AJV (01:38):
Her second and most recent is Sell Yourself How to Create, live and Sell a powerful personal Brand, which is part of why I wanted to have her on the show here today. She is also the CEO of Orange Leaf Consulting. She also has her doctorate in organizational communication. So this, these are, these aren’t just thoughts and ideas, like this is backed by tons of research and time and experience and expertise. And I could probably go on and on but I wanna jump in and actually do this interview. So before I get carried away with talking about you, let’s talk to you. So, Dr. Cindy, welcome to the show.
Dr. C (02:17):
Thank you so much for having me, aj. It is a pleasure to be here.
AJV (02:21):
Yes. And one of the things that I wanna do that I think is just really helpful is to help our idio, our idiots, our audience, get to know you a little bit and why sales has become such a part of your life. So like, where did that come from? How did you get into this and how did, how did you get to where you are today?
Dr. C (02:42):
Dr. C (03:30):
I just didn’t call it sales. Hmm. And I literally struck me and I went, wait a second. I have a PhD in communication, and I was never taught this, and I went to good schools. And it was like, why wasn’t this part of the curricula? And so that took me on a totally different journey. Started my company, my first company, orange Leaf Consulting, started writing books. And so, I know you guys believe in this too, is like you deliver to the person that you were like, you’re literally solving the problem that you had. So now I write books for my 20-year-old self
AJV (04:05):
Love that. So tell me what, what happened? Like, what was that kind of like revelation moment when you realized, wait, I’ve been doing this my whole life, I just never knew it was sales. Like, what was that?
Dr. C (04:19):
So I remember I was actually having to go and do what they called the pitch right at the, at the day and time. And I’m like, Ooh, pitch. It just sounds awful. Like the word sounds bad. And what I was preparing, what I was realizing is all I was doing was listing all the problems that I had come up with in the conversations with a prospective client and how I could solve them. And I went, wait a second. All I’m doing is helping them with a need that they have. Why are we even calling this a pitch? I’m not pitching them anything. I’m inviting them to this list of solutions that are literally gonna make their life and their company better. Hold on. Like, hold the phone,
Dr. C (05:10):
I was calling it negotiation. I was calling it persuasion. I was calling it convincing, I was calling it inviting. And I went, okay, I have to change the script on this. So I believe that sales is a life skill, not a business skill. And I am on a mission to help people to embrace their inner 5-year-old. As I say, you know, we’re all, we were all five. You have got littles, so you understand they’re the best salespeople on the planet. So it’s really just getting back to those innate sales skills that you already have, and then knowing how to use them to get more of what you want and help more people.
AJV (05:44):
Ugh, I love that. And you know, not to go too sidetracked for a second, but you know, I’ve been in sales my whole life. I consider myself the number one job I still have today, E even as like CEO is to sell, right? That recruiting, selling, interview, selling, retaining, selling client acquisition, selling vendor negotiations, selling contract, negotiate. Like the list goes on and on. It’s like even as a CEO, I feel like still, like the number one thing that I’m trying to hone on a constant basis is this concept of sales IE communication. But where I find it’s the most valuable at this current stage of my life is in my parenting. Like legitimately
AJV (06:42):
Like, like their, their, their per, their persistence is, it’s impressive. It’s impressive. And I tease all the time, I’m like, how can I transfer this level of persistence to like our sales team, like to our, our business development team, this, this level of, there’s no shame in how many times you ask or how repeated the ask is. And I think I, I, I love what you said, it’s like, how do we get all back to that inner 5-year-old? And as I have a 5-year-old, it’s like he knows what he wants and he knows how long it’s gonna take before I crumble, right? And it’s about 45 minutes, and I’m like, fine, you can have it, whatever’s, whatever. But it’s like there something hap along happens along the way, clearly, where we don’t do that anymore. And probably for most of us, just like you had, and I’ve even had these feelings before of like, I don’t wanna be seen as a salesperson.
AJV (07:34):
There’s this negative connotation with the word sales, with the concept of selling. And I would love to just kind of unpack that for a second of where did that come from? Where does that happen? Because I feel like most people would all agree that you did not grow up saying one day I wanna be a salesperson
Dr. C (08:15):
So I always joke with people and I say, you know, nobody dresses like a salesperson for Halloween, right?
Dr. C (09:13):
And I would argue even those people don’t wanna be those people, right?
AJV (10:40):
Yeah. So let’s talk about that for a second. What are the sales that we’re all making every day that we don’t realize are sales?
Dr. C (10:48):
So first one is, if you’ve got kids
AJV (11:55):
Oh, I love, like, even even the non-verbal exchanges. And I love that concept too, is that sales is just an exchange of trust. Right? And I, I love that concept because it really does take away some of the ickiness that we feel. And, and I know, I bet most of you listening would agree with this. It’s like when you’ve had a great sales interchange, it’s like, I love it. I love when I’m like, man, that was a great sales presentation. ’cause I feel good about it, right? I feel good about the person. I’m entrusting. I feel good about the person I’m paying. I feel good about the product or service I’m receiving. The, the entire experience was positive. And part of it is like, when it’s really good, it’s like, yeah, I want my money to go to you. That was great. And I think sometimes when I’m annoyed, it’s like I’m almost more mad that I have to give the bad sales experience.
AJV (12:49):
I have to give that person my money, even though I need the thing. I’m like, I do not want you to get paid for this. ’cause That was so bad. Like, and regardless if that’s good or bad, like a lot of my mentality is around like, I do not want to pay you it, it’s a, it’s a you thing even when I need it. Because I’m like, that was so, so bad, so bad. Yeah. And the opposite happens too, where it’s like, man, that was amazing. ’cause You know what? It just felt, it felt natural. And that’s how it, it should, right? And we have those daily exchanges every day. It’s like you know, it doesn’t matter if you’re carrying boxes or a stroller or whatever, it’s, yeah. It’s like those nonverbal exchanges happen. Those are like micro sales throughout your day. And so this whole concept of, you know, we’re selling all day long without even knowing it. How do we come more aware of these things? ’cause I know like one of the things you talk about how like sales skills are life skills, right? So it’s like, I think a part of that is the awareness that, okay, guys, we’re already in sales and our marriages and our friendships and our parenting and our jobs and our, our social interactions, like there, there’s a sale always happening. So how do we kind of reframe how we see that, become aware of it and then ultimately embrace it?
Dr. C (14:13):
So I think it’s kind of like the blue car syndrome where, you know, once you buy a blue car, you start noticing blue cars everywhere,
Dr. C (15:00):
That was a sale. They sold you on coming back and they sold you on being an advocate for them because you left feeling so good. You wanna go tell other people. So when you start to think of sales as that, you start recognizing it differently. But I do believe that it’s good to have a plan. I’m a planner, I’m a hyper planner, I’m a to-do list gal. It’s just my jam. But I think when you have a plan for the things that you want to occur, you’re gonna seek the opportunity to sell, to get closer to it. Mm-Hmm. So for example, take a personal one. You’re looking for a new sitter, okay? You’re gonna be hyper aware when you hear other parents talking about their sitters and you’re gonna jump in and have a conversation. It’s just because you had that plan in place. If you’re an entrepreneur and you’re looking for a website designer, you’re still seeking that. And then you’re gonna find an opportunity to have a sales exchange to somebody either send you a referral or you’re able to sell your way into getting that person to work with you. And by the way, even when you’re hiring a vendor, you’re selling them just as much as they’re selling you. And I think we forget that as well. So I think that once you know what you’re looking for and you have a goal and a plan in place, those sales moments start revealing themselves differently.
AJV (16:22):
So, and, and I love that. And it’s like, what would you say? Like, as I’m thinking of, you know, I’m just thinking of like the, the micro example of just the team that we have here at Brand Builders Group. We have client facing team members, we have non-client facing team members, we have a leadership team. We, we got all types, we got vendors, contractors, all the things, right? And so if I were to kind of pinpoint what are some of like the universal sales skills that every person, no matter what your role is, no matter what your job is, whatever your daily things are, like, what would you say that you’ve identified as some of like the universal sales skills that we as just humans need to develop to be better communicators?
Dr. C (17:04):
So the first one is, is your authenticity of who you are, your own personal brand, and who you are bringing yourself to the, to the world and what your superpowers are In that as well, you get to know people based on their own superpowers. You’re the person I’m gonna go to because I know you’re gonna get the job done fast. You’re the one I’m gonna go to because I know that you can take it and run with it and make it happen. You start to sell into that, right? So that’s the first one is knowing your own personal brand and being really authentic because that’s how you build trust with those around you. I, I say this all the time. Nobody does this life alone. Show me a person that did it by themselves. And I’m gonna show you 14 people that helped ’em along the way,
Dr. C (17:44):
And so it’s recognizing how you’re creating those exchanges of trust so that you can get closer to what you need in your role, whether it’s client facing or behind the scenes, whether you’re in a support position or you’re an independent contractor, it doesn’t matter. You’re selling those exchanges of trust so that you can get your project, your job done, get closer to your goals. That’s the first one. Second universal one is you have to ask
AJV (18:23):
So true.
Dr. C (18:24):
You have to know what you’re asking for and you have to be clear because if you’ve built that trust, people wanna help you. You wanna go back and reward that behavior. You want to support people, but they don’t know how to support you. So you have to invite them in
AJV (18:41):
I mean, just, I don’t wanna like derail your thought train here ’cause I wanna hear the rest, but it’s so interesting because we are in the process right now of, of building a new home and I’ve been interviewing lots of different things. And anyhow, I’ve been having this interchange back and forth via email, and I’m not exaggerating. Literally this morning I had to send an email. So like what’s the next step? Like how do
Dr. C (19:41):
Awful. And so, and so, actually, funny enough, that’s the third piece is you have to follow up. It’s on you to be the one to f So the fact that you had to follow up like that makes me so upset because it’s like you had that person right there ready and you didn’t ask and you didn’t follow up. And so the key to think about it is you as the person selling, are doing 90% of the lift. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (20:43):
Yeah. And I think that’s a, I mean, just telling people, right? It’s like asking and then telling people what to do. And that’s one of the things that I’ve always said, it’s like for most people, they just need to be told what to do, right? Click here, write this, say this. Right? It’s like, like even me sometimes I’m like, I don’t want to have to think in this process that that’s why you’re here. Right? Yeah. I don’t wanna have to go through all of that. I just want you to do it, which is why I’m gonna give you my money, right? And so if I’m often left to my own vices, I just, I I I’m gonna, I’m gonna forget, right? It’s not anything other than as soon as this interaction, this exchange is over, I’m off to my other set of 99 things that I’ve gotta do. And if I didn’t have clear instructions from you on what is the next step and when is the deadline and when I’m, you know, like all the things Mm-Hmm.
