Human Factor Media With Zack Slingsby
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Storytelling is an effective way of getting people to buy into what you are selling. As long as you can harness the human factor in your story, you will always find someone interested in your brand. In this episode, John Livesay teams up with Zack Slingsby, the Founder of Human Factor Media. Zack discusses using literary techniques to gain attention and how to effectively leverage story-telling. Full of great insights, tune in and learn how to use story-telling to create the perfect pitch.
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Listen to the podcast here
Human Factor Media With Zack Slingsby
My guest on the show is Zack Slingsby, who created an agency that does amazing videos using storytelling. He said, “When you create wonder and awe with stories, you pull people in.” Find out what he means. Enjoy the episode.
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My guest is Zack Slingsby, who is the Founder of Human Factor Media, focusing on redefining branded storytelling. Zack is a writer, Short Film Creator, and Founder of Human Factor Media, which is an award-winning branded storytelling company that has worked with leading brands and publishers to create videos people want to watch. He graduated from Fordham University, received his MFA from the New School, and published in over a dozen creative and industry publications. He believes the ingredient that makes a literary story great is the same that makes for a great video. Zack, welcome to the show.
John, how are you?
I’m great. It is nice to have someone so creative as you on the show. Let’s go back to your own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, college, wherever you want. Were you someone who loved to read? Obviously, you have a lot of books in your background here. I’m curious as to your own interest and passion for where storytelling got.
My love of reading came a little bit later like early college. Growing up, I loved shows. The emergence of basically TV shows had literary qualities, starting with the West Wing and Sopranos. Everything from the late ’90s through 2010. It was such a great time for television. That got me obsessed with storytelling. I would write the scripts for my favorite shows. Growing up, I would write my own versions of them alone for many hours while my friends were out doing more normal things at that time.
When I’ve got the MFA program after college, which is called the Master of Fine Arts, for those whose background may not be creative, I had been very obsessed with the traditional path for a creative, which is, do great work and try to find an avenue that already existed to push that work out there. In my case, it was literature. Everyone in the MFA is pretty sure that within a year or so, they will be Hemingway. They are pretty positive that it is common. You need to get discovered and write a perfect paragraph. You are side by side with these people. You build each other up and think, “It is not good. It is going to be me. It won’t be these other 30 guys. It will be me.”
Very quickly, that gets deflated. I had a good amount of early success. I finished a book, got an agent, and published some short stories. My book went out to press to be sold to a publisher. We went to all the big guys, and you have to get unanimous consent from an acquisitions board. With some of the big ones, Random House, Picador, and these guys, we had 9 out of 10 people say yes or it is 8 out of 12. It is short of where you want to be. At that time, it was in my early twenties and crushing. As I’ve got older, I went to Washington and started writing.
I saw the way branded content was going. It was a vehicle for storytelling. I thought that I would be very happy to have a career like that. Some friends and I started this thing where we tried to make creative and funny videos, and over time it evolved. We are this group of creatives who make story-driven videos for brands. I do not know if that was a longer answer than perhaps you intended.
[bctt tweet=”Fear kills creativity. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Everyone’s story is not usually linear. You took your love of literature and created something that pulls people in. That is what a good story does, whether you are watching it as a video or listening to someone tell you a story. What are some of the mistakes that you see people making when they create branded videos these days? Is it that they are trying to make it like a commercial? Is it they are making it too long or they are trying to be funny, and they are not? What are some of the things that you see entrepreneurs do that aren’t working?
There are different tiers to this. There is a startup, a brand, and obviously, the established brands. We have gotten worked for both kinds and done a lot of work with nonprofits and startups. We have also gotten to work with some bigger brands like LG, Planet Fitness, and New York Post. Let’s say on the startup front. There is this need to focus on the product because you feel this is your one chance. You have this certain amount of money and are going to do a blast. You have to get home the differentiating features of your product or service very quickly.
I am totally sympathetic to that and understand how that could happen. It is not always the wrong strategy either. Maybe that is where you are but at a certain point, that brands have to ask themselves if they see value in being even tangentially entertaining and some scale going into the entertainment business. The age of the traditional ad, we all agree, is behind us. We need to find a way to access a wonder and awe in the people we want to reach.
Teaming up with actual storytellers to do this tends to be a strategy that is rewarded by the market. Laughter is older than language. Music is older than human speech. When you only appeal to the rational side of consumers, you are leaving all these other things on the table. The new trends are bearing this out more and more.
How did you come up with the name of your company, Human Factor Media?
I do not know. There is a novel by Graham Greene called The Human Factor, which is about spies. There was one passage in that where he said that he could empathize too much with both sides. He can empathize with the communist and the capitalist. It drove him crazy because he could see the human factor in both camps. More to the point is we are trying to find something resonating about a story that moves beyond the product. Those are the stories you could eventually find on a streaming platform.
Human Factor: We are this group of creatives who make story-driven videos for brands
We are trying to find something that relates to people as people. There is an old definition of commerce that you want to lower uncertainty about one another so that we can exchange value. I thought that is what great branded content does is lowers the scale. I know this is primarily an audience of entrepreneurs. I’m sure you know more than I do but the great salespeople I have met were not even doing sales anymore. They found something else to do that simulates the effect of sales. They are not saying over and over, “Can I have five minutes of your time?” They found some creative way to lower the skepticism of the prospect. Narrative video is simply a way to scale that strategy.
It is interesting because, in the core startup world around trying to get investors, the phrase is, “How do you mitigate the risk for an investment?” You are saying the same thing needs to happen even at the consumer level and the B2B level when you are selling a product. Are there certain things that you think a story needs to have so that it, in fact, resonates?
It has to be motivated the way the story is motivated, which is to say that it is not motivated to manipulate an end product. It has to be motivated by a genuine desire to tell that story or create that piece of art, for lack of a better word. That won’t be the priority of every brand out there and fair enough but it will have to be something where you say, “We are telling the story of this woman or this man on this journey.” That has to be all we are in this for and the whole point of this video. It can’t be that 2/3 of the way through, and we give you a list of the reasons why this razor is better than the razor that you are currently using.
Are there any rules about how long a video should be? Thirty seconds is too short. Ten minutes is too long. Anything like that?
I do not think so. I think that people say that maybe. When we do a campaign now, we do long videos, sometimes five minutes. We did a documentary that was 30 minutes. Sometimes they are long but we always break down tons of small content from that. You can take 15 to 30-second clips out of everything. We try to cover the scorcher of the content strategy. I do not know. It is a weird time. TikTok is 15 seconds but Joe Rogan’s got 4 hours and he is the most popular media figure out there. It is so bizarre. What do you think about that, John? Have you had any experiences?
A good story pulls you in and keeps your attention if there are open loops, hooks, and something unexpected. It depends on what platform the story is but in terms of businesses that have hired you, as you mentioned, Planet Fitness and LG, can you tell us a story of what the scope of work was or what problem they were trying to solve, and how were you able to use storytelling to solve that problem?
[bctt tweet=”Lower the risk so you can share value.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Let’s say Planet Fitness was integrating a new product into several locations. That was more along the lines of traditional branded storytelling, and they had something they wanted to impart to an audience. It had something to do with the brand itself. It wasn’t a documentary or comedy series as we have done for other companies. In that case, in terms of content length, we did, once again, everything that was the long stuff, 3 to 4 minutes stuff. For the short content for LG, we were brought in similarly to do a product integration video. We’ve got to talk them into letting us do a 90-second to 2-minute vignette to go along with it.
A common pattern is we will start the conversation on the level of traditional branded videos and we will say, “Give us some percentage of the budget over here to do something that is a little more experimental, run that through your channels, and see if there is any value to this.” Oftentimes, the client is surprised and wants to experiment more.
We have case studies on a ride-hailing app that did a comedy music video side by side of a product video. We did this with a couple of nonprofits, a water company that we are doing a documentary for now, and a jewelry brand that did a series of funny videos. In some sense, this is a trend but also, by and large, most companies are still making ads. The market is wide open for these experiments.
Are these videos living on their website and their social media platforms, and that is it or where do they go?
