#16 Ethan Beute - The Heart of Customer Experience: Human Emotion and Artful Communication
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Best customers are executing the team model in the real estate space. And so we want to advocate for this concept, not just to sell more follow-up subscriptions, but to be a value and to educate the community, create a movement, find a rallying place for people that see the world a little bit the same way that we do. You have to use your intuition when you're looking.

at data and the data isn't always right. If you are innovating, you must be evangelizing. That's to say, if you're either solving a known problem in a truly new and unique and different way, the world doesn't understand that the current solution is inferior. We've got this new, different, better way to solve this problem. Or if you're solving a problem people don't even know that they have, you need to be evangelizing.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, I'm speaking with Ethan Butte, the chief evangelist at Follow Up Boss, a real estate CRM platform. Previously, he was the chief evangelist at a video messaging platform, BombBomb. And Ethan is also a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, having written two books, Human-Centered Communication and Rehumanize Your Business.

Last but certainly not least, and I'm sure there's so much more that I'm not even mentioning here, but Ethan also knows the podcasting world well, having hosted multiple podcasts on the customer experience topic and now his latest show, The Evangelist. Ethan, it's so wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you so much. As you said, I love the podcast format and your invite was very warmly received. Thank you.

Wonderful. Well, let's start it off by just defining your role for everyone, because you are a chief evangelist, and I'm not sure everyone understands really what that role is all about. So please tell us. Sure. So

First of all, nobody does. So I'll give you a medium-sized story. I did something several years ago that I had done a handful of times at that point, which is reach out to a podcast host and invite myself to host them as a guest on their own show. And my friend Sangram Vajray, he was a co-founder and chief evangelist at a software company called Terminus at the time. And he said, that sounds super fun because I proposed doing it around his title, chief evangelist.

And he said, I'll do you one better. Find three more chief evangelists and I'll run it as a four part series once a week for a month. So I did the series. It was awesome. I got some great people, including Guy Kawasaki, arguably the first secular evangelist. He is chief evangelist at Apple years ago, wrote a book. His first book 30 years ago included an entire chapter on evangelism.

called The Macintosh Way. And today he's the chief evangelist at Canva, which most people are familiar with. So I had some really great guests in that series, wrote up a heavyweight blog post on it. It ranked very, very well for a number of years. And it just started bringing it first. It resulted in my title change to chief evangelist. And second, it started bringing other evangelists toward me who were wondering, are

Or is anyone else doing it or people considering the role? What the heck is it? And so I ended up just kind of building this kind of informal community around it and decided to start interviewing them on the show to answer the question much more concisely. In general, when you are evangelizing, I'll share two things here and then give it back to you, Lauren.

One, if you are innovating, you must be evangelizing. That's to say, if you're either solving a known problem in a truly new and unique and different way, right? The world doesn't understand that the current solution is inferior. We've got this new, different, better way to solve this problem. Or if you're solving a problem people don't even know that they have.

Um, uh, you need to be evangelizing and evangelism is about the problem, not about the product. It's about escaping the, the limitations of brand and brand messaging, product features, benefits, et cetera. It's about creating a much bigger tent, a much bigger conversation, a much bigger party. It's about creating a movement. And yes, your competitors should be part of that movement. If you are moving in the approximately the same direction, um,

And you're trying to advance this movement. You need a function that you may or may not title evangelism. And a lot of people are evangelizing whether or not they consciously know it. That's so cool. So in your role at Follow Up Boss, how does this take place? Like what are your what is your day to day look like as a chief evangelist? Yeah, thank you. So I've been with the team for about four months now. And my first charge was to start a new show.

And essentially, the concept that I'm evangelizing is that the team model in the real estate business is one that more people should be considering.

It's in contrast to the traditional brokerage model. It's not new, but we identified as a team and as a company that there weren't a lot of people talking about it in a consistent manner with people who have been there, done that, who are active and iterating. And so that's my first charge was to develop a new, essentially a media brand, Real Estate Team OS.

develop the concept for the show, create the show, start executing it, podcast format, YouTube, social, weekly email with unique content in it. And so that's essentially what I've been up to out of the gate. But in general, some of our best customers are executing the team model in the real estate space. And so we want to advocate for this concept and

Not just to sell more follow-up boss subscriptions, but to be a value and to educate the community, create a movement, find a rallying place for people that see the world a little bit the same way that we do. That's great. And when you say team, you mean like teams of agents?

