TSP039 | Mark Asquith – Transcription

Posted by John Livesay in Uncategorized | 0 comments

John:

Today’s guest on the Successful Pitch podcast is Mark Asquith. He has the number one podcast in the U.K. with a podcast called “Excellence Expected.” He’s also a speaker, an entrepreneur, an author of a wonderful book about productivity that’s free to download from his website. He also has some great insight on the five Twitter mistakes to avoid. He says, if you have a start-up there are three things you need to do to be successful. Number one, you need to really be focused, and that taps into your productivity.

Number two, you need to really be prepared to shift or pivot. He gives a great analogy of, you’re a captain of a ship and you’re just off by one degree, it doesn’t matter at the beginning, but by the time you get a year into your business, you could be miles away from the destination you need to be at. Finally, you need to have a profit mindset. That really is the key to being a successful start-up. I think you’re really going to enjoy listening to Mark. He’s going to talk about Blab and Periscope and all things new and exciting for start-ups.

Hi, and welcome to the Successful Pitch podcast. Today we’re honored to have Mark Asquith, who is an entrepreneur, a speaker, has the number one podcast in the U.K. called “Excellence Expected,” and a self-described geek. Obviously, I want to know him. Mark, welcome to the show.

Mark:

Thank you, sir, pleasure to be here.

John:

Mark, you have such an amazing story of how in 2005, you decided you weren’t going to work for anybody anymore, you were slightly burnt out, and you said, there’s got to be a better way. You started your own design and digital agency, with a bunch of great initials, DMSQD, 2010, which is still operating, and then you really have become an expert on productivity, starting in 2012. Would you mind taking us a little bit on that journey, because it’s so interesting?

Mark:

Yeah, of course, I kind of got to about 2005 and realized that I just got really bored working for other people. It was just quite a dull time really, and I was working in the corporate world, as many people do. It’s just a story that’s familiar to many entrepreneurs and business people, and kind of realized I was spending a lot of time with people that, being completely honest, I didn’t really have too much in common with. I decided just not to do it any more, so I stopped doing it, just stopped doing it.

I was kind of lucky, because I was still young. I didn’t really have too many commitments, especially financial commitments, so I was able to do that relatively easily. Just kind of started freelancing, doing contract work, and moving through into training and digital training and digital enablement for big public bodies and private sector clients in the U.K.

As you said, in about 2008, I think it was, I started the web agency, which has gone through various different versions, and when I say that, I mean, it started out, it was me, just being me, then we morphed into being me with a couple of co-founders, and then we morphed into what we have today, which as you say, is actually DMSQD. Believe it or not, as we record this, we have just actually rebranded. Yeah, we’re changing from DMSQD to Hacksaw, which is quite an interesting one. I always feel that, there’s always different, I guess, progression points in the life of a business. Being in the creative sector, we find that so much. Every few years, we redefine how we serve people and help people.

This particular time, when we did that, we realized that actually DMSQD didn’t fit anymore. We’re just going through a bit of a fun rebrand, which is kind of nice. Throughout the process of developing that business, like you said, John, I’d sort of got to about 2012, and just got the balance wrong. Even if there is such a thing, I actually don’t think there is, balance to be had between work and life. I kind of got that wrong, I was working on the wrong things at the wrong time, spending too much time on these wrong things. Just have to do something about it.

That’s when I started really taking productivity seriously. Which sounds odd, I mean, had a business for such a long time before that. I realized the power of focused and conscious productivity as opposed to just getting through the day. Big, big turning point, and that led to the podcast, “Excellence Expected,” led to what we’re doing at the studio, rebranding to Hacksaw, and the success that we’ve had there. Yeah, it’s an interesting journey. It’s certainly been a fun one, and it continues on, which is always the main thing, really.

John:

Well, I’m always fascinated, because my background is in branding and advertising, and I think all the founders listening, when you’re pitching for investors, you really have to have a good story behind your brand, and even the name of your brand. Oftentimes there’s a great story on how you came up with the name. I’m sure you considered a lot of different names before you landed on “Excellence Expected” for your podcast. How did you come to that?

Mark:

You know, I didn’t consider many, as odd as that might sound. Normally, I completely agree. I’ve renamed several businesses, I completely agree, you go through such a process with it. But I kind of knew what I wanted to say with it. I knew that it was for business people, they always want more from themselves, they always expect themselves to be excellent. I knew what the sentiment was for the show, I knew that it was helping small business people, I knew that it was trying to enable people to pick out certain issues that were stopping them excelling, and really try and solve some of those problems, using the show.

I stumbled upon, well, I didn’t stumble upon it, I was consciously reading Steve Jobs’s autobiography by Walt Isaacson, and did the famous quote that Steve Jobs states that people aren’t used to working in an environment where excellence is expected. I just thought, you know, that kind of just summed everything up.

John:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mark:

People like you and I expect ourselves to be excellent, and if we’re not, we don’t let it out the door, or we beat ourselves up. That was the real light bulb moment. Of course, you know, we expect ourselves to be this good. That’s where it came from, really.

John:

I like it.

Mark:

The sentiment was there for a long, long time, and then Mr. Jobs managed to articulate it for me in the pages of his autobiography.

John:

Well, Steve Jobs was also known for being a perfectionist, but for me, excellence is not the same as perfectionist, perfectionism. Do you agree that there is a difference?

Mark:

Oh, absolutely, you can be a perfectionist and completely fail at everything, because you focus on the things that don’t matter.

John:

Right, got it. Well, let’s take a deep dive, so the listeners are going to get some great takeaways. Because you’re such an expert in productivity, you actually are kind enough on your website to allow people to download a free book on this topic, which I’ve spent some time reading, and I have to tell all my listeners, you’ve got to download this book on productivity, it’s fantastic. One of the things that really resonated with me was, you know, the element of personal scheduling. One of my favorite quotes is, “If it’s not scheduled, it doesn’t happen.” How do you personally, and what kind of advice do you give people who are saying, “You know, I have my schedule and then the day gets out of control, and all I’m doing is putting out fires, and I don’t get any of my things accomplished.”

