Episode 25: Profitability Neuromarketing with Roger Dooley

Silence in the studio, please.

From the studios of Fractal Recording, this is the Profit first podcast, episode 25.

Oh, there's a sound. 25, 20, 25, 25. You know, we were doing. I was listening to one of our episodes, Chris, that you and I did back in the beginning. You were doing offbeat. This music was kicking in. It goes dun dun, dun. And you were doing the offbeat. It was amazing.

Welcome, everyone, to the Profit first podcast. I'm Chris Curran. I'm the founder of Fractal Recording.

And I'm Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit first. And it's on this show that we talk about all elements of profitability. Today we're going to be talking about persuasion and actually getting people to buy your stuff, which is going to be very cool.

So cool. I'm so psyched to talk to our guest today.

Oh, dude. I'll do it during the intro. I'll get all fired up, but I'm pumped.

Yep. So you can find our show on itunes and Stitcher. Those are two big podcast directories.

And of course, the website profitfirstpodcast.com profitfirstpodcast.com.

It'S Christina, three times fast. Go.

Oh, profitfirstpodcast.com proffer. There you go.

Okay. She got about halfway through.

I just got one.

Well, guess who our guest in the studio is? It's Christina Bulldog. She's back again.

She's back again. Thank you.

Wow, you got two claps.

And a bruh. Good to have you back, bruh.

Thanks.

Wow, this is awesome. So how you been, man?

I've been good. I've been good. Families returned from Italy, so I'm gonna get the debrief. So last episode, my in laws were in town. They've been in town. And then they went to Italy. So they were stopping here from Hawaii. Temporarily went to Italy. Traveled around the northern part, which is, I guess I want to say Naples. Is that right?

I think so.

Milano, Milan. Right. So up there. And then they come back. So once I get home, I'm going to hear the stories.

Nice.

So I'm pretty pumped about that. What have you been up to, my brother?

Well, I'm actually publishing another book. It's not. I didn't write it. James Allen wrote it. And it was published originally in 1904. I'm republishing a James Allen book. It's called Byways of Blessedness. Wow. It's sort of like a self help book. It's from the new thought movement. It's so powerful. James Allen is. I mean, the way he writes is. So his most famous book is As a Man Thinketh.

I've read the book.

Yeah. That's ridiculous. But By Ways of Blessedness is so cool. And literally, the cover's done, the inside's done. I wrote a little intro from the publisher. It's gonna be awesome.

You know, Think and Grow Rich was based upon As a Man Thinketh. There's parts extracted from that book, right? Yeah. What have you been up to, sista?

Nothing. Just doing my thing. Voice lessons week and hitting the grind.

She came in this morning with no voice. I was like, what the hell?

I know. Had, like, party girl voice going on.

Really? I'm like, we got a podcast to do. She's like, it's okay. I'll be fine. Oh, yeah. You want a pack of Camels while you're at it?

Never.

So what are we going to talk about today?

Oh, my God. So I go south by southwest. I was speaking down there. And let me tell you about a humbling experience. I go down there and, you know, I guess my ego got part of me. Like, hey, I'm speaking south by Southwest. I clearly have cracked the author code. I'm the big shot in town. And so before my speech, I get invited by a friend who's been on the show before, Dorie Clarke. She says, hey, why don't you come over to an author's dinner? I go there. I sit down. I sit back, sit down next to Sam Horne, and I'm sitting next to her. I'm like, I recognize that name. She's like, oh, yeah. I wrote a book called Tung Fu. I'm like, I love your book. I can't believe it. All these other people. Dan Pink is there. Dory Clark herself is there. And then there's one guy sitting across the table. Like, God, that guy is familiar. It's Roger Dooley. He wrote this book. I brought it into the studio. I wish you could see it right now. Brain fluence. I love Persuasion. Now, there's persuasion. There's manipulation. Manipulation is where you move your client or someone to an area where they don't want to go. You take advantage of them. That will come back and bite you. And then there's Persuasion. Persuasion is where you move people through fast and quickly to the point that benefits them. And so I read books like Roger's book about these strategies. Now just look inside the book. I mean, how much I mark this puppy up, like, every single. See all those highlights in red and stuff? And I'm so Into his book on the back, I'm writing down like, oh, my God, I learned this, I learned that. I'm taking notes in the back. I circle his face a million times, like, I gotta meet him. He's sitting across the table from me.