It is everywhere. We are engaged now pretty much ends at the content creation. We do not oversee the distribution generally. Sometimes occasionally, we do, but they are ad assets, social videos, and sometimes website videos. Sometimes, they are sales videos. How weird is that? We are working with one company now in the tree-free paper product space, which is a very niche space. We want to use these to strengthen our prospects or leads because what is better a sales intro than some content that seeks to lower the guard. It is not coming in with five reasons why you should book a meeting with us.
That brings up the point. We briefly discussed the relationship between sales and marketing. That has been a theme that comes up a lot in our conversations lately. You have this strategy for creative content. You live in the clouds, which is fair enough as a lot of us do. How do we connect that to our actual sales strategy? I do not know. Have you experienced that at all?
The Human Factor
Yes. As a storytelling speaker, I often get brought in because they realize that they are not telling stories in the marketing materials or what is coming out of the salespeople’s mouths. Especially in medical tech sales, they love to get stuck into the percentages. This makes this surgery go 30% faster. Speeds and feeds, as I call it, in the tech world. When did you start to get them to tell a story of what is 30% faster means, and who cares about that? Is it strictly an ROI? In one case, I helped them tell a story of how it made a patient’s family not have to wait an extra hour to find out if somebody was going to have cancer or not.
You start going, “It never occurred to us to tell a story and let alone make the patient’s family a character in this story.” Part of what I do is take these facts and figures or even basic case studies and turn them into case stories, and then they start using that as their marketing material. As opposed to listing features, they start having little 2 or 3 sentence case stories about how happy the family was. The doctor, who was the hero of the story, came out an hour earlier than expected and put them out of their waiting misery.
You are doing the human factor the same way we are.
When I start to work with sales teams, sometimes they think, “If I’m going to tell a story, surely I’m the hero of the story.” I go, “No, the goal is to make a potential buyer.” If you are telling a story about a doctor, the doctor is the hero. Another doctor sees himself in the story and wants to go on the journey. People are like, “I thought I was a pretty good storyteller but I have never thought about how to make people see themselves in that story.” When that happens, we are all in.
My ad week about what Super Bowl commercials I think are the best, and it is fascinating to put it through the lens of, “Was it entertaining? Yes. Is it memorable? Yes. Do I remember the product? Whoops, no.” There are a lot of boxes to be checked off besides that was great content but I have no idea who or why that brand should be part of that content.
That is a common thing that we come up against, and it is a fair objection. What do you think is the difference, though, between storytelling on TV and digitally?
For certainly like the Super Bowl that is appointment viewing and what is fascinating about that is the commercials now are released before the Super Bowl. People are literally interested in watching your commercial and seeking it out. Not just the trades are covering it. The Today Show was revealing a new Super Bowl commercial every day before the countdown.
[bctt tweet=”The most coveted real estate now in media is the subscriber base on social channels.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Do you think we have a long time left to do that? Do you think that is dated or that it is going to expire? Do you think we will always do that?
Obviously, the award shows are struggling for viewers but in sports, when people get together, it is a whole experience and eating good foods. It is almost like an American tradition. There is still that window. I saw a brand using storytelling, and they weren’t paying to be on the Super Bowl yet. They were part of the Super Bowl buzz.
I would love your opinion on this. It is called Enfamil, and they work with babies that are premature. They started showing commercials, “This baby was due on February 13th, which is when the Super Bowl was airing but it came two weeks early. We are taking good care of it.” It was very clever marketing on a lot of different levels to get part of that buzz without having to pay the fee to run it on that.
Much of marketing is cleverness like that. I do not think that is our core competency. I wouldn’t have thought of that. I had to leverage what is going on in the country to get attention, for what you are working on is a special skillset. It is not ours. We have an ability to tell stories that will be as impactful as they will be in five years. They can transcend what we do. That is our goal for what we are making and to try to appeal to people the same way your favorite show would appeal to you.
Can you give an example of that jewelry one you said that had some humor in it?
In that case, what we were doing was how can you compete as a jewelry brand. You have Diamonds Are Forever. Kate Spade had a web series. I remember they brought in Tina Fey or Amy Poehler or somebody but products like that are CPG products or luxury products. They only can compete on the story that they are going to tell. The commodity itself is too ubiquitous. We are too used to it as consumers and too commonplace. To me, it is crazy that when you are in a highly competitive market like that, you are not figuring out ways to make the coolest web series.
Human Factor: It is crazy that when you are in a highly competitive market like that, you are not figuring out ways to make the coolest web series. That is the greatest tool you are not using if you are in that space.
That is the greatest tool that you are not using if you are in that space. We tried to do some very small versions of that. You could see how these things can be scaled up or down based on resources and the size of the brand. In that case, it was a smaller one. It is accessible to everyone. To try to use the power of entertainment, you do not have to be Prada or Kate Spade to do that. It is so strange what is happening when you touch on it with the television medium. Movie stars are trying to find television shows to go on or TV series. The TV stars are going to YouTube.
The YouTube stars do not care about anything. Those people who have 5 million to 10 million people do not care. They do not want anything else. They feel they are the kingpins of entertainment. They are right. The most coveted real estate now in media is the subscriber base on these social channels. It has happened very quickly and is bizarre but anybody can try to do that. They won’t all succeed but their barriers to entry are gone. You have to make a commitment to recurring storytelling and genuine entertainment value. We think that, in our humble way, literary style can have someplace in that.
Let’s say you have got this amazing web series you have created for this diamond company. If the salespeople at the retail stores are not aware of that and someone comes in and references it, all that creativity and momentum has gone. If, on the other hand, there are images in the store reminding people of it or maybe they didn’t see it and go to a QR code and download, or the salesperson brings it up, now that is when sales and marketing are working well together. That is what I love to see.
Your whole goal is to get someone to put something on their shortlist of things they are considering and break through the clutter. That is what you are doing. For me, as a speaker, there are some similarities in what you are doing as an agency because every agency I have ever worked with is usually asked to come in and pitch or present. It is between you and 2 or 3 other agencies or other people who do something similar to what you do. We all have to sell ourselves, our company, and what makes us unique.
I certainly have to do that as a speaker. We will tell a story about another talk I gave and the outcomes that happened that people say, “That is what we want.” Do you have any tips for someone? We are all in that. If we do not have stories, my whole line is we are drowning in a sea of sameness. I do not think it is good enough for anybody to go, “Let my work speak for myself.” I have had people hire me from watching my demo videos, my TEDx, which is lovely but we still need the skill to sell ourselves to get picked. People could watch your amazing videos and go, “We want that,” but I’m still guessing you might need to quote, pitch, interview, whatever you want to call it.
We do that every week. We generally get hired through making presentations on spec. We think that we haven’t been an idea. We want to present them and try to get the attention of a brand manager, a CMO or a business owner. I have an incredibly deep respect for salespeople after starting this business that I lacked beforehand. The answer is definitely, yes.
[bctt tweet=”Everything about the creative mindset is in opposition to the act of creation itself.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What is it that you say in those presentations without giving away any of your intellectual property secrets? My belief is that people buy your energy. I think because you are so likable and approachable, they think that this guy has the skills to do it. Probably another agency we are looking at might have the same skills.
At the end of the day, is he going to be easy to work with? Is he going to take our feedback? Is he accessible? Those are some skills and unique selling benefits that we sometimes might overlook. I have literally had given a presentation, an interview by a potential client to hire me, and knew they were looking at 1 or 2 other speakers.
My bureau agent calls me, “Congrats. They picked you. They liked your energy.” Rarely is it that spelled out. I spoke to the client later and said, “That was so nice of you to say shit.” I felt bad. I am better about myself. I felt energized about the possibilities of what you could do at our meeting. I figured, “If you make me feel like this, you will make the hundreds of people that are coming to the ballroom feel the same way.”
All that other stuff gets us to that interview. We have got a referral. They have seen your video. They did not see it at all or whatever it is, then we need to have storytelling. My latest book is The Sale Is in the Tale, which is a business fable. It is a story about storytelling. Your presentations are hiring us. We are going to tell you a story of why we are the best people to create your stories. It is very parallel.
We will have a couple of slides that our accolades, awards, and some brands that we have worked with him. We try to rush through that because it is important to say but it is not something we want to be overly self-conscious about or reference about. We get to a couple of slides on where content is going, how we move from the idea of commercials to the idea of the content, and the skip rate for, let’s say, traditional ads or the amount of money wasted every year on interruption marketing, which we become geniuses at obfuscating as consumers.