Dr. C (21:40):
Yeah.
AJV (21:41):
And so
Dr. C (21:41):
I think entrepreneurs, yeah. Oh, I’m sorry, say that again.
AJV (21:44):
I was like, just, just the whole idea of like, don’t forget to ask and then don’t forget to tell ’em what to do and then follow up. Yeah. I think that that’s,
Dr. C (21:53):
It’s so hard for entrepreneurs too, I think when they’re building their brand and when they’re getting themselves out there because they have this feeling that, but everybody knows what I do. Everybody knows that I wrote a book, everybody knows I wanna be a keynote speaker. Everybody knows these things. But did you make it easy for them to help, you know, if you’ve got a friend that’s, you know, part of an association and when you wanna go speak there, do they have your speaker bio? Do they know the topics? Can they literally deliver it to the education committee with an open line email that says, Hey, I’m so and so and I speak on engineering and here’s what it is. You know, make it super easy for those people around you to be able to sell for you as well. And that, that’s another piece too, where I think we have to recognize we’re not just selling ourselves, but others are selling for us and with us.
Dr. C (22:44):
And so they need to know your network needs to know what they’re supposed to be doing as well. And advocating and saying, you do a great job, or you give good service, is sort of like, yeah, you, you made it into the game,
AJV (23:20):
Yeah. And it’s, again, back to left to their own devices. It’s like, who knows what people say, right? Yeah. And it’s like, we’ve got to go, this is how you introduce me. This is, this is the story I want you to tell. And as you were talking, you got me thinking about this, this asking thing because I think as you were talking about, I had like said to you gotta ask like, you, you gotta do it. Why don’t people do that? Like what, what what have you found is the hesitation, the lack of awareness whether it be fear or just sometimes complete unawareness or lack of training. But there, there’s a huge amount of people who even self-identify a salespeople that their hardest thing is the ask.
Dr. C (24:07):
It’s so true. And I think it’s a couple of things. I think you mentioned a few of them, which is they don’t know that, you know, there’s this assumption that, but you know what I do? Of course, you know what I do. Like why wouldn’t you, you know, use my services or come to my restaurant? So that’s one. Second one is they don’t know how to ask. So that’s a lack of training. And the third one is, and we all know it, it’s the fear of no. And it’s that fear of, if you tell me no, my entire world is going to crumble aj, it’s gonna be awful and nothing’s ever gonna happen,
Dr. C (24:49):
You get to understand why it’s no. Was your pitch bad? Did you not do a good job of understanding their needs? Did you not do a good job of differentiating yourself? Were you unclear on what the path was going to be that was gonna make their life better after the sale? Were you unclear in your ask? You know, there’s a lot of things that go into that. But the key is, if you’re not focused as the salesperson on what’s on the other side of the sale, then the no feels like, oh, I’m gonna crumble. Hmm. You gotta be focused on what happens past that for them and for you. And if it’s a no, it’s a gift because you also get to decide whether you’re gonna keep chasing them or not. And I have this conversation literally at least once a week with anybody we’re coaching about stop falling in love with people’s potential
AJV (26:03):
Yeah. And so, yeah, so I wanna dive into that deeper too, because I totally agree with you. And, and as someone who has spent the last 20 years in sales in some capacity, like, one of the things that I definitely in the early days I, I loved hearing, let me think about it. Or maybe because I was like, there’s hope, there’s hope,
AJV (26:58):
I’m not exaggerating. And me and my three business partners, we divided ’em up and they gave me WX, y, and Z of the alphabet. I didn’t know any better. So we’ll just say that was a gift. The naivete was a gift of this horrible set of letters. And one of the things I just remember, it’s like about eight or nine months in, it was like, I, I’m an obsessive OCD user of color coding and outlook and purple meant follow up. And I would have all these like micro 15 minute segments of like, and I, and here’s what I started to realize. I was like, I have no time to do anything else. All I’m doing is following up. And then I would just move it three months ahead, move it three months ahead. And so finally I started realizing these maybes aren’t aren’t so good after all.
AJV (27:43):
And it was like probably like a year, year and a half into my sales career. And I was like, no, actually no really is a gift. No is a gift that allows me the permission to move on and not get caught up in this emotional thing of, man, I have been following up with you with dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And it’s like, no, I don’t have to do that anymore. I just need to go find someone who would say yes. But I was so consumed with following up with the maybes that I was never actually doing a great job at finding the people who were a great fit. And when you realize that nos are not rejection their protection, and it’s like, hey, it’s like if you’re gonna spend all your time with people who are actually never even gonna get back to you you’re never able to actually serve the people who need what you have, who want what you have that you can build relationships with, friendships with, because you’re just stuck in this email cycle that actually is going nowhere.
AJV (28:39):
And so there is a lot of power in what you said of no being a gift, so that you can move on. And what I’d love to hear from you, and I, and I bet what a lot of people struggle with is what needs to happen in our brains for no to become a gift? ’cause There is this fear of rejection, there is this fear of no, and, and honestly for most of us, it, it’s what stops us from ever starting. And so I would love to just kind of hear your thoughts as we’re kind of like, you know, approaching almost the end of our conversation. I think this is one of the most powerful things that can really help people embrace this concept of, well, how do we overcome this fear of no.
Dr. C (29:22):
So the first thing is I really believe that a full pipeline will set you free. Hmm. So it’s about not falling in love with the 10 prospects, but falling in love with the entire yellow pages of X, Y, Z, not page 72
Dr. C (30:12):
Mm-Hmm,
Dr. C (31:07):
We don’t know what’s happening in their world. We don’t know why. The answer’s no unless we find out. But it’s not about you. It’s actually about them and about what’s going on with them. And so when you let that go, then it actually frees you up to go and seek the people. You can help more impactfully. Because remember, if you stay in that moment of no and push them, that becomes the icky sale. We don’t wanna be them. So that’s kind of freeing in that regard where it’s like, okay, that’s a no. Let me understand. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate you, and you move on to somebody that you really want to help and wants your help. And I think if you reframe it that way, it’s great. And then this is something I do at my workshops where I always ask the group, I’m like, okay, who’s ever been told no in your life?
Dr. C (31:55):
And, you know, every hand goes up and I think y’all survived. Yay. You didn’t melt still here, like
AJV (32:41):
No, I love that. And I, I love what you said too, is that a full pipeline will set you free. It’s like when you have so many people to get to next, this one is not as, you know, life consuming. Right? And I think that’s a huge, and I think that’s a really important element. Like we brought earlier there’s 7 billion people on planet Earth, roughly 365 ish million people in the United States. There’s lots of people to call
AJV (33:45):
And I love what you said too about this whole idea of like, no is research. And it’s like the more nos you get, the more research you have, the more answers you have, the better you can equip yourself to cover it next time. And those are just like mindset shifts that are so powerful, no matter again, what your role is, customer service, sales, leadership, executive team, parent, whatever. Of like, yeah, like every one of those is research. So I love that. This has been so helpful. And I’ve got one last question that I wanna dive into and then I’ll let you go before we run out of time completely. You talk about this whole thing of the like unofficial sale. And I’d love for you just to kinda like, share with everyone, like, what is the unofficial sale?
Dr. C (34:31):
So the unofficial sale is the one that you’re making every single day, but you’re not even realizing you’re doing it. I call it kind of the, hey, by the way, sale. And it is that nonverbal exchange a lot of times, but it’s also the one where it’s so natural for you and it’s such an opportunity for both people to get something out of it that it just feels right. You have these all day every day where it’s, you know, you’re negotiating who’s gonna pick up the littles or who’s gonna feed the dog? Who’s gonna take the dog out? Who’s gonna do the laundry? That’s the home piece. At work. It’s the same thing. It’s the, you’re gonna make the copies and you’re actually gonna go ahead and send that email and you’re gonna do this. It’s that quick exchange where it’s just so casual. But look at it as a sales win.
Dr. C (35:17):
Because the more you start identifying those as a sales win, it builds your confidence of a sales person. I believe every job is a sales job. I believe you have to sell yourself. They’re not just the names of books like I really do believe this, but embrace your inner five-year-old and recognize that these casual sales are also your opportunity to truly sell yourself. So for example, let’s say that you’re at a community barbecue block party and somebody is talking about needing your services. If you’re not ready to bring that up in that moment and you’re not ready with what you wanna say to differentiate yourself, they cannot become an advocate for you. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (36:10):
Oh, I love that. Be ready. Never know. Be ready.
Dr. C (36:14):
You,
AJV (36:14):
You’re gonna run into that next potential client. And I do, I believe that’s so true. It’s like inline at Starbucks grocery store, t-ball game. It’s like, be ready and be aware. And I want those kind of concepts of the unofficial sale. And this is one, I feel like this whole time I’ve been having flashbacks to like all my different sales experiences, and I love these conversations. ’cause I feel like most people who are listening would not consider themselves salespeople. And that is something that I hope as you’re listening today, you leave this going, no, I am a salesperson and I need to embrace that. I need to learn it. I need to, you know, educate myself and I need to become aware of all of these sales moments that are around me every single day. And so I thought this was an amazing conversation. I hope that people continue this conversation. So, Dr. Cindy, if people wanna connect with you, follow you buy your books, where should they go
Dr. C (37:12):
For cindy.com, D-R-C-I-N-D y.com or orange leaf consulting.com and I’m on all the social media platforms at one St. Lady of Sales, and I love to hear how people take this and do something with it. My favorite thing in the morning is when I get up and I see social media and somebody says, I heard you on this podcast, or I read this part of your book and I did this and it worked. And I love that. So I want to hear those success stories that just, it fuels the mission more of helping more and more people. And when you become a salesperson, guess what? You’re gonna help somebody else to become a salesperson too. And I think that’s the way we bring our amazing superpowers to the world, is we help elevate each other.
AJV (37:53):
Amen. I could not agree more. I’ll put all of those links in the show notes. Dr. Cindy, so amazing having you. So many golden nuggets, so thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and you guys heard it. Learn more, stay in touch with her. Go to dr cindy.com, follow her on socials, check out more and embrace that inner sales person that is already within you. We’ll see you next time on the Influential Personal Brand. Bye guys.
Ep 515: Turn Stage Fright Into Spotlight | Terri Sjodin Episode Recap
RV (00:06):
Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is the place where we help mission-driven messengers, just like you learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden and I’m the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. And this show is to help experts learn how to become more wealthy and well known. I know you’re gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started. One of the biggest fears that people have is speaking in public. One of the things that will reduce your fear is realizing that the more you prepare, the less fear you’re gonna experience. So I wanna share with you and just walk you through the six step process that I personally use to prepare to customize every single presentation. Okay. So step number one is my pre-program questionnaire. My pre-program questionnaire is a set of questions that I have developed over the last 20 years of speaking all around the world.