Mark:

I think it’s a challenge that faces all, and I think so many of the most successful people would just completely live by the sentiment that you’ve just stated, “If it doesn’t get scheduled, it doesn’t get done.” That was something that recently I’ve tried to even tighten upon myself. I think we all dip in and out with habit, and we sometimes catch ourselves falling back on things we’re comfortable doing. I think we constantly have to be assessing that and you know, the idea that “if it’s not scheduled, it doesn’t get done,” is really important.

The way that I determine what gets done is, kind of using a couple of different methods. I’m a big advocate of the Gary Keller book, The1Thing, which I think is a fantastic book. I wholeheartedly believe that set some time aside and focus on something that’s the one thing that you need to get done. The issue is, defining that one thing that needs to get done can be really, really difficult. The way that I do it, and it’s in the book actually, is I just use something called the “triple one principle.” Someone told me the “double one” principle when I was younger, and I added the third one myself.

John:

I love it.

Mark:

The first two things are, you’ve got to basically sort out what’s important and what’s interesting. So the task that you undertake, which of these is important, which of these are interesting. The trouble is, that doesn’t really take into account the things that you can’t get away from, so that’s the third one, which is, what’s integral. Just measure your time out, figure out what you do on a daily basis. I mentioned in the book, measured it for two solid days, and then all the tasks that you do, split them into one of three categories. Important, interesting, and integral.

John:

Fantastic. We’re going to tweet that out. That’s great. “Is what you’re doing important, interesting, and integral?” That’s great.

Mark:

Exactly.

John:

I love it.

Mark:

It’s huge, and it will change the way you think about things. I talk through in the book as well, various ways of deciding what to do. So many productivity books will just cut out what’s interesting. But you can’t do that, that’s impossible, because it’s interesting to you for a reason. I think it’s about finding a harmony between all those tasks, and making sure, just as so many other productivity books state, making sure you get the important stuff done when it should be done, and making sure that your mind is completely active when you’re doing those things.

You can’t ignore the integral. You can’t, it’s not as easy as turning off your e-mail, it’s not as easy as not taking any phone calls all day. It’s just sadly not that easy. Yeah, I think that’s the big thing people need to understand. I think we all need to keep reassessing that, break everything that we do down into this “triple one” principle.

John:

Right, and especially the interesting aspect of that. Because you talk about one of the key ways to prevent burn-out is to stay happy. It seem so basic, but if you’re interested in what you’re doing, then you’re engaged and then that prevents burn-out, if I understood your book correctly. Would that be accurate?

Mark:

Well, I think so, and I would sort of add to that piece. It’s the, I feel the happiness comes from the fulfillment and the satisfaction that you don’t have anything hanging over you, so you’re not, when we think about the burn-out stage or we think about the path that takes us to that stage, it’s because we’re constantly, as you said earlier, John, we’re constantly fighting fires, and we’re constantly shifting gears and shifting directions, just to try and get these little things done. I think when you start to focus on what’s important, and you achieve that, you actually concede to yourself that it’s all right to do something interesting for twenty minutes or for half an hour.

John:

Nice.

Mark:

Because you’ve achieved what you wanted to achieve for the day.

John:

Yes.

Mark:

I think we can’t be too hard on ourselves in that respect. We’ve got to understand that we set out in business to enjoy it. No one ever says to their parents, “I’m going to start a business and two years in, I’m going to absolutely hate it. I’m going to be doing work that I don’t enjoy.” No one says that. So you’ve got to keep it interesting. No question.

John:

Fantastic. One of the guests that you had on “Excellence Expected” was none other than Guy Kawasaki, and one of the things that he said in that interview that I wanted to ask you about, that I thought was so great, is “most CEOs suck at social media.” Since one of the other things that you offer on your website, is something again that you can download for free, everybody, “Five Twitter Sins,” I’d love to have you talk about Guy’s quote and the whole concept of social media and all that. Good stuff.

Mark:

Yeah, it was a fun one with Guy, such a fantastic character and such a nice, gracious chap. The sentiment there, the context of that was really that, he’s very much, and this is massively advocated by so many entrepreneurs, but he’s very much about people-to-people, human-to-human, and that’s why most CEOs generally suck at social media, because they don’t understand that it’s not the traditional one-way, linear, shout-out-loud marketing that they perhaps are used to.

That kind of puts that into some context, and I think especially in small business, I find that most people still don’t get how social media works, because they feel like they should go on there. It’s like an e-mail newsletter, they think their e-mail newsletter is still the way to go about marketing, using e-mail marketing. The minute that you realize no one really cares what’s in your newsletter, the minute you start to get creative and actually start to give value. I think that’s where so many people in small business really, really struggle. They’ll jump on, they’ll pop a tweet out once every three days because “it’s the right thing to do,” they feel somehow vindicated by doing so.

All they’ll do is, they’ll say, we’ve got a new product, we’ve got a new service, or we’ve won an award, or we’ve got new premises, or new team member. No one cares. When you start to dig underneath that and really dig into it, most people in small business, they only worry about that, because they assume it will take all of their time to create this massive overarching social strategy, when actually they can start, they can really start very easily by just being their self and having a bit of personality, and having something to say that will connect with people. You know, the whole “know-like-trust” linear path through

That starts with personality, and I think that’s what Guy was getting at, that most CEOs don’t get that. I do believe a lot of small business people still don’t understand that it’s all right to just be yourself and actually be you.

John:

Yes, because especially when I’m coaching people on how to pitch themselves to investors, I explain to them time and again that you’re pitching yourself. They’re investing in you and then your idea, not the other way around. Social media is a great way to develop relationships as you mention in your “five Twitter sins to avoid.” Judy Robinett who wrote that great book, “How to be a Power Connector,” and how we actually met, which is a great example of connecting, is all about connecting through people and who can you acknowledge on Twitter that’s said something nice about you and having that personal relationship and your personality come through in social media, which then translates to your brand, which then translates to what you’re doing, really is such great insights that you’re offering people.