We get to the ideas themselves and usually have 2 or 3 ideas. To your point about the energy, I agree, and it is hard to articulate that and even talk about it because it is such a nebulous force. It doesn’t always work in your favor. You almost go through a prism of insincerity before you come out yourself again. You have to go through all these things to go back to who you normally are in your life. When that person comes through again, you are like, “Now I can talk to these people genuinely.” When we first started out, it was very hard for me to feel like I could be myself in those situations. That worked against us. I do not know if you have ever experienced that.
Human Factor: Creatives generally are hostile to routine and discipline. They do not want to be put in a category or a box.
I tell people the gateway to the Imposter syndrome is to start comparing yourself to other people. The minute when you start that, you are down that rabbit hole. If I start to find myself doing that, I go pull up like an airplane. We do not want to go down that path. It is a conscious decision, and it goes back to some core beliefs of who I am is enough. This is what I have to offer, and not needing it. It is like dating. Nobody wants to date anybody desperate and wants to work with somebody who’s desperate.
Sometimes when we pull back a little bit and say, “I may not be the right speaker for you but I probably know somebody who is.” Those kinds of comments as go back to mitigate the risk of working with you because we do not feel like you are being pushy. That goes full circle to why I love storytelling, and I like talking to people like you who make wonderful stories. Stories pull us in. We are not being pushed out a bunch of facts, figures, bells, and whistles to look at this price. “It is 20% off, this weekend only.” You are not creating that content.
That is self-consciousness that gets you into trouble. It is incredibly inherent to the creative mindset. It is a very weird and cruel trick of nature. Everything about the creative mindset is in opposition to the act of creation itself. Creatives generally are open to so many possibilities. It is hard to marry themselves to anyone. They become hyper-aware of cliché. They would rather die than repeat a cliché. They want to try new things but they think most of them won’t work. They generally are hostile to routine and discipline. They do not want to be put in a category or a box.
All these instincts could generally make you a good storyteller. They also can be paralyzing when it comes to something concrete and important like growing a business. It is like you try to convince someone that you have something to offer them. You have to go through that ring of fire to be able to come out of the other side and say, “I can help you here.”
What I heard you say is fear is the killer of creativity, and so you cannot be afraid of whether you get the business or not because then you can’t be creative at the moment. A friend of mine asked me to read the draft of something they are working on. He literally wrote, “That family made lemons out of lemonade.” Please do not say that. There’s got to be a better way to say that. We all need editors. Zack, if people want to find out more about the Human Factor Media, where should they go?
They can go to our website, HumanFactorMedia.co. We have got a portfolio on there as well as a form to contact us. You can also get in touch with me directly at [email protected].
Thanks so much for sharing your insights into what is going on that will continue to grow. I think you are in a good niche there. Congratulations.
Thank you. I appreciate this. It was good to talk to you.
Important Links
- Human Factor Media
- The Sale Is in the Tale
- [email protected]
- The Human Factor
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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I Am No Limits With Brian Bogert
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
There’s a sleeping giant in every human. To awaken this giant, we need to help them grab what they believe is out of their grasp. Brian Bogert is the person that does just this. Brian is a passionate performance coach on a mission to help people prevail over the limits they’ve set for themselves. Brian disrupts the normative approach on how to create sustainable growth personally and professionally. He joins John Livesay in this episode to talk about his philosophies on how to embrace the pain to avoid suffering. Listen in as Brian shares his own story and how overcoming his triggers helped him acknowledge his limitless potential.
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Listen to the podcast here
I Am No Limits With Brian Bogert
Our guest on the show is Brian Bogert, who talks about how we need to get unstuck by moving and that moved people move people and when you embrace pain, you avoid suffering. Find out what he means. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Brian Bogert. There’s a sleeping giant in every human. Brian’s purpose in life is to awaken giants within and turn them into legends by helping them grab what they believe is out of their grasp. Brian is a heart surgeon without a blade. He does not start outside with what you need to do. He instead starts inside with who you are. In a world that is disconnected, Brian is revolutionizing how individuals, leaders and entrepreneurs deeply connect with their authentic selves to achieve the best version of themselves.
As a human behavior and performance coach speaker and business strategist, Brian disrupts the normative approach on how to create sustainable growth and lasting change personally and professionally. His philosophies on how to embrace the pain to avoid suffering, people before profits and who before what has helped individuals and companies discover and activate their limitless potential. Brian’s team have in led with intentionality as they are driven by their vision to impact one billion lies by 2045. We better hurry up and help him do that. Brian, welcome to the show.
I need all that I can get, so yes, please. Let’s hurry up. We got to do that impact quickly. I’m happy to be here with you, John. Thank you.
We had the pleasure of hearing you speak at an event virtually. I was so compelled by your story. Let’s go back to your story of origin before you had this intense inciting incident as we describe it in the world of storytelling on our hero’s journey. Did you know you wanted to be different, make an impact or get into the world of helping people perform better? How did all that start?
I have always had a deep desire to serve and impact people, but I didn’t necessarily know the vehicle that was going to get me there. As with anybody, I have done a variety of different things, thinking that what I wanted and chasing was going to be the path to realize later in life that it was who I was that was going to be that vehicle.
It’s there that I’ve realized that I’ve got greater power to influence others by allowing my truth to give them permission to live theirs. I have always had a deep intellectual curiosity for people, human connection and human behavior. Though I did not start out saying, “I’m going to be a speaker, coach and entrepreneur to do these things,” I always had that drive and desire. I just didn’t know how I was going to get there.
Sometimes we hear a speaker, read a book, or someone introduces us to a concept of professional growth or have a wake-up call. For some people, it’s a health challenge. Your situation is a little different. Why don’t you take us right to that part in your story?
No Limits: Storytelling is a way to connect with people and get them to be in their bodies, experiencing it as their own story. That’s when you most effectively move people.
When I was seven, my mom, brother and I went to our local Walmart to get a 1-inch paintbrush. As we were heading back to the car, getting to go on with our day, I had to wait for my mom and brother to catch up to the car so she could unlock the doors. This was back in the day before there were key fobs. She had to put that physical key in the door and turn it so that we could get on and go with our day.
As I was standing there waiting, a truck pulled up in front of the store. The driver and middle passenger get out. The passenger to the right felt the truck moving backward. He did what any one of us would do and scooted over to his foot on the brake. I always imagined in my head that he scooted it over and gingerly, put his foot down calmly.
In reality, when you’re in a vehicle moving and there’s no driver in the seat, there’s probably panic setting in. He probably had his knee way up to slam it down on the brake pedal, but he missed. He hit the gas pedal. All that force went right into the gas. He threw himself up on the steering wheel and dashboard. Before you know it, he’s catapulting 40 miles an hour across the parking lot, right at us with no time to react.
Fortunately, my mom and brother were still a few feet behind me. By the time he got there, I was holding onto the handle. The truck went up and over the tree in the median, hit our car, knocked me down, ran over me diagonally, leaving a tire track scar on my stomach, tearing my spleen and continued to sever my left arm from my body. It was August 10th, 1992, 115-degree day, 6:10 PM. I’m, all of a sudden, laying in the parking lot. My mom and brother look up and see my arm lying 10 feet away.
Fortunately for me, my guardian angel also saw the whole thing happen. I always have to tell this story and she always has to be a part of it because I’m forever indebted to this woman for choosing to go into action versus go on with her day. When she walked out of the store, she saw the literal life and limb scenario in front of her. She rushed immediately over to stop the bleeding on the main wound and save my life.
She also instructed some innocent bystanders to run inside, grab a cooler and fill it with ice to get my attached limb on ice within minutes. If that did not happen, I either wouldn’t be here with you or I certainly wouldn’t have an arm be reattached because that arm was cooking like hamburger on a 115-degree day on the parking lot.
What I know in all this time, John, is that I’ve got a unique story. It’s not one you hear every day. What I realized through everything we’ve done, the more I’ve done it, is that every single one of us all has unique stories. What’s important is not to look at the extremity of anyone else’s stories but to start with your own and realize, “How do we become aware of the lessons we can extract from our stories? How do we become intentional with how do we apply them in our lives?” We all can do that and tap into the collective wisdom of other people’s lessons to shorten our curve to learning. I’ll share with you two quick lessons and we’re going to go from there.
