Talking About Learning + Growth in a Human Way #value

Good afternoon, LinkedIn friends. Value First Nation. Welcome to another episode of Value First Humans with George B. Thomas. How's it going, George brother?

I am doing good. It's another week I've had a very helpful day helping humans, you know, battling the chasm of helping humans and helping oneself in a way of learning and growing through the things that one needs in the moment one needs them. How do you like that for the beginning of this episode?

I love it. Aligned as always. Which is easy to do, honestly, when it's value first. I am reminded every day, value creation of value as like is a foundational, like first principle. When you can start there, man, everything gets easier.

Yeah, here's the thing. It's I like Chris. I like where you're going with that because for me, when my, my simple brain translates it to you reap what you sow. But the fundamental truth is you need to know how to sow. You need to know how to farm. You need to know how to add that value into the earth so it can grow into something spectacular as you move forward or as others move forward, because you're literally planting the things that they need to get to where they're trying to grow to. I'll stop.

I'll stop. It's well said. And Nico shared some feedback after his, his admin hog appearance today, thinking that he went, he went through, through it too fast. He's talking about actual customer profiles.

Yeah.

And I was like, no, dude, like when you start to work in like real data and come from a place of value, like, we don't need to overthink it. Like the worst thing we can do and what we're trying to kind of unlearn is all the overthinking and over complication of what we've created. So it's like, yeah, can we just slow down for a minute? And when it does come from this place, it should be simple. It should move with less friction. Yeah. And so commitment number two today, and then we'll, we'll get into it is we will enable natural growth rather than force artificial processes. We believe humans and feel free to challenge this if you feel like this is not a good belief.

Let me get the comments pane open over here. So somebody challenges us. I can see it.

We believe humans learn, develop and make decisions in natural nonlinear ways that resist artificial funnels and predetermined stages. We commit to creating environments where people can explore possibilities in ways that feel natural and self directed. This means we will create flexible systems that adapt to various learning and decision styles rather than forcing everyone through identical qualification steps. We will provide resources that support self directed exploration rather than gated content that requires information exchange. We will remove artificial barriers to information and connection rather than creating lead capture requirements. We will honor natural decision timeframes rather than imposing artificial urgency or sales pressure. You want to get that deal this month, you got to close by the 30th. And we will build discovery pathways that evolve based on genuine interest and need rather than predetermined funnel progression. And I'm going to share this example. I don't always do this, but when they hit, they hit, right? So here's the implementation example. What's different? Right? Instead of moving prospects through marketing qualified lead to sales qualified lead stages based on point accumulation, we'll create adaptive pathways where people can access expertise, schedule conversations, or explore solutions based on when they are ready and not when our close date is. Yeah, so what comes to mind?

I mean honestly when you're expressing that, I'm like, yeah, that's my clone. Like if you go to sidekickstrategies.com forward/AI, you'll see our business coach Leadership coach market like deep entrenched hubs. Like we give it HubSpot updates every day. So it's like deep in HubSpot but it's like broader like marketing sales business leadership like AI coach. Like you can go there and you can start to have the conversation that you need and then if it ends up that you want to reach out to us, cool. But you could ask it almost everything that you need to ask it to do things inside of your business. And never ever need to convert on one of my forms or never ever have a discovery meeting with me or have my agency ever do any work with you because like it, it'll like where are you at? And by the way, do you like to type? Type with. If you like to call, call it on the phone. It's like you could be driving down the road, hiking in a mountain, flying on an airplane. I don't know if you could fly on an airplane, but anyway, and have these conversations contextual to you and your organization. It's the I let go of control, lean into trust, care about the human and their healthy outcome of where they're trying to get to more than putting them through some, you know, six life cycle stages and a funnel that doesn't even exist.

Yeah, and this is how hard it is to break free from this as an example. So I've been working on this framework for a while and this is the new website value first, team.com. and there's an assessment that I've worked on.

Yeah.

And as a part of this process, I've created the design and brand guide. And like, here's how, like, we don't use words like leads, we use like this language instead. Like, it's not about conversion, it's about conversation. You know, no pressure anywhere.

Yes.