Mark:

Well, I think it really is about that, I think it is about just connecting and being there and adding the value.

John:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). One of the things that I really enjoyed recently is your new Periscope videos that you’re doing, and you had such great tips on start-ups. There’s three of them, focus, pivot, and profit. I wanted to have you, if you wouldn’t mind, go into each one a little bit, but in particular, I love this concept of how being, the analogy you used of the captain and this ship and one degree.

Mark:

It’s a massive one that is, and really understanding that, that’s in the pivot, and it kind of overlaps into focus as well, but definitely the ability to be able to pivot and just decide that you’ve gone ever so slightly in the wrong direction, and when you start looking back over your shoulder, you’re miles away from where you wanted to be. I think, as you said, the captain of the ship analogy is a really useful one, because if you set out in small business, I don’t know any business, really, that one year later is exactly the same as it was the year before, you know, when they first started. People change.

The businesses that go under, in my opinion, a lot of the problems that they have is they don’t realize soon enough that they have got it wrong. They’re focused so much on being busy, getting through the day today, going in and doing what they need to do just to get through that day. They’ve not stepped away from it, looked to the big picture and course corrected where they need to. You know, if you do set off one degree out for six months, you’re still only, you’re within touching distance of where you thought you might probably want to be. But a year down the line, eighteen months down the line, you’ve got such a massive chasm to cross to get back on course, that people really do then start to lose a bit of faith.

I think having the mindset of being able to pivot and allowing yourself to actually understand that that’s all right. It’s not failure, you’re just changing. If you go to a restaurant, you order a steak, and then the minute the guy walks off, you say, “Excuse me, actually, sir, I changed my mind, I didn’t want a steak, I wanted a lasagna.” He doesn’t care, he’s not, oh, look at this guy, he’s changed his mind. It’s just that steak wasn’t going to work for you at that time. I think that’s, allowing yourself to have that confidence that it’s not failure, you don’t have to impress anyone, you don’t have to pretend to anyone that you’ve got everything sussed, it’s all right to have that pivot.

I think that’s where the focus comes in. You’ve got to, I believe you’ve got to have the focus on the day-to-day, and you’ve got to schedule a time, as we mentioned earlier, to be able to get through the important tasks. But then, you’ve got to allow yourself to focus on the course. If you look Eric Reeves’s book, the job of a founder is to steer the business, it’s to knock it back in line. It’s like a puck on an ice rink, you’ve just got to knock it in the right direction. That’s the same thing with focus, you’ve got to take some time out to not only focus on the minutiae and get the day-to-day done, but focus on this course, and if it’s not right, be able to pivot through.

When you put that together with a third tip that I discussed in that Periscope, which is to have the profit-first mentality, and this is something that people like Chris talks about a heck of a lot. You’ve got to understand that it’s not about being in a pub and saying how much you turn over. No one cares. It’s about actually making the cash, you’ve done the thing that makes your business a success. Really, when we break it right down, is you’ve got to have cash in the bank. If you don’t have that, you won’t be there doing business.

John:

That’s so valuable to our listeners, because when you’re pitching an investor, you have to not just say how you’re going to make money, but how you’re going to be profitable so that they can actually get the return on investment that they’re seeking. If you’re just talking about how many users you have on an app and you haven’t figured out how to monetize it, it’s meaningless.

Mark:

Well, the best example of that is Twitter, you know, they still struggle. They still really, really struggle. We’ll tweet that.

John:

We’ll get kicked off Twitter.

Mark:

Yeah, we’ll get kicked off Twitter, see you all on Facebook. It is difficult, and in the first year, you just, you get through the first year by getting through the day to day. You go to work, you’re busy, you come home, and then the next day you do the exact same thing, and before you know it, you’re eighteen months in, you’ve not made a penny. It’s difficult because you need to step out and look at the profit. We’ve all fallen prey to that before.

The sad thing is, it’s because we enjoy what we’re doing so much that we just want to go and do it, especially new start-ups or new business people. Never had the freedom, we’ve never had that freedom to be able to do what we want, so for a year or eighteen months or whatever it is, we’re just going and loving it. We’re like a dog in a field, we’re running around, it’s amazing. But without it actually being profitable, not turning something over that’s impressive but without actually making profit, the second eighteen months is not going to be as much fun.

John:

No, and I think one of the key things that you talk about is this importance of focus. One of the focal points is how many months until we break even, and once we hit that milestone, then we can start talking about being profitable, but if you don’t even have that first milestone of breaking even in mind, then you’re never going to be profitable.

Mark:

Exactly. Completely, sorry, just to interject there, I think one of the, the other thing I would say to people, I would even skip over break even. If your goal is just to recoup the cash that you’ve invested, that really feels like such a safe goal. I always really, really try and tell people, look, just make the profit as quick as you can. Because you can make it, with the right focus in the right place. You can focus on it, because if you didn’t think you could profit from it, you wouldn’t have started the business.

John:

You wouldn’t have started it, exactly. Great. Well, the other thing that’s really in your wheelhouse of expertise is Periscope and Blab and getting leads from all that. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Mark:

Yeah, absolutely, this is still quite a new thing for me, actually. Well, it’s a new thing for everyone at this point, and there’s certainly some massive social media influences that are doing a really, really good job with this. But I’ve been using Periscope very specifically to build the relationship, put my face there, because I do an audio podcast, I write the blogs, I run the Facebook groups, I do everything else, I do, I run the agency. People in the agency know me completely differently to the people that listen to the podcast.

It’s all right for me to go on Periscope and give my tips out, but I also want you to see me walking through my house, past my Batman and Robin picture and my set of comics. You know, I’ve got, I’ve just literally picked up a Superman hat , and I want people to see that it’s me that’s doing this. It’s all these things that I say, I’m actually practicing. It’s not just wannabe, this sounds like a really good idea. That’s what I’m using Periscope for, so it’s about generating leads in a very passive, nurturing manner, just allowing you to contextualize a lot of the content that you put out there.

