251: Simply Put—Reducing Friction on Sales Pages and in Business Communication with Ben Guttmann

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It's about empowering somebody to kind of have creative leadership to be able to say this idea is not that great. This idea is because it's not a sexy job. Everybody kind of hates doing it or hates the responsibility that comes along with it. But you have to be able to draw a line somewhere in order to actually make anything stand out.

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Welcome back Free Timers. I am so excited to be here today with Ben Gutman. He is a marketing and communications expert and the author of his new book Simply why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them. He's an experienced marketing executive and educator on a mission to get leaders to more effectively connect by simplifying their message. Ben is a former co founder and Managing partner at Digital Natives Group, an award winning agency that worked with brands like the NFL, I love New York Comcast and he's now teaching Digital Marketing at Baruch College in New York City. Ben, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me Jenny. It's great to be here.

When I met you, we were on a zoom with a couple other people and I saw your book. It's very beautiful and compact of course, per the message. Simply put, I knew it would be a great conversation for free time because I feel like one thing that the small business owners I work with are always confronted with is how to describe what they do and how to put it simply enough. Let's say on a sales page, which I would call an invitation letter, that why are we always messing up our own message? Why does this feel so impossible to do, to say what it is that we offer succinctly? Why are we always gumming up the works?

Well, precisely because of what you just said was that they know their stuff so well. We know what we do because we do it all the time. We are so close to our work, we are so close to our own experience that it's hard for us to separate that from what the audience wants and experiences and how they live and how their brains work. And we're also kind of built to overestimate how much we represent the opinions of the audience or how our motivations, emotions, our perspectives represent the whole. And so when you take that and then you combine it with all these other ingredients stirring around in terms of this age of distraction that we're in, in terms of our own biases to add and to complicate, well, that's how we get to this point where we feel like we have this thing that's really important, we got to get it out there, but we just kind of fail when we actually want to go out and do it.

You mentioned this idea that we are not necessarily the target client, customer, avatar, whatever terminology. And yet some people say, create for yourself, like, what would you want? And I always quote Tim Urban because I found it helpful, at least from a writing perspective. He just pictures a stadium of 10,000 of him repeated, and he's kind of writing in a way to please or entertain himself. So that seems like kind of a conflicting set of best practices where on the one hand, we are not our audience, and yet on the other, it seems like at least a lot of the free timers that I know, we are kind of creating what we wish we had. I'm wondering if you can address that gap.

Sometimes we do represent our audience. Right. I wrote this book because it was something that, okay, I want somebody who's had maybe agency experience, maybe they're a business owner. So that's a little bit more representative. But the challenge comes up when we're saying, okay, well, we're going to target this advertisement or we're going to target this new product to CPAs. Right? We want accountants to get this product. Well, if I talk to 500 house painters, that doesn't help me as much as if I talk to kind of one CPA to understand what their perspective is on things. And so I'm not discounting that. The part of that, though, that stood out as you're mentioning was the 10,000 people kind of in the arena. One of the things this is kind of putting the cart ahead of the horse. But one of the tactics that I outline in the book that I've looked at some of the research for is that it's most Effective, actually, when we try to communicate to one person and not to 10,000 at once. If we're sending out an email and it's going to 10,000 people or a million people, we write it like we're standing on the mountaintop and we're shouting out to everybody. Nobody really connects to that. But if we're saying, hey, this is for the one person, it is for that avatar. It is for that. Maybe it's just for me. Well, that puts us in a headspace, which we. We are much more likely to connect. It changes how we view the audience. When you look at how this plays out in the data, it also backs it up right when you personalize things, when you say that this is for a specific individual, well, those type of ads, they sell more stuff. Those emails get opened more. It's a balancing act. You want to make sure you know who your audience is, but you also make sure that you're aware of what your biases are and how they might color them.

