Designing Disruptive Products with Tracy Hazzard from the Selling Disruption Show with Mark S A Smith

If you've got to sell something disruptive or just want to disrupt the competition, stay tuned. It's the Selling Disruption show, the weekly podcast for professionals whose job depends on.

Disruptive sales and marketing. I'm Mark S.A. smith.

We'll start disrupting after this.

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My guest today is Tracy Hazard. She is a designer that helps people create and launch disruptive products. And let me tell you, she's got a heck of a history working with disruptive products. Starting off with a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, otherwise known as risd. So many great designers, great artists have come out of risd. And then she went on to the Wharton School to get a degree in marketing and new Product development. Then she went into the world of textiles, working for Milliken. Ultimately ended up at Herman Miller. She may have been the designer of one of those chairs that you're sitting on right now.

Now she has a practice of helping businesses launch and design their disruptive products to the marketplace. She's also a fellow podcaster. I've been on her show. She's a columnist for Inc. And Forbes, and she's been kind enough to feature me in some of her writing. Welcome, Traci Hazzard.

Thank you for having me. Awesome to be on your show because I love the topic of disruption.

Thank you. Well, let's bring it on. How do we disrupt with product design?

So, you know, I think that we get a little caught up in the idea that we just have to reinvent everything. And to be honest with you, disruption can be small. Like it can just be a little ripple that ends up a big wave. And we, you know, we think about that all the time because it's really about making small changes that have big results for whoever the users or the buyers might be. And if we can do that, then we are creating bigger market for our businesses and our product sales. But we're also creating a Better outcome for our users. And that's at the end of the day, it's a human centered approach.

Indeed. So give me an example of a small disruption, a small change that made a big disruption.

So we were designing office chairs and I can tell you that I designed like 300 of them at the point at which I designed this particular one. And so, like, you know, you think about that total, in three years, I designed 800 samples. So like different models. Now, some of them were not all that different. Right. You know, it's like, oh, this one's in black and this one's in brown. Right. So, you know, not all that different. But thinking about that, it was like, it's, how are you going to be innovative? Well, office chairs are designed predominantly by men for the majority of the time. I have a textile design degree, so I have a material focus. And, and so I started thinking about like, you know, what do, how do women sit in chairs? Women are the ones who are buying them or specifying them. And how can I be more centered around doing something that helps them? Because when I came to do the research, I discovered that the chair design, the ergonomics of the chair design was designed for a six foot male. So I don't know about you, not.

A lot of women in that frame.

Not a lot of women. So it essentially, the whole design of, it doesn't fit a whole part of the population and it probably doesn't fit all the men either. So when we're designing for what is a higher percentage or a smaller percentage of the community, but what they think is the bigger population? Because when it was originally set as the standard, most executives were men. And what they didn't realize is that over time, most chairs were bought for the rest of the staff, not the executives. And so we switched our model of it. So one of the things that we did was we actually made the chair slightly smaller, but we gave it a bigger range so you could go higher and lower. Like a silly little technical thing that did nothing. I mean, it cost pennies more to put a different gas lift in it. Like that was the simple change. But the second change is we said, you know what, whether you're an executive male or an executive woman, you are now using the computer yourself. You don't have a secretary. So for us not to put in secretarial type things, things that allowed us to type, then that would be a mistake. And so we created these armrests that lift up so that you could scooch in closer to your desk so you could be closer to your keyboard because we were also more using laptops and not keyboard trays anymore. So that was a difference of it as well. And then the last thing we did was we said, well, you know, if you're. We want to still create a chair that fits most of the audience, so. Or most of the users and buyers, but women are a little bit smaller than that. So how can we take up the distance from the back of the chair? Because most women have. They have lower back issues where more men have a little slightly upper back issues, as we discovered and did some ergonomic research. And so we built a pillow on the back of the chair that slides up and down so it could fit in the upper part for men and lower part for women. And it takes up the distance so we don't sit on the edge of our chair, which actually causes more back pain. We now can sit back because that's pushing us forward and giving us the leg distance we need to.

Well, you've just given me about half a dozen little tweaks that make all the difference in the world from something that was originally designed. Probably if we rewind the clock 100 years ago for somebody was smoking cigars and saying, tammy, come in here and take a memo.

That's right. And that's where these things start, is we don't rethink that. And that's where I look at disruption as like, let's disrupt the thinking of how this was designed. And when we start to disrupt that thinking, we start to serve our audience better. Cause we start focusing on them.