RV (01:06):
And it’s a set of questions that I ask. And I realize that if I get the information, if I get the answers to these questions before I go out on stage, I can use the answers that the client gives me to customize certain parts of my program and presentation that’s unique just to their audience using their lingo, their language, their, their nomenclature, right? That the connecting it with terms that they understand that’s unique to them, even though it’s based in the principles of my content. The second step is the pre-event call. This is something I think should be mandatory for all speakers if you’re not doing it already, that you must do a pre-event call to plan your content with your client before you actually go deliver the program. And the key to this call is that you should not be talking, you should be listening, you should be asking questions.
RV (02:00):
And specifically what I do is I think of my program and I take the outline of my speech. And then for every core idea that I teach, like every technique that I teach, every big moment where I go, here’s a big idea, I ask the client on my pre-event call, how does this big idea apply specifically to your company, to your team, to your organization in this exact moment? And then whatever they tell me there is like, they’re giving me the answers to the test, I can take their answers, and then I drop that in during my presentation shortly after I teach that part, I customize it using the context that they have given me. It’s so simple and it’s so easy, but it creates a magical experience for the people in the audience. And it makes the people who hired you look like champions because it, it makes it look like they hired a speaker who spent years and years learning all about their company.
RV (02:57):
Really, it just took a few minutes and a couple key questions on a pre-event call. Now the third one is obvious review their website, right? So just go to their website and actually read what’s on their website. Very few speakers do, this is the easiest thing just to go to their website and look, which ties into number four, which also you would think is obvious. But so many speakers don’t do this because they’re lazy and they don’t take the time to customize their presentation at all, which is social media. Go to their social media profiles. You will learn more about a company from their social media profiles, like their cultures, their values, and what’s happening internally. You’ll learn more about it from looking at their social media feeds than you will from reading their website, right? Like their website is basically a stagnant brochure with a bunch of a bunch of fancy marketing speak.
RV (03:51):
Their social media is like the insider secrets of like what’s going on every day and what’s important to them and what they’re promoting like right now in this moment. So I always try to go look and see if they have social media. Step number five, this is one of the secret secret steps is to use the Google news function. So a lot of people don’t know this, but in the Google search bar, you can, you know, type in anything obviously. But underneath the search bar, there’s a specific little button that says news. And what it will do is it will search for that term only as it appears in the news. And the news is really, really valuable to learn things that are going on about that company from other people’s perspective, what’s the coverage they’ve had? Did they just go through a merger and acquisition?
RV (04:41):
Do they have a new CEO? Are they rolling out a new product? Those things you find easiest in the Google news search function. So make sure that you’re using that. And then number six, which is probably the, the best and the easiest of all, and still something to this day, it blows my mind that speakers don’t do this, is get to the venue at least an hour early before your presentation. Ideally a few hours. And I don’t just mean like you’re staying in the hotel that the presentation is at. I mean, go downstairs and sit in the back of the room. Listen to what people are saying, listen to the speakers before you listen to what people are complaining about. Has it been too hot? Is it too cold in the room? What did, did some speakers say something, you know, very controversial? Did they roll out a, a, a new program or a new plan?
RV (05:34):
And then find one or two nuggets from what people are talking about that morning or that day and pull it into your presentation. It doesn’t have to be genius. It doesn’t have to be complicated. You just have to reference something that signals to the whole audience. You’ve been paying attention. And the only way you could know that little tidbit of information was from being at the conference in a moment where you were not on stage. It’s really, really important that you do that. And I’m gonna share with you my extra special insider secret on this. The, the real thing that you want to be listening for is what we teach in our humor training. It’s called callbacks. Callbacks. We, we talk about nine psychological triggers that cause laughter in our formal training. One of them here is callbacks, and here’s how a callback works. These are, these are the easiest ways to be hilarious in front of an audience.
RV (06:35):
All you have to do is sit in the back of the room, listen to the, the, the, the main speakers before you, and listen for the moment when the entire audience laughs and whatever it was that made them laugh. All you have to do is reference that when you are back on stage later that day, or you know, that afternoon or the next day or whenever that’s called a callback. You don’t even have to be funny. You just have to reference back to the thing that was funny. You will look like a hero. Everybody will laugh. It’ll increase your confidence, and it’s the magic of customization. If you do these simple things, you’ll be better prepared, which means you’re going to deliver, and then you’re gonna get invited back and you’re gonna get referred to other places. This is one of the simple secrets of the best presenters in the world.
Ep 514: The Science of Persuasive Presentations with Terri Sjodin
RV (00:02):
Well, it’s always an honor when I get to bring to you someone who is a friend, a longtime friend, and someone that I’m a fan of, someone who I would consider a mentor and a coach, somebody that I’ve learned from for years and years and years. And that’s what’s gonna happen today. We have TerriSjodin actually Terri and I both share a history with the National Speakers Association, and she also, like me, she was inducted into the CPAE, the Council Peers of Award award for Excellence, which is the National Speakers Association Professional Speaking Hall of Fame. For 25 years, she has worked as the founder of SHO Dean Communications. She specializes in public speaking sales training. It’s a consulting firm, and she’s a New York Times bestselling author. She’s been featured on the Today Show, Bloomberg, CNN, and just lots of other major, you know, talk shows, TV, radio also has become really popular as a LinkedIn learning instructor. And she has a new book out called Presentation Ready. Improve your Sales Presentation Outcomes and Avoid the 12 Most Common Mistakes. Terri, welcome to the show, friend. Thank you,
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Rory. I adore you. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. It’s fun,
RV (01:18):
So, one of the things that we were talking about is this book in a sense is a little bit more academic, I guess we’ll say, than some of your other books. So talk us through what, how the academics land, why the academics land, and exactly what was some of the research that went into putting this together?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Oh, I love it. Thank you for asking. So yes I’m going on almost 30 years now as a full-time professional speaker and trainer. Come on,
RV (01:49):
Come on. 30 years, full-time. We need to get you a watch or something, man.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
I, I know. It’s crazy. And, you know, and I think as you and I talk about the evolution of a speaking career, you know, each piece builds on the next piece. And so you can grow and expand in a variety of different ways. My emphasis has always been in the area of public speaking and persuasive presentation skills. And the first book that kind of put me on the map, if you will, was called Sales Speak, which addressed the nine biggest sales presentation mistakes that professionals make. So fast forward, as we’re rolling into 2019, I’m like, wow, you know, we’re, we’re coming up on almost 20 year anniversary of that book. It would be wonderful to do a deep dive research study and do a formal study and ask, are these still the, the most common mistakes? And if so, why? And if not, why not?
Speaker 2 (02:42):
So I reached out to a colleague of mine who’s the head of the communications department at San Diego State University, full confession, my alma mater. And she said, yo, this would be really interesting to do a joint venture as an alumni pairing with faculty and students at the campus. So we ran the first phase of the study, and it was focused on a specific question. Does making a sales presentation mistake matter? Does it cost someone a win or a deal or an opportunity? And we did it using a formal Qualtrics platform. Again, almost 2,500 professionals participated in the study, and we garnered all of the content from people who only sold a product service or cause, meaning that their livelihood depended on their ability to build and deliver a persuasive presentation. And my promise was, if we were gonna do this kind of research, then there should be no research about us without us, all of it should come from salespeople. So that was really the underpinning of where the research came from. And then the findings of course, evolved over time.
RV (03:47):
Mm-Hmm,
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, great question. So yes we found, we were able to verify that the nine mistakes were still playing out. There were three new additional mistakes that added to the list and what was really painful and, and shows, you know, it’s just about resilience. And you and I can talk about this, but, you know, so we were really excited. We launched the first phase of the results report on March 5th, 2020, and it was amazing for all of two weeks,
RV (05:18):
Hybrid or in person, doesn’t matter.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Did not matter. All the 12 mistakes still played out.
RV (05:25):
Fascinating. So which one, which one of the original nine do you think is most applicable to personal brands? Right. So, so, you know, anyone who’s speaker, author, coach, or a, a lot of professional service providers listen to this, right? Chiropractors, doctors, lawyers, anyone using their personal brand to like, grow their business, direct sales real estate, mortgage,
Speaker 2 (05:55):
All of
RV (05:55):
It.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
So so I believe, and very passionately in the power of the spoken word, no email, text message, or viral video will ever replace it. One, human being speaking to another in real time can shift everything. So to your point, whether somebody sells or promotes a product, a service, or a cause, wherever they are, they, they made up the body of these research participants. And there were actually three mistakes that rose to the top, regardless of gender, regardless of generation, regardless of how many people, how many years of experience people had. So the number three biggest mistake that most people self-confessed, which was also in phase one, was that most people had a tendency to conclude at the end of a presentation, but they did not close. They didn’t have an ask the number two biggest mistake that most people,
RV (06:56):
People, sec, hold on a second. Can I just wanna double tap on that and zoom in there on that one. So what’s the difference between concluding and closing?
Speaker 2 (07:03):
I love that question. So a conclusion as a wrap up, right? A close is your specific call to action. What do you want people to do as a result of the message? So what you’ll notice is when somebody’s giving a presentation, they might say, okay, so do you have any questions? And the listener will say, Nope. And you’ll say, great. Okay, thank you so much. So if there’s anything we can do, like, don’t, you know, please let us know. Call us. Call us. Isn’t a close, A close is an action step. What do you want the people to do as a result of the message? So a simpler, easier line, and we can get into that
RV (07:58):
So you’re, and you’re for a dec you’re asking them to make a decision in some regard also. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Whether you’re asking them to set up the next appointment time, whether you’re asking them to make a commitment to give you a referral or asking them to make a decision right then and there to say yes and move forward. Cut a check, sign the contract. Mm-Hmm.
RV (08:20):
Speaker 2 (08:44):
It’s horrifying. And, and we, I mean, I work with some incredible people and they’ll say, oh my gosh, I’m alu, I’m not a closer. Oh, don’t,
RV (08:54):
Don’t concluder. Don’t be a concluder, don’t a con. Okay. All right. What was, what was the second most
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Number two biggest sales presentation mistake that people self confess? Remember, these are be based on self-identification. Okay. is that they are far too informative in nature rather than persuasive. They data dump. Mm. Overly informative versus persuasive.