Those are lipstick marks. I think.

Roger's listening right now. He just hung up. Oh, my God, dude.

What?

So Roger and I don't get a chance to even talk because this dinner, there must have been like 10 different authors there, so I never got a chance to speak. At the very end, he comes up, he's like, hey, it's nice to meet you. I said, roger, it's an honor to meet you. I'd love to connect with you and maybe sit down and talk with you. So this is the opportunity. With no further ado, get ready for some profound knowledge. Roger Dooley.

Roger.

Hey, Roger.

Hey, Roger. It's a pleasure to have you on the show.

Hi, guys. Really glad to be here. That was really a unique intro, and I'm kind of glad. This is audio only, not video. That book sounds kind of sketchy at this point.

I know. It's really not that bad, but. No, it's a pleasure. It's a pleasure to meet you. Just to get our audience familiar with what you write about as an author and what you speak about as a speaker. Roger, could you tell us a little bit about the overview of what brain fluence is all about?

Yeah. The fundamental principle that I start with is that 95% of human behavior is non conscious and only 5% is conscious. And that's. It's not me that came up with that. That's from Gerald Zaltman of Harvard. And neuroscientists may disagree a little bit on that, but fundamentally, they all agree that a huge amount of our thought processes are non conscious. And so when marketers want to convince their customers to buy or even just to turn into a lead or whatever, often they focus just on features and benefits and price. And when they do that, they're only appealing to that 5% of the customer's mind. So what I try and do in the book, in my various blogs when I speak is highlight interesting and clever ways and practical ways. I'd add, too, that marketers can appeal to the 95% of the nonconscious.

So I want to hear all the practical ways, but basically what I'm hearing is 5% of what consumers go through is conscious. The features and benefits strategy, does that speak to the conscious brain?

Yes, by and large. Obviously, the way you phrase something can have some overlap into the non conscious. And I wouldn't totally discount features and benefits because for many products you do have to enumerate at least some of what those are, because that's an important decision criterion for the customer. If you're selling them a piece of software, they have to know that it will at least do what they expect it to. The only types of products that can sort of completely ignore features and benefits in price are things like fragrances or maybe some spirits and so on that can use really totally an emotional sell.

So we have lots of questions that come in around pricing and I wonder if you can give us a perspective that no one has yet. We have people come in, entrepreneurs saying, I can't raise my price, Roger, I'm at the maximum limit and if I raise my price, I'm going to dissuade customers from buying from me. Right. And Chris, you were even saying this about your own offerings. Yep. I don't know if I should increase my price. Roger, how, how did you navigate that? And is there a way to influence brainfluence others and increase our price?

Well, yeah, I think there's two ways of looking at it. One is, can, can you really increase your price if you do something differently? And clearly if you can reposition the product as more of a luxury product, that's one way that you can reduce price sensitivity. But sometimes you're just in a commodity market and I spent a few years with a large industrial company and their products were just absolute commodities. If you raised your price $0.01 over six competitors, you would simply lose all your business. And that was pretty much a fact. You couldn't reposition it, you couldn't market it better. But what you can do in those cases sometimes is make yourself the more attractive alternative. One company that comes to mind that does a brilliant job of that is Amazon. They often have a price that is similar or even higher than some of their competition. But they've done a few things. First of all, they begin become a habit almost with their customers. And that really makes a big difference. And also they've eliminated most friction from their ordering process. They make it so easy and it's so reliable. You know, when I'm on their page, I see a little box that tells me, you know, click this button and you'll have it with no shipping charge on Wednesday. And I know if I click that, there's about a 99% chance that Wednesday I'm going to have that product. And so I really don't shop around to save an extra. In fact, I think I and many other Texas residents are a good example because for years we were like most Amazon customers, tax free. We didn't have to pay sales tax. But then Amazon negotiated a deal with the state of Texas where suddenly residents had to begin paying taxes. And I found that my buying behavior, despite that 8% jump in pricing, really didn't change all that much. So I think there's different ways of attacking that price.