Because if you send an e-mail newsletter to your clients, they don’t know, they don’t care. If you’ve won an award and you tell them on the, the only newsletter that you’ve sent out in the last six months is you telling your clients how well you’ve done at awards ceremony, they don’t care, but if they know you, if they feel like they know you, then they care. Then they reply, and say, “Well done.” Then you’ve got a dialogue, you can start talking, you can start to help them, you can start selling things with them. For me, that’s where Periscope really comes into it.

Of course, it has so many applications, but I think for the small business owner, for the entrepreneur, it’s about taking your face and making it something that people are used to seeing and enjoying what you’re doing. I think it’s just add the personal element, and it will add to the arsenal that you’ve got when it comes to saying, “Listen, guys, I’ve got a new product, let me give you this behind the scenes look at it. I’m going to turn my phone around. Here is my product that I am working on right now, so when you buy this, you can see, it’s blood, sweat, and tears gone into it.” I think that’s really powerful.

John:

We’re going to tweet that out. “Use Periscope to make your face something people are used to seeing.” That’s a great line. Love it. Then can you chat briefly about Blab?

Mark:

Yeah, Blab again, I mean, this is really new as we’re recording this one. But I’m seeing, especially in podcasting space, I’m seeing so many people, so many people start to use Blab for recording, which is mindblowing, you know, really just recording the entire conversation. Which I love, I love the idea, I wish I’d kind of done it sooner. I think Blab is really really useful, I think that’s going to really find its place for small business in particular, when it comes to Q&A sessions or when it comes to engaging your customers.

Like for example with podcast websites, I can see us using Blab to have a conversation, “Listen, guys, what do you want? What else can we do to make your life better?” Allow people to jump in on that conversation. I think small business people, the barrier, I wrote a blogpost on it earlier, actually. It’s called “Periscope: The Marketing’s Game Changer.” Something like that, it’s over on the website. It talks about how the barrier to creating an engaging video content has never been lower. We’ve all got amazing cameras in our pockets, we’ve all got access to high speed internet. We complain if we’ve got 3G, like that’s the slowest we can tolerate. Think about, that’s amazing.

The tools that we’ve got at our disposal, the things that we’ve been doing business with for so long. We’ve got our personality, we’ve got our faces, we’ve got our expertise, we’ve got our smile, we’ve got the way we articulate things, and these are the tools that we’ve been doing business with for the last whatever, five hundred, six hundred years. Commerce has been going on with these tools only. People using Periscope and Blab, that’s all they’re doing, they’re using the tools that they’ve always had.

I think that’s where small business needs to just perhaps catch up a little bit, insofar as don’t be shy of it, don’t be afraid, don’t worry about, well, what do I need to say? What do I say? Just go on, and people, when you’ve done two or three of them, people will tell you what they want you to talk about. Because they will ask you the questions. I think that’s where Blab is really going to take off. It’s about small businesses, it’s about talking directly to the people that you want to work for, that you want to serve. I don’t think there’s ever been a medium like it. I think it’s stunning.

John:

It’s great. It reminds me of an old TV show called “The Brady Bunch” here in America, where they had all these squares of the family members popping up and pointing and looking at each other. It’s quite funny to see all that now become a reality, of a whole new way to communicate and connect. In addition to the book that you have on your site of “The Fourteen-day Guide to Being More Productive,” and you mentioned The1Thing, is there another book that you want to leave our listeners with as far as a recommendation about life, productivity, anything.

Mark:

One of the biggest influences on my life has been such a short book, but it’s so powerful. It’s “The Strangest Secret” by Earl Nightingale. I mean, it’s such a powerful book. It talks about success, it talks about what we as a society, what we desire and how we pursue what we desire in life. The sentiment of that book being, we become what we think about, and it’s really that simple, the strangest secret to life is we become what we think about. It’s so simple, yet so profound. I think that is always my barometer. If I’m in a bad mood, if I’m having a bad day, I always go back to, we become what we think about. Do you want to become this pain in the ass, negative person? If not, get over that bad mood. Just get back to normal.

John:

Right.

Mark:

Yeah, the Strangest Secret, Earl Nightingale, is amazing.

John:

Oh, that’s terrific. I love that. We’ll be sure to put that in the transcript and the show notes for people to click on that. Because you know, if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re afraid that this isn’t going to work out or you got some bad news from a customer or what have you, you can either continue to think about that, and make catastrophe in your head and play worst case scenario out, or you can stop yourself and focus on something you do want to have happen. That’s great insight, there, Mark.

Mark, it’s been a pleasure. How can our listeners follow you on Twitter and your website? Give us all that good information if you would.

Mark:

Of course, well, thank you, John. Honestly, it’s been a real pleasure chatting with you. I’ve enjoyed every second of it. The easiest places to connect with me are, as you said, on Twitter @Mr. Asquith, and over at excellence-expected.com. Or if you do a Google search for Excellence Expected, the site will come up, and you can find everything there.

John:

Terrific. Well, it’s just full of so much valuable information, and your podcast is fantastic, you have amazing guests and we’re honored to have had you on The Successful Pitch today. Have a great one.

Mark:

Thank you, John, all the best.

John:

All the best. Thanks for listening to The Successful Pitch podcast. If you like the show, please go to iTunes and write a review, and encourage your friends to write reviews, too. It really helps get the word out. You know, people say that the longest distance is between someone’s mouth and their wallet. People can tell you they’re going to invest, but when it comes time to write the check, they don’t do it. So how do you get people to say yes and then follow through?

Visualize yourself on the left side of a river bank, and you have to cross the river, and on the other side of the river is where the funding happens. So first you make up your idea, then you make it real, then you make it reoccur. Once you start dipping you toe into the water to get to funding, that’s where I can help. I get you across that river faster than you would on your own, with a lot less frustration than you will get when you hear a bunch of noes and you don’t know why. So if you want some help getting funded faster with less frustration, go to my free funding webinar, sellingsecretsforfunding.com/webinar. Sign up and get in-depth information on how you can get funded fast. Thanks.

