#169: LEVEL UP Your Communication Skills With Ethan Beute Chief Evangelist at BombBomb

It's just easier to answer people's questions with a video. You know, this idea that we can and should continue doing what's comfortable and easy, typing stuff up and sending it, copying and pasting things and sending it. It's like that party is over and it's time to take advantage of these things that technology has given us. I mean, they assign so much more value to it than if I had taken eight minutes and typed up the same thing in four paragraphs with a couple of links to support articles or, you know, these kinds of things. Like, it's so deeply human that it is transformative in the way that we work.

I'm on this journey with me each week. When you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow.

I'm ready for my close up.

Hi, and welcome back. I'm so excited for you to meet my guest this week. Ethan Butte is Chief Evangelist at BombBomb, Wall Street Journal, best selling, co author of Human Centered Communication and of Rehumanize youe Business, host of the Customer Experience podcast, which I was lucky enough to be a guest on. Ethan, thank you so much for being here.

Sure, thank you. And I love the time that we spent together on episode 164 of the podcast. I really am excited about Overcome youe Villains. And I was excited to talk about it after reading it. I'm happy to be here too.

Okay, so I like to give a little behind the scenes and I want to share with everybody how we first met and how you went out of your way to help me, which I'm super appreciative of because I like for people to know who someone is when the camera's not on. I personally just find that really important. So someone from your team, someone from BombBomb, and I don't remember the name right now, reached out to me and sent me a very nice note. Something around like, hey, I love your content on LinkedIn. It's great, whatever, you know, something very positive. And I replied back, hey, if there's any way you can help me with my book launch, I have a book launch coming up. I'd appreciate it. And he said to me, you need to meet Ethan. So he connected me to you. You said, I'll have you on my show, which was a great experience. And please check out Ethan's podcast. It's amazing. So I had never heard about Bombbomb before. I had never heard about you. And it's so crazy. As you know, things are so noisy on the Internet and everywhere that I don't know how we had never been connected before. We enjoyed time together on your show and then I reached out to you to say congrats when I heard you hit Wall Street Journal bestselling author. Which guys, this. It's such a flipping huge accomplishment in the author space. And you were so kind to not only say, hey, you know, let me know how I can help you, but jump on a call with me and really walk me through some of the things that you attributed to getting you to that level. So I just want to say thank you for not only being a great guest and a great person, but, you know, thanks for your friendship and your support.

Yeah, you are welcome. I appreciate that. Those kind words. I love this idea of going, you know, when the camera's off kind of a thing. I think that's it is important. It's nice of you to share that with other people and with me directly. And it's something that I'm always happy to do. I mean, like all the stuff that we learn, it maybe helps us, but I think so much of. Because we're learning after the fact, it doesn't help. It might help us the next time we encounter something similar, but it doesn't help us at the point of learning immediately. So there's no sense holding it in and just waiting for, if this happens again, then I can apply it. We should be sharing this stuff with the people that we meet. And that's how we get to know each other. That's how we. It sounds transactional at some level, but the more we give, the more people will give back to us. And I know that a lot of people say that in a lot of ways it can sound kind of trite and cliche, but I think so many things that come across as trite or cliche are true. And so people say them and they say them in different words and they say them a lot. But it really is about sharing what we have with other people as a way to enrich our own lives in a variety of ways.

Well, I couldn't agree with you more. Can you share for people who don't know what Bombbomb is, and then some of the tips and strategies you shared with me that you believe are really the drivers that accelerated you to Wall Street Journal's list?