Right? Correct. Yeah. Got it. Traditionally, just really quickly for folks that aren't familiar with real estate, traditionally, over the past many decades, if you were a successful real estate agent, you were wondering what was next for you and your business, you would very often become a broker owner. You would buy into a franchise model like a Remax or a Keller Williams or something else. And

You become a broker owner, but that's a completely different job. It's a completely different function. What a lot of agents have started doing over the past decade or so is instead of becoming a broker owner, which is a challenging business for a variety of reasons, they're just bringing, they're supporting themselves with some full-time staff directly. And they're bringing more agents alongside them and essentially building an organization inside someone else's brokerage. And of course it's, it's morphing. Some people are building brokerages that are completely teams.

So they're called Team Riches. So anyway, these are some of the things I'm exploring. It's super fun. I'm really intrigued by it. I enjoy the conversation. And it's in a way a return to where I was with BombBomb about seven or eight years ago, where our primary, like the first market we ever connected with and got real traction in was the real estate community.

Yeah. It's funny because I worked at Compass, the real estate tech company for about five years. So I know everything you're speaking about really well. And I would get a lot of bomb bomb videos from sales people. So I get it.

But moving on to what you've written about, and I love the topic very much of human-centered communication. For our listeners who may be less familiar with that concept, can you kind of define human-centered communication?

Yes, absolutely. It's a framework that I developed with my longtime friend and team member, Steve Passanelli. He was my CMO at BombBomb, and he is my current CMO at FollowUpBoss. So when you find people that you love working with and are very complimentary with, very often people move around with one another. So he took the lead, and I followed him to FollowUpBoss.

But we were looking for – you already mentioned you'd received some bomb bombs, video email, video messages in place of faceless typed out text. So the first book, Rehumanize Your Business, was the what, why, who, when, and how of video email and video messaging. Like what the heck is it? Who's doing it? Why? When? Et cetera.

As the movement around video, email and video messaging grew and we had a lot more competitors coming into the space, some of them were very well backed with VC funding, like hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the video, email and video messaging space.

it started getting a little bit commoditized and it was starting to get abused from our perspective. And so we were looking for a framework to level up beyond the mechanics of record and send a video message to what is this really about? And what we landed on was a framework that we ended up titling human-centered communication. We borrowed a bit from a 30 or 40 year old design practice called human-centered design. And it blends a

viability, feasibility, and desirability. Viability, feasibility...

Viability is what's necessary for business success. What is our desired outcome here? It could be a revenue goal, it could be a customer count, it could be registrants for a webinar, it could be people showing up at an open house. Whatever our business goal is needs to be balanced with feasibility. What does technology actually allow us to do? And then the third piece is desirability. What do humans actually need and want?

And sadly and oddly, when anyone puts on their sales and marketing hat, especially if you have to wear multiple hats in your role or in your business, you generally start with viability. What do I need and want? I need X amount of revenue. I need X number of closed transactions. I need X number of subscriptions. I need X number of registrants or attendees or subscribers or whatever. And then you go to feasibility.

What does technology allow us to do? Well, of course, technology is less expensive and more powerful than ever. You and I have certainly both seen abuses of AI as well as good uses of it, among many other things. In general, I'm thinking about sales automation and marketing automation and the number of unsolicited, unwanted, not useful, irrelevant things.

Emails, voicemails, text messages, social posts, et cetera. All of this stuff is noise. And in fact, it's pollution to the degree that it takes us off task. And so it blend that in with the idea that we have cyber attacks, phishing schemes, malware, et cetera. Is this email from who it says it's from? Is this link safe to click? Is this attachment safe to download? Or is it going to like hijack my whole laptop and ruin my life for the next three weeks?

So this blend of noise and pollution in the digital environment calls for putting first and foremost the third leg of that stool. Again, what do we actually need and want in our business? What does technology allow us to do? And what do humans actually need and want? So the framework is simply a means of putting other people's needs, wants, and interests first.

on a level playing field or on equal footing with your own. And I know that sounds really, really simple, but if we think about what other people need and want from this message, from this post, in this moment, whatever, and we design with that first and foremost in balance with the two other things, this isn't pure altruism. It needs to be beneficial to you and your business. It needs to be profitable at some way. It needs to provide a return on your investment of time, energy, resources, etc.

But if you're not thinking about in the design process of whatever message or communication or piece that you're putting out, what is the return on someone else's time and attention?

