Value-First: Recognize Signals, Not Manufacture Leads

Sa. Good morning, Value First Nation. LinkedIn friends, welcome to another episode of Value First Humans with our favorite Value First Human, George B. Thomas. How you doing, man?

I'm doing good, brother. How are you doing this morning?

I am doing all right. Doing all right. Good. Still getting used to the, the new surroundings, the new setup. Thank you for being flexible this week. That's why we're showing up on Thursday morning. But yeah, having a good time. Got some good views here in, in Colombia. So yeah, all right.

Good views and good views in eastern time zone. So you gotta love that. The week has been going good. You know, it's always interesting because you get to this point of the year and one of two things are happening. One, people are trying to hit the gas pedal and go as fast as they can to get as much as they can done before the end of the year. Or some humans have just flat out hit the brakes. They're not responding to you in any sort of way humanly possible. Send up smoke signals. They're not seeing them. And so you know it. I just have gotten used to this type of year or this time of year. You're just like, do what you can with who's trying to do the things that they can. Can do. But, but it's so. It makes it for a weird week, but it's been a good week. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

I had a, I had a call like that last night where it was like, you know, some new people on the call. The person who's usually most vocal on the call, apparently somebody shared at the end of the call like they're checked out for the holidays. So yeah, they'll be back with us in 2025 or in 2026.

2026. Yeah.

Oh man. Yeah, Here we go. Well, we're here today to talk about commitment number six, which is we will recognize signals rather than manufacture leads. We believe people naturally express genuine interest and need in observable ways. We commit to becoming attuned to these authentic signals rather than manufacturing artificial leads through many manipulative tactics. This means we will develop awareness of how people naturally indicate interest and need rather than creating artificial trigger events. We will respond to authentic signals with helpful relevant engagement rather than automated follow up sequences. We will avoid tactics designed to create artificial interest or urgency rather than serving general genuine exploration. We'll train teams to recognize and respect genuine signals rather than pursuing quota driven activity. And we'll build systems that capture and respond to natural expressions of interest rather than manufacturing engagement through interruption. And this just heads up folks. This is going to probably be my favorite episode of all of the value first content that I've been doing all year.

Yeah, it's, it's been some good stuff, for sure. Good conversations, without a doubt.

What hits, what hits there, George?

I mean, listen, there, there are, there are things that we've been trained to listen for and there are things that I think if we go deeper as humans that we want to listen for. Last week I told the story, Chris, of like ripping out a conversion point. Right? Why would I do that? Because there's a deeper signal. Here's the thing, let me, let me do this and then I'll stop because I, I think we're going to go in that direction anyway. So many times in life in general. So let's not even talk about business. We walk into a room and humans are at surface level, surface level conversations, networking. Just.

There'S.

Nobody's going deep, nobody's getting into the trenches. Nobody's trying to, like, by the way, I, I hate that, like, if you meet me in real person, you know, like, I'm just not about the surface level stuff yet. In business, when we think about the conversions, the urgency, the psychological triggers that we play around with, and I do mean play, I'm using that word purposefully, it's for surface level actions so that we can then try to run as fast as we can to this like, outcome that benefits us. And I think if we try to find that deeper conversation, that deeper signal, we end up in a way better place. I'll, I'll stop there. But that's kind of where my brain goes at the beginning of this conversation.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's, that's dead on. And again, it was the leads trap I'm about to get into. Why this word, I think is such a, is such a canary in the coal mine for the whole story that we're trying to share and encourage moving forward. This started with the lead strap and I got to the point where it's like these things keep happening. Where it's like, well, we would never do that to ourselves or our friends or our family. We don't like pop ups yet. We assume we, we, oh, it's, it's par for the course. It's what I'm supposed to be doing as a marketer. The data says it's good idea.

Right.

We do all these things that we would never do if there was a human right in front of us and we saw them. Right. And recognized them. We would not do that. So that's where I Went in the tank and like the word itself, I believe like if we were able to just remove this word lead right from this part of the conversation. Most any part of any sales or marketing conversation.

Yeah.