Sure. Bombbomb is a software company. It's something you could subscribe to by the month or for the year you can do as an individual person. I think our biggest account is a couple few Thousand people, so entire teams or companies can subscribe. And our whole goal is to get you face to face with more people, more often to communicate in these digital, virtual and online spaces in a more, in a more clear and a more connective and in a more human way. And by that I just mean simple, casual, conversational videos. So when we think about it, every day we're entrusting some of our most important and valuable messages to faceless typed out text. It doesn't have nuance, it doesn't have personality, it isn't as clear as we are when we just talk to people, but there's reasons that we use these channels. LinkedIn messages, emails, text messages, etc. It's like fast, it's easy, it's useful. Every one of those spaces is a space where you could add a 30 second video or a two minute video and there are tons of use cases. We could probably spend two hours. I've been at the company for a decade and I've created, I've written two and a half books on the topic or related topics so we could go really, really deep on it. But the whole idea is when people say yes, they're saying yes to you, to who you are and the trust and rapport that you've built with them. Not just to the terms or conditions or the price or the features or these other things. So when we want people to say yes, which is a lot, yes, I'll make that introduction, yes, I'll click that link and fill out the survey, yes, I'll return the phone call. Yes, I'll buy that book. It's so much about who we are. And so this idea that we're going to continue to hide behind a cloak of digital anonymity by sending this faceless typed out text that looks just the same as everyone else's message. Like there's still places for it, but there are also places for video messages. Now that we all have HD cameras and Internet connections that can support this. Like there's no reason we shouldn't be communicating as ourselves more often. So that's what we do at Bombbomb, make it easy to record and send video messages, see exactly who's opening them, playing them, how long people are watching them and all of that. And so that's what we do at Bombbomb. And when you reached out and said like, this is awesome, congratulations. And we started chatting about it, you know, you asked like what, you know, what are a couple things that. Cause we launched a book before and we sold a lot of books rehumanize your business. But we didn't hit that list. And so what did we do different this time? And I truly believe that I personally, directly and indirectly sold more books, sending one to one personal video messages to people in my personal and professional network than I did by sending mass emails to our database. And it's a large database, we have tens of thousands of customers and we did sell a lot of books that way. But I think reaching out to people with a personal video that was relevant specific why I thought of them, when I thought about who should know about this book and not making a particular ask, just making available to them some links to things about the book and, and if they wanted to take a look, I welcomed their feedback. If they wanted to share it with other people, that'd be awesome. And so some people would reply and say, that's great, good for you, that's amazing. Some people would reply back and say, awesome, I just pre ordered one. Some people would reply back and say, awesome, I just pre ordered 10. Send me my preorder bonuses because we put packages together. Some people replied back and said, oh my gosh, I need to have you back on the podcast. Some people said, this is great. And then they went and posted about it on a social network. And so that chain of events, directly and indirectly, I think was the single biggest change. The other thing is that we did interview 11 other experts in the book, Steve and I, the guy, a longtime friend and team member of mine and co author on the first book and this one. We also reached out to 11 of our expert friends to talk about digital, virtual and online communication and sales, marketing, service leadership and some other contexts. So we had a lot more people promoting it than we did last time, too.

That's so smart. I mean, thinking of that instead of just one author out hustling the book down now, you've ultimately brought in 11 different people, which is an excellent strategy that I love. But here's the thing, and I shared this with you. One of my brilliant friends, marketing maven Phillip Stutts, had shared with me a couple of months ago, Heather, the most important thing for you to do this time around that you didn't do last time. My first book came out in 2018 and I just didn't know any better. He said, don't send out the mass email. He said, go one to one. To your point, however, you've taken it another level. He wasn't thinking about the video element yet. He was just saying on an email text standpoint, go one to one, people don't respond to mass emails anymore. Maybe in the past that worked, but definitely don't rely on that strategy because everyone will tell you the email list is one of the best converters for any type of sales. And so when I heard you explain that to me on the video level, immediately, number one, in my head I went to. In my mind, there was a young girl that sent me a video Message through Instagram DMs wanting me to be on her podcast. And I typically, I will not say yes to that. Cause I just don't have the time to do a lot of shows. As soon as I saw how cute and personalized her method, that she was thoughtful and I saw her smiling face, I wrote right back, I'll find a way. You know, work with me here on schedule. But yeah, let's do it. And so just from my own personal, limited experience with it, it really resonated with me that that's where we are now as a society. That if somebody's gonna go out of their way to, to show up in your inbox, you see their smiling face, they're tailoring something specific to you. It's going to have a much bigger impact.

Absolutely. And it's because, you know, we cannot discern from faceless typed out text A. Did someone copy and paste this? To be very clear with you, Heather, and with everyone listening, you know, I had a layered approach. We did send some mass emails. I did do some 10% personalized sends to people where it was like, all right, I had this kind of templated thing that I had made. The video is the same. I don't name the person or speak specifically to my experience with them. But, you know, so with these, we all know that whatever language we want to use for our database or our sphere of influence or our network or whatever language we want to use, you know, you have the A's, the B's, the C's and on. Right. And so, you know, beyond a C, everyone gets kind of a mass treatment and you have to make some plays there. With a C, you don't know them that well. You're maybe not that deeply connected to them, and they're not necessarily that deeply connected to you. You do have to decide, do I have time to get truly personal and make a truly bespoke message for that level of connection where, you know, the opening line about the last time we connected doesn't exist because we've never directly connected before. We're just like very loosely connected. So you do need to, like, Pick and choose your spots and use it that way. But in these, especially for someone who's reaching out to someone like you, Heather, who is maybe. And I'd be curious to know how you got Gary Vaynerchuk on your podcast. For example, like, I don't know what your relationship was at the time. You've probably told that story. I just haven't heard it. But like, you know, I'm thinking about you potentially being the Gary Vaynerchuk for her show is like, I know Heather. I've read her book. I'm looking forward to her next one. She'd be just such an amazing guest. Like, you know, she's in my top five dream guests for my new podcast. What can I do? There's nothing better that you could do if you are sincere in your desire to talk with somebody or connect with somebody or to get someone to say yes to anything, than to put it out there in a truly human and personal way. Because the thing that people judge first and most before they go on and assess again, the price, features, cost, all these other elements, I'm just using that as a generic bucket of the transactional considerations. Do I have time? Does it have the right things for me? You know, et cetera, et cetera. What they're judging before they even consider that is your intent. What is your motivation? Do you believe what you're saying? Do you actually care about me? Are you acting in my own best interest? And so if someone sends you a personal video and includes what's in it for you? And their sincerity and enthusiasm are just so plainly obvious in a way that faceless typed out text can never deliver. What else is a human being supposed to do but reciprocate? That's how we operate. That's what we do. And so I love that story and I'm excited for her to just be putting herself out there. And we can get into the challenge of that. By the way, recorded video messages have this kind of putting yourself out there, working through vulnerability component to them that stop a lot of people before they ever start the habit in earnest.