Great. Well, and along the way, what you illustrated is that we have to think about how people are using what we buy today. Because the context is so different today. So, so different.

Yeah, absolutely.

And they'll probably change again, you know, because this year we made a crossover. More corporate data is accessed from a mobile phone than from any other device.

Right.

So we may have chairs that look more like gaming chairs in the future as we sit back versus lean forward in our seating. And I think this is the thought process that we have to do to go through to create disruptive products that people go, oh, that's what I was looking for.

I'm a proponent of what is called design thinking, Although I have heard that design thinking is an oxymoron, that you can't think your way to design because it doesn't work in that part of your brain. But to use the actual accepted industry term of design thinking, it's like that's what we all need to be Thinking about is, are data sets designed badly? They're flawed from the beginning. And that's a question I ask when I get into discussions about AI all the time. So artificial intelligence or learning machines, whatever you want to term it is, are we starting with bad data? Data that was designed at the early 1900s that, you know, set our ergonomic standards, that we've now accepted as a norm, and it's really not the norm.

And so garbage in, garbage out.

That's right.

Classic thing we learned back in the days of designing computer programs. Yeah. So we have to essentially challenge every piece of the narrative.

And we also.

Why do you do it that way? You know, actually, that's kind of a really interesting insight because you and I, we have a consulting practice. We both have consulting practices. And how is it that we succeed at being a consultant? We ask the stupid questions.

Well, we also have a broader view. Like this is something that really helps and really why it's hard for an organization to question data internally, question process internally, question how things are designed internally. So, you know, the company that I was designing office chairs for, the company that was making the most money in the industry in office chairs, had this old school designer who was their head designer there. So who was going to jump up and question him. Right.

But politically incorrect.

Right, Exactly. So, but I came from the outside and worked for this company who'd never had a chair division before, and they said, do what you want, we don't know any better. And they let me look at that and question all of that. And that's why it worked. And actually our chairs killed two of their chairs at Costco and removed them from the marketplace. So it ended up with not just doing 20% better on its own, but it ended up taking over two placements. So it became a $20 million a year seller for seven years straight.

Wow. Just because you challenged the data, you questioned the data, you challenged the design thinking.

That's right.

Fantastic. How else can we bring disruption to product design?

You know, that's a really great question. Because it's, you know, everyone's on the edge. Like, I want to be innovative. I want us to have cutting edge things. And that's, I think, not the goal. And that's where real disruption comes from. It comes deep from pain, deep from a need. And that need isn't always just internal, although some of it can be. Like 3D printing comes about because of deep pain and expense and in prototyping, so you get 3D printing coming out of it, and now there's a different future for things that we never imagined we could 3D print. So you know that I look at that as really more of a evolving disruption that, that it's not a just instant disruption. Right. It's an evolving over time because the pain is so strong, it starts to find its traction quicker. And it starts, but it's smaller steps all along the way till it's big disruption and you come back and you find, wow, we aren't making products the way we used to or we aren't designing them the way we used to.

Right. Well, I think it's important to understand the psychology of the buyer. And it's absolutely true. Is more crossing the chasm is an important concept to consider because of the fact that people at the bleeding edge of technology buy for one reason and then the next group buys for a completely different reason and the next group buys for yet a completely different reason.

Yeah.

And so this customer.

Very fragmented. Yeah.

Oh, extremely fragmented. So this customer thinking strategy has to be from the group that we're targeting versus a broad market. We have to think of the market in chunks because those leading edge thinkers can take large leaps in what they bring into their life. They can shift their identity extremely rapidly because their identity is all about rapid change.

Right.

And then as we move down the curve, it ends up that those people's identities change slower. So therefore they can only change what they purchase at a much slower rate to the point where essentially the first half of our market can change in aggregate at about 10% year over year.

Real issue is that a lot of times we design and continue to design and our process is all set on those, I call them the early adopters. Right, right. So if you follow your early adopters, you'll never get to the second half of your market properly. That's right there soon enough. And so that's really where we have to have a multi pronged approach of how we're listening to people. And you, you and I both know Betsy Westhaver. She was on your show and she does these consumer advisory boards. And I love them because they're getting at the information of where your customers are going. So that's in a more business to business model obviously than it is in a, you know, in a business to consumer model or a C2C, even a, you know, straight consumer product retail type model, which is very.

Consumer packaged goods.