One thing you say in your book on page 80, I come reading from the Bible, verses one through three. You said, if you're selling a costly product, describing it using a hard to read font will suggest to the viewer that more effort went into creating that product. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?

Sure. There's a concept called cognitive fluency or simply fluency that is a really potentially insidious but maybe occasionally beneficial effects of the way you present information. If you present information on your website or in your print ads or whatever in a hard to read manner, perhaps a strange font that's a little bit harder to read than Arial, a simple sans serif font, or if you have white type reversed out of a black background, which is a less fluent font, it makes it more difficult for the customer's brain to process. And normally that's a very bad thing because it's a weird effect of fluency that when the customer's brain is sort of slogging through interpreting that information, the difficulty that it's experiencing attaches to whatever you want that customer to do. So if you're saying, hey, please fill out my form so you can get more information, and that information is presented in a disfluent or hard to read way, they're less likely to actually take the action because it will seem more difficult. The classic example is a test that University of Minnesota ran where they presented people with two sentences describing a very simple exercise and asked them how long it would take to do that. And half the people saw it in Arial, which is a very simple font, and the other half saw it in Brushy. And the people who saw it in the simple font said 8 minutes, and the other group said almost twice as much, almost 16 minutes. So the information was identical, the size was identical, but it just seemed a lot more difficult. So normally you don't want to use a difficult font, but I've occasionally said sometimes a difficult font may sort of make whatever you're describing seem less pedestrian and like it took more effort. And I use an example of a hamburger at an expensive restaurant where they have these sort of gourmet hamburgers that cost three times as much as what you might expect to pay for a hamburger. And they go into this lengthy description of the where the beef came from and how the chef prepared it and all this, which is good because just the large amount of text decreases the fluency. But then they put it in a relatively hard to read italic font. So, you know, to me, in that case, it probably makes the customer seem like, whoa, boy, they really did put a lot of effort into grilling this hamburger for me.

It never stops to amaze me how that first impression, the complex font that we then default to assuming certain things like complex font. Oh, lots of effort and so forth. By the way, Roger, when you were saying that, I was desperately trying to find the where's the beef button to play that old Wendy's commercial. You know, also in your book, you talk about handshakes, you know, the first impression, and you actually specify, do a complete firm grip, eye contact and vigorous up and down, but don't do a firm grip. Something is as basic and common as that. Even a handshake can influence the customer's perception of our value. Can you tell us more about that?

Well, yeah, I'm not a body language expert, but that's just one simple way that first impressions make a huge difference. Your appearance makes a difference. And sadly, it's often difficult for us to really change that very much so we have to kind of live with what we've got. But on your website, it's the same thing. People form a first impression of your website in just a fraction of a second before they have a chance to read your headline, look at your images or anything else, they form that impression. And one of the strange things about first impressions is that they tend to be sticky. And they've actually run various studies that show that even when people are presented with information that contradicts their first impression. In other words, if I, I thought you were a doofus when I first met you, but then subsequently I find out that you've got several really impressive degrees and you've really accomplished a lot in your career. There's part of my brain that says, yeah, yeah, I think the guy's still a doofus. So the, you know, the first impressions are really important. Whether it's in person, in a handshake, and the appearance that you convey, or whether it's your website or your. When somebody walks into your office or your store, your place of business, you.

Know, talk about first impressions. And I don't recall, Roger, if you put this in brain fluence, but there was a study about people's names. And if you're, say you're a female Christina and your name is Melody, you have a higher propensity of moving into the musical industry than if your name is Sophia simply based upon the name. Roger, Are you familiar with those studies or have you heard of them?

Yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of strange studies about names and some of them are almost crazy with the results. The craziest one, I think is they found that people whose letters, their names began with like A or B tended to get higher grades in school than people whose names had like C, D or F. Isn't that amazing? And that is really bizarre. But it's not a surprise, perhaps that people with suggestive names that like, may suggest a profession. I knew a dentist whose name was Toothacher, for example.

What?

No.

Would you ever go to that dentist, though?

Yes. And here in Austin we have a urologist named Dr. Chop. So you can use your imagination, but, you know, you can imagine that somebody named Toothacher throughout their entire childhood. People are going to be saying, oh, I bet you're going to be a dentist. So there's clearly sort of a logical explanation for that. If, you know, you've met hundreds of people asking if you're going to be a dentist, you probably have a slightly higher probability of becoming one than somebody who doesn't have those cues. But there are all kinds of weird name effects. Another one is complex, hard to say. Names tend to be less credit. Those people are considered to be less credible than people with fluent names. You know, so Bob Smith is going to be much easier, is going to be more perceived as being more believable than somebody with a, perhaps a foreign sounding name or just a, for example, Gertrude Michalowitz. So you've got Mike going for you. So that's.

Yeah, Mike is easy. Yeah.

By the way, there's a sales course I took and the guy said that there was this one doctor, his name was Dr. Goodwin. He's like, would you like to go to a doctor that's called Dr. Bad Loser Dr. Goodwin. Right.

But there's really truth to it. I bet you you were a C student, Chris. Were you. You were driven toward it subconsciously to some degree. I was B student.

Yeah. No, I was a little higher than.

C. All right, you were. You could have been an A student if your name was like Alfred.

I wanted to change my name to Aardvark, but I never went through with him.

So, Roger, the folks listening in all are business owners or have some relation to the profitability of the business. Do you have strategies or ways we can influence ourselves or our customers to improve the profitability of our business, the volume of sales or the price that we're dictating?

Sure. And there are strategies that can be used in really every part of the business. In the book, I've got a whole section on pricing, and there are people who have written entirely books on pricing psychology. There's effects if you include decimals and currency symbols or not, whether you use rounded prices or very precise prices. And one clue there, by the way, is that precise prices tend to be more credible or believable than rounded prices. So if you're selling a product for $500, people will find that it probably is a higher real value. If you price it at 498.52 or, you know, 501.30, then 500. So there are a lot of strategies in just about every area. There are a lot in copywriting, if you're trying to be a persuasive copywriter in your ads or on your restaurant menu or whatever, using certain kinds of adjectives has been shown to be more persuasive. One particularly interesting thing is sensory metaphors. And you would say that if I just said, boy, I've been having a rough day or I've been having a hard day, you would say those statements are equivalent. But when I use the word rough, that actually lights up a sensory part of your brain that's actually sort of feeling that roughness. So by incorporating those kinds of little cues into your copy, you can have a little bit bigger impact on your customer's brain. And you can just go down the list of, you know, dozens of different little cues like that. And I think it's important to realize that there's not one of single one single one of these that's going to magically turn everybody from a visitor into a buyer. But what you want to do is perhaps in addition to those facts, you have to present the customer with what your product does so they know that if it's going to work for them at all, you want to layer at least a few of these cues and another one. Well, actually, a lot of them go back to Bob Cialdini, who wrote influence, and he came up probably, I don't know, 30 plus years ago with his six principles of persuasion, things like social proof and reciprocity. So that social proof, for example, you see on a lot of websites where they'll show you we have 32,000 users or we have some number of customers. They will use photos and testimonials. All of these are forms of social proof that will increase conversion. So, you know, you could go on for hours and hours, but you want to layer at least a few of these cues in, not necessarily a dozen of them, because that can work against you. But trying to find and particularly test to see which hot buttons work in your environment for your customers is really important.