Because what it's doing there is giving us permission to not treat the person on the other side like a human being. Right. It reduces a complex human being with hopes, fears, professional pressures and personal priorities to a unit to be processed. Here are the obvious examples. Lead generation. Literally hunting humans. Nurturing, processing humans through automation. Lead scoring. Ranking humans by their value to us. Lead qualification. Filtering humans based on our criteria in converting leads. Successfully extracting commitment from humans. Every time we use this language, we're reinforcing a mindset that treats people as objects.

Yeah, yeah. It, when you list them out like that. And at least for me I get kind of this like sinking pit in my stomach of like value and worth. And especially when it's like the scoring the value to us. And I think that that's asked backwards like in, in business and sales, it should be like the value we are to them. Like what's funny is nobody's built this but. Or maybe they have and I'm just, I live under a rock. But I feel like there needs to be like lead score that we don't own, but a lead score that the actual human owns that points towards the business. Maybe that's the next tool that somebody needs to, to build. And what I mean, coming to a.

Value first team website near you very soon.

There you go. Because it, it is, it should be about the value that we're adding. It should be about the experiences that we're creating. It should be about, you know what I mean? And, and so many times from a business perspective we look at it as like, well, you're good enough to extract some currency from your wallet, I guess, which that just makes me sick even like thinking about or saying it that way. Which I know why, because I don't, I don't natively run in that mode. Like that's not, I'm, I'm using like I'm teleporting myself into other companies, into other systems. I, I very much try to just not be that. But again, like I said last week, I catch myself time sometimes going, ooh, why did I do this knee jerk business response when I actually know I'm trying to show up as a real ass human.

So yeah, and I think the part that's interesting again why this whole journey exists is that AI doesn't operate in this mode either. Right. It's trying to create value in whichever way that it can, right? And that's what's going to kind of force if you still want to work in this mode. You're on a burning platform right now because it's going to be harder and harder to do this. And it's where, if you think back and what I did when I first started thinking about this was, okay, Salesforce introduced this object into the CRM and then it created this cascade of events where if, even though we're speaking rather harshly, like nobody wants to be called out for dehumanizing the person that's in front of them, right? But you, you have. There's still a little bit of time to give yourself some grace and some permission because you have been brought into this system where this is your goal. Leads like, that's what you're supposed to be doing. That's what your whole job description is sometimes. And there's no way for you to get that job done if you try to humanize the process in some way.

We have to pause there. We have to pause there because I want people to. I want people to understand the granularities of what you said because it literally. I grabbed Google real quick and I looked something up. You said Salesforce created the lead object. Okay, now think about that. There's a moment in time where business was done a certain way and humans were thought of in a certain way. Shake hands, word of mouth, salt of the earth, like ground. You see what I'm saying? Then all of a sudden we get to this world, which, by the way, everybody needs to know. As, as Google says, Salesforce created the lead object early in the platform's history, essentially as long as the platform itself around its launch in 1999. So before 1999, humans were treated like humans in the sales process. 1999 and beyond, all of a sudden this started to change a road and take effect into not only Salesforce, but other platforms, because other platforms were trying to compete with Salesforce, AKA B Salesforce, but do it in a lightly, different way. HubSpot held out for a very long time. We didn't have a lead objects lead object. And all of a sudden, now HubSpot has a lead object. Why? Well, because we're competing in a space where that's the narrative that has been presented, but it's not the forever and true narrative of what a sales process looked like. For how many years before 1999 had people been selling things? So you can't tell me. We can't go back. You can't tell me that it won't go that direction. Sorry. Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, no, and that's where a lot of people, like, especially in the manufacturing space where I'm from, like, they've never bought into the CRM concept because of things like this. It's like, no, I'm not gonna. Why would I create leads? I just met the person, their contact, like, and if you force me to do this leads thing first, like, no, I'm just not going to use the CRM now because I know that I'm about this relationship and this whole full funnel, like, people that can own it from start to finish, they don't. They know it's incorrect to try and categorize this human in front of them in ways that can be detrimental to the relationship. Right. And the reason, I think, is historically important because there was a shift, like, what do we do? Oh, we need to get a lot of leads. All right. That means we need to do a lot of ads to get leads. Oh, man, we've got a lot of garbage leads in here. We know there's some good ones, but now let's get as SDR team in here so that they can qualify. Yeah, right.

