Podcasts about influence science

"And it dawned on me that these executives are solving the same communication problems in their meetings that I'm solving for in the interrogation room." -Michael Reddington On this episode of the Turmeric & Tequila podcast, your host Kristen Olson sits down with Michael Reddington, an expert in transforming resistance into commitment and a certified forensic interviewer. Michael shares insights into his unexpected journey from aspiring special education teacher to a career in investigations and executive education through his company, Inquasive. Discover how his early experiences integrated with diverse and inclusive environments shaped his communication skills, pivotal to his success today. Delve into the disciplined listening methods that not only unlock hidden value in conversations but also highlight the ethical approach to communication. Kristen and Michael also explore common human experiences, the importance of empathy, and the significant role personal growth and learning from mistakes play in achieving true success. Whether you're navigating business, personal relationships, or just aiming to be a better communicator, this episode is packed with valuable takeaways to inspire your journey. Tune in for this gracefully disruptive conversation and learn why sometimes not having a single pivotal moment can be the greatest story of all. Time Stamps: 00:00 Reflections on Life's Unseen Influences 05:19 Journey of Self-Understanding 09:03 "Let Life Unfold Naturally" 12:18 Interrogation and Teaching Aspirations 15:08 Passionate Educator's Journey Unfolds 18:52 Business Communication Meets Interrogation Techniques 20:23 "Unlocking Value in Conversations" 26:00 Boring Conversations through Good Preparation 27:35 Drugs, Guns, and Interrogation 31:34 "Empathy in Human Decisions" 34:54 "Mastering Effective Communication" 38:55 Effective Communication Tools for Success 40:52 Effective Persuasion Techniques 44:06 Influence: Science or Manipulation? 46:52 Teaching Boundaries: A Proud Parenting Moment 50:12 Humor in Youth Sports Coaching 53:21 "Nurturing Future Influencers"   Michael Reddington EXECUTIVE RESOURCE, CERTIFIED FORENSIC INTERVIEWER & AUTHOR Michael Reddington is an expert at moving people from resistance to commitment. He is an executive resource, Certified Forensic Interviewer, President of InQuasive, Inc., and author of The Disciplined Listening Method. Michael's public speaking career began in his teenage years as he travelled around New England educating audiences on the benefits of including students with, and without, disabilities in the same classrooms. His speaking endeavors simmered for several years as he facilitated training courses for investigators at the organizations where he was employed. https://michaelreddington.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelreddingtoncfi/   Connect with T&T: IG: @TurmericTequila Facebook: @TurmericAndTequila Website: www.TurmericAndTequila.com Host: Kristen Olson IG: @Madonnashero Tik Tok: @Madonnashero Website: www.KOAlliance.com WATCH HERE   MORE LIKE THIS: https://youtu.be/ZCFQSpFoAgI?si=Erg8_2eH8uyEgYZF   https://youtu.be/piCU9JboWuY?si=qLdhFKCGdBzuAeuI https://youtu.be/9Vs2JDzJJXk?si=dpjV31GDqTroUKWH

A lot of the marketing for your business will occur when you aren't even talking directly to someone - on social media or in other conversations. But you still can control what is said, when you leverage social proof. Social proof leverages the opinions and feedback of other people to talk about how great your product or service is. For your Virtual Assistant business, being able to share social proof can really help build the know, like and trust with those people that haven't worked with you before. What do I mean by social proof? Wikipedia: Social proof (or informational social influence) is a psychological and social phenomenon wherein people copy the actions of others in choosing how to behave in a given situation. The term was coined by Robert Cialdini in his 1984 book Influence: Science and Practice. Social proof comes in many forms. Some you might have thought of before, and some you may not have. But all of them are effective ways to get the word out about your services. We'll talk about how to collect, create and use social proof in your VA business so that clients will feel more comfortable making the decision to work with you!   I'd love to help you get there. It's time. I'm here to help. It's the only reason I'm here at all, is to help you become a ridiculously good VA. But it's you who has to take that first step. I have helped hundreds of VAs who are stuck get moving through private coaching, my monthly mastermind group The Virtual Circle, my group coaching program 50K Bootcamp, and my self study trainings like my Getting Started program, my monthly email membership The Virtual Toolkit, and more. If you are ready to get my help, let's connect on a Cut to the Chase call. You can book yours at YourVAMentor.com/chase Thanks for tuning in this week! I'll see you next time!   PRIVATE COACHING: Let's work together privately to get you to your really big goal. It's the fastest way to get results and we can start right away. Learn more about private coaching here. GROUP COACHING MASTERMIND: The Virtual Circle is a group coaching mastermind option that costs less than private coaching, and can help you achieve the goals you set for yourself. . Check it out here: The Virtual Circle Group Coaching Mastermind for Virtual Assistants. We'd love to have you join us! 50K VA GROUP COACHING PROGRAM: If you have been struggling to build your VA business, get in on this live coaching program where we will help you create the framework for a business that can earn you 50K a year and beyond. Register here now: 50K Bootcamp for VAs MONTHLY EMAIL MEMBERSHIP: I also have a brand new low-cost monthly membership program that will help you build your VA business – and it doesn't require you to be on social media! It's an email membership that I call The Virtual Toolkit! Every Monday morning you'll receive a lesson and a downloadable resource in your inbox, that you can use to take a step further in your VA business. Get more details and sign up here now! SELF STUDY PROGRAM: My self study program Getting Started as a VA can help you get your VA business started easily and quickly too. You can sign up right away and be on your way to getting clients by the end of the program, with all the right foundations in place. Check out the program here. COMPLIMENTARY CONSULT: Reach out to me if you need to talk about where you are stuck and what the right option might be to get you moving. It's literally all I'm here to do is help you get to where you want to go. Book a complimentary Cut to the Chase call with me here.

Professors Viveca Morris and Jennifer Jacquet dug into how the livestock industry has co-opted certain university experts to minimize the impact of findings on climate change related to industrialized animal agriculture. Their findings have been published in a new paper detailing just how successful meat companies have been in skewing perceptions of climage change, altering emission targets, and making sure the industry remains the unregulated monster it is. Prepare to be outraged.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Professors Viveca Morris and Jennifer Jacquet dug into how the livestock industry has co-opted certain university experts to minimize the impact of findings on climate change related to industrialized animal agriculture. Their findings have been published in a new paper detailing just how successful meat companies have been in skewing perceptions of climage change, altering emission targets, and making sure the industry remains the unregulated monster it is. Prepare to be outraged.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Like and subscribe on your favorite platform!Happy New Year! In this short episode, Kevin Oakley offers some encouragement and advice going into 2024 and shares some positive data on website activity.Kevin's 3 must reads on human psychology:  Influence: Science and Practice - Robert CialdiniPredictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions - Dan ArielySame As Ever: A Guide To What Never Changes - Morgan HouselMarket Proof Marketing · Ep 319: Happy New Year! Questions? Comments? Email show@doyouconvert.com and we'll address them on the next episode. More insights, discussions, and opportunities can be found at DYC: All Access.A weekly new home marketing podcast for home builders and developers. Each week Kevin Oakley, Andrew Peek, Beth Russell, Jackie Lipinski, Julie Jarnagin, and other team members from Do You Convert will break down the headlines, share best practices and stories from the front line, and perform a deep dive on a relevant marketing topic. We're here to help you – not to sell you! The post Ep 319: Happy New Year! appeared first on Online Sales and Marketing for Home Builders - DYC.

Join the community on Dentaltown at https://www.dentaltown.com  Subscribe to Dentistry Uncensored on Apple Podcasts:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dentistry-uncensored-with-howard-farran/id916907356

Minden, ami az eredeti AI-os adásunkba nem fért bele. +90 perc tömör mesterséges intelligencia gyönyör. ChatGPT, SEO, kódolás, stb, stb. Linkek: - Biznisz Boyz: https://soundcloud.com/bizniszboyz/ - Data36 course: data36.com/jds - Gigabrief: gigabrief.com - Lex Fridman podcast: https://lexfridman.com/podcast/ Említett eszközök és kutatások: - Cialdini befolyásolási alapelvek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence:_Science_and_Practice - Inversion szabály: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger#Principle_of_inversion - Chat GPT: https://chat.openai.com - Github Copilot: programozási segéd https://github.com/features/copilot - 8Base: automatikus API és frontend generálás adatbázishoz https://www.8base.com/ - Constellation Software: $31mrd-os M&A cég https://colinkeeley.com/blog/mark-leonard-constellation-software-operating-manual - Amazon Mechanical Turk: ismétlődő munka kiszervezése https://www.mturk.com/ - GPT is all you need for the backend: 65 sor python tetszőleges backend szimuláláshoz, legyen az todo vagy sakk program https://github.com/TheAppleTucker/backend-GPT - Attention is all you need: eredeti Transformer paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 - Google érzékeny témák: Your Money Your Life https://triggerfishwriting.medium.com/what-are-googles-your-money-or-your-life-ymyl-pages-ffc53d159a55 - Andrej Karpathy https://karpathy.ai/ - Antrophic AI Constitutional AI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08073 - AI implicit megtanulja az emberi értékeket ha tőlük kap visszajelzést és elkezd félni hogy leállítják https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.09251 - Ex Machina: kiváló dráma AI-ról https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/ Mikről van szó: 00:02:24 AI-alapú nyelvi modellek áttörése: instant válaszok végtelen guglizás helyett 00:05:25 Zéró shot promptok: az AI példa nélkül válaszol 00:06:41 Jobb válaszok struktúrált Chat GPT promptokkal 00:09:51 Híres írók és emberek stílusának másolása Chat GPT-vel 00:13:25 Vázlattal a személyre szabott tartalom generálásához 00:15:12 A GPT megtanítása a szerző stílusának másolására 00:17:19 Jobb eredmények mentális modellekkel és AB tesztelés az iteratív javításhoz 00:26:21 E-mailes kommunikáció megkönnyítése 00:27:14 Segítség az ötletelésben 00:31:00 Paradigmaváltás a szoftverfejlesztésben a GPT-vel és a GitHub Copilottal 00:35:24 SQL generálása a GPT Codex segítségével megjegyzésekből és az adatbázis szerkezetéből 00:36:32 Program kód fordítás más nyelvekre 00:40:35 Növekvő absztrakciós szint a technológiában és a tervezésben, no-code mozgalom és új adatbázis paradigmák 00:43:48 Ez már a mátrix? Gyors tudás letöltése az agyunkba bármilyen területen 00:56:24 A mesterséges intelligencia etikája és Andrej Kárpáty AI-guru 00:58:56 Anthropic AI cég 1 milliárd dolláros befektetési köre, és az alkotmányos AI 01:01:33 Egy általunk nem értett rendszer létrehozásának veszélye 01:05:13 Harvard kutatók bebizonyították, hogyan lehet visszafordítani a biológiai öregedést 01:10:38 A szűk AI jelentősége a nagy technológiai cégek számára, valamint a Google bevétele és keresődominanciája 01:13:20 Google stratégiai kihívása 01:16:41 AI nyelvi modellek hatása a keresésre és a ChatGPT növekvő felhasználói bázisára és fejlődésére 01:19:21 Google befektetése az Anthropic AI-ba és a ChatGPT hatása a SEO-ra 01:21:29 A nagy nyelvi modellek jelenlegi integrációja a mindennapi életben és az AI emberi inputra való támaszkodással és a rossz mérőszámokra való optimalizálással kapcsolatos aggodalmak. 01:27:11 A TikTok mint propagandaeszköz veszélyei 01:28:09 Open Assistant projekt: egy chat GPT alternatíva 750 GB-nyi adaton trenírozva 01:29:00 A digitális heroinba csúszás veszélye 01:31:00 Hallgasd meg a korábbi 113-as AI részt, illetve kövesd be a Biznisz Boyz-t

