John Jantsch (00:00.972)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rand Fishkin. He’s a co-founder and CEO of Spark Toro, an audience research software company and indie game developer at Snack Bar Studio. We probably ought to talk about indie games, Passionate about helping marketers, he shares insights through writing speaking and his book Lost and Founder, previously co-founded Moz and inbound.org and co-authored the Art of SEO.

He’s going to talk about, we are going to talk today about zero click. something that I said off air, you were probably getting tired of talking about, but still a lot of people want to hear about. Welcome to

Rand Fishkin (00:43.672)

Great to be here, John. No, I don’t think people are tired of talking about zero click. I think there’s a lot of people who, don’t totally know what it is and B, are feeling the effects of it, even if they’re not super into the tactical and strategic world of zero click.

John Jantsch (00:54.092)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:00.216)

So having said that, maybe we ought to define that’s what we’re talking about, right? And maybe even talk about, mean, you’ve been following Google for, I don’t know, since Google was born, right? So, you know, when did it start showing up?

Rand Fishkin (01:13.356)

Yeah. So, the term I believe was coined by initially Gabriel Weinberg at DuckDuckGo. That was the first instance I could find of it. In 2011, Gabriel described Google as having these zero click searches and zero click answers. So this is the first sort of appearance of a zero click concept in the marketing world. And a few years later, I did a study, with Jumpshot, which was, which is a now defunct

clickstream data provider. And JumpShot worked with me to see what percent of all Google searches ended without a click. Essentially, they stayed inside Google’s ecosystem either by opening up the Google Maps app or getting their answer right at the top of the results through those instant answers or featured snippets or now AI overviews.

John Jantsch (02:04.896)

Right, right, right. So, I guess maybe you’re going to say it. The zero click meaning that somebody goes and they don’t go away. They get their answer and they don’t leave Google, right? Zero.

Rand Fishkin (02:15.918)

So that, yeah, and that was the initial idea of like, oh, there’s these zero click searches and search marketing might be changing as a result. And maybe we should think about rather than trying to get traffic, simply provide the answer to the searcher, right? To the user. In 2019, Google answered just under half of all searches without a click. like 49 % or something. Fast forward to last year, I just did this study again with Datos.

John Jantsch (02:26.253)

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (02:45.07)

And that number is now 60%. So 60 % of searches are answered without a click, which as a user is super convenient. And as a publisher is terrifying.

John Jantsch (02:57.026)

Well, that goes to a point. mean, there are some that are saying this is an evil plot by Google, but really it’s like behavior, right? I mean, it’s like, this is what the user wants. I know as somebody who’s trying to get a quick, I want to know what time the ball game starts. You know, I don’t need to go to ESPN’s website, right? And read the history of football before I get the time, right?

Rand Fishkin (03:17.326)

That’s exactly right. If you want to know how old Paul Rudd is, or you want to see which channel you can watch SNL 50 on, or you’re trying to figure out what are the ingredients in Moroccan spices, you know what? Google can just answer those things for you, and it is incredibly convenient. So zero-click searches started with Google, but they did not end there. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit.

YouTube, TikTok, Slack, every single platform realized that they could keep more people on their websites and their platforms if they stopped sending traffic out. And so, Twitter was one of the early adoptees of this. algorithm, this is probably 2016, 17, their algorithm started biasing against links. If you included a link in a tweet, Twitter would limit the reach of that tweet.

John Jantsch (03:47.746)

Tick tock.

John Jantsch (04:00.716)

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (04:15.542)

Substantially compared to a tweet that did not contain a link that’s true on Facebook as well It’s true on linkedin as well. You can see it in subreddits where moderators and reddit themselves started down voting and and stopping the promotion of Reddit submissions that contained a link youtube started Minimizing the description field so that it would hide any url external url link that would take you off of youtube

John Jantsch (04:40.961)

Ehh.

Rand Fishkin (04:43.31)

So every single platform is doing this over and over. And my colleague, Amanda Natividad, when she joined SparkToro, what was that, 2022, she sort of came up with this idea that zero click is not just about search, it’s about all platforms. The zero click internet is here. And as a result, the only thing to do is to create zero click content and do zero click marketing. Influence people in the places they’re already paying attention

John Jantsch (05:11.52)

Right. Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (05:12.876)

rather than demanding that they come to your platform and requiring traffic to be your only KPI.

John Jantsch (05:18.806)

Yeah. And, you know, lot of the people, the sky is falling, you know, looking at the results. was a pretty, sexy headline that HubSpot had lost 72 % of their traffic or something like that. But can we say that a percentage of that, maybe a large percentage was kind of garbage traffic anyway? I mean, it wasn’t intent traffic. was like, they published a listicle and somebody went to that cause they wanted the list, but they didn’t want anything to do with HubSpot.

Rand Fishkin (05:43.416)

Well, John, I don’t know if you did what I did as soon as I saw that headline, but I went and looked up HubSpot stock price and their latest earnings report. And guess what? Record highs, right? So HubSpot and a whole bunch of other platforms, I did a whole blog post and a video about this. They are indicative of a new trend that zero click marketing is.

John Jantsch (05:47.564)

Heheheh, Potter.

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (06:11.424)

almost certainly at the head of, is traffic down, revenue up. If your traffic goes down, but your revenue goes up, should you be pissed at your marketing team? Or should you celebrate the fact that they are finding opportunities in a zero click internet world for your message and your influence to reach the right audience and attract the right customers? I think it’s the latter.

John Jantsch (06:34.56)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so you started to hint at what to do now. If you’re especially SEO folks, know, or I mean, they, they’d kind of dialed in the game, right? So now like, what’s the new game? I mean, for SEO folks, if you were advising a group of SEO folks, you know, talking, doing a keynote, you know, what would you be telling them that they need to be doing how they need to be changing their model?

Rand Fishkin (06:55.82)

Yeah, I’m actually, I’m giving a at SMX Munich to a couple thousand people next month. And the topic, John, you’ll like this is called, it’s the end of traffic as we know it. And I feel fine. And the basic premise here is that, look, if you’re an SEO, some of you will have no choice. Your boss, your team, your client.

John Jantsch (07:00.748)

Right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:09.474)

Yeah, great. That’s awesome.

Rand Fishkin (07:20.302)

They’re going to say, I don’t care what Rand Fishkin says. I don’t care what’s going on in Google. I don’t care about zero click marketing. You get me traffic. That’s your job. You know what? Okay. You’re going to have to focus on the few keywords that send traffic and sort of the 40 % of searchers that click and you know, the platforms that still do send some traffic, that kind of thing. But for everyone else, I would urge you to break out of this mindset that everything has to be about SEO, right? That the classic SEO is the only thing that you’re good at.

John Jantsch (07:45.484)

Yeah. Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (07:49.01)

SEOs, at least when I was an SEO, you know, seven years ago now, it was not just about ranking in Google, right? There was lots of things that you’d have to do as part of that. Things around accessibility of your website, sure, but also placement of content on third-party websites and pitching and essentially, yeah, a public relations job, right? It is a PR job. You’re trying to create content and a message that people want to amplify and get that message amplified in the places they pay attention.

John Jantsch (08:06.68)

Authority, yeah, Yep, yep, yep, yep.

Rand Fishkin (08:19.638)

I’m not sure exactly what the industry is going to end up calling that. Maybe they’ll call it PR. Maybe they’ll call it the new form of influencer marketing. Maybe they’ll call it content placement or offsite content marketing. I don’t really care. I don’t care what that’s called. What I do care about is you should do it because it works.

John Jantsch (08:37.974)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think, you you made a point about why everybody’s so fixed on SEO. I think for a lot of SEO folks, it was easy, cheap traffic. And in some cases, easy, cheap conversions and business. And so I think we got lazy. And I think that to me, that was a big part of it. But what about that business that is all about trust and authority? Content was huge for them to drive, you know, folks to their website.

couldn’t buy ads, ads were useless to them. What is that business, like a professional services business? How do they survive in this

Rand Fishkin (09:13.038)

I look, I think whenever I realize my video is getting a little fuzzy and Riverside’s giving me a funny message about that, but my internet’s fast and my device is running fast, so I don’t know. I’m just gonna go and hope that the recording catches it correctly. The reality is when your business model gets disrupted, you either decide to embrace the change that’s coming,

John Jantsch (09:19.426)

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (09:42.41)

Or you face the consequences. And I think the consequences are not nothing. It’s not all going to die. SEO is going to go away. That’s not what’s happening. It’s just going to become a lower growth rate industry or even a shrinking industry over time as CMOs and CEOs and boards of directors wake up to the fact that the opportunity in organic types of marketing might lie elsewhere, i.e. influencing people in the places where they already play.

John Jantsch (10:10.998)

Yeah. The new sexy term is AIO. How much do we need to pay attention to that?

Rand Fishkin (10:16.878)

it, it varies quite a bit. If you’re in B2B, especially B2B tech and you’re selling to other B2B techies, the answer is you probably need to pay some attention to it. There was a great report from SEM rush, recently where they looked at the clickstream data. like clickstream data a lot. think it really tells the story accurately.

They looked at 80 million different click streams of people who visited and used ChatGPT, and they analyzed what they did with the platform, the prompts that they put in, all that kind of stuff. What I found quite interesting there is 70 % of those prompts had no corollary at Google. So you could not perform the task that was asked of ChatGPT in Google’s ecosystem

John Jantsch (11:05.868)

Hmm.

Rand Fishkin (11:13.55)

outside of Gemini whatsoever, right? This is an AI type of task. It’s like saying how much market share is Microsoft Excel taking from Google search? What? None. Like that’s people are doing different things with that. Chat GPT is taking 30 % away from a search engine, right? Or, or adding it to it, right? Those are, those, those are people who are using it for that replacement thing. But I think the answer here is every single business.

John Jantsch (11:15.948)

Yes.

John Jantsch (11:35.436)

Right, yeah.

Rand Fishkin (11:43.2)

Every sector needs to figure out whether its customers and audience are using large language models and AI tools to perform search like tasks inside their specific ecosystem. you know, not to promote spark Toro, but I, I don’t know of another place you can do this, but you can inside spark Toro. what that’s what we do with clickstream data, right? You can go and you can search for, you know, my audience is science fiction writers or interior designers or.

you know, painters or landscaping professionals, or I want to find people who search for backyard gardens. And, Spartora will then tell you in the AI and tools section, which platforms they’re using and how much more or less than normal. So you could see, for example, I ran a search recently for, people who do custom decking, like for their backyards. They don’t use AI tools very much, right? That’s not, that’s not their goal, but.

John Jantsch (12:34.583)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (12:37.952)

Right, right, right.

Rand Fishkin (12:40.396)

If you look for people who are searching for B2B CRM software, well, yeah, they are using ChakGPT and Gemini and Kaggy and all these different AI tools, much more than average. You probably need to pay attention to large language model optimization.