Can I jump in? Because you did something that tweaked my brain, which, again, this is why I love these conversations. You said, no, I'm not going to use this lead thing. These people are a contact. I don't. I don't think that's the words that they would have used. Because if you think about previous to somebody being a contact in a CRM, in a system, in a SaaS software, they would have said, they're an acquaintance, they're a connection, they're an associate, they're a colleague, they're a relation. Like, these are the human words that they would have used before contact. That equals a lead. That equals an opportunity because they work at an account.

Yeah, that's fair. And as we added, like digital added this level of complexity, so then we needed these systems that we could use to qualify everybody. We're literally creating this problem up front because we choose to just bring in as many leads as we can without knowing who the humans are or if they need us, trying to create urgency, all this stuff, then it just flows. An entire industry is built to the point where managed services exist and people profit and build businesses off of all of this complexity. Right. And AI is naturally built to cut through complexity and remove these pieces. So here's. And it should not be that hard to understand the alternative here. Right. So here's some alternative language. Signal recognition, right? Instead of lead generation. Relationship development. Instead of lead nurturing. Signal strength assessment. Instead of lead scoring fit and readiness exploration. Instead of lead qualification. Supporting decisions. Supporting decisions. Instead of converting leads. Man.

Yeah, so. Oh, go ahead, Go ahead.

So the language, you know, we use, and this is why, like, we talk about common language and why things like MQL and SQL and lead, like, when you have to explain what those things are like, it just creates this. This culture, and it shapes the reality that we create around us. When we call people leads, we give ourselves permission to treat them like inventory.

Yeah. And nobody likes that feeling. I don't like nobody. I don't like feeling like a number. That's why I hate the DMV from a mile away. Yeah, it's ridiculous. Chris, you.

You used.

You said fit, and you used a word with fit. Fit. And what. What did you say?

Fit and readiness.

Readiness. To me, that's. That's the. That's the golden one. Right? If I think about how not complex my process or system or whatever you want to call it to get a human to the point where we both understand if we're a fit and if they're ready to move forward with the way in which we can help them, that's. That's the only focus. Like, there's one call, and on the call, I explain who I am, how long I've been using HubSpot, and then who they are and what the problems that they're facing. We talk about what it would cost for us to help, but that's only after we spent now probably 80% of the time talking about where they're at, where they're trying to go, and what would need to change to make that happen. Not are they a good fit for me, but are they a good fit for us, and are we a good fit for them? If they're not a good fit for us, then we're gonna, you know, like, we're gonna, hey, this is who you should talk to. Like, XYZ is the most technical shop, and you're talking about API, this web hook that. Although I'm getting to the point where I might not be scared of that as much as I once historically was. But. But my point there is, like, I'm not afraid to hand off somebody to a better human or a better organization for the problem that they might have. And so many times the sales process is not built for that. It's not built to have handoff partners. It's built to close every Single thing, because we need every single dollar in it. And so, like, that fit in readiness. Like, if I could get organizations to focus in on that and if they're not a fit or we're not a fit or it that readiness, by the way, okay, yeah, we can help you in two months or yes, we can start your project in three weeks. Right, that's different. But the fit side of this, like, have handoff partners, have integrity, say no, let your no be no and your yes be yes when it should be right, I'll stop, I'll stop.

And. And when this is happening in the context of you said that you would do your best to provide value. Imagine it's an interest object in the CRM and it's built to gauge and understand fit and readiness. Right? And you said you're going to add value and provide value and help this person if they booked a call with you. Right. You're gonna hand. You might hand them off, but they don't close. There's no closing happening in your CRM until the handoff has happened. And there's fit and readiness confirmed over there. Because what often happens is like, oh, there is something that we can work together on. And now you've got a three pack of, you know, partners. And that's the part where when it's just qualification mode, it's either I gotta. Yes. Know it as quickly as possible. It just misses the point. And I chose not to get this crazy with the language transitions, but as I was thinking about, because honestly, the researcher stage is representative of what I'm about to say. Yeah, but like, when I built the value path, like, it still didn't account for, like, the prospects area of most CRMs and most, like, tasks and workflows that teams have to do. And I was like, all right, first of all, it doesn't belong in this path. Right. It's a, it's a thing that we think we have to do as an organization. Like, give me a list or I'm going to go find prospects or I'm going to prospect. To what George said earlier, they are prospecting us. They are prospecting for value and gold. They are trying to find what's going to work. They're going, they're trying to find the value for them in any given moment on their journey. And that's when I was, I was working on this with AI and like, he was, he was going along for the ride. It's like, all right, yeah, so they're a prospector when they're in that moment. So we might have a list of prospectors that we want to be seen with. Like, if we know they're the prospectors, we want to kind of show up and make it easy for them to find the gold. Right. But then when he did like a recap, he did like researcher slash prospector. And I was like, yeah, you're right. I probably don't need to get, like, that's. That's what they're doing. Like, they're researching and they're trying to find the gold for them. So that's not. We're not prospecting. They are.