Right. And this pops up, right. And since I've been working with cloud code, I'm like, just apply it, just apply this. Make sure it's applied here. Like, I'm not paying attention to all the places that it's applied. But obviously an assessment is usually a place that ends with an ask for information to get the thing right, to get the understanding. The first time I go through this, I see this form because I'm also trying to plug it into HubSpot and then I see this link on the bottom, skip and view results without email. My initial reaction was like, oh, I can't do that. I need to get their information. That's the point. Right? And then after 30 seconds of clear thought, it's like, oh, oh. If they want to do that, cool. Like, this is the value that they're getting. If it's truly valuable, they're going to come in, they're going to share information, they're going to raise their hand when they want to. Not like as a, as a. As a way to get information that I'm holding hostage. Hostage.

See, that's the verbiage, holding hostage. Like, here's the thing, Chris, when I. Obviously I'm talking, as you're doing this, I'm like, why not? Like, no, it's not the point. Here's the thing. What's funny is everybody is focused on funnels, but nobody's focused on nervous systems. And what I mean is the human and their nervous system and what it actually does when they go through these processes and they hit a form and they have to make a decision or the nervous system, when they see that little link that you just showed and they can skip that and just go to the thing of how they now the nervous system is in delight and how, historically, how when humans are delighted and when they get the value that they need and they want to take a next step that they actually can't do themselves, that they're going to reach out and do what humans do, tap you on the shoulder, call you, fill out a form on your contact Us form, because you've. You've added the value, you. You've paid attention to what we've built historically and realized that, man, it doesn't necessarily have to be this way. And by the way, what comes to my brain immediately in this conversation right now is like, the massive differentiator that things like a little link of skip this or having a AI clone that answers anything that they would need to know that. The massive differentiator. And I say that humbly, by the way. I'm not bragging, I'm just saying. But it's a, wow, this looks different, this smells different, this tastes different. You know why? Because it's different.

Because it is different. Yeah. Right. And they will get there. Like, we get there on our own. It's like, oh. Because we try to pull it apart. It's like, what's the game here? What's the game like, what's the angle? And you never hit the angle until you show up on a call with George B. Thomas, in this case. And it's like, oh, this is. Everything's consistent. Right. There is no game I have to play. I just get to be me. Right. And move on my own accord, in my own time. And whatever is valuable for me, I take that action.

Yes. And the. And the other side of this is, like, so many organizations, because of where they're at from an investor standpoint, a board standpoint, an owner or leadership mindset standpoint, they're in a hurry. We've got to hit this number by this date. Why? Who said like? And when? You can come at this from like, hey, am I making money? Is the company surviving? Is the company thriving? Can I. Can I live in the world of long game instead of short term? Because as soon as you can live in the world of, like, the long game, like, you're not pressuring people. It's not low pressure. It's no pressure. It's like, let me add value to the world. Let me give people what they need, and when they need me, I know they'll show up. And by the way, I'm not going to pressure you. If you're a good fit and I'm a good fit, we can continue this conversation as soon as you feel like I'm not, tap out, let's go. Let's not waste time. But these are hard mindsets to get organizations to flow into.