Rota if you're not thinking about return on others time and attention you're teaching them that you are not worth their time and attention you're teaching them that they're worth an unsubscribe a block. I do not receive report is spam report is you know a bad number whatever the case may be and so if we're not thinking about that now less lasting and I'll give it back to you if we're not thinking this way now.

We're training humans that we are not worth their time and attention, and they can easily ignore us, block us, in addition to doing things like say bad things about us and write us negative reviews.

More importantly, the machines that are going to be making these decisions for us going forward. And we already have it. It's when Gmail introduced filtering on your inbox a decade ago. And there's the promotions and updates and all these other things. That's kind of a dumb version of what we have now and what we'll continue to have increasingly going forward. There's so much noise in the environment that we'll increasingly rely on machines to make these decisions for us, to surface the most valuable things.

to show us the things that we should look at, to tell us the things that we should be responding to. And if we're not teaching people who are now teaching the machines, then we're going to disappear from the people that we're trying to build our business with and for. And so anyway, I obviously care a lot about it. I interviewed 11 experts for it with Steve. And there are a lot of perspectives in there, not just our own. Yeah.

Yeah, it's really funny that we're talking about this because and this was even separate to me knowing that we were going to have this conversation. But literally like an hour ago at lunch, I was talking to a friend of mine and we both have coaching businesses. I'm a leadership coach and, you know, I have the word coach on my LinkedIn. And that is driving probably three to four sales emails into my inbox per week that are really annoying, right?

Like I'm like, how do I stop these? Whoever they are, it's like they're really they're not very well written emails. They're not very targeted to me. They don't really have a lot of information. I'm annoyed because it's wasting my time to even open this and read it, let alone the question of did I just get like a virus for opening this because this feels so out of the blue. So I mean, and I'm sure that people

Whoever is sending those emails, there is someone who has good intentions. So if we're thinking about

sales outreach is a topic or one of these areas where we do send a lot of communication. How can people think in a more human-centered way? What are some examples of things that you would say would kind of help to make those types of communications more effective? Yeah. Okay. First, I'll restate myself, which is what do they need and want? That should be the guiding principle before you record a single second of video, before you type a single word, before...

So there's that. Yeah. Yeah. There's, of course, the whole process of journey mapping. And journey mapping is this idea of like, you know, what are the stages of relationship from, you know, whatever triggered you to start getting those emails or the precursors to that all the way through, you know, some type of commitment or purchase and an ongoing relationship, whether that's repurchasing or renewing the subscription or, you know, whatever a healthy long-term goal.

growth relationship looks like with your, and not just your customers, but also strategic partners, referral partners, et cetera, whoever is important in your business ecosystem. So first is thinking about their needs and interests.

a really practical way to communicate that. And, you know, I was very forward facing. I had a ton of direct customer access in person and virtually and in inboxes, et cetera, in my role at BombBomb. And I would constantly get people asking me, you know, why didn't people open my email or why didn't this video get played or why didn't she reply and these types of things. And like bonus points for being curious and wanting to do better the next time. But

It's looking backward, not looking forward. And it's about you. It's not about them. Why didn't I get what I want on that thing that I already did? So instead, if we can just start to, as a habit, as a matter of course, it's like the way that we operate. If we start moving more toward, and none of us is perfect. I've sent a ton of garbage emails in my life.

But if we can start moving toward why would she play this video? Why would he reply to this thing? Why would they fill out the survey? Why would they open this email and do it again next week or next month or next quarter or whatever the cadence is? And if we can start going that way, that's a thing. Also,

We have all these tools to set up and execute and report on things that are happening digitally, whether that's auto posting to social or whether that's auto sending a series of six emails first as soon as this thing happens, then another one 24 hours later, then another one three days after that, then another one five days after that, etc., etc. We have all these machines to do this and they all have reporting, but so infrequently do we do a couple of different things.