The first one is I learned very early not to get stuck by what has happened to me but instead get moved by what I can do with it. What I’ve realized through many years of seeing this is that when you get moved, moved people moved people. That approach to impacting one billion lives is only going to happen with several moved people pulling in the same direction. That’s what I call collective impact.
[bctt tweet=”If we don’t feel, we don’t heal.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The second lesson is this concept that I didn’t quite understand until later in life. At 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 years old, I was in a fog. Although I was the one having surgeries done to me and all these years of therapy, I was being guided through the process. My parents, however, were not. They were intimately aware of the unceasing medical treatments, years of physical therapy.
The idea of seeing their seven-year-old son grow up without the use of his left arm was a source of great potential suffering for them. They willed themselves day in and day out to do what was necessary, what was tough and embrace the pains required to ultimately strengthen and heal me. What they did, whether intentional or not, was ingraining me in this philosophy and way of living, which is to embrace the pain to avoid suffering. When this is done correctly, it’s also where we gain freedom.
Let’s unpack some of these things. I first want to go back to why you’re a good storyteller for people who might want to think about improving their storytelling skills. My mission is to help as many people as possible to embrace storytelling and get better at it. When I have a master like you here, I like to take them behind the curtain a little bit.
Part of what you did so well was the descriptiveness of it. We know exactly where you are, how hot it is, how old you are, how a few seconds, one way or the other, would’ve changed everything. Your whole intent of going on that trip was for something as insignificant as a 1-inch paintbrush. I thought to myself, “It doesn’t get smaller than that.”
Suddenly, the three of you are on that trip that’s seemingly an innocent everyday experience. The other thing you said that was so clever is about losing an arm and extremity. Then you talked about, “Everyone’s got stories, but let’s not look at the extremities of those stories.” It’s a clever play on words. Was it intentional or is that something that I’m the only one to notice?
There are not many things I do at this point in life that aren’t somewhat intentional. That was intentional. I’ll tell you that part of that is I’ve had to learn to normalize my story because it is so extreme. Extremities and the play on words connect with people because that’s the truth.
It’s clever.
Thank you. I’m impressed at the little elements that you picked up on that I have learned to embed in storytelling, which are ways to root and connect with people and get them to be in their bodies, experiencing it as their story. When we do that, that’s when we move people the most effectively.
No Limits: The things that keep us stuck are either stuff that’s in the past or fear of a fabricated future that hasn’t happened yet.
There’s a craft to this, honing of words, editing out and consciously choosing things. When it lands to the audience, that’s true artistry. “Was that intentional? It seems so spontaneous, yet that’s the cleverest thing.” I never thought of the clever use of that word on that. That’s a childhood incident that is going to either inspire you or take you down. It’s one or the other. It’s not going to be like, “I forgot about it a few years later.”
In this first lesson you talked about, we need to keep moving and not stay stuck in the past is so challenging for so many people or they get paralyzed by a fear of the future that gets them stuck. They don’t know what to do in their business, career or personal life. Either something happened in the past that is so terrifying, horrifying and traumatic, I can’t get past it like, divorce, death of a loved one or I’m playing out a horror movie in my head of what this future’s going to be either in my career or the world.
Therefore, I’m not even sure I want to bring a child into the world. All of these are things that cause people to not take action. I’ve seen it where people were like,” I was so devastated by the death of my pet. I will never have another pet.” I thought to myself, “That is a big choice to not be willing to feel that pain again because it was too traumatic the first time.”
I remember when my dog died, I was devastated and extremely sad. A friend of mine said to me, “Knowing this amount of pain, would you still choose to have a dog?” For me, the answer was yes. There were years of joy and all that. I was shocked that that’s not the choice everybody makes. You seem to be a real expert in this concept of, “Move again, get another dog, get up from the life knocking you down and embrace the pain to avoid struggling.”
That phrase alone, people go, “What? It’s like putting my hand on a hot stove and taking my hand off the stove to prevent the pain. What are you saying, ‘Embrace the pain?’ How does that help me avoid suffering?” Our brain makes you stop and think because your brain’s going, “They seem like opposites. I want to avoid both pain and suffering. How can I embrace one and avoid the other?” Can you give us an example of that maybe not tied to the accident that you help people look at that?
I can. You did a very solid job of articulating the things that keep us stuck. It’s either stuff in the past or a fear of a fabricated future that hasn’t happened yet. At the root of both of those are the things that keep us stuck. Those are situations or timelines that allow us to experience the world in a different way, either in the past or in the future, both are existing in a way that’s not right here. One of the things that I want to talk about is that so many people think that they are stuck and seek strategies and tactics to solve the problem.
If I get a new program, a new leader, switch companies, make more money, buy that car, that house, remove this spouse or whatever the case may be, then all of a sudden, I’m going to be free of either the confines of the past or the fear of the fabricated future. What we’ve learned in working with some of the world’s highest performers is that it’s not the stretching tactics to keep us stuck. It’s a combination of emotional triggers, behavioral patterns and environmental conditioning that keeps us perpetually repeating the same patterns in our lives.
That feeling of being stuck is because we haven’t unrooted and dealt with the emotional trigger that’s tied to it. You talked about the dog example. Being around other dogs and the idea of having another dog is triggering a person into a place of pain and not allowing them to see everything else that’s right in front of them, all the joy, freedom and fulfillment that comes through that experience. It’s the singular trigger.
[bctt tweet=”Moved people move people.” username=”John_Livesay”]
If we pull out that root that’s connected to that trigger, that’s when people can move. I had to hit on that point because you articulated it so well. It’s important to understand that it’s not about putting yourself into pain intentionally. I will break down and answer that question. It’s about understanding the dynamics that keep us stuck are not what we think they are.
It’s the emotional triggers that cause a certain behavior, then there’s a third element to that?
Environmental conditioning is also a dynamic of that. It’s these things that get so deeply ingrained in us. An example of the triggers is when your spouse gets on you about loading the dishwasher incorrectly. It has nothing to do with your spouse or the dishwasher. It has everything to do with how your grandma looked at you when you were four. That’s a point I had to hit on because of this idea of move, we have to understand the only way we can move is to uproot those triggers so we can see ourselves and the current situation more clearly.
Does it help people get over their addictions, whether it’s an addiction to food, smoking, money or getting likes on social media? Some of that seems to all be trigger, especially in young people, an addiction to getting people’s approval of how many likes and shares.
Validation, worth and all those things are tied to this thing. Those are all triggers that create these types of patterns that we tend to numb ourselves through so that we can experience the world or seek to connect more deeply either with ourselves or the outside world in some form or fashion. It’s not the things that fill us. You’re spot on, but this is an important place to say, “What is the difference between pain and suffering?” Often we’re seeking validation to fill a void. We have to understand in pain and suffering the definition of both.
First, we have to understand the narratives of the world, which is to reduce, eliminate or avoid pain at all costs. We see seek comfort, safety and protection. The world is wrong. It makes sense why we have this tendency because it’s a natural evolutionary response to survival. You cut your leg 100 years ago, you could die. That’s not the reality that most people in the world live in.
If we understand that pain is defined as short-term, intermittent, a direct cause from something and alleviated once that direct cause is removed, what do we do as human beings? We tend to screw it up by throwing other adjectives in front of it like we screw up so many other things. We say, “Acute pain and chronic pain.” Acute maintains the definition inherently, but chronic changes it because it implies that it’s no longer short-term and doesn’t heal after that direct cause is removed.
Let’s stop calling that chronic pain because it changes the definition of pain and call it what it is, suffering. We don’t want to admit suffering exists, particularly when it’s a direct result of our choices. Often we are blind to the fact that it’s even there because it creeps up on us so much so that we don’t even notice the effects of it sometimes until the point, it’s irreversible, whereas pain gets lots of attention because we feel it, so we want to react to it and eliminate it at all costs.
A Course in Miracles
Let’s use an example. Let’s say someone’s parent dies and they get addicted to either drinking or eating too much to eliminate that pain. They can’t imagine a life where they are not in that much pain. They can’t zoom out and say, “Years from now, I’m going to still miss my parent, but I won’t be this sad. This is going to be this much pain or forever. I’m numbing myself whenever I’m at.”