RV (09:16):
So
Speaker 2 (09:17):
There’s a lot of reasons for that. Like, the biggest one is there’s no risk in being informative. We don’t hear, no, we don’t get pushback while we’re being informative. And it’s like, somewhere along the line, people started feeling like, I know maybe if I just give enough information to people, then they’ll just be able to sell themselves. And, and that’s lovely. But that’s, that’s not how adult decision making processing works. So
RV (09:39):
So how does it work then? Like what, so I think I know what informative looks like. I’m basically just spewing in information and facts and you know, ideas at you.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Yes. Data dumping is part of that overly informative phase. But okay, so I’ll get really academic here. In communication, there are three types of presentations, informative, persuasive, and ceremonial. An informative presentation by design is supposed to be unbiased. It’s supposed to tell all sides of the story. It’s supposed to be cooperative versus competitive, and it’s sole purpose is to promote learning. That’s why you’re there. So unless you’re going out into the field and you’re like, hi, Brett, all the material of all my competitors, because I just wanted you to see everything that’s out there, and you can pick anyone you want to, because quite frankly I’m not attached to the outcome. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m not gonna profit. I’m not gonna do any, like, I’m just here to be a philanthropist of information. I mean, if you, that’s the only way that you’re really authentically informative.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
A persuasive presentation by design has intent. It means that you want somebody to do something as a result of the message. And if you are working on promoting your personal brand, if you are selling a product, a service, or a cause, you are very intentional. You want them to work with you, you want them to work with your company, you want them to do it now. So I, I’m trying to help people to just love that, like own it and love it and roll around in it. And sometimes people say, Terry, are, are you selling me? I’m like, yes. That’s what I do. Like no one’s shocked, right?
RV (11:28):
How do you get past that fear part? Like, I, I think, like you said, you know, are you selling me? Yes. I think a lot of people would say, are you selling me? No, no. I don’t, don’t think of me as a salesperson. I’m not selling. I don’t wanna sell to you. Oh, no,
Speaker 2 (11:40):
I, I I own it. I love it. How do you, I
RV (11:42):
I know that you do. How do you coach? I I know that you do, how do you wrap your mind around that? Or how do you help other people wrap their mind around that? Like, I don’t wanna be thought of as a pushy salesperson,
Speaker 2 (11:58):
And, and I love the, that you put the emphasis on pushy Look I believe in the power of the sales professional. We move commerce. Nothing happens until somebody sells something, but we do, we shrink from it. And so I think what makes this book different and what makes this conversation different is, you know, my, my training is in academic focus. I was on the speech and debate teams in high school and in college, and I use debate strategy in a selling environment so that I can apply persuasive arguments to move a transaction forward. I don’t think it has to be hard sell. I don’t think you have to have a negative connotation of what a salesperson is. I think you can craft a beautiful, elegant, persuasive message and move people towards action without being hard sell. So to kind of circle back to your question, how do you get them to lean into owning being a sales professional?
Speaker 2 (12:56):
And I think if you, if you own it and you believe in it, then it’s a lot easier to have that conviction. Somebody asked me, okay, Terry, in all the research that you’ve been doing, what’s the hardest product to sell? And I’m like, the hardest product to sell is the one you don’t believe in. Mm. You know? So if you, if you believe in, in yourself and the services that you offer, then the bigger question that I’m trying to help people with is, you can’t just give people a laundry list of the things that you do. You have to construct a logical, persuasive case to move them towards action. And so there is a clean process. Again, I don’t use any weird, crazy manipulative closing tactics. I use strategies that are based on logic and evidence and social proof. And I think that when you give people those tools, they can feel better about being persuasive and being, and crafting a compelling message. They’re like, woo. Like I hear all the time people going, woo, I, oh, I wish I would’ve known this 20 years ago. Like, I, it freaks me out to think how much money I must have left on the table. But once you give them, then they’re liberated. And I just try to teach people to fish so that they can go and do it on their own.
RV (14:06):
How do you close, like how do you, we were talking about that just a moment ago too. Like, do you like, like if, if you had to give someone like, you know, a five minute crash course on closing you gave us that question earlier, which I think was, do you wanna move forward? Something like, something to that? Yeah. Would you
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Like to move forward?
RV (14:29):
Is that at the end of that? Is it as simple as that? It’s like one, here’s one, just one question. Boom, that’s a close.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Well, yes or no, but
Speaker 2 (15:19):
So when you, and, and it starts with, you know, did you create an awakening? What are the needs steps? How do you address satisfaction, visualization and change? It’s called Monroe’s motivated sequence. And it’s really based on a human being’s a authentic way to make a decision so that they feel good about it. And so it’s really kind of a very big topic to address right here, but it goes back to the number one mistake you have to prepare. You have to block it. Just like anything, you wouldn’t just, you know, throw content up on your website and think, oh, yeah, that’s gonna be compelling. You don’t just you know, if you’re creating a brochure or you’re creating your demo video, or you’re creating your narrative on your website, whatever it is, if you always have that persuasive mindset and you use this pattern, then you’ll think to yourself, okay, what’s the awakening? What’s the need step? What’s the satisfaction step? The visualization step, and then the action step. And with that consistency, you get the outcomes that you’re looking for.
RV (16:26):
Say those again. It’s a, just the five. It’s awakening.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Awakening, need, satisfaction, visualization, and action.
RV (16:35):
Uhhuh,
Speaker 2 (16:36):
So when somebody comes to me and they say, okay, Terry, will you watch me, watch me? I’ll say, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, I listen to their whole talk, and then I’m asking myself, did they create some sort of awakening in my mind? Like, people think that the attention step is about having a pithy quote or maybe some statistic or some dramatic story, but that’s not what a listener needs in a buying situation. I’m not saying that you can’t use those things, but they should create an awakening. The listeners should go, wow, you know, I’ve heard this before, but the way you’re saying it, it’s landing in my mind in a different way. And now I’m curious, you know, that that awakening curiosity step is what helps you to convert someone who maybe didn’t even initially want to be there.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
So you have to make them intrigued and inspired to want to move forward, and you wanna do it in a way that makes you feel good about it. So that’s that whole essence. And that kind of weaves into the second part of the book. So the first part of the book is focused on how do you build your persuasive case? Okay? The second part of the book is focused on creativity and how do you really bring that message to life? How do you drive connection storytelling, all of those elements, timing, how do you use time effectively? And then the third piece is everybody’s favorite part, right?
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Like there are four mistakes that fall under case four that fall under creativity and four that fall under delivery. And I confess, you know, Rory, I have personally made every single one of these 12 mistakes, and that’s why I know they’re so costly. In the 5,000 participants that were in the study, there was really only one human that said, I don’t make any mistakes.
RV (19:27):
Okay?
Speaker 2 (19:28):
The number one mistake that people noticed in others is that that talk was boring. Boring, boring.
RV (19:33):
Uhhuh
Speaker 2 (19:36):
So don’t you think that’s interesting that most people self-identify as being overly informative, but other people are boring.
RV (19:43):
Call it boring. Yep.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
It’s like, yeah. So we say that in
RV (19:46):
Communication. Sorry, break it theory. Sorry. To to a sweetheart. Yeah. Boring. You’re boring. We’re sleep over, we’re sleeping,
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Right? Yeah. And that’s, that is the, the, that was where things really got super crazy interesting was because we did a, a comparison of what people self-identified with what they noticed in others. And you, what you just said, Rory in instinctively is what really hit it on the head. We don’t tell people, you don’t tell someone, oh, you know, I, I thought that was really good, but you’re boring. We don’t tell people, you know, you, you have all kinds of weird, strange body language and gesturing when you speak. We don’t tell people, did you know that you say or like, or, you know, every other word. Hmm. We don’t say to people, oh, you know what, you use so many industry acronyms and I had no idea what you were talking about. I don’t, we don’t tell people. So what was fascinating is what people self-identified versus what they called out in others. And in those observations, you know, that’s where we get the learnings.
RV (20:54):
Well, and here’s something I would just say for those, if you’re listening and you are a professional speaker wanting to like, get more gigs or get higher fees, or if you’re aspiring, if you’re not getting gigs, that is people telling you you’re boring
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Alright. And let’s take it even to your, your seasoned pros that are on the call. You know, we have a burden to evolve our content. Mm-Hmm.
RV (22:56):
Taylor Swift. Swift, our rocket ship, swift Taylor Swift man era’s to her, even though she’s young. She’s, she’s reinvented so many times. I’m a Taylor, I’m a swifty. I’m a swifty. I’m in court.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Who isn’t? How can you not admire that woman? I
RV (23:09):
Mean, yeah, you got, you may not like her, but you gotta respect her. I mean, there’s, there’s lots of people like that in the world where I go, I don’t, I mean, I happen to like Taylor Swift, but like, there’s other people where I go, I don’t like this person at all,
Speaker 2 (24:18):
It isn’t, and it’s not going back. So yes, there’s a whole chapter that’s dedicated to technology and demonstration failures, and they can take place in either a virtual or hybrid environment. I think one of the opportunities in virtual is, is the reach. I mean, you can really yeah. Meet with decision makers in a variety of different locations all at the same time. I mean, from a sales perspective, again, I’m asking people to put their, their sales hats on, but we used to say, oh gosh, it’s so challenging. ’cause Now you can’t just walk into their office and meet with that person. That’s true. There is a limitation to that. However, the opportunity is you can schedule a virtual call and meet with multiple decision makers in, on multiple continents Yeah. And accomplish more in a shorter period of time. And you save not only time, but you can save a great deal of money. And so there is an efficiency when you schedule it correctly. The downside is the time factor. We know that the amount of time you’re given in a virtual or hybrid environment is significantly reduced. You get maybe 30 minutes and then you get a really hard stop. Right? Like we, what is the hard stop? We never used to get this hard stop factor. Yeah.
RV (25:38):
Well, it’s like I have another meeting in two 10 seconds, not, yeah. I need to walk down the hall and drive in my car and there’s flex. It’s like, no, it’s, it’s right now I have to go. Yeah. That’s interesting.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
It’s so just like we were talking before about winging it, we can see that in virtual calls or in hybrid calls, that winging at issue is a huge problem. You cannot just jump on a call and wing it. When you have really strict time parameters, you have to kind of block the time and then you have to try to rein it in if it starts to go sideways. Right? I mean, we’ve all had those moments where, you know, someone on the call will take you down a path that’s gonna pull you off your agenda. So you have to have an awareness like, okay, this thing’s gonna close in like five minutes. Yeah. So what do I need to accomplish before we hit that hard stop? Mm-Hmm.