One, look at the actual reporting and saying, gosh, maybe we should pull out email three because it's inhibiting what's happening later on. Or maybe we should change this email. Or maybe we should flip these two. That's one. How can we improve what we're doing based on what other human beings are telling us with their real behavior? In addition, you can layer in anecdotal feedback as well. If you get three replies that say,

for the love of God, please stop. That's a very clear sentiment. It's not just like, please unsubscribe here. I clicked unsubscribe. That's another thing to look at too, by the way. The other thing is, especially if you're in a medium to large size organization,

What are other people seeing, hearing, doing, right? Like, what are our customers telling us that they really enjoyed about the pre-sale process? And how can we do more of that? What are salespeople telling us are the main concerns or objections that people are coming to the calls with? And can we maybe...

layer some of that into the emails because they obviously wonder about it. And it's something that's top of mind so they would bring it up. And it's something that we're not satisfying in whatever type of communication or process that we're creating. I'm speaking as a marketer here, but in general, when we think about

Marketing, sales, customer service, customer success, whatever you want to call that, account management, kind of the marketing and sales typically pre-sale, account management, customer service, customer success, typically post-sale. These two sides of the customer creation and customer retention piece are

need to have a lot more conversation. And in that way, we're weighing more voices. We're weighing more perspectives. We're not just putting on our clever hat or worse, lazily going into chat GPT and saying, write me a thing that does this, that, and that. And here are six facts about my business. And these are the types of people I'm trying to communicate with. Like,

Do that, but then layer it in with what are your analytics telling you and what are your other team members telling you? What are real people telling you with their voice and with their behavior? And what are they telling you at different stages in the journey? I think you're highlighting something so important there where, you know, I mostly operate in the post-sale environment and.

It is, I've had the sales team come and train my customer success team. Like they're really good at getting people to be interested and, you know, getting them on the phone and all of this. And so how can we learn

From the pre-sale and the post-sale, what are things that people say in the pre-sale that we can also continuously build on in the post-sale and vice versa? What are people saying in the post-sale that are really important to them or things that they realize about your tool that is really helpful or really annoying down the line that we can then make sure that our friends in the post-sale

pre-sale world are considering in their communications? I feel like that is absolutely a broken loop. I don't know the range of folks listening, but in general, some of them will be familiar with the idea of sales and marketing alignment. It's been a theme. It's been a topic forever and ever and ever and ever.

Um, you know, essentially it boils down to sales saying these leads that you're giving us suck and marketing saying, you don't follow up on the leads and close them at a high enough rate. Like that's the essence of it. So like that, that loop has been worked over and over and over again, the loop that you describe from the, from customer service, from customer success, from account management back at

Who are the good customers that are actually staying? And then, you know, kind of reverse engineer that. Who are the salespeople that tend to create the best customers or help touch the best customers? What are the marketing channels? What are the marketing messages? Who are these types of people? Like that loop is so broken in so many businesses or just absent. Like the feedback from who's actually staying and buying again or continuing to subscribe back into the front end just like doesn't really exist in most businesses.

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Completely. And this is going a little bit off topic because now we're getting into the customer success world, which I can talk about forever. But I was literally talking to a client about this like yesterday. And I was asking like, what are the customers that are really good? And why are you going after people? I was talking to the sales team. Like, why are you trying to sell to the people who are not those people? Like we know who sticks with the product in the long run, but it requires that pre post-sale alignment to really say like,

post-sale to say, we want more of these customers. They're really good. They're much more likely to upsell. They stay with us for a long time. They're loyal and they speak about us to their friends. Like, how do we really, you know, put them in a, like, I'm making like a box with my hands, but just kind of like a persona that we go after. I think it's, yeah, it's something, it's a big opportunity that is not taken often enough. Yeah.

So I wanted to go back to something else that you had said around AI, because I think when we say human-centered communication and AI, I think it's a wild west out there in how we're actually finding a balance of those two. What do you think? What are you seeing? In general, I would say some very obvious things like the answer is with, not instead of.

In general, it's humans with machines, not machines in place of humans in general. The worst social posts, the worst emails, the worst. I mean, gosh, people are doing SEO oriented blog posts straight out of the box, like straight out of the machine. Like it's like this is not the way it's helpful.

Help yourself, spur yourself, get a foundation, get an outline, and then layer in your own personality. I mean, I'm of the mind that customer experience is your only differentiator left in almost every business. There are very few industries in which there are legitimate, defendable moats around your business.

Experience is the differentiator in a world of product and service parity. That's to say you launch a new feature, you launch a new mechanism, you launch a new process. Anyone else can knock it off in a matter of quarters if you're lucky, months if you're not, weeks if you're not, days or even hours, right? Especially in software, but really in a lot of other businesses. So I'm thinking about a great customer service, customer experience guy, Shep Hyken, who told me a story about...

He ended up changing the place that he bought his next car after buying five cars from the same dealership because this new place would go pick up his car, take it back to the shop for service, and then bring it back to his house. You need to bring it in for oil changes or repairs or anything else. They would do all that for him, right? Well, anyone else could design that in a matter of weeks or days if they wanted to, right? So that's what I mean by parity.