Yeah, exactly. And so anyway, but you're having the communication about where they see the industry going, where things are going, and you're taking that viewpoint and you're filtering it through your organization into having the conversation that here's the future pain that they're going to be faced with. How can we be the solution? That's a very different model than our customers told us to fix this. They want this. And when we're only listening to those early adopters and we're not listening to the players in the marketplace or where the future market we want, we don't shift into keeping up with the changes in the marketplace, keeping up with what they need and want. And we don't help bridge, like, bridge that gap for those that are not on that early adopter side that we. But they could benefit tremendously from your products.

Well, listener, I want you to really nail this down. I really want you to get this inside your head when it comes to thinking about product design and innovation. You have multiple horizons, multiple markets. And so target those markets and target those horizons intentionally versus accidentally. And a lot of innovation is very incremental.

Yeah, we call it intentional invention. Actually, that's what we practice here. We are intentionally inventing, whether it's how to reach the market, whether it is the process by which something's made so that we can make it mass customized or personalized, or we can easily shift to those different markets and allow a smaller run of production because we are going to do different market fits. So we are always thinking about that and intentionally inventing into that need.

Intentional invention. Is there an approach to that that you're willing to share with our listener, or is that a trade secret?

You know, it's, it's, you know, some of it is just, I'm going to call it intuition because there isn't really a good way to do it. But intuition is really like more than a hundred thousand hours of designing here that Tom and I have. Right. And, and so when you do that, you have this situation in which you, you can easily. You're tapping into things, you don't even realize that you're tapping into knowledge that you have. And so that's really where a lot of it comes from. But a lot of it comes from listening to the market on an ongoing basis. So constantly understanding where the market is shifting and what they're not getting and what they're not happy about. So you're tapping into that. So you say, well, these things haven't been designed for women for a really long time in pretty much every product category. So I can, I know that I should first look for that. So, so it kind of shortens the invention process. And I'm intentionally looking for something because women buy or control 86% of consumer purchases out there. So if that's the case, then if you tap into something, you're going to improve your sales instantly. If you tap into something that they want to buy instead of the only option they have to buy, I think.

That'S a really important component. How do we listen to the market on an ongoing basis to get real data versus confirmation bias, which is fairly typical? People put out surveys that essentially confirm what they think that they want to find versus surveys that really discover what customers really think. So what's your approach to listening to the market to figure out what to design next?

So I learned early on because I was working at Herman Miller and they were working on the Aeron chair, which is the really famous mesh chair. And I was of course on the material side of things. So, you know, this is a material that no one had ever seen or used before in the marketplace. And how can we research and understand whether or not this is going to be accepted to the marketplace? So we're a big fan of what we call market proof testing. And so that's really where we focus everything on. So where a lot of people will test, focus group test, we find that products that are truly innovative, that are truly going to disrupt, that are going to become, you know, amazingly big sellers. I mean, there's no question. Aaron has been the top selling chair for 25 years.

Right. So, you know, the go to chair.

Yeah. And I still have mine that's 25 years old. And it's amazing. Right. You know, so it's not, you know, it still lasts that long too. So it's really well built on top of everything. But, you know, so we look at that as would it have been sad if they had listened to the focus group who told them no one's going to buy that. It doesn't have leather and cushions on it, it's uncomfortable. And so, you know, that's where we get caught up in getting this like either confirmation bias, that we want them to accept this chair, so we lead them to accept it and it's a mistake, or we get the wrong audience who's responding back to us. So one of the things we did there, which is something that I continue to practice, is we ask questions in a different way. We try to find a way to sell them something that is similar to or has a feature that would just be a baby step from where they are today. So can we put a more tech savvy fabric on a regular chair and show them that first and get buying feedback on it. If we want to make a juicer blender, can we sell the juicer and the blender, get the exact right audience and then talk to them about whether or not they. The opposite does it. So do the juicers blend and the blenders juice and have an actual conversation with people who are real users? So how can we facilitate these conversations with actual dollars exchange? I'm not a fan of the ones where you just build a community and you just start to have surveys and conversations with them because they tend to be early adopters and they tend to lead you wrong.

Exactly. Well, I think this is an interesting insight. What you're telling me is that focus group testing doesn't work well for innovative designs.

No, I've never seen it work well.