Yeah. In Roger's book, Chris and Christina, I mean, literally, I don't know, 87, 90 chapters or whatever. I mean, there's just tons of content. So I almost feel it's unfair to ask you because you got to basically memorize your own book, Roger, word for word. But on page 11, I remember highlighting this, and we've been using this. You talk about lessons from a restaurant and what happens when you remove or add dollar signs and decimal points. Do you mind sharing some of the detail about that?

Sure.

People.

For most people, a currency symbol, like a dollar sign or a euro symbol or whatever queue that will do several things. It makes people a little bit more selfish. And in the case of a restaurant menu, it may cause the person who's reading the menu to tighten their purse strings just a little bit and be a little bit less receptive to that item. And as a result, you'll often see in restaurants a price that just says 191 9. There's no decimal after it. It's not 1950. There's not a dollar sign in front of it. And that's been shown to be a little bit more persuasive than including that information. And for nonprofits, it's particularly important not to use any of those currency symbols or even, like, pictures of currency that you might. If you're asking for donations, someone might say, boy, it'd be a great idea if we put a picture of $100 bill in here. All those things actually cause people to be less generous, less altruistic, and as a result, they should be avoided like the plague by nonprofits who are trying to get volunteers or donations.

Wow. So we have a lot of Roger, we have a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs listening, and they want to know how to make their business more profitable. And on this show, we found that a lot of times, you know, the problem is between their ears. Right. It's in their own mind. So is there any way, you know, you can use some of your neuromarketing techniques? Can people use any of the techniques on themselves to encourage them to make changes and grow their business and maybe motivate them or encourage them.

Right. That's probably true. It's not an area that I focus on a whole lot, but there's plenty of evidence that shows a lot of these cues still work, even if you are aware of them. So even if I pointed out some of these things and then showed you the restaurant menu or the webpage or whatever, you would still be somewhat influenced by them, perhaps a little bit less than if you were caught completely unawares. But. So that does suggest that people can use some of these cues on themselves. And just got back from the habit conference in San Francisco, and there were some folks out there who talked about developing personal habits. James Clear has a great blog on that. And you can use psychology to persuade yourself to do stuff. We've got a local author here, too, Art Markman, who wrote a book called Smart Change. He's from the University of Texas. And some of his cues are not necessarily all that psychological. But he points out that if you can increase the friction of performing a habit that you don't want to, for instance, eating ice cream in the evening, if you make it more difficult, you won't do that thing. You're less likely to do it. And he said, of course, if you do not have it in the house, then you really add a lot of friction and you won't do it at all. But those are things that you just have to see what is the habit that you're trying to improve or to adopt or avoid, and then use a few of these little cues to point you in the right direction.

That's awesome.

Roger, in your book, you have a fascinating discussion around anchors. Here's one interpretation I took out of it. Christina. You know, we actually do this in the office now when we propose services to our clients. Historically, we've had three options, and we started with the lowest option going to the highest. But since reading your book, we've actually flipped it and it seems like more people convert. It's hard to measure, but it does seem that way. We start with here's the highest option. It doesn't necessarily apply to you. Here's another one. And then here's the option that applies to you. And we based it upon your theory, or at least the theory that exists. And you discussed about anchors. Could you explain what anchors are?