TSP038 | Roger Dooley – Transcription

Posted by John Livesay in Uncategorized | 0 comments

John Livesay:
Today’s guest on The Successful Pitch is Roger Dooley, the author of Brainfluence. Roger has so much expertise in neuroscience and how our brains work and how to persuade people that he shares in our episode today he talks about the importance of social proof and being likable and that our brains have literally evolved to pay attention to stories. So, if you want to get investor’s brains to literally light up like it does on a brain scan, tell them a story.

And instead of just thinking of our brains as left brains about numbers and right brain about emotional storytelling, he has a whole concept about system one is the gut reaction we have, we don’t have to think about it, we just do it and then system two is a more in-depth analysis that we have to do like due diligence in an investor, but it’s important to realize our brains want to conserve energy, so you want to make things as easy to understand as possible. He talks about that if something is too difficult to process, even using the wrong font in your pitch deck can cause someone to say no. So, listen to find out all the ways to get people to say yes to your pitch in today’s episode.

Hi and welcome to The Successful Pitch podcast. Today’s guest is Roger Dooley, the author of several books on the importance of our brain and how that influences our ability to persuade and convince people with neuromarketing. He is a contributor to Forbes, an author and keynote speaker and big demand for learning this neuroscience behavior research so that people can attract new customers. Roger, welcome to the show.

Roger Dooley:
Well, thanks. So glad to be here John.

John:
I’m really curious if you wouldn’t mind taking our listeners back on your background a little bit about what made you interested in how our brains work and how did you become such an expert in it.

Roger:
Well, it’s kind of a strange story. It really dates back to my college days. I studied as an engineer a long time ago, back in the days of slide rulers if you can believe that.

John:
I love it.

Roger:
Yes and if your listeners don’t know what they are, they can check an antique store.

John:
Pre-calculators, people!

Roger:
In any case, I was studying as an engineer, but in school I was really pulled in a couple of directions. One was psychology and I minored in psychology, which was sort of an odd thing. I was the only engineer that I knew that was minoring in psychology and the other was advertising and that was really just a strange interest that I had. When I was in the library suppose to be studying differential equations and organic chemistry, instead I’d go over the periodical department to read advertising age, but then I put those aside, had a pretty conventional engineering career to start.

Work my way up to product management that had more of a marketing emphasis and finally at a pretty young age my corporate career finally seemed to be taking off and I was in charge of strategic planning for a fortune 1000 company and I picked that moment to bail out of the corporate world completely and become an entrepreneur and this is something that may resonate with some of our listeners, but this was in the early days of home computerizing and my partner and I started a direct mail business geared to owners of home computers and via PO of this kind of marketing.

We were using a catalog format primarily was that at the time, it was the most quantitative kind of marketing available. It was, we could do things like square inch analysis. We could do A/B testing. Now, these tools really pale by comparison by what you can do in today’s digital world, but at the time, we actually had a pretty good idea of which elements of our marketing were working and that really contrasted with most marketers particularly at that time who pretty much guessing at whether their marketing was driving traffic, driving sales or not.

So, that, that was my entrepreneurial start and it morphed into over time several businesses and became much more digital. I got involved in both e-commerce and digital marketing, SEO, online community building. Built a very large community in the college space and sold that business a few years ago. While this was going on, about 11 years ago now, I saw the confluence of two areas coming together, neuroscience and marketing.

People were starting to not only talk about but actually try and start applying the tools of neuroscience to improve marketing and this would be doing things like using brain scans or brain wave measurements while people were watching an advertisement, TV commercial or perhaps looking at a product to evaluate their true response to it. I did what any good digital marketer would do, I register a domain, NeuroscienceMarketing.com and then started writing there. That was ten years ago.

So, I’ve been writing about it ever since. That site alone, I’m up to well over a 1,000 posts. I’ve got a blog at Forbes on pretty much the same topic and four years ago, Wiley published my book Braininfluence, which is 100 ideas that let entrepreneurs and businesses of any size apply some of the findings of brain science and behavior research to improve their marketing and the reason I created that book and really a lot of what my writing is and my online writing are techniques that don’t require you to have an expensive brain scan machine or to engage in an agency that’s going to cost tens of thousands of dollars to run a simple test, because most businesses simply don’t have that kind of money in their marketing budgets. Certainly big consumer brands do.

If you’re going to run a super old commercial, putting $50,00 to $100,000 into some brain type of analysis of it, some neuromarketing studies makes a huge amount of sense, but most entrepreneurs and even in large businesses most projects simply can’t justify that. So, what I’ve tried to do is translate some of the findings of brain and behavior research into actionable strategies.

John;
I love it because when the founders are pitching investors, they want to be intriguing, they want to be enchnting. I know you got an amazing quote from Guy Kawasaki saying, you know, we all need to be enchanting and that your book is one of the best ways to do it. So, kudos to that, because he certainy knows about the startup world.

Roger:
I’ve known Guy for quite a few years and he’s really great. He’s an inspiration as any mentor to entrepreneurs and I loved his book Enchantment and I think he wrote that blurb around the time of that book coming out, which was really a great book because so often entrepreneurs ignore that aspect of what they’re doing. In other words, they’re pushing facts and figures and so on where Guy would say, hey, it’s necessary to be enchanting, which isn’t a word that gets that much use these days, but it’s clear what he means.

John:
Yes, I had another guest, Ben Larson talk about the need to be enchanting to your investors. So, if those are the only two people I have ever heard use that word, but since you’re such an expert on how our brain works and neuroscience I really want to dive into this. You know, obviously, your book is great about 100 ways to persuade people, can you give us the top three or four that come to mind as it involves pitching something that is probably very technical if you’re a tech CEO and how do you get people into the right brain world of storytelling so it’s memorable and easy to understand.

Roger:
Wow. There are certainly a lot of ways and a lot of it depends on the context, but I think that for starters the divide that I would make, there are a lot of ways to divvy up how our brains works hence the right brain, left brain where right brain is typically been associated with creativity and emotion where left brain is facts and figures. That division has some validity, but as with most divisions, it’s a lot more complicated if you really look at what’s going on.