Yeah. And the fact is, is it is an organization that is composed of humans. And that's the one thing I've learned over the last couple years of, like, it was easy to, you know, look at the organizations I was in and try to find all the weaknesses and all this is why I stopped working. Oh, this is why I stopped working. And you so easily get to. When it comes to culture and humans, like the, the values conversation about our people are the difference. And it's like when you use that, when you put that out here, that usually means like, it's not really like the case. Like everybody says that, but when you get into these, these projects, yeah, they are the difference in terms of like, they all have different backgrounds, different experiences, different, like politics inside the organization going on. And if you think that you can just come in and drive your process, no matter whether it' marketing person in charge of HubSpot or the salesperson in charge or the CEO, like those are dramatically different scenarios, right? And it might be composed of the same like, team structure, same number of people, like same number of seats. But the fact that somebody else is driving it and they have individual experiences and are moving on their own journey completely can change the implementation path. As an example. And I'll tell you literally who said it's supposed to be this way. So serious decisions demand Waterfall 2006, right, comes out and says, this is what you're supposed to be doing. This is the funnel inquiry. MQL Sales has got to accept it. Of course, it's up to sales whether this human that we've forced into a lead object is worth our time. And of course, they're only worth our time if they have budget, authority, need and a timeline. And this is the way that it goes and this is the way that it's supposed to go. Right? And the entire industry that we work in is built around this model to the point of where I'm still learning how impactful this is as we have all these conversations, a bunch of great people with the value first, like other contributors, like, just so much learning happens as we create content together as we try to educate. This has been set so much in stone where it's easy to. I think everybody understands the example of, okay, if we win 20% of our deals and we want to win two deals a month, right, then we need 10 deals and we need 100 leads and then we need a thousand of these leads. And then just. And as long as we hit those numbers, which is where all our KPIs come from, we will get to those two deals to the point where we put dollar value on these leads, right? Like lead value, like, what's our pipeline worth? Even though it's not, it's. It's. We're making assumptions all over the place. And while we do that we don't pay attention to real data. That is. Oh, what happened after the sale, right? Oh, we sold them some more here. We sold them a little bit of more here because they renewed and they ended up upgrading or we got it into the other team because we did such a good job. They started talking to the other team and this is when it happened. We don't track any of this, how it gets tracked. And literally, like, because we call the stage closed one folks, like, it's closed, right? Like, so of course, people just naturally don't focus on. So you have the CFO in the accounting system or the erp, like pulling numbers out that have happened to our group, big old group of customers and they're bringing it together, you know, with this data. So naturally we're really bad at forecasting, like from tip to tail, don't understand the differences of when we make money. Even though every leader will tell you they want this kind of visibility, right? And when they get it, and the best of the best have it at all times, right? They make seriously on point investment decisions, the experiment decision. They run the business effectively and they grow. And those are the ones that scale profitably, sustainably. And with the goals that every leader that we talk to says they have some goals like this. And all we're trying to get to do through this content, through all these differences, we got to break free from this. This is not real, this is not reality. Like, humans don't move in this way. And just because our internal process says it's supposed to go this way, like, that's why it's not hard to get people to agree that this is like broke in half right now. And it's been for a while. But we don't have a lot of good frameworks to move to to say, like, oh, what am I going to do? Like, my KPI is MQL's, right? Like, what, what's my new KPI if I don't have MQLs? Like, so it's been an interesting journey talking about this, but that's where the key is understanding. Like, okay, if we agree that it's not linear. Yeah, let's not create KPIs that require it to be linear.

It's funny, you know, earlier today I was sending you some stuff because I was doing like a deep dive and I was like, I got to this thing where it was like, choose your own adventure style content strategy to go along with kind of this idea. Which by the way, I, I feel like I've been doing for the last, like, 10 to 12 years is like, here's a whole bunch of information, and some of its video and some of its podcasts, and some of it's textual. And so if you'd like to learn in one of these three ways, here's how you can go and learn about these things that we're talking about that are, by the way, related to the pain points that you might be feeling in the thing that you're trying to do. And so I was. Afterwards, I was working on client stuff, and I was trying to think about, like, okay, it's not a funnel, and it's not linear. And so, like, what is it? And I kept getting coming up with this, like, is. It's more like a spider web, right? In my brain. It's this web. So, Chris, as you were talking about the math of it all, two things came to mind. One, I was like, yeah, I remember when Remington Beg told me, like, as soon as I can do the math of marketing, I'll be an amazing marketer. And I'm like, probably true, because I suck at math. I know why. Because I had a math teacher tell me I'd never amount to anything, and I, like, shut my brain off to that. And so I've worked on, like, getting better at that. However, I was trying to find an eloquent way to be like, what's the opposite of business math? Right? And so I literally opened up my assistant because I'm like, I have to ask this question. And so my assistant literally says this, Chris, if a traditional funnel is the math way, and it uses quotes of doing business, the opposite is a human nonlinear relationship model. A relationship model where you care more about the quality of connection than about how many people humans move from stage to stage. And. And it goes on. It says, think of it like this. God, I love this so much. Funnel mindset. How many strangers can I push down this path until someone buys? The opposite mindset is, how deeply can I serve humans so they want to stay, come back, and bring others, right? And so a relationship web.

Web.

It used that word. Chris, this is what I was thinking, right? Not a funnel. People do not move in straight lines. They jump around. Jump, jump, jump around. Okay, anyway, I digress. And it talks about a community or campfire, not a pipeline. It talks about a flywheel of value, not a staircase of conversion, bro. Like, come on.