And I've had that same experience. I think focus groups have taken companies down the wrong way. Listener, pay attention. Now, those that conduct focus groups will fight us tooth and nail because we're salting their income stream. But I think what you you've nailed is exactly the best. What you pointed out is the best possible approach, which is are they willing to pay for it? Yeah, yeah, we have some dollars we can exchange here. Will they put the money up? If the answer is yes, then we market test. That's going to actually work versus people saying, yeah, I think I'd buy that.

Yeah. I mean, you know, in 14 out of 15 home shopping network products fail in the marketplace. You know, they treat it like it's a market test for them, and it usually fails. They're usually wrong. And seven out of 10 consumer products fail at retail. So they've stopped doing that as often. And now what they do is they just are less innovative. Right. They just follow. So when they see a trend happening, then they buy it. Right. But then there's companies like Costco who require every single product to be tested before it goes in. And so they run a couple of container tests on the east coast, the west coast, the Midwest, wherever they feel is the strength for that product. And unless it turns at the right rate, then it's not the right product for them. And they'll go through six, seven iterations of products before they say, this is the one. Wow. And then they put it in line after that. So even then you still don't get a full in line. So, you know, they're taking caution in how they're approaching it to be sure that it's converting because their buyers are members. And so what members want to buy is all they care about if it's sold in Walmart doesn't mean it's going to sell in Costco.

Interesting input. We'll be back with more after this.

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That you just quoted are. They're stunning. They're frightening.

Yeah, they're absolutely scared.

Why would anybody want to be in that particular business if 14 out of 15 are going to fail or 7 out of 10 retail releases fail? There's just why would anybody want to be in that business? Because the margins seem pretty thin to begin with.

Well, part of it is that the numbers gotten worse over time because we no longer have in house design staffs. We no longer have buyers who are merchants who are experts in their product categories. So it's really gotten worse over time because of that.

But I think that's a really important point. Let's not let that fly by. We've lost a lot of marketing and merchandising expertise.

Yeah, and design expertise, product depth too, because that used to be in house. And if we look at the big corporations like Apple and companies who really spend a lot on their research and development, they are also spending a lot in making sure that they're experts in their category. And so they have team that is really focused on that and stuff doesn't transition from design without marketing and merchandising and all of those things going hand in hand and working on the project together.

Right on. It is an entire acquisition package. And the way that I view customer acquisition, it is the product, it is the marketing, it is the sales, it is the customer service that all have to play together to acquire and to maintain customers. And if you don't have that complete cycle, there's so many places that it can blow up. And what you're actually telling me is the stats prove it.

The stats absolutely prove it. So I'm going to tell you this. My stats are the opposite. I have nine out of 10 successes and we have almost two. I think the last time I checked we were well over 250 products in the last decade. So. Yeah. So how do we do that? Is the question. I get the most. And how do we do that? Is the reality is that we are choosing about our clients.

Because. So if my client doesn't have that understanding, core understanding of their market and their channel, like those two things matter to me. So if they're, if they don't even have a sales website, they haven't tried to sell anything before. I mean, if they're selling on Amazon, I understand Amazon. I don't have to rethink and redesign for a different marketplace if they're selling on. In Costco. I know Costco. So, like, they have to be in one of the channels that I get and understand or they have to have their own channel that's been up for a long time, has a lot of data available to me because now I can start to mine that, to design to it. And that's what makes us more successful, is we're actually creating our product to fit the market that already exists.

Well, Tracy, what you're telling me is you have flipped the model on the head.

We had to because we're small. So.

Yeah. And the other model is broken. Yeah. Because traditionally people think that the product design is the king. No, And I agree. I've always felt that the market is the king. Because if I have a market that respects me and will have a conversation with me, I can sell them almost anything they buy.

Yeah. Now the key is to sell them something they really need and they're going to buy use again and again. Like, that's my mission, to create that, you know, not just exploit that market, but we see it a lot. I mean, look at these digital marketers who are out there selling junk. I mean, these are like junk supplements and junk things that they're selling out there. Junk science in some cases. We've got medical, you know, we've got medical claims being made on books that are diet based, that have nothing to do with medicine, and yet they're selling tons of product. They're outselling really great programs, really great experts who are deep in their fields. They're outselling them on their books. How are you doing that? Well, you're doing that because you're mining the data. You've developed a core connection to an audience that's disenfranchised and that's where podcasts have come into play and that's why we utilize them so much.

Yes. Let's shift gears for a moment and talk about your podcast. You have.

Three.

Three right now. Yeah.

Going on four.

Yep.

Tell me about your podcast.