Yeah, I mean, it stopped me. I remember a friend of mine a couple of years ago challenging me, hey, you never put video up. You never. You only put still pictures. I said, well, it's much more comfortable to do that. Right? It doesn't feel as familiar to me. It feels a little bit out of my comfort zone. And he actually challenged me. He said, I'm going to challenge you to do one video a week, you know, on social media. So how do you help people break through that?

My attempt would be to approach it rationally, but this is not a rational issue. I think in your own head, Heather, in that moment, you probably thought, yes, this would absolutely be good for my work and my career and my relationships if I did more video rationally, you understand this. But the emotional experience, that discomfort in the vulnerable moment, which, to use Brene Brown's language, is characterized by risk, uncertainty and emotional exposure. Like, when we are feeling vulnerable, we're feeling risk, uncertainty and emotional exposure. And so when we put ourselves out there in a more casual, conversational way, where we have to let go of all of the control that we've been trained to expect in digital formats, we can publish things and then edit them and republish them on the fly with any imagery or graphics down to the pixel. We can change things, and we can change them even after they're published or withdraw them. We have all this, like, down to the letter, down to the pixel control of all of our digital expression. But this style of video requires you to let go and just be yourself for 45 seconds or four and a half minutes or whatever, you know, whatever you're trying to do. And so the only way through that is through it. Like, you can't ignore it. There are no shortcuts. There are no cheats. I think another thing, two things that people should understand if they try to pursue this type of video messaging in particular. One, I think, because we've all been on Zoom incessantly for a year and a half now, we all think like, oh, I can do this. So you just turn your camera on. I kind of put a new light up in my office so that it looks a little bit better. I know where to stand, I stand all day, or I know where to sit. You know, I know how to position myself against the window now, because I was getting blinded between 11am and 1pm every day. Now I fix that. Like we think, okay, I've been on Zoom for countless hours over the past year and a half. I know how to do this. It's a new skill. And just like any other new skill, whether it's skiing a double black diamond, whether it's learning to speak Mandarin, whether it's learning to play chess or the oboe or anything else, like you're not good at it the first time or the third time, you start to get better. But it takes a little bit of practice. And so people approach it with this assumption that. That they can just do it, which some people can, but it's rare. It's a developed practice skill.

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Quince.com confidence the other thing is everyone goes through this. Even the most hardcore badass type A people. Even the people that you see doing, you know, video on their website. They have these extensive YouTube channels like all like people that are even comfortable doing video struggle sometimes getting started with video messaging because you can play it back, you can watch it again, you can judge your you by the way, you're going to judge yourself more harshly than anyone else will. No one will judge you as harshly as you will because nobody cares.

No one cares.

They don't care about your hair or your collar. They don't care about all these little things that you're going to fuss over. They care. Who is this? Do they believe what they're saying? Do they seem to care about me? Is there some value here? Have they made it clear what's the interest and opportunity and why am I getting this? We can kind of package up why did I get this, what's in it for me and how do I proceed on behalf of somebody else? Before we record a single second, it's going to go a lot better. So that's my long way around. It's uncomfortable. You are feeling vulnerable. But to go back to risk uncertainty and emotional exposure. When we think about anything good that ever happened in our lives, it's characterized by one or all of those things. Your TEDx talk Transformative in your life and your career. I'm sure you felt Risk, uncertainty and emotional exposure.

Oh my gosh, the most painful thing ever. It was the scariest thing ever.