It's funny you mentioned that, because I have noticed this in myself. When I was writing Pivot, I certainly had maybe two people in mind, but they were very specific people. And then over the years, I've found it challenging with the newsletter and the podcast. I don't really know who I'm speaking to anymore. Maybe listeners are thinking, yeah, that's why I don't listen to you anymore. But it became hard because Pivot was more of a psychographic than a demographic. It was high net growth individuals. They could be any age, any life stage. They might work in a company, they might work for themselves. And it wasn't until I started the Free Time book brand and podcast that I realized, oh, this is so much easier. I felt relieved putting together a newsletter because I knew who it was for. It was people running small businesses who have delightfully tiny teams. They don't have aspirations to grow to an enormous size with their company. And everything became so much easier. And even still, I could probably take your advice better in terms of writing a newsletter to one person instead of even thinking about, at this moment in time, all 3,000 newsletter readers for free time.

Oh, yeah. And if you want to go kind of to the largest scale here, you know who's the best in the world at doing this right now? It's Taylor Swift, the new Time person of the year. Did you see her concert or the movie for her concert?

No, I'm not an avowed Swiftie, but I respect it. And I love the Taffy Brodesser actor profile that she's one of my favorite writers.

Oh, she's a great writer. I'm not as big of a Swiftie either, to be honest. My wife is a fan. She went and she saw the concert. She flew across the country to go do it. I'm not that big of a fan as she is. I appreciate her, but I saw the movie when it came out in theaters a couple months ago, and she pulls off this magic trick, both in the stadium there, when there's 70,000 people, as well as when you look through the expanse of space and time being recorded and shown in thousands of different movie theaters across the country, that every single lyric feels like it's for you, Every single piece of little banter feels like it's just you and her talking. And this is something that she's really good at. I mean, some of the best politicians in the world, when you look at the praise they get, someone like Bill Clinton was famous for this, making it feel like there's this one person that you're speaking to, just a one to one conversation. And I think this works because it doesn't matter if that is a newsletter that's going to a million people or you're standing on a concert stage in front of 70,000 or it's a Super bowl ad in front of however many millions of people. Every conversation, every ad that you're having, every time you're hearing a political speech, it really is one to one, right? Because there is the one sender. And while the audience does exist, the crowd exists. In some ways, the crowd doesn't exist in your own head. And what's happening between your ears or behind your eyes is kind of an individual decision about, do I like this person? Am I going to vote for them? Am I going to subscribe to their newsletter? Am I going to buy their stuff? And so that is a one to one relationship. And so I think that's part of the reason why that framework ends up being so effective.

I love that you brought up this example of Taylor Swift. That's a good one. Where maybe she's talked about this, but her audience is so vast. I mean, by definition it's like probably a billion people by now. Certainly many millions. And I wonder when she's on stage, I wonder who she is picturing. Do you have a sense? Because maybe your wife is not exactly who the one person Taylor Swift is imagining she's speaking to. And yet it still resonates. I find that interesting because she does have a very broad audience at this point.

I'm curious I don't know who that exact avatar might be for her, but I know that the voice in which she talks is the voice that someone would talk to their best friend in. And I think that's the emotion that she's looking to evoke from it. And you see that carried across and how she, at least in the past, when she was more active on social media, how she would post on, like, Tumblr and everything else. When you look at how people respond to it, when you look at how fans across Instagram and TikTok and whatever, when they comment on it, they talk about her like they're talking about their friend. I mean, it's this kind of parasocial relationship, and there's a whole big discussion about that type of stuff, but it seems to be incredibly effective.

That's a great point. And that is a skill. And I think some of our favorite writers, like you said, bloggers, YouTubers, podcasters, it feels intimate. They could be talking just to you. I think that's why so many people listen to Joe Rogan, for example, because they imagine they're hanging out with him for three hours every afternoon. It's a casual thing, and yet it's going out to all these millions of people, the Swifties probably similar. And that is a skill. I guess people can see through the mask. Like, if you're trying too hard, and that's the same thing with anything speaking on stage, that for people who are maybe not as practiced at this skill of sounding like you're talking to just one person, it does come across stilted or fake or trying too hard or scripted. Even now I've gotten a little more into them, but I don't really like scripted podcasts. I could tell they're scripted unless it's super narrative and very well produced. I would rather hear people shooting the breeze in a more unscripted way.