Today's episode is all about scarcity. This is a term you are familiar with, but I am willing to bet you aren't using it in all the ways it can be leveraged in your life and business. The term gets thrown around a lot and people know some of how it works, but the nuance is so so so much more than you can imagine.  This refreshed episode, which originally aired in the fall of 2018, will introduce you to the depth that this topic can have to set you up for this Friday's episode with Mindy Weinstein, author of the book The Power of Scarcity which will absolutely blow your mind. It is so good. Within the book, she includes so much depth and nuance in a way I have never heard anyone else talk about scarcity. It's fascinating.  Today is a primer to expand your thoughts about scarcity in a way that will get you ready to continue your learning when that episode comes out on Friday. As you listen, reflect upon times in your own life where you have been pulled in by scarcity, and where you can incorporate it more into your business. Show Notes: [00:39] Today's episode is all about scarcity. This is a term you are familiar with, but I am willing to bet you aren't using it in all the ways it can be leveraged in your life and business. [02:15] In traditional economics, scarcity occurs when an item has limited availability but unlimited desire for that item. This could include natural resources like oil and water or more abstract concepts like time. [02:55] Studies have proven that we see things as more valuable when they are less readily available.   [05:55] Scarcity and value are closely tied together. Our crazy brains think less equals more…even when it is kinda weird. When something is scarce it triggers our loss aversion because we don't want to miss out on the opportunity.  [08:13] Scarcity can only take effect when items are truly limited. This means not everyone gets one. [10:49] Scarce items can take on a life of their own.   [11:37] Scarcity can create a cult following, which means other people do the marketing for you. This makes the brand bigger than anything you can do on your own. [14:57] These examples from Starbucks and Disney are a combination of scarcity and availability. This is essentially capitalizing on something popular and becoming part of the craze.  [15:26] If you are going to take a shot at incorporating scarcity, know that not everything will cause an uproar of epic proportions. Sometimes there will be duds and that is ok. The question is what did you learn from them for next time? [16:50] There are some words you can use to trigger scarcity in the brain of your consumer, including: limited time, extended, custom, handcrafted, one of a kind, closeout sales, everything must go, and last chance. These terms can be added to more than products, extending into services as well.  [18:27] If you do a promotion or discount, make sure it is short term and remind people when it ends. You can also limit the quantity available and stick with it.  [20:16] Contests and giveaways can work really well for you, but there are a lot of rules and you need to make sure you play the game.  [21:37] It is easy to sound like a cheesy infomercial when you're using scarcity, so take a step back and don't get too over the top. [23:23] Scarcity and availability are another peanut butter and jelly sort of concept grouping like anchoring and relativity.  [26:15] Scarcity is a tactic that works especially when combined with availability.  [27:05] If there is not enough value they need to control the supply that is available to keep demand high.  [28:12] Melina's closing thoughts Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Android. If you like what you heard, please leave a review on iTunes and share what you liked about the show.  I hope you love everything recommended via The Brainy Business! Everything was independently reviewed and selected by me, Melina Palmer. So you know, as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. That means if you decide to shop from the links on this page (via Amazon or others), The Brainy Business may collect a share of sales or other compensation. Let's connect: Melina@TheBrainyBusiness.com The Brainy Business® on Facebook The Brainy Business on Twitter The Brainy Business on Instagram The Brainy Business on LinkedIn Melina on LinkedIn The Brainy Business on Youtube Join the BE Thoughtful Revolution – our free behavioral economics community, and keep the conversation going! Learn and support The Brainy Business: Check out and get your copies of Melina's Books.  Get the Books Mentioned on (or related to) this Episode: The Power of Scarcity, by Mindy Weinstein What Your Customer Wants and Can't Tell You, by Melina Palmer Influence, by Robert Cialdini What Your Employees Need and Can't Tell You, by Melina Palmer Power of Regret, by Dan Pink Top Recommended Next Episode: Availability Bias (ep 15) Already Heard That One? Try These:  The Top 5 Wording Mistakes Businesses Make (ep 2) What is Value? (ep 234) Loss Aversion: Why Getting New Stuff Is Not The Same (ep 9) The Truth About Pricing (ep 5) The Power of Regret with Daniel Pink (ep 214) Dr. Robert Cialdini and the (Now!) 7 Principles of Persuasion (ep 157) A Behavioral Economics Analysis of Costco (ep 47) Starbucks: A Behavioral Economics Analysis (ep 73) Disney: A Behavioral Economics Analysis (ep 144) Other Important Links:  Brainy Bites - Melina's LinkedIn Newsletter  What is ‘Scarcity' Influence: Science and Practice (5th Edition) Narcissists as consumers: The effects of perceived scarcity on processing of product information The Top 10 Most Expensive Stamps In The World The Five Most Expensive Coins Ever Sold at Auction Costco Business Model and Their Strategy @TheRealPSL on Twitter Want a Starbucks Unicorn Frappuccino? Too bad. Most stores sold out Starbucks Coffee Rose Gold Pink Sequin 24oz Venti Tumbler Cold Cup The Rarest and Best Disney Mickey and Minnie Mouse Ears How ‘Tickle Me Elmo' Caused Holiday Hysteria Back In 1996 Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?

Today Chris is talking with Ronald E. Riggio, Ph.D., the Henry R. Kravis Professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology and former Director of the Kravis Leadership Institute at Claremont McKenna College. Dr. Riggio is a social/personality psychologist and leadership scholar with more than a dozen authored or edited books and more than 150 articles/book chapters. His research interests are in leadership and organizational communication, particularly leader nonverbal communication, and emotional competence.  He is part of the Fullerton Longitudinal Study that is examining leadership development across the lifespan (beginning at 1 year of age and continuing through adulthood).     [Sept 12th, 2022]    00:00 – Intro   Social-Engineer.com Managed Voice Phishing  Managed Email Phishing  Adversarial Simulations  Social-Engineer channel on SLACK  CLUTCH  innocentlivesfoundation.org 00:20 – Intro Links  03:02 – Dr. Ron Riggio Intro  04:13 – How did you become a professor of leadership?  07:41 – What year did you start focusing on charisma?  09:16 – The importance of charisma for leadership  12:49 – How does one learn to develop personal charisma?  15:27 – How important is getting gestures right?  18:22 – The benefits of showing emotional expressions  21:41 – Dynamic Attractiveness  23:45 – What can I do to become a better leader?  26:51 – Transformational Leadership  28:34 – Leaders need to know their followers  29:41 – How do you lead at scale?  32:42 – Developing leadership capacity in others  35:44 – The attraction to the "Strong Man"  40:11 – Spare the rod  44:16 – Who do you consider your biggest mentors?  Howard S. Friedman  Bernard Bass  47:04 – Book Recommendations:  Influence: Science and Practice - Robert Cialdini Leadership - James MacGregor Burns Daily Leadership Development - Ronald E. Riggio 50:58 – Find Dr. Riggio on the web  Twitter: https://twitter.com/ronriggio  Website: www.riggioleadership.org  Blog Site: psychologytoday.com/blog/cutting-edge-leadership    51:54 – Guest Wrap Up  52:28 – Outro  www.social-engineer.com  www.innocentlivesfoundation.org  

In dieser Folge spreche ich mit Raoul Plickat. Raoul gehört zu den 17 besten Marketern weltweit. Für seine Courage, seine innovativen Ideen und der Fähigkeit reale Resultate zu erzeugen wurde er schon mehrfach international ausgezeichnet. Raoul steht im Hintergrund von sehr großen Namen und kümmert sich um die Positionierung und Vermarktung von Dirk Kreuter, Bodo Schäfer, Karl Ess und der Modemarke Philipp Plein. Mehr über Raoul:  Instagram Raoul's Buchtipp:  Influence: Science and Practice    Hier geht's zu deiner Immobilie als Kapitalanlage (Trage dich in das Kontaktformular ein und einer unserer Experten meldet sich bei dir zeitnah)

In this episode, Will and I discuss a variety of topics that he include his new book "The Science of Baseball". We also branch into how common injuries such as UCL repair/ reconstructions have evolved over time and how certain environmental constraints can influence recovery. How the measurable and objective data must have context in order to see the full picture and even how sports gambling can potentially influence the game in the future. You can find Will on his socials: @injuryexpertand Read is column Under the Knife

In episode 2.5, Scott and Vince continue their power conversation from episode 2.3. Here, they really focus on the power and importance of influence and persuasion. Personal and professional power are tools that help drive influence and persuasion. From the importance of being genuine or authentic to believing and living your core values, to recognizing people for who they are versus what they are, will fuel your personal power and put you in an incredible position to influence in a positive manner. They also discuss negative approaches such as scarcity tactics and the pitfalls that come with using fear as a part of your personal power. Further, Scott and Vince reference a few of their favorite books that relate to this topic, including, Robert Cialdini's book, Influence: Science and Practice, and Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, and discuss some of their key takeaways. To learn more about our hosts, Scott De Long and Vince Moiso, please visit theceopodcast.net. With questions, or to make suggestions for future topics, please contact them at scottandvince@gmail.com. Cheers!

Can understanding the nature of influence support people in cult recovery?  Dr. Steve Hassan, former cult member, author, educator, and world authority on cults will be our honored guest throughout this season . His published works include: The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control, Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults, Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults, and Beliefs. Today we are going to discuss his dissertation published January 2021: “The BITE Model of Authoritarian Control: Undue Influence, Thought Reform, Brainwashing, Mind Control, Trafficking and the Law.”Our focus today is the BITE model, which refers to Behavior-Information-Thought-Emotion control. Dr. Hassan developed BITE as a model for evaluating degrees undue influence. Gerette references the book Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini. Steven Hassan, PhD is a mental health professional and expert in undue influence tactics used by authoritarian leaders and destructive cults. His foundational online course is “Understand Cults: The Basics.” He is the Founding Director of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, which provides training, consulting and support to individuals who are struggling to leave or recover from a cult and to families and organizations that are concerned about cult behaviors. He also is the founder of Freedom From Undue Influence, a not-for-profit entity with the purpose of conducting and publishing the research on undue influence that is needed to update legal and social policies. He developed the BITE Model of Authoritarian Control to identify control tactics and the Influence Continuum Model to discern ethical from unethical influence. He developed the Strategic Interactive Approach (SIA), as an effective and legal intervention alternative for families to help cult members. Dr. Hassan believes that access to the truth, freedom of thought, and freedom from undue influence are basic human rights. A complex systems approach, based in science and supported by the rule of law, is necessary to protect these rights. He is a member of the Program in Psychiatry and the Law at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. He is an experienced educator having served as an instructor for the Harvard Law School Trial Advocacy Workshop, as an elective teacher and a presenter for the Harvard Longwood Psychiatry Residency Training Program, and in other educational and training capacities for other higher education, professional, law enforcement, governmental, non-governmental and advocacy group audiences. Dr. Hassan began helping people affected by undue influence after he was deprogrammed from the Moon cult in 1976 at age 22. His 45 plus years of experience give him a unique perspective on the damaging effects of undue influence and exploitation by destructive cults. He is a frequently requested speaker and media interviewee. Dr. Hassan holds a Master's Degree in Counseling Psychology from Cambridge College and a Doctorate in Organizational Development and Change from Fielding Graduate University School of Leadership Studies. Visit freedomofmind.com to access information and services. If you hav

It is never too late to start over. That's exactly the testimony of Dr. Iris Wagstaff. She is a chemist, educator, mentor, researcher and science policy advisor with extensive experience in STEM outreach and advocacy.  She is also a thought leader and change agent in the broader STEM community. After spending nearly 15 years in a successful industry career as a research chemist, she decided to leave that job and embarked upon a new path.  She would go on to earn a PhD in Science Education, be named a AAAS Science Policy fellow and serve as a STEM Program Director in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Her inspirational and motivational story is one that all can benefit!  

The psychologist Robert Cialdini reveals the six laws of influence and persuasion so that we are able to convince and influence others, in this splendid book "Influence, Science and Practice."

In this episode of the 18Forty Podcast, we sit down with Professor Allison Coudert, of the Department of Religious Studies at UC Davis, to discuss the historical interplay of science with religion, and specifically with Kabbalah. During a 1917 lecture talking about the rational mindset underlying science, Max Weber famously declared that “This means that the world is disenchanted.” Though this sentiment has permeated the public consciousness, Allison thinks the real story is more complicated. She thinks that science and enlightenment philosophy only heightened the magic we humans could experience, and that enlightenment movements have done so historically. In her mind, religion and science aren’t opponents, as they’re so often framed, but engage in a mutually-beneficial relationship, each inspiring and strengthening the other. - What has the historical interplay of science and religion been?- What influence has Kabbalah specifically had on scientists’ thought?- What connotations do the words “modernity” and “enlightenment” tend to evoke in listeners?- And are these evocations justified?Tune in to hear Allison Coudert discuss the influence that Jewish thought has had since the Scientific Revolution. For more, visit https://18forty.org/science/#coudert.

In this episode of Agents Influence podcast, host Jason Cass interviews Brian Ahearn CPCU, CTM, CPT, CMCT, Chief Influence Officer at Influence People, and international speaker, coach, consultant, and author. Brian talks about being one of only 20 people in the world certified by Robert Cialdini to teach his methodology when it comes to influence. Brian also talks about his passion for teaching how to communicate differently, understanding what psychology says about our minds, and how we can ethically influence people to do things.   Episode Highlights:   Jason introduces Brian Ahearn. (1:01) Is Brian an Android or an iPhone user?  (4:18) What was the last app that Brian downloaded? (4:36) Does Brian love to win or hate to lose?  (5:57) What does Brian attribute to his success, skill, or luck? (7:01) Where does Brian reside now? (8:11) Brian takes us back to his college life and brings us forward to where he’s at now. (8:34) Jason shares why Brian’s LinkedIn profile is very unique. (10:22) Brian explains who Robert Cialdini is in his methodology. (11:57) Brian says that Robert Cialdini wrote a book called “Influence: Science and Practice” which has sold three and a half million copies. (12:18) Brian explains what is so special about Robert Cialdini’s teachings. (13:26) Brian says Robert Cialdini is practicing what he preaches. (13:39) Brian says we need to recognize that humans are most likely to respond to loss as opposed to gain. (15:49) As an ethical persuader, Brian is putting out what he knows is in your best interest as a potential customer. (16:22) Brian gives an example of what creates a scarcity mentality. (22:30) Jason believes that our podcast is the best because we take these listeners down roads that people don’t normally go. (23:01) Brain explains the scarcity mentality. (25:30) Brian tells his story about running across Robert Cialdini’s materials. (27:15) Brian explains what reciprocity is. (43:40) Brian talks about a meme of Eminem that circulated on Facebook a few years ago. What is Brian reading right now? (44:34) Brian Ahearn shares what he does for the insurance industry. (47:24)   Key Quotes:   “Give what you want. Give respect, love consideration, whatever you want from somebody else, be the first to give it and you'll be pleasantly surprised at how many people reciprocated.” - Brian Ahearn “If I had an abundance, that's a wonderful thing. But if I don't have enough, that could be life and death.”  - Brian Ahearn  “I want people to enjoy more success at the office and happiness at home. And I believe that I can help them do that by teaching them how to communicate differently, how to understand what psychology says about our minds, and how we can ethically influence people to do things.” - Brian Ahearn   Resources Mentioned : Agency Intelligence Reach out to Jason Cass Influence PEOPLE: Powerful Everyday Opportunities to Persuade that are Lasting and Ethical   Advertisers: Lightspeed Voice Tarmika Agency Va