Oh, man, I love it. And, like, one of the things I'm enjoying right now as we do all this content, like, it's starting to, like, there's starting to be a flywheel also alongside like at the heart of it loot marketing. That whole playbook wants to enable exactly what we are talking about. Because that web, like there's a lot of webs out there that we're, we don't have control over, but we can go hang out on that web. We can help make a little bit better web in this part, you know. Thanks sprocketeer. Like the HubSpot community. Like, that's why this ecosystem is completely different. Like, and why if you go and try to find that in another CRM, you will not find it. And this example has popped up over the past couple days because so much like we get it, this is brand new. Like none of the systems we are using. The idea of allowing ourselves to be reactive in the way that we're suggesting. Right. Is just totally counter to what we've been taught, how the systems are built. But here's a practical example of what I'm talking about. Right. Like, so this VP and CTO authors a recent article on advancing connectivity and sensor solutions. And so let's say this is a match for our actual customer profile. Yeah. If this were normally like if this is in the funnel, if we're in funnel mode and it's just handoffs and,110, it's like here's sales, here's signal leadership content. Okay, I'm going to add that to my email and say, oh, I saw you authored an article. That's cool. Here's my stuff. Like let's, let's, let's do a demo. Right. But instead we're going to be able to do things now with the flexible systems that I mentioned, which is HubSpot in this case.

Yep.

Where if we know that when this happens, there's a good chance that there's a LinkedIn post that shares the article. And if we are in a place where on this date, let's say we get the signal like right away because our systems are good enough to do that, we can go and be the first one to comment on the LinkedIn post. Like thought people who truly are trying to be thought leaders, they love that. I can tell you personal experience, like it's doesn't feel great feeling like you're always shouting into the void and nobody's engaging. Like, so that kind of the amount of trust that you can build in that moment, I believe we will see portals that have data like that that says every time this topic is posted about and we are the first to comment, we get 80% of that pipeline that gets created, we win 80% of the time.

Maybe two scenarios. One, you use this information, you run over to LinkedIn and your comment is, hey, we have this solution that you can buy to do this thing. No. Now second scenario is you use this information, you run over to LinkedIn and you leave a comment that adds more value insights or your appreciation of tip number seven in the actual thing that you had to go read. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Winner, winner, chicken dinner. In other words, human. Not human. Like, do the human thing. If you're gonna use AI and technology to empower you, don't lose it along the way from traveling from your CRM to the LinkedIn post in this example.

And that's the difference between enabling like a growth path, like enabling the path that they want to take, like engaging in that valuable way, versus trying to create a controlled urgency path that you design to say, like, oh, let's convert, like you're ready to convert. Let's go. Like, this is how our path works. Right. And it reminds me, like, in order to make that decision, because I'll admit, like, even though I know commenting is a valuable activity right now on LinkedIn, if I feel like I put the number on my head of 10 comments per day, all of a sudden I can't be authentic. No, it just can't be right. But to try and create the process around that, that's where we take a step back and the conversation with JJ last week and I think our first one, when the organization cares, like there's caring, it's easy to show up to that post as quickly as possible.

Yeah.

Because you know that that person's going to appreciate it. It's going to make you feel good whether it does anything after that or not. And it's the difference in like this culture A versus, you know, culture B.

Yeah, it's funny, Chris, because where my brain goes. Again, you made it about math. If I go do these 10 comments and I go back to the other marketing math. And again, by the way, I'm not saying you shouldn't know your numbers and you shouldn't have like cash flow to actually be able to stay in business. So please send all hate mail to Chris at and just leave me be. But, but here's the thing. Like when I hear you bring up the interview with JJ and the amount of time we spent on care. Again, my assistant, if I go back to the assistant, when I asked about math, it says, why does this matter when businesses run only by the math of the funnel. It tends to over optimize for clicks and under invest in care. Treat people like data, not like humans. Chase short term wins instead of long term relationships. When a business moves to a relationship web or flywheel, it tends to attract better fit customers over time, spend less energy convincing and more energy guiding and build a base of humans who stay, buy again and refer. It's a dumb question, but which world do you want to live in? And it's your choice to pick the world that you want to live in and build the systems that you want to build and interact in the way that you want to interact so you get the impact.

I mean, that's why we're here. And a little bit, you know, exasperated and I can say that I've met some people who feel like they don't have the choice and that's why we're here. Like this is a whole system.

Makes me sick.