RV (26:34):
Can’t, you wind it down and sort of land the plane gracefully.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Yeah. And then the secondary factor is one of the biggest mistakes within this chapter is this
RV (26:44):
Is mistake number 11. So it’s techno technology and demonstration failures. That’s what you’re talking about here.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Exactly. And the hybrid environment. So you might be with five or six people in front of you, but you could have five or six people offline. And navigating that hybrid opportunity is tricky. Especially if you’re doing, let’s say for your speaker colleagues, you know, how often are they speaking in front of a live audience and then they have participants. You could have a hundred fifty, two hundred fifty people offline in a hybrid. Yeah. The number, guess what the number one complaint is? They ignore the virtual or speaker.
RV (27:24):
They ignore the virtual.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
They ignore the virtual Mm-Hmm.
RV (27:33):
The problem. Even if there’s, we’ve done events where we’ve had events for clients, like with Ed Millet’s event, there were 400 people in the room, there were 16,000 watching online. And we still naturally default to playing to the people who are right in front of us. Even though it’s like there’s 16,000 people. It’s like, it’s, it’s just, it’s, it is hard to, it’s hard to do that. It’s hard to play to both. It
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Is. And so that’s why I really committed this book, because there’s these things that you and I, we know, but I say this all the time. I was just with Brandon Steiner and he said, you know, Terry, I, I know this stuff. And I said, Brandon, it’s not that you don’t know, it’s what you do. What I’m fixing is a lot of times not things that you don’t know but you’re not doing. Yeah. And how do you integrate what you know into your behaviors on a consistent basis so that you can get the outcomes that you want? And I think it’s, I think it’s really fun.
RV (28:29):
I love it. I love it. So presentation ready. Improve your sales presentation outcomes. Avoid the 12 most common mistakes. Terry is one of the best trainers in the world on presentations, persuasive presentations specifically including speaking skills, sales skills, and check this book out. Y’all go, go get it. I promise you’ll love it. Terry’s a pro. Any, Terry, where else should people go? If you want, if you want them to sync up and connect with you.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Oh my gosh. Please visit my website. You can just go to teri sine.com. That’s T-E-R-R-I-S-J-O-D-I n.com. You can access all the information about presentation ready. It’s available in bookstores worldwide, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, all of the above. And I do have a newsletter. If you would like to receive a complimentary copy of each of the three research study reports, you can just visit my website. You can download the research summary reports, and you’ll see the data that really underpins all of the content that’s in the book and subscribe to the newsletter.
RV (29:36):
Really cool. Really cool. Of course we’ll link to that in the show [email protected] slash podcast. Terry, thank you for this. Thanks for being here, friend. And I wish you all the best.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
I adore you. Keep doing all your magic. Roy. You’re such a star and I’m honored to be your friend. And thank you for having me on your show. It’s a privilege.
Ep 513: On the Other Side of Fear | Victoria Jackson Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
Hey, everybody. I actually just got off of the amazing privilege to interview a friend of mine on our podcast, the influential personal brand. And her name is Victoria Jackson, and she’s the founder and CEO of Victoria Jackson Cosmetics. She is the founder of No Makeup Makeup, which is, if you’re watching this makeup I’m wearing right now, I’m a super fan of No Makeup Makeup. She’s the author of five books. She’s half of the duo of the Guthy Jackson Charitable Foundation, where they have personally donated over $80 million of their own money to help fund cures for rare autoimmune diseases. She was inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame by Gloria Steinem. She was awarded an advocacy person of the year by the Pope at the Vatican. Like she has done so many things, and there’s been incredible highs in her life, but there have also been some tremendous lows from a really stable, unstable upbringing to she was the victim of the Pillowcase Rapist when she was a teenager in California to her daughter was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease called NMO in 2008.
AJV (01:23):
And so there’s, it’s this amazing interview of really high highs and really low lows, which all, at the end of the day, make up life, right? And I think that’s one of the things that is hard to understand is I, I hear people ask all the time, like, why do bad things happen to good people? And, but I don’t hear as much of like, why do good things happen to good people? Right? And it’s, I think Victoria is an amazing example of, there has been so much goodness, so much blessing in her life, but there’s also been a lot of heartache and tragedy and, and loss. And this interview was about her new book that’s coming out called We All Worry Now, what? And as we were talking, it got me thinking about what I worry about and as a, a business owner and who feels Uber responsible for what?
AJV (02:19):
42 employees. And as, as a wife to a husband who I love and adore and cannot imagine my life without, and as a mom to two incredible little boys, that even the thought of not having them literally brings me to my knees and to my family, who I love, my dad, my brothers, my my sisters in-laws, and my nieces and nephews, and my, my close friends. And, you know, even to the material things that like I love and hold dear, like our home. It just got me thinking. It’s like, whoa, it’s not, what do
AJV (02:58):
I worry about? What don’t I worry about? But one of the things that came up in the conversation is, you know, there’s, there’s, there’s always relief and joy on the other side of fear. And so how do you go from worry and fear to this other place of, of joy and peace and almost a, a calmness, right? And, and the answer is, is action. It’s action. And what, what does that give us? And ’cause sometimes not only is there joy and peace and calmness on the other side of fear, there’s also success and there’s, there’s blessing. And one of the things that I wanted to share is, and I don’t talk about this often, but well, one thing I do talk about often is I’m a devout believer. I have a very strong faith. I believe in God. I believe in Jesus.
AJV (04:02):
I believe that he was crucified and raised from the dead. I believe he is my savior. I believe that the words in the Bible are true. I believe those things, and not everyone does, and that’s okay. But these, these are things that I believe in ’cause I’ve seen the work of God in my life. I have seen what salvation has done for me. I, I, I’ve seen the changes that knowing Jesus Christ have made in my life. I have seen it physically, emotionally, spiritually. I’m a believer because I’ve witnessed it. And with that said, I was raised a believer, raised in a Christian home. There were lots of highs and lows in our family. We were in a really horrific car accident. When I was seven years old with we were the first car hit in a 13 car pile up by a tractor trailer.
AJV (04:55):
I don’t talk about this often. Both my brothers were pronounced dead on the scene. Hell, you know, hell evaced to the children’s hospital. Both my parents were severely injured, unconscious. Both of them admitted to the hospital. And then there was me who was sitting in the bo back of the car. And I was pulled out by the jaws of life and set in a police car while I watched limp Bodies pulled from this car. And I watched miraculously with no medical explanation. Both of my brothers healed, both of my parents healed. And we toured the country for years with the Children’s Miracle Network, telethon, telling the story of the miracle. That was my brother’s. I’ve seen God’s work and highs and lows in that. And when I was 13, my mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, and she died when I was 15.
AJV (05:56):
I deeply believe she would recover. She deeply believed she would recover but she didn’t. And I saw God at work in that too. And that took, that took a while to come full circle. But there was, there was God’s grace and and love in that time. But there were highs and lows in that, right? I have chosen to focus on what I was given, not was taken. But those were choices that took a long time to come to. So I share that to go, I have seen God’s work in my life since I was a really young child. And it hasn’t been until here recently that I decided to share that. And I think the reason why is I was worried, like back to the conversation with Victoria. Look, we all worry now. What are you gonna do about it?
AJV (06:54):
And I was worried about sharing my faith. I was worried in college, but I wouldn’t be cool. So I didn’t, in fact, I did the opposite. I just went with what everyone else was doing. I was worried in my young twenties that if I came a, you know, if I talked about that too much or I’d be a, you know, a goodie two shoes, which I most certainly was not. But I, I was worried that if I shared that I would be ostracized or I wouldn’t fit in. Or in my later years, I was worried that I didn’t wanna come across as judgmental or I didn’t wanna make anyone uncomfortable. And so I didn’t share it. I was, I was afraid. I, I was afraid. I was really worried of what everyone else would think about me if I opened up about my faith.
AJV (07:42):
And so we, we didn’t, I didn’t share my faith for a really long time because I was worried. And then in 2022, something changed in my life and my heart and my soul of going, I’m gonna be worried about anything in this world. It cannot be about what people think about what I believe. And I think a lot of that transformation happened because I started reading the Bible again as an adult. In fact, as a 37-year-old lifelong believer in Christian. I read the Bible for the first time, cover to cover. It’s kind of embarrassing for me to admit that. But that’s true. It was the first time that I had picked up the word of God and said, I’m gonna read it. I’m gonna read every word and I’m gonna try to understand it. I’m still trying to understand a lot of it.
AJV (08:36):
But I’m gonna read it because I need to. And so I did. And that’s also when I hired a life coach. And it’s when I started reading books by Jenny Allen and Craig Rochelle and John Mark Comer. And I really said like this, this worry, this, these, these fears. And not just about what people think about me, but fear of my business, fear of my children, fear of losing my husband. Like it’s, it’s consuming me fear of not being able to make payroll, fear of, is this gonna work? Fear, am I, am I making the wrong decisions as a leader? Like worry and fear were consuming me. And I was becoming a dreadful person at the end of 2020. One was probably like least I least ideal, aj, let’s just say that. And in 2022, I was like, something’s gotta change.
AJV (09:29):
Like, God, show me something. And through that process, I started talking about God publicly in my speeches, on Instagram, on podcasts, on videos like this. ’cause I realized that that was a real worry. It was a real fear. And on the other side of that, there had to be something better. And what I really needed to do is take action, right? Is, is do the thing that would like, kind of holding me up, which is, I, I’m not being authentically me. I’m not letting people get to know me. I am, I’m not speaking up for the thing that I believe in more than anything else in this world. I’m not speaking up when I know that God is prompting me too. And I got that’s a problem. And y’all, I share that to go with this. When this interview talks about like on the other side of fear, there is something beautiful.
AJV (10:29):
Here’s what I can tell you is that the moment that I just started sharing of going like, it’s okay if you don’t believe what I believe, it’s okay if I don’t believe what you believe. We can believe different things and coexist and have mutual respect for each other. But I can’t this not share this part of me. It’s that ingrained in who I am. I’ve seen it, I’ve witnessed it. I have to share it. Our entire business changed. My marriage changed, I changed. I believe that taking action in the areas where you have worry and you have fear that not only is there something beautiful on the other side of it what you do is you’re, you’re, you’re giving others the confidence to do the same thing. And I think that’s an a really powerful and empowering gift of going, even if they don’t agree with what you said, by going, man, I really appreciate, appreciate the courage.
AJV (11:29):
‘Cause I know there can be a lot of hate coming your way for that, and you’re doing it anyways. And it’s like, if we’re not willing to stand up for the things that we believe in, what are we doing? Like what are we doing? And there’s a way to do it with kindness and respect. There’s definitely a way to do it not that way. But I believe there’s, there’s a way to, to overcome the worry that we have by, by facing it. And for me, a huge worry was what would people think if I let them know that, you know, Jesus Christ is my savior here? Like, what, what, what would people think if, like, I talked about God and faith and Bible verses and everywhere I went, like, like that was a worry. And here’s what’s happened. The more that I talk about it, the more that people are asking of, why are you doing that?