Yeah. It's interesting because my brain wants to play with that prospector thing a little bit because, like, what the prospector is trying to find is the gold nugget, Right? And if you think about that from the organizational standpoint, like, what is your gold nugget? What are your gold nuggets? And I agree they're in the research phase, but in that research phase, they are a little bit of a prospect or hat where I'm like, hey, the way that I'm going to figure out if this organization is a good match for me, a good fit, is I'm going to find a couple gold nuggets here and there. So, like, if you think about your business storytelling in the sales process, what are your gold nuggets? What do you need to lead people to. Of understanding? So, Chris, I'll go back to something you said earlier where it's like, if I hand them off, they're not really closed until, like, they're handed off and, like, everything's going on there. And they're really not closed because for us, one of our gold nuggets, HubSpot training. So while I might send somebody off, as I was talking about APIs and web hooks and all that more technical stuff, Boom. By the way, once that's built, we can help you train your people on HubSpot because we've been doing that since 2013. That's one of our gold nuggets, right? If you get confused about workflows and creating emails or if you just don't have enough time and you need some worker hands, we can also help with that. That's a gold nugget. Like, so. So understanding that narrative or that mindset around that researcher and what they're trying to find, I think would help unlock some, some sales folks and some business ideas of like, oh, wow, if I can just, in the conversation, get them to know, like, and trust me and show them these three gold nuggets. That back to his researching seven other agencies will probably fall in love with me. There's your model. Like, run with it. I mean, it's worked for me.

I'm just saying, humbly, all it takes is that understanding. Like, if that makes it easier for you, like, run with it. Like they're prospecting us, not the other way around. And that's the whole point here. Like they are humans on the other side of these screens, right? Even if you can't see them. And that just shifts the mentality so some. And again, I'm about to run through a list of authentic signals that will not be, you know, anything new.

Before you do that, can I, can I double click on the story that I started to tell last week? And then you can run through these signals because I wanna, I wanna position this. So first of all, the, the thing that I was talking about last week is literally been putting a side mission together, spiritualsideofleadership.com where we created an assessment that is the superhuman framework for faith driven leaders assessment. And we had a conversion point. In the middle of it, I ripped it out. And here's why, Chris, because is. Is a conversion point a signal? Yes. However, if I were to get an email saying, wow, a 43 on whatever pillar or a 76 on whatever cornerstone, right? So purpose, passion, persistence, love, or any of the H pillars. Imagine getting an email being like, dude, I got a 46 on humility. How was that? How? That ain't surface level, bro. That's a deep signal. Like I can do something with that. The amount of value that I could add in time to value based on somebody responding with, I got a 47 on humility versus first name, last name email. Our worlds apart. That's the signal I want, I want, I want the deeper signal so I can add deeper value more like quicker. Anyway. Okay, yeah, I think that's a good portrait to paint for people to be like, oh yeah, like, why wouldn't I take that secondary or tertiary? Like real human response instead of just a HubSpot form submission notification.

Anyway, yeah, like that, that conversion point that we're forcing in that moment, like it lets everybody off the hook to go deeper and actually add. Find, find the value. Because what's happening there, you've already created value for that person, right? And they might have had that value, but there, if they have to fill something out now it's like, okay, I'm gonna hear from George anyways. So I'll just tell him whenever, whenever we get together, I'm not gonna send this email that I might have sent otherwise. Right. And so it just all these mechanisms that just, first of all, they just don't work as well anymore because humans are, have figured it out. AI knows how the game is played too. So when humans are presented with those scenarios, they might say, hey, I'm about to fill this form out on SidekickStrategies.com or, or spiritual side of life or leadership. What's, what's going to happen next? Like when I fill this form out, what are people saying out there? And if, and if it's super transactional, AI will find that.