Right. And Value First Humans is the counter to the leads trap which as it's been built into the fabric of go to market, it literally dehumanizes the process because you cannot sit there and make a hundred calls a day and care about the other person on the other side. You just can't. Like it's, it's humanly impossible. And now it's much to the point where if 100 calls is the goal, we're getting AI involved and they don't have to care. Right? Like they're going to feel great about it next day no matter what. Well, guess what? The people on the other side, they don't feel great about it still. Like I've been on the receiving end of some of these AI SDR calls.

That's my biggest worry in the future, honestly, with AI and it's not about the AI technology in itself. It's in the wrap. Because by the way, if you, if let me back up for a second. If you ask humans how they feel, like right now they feel like they're on a hamster wheel. Everything is moving so fast. Oh my God. I can't believe it's almost Thanksgiving. The this year will be over before we know it. There's 50 billion HubSpot updates. AI is changing. Gemini 3 came out today. Like, and it's like the rate at speed of which you can do things in your effort to grow your business and leverage AI to either replace hope, not augment the humans. What I hope that doesn't happen is that you erode the trust of your brand at a rate in which you cannot even fathom right now, rewind that. Because you'll be able to move so fast, you'll be able to crash a brand faster than ever humanly possible in the next year to five years. Because you're going to make one choice that sounds smart and it's going to piss off 72% of your audience, your potential customers, your current customers, your. And all of a sudden you're like, man, how did this become like a ghost town? One choice and you weren't paying attention. Like, that's scares me more than any of the other things that people are talking about right now. Because brand is everything, trust is everything. Being human will be everything. And those of us that choose to make decisions based off of not being human for efficiency and math sake. Hold on, just hold on.

Yep. I mean, this is why I'm a big fan of HubSpot. Right now. You start to hear things like signal based scoring and signal recognition and all this. I can tell you I never thought in a million years at the beginning of this year that I'd be talking about buyer intent data in a positive way. Right. But that's what we were just looking at. And what's exciting is that it's very hard to talk about this world we're describing in a real way because everybody's stuck in the hamster wheel that you described. But can we make it more practical? And here's an example of that situation we do describe, like, if we capture it in an intentional way and we set ourselves up to like understand the context of these signals that are happening all around us. And if you talk to like the best of the best salespeople, they'll be able to rattle off these signals, like, no problem. Like when this, this and this happened, like, lock it in. Right. And can we give ourselves permissions and our team's permissions to say, okay, let's get together at the end of the month and look at this data, which is new. Like, we've never used it before. Like, we've never cared about leadership content before, like, whatever, right? Can we just take a look at it? And if we can and we see signals and see trends with the help of our fellow human beings that we're usually not talking about this stuff with and AI, let's put an experiment in place. And if this data is telling us that when we are Johnny on the spot to respond in a valuable way to when this LinkedIn post happens, that means we got to be ready for it to happen. And if I'm in the middle of my two hour call block. And I have to get through these 25 people and I'm just supposed to call. That's what I'm doing right now. And I can't let anything else bother me. I'm missing that signal and I can't be there.

So there's a couple things that come to my mind. One, Chris, I don't think that this is, like. I think for a lot of organizations, this is a place that people dream of. However, I feel like I've been living proof for the last four years since starting a business, that you can run an effective business, grow a business and, like, make money in the things that we're talking about, because we're talking about just like, me being me and doing the things in business the way that I've been doing them, because I can't be any other way. But the other thing that I want to throw out here is that humans, they're siloed. Like, I sent another message over to you and Nico earlier in this week and I said, does this excite anybody else? And it was an update where multiple people could be in the same chat in, like, Chat GPT or like, Claude has had, like, team projects or, like, Chat GPT just released, like, where I can invite people into a project. Ladies and gentlemen, you gotta kill the silo because you need to have a single source of conversation and truth around the things that Chris was just talking about so that, like, you're bouncing ideas off of each other and AI hybrid team in the same chat or in the same project. So, like, all brains are headed in the same direction. Seeing and listening or doing or in. With the. With this, you're all molding the same clay. Instead of like Bobby in Office one and Susie in Office three and somebody, like, formed a horse and somebody else formed, like a jackass. Like, what? No, we're here to build. So, like, that centralized communication, conversation, hybrid AI thing is going to be really important from, like, a business communication, iteration, implementation standpoint. And I don't even know if people are thinking about how they pull that off yet.