So, yeah, so we started almost five years ago with WTFF, which is the geeky term for 3D printing, fused filament fabrication. And so we were at the model of really going, you. We hear about this disruptive design thing, but I didn't believe that there was going to be a market for 3D printing in the consumer market. Because I don't think consumers go, I want to buy an injection molded product. Like, why would they go in and say, I want to buy a 3D printed product? And yet all these 3D print marketplaces are jumping up and saying, we've got 3D print products, come and buy them. And nobody bought them. Right.

Nobody cares about how you design and build it.

Right. They just care about what. And so what's happened in that marketplace? So that's why we called it what the fff. And so the what really mattered more. And no one invested in the what no one invested in designing really great things because they were like, well, you can create anything you want. Well, that's pretty broad.

Yeah.

I was like, do you know how many people buy what's on the mannequin? Because that's what they can see. They don't feel creative in and of themselves. Most people do not. So, yeah, so, so that's. So we started the podcast as a market test to see if we could draw an audience that would care about 3D printing, that would want to buy great design from us and we could build a catalog and build this big company. Luckily, I didn't build the company because I found out really quickly nobody cared. But they cared about the information, the education I could provide them. And so we ended up with this completely what you would call a passive income site where we sell them information and we sell them and we sell advertising space and we do all that website still exists and that 3D print podcast still exists, although we're kind of slow on our production of that one. So. But then I have product launch hazards, which is for the inventors and the product launchers of the world. And it's my exposure to the right things with the. In the right order, with the right resources. Because that's where everybody goes wrong. Because the data that I have from 27 years of doing this is that it really is a key of the process you use is more important getting that market testing happening early on. And the people that I utilize to make my. To get my products successfully launched for my client believe in that as well. And that's not like other industrial designers out there. It's not like other marketing firms and things like that. So it's a very different viewpoint. And we have, you know, a lot of stuff is being pushed by a bunch of lawyers in the invention world, for instance, who are selling them patents that end up.

Oh, yes.

Yeah. You might have heard them in the news recently, like some of these scams that are going on out there. And that's because inventors want that validation. They want that patent at the end of the day, but that's no sign that your product will sell. And here's the even worst statistic for you. Less than 2% of all patents issued by the Patent and Trademark Office here in the US they are inventors. Any money? Now, keep in mind, Apple has hundreds of patents, thousands even, and they make a ton of money. And so that 2% shows you how bad it really is. So I want you to make money.

That's right. A patent is no guarantee of anything other than you got a piece of paper to hang on your wall.

And then we have Feed your brand, which is why we started focusing on the marketing side, because we found so many product launchers were doing things wrong. They weren't building communities. They had passion products, but they didn't have a way to communicate that to anyone. And you know what? If you think you're going to just. If you build it, they will come. They don't. You have to draw them. And so that's why we started that. And feed your brand is our marketing podcast for digital marketing and podcasters and videocasters, specifically because we believe that's a faster and better way to create the content, but also to make a tighter connection with your community. Because when they're in your ear like you are today, you know what? They trust you. And so I like to go, rather than know like and trust, I like to go trust like, and then I want to know more and buy more.

Mm, beautiful. Great synopsis. You want to preview what your next podcast is or you want to hold off on that?

Yeah. So, you know, I'm feeling really strongly that there's a lot of gaps. And, you know, we were talking about the AI problem of bad data and things like that. Well, we're seeing a lot of that in the, you know, influencer world. So we have these influencers who are getting, you know, caught up in, you know, fake scams for how they're for a product they're promoting, and then they make a message and it turns out to be anti Semitic or something that just happened Recently. And, you know, so we look at these things and we think, wow, the influencer marketing world is broken. The digital marketers are putting out not great products. There's, like, flaws in the whole process of how this works. What can we do about it? And so I was sitting there, got invited to a cryptocurrency blockchain conference, and I said, I don't, you know, this cryptocurrency stuff, I don't write about that. That's, you know, I'm curious, but am I really going to be, you know, interested in that? And.