We like to believe that everyone gathers all the available information before they make a decision but the sad fact is that there is too much information out there. What influences our decision making process? How do we persuade others to our way of thinking? Meyrick D'Souza, Digital Marketing expert, has always been intrigued by what drives people's behaviour. In his research the best example that he could find was the book Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini. The book is based on Cialdini's research of six important weapons or shortcuts that people use to influence their decisions and behaviour.  Meyrick D'Souza is a Digital Marketing professional with over 20 years of international experience helping organizations build customer-focused digital engagement. Has worked both agency and client-side. Experience ranges from Fortune 500 to start-ups. Skilled in helping organizations reimagine and transform their customer experience, by understanding the opportunities and challenges that new technologies can have. Strengths in strategic council & best practices to develop digital capabilities Passionate about what motivates human behaviour in digital spaces Experience includes working for blue-chip organizations such as Adobe, LenovO and BT. Recently returned to London after 21 years of working and living in Asia. In this episode, Meyrick D'Souza introduces the six shortcuts and looks at how they apply to the world of eCommerce.     Connect with Meyrick: Twitter @metric_dos LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/meyrickdsouza/   Sponsors: Kurious Digital The eCommerce platform we use to run all our eCommerce businesses. If you are in the market for a new eCommerce platform, check it out. Their new monthly subscription service has made this even more accessible. Have a look at it, check out the demo. Lightbulb Light bulb agency is an end to end eCommerce business that anything that you don't really want to do or have the expertise to do with eCommerce. It offers a range of services such as research product, create website, marketing, generate traffic, customer service, picking and fulfilment.  Lighbulb ship from the UK all over the world for a number of customers and you can try out their service with no problems.    Links to other platforms where this podcast is available: Apple Podcasts Stitcher Spotify

Con la misión de llevar las marcas correctas a los consumidores correctos en el momento y lugar ideal, “Ecom Ventures” nace como un intermediario que conecta marcas con los consumidores finales mediante el poder del marketing digital. Conoce la historia completa de Juan Martitegui en esta edición de Maestros del Escalamiento junto a Daniel Marcos. PODCAST TIMESTAMPS   1:09 Daniel Marcos nos da bienvenida a una nueva edición de Maestros del Escalamiento junto a Juan Martitegui, miembro del capítulo de EO Buenos Aires. 1:54 Ecom Ventures funciona como un intermediario entre marcas o productos centrados en el consumidor que mediante diferentes estrategias y marketing digital las conectan con el usuario final en el lugar y momento adecuado. 2:33 Nos comenta, que su empresa en un modelo completamente remoto con 130 colaboradores fijos o eventuales con presencia en casi 20 países. 3:28 Juan nos comparte su fracaso favorito fue hacer cientos de modelos y propuestas que funcionaban en papel pero que no lograban venderse por lo que cambió su enfoque a trabajar en propuestas que no sólo funcionaran en papel, sino también en la realidad. 5:36 Es miembro de EO desde 2015 con el objetivo de hacer el curso de EMP, sin embargo, al entrar, descubrió otras paralelas como los foros, las conferencias y la gente y que gracias a ello ha podido lograr mucho más en sus empresas, así como en su persona. 8:36 En su opinión, EO le ha dado la posibilidad de ver como ha avanzado su negocio a lo largo del tiempo pero que también le ha brindado un grupo que lo entiende como persona, emprendedor y empresario en situaciones muy particulares a diferencia de otros grupos de amigos que no pueden ser igual de empáticos. 10:49 Su día comienza haciendo ejercicio por la mañana, convive con su familia y medita para finalmente de camino al trabajo escuchar un podcast o algún audiobook. 14:53 Juan nos platica que los libros que más ha regalado son: “The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies” (Chet Holmes, 2007), “Influence: Science and Practice” (Robert Cialdini, 1984), “El caballero de la armadura oxidada” (Robert Fisher, 1987) 15:33 El poder descubrir alguna nueva forma de ver las cosas y hacerlas funcionar, así como encontrar una solución diferente, es de las cosas que más disfruta de ser emprendedor. 17:17 Por igual, considera que los ir y venir a nivel emocional es lo que el considera, que ha sido lo más difícil de ser emprendedor. 18:25 La publicidad de respuesta directa, así como el manejo de social media / marketing digital, así como pensar algorítmicamente para hacer funcionar esa comunicación es uno de los factores que más le ha ayudado a escalar su negocio. 19:33 Por igual, nos recomienda leer “Wizard of Ads” (Roy Williams, 1998) y “Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts” (Annie Duke, 2018) así como aprender cómo funcionan los algoritmos detrás de las plataformas como método para aprender marketing digital 22:58 ¿Cuál es la habilidad única de Juan? Aprender a trabajar con equipos a freelance para sus estrategias de marketing. 23:28 Recomienda ampliamente ver “Silicon Valley” (Mike Judge, John Altschuler, Dave Krinsky, 2014) así como las películas del género “robo / atracos” 25:20 Considera que una compra que le ha cambiado la vida es una cinta para guardar la pluma de su ipad junto al mismo. 26:00 SI tuviera la oportunidad de decirle algo al mundo es que: “hoy mejor que ayer y peor que mañana” 26:36 En su opinión, considera que uno de sus hábitos raros es bañarse con agua fría por las mañanas. 30:43 Cree que una opción errónea que tiene la gente de él es que vive en la panacea al decir que no tiene empleados sino freelancers 31:14 Nos platica de su paso por AISEC en su juventud, así como el que hoy en día, gran parte de su plantilla son pertenecientes a la organización. 35:28 ¿Cómo es la cultura de su empresa? 36:50 Si pudiera darle un consejo a su versión de cuando empezó a emprender es que los negocios grandes se hacen con constancia y dedicación a la solución del mismo problema. 38:50 Al pensar en éxito, Juan piensa en hacer lo que quiere, cuando quiere, con quien quiere y todas las veces que quiera, así como tomar 39:12 Cree que sus mejores decisiones de negocios ha sido empezar Ecom Ventures con su socia actual 39:35 Cree que su mejor inversión en tiempo y dinero ha sido siempre, tomar capacitaciones y trainings, así como invertir en sí mismo 39:57 Cuando se siente abrumado o fuera de foco, Juan trata de cambiar su ambiente mental pues considera que, impacta en lo físico 42:03 Daniel menciona que el escalamiento es mental antes que físico, a lo que Juan responde que, leyendo, haciendo ejercicios mentales, tener conversaciones consigo mismo y con otros miembros de su foro. 43:12 A los nuevos emprendedores les recomienda que no subestimen entender de la operación de su negocio. 44:26 Despedida y agradecimientos.     INFO FINAL   Conoce más de Juan Martitegui en: LinkedIn   Conoce más de “Ecom Ventures” en: Sitio Web LinkedIn   Conoce más de EO en: LinkedIn    

The variables that influence how people communicate. Compliance gaining strategies. Detecting deception. Interview with: David Keating, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, California State University, Northridge. Resources: Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception, by Timothy Levine (book); Persuasion in the Media Age, by Timothy Borchers (book); Persuasion: Social Influence and Compliance Gaining, by R. Gass and J. Seiter (book); Influence: Science and Practice, by Robert Cialdini (book); The Dynamics of Persuasion, by Richard Perloff (book)

Book Bites are quick looks at a book from our Guest Host readers. Try a new book this week! This week our Guest Host admires the book Influence: Science and Practice, by Robert B. Cialdini. @RobertCialdini "Written in a narrative style combined with scholarly research, Cialdini combines evidence from experimental work with the techniques and strategies he gathered while working as a salesperson, fundraiser, advertiser, and in other positions inside organizations that commonly use compliance tactics to get us to say “yes.” Widely used in classes, as well as sold to people operating successfully in the business world, the eagerly awaited revision of Influence reminds the reader of the power of persuasion." Subscribe to our newsletter, our social media, and our podcasts to stay up to date on all kinds of great stuff! We serve 300+ libraries of all types, and are always ready to talk about libraries and books.

Our guest on this week's podcast is Michael Kitces. Michael is a partner and the director of wealth management for Pinnacle Advisory Group, a Columbia, Maryland-based wealth management firm that advises on about $1.8 billion of assets. In addition, he is a co-founder of the XY Planning Network. As the host of the Financial Advisor Success podcast and the publisher of the popular financial planning industry blog Nerd's Eye View, Michael has established himself as one of the most prolific and insightful commentators on the financial advice business. A fixture on the speaking circuit and in the media, Michael often addresses key trends and innovations in the way advisors serve their clients; our interview with him focused on the future of the financial advice business.  Show Notes and References Background and Professional Development Michael’s formative years: “The only thing I really think I figured out by the end of college was … that I didn’t want to do psychology, theater, or medicine” (0:59-2:51)  Michael’s bio Pinnacle Advisory Group XY Planning Network  Financial Advisor Success podcast  Nerd’s Eye View blog Dad’s old life insurance policy: How a wedding gift led Michael down a path to a career in the financial services industry (2:52-4:21)  Michael’s background and entry-path into finance  “He was just a really different guy than everybody else”: Michael’s recounts his breakthrough realization that he wanted to be a financial planner (4:22-6:07) ·  Certified financial planner designation  How Michael used his pre-med training to overcome a crisis of confidence that he didn’t know what he was doing: “I probably shouldn’t be giving them advice; I’m going to hurt someone” (6:08-7:31)  Hippocratic oath  Going deep to differentiate: “I’m going to get really good at these annuity benefit riders” (7:32-8:45) Leveraging a Mini-Specialization to Gain Experience and Get More Client Referrals” by Michael Kitces (Aug. 16, 2018; Nerd’s Eye View blog)  Variable universal life insurance—a short explainer   The Advisor’s Guide to Annuities (5th Edition) by Michael E. Kitces and John L. Olsen  Behavioral Finance in Practice Where behavioral finance falls short: Practicality (8:46-11:40)  Recency bias: A brief explainer  Persuasion: Using psychology and coaching to help clients overcome their biases (11:41-13:01) “Why Evolutionary Psychology May Be Better Than Behavioral Finance Research to Understand Financial Behaviors” by Dr. Derek Tharp, lead researcher for Kitces.com (Jan. 16, 2019; Nerd’s Eye View blog)  Influence: Science and Practice (5th Edition) by Robert Cialdini   Advice that Sticks by Dr. Moira Somers  “Most of us just don’t want to say that about ourselves”: Clients don’t hire us to save them from themselves, but to get on a better path and save time (13:02-16:37) “Do Clients Really Value Getting Help Managing Their Behavior Gap?”; transcript of episode 5 of “Kitces and Carl” video series  “Zoom the camera out a little bit”: The key to helping clients through difficult times is being available, clearly communicating, and setting context (16:38-18:18) “There’s very little research at all about what you’re actually supposed to do about this stuff” (18:19-19:56) Financial Advice: Evolution and Great Leaps “Disturbingly like clockwork”: Technology’s role in propelling financial-advice from stock-brokering to the mutual-fund era to asset-allocation models (19:57-22:14) “How May Day Remade Wall Street” by Jason Zweig (May 1, 2015; Wall Street Journal; Total Return Blog)  “So Easy a Baby Could Do It” E-trade commercial  Computers disrupted the stock-broker model and the internet disrupted the mutual-fund model. Michael on why he thinks software will disrupt the fee-based asset-allocation model (22:15-24:06) An S&P 500 index fund just for you: “Technology is going to allow us to completely disintermediate not just mutual funds but most of the ETF complex as well” (24:07-25:36) “Indexing 2.0: How Declining Transaction Costs and Robo-Indexing Could Disintermediate Index Mutual Funds and ETFs” by Michael Kitces (May 28, 2014; Nerd’s Eye View blog)  “Global Fund Flows Report” by Morningstar  The Future of Advice “If we can do that with medicine and we can do this with clothing, we can do this with at least large portion of financial advice as well”: Michael on delivering advice virtually (25:37-30:25) “How Video Conferencing Can Put the Face-to-Face (Back) into Distance Financial Planning Client Relationships” by Michael Kitces (July 27, 2015; Nerd’s Eye View blog) “(Saying) ‘Oh no one’s ever going to want to work with an advisor virtually; it’s all in person’ … is like clothing stores insisting that Amazon was no threat to them 20 years ago” (30:26-32:56) “The Future of Financial Planning in the Digital Age,” a presentation by Michael Kitces to FPA Georgia (May 24, 2017)  “Is Digital Search About to Replace Referrals for Finding a Good Financial Advisor” by Michael Kitces (June 3, 2013; Nerd’s Eye View blog)  Technology leaps like robo-advice are less of a threat to the financial advisor than to the the back- and middle-office that supports them (32:57-33:54) “The Advisory Firm Jobs That Robots Really Do Threaten” by Michael Kitces (May 10, 2018; Nerd’s Eye View blog)  The great inversion: In the future, advisors will charge for financial-planning services and give away investment management for free (vs. today where the opposite often holds true) (33:55-35:36) “Pricing Models for Financial Adviosrs and the Power of 'Free' Financial Planning” by Michael Kitces (Aug. 10, 2015; Nerd’s Eye View blog)  Best Practices for Delivering and Paying for Advice “We still have a huge industry gap”: Not even 30% of financial advisors have achieved a baseline financial-planning designation—the CFP mark (35:37-39:20) “3 Reasons Why the Financial Advisor Market Size Isn’t Actually Shrinking” by Michael Kitces (Nov. 15, 2018; Nerd’s Eye View blog)  “The Long Tail, the Big Head, and the Dangerous Middle of Financial Advisory Firms” by Michael Kitces (Aug. 27, 2018; Nerd’s Eye View blog)  FINRA Series 6 exam  FINRA Series 63 exam  FINRA Series 7 exam   FINRA Series 65 exam  A question of when, not if, more exacting financial-advice standards will arrive: “The U.S. has become a laggard on fiduciary and competency standards” (39:21-43:21) Australia’s Financial Adviser Standards and Ethics Authority (FASEA)  The Fiduciary Standard  “Is Financial Planning an Industry or a Profession?” by Michael Kitces (Dec. 15, 2016; Nerd’s Eye View blog)  We can’t do financial advice for young people? Michael on why that’s ridiculous and how flat-fee or subscription-based advice will come to fill that void (43:22-46:51) “How the Financial Planning Process Differs for Young Clients: Not Simpler, but Different Complexities” by Michael Kitces (Apr. 17, 2019; Nerd’s Eye View blog)  “Introducing AdvicePay and the Automation of Billing Financial Planning Fees (without Custody)” by Michael Kitces (Jan. 22, 2018; Nerd’s Eye View blog)  “The New 1% Advisory Fee: 1% of Income, Instead of 1% of Assets” by Michael Kitces (Feb. 11, 2019; Nerd’s Eye View blog)  “I don’t … see anything wrong with the AUM model”: Why charging a percentage of assets-under-advisement makes sense for some clients, but will become less common in the future (46:52-48:56) “How to Profitably Price Fee-for-Service Financial Planning” by Alan Moore, co-founder XY Planning Network (May 21, 2018; Nerd’s Eye View blog)  When it does and doesn’t makes sense to pay for financial advice by the hour (48:57:51:47) “The Opportunities in Providing Hourly As-Needed Financial Advice for the Middle Market with Sheryl Garrett” by Michael Kitces (Jan. 23, 2018; Financial Advisor Success podcast)  About the Podcast: The Long View is a podcast from Morningstar. Each week, hosts Christine Benz and Jeff Ptak conduct an in-depth discussion with a thought leader from the world of investing or personal finance. The podcast is produced by George Castady and Scott Halver. About the Hosts: Christine Benz and Jeff Ptak have been analysts and commentators on investments and the investment industry for many years. Christine is Morningstar's director of personal finance and senior columnist for Morningstar.com. Jeff is head of global manager research in Morningstar Research Services, overseeing Morningstar's team of 120 manager research analysts in the U.S. and overseas. To Share Feedback or a Guest Idea: Write us at TheLongView@morningstar.com