Yeah.

And come back with, yeah, you know, people on Reddit saying two or three days to get back to you and like there's, there's nowhere to hide on this stuff. There's no ways to trick the system anymore. Right. And instead of trying to trick it with conversion optimization, just this word optimization in general, like think about these, these signals. Depth of engagement. Right. Reading full articles versus bouncing. We've been tracking stuff like that for a long time now. Right? Return visits. We've been tracking that for a long time. Multi topic exploration. If you've got a lot of content, you've been tracking that as well. Time spent resource downloads without gates. Right. When you remove the gates and you decide to capture that information instead, you can very quickly see what you want to see without manufacturing it inauthentically. It's just this manufacturing moment reduces it from so many different directions, reduces the value. Right. And so those are, those are just behavioral. There's easy intent signals to see on social now, relationship signals, referrals given without incentive. Right. Somebody who defends your approach to skeptics. Right. Without you having to prompt them to do so. Yeah. Bringing you into relevant conversations. And this is something I'm trying to play with and also teach at the same time. You know, in the My Value Path portal, people can see all the data that we have about them in HubSpot because we collect as much as we can while you're on the website. And even as we interact with you outside of the website so that we can give you this personalized value first kind of experience. But you can see it and if you want to delete it, you can. But what's interesting, and I know you know this, when we show up transparently, people give you more signals. Oh yeah, because they trust you. They trust you because you show up in a certain way and it's like, hey, we're, we're in this together. We're here to create value. Let's go. And it's like, okay, let's go. Like, what can we do? What other, you know, things can I read? What other signals can I create? Obviously, they're not saying it like that, but that's how. If you can understand that's the outcome of these interactions.

I mean, if you. So there's. Let's talk a little bit about life and let's talk a little bit about business. So we always talk about, like, how empathy is a superpower and if I could wave a magic wand, I would. I would make more humans, especially if they're in the sales process, like empaths. That's just like a natural, you know, empathetic nature. Because I can tell you the amount of times that I've got on a call and you can tell. And I use these words. Other people don't use these words, but they're guarded. And I literally, in my mind will be like, oh, yeah, they have their business armor on. I can tell they have their business armor on. The amount of times I can tell you that within 10, 15, 20 minutes of a conversation that I can tell that somebody has placed their armor off to the side. And we're now actually having an unguarded and just open and transparent conversation that, like, that should be. By the way, that should be. Your first goal, is how do you get them to remove their armor? Because if you're going to sit there and talk to armor, armor, armor, armor, armor, you're not getting anywhere, right? You cannot pierce the heart or pierce the mind if they're wearing a breastplate or a helmet. So you've got to, like. And so you can, like if you're. If you pay attention, because. And that's why I love video, by the way, zoom. Because I no longer have, like, in person, like, sales meetings. But if they're on video, I can see the micro expressions, the mannerisms, the leaning in as they're talking, things like that. Like, do all you can do. And if you're watching this, listening to this, however you digest it, moving forward, please, by all that is holy.

Use.

The next two, one, two, three years to figure out how to turn yourself into this superhuman. When it comes to empathy, micro expressions, body language, you will need it more in two to four years than ever in the history of the human race. There's. There's been some things that I've been watching and listening to lately that are like, we are we. We only have started to understand the massive change that is about to happen in humanity and the value that you have Historically provided is not how you'll provide it. It will be in different ways that you'll provide it. It will not be from your hands, industrial age. It will not be from your head, information, Internet age. It will be from your heart, human emotion, energy, frequency. This is how you will walk into a room and be able to do the things that need to be done in the future. I literally was listening to this thing with Joe Polizi as well, an interview and this idea of your tilt, this idea of some people call it a niche. I think it's more than that. Listen, invest in yourself right now on these things that we're talking about. It will be at some point and I'm not a doomsdayer, but it will be a make or break in future years if you have or have not taken the time to do 1% better each and every day. On these things that we're talking about.