So, what's different is the way that we make people feel. How do we make them feel about themselves? How do we make them feel about their problem or opportunity that brought you into a relationship, maybe a commercial relationship? How do we make them feel about each of your individual people that they communicate with? How do you make them feel about the intangible stuff like...

You know, when they see your theme colors and your logo and some of these other visual identity pieces, like, you know, what does that, what does that trigger for them? And they'll never be able to clearly, well, very infrequently can they ever explicitly and clearly communicate it to you because it's all subconscious. And the vast majority of our mental processes are sensory and emotive. They are subconscious. That's to say we're not aware of them, but those are the thoughts and feelings that

that guide our conscious thoughts that then guide our words and our behaviors. And very easily, we can all agree that what other people do and say guides your business outcomes. That's to say, the way we make people feel guides our business outcomes through the process I just laid out. So in light of that, thinking about the various ways that we're interacting with people,

it needs to feel like it has something to it that is for and about the other person. And I think if you're going to some generalized, tidy, clean, approximately competent, but very often contextually irrelevant feedback that you're getting out of something like ChatGPT, you're not going far enough. There are a number of ways to leverage it. Taking the output and publishing it, and I'm using that in a general sense,

is not the way. You need to layer in some sense of who is this for? Who am I? What are we about? How do we do this, et cetera? So it's with, not instead of. The middle way is always the right way. In almost any situation, that or that other thing that's completely opposite, neither one of them is rarely the right answer. It's almost always somewhere in the middle. And so I think that's what it is here too. So the laziest people are just straight people.

Cranking for easy, automated, fast stuff. And I can't think of many places where that's a good idea. Yep. I could not agree more. I mean, we are still in early stages of AI and perhaps there will be AI that is able to think about those things that you just mentioned. You know, how is this actually benefiting the person we're speaking to? What are their needs? Like, how do we relate to their experience? Yeah.

But it's definitely not there yet. And you can feel it. You know, even in written communication, you can feel if this isn't really adding up. You know, it doesn't have that humanness to it. Yeah. Or it's not for me in this moment. Like even that, right? Like, I mean, you just think about in almost every business, data matters.

is still a challenge. Are we getting the right stuff? Is it going into the right place? Can we access it? But most importantly, is it even hygienic? Like, can we trust

this data, right? Like these are all problems that we're all struggling with almost all the time, unless you're in a very, very sophisticated or clever or amazing or lucky business. Most people are struggling with the quality and accessibility of their data. And so this idea of making something for the right person in the right moment remains a holy grail. And even if you have like very specifically trained AI, right?

It's being trained on incomplete things. By the way, I just saw a piece last night about... And this isn't new either. But for example, the inherent racism in a lot of data sets and the way that the decisions are coming out of these machines, but like...

If you don't have this handle on, if you're not working with, and I mean truly with, and frankly, prompting is an art. You can get a lot closer to a highly relevant message the more information, the more you kind of like coax and give and take and manipulate and work it. That's what I mean by with. But the more you rely on it quickly and easily, and I would say the same thing about a spreadsheet, right? It's a completely different thing to build a spreadsheet, right?

and to work it, like to get your hands dirty in it. It's metaphoric. Versus seeing a summary overview report, having someone send it to you, you spend 30 seconds looking at it. Where do you have the greater amount of understanding that can be turned into real tangible value for yourself or other people?

It's in the deal where you get your hands dirty and you work it and you understand it and you manipulate it. And then when you start seeing other people's reports, you have this intuitive sense that like, that's not quite right. I don't try, like, tell me more about that. Where did that come from? Tell me more about that. What's the underlying assumption, et cetera, et cetera. Like, so it, both and again, I guess is where I'll end up.

For sure. I do. There is, you know, when it comes to AI, you're saying you're mentioning something that I'm really excited about, which is helping us to see where people are at and being able to pick up on, oh, they were doing this thing on our website or they mentioned this person to their salesperson. And now we can actually glue that data together to understand why.

what experience they're probably having, but I fully agree. We need to be using our intuition and gut checking. Like, does this feel right? Because there are, it is still technology. There are still mistakes and we are still humans and we need to still acknowledge that. So yeah.

So, yeah, I'm curious, you know, kind of going back to the topic of evangelism and how that connects to human centric communication. Like what what role would you say that plays? I mean, that is you in a nutshell. Yeah, I love I love this question and the way that you put that together. It's so what we've been talking about a bit, especially in terms of sales and marketing, is inbound and outbound.

