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.

TSP037 | Geri Stengel – Transcription

Posted by John Livesay in Uncategorized | 0 comments

John Livesay:

Welcome to The Successful Pitch. Today’s guest is Geri Stengel who runs a company called VentureNeer. Geri is this wonderful combination of a serial entrepreneur, a teacher, an author, and someone who is an expert in making social impact. She talks about the importance of your elevator pitch grabbing someone’s attention either through questions and analogy or statistic. Geri also says how important it is whether you’re a female or a male entrepreneur that you are an agile learner, someone with curiosity, tolerate ambiguity and that you have grit, integrity, and passion, and finally that you’re coachable. Those are the things investors are looking for when they hear a pitch. She’s an expert in equity crowd funding and has a real insight into how to find angels, what they’re looking for, and what you need to do with all the new legalities. She has great stories to share with us, enjoy the episode.

Hi, welcome to The Successful Pitch, today’s guest is Geri Stengel who if you want to know who you get when you combine a serial entrepreneur, a teacher, and an online business expert that is making social impact, you get Geri. Geri, welcome to the show.

Geri Stengel:

Well, thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

John:

Well, you have so much expertise in so many areas. One of which of course is equity crowd funding and specializing in helping female founders get their message across in a strong way, but before we get into all the things that you are doing, I want to ask you to take the readers and listeners; because people can read the transcripts as well; back to how did you become such an expert. I know from your background you worked at both Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. I love to hear people’s story and how they got start. So, would you mind telling us what life was like at Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal and how you decided to parley that into what you’re doing now at VentureNeer.

Geri:

Absolutely. I love working at Dow Jones, but certainty it was not one of the most women friendly companies and when I transferred into the information service division I had double the responsibility and made 60% less than the man I replaced and when I complained about it, I would get answers like, well, you’re not married, you don’t have a family to take care of.

John:

Oh my gosh. What year was that? Just for reference.

Geri:

That was 89.

John:

Okay, it’s not that long ago, people.

Geri:

No. And really sort of what got my juices flowing was when I looked, when I started hearing all of the stories of women raising money and that they were experiencing similar and different things that I experienced and I really wanted to make a different, so I had already been involved with women entrepreneurs in the late 90s. I was on the board of the National Association of Women Business Owners. I had started a conference company in which we did conferences for women that were breaking through the one million dollar revenue mark and then I got more into the social impact world.

As I was saying, I started writing in Forbes to give women role models so that they could see women just like them were starting and growing multimillion dollar companies that were scaling into mega companies and that could be tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars and even billion dollar companies and over the last three and a half years, I’ve had the honor of interviewing some of the most successful women entrepreneurs that are out there.

John:

What do you see – I’ve actually read some research that says a lot of women CEOs perform better than male CEOs. What do you see is the big difference between a female founder and a male founder, if any?

Geri:

I actually don’t think that there is a different between male and female founders that are successful. I think they are agile learners and that women and men may approach it slightly differently, but they have intellectual curiosity, they tolerate ambiguity, they have EQ or emotional quotient and those are the things that are really critical to being a successful leader and I don’t really think that there’s a difference between men and women. I think one of the reasons women led companies are out performing male-led companies is that there’s diversity in their companies.

So, a women-led company is going to be more likely to have a diverse management team and diversity takes all shapes and sizes, so that could be race, ethnicity, it can be gender. I don’t think that women have, in a sense, a better skill sets at being a leader.

John:

Interesting. You know, I really want to take a deep dive if you don’t mind in what you just described because so many of our listeners are trying to find ways to make their pitch successful when they’re talking to angels, VCs or to even get funding through equity crowd funding, which we’re going to get to in a minute, but regardless of what challenge you’re going after. Everyone that you’re talking to or pitching to about your company you have to come across as a leader, so those things that you mentioned that all successful founders have are worth just describing in a little bit more detail, because they’re so great and it’s so important that everybody realizes that they must come across as an agile learner, someone with EQ, emotional intelligence, tolerating ambiguity, I love that one, and I think the other one was just being curious. Is that right? Did I get those right?

Geri:

Absolutely, absolutely. I’ll throw in a last item there. It’s perseverance or grit and I think in terms of presentation skills, it’s really showing that you have high integrity, so it’s really important to show potential investors that you are trust worthy, because they’re giving you their personal money, that you are passionate about the business that you’re going into and that you’ll do anything to succeed at that business.

In the presentation, I’m not sure that you’re actually showing your intellectual curiosity, you’re certainty showing your expertise, your knowledge, your skill set, and you’re doing it in a very quick way, because, you know, when you are presenting and you know this better than me, you only have a few minutes and you have a few minutes and you need to do it in a plain English.

So, you’re weaving in a story, you’re showing that you’re trust worthy and you’re passionate and, yeah, so there are a variety of things that you need to convey as you’re doing your presentation and I’m just going to take a sip of water now.