There are consequences to that behavior. You get diabetes. It’s not like some genetic diabetes. This is years of eating too much sugar and then you’re in this endless circle. Your premise for all of us is if you embrace this pain of, “I’m so sad. I feel so lonely and rejected,” whatever the feeling is that you don’t want to sit with, that causes you to numb it. If you can embrace it, you will avoid the long-term suffering as the consequences of acting out in a way.
If we don’t feel, we don’t heal. To give you a couple of other examples, we can embrace the pain of hitting the gym for 30 minutes a day to avoid the suffering of aches and pains of a sedentary lifestyle. We can embrace the pain of difficult conversations with a spouse or loved one to avoid the suffering of being stuck in a loveless marriage that’s going to end in divorce or wanting a divorce and not being able to escape that dynamic.
We can embrace the pain of the fit our kids are sure to throw by having them put down their mobile devices at the dinner table to avoid the suffering of years of lost connection and conversation that will never get back. As business owners, we can embrace the pain of firing our top salesperson who’s contributing the most to top-line growth to avoid the suffering of losing all our other top talent because they were the greatest cancer in our culture.
The list goes on in every category of life. It’s important that we have to acknowledge the suffering we wish to avoid. We can identify the pains we tend to avoid and learn to embrace them to establish them as a habit in all areas of our lives. You had heard this, “Get comfortable being in the discomfort.” What I’m suggesting is discomfort is the 5K to pains marathon.
It goes deeper than that. If we need to truly avoid suffering and have joy and freedom and film it holistically in our lives, we must understand that the small decisions that compound over time leads to suffering. Seeking validation externally online is filling a void and worth that likely was the inability to give or receive love effectively as a kid to know how to connect at that deepest level. When we tend to numb ourselves, it makes sense as well.
One of the first things we want to do is feel safe. The human experience is rooted in four areas. We all seek the desire to feel safe, protected, seen, understood and connected. Seen, understood and connected don’t happen unless the first two do. When we don’t feel safe, we put protect ourselves. Our armor goes up. We guarantee at that moment that that impenetrable force, nobody’s going to see and understand us through that.
On one side, we can’t project who we are clearly, nor can they see through it, which means we won’t connect. We’ve got to embrace the pain of lowering our armor and convincing ourselves that we’re safe, wrapping an element of protection around either who we’re with or the environment we’re in so that everyone can feel safe, protected, seen, understood connected. That’s what effective leaders do.
[bctt tweet=”To have the power to influence others, you have to allow your truth and give them permission to live theirs.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It reminds me of a quote from A Course in Miracles which says, “In my defenselessness lies my safety.” Most people go, “What? I’m going to lower my defenses and put my weapon down?” You’re like, “If you’re thinking you need to be in fight or flight mode all the time, you’ll burn out.”
True strength hides behind vulnerability.
With this concept of the outcomes of feeling a little bit of pain, years ago, the trainer I was working with said, “I want you to do some deadlifts.” I said, “Who cares what the back of my legs looks like?” He calmly said, “Have you ever seen some elderly men in their 80s who may be in the shower? They don’t have any muscles in the back of their legs, so their butt has dropped.” I go, “Yes.” He goes, “If they had done deadlifts, that wouldn’t have happened.” I’m like, “How many do you want me to do?”
It’s true. When you understand what you want to avoid, it’s much easier to embrace the pains in real-time.
I’m like, “I don’t see the back of my legs. Who cares?”
You’re like, “There’s no way an 80 is having no butt that hangs.”
I didn’t even know that was preventable. I’m in. I thought that’s gravity. That’s sad. I wanted to lighten it up a little and then we’ll go back into the intensity of this. We need to ease it people and out a bit. When I was working in media sales, some personalities were running certain publications that were tyrants. They were top producers, so they got away with horrible behavior. They were making so much money and getting away with anything. There were drugs involved. There’s all that drug behavior that causes people to scream, yell and be horrible.
I’m so happy to see people saying, “The culture’s more important than one person’s bottom-line performance.” If you are afraid of losing a top performer or a top client and you put up with the abusive behavior or you’re in an abusive relationship, that’s not coming from a place of abundance. When your message is, “No, let’s shift. The ends do not justify the means.” Therefore, if we create a wonderful culture, we’ll attract the right clients and people who can perform.
No Limits: People don’t want to admit that suffering exists, especially when it’s a direct result of their choices.
There are 2 dynamics to what you said that hit on 2 very strong elements. You focused on the pain piece. We need to embrace the pain because the culture is going to supersede any individual. Recognize that what you said is, “If you are afraid to get rid of a top performer or an abusive spouse, the individual and the leader that can remove that person, the one to embrace the pain also has to recognize that their hesitancy is rooted in an emotional trigger. If they’re afraid to lose it, that scarcity is tied to something deeper.”
There are two things to pay attention to. If you’re in a position where you are not able to freely move when things are out of alignment in your world, pay attention to, “What do I need to address internally?” A guy by the name of Alex Charfen has one of the greatest quotes that I’ve heard. I’ve always said for a long time that everything begins and ends with you.
He says, “If you’re constantly putting out fires in your life and business, there’s a good chance you’re the arsonist.” Not only do you have to learn how to embrace the pain to avoid the suffering and protect the people in your environment and your culture but recognize that if you have any hesitancy to do that when something’s out of alignment in your culture, it’s probably something you need to deal with first.
This is so valuable for entrepreneurs who are reading, who maybe are in the first few years of their new business. They have a client who is not paying on time, never happy, never going to give them a referral, and making their lives miserable. There are no boundaries. If you need every dime for your cashflow needs, it’s hard to fire that client or even to say no at the beginning. My whole thing is, “Who you say no to is more important than who you say yes to.” Ironically, the more you keep your boundaries of, “I don’t do that for that price. This isn’t working out,” we’re always teaching people how to treat us in our personal and business lives, but if we have these emotional triggers still there, then we’re reacting and not coming from a place of choice.
That’s one of the things that we talk about around emotional triggers. Triggers cause you to react versus respond. When you react, you create damage. When there’s damage, you need to create repair to neutralize and diffuse the energy and connection with everybody involved. Whereas if you respond, you can realize that what you’re reacting to internally likely has nothing to do with the situation right in front of you. You can move through it without creating damage and eliminating the need to create repair, which takes more energy, time and attention.
People are always focused on speed. How many things are slowing you down? When you have resistance and energy drain because of a bad relationship, a bad client, somebody who’s not paying on time or you’ve created damage that you’ve got to create repair, how much energy does it take to move through that? If you’ve responded in the first place and seen it clearly, you would’ve eliminated 75% of the drain from that experience.
When people hire you to be a speaker, who’s your ideal audience? Is it sometimes salespeople need some insights on resilience? Is it more of a leadership people looking for ways to become a better leader or both?
I would say both because of the direction in which we take things. We will do very strong leadership and culture development-type themed talks. We will do one to be able to help people move through those blocks that are limiting them from living at the level they’re capable of living. People with variable incomes identify on that side very deeply. They start to recognize when there’s hope and desire that they can lean into if they address the stuff they need to. Their performance, their teams’ performance and the organizations are raised.
[bctt tweet=”Do not get stuck by what has happened to you, but instead, get moved by what you can do with it.” username=”John_Livesay”]
As a speaker, generally, individual organizations hire me to fit into 1 of those 2 buckets. I also speak at a lot of conferences, though. My ideal audience in that space is on the entrepreneurial side because where we engage with organizations typically beyond the stage is at the top level of leadership. These are large organizations we’re working with C-Suite and executives, mid to small-sized organizations and even large ones that are true entrepreneurs. We hit on two different areas. It only depends on the way that we enter the world.
Tying back to your goal on your mission to impact one billion lives by 2045, how are you tracking that? What can people do to assist that?
It’s being tracked in a couple of different ways. What I largely recognize is it’s going to be untrackable to a large degree. I have a genuine belief that if I chase impact, income always follows and everybody else gets to be moved so they can move other people. Collective impact is something that we talk about. If you hear one thing for me that you’re like, “That’s in my life,” whether you pass it on or not, you’re part of the billion.