Right. Outbound is is exhausted in a lot of different ways. There are still people that are finding some success with it and are doing it in a way that's respectful of other people and it's generating good response. But in general, let's just say, you know, outbound phone calls and text messages and emails. It's pretty tired.

Right. The sales and marketing playbook is pretty tired right now. And then the other side of that is inbound, which HubSpot pioneered, you know, 15 or so years ago. And it's still useful in a lot of different ways. But a lot of the traditional stuff is broken as well.

And by that, I mean, I'm not going to fill that form out because a, you know, you should probably ungate it because B, I don't want to give you five pieces of my information in exchange for this download or whatever I'm getting access to. Because C, I already know that three quarters of the ones that I do this for suck.

Right. Like and everybody knows this stuff now. So we know the games of outbound and inbound. So they're not producing the same return. And the logical outcome is not more. Right. So this idea of like, oh, it takes seven touches. Now it takes 17 touches. And, you know, next year is going to take 28 touches. And the logical conclusion is like fifteen hundred touches from your bot to my bot. And maybe my bot will surface it to me. Like it just doesn't make any sense.

And so some of the language that I really like right now is near bound. This idea of not constructing all your stuff and your strategy and your messaging and your packaging and your pricing and all this and going to market, right? We hear go to market.

It's the idea of near bound is living in market, go out in the market, be with the market, know how the market talks, be one of the community members, be one of the movement leaders, be one of the movement participants in someone else's movement, live in market. And so, um,

Typically, this concept of near bound is adjacent to partnerships, like growing your business through partnerships with other companies who have similar values and similar customers and complementary features, benefits, etc. Your products work well together, your service works with their product, these types of things.

But in general, I think the idea of near bound can be applied much more broadly. And some industries have this a little bit more inherent and others don't. I think, you know, I come from software and so it doesn't. Right. It's this let's, you know, build all the stuff behind the scenes and then splash it out. You know, and sometimes we'll do that paid. Sometimes we'll do organic. We'll do some outbound. We'll do some. It's just go out and live in market.

And evangelism plays a perfect role here because that's who the evangelist is. The evangelist typically has some authority and credibility in the space, maybe even an audience or a following potentially, but certainly a network of other people who they know. They are a subject matter expertise. They're not a creator or an influencer per se. An influencer develops a platform and then leverages it in exchange for something, right? Like, yes, I'll include you in my thing, right?

you know, as long as you pay me for it, or as long as you give me something else in exchange, a creator doesn't have, you know, at least the way that it's most popularly used, doesn't have that same gravitas, business acumen, network, decade or decades of experience actually doing the thing. I have been in your shoes and therefore I'm coming alongside you

yes, I'm a representative of this company, but I'm not coming to sell you anything. I'm here to help you with the problem, to talk about the problem, to learn about the problem, to live in market with you so that I can understand, help, facilitate,

in part to generate good feelings, in part to generate opportunities that I can hand off very warmly to the sales team, in part to re-engage an account that bought this thing six months ago but never really fully adopted it. And when they made the initial purchase, it was only 25% of the potential growth that we could have inside that account. So like bring in the evangelist to remind, engage, light up, educate, entertain at some level, et cetera. And so

I think this is my last offer here. There's something very distinctly, uniquely powerful

about the human embodiment and the human expression of your company's product, service, best practices, mission, values, team, community, et cetera. There's something different about you and I doing this in a conversation. People listening to us, by the way, I'm a One X podcast listener. I know it's a little bit of a purist play, but there's something powerful about a one-to-one conversational experience that other people are invited into and

I don't know if you publish transcripts of these, but you could sit down and read the transcript of our conversation, but it is going to be a shallow, even hollow version of what you and I are doing right now. So I would extend that to say, when you look at all of this,

the digital touch points that we're increasingly relying on, and I hate to say things like post-COVID this far removed, but when everything went digital and virtual from a conversational, transactional perspective, there's no more getting on planes and going out to nice dinners in order to close the account or a lot less of it than ever before, which is fine. But like this

Some of these relationship dynamics have gone missing. And so how do we restore some of that? How do we bring these flat messages and flat experiences more to life? I would suggest that if you have the right person or the right people to put in some type of an evangelist position, you're certainly moving in this direction of a more differentiated, more human and more powerful, more memorable, more remarkable and more useful experience. Mm hmm.