John:

Of course, I love what you said about in plain English and weaving in a story. One of the things I like to work with my clients on is, you know, how did you come up with the idea for the name of your company, how did you come up with the idea to solve this problem. Take people back and show that you were curious to solve a problem and make a difference in the world, especially in the world of anything to do with social impact.

So, those are some great, great suggestions and insights, because those are the, what I call, the unspoken questions that an investor has when they’re listening to you pitch, so it’s so important that you’re aware of the subtext and am I coming across as someone with passion and integrity and grit and all the things that you say and often times having a story about perseverance or a story about a previous startup that you had to figure out how to make something work, those are the kinds of stories that investors are looking for.

Let me ask you about an article you wrote for Forbes where you’re talking about women get their game won with angels and how one of the things you talk about in there is you need an elevator pitch, an executive summary, and then the deck. I love these five things that you talk about. The team, the idea, the market size, the competition, and what’s your unique advantage. Can you expound on that great article you wrote for Forbes?

Geri:

Okay, so I actually wrote it for QuickBooks.

John:

Oh, I’m so sorry. My mistake.

Geri:

That’s quite alright. I write in QuickBooks and for Turnstone, which is still cased as small business and then I also write in Forbes. So, in QuickBooks I’m primarily writing about financing and I was writing about, again, the tools that you need for your presentation. So, you know, now I’m forgetting what the question was. What do you want me to cover on that one?

John:

Sure, I was just curious about what, when you’re talking about the team and the idea and the market size and the competitive advantage and what you’re bringing to market place, how do you encourage people to bring all of that to life? Is there anything that you can expand upon about what you wrote there?

Geri:

So, I think it’s really important to grab investor’s attention. So, I teach entrepreneurs also and last night we’re doing our elevator pitches and we were talking about different ways opening whether it’s your investor presentation or your elevator pitch and I know you interviewed Sam Horn, so I was giving her approach, which is to start with three questions and I think that is one really, really terrific way of doing it.

Other people may do an analogy, so one student in my class was we are the Expedia of XYZ and then the other thing that I also like to do is open with a number. So, I actually used an elevator pitched from somebody I was helping a couple of years ago who was doing the Dolphin Tank, which is Springboard Enterprise Platform and she opened up with 70% of all middle-aged students are reading below average in scientific knowledge.

John:

I love what you just gave us, because grabbing someone’s attention, making sure that your pitch is memorable is one of the keys to getting people to want to know more and if you don’t have one of those three things in your tool box, whether it’s the three ‘did you know’ questions or an analogy, we’re the Expedia of XYZ or we’re the Uber of XYZ or opening up with a number. The number example you just gave I love because not only does it grab your attention but it also describes a huge problem at the same time, so if you can do two of those concurrently in one sentence, you’ve really achieved a great opening. That’s really wonderful Geri, thank you.

Well, let’s dive into your expertise into equity crowd funding and how VCs look at that and just for the people who are listening trying to decide if they should go right for angels or should they start with equity crowd funding.

Geri:

So, equity crowd funding is angels. So, what is now approved by the FCC is title 2 which was enacted in September 23rd, 2013. So, we’re coming up on the two year anniversary and it’s actually not taking off. Only a small percentage of money that’s raised from angels is being raised on equity crowd funding. So, despite the fact that it streamlines and it centralizes the process for both the angel and for the entrepreneur, very people are actually doing it yet.

So, you’re still going to the accredited investor, that person who either owns $200,000 individually or has a million dollars in assets in addition to their home. What was also approved this year was title 4, which allows you to raise sort of a mini IPO offering, so there’s two tiers to that and you can raise money from average Americans, so you don’t have to be an accredited investors and there were two tiers where you don’t have state preemption, which means you have to go state by state and register your offering. The benefit of that particular tier is that you don’t need a lot of financial reporting.

The second tier, there’s much more financial reporting and in that case the states have a coordinated review process. So, it’s just one application and you’re getting approved and then individual states nearly 30 of them have enacted interest state rules, because it’s been taking so long for title three to get approved, which is aimed at the average American. So, one of the things I really like to advise people right now is to work with a securities law firm. I think that’s really critical is to have that right professional advisor.

John:

Got it. That’s great advice that you must have the right advisor so that you don’t make any mistakes and speaking of a great number. I know in the number of an article you wrote about the misconceptions about equity crowd funding, you talk about it’s only 3% of the population that qualifies.

Geri:

So, yeah, it’s 3% of the population who would qualify with that amount of wealth and it’s also only 3% of accredited investors who actually become investors. So, angel investing isn’t for the faint hearted. There’s a lot of risk to it, but there’s also a lot of reward in addition to the potential of making money.

John:

Do you find in this 3% that are angels are really interested in helping people build their business and not just give them money?