John Jantsch (12:58.334)

That’s a great, great point. I’ve seen a real divide between the idea of local businesses versus national or B2B, like you mentioned, like that Decker, you know, that you talked about that’s, that’s fixing people’s homes. I mean, he’s probably got people in his geography or he or she that’s looking for them and you know, Google maps and some of those tools are still their friend, right?

Rand Fishkin (13:20.414)

Yeah, absolutely. this, I mean, I don’t know what to tell you, John. Like there’s, there’s still people who just as they did in 1720 or 1950 or 2001, their primary resource for which person am I going to use to build my deck is they ask their neighbor, they ask their friend, right? And that, is a source of influence that is influenceable via different means than, you know,

John Jantsch (13:41.59)

Yep. Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (13:50.072)

highway billboard or a Google search or an AI tool or a social media platform. And so your job as a marketer is to figure out the sources of your audience influence and be present in those places, hopefully commensurate with how much they use them.

John Jantsch (14:07.98)

Yeah. Yeah. And dedicated what limited resources you have to the best ones, right? Now, so another sexy headline is Google’s dead. So is their dominance, you know, is their dominance going to fade? mean, obviously, the cash cow depends on people going to their homepage and clicking on ads instead of getting answers.

Rand Fishkin (14:14.219)

Exactly.

Rand Fishkin (14:20.325)

you

Rand Fishkin (14:32.512)

Yeah. So, it’s funny. I was just asked about this by some reporters. and I don’t like to give opinion based answers here, right? Google’s getting worse. I ran this search and I got a bunch of junk in my results where 10 years ago when I ran this search, I used to get good stuff. I don’t like those types of anecdotal, replies and responses. I don’t trust them. The thing I trust is data at scale. So

What I would look at if I were a reporter trying to answer the question, is Google dying? Is Google getting worse? Is, are there more or less people searching on Google than there were last year at the same time? Are there more or fewer searches per searcher than there were last year at this time? The answer to both of those, according to some research that I hope to publish in the next couple of weeks actually, is no.

Google grew about 10 % in terms of searches per searcher last year, and it grew in terms of number of total searchers last year. You don’t have to believe me, by the way, or Datos’ numbers. If you prefer, you can look at what Sundar Pichay said in the earnings call, the Google earnings call two weeks ago. He said the same thing, and our data bears it out. I don’t always trust Google to tell us the truth, but in this case,

all the data sources agree, if Google is getting worse, then the only logical response is, well, if they’re getting worse, everything else, all the alternatives must be even worse because people are still using them more and more.

John Jantsch (16:10.616)

Yeah.

Yeah. And I think people under or forget, you know, they’re more than just that search box as well. You know, I pay Google a hundred bucks every month to use Gmail and Sheets and Slides and all those kinds of things too. they’re an ecosystem way beyond their ad network.

Rand Fishkin (16:31.244)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But, but I want to be clear, I’m not talking about their earnings report in terms of their dollar, you know, of, of growth. I’m talking about right growth in, in raw searches.

John Jantsch (16:38.38)

Yeah. Just searches, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So another topic that, and this is right up your alley, so I’m inviting you to talk about Spark Toro here, is that attribution is just getting harder and harder. And yet, as I listen to your talk, it’s more important maybe than ever. Like, where are your people hanging out and actually reading stuff and how do you find them? So how do you advise businesses to really kind of arm themselves with better attribution?

Rand Fishkin (17:12.578)

Gosh.

John Jantsch (17:14.168)

Oh, I asked a hard question. like that. Well, that was my entire intent, so I did well.

Rand Fishkin (17:16.416)

Well, here’s the problem, John. You’ve set me up once again to like tee up my own software and I really, try not to. But you know, you know, I don’t like to be self-promotional. Okay. First off, there are, there are several ways to do this. Some of them good, some of them bad. One of the ones that a lot of people use that I really don’t like is they do post-consumer surveys.

John Jantsch (17:30.874)

hahahahah

Rand Fishkin (17:45.998)

So this is, you you just bought this pair of shoes from Nike, Nike sends you an email and they ask you, how did you find us? Or they ask you at the end of the checkout process, you know, how did you learn about these shoes today? What made you buy from us? And people will give answers that are incomplete, often inaccurate. And if you’re a marketer, you’re only ever going to get answers from channels and sources that you already reach. So you will never know.

about the ones that didn’t send you traffic, right? This is a huge bias problem. I cannot recommend enough against asking people where they heard about you and then using that to determine your marketing budget. is just logic. You you have failed logic 101 in college and you’re going to get kicked out of the class.

John Jantsch (18:20.973)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:28.536)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:35.99)

Well, and you’re also going to pay Facebook a lot more money because everybody says they saw your Facebook ad, right?

Rand Fishkin (18:41.006)

It depends on the sector. So we tried this. of my, one of my favorite stories, John, is early in the spark after spark Charles launch, we tried this with one of our customers. We asked them, this is a consumer brand in the food industry. So they like sell a food product. I don’t have permission to mention who they are, but they sell a food product direct to consumers. And we said, Hey, can you try something for us? Would you put these two? think it was like Martha Stewart and I wasn’t Guy Fieri, but it was some other like.

notable food person in the food world. We asked them to put that in their dropdown list of places where people had heard about them. Yeah. Guess what, John? Those people had never mentioned the brand. They had never talked about them. And 30 % of the customers said, yeah, that’s where I heard about you. So just, you you’re getting terrible data, like absolutely terrible data. the, the second one, the one that I do.

John Jantsch (19:09.986)

Food. Foodie. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:23.01)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:30.168)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (19:38.072)

quite like is to look at, broadly speaking, if you use a competitive intelligence platform and you can see where traffic is going to your competitors, that can make reasonable sense, right? So similar web is a good resource for that. Obviously, Spark Toro offers that type of data as well from a competitive perspective. I think SEM rush, the folks I mentioned who did that research.

John Jantsch (19:51.32)

Hmm.

John Jantsch (19:55.81)

Yes.

Rand Fishkin (20:05.676)

I think they might have some of that in their platform, but it might be search centric. So be careful. You’re not just getting biased by Google stuff. and then the, you know, the absolute best one, the absolute best way to do this is learn lockpicking, get the home addresses of all your customers break into their houses, steal their own, get the phone unlock code, and then look at everything that they read, browse, watch, subscribe to follow that of course.

John Jantsch (20:25.016)

Yep.

Rand Fishkin (20:33.556)

super illegal, highly unethical. have, I, yeah, that’s right. Yeah. You got a lot of competition for that. but, but the next closest thing is essentially clickstream data, which is, you know, a panel of users and the providers look at every URL that’s visited. And then you can sort of, take a broad group of people and extrapolate what a general population does.

John Jantsch (20:36.066)

Plus, Alexa’s already doing it anyway, so.

Rand Fishkin (21:02.094)

That’s what we do at Spark Toro. so, you if you want to see, you can type in your website or a competitor’s website or a search term that people use in Google or, a descriptor that people use in their buys. And then you can see what websites, what topics, what social media platforms they use more or less than average. and that can, that can be a good way to sort of get a sense of, Hey, you know, lot of our customers are using.

I don’t read it and we’re not there at all. A lot of our customers are on TikTok or LinkedIn or Pinterest or they’re using ChatGPT or they’re using Gemini and we’re not in those places. We should probably be making investments there.

John Jantsch (21:35.702)

Yes.

John Jantsch (21:49.876)

Yeah. Well, Rand, we’re, we’ve run out of time. I appreciate you dropping by. Uh, we’ve mentioned sparktoro.com a couple of times anywhere else that you’d invite people to connect with you and learn more about your work.

Rand Fishkin (22:00.504)

Sure, well, you know, at the start of our chat today, you mentioned Snapbar Studio. So folks are interested in an indie video game where you get to play an Italian chef in the 1960s. You can check that out at snapbarstudio.com. And who isn’t? It’s not live yet, but give us about 18 months, and there’ll be an early access version on Steam.

John Jantsch (22:14.2)

And who isn’t?

John Jantsch (22:24.408)

Awesome, awesome. Again, I appreciate you taking a few moments and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Rand Fishkin (22:29.838)

Yeah, I look forward to it, John. Take care of yourself. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (22:32.098)

All right, bye now.

John Jantsch (00:00.866)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guest today, just me, solo show. Those of you out in TV land, see I’ve got my DTM hat wearing just for this solo show. So what are we gonna talk about today? Remember when I was a little kid, I went to the circus, probably many of you did as well. I think they still have it around. Anyway.

They had the elephants and the trapeze and all that stuff, right? But my favorite, always remember was like this guy that would have like seven or eight plates and you’d have them spinning on these long big sticks. You’ve probably seen somebody do that before as well. And you know, it’s just as one would start to drop, he’d get over there and get that one going again. And then he’d find another one that was getting ready to drop and he’d do that one again. you know, years later, I find that and maybe some of you can relate running a business is a lot like that, isn’t it?

feel like we’re constantly spinning plates. And there’s a reason for that. Unless you have 50 or 100 people working for you, you’ve probably got multiple roles. In fact, the typical small agency owner, marketing consultant, that’s who we work with. That’s who I want to talk with, talk about today. I would say that we’ve all got like seven roles that we have to do every single day, maybe or maybe a lot of them we’re not doing, but they still follow us, right? And so

I want to talk today about what those roles are, but then I want to spend some time focused on how we actually free ourselves from the chaos of that, of the, many of those roles. mean, there’s so many amazing tools today that we have available to us. mean, AI being one of them, of course, but a lot of automation tools that really can make life a lot easier.

There’s a couple other things, certainly delegation to VAs and things. So I’m going to cover all of those today. So let’s go with the seven roles, what they are first off. The first one is CEO. mean, whatever you call yourself, somebody’s got to have, somebody’s the leader, that’s probably you, has to have a vision for the business. so, and that’s a role that I see that doesn’t get played very often. But if we’re not looking up and occasionally saying what needs to happen or where do I want to be this time next year?

John Jantsch (02:12.75)

be really, really simple. I mean, you don’t obviously have the same needs as a large organization for a CEO, but somebody who’s at least somebody that being you, who’s at least thinking about like, where am I trying to take this thing? What’s the big picture? All right. Number two, salesperson. Nobody’s going to make it rain, but you, right? I mean, you’re out there generating leads. You’re out there having those meetings. You’re out there closing those deals. That’s a, that’s obviously a very important role that you have to play typically.