I'm so inspired right now. I mean, it makes it makes so much sense. And you're really it's clicking something for me. I mean, I've worked with chief evangelist before. I understand what it is. But you're when we talk about, you know, that human centered communication and how like that is really important to actually connect with your customer. And then you have someone who is like the living example.

Kind of version of the company who's actually going out there and speaking to people about use cases and who they are in terms of your customer, like actually getting to know them and, and yeah, being able to just like interact is really great. And more companies should do this. Why don't, why doesn't everybody company have a chief evangelist? Yeah.

Well, first of all, that's what we're exploring on Chief Evangelist. And we can check it out at chiefevangelist.com or on YouTube at Chief Evangelist and in your podcast player. The role takes on a lot of different shapes. Almost every role is bespoke. I would say the single biggest challenge

that the ROI is not clear. Um, the, the closest anyone can come is evidence that this is financially a good investment. Um, but you'll never get proof. I had, uh, the, the chief analytics, uh, evangelist from Google on, uh, former chief analytics evangelist. And he was very, very, uh, forthcoming and, um,

generous and fair in his discussion of why he and several of his team members are no longer there. And it falls into this category of we produced a lot of evidence, but we didn't produce any proof. And at the end of the day, and what I would extend there is if the chief analytics evangelist at Google with a team of other Google evangelists,

This guy's written multiple books on marketing analytics. He has taught at Northwestern, University of Chicago. He's currently at Notre Dame's business school, like teaching marketing analytics. Like if teams of people that well versed in the expertise and in the subject can't produce proof, I don't think anyone can. And I think a lot of people hang up on that. That said, I'm also hearing from people who are in companies,

inside a VC portfolio,

you know, generally some of the most aggressive of all saying we know what the next growth lever is for the next 24 to 48 months. It's this evangelist thing. Take a look around and see if you know anyone that might fit the bill. And so I'm hearing from all kinds of different people, but this ROI piece and the idea that it's an intangible benefit, you know, some people are like dropping down things in Salesforce saying, you know, evangelist influenced, evangelist influenced, like I influenced $4.8 million in revenue, but it's like,

OK, kind of, you know, like just because you touched it doesn't like it. It's just hard. It's really difficult. I think the people who are successful with it have leadership and executives that trust that this is valuable and know the power of relationship and are willing to do things that they know intuitively are right.

even if they can't prove it. And they're willing to defend it against a board of directors if necessary. Yep, for sure. I mean, this is the problem that we have in the realm of customer experience and creating great experiences for our customers because we can't measure success

the size of someone's smile or how happy we made someone feel or angry we made someone feel. Of course, we have customer satisfaction scores and net promoter scores and all these things. But at the end of the day, like you were speaking about earlier, the importance of that human emotion and how that's really what drives someone's opinion of a company, it actually is not something that we can track. So

And I think we get too obsessed with data sometimes. Like if the data isn't saying it, then we shouldn't do it. If we can't see the direct ROI, then, you know, how can we justify the expense? But humans are not machines. Yeah.

Yeah. And there are multiple people represented in human centered communication speak to this kind of art and science balance. And I think, you know, when we look at the science side of it, it goes back to Henry Ford's assembly line, which was, you know, Taylorism, Frederick Taylor, like scientific management, like as we started to get a handle on science.

the fact that there are metrics that we can generate on the things that we're doing. Like we became so fascinated with it. And some people still respect the balance of art and science and other people are beholden to the siren song of, look, I can, you know, I can see this like, well, no, you can see a representation of it. It happens to be in something relatively tangible that feels super like solid, like a number, but it's,

the number might not even be right in so many cases for, again, data hygiene being the primary issue. But so anyway, there's a lot there. Yeah. Have you read the book Build? I haven't. But I'll take it as a recommendation. Tony Fadell, who... Yeah, totally. Nest and... Yeah. And I mean, he... Where Apple and Philips and all these things. He writes about this...

In the fact that you have to use your intuition when you're looking at data and the data isn't always right. Like sometimes the data might tell you you need to do something. That's it. That's getting into the spreadsheet and knowing, like feeling when it's off and honoring it at least to investigate. Exactly.

Yeah, 100%. It's cool. I'll add one more on for, you know, I feel like a podcast listener is very often a book reader or book listener. So I'll just layer one on. Tony Fadell first came onto my radar when I was reading Rich Karlgaard, who's with Forbes for a number of years. I think he was the executive editor or something. He wrote a book called The Soft Edge.