Geri:

So I think there are two types of investors and sometimes both types of investors are located in the same person. Some investors have split personality. I interviewed Elizabeth Kraus who is running MergeLane, which is an accelerator for women-led companies based in Colorado and when she invests, she will invest larger amounts of money in the offline world where she gets to know angel investors, but she likes to diversify her portfolio and invest alongside a well-known investor through a syndicate, through a equity crowd funding platform so she can invest alongside, I’m trying to think of some of the names, Tim Ferriss, Jason Calacanis, Brad Feld, and it’s a quick way of diversifying her portfolio, but those companies she’s not providing a lot of mentorship to. So, certainty her companies in her accelerator program and the other investments that she’s made that are going to be more substantial.

John:

So, it depends. You can have a split personality and say, you know, there’s certain people I want to mentor and go through an accelerator program and others probably don’t need my advice. This is just a good investment and I respect the other people that are part of the round, basically.

Geri:

So, it’s funny, I also just published today on QuickBooks I talked about a Shark Tank episode, actually it’s probably a couple of different episodes because it’s two different entrepreneurs. One entrepreneur really wanted and was perfect for Lori Greiner is really a hands-on angel investor. The other entrepreneur really was so driven and had so much game, he didn’t need as much attention and was much more independent and he was perfect for Robert Herjavec.

John:

That’s great. There’s somebody for everybody.

Geri:

There is. So, I think it’s an internal process that you have to ask yourself as to whether what you want out of a relationship with an investor.

John:

Right and also regardless of how involved they want to be, I keep hearing and I would love your opinion on this; they still want the founders to be coachable.

Geri:

It’s funny that you bring that up. I forget to mention that in the beginning.

John:

We’re in sync. I love it.

Geri:

We are. We are. I don’t think, there are a very people I think that would disagree on that. If you’re going to give money to somebody, you want them to be coachable. They don’t have to take every piece of your advice, because you want them to be leaders and you’ve given them money and you have faith in their ability, but you don’t want somebody that’s going to run off and not listen to advice.

John:

You have on statistic in your quick book article where you talk about women entrepreneurs are twice as likely to seek money offline from angels (36%) than publicly online according to Center for Venture Research. Do you have any ideas as to why that is?

Geri:

So that’s a really interesting question and I’m going to give two answers here. One is that women have the skills to succeed at equity crowd funding. There’s research out there on the success rate on women versus men at reward based crowd funding. So, there’s a similar skill set involved in reward based crowdfunding as well as an equity crowd funding and I think those skill sets are absolutely transferable. Women out perform men at reward based crowdfunding.

John:

Ah. Earlier when I said equity crowdfunding I meant to say reward crowdfunding.

Geri:

No, no. You had the right statistic and that was an equity statistic. Actually in any of the articles that I sent you from QuickBooks, I don’t think that statistic is fair, but this was an analysis that was done of KickStarter campaigns. With equity, there are a lot of misconceptions about equity crowdfunding and the misconceptions are coming from professional advisers from lawyers and accountants and women really rely on their professional advisers and if they say, you know what, I don’t think you should get involved and women don’t.

Now I’m doing generalizations that are not completely true, but you know, some women are raising money, but a lot and this was part of my research, I was very surprised that some very sophisticated women including a female entrepreneur who is a lawyer was sitting on the sidelines because a lawyer friend that she knows in a really, really big law firm told her that they were gray areas and when she ticked it off, every single thing I said not true, not true, not true.

John:

It’s almost like going to a doctor and taking what they say as gospel and not getting a second opinion.

Geri:

Yes, yes, and it’s also getting the right second opinion. So, it’s really, it’s not just any small business lawyer that has the expertise here. It’s lawyers that specialize in security law and in particular the jobs act. So, it’s very, very specific. I think overtime more and more lawyers and accountants will understand this, but it’s very important to have that right lawyer on your team.

John:

Great. One more quick question for you about this, which you wrote, which I think is so fascinating is, major companies like Coca Cola and Nike are using crowdfunding platforms not just to raise money but to gain insights into consumers. So, founders can do that same thing before they seek angels, right, to get some proof of concept and all that good stuff. So that’s full circle from what I was saying the different between should someone start with just basic crowdfunding platforms for research and proof of concept before they jump into talking to angels and if big companies are doing it, it certainty makes to me and I think you agree based on what you wrote that founders should do the same.

Geri:

Absolutely. So, I think rewards based crowdfunding is a fabulous stepping stone into equity. Number one, you get to test your social juice and whether you have the right skill set and you’re testing it in a much smaller environment, a more low risk, so in my research Stand Out from The Crowd: How Women and Men are Benefiting from Equity Crowdfunding. I do a whole chapter on this and I talk about two women entrepreneurs who did first reward-based crowdfunding and one was real blend foods and she did I think a reward-based crowdfunding campaign that was $10,000-15,000 and went on to raise either $700,000 or $800,000 in offline angel investments and then I’m forgetting the name of it, I think it’s Bubble Root. Bubble Root and she raised, again, $10,000-$15,000 in a reward-based campaign and then went on to raise money through on a crowdfunding platform but privately and she raised I think $30,000.