Strategist, if you are a marketing consulting firm, if you’re an agency, you need to develop strategy for your clients. That’s really what’s going to differentiate you from everybody else who’s making those marketing plans, who’s helping that client decide where they’re trying to go. Project manager, right? Once you get the client, you do the strategy, you turn into a project manager, managing maybe its vendors or managing projects, campaigns, whatever the work calls for, there is essentially a project manager.

role in it. Then client manager, we have to do the reporting, we have to actually if we’re gonna, if we’re gonna have long term retainer clients, which are my favorites, we’re gonna have to actually maintain that relationship, we’re gonna have to be showing value, week in, week out, month in, month out. And that’s a role. That’s a that’s a function inside of business. And then finally, do we call it accountant? I don’t know. It’s a finance role. Somebody has to collect the money, somebody has to send out the invoices, somebody has to balance the

The checkbook, somebody has to make sure that bills are being paid on time, right? So there is that bookkeeping function. most people that I work with, agency owners, didn’t go into business because they love doing that work, but it’s an essential role. So of these roles, I think the key is to decide.

which ones are the most important? You know, you can make a case for all of them, right? But there’s no question that selling work, doing strategy, maintaining clients, maybe marketing your own business. I mean, these are roles that really have to be done on a consistent basis if you’re going to grow the business until you start getting help, until you can start getting into the role where maybe you are doing one or two of these and you have people doing some of the other roles.

John Jantsch (04:31.576)

So how do you balance that idea that some roles are more important than others, but you can’t just simply neglect or abdicate any of roles. So let’s go through those and talk about maybe how you not escape the role, but escape the chaos of either doing the role poorly or not at all. All right, so the first one, CEO. This is something that in a small business, I mean,

Time blocking is is the probably the only way you’re going to get to this right? If you just put it down as a task, think big about my business and then that like everything else on your checklist has to be addressed first. You’ve got to give yourself. I don’t care what it is, but let’s just pretend it is. Monday afternoon, block off two hours and use that two hours to think about the future of your business. The vision of business where you’re trying to go.

who you need to be doing that with, what you need to be doing without kind of feeling like, in between that, I’m gonna return email and I’m gonna do this project proposal for a prospect. No, that time is your big thinking time. If you don’t do it, if you don’t take that time to analyze where you are, where you’re going, where you wanna be, where the opportunities are, it never gets done. And then you just get really trapped in, gosh, wonder what I did today. Don’t know, I sure was busy, right?

So having that time is how you play the CEO role. Now the salesperson role, you’ve got to really get good at automating a lot of your follow-up. mean, if you are putting, if you’re generating leads by inviting them to webinars or you’re writing, having eBooks or things that they can download, checklists that they can download, you want to make, you know, the active campaigns of the world, the HubSpots of the world will allow you to create a 15 series email follow-up series

that just heaps value after value after value conversation and does it really automatically. I mean, that one’s kind of a no brainer because you really want to be taking a look, know, sale, active campaign, HubSpot, both also have pipeline. So you want to be taking a look at, are people I’ve talked to, here are people I want to talk to, here are people that have expressed interest but not move forward. You want to be having that kind of conversation where you can use those tools to automate

John Jantsch (06:54.862)

You know, if you move somebody from, we had this conversation or we had this meeting, now I’m going to move them to another stage in the pipeline. And that’ll automatically continue to nurture them with a different series of emails because they’ve moved to a different spot in the journey. So it takes time to set some of those things up, but really from a salesperson standpoint, you have to do it. Sales and marketing are something that you have to do every single day. And if you don’t set those things up,

you’ll not only be dropping opportunities, but you’ll be very inconsistent in terms of pipeline. And I think that’s one of the real killers with a smaller business because you get busy and then you look up one day and go, we haven’t been doing any marketing. Now the strategist role, mean, here’s the pitch from duct tape marketing. If you’re an agency or to this role, developing marketing strategy, developing the master plan for a client.

is something that you need to have a repeatable proven system for. If you are constantly making it up with every new client, reacting to what they say they want, here’s a hint. They don’t know what they want. Well, they know what they want. They don’t know what they need. They come to you with a list of tactics. We need you to do our social media and run that campaigns and produce content. What they need is a marketing plan, a marketing strategy that really differentiates them.

And that’s something that we license to agencies, fractional CMOs, consultants as the strategy first leadership system. They need leadership and they need scope. They need you to tell them what to do. They need you to lead them. So having a proven system to do that, quite frankly, is absolutely how you escape really that role from drowning you. Cause that’s, you know, I’ve talked to many, many business owners, many, many agency owners, and that’s the role that

consumes in some cases the greatest amount of time because it’s custom work every single time you do it. So what I imagine if you actually had a client come to you and say, hey, we need a website. You say, yes, you do. But first you need strategy first. And here’s how. And then you literally went down the process step by step. Here’s the process. You taught others in your organization to run many aspects of the process. You don’t have to think about what are we going to do? We’re going to do strategy first.

John Jantsch (09:16.588)

I mean, it’s a game changer. All right, let’s keep moving. Project manager. So you got to work, you develop strategy. They say, the strategy’s brilliant. Who’s gonna do this? And you say, well, I guess we are. And so there, again, using tools like, and we happen to use Monday, project management tools that allow you to not only show your client everything’s on track, give them unified communication.

give them access to all the reports, setting up a project management process that uses a technology like Monday or ClickUp or Asana. mean, there are a dozen, they probably all work about the same way. It’s essential, I think, if you are going to make this work. And a great deal of the things I’ve talked about, AI can play a real role in helping you. It can help you create, it can help you analyze your sales calls, past sales calls. It could help you create that email nurture

Setup that I talked about it could actually help you Set up repetitive tasks in some of the the you know, most of these tools today are building AI into it You can set up repetitive tasks in those All right marketing Your own agency. This is probably the one that gets most people I mean We were a lot of successful agencies in there and I can’t tell how many times they’ve said so they’re coming to us, you know analyzing our program and saying

and don’t look at my website because it’s a work in progress or it needs to be updated or I don’t know what it is. Maybe some of you have experienced that, right? We all do. It’s so hard to work on our own stuff because we’re working on our clients’ stuff. We’ve successfully done where we’ve actually, we have project managers in our business and we actually assign a project manager to our business as a client.

And I suggest that that’s how you have to look at it is you are one of your clients, you’ve got to get that work done. And that’s where really, you know, delegation, having somebody on board to do it. Consistently producing content, reproducing content, a lot of the AI tools, I never advise anybody to go to chat GPT, and say, give me a blog post on x words, but it does a great job of outlining

John Jantsch (11:34.466)

hub pages or outlines for bigger topics or giving you ideas. Then you write the content in your point of view, your voice. And then it does a really good job at repurposing that content into video scripts, into webinars, into LinkedIn posts. And then of course, you know, all of the social networks now tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Zapier, Zapier, depending upon how you say it.

Lately, all of these tools really allow you to take a long piece of content, turn it into a hundred social posts, schedule those social posts out. The tools now will analyze. Lately is a great tool. It’ll actually analyze your content for what will get the most engagement. So there are many things that you can do and it’s not just a matter of spraying stuff around, but today, our clients, our prospects are actually

participating in a lot of networks. They’re getting their information a lot of different places. And so to some degree, we have to have that content in the format that they want it. Video, audio, text, short form, long form, both in video, long form, short form. So I mean, it’s overwhelming job to do that. And so using some of these assistants to really help you can be key. And before I go any farther, let’s use that word assistant again.

There are so many great ways for you to get virtual assistance. And it may not be, you’re gonna go out and find the marketer of the century and you’re going to delegate all your marketing to them. But maybe your first step is to actually say, look, of these seven roles that John’s talking about, which ones, what are those that I can’t do, I don’t like to do, maybe aren’t as essential for my business?

You know, finance is essential, but it’s not essential that you do it. That’s one that there are a ton of people out there that just basic bookkeeping can be purchased very inexpensively and it’ll get done right. It’ll get done on time. You will have your invoices going out. So, you know, there are places where, you know, investing in your business to get to free up not just time, not just tasks, but maybe even headspace. You know, some of these roles you don’t get to because you just don’t have the headspace.

John Jantsch (14:00.814)

I think we covered, no, I’m down to client manager, keeping clients happy. Boy, I tell you, this is one where we have heavily used AI. And the reason is because a lot of the reports that we get, you use tools like SEMrush and you use Google Analytics and you get these reports, you get a lot of data, but making sense out of the data, extracting anything that demonstrate to a client, here’s the value of what we’re doing.

AI is tremendous at actually analyzing those results. you know, using tools for that. In terms of accounting, again, I’m sure I don’t think there’s an AI tool out there that’ll send invoices. The day’s coming. We will have that. But in terms of the accounting role, I would definitely say that’s one that find somebody to do that. If you’re doing that yourself, it’s not getting done well. It’s not getting done on time. And that’s going to seriously hurt your business.

Here’s kind of the four prong approach, if you will.

John Jantsch (15:08.216)

Figure out what’s important, figure out what you like to do and what you’re good at doing. What’s the most valuable to your business and focus on creating systems and processes around those things that free up some of your time. Think about what you could delegate. And again, the list for that is what do I hate doing? What am I not good at doing? What maybe doesn’t move the needle?

if I’m doing it. And those are the first things that you should delegate and outsource so that you’re not doing them. The trouble with a lot of agencies is that, even solopreneurs, maybe you have three or four clients. And so, hey, I can do all this work. But then you look up one day and you can’t. You’re designing the websites, you’re writing all the copy, you’re doing all the things, and all of a sudden, you’ve got as much as you’ve

got on your plate, can no longer look for clients. You can no longer do really great work. You’re getting burned out. So, you know, delegating and outsourcing as soon as possible is a real key here. So the seven roles that I defined are important. They’re the plates that you have to keep spinning. But guess what? You can build foundations under those plates. They don’t have to be a little skinny stick anymore. So

That’s my two cents. If you’d like to know more about the duct tape marketing strategy first leadership system that we licensed to agencies and consultancies, check out duct tape marketing.com. We’d love to visit with you about how we might be able to bring our proven systems processes, almost business in a box. These seven roles are all covered in our training. So we can bring you that proven system so that you

can actually start getting out there and doing your best work, having a life, scaling a business that serves that life. All right, thanks for tuning in. Love to hear your feedback on today’s show and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Sara Nay (00:01.592)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is Sara Nay and today I’m stepping in as host for John Jantsch. And we’re actually doing a ladies takeover of the show because I have Jane McCarthy as my guest. Really excited to talk to you, Jane. Jane is a brand strategist who has worked with clients such as Sweet Tart, Southern California Edison and Pilot Pen. She is the author of the goddess guide to branding.

Helping female entrepreneurs create an abundant and authentic feminine brand. So welcome to the show, Jane.

Jane McCarthy (00:33.144)

Thank you, Sarah, I’m so happy to be here.

Sara Nay (00:36.792)

Well, let’s dive on in. One of the things that I know that you talk about a lot are the concept of goddess archetypes. And so for our listeners today, can you give me an overview as to what are goddess archetypes and how do they relate to brands and in business in general?