What often happens when people hear something that moves them is they move it through the world. They’ll pass it on to somebody else or say, “I heard this great quote,” as I did with Alex Charfen. The ripple effective impact is significant but that’s also why for myself. I typically am working with the leaders of these organizations. If we permeate them, there’s also a trickle-down effect through the culture and everybody in that organization can have an impact if the leaders change.
That is a philosophy, at least in the speaking and coaching stuff. We’re in four different businesses, all rooted in the who, helping people discover who they are, who they’re doing this for, who they’re doing this with and who they’re going to impact. Each one of our entities has different ways that we’re tracking impact and how that is translating.
We’ve got a movement over on the side that’s going to be launched. There have been months of foundational stuff, but the movement is called I am One Billion. It’s going to be something that we’re going to have as collective energy to move things forward. I’m less concerned about tracking and more concerned about focusing on the day-to-day individual or mass aggregate impact we can have. Over the next years, if that happens and we stay regular and consistent in it, one billion’s going to be behind us before we know it. I don’t say that arrogantly. I just believe in the added benefit of the compound effect and collective impact of people.
We’ve seen things go viral. Once you start going global, it goes fast. Brian, if people want to find out more about how they can discover to let go of these emotional triggers and embrace some pain so they don’t have to suffer, where should they go?
If you’re on social media, it’s @BogertBrian on any channel. If you are perusing the web, go to BrianBogert.com. Those will both be great entry points. We realized to impact 1 billion lives that 99.99% are never going to pay us $1. We are very okay with that. We do have a free resource as well that we put a lot of time, energy and attention into. It’s a free course with over 30 minutes of video dialogue to help individuals evaluate these concepts themselves.
If you go to NoLimitsPrelude.com, that’s a place where you can get that. I always get full disclosure here. Do you exchange an email to get it? You do. Will you get some emails throughout the experience? You will. Will you get four emails after you’re done with it? You will because we want you to have other opportunities to do so but there are big unsubscribe buttons on there every single way. This is not a way to funnel you. This is a tool and a gift we want to give you to hopefully elevate and empower you.
Thank you for that gift and for being you. I am so grateful to be able to know you and help in some small way, get your message out through this show and share what you do on social media. I love it. It’s needed and you’re the right person to be doing it.
Thank you so much for building a platform to give me the ability to serve your audience and pour my soul into the world. You are a part of the collective impact. It’s not lost on me who you are in this world and I’m grateful as well.
Thanks so much.
Important Links
- Brian Bogert
- A Course in Miracles
- @BogertBrian – Instagram
- NoLimitsPrelude.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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I’ll Be Back With Shep Hyken
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
How do you get your clients to say, “I’ll be back”? Renowned customer service and experience expert Shep Hyken believes that delivering an amazing experience is what keeps customers coming back for more. With this in mind, Shep has managed to work with companies and organizations that want to build loyal relationships with their customers and employees. He sits down with John Livesay in today’s episode to share how his upbringing instilled in him the values that are essential in the service industry. Listen in and learn more as Shep discloses his secrets on how to turn repeat customers into loyal customers.
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Listen to the podcast here
I’ll Be Back With Shep Hyken
This episode’s guest is Shep Hyken, an expert in customer service and the author of I’ll Be Back. He said that repeat customers are different than loyal customers. Find out what he means. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Shep Hyken, a customer service experience expert and keynote speaker. Shep works with companies that want to build loyal relationships with their customers and employees. His focus is on delivering amazing customer service, engagement, managing the customer experience, and creating loyalty. He is a Hall of Fame Speaker and a New York Times and Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author. His new book is I’ll Be Back.
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Shep, welcome to the show.
It is great to be here. One day, I will get to say I am back. Will you have me back? We will find out at the end of this show, won’t we?
That is what is known and storytelling is an open loop. We are already creating them, so take us back if you will to your own experience of getting involved with this. Were you a child that had bad customer service and went, “I am going to fix this,” or did you start thinking you were going to be something else? How did this customer service business come about?
There are two pieces of the story. The first one was when I was a child. At twelve years old, I started my first business. I was a birthday party magician. I would do magic tricks at birthday parties. The first show was on a Wednesday after school. My mom picks me up and takes me over to these people’s homes. I am there in front of 25 screaming little six-year-old kids. I do my show for about 30 to 45 minutes and collect a whopping $16. It was $15 plus a $1 tip. When I came home, my mom said, “What are you going to do after dinner?” It was a school night. The typical answer is my homework. She goes, “Not until you write a thank you note.” I go, “That is a good idea.”
That was a great customer service lesson. I did not realize it. My parents raised me to always say please and thank you and be polite, but she wanted to emphasize that. Even though I had said thank you on the way out the door, maybe a follow-up would be nice. My dad said, “That is a great idea. After they have received the thank you note, by next week, why don’t you give them a call and thank them again? Ask them, ‘How did you like the show?’”
Get some feedback. Find out if you did a good job, and get specific. Ask them what tricks they liked the best. If you do this enough times, people start to say the same tricks and won’t mention some of the tricks. You will notice a pattern. Those are the tricks you get rid of and replace with tricks they will talk about. I was like, “That is a good idea.” That is exactly how my whole entry to customer service got started. I had no idea that is what it was called, but later on, I found out.
It was ingrained in me from even much earlier than that. As I said, I was told to be polite and say please and thank you. I am a people pleaser and that helps if you are in the customer service world because some personalities are meant to take care of customers. Some people are meant to work on that frontline or call center. They live for taking what I call moments of misery, those complaints, and turning them into moments of magic. I might be one of those people.
I’ll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again & Again
When I was about 19 or 20 years old, I was working at a gas station while I was in college. This was many years ago. Even though we were a self-serve station, we did not have the computer where you paid outside, come in, and get your receipt. We had to stand on the lot, reset the pumps manually, and make the change right out there. Even though the customer pumped their own gas, we walked around with a wad of cash, and I had a little metal changer on my belt, and I made the exact change.
One very cold day, I asked a woman who was elderly who I had seen in the station before. She was probably about 85 or 90 years old. She was pretty old but still driving. I said, “Let me pump the gas for you. It is a little cold.” I thought that was the right thing to do. I go inside and my manager goes, “What did you do?” I go, “I am not sure. What did I do?” He was like, “I saw you pumping that lady’s gas.”
I was like, “Yeah. I did that.” He was like, “Why did you do that?” I was like, “She is 90 years old. It is six below zero outside. It is pretty cold. I had to be out there. Why not let her stay in the car?” He was like, “Now, she is going to want it the next time.” I go, “Maybe she will come back here instead of the gas station across the street or the one on the opposite corner.” He gets mad at me, walks out, and slams the door. All I knew at that moment was that I was right and he was wrong. I have been living my life ever since.
I get out of college and I am looking for something to do. I see a couple of motivational speakers. I think, “I can do that. I am going to talk about customer service.” Within one year out of college, that is exactly what I was doing. I was doing speeches and talking to the companies that I was working for about how to deliver a moment of magic. I have been talking about creating that magic and avoiding misery for years.
I love that your twelve-year-old magician has created a career where you help companies turn unhappy customers into satisfied customers through a moment of magic, what a wonderful through-line of a hero’s journey there. Let’s talk about some of the clients that have hired you to come to speak to them. Let’s start with American Airlines.
I love American Airlines. I realize the airlines have a tough goal, but I have been with that airline and I have worked for the airline for years. Before that, I worked with TWA, Delta Airlines, and Southwest Airlines. I have had the privilege of working with these companies. The airline business is tough because it is very hard to make a customer happy when there is a delay that the airline or the customer has no control.
It could be bad weather or more traffic than usual. There are all kinds of things that could go wrong that can make your trip not perfect. The fact that if you get the right person, it does not matter whether or not they show up on time but eventually get there. If you get the right person, they take great care of you. If you get the right person on the phone when you have a problem, it is amazing how well you feel about that airline. I know you are looking at my list. There are American Airlines and American Express.
That is the other one I wanted to ask a question about, but before we jump off the airlines because I worked for TWA as a ticket agent when I was in college at O’Hare, the training I went through to be a part-time ticket agent was incredible. They always asked, “Did you shine your shoes?” They always made the appearance important. They also had the ability to answer people’s concerns and anger. They stand on the wrong line because they did not read the sign.