Oh, certainly. And I feel the same. Right. There were a couple podcasts I remember listening to where I liked the idea behind the podcast. I was like, oh, this is interesting as a general thesis for the podcast. And then also this episode sounds really interesting. And then I listen to it, and it's somebody reading a script, trying a little bit to sound like they're not reading a script. And it was so dry. And I gave that one up. On the other hand, though, I have also encountered a handful of podcasts where I do really want to like them, and they are very conversational, but they don't put in as much research as they should. So it's not like A guest based podcast like we're talking on right now, but it's, you know, two people talking about topic X or Y or Z and it feels like they just kind of learned about it after like five minutes of scanning a Wikipedia page. And then they do that. There's kind of a danger of going too far in the other direction too.

We'll be right back just after this.

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There's a podcast I listen to about writing that I will not name. They're kind of trying to do the Marc Maron thing where there's the monologue before the guest comes on, and almost every time I'm bored out of my mind, I don't know where it's going. I don't care about this monologue. Just get to the guest already and that goes to that very popular, often misquoted, misattributed statement. I would have written less, but I didn't have the time. Maybe in your book research, because I think you had it in there. I forget who exactly you traced it back to, but the point is that, yeah, just rambling isn't gonna do anyone good either. Like your whole book, simply put, is the work of getting something down. The Occam's Razor of it. Getting it down to the fewest possible words to convey the sentiment.

Oh, certainly. So the quote that you referenced there. So is I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have time, so I wrote you a longer one.

Yeah. Who was that?

It's one of those things that's often, you know, you mentioned the misattribution. People say it's Mark Twain.

Right.

I'm pretty sure it's not him, if I recall correctly. If you don't Know who said a certain quote, you can say it's Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, or Winston Churchill. And like.

Yeah, or Ben Franklin.

Yeah, Ben Franklin. Maybe Confucius. There's a bunch of ones that you can just kind of pull out of a hat. So that's actually an important piece of this. What I found in researching for this book was that it's a little bit of a confusing thing. We're not talking about the least amount of words or the least amount of pages or sentences or slides or whatever it is that you have in your messaging. It's, do you have the least amount of friction? My background is in design. And if you ask a user experience designer about friction, well, this is what they work in. All day. You put friction between the things that you don't want people to do. So if you ever have tried to like cancel your subscription to the gym, for instance, a lot of friction, right? You gotta call, you got to send a letter. It's a whole thing. We've got to come in. But if you wanted to give somebody money, the thing that they want you to do, well, there's no friction whatsoever, right? It's Apple pay. It is one click checkout on Amazon. Every time there's a bit of friction in experience, it's an opportunity for somebody to kind of pull off. And that experience can also be your messaging and your communication. I call those opportunities off ramps. There are millions of opportunities a day for us to pay attention to things that are not your message. In fact, that's almost all of the opportunities. We spend 13 hours a day, the average American, consuming some form of media. That's a lot of things competing for our attention before we get to the point that you're trying to get to. And if there's a lot of friction in there, then we're just not going to get to it. And friction is correlated with shortness, with brevity, but it's not necessarily the same thing. You can have something that's maybe a little bit longer in terms of the kind of raw word count or page count, but not necessarily that it's harder.

And speaking of attention, I mean, even 10 years ago we were citing that people had the attention span of goldfish. And now with TikToks and clips and reels, I mean, our attention span is so much less than it ever was. It's getting chopped up into tiny little pieces. And I see that a lot of authors that I speak with see it reflected in book sales. Like a book is now a sort of monumental attention Giving feat and even videos on YouTube where people might in the past have sat through a 3 minute or a 10 minute, now want it to be 30 seconds or they're going to move on and just swipe to the next.

Oh yeah.

Would that change how a business owner should communicate, let's say, on a sales page or in a newsletter? How do you think that's shifted?