Getting pregnant or having a child for the man and, or the woman. Right? Risk, uncertainty, emotional exposure, accepting a job offer. Risk, uncertainty, emotional exposure, going out for the team, trying for the team, setting your personal best. All of it's characterized that way. And so this idea that, you know, in this instance of video messaging, which by the way, can be absolutely transformative for someone's life and career, I've heard, I've been doing this for a decade, full time. Bomb, bomb. I've heard it so many times. When you get to the other side of that discomfort, it's just so liberating. And you can be yourself and win as yourself and a holy unique and different way. And the good news, for anyone who is just getting going or who is already doing it or thinking about doing it, you're still way ahead of the curve. I mean, in terms of the broader, I think everyone working in a professional capacity can and should be using video messages in their day or their week to explain things more clearly, to connect with people more effectively, to break down detail or complexity and all these other things that aren't really very good or fun or easy to do in typed out text.

So tell me, you're very comfortable and confident in your messaging. And that's. And it's so funny. I guess it's not surprising now that I know you. But, you know, I sent you an email and you sent me back a, you know, personalized video message to respond to me and you were very comfortable and confident. How many of those personalized videos have you sent at this point? And at what point during this did you say, you know what? I'm, I'm finally comfortable doing it?

Great question. I've sent about 12,500 in how many years? 10. Wow. So it's just this consistent thing, like there have been a couple of moments like, and again, this, this idea of I need to get the word out about this book and I'm going to start with the people who care about and who I care about most and who should, who I know, share similar values on the way life and business can and should be done. A relationship orientation, a service orientation, some of the themes that are in this book. And so there I would like, I would knock out, you know, 3, 5, 10, 12 at a time. There's one afternoon where I sent about 180 in one afternoon. But for the most part, it's like when I need to or when I want to. So when you emailed me, Heather, we had not met yet, and I wanted you to feel like you knew me. I wanted to warm up the relationship. I wanted our next call to start in a different place than it would if it was, like, more blind and faceless. And so I do that all the time with people I haven't met yet. I will always reply with a video message. And so that might happen once today, it might happen three times today. I might find that I do have 20 minutes to reach out to my last 10 LinkedIn connections and send them personal videos, just introducing myself and thanking them for connecting. But I might not, right? So that might not happen this week, a customer. Thousands and thousands of people have my email address because I was the first and only marketer at Bombbomb and I sent every newsletter and offer and webinar invite from my personal email address. So I get all kinds of random inquiries. And so in a lot of those cases, it's just easier to answer people's questions with a video. And the interesting dynamic is that because it took me a minute and 47 seconds to answer their question, and there's no mistaking that I took 1 minute and 47 seconds to look them in the eye through the camera and speak to them very specifically in a spirit of service, they assign so much more value to it than if I had taken eight minutes and typed up the same thing in four paragraphs with a couple of links to support articles or, you know, these kinds of things. Like, just the fact that it's such a tangible gift of your time and your attention, which are two of the most valuable things we have, is part of what makes it so valuable. And that's why a, a thank you, a good job, a congratulations. I've been thinking about you. I just noticed that, right, like, so we're scrolling Facebook or Instagram or whatever and we see something and maybe we like it and we comment on it. But I'll also keep this notebook next to me all the time. And when either A, someone comes to mind, I'll write them down. Or B, I see something in a feed that I want to kind of double back on, I'll write it down. If I hear a team member's name, like, we're about 140 people here at Bombbomb and I'm in the leadership standups every morning. If a leader mentions someone on the front line of their team who did something awesome or was facing something challenging or just hit a one year anniversary or something, I'll write it down and then I'll find five or ten minutes in the day to send personal videos to people like about these things. And so it seems like these little habits. So it's not about the volume of the messages, it's about making it part of your day. And especially the ones that are borderline personal, professional, those are the ones where you'll get the reply backs the that'll say like, I loved all capitals your email, which nobody says unless there's a video in it or this totally made my day or I totally needed to hear that. Right? Like these kinds of things, it's like that's what we're here for. We're here to be in relationship with one another and to support one another. And the efficiency of these digital channels is very, very powerful. And layering in these personal moments in the context of these highly efficient digital channels makes it a little bit more human. Again.

When I'm listening to you talk right now, I'm just thinking how any person listening right now has the power to change another person's life. And you've had people do that for you. I've had people do that for. We've done that for other people. But really, like you said, taking that one minute to recognize someone and say, I heard about what happened for you, I just wanted to reach out and say how amazed I am, impressed and excited I am that you accomplished this or whatever it is, it's just so meaningful to be seen and someone took the time out of their day to do that. It's really a powerful leadership strategy technique or just a wonderful thing to do.