The founder of nasgo, if you haven't heard it, N A S G O, they were just. They rang the bell at NASDAQ recently and they. He impressed me so much with his vision of the future, of the fact that we are at this industrial revolution, the fourth industrial revolution, and we're at, like, the stage of where wouldn't it have been great if we. If you had been able to understand what a website could do for you back in 1998? Right. Yeah, I had one. Right. I know what it was like. I was on the cutting edge of that, and I was lucky, and I knew how to mine it. I knew what to do with it. And it's today why my business is more advanced than others, because I've kept up on that. And so this is where we are on blockchain. And what he was talking about is this sort of trust and distrust economy that we have going on doesn't require us to have any investment in that. Like, we don't have to have a piece of that. We can work in a distributive model on the blockchain. And so that set me out on this curious path of how do I create a blockchain? Like, let's say I wanted to create a blockchain for my podcast business. How can I offer podcasters like you the opportunity to have advertisers who don't have to trust that you say you have the plays you have, that the system gives it to them and they select them? But not just that. What if it also facilitates payments so that a big brand can write a $10,000 check and it gets distributed to all the podcasters who have promoted them in that process? And, like, so I was like, that sounds like something I would like to build into my platform. How can I go about doing it? Would you know how hard it is to figure that out? Like, there's no information for how am I going to easily. You know, you and I talked before executive Strategy, Right. On a big picture, how am I going to build that? Who's going to help me?

Right?

What's going to happen?

Like, what question should I ask?

But yeah, who do I need? Who can I trust? And you know, and so that's where I said, you know what? I'm going to do exactly the same thing we did back when we started our 3D print podcast, and I'm going to start a new one so I can explore those topics, vet those people, start to learn who's got who's in the know, start to figure this out and take people along who might want to do the same thing. So we call it the New Trust Economy. And the person who is my co host name is Monica Proffitt and her profit has two Fs and two Ts and my hazard has two Z's, so we're like perfect together. So Profit and Hazard are going to explore the new trust Economy. She has actually built her own blockchain in the real estate market, so she has some experience here and she's going to explore the investment side of that and I'm going to explore sort of that innovation side of it, like what can do for your company and how you can accomplish these things.

Brilliant. Well, I think that's a needed conversation. So many people have conflated podcasts and cryptocurrency and the realities. I'm sorry, they've conflated blockchain and cryptocurrency. And the reality is that cryptocurrency is just one single application to blockchain.

It's kind of a catchy phrase. That's why they let you know blockchain is really hard to understand. It's hard to grasp. It's so technical. Cryptocurrency, you get a picture in your head, it's money.

Yeah, it's kind of money. That's digital money. It's a way of representing value in some form. And I think the other aspect is that people call cryptocurrency an investment, and there's nothing farther from the truth. Do not use investment in cryptocurrency in the same. Definitely not if you really want to be taken seriously. It's just a way of exchanging value or recognizing value.

Right. Which is why I'm a little more fascinated with the tokenization side of blockchain, for instance.

Indeed.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Tokenization is really the whole idea. Now, if we want to assign that token to a value, that's fine, but tokenization is how we're going to have frictionless types of transactions that allow us to do really interesting things, such as who has listened to this podcast.

That's right.

And when we get into that kind of environment, things get very interesting because you can be anonymous or you can be well known who you are and what a great thing for us to do. Lots and lots of interesting opportunities to involve blockchain into product creation in the future.

Supply chain management is like one of my big areas of exploration as well, because we know how broken that is.

It's massively broken. Boy, Tracy, what a great conversation. Lots and lots of great ideas from my listener. This is definitely one listener. You're going to want to go back, take notes, share with your team, make sure that you choose the podcast that Tracy does that's going to best fits you. And how does my listener get ahold of you? If they want a conversation about some insights in product development, product launch, go to market strategy.

So I'm pretty much anywhere. If you type Tracy Hazard into Google, that's the way I like to leave it. Because, you know, everybody has a preferred method. The only thing you have to remember is Hazard has two Z's. And so if you Google me, you'll find me because I. Because I produce so much content that I'm always out there. But this way you can join me on LinkedIn because that's probably my preferred method of connecting with People is through LinkedIn. And then I love to have direct conversations so I am accessible to you. I actually answer my email and I actually read my LinkedIn messages. But you know, this way people can get in touch with me any way they can. The only one I can say I definitely don't do is Twitter.

All right. In which case, Tracy Hazard 2Z is the same reason why I use Mark S A Smith. Because you always find me on Google the same way. That's right, Tracy. What a great conversation. I always enjoy my conversations with you and look forward to the next one.

Me too. I can't wait.

Get on over to the show page@sellingdisruptionshow.com youm can get special offers, order a transcript, join the Selling Disruption Show Facebook page and listen to more shows. If you like what you hear, the best way to say thank you is to leave a review on itunes. I'm Mark S.A. smith and this is the Selling Disruption Show.