So, people are combining it and it works well and there are lots of other examples of people doing that and I’m now, it’s not in the research, but it’s in a webinar that I did. So, other examples are other machine company and things that did reward-based campaigns and then went on to raise multiple million dollars from angels in the offline world.

John:

So, there’s no stigma attached to doing it any way you can to get your proof of concept and it actually possibility shows more creditability and the more credibility you have the lower the risk is perceived so I think it’s great what you’re doing with your research. You also, I can’t let you go without talking about the book you wrote Forget the Glass Ceiling. I want to ask you about that book and if there’s any other books that you think entrepreneurs trying to make a successful pitch should be reading.

Geri:

So, Forget the Glass Ceiling: Build a Business Without One profiles ten women entrepreneurs and what I love about the book is the three most successful women in the book actually didn’t raise on penny of outside funding. So, my favorite and I happen to reconnect with her a couple of months ago, Nina Vaca of Pinnacle Technical Resources and I think I lied. She may have raised $300 on outside funding.

John:

Okay. No one is going to look at that.

Geri:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. She is the number one company on Women Presidents Organization fastest growing company list. She also will -either this year or next year- be a billion dollar business.

John:

Oh great. I’m sure that’s a wonderful book. I love the title. Forget the Glass Ceiling: Building a Business Without One. Are there any other books that you have found inspiring or useful all about investing or not?

Geri:

There are a ton and actually one that I’m going to recommend and this is, we talked about knowing Judy Robinett.

John:

Yes.

Geri:

She introduced me to Laura Rittenhouse and she did a book on investing between the lines and what I like about the book and I think this is going to resonate with you as well is she talks about, she’s really talking about public companies, but everything she says is applicable to startup companies. So, companies that are raising money from angels and she talks about speaking in plain English, being trust worthy, as critical factors in trusting a company to invest in. So, she’s actually analyzed public companies and finds the most transparent companies are the companies that are more likely to do well.

John:

I like that. We’re going to tweet that out. The most transparent companies are the ones that are most likely to do well. That’s a great line. Geri, how can people follow you on social media if they want to engage and get more of your incredible research or hirer you to consult with them like you have for other major brands like Dell I know and other incredible companies that have been lucky enough to have you. Tell us how they can find you?

Geri:

Absolutely. So, on Twitter it’s VentureNeer. I write on a weekly basis on Forbes. You can just search my name, Geri Stengel, better yet, subscribe to my newsletter on my website and then you’ll get all of my articles whether it’s Forbes or QuickBooks or Turnstone and each area I’m specializing or for each company I’m specializing in different areas. So, I’m writing about the success factors of women entrepreneurs in Forbes, financing in QuickBooks, and just general startup culture for Turnstone.

John:

Fantastic. We’re going to put your book and the books you’ve recommended as well as the link to your site so people can subscribe to your newsletter in the show notes. Geri, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. I can’t thank you enough for all these insights and your expertise is clearly something that your introduction, you really combine being a serial entrepreneur, teacher, and someone who is making a difference with social impact.

Geri:

Terrific. Thank you so much for having me. I so enjoyed our conversation.

John:

So did I. Thanks Geri.

TSP036 | Dorie Clark – Transcription

Posted by John Livesay in Uncategorized | 0 comments

John Livesay:

Welcome to The Successful Pitch podcast. Today’s guest is Dorie Clark. The author of Stand Out and Reinventing You. She’s consulted and been a speaker for both Google, Microsoft, and a contributor at Forbes and The Harvard Business Review. She’s also been a former presidential campaign spokesperson. She is a branding expert according to the AP and she gives us great insight as to what it takes to stand out and for all the listeners who are wanting to know how to make their pitch stand out to investors, she gives amazing insights about how to build your network, your audience, and your community, so that you will be successful if you do that and investors will be sharing your pitch, because you have gotten it so great from using Dorie’s tips that you will be successful. Enjoy the episode.

Welcome to The Successful Pitch podcast. Today’s guest is Dorie Clark who is a branding expert according to AP. She’s written not one, but two books. One is called Stand Out, the other one is called Reinventing You. She consults for companies like, oh, I don’t know, Google, Microsoft, Yale. She’s also a contributor for Forbes and Harvard Business Review. She teaches at Duke school and she’s a former presidential campaign spokesperson. My goodness, what an impressive background. Dorie, welcome to the show.

Dorie Clark:
Thank you so much. It’s really fun to be talking with you.

John:
You know, I always love to hear about the concept of branding and I was listening to one of your talks where you said that your personal brand is, “your career insurance.” Which I think is such a great way to think about that, but before we dive into that, I want you to take our readers and listeners, if you will, back a little bit; because sometimes people read the transcript and not listen to the podcast; how did you start out? What made you come interested in branding and how did you write your first book and all that good stuff?