Yeah, I mean, just that alone. If you are a leader or manager or a business owner with multiple employees, if that's the only thing you do is to provide constructive feedback or even, you know, word of caution before your next one on one, like, hey, you know, I've been noticing this and this, we talked about this last time we met. I definitely want to see like you can provide corrective action this way too. For example, I'm thinking of a longtime customer of ours who said thousands of videos himself and he's a college professor, like an adjunct professor at a couple different universities. And you know, instead of just redlining the crap out of someone's like 14 page paper that they put countless hours into, he sends a video with it and he can provide this corrective, constructive feedback in a way that like, it makes them feel good about the effort. He points to the highlights, but he can also provide the constructive, perhaps arguably negative feedback in a way that doesn't feel so cold or harsh or, or misunderstood. Like when someone can, you know, I mean, you know this as a parent, sometimes you need to be firm and clear and loving all at the same time. And it's hard to do in just digital channels. We need to do that with our team members, we need to do that with our peers. We need to do that with the people around us sometimes. And so, you know, whether it is this positive thing or whether it's kind of a constructive concern. And here's another one. We all mess up. You need to apologize. You need to break bad news to somebody. Great opportunity to use it in video because we've all seen that apology, not apology, press conference from a politician or an athlete or celebrity or like that dude does not mean any of the words he just said. He's just reading the crap that his lawyer wrote for him. He doesn't mean a single word of it. And we can tell that immediately. Which I want to step way, way back. All of this is about human to human communication in the context of the developed Western world in 2021, 2022 and beyond. This is how we have to do some of these things. But the reasons we need to do them this way are ancient vulnerability. All it's about in terms of putting ourselves out there in an honest and simple and direct way, it's fear of judgment and rejection. And if we think about that, if we were judged and rejected 2,000 years ago, we'd die on the beach or in the forest or on the mountainside or wherever our tribe was at the time. Assuming we were nomadic or wherever the village was, we needed to be healthy, successful relationships with other people. So we fear judgment and rejection by the people around us. Const. Some people manage it well, but of course it could be manifest in a very psychologically, emotionally and spiritually unhealthy way. Most of us are relatively healthy in this regard, but it's hard to do these newer things when it casts us back into that again. When I was talking about intent earlier, do you have my best interest in mind? I'm going to judge your warmth before I judge your competence. And if you think about that from an ancient perspective, I'm thinking now of like an evil super genius, right? Someone who's highly, highly competent. They can do all the things that they're telling you they can do. But if they don't have your best interests in mind and you're not able to judge that before you agree to proceed with them, they could get over on you and the consequences could be fatal, potentially, especially the farther back we go. Right. And so we need to judge someone's intent and motivation. But when you think about faceless, typed out text, we're not giving people the information they need to make a safe, constructive choice about whether or not to move forward with us. Now, this is in a sales context or a marketing context or a service context or a leadership context. Or should I take this job? Right. If we're exclusively relying on communication that doesn't include this valuable critical intent data that every human needs to make a safe choice, guess what? Their brains fill that in in the absence of real data. And they don't fill it in with your interests in mind as the hiring manager or the, or the seller. They do it in a protective way, naturally, because deeply human, we want to protect ourselves and survive and thrive and create offspring and all these other things that humans have done for millennia. And so they fill in those gaps in our digital communication in a way that protects them and assumes the worst. And so this idea that we can and should continue doing what's comfortable and easy, typing stuff up and sending it, copying and pasting things and sending it, it's like that party is over and it's time to take advantage of these things that technology has given us. Again, I've been doing this for a decade. This is not new, but it's so deeply human that it is transformative in the way that we work.

Well, sadly, it's new to most of us. Right. It's definitely new to me. Okay. Which is great because I mean, it's an opportunity to improve drastically, like you said, and make a big impact with just making a couple of different changes. So in your book, Human Centered Communication, you mentioned that you interviewed over 10amazingly successful people, experts in sales and marketing. What feedback or techniques did you glean from them that you were surprised by or excited to reveal?