Jane McCarthy (00:52.684)

Yeah, so let’s start with archetype. Okay, so many of us are familiar with archetypes from Hollywood movies. Think about the hero of an action film or the outlaw of a Western. The comic who plays that role of giving a little bit of comic relief in a film. We are familiar with these characters. They play

they’re played by different actors, they wear different costumes, but at their essence, it’s a character we know, and that’s what’s considered an archetype. And this concept was developed by Carl Jung, who is one of the famous psychologists, psychoanalysts of the 20th century. And he developed a set of 12 archetypes that can be utilized as like base characters in the human experience. And if you think about,

Star Wars, that was a film that was really based on the knowledge of archetypes from Carl Jung. And in marketing, branding folks started to realize that we can use these characters to create a brand that feels like it has a personality people can actually connect with, a sense of humanity.

And so I, in my career as a brand strategist, and I’ve worked in advertising for over 15 years, have loved using archetypes. And I found that when I get to that central character with a business, we immediately understand the voice. We have a sense of the feel, even the colors and the symbols start to become clear. And so I’ve utilized Carl Jung’s archetypes throughout.

My my journey as as a brand strategist. However, one thing that I noticed is that a lot of those archetypes Tended to toward the masculine. So you have the hero you have the everyman is what it’s called in that system Which is like the guy next door and the explorer and there’s that that’s great but then the more feminine ones were

Jane McCarthy (03:08.556)

the lover and the caregiver. And I thought, wait a second, there are so many variations on the archetypal character from the feminine lens. And that led me to the work of Jean-Chenota Bolin, who is a Jungian analyst. And in the 1980s, she wrote this seminal book called, Goddesses and Every Woman. And she mapped the psyche of women along archetypal lines, utilizing the Greco-Roman goddess system.

Sara Nay (03:11.116)

Hehehe

Jane McCarthy (03:38.624)

and the goddesses. And I thought, this is an amazing source point to bring to branding and to say, let’s look at which goddess energy, if you want a more feminine energy brand, what goddess energy are you? And that’s how I got to the goddess archetypes for branding, which is like Athena, the free, the huntress, or Demeter, the love, the mother, or Maiden Persephone, the goddess of youth and magic and fantasy. And so,

It’s just been really fun to outline these. have eight goddess archetypes that you can utilize to inspire your brand based on this Jungian work.

Sara Nay (04:17.388)

Yeah, that’s great. And so you touch on a few of them, but can you quickly go over what are the eight different architects that you have identified?

Jane McCarthy (04:24.672)

Yeah, so Athena is the goddess of wisdom. She’s very much about education, working within the system to create credibility and legitimacy. She works toward justice. Another example is Hestia the sacred. She was the goddess of the hearth and she’s very much about like light and purity. So I associate her with healing.

And with products that are about wellness and about sacred space and quiet and almost, she’s almost the Zen kind of energy. And then we have Hera. She got a bad rap as being Zeus’s jealous, venomous wife. I think I see her as the regal energy and she’s the goddage of tradition and partnership. She is the queen energy. And…

you know, I rewrote her story a little bit for this book. So those are some examples of the goddesses and how much fun it is to work with mythic archetypes and then think about how that translates into brands today in contemporary life.

Sara Nay (05:40.526)

That’s great. So if someone is listening today and they’re working on their branding and they’re looking for clarity and direction, how would they go about identifying what goddess they might align with as a company?

Jane McCarthy (05:53.164)

Yeah, so if you look at this set of eight archetypes, you’re gonna see that there are dominant gifts that each goddess has. So for example, I mentioned Diana the Free, the goddess of the hunt. So she inspires adventuring, she inspires confidence, she inspires going out beyond the known. And so if you’re a brand that’s about

exploring new territories, then you can look to Diana to inspire you. So it’s a lot about what is the energy that you want to infuse your bandwidth and also the gift that you have. And so then another gift is Venus, the goddess of beauty and pleasure. And so if you’re bringing the energy of like pure joy, recreation,

Playfulness, then you can be a Venus archetype. So it’s thinking about the, you can think about the gifts that you want to bring to your customers through the brand experience. And that will bring you to your archetype, among others. I have a bunch of different exercises, but that’s one.

Sara Nay (07:09.228)

That’s one. It’s interesting to hear you talk through that, especially because I took the assessment that you have available on your website that I found and it identified myself as Diana the free and I’ve been at duct tape marketing for

about 14 years now and people have always looked at us as a marketing firm to be ahead, one step ahead of all the changes and evolution that’s happening in marketing. And so when I got that specific architect type, that aligned very nicely with what I’ve been in the position to do over the last 14 years.

Jane McCarthy (07:40.972)

love that. And I have to admit that I saw your quiz results and I saw that some folks at Duck Tape, a lot of you guys got Diana and I thought, okay, this is a team that’s aligned. And so yes, this is the goddess that is the innovative goddess and is one step ahead of the curve. And by the way, a lot of female founders have Diana as their core archetype. So you’re hitting on something too, which is a brand has

Sara Nay (07:45.004)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (07:53.024)

Yes.

Jane McCarthy (08:10.528)

an archetype, but then your person can have one. And of course, that’s what I took them from. I took them from a young analyst who was talking about people. And so we tend to all have one core archetype that defines our personality. I, for example, am a maiden Persephone. And so I’m all about imagination and feeling into possibility and

fantasy and myth, which actually makes sense for why I ended up doing what I’ve done here. But this can be very informative as we think about our own mission and our own purpose. And then if we are at the heart of our business and we’re the face of our business, like you are the host of this podcast, then who you are is going to inform the energy of the brand, the energy of the business that you’re driving. So who you are and your

Sara Nay (08:47.971)

Yeah.

Jane McCarthy (09:05.536)

your archetype is potentially linked, not always and doesn’t have to be, but potentially very linked to the archetype of your brand.

Sara Nay (09:13.9)

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And that’s actually a reason that I was interested in having my team take the assessment as well after I did, because, you know, I think we’ve established duct tape marketing as a brand over the years, but, one of the things that we’re always hiring for when we’re hiring new people are things, people that are up for change and up for a challenge and that want to be seen as leaders. So it wasn’t a surprise that we had.

a bunch of Diana’s on our team because of kind of what we’ve built as a brand and who we’ve hired for. And so I’m just curious in your experience, like this is all really important conversation for building the brand and putting yourself out there and resonating with clients. But in your experience, does it help with, you know, hiring and attracting the right type of candidates to join your team as well?

Jane McCarthy (09:56.226)

Well, I think this is a really intriguing idea. And I don’t have tremendous experience with team building based on archetypes, so I won’t make a objective statement. But I will tell you that I’m really interested in personality types in this whole world, and I have been for some time. And I was up at Esalen in Big Sur taking a workshop on Enneagram types.

Sara Nay (09:59.651)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (10:09.176)

Yeah.

Jane McCarthy (10:22.59)

And the Enneagram, I also mapped the Enneagram to the goddess archetypes and I utilized that system as well. And I remember talking with a guy who is a very successful CEO of a essential oils company. And he told me that when he was hiring, he did an Enneagram personality test on every applicant and he only hired number two, which is called the helper in the Enneagram system.

Sara Nay (10:50.275)

Mm-hmm.

Jane McCarthy (10:51.662)

for people who were gonna be working on the floor in stores. And he was just looking for that natural helping personality to be frontline, because we all know that if you have a brand or a business where you’re interacting with people in real life on the human level, that service experience is essential and you can have the right colors, you can have the right symbols, you can have the right products, but if everything falls down at the service level, that’s a disappointment. So I think…

Sara Nay (10:59.288)

Yeah.

Jane McCarthy (11:21.406)

I saw I saw I’ve had that anecdotal story of somebody who applied personality types to position in company effective.

Sara Nay (11:33.046)

Yeah, we’ve done a number of assessments over the years. So that’s why I was curious in relation to yours. well let’s dive into some, I love hearing about examples like the one you shared there. so, but can you identify any brands that you would say embody one specific type of architect and why and how they identify that.

Jane McCarthy (11:51.822)

Okay, yes, so since we’re talking about Diana the Free, we’ll just continue on that path. I think she’s a goddess, she’s the huntress, she’s running through the wilderness, she has no interest in cocktail parties on Olympus. And if you think about Wonder Woman and the Wonder Woman film from 2017 that was so great, her name is Diana. So this is Diana or the Athena archetype.

Sara Nay (11:55.906)

Yeah.

Jane McCarthy (12:19.694)

I interviewed for the book, The Goddess Guide to Branding, a CEO named Caitlin Bram. And she has started a hard cider company called Yonder, which is based in the Pacific Northwest. And they have a taproom now in Seattle. And then she has distribution throughout the region. And I think eventually she wants to go national. But her brand is called Yonder. And it’s all about the wild and wandering spirit.

of a yonder brand. And if you think about Diana as being this goddess of the wilderness, she has this wild and wandering spirit that’s about, that has to do with yonder. And on her can is a wolf howling at the moon. And she said, I can’t tell you how many people ask me for more merch that has this wolf. They just love this wolf. And so you could think apples, fall festival.

Sara Nay (12:51.331)

Mm-mm.

Sara Nay (13:09.688)

Mm-hmm.

Jane McCarthy (13:16.952)

that it’s not necessarily where you would go with a cider brand, but she went to a wild spirit, a wolf spirit, or in my case, in my book, a Diana spirit, in order to get at this adventuring spirit, first of all, so that people would think about trying something different, because most people are not familiar with hard cider, but also to deal with any issues around, think this cider is gonna be sweet.

Sara Nay (13:29.026)

Yeah.

Jane McCarthy (13:44.642)

Her products aren’t sweet. She focuses on making hard cider that tastes more like a cocktail. And so through her brand story, she combats any naysayers around, this is going to be sickly sweet. I don’t want to try it. So you can see how the wildness energy appeals to people on a visceral level. But then it also helps with tell the product story in a way that will be appealing. And that’s totally Diana. It’s about adventuring forward.

Sara Nay (13:50.701)

Yes.

Sara Nay (14:12.992)

Yeah, great. Can you give me another example? really love hearing, you know, use cases like you just did there. So can you talk through just one more example of a different brand? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jane McCarthy (14:18.154)

Yeah, yeah, let me talk another one. So I love talking about the women in the book because they’re so awesome and they have, you know, fairly new companies. And so another brand in the book is Alice Mushrooms and Alice Mushrooms makes functional mushroom chocolates. And so people are familiar with functional mushrooms. Some of some people take it in their tea. They put it in smoothies and

These ladies put, these founders put their, Lindsey Goodstein and Charlotte Wasserstein to be specific, put these chocolates, the functional mushrooms in chocolate and then in a beautiful tin that is meant to have, you’re meant to have one square a day. So the mechanism of giving you the functional thing is a delightful treat.

And that was the innovation is they were, sorry, it was Charlotte Cruz. We may have to, maybe I could just retake this. Is this okay? I don’t want to get their names wrong. I’m so sorry. Okay. Okay. So Alice Mushrooms is a functional mushroom chocolate brand and they deliver the goodness of functional mushrooms in a chocolate square.