The split that I tend to use is conscious and non-conscious and it’s loosely maps to a split that was purposed by Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, where he talks about system one thinking and system two thinking and system one is, he describes this very well in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow and system one is fast, intuitive, emotional. It’s rule-based and it’s no energy. It doesn’t cost the brain a lot of energy to do system one thinking and make decisions using system one processes.

John:
Is that like a gut reaction?

Roger:
Yes, it would include your gut. It would include doing something because when you go into buy a brand of detergent, you pick it off the shelf because that’s the brain you always buy. Okay, you have paused to consider the different merits of the different brands or products. You look at the shelf, you recognize the brand package that you normally get. You grab it and you move on. That would be heuristic based or rule based, but there can also be an emotional base. If you’re trying to decide between a couple of items and you just look at one and say, eh, I like the way that one looks and grab it. That’s system one thinking.

When you start creating a mental spreadsheet and listing pros and cons of different alternatives and really sort of forcing yourself to grind through the thought process, that’s system two. One of Kahneman’s insights is that system two is very energy intensive. Our brains use an inordinate portion of the body’s energy already and as a result they’re always in conservation mode. They’re trying to find shortcuts and ways to make decisions in a simple and energy efficient way.

John:
Everyone is looking for the hack, aren’t they?

Roger:
Right, our brains are doing that subconsciously. So, our brain can make a decision using system one it’ll do that. Sometimes you have to force it into using system to thinking. If you’re buying a product that has to work with your existing – buying a piece of software that you’re going to implement in your company. You’ve got to look at it in some of the criteria. You can’t just say, wow, I like their logo or the sales person is really charming. You really got to look at say, okay, do we have the hardware and software to support this. Will this be compatible with those elements of our systems that it has to interface with and so on. So, certain kinds of decisions do have to use system two, but in general our brains will try to get out of that mode as quickly as possible.

John:
So, what I love about this so far. First of all, I’ve never heard anybody describe it like that, so that’s huge. I love learning something new and I’m sure our listeners do too, but if you think of yourself as someone pitching an investor, your pitch has to be so enchanting and compelling and giving them goose bumps that it is system one. You know, I like that. I want to know and then they get you another meeting and the due diligence starts. That’s going to be system two where it’s a deep dive of sometimes 50 to 70 hours of looking at everything you’re asking and saying to make sure it’s true before they give you a million dollars. Would that be an accurate breakdown?

Roger:
I would say that would be somewhat accurate. Although certainly when you get into due diligence, that’s definitely system to thinking where you’re grinding through numbers and being sure things add up and check out and assumptions are in fact correct and are based on market realities and so on and so on.

So, that’s definitely is however I’m sure we’ve all been part of decision processes where the decision maker has made an emotional decision and the facts are then somewhat shaped to support that decision. Not that an investor is going to take a horrible deal. You know, if the numbers don’t add up and they find that they, hey, there’s all kinds of flaws in your calculations, but I think there’s an emotional decision that I trust these people.

I believe their story about their product in the market that the due diligence phase will go a lot better than if there is less of a commitment from the emotional side of things and actually that’s probably an important thing from the investor side, because it’s easy to get carried away. One of the worst ways to choose employees for most jobs is the in-person interview and that sounds counter-intuitive because we feel, okay, that’s the only way to really pick the right person, but there’s a lot of evidence to show that we are influenced by various cognitive biases when we’re doing an in-person interview.

We are influenced by how much that person might be like us, for example. We are probably over weigh physical appearance, which in most jobs isn’t particularly relevant. We probably overweigh their facility for speaking and so on. You know, there’s a whole host of things that may not be relevant. If you’re going to choose somebody for an in-person salesperson, then an in-person interview is probably not too bad, but if you’re going to hire a project manager or a coder or an accountant or even perhaps a phone rep, you know, that is not the best way to do it.

John:
It’s interesting because the founders work so hard to get these in-face meetings so that they can have an emotional connection with the investor so they have a sense of who they are, but I think what you said is so valuable for the founders to realize is that the investors are human and they’re probably going to be a little biased in how they’re just judging. So, if they’re going to judge you on your appearance, you want to look your best. If they’re going to judge you on how well you speak, you want to practice your pitch. All of that stuff might get a little more weight than it should, but that’s human nature, so we can certainty make sure we look our best and practice our pitch so that we come across as confident and persuasive speakers, right?

Roger:
Well, I think there are a lot of other things too that sort of go beyond the sort of obvious things and one of them, backing up just a second. Probably 30+ years ago, Robert Cialdini purposed his six principles of persuasion and those are still very valid. They’re things that are like reciprocity. If I do something for you, you’re more likely to do something for me. Social proof. If you see other people doing something, you’re more likely to do that yourself.

So, if you see two restaurants and one’s got a line going out the door, you’re likely to get in the line rather than go to the one that has plenty of empty of tables and it would be more convenient and so these principles and certainty many others. There are many other techniques, but these principles I think it apply in the pitch process very well.

Well, one of these, of course, I just mentioned social proof. If there are any indications of adoption of a product or a service or whatever, this is something that you see. Like, whenever you go to a software as a service site, you’ll see, you know, join our 13,000 users or 28 million users or whatever and they’re evoking social proof and that’s something that can be effective with anybody. One of his other principles is authority.

So, if you can get, we were talking about Guy Kawasaki. If you can get guy to say he likes your product, then when you show up at the VCs office or the angel investor’s office, that will be persuasive. They’ll say, hmm, okay, Kawasaki likes this and it doesn’t have to be, you know, it could be anybody who would be perceived as having some expertise and knowledge. It could even be a college professor. It could be a local business leader or somebody, but that will help.

Another one of his principles is liking and what that means is if, it’s simpler than just well, gee, I like this person because they have a pleasing personality. What you need to try and do is establish attributes that you have in common with the person that you’re dealing with and it can be anything and so what I would always recommend is if you’re going to pitch somebody, do your homework before hand. Look at their social media profiles, find out what you have in common. Maybe, it would be awesome if you went to the same school or perhaps lived in the same city for a period of time. If you both own dogs, there could be any number of things, similar hobbies, interests.