I would imagine they're not because most, in most situations, like, a communication strategy in general is hard to be found. And this is like, kind of the promise of HubSpot has always been that enabler of collaboration beyond silos. But since it was still, like, in this kind of like, CRM structured data kind of way only. Yeah, like, from my internal experience before, I got out into, like, consulting and just got to interact with more people, developed language around rev ops and all this Stuff I was like, okay, I'm going to bring HubSpot in. It's going to force people to collaborate because they're going to be bringing in emails and it's just going to force this unified view. See, that's the problem which like works until it doesn't. Right?

Yeah.

And now like the difference now. And I've been excited for this too. Like as I was excited that you shared about GPT. It's why I'm pushing people to do the team clothing. Yeah. When AI can enable collaboration in a conversational way, that's the unlock. Right. Because that gets us close, that gets us almost to like we, there's lots of bad meetings. Right. While everybody knows one of the quickest ways to make progress is the quick like 15 minute get together to just verball it. Like, okay, we nailed it, we're aligned. Okay, we're moving forward. And this is the kind of stuff like when you can turn almost all of our interactions into synchronous, more synchronous conversational communication. Yeah. Watch out, man. That's one of the biggest barriers that digital kind of like created. It's the promise of oh, scale. But wait, we're not next to each other. There's all sorts of ways to just miscommunicate and misinterpret what's happening. And, and the only way we've been able to solve it is to try and create process and control. And like, let's build these systems in ways that really can't represent the human condition. Like in most cases I need, I.

Need to do something on control. Like every time I hear that word control I just start to twitch because I feel like that is a human manufactured piece of turd. You don't actually. Like, we don't have control. We never have. Like we, we create this false sense of control so that we can sleep at night. Because if we actually open ourselves up to how wonderfully blessed or crazy chaotic life can be, like everybody's trying to keep this like single line and they're not enjoying the mountaintops or learning from the valleys in the way that we could. If we just open ourselves up as like the humans that we are. And like God, control is like, oh my God, I want to swear right now. And I don't swear like it is.

At the heart of most. When I say like we're trying to help people move from industrial age thinking to AI like abundance and like leverage, like let's get ready for that. A lot of it comes back to industrial controls that were Put in place to try and like, you know, basically assembly line, everything. But here's an example. Glad our prep doc is coming through here. Section four, the control versus trust issue. Yeah, and this is where like when, when you understand this like 90 day implementation schedules, onboarding, they just, just destroy, throw them out the window. Because if you can build trust quickly, especially with AI in people's hand, you do things in like minutes and hours that used to take months. But why do we force processes that create control? They're easier to measure, predictable for forecasting. Forecasting that we've never been good at by the way, feels more professional. Oh, that's so good. Our systems require it. Oh, required fields. And we're afraid of chaos. This is the not only afraid of chaos, but we don't like uncertainty naturally. Right. So our imaginations are almost built to create control that we don't have.

Yeah.

But when we can take a step back, here's what trust enables. People actually find what they need faster. There's better solution matching because context gets aligned, timing, relevance, all of these things. Natural qualification. I bought into the thing, I'm deciding to change. So naturally our relationship's gonna move better. Sustainable relationship happened to be the next one because we started with no pressure. Like there's just, oh man. An actual understanding. I know what I'm getting myself into because I did it on my own accord, not because you gave me a discount at the end of the month. And starting from this place, it's just, yeah, we're going to have some data this time next year. I agree for all the people who need data, but all the people who don't need it will be on board by now. But we're going to have data that shows like all the signal recognition definition that AI can do is going to be able to put this pieces together that start to really solidify. And of course there's all these scientific studies and all this stuff that prove all this but like we've got to find ways to unravel what's been happening in B2B specifically that relates to why we have good human beings that want to create value and then they do things that don't create value because that's what, you know, what they're supposed to be doing.

I think there's another side of this too. I think there's the, hey, this is what you're supposed to be doing. This is what my organization told me I'm supposed to do. This is the process that they built around the platform for me. That is the person. But I also think there's this very interesting space that we're moving into, Chris, of like, humans. And by the way, I think this is 90% of why you do what you do and why I've been doing what I've been doing is humans, we're moving into this world where fundamentally they're not going to know where to look or what is possible. Like, right. The only reason you know about buyer intent or can draw a line to the strategy that you would want to use as a human around buyer intent is because, one, you know, buyer intent is a new tool from HubSpot because you pay attention to HubSpot updates and you're now tying it to human. Why? Because you've been working on value first. And so think about all the humans on the planet right now that one, don't know anything about value first. Two, aren't HubSpot users. And if they are, they don't pay attention to buyer intent or even know it's a thing. And so, like, there's this just gap of needing to learn or grow yourself into being able to find the spaces and places for the magical buttons that allow you to enable you as a human to be augmented and better to the other humans around you.