Yeah, there's a variety. So Steve and I, Steve is my longtime friend and team member, our chief marketing officer here at Bomb. We co authored that previous book together in addition to this newer one, Human Centered Communication. So we handpicked people we knew and liked with diverse backgrounds. And one of the things I think we did right in trying to get to strategies and tactics to help us connect and communicate more successfully when we're stuck in digital, virtual and online environments, which course all of us have been extensively by the way. You'll not read the words pandemic or Covid in the book on any page by design like this is. These are timeless ideas, but very Specific to the moment, too. And so I think one thing we did right in getting to people's strategies and tactics, despite some diversity in the group, is by starting with the same three questions. So we did these interviews with all of them, and of course, we did our research in advance. We followed up afterward, and all the things that you need to do to develop this properly. But we asked first, what is your guiding life or business philosophy nested underneath that? What role do relationships and human connection play in service of that philosophy? And then underneath that, what role do video messages and video calls and other, you know, video communication play in service of relationships and human connection? And so by starting that way, we oriented everyone toward what really matters. And so I think in the strategies that you see throughout the pages, and I'd be surprised if I didn't just pick this up and open it to a page and you couldn't get something that you could apply. Same day, especially in chapters three through 13, where each of these people are featured, the themes that we got out of it are really about. This is just a simple one, putting other people first. Different people said it in different ways, but it's like, what's in it for them? So often when we get on a call or we type up an email or we record a video or whatever we're doing, we're just. We're always in a hurry. We're just showing up and figuring we can get it done that way. We sometimes say what we need to say or we ask for what we need to get, or these types of things. And I think if we just stopped as a habit for a week or for 30 days and consciously thought before we typed a word or recorded a single second or got on the call, if we just spent a minute to focus on what's in it for them, whether that's her or him or a group of people or everyone in our database or whoever we're communicating with, if we just stopped for a moment and thought about what in it for them, every single word we type and every second of video we record is going to be better as a consequence, because we're going more than halfway to meet people past where we would traditionally ask them to meet us. And frankly, when we're in a rush, we're not even going halfway, and we're just wondering why people didn't respond to our email, or we're wondering why people didn't watch our video, or wondering why people didn't do what we asked them to do. It's because we only went like 25% of the way for them. And so I think if we can start doing this as a habit, not only can we change business culture, but we can also change business results. I think this idea that we can come part way and expect everyone else to continue to meet us, I think that's why we settle for 2% conversion rate on an email campaign and ignore the 98% failure rate. By the way, we're not even asking ourselves about the 90. What happened to the 98%? Well, let's just be kind to ourselves and say the vast majority of them were just like swipe, delete. But there's some share in there that are like block, unsubscribe or I don't know if you've seen these on LinkedIn, Heather. I see them pretty regularly. It's like, hey, I just accepted this connection request and look at this junk that this person just sent me. Now if they're really polite, they'll blur out the face and the name and the company name. But it's just like this stupid stuff that we do and we accept it as like normal and appropriate and like, ah, it's just what you do. That's not how you get forward. Like, our reputation is not just being determined person by person, experience by experience. That is happening, by the way, every time we reach out to somebody with a message or an experience, digitally, virtually or online, we're training them whether or not we're worth their time and attention the next time. But we just send another one like, well, we've got, you know, it didn't work last time, but I, you know, we're back at par and I, maybe I'll give it another shot, I'll give it another shot, I'll give it another shot. The fourth time they ignore you. Not only does their brain now know this person has no value for me because they looked at the first one or two and decided, this isn't for me, it's not useful, it's not targeted, it's not relevant, it doesn't speak to me, it's not about me, it doesn't even seem like it's for me. It's not clear. Like all these things that people experience, like in this quick flood of subconscious thought and decision making, which is, by the way, is largely emotional among anything else. That's why this emotional resonance of when I see your name in my inbox, how do I feel? You know, that's another way to think about what's in it for them. If the association is negative or neutral, you're going to be swiped, delete at best, you're going to be blocked at worst. And so proceeding in this kind of like myopic, short, small, simple view of a train. You know it's just an email, right? No, it's not. You're training people and then as a consequence, you're training the machines that are watching everything that all of us are doing all the time. Heather, if you and I were connected to the exact same 1000 people on LinkedIn and we both logged in at the same moment and hit hard refresh and we got a new feed, it would look different because we like different things, we comment on different things, et cetera. We're already seeing this happen. And so if you don't like or comment on someone's stuff, they just disappear. And the same thing is going to be happening in all these other channels because the noise and pollution are only growing. And so we're going to, as humans, with limited attention and limited time, we're going to need machines to filter more and more and more of our stuff. I remember everyone freaked out when Gmail introduced the tabs in the Gmail inbox. Like, how dare they put my, you know, mass sales email into the promotions tab. Well, because it's a promotion that you sent to 5,800 people. What else are they supposed to do with it, right? So these tools are acting in service of us, the recipients who are feeling busy, anxious, frustrated, confused, sometimes threatened. Like, is this link safe to click? Is this from who it says it's from? If I click this attachment, I'm going to get malware. Like, this is a noisy and polluted environment. So I think the more we can be clear with people that we're coming with sincerity, that we're coming with their best interest in mind, that we're coming with something useful for them, the better off we are. And to think otherwise and to play a volume game and to treat people like numbers, the days of that being effective are like, if they're not gone, they're going to be soon.