Bloomberg Opinion columnist Barry Ritholtz interviews Dr. Robert Cialdini, professor emeritus of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University and an expert in the fields of persuasion, compliance and negotiation. His book "Influence: Science and Practice" has sold 3 million copies in more than 30 languages; his most recent work, "Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade," is a Wall Street Journal and a New York Times bestseller. Cialdini is also the CEO and president of Influence at Work, which provides training and certification.  

Fall is a favorite season of mine and probably a favorite season to many of you. It’s also the time of year that my favorite honeycrisp apples are available. Like cotton candy grapes, these apples benefit from scarcity. Today, I break down what scarcity is and how you can apply this concept to your business. Scarcity is another concept in my lessons on behavioral economics foundations. Traditionally, scarcity is when an item is limited, but there is unlimited desire for that item. When we see something as scarce, we perceive that it has higher value. In today’s behavioral economics podcast, I will share stories and examples of how scarcity affects perceived value and how it relates with other foundational concepts like loss aversion. CLICK HERE FOR YOUR FREE DOWNLOAD! Show Notes [02:27] I love the fall, baking, and apple season. [03:12] My favorite apples, honeycrisp, are only available around certain times of the year. These apples have the benefit of scarcity, and that is what this episode is all about. [03:36] In today's episode, I break down what scarcity is and what happens in our brain when we perceive that something is scarce. I also give a lot of examples on how to implement this tactic in a business like yours. [06:00] Scarcity occurs when an item has limited availability, but unlimited demand. This includes resources like oil and water or more abstract resources like time. [06:22] We see things as more valuable when they are less readily available. [06:52] With a watch advertisement, people were actually willing to pay 50% more when they thought that the watch was scarce. [08:01] The most valuable stamp in the world, the British Guiana is valued at $11.5 million! [08:23] The first silver dollar printed and issued by the US government (called the flowing hair) sold for $10 million at auction. [09:32] Scarcity and value are closely tied together and for some reason our crazy brains think less is more. [09:38] Scarcity also triggers loss aversion. When something is scarce, we don't want to miss out on the opportunity to get it. [10:48] Examples of big brands using scarcity that you can use to apply in your own business. [10:51] Costco: People stock up when shopping at Costco, because they know that the great deal they find won't be there when they go back. Costco also has a great return policy to eliminate people's fear of making these purchases. [13:01] Starbucks: Right now it is time for the pumpkin spice latte. A drink made famous by Starbucks. Scarce items take on a life of their own. @theRealPSL even has its own Twitter account. [15:19] Scarcity can create cult followings which means other people do the marketing for you. [17:45] From rose gold Starbucks tumblers to rose gold Minnie Mouse ears, scarcity encourages items to sell. [18:40] These examples are a combination of scarcity and availability which will be the topic of next week's episode. [20:22] Real estate: Scarcity is implied. You can use words to trigger scarcity, such as limited time, extended, custom, handcrafted, one-of-a-kind, and close out. [21:21] There is value with holding firmly to specific hours. When you are booked you are booked. [21:52] When enforcing your hours, you need to say it with confidence. I talked about this in last week's episode about mindset. [22:51] If you aren't selling a product yourself, you can still you scarcity by putting on a contest. [24:07] The holidays are full of examples of scarcity. There are limited holiday treats, black Friday sales, and usually a big toy of the season. [25:26] When using scarcity think exclusivity instead of cheesy tactics. [25:50] Diamond engagement rings. Diamonds actually aren't that rare, and large diamond engagement rings weren't that popular until the 1940s. The concepts of scarcity and availability work together to make diamonds what they are today. [30:29] The diamond example is fascinating, and next week I will talk a lot more about it. Basically, they used scarcity to create perceived value. [32:49] You can book a strategy session with me for 10% off if you book by September 30. That 10% discount also applies to the workshop in Seattle on October 24. [34:08] I will be giving my Consumers Are Weird talk at the Arkansas Bankers Association Mega Conference in Little Rock next week - will you be there? [34:38] I will also be in Portland, Maine in a couple of weeks. Email melina@thebrainybusiness.com if you would like to connect. Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Android. If you like what you heard, please leave a review on iTunes and share what you liked about the show. Links and Resources: TheBrainyBiz on Instagram Episode 2 The Top 5 Wording Mistakes Businesses Make The 10 Behavioral Economics Concepts You Need To Know (And How To Apply Them)What is 'Scarcity' Influence: Science and Practice (5th Edition) Narcissists as consumers: The effects of perceived scarcity on processing of product information Episode 8 What is Value? The Top 10 Most Expensive Stamps In The World The Five Most Expensive Coins Ever Sold at Auction Episode 9 Behavioral Economics Foundations: Loss Aversion Costco Business Model and Their Strategy @TheRealPSL on Twitter Episode 5 The Truth About Pricing Want a Starbucks Unicorn Frappuccino? Too bad. Most stores sold out Starbucks Coffee Rose Gold Pink Sequin 24oz Venti Tumbler Cold Cup The Rarest and Best Disney Mickey and Minnie Mouse Ears How ‘Tickle Me Elmo’ Caused Holiday Hysteria Back In 1996 Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?  

Influence Science and Practice book by Robert B Cialdini, The Foot-In-The-Door Technique, SJWs, Westminster Bridge Attack,Cannibalism, Michael Tellinger, Pizzagate, The Dollar, Elon Musk, Space x, D-Wave, Nuke Lies, The Great Moon Hoax of 1835, Shaquel Oneill, Veganism, Actors, The Big Bang Theory, Ed Teller, Biometrics, Kurt Godel, John Trump, Nicola Tesla, Bears, Bigfoot, Greyhound, Idiocracy, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Obama Care. Intro Hold Music Snippet:Herb (Herby) Remington - Plays The Steel via John Adams Recommended Listening Endcap: Message from Paul Craig Roberts(Jay Dyer), Caveman by Placeboing via Thee Lion, Lenny the Call Bot.(toao.net) hoaxbusterscall.com

Bob Burg shares information on topics vital to the success of today’s businessperson. He speaks for corporations and associations internationally, including fortune 500 companies, franchises, and numerous direct sales organizations. Bob regularly addresses audiences ranging in size from 50 to 16,000 — sharing the platform with notables including today’s top thought leaders, broadcast personalities, Olympic athletes and political leaders including a former United States President. Although for years he was best known for his book, Endless Referrals, over the past few years it’s his business parable, The Go-Giver (coauthored with John David Mann) that has captured the imagination of his readers. The Go-Giver, a The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek Bestseller, has sold over 500,000 copies. Since its release it has consistently stayed in the top 25 on 800 ceoread’s Business Book Bestsellers List. It has been translated into 21 languages and is Bob’s fourth book to sell over 250,000 copies. Bob is an advocate, supporter and defender of the Free Enterprise system, believing that the amount of money one makes is directly proportional to how many people they serve. Show Notes  The Go-Giver: a business parable about shifting your focus to giving. Mindset of giving will be profitable. We must focus on bringing on bringing value to others. The Law of Value: “your true worth is how much you give in value than you take in payment” Difference between price (a number) and value (desirability). You can control the journey, or the actions you take, to get to the goal. The Law of Influence: “determined by how abundantly you put other people’s interests first.” Influence= The ability to move a person to a desired action. “Pull” as opposed to “push” Dale Carnegie said, “Ultimately, people do things for their reasons, not our reasons.” Trust is assured reliance on the character of someone. Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek: “Trust is a biological reaction to the belief that someone has our well-being at heart.” Who we are is more important than what we do or say. Character is “the sum total of all one’s qualities.” “The most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself” Some people do not have the self-confidence to be authentic. Intrinsic value and Market value (what allows you to bring value to the world) Sometimes we are unaware of our value to others. Empathy- experiencing another person’s feelings, or trying to understand their feelings. “Let them see you sweat when it’s appropriate.” Learning from failures: getting left behind in technology for not wanting to change. “Personal development political correctness” Success= Bob’s parents. People who appreciate what is good in their life. Being loved by people. The best “people skill” is having interest in the other person. Don’t confuse authenticity with not improving yourself. Books: Harry Brown’s The Secret of Selling Anything Simon Sinek Leaders Eat Last Robert Cialdini’s Pre-Suasion and Influence: Science and Practice Best advice: “When the shooter misses the target, it ain’t the target’s fault. If you wanna make a lot of money in sales, make your target serving others...The money is the reward for hitting the target.” Contact: TheGoGiver.com Go-Giver Sales Academy Like what you hear? Subscribe! If you’ve found any value or helpful information in the Chiro Business Mojo Podcast then we’d love to hear about it! Please head over to iTunes and subscribe. While you’re at it, leave us a rating (5 stars would be great) and a review so others can find us! If you have any questions or comments about this show or its contents, please post them in the comments area below and we’ll be happy to answer them!