Sara Nay (15:24.332)

Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Yep, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. It’s okay.

Jane McCarthy (15:43.22)

And so you can take your daily dose of functional mushrooms through chocolate. And so then what they did with the brand, this is Charlotte Cruz and Lindsey Goodstein, these are the founders. They decided to use what I call a Maiden Persephone archetype. And so they took a functional mushroom chocolate and they made it delightful. They made it the energy of magical, fantastical, Alice in Wonderland world.

And if you go onto their website, when you use your cursor, little stardust follows your cursor. So the whole thing is delightful. And interestingly, in that category, a lot of the functional mushroom products are doing 70s psychedelia. So they really do like, and I love the Grateful Dead, but it’s kind of like tie-dye Grateful Dead energy. And so they completely did something different and they went to

Maiden Persephone energy, the goddess of delights and youth and sweetness. And they created a functional mushroom product that’s very feminine, very elevated. And so they found an archetype really inspired by Alice. And I would think of this as Maiden Persephone that differentiates them in market and appeals to people in a wholly different way compared to having a functional mushroom tea.

Sara Nay (17:10.488)

I love it. Thanks for sharing both of those examples. I’m gonna have to go check out their website and see the fairy dust. Now you intrigued me. My next question to you is let’s say someone’s listening today and they just overall like feel like their branding is tired. needs a do over, it needs a relook. How would you encourage them to approach this whole topic and just brand strategy in general?

Jane McCarthy (17:32.994)

Yeah, so I think this is a really intriguing thing to take on because what I want to caution is you never want to walk away too quickly from something that you’re known for. It takes time to establish credibility, legitimacy, and connection with customers. That takes a lot of time. So if you’ve been in market,

First, you want to look at what people love about you and really savor that and make sure that you build on that in a fresh way rather than throwing everything out. I’m always cautioning against a full reboot and I think an evolution and the word evolution is nice. And so then thinking about what people love about you and then what is the credible impact you can have on their life.

starting from there, I would then say, look to the archetype who delivers that and get really rooted in the meaning that you bring, get really clear about it, and then come up with all kinds of fun ways to do things new and different. That’s in the creative expression, right? That’s in the tactical imagination. But strategy-wise, don’t be too quick to walk away from what you’ve developed. Figure out what’s best.

about what you do, what people love about you, and then amplify that. And if you get the book, you can figure out which archetype you are. And I have a system for thinking about how to evolve. But that’s my big suggestion is don’t be too quick to walk away from what people love. Instead, come up with fresh ways to deliver on that.

Sara Nay (19:22.754)

That’s great. And one last question I was going to go to today. So I’m glad that you mentioned your book there. What can people expect if they do grab a copy of your book? What are they going to learn? Obviously learning what archetype makes the most sense for them, but what else can they get out of that book?

Jane McCarthy (19:37.472)

Yes, so figuring out your archetype is the first step. And in a lot of ways, it can unlock other keys to what I call your brand blueprint. But in the book, I walk you through this full set of exercises to get you to a complete brand blueprint. so for me, that’s not just the archetype, but we also share how you figure out the heart of your brand. So what is that core motivation, that driving energy,

Many of us who are into marketing are familiar with Simon Sinek’s idea of why, like why you’re doing this and what is that raw passion behind your business? So we get clear on that. And then the, what I call the gift. So what is the central emotion that you want your brand to help amplify in people? And so what is the takeaway feeling that they have?

after they’ve had an experience with your brand. So we wanna get clear on, once you know the feeling you wanna give people, you can come up with a million different ways of delivering on that feeling. But we wanna figure out what is that positive impact you wanna make at an emotional level. And then the style piece, which I think of both the iconic elements of your brand, so your colors, your symbols, the words, the voice, those are things that are true threat over time. And then we have a couple of…

exercises to start to think about how you then live that brand day by day, that brand identity day by day in terms of the dynamic actions. So what’s happening this month in the social media calendar, et cetera. So you leave with a complete brand blueprint that I think boils down the essentials of what makes a brand identity.

Sara Nay (21:26.582)

Yeah, that’s great. And a lot of those components are elements that John and I have been talking about the importance of marketing right now with everything that’s evolving. Like it’s becoming more and more important to connect with your clients on an emotional level and to tell the story of why and to represent the brand in a positive light. Like those things are gaining importance in marketing. So I’m glad that you touch on all of those in the book. If anyone wants to connect with you online, where can they find you Jane?

Jane McCarthy (21:53.464)

So I have a website, goddessoffice.com, and then I’m also on Substack, goddessoffice.substack.com, and I would love for you to reach out.

Sara Nay (22:04.438)

Awesome. Thanks so much for being on the show, Jane. really loved learning from you and speaking with you and thank you everyone for listening to the duct tape marketing podcast. We’ll see you next time.

John Jantsch (00:00.855)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Mike Ganino. He’s a creative force behind some of the world’s most compelling speakers and thought leaders. As a keynote director, he’s helped shape viral TEDx talks, launch bestselling books, and transform leaders at Disney, Netflix, and Adobe into magnetic performers.

He’s the author of the number one international bestseller we’re going to talk about today, Make a Scene, storytelling stage presence and the art of being unforgettable in every spotlight. So Mike, welcome to the show.

Mike Ganino (00:35.234)

Thanks, thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (00:37.175)

So do magnetic people like stick to stuff?

Mike Ganino (00:39.852)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they just walk around and like they attach themselves to like warehouses and cars and it’s a good life.

John Jantsch (00:45.015)

I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself. That was terrible. All right. So storytelling hot topic. I bet you now we’re only one month into the year, but I know I’ve done at least one other show on storytelling. So two things. Why do you think so? And it’s such a hot topic. And, and I suppose the follow-up to that is like, what are you bringing that’s different?

Mike Ganino (01:08.686)

It’s such a hot topic because like it fundamentally makes sense. We get it. see, you know, storytellers, whether we’re watching someone on stage or we’re watching a movie, we’re watching a play, we’re reading fiction, we get that storytelling does something to us. And I think that there’s an element of it that the reason why it’s this kind of like, it’s coming up and it’s coming up again and it’s coming up again is because so much of the education around it out there focuses on the fact that like storytelling is important.

you should be storytelling, everyone has a story, but not very many people are actually saying, how do you make a story interesting? Where do you actually start? And for me, that’s what I hope I’m bringing that’s not new, but is definitely different than, know, and I have so many of the books on like the psychology of it, the neuroscience of it, the history of it, but like, how do you actually, what’s the first thing out of your mouth? There’s not a lot of great resources on that.

John Jantsch (01:43.233)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:55.212)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:01.781)

Yeah. You know what I’m always fascinated with? I read a lot of stuff, probably verges on anthropology. And you know, that storytelling was it. Like that’s where it started. Right? I mean, that was the only way to communicate necessarily. And you, you told stories to stay out of being eaten. You told stories, you know, where the food was, you told stories about, know, who not to trust on the road. you know, is, is that sort of in our DNA kind of why you think storytelling, you know,

part of what makes storytelling so natural.

Mike Ganino (02:34.49)

I so. mean, I think, and I think there’s probably plenty of books out there that talk about that exact thing of like, is by, but, we are like wired. Like in a make a scene, wrote about how so much that we could be learning about how to tell more effective stories is about how to trigger a dopamine response from the audience in that anticipation of reward in your story. And so I don’t know our, our, you know, body chemicals respond to wanting to know what happens next and needing a solution. It’s like,

when you sit down and you watch an episode of Law and Order SVU and your brain, even though you’ve maybe seen it 27 times, you’re just like, ooh, I’ve got to watch this episode again, because we want to know what happens next. We want to understand and feel that. And so, yeah, I think it’s somewhere in there.

John Jantsch (03:17.879)

And then six hours later, you’re like, I better go do something else. So it’s in the title, Make a Scene. So, you know, what do you mean by that? Other than it, you know, cleverly works with the basis of storytelling as a scene, right? But there’s also you can also interpret that as, you know, somebody is making a scene, you know, in a maybe not altogether positive way. So where are you trying to what line are you trying to strap?

Mike Ganino (03:47.73)

I think both, you the idea was that it had that double meaning that often my storytelling advice for people is start in a scene. A lot of times what we hear, we hear this bad advice again of like, start at the beginning. And it’s like, well, maybe not, maybe we don’t need to start at the beginning or we’ll hear that we need lots of exposition or a great story, you know, has X, Y, Z in it. And most of the time, my advice to people is, can you just make a scene for me? Like if I’m the director of this film that you’re creating,

What would I put in front of the camera? And if the first thing out of your mouth doesn’t help me decide what I would film, then we’re probably in summary and not in story yet. So make a scene is literally my storytelling advice. And then secondarily, I just think there’s so many people that have read so many books about all the things they shouldn’t do when public speaking or going on video, get rid of your isms and change the way you sound and try to sound deeper, try to sound less shrill. Don’t move your hands too much.

get rid of all of your ums, that I thought, what if we just had a book that was like, all of that can actually be quite effective. And when we see someone do it who is effective, we don’t worry about how many times they said at all.

John Jantsch (04:52.595)

F

John Jantsch (04:59.511)

Yeah, I saw somebody that I think was one of the most impactful talks I’ve heard. And he leaned against the podium most of the time. But there was something about it worked for him. Yeah, yeah.

Mike Ganino (05:14.872)

breaks all the rules. In the book I wrote about Monica Lewinsky when she did her TED talk several years ago, she’s one of the only people ever in the history of that to have a podium in front of her on the red dot. But it was a device. And at the end, she stepped out from behind it as like taking back her identity. And so that even is don’t stand behind a podium. No one at TED is allowed to stand behind a podium, except you can sometimes if you know how to break the rule.

John Jantsch (05:27.084)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:39.223)

Yeah. So this is dangerous. Is there a definition of great story or great storytelling? Is there a framework? there rules? is there, you got to have this and this and this. mean, that was about eight questions. So take it anywhere you want, but.

Mike Ganino (05:55.654)

I think the ultimate measurement of a story, and this is why even in the book, I don’t go through all of these, like, here’s the one framework you need, because you could find 20 examples of that not working. And I think so many people have lost themselves trying to do the like, I need to tell a hero’s journey. And then all of a sudden you’re like lost in the dark soul of your night and you don’t know where you are or what side, and you’re like, I just wanted to tell them. But Yoda’s there, I think.