Dorie:
Well, I got interested in branding essentially because I needed career insurance and I came on board too late and so I started to learn about it and to try to help other people figure out they could a little bit ahead of the curve as compared to where I was. I started my career as a political journalist and I was about a year out of grad school, I had been working as a reporter for a year and fortunately, I had entered the profession at a pretty bad time.

It was right around the tipping point where the internet started to erode the newspaper’s profits, which had been very fat for a long time. I mean, newspapers, we forget now, but there was a very, very lucrative business and all of a sudden Craigslist was just going nuts taking everybody’s business and so my newspaper laid me off and it was during a bad recession.

It proved almost impossible to get another journalism job, so I really had to reinvent myself and try to figure out a new thing that I could do and I realized that it would be a heck a lot easier for me or for anybody else if you have the kind of really strong brand that has developed so that people are seeking you out specifically and for me the true test – it’s not, you know, are you immune from vicissitudes or layoffs or whatever.

I mean, you can’t control stuff. You can’t control what’s happening at a macroeconomic level. You can control necessarily what’s happening at your company. I mean, the poor people at Enron or Arthur Andersen or whatever, there’s lots of really good people that had no clue and no way of doing anything about it, but the real thing that you can protect against is at an individual level, what is your reputation, what are you known for, and if you lose your job or if you fall off the horse, how quickly can you then recover?

John:
What motivated you to write Reinventing You. Was it this whole concept that you yourself had to reinvent yourself from a political journalist into a branding expert?

Dorie:
Yeah, pretty much it was. The genesis of reinventing you was I started out with a blog post that I wrote for the Harvard Business Review and I didn’t really think of it as, you know, big official statement per say, but it was one blog post that I did based on my experiences. It was called how to reinvent your personal brand and I thought oh, this will be interesting.

I’ll share a few insights about the process, but it turned out that it actually proved to be a very popular blog post. Popular enough they asked me to turn it into a magazine piece, so it went from about 700 words to about 2,500 words and it when it came out in The Harvard Business magazine, I got approached by several literary agents that said, hey, have you thought about turning this into a book? And so at that point I realize that it was an idea that had traction and so I decided to go ahead and turn it into a book proposal and make that work.

John:
Wow, what an amazing Cinderella story. I mean, so many people feel like they have a book inside them, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody tell us the story of a blog, a magazine article, to a book that they are calling you to turn it into a book, which really shows if you put something out there whether you’re a startup with an app or in your case somebody putting out really great content and it clicks with people, it will be successful organically and that’s a great way of reinventing yourself, so I would guess if you’re going to get career insurance and being a branding expert that you would recommend people make sure they start putting out good content is a great way to enhance your reputation and brand, yes?

Dorie:
I’m a big fan of that. It absolutely worked for me. I mean, the asterisk on this, the proviso, is that what happens to me in terms of, you know, publishing something and then having agents come to me, it’s of course relatively rare, but what I did to team myself up for that possibility was, this was not, like you try once and then all, you got so lucky. I had actually written three book proposals prior to Reinventing You. None of them got picked up. No one was interested and so it was part of a continuing process where this one clicked, but I was trying to put myself into the path of opportunity beforehand.

John:
Thank you for clarifying that, because it is helpful to know that you’re not just an overnight success. That you learned so much just like entrepreneurs do while they have their startup. When they pivot, well, that proposal didn’t work, nobody bought that one, let me try something else and often times people really don’t get the successful exits until their third or fourth or fifth startup and in your case it was three and bam, after that, you got the book. I’m extremely curious to know how you got and what it was like to be a presidential campaign spokesperson? Talk about branding and every day dealing with poll numbers going up and down and one wrong word and your brand is damaged, that’s right?

Dorie:
Yeah, absolutely. So, the initial transition that I made, so I lost my job as a political reporter and I kept hoping that I could get another reporting job and it was just not happening and so finally after about six months of freelancing and trying to cobble together a living, I got a phone call from a guy that I knew. He was a political consultant and it turned out that Robert Reich, the former US labor secretary was running for governor of Massachusetts and he entered the race really late and he didn’t have any campaign infrastructure and so they needed to hire people very quickly and so my friend knew that I had been out of a job, he asked me if I was interested in it and I ended up taking the job so I serve as Reich’s press secretary.

So that was kind of my initial experience, you know, working as a high level press person on a campaign and then after that I figured that I might be able to leverage that into a role on the subsequent presidential cycle, because the New Hampshire primary, of course, is really central to the elections and most of New Hampshire’s medium market is the Boston medium market. There’s actually only one television station in New Hampshire. All the others are the local Boston channels, so I had relationships with all of those reports. I thought, you know what, that’s an asset I can leverage.

So, again, it took a long time. It took about six months for me to be able to make the connections that I needed, but Howard Dean was the candidate that I most want to work for and I had to really finagle my way in. I had a bunch of meetings that didn’t go anywhere, but eventually they did hire me.