Sure. Anchors are when you see the first number that you see sort of sets an anchor. That's why on an infomercial, they'll tell you that they'll start out by telling you that thousands of these were sold at $299. And that sort of sets an anchor in your mind that, okay, this thing's at 299 product. And then as the infomercial goes on, they will show you what the real price is, which is lower at that point seem like a bargain. And then maybe they'll even layer on by throwing some additional stuff into it. And there's a kind of bizarre effect that the anchor doesn't even have to be logical. Danny Rioli did a great study in having students estimate what the value or the price of a keyboard was. And a keyboard is something that most of us don't buy very often, so you really don't know what a computer keyboard costs, particularly depending on the features and so on. And prior to having them estimate this value, everybody in the room had to write down the last two digits of their Social Security number. And then they were asked this question and answered it. And when they correlated the prices, they found a huge difference. I don't have the numbers right at my fingertips, but it was from like $16 to $70 or something, depending on whether the individual's Social Security number was in the lowest quintile, like 0 to 20 or 1 to 40 and so on. So it was really a remarkable experiment because the Social Security number had absolutely nothing to do with the keyboard price. But where that relates to probably your listeners, businesses is often they have multiple products, software as a service, you always see three or four levels of product. And it's. I would say that probably three quarters of the websites I see start off with the cheapest one first and then work their way up. But I believe that the way you're describing it makes a lot of sense where you have the most expensive product first that sets this high anchor. And then when people see, oh, this middle one here is the one that really applies to me, it makes it actually seem like a better value. So that's really huge. And they. There's another effect too, called decoy pricing, where perhaps you've got a product that you really would like to sell and it's a $99 product and you've got a cheaper one for 49 and maybe a freemium version or something like that. You can probably increase sales of the $99 product by adding a higher level for $199. Even if you don't expect to sell that many. Perhaps it's. It's just, you know, it has some additional features that aren't going to be all that valuable to most people. But what that does is it repositions the previously high priced product now as a middle of the road compromise, you know.

And Roger, don't consider me a freak, but that's actually on page 12 where you talk about irrational rank anchors. Because when I read that, that's when we started doing our pricing strategy. But in here it says Social Security number digits 0 to 19. If your last two digits were there, the keyboard pricing was 1609. Then if the person's Social Security number ended between 20 and 39, it was 2692. And you can continue this up and it linearly increases. People that had their Social Security numbers end in 80 to 99 were pricing at 55 64. Is that amazing?

Wow.

Wow, Roger, I wish we had more time. Unfortunately, time flew by. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on with us. I know our listeners want to learn more about you. Where can they go to find out more?

Probably the best jumping off point is rogerdoule.com and there I link to my neuromarketing blog, my Forbes blog, and the podcast and so on. So that's a good place to start. On Twitter, where I am most active in social media, I am rogerdoul.

That's awesome. Or you can come to my office and drool over Roger's book like I have and you can get started there too. So Roger, it's been a pleasure having you on. It's a pleasure getting to know you and we'll be in touch real soon.

Hey, it's been a lot of fun guys.

Thanks Roger. Great job, man. And by the way, real quick, I want to mention the subtitle of his book, 100 Ways to Persuade and convince Consumers with Neuromarketing. Yeah, so cool.

No, it's. I love these persuasion influence books because it's subtle changes that you don't have to do. It doesn't require more effort. You just change the sequence of what you put pricing at and people buy more or buy at a higher price point. It's just come knocking the microphone around.

No, no, no. What you're saying is so true. It's so subconscious.

That's what you need. You need to be brad down. Oh my God.

Oh man.

Oh, and the other thing about books is, you know, you can go to conferences. Chris, I know you're heading out to a conference soon. I've go to some a book. I mean this is all of the author's thoughts prepared for you. It's the notes from a conference and you get it for 20 bucks. Or I buy used. I bought for like $7. And you get all this knowledge instead of taking a trip doing all this stuff. I mean, it's just amazing what he packed in there. All right, I want to know. I want to talk about our corporate partners first, but I do want to also talk about our top takeaways.

Yes, I have a good top takeaway.

All right, hold on to it real quick. Quick. I want to know our corporate sponsors. A little more detail. Christina, you're starting us out. Who? Name one.

Fundera.

That's right. Right? What they do, Chris.

Fundera. Yeah, they. If you need funding for your business, if you need some cash or moolah.

Or hashish, if, you know, smoke weed every day. Yeah, for sure. I don't know if you need that stuff To Colorado.

Oh, yeah, sorry.

You actually are moving to Colorado.

I know.

Oh, God.

You smoke weed every day.

Oh, good.

Okay. Okay. So Fundera is not for that. Fundera, though, is if you need funding, one stop shop. Name another one.

TSheets.

TSheets, that's correct. What do they do?