Whenever you can point that out, that is a powerful tool to establish liking and I recall reading a story about a car salesperson. I don’t recommend that our listeners actually do this, but what he would do as part of his sales processes when someone said, oh yeah, I’m original from Brooklyn, he would immediately find or invent some tie there. So, you know, if he didn’t have any actual relationship to Brooklyn, he would say, oh yeah, my uncle lived there and the person was to create this like, I don’t recommend doing that, but it’s an illustration of how that can work.

I think another way that liking can be used is also in marketing a product or service. Often times the person creating the product or selling the product has something in common with the particular customers for that product. If I’m creating let’s say a new pet product or if I’m selling pet supplies or something of that nature, as a pet owner have something in common with all of my customers and by bringing that to the front, in other words if I put myself on the home page or the landing page with a picture of my dog, then all my customers are going to immediately see that I have something in common with them and that will create liking. So, liking is really the most powerful tools whether it’s marketing or pitching or anything else.

John:
Well, I really love what you just described. I mean, this whole concept of social proof, you know, we’re always talking about your pitch deck has to have some traction with either users and certainty what I find really interesting about this is if you watch Shark Tank, if one shark says yes and then they start competing with each other.

If you want in, then I want in and I don’t want you to have something that I don’t have and you get that momentum going where they’re bidding against each other or much like somebody having multiple bids on a home. All that social proof is people will bid over what it might be even worth in the case of a home, because it’s in such demand and this concept of obviously having other people who are authorities endorse your product is key.

The whole likability factor is completely fascinating to me that, you know, the more we have in common with someone and sometimes it’s something as simple as well, I think we’re on the same page here, because you and I both believe XYZ, right. That kind of mindset that you’re telling someone allows them to connect with you and say, oh, this is someone I want to be in business with, because sometimes these investment relationships can last longer than marriages. They can be ten years. So, they have to like you and see that they’re going to have some things in common and want to work with you and that’s really helpful and interesting, Roger.

Do you have any insights that you can share with the readers about persuasion in general over and above these six principles? Is there anything else that jumps out at you that really gets people to have an emotional connection. I know that you’re real area of expertise with brands, is there come kind of, either through system one or system two or right brain, left brain lenses that you can share with us?

Roger:
Well, let me, earlier on you mentioned stories and stories are incredibly powerful persuasion tools and there’s a reason for that. Our brains evolved to pay attention to stories. Back in our hunter gather days, our early ancestors didn’t have to go out and find out where danger was or where food was on their own, one person could come back to the group and explain where he or she ha been that day, where had they found danger, where they found food, and then the entire group would know that and as a result, that was an evolutionary advantage and we sort of evolved to pay attention to that kind of information and even today, when you put a person in an MRI machine that measures their brain activity in essentially real time and tell them a story, you will see their brain lighting up as if they were performing those same acts.

The motor areas of their brain will be lighting up even tho their immobilized in this noisy tube, their brain is acting out the story and one of the more startling things is n experiment that put two people in MRI machines, in separate MRI machines with one of them telling the other a story and what the scientists were really shocked to find was within just a few seconds of a first person starting the story, the second person’s brain started flickering in essence in unison with the first person’s brain.

So, if you want to exercise mind control over somebody, telling them a story is about as close as you’re going to get to that, because their brain will start mirroring yours as you tell that story, so I think that when you are communicating with investors, potential investors, certainty facts and figures are important, but making certain elements into a story or a narrative will be particularly powerful.

John:
Is there any research that shows that people remember your stories more than they do your numbers?

Roger:
There is research that shows stories are memorable, but I don’t think I’ve actually seen a sort of like a side-by-side comparison of the two. The other thing I think is the ease of processing. I talk about our brains are always trying to conserve energy, well, there’s a concept called cognitive fluency and what that means is how easy or difficult something is for our brain to process. If you give somebody, throw slide up that’s a spreadsheet that’s got 20 columns and 50 rows and lots of fine print, that is not easy for our brains to process and it will look difficult and there’s some fascinating research that shows that when something is difficult for us to process, that difficult translates into the follow on action even tho it may be unrelated.

So, for instance, if you read a description of something in a type font that is somewhat harder to read than another type font, okay, it’s the same description, but you, it’s presented in a little bit harder to read fashion. I’m not talking about where a person has to decoded, just you know, it’s just not quite as easy. Like, sort of a fancy font versus a simple San Sera font that people estimate that it takes longer to perform the action you’re describing. In one case, involving simple exercise. The difference between an Ariel font and a brushy-font for two sentences describing the exercise meant a difference in the amount of time people thought it would take to do that to eight minutes to 15 minutes. So, that’s eight versus 15. It’s almost as twice as long.

John:
Twice as long.

Roger:
And the sole difference was the font that they wrote it in. So, when you’re communicating with potential investors or anybody else for that matter, your customers as well, you really want to present things in a simple and easy to process way as possible, because even if something is in fact easy to do, it will seem harder if your explanation looks a little bit harder, so like, if you want somebody to fill out a form on your website, which is pretty common action that you ask people to take, you don’t want to let your desire choose this really cool font that looks like with the design. You want to be sure it is as simple as possible, because you don’t want that extra effort to be on whatever you want your customer, your potential customer to do. So, I think in terms of pitching, that means being really careful how you present your data.

John:
I love it. So, if you want someone to really follow your pitch, make it as easy as possible for them to understand and really pay attention to the details like what font you’re using on your pitch deck.

Roger:
Right, so tabular data maybe can be expressed as a visually graph, maybe some kind of data visualization could be use to make it seem simpler and then even that might be simplified. In other words instead of including a lot of lines and shapes and so on that you think will really be cool, perhaps there’s a simpler way to present that data so that the person losing at it can immediately grasp what’s going on without a whole lot of thought process.