Create experiences that people will talk about. Click To Tweet
This is not a place where they sell tickets, check bags or whatever the issue is, or wonder how much sleep the pilot got. Those are the kinds of questions you got. People’s anxiety about flying would manifest in different ways. It could be being tapped on the shoulder while you are standing at the urinal in your uniform asking, “What gate is this?” If the employees feel like they are not being treated right, it will trickle off into the passenger experience.
Which airport were you at?
I was at O’Hare.
I was in LaGuardia, New York, one day, and this was back in TWA. There is this flight that I was on that was canceled. Everybody is getting put on to the next flight. The guy in front of me says, “Are you going to feed us? I was going to get a meal on my other flight.” The lady says, “We will have a meal, but you are going to have to feed yourself.” She smiled and laughed. His exact words were then like, “I am being a jerk, aren’t I?” They were close to the exact words. She goes, “I am not going to judge, but I am happy to put you on your next flight and I will make sure that there is a meal for you to eat if you would like to.”
You have to roll with it and have a sense of humor.
She was so funny and then I walked up to her, and I went, “Can I have a meal too?” She was so nice. That is the thing. You get people that are very difficult to deal with. I remember I was at O’Hare and this was many years ago. When you are a high-ranked flyer on their frequent flyer program, you get privileges. One of the privileges is you get to fly standby, and when you fly standby, they put you on the standby list. Based on the seniority of your frequent flyer status, they put you at the top. The guy said to me, “I am not going to put you on here. We already have too many people on standby. You are not going to make it.” I said, “I am the highest level flyer.” He goes, “Do you want to jump in front of everybody?” I go, “That is exactly what I want to do.” That is the privilege of spending all your money on one airline.
That is what I wanted to talk about. Your book is perfect. When I have maybe more convenient routes or a cheaper fare, but I want to build my points with one particular airline, then that is what keeps me loyal for the potential upgrades with miles or whatever it is.
I write articles about this all the time. There is a difference between a repeat customer and a loyal customer. This is right out of the book I’ll Be Back: How to Get Your Customers to Come Back Again & Again. One of the things I talk about is there is nothing wrong with repeat business. We need to go for it. It is really important. However, to create true loyalty would be for the airline to say, “We are getting rid of the frequent flyer program and we hope that you stay with us.” If you get rid of the free upgrades or the free trips, would that passenger says, “You are good enough to keep me?” That is loyalty.
Loyal Customers: Some personalities are meant to take care of customers, and they live for taking moments of misery and turning them into moments of magic.
A lot of times, even though we call this a loyalty program, it is really a marketing program. It is a way to get perks and points or perks and miles. If you think about those perks, the more points you get, you get a free ticket. What that really is is a discount program. To put it in a more simplistic term, if I go to a restaurant and they give me a little card that says, “Come back here five times and the fifth sandwich is free,” that is like a 20% discount card.
There is nothing wrong with repeat business and giving out the perks to give you discounts or free whatever, but recognize it for what it is. The goal would be you want to create both loyalty, which is an emotional connection, as well as the desire to do business because maybe they do take care of you in such a way. The combination of the two is unbeatable, but the moment you focus just on points, the company that has a better point program is going to win.
I do love American Airlines. They are my airline of choice. They do take care of me and there are times that I hate all airlines. There is no doubt about it. Things happen, but I realized that most of the time, the things that happen are not the person at the front desk control. I have had bad flight attendants. I had one flight attendant many years ago when they were cutting the salaries of people. It was sometime after 9/11.
She was not being very friendly. The person next to me was another flight attendant sitting there. She was deadheading, meaning they were going to another city. They are not in uniform. They are dressed in street clothes. I said to the woman that was working, “Are you having a bad day?” She goes, “They’ve cut my salary, so I am not going to try as hard.” I looked at the person next to me who worked for the airline and she goes, “I can’t believe she said that to you.”
What is interesting about these points or loyalty programs is there are different levels, but you have to qualify. If you flew an X number of miles, then you get up to platinum, executive platinum, etc. I find that mindset fascinating. That ties me into American Express, another one of your big clients. Now, American Express has a premium associated with it. They do the same thing where there is the green, the gold, and the platinum level.
There is also the black card.
The levels of the prestige of everything are fascinating for people trying to impress people at a restaurant.
Here is what is cool about the AmEx card. They did a change that I don’t like, and I have let them know I am unhappy. I am one of those people that never publicly say what is on my mind because I realized I represent a lot of these brands. They changed something, and I wanted to understand why they did it. I understand why they did it, but it is not in sync with the highest level. The highest level is black, but the typical high level most people have is that platinum card.
Your last customer impression should not be a survey. Click To Tweet
It costs $600 a year to buy that card. I use it for FedEx now. I get 10% off FedEx. That almost pays for my card at the end of the year. In addition to that, they give you $200 in airline credit for miscellaneous fees, which could be everything from baggage to flight change fees to an American Airlines wireless. They reimburse you for your TSA approval for your global entry.
I get $200 back when I buy a Dell computer. At the end of the day, not only did all the points accumulate, but I also made money on this card. The American Airlines card that I have, which is a MasterCard, is a point card. The reason I like to use that for certain things is the points go toward miles. It used to be that every mile I have on American Airlines was because I flew it. Now, they said, “We don’t care how many miles you fly as long as you spend money on our airline or our card.”
To get an executive platinum card, you have to spend more than $200,000. They don’t even give you miles. It does not matter if the flight from St. Louis to Chicago is 250 miles, but if it costs you $1,000, they give you 1,000 points times a premium for your status. It is a little higher if you are executive platinum and a little lower if you are gold, but you earn the points.
Anyway, it is a different program. I am not sure I like it or don’t like it, but it is interesting the way credit card companies, airlines, and different companies are working toward creating what they term loyalty, but it is really the repeat business. Even Amazon and Walmart are going head to head trying to create loyalty, and the way they are doing it is by charging you to be part of their program. This is brilliant thinking. I am a member of Amazon Prime. The direct competitor of that is Walmart+.
Walmart+ gives you free grocery delivery and whatever other perks they have. Amazon Prime gives you a number of other perks as well. The question is, which do I like? No matter what, I am paying either $99 for Walmart or $129 for Amazon. I want to get my money’s worth, so what am I going to do? Once I pay, I am going to try to use the card. I love that that is a membership program that has a premium attached to it that you have to pay for.
You have got a company like Nike. Nike has no charge to be a part of their program, and from the standpoint of discounts and perks, they give you nothing, but what they do give you that makes it interesting to be part of that program is content that is served up exactly the way you would want it. What I mean by that is if I buy running shoes and that is all they see that I am buying through their program, they will never send me anything about basketball shoes. They know what I want. They also notice like, “You might be interested in the new version of your shoe. We put new technology in there.” They will give me a preview as to what is going on in my shoes.
People love that insider look.
It is giving me an inside feel.
Loyal Customers: The sense of airline customer service is if the employees feel like they’re not being treated well, it trickles off into the passenger experience.
Before we get off the airline and credit card thing, there is this new phenomenon of the flight attendants trying to get everyone on the plane to subscribe to a credit card that is separate from theirs where you get a free trip or you get so many more miles than a regular credit card. I think the flight attendants get a little commission. Also, it is all premised on that. You are not paying off that debt every month. They get a lot of money by charging a lot of interest. Otherwise, the whole thing is a house of cards.
That is standard credit card marketing. The airlines are brilliant to do that. To me, a guy that flies every single week, especially if I had to take two flights in the day to get where I am going, I got to hear that darn message twice a day. I could do the message for them. Act now and you get 60,000 bonus points. That is enough for two round trip domestic tickets or one to Europe.
With this new insider information that you mentioned that Nike is doing, I experienced that when I was speaking for the Wizards Play Network, which has Dungeons and Dragons. They have salespeople who call on retailers that sell the games and they want them to upgrade and spend around $20,000 to make the stores a special premium level. I said, “What is in it for the store?” They said, “They get to give their regular customers insights into what is going to be on the game before the game comes out.”
People who are avid game players love that bragging right. The throwing the blackboard down at a restaurant is the bragging rights that I know something that is coming before you do because I stopped at this store and this store happens to be one of these levels of premiums. I thought that is a valued commodity. Within the world that these are all of our customers, there is a certain niche that will pay or be loyal out of you giving them some bragging rights, for lack of a better word, yes?