TSheets does time tracking. You have to track your time. Time is not infinite.

Yeah, and for God's sake, you'll lose track of time if you smoke weed every day. Yeah. You'll never be able to know what time it is. So T sheets is good for that. And our last sponsor is nextiva. Nextiva. Hey, they're all awesome. But. But nextiva came on first. What do they do?

Nextiva is a phone system for your office. It's a voice over IP phone system that does everything any phone system can do. It's voice over IP and you guys use it and you love it.

We love it. And listen, if you can't set up the phone yourself because you're smoke weed every day, then you can call nexteva support and they'll do it for you. Yeah, now you have that. I never had an opportunity to use that, that sound effect. So now. All right, top takeaway. Chris.

Oh, well, I liked what he said about friction.

I'm sure you did. Yeah, dude, the induendos when you were over the top.

No, we're going to take out that other one. Don't worry.

No, we won't. Come on. We should. We should. Cuz Roger was like, dude, these guys, clearly, that was.

Yeah, no, that one was too much.

That was too much.

And. And the poor listeners, they're not going to know what we're talking about. I know, but friction, he said when you order on Amazon it's so easy. There's no friction, so it's just easy to do. And then he was talking about if you want to change your ice cream habit, which I know my wife wants me to do. He says if you make it really difficult to eat ice cream, you'll do it less. So it's interesting, this idea of how much friction is involved in a certain activity. And if you want to do the activity more, make less friction. If you don't want to do it, create more friction.

Yep. Here's the funniest way I found out how to eat less cookies. I'm a cookie addict. My gum is receding, which is like, the most embarrassing thing in the world to admit when you're 41 years old. But I brush too hard. When I bite into cookies, the sugar will get up in the gum line. It hurts so badly. I'm not so into cookies anymore. Talk about making. I'm not suggesting that's the strategy for your ice cream is shave away part of your gum line. But it will have some effect. Christine, what. What was your best takeaway?

I just found him fascinating. But one thing that he said which is so simple and true, people form an impression of you in, like, half a second. And it's amazing that he was saying if you use sensory metaphors. What did he say? Like rough. Like, just using these certain cues to make people feel what you're actually saying is gonna leave a more lasting impression than if you're just.

Yeah, I love that tip. I love that tip. The first impression. Tip. Tip. If you want to sell something at a higher price point, just deliver the first impression that justifies a higher price point. Then you don't have to worry about all those individual details. They're important. But that first impression is everything. If you present yourself and you got a crappy website, good luck getting a premium. You have a great website. When people land on, they go, wow, that's quality. Now their default is, it must be a quality organization. It gives you a huge leg up.

Bazinga. Yes. So how does it work, though? Because putting a big, huge, awesome professional front because you want to charge higher price, that's fine. But these days, everything's a lot more casual. People are dressing more casual, everything's more casual. Does that hurt? That.

Yeah. So ironically, I think that becomes the bigger opportunity. I believe in a strategy. Roger didn't talk about it, and I wonder if I derived it from him. But I have a presentation I do where I say better is not better. Different is better. And maybe I Use the analogy here, but could you imagine on the road here, always cars shooting by, and all of a sudden a giraffe goes walking down the street, you will notice. But if you're in a zoo, you won't notice. There are just more giraffes in there. But if a car went shooting through the zoo, you'd be like, what the hell? You see, it's the environment that we very quickly become familiar with, and something that's distinct will stand out. Ironically, it was the guy who's dressing down, the T shirt, whatever, in the office that stood out 10 years ago because everyone's wearing suits now. The suit is becoming the opportunity to stand out and distinguish yourself. So. So, ironically, yes, I think the dressing down doesn't hurt you, but you're regular again, wearing the suit or presenting yourself differently today will make you stand out and give notice to people. They'll pay attention, and I think it is an advantage. But ironically, 10 years ago, I think if you dressed down, people noticed and they said, what's going on here? And it gave you an opportunity to present yourself differently. That's how I interpret it.