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Wow. That is really powerful and so true. And I was thinking about my own email list while you were talking because I of course I've had people unsubscribe I go to some people's spam or junk mail. And I'll get messages. You, I signed up for your program and I never. And I always say, go check your clutter or your junk mail. Right. So you know that people have unsubscribed or blocked you or complained about the content you sent. And as I challenge myself and everyone listening, I want you to challenge yourself, too, because we can be better. Is that okay? What was I sending in those emails that got someone to write spam block? You know, I don't want to hear from this person again. LinkedIn has launched newsletter, which is. Has been new for me just the last two months. I've been so thoughtful, Ethan, about every email I send out. I mean, beyond and to your point, through that lens of what is it that the person that's going to open this wants to feel, what is going to be adding value for them? You know, and I look at the data, number one for me, I go back to the data in my analytics to see what, what's resonating with my audiences, what are they responding to? What, what's timely right now and relevant right now to them. So I can be helpful. And then I try to, you know, create thoughtful content around that. And again, my Open rate is 50% on my newsletter on LinkedIn, which I'm really happy with. My personal email list is at 20%.

Right.

I've had that a lot longer and I wasn't as thoughtful for years. So I'm just learning now at 47 years old. Holy cow. And what I'm also learning and reading a lot about is that email's not going away. Email seems to be growing, if anything.

Yeah. And so, and I want to be really clear, like, as I said earlier with kind of the ABC and beyond groups, like, this is not about bespoke messaging for each person. If you set the expectation, hey, I'm going to give you a tip that you can read in 60 seconds and it's going to be in your inbox every single day, then people can expect to hear from you every single day. If you, Heather, are saying, like, hey, every week or every other week or once a month, I'm going to be sending you this, that, and the other thing, and people sign up for it. Well, it might be exciting to them right now and their needs might change, or they've now subscribed to four things and they need to get rid of two of them and unfortunately, yours is the one that they get rid of. Like, things change. It's all contextual. But I think as long as we're setting clear expectations. There's nothing wrong with sending mass stuff, I think where people get the most frustrated. And I've experienced this too. As I said, I've sent tons of emails to, you know, segmented but still large lists of people for years. And I've, I've seen and experienced everything. By the way, when people reply back and they're really pissed off, like, why are you getting this email? And you just do a quick dive and you get. Your system should be able to tell you that they signed up over here on this day and I send videos back. Joe, hey man, got your reply. I'm really sorry that you know, that you're upset with this email. Want to let you know you're getting it because you signed up, but you did sign up 2 and a half years ago, so I get it. You know, you might have forgotten about it. I wanted to let you know that I personally and manually unsubscribed you in both systems that we use to send emails. So this should not happen again. Hey, it doesn't do me any good and it doesn't do you any good for me to send you emails that you don't want to get. I respect it. I hope you have a great rest of your day. And if you ever want to learn, you know, if you ever want to learn some of the stuff that we're sending out, just email me back. I'd be happy to resubscribe you. And even that alone, just kind of going back to where we were before because you said really powerful language. Heather, all people want is to be seen and heard and understood at another layer. Valued, respected, appreciated. That's all any human wants. That's also a deep human need. Like, because we're all struggling. That's why we have so many religions and philosophical systems. Like we're still desperate to know as human beings here on Earth, as individuals and as groups of people, why are we here and how are we supposed to live? Like, those are ancient questions that are just as challenging and relevant today, despite all the kind of schools of thought that have come up to try to answer these questions. And so at a personal level, this idea of just sending this video back and being like, dude, I totally get it, I'd be mad too. Here's the deal, here's what I did to resolve it and I'm happy to like revert my actions and bring you back into the email list if you want to just that act alone. Half the time people reply back and say something positive in general And I'd say half of those replies are, yeah, okay, okay. You know, keep sending it to me. You know, there are, there are ways to do it. Well, it's about managing expectations, really. It's about managing expert setting expectations, managing those expectations and delivering or over delivering on those expectations. And it's impossible in any group setting. It's impossible to satisfy everybody all the time. And so you're going to lose people, you're going to confuse people, you're going to frustrate people. And the best thing you can do is just, you know, do your best. Do it in a spirit of service and keep going.

So I know right now someone's listening and they're saying, well, that's great for Ethan because he works for Bombbomb, but I don't have the time to do this. How do you respond to that?

Oh, you mean like replying to the people who are pissed off and creating.

Video emails just to begin with?