Lincoln Murphy's focus is customer success. He's currently the growth architect at Winning by Design, where he creates blueprints and playbooks for customer success managers and leaders. In the past, he founded Sixteen Ventures and led customer success at Gainsight. Using customer success to drive growth across the entire customer lifecycle, he has helped over four hundred SaaS and enterprise software companies accelerate growth and retain valuable customers. Contents On the website, click any timestamp to start listening to the episode at the noted location. Resources Mentioned in Episode Episode Transcript [00:00] Intro [Read] [02:27] Pre-SaaS Career in Supply Chain Management [Read] [04:14] Early SaaS Company for Mail Center Management [Read] [07:55] Early Days of SaaS [Read] [11:12] Before SaaS Was SaaS [Read] [12:56] Resistance to SaaS Adoption [Read] [14:08] Role of Corporate IT in SaaS Adoption [Read] [15:18] SaaS Business Model [Read] [16:27] Business Architecture [Read] [17:18] SaaS as a Business Architecture and SaaS Revenue Models [Read] [19:13] Recent Career [Read] [20:27] Sixteen Ventures [Read] [21:44] “The SaaS Guy” [Read] [22:16] Contrarian Views [Read] [23:57] Freemium in SaaS [Read] [25:10] Thought Leadership (or Getting Things Out of Your Head and Moving On)[Read] [26:06] Facts and the Contrarian Point-of-View [Read] [27:48] Customer Success Management [Read] [28:37] Customer's Desired Outcome [Read] [29:01] Customer's Required Outcome [Read] [30:06] Customer's Appropriate Experience [Read] [31:39] Appropriate SaaS Experience [Read] [33:26] Solve for Success Not Happiness [Read] [33:59] Successful Customers Advocate But Want More [Read] [34:49] Happy Customers May Not Be Getting Value and Then Churn [Read] [35:15] The Appropriate Success Vector [Read] [36:21] Customer Success and Company Valuation [Read] [37:15] Churn [Read] [37:50] Customers to Save and Customers to Let Go [Read] [39:41] When Churn Becomes a Non-Issue [Read] [42:03] Individual Contributions to the Customer's Desired Outcome [Read] [45:05] Personal Recommendations [Read] [46:34] Make Your Customers Powerful [Read] [47:20] Operationalize Customers Making you Powerful [Read] [48:16] Proactively Convert on Success Milestones [Read] [49:31] Customer Lifecycle Success [Read] [50:07] Tools to Monitor Customer Progress [Read] [51:01] Understand Desired Outcome Before You Operationalize [Read] [51:31] Start with the Customers and Tools Will Become Apparent [Read] [52:22] Saas Networking Recommendations [Read] Disclosure concerning affiliate links [Contents] Resources Mentioned in Episode Please see Disclosure* (below transcript) concerning affiliate links on this page. 7 Ways Customer Success Drives Company Valuation – This blog post by Lincoln Murphy on Sixteen Ventures discusses how Customer Success can impact the valuation of your company. Listen or read at [36:21]. ClientSuccess –Customer success management app mentioned by Lincoln Murphy as an alternative to Gainsight to measure customer success milestones. Listen or read at[50:18]. Customer Success: How Innovative Companies are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue* – Book by Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman, and Lincoln Murphy. Lincoln did not mention the book during the interview. I recommend you digest the information in this podcast episode, read Lincoln's Customer Success: The Definitive Guide, and then read the book. The book is broken down into three parts: (1) Customer Success: The History, Organization, and Imperative; (2) The Ten Laws of Customer Success; and (3) Chief Customer Officer, Technology, and Future. Each of the Ten Laws is covered in a chapter. Customer Success: The Definitive Guide – This is a 2016 update to Lincoln's original post The Definitive Guide to Customer Success. A PDF of the guide is available from the site. If this podcast episode interests you, I would recommend you read this next. I brought this up during the interview. Listen or read at [27:48]. FlipMyFunnel – According to the website, FlipMyFunnel is a “B2B Marketing and Sales Conference.” Lincoln Murphy mentioned that he would be speaking at the 2016 conference in Austin, Texas, but the conference moves. Check the website for info. Listen or read at [52:22]. Gainsight – Lincoln Murphy's former employer. Gainsight is a customer success management platform to measure customer success milestones. According to the website, Gainsight is: “Community, Best Practices, and Platform to Drive Business Transformation.” If you scroll to the bottom of their homepage (as of this writing), you'll see several useful guides listed. I have not checked them thoroughly, but they look good. Listen or read at [50:18]. Heroku – PaaS (Platform as a Service) for web app development and deployment. Lincoln Murphy mentioned this during the interview because he was once involved with a startup that was a competitor. That statup is gone, but Heroku remains and is well-respected. Listen or read at [18:35]. Influence: Science and Practice (5th Edition)* – Book by Robert Cialdini about the factors that influence us to say, “Yes.” According to his research, there are six such factors or principles: reciprocation, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. This is a well-written book and must-read for anyone interested in how people are influenced. Lincoln Murphy recommended this book. Listen or read at [45:33]. Intercom – According to the website: “Intercom is a customer platform with a suite of products for live chat, marketing, feedback, and support.” Lincoln Murphy mentioned this with other tools to operationalize customer success. Listen or read at [50:18]. Lincoln Murphy on Twitter @lincolnmurphy. Listen or read at [53:56]. Ruby on Rails – Ruby on Rails is an MVC (model-view-controller) framework based on the Ruby programming language used for web development. Mentioned in passing by Lincoln Murphy. Listen or read at [18:35]. SaaS Business Model [graphic] – SaaS Business Model graphic by Lincoln Murphy on Sixteen Ventures site. I mentioned this during the interview with Lincoln Murphy because it has his definition of customer success. Listen or read at [15:18]. SaaStock – European B2B SaaS conference. Listen or read at [52:22]. SaaStr – Annual conference, podcast, academy, and extensive blog about SaaS. According to the website: “SaaStr began in 2012 as a simple attempt via a WordPress blog, together with a few answers on Quora, to help share back Jason M. Lemkin's learnings of going from $0 to $100m ARR with the next generation of great SaaS and B2B entrepreneurs.” Mentioned by Lincoln Murphy. Listen or read at [52:22]. SIIA (Software & Information Industry Association) – According to the site: “SIIA is the principal trade association for the software and digital content industry.” Mentioned by Lincoln Murphy in passing at [23:23]. Sixteen Ventures – Sixteen Ventures is a company founded by Lincoln Murphy. The site contains blog articles about SaaS back to 2007 and Lincoln's current speaking. Mentioned in numerous places during the interview. Listen or read at [01:54], [19:13],[20:27], [20:41], [27:48], and [53:43]. The Reality of Freemium in SaaS – PDF by Lincoln Murphy mentioned during interview. Listen or read at [23:57]. Totango – Customer success management app mentioned by Lincoln Murphy as an alternative to Gainsight to measure customer success milestones. Listen or read at[50:18]. Winning by Design – According to the website, Winning by Design has a “proven customer-centric SaaS process for sales organizations” to assist with the design, implementation, and scaling of SaaS sales organizations. See their How It Works tab for more information. This is Lincoln Murphy's place of employment as of this writing. [Contents] Episode Transcript Intro [00:00] Ron Gaver: This is the SaaS Business Podcast, episode 16, an interview with Lincoln Murphy. [00:16] Lincoln Murphy: I'll tell you what: this is one of the most powerful concepts that I've ever come across in business, and that's kind of a big statement, but I believe it to be true If you understand what your customer's desired outcome is, what they need to achieve, and the way they need to achieve it, I think it changes everything. [00:45] Ron Gaver: Hello, welcome to the show. I'm your host, Ron Gaver. Thank you for listening. This is the podcast designed to help you put the pieces of the puzzle together to start, grow, and succeed in your SaaS business. Before we get started with the show, I would like to invite you to visit the podcast website. The URL is SaaSBusinessPodcast.com. On the website, the most important thing to do is to sign up to get your copy of the current free download. This will also put you on the list for future free downloads and updates. For your convenience, there's also a page on the website for each episode, where you will find show notes for the episode. The show notes will contain links to resources mentioned in the episode. Just enter the base URL, a forward slash, and the three-digit episode number. [01:33] If you enjoy this podcast and find the content to be valuable, please consider giving us a five-star rating on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Five-star ratings help the show stay visible so that new listeners can easily find us. [01:54] Ron Gaver: [Guest intro. See top of page for text.] Welcome, Lincoln. [02:22] Lincoln Murphy: Hey, Ron. How are you? [02:24] Ron Gaver: Fine! How are you? [02:25] Lincoln Murphy: I'm doing well. Good to be here. [Contents] Pre-SaaS Career in Supply Chain Management [02:27] Ron Gaver: Let's move back to 2004, roughly. You're getting ready to go to San Francisco, you're about to board an airplane, and your task is to go out to San Francisco and lay off a bunch of employees (or at least give them the bad news). [02:42] Lincoln Murphy: Yeah. [02:44] Ron Gaver: I think you had it pretty much up to your eyebrows at that point. What did you do? [02:50] Lincoln Murphy: I called my boss, and I told him that I wasn't coming out and that I was done. That's not what I signed on to do. It wasn't what I wanted to do. I didn't believe in the reason that we were laying off people, anyway. This was to move jobs—not the people, but to move jobs—from San Francisco to Dallas, and I knew that, fundamentally, the people were good people. I didn't want to do that for them. [03:17] Lincoln Murphy: But I also knew, fundamentally, this was the connection between us and our trading partners. This was in supply chain management, and if we lost these people with all this institutional knowledge—the systems were not great, we weren't all working off of one centralized database of customer data or trading-partner data, we weren't working off of one centralized form of documentation, processes weren't documented—I knew if we lost these folks, we would lose the relationship with our trading partners. And even in a situation where you have two giant corporations coming together, it still relies on just a handful of human connections. [03:50] Lincoln Murphy: And I thought it was a bad idea all around, and I had it at that point and was lucky enough (I don't know how it played out like this), got off the phone with my boss, called the airline, got a full refund (I don't know how that happened), and I said, “That's a good sign; this was the right decision.” Then I decided, “Well, I quit my job. Let me figure out what to do.” So I started a company, and it turned out to be a SaaS company, at the time. [Contents] Early SaaS Company for Mail Center Management [04:14] Ron Gaver: And you characterize that as a mail-center management for large businesses in the Texas area? [04:21] Lincoln Murphy: Yeah. From a supply-chain-management standpoint, you have very structured data that moves between, what we call, trading partners; and it's what allows products to flow from supplier to vendor, and invoices and purchase orders and everything else to flow; and it's all structured, and it's all heavily—I don't want to say regulated, but there're rules in place, and that's cool. [04:42] Lincoln Murphy: But then I saw a part of the organization that isn't structured, yet a lot of really important information and other types of things—packages, things like that—flowed through this mail center. So you think of the mailroom at some companies, but your large companies actually have very sophisticated, very large mail centers, and there's a whole industry out there involving mail-center management; and I said, “Look, I think that is an area of the enterprise that could be automated—not fully automated, but we could bring technology there and maybe provide visibility into the process and have it not be such a black box, where some really important information (things like checks and packages) are coming in.” And I said, “Let me just take that and run with it.” And—you know what—we did. [05:29] Lincoln Murphy: I pulled in some partners and we built a product—very much a minimum, viable product based off of what we now know as customer development (didn't really have the term for that), but I spent a lot of time going to industry meetups. I spent time with the post office, trying to understand how mail is routed through the U.S. Postal Service. I spent time with anybody that would let me go to their mail center and their mailroom. I remember Greyhound was nice enough to let me have some access. Pitney Bowes was a company that did a lot of outsourced mail-center management. I got to sort of piggyback on what they were doing for other companies. I went down to Exxon in Houston and toured there. [06:09] Lincoln Murphy: Actually, I'll tell you a little trick I used: I went to a company that does inbound mail-sorting automation; because I thought, “I want to, number one, be able to connect into their technology for our product.” But what I ended up doing was having them take me to some of their clients to show me their products in action, which also allowed me to get my foot in the door at ExxonMobil and at Frito-Lay, and a couple of other big companies, and so I met the right people based off of an interest in buying and also partnering with these makers of these really big, automated, mail-sorting machines. So that was a little hack that I used. But the bottom line is: I started understanding this market a little bit better and understanding what the needs were. And so you take a company like ExxonMobil that actually has a very distributed workforce, yet all of the mail comes in through their Houston mail center and then it has to be sent out. One of the things we did was created a way to view your mail. It comes in the mailroom, it goes on one of these sorters, those sorters actually have really high-speed cameras, we take the picture, and now that can be visible to somebody in Alaska, working on the North Slope above the Arctic Circle. They don't actually have to get the physical mail sent to them; they can go through and say, “I don't need that. I don't need that. I actually do need that.” And that actually cuts down on the cost of sending mail across the world, which, for a company like that, is actually a pretty significant cost savings. [07:30] Lincoln Murphy: Bottom line is: very interesting, lots of customer-development work, a lot of understanding of the market; and then, ultimately, the understanding that, no matter what, that market was not as exciting as I thought it was. It was just really slow to take up new technology—a lot slower than I was willing to or comfortable with waiting out—and we ended up selling to a competitor; I like to say I ended up not owing too many people too much money. But I learned a lot. [Contents] Early Days of SaaS [07:55] Ron Gaver: This was in a time when SaaS was not as ubiquitous as it is now. How is it that you decided that that was the right place, that was the right thing to do, SaaS was the answer? How was it you even came to know about SaaS at that particular time? [08:10] Lincoln Murphy: In all of the supply-chain-management stuff that I was doing—this will kind of go back to even the early '90s, when I got into that world—it was a network-centric, business architecture. If you think about the way that information is passed between companies, none of that really matters if you can't actually connect to the other companies. It absolutely relies on having this network centricity. And that was kind of the world that I grew up in. It was all about, ultimately, what we would refer to as B2B ecommerce. At the same time, of course, B2C ecommerce was coming up, and I was doing a lot of work with Web technologies. Even as the supply-chain world sort of evolved, we started taking on these dedicated networks and what we called value-added networks where—if you think about it—it was literally a server that two companies would dial in to—literally dial in to with old-school modems and things like that. You would have different types of computers, and we would have different format standards that we would use, and we'd upload a file to these systems. Those systems would translate the file into what the other company could use, and that was how we did business. [09:13] Lincoln Murphy: Well, we started moving that to the Internet, started using more standard technologies, more standard formats and things like that. I was doing a lot of really hardcore business work, using Internet technologies, so when I decided to move outside of where I had been in the supply-chain management world into creating a startup, Web technologies—that was what I knew more than anything else. I really had no idea how you would even build an on-parameter client-server piece of software, and I had no real interest in that. And like you said, SaaS wasn't a thing yet. And, certainly, ASPs—application service providers—had been around. People were “delivering” software over the Web. I saw this as a way to, not just deliver software, but if everybody signs into the same system (what we now know as multitenancy and things like that)—if everybody's signing into the same product, the same system—now we have that network centricity. And I wasn't really sure what we could do with that, but I did know what we've seen with companies like Workday that sort of upset or displaced previous types of products, like PeopleSoft in the human capital management space. One of the reasons Workday really took off is the fact that, for a distributed company, all they have to do is have Internet access to be able to get to the system. They don't have to have a server set up in a room somewhere and then dedicated circuits, or even VPNs, to get to this centralized server that, for all of their remote offices, all they have to have is Internet access. [10:44] Lincoln Murphy: Well, I saw that same thing in this case, where, at a company like Exxon, all they have to do is scan the content, put it on the server (which is on the Web), and then all the different remote locations could all log into that; and you don't have to have any of that dedicated IT infrastructure. So I saw that as a real positive. It was kind of two-fold: (1) I didn't come from an enterprise-software background, so that wasn't even on my radar, and (2) I really saw the benefits of having everything on the Web. So that's kind of how I went into that. [Contents] Before SaaS Was SaaS [11:12] Lincoln Murphy: It was hard to find information, certainly, on this, because there wasn't one thing that we called it. We didn't call it SaaS, didn't call it Cloud, so we kind of had to just feel around in the dark, but we eventually realized that this was a SaaS company. Right around the time we were getting ready to exit this venture, I think SaaS was becoming a term. But it was a real learning experience from all sorts of angles, and, you said it yourself: it wasn't ubiquitous. Really going out and selling this stuff to very staid, old-school companies who were technologically forward in the places where it mattered to them—Exxon was technology forward when it came to drilling, and some of the other companies were really technologically forward when it came to supply-chain management—but when it came to things like this, especially in a part of the business that was kind of considered a cost center (not really that important), they were not really looking to take any chances; and, of course, the management of the mail centers were not looking to take any chances, so they would bring IT in, and IT would say, “We have a lot of concerns.” And it was all of the things that I'd heard. Later on, you heard there were challenges for SaaS. We went through all of those, and so it was not ubiquitous. [12:22] Lincoln Murphy: But at that time, when SaaS was becoming a term, you would hear things from Silicon Valley (from investors and pundits and the press) that SaaS is everywhere and it's the next big thing, which was true. It was absolutely the next big thing. But in terms of being everywhere, in terms of being the norm or the way that you do business, it was hard. It was rough. And so we had a major uphill battle. When I came out of that, it was hard, but we were able to sign a number of fairly sizeable accounts, even with all of those challenges. And I thought, “Man, I think I've learned something that other people might be able to benefit from.” [Contents] Resistance to SaaS Adoption [12:56] Ron Gaver: You mention a variety of challenges. One of the challenges that I continue to read about is the disinterest on the part of corporate IT departments in adopting any kind of a SaaS infrastructure or a SaaS product. Do you see that still as a large problem, or do you think that that's gradually eroding away? [13:16] Lincoln Murphy: It depends on several things: everything from geography—I think in a lot of places in Europe, overseas markets are (I say this in the most kind way) a little bit behind where we are. They just haven't adopted it as much. I think you're still going to run into some of those things. [13:32] Lincoln Murphy: Certainly, there are regulatory issues. There are probably going to be some markets in the U.S. that are more reluctant, but there was a time when banks, financial institutions of any kind, healthcare—these guys will never, never do SaaS, and now it's basically in every market. Again, there may be some—and maybe there're some that should be. I don't know about building a SaaS product to run nuclear reactors, but save from that, maybe we're not really seeing too many of those barriers in one entire vertical. But I think you're still going to find that every once in a while. Certainly, older companies that haven't evolved, I think, are going to be there. [Contents] Role of Corporate IT in SaaS Adoption [14:08] Lincoln Murphy: That said, IT still plays a very important role, and the more your product is mission critical to the organization or to very important departments, I think, the more IT is there to vet your security. And so, you, as a vendor, need to know—when you're selling into a particular type of company, into a particular market or vertical—you need to know if IT is going to be a part of the sales process and what they're going to be looking for. Oftentimes it's as easy as putting together a one-pager that just says, “Here is what we do for security. Here are all the things we have in place,” and just allowing IT to kind of look at it, check the boxes, and be good to go; or follow up from that, and you'll have a much quicker conversation. [14:54] Lincoln Murphy: If you understand your customers and their buying cycles and their buying process and everything, you should be able to be proactive in offering up those kinds of pieces of information to the different personas that are involved in the buying process. And where IT is involved, you want to make sure that you help them check those boxes. A lot of times, they can't say “yes” to a product; all they can do is really say “no,” and so it falls on you to make sure that they have everything they can do to not say “no.” [Contents] SaaS Business Model [15:18] Ron Gaver: Alright. Now you started by talking about your experience in supply-chain management, bringing that into what became known as SaaS. You have a graphicon your website, SixteenVentures.com, that shows your SaaS business model, or your model of what a SaaS business looks like, and at the very center of that is network centricity and surrounded, then, by four other balls—customer success, revenue model, technology and core IP, and marketing. So you went from supply-chain management, you had this realization that network centricity was sort of at the core of what you wanted to pursue, and you went into the mail-center management; but it didn't turn out to be quite as much fun as you thought it would be, and so you got out of that, and then you started to do other things. What did you do from there? [16:09] Lincoln Murphy: It wasn't as much fun as I thought it would be, and what I mean by that is it was just really a slog to get these deals done, and they didn't end up being that lucrative and so we weren't really going to be able to build a very big business. I mean, we just had to be intellectually honest about that at some point. [Contents] Business Architecture [16:27] Lincoln Murphy: But what I had learned, I thought was valuable, and so I just started consulting with different companies, and, really, I started thinking a lot about the business architecture. Where I was when I left my supply-chain-management career is I had gotten to the point where I was what we called a business architect, which was really just looking at all the different ways that we can make things work. The mandate I had at my last company was: get us as deep as you can into our vendors', our suppliers', and into our customers' worlds. That was the coolest mandate I'd ever had. I mean, how do we infiltrate their business in really awesome ways, where it's not a bad thing, but how can we make sure that we know what our suppliers are doing and make sure we know what our customers are doing and try to get ahead of the curve? I tried to apply that thinking to mail-center management, and then, once I left there, I spent a lot of time applying that thinking to SaaS. [Contents] SaaS as a Business Architecture and SaaS Revenue Models [17:18] Lincoln Murphy: So SaaS had become a thing at that point, and I said, “Well, okay, it's not just delivering software over the Web. This really is something new.” And, of course, the SaaS business model was kind of the way people were talking about it, but I looked at it as almost something different. It was really this architecture of a business: it's how you would build a business; and the revenue-model part of it was one thing. I, from very early on, thought, “SaaS is not monthly subscriptions.” You can apply any revenue model to this architecture, which was fundamentally different than how everybody was thinking about it at the time. Most people were looking at SaaS as equaling subscriptions and a monthly fee; and today we're at a point where SaaS is the architecture, and the revenue models run the gamut from pay-as-you-go, to subscriptions, to multi-year contracts—they're just across the board. So SaaS today is kind of where I thought it would be a long time ago. I mean, I couldn't have predicted exactly what it was, but I didn't think it was just subscriptions. So I actually came up with seven different revenue models and that applied to SaaS. I did a lot of thinking about that, put that stuff out there, published that; and that got a lot of people interested in working with me, and so I would do a lot of consulting—and that was from, like, 2006 to 2008. [18:35] Lincoln Murphy: I joined a startup at that point. It wasn't one that I started; but, kind of early on, they built a platform as a service. At the time, you were starting to see you had SaaS and then platform as a service. Then you had infrastructure as a service, and all these different X-a-a-S things coming up. And this was one that was very much like Heroku is today. They were a competitor of ours. It was built for, at the time, Ruby on Rails apps to run, and since I had been doing so much around SaaS and had become kind of well-known as the SaaS guy, they wanted me to be the liaison or the evangelist to get SaaS companies to run their business, basically, off of our platform. [Contents] Recent Career [19:13] Lincoln Murphy: So I did some consulting; I did that, moved over to Morph, and then Morph ran out of money about the time that everybody else did—the banks and everything—at the end of 2008. That's when they shut down operations, and I decided to formalize my consulting with Sixteen Ventures. That's the company name I came up with, which is a story in and of itself. Over the next eight years, I took a couple of years and worked with another startup called Gainsight the last few years; but along the way there, I kind of evolved with the market. [19:45] Lincoln Murphy: I was talking a lot about the business architecture in the early days. Well, then, it kind of solidified, and we were all somewhat in agreement on what it was, and I kind of moved into pricing and conversion optimization, especially around free trials. I spent a lot of time talking about free-trial optimization, and it's great to acquire customers, but what happens when they start to leave? Well, we need something to keep customers around. Once you eliminate churn—man, wouldn't it be cool if we could actually grow those customers? And that's where customer success comes into play, which is what I spend a lot of my time working on today. But I just kind of evolved with the whole market, when it comes to SaaS, over the last decade or more. Gosh, time flies. [Contents] Sixteen Ventures [20:27] Ron Gaver: I really want to get into customer-success management, but you threw out a couple of things there that I'd like to explore first, quickly. First of all, you said Sixteen Ventures was “in and of itself” a story. Is there something you can quickly tell us about the story behind that? [20:41] Lincoln Murphy: Yeah. I was coming to the end of 2008, and I wanted to formalize my company within that year, but we needed a name. So, it's not a really exciting story, except some people would often wonder where that name comes from, and, honestly, I think I just said, “Well, you know, this is probably my sixteenth venture,” if you count all of the different things that I had tried over the years, and I think that's what took. Now I can back into the fact that my name is Lincoln, and President Lincoln was the sixteenth president of the U.S.