That is right. That is the point. You make them feel like they have insider information, and it is very personalized because it is based on just the game or the shoe. There are other companies that will give you that inside scoop of information. I received an email from a guy that sells this little piece of equipment. Not many people would buy that, but what he said was, “I have 100 of them. The last time, they were gone within a day, so I remade some more for anybody that is interested.” That is like, “I am the insider. I got on his list,” because all my friends, when I said, “You need to go and get this,” they could not get it. It was gone and sold out.
That used to be something that the luxury market would be involved in. That is my background.
It is a scarcity mindset or mentality.
For example, the Hermes Birkin bag. Before, you are on a waiting list with all of that anticipation. Now, it has become much more mass where people wait in line for iPhones and other things like that.
A lot of times, loyalty programs are really just marketing programs. Click To Tweet
Do you know who has done a great job of this? It is Rolex. My son got me fired up about the watch market. I don’t know why he is into that, but interesting. Rolex has done a great job. There are only two watch companies that have done a fine job of making sure their watches on a regular basis will appreciate. They have some duds that they come out with that nobody wants, but Patek Philippe and Rolex are the two companies that have done it.
I watched how Rolex does it. They can release ten times more watches than they are releasing, but they don’t because it keeps the market solid. They would rather keep the demand for what they have so strong that the prices on the secondary market are often 2 and 3 times higher than what you might buy in a jewelry store, but the wait at a jewelry store is sometimes 2, 3, or 4 years to get the watch that you want. They could make a lot more money if they wanted to, but they have done two things. They have created a great experience for the person that owns the watch and think about how they are handling the middle person, the jeweler. They are saying, “We are taking care of you too because we are going to create the demand, and that means you are going to sell every watch that you have.”
What a dream for a retailer. That is loyal. You have this amazing ability to have your pulse on the zeitgeist, and that is what makes you such a great author and speaker. You are verbalizing people’s inner voices and frustrations and figuring out solutions to them. The one that you have done that I went, “There he is again getting ahead of the curve,” are the endless emails asking you to fill out a survey form. Everyone seems to do it and they won’t leave you alone. Shouldn’t there be a limit to how many times you ask?
The same customer gets the same survey. My car dealership is bad about that. I get the same 15 to 20-minute survey every single time I go in there. Whether it be for an oil change or a transmission overhaul, I am going to get the same survey.
These people’s livelihoods are dependent on it. I bought a new home and the people said, “You are going to get a survey of how every department did. Unless you give us all tens, none of us get a raise.” They are begging you to lie on the customer service report. The loan people were horrible, but they were great.
Somebody referred to it as they know that the Uber driver gets dinged if you give them a low rating. If I have bad service, I choose not to give a rating because I don’t want to hurt the guy’s reputation, but I am not going to help it by giving a false rating.
I remember the reverse was the surprise when Uber rates you.
Uber rates you as well. We do a survey every year, and we survey over 1,000 consumers. It is a GenPop survey, so it looks like the cross-section of the US-based on age, ethnicity, geography, gender, and everything else. Forty percent of customers have said they have stopped doing business with a company because the survey was too long.
Loyal Customers: There’s nothing wrong with repeat business and giving out perks or discounts, but you need to recognize it for what it is.
That does not mean they do it to every company, but they have done it. They said, “I am not going back there anymore.” The last impression should not be the survey. Think about this. I have a great meal. If the next day I get a survey that said, “Would you answer two quick questions,” and it took me less than 30 seconds, I probably don’t remember doing that, but if you asked me to spend five minutes on a survey, I am going to remember that.
Your whole brand positioning for what you do is that customer service gives you a competitive advantage and not the product or price. I have to say the reason I love Apple so much is that Genius Bar. Dell does not offer that. I need someone that peace of mind that if I need to go have some buddy help me, I can get that help. I am loyal because of that. That is customer service in my mind.
That is why people love Apple. That is not my favorite way to do business. I don’t want to have to make an appointment to go get customer service. I want to pick up the phone and get it. Apple does a great job. If they can’t fix it on the phone, then I have to go to the Genius Bar. I wrote an article. It reminded me of something that happened a few years back, and I don’t mention the name of the company, but it was Apple.
I bought a new Apple phone and it was so different from the phone I had before that I was ready to smash it on the ground, put the parts in an envelope, send it back, and say, “Give me my money back.” I was that mad, so I called them up. I am talking to the guy and he knows I am not happy. There were things that we had to do to fix something that did not work as it should have, but this is what he said to me. He says, “I understand how upset you are. This is my job now. My job is to make you so happy with your phone that you would jump in front of a moving bus.” I go, “That was the perfect thing to say, wasn’t it?”
That is a passionate level.
What it did is it set a goal. It set a goal that I said, “If this is what this guy wants to do, I am going to give him a chance to do it.” In the end, I said, “I will jump in front of that bus as long as it is moving backward.”
Before I let you go, how do you, as a sales keynote speaker, provide amazing customer service when someone hires you as a speaker?
The first thing is I inform them that I will be the only thing they do not have to worry about at this point. Number two is constant communication. We tell them, “You don’t need to worry about anything. We are going to call you. 6 to 8 weeks before the event, I am going to call you to start working on the content. We are going to have as many content calls as necessary, and I will interview others. If you don’t have the time for it, you tell me who you want me to talk to and I will do that.”
You need to make your customers feel like they have insider information. Click To Tweet
The product is the product. I am going to deliver the speech. I am going to meet the expectation if not exceeded. By the way, I have a really good demo video, but I am better than that video. There are plenty of speakers out there that are not as good as their video. I was very clear. Chris West from Video Narrative did a magnificent job. I said to him, “You cannot make me look better than I am. What I want you to do is make me look good enough to justify what I charge and make good enough to be comfortable that the client is comfortable booking me.” That was our goal because I have seen sizzle reels that are really sizzling, and when you see the speaker on stage, it is a dud.
We have all had that experience. I am not going to name the brand. I saw a car commercial and I thought, “I am going to go experience that.” I went to the dealership and was like, “This is a bait and switch. This is nothing like the commercial of what this experience is supposed to be like.” You hurt yourself by overpromising in a sizzle reel TV commercial.
That is what we are worried about, but the moment I hit the ground, I text the client, “I am maybe not in the building, but I am on my way to the building. Let me know if you need anything before I meet you for my soundcheck.” The soundcheck is often the next morning before everybody gets up, and that is fine, but if they need me the night before, I always fly in. That is the other thing I tell them. I say, “I will never take the last flight.” I tell them a couple of things. Number one is that I have only missed one speaking engagement due to weather-related issues in my entire career, and that is because both airports, mine and theirs, were closed down. I felt bad, but those were acts of God. There is nothing you can do about that type of thing. I said, “I am going to figure out a way for that never to happen again,” and the way you do that is I tell them I am going to keep an eye on my flights.
If I see there is a weather pattern coming in and my speech is in Los Angeles, I might be there two days ahead of time. I showed up to a speech once. I will never forget it. I was out somewhere in the LA area and it was such a bad snowstorm on the East Coast and the Midwest. She was like, “How did you get here?” Only she and I were the only ones that showed up for this meeting. I said, “I told you I would be here.” I had to fly and drive to get to those planes, trains, and automobiles. I got there and she was so impressed. She goes, “The meeting was canceled. Other than the weather, we are going to redo this again. We are going to take care of you.” She was so amazed that I cared that much to get there. You have to do that.
What a great story. Those are the stories that people remember instead of you telling people, “Don’t worry, I will be there,” then you have a story to back it up, and that is everything. If people want to track you down, your website is your last name, correct?
Yeah. It is Hyken.com. It is pretty easy.
If you want to be entertained and learn how you can be better at customer service between the book or if you don’t get to hear Shep speak, then he has got a blog.
Go to the YouTube channel. It is called Shep TV. There are 900 videos. Everything that is in my head eventually ends up on YouTube.
That is impressive. Thanks again for being such a great guest and sharing with us how we can all be a little bit better at giving people an experience that makes them loyal.
Thanks for having me. I will be back.
Important Links
- Shep Hyken
- I’ll Be Back
- Shep TV – YouTube
- Hyken.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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