John:
That’s a great story of networking. You knew enough people that when an opportunity arose somebody thought of you. You had brand awareness and you delivered on your brand when the opportunity arrived. So many of the founders are looking for how do I position my startup to investors in a way that comes across as a brand with a culture that attracts the right team, because that’s number one criteria for investor is not the idea, but the team, and the team is attracted to the leader, which creates a culture, which is what the brand is, so that’s why you’re such a great guest, because you’re a branding expert, so the listeners need to know how do I create a brand. So, when you’re talking to Microsoft and Google, what advice do you give big established brands like that?

Dorie:
Yeah, yeah. So, it is an interesting challenge when you have this sort of behemoth that people already had fixed thoughts about, so I think that the key thing there is you want to focus on segmentation, because you’re never going to be able to succeed in changing everybody’s mind at the same time. People have different levels of awareness.

You know, if you think about like a tech company as in your example, there’s going to be a different opinion in the general public of like, oh yeah, I’ve heard of them, versus tech super users who have really particular opinions about, oh, they’re amazing, or, oh, they suck, and so you really have to start with that and to figure out, alright, who are the distinct constituencies and what is the message we want to drive with each of them and what are the proof points that we need?

What do we actually have to do, because, you know, a crucial thing that people often times fail to understand when it comes to marketing and messaging is, you know, they think, oh, it’s just about spewing messages at people, but actually, you know, it can’t be, because no one will ever believe it, no one will ever take it seriously.

Marketing has to be integrated with product, with operations, etcetera, because if people think your product sucks, you actually need to change the product in such a way that it doesn’t suck and then you have the ability, you know, the flexibility, to change the messaging, because it becomes about hey, have you tried this? Have you looked at us lately? But I think that some people just think it’s like this generic spin doctor kind of thing, but actually it’s taking a holistic look at everything that the company is doing and then making sure that a light is shined properly on those initiatives.

John:
What I find fascinating is you use the word constituency, I’m mispronouncing that, but it’s a political word, right? And so, you have taken your political expertise of branding a politician and who their audience is, if you will, they can vote for them in their neighborhood or region or state and apply it to branding for startups and huge successful tech companies figuring out, alright, we’re going to break down which segment are we talking to, as you mentioned, the really techies, are they gonna be the first adapters to try something new from Google or Microsoft or if you’re working for Apple, the new apple watch, right, you have to segment out who’s going to be the first to try and who are the brand ambassadors. Can you share any differences between the brands of Google and Microsoft? I think everyone has their own person opinions, but I would just love to hear what Google and what Microsoft want to think of them as brands. What’s their idea goal and see if it matches, you know, what we each think.

Dorie:
Yeah, the first caveat with that is I wouldn’t want to say in any way that I speak for Google or Microsoft.

John:
No, no, of course.

Dorie:
And I’ll also say too, I have consulted for Google and worked for them as a consultant in the past. Lately, my most recent connection with both Microsoft and Google has been as a speaker. So, I’ve come in and spoken to their organization. My new book Stand Out came out in April and so, you know, for folks who are interested in watching online, I actually just in July was at Google’s offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts and I gave a talk about Stand Out to that, which is available on YouTube and then I also, when I was on book tour, I spoke at the Microsoft campus in Redmond as well about the book.

John:
Well, let’s talk about that then, because that’s even more interesting than my question was. So, instead of what is Google’s brand that they want people to think of, I’d love to hear what was it in your message from your book Stand Out that Google felt compelled to listen to? I mean, clearly, it’s like, how much more does Google need to stand out, right? Or how much do the employees, are their employees trying to get their idea to stand out? So, I’d love to hear, without having, give us a little trailer, teaser, to get us to go to YouTube and watch your whole talk, so what was it that made Google say this book and this topic is right on brand for us.

Dorie:
Yeah, yeah. Well, one thing that I have learned a bit about Google. I’ve actually spoken at Google, at different offices three times for Reinventing You, my first book, I spoke at their Mountain View headquarters. That’s actually available on YouTube as well and I spoke about Reinventing You at their London office and then the Stand Out one at Cambridge, but something that I’ve learned that I think is actually quite interesting is that Google, I wish more companies would do this.

They really seem to have a culture where their interested in retaining their employees and even if the employee gets bored or for some reason doesn’t want to do the job that he or she has been doing, you know, they don’t just say, alright, well fine, leave. They really are invested in these people, they want to keep them, so there’s a lot of culture, in fact, encouragement within a culture for people to switch jobs and functions within the company and so it’s constantly revitalizing yourself creatively by having the opportunity within the confines of Google to do a lot of different things. So, that’s kind of exciting.

So, I think that is relevant to the message of reinventing you that you’re constantly sort of proactively deciding, you know, well, what do I want to learn? What do I want to be doing and how do I go about doing it. For Stand Out, I think the message that seems to resonate there is that if you’re doing something within a company or outside a company, you want, if you want to have an impact, which I think most of the people at Google and probably many people elsewhere want to have, it needs to get recognized.