—that's also one thing. Ultimately, it was just kind of a fluke that I chose that name, but I'll tell you an interesting little side effect of calling it Sixteen Ventures is that, before that name became synonymous with just anything to do with SaaS and ultimately customer success, it got me into places because people thought I was a VC. I actually got access to things that I might not have otherwise had access to. So that was not planned, but it ended up being a pretty interesting side effect of calling it Sixteen Ventures. [21:39] Ron Gaver: I can see how that would happen. When I first saw it, I was kind of wondering the same thing. [21:43] Lincoln Murphy: Mm-hmm. [Contents] “The SaaS Guy” [21:44] Ron Gaver: Before we get into customer-success management… You became “the SaaS guy,” you said. How did you become “the SaaS guy?” You've now, at this point in your career, consulted with four-hundred-some-odd companies; there was, obviously, some sort of growth, some sort of transition that happened along the way that you went from supply-chain management, into your own venture, into your mail center—I don't remember the name of it. [22:10] Lincoln Murphy: Global Mail Technology. It was a wonderful name. [22:12] Ron Gaver: But then you became “the SaaS guy,” and I'm just interested: how did you become “the SaaS guy?” [Contents] Contrarian Views [22:16] Lincoln Murphy: In 2006-ish (and these posts are—while they didn't start out there—now at SixteenVentures.com; if you somehow get to the very first posts on the site, they are there), what I did is, after we sold the company and I took a few days (or weeks probably) and decompressed, I got kind of irritated, again, with all the noise that was coming out of Silicon Valley about how SaaS was ubiquitous. And I just wrote three or four pretty-lengthy blog posts. They were on Blogger at the time. It was easy to make noise back then because there wasn't a lot of it, and I just laid it out there. I was like, look, you guys are saying this stuff. I believe what you're saying will be true, but it's not right now. If you go into Middle America, into actual, regular corporations—not the things that are happening in Silicon Valley—you are going to be hard-pressed to very easily close a SaaS deal. That's what I laid out there, and I got a lot of people saying, “Interesting; thanks for sharing that.” I got a lot of people saying, “Who are you, and what right do you have to say anything?” [23:23] Lincoln Murphy: It worked, and it kind of got my name out there. And I met a guy, Ken Boasso, of Keychain Logic, basically out of East Bay in San Francisco. He was one of the guys who was, like, “who are you?” and ended up becoming one of my best friends. He'd been a sales guy, and I remember there was an SIIA event, I believe; and he knew people there, and he kind of got me in, and I think I asked some tough questions of a few of the speakers and probably irritated people, but I just made noise. And it was easier then, but it's certainly not impossible now. [Contents] Freemium in SaaS [23:57] Lincoln Murphy: Fast-forward a couple of years from there. I published a twenty-seven-page PDF that kind of went viral called The Reality of Freemium in SaaS—so, it was right at the beginning of 2009—and it just called out all of the things about freemium; and, based on companies that I'd been working with, why freemium was a cop-out. You didn't want to sell, didn't want to have to really try, so you just opened your product up for free and then hoped people become customers. And I laid it out there. That thing got some fifty thousand downloads, and it was being shared, and I think it's just wild because it was a really ugly PDF. It got me a speaking gig at Freemium Summit, the only one there that was sort of a contrarian and the only consultant on the event. It was just another case of me making noise, but it wasn't just noise for the sake of noise; these were things that I believed that people needed to hear that were not being put out there, that were not being said. And, of course, with the freemium paper, I wasn't being contrarian to be contrarian; I was saying, “Look, if you're going to do it, this is how you should do it.” Just like SaaS isn't ubiquitous, back then, yet, but it will be, and here are some of the things that I learned along the way. [Contents] Thought Leadership (or Getting Things Out of Your Head and Moving On) [25:10] Lincoln Murphy: So, there's making noise, and then there's causing people to pay attention to you by saying real things but also maybe adding value. So, what I learned from that was, “Hey, you know what? I have experience that people can learn from.” It just caused me to really start sharing. And that's what I've done. That's the story of how I am anything—how I've been able to maintain whatever this is that I'm doing for the last ten years; it's because, when I learn things from working with my clients, studying, and thinking, I put it out there. And some people refer to that as thought leadership—that's cool—but, to me, I just share these things, and a lot of times it's just to get it out of my own head. Once I get it out of my head, put it out there on the blog, then I can go move on to the next thing. But that's how it works. You have a podcast. Now you're getting to be known in this space. Everybody has a different way that they're going to do this. It's just a lot easier for me to write a bunch of words. Luckily, that still works pretty well. [Contents] Facts and the Contrarian Point-of-View [26:06] Ron Gaver: Even though you have a dissenting opinion—you are contrarian—you're not really just making noise for the sake of making noise; you really are trying to lay out the facts and say, “Here's a different way to look at this. You might not want to just buy into all the hype. This is the way I see it. You might want to consider this point of view.” [26:24] Lincoln Murphy: Yeah. [26:25] Ron Gaver: I like that. [26:26] Lincoln Murphy: I appreciate that, and I like that, too. That's how I like to learn. So the people that I—and I couldn't name anybody right off the top of my head—but that I've know over the years, including when I was younger and growing up, I think those are the people that I gravitated to—that would say something that caught my attention but then add value. The people that just say things to be loud and obnoxious—I don't like that. I don't think anybody really likes that, and it's certainly not something that's built for longevity. I'll tell you, there were times people have called me—one word that sticks out is bombastic. I make these bombastic statements, and I'm, like, “Well, yeah, but it's true.” And then usually what happens is—this sounds weird—I like to make all this noise, but I'm not really good at bragging or tooting my own horn; but usually what happens is I get people that'll react negatively to what I say and then, eventually, it comes true. That's not to say that I'm a futurist and I can tell the future or anything like that, but it's just that it was true all along; and eventually people start to gravitate to see that it was actually the right way. That doesn't mean I'm always right, but when I am, that's usually how it plays out. At first, people kind of react negatively and then they come around. So, that's cool. [27:38] Ron Gaver: Logic often prevails over illusion. [27:40] Lincoln Murphy: Hopefully; usually. [27:42] Ron Gaver: Not always. There are many exceptions in history where that has not come true. [27:47] Lincoln Murphy: Exactly. [Contents] Customer Success Management [27:48] Ron Gaver: I would like to kind of get into the area that I said I was interested in—customer success management. I know that that's something that you talk about a lot, and I mentioned that in terms of your business model earlier. You've got a quote—I think it's your definition of what customer success is—and I'll quote it. It's: “Customer success is when customers achieve their desired outcome through their interactions with your company.” Not just with your product, but with your company. Maybe we could deconstruct that a little bit. I think you've deconstructed it in one post in particular that you've rewritten, which is the Definitive Guide to Customer Success, which is on Sixteen Ventures, and I'll link to that. There's a picture, also, there of you in front of a big screen, somewhere, with that definition behind you. So, the customers' desired outcomes… [Contents] Customer's Desired Outcome [28:37] Lincoln Murphy: Yeah. I'll tell you what: this is one of the most powerful concepts that I've ever come across in business; that's kind of a big statement, but I believe it to be true. If you understand what your customer's desired outcome is, what they need to achieve, and the way they need to achieve it, I think it changes everything. Let me explain. Desired outcome is two pieces. [Contents] Customer's Required Outcome [29:01] Lincoln Murphy: What they need to achieve—I refer to that as their required outcome. This is the thing that they need to do. This is not using your product. This isn't even the job to be done. This is the outcome that they absolutely have to have. If I need to get from point A to point B, quickly, that's my required outcome. Now, I might choose to do that through commercial airline travel. That's one way. If I need to get more people to my event—that is my required outcome. I could do that in lots of different ways: I could print out flyers and hand them out, I could place ads on Facebook, I have a bunch of email addresses—maybe I could use email marketing. So if I choose to use email marketing, that's what I'm choosing to use to achieve my required outcome. Vendors need to understand that a customer is coming to you because they have a required outcome that they absolutely have to achieve but that they could do that in lots of different ways. We need to keep that top-of-mind, if for no other reason than it keeps our ego in check. [Contents] Customer's Appropriate Experience [30:06] Lincoln Murphy: Once they have chosen to do business with you, they've done so because they believe that you can help them achieve that required outcome; but they also believe—based on your sales and marketing, and how good you are at promoting your stuff—that you will help them achieve that required outcome in the appropriate way, giving them the appropriate experience. That's the second part of desired outcome. So, it's required outcome plus appropriate experience. And I use the termappropriate—you may have seen this in some of the articles where I write this out—I use the term appropriate because it's the appropriate word. Our customers have an experience that is specific to them, which means we need to understand the different customer segments that are doing business with us, and we need to understand what the appropriate experience is for them. That's why I don't say “a great experience” or “a high-touch experience” or “modern” or whatever. It's whatever is appropriate for that segment. So using the airline analogy, we have one airplane. There is a first-class cabin and there is the coach cabin. The first-class cabin—there's a particular customer segment that is going to do business with the airline on a first-class basis—and there's the rest of the airplane that's going to be filled with people doing business from a coach standpoint. It's the same required outcome: get me from point A to point B safely and quickly. But as soon as you understand that there are different customer segments that have a different appropriate experience, you understand why some people are going to pay a premium to sit in first-class and some people are going to try to save some money and sit in coach. [Contents] Appropriate SaaS Experiences [31:39] Lincoln Murphy: From a software standpoint or a SaaS standpoint, if I'm selling to very early-stage startups, I could probably get away with an API only. I don't need a graphical interface. I could probably just have some lightweight documentation and maybe a Slack channel for support for that customer segment. If I'm selling that same thing, the same underlying product, to a department in a Fortune 500 company, I'm probably going to have to have a full-blown UI, probably going to need some better documentation, maybe 24/7 support, maybe I need to be able to sell it to them on a three-year contract. There's going to be a different experience that is appropriate for each of those customer segments, but a lot of the time, companies don't think like that. They think, “Well, I'm just going to create one experience and sort of normalize it for everybody”—in which case they don't connect with really anybody and that's why they're struggling, or they just don't take into consideration that different customer segments are going to need a different approach. In a worst case, they don't resonate; best case in that scenario is that they actually overinvest resources. They throw a bunch of customer-success managers at these customers, and the lower-end customers that aren't paying much—they don't need that level of coverage—so we're overinvesting where we don't need to be overinvesting. The larger customers actually need a much greater level of touch, but we can't do that because we don't have enough people, and so we underinvest where we should be spending more. And so it just ends up being a problem. If we understand our product has different customer segments that use that product, and those different customer segments are going to have a different appropriate experience with us—again, not just in the product—then we can build out a strategy that really allows us to more effectively get those customers to be successful over time. [Contents] Solve for Success Not Happiness [33:26] Ron Gaver: Perhaps it's a corollary to that, but when you talk about what a successful customer is, you do say that you're not solving the equation for happiness; you're solving it for them to be successful—for them to have the appropriate and the required outcomes—not necessarily happiness. And I think that, a lot of times, people think that a happy customer is a good customer, but that might not be the thing because a happy customer, as you write, might walk away and do business elsewhere, where they get a better experience or where their needs are met a little bit better. [Contents] Successful Customers Advocate But Want More [33:59] Lincoln Murphy: Totally. I think what happens is, a lot of times, happiness is the wrong approach. We look at things wrong. We say, “Okay, this customer is just opening a lot of support tickets, they're always asking for different features, they're always pushing back on us to do more, and they just never seem happy.” But if you look at the actual context of what's going on—they've been around for a long time, they're continually adding more and more seats or they're buying more add-ons. They are our biggest advocates. They're actually the ones that will be references for us. They leave reviews. They speak at our events. They're actually the most successful customers. But if you ask, “Are these customers happy?”—you would probably say, “No, they never seem happy. They always want more.” [Contents] Happy Customers May Not Be Getting Value and Then Churn [34:49] Lincoln Murphy: On the flip side, customers that we never hear from, we might misinterpret that as being, “Well, they're happy; they're not complaining, so they're fine.” Or maybe they're even pleasant. When we do talk to them, they're happy, but then they contact us and they say, “By the way, we're going to cancel our account because we're going over to this other vendor.” And you're like, “I don't understand; I thought you were happy.” “Oh, I'm definitely happy; we just weren't getting any value from the relationship with you.” [Contents] The Appropriate Success Vector [35:15] Lincoln Murphy: So, if our customers are achieving their desired outcome—if they're on the right path to achieving whatever that desired outcome is that they have—then that's all that really matters. Customers that are doing that are, hopefully, emotionally happy. I have to be really clear: I don't want to be around people that are unhappy. I don't want people that I work with to not be happy. I just can't solve for your happiness. I can solve for your success. I can ensure that you are on the right track to your desired outcome; and if you are, hopefully, that will make you happy. But those are two different things. And I think from that standpoint, when we look at our customers to know whether or not they are on the appropriate success vector, we have to look at, “Are they on the right path to achieving that desired outcome?” If they're happy, great. If they're not, that's okay, too, because we're human, and I can't really solve for that. On the flip side, if we want to be taken seriously in customer success, or as a CEO we want customer success to be taken seriously by our board or anybody else within the organization, we have to get away from talking about fluffy metrics like “happiness” or “delight.” I have to be really clear: I don't want to be around people that are unhappy. I don't want people that I work with to not be happy. [Contents] Customer Success and Company Valuation [36:21] Lincoln Murphy: We need to really understand that customer success—and I just published a post the other day that goes into seven ways that customer success actually directly impacts the valuation that investors or acquirers will apply to your company—the value of your company is directly impacted by customer success. We need to be talking about customer success in those terms, and not in “happiness” and “delight” and things like that. If we talk about it in the way of, “Look, if we have this net revenue retention at the end of the quarter that's going to potentially impact the value of our company”—that is so much more powerful than “happiness” or “delight.” Again, I want people who I'm working with to be emotionally happy, but I just can't solve for that, and it doesn't actually end up moving the needle along the value of my company. This is too important to be thought of as just another way of creating happiness or delight. [Contents] Churn [37:15] Ron Gaver: You talked about customer retention. Well, one of the aspects that you often do refer to is churn; and, of course, churn is a topic, a subject, that comes up in the SaaS world all the time, but stopping churn when a customer is about to churn is like stopping a fire after it's already started. [37:34] Lincoln Murphy: Yeah. [37:35] Ron Gaver: You need to attack that problem upstream. Customer-success management, I believe you say, is preventing that customer from ever wanting to churn, not looking at attacking the churn problem at the end. [37:48] Lincoln Murphy: Right. [37:49] Ron Gaver: I'm sure you can say it better that that. [Contents] Customers to Save and Customers to Let Go [37:50] Lincoln Murphy: From the conversation so far, you can see that I probably can't say it any better than that. You're absolutely right. I mean, if you have a fire, go put it out. We've got to put that fire out. If you have a customer who's about to churn, do what you can to try to save them if they have success potential. Some customers do not have success potential. They never should have been signed in the first place, or they never should have signed up or whatever, so we probably need to let them go because there's no way they will ever be successful. But if they have success potential, then do whatever you can to save them. That is not customer success, though. That's usually going to involve begging, maybe some discounts, whatever. That's not customer success. That's just doing what we can to try to save a customer. [38:33] Once they agree not to churn, then it's customer-success management's job to get them back on track. See, all we did was keep them from churning; we didn't actually make them successful. So they're still very much at risk. And where a lot of companies go wrong is they offer concessions and make promises and they keep the customer and then, a few months later, the customer—because nothing has changed—is still not successful, and so they churn out, only this time they're actually angry because you wasted their time. So, only save a customer if you have a plan to get them back on the path to success. But again, that's not customer success. And here's the thing: churn is just a symptom of a greater disease. So if you have a churn problem right now, then we've got to do what we can to triage that, do what we can to keep them around, then get them back on track; and if we get them back on track—and we do that by having a very clear understanding of customer success, what their desired outcome is, understanding how to orchestrate and operationalize that—then churn will actually start to go down. [Contents] When Churn Becomes a Non-Issue [39:41] Lincoln Murphy: And then eventually—if we do things right, including making sure that we're only signing customers that have success potential, we're not bringing on customers that have no potential for being successful with us—we actually get to a point where churn is just not an issue anymore. Then what? Well, then customer success really starts to come into play because now we're not only going to keep these customers around longer (which is great), but now we can actually start to grow customers and create an ascension model where customers not only stay with us but they actually expand their use. So whether that's inviting us into other parts of their organization, whether that's just buying more capacity, whatever that is, that's where we need to be. So churn may be your initial catalyst for looking at customer success, but, eventually, if you do things right, churn won't be something you even worry about anymore. Obviously, you want to make sure it doesn't creep back up, but if we're focused on the customers' desired outcome, we're ensuring that our customers are doing the things that they need to to get there. Churn won't be an issue, and now we can focus on growth. [40:42] Lincoln Murphy: So, I don't talk a lot about churn as much as I used to because I think customer success is about so much more than that. If churn is your initial catalyst, obviously that's going to be the thing you focus on. But, even then, you should look at customer success long-term as something that isn't just about churn-busting or firefighting; it's ultimately about getting your customers on that ascension path so that they're always growing, to the extent that I say the real measure of success isn't even having customers that are just sticking around—so it isn't just retention. If I have customers that are only sticking around, but aren't growing, to me that's not successful. I want customers that are on that ascension path, that are moving up, that are growing, because that means I have created an environment that really allows my customers to thrive and one that I really understand—that customers are always evolving and that they should be growing. And I think that's something, that, most of the time, when people are developing customer-journey maps and they're thinking about the customer, they kind of think of the customer as a static entity, but the reality is our customers are always evolving and changing, and that's good. That's what we want. And so we should think about, “What is a customer that signs today? What do they look like in five years? Are they just going to be the same, or could they be ten times as big of a customer as they are today?” That's how we need to be looking at that, and that's, really, to me, the real power of customer success. [Contents] Individual Contributions to the Customer's Desired Outcome [42:03] Ron Gaver: And as far as the customers' desired outcome and what's valuable to the customer, you say that, really, that's a question you should begin to ask when you're starting the company, when you're developing your product, when you're first starting out; and you should continue to ask that question over and over and over, and everyone in the company should really be able to answer the question of what they're doing to provide the value to the customer—I don't remember exactly how you said it—but what are you doing that is worthwhile to the customer? [42:31] Lincoln Murphy: Yeah. The way that I phrase it is to ask each individual contributor in your company: “How do you contribute to the customer's desired outcome?” And, a lot of times, when I'll go work with a company—and maybe the CEO brings me in because he or she really wants to make sure that customer success is really part of the overall DNA of the company, bringing that in at the high level—we'll figure out what the desired outcome is so that we're all on the same page. We know what we're talking about when we say, “What is the customer's desired outcome?” And then we go to that question, “How do you contribute to the desired outcome of the customer?” And every single person in the company should be able to say that, even somebody in HR or finance. HR brings on and keeps the talent that enables us to provide the desired outcome to the customer. Everybody has that impact. And the scary thing is, a lot of times, people building the products, people selling the products, people in customer success, can't answer that, and that's a problem. So we need to answer that. And then any new person that signs on, we tell them, “This is what the desired outcomes of our customers are, depending upon all the segments, and this is how you contribute.” And so now, from the very beginning, we're letting people know, “This is how you contribute to customer success.” It's so much better than just saying, “Hey, we're all in customer success.” Well, of course we are, but what does it actually mean? Let's actually get down to something tangible there and then reiterate that every time we do a performance review. Or if somebody changes jobs, okay, it's time to change the definition of how you contribute to the desired outcome of the customer. So you really want this to be a part of your organization at a DNA level. Those are some very simple, little things you can do that have a huge impact. [44:03] Ron Gaver: I feel like we could go on for a long time talking about this stuff, but I'm going to respect your time and start to ramp it down a little bit. Is there any particular subject or anything that you really wished that I had asked you that I haven't asked you? [44:18] Lincoln Murphy: Like you said, we could talk about this stuff forever. I think the main thing that I always like to talk about is desired outcome, and I think we did a good job with that. It's one of those things that I encourage you to go to SixteenVentures.comand read as much as you can about desired outcome. I'm really thankful for you, Ron, for bringing that up and having this as a topic because it really is one of the more transformative things. If you understand this about your customers and build your company around that from the ground up and continually evolve around that as you grow and as you scale, I think you're going to be a lot more successful than if you try to go the opposite approach, which a lot of companies, unfortunately, do. They don't thrive as they could be. They're kind of focused inward. They're focused on their desired outcome and not their customers'. That's the hard way. And I think the easy way, really, is to just make sure you're making your customers successful. [Contents] Personal Recommendations [45:05] Ron Gaver: Something I'm always a little bit curious about is the things that you would value as my guest, the things that have built you, and things that have had a positive influence on your life or your attitudes or whatever it may be on your business. It really could be just about anything. Is there anything that comes to mind right away that you would say, “This really means a lot to me, and I would recommend it without reservation to the entire audience?” [45:33] Lincoln Murphy: I think there are a lot of different things. I believe in karma and that what goes around comes around. If we think about that concept—and it's kind of the law of the universe; or even of science (one reaction has an equal and opposite reaction)—if we understand that and we focus on making our customers powerful, then that'll come back to us, and they'll make us powerful. And they'll do that by staying longer, buying more, and telling their friends. It's pretty simple. The other thing I would say—just because this book changed my life—it's a book by Dr. Robert Cialdini called Influence.*. It's just one of those things that I always recommend everywhere. The more you can understand about how other humans operate, I think, the better off you'll be in business but also just as a fellow human. It's called Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini. I'd check that book out, too. Those are the two things—one's my operating philosophy, and one's a book that changed my life. [46:25] Ron Gaver: I'll definitely link to the book. I may actually already have it on the website. [46:29] Lincoln Murphy: Cool. [46:30] Ron Gaver: I'm familiar with the book. I have it on the shelf behind me. [46:33] Lincoln Murphy: Awesome. [Contents] Make Your Customers Powerful [46:34] Ron Gaver: As far as the karma that you mentioned… Something you've recently spoken about—flipping the funnel and taking the power back—just really inverting some of our concepts, and by satisfying the customer, your customer will also promote your product and will help you to become successful. [46:52] Lincoln Murphy: Yeah. That concept stemmed from some conversations I've had with CEOs and founders who are, like, “Look, customers just have too much power these days; how can we take some of that power back?” And the reality is, it's not our power to take. We all have power. It's equally distributed. The best thing we can do, if we need to use power as an analogy, is make our customers powerful so that they will, in turn, make us powerful. Now the secret is: it's not magic. This is where customer success management comes into play. [Contents] Operationalize Customers Making you Powerful [47:20] Our customers—we make them powerful, but we also have to operationalize them making us powerful. Don't just let advocacy, for example, happen by chance. Understand the points in time when it would be right for them to give us a review somewhere or to be a reference for us, and make sure that we reach out and enable them to do that. When it's time for them to buy more, don't just let them wait until they're ready to buy. If we know that it's a logical time for them to add this new product onto what they buy already or to add more seats, then let's proactively reach out and make that happen. It's about knowing when the right time is and doing what's right to ensure that they are moving in the right path, even if that means pushing them outside of their comfort zone sometimes, because we have to make sure that our customers are always growing and evolving and achieving their desired outcome. So we want to operationalize that stuff and not just hope that it happens. It is about making sure that what goes around comes around; and if we help our customers, they will help us. [Contents] Proactively Convert on Success Milestones [48:16] Ron Gaver: You just said something, and I'm really curious about this, and I actually even wrote a note in some of your material about this. You talk about being proactive rather than reactive—if you've got your customer on a trial, don't wait until the end of the trial to try to convert them or try to upsell them or whatever it may be, but monitor the process along the way, measure what's going on, determine where they are, what value you're providing, and then use tools to monitor that; and, as you said it, to be proactive rather than reactive. [48:48] Lincoln Murphy: Exactly. In a trial, for example, we need to know at what point is the most logical next step that they become a customer? Let's figure out what that is, let's work to get them to that point as quickly as possible, and if they get to that point on day three of a thirty-day trial, well, let's make the offer. That's the point where they're ready. Now if we, on day three, try to get them to convert and we don't know that's the point where they're ready, that's why I say, “Don't do things on a timed basis; do things on a success-milestone basis.” If we just do it on a timed basis and they're not ready, it's just not going to be met with a lot of acceptance. It could be off-putting. But if we know that they've gotten to a point where the next logical step is to become a paying customer, then, yeah, “make the ask,” as we would say. [Contents] Customer Lifecycle Success Milestones [49:31] Lincoln Murphy: So the same thing applies across the entire customer lifecycle. Know the success milestones. Know which ones are associated with an upsell or an advocacy ask, and reach out and make sure that we're moving them up that ascension model and make sure that we're taking advantage of their willingness to advocate for us by operationalizing them. This isn't all about being altruistic. If we make our customers successful, we should be able to also get some value out of that, too. And that's cool. If all we're doing is trying to get value without ensuring that our customers first get value, then that's not where we want to be. But if we, like you said, flip it around, make sure that we're focused on them, then we'll get what we get in return, which is awesome. [Contents] Tools to Monitor Customer Progress [50:07] Ron Gaver: And tools for monitoring your customer's progress and the value you're delivering to the customer—are there any favorite tools that you would recommend that you find to be extremely good for that? [50:18] Lincoln Murphy: It really depends on where you're at. Companies use everything from Excel spreadsheets to purpose-built, customer-success-management tools like Gainsight or Totango or ClientSuccess. I