Oh, oh, there you go. Okay, so a couple things. One, once you get past that initial discomfort of like, how do I start these videos? How do we get out of them? You know, am I good enough? Do I look good enough? Do I sound good enough? Did I say the right things? Once you get out of your own head about those. It took me, you know, 10 maybe, to get, like, comfortable, but there are still moments where I'll stop and rerecord because I didn't like the way I was doing it, or I'll still get anxious again because I'm doing something. Like that young woman that reached out to you on Instagram. Like, I'm making some assumptions about the nature of that dynamic, but I think they're probably approximately accurate. You know, where I'm reaching out to someone that I'm really excited to be in conversation with. I don't know if they're gonna get it or if they're gonna watch it or if someone else actually monitors their inbox or, you know, like, you know, where I'm still kind of anxious or excited about what I'm doing. And so I still, from time to time, will be a little bit nervous about some of them. Couple things. One, you're doing this to make it easier for people to say yes. And so there, at some level, you need to be honest with yourself about efficiency, getting lots of stuff done really quickly and effectiveness, maybe doing fewer things, but getting the same outcomes or more outcomes through fewer activities. There's a balance there between efficiency and effectiveness and this industrial mindset that set onto all of us culturally 200 years ago at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, plussed up dramatically about 100 years ago with the assembly line, you know, Henry Ford's assembly line. And we still operate our businesses and funnels a lot of the time in like assembly line type manners. And my God, that's a hundred years old. Like I think we could move beyond that and like be a little bit more dynamic because all of us know, especially anyone in a selling motion, buyers are reaching out to us and engaging with us at so many different points in their journey. Now some of them have done 90% of the work and they have two questions and they're ready to buy. Other people are early on and their friend told them they should reach out and learn more. Right? And so we can't treat all these people the same way. So anyway, once we get past the discomfort, once we get comfortable like with our equipment and our setup, whether you're using Bombbomb or another service and there are a lot of services that do it now, once we get all those basics out of the way, you're going to find yourself saving time by doing this in a lot of ways. An important customer or an important friend or an important partner, like strategic partner. Someone who's giving you lots of referrals or introduced you to a couple like super awesome people, they reach out with a question, it's going to be faster for you and it's going to be more important for them that you just send a video back. We speak four times faster than we type. And on my phone, like, you know, my son can type a heck of a lot faster than I can on his phone. Like on my phone, I'm probably, it's probably 6 to 8x faster for me to speak than it is to type on my phone. And so you're going to find yourself saving time in that way. Another time saving idea. You can record a video once and use it over and over and over again. I call that an Evergreen video. And so, so anytime these two things are true, this number falls between that range and this criteria is false. Trigger this automatic video to send from my CRM or my marketing automation system, right? Because if these two things are true, this number is between these ranges and that thing's false, then you can speak to those things. Hey, it's Ethan. You're getting this because you're not going to say this explicitly, but because these two things are true, this thing, these numbers between this range and this thing's false, right? And so but it's still relevant to them. It's helpful to them. And you're not acting like you made this truly personal video. You're sending it because that's a better way to communicate the message and a better way to get them to whatever the next step is. And of course, you can also do this in mass. And so I understand the resistance. I think there are lots of ways to save time to make a bigger impact, to be more effective, not just more efficient. And I think the main hang up around the question that you asked Heather is just in those early stages in like the first three to five to ten messages where the like, like, oh my gosh, this is so slow. I got, I got to move my camera a little bit. Oh, my gosh. The countdown is two, one flash. And then it goes like just the early stuff that will become muscle memory just like anything else. Right? Your new workout routine because you got a new personal trainer. You're like, oh, my God, this is the craziest, hardest, weirdest, most uncomfortable, most awkward workout ever until the third time that you do it.

And that's when you get the biggest results too, is when you're doing something different and new.

Yeah, there you go. So anyway, that's just a few thoughts around that and it's a common pushback and I totally get the concern.

Well, I am ready to be more effective. So please tell us, where can everyone find Human centered Communication? Number two on the Wall Street Journal list.

Awesome. Thank you so much. It's bombbomb.com book. It's just the word bomb twice. B o m b bomb.com book. Or you can search human centered communication at Amazon or, or anywhere else. It's in all the places.

Well, Ethan, thank you so much for all the work you put in to this new book, which is unbelievable. And thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate your honesty, your integrity, and I'm really grateful for having you here.

I appreciate you, Heather. Thank you for having me. I know I've listened to multiple episodes of the show. I know we probably went a little bit long and it's been a joy and privilege. I appreciate you asking such good questions and allowing me the opportunity.

All right, guys, until next week, keep creating your confidence and check the links below because we're going to have Ethan's book book right there for you. I decided to change that dynamic. I couldn't be more excited for what you're going to hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably something will happen. No one succeeds alone.

You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it.

Come on this journey with me.