AJV (12:20):
Why do you believe that? It’s inviting conversations that I had never got to be a part of before. ’cause I didn’t share. It’s, it’s also allowing us to be authentically who we are designed to be. It’s, it’s giving us the strength and the power to do stuff that we probably wouldn’t have done before. And that’s what’s on the other side of fear that that’s what it looks like to overcome worry and overcome fear is to do things. Be things, experience things that you never thought possible. Because they were on the opposite side, right? They were on the side pre pre overcoming fear. And I just felt compelled to share this particular thing because it was the thing that was plaguing me. It, it was, man, I’m a, I’m afraid to do something that I feel called to do. And the moment that I stepped into that calling, my whole life has changed, our business has changed my relationships, my marriage my family, it has changed on the other side of fear.
AJV (13:20):
And so my question to you is like, what is that saying that you know that you should do, but you’re not because of worry or fear? Like, what are you worried about to the point where you’re not doing something that you know that you’re supposed to do or say or be, right? Like, what, what’s that thing for you and what’s the action that you know you need to take to overcome it? Even if it’s this first step in overcoming it. And it’s like, so what’s the worry that’s consuming you? What’s the fear inside of you? And what’s the action that next step that you need to take to start the path to the other side? So highlight of the conversation. If you wanna learn more, check out the book. We all worry now What? By Victoria Jackson. You can get your pre-sale orders now on Amazon Book comes out September 3rd.
Ep 512: From Income to Impact: How to Make the Most Out of Your Gifts with Victoria Jackson
AJV (00:01):
Hey, everybody, welcome to the Influential Personal Brand, and that is the perfect title of a podcast for the interview that I get to do today with the one and only Victoria Jackson. When we talk about influence, this is a woman who has immense influence, and I am so honored to get to know you personally and to get to know your story. And I also, to get to be the one to interview today, I snatched this away from Rory so that I got to lead the interview today. But before I launch into this episode, for everyone who is listening who maybe is new to the name Victoria Jackson, let me give you a little bit of the background. And if I were to read all of her accomplishments and accolades, it would take up the entire podcast. So I’m going to give you some of what I consider the biggest highlights that stand out to me.
AJV (00:57):
So here are some of the things that you need to know about Victoria Jackson. First and foremost, I think this is first and foremost to me. She is the mother of three awesome kids and her and her husband, bill, how long have you guys been married? 32 years. So to me, like those are some of the best and biggest accomplishments. But she is also the founder and CEO of the global brand and infomercial giant Victoria Jackson Cosmetics. And I think this is phenomenal because Victoria was a part of revolutionizing and dominating the entire beauty industry with her no makeup, makeup, which is just relaunched. And I wanna talk about this later. It’s actually, if you’re watching the video today, I am wearing no makeup makeup, and I love it, and I could go on and on about it. But as a huge part of this entire way that she launched this makeup, she was a really, truly a pioneer with being the first to market a cosmetics line on TV with more than 11 international infomercials.
AJV (02:03):
And so she had a 10 year run on QVC with Victoria Jackson’s cosmetic, with more than 600 beauty products, generating a billion dollars in sales. That’s a BA billion dollars in sales, and I love that story, but I think some of the things that, that make up who you are are just as significant as, as, as a teen Victoria survived a sexual assault, and she has gone on to reach out and empower women of in so many different ways around the world. And then in 2008 her daughter was diagnosed with N mo Neuromyelitis Optica and was shared that they, she only had four years to live. And so Victoria, along with her husband, bill, went on to found the Guthy Jackson Charitable Foundation which has raised an unbelievable amount of money to fund research to help find a cure for this disease.
AJV (03:04):
She was nominated as the National Women into the National Women’s Hall of Fame for this work. And then she was also at the Vatican, at the Vatican accepted as the Pontifical Key Advocacy Award for her personal work in trying to overcome and understand the rare autoimmune autoimmune diseases that are in the world. She has funded a series of documentaries. She’s the author of five books. She has a brand new book coming up that we’re gonna talk about later. And she has relaunching this makeup line Woman. I do not know how you have time to do all of these things. So without further ado, everyone and Victoria, thank you so much for being on the show. We’re so excited to have you. So welcome.
VJ (03:48):
Thank you for having me, aj. Yeah, it’s definitely, I, I like to keep myself busy and, you know, I think I was just, you know, born ready. I, I don’t know, a friend of mine said, I’m born ready. Like, I feel like I was just born ready to, ready to go and take on all the challenges, and then just be a doer, you know, and always really there to help and support women and people. I’ve been a Goodwill ambassador in so many different ways.
AJV (04:16):
Ryan, what I love too, is like, you truly are so humble about all of it, and it, it’s, it would be easy for you not to be humble about all of it, but you are. And so I kind of wanna just help the audience get to know you just a little bit. And so can you just tell everyone a little bit of the story of how did you get into the world of makeup? And I mean, I know the backstory, and so just pull out some of the highlights, because I think it’s a really phenomenal story because I think a lot of the people who are listening to this are trying to figure out like, what’s my next thing and how do I go from where I am to where I wanna be? And you have done that exceptionally well.
VJ (04:57):
Well, there, you know, it’s, I think my least favorite question always was when people would go, well, what do you wanna do when you grow up? Or What are you thinking about doing? And I actually, I didn’t know. I didn’t as you mentioned, you know, I had an unfortunate kind of start in life in a, in a few different ways, but one in which really prevented me from graduating high school, from going to college. I was a victim of the Pillowcase Rapist in California when I was 17. And up to that point, I was always a little bit of a, of a nervous Nelly and had anxiety. And, you know I don’t know that I knew where I was going in life. I had a very tumultuous, unstable upbringing, parents kind of getting divorced and, you know, just really not kind of always being able to find my feet.
VJ (05:47):
But one thing I did find my feet with and my hands was I liked doing makeup. I liked taking, having my friends come over and doing makeovers on them. And even though my technique really was something that I had to perfect over time, it was just something that I liked doing. I liked, you know, I, I’ve always had a good eye and wanted to work to, you know, show people how they could look better. And I realized through many, many years of doing this that when you look better, you feel better. And when you feel better, it allows you to go on in life to have more success, or, you know, just feeling good about yourself opens up the door to so many things. So I just started one foot in front of the other, started doing makeovers for friends and put together a makeup kit. And that was the beginning
AJV (06:37):
Mean, but to go from doing makeovers on friends Mm-Hmm.
VJ (07:00):
Well, I think for me, it’s all about perseverance. I, in one of my books, I, I wrote and I opened up in The Power of Rare, which is a book I wrote on Cure and, and helping find cure for disease, and how to put a blueprint together for that. But I write that perseverance is where the God swell. I think that what I can do, and what I will always do is stay the course that I persevere, that even though everybody told me, you know, nobody’s gonna be able to buy your, your products. I sold them on television that nobody was gonna buy makeup on tv. That women need to see them and touch them and feel them in person. I’ve always taken the No and turned that around and said, well, I don’t know about that. You know, I, I, I think I can do it, and here’s how.
VJ (07:45):
So it’s just that sense of perseverance, of this constant, this resilience that just makes me move forward no matter what. And I think that’s the takeaway most people get when they look at, you know, the breadth and the depth of, of my career. And what I’ve done is that I just, I never give up as all the people that, you know, you talk to and your listeners, all the aspiring entrepreneurs out there, you just have to keep going. You. so even though I’m saying, oh, I started by putting a kit together and doing my friends, it really was, everything was one step to the next step, to the next step. And even the book that I’ve written now, we all worry now what Ta-da. It’s really the, it’s the step by step of how to zoom out, how to get perspective, how to just take that next step. And a lot of it, you know, we think of, oh, you know, it’s so basic, but it’s, the basics really are the stepping stones that get you there. It’s just doing it, you know, it’s doing the work, and it’s not easy, and you gotta just keep moving forward. Even when everybody tells you, you know, it may not lead to that pot of gold. Everybody’s pot of gold is different.
AJV (09:04):
Hmm. I love that. Curious, I don’t know if I know this timeline from the first day that you started, like professionally doing makeup, so we’ll say beyond just doing makeovers, but like, when you were actually doing professional makeup to when you actually had, like, success with these infomercials, how long was that timeline?
VJ (09:28):
Oh, that was 13 years. So people think, oh, overnight success. Yeah. I was doing I was doing makeovers for 13 years. I was working in the, you know, editorial space, so I was doing everything, A lot of the ads that you see a lot of at the time magazine covers, album covers. I did about 200 album covers. I would do people magazine covers. So many kind of, and that time is invaluable because during those 13 years, I could see, well, what kind of products do women respond to? I came up with during that time what I became known for, and still to this day, hence product number two, no makeup, makeup. That was really something that I came up with in the eighties. And think about that in the eighties, everybody’s wearing like the shoulder pads and like, you know, heavy glam makeup. I’m doing no makeup makeup. So I was completely going contrary to what was happening at the time. But it was very much, and you see how timeless things can be still holds true to this day. I mean, you have it on, you look beautiful. I want women to just not look like they have a lot of makeup on, but just feel like themselves, not use it as a mask or war paint. And so that 13 years gave me that chance to perfect my, really became my signature of no makeup makeup.
AJV (10:52):
You know, I love that because I think most people listening, no offense to anyone, don’t get offended. We’re trying to skip all that time. Yeah. We’re, we’re trying to skip the hard work. We’re trying to skip the hard years, the research years, and we’re going, why isn’t this working? And the truth is, is you’ve been doing it six months or a year. I saw this quote on Instagram a few days ago, and it just really stuck out to me, and it said, you don’t have the patience to build your business in three years, but somehow you found the patience to work for somebody else for 40.
VJ (11:26):
Yeah.
AJV (11:27):
And I think that kind of sums it up. It’s like, good take time and nothing is wasted,
VJ (11:34):
You know? And I mean, honestly, it, those are the kinds of things you have to think about. You know, being an entrepreneur and being in that, there is a little bit in that secret sauce is you have to be somebody. There are some people that they, they want that security and that comfort of working for somebody else for 40 years. And that’s okay. That’s okay. Because when you’re kind of, you know, cutting that tie and you’re going out solo and you’re doing your thing and you’re, you’re, you’re flying on your own, that’s scary. And that’s not easy to do. So you really have to have those hard talks with yourself to see, I’m the first to encourage it, but I never shame anyone for deciding, Hey, yeah, you know what, I’ve got the good job that I like, or the comfort or the things that I’m familiar with, and no, that’s okay.