Yep. And we're seeing so many long time practitioners, people that have generated a ton of value in their, their decades of service to the business world like Joe Pletzi just starting to lean into these less measurable things like when you describe tilt, you know, and you mentioned frequency, energy, all these things that, that's what the digital space has really taken that away because we were used to being in person, we didn't have to figure out how to understand that because we could just feel it with each other when we're in the same room talking to each other. And that's where digital, digital tools and AI now can help a lot with that. And just here's an example of things that are already happening in tools like HubSpot, right? That if you just shift how you, how you're looking at the data to, to the point where data's here so I can understand it and then show up more human instead of data's here so I can understand it and get and know how I'm going to convert the hell out of this human. Right? It's 100% different. So page view tracking, content engagement, depth return, visitor identification, social monitoring, email engagement, beyond just opens custom behavioral scoring, custom events. There's a huge long list now, right. But most organizations use these tools to manufacture more leads, right? So HubSpot's bringing in these signals from the market and the question is whether or not you're going to pay attention to them. And you naturally won't when you're too busy running lead gen campaigns to notice. Right. Because all those signals come in. My lead gen campaign is here. I'm grabbing Those signals. And it's always in the context of my next conversation that's supposed to convert. Because sales velocity needs to be high and conversion rates need to be high. And I can't be wasting time on these calls, right? Instead of just taking a step back, seeing all the signals together, and then making it very obvious which humans are the fit, which humans are ready. Yeah, Right. And even the humans that aren't ready but are a fit now, you have ideas on what to do in that next conversation to help them be ready. Yeah, Right.

So I gotta. I gotta unpack something because that's just who I am. And some people are gonna be like, george, you're so full of burp. Like, you use the word running, running these lead campaigns, which, by the way, the word running people are just running through their day. They're running through the business. The amount of humans that I hear talk about, I feel like I'm on a hamster wheel with HubSpot updates and with AI and with everything I got to do, I'm just on a hamster, I'm running. Oh my God, how did we get to December? Like, because you've been running head down, eyes shut, as fast as you can, and guess what? Here we are. Welcome to the present day again. There's going to be people out there that, dude, you're just full of shit. And I don't usually swear, so there you go. Have that one. I try not to. I have been spending a massive amount of time in my personal and professional business trying to figure out how not to run and how to make it feel more like a stroll. I feel like if we can figure out how to slow down, it'll actually have more impact than all the frantic crap that we're doing at the current moment. Now I'm at the beginning of this journey, so, like, I've been able to have a 10 to 12 year period of like, look, adding value to humans is actually a good strategy. Look what happened with our business. Maybe 10 years from now, I'll be able to have the story of like, look, if you slow down, you can actually make more. I'll let you know in 10 years. But. But there is just something inside me that says this is not sustainable. This is not the way it's supposed to be. And so how do we turn life into a stroll? To be able to pay attention to the things that should be yeses to then create the maximum amount of impact, therefore, reaping more, sowing more, rinse and repeat. Like, again, if you think I'm full of beep. It's Chris at No, I'm just kidding.

I'm just kidding. No, I'd be surprised if anybody thinks that. I mean fair though in the context of AI and everything moving fast. But so many different ways to say this, but it should not be hard to think about a stroll versus a sprint. Like if it's a sprint and you're sprinting, it's very hard to see what you need to see and make quick decisions that are going to change your direction because you're already going this way. So now the decision is made because we're already going this way instead of whether it's valuable or not when you're just strolling. It gives you the opportunity to speed up when you need to, to react quickly when you need to. And it just opens up the space required for a lot of the things that we're talking about. And here's some practical examples of these outcomes that are guaranteed. Like they're just guaranteed. If you start looking at, at it this way, conversations start from better place because they, they came to you genuinely. Less time wasted on unqualified quote leads. Higher close rates because you, you're acting on genuine signals, right? Like the whole concept of website traffic going down but now conversion of the traffic that gets there goes like yeah, because they're, because they come with intention. Like the people that have worked hard to get there, right? Those are genuine signals. Relationships that become long term partnerships for marketing metrics shift from volume to quality. Content strategy serves education, not extraction man. Wouldn't that be nice? Attribution. Attribution becomes clear because they tell you how they found you.

Oh God, yeah.