John Jantsch (06:18.113)

But Yoda shows up at least. mean so…

Mike Ganino (06:21.058)

goodness, know, Dios y machina, he’s gonna save us. But I think that, again, all of the, can the frameworks work? Sure. But I’ve got 30 books on screenplay writing over here. And if all of the frameworks worked, every single movie would be a runaway hit. It’s not. I think the measurement of story is, is the pacing correct? That the audience is kind of like, wants to know what happens next, that they’re never saying, maybe they’re saying to themselves,

I can’t wait to see where this is going versus where is this going? You want the first version not the second. Does it cause an emotional response? Do they hate things? Do they love things? Do they feel things? I think those are ultimately the measurements. And when we start to look at storytelling and measure, did you have five acts? Did you have seven beats? Did you have this? We’re measuring the wrong thing instead of measuring what was the audience’s feeling from what they had. Did it do its job?

John Jantsch (06:53.047)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:11.777)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:18.561)

So I’m not sure if you work with these people, but there are certainly people out there probably listening who say, I’m just not good at story or I’m not as natural born story. Cause you, we’ve all met somebody you’re like that could talk all day long, you know, tell stories from their youth, you know, all day long. But a lot of people just, just really hesitate. I mean, it’s the same with getting on stage period, but you know, when you, when, somebody says I’m not a good storyteller, what do you do with that person?

Mike Ganino (07:30.422)

Yeah

Mike Ganino (07:46.402)

I generally ask them questions. Like when I have a client who says, I’m not a good storyteller. Like when I work with a lot of executives who are going to have to go out and speak to their company or speak at a convention or conference. And they’ve been sent to me usually by their like chief communications officer to say, help them be less boring. And I say, great, tell me some stories. I’m not a good storyteller. I just stick to the facts. My general thing is great. So the thing that you just told me, you just told me that AI is a great solution for small businesses. How do you know that to be true?

Where have you seen that to be true? I ask questions like that that are like, show me some of your personal experience with it. And that almost always gets them to be able to tell a story. Now, we need to shape it. We need to kind of clean it up a little bit, but it gets them to realize that they actually can tell stories. The issue is that they’re measuring themselves against like Steven Spielberg or Mel Robbins or something like that. And it’s like, we don’t have to all have the story of an astronaut who was in space. We can have just a, happened on a Tuesday story.

John Jantsch (08:24.171)

Yeah,

John Jantsch (08:30.806)

Yeah.

Mike Ganino (08:44.61)

that is a metaphor or just an example, if you know how to tell it. And usually that’s my way in with people who say, I’m not a storyteller. say, cool, no problem. That’s certainly a strange job to have anyway. Like there’s not a lot of people who get paid well being a storyteller. So don’t worry about that. But can you tell me how you know the thing that you just said is true? When did you see that? How’d you learn it? And we started locking stories out.

John Jantsch (09:05.929)

a little Byron Katie. I don’t know if you’re familiar with her work, but, but it the essence of that. Can you know that that’s true? Yeah, that’s so, so, you know, a lot of people naturally think, especially you work with speakers who are on stages, but storytelling is a part of life, right? It’s a story of, it’s certainly a part of a lot of elements of business. So, you know, how do you get somebody to start realizing that?

Mike Ganino (09:08.278)

Yes. Yeah, the questions, right? Like, how do you know that to be true? I’ve read that book.

John Jantsch (09:34.251)

They don’t have to want to be a paid speaker to be better at storytelling.

Mike Ganino (09:38.862)

It’s really that idea of if you’re, I think there’s very few people whose job is not to communicate with others and very few people whose job is not to get others to see something the way they want them to see it. And that doesn’t mean it has to be some persuasive, like you’ll change your mind, but like, I just want you to understand the situation the way that I do. And a story is often a very effective way to help them see it or say, oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, I didn’t think of it in that situation or scenario in a way that the data or facts alone couldn’t do. And so,

When I’ve worked with organizations like Disney or Adobe and Netflix, Caesars Entertainment, it’s helping them see that like, helping the audience understand the situation they’re in. If they’re in a sales meeting, if they’re a leadership at an all hands trying to convince the team that we have to like, know, buckle the purse straps a little bit, cause things are going to get tough. The most effective way to help them understand the situation is to put it into a narrative that they can say, I get that. I kind of, I don’t like it, but I see where you’re coming from. That makes sense now. Or.

I understand how the analogy you used about, you know, your grandma growing up is exactly like the situation we face. Okay, cool. I’m with you now. And so it’s helping them realize that all of those instances are times where a story could do a lot of the heavy lifting that a whole bunch of facts would have to do.

John Jantsch (10:54.293)

Yeah. And I think sometimes like in a sales environment, right? Stories are kind of disarming, right? We’re all of a sudden, we’re listening to the story. We’re building rapport. We’re building trust rather than being sold to. Do you think that, and you know, we’re 10 minutes in, I’m going to mention AI for the first time. Although I think you did earlier. I feel like, do you feel like I should ask you that storytelling is actually going to be a differentiator?

Mike Ganino (11:13.974)

I did, yeah.

John Jantsch (11:23.957)

You know, because AI doesn’t know my story. It never will. I mean, it might make up some stuff, but you know, my true authentic story that somebody might relate to is probably all I’ve got left, isn’t it?

Mike Ganino (11:35.928)

Yeah, and your takeaway from the things you experienced. So even if it’s not like your origin story, because sometimes people get lost with that of like, need my story. And I think, I don’t even know what my story is, but I got a whole bunch of them that helped me do my job every day. And I think that that’s the thing that AI can’t get. It could probably at some point learn something. We can shove enough blockbuster screenplays in there to work, but also we’re dealing with human feelings on the other side. So as soon as it starts to work, it’s going to start to not work anymore.

John Jantsch (11:48.519)

You

John Jantsch (12:05.473)

Yeah.

Mike Ganino (12:05.75)

And so those little stories of something you saw yesterday when you went to drop your kid off at school that made you think about something, AI will never know that because it’s always going to be lagging. It’s always going to be behind. And so I think that our ability to communicate in a way that actually makes people feel something, if we go back to like, how do you measure a story? Well, did it elicit a feeling in the person that is going to be such a differentiator because

We have all of the news of the day, all the history of the world, anything we want to find. You could even have AI. I’ve seen people do it like, know, pop in there and say like, here’s my goals for my business this year. What should I do? It can do all of that work, but it cannot do that storytelling piece of connecting something you experienced and almost holding it out. And I don’t remember who originally said this of like, hey, have you ever felt this way too? That is going to be such a differentiator, I think.

John Jantsch (12:59.671)

How big a part is the performance part? So the story or the words, the way you express the expression, but you know, how you act on stage, your body language, how you use your voice, your hands. I’m trying to gesture right now. But so how much of that is what really takes a good story over the top?

Mike Ganino (13:21.816)

I think a huge percentage of it, you know, in the book I talk about these five stage languages, which are the five ways that an audience interprets and understands our full meaning, right? The first one is verbal, the words you choose, the stories you tell, all those things. The second one is voice. Just the way that we sound signals to the audience how to feel. If, you know, I was working with someone recently, an executive, a chief marketing officer, and she was getting asked to go speak more frequently, and the feedback she’d gotten is that her voice was difficult to listen to.

And when we got on a call, we started working together. It’s that the whole time she was really up here this whole time speaking like this. And she thought, this is just how I sound. But she also was holding her chest. She wasn’t breathing. She was gasping for air. And all of those are defensive mechanisms. All of those are learned behaviors. And so we did some exercises just to have her kind of like drop her, her larynx a little bit, which is going to make your voice sound a little more grounded. And she was even shocked of like, is that me? And it’s like, yeah, you haven’t heard that voice in a long time because

John Jantsch (14:14.07)

Mm-hmm.

Mike Ganino (14:19.98)

You have been on guard probably for lots of valid reasons, your childhood, your I don’t know what, who told you what? But we show up in this world physically and vocally shaped by everything that’s happened to us. And then we think that all we need to do to be an effective communicator is put the words in the right order and stop saying But the sound of our voice is actually what the audience hears, not even fully the words, the pacing of our voice, the speed at which we do. If we’re on stage, I had this recently, I was reviewing someone’s video.

and the physical language is the third one. So verbal, voice, physical. And he was trying to have this moment where he was saying to his team, know, trust me, I’m with you, but he was moving backwards from them on stage. And I said, that is a signal to them of you’re hiding something, something isn’t right. And you’ve seen it before too, like, right? Like someone with a hand in their pocket. I think in the book, I use the example of Nixon and Kennedy. And when seen on TV, that debate that they had that was aired, Kennedy,

John Jantsch (15:01.662)

Right, right.

Mike Ganino (15:19.518)

overwhelmingly won because he looked calmer, he was tan from a resuscitation. Nixon had just had surgery and was sick and sweaty and pale and looked thin in his suit. But when people listened to it, they thought Nixon won because he had that more gravitas voice, that more distinguished voice. And so the way that we look, sound and move is not, we cannot separate it from the message we communicate to an audience. We simply can’t. It is a core part of what they take away from us.

John Jantsch (15:31.915)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:48.993)

So for somebody that just hasn’t done much of it wants to get started. mean, somebody comes to you and says, Hey, I’m, I’m in this new role or whatever it is, and I need to be doing a lot more. need a coach for this. mean, what are the free throws? Like what’s the, what’s the thing you have them do that is practice.

Mike Ganino (16:06.882)

The easy thing is to say, are all the low stakes places where you can try some of this on that like won’t matter? if you have a, I just did this with a chief finance officer. He was like, hey, I want to be a better communicator. I’m getting asked to speak at X, Y, and Z, go on podcasts. Their PR people are trying to get him onto like MSNBC to be, you know, a talking head in these places because it’s helpful to their business. And he said, so how do I practice? Do I get ready for that show? And I said, well, you don’t.

John Jantsch (16:09.9)

Yeah.

Mike Ganino (16:33.762)

get ready and the first time you deliver anything is in front of the real live audience where the stakes are super high and your nerves are going to take over. What kind of meetings do you have every week? Can you start off the meeting with some kind of story or metaphor that helps the team understand something? When are you going to go into a board meeting, which is relatively, you know, something a CFO does all the time, so not super high stakes, and how can you help them understand a situation that’s going on or

where some kind of money is being allocated using a story. How can you play with, for him, some of what we’re working on with his physicality and his ability to smile and soften his face on camera, because it all came across very harsh. So said, those are all things that you can, on your next Zoom call with your team, be more aware of how are you looking at the camera? How are you leveraging and playing with your voice? How are you using your physicality? And so,

All of those places are spots where we can test things. You know, even for me, so many ideas in the book are things that I’ve tested through group coaching calls with my clients, through live workshops with my clients, through being on podcasts like this and trying out different stories and seeing what resonates and saying, ooh, people seem to like that and mention it back to me. I ought to put that in a book, you know, which is the more high stakes version of doing a podcast or a group coaching Zoom call.

John Jantsch (17:49.675)

Yeah, you alluded to the Zoom call. I mean, we are on a lot of formats now, right? We’re on stages, but we’re also doing our own video. We are doing virtual presentations. We’re on podcasts. Do we need different stories, different approach, you know, for each of those?