You don’t want it to be, you know, you’re doing this amazing thing and a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears about it. You want the word to be able to get out so that people can, you know, A) understand your contribution, but B) so that the idea can spread and so I talk a lot about in Stand Out I have a latter section of the book talking about how to build a following around your ideas. So, if you have something you’re doing that you’re really passionate about, I think that people are excited to spread the word.

John:
Yes and do you have to get them to believe in your vision in order for them to spread your word? I would think that there’s got to be something in it for other people to get them on your team. I keep using the analogy of a founder getting really great talent to come join his startup when they have other choices and some of the other choices might even pay them more, so it goes to this whole culture of, you know, if you get into Google and Google puts you through such a arduous process to get in, I can see why they don’t want to let you go, because obviously they feel like they’ve picked the best of the best, but this whole concept of, alright, so you’re a startup or you’re in a big company like Google, how do you get your idea to stand out or if you’re a startup, you know, working on your pitch, how do you make your pitch stand out? Do you have any tips that you could give our listeners about, if you’re pitching an idea or in this case, asking for money, what are your tips for standing out on a pitch?

Dorie:
Exactly. Well, I think your question John is really to the point, because I lay out a framework in Stand Out that is a three step process that, you know, I interview about 50 thought leaders and tried to reverse engineer what their process was for how they got known.

John:
My listeners are going to love the fact that you reversed engineered that by the way.

Dorie:
That’s right. When in doubt reverse engineer. That’s definitely how to do it. What I learned was that almost everybody followed this formula for spreading their ideas. It’s a three step process and I’ll lay it out briefly and then explain a little bit more, but the short version is step one is building your network, step two building your audience and then step three is building your community and so what I mean by this, step one building your networking, this is of course really important, because in the early days of any idea, there’s a few things that are happening.

Number one, the ideas are probably not refined. It’s probably not that polished. It may actually not be that good and so you need to have a group of people around you who are both smart and talented, but also people that you really respect and respect you. They have to have your best interest at heart so that you can receive honestly their feedback to make the idea better and they’re the people who are rooting for you. They want to help you. So, they’re going to open their Rolodex, they’re going to try to do what they can to advance you to the next level. That’s number one.

John:
That’s great. I just want to recap, because it’s so helpful because in this case it was an idea, but so many pitches are not refined and you can’t just pitch something without getting some feedback from your network is my big takeaway there, so thank you. So, step two is the audience, how does that help you stand out?

Dorie:
Yes, yes, exactly. So, step number two about building your audience, this becomes the place where you start to share your idea with the outside world, because, you know, clearly, your idea is not going to do a very good job spreading if you are only talking to the inside circle or the people that you know personally in your network, you gotta start sharing it, so this is the place where, it’s the public phase, you are speaking about it, your writing blog posts about it, you’re sharing on social media, writing books, basically what you’re doing is you are making yourself findable by other like-minded people who would be interested in an idea of this sort. So, you start to do this to get the idea out into the ecosystem.

John:
We’re going to tweet that out. Make yourself findable. I love it.

Dorie:
Yes, yes. Exactly.

John:
And while you’re on the topic, Dorie, if you don’t mind, I just want to take a little subset into this, because so many and, all of us experience it to one degree or another, have a little bit of fear of what other people are going to think and what if it gets rejected and all that stuff, so when you’re helping people stand out and say okay, now it’s time to put it out there, there’s decision, analysis paralysis, it’s not perfect yet, especially with a new app or something. It’s like, ugh! Do you have any advice for people of how to let go of fear or how to not worry about what other people think?

Dorie:
Yeah, yeah. It’s a real challenge obviously. We’re held back by the concern about what people might be thinking or saying or whatever. I mean, I would say this is yet another reason why it’s really important to have that internal network as your first step, because even if you don’t trust yourself and it’s easy, frankly, if you’re getting negative feedback to doubt yourself. If you have put around you a group of people whose opinion you really respect and they’ve said to you no, no. You have something here. This is good, I believe in this, then in the moments when you’re doubting yourself, you can look to the people around you to get that kind of extra boost of confidence you need.

John:
That’s fantastic. It’s almost like a force field from your network before you go out into your audience. Love it.

Dorie:
Yes.

John:
Alright and the final secret is how do we get a community around us so we can stand out.

Dorie:
Right, exactly. So, the final step here, so you’ve been building your audience, you’ve been sharing the idea, getting it out there, so what happens next? Ideally what happens is that your community, your audience members who have been listening to you start to form a community and basically what that means, what that looks like is instead of just you talking to the audience as kind of this one way megaphone, they start talking to each other and that is what enables virality to take whole.

They become ambassadors, they become messengers, they’re spreading so you’re able to achieve experiential growth for your idea, but the key and this is something that you were alluding to earlier is that this is never going to happen if your message is too self-centered or self-focused. They need to see themselves in the idea, they need to feel the idea is valuable to them and if they do, then they will be willing to spread it.