That's one of those things that I try to be conscious of, like the historical perspective of that as much as we can. Because you can look back for literally thousands of years and find people that are saying that kids these days, they're so distracted, right? Or oh my God, we're suffering from information overload. There's so many scrolls we have to read, you know, or there's so many debates in the forum, or there's so many books that now we have the printing press, there's too many books, One person can't read all the books now there's too many pamphlets, too many newspapers, too many radio shows, too many television shows. And then it just accelerates with the Internet and social media. As long as we have communicated, that has been a criticism, that there's been kind of too much of it. So I always want to kind of preface things with that. However, there is an acceleration of this. When you look at the quantity of emails that people get, of text messages, of push notifications, the amount of time we spend on phones and all these other metrics, they do show an acceleration. We are spending more time reacting to more things and then therefore, we're spending less time on every one of those things than we have before. And we respond to this, by the way, we're all installing meditation apps and ad blockers. Both of those numbers are off the chart. These platforms like Google and Apple, everybody else, they're in the business of selling your attention. But now they've introduced software that allows you to kind of claim some of that back because they realize it's been going a little bit too far saying all of that. Before we talk about kind of the business implication is that you have to be conscious of the fact that nobody wants to hear your advertisement. Nobody woke up today and said, you know, what's on my to do list is I want to get your newsletter and I want to go view your website and I want to go click on your ad on Instagram. And we woke up caring about so many other things. We cared about our friends and our family and our sports teams and our work deadlines, but we didn't care about your like New shampoo. And if we don't put that kind of humility or communicate from that sense of humility that we have to fit with what our audience wants and needs and that they are not going to care as much as we care about it, well then if we don't do that, we're going to set ourselves up to fail because we're going to think, oh, you know what, everybody wants to hear this, wants to read this 5,000 word email from me, everybody wants to watch this 20 minute video from me. And that ultimately is going to be a lot of wasted effort.

One of the little tricks that you give in the book to test cohesiveness is instead of saying this and that, transforming it to this so that, that a lot of us, and you know, I think anyone who's been in business for a while, we kind of know we shouldn't just list a bunch of features, but we should focus on the benefits of whatever it is we're offering. And yet it's easy to stack stuff in. So I remember when I worked with Jay Okunzo, who's been on the pod, I used to say systems to set your mind, time and team free or something like that. Or I would say free time. And the tagline was free your mind, time and team to do more of your best work. That's what it was. And Jay said, pick one. He's like, don't try to free three things at once. Those are three different things for your mind, for your time, for your team. It's three separate ideas. And so after working with them, it became set your time free through smarter systems. Because time was the main thing that I was going to help with the mindset. You'll get that elsewhere. The team, you know, I'll do a little bit, you'll get that elsewhere. And that was really helpful. And that was exactly an example of not just stacking a bunch of stuff with the ant, but transforming it into a. So like set your time free so you can do more of your best work and trying to connect it to. At the end of the day, the book is about operational efficiency, but nobody's going to buy that. So it really is. I wonder if you have any examples like that with things you've done recently.

I love that. I'm so happy you shared that. That is a perfect example. Because what was the first version of that again?

The first version was free your mind, time and team to do more of your best work.

Got it. So that's a great example of what I often call, like, pretty Words, they're things that look really great when you put them on, like a mission statement on the headline to a website or something like that. And nobody's going to object to them. But the one you landed on is so much more focused on and therefore so much more kind of tangible that it totally transforms the meaning and it makes every other bit of communication you do easier because of that, right?

Yes, that's very true. And even set your time free through smarter systems that doesn't quite have the so connected to it, but it is clear. It became so much more clear what my mission was. Even in a weekly newsletter, give people a little system or one thing if they read that will set their time free. Even in an episode, a conversation like this one, ideally we're driving at some ideas that will set their time free and, you know, little habits, tips, tricks, systems, things that can work repeatedly. So thank you for saying that. And I know there's always still work to do and I always have to give my writing a haircut. I'm always like, again, it's kind of the sloppy thing is going with the maximalist version. That's the one that's focused on the sender and not the receiver, to use your lingo.