Mike Ganino (18:08.482)

I think that the stories probably have some universalness to them. Maybe they’re told slightly differently because the context, you know, if you’re on a stage telling a story versus, and it’s part of a bigger insight in a keynote, that might be different than if you’re on a Zoom call with your team. But the medium definitely changes it. for folks, one of the big things that people get wrong with having the camera is they want to be looking at the audience, to see the audience on their little Zoom camera, on the little Zoom screens to connect with them.

But there’s a flaw in that for a couple of reasons. One is we have no idea what they’re looking at. And so someone makes a grimace. Well, they could be watching a TikTok that upset them, or they could have gotten a text message from someone. We have no idea. And then we respond to that thinking, I’m boring. Versus when we’re on camera, our job is to have a relationship with the piece of glass in front of us, to be able to look through the lens and to have enough energy that this thing that absorbs these cameras absorbs so much of our energy that we can still.

deliver what we want without being obsessed of having a live audience like we would on stage. So I think that the stories can have, you if you’ve got three or four good stories that work in your business to set it up, like you probably don’t need a whole bunch more, but understanding the difference of telling them in a, a stage, in a boardroom, sitting around a table, in an interview with someone or telling it to a camera and even here, right? The difference between doing it for

John Jantsch (19:17.483)

Yeah, yeah.

Mike Ganino (19:31.98)

social media versus doing it in a group coaching call. All of those are different mediums. And so that’s where you can leverage, know, voice can be different. Physicality can be different.

John Jantsch (19:39.319)

Right, right, right. Yeah, wouldn’t use your big booming projection voice with five people in a boardroom, right? You’d freak them out. You know, one of the things I, my one little tip, and you probably tell this to people all the time, but when I do, especially group Zoom calls, I turn my view off, camera view off, because I find myself looking at myself and I may be way over there at the corner of the screen as opposed to, then once that’s off, all there’s left to look at is the camera.

Mike Ganino (19:46.956)

Yeah, yeah.

Mike Ganino (19:58.54)

Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Ganino (20:08.62)

Yeah, you know what I have? got this, I got an Elgato teleprompter and I have it on the front of my camera with the zoom screen of the person I’m talking to. So I actually am just seeing you right now through the glass and it’s quite helpful.

John Jantsch (20:09.047)

I

John Jantsch (20:20.277)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause you have to look at the camera at the same time. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I also have, this little, Plexo glass, camera holder. And so what it does is it, can put my camera in it and then I can move the camera anywhere I want. you know, it’s just one of those little screen, you know, those cameras you’d put on a screen. but I can, I can move it around that way. So, it’s really nice for doing a lot of that as well.

Mike Ganino (20:39.622)

nice.

Mike Ganino (20:44.12)

Yeah.

Mike Ganino (20:49.24)

fun.

John Jantsch (20:50.379)

Well, Mike, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where would you invite people to find out more about your work and obviously find a copy of Make A Scene?

Mike Ganino (20:59.756)

Yeah, I’m easy. Once you figure out how to spell Ganino, I’m usually the one you’re going to find. So G-A-N-I-N-O, Mikeganino.com. The book and all the information about it is at Mikeganino.com slash book. And it’s wherever you like to get your books. We’ve got it everywhere for you.

John Jantsch (21:14.123)

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

Mike Ganino (21:19.224)

Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (21:22.999)

Okay, you’re supposed to get a little…

John Jantsch (00:01.166)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is David Garfunkel. I messed his name up. It’s Gar-finkle. Sorry about that. We do one take here, so you’re going to have to live with that, David. He’s a renowned copywriting expert, author, and coach, widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on persuasive communication. He’s spent decades helping businesses, entrepreneurs, and

David Garfinkel (00:15.624)

I’ll live with it.

John Jantsch (00:29.55)

marketers craft compelling messages that drive results. We’re going to talk about his latest book, the persuasion story code, the magic of conversational storytelling. So David Garfinkel, welcome to the show. So before we get into the content of the book, storytelling has become a pretty hot topic in, especially in marketing circles. Number of books I’ve interviewed, a number of authors that have read about it. So I always like to start with, you know,

David Garfinkel (00:43.08)

Thanks, John.

David Garfinkel (00:49.886)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (00:59.66)

What do you feel like you offer that’s different in this book?

David Garfinkel (01:03.144)

Well, to put it bluntly, I offer stories that people can learn quickly and use immediately that aren’t going to put their listeners to sleep or go, what is he talking about?

John Jantsch (01:15.214)

Well, in fact, let’s dive right into that. You have, I don’t know, 25 or so what you call mini story frameworks.

David Garfinkel (01:23.56)

Yeah, there, I call them persuasion stories and, they are actually stories we tell every day, but we don’t realize it. And sometimes when we tell them, they’re not as persuasive as they could be. I show you how to make them persuasive without coming across like a carnival barker, but just like a normal human being telling a story.

John Jantsch (01:37.006)

Alright.

John Jantsch (01:47.211)

Can you give me a couple of examples of how you would apply some of those story frameworks in, particularly in marketing circles?

David Garfinkel (01:56.724)

Sure. Well, let me turn the tables on you for just a second for the first one and empathy story, you know? So, John, I know you do a podcast. I do one too. And sometimes it can be stressful because the guest doesn’t show up or they get tongue tied and they’re tripping over their words. And it’s always a good idea to have

a backup, a way to get yourself out of it. That’s what I call an empathy story. Now, you’re obviously an experienced guy and you probably have a dozen backups or workarounds. I mean, even as I was saying that to you, didn’t you feel like I knew you just a little better?

John Jantsch (02:44.184)

Sure, sure, sure, sure, no question that most podcasters have been through the same thing. So yeah, absolutely.

David Garfinkel (02:52.336)

And I want to point out that story has a beginning and a middle, but it doesn’t have an end. You know, it opens the door for me to sell you my brand new $10,000 course, backups and workarounds for tongue tied guests, right? Which is, of course, is a joke and I don’t really have that.

John Jantsch (02:57.07)

Okay.

John Jantsch (03:16.344)

Yes, that would be a short course, right? So you introduce the idea, you’ve probably trademarked this even, of stories with a dollar sign to start the S. You want to talk a little bit about that concept?

David Garfinkel (03:17.844)

Right. Exactly.

David Garfinkel (03:36.082)

Yeah, so what most people think of stories, they think of a novel, you know, they might think of an Orphan X novel. I love those novels myself or, you know, a Lee Child Jack Reacher novel or maybe an 18th century Emily Bronte novel or something. 19th century, guess. But those are very long stories. And I call them stories with the dollar sign because we have to pay money.

to read them, see them, you know, even cable TV movies were paying a cable bill or were paying some kind of bill for that. And so those cost us money and usually well worth it, but that’s why it has a dollar sign instead of an S at the beginning. Stories, the other type persuasion stories are stories that make us money, stories that help us build trust, build rapport. And in some cases, certain kinds of stories close sales.

And they’re much shorter. They’re much simpler. They don’t have lots of characters and character development and an inner journey and an outer journey and, you know, mentors and villains and all that stuff that you need for an entertainment story. The story with a dollar sign. Otherwise, why would anyone bother paying for it? If it’s not interesting.

John Jantsch (04:57.634)

So that story you started with, the empathy story, is that something that, you know, particularly when it comes to resonating with the target audience that you’re trying to attract? I mean, is that an essential piece of even getting started?

David Garfinkel (05:13.488)

It’s one way to do it. I think it’s the best way. There are other ways. You can cite statistics. can talk about, there’s another kind of story called a story about what’s going on in the world today. A lot of people in the financial marketing space call this a top of mind story because it’s about the news and it connects with what the person’s thinking, but it doesn’t always connect with what they’re feeling. Now, if it’s very pitched, if it’s political about a point that

your target market strongly agrees with, then it does have an emotional connection.

John Jantsch (05:47.662)

do you make stories, I mean, you see people trying to do this and they come off sort of canned. How do you make a story feel very conversational? mean, do you have some elements that you bring to that or is that just you’re a good writer or you just intuitively know this? mean, how do you get that conversation?

David Garfinkel (06:09.042)

Well, sometimes it takes practice and some people are better at this naturally than others. But basically, if you’re talking about something you already know, whether it’s about yourself or your product, or most likely about your prospect and their pains or their dreams or their hopes, or some imagined future that you can provide for them, deliver to them, it’ll come across more naturally. It’s really when you try to be someone you’re not.

You remember Hal Holbrook and he did all the Mark Twain stuff. I mean, there’s a professional storyteller. My gosh, he spent years and years honing his craft and probably spent hours in makeup, making himself look like Mark Twain and all the rest. That’s not what you do as a business person unless you’re in the entertainment business. It’s what you do as a salesperson is you talk to people, you talk to them.

about what they need about their problems about a solution that you have and to deliver the same information you’re already delivering conversationally but in a story form it’s just going to work a little better.

John Jantsch (07:17.912)

So a lot of what you’re talking about selling is getting the order. So you tell a story, you get some rapport, bring in some empathy, but ultimately you have to say, now. So how do you work a call to action in that meets the same meter as the story?

David Garfinkel (07:37.8)

Well, the interesting thing is a lot of people think that when you tell a persuasion story, the persuasion story has to close the deal and it doesn’t. What I like to say is it moves the prospect closer. So you can tell a story that eliminates a projection. You know, some people think that this $10,000 podcast workaround course isn’t for them. But let me tell you about George. He was always getting these

guests that started drooling when they come to this podcast and and we taught them how to get them to actually wipe the saliva off their mouth before. Okay, terrible example. But you get the point. You’re just telling about something that happened. And in the process, you’re giving an example that obliterates an objection. So getting over objections is one of the most important steps in closing a sale. There

is one story having there and the I don’t remember the official name I gave it but the shorthand is the choice of one where it basically eliminates all the other alternatives you can tell that story talk about how all of the competition doesn’t do this but we do doesn’t do this but we do doesn’t do this but we do and that can be pretty close to okay would you like one you know

John Jantsch (08:47.726)

Ahem.

John Jantsch (09:03.342)

So are the stories that you are explaining in the book need to be in print, need to be spoken? Are there differences to the medium or to where they’re encountered?

David Garfinkel (09:18.652)

No, no difference. mean, when I, I’m of the school direct response marketing that copy is basically the spoken language in written form. So anything written in copy could be spoken out loud. And so the words would be the same. Now there are other people I know who think that copy needs to be big and bold and, flamboyant. And I think that’s more like a story with the dollar sign. It’s very entertaining, but

John Jantsch (09:30.798)

You

David Garfinkel (09:48.857)

In my experience, rarely works in actually getting new customers.

John Jantsch (09:55.246)

Can you use this technique to get attention? know one of the chores for a lot of marketers is just people have shorter attention spans, the world is cluttered, search engines take people where they want to take them. mean, can you use this to really get that initial attention in your view?