And that's the place where I get to talk about joy. Like, when you allow for that to happen. Like, I've been such a fan of the joy conversations that have been happening even since last year. But, like, we talk about, like, trust, like, getting to trust all these ways when you take all these avenues of creating value, of being there, where they are letting them move on their own schedule, and that's what leads to the trust that you can't force. But you can definitely create a system where you make it easier than ever for it to start happening. Because, you know, sorry, I keep bringing up math, but you know, the equation of, like, if somebody, you can't change people before they're ready to change, if somebody, like, has a smile on their face when you start talking, much more likely to have more conversation if they don't. If you turn that frown upside down. We know inherently this is the human element. If we can humanize this stuff, it starts to simplify all the language that we use, all the, the processes that we build, because there's still. We're not saying just, oh, you know, sit back and everything's going to be fine if you just let everybody do what the hell they want. That's not what we're saying at all. But there are these signals everywhere to Say one the way you've been doing it, trying to force people down a path that they don't want to go down, it ain't working anymore. And with AI now involved, it's almost close to zero. Nobody's making decisions on their own anymore. They always have a friend nearby, whether it's an AI assistant or a happy, helpful, humble human like George. And if we accept that, then we try to be in that place that we start the relationship and start the conversation together instead of expecting everybody to convert on their own or us to force a conversion before they're ready.

So yes to everything you said, Chris, and you mentioned joy and you know how my brain works. I was like, hey, what's a great acronym for joy? Based on the conversation we're having today, I might have to use this for the rest of my life. Joy, Just offer yourself, offer your values, offer your stories, offer your service. Not just your offers and your automations, just offer yourself the human in a human way.

Oh, so good. So leading to next week, this week's action, a challenge for you. Some examples. Let's see here. Replace some qualification gates, right, with some, some recommendations. Like that's where it's when you show up on LinkedIn and you say, oh, I think this would be valuable for you versus oh, are you in the market this, this, this month, this year? Are you trying. Yeah, no, replace that stuff, right? The urgency tactics like create some, some patience, some context of again we have data in our CRM that says every time we try to make it go faster, it doesn't work out like, so maybe we should be a little more patient and figure out what that means to, to us and what we have to do to change. So I think those, those two things like find these places where, you know, it's just an unnatural thing to show. Show up and behave in the way that you're being asked to and say what could I do differently? And that's where it's turning that ask into a recommended resource that you. Surely it doesn't have to be yours. That's the thing. You don't have to be the creator of all the value, but just showing up and offering this like, hey, I thought this would be valuable. That is value creation in itself. So especially as we talk about the holiday season, some success indicators, whether this is working or not, right? People show up after an extended absence. They haven't been in your, your funnel in a while.

Oh man.

The depth of engagement increases over time. You get to ask. Not sure if I like the word More sophisticated questions, maybe more meaningful questions. Yes. And you get to dig deeper because you've already established these things or you've just decided bant, not important. I'm not going to ask those questions anymore because they don't. They don't build trust. They just don't. Right. And then you just know. And this is where it's. You got to feel this one out, folks. This is not going to be found in the cm. I can say that AI might be able to tell you this is happening, but less resistance when you do engage.

Yep.

Right. We all appreciate that. How about a final thought as we wrap for today, George?

I mean, my brain is going 100 miles an hour on this conversation. The thing that I'll wrap up with is like a. I'm gonna say it is possible. Everything that we've talked about today, what I would leave you as the viewer, listener of this is at least give yourself the grace to ask yourself, your organization, is it possible for us, us, and then start to have the conversations of what would you need to move or remove to actually be able to live an organizational life like we've been talking about today? Move or remove. There's going to be a lot of removing.

Yep. So we look forward to seeing everybody next week. We'll hit commitment number three. That is, we will align with purpose rather than manipulate with incentives. On that note, have a wonderful week, everybody. We'll see you.

Thanks, Chris.