Resources redirect from acquisition to value creation and for the business overall as, as the stuff builds on it, on each other customer lifetime value increases and you can see it much easier. Referrals happen naturally and it's okay to build a referral driven business. Like it's not a bad thing when all your business is coming from referrals like oh my God, great thing, right? Less churn from poor, poorly fit customers who were converted and team morale improves. No more thanks for this one, Claude. No more soul crushing lead processing. Exactly.

Yeah. If you wanna, if you wanna really have a fun conversation on the last thing you just said, just go ahead and interview Jorge Fuentes on my team. He's worked for other agencies, I've worked for other agencies. I've had other jobs. He's had other jobs. Homeboy ain't going nowhere anytime soon, I can tell you that. Like because of the culture that we have. Chris. It's interesting because, like, as you were saying all those things, I started to giggle and I'm like, how much of these conversations that we've historically had are impacting the way that I'm making some decisions right now. Because, like, last week I launched my first PDF that I designed that I didn't have or want any type of conversion opportunity. I literally was like, getting ready in the morning and was like, can I upload a PDF to LinkedIn so everybody can just download it there? Do I, like, do I even need to get them to the website? And if I do get them to the website, can I just give them a download button? Because, like, the moral of the story is I want them to read the stuff in the PDF. I don't necessarily give a crap if I know who actually read the stuff in the PDF and like, and it's timely. So, like, if I can just do like, the easiest way for them to get it. By the way, it was literally like the twelve days of Christmas and it was a faith driven devotional for 12 days. And I was like, I don't need to convert on that. Like, I just spent time with a cup of hot cocoa in my fireplace creating something of dopeness for people who might need it, who feel like, burnt out and stressed and like, the weight of business on their shoulder and wondering like, God, am I going to make payroll? And they want Christmas bonuses. Hope, like, I don't need a conversion for that. What the frick? Like, but, but I think all of these are like layering on historical conversations. And I say that, ladies and gentlemen, if this is the first one you're tuning into or listening, go back and listen to the other six episodes that we've done around this conversation. And by the way, what would be fun is like, find all of the ones that we end up doing and throw them into your AI assistant and start having a conversation with your AI assistant of what, what all of these conversations mean to you as a human and to your business moving forward. But because, because I'm telling you, it, it's forcing me to think and act, even though I historically had differently, even more. That's not proper grammar. But I'm going to go with it even more differently than I had historically.

Yeah, man, you just gave me another idea too.

What? What idea? What idea?

Because I've done similar things where it's like, go look at this page. Like, if I'm in a conversation, go look at this page. I know there's A lot of stuff on it. I don't expect you to read any of it. But share it with your AI and like get the. Like. Yeah, that's how you learn. Right. What if there's a button instead of download that's like, like build prompt to share this with AI or something like that.

I have had the same idea of like a, A what it would be. You know how you have like share to Facebook, share to Twitter, share to.

Yeah.

Can you imagine if it was like a share to your LLM and then also. And it would be like a copy and paste. Because I don't know if we have the technology to actually send it to. I don't know if they're using Claude. I don't know if they what. But like at least like a copy and paste. And what would be cool is if in the copy and paste it was like a starter prompt and the information to like get them going in the right direction. But yeah, it's.

Yeah. Almost exactly the way it works when you click on the email button.

Yeah.

Where it opens it up and here's a starting message.

Yep.

All right. That's happening this week.

That's funny.

Yeah. And it requires this, this change of direction of, you know, like aligning with what humans want right now and how they're. How they're doing research. Right. The point that they're, you know, they're going to go there to have that conversation. Help them. Help them have the conversation. Right. If you just made it easier for them to have that conversation. That's value. Right. So practical challenge this week you probably got a ton of these. Identify one signal you've been ignoring because you were too focused on manufacturing of leads, of conversion, of urgency, whatever it is. So specific things to look for someone who keeps coming back to your content but hasn't filled out the form. A person who engages deeply on social. But you've never reached out humanly. Right. You might have reached out and said, hey, here's a link to book a demo. Right? Yeah, don't, don't do that. Unless they specifically said. Commented on the post. Man, I'd really love to have a demo of this, whatever it is. Right. Then do that. Comments or questions that went unanswered because they weren't qualified referrals that happened without your referral program. Someone who mentioned you in a conversation. You weren't tracking. All the. The action is just respond to that signal in a human way.

Yeah.