John:
Oh, got it. If you want virality, make sure people see themselves in the idea. Another great tweet. That’s fantastic. That’s a whole shift from push messaging to pulling people in. It’s all about the secret of virality. So, you know, it’s so great. First come up with an idea, make sure your internal network agrees with you, gives you feedback and adjust it, then put it out into the world and then, in other words, make yourself findable and then finally, if it’s really clicking your first blog did, you will find people that will want to share that because they see themselves in how to reinvent themselves or the need to stand out and that this is something they want to share with their friends because they think it’s got a lot of value and that they’re going to be perceived as someone who’s got good content and their friends might even thank them for sharing something and therefore you become someone who stands out. How did I do? Did I get that right?

Dorie:
Yes. Rock and roll, you got it.

John:
Alright, it’s just so great. I really want to do it justice and then just connect the dots for the listeners who are founders as it relates to how does it relate to my pitch. Well, it’s the same three steps. Practice your pitch with your network and then start talking to investors and then believe me, if the investors like the pitch, it will get a community, all the investors know each other and your pitch will become viral.

So, if you follow Dorie’s book Stand Out and these three steps, it will make your pitch hugely successful and you will get funded fast because of what Dorie had to say today. Can’t thank you enough. That’s absolutely amazing. Before I end the podcast because it goes so fast with somebody like you with such great content, can you talk to us about the Forbes inner critic article that you wrote that talks about taking a pause and having compassion and being curious?

Dorie:
Yeah, absolutely. So, I think this is a really important topic obviously because for so many of us, we’re not compassionate with ourselves. People are incredibly hard on themselves. They see someone else doing something and they say, oh, well, I get it, I understand, and then we just hold ourselves to such a high level of perfectionism and so for Forbes I actually co-authored a piece with a friend of mine named Susan Brady who is high-level staffer at the consulting firm Linkage and this is a topic that she’s written about pretty extensively about how to quiet and silence the inner critic and I think that part of why we wanted to address is that it’s almost impossible frankly to accomplish what you need to accomplish if you’re the one shutting yourself down.

You, you know, you can’t move forward if you’re expecting perfection, because no one is perfect out of the gate. That’s just sort of the definition. I mean, you know, it’s like somehow we’ve seen these stories about like a three-year-old that you sit him down at a piano and he can play Mozart then everyone thinks, oh, I should be like that, you know, about pianos and about everything else and it’s like, are you joking? Like, no one is like that. So, I think we need to give ourselves a break. I mean, of course, we need to do our best and try improve, but that’s a very different thing than saying, oh, if I’m not perfect then somehow I’m flawed.

John:
That’s great because there’ so many founders are going to struggle and do struggle with the need to perfect and they think the pitch has to be perfect to get an investor to say yes and I think the app needs to be perfect to get a lot of users and this line you said, we’re going to tweet out, you can’t move forward if you expect perfection.

So, I’m all about telling people to be progression-ist not perfectionists and just focus on your progress, but this whole concept of compassion as the way out of silencing the inner critic and if you’re criticizing yourself more than anybody else, you will not be successful, so thank you for that.

As we wrap up, besides the great book Stand Out and Reinventing You, are there other books that have inspired you that you would think would be helpful for a founder who is looking to pitch investors to read?

Dorie:
Yeah, yeah. There are so many really interesting, great books out there. I mean, someones that are favorites of mine to recommend I always like Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi, great networking classic. One that I feel like is talked about less, but I think is very valuable is called Power by Jeffery Pfeffer. The subtitle is sort of goes, Power: Why Some People Have It – And Others Don’t, which is always a very interesting thing to be aware of.

John:
Especially in the political world.

Dorie:
Yeah, right, and I’ll just wrap up with Robert Cialdini who wrote a classic book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. He is so impressive. I actually interviewed him for both of my books. I have sections about him and his insights in both Reinventing You and Stand Out.

John:
Oh, great.

Dorie:
He’s somebody with the book Influence was very influential to me and to lots of other folks.

John:
Well, we’ll be sure to put all three of those books plus yours, of course, in the show notes for people and Dorie, how can our listeners follow you and if someone wants to hire you as a speaker, obviously people should go and buy your book, you have a website, give us your Twitter handle or give us everything we can to know more about you and attract what you’re going to be doing.

Dorie:
Yeah, John, thank you so much. I appreciate it. One thing that I’ll actually mention to your listeners if they are interested in honing their skills for pitches and developing breakthrough ideas is that I have a free 42 page workbook that I developed that folks can download off my website. It’s available right at the home page at DorieClark.com and in addition to the free 42-page workbook, I have about 400 free articles that folks can access there and I’m on Twitter at Dorie Clark and I do a lot of speaking and consulting and information about that is all on the website as well.

John:
Great, well, clearly you walk your talk. You have put out amazing content and you’re generous with it and obviously people see the value in that and you are someone who definitely stands out and makes a difference in the world. I can’t thank you enough for being on The Successful Pitch podcast today.

Dorie:
Thank you very much.