Oh, yeah. So what you referenced there in the previous version of this is, I think, a really good example of what I call the Frankenstein idea. So if you read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, you look at the description of the creature, the monster, the way that they talk about the individual pieces of the monster are all positive and every bit was selected to be beautiful. You know, pearly white eyes, lustrous black hair, strong muscles. All of these things were individually great elements, but together they formed this kind of gruesome composite. It was worse than the sum of its parts, where every kind of bit had a horrid contrast, I believe is the phrase in the book. And this happens all the time. This happens in. You talk about putting a slogan together like this. I see this most acutely when you look at flat organizations you mentioned before that I teach as an adjunct at Baruch College here in New York, and I give my students every semester an assignment. I tell them, get into groups and I'm going to give you a brand and then come back and form an agency and pitch back for this brand. And these are inherently flat organizations. And no matter how much I warn them ahead of time, every single time they come back with the same problem. Some of them are great, but then some of them, they just couldn't gel necessarily. Nobody took creative leadership and they come back with three different hashtags. They say they're going to use NFTs and AI and a chatbot, and they're going to do this with this celebrity, and they're going to do this activation over here. And I'll sit there with the other judges I bring in, who are often other professionals, and we'll look and we'll say, there were some really great stuff here. Like, that little piece was great, and this little piece was great. And if you just gave me that, you would have won the project, you would have gotten the A, you would have won the bid. But because they put everything else in there, it made that part less important and it made it more kind of muddled, and that ended up kind of screwing over everything else that they did. And so this happens all the time. This doesn't just happen with students. It happens with professionals that I've worked with. And the cure to this is some of the stuff you talk about, you know, is this that kind of. And so test it. Really, though, it's about empowering somebody to kind of have creative leadership to be able to say, this idea is not that great. This idea is because it's not a sexy job. Everybody kind of hates doing it or hates the responsibility that comes along with it. But you have to be able to draw a line somewhere in order to actually make anything stand out.

We'll be right back, just after this.

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I think that is the hard part. It's the indecision and the hesitation. Ooh. Sometimes we're so close to it, we don't know, is this the good part? Is this. I laughed so hard. When I got to a point in your book where you include an image of a text thread, there's three little bubbles. I ain't reading all that. I'm happy for you, though. Or sorry that happened. It's like, I'm happy for you or I'm sorry that happened. But this person, I don't know if it's. I mean, I'm sure it was probably a joke. I don't know if it's a real text, but it's just so funny. Like, I ain't reading all that. Where did you find that?

That's a meme that's gone around for a number of years. And it's always a very funny reaction that people use when there's just a lot of stuff because we're just going to zone out. Bring this back to kind of the business example. If you send somebody, if you send a client or a prospect or just a cold outreach email that is like seven paragraphs long. Well, what's going to happen? Well, what happens when you receive an email that's seven paragraphs long? Well, I'm going to get it and be like, I can't deal with this right now. And so I'm going to mark it as unread. And then it's going to get buried. And then six months later I'm going to feel really guilty and I'm going to find it and then maybe I'll deal with it. And maybe there wasn't even a question in it, or maybe there was just a kind of quick yes or no thing. But the more kind of stuff you shove in there, well, the less likely you are to actually get a response from somebody most of the time.

That's so true. A friend and I were just talking about that there's a kind of emotional labor attached, or just labor labor. Always emotional. It's just labor to like, parse through it. And for a while now, because I've had a blog since 2005, I've had a website and an email contact form out there. And I remember I would always be really grateful when these very long emails came in. I remember feeling honored that the person was engaging with my work and people were maybe a lot more open with asking for advice back then because I don't really receive things like this much anymore. But they would linger, they would languish in my inbox for a long time because I never quite felt like I had the time to give them the type of response that they had sent to me. And over the years, I Had to learn. I'm just not going to be able to do that. But it created a lot of friction in my inbox. And that's never the experience that you want. If you're reaching out to someone, you don't want them like looking with dread and guilt at your message because it was so long or complex that they have to do a ton of work just to parse it out and reply. I'm glad you mentioned that.

With email 100% slightly kind of tangential. There's a great podcast called Reply all which shut down a couple years ago.

Gimlet.

Yeah, from Gimlet. Right. So they had a. I think it was like email Debt forgiveness day. That was their thing. So do you remember that?

I do, I remember that. I remember the movement of declaring email bankruptcy. But tell us about Email Forgiveness Day. That's so good.

I love this. It was basically everybody has those emails, those emails that are sitting in your inbox that are 6 years old or something like that and you feel guilty there. Maybe they're marked as unread, maybe they're just, you know, starred, whatever it is. And the idea of email Debt forgiveness day was this is a day once a year that you can reply to every single one of those like two year old emails. It was like a jubilee. You were forgiven from the responsibility of it being an old reply replying to an email from years ago. And all you had to do was kind of link to that podcast episode in the reply.