John:
I like to say that the confused mind always says no and what you said, if it seems too difficult to process, it’s going to double the amount of time somebody’s going to decide whether they want to invest in that and it goes back to the system one and system two. If it’s going to require a lot of energy for me to figure this out or read this or squint or try to figure out what that is, then I’m just probably not going to do it. I’m not going to spend time on your pitch deck. Fascinating. Well, before I let you go, I really want to ask you about this wonderful blog you wrote on Forbes about Disney knows your brain and wants your emotions based on that great movie Inside Out. I just love how you dissected Disney’s ability to combine facial coding and neuromarketing. Would you just take a minute and expound on what you wrote there?

Roger:
Sure. Well, first of all, I hope many of our listeners have seen Inside Out. I don’t go to a lot of animated movies, but I did go to this one and it was really interesting the, without any spoilers, the movies involves this young girl who is going through a difficult move and the characters mostly are her emotions. Five emotions in her brain that are having these conversations and all this stuff going on inside her brain and these emotions have been translated into animated characters with different personalities and appearances and it’s really cute, but the amazing thing is that the science underlining this, obviously there aren’t little-animated characters in your head, but the science underlining it is relatively sound.

I mean, it’s not meant to be a documentary by any means, but the emotions are actually based on the work of doctor Paul Ekman who is a technical consultant for the film and years ago, probably 30+ years ago, Ekman more or less invented the concept of facial coding. What he found was through studying people’s expressions that we have just some 50 odd expressions that our faces form and then these in turn could be grouped into a smaller category of emotions, which he has six, but they eliminated one of his for simplicity. There were two emotions, I think surprise and fear were a little bit too similar. They eliminated one of them for the purpose of the movie, but the implications of his facial coding work have been pretty powerful in the neuromarketing space.

There are companies that will analyze people’s expressions as they watch your advertisement or view your product and determine what these people really think about the product, because most people can’t or won’t express their exact feeling about a product. They may say, oh, I like it, when in fact they really don’t like it. Maybe they’re trying to please you, maybe they just don’t know and that’s the first thing that pops into their head. Maybe they like some aspect of it, but some part of their brain is saying, oh, this looks really complicated and a skilled facial coding analysis may be able to pick up those micro expressions as they’re called those sort of fleeting expressions and so there’s a whole basis of neuromarketing that uses facial coding techniques.

First it was done with expert analysis where trained coding experts would look at video, even slow motion video, of people’s responses, but now there are some automated tools that can use cameras and some even webcams or phone cams to perform that same kind of analysis. So, that’s, as far as the movie goes, Disney has a great history of really understanding people’s emotion.

I mean, first of all, you look at Pixar and Disney’s success. They know how to tell a story and they really know how to plan people’s emotions and when you think about it. Who knows more about facial coding than a skill animation artist? Because they have to with just a few lines of their pen, although I guess they probably don’t use pens too much these days, they have to convey an emotion for an animated character that’s going to resonate with the audience. The audience is immediately going to say, oh, that person is sad or worried or well, they seem happy, but there’s a little bit of concern there and so on.

So, they know that for more than five years here in Austin. I’m based in Austin, Texas. Disney had a somewhat secret, not really secret, but they didn’t publicize it in a neuromarketing lab and it was a neuromarketing firm that was under exclusive contract with Disney. Now they are not, so they have other clients, but for a while it was only Disney doing tests to see for instance how people reacted to their entertainment content and other things that they had going on, so Disney is really into this aspect of it and I think that Inside Out is sort of a great combination of this where they’ve actually produced a movie that’s very entertaining and a lot of fun. Kids love it, adults love it, but actually has some pretty good brain science about foundations.

John:
Well, I have a client at Fido Labs that works in artificial intelligence and we were talking about it, because you know, artificial intelligence is all about predicting people’s emotions and trying to understand not just if somebody’s happy or not but why they’re happy or not and another client of mine Mogeeapp.com makes animated emojis and they’re always talking about how do we get the animated emojis to have real life expressions.

So, it’s so relevant on so many different levels so thank you for taking us on that and you know, you have so much great information. I also really loved your article about writing headlines that surprise our brain really grab, because if we want to grab an investor’s attention, just something that you really have proven it with your article of, you know, when you give your brain something unexpected that is grabs their attention so that’s whether, you know, the tag line for your startup or something that makes people remember you, there’s so much great information that you have on your website.

So, you’ve mentioned so many books, the six principles of persuasion, of course yours. We want to encourage everyone to get Brainfluence. Are there any other books that you would recommend that the readers take a look at?

Roger:
Well, I think I could go on and on about that and certainly I would leave some good off. I think Cialdini’s Influence is a classic that people need to have on their shelf. If you have folks that are in the software website space, Nir Eyal’s Hooked is excellent. It’s sort of a blueprint to create products that keep people engaged and turn them into habits, which is really what predicts success in the apps space or in the website’s space. You know, if you can get people, you know, to habitually use your products, those are what I’d suggest.

John:
Thank you Roger. That sticky factor that everyone is looking for that have people keep coming back to reuse them. Fantastic. Roger….

Roger:
My other author friends are going to be mad at me.

John:
I know it’s like Sophie’s choice a little bit. So, how can people follow you on social media? Your neuromarketing website and somebody wants to hire you for speaking, tell people how they can keep track of what you’re doing and follow you and all that good stuff, buy your book.

Roger:
Sure, well, the best place to start would be RogerDooley.com. That’s sort of jumping off point where you can reach my neuromarketing blog, my Forbes blog, and my social profiles and so on, see my speaking stuff. On Twitter I’m @RogerDooley. So that’s fairly logical and I hope to connect with some of your listeners.

John:
Fantastic. Well, you’ve been a source of fascinating information about how our brain works and how we stay motivated and how to influence people. I really have found it very compelling. You grabbed my attention and I’m sure the listeners as well. We’ll be sure to put your book and the other ones you’ve recommended in the show notes Roger. Thanks again for joining us today.

Roger:
My pleasure John. Happy to be here.