VJ (12:22):
But that’s, that isn’t my, you know, spirit. I am that little warrior that is always sort of from the beginning, gotta explore and do, and, you know, figure it out. And sure, it’s a lot easier now at this point in my life as I’m getting ready to wait for it, I turned 70 you know, I’ve had a lot of life experience and all of that has really led me to where I am now to be able to tell my story and try to encourage people and look back at all the things that I’ve done and, and, you know, pay it forward.
AJV (13:00):
Yeah. And, and first of all, I hope I look like you do when I turn 70. You look amazing. But I think also one of the things that you just said is one of the reasons I really wanted to have you on the show, because this is about, you know, building an influential personal brand, and not for the sake of fame or notoriety, but for, for doing good and making a positive impact in the world. And in many cases, you can do that without money. And in some cases there are opportunities for people in, in your case, like you had this a abundant mental abundance mentality of going, I have the money. How can I do good with it? And one of the things that I love is this idea of like taking your income and turning it into impact. And I think that’s one of the things that you’ve done so extraordinarily well with the success of all that you’ve done in business, you were able to take that and also do some really amazing things with you know, this charitable funding, trying to find cures for rare disease.
AJV (14:05):
So here, here are the questions I have, because a lot of people in our community, in our audience impact is really what they’re after. They, they have good sustainable businesses and they’re going, but I, I just, I know there’s more from me than just, you know, the revenue and p and l statements. Like, I, there is something in me that wants to do good. And I know that there was, you know, kind of this life altering moment in your, you know, life in 2008 when your daughter got diagnosed, but there was also something else in you that goes, no, I have the funds. I’m gonna do something about it. Because I think a lot of us have funds that we’re not doing something with. So can you talk a little bit about like, what’s the path of turning your, your income into impact?
VJ (14:50):
Well, I think you have to start earlier on the path. When I did that, as I was even in my makeup career, I was going to the jails, right? So even when I didn’t have money, I was thinking, what ev what else, what other skillset do I have that can feel like I can add value, that I can do something when I didn’t have money? So I went to the jails for 20 years, and I had a look better, feel better program for women that were in jail. So I was already thinking about and wanting to give back. And even in my makeup skillset, I was doing makeovers at the hospital for patients. So, you know, I was always already thinking and geared that way. So when my daughter was diagnosed in 2008, it was really, okay, I’m gonna, you know, as a mom, I’m gonna find a cure for my daughter.
VJ (15:42):
I don’t know what that’s gonna look like. As I said, I didn’t graduate high school, I didn’t go to college, and now I’m in the world of a very complex autoimmune disease, NMO neuromyelitis optica, which really manifests in very much looks like in misdiagnosis and ms. People think it’s ms, they’re very similar. And so how am I gonna learn about this, do this? And I started from that place. And then very quickly as my daughter and I were going through this very, very difficult time, she said to me like, you know, this isn’t just about us anymore. And then I realized it wasn’t for, and we, fortunately due to our business and my husband’s success and business, we put in $80 million of our own money. We never raised money. We actually put in our own money. And that was something, you know, and, and we’re still doing that 15 years later, we’re still putting in money for a foundation that is now changed the entire landscape.
VJ (16:44):
And I recommend for anybody out there who’s suffering with, you know, any kind of a, whether it’s a, a tough diagnosis or how to go about looking at what we did, our story Ally and I, is called saving each other. And it’s what I call my momi, really our story. And then the Power of Rare, which is the blueprint of how did we actually take this money and get drugs made, because now we have four therapies and my daughter is, you know, is stable at this point in time. So it’s kind of, I took that same thinking from my makeup days because it was very much about, here’s the makeup and then here’s how to, it’s very much like, here’s the foundation, here’s our story, and then here’s how to, how to do it. So really from like almost foundation to, to foundation. So it’s always been for me about giving back an impact and purpose and taking a lot of leaps of faith along the way.
AJV (17:45):
Yeah, I love that. And I think that’s probably where I think a lot, lot of people are struggling of finding the balance of like, okay, I want this to be about impact, and I need it to be about income. I have to make money at the same time. But, and I love what you said, it’s like there’s, and there’s a million ways to get back with your gifts and talents. It doesn’t require money, but how do you figure out what those gifts and talents are and put them to good use?
VJ (18:14):
Yeah. You just gotta get scrappy and think about it, you know, like, what’s going on in your local community and what, and what can you do? I think the world being as nutty as it is now, and as you know, divisive and polarizing, all the things that are going on, I, it’s so important to get back to community and to thinking about what can we do to support each other? You know, where is that kindness that we can really can put into every day something that we’re thinking not just about ourselves, but others? I think that, and, and that just, you never know when you’re doing that, what doors open where that leads you because so much of it is you, you just don’t know. Like, if somebody would’ve told me while I was doing makeup and trying to figure that whole part of my life out, that cut to the next part of my life, I’d be actually working to cure rare autoimmune disease. I would’ve never believed it. Or that I’d be at the Vatican receiving an award from the Pope, or that Gloria Steinem would be inducting me into the hall of, like, all those things would’ve never even entered into my consciousness. And yet, they’ve all, they’ve all been a, an amazing part of my life that I’ll always, you know, look back on and go, wow, how did that all happen? But life unfolds in a way, and if we just keep doing the work and showing up.
AJV (19:37):
Yeah. And I, I mean, I think that’s like the heart of so much of your message. It’s like, show up, do the work, keep going. What’s the best next step? Yeah. And I think a huge part of how you’ve been able to give back a lot of, you know, you’ve written five books. Mm-Hmm,
VJ (20:27):
You know what, it’s also, it’s all part of that sharing. There’s that, I just have this very, if I can do it, you know, because I come from a place of low self-esteem, I still am constantly working on that, which people go, really? But yes. So it’s always the, well, oh, look, if I could do it, you can do it. And here’s how, like, I, I did this, so you can do this too, and here’s how I’m gonna just show you what I did, and you, you know, take what works for you and, you know, leave the rest. And so that’s always been it. The first book was a, it was called redefining Beauty. It was a beauty book. The second book was Make Up Your Life. So again, it was the, the how to of the book, redefining beauty and then Make Up Your Life was, why does it all matter?
VJ (21:12):
How does looking better feeling better change? Then, you know, the third book was saving Each Other, which was really when my life changed and our story. And then the fourth book was, and here again, is the how to and now this book is really all about, you know, I’ve been, at this point in my life, as I said, I’ve always been filled with anxiety and a warrior, and, but I’ve also been a, a warrior. So the book originally was Warrior to Warrior, but I’ve, there was a few titles with that. But I also liked the universality of like, we all worry, you know, worry is, we talk about stress and anxiety, but you kind of start with worry. Worry is what you like water. And it, all of a sudden now it has become the stress, the anxiety. So I think you’re gonna hear a lot more about worry.
VJ (22:02):
And it’s kind of, now what do we do about that? So it was important to me to share my experiences. What do you worry about? I worry about everything. I’m a black belt warrior,
VJ (22:54):
And men, I have Jay Shetty in there as well. But Maria Shriver, Chris Jenner, okay. We think about the Kardashians. So what are, you know, what are they worrying about or what’s going on? Chris Jenner, you know, very religious, you know, what, how does she start her day with, you know, faith every day? You know, how does she bring her family together? Gloria Steiner, Jane Fonda, what does she worry about? There’s so many interesting things that I was learning from what women, not only worry about, but how they navigate it. So I wanted to put all that together. And again, it’s my offering to people out there on how in a, in a world of a time where there’s so much we worry about just because you have a lot of money doesn’t mean you don’t worry, you know? I, my life is fantastic. I mean, I am so blessed and so lucky, and at the same time, we’ve worked really hard and I make sure to give back, but there’s still worry, you know?
AJV (23:59):
Yeah, I know. I mean, I think, I, I agree with you. It’s a universal, doesn’t matter how much or how little you have there is worry, right? Yeah, yeah. Whatever it is, right? The, the magnitude of the worries are different with each stage of life, but we all, we all do that. So I’m curious to know a little bit about your writing process, because so many people who are listening to this podcast, they do have a calling on their life like you have where it’s like, I, I feel called to put this on paper and, and turn it into a book. And so I would love to hear from you. It’s like, how did you go about deciding what the book should be about? And I think if I recall, you hand write, right?
VJ (24:47):
I hand write. I mean, I’m so old school that is part of being, being old. I’m old school. I like, you know, I have my little pad of paper and I just write stream of consciousness thought I talk I’ll talk it out into a, you know, a recorder. And I just did the audio version. This is the first time on this book that I actually did the audio version. And I have to say that was an experience in itself as well, reading it all back to yourself. Because a lot of times when I’m writing, you know, you’re not, I’m not always reading it back as much as I, as I think I am, until I’ve really finished the book. And I was like, wow. But you know, it’s just a very, it’s, I think writing a book is really tough. It’s really frustrating for me at times.
VJ (25:34):
I, I struggle with it. I’m lucky. I’ve had, I can never take full credit. I have people that have helped me in my writing because I’m very insecure in that I grammatically will think, oh wait, do I need to put a a period here at the end of this sentence? Or should that be a comma? Or, you know, I can get so stuck on the stupid little things. That it’s been helpful for me when I’ve been able to sit with somebody and go like, okay, these are the big points of what I really wanna say and get across. And again, it’s just doing it. It’s just doing it. Like, I could use, I could have used that as an excuse. Well, you know, I’m not really good at writing dah dah, dah. You have people that support you or help you, or, you know, it takes me longer than most people to write a book, but I still manage to put out five of them. Versus there’s a lot of people that talk about it, think about it, never do it. Yeah. You just gotta,
AJV (26:31):
Yeah. And I love that. ’cause It’s like, and I love that you hand write, like, I think that’s incredible. And I think that’s just a testament for everyone listening. It’s like, there’s no right way to write a book, talk it out on audio hand, write it in a notebook, work with a coach, have a ghost writer, hire an editor. Like whatever it is, just do it.
VJ (26:53):
Just do it. And then make sure it’s true to you. You know? I mean, that’s when I felt really good was when I was reading back the book and I went, this is absolutely true to me. This is, this is honest, this is true. This is real, this is helpful. This is what I want to impart to people. So that’s really important. ’cause I genuinely care.
AJV (27:16):
Yeah, I know you do. Why, why a book on worry. So what was it about this particular topic that compelled you to write a whole book about it?
VJ (27:27):
Because that’s been the theme of my life.
AJV (28:55):
That’s good. Who would you say for everyone’s listening, like who would you say this book is really for?