Bobbie wrote in saying she asked several of her clients for testimonials, but is unsure what to do with them now that she has them. Vicky shares her tips and further explains why having testimonials is so important. Joe has a hard time receiving testimonials from his clients because there are often confidentiality agreements in place. However, Vicky offers a creative solution on how he and you can get around those without breaking the contract.   Key Takeaways: [0:50] It's 7:30am and there's no gin. [1:10] Vicky and Joe are not very awake right now. [1:35] Vicky reads out loud Bobbie's email about testimonials. [2:25] Good job for getting testimonials! [4:25] Why are testimonials useful? [5:50] Vicky loves cricket. [7:00] When in doubt, we look to other people's behavior. [8:40] When you need help, don't scream out help, because people automatically assume someone else will help you. [10:25] The very best business comes from word of mouth sales. [11:50] How does Joe get his testimonials? [13:10] Stop paying attention to what everybody else is doing and focus on your own business. [15:25] How do you get testimonials when there's a confidentiality agreement in place? [18:30] There's no such thing as too many testimonials! [21:20] Where should you put your testimonials? Everywhere! [24:20] Come back next week to get the answer to Bobbie's second question about pestering people with emails.   Mentioned in This Episode: www.businessforsuperheroes.com/ www.businessforsuperheroes.com/inner-circle www.bobbiesroom.co.uk/ Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini

Consistency, Excellence, Brand Builder, Interview with Joe Calloway Summary In this episode, we consider the importance of consistency from cave-person days to our present day. How does consistency frame the way we see others and how they see us? Bob shares his thoughts on this critical topic. Then in our interview segment, we'll hear from successful entrepreneur and performance expert Joe Calloway, a man who holds consistency as a core value of any high-performing business or successful individual. We'll find out why. Powerful lessons from Joe! Bob's Thought of the Day · Consistency is a large part of the success of any franchise (perhaps even more important than quality). · Dr. Robert Cialdini, in his book Influence: Science and Practice, says that we desire consistency in others, but also have a need to appear (and be) consistent ourselves. · The more consistent you are, the more you'll be liked and trusted. · When you combine consistency with excellence, you communicate exceptional value. Interview with Joe Calloway · Why Joe is rarely impressed by “WOW! experiences" · The importance of the “three things” in upping your performance · Consistency of performance is your brand builder Links JoeCalloway.com Magnetic: The Art of Attracting Business by Joe CallowayInfluence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini www.GoGiverSpeaker.com www.TheGoGiver.com bob@burg.com www.TheGoGiver.com/reviews  

Hello and welcome to The Consumer VC. I am your host Mike Gelb and on this show we talk about the world of venture capital and consumer facing startups. Thank you very much Natalie Dillon ( https://www.maveron.com/team/dillon-natalie/ ) for the intro to today's guests, Jessica Rolph ( https://lovevery.com/pages/about-us ) and Rod Morris ( https://lovevery.com/pages/about-us ) , the co-founders of Lovevery ( https://lovevery.com/ ) , Staged-based play essentials designed by experts, built for babies and toddlers up to age 3. Previously, Jessica co-founded and served as COO of Happy Family, an extremely successful organic baby food company. Rod previously was the Senior Vice President at Opower. Going into this episode, I didn't know much about toys and learning behavior for babies, so I learned a ton and Jessica and Rod make it so easy to digest how they are thinking differently about child development with Lovevery. Without further ado, here they are. You can follow Jessica @rolphjessica ( https://twitter.com/rolphjessica ) and Rod @roderickmorris ( https://twitter.com/roderickmorris ). You can also follow your host, Mike, on Twitter @mikegelb ( https://twitter.com/MikeGelb ). You can also follow for episode announcements @consumervc ( https://twitter.com/ConsumerVc ). If you're enjoying the show, if you could leave a review on the apple podcast app as that helps other folks find it, that would be really helpful. If you are a founder and working on something innovative, have a question you'd like to hear VCs or founders answer on the show you can DM me and follow me on Twitter @mikegelb. You can also follow for episode announcements @consumervc. For all episodes, please visit theconsumervc.com ( http://theconsumervc.com/ ). Thanks again for listening. One book that inspired Jessica professionally is High Performance Habits ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1401952852?camp=1789&creativeASIN=1401952852&ie=UTF8&linkCode=xm2&tag=theconsumervc-20 ) by Brenden Burchard. One book that inspired Rod professionally is Influence: Science and Practice ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0205609996?camp=1789&creativeASIN=0205609996&ie=UTF8&linkCode=xm2&tag=theconsumervc-20 ) by Robert Cialdini and one book that inspired him personally is Plato's Allegory of the Cave ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1521777810?camp=1789&creativeASIN=1521777810&ie=UTF8&linkCode=xm2&tag=theconsumervc-20 ). Here are some of the questions that I ask - * Jessica - how did you come up with the concept of Lovevery? * What was the insight that you learned that inspired you to start Lovevery? * When did you know that you wanted Roderick as a co-founder and how did that come about? * Talk to me a little bit of the dynamic between you two. What's the decision making and the delegation process when it comes to business activities? I understand that Jessica is the CEO and Roderick is the President, but what does that actually mean? * Let's talk about the early days. * How did you think about design, quality and this translating into your first product, the $140 baby gym? * How did you approach the supply chain? * Once you built your first product, what was the go-to market strategy? * How did you know if the brand building was working if the primary objective is not to sell the baby gym * How did you think about growth? * Organic vs. Paid * What were some of the ways you were able to establish a community around - bothyour brand and products? * The fundraise * Why did you want to raise money? * What was your fundraising strategy? * Was it tough to raise with your company located in Idaho? * What was the biggest hurdle when fundraising? * Any advice for founders that are located in secondary and tertiary markets that are looking to raise money from institutional investors? - have to show up and get smarter through the process * Any Advice for founders that don't have a network that are looking to raise? * What's one thing that you would change when it came to fundraising? * Product and pricing strategy. You have a subscription business for the play kits and then you have individual products like the play gym. * When you think about building a new product, how do you think about whether it should be part of a subscription vs. separate? * How do you think about market expansion? Are you going to stay in the 0-3 age or is the plan to eventually introduce products later on in a child's development as well? * How has COVID changed your operating plans and did you have to pivot any part of your business? * I've heard investors say that they wouldn't invest in companies that are located in secondary/tertiary markets because of their worry about talent recruitment as the company scales? How do you think about talent recruitment as you're based in Idaho? * What's one piece of advice that you might have for folks that are fundraising?