Not with an automated sequence, not with a pitch. Just respond, acknowledge and offer help without requiring Anything in return?

Yeah, two things that come to mind. One, whenever I get tagged into conversations, let's talk about LinkedIn for instance. Usually it's just to say thank you and I appreciate you. Like I'm not gonna try to. Yeah. And here's what I'm gonna do this year. No, hey, thanks. Appreciate it. Love adding value to the community, but like very human thing to do. Here's the second thing that I want to. Because every mention is not a future sales pitch, please. Because if, if that's where your brain goes when you get mentioned, just slap yourself across the face for a second. Wake up, splash some water. No, I'm just kidding. Don't slap yourself in the face. Anyway, second thing I want to mention, if you haven't done this in HubSpot, this is actually fun thing that I love to do. Chris mentioned like they keep consuming your content but they're not filling out forms, they're not converting. If you at least have one conversion or they've been cookied in some sort of way and you can see when they come to your site. This is always fun to create segments, aka what used to be HubSpot lists. Create segments of 20 pages, 40 pages, 60 pages, 80 pages. Now I don't know how many pages you have on your website and you can't ask somebody to read your website twice. But if you are a person that is adding value and you are creating podcast, podcasts and blog articles and all of that, you're going to be able to see when people reach these segments. And I'm saying create those segments, not so you can sell. I'm saying create those segments so that you can know. And if somebody has reached the 40, 60 or 80 page segment, do something nice for them. They are spending a copious amount of time digitally with you and your brand. Send them a hat, a T shirt, a Christmas box, whatever. And again, not because you're manipulating the situation that if I give them something nice now, they might come and buy from. No, they might not be a good fit for your organization, but dang gone it if they haven't been focused on you and probably talking to other people about you. Anyway, set up those lists, those segments in HubSpot and see how many people might already be in these different levels of digital education engagement that you're not even paying attention to.

Yep. Yeah. And what you'll watch for, it's not going to be conversion rates, but quality of conversation, you know, that follows how the other person responds to human outreach versus manufactured outreach. And this one's my favorite because I've just seen way too many people stuck in these moments feeling like this is the way it's supposed to go. This is how it's always been done. Pay attention to your own energy level. Does it feel better than lead processing, than doing the manufactured thing, than doing the templated thing? That should. I mean, honestly, I hope you can be in a situation where that positive impact is enough to start to understand and you don't need more results than that.

By the way, for anybody who doesn't know, the answer is yes, it feels better. Okay, I'm done.

Yes, indeed. And that's why we're big fans of serendipity. At the end of the day over here at value first, because you won't. You won't end with the conversion, but you will have ended with adding value just simply by seeing them, hearing them, and probably doing a little bit of that for yourself, too.

So, hang on, I know you're about to close out, but I gotta say this, because it just came to my brain. You don't have to start with a conversion to get to a customer.

Just saying, here we go. When we close out this foundational series with commitment number seven, soon enable multiplying value rather than extracting diminishing returns, is commitment number seven. You know, we've talked about removing barriers, recognizing signals. Now we're going to ask what happens when value starts flowing? Do you try to capture and extract it or do you enable it to multiply? Very different responses with very different outcomes.

Yeah.

Anything else as we wrap up, George?

No, buddy, I just. I love these conversations. Honestly, I can't wait to get to the end of this and take the bank of all of these conversations and throw them into my assistant, because I know how dope my assistant is. So maybe that's the last thing. Because we referenced that earlier. I'm referencing it now is like, if you haven't been spending time to make your AI assistant, the dopest AI assistant, it can be with things like projects, memory, custom instructions, maybe over the holidays when you're kind of slowing down, shutting down, maybe find a couple YouTube channels or maybe find Nico and Chris and things that they've been talking about on weekends and weekdays and mornings and stuff, and try to figure out how in 2026, do you have a plan to create an AI assistant that augments you in a way that you can take information like this and just learn at rapid rates and transition into the business and human that you need to be? As this future just continues to change everything that we thought we knew it was gonna be, and it isn't. Show me one person that's worked anywhere for 30 years in the last. I'm done.

Yeah, I like it. I think that's. That's good advice. And on that note, I hope everybody has a great rest of your week, and we'll see you next time. Thanks so much, George.

Thanks, Chris.