VJ (29:03):
I think it’s for everybody. I really do. You know, you look at these books now that are out like the anxious generation and with where we are in social media, I mean, everybody’s affected one way or another. I mean, young people are, are worrying about everything to do with their friends and how they look and you know, there’s so much that young people now, and it, because of social media, which I didn’t grow up with the way it is now, I think it’s just, there’s so much more anxiety and stress. So even if they’re not sitting down and reading every page of my book you know, there’s something that they’ll be able to take away from, like, something that’s actually doable. So is do we really know too many people that are, you know, short of like little kids that are not worried or stressed or anxious these days?
VJ (29:53):
Sadly, I, I don’t, you know, I’ve got little grandkids. So at six and eight, I hope they’re not dealing with too much anxiety. But when you read this, these books now that are so much, it starts pretty early. So I, I write something just like I do my makeup. You know, people always say, well, who’s your, what’s your makeup geared for? What? It’s a, oh, you’ve got skin. I am, this is your makeup. You know, I mean, I’m, I’m not putting it at a over 40 person. I’m not, you know, I like the idea of no makeup makeup for everybody to just look natural and look like themselves. So I think more universally, I guess is what I’m saying, ultimately.
AJV (30:35):
Well, I do believe, you know, worry is a universal problem. We all struggle with. Like, I could probably make a list of at least 10 things that I’ve worried about today Yeah. Since I woke up just a few hours ago. And so one quick thing about the book, and then I would like to talk about no makeup makeup in the last few minutes that we have. But if you were to say, if you consider yourself somebody who really struggles from worry, like if there was one thing from the book that you’re like, I don’t care if you don’t get anything else from this book, if you just left with this one thing I know it would help you, what would it be?
VJ (31:09):
It’s taking action that even in the face of worry, even in the face of your massive anxiety, that you still have to do something to take that next step. So to me, you know, yes, it’s okay to fall apart and be stressed out and have that moment, but you have to then like not sit in that. You have to take that walk in nature or make that phone call. You’re afraid of, you know, everything that, there’s that saying, you know, everything is amazing. That’s on the other side of fear. It’s, it’s really working to get to that other side of fear and to get anywhere close to that other side of those amazing things that can be on the other side, you’ve gotta just take the next step. So it’s just doing something, whatever it is, when you’re in that moment of like paralysis and you’re worried to the point of not being able to do that, you’ve gotta just do something. And sometimes that’s just walking outside and, you know, going around the block, something to shake it up. I know it sounds so basic. You’re like, that’s it, Victoria. It’s like, yeah, sometimes that’s it. Because in that moment you clear your head enough to sort of let the next thing in and the next thing and the next
AJV (32:28):
Thing. Hmm. That’s good. Quick personal question. Is there anything that you can say like, Hey, this is something that I fear, fear that I haven’t yet done that I know I need to do to take action on?
VJ (32:44):
Yeah, I mean, for me, travel has always been sort of my like little bugaboo. Like I don’t love a lot of movement. And I say this as a person who’s moving all the time, probably like going to some exotic traveling will be what I’ve gotta sort of go, okay, you can do it. I didn’t fly for so many years 35 years, I didn’t, I didn’t fly as a result of claustrophobia. And I still struggle with that. So I think for me, that will be my continued kind of, you know, eat, love, pray moment of going out, you know, in the wild and, and just wherever that is, just out of my comfort zone.
AJV (33:30):
Hmm. Yeah, I asked because I, you know, I was just sitting here thinking as you were talking about like, what are the things that I know I need to take action on, but there’s some amount of worry or fear that is preventing me to move forward. And I just know that if you struggle with that, if I struggle with that, everyone’s listening, we all struggle with something like that. And, you know, Rory and I have had these conversations in our house a lot here lately. And I think one of the things that we fear is like, man, like how much of what we really think should we share? You know? And I think there’s a real fear of not wanting to come across as judgmental, but also feeling compelled to, to share an alternative view or one that maybe isn’t as popular or as common. And I think there’s a lot of that fear of cancel culture, which has a lot of people who have thoughts and opinions afraid to talk.
VJ (34:31):
Yeah, no, it’s, it’s very, it’s very real. It’s all part of what creates the, the stress and the anxiety is ’cause people are afraid to just be themselves. But I think that there’s a way to do it if you do it with kindness, where the problem is there’s so many people that are doing it you know, with so much hate or bitterness or, you know, anger and, you know, that’s always hard. And then, so then other people are afraid to just say anything because of the afraid of the judgment. You know, I’ve always tried to be as authentic and real and you know, I’ll, I may have opinions that other people don’t like and they’re just mine and it’s like, take it or leave it. And I’m very, you know, if people are not like doing harm to somebody else, and some people politically believe this and some people believe that, and somebody was pro-abortion, somebody’s pro-life, like, you know you know, I just take it all in and, you know, you try to have conversations as civilly as you can and listen to other people. You know, there’s that level of respect at times that we’ve all lost a little bit. And I think you just have to get back to that and and not worry so much about not being able to just have conversation and be yourself. I think that’s important. You hate to lose that because that’s kind of really where the magic is because that’s where we’re authentic to who we are.
AJV (35:57):
Totally agree. And, and back to, it’s like we all have worry at some level. So what are we gonna do about it? So again, we all worry now what coming to a bookshelf near you very, very soon. Again, I’ll put the show notes or the link in the show notes, but you can pre-order it now on Amazon. Pick up a copy, buy one for yourself, buy one for a friend. And before we go, I also wanna talk about this relaunch of Yeah, no makeup, makeup. And as I mentioned earlier, I am wearing it today and I love it. I think it’s amazing. One, I love that it’s in a little compact and it’s so creamy. ’cause I’m usually putting my makeup on, on the go
VJ (36:45):
You know, for me, I mean, I love look at being, I was always in a, in the lab creating product. As I said, I made about 600 and it’s really fun working with color and pigments and coming up with a great product. So I am a formulator at heart. I love it. And my foundation, when I first launched No makeup makeup many years ago, was my hero product, my number one product. And so I wanted to bring it back, but bring it back in a new clean vegan, like, just an amazing formula. I was not gonna launch anything until I had like, what I thought is the perfect foundation. That’s what this is. It comes in 13 shades. And I, I love it. I mean, it’s so easy for me to sell it because I’m like, I love it. I think since I’ve launched, just in the last month, we’ve had two returns. I mean, like, people love it. So that’s what I wanted to just get back into kind of back where I started the whole no makeup makeup and I own the trademark. I trademarked that in the eighties. So it’s just a message that’s still true. It’s timeless. So I wanted to make a, just a fantastic product and I’ve done that and it’s no makeup makeup.com and people can check it out and yeah, I love it.
AJV (38:00):
Well, you know, that’s the thing about building something that’s evergreen and timeless, and now it’s getting introduced to a whole new generation of people like me who wasn’t wearing makeup in the eighties. And and a again, I think one of the things that I love is just a great reminder for all of us is that, you know, it’s never too late to start and it’s never too late to restart. And that’s so much of what I love about you. It’s like, I mean, if I can do it, why not? We can figure it out.
VJ (38:36):
Why not? And I mean, even in makeup, you know, it’s sort of like, it’s, it’s pretty easy. Like this comes with a brush and it’s start at your jawline, match your color. You’re, you’re in, it’s, it’s makeup. If you don’t like how something looks, you wash it off. Like I, I try to get women off the, the hurdle of, you know, they get so in their head sometimes, not just women. And we get stuck that even when I was doing my makeup for so many years, which with this how to, it was just like, here’s, here’s how you do it. And it doesn’t matter. Like, people go, well what if, do I need to start with my eyes first? And then my lips, I’m like, at the end of the day, we just care how it looks like when it’s all done. So I just wanna create products that make you feel good and look good and look like yourself and not wear a mask. So there’ll be other products that follow this, but right now it’s no makeup, makeup, just the foundation for beautiful skin. Well,
AJV (39:29):
I can attest. It’s feels good on, looks good on, I think the feel of makeup is really important to me. And this, it doesn’t feel like I have anything on. I really love it. And I, what I love too is that, you know, this whole idea of like, people think all the time I have to create something new. Yeah. And it’s like, no, you don’t. Yeah. You can just take something that already had and just make it better. Make
VJ (39:57):
Better, improve it. Yeah. That’s the good thing. You know, technology’s changed and I took what was an original formula and I just improved it, you know, manyfold. So, and you look beautiful.
AJV (40:09):
Thank you. And I think for everyone listening, it’s like when you think, oh, I have to write this whole new book, or I have to build this whole thing. No, you don’t. You just, you can take what you have and revise it and it’s taking
VJ (40:21):
That next step. It’s just, it’s just, it’s just doing it. You know? It’s, there’s talking about it’s great, but then you just gotta, you just gotta do it. And it’s always work. So you gotta just be ready to do the work. And and that’s honestly, like I said, it’s, it’s simple, it’s basic, but and people are, are listening, trying to always find what are the magic words you’re gonna say? Sometimes it’s just, you gotta get uncomfortable. You gotta do it. And you gotta work to find what’s on that other side of, for me, fear. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (40:59):
All right. Last question. And I know that we’re running out of time here, but you mentioned this earlier, that you’re about to turn 70. Yes. And so I wanna know what’s next for you. Like,
VJ (41:12):
You know what, that’s the great part. I don’t know. Who knows? Who knows? Maybe you, and I’ll be talking in five years, 10 years, and you’ll go, you did what
AJV (42:15):
And I love the, the mystery and the adventure and all of that. ’cause The truth is, if we had never put out what we were doing, our paths would’ve never crossed. Yeah. And you just, you just never know. But you gotta put it out there. You gotta do the work. And I love too of going just enjoy the beautiful mystery of just not knowing, but do the work, keep moving and enjoy the ride.
VJ (42:39):
Yeah, exactly.
AJV (42:41):
Victoria, thank you so much for coming on. And everyone just one more time. Her book is coming out very soon, September 3rd, pre-order now on Amazon. We all worry now what? And her makeup as relaunched now available [email protected] and at Victoria. If anyone wants to just follow you personally, where’s the best place to send them?
VJ (43:07):
Oh my gosh. Probably Instagram. You can, you know, the original original Victoria Jackson, I believe is where we’re, I’m so not in the world of social media. You’ll all help me as we go along on this journey. But yes, you’ll be able to follow me. Okay,
AJV (43:23):
Well that’s what’s next for Victoria Social Media. That’s it.
VJ (43:28):
AJV (43:31):
I’ll put the handle the official Victoria Jackson. I’ll put that in the show notes. Thank you so much. Loved having you on today. Love getting to see you and talk to you and everyone else. Stay tuned for the recap, which will be coming up next. And we’ll see you next time on the influential personal brand.