David Garfinkel (10:14.884)

Sure. There are four types of origin stories that I have in chapter three, and any one of those could very easily get attention. The coffee that I’m drinking here is made with my favorite device in the world. The Aerobi Aeropress costs about 30 bucks and it makes delicious coffee. And I actually include their origin story, which is not all that dramatic.

from their website, but if you wanted to get more attention, could say, know, that was the last cup of coffee at the office I could take, you know, burned flavorless. I was going out of my mind. And then I thought, and that will get someone’s attention. And then he can describe how he invented and tested and perfected and rolled out and offers this aerobie aeropress for 39 bucks as opposed to.

$2,000 for an espresso machine. It makes better coffee. So you can use origin stories to get attention. You can also use an empathy story if you start talking about somebody’s pain. could be talking, you’re selling a remedy for joint pain. could say, you wake up in the morning and once again, you dread to get up.

not because you’re sleepy, but because you know that your joints are going to hurt and soon it starts to feel like sandpaper. know, somebody who is in the market for something to get rid of that feeling is going to pay attention.

John Jantsch (11:55.192)

Does a story in this format have a headline? Does it need to have a headline?

David Garfinkel (12:00.084)

Well, the story is a component of a sales pitch or of a sales letter. So the sales letter probably should have a headline. Yeah. In fact, you can even start your story in the headline. mean, one of the most famous ads ever was the John Capel’s ad. They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I began to play, you know, and then he

John Jantsch (12:08.524)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (12:21.262)

I knew that’s where you’re headed, yeah. Right, right, right, yeah.

David Garfinkel (12:26.992)

And then he actually develops the story. It’s about one sixth of the whole ad. So it’s not a long story, but it’s it’s, you know, it’s a it’s a failure success problem solution kind of story. And he wrote it about 101 years ago and we still talk about.

John Jantsch (12:28.045)

Meh.

John Jantsch (12:43.276)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see people making when, really trying to persuade through story telling?

David Garfinkel (12:52.944)

TMI, too much information. just, they try to tell everything. They can go into way too much technical detail. mean, stories get translated into pictures in people’s minds. And if the picture is too ornate and detailed, they’re not going to be able to process it before you move to the next point in the story. Also, sometimes people are pushing too hard in the story and you don’t need to push. You’re just moving people gently from where they are to, want it.

And sometimes there’s no, there’s no momentum at all. The story is just sort of sitting there and it’s going, it’s not focused. It’s going around in circles and it’s not very persuasive.

John Jantsch (13:39.864)

Can people learn, how would you tell, obviously, your book gives them a lot of training, but I think the best writers, maybe you agree with this, the best writers are commonly readers of a lot of things. Can we learn anything from our favorite fiction works?

David Garfinkel (13:53.042)

Mm-hmm.

David Garfinkel (14:01.076)

Yeah. So, um, about a hundred years ago, I don’t know why I keep bringing up these old examples. I guess I’m feeling old today. Exactly. Good point to say, um, yeah. Um, there was an actor, I don’t remember her name, but she was, um, CB Demille’s favorite, you know, filmmaker, famous, favorite actor. And she said that every

John Jantsch (14:09.678)

That’s because that’s when we started in business.

David Garfinkel (14:30.51)

And I’m paraphrasing every scene in a movie is a story. So if you realize the kind of stories we’re talking about with persuasion stories are little little bricks that that build the wall of a whole story with a dollar sign. And so I think if you I mean, you know, my my go to favorites are Stephen King, Lee Child wrote the Jack Reacher books and

John Jantsch (14:46.467)

Yeah.

David Garfinkel (14:59.7)

Greg Hurwitz who wrote the orphan X-books, all of those guys, they, they write very tight, moving and I don’t just mean emotionally moving. mean, there’s some momentum in the story. They write little snippets of things that happen, little scenes that are complete stories in themselves. And those are, those are really good examples. had one client, who was crazy Jack Reacher fan.

And he was having trouble with some stuff. And I told him, get five or six of your favorite Jack Reacher books and just copy the first page. Hand copy it word for word. Not to use in anything, not to violate copyright, not to be plagiarist, but just to get a sense of the rhythm and the tone and the feel. And he did. And it transformed him.

John Jantsch (15:40.578)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (15:48.43)

Huh. I was going to ask you for a success story, but that’s a pretty good one right there. Let’s talk a little bit about AI and storytelling automation. mean, is this going to compliment or hinder what you’re teaching? Yeah.

David Garfinkel (15:57.908)

Sure.

David Garfinkel (16:05.97)

Both. So I’m taking, you know, the book, The Persuasion Story Code, and I’m creating a video course, which is going to be much more thorough. And I’ve been working with, with, with, what is Rhonda’s last name? You know Rhonda, because she got, she hooked us up. But Rhonda Lynn, she’s been helping me develop an AI feature to go inside.

behind the paywall inside the course. And what I am insisting that it do, even though it doesn’t want to, it wants to write the stories. I don’t like stories that AI writes. It generally screws them up. And sometimes it makes up facts that you won’t catch and that can get you in trouble with your customers or with regulators. But what I’m having it do is draw out of the person key points in the story so that you come up with an outline in your own words.

John Jantsch (16:43.404)

Yeah, right.

David Garfinkel (17:03.86)

through a conversation with the AI. And I prefer to use AI that way a lot where I’m very good at interviewing people, but I also enjoy being interviewed. As you can tell, you’re interviewing me right now and I enjoy having a conversation with an AI when it asks me good questions. So you’ll basically answer six questions with a single sentence and it’ll arrange those sentences for you and you have the outline of your story.

John Jantsch (17:09.923)

Yeah.

David Garfinkel (17:33.46)

I think the problem with AI writing in general and writing stories in specific is there’s something that whether you’re good at writing stories or writing copy or writing conversationally or not, you and everyone else has a life experience, has had a lot of conversations with people, has a spidey sense, you know what’s real and what’s phony.

John Jantsch (17:54.702)

All

John Jantsch (17:59.116)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

David Garfinkel (18:01.616)

AI knows what it’s been fed and it’s training by its developers. And sometimes the stuff it comes up with, plus AI seems to have this, I don’t know, algorithm or tendency to want to make everything better and inspirational at the end, even if that’s not what you want to do. And so you end up editing it and you could end up spending more time editing it than you would have if you’d written in the first place.

John Jantsch (18:04.27)

It’s just predicting.

John Jantsch (18:30.36)

Well, I’m really happy to hear you describe it that way because I’ve been saying for a long time that our job now is going to be provide context. And I think that that’s really what you’re describing because it can’t do that.

David Garfinkel (18:39.262)

Perfect. Our job is to provide it. It really can’t. Now you can do more of that than you might have imagined by giving it rules, but even figuring out what those rules are is quite a mental strategic exercise in itself and then communicating it, figuring out how to communicate it so it’s effective to the AI is also an exercise in itself. But you can do more with AI and get higher quality output than you thought.

John Jantsch (18:50.946)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:02.414)

Yeah.

David Garfinkel (19:08.798)

When it comes to something like stories, I’m not sure.

John Jantsch (19:11.926)

Yeah. Yeah, I think you just have to treat it as that assistant, is what I’ve told people. I mean, you can even, I’ve had a lot of luck with, I mean, never had luck with saying, write something, but I have had good luck with saying, could you make this sentence better? You know, things along that line. And then it will bring in lots of stuff because you’ve trained it.

Is there a formula like a must-have? You must have an object of desire. There must be a climax. There must be all those kind of types of commandments.

David Garfinkel (19:47.556)

For stories Well, these these stories are are different I mean in in the typical heroes journey story there are those rules but a hero’s journey story is two hours long and has many pieces to it in There are specific rules, but they’re different for an origin story than they are for an empathy story an empathy story All of the story I call there are four types and I call them

John Jantsch (19:48.696)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:56.93)

Right. Yeah.

Yeah.

David Garfinkel (20:15.238)

stories about what your customer is experiencing. Those generally only have a beginning and a middle. There are case study stories and, and, know, with, with case studies and other proof stories, testimonials that are effective. You generally want to have a crisis and obstacle away. The person overcame the obstacle and

a positive resolution and that’s, that’s a lot like a typical hero’s journey story sort of shrunken down to two or three minutes. So it depends.

John Jantsch (20:51.918)

Yeah. Yeah. I’m curious. This is my own curiosity. Who did you read? Who did you learn from when you were getting started?

David Garfinkel (21:04.44)

in storytelling or copyright? my gosh. Well, Gary Halbert was the guy. I read all his newsletters. I went to one of his seminars, it changed my life, Hurricane Andrew.

John Jantsch (21:05.942)

Well, copywriting period, yeah.

John Jantsch (21:11.406)

All right.

John Jantsch (21:16.461)

What was it? From Fish Creek or something like that? Where did you write from? I can’t remember what the…

David Garfinkel (21:21.464)

let’s see, no, it was, well, he was in Key West, but he was south of, something, do fish key or something like that. I Yeah. but I read all the classics. read scientific advertising 15 times. and, it’s, not even a very enjoyable book, but incredibly valuable.

John Jantsch (21:32.45)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (21:39.544)

Right. Yeah.

David Garfinkel (21:48.314)

I like Gene Schwartz’s book a lot, Breakthrough Advertising. I’ve been reading it for 30 years. I still keep getting new things out of it. I love Joe Sugarman’s book. was originally called Advertising Secrets of the Written Word. It is reissued at a much better price by Adweek Magazine, and it’s, I think now called the Adweek Copywriting Guide. And that’s one of my top books. So I’ve read a lot of copywriting books.

John Jantsch (21:51.278)

Yeah.

David Garfinkel (22:16.239)

A few of them have been really good, like those.

John Jantsch (22:20.568)

So David, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the podcast. Where can people find out more about your work? Certainly learn more about the frameworks and obviously pick up a copy of the persuasion story code. I’ve been sick with a headache today and so I’m like, can’t talk.

David Garfinkel (22:40.468)

That’s okay. That’s okay. No, you’re doing great. Thank you persuasion story code Persuasion story code is available on amazon the persuasion story code because some people look for the persuasion code, which is a different book you can find me on linkedin and and twitter x or x or twitter And I have a podcast myself copywriters podcast. It’s um

You find a copywriters podcast.com. We’re also on all of the platforms. you know, Spotify and, Apple podcasts and all the rest. if, if someone is, has a fairly robust business or they’re doing pretty well as a copywriter and they want coaching, can go to Garfinkel coaching.com and, I think that’s about it. I don’t know.

John Jantsch (23:38.528)

Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a few moments out of the day to stop by the podcast and hopefully we’ll hopefully we’ll thank you. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the

David Garfinkel (23:39.592)

Yeah.

David Garfinkel (23:43.873)

thanks for having me. My pleasure. Great questions too.

David Garfinkel (23:50.312)

That sounds good. I like that.