I love it. I used to be in touch more than I am now with James Altucher and he once told me that he replied to a message from Nassim Taleb maybe eight years later. But he didn't apologize. He just replied and said, I would love to get coffee, how's Thursday? And I never forgot that because also for a long time I was always apologizing. So I love this jubilee emailed that forgiveness day. But I was always saying sorry for the delay. Sorry, apologies constantly. The number of sorrys that I sent out into the world is just ridiculous. And eventually I just started to take a page from James Altucher where sometimes it's two years later and I'll just say, well what'd you look at that, you know, I mean some of those you gotta let em go. Like as much as it hurts, I'm just not gonna be able to reply or I archive it or I just give up, it's been too long. And then other times I'll just say time is a flat circle. I hit reply whenever I do Maybe I will apologize if it's been a year, some outlandish amount of. But we move on. Sometimes it's the perfect time to be back in touch with that person.

I love that I've done similar things with kind of client prospects in the past. When you run a marketing agency, you have a big board of people that are, you know, they reached out and maybe you sent a proposal and whatnot. And one thing that always bugged me, that was crazy, was the amount of people who you would send a proposal to and just they would never reply. Like you would talk to them. Maybe you had a site visit, maybe that drove me batty. So I would make it a point where it's like I would just keep that list and I would go and I would find a reason to reply to them. Just check in and reply to a two year old thread sometimes and politely, but in a kind of like polite poke at it. And I will say that resulted in a few projects coming back to life that we never anticipated ever getting again. You have to just assume people are busy, right? And if you kind of start with that kind of benevolent view instead of assuming that they're evil, it makes it a lot more possible for them to come back. And then also another kind of tangent off of that was I've been in exchanges like that with a few like long term friends from like college or high school. It might be like a LinkedIn message with like one of my best friends. I purposely don't reply for four years and then I say, you know, let's do this on Saturday. And then he won't reply for like two years. And then we're like. And so it ends up being kind of a funny little joke because of that.

I love it. That's so good. So, Ben, if you could give fellow business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether as it relates to all this, what would it be?

So this is going to seem a little weird because I just mentioned I ran a marketing agency for 10 years and I just wrote a book on marketing and I teach about marketing. I don't think every company has to spend money on paid advertising. I think that a lot of companies obviously benefit from it. The industry wouldn't exist if that wasn't the case. But if I look at the type of business that is a marketing agency, we weren't going to get most of our clients from running Google Ads or running Facebook ads or whatever it was. Even though we did plenty of those type of things for the people we worked for. We realized that for us, 90% of the work would come in through referrals. And so we would be better off spending our marketing dollars on making ourselves kind of more referable, putting ourselves out there in other places, making sure more people knew us, the people enjoyed working with us, that we obviously did great work, but also we sent birthday gifts. The little things like that are going to give us a better ROI than spending another a hundred bucks or a thousand dollars or whatever on a Google Ad. So you just have to look at what does your business do for who and where are those people and does it make sense to advertise? Sometimes the answer is absolutely yes. And sometimes the answer, surprisingly, can be no. We can kind of spend that money somewhere else.

I love that permission slip. This is the first one we've had in almost three years not to do Baid ads if you don't want to. And I've always focused on referability and word of mouth too, because sometimes in the paid ad game, you have to have a lot of money as well. Nobody really says that or tells you that you have to have a lot of money to make a lot of mistakes, to refine your ad pipeline till the point where it's optimized. And then the algorithm might change and you start all over again. Like it's not a straight line to clients. Just like you said, it's not the panacea, although some people make it seem like it is. So I love this permission slip. Thank you, Ben.

Thanks for having me. Jenny. This has been a ton of fun.

Yeah, so fun. Where can people find you? In addition to grabbing a copy of.

Simply Put, so you can find more about the book, more about me, and some stuff I've written over at my website, bengutman.com so there's two T's and two N's in there. That name is not minimal. Can't do anything about it. But if you go to bengutman.com there's a free chapter you can download if you're interested. I also send out a newsletter every Tuesday, which is a ton of fun and you can go grab that as well or reach out on LinkedIn. Would love to chat and see how you know, how does I can help you or how this book has affected you. I'd really love to have a conversation.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Ben. I really appreciate you being here. And big thanks to everybody who's here listening.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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