So what should I wear to New Media Expo when I get to go nude?

Go nude.

Suit up nude.

No one else will be nude.

Dude, they'll cuff me and stuff me right there.

I challenge you. I challenge you to go in a suit. I mean, a full suit.

Full suit.

Every. Every meeting. You may. If you may feel uncomfortable, that's because you're standing out. You're being a giraffe in this environment. You'll get noticed.

I'll look like a vendor.

Yeah, but if you wear your podcaster libson shirt like you're wearing now, people like, ah, dude, like, he's just a regular guy.

Right.

You know what I'm saying?

See?

Yeah, yeah, he's uncomfortable now.

Yeah, no, I'm just thinking. I'm a thinker. I take. I pause and think, and everyone around me is like, hello.

No, that's good. That's good thing.

Well, yeah, anywho.

Okay.

So I was gonna. Christine, I didn't prepare you.

He's like, yeah, okay, this will be unfair.

I didn't prepare you for any apps or tips of the day at all because I didn't let you discuss it this morning. Do you have anything that just comes to mind or did I totally screw you over? I'm stretching. I'm just gonna keep talking. Play some music.

What apps do you use on your phone?

Yeah, here it is. Oh, what's your idea?

No, I mean, Just on my phone. I know Google Calendar doesn't have a specific calendar app, but, I mean, when I'm not in the office, I actually. You can download kind of like a tab from your Explorer. Now. What is it that you use on the iPhone, The Internet Explorer? What is.

Oh, Safari.

Yeah, Safari. I just put the link directly on my app. I'm sorry. On my home screen. And if I press on it, I don't have to log in or anything. It goes straight to my work calendar. And then that way, if I'm not in the office and you call me, you're like, what's going on? Just look at it real quick.

I was stuck in Indianapolis in a snowstorm or San Antonio or something. Christine's at dinner with her dad and family, and I'm like, hey, do you mind? She's like, I'm on your calendar already. It's true. The tip there is there's such great efficiencies in the software we already have. I call it the squeeze the juice out of it. When you use software like Google or whatever, spend the time in learning what else is available in that tool. It's so easy to default and say, oh, I need the tool that does this. And go out and look for it instead of squeezing the juice out what you have. There's huge profits in leveraging all the stuff that's in your current apps. Damn. Suck that.

Boom.

Boom. Oh, man. Kris, we got to. We got a rock.

We got to go. So where can people find profit first professionals?

Exactly. There. Just type in profit first professionals. You'll find us. We are a collection of accountants, bookkeepers, and business coaches that are bringing profitability to businesses in a unique way. We guide businesses to take your profit first.

Always.

Always. That's what this whole show is about. You listener, you and your business start. You know, Bobby McKnight. Take your profit first. It's so simple. It's so simple. Please, please get started today. Right now. Don't waste another second. Go to your bank, set up a bank account, a profit account account. Start taking 1%. Then call Christina or Ron or Aaron or me or Lee. But call the office, profitfirstprofessionals.com and then one of our professionals will help you guide through the rest of distance.

There you go.

Dude, what do you do, bro?

Talk to Ron. Ron's the best.

Ron is the best.

No fractal recording dot com. I produce podcasts for businesses. That's it.

There you go.

And be sure they're really, really expensive. Expensive. Off the charts expensive. I'm sort of kidding. No.

No.

Is that what I'm supposed to say?

You are.

Okay.

You are. Hey, join us for next episode. We're gonna talk to some IT Guys. Andrew Moon, Peter Ver Verlesa. We're gonna be getting insights on what it's like to run. Christina's gobbling her head back and forth. She's into the music. We're gonna find out what it's like to run a profitable IT business. And you know what that means, bruh. Perfect timing. Oh, God.

He's a bro. Check us out on itunes and Stitcher and Profit first podcast dot com. Thanks for listening. Check out our past episodes. See you, bro.

Yeah.

We got to fade this thing.

I was a little late, bruh. That was a good one. Oh, God.