And it was essentially about this, what we're using the language of art and science around. But it was like there's the hard edge of business, which is what gets the most respect and study and all of this because it feels the most concrete. And then there's the soft edge, which is design and feel and these types of things. And so Tony Fadell is featured in there, I believe, too.

for his design kind of prowess and intuition. I mean, he, he made the iPhone, so we should trust him. Yeah. So I'd love to start closing us out. Yeah, please. Not because you want it to be over, right? No, I'm kidding. No, this is super fun. I'm kidding. Um, I'd love to know about a recent experience you've had with a brand that left you really impressed.

Gosh, this is kind of a lazy one. Um, but like Amazon just can consistently delivers. Um, you can't really trust the ratings that much anymore. Cause those are all gamified. Um,

You can't always trust like the discounting because what looks like a discount today is actually the price that it was three days ago. But in terms of constantly adding little things like the idea of like, you know, rounding them all up and getting them on. And this isn't like fresh or brand new, but I just upgraded a number of aspects of my office because I, you know, as I left BombBomb to join FollowUpBoss, I went from being in office to being at home. So, you know, there's a lot of little stuff, you know, like, and you're constantly kind of fixing the thing up, you know, months into the journey.

And so they've been on my doorstep quite a bit, but like little things like, hey, round all these up and send them on a Thursday instead of getting them throughout the week. Or even better yet, we'll bring it whenever the heck we want or whenever the heck we can. And we'll give you like a digital credit for it. This idea that if you don't like it, here are like six retailers that you can go take this thing to, et cetera, like just consistently good things.

Uh, in general, like not mind blowing, but the scale that they do it at the speed, the increasing speeds, like, and so I guess what I want to highlight here is just the constant iteration and the constant improvement. Um,

And while also acknowledging some of the fundamental flaws, like the reviews, eh, kind of. I mean, I guess I can trust 5,000 people, but I know that a number of them were like, you know, incentivized, that kind of a thing. So they're not perfect. They have a number of problems like every other company, but I'm consistently impressed. I guess I'll go one more. As we're recording this in late 2023, I'm thinking back to a road trip that my wife and I took to see family and friends around Thanksgiving.

And so we were in a variety of Starbucks because we're early people. So we're in a variety, whatever Starbucks in that town was open at five or five 30 in the morning we were at. And the cheery, cheery people in, uh,

a nice neighborhood in Kansas city. Um, you know, the country club Plaza type area, I think is what it's called. Um, which is the warmest, friendliest people. It was like the middle of the day to them, even though we're like just getting up and get ready to haul for like eight more hours East, uh, from Colorado. And, uh, so anyway, like the, and the, and that is just, it's the people. I mean, the reason you go is that you know exactly what your order is. It's going to be very, very consistent in price and quality. Um,

But the people make the difference. And so my wife and I ended up having this ongoing conversation because we were probably at four or five Starbucks over the course of this period. Which ones stood out and which ones didn't? And it was 100% about the people and the way that they managed you. Like, hey, hey, I know you've been standing there for a minute, but you're next up. I got your...

oat milk lattes coming up or whatever. So like just these types of things. So anyway, yeah, those are a couple of completely and they're not like cool brands. I don't have like an amazing out of pocket story there, but they're there. It's real. But you just mentioned two brands that have completely changed the way that we live, like brought broad strokes, right? Like Amazon, the way that we shop has fundamentally changed because of Amazon.

Starbucks. Coffee wasn't really a thing until, you know, the way that we drink coffee now is different because of what Starbucks did and made available to us. And there's something to be said about the size of those businesses. And I think so much of it has to do with the customer experience. Like they really focused on it and look at where they look at where they are now. And I'm sure there were things that they were like, we need to invest in this.

Even if we can't see the ROI, like, you know, delivering the same day, I'm still paying the same amount for that, but I'm definitely buying more. So I'm sure that Amazon has some way of tracking that, but, um, no, they're, they're, they're both great brands. Good. Last question for you. What is one piece of advice that you think every customer experience leaders should hear?

Um, gosh, I feel like it's, uh, on all these themes that we've been in. It's not going to be super concise, but it's this idea that like the people are the difference. And of course it's the, it's the people who are customer facing. I mean, there's, that is a big deal. Um, but then there are also the people behind it. Um,

And I guess I would also say something that should be a truism for folks that listen to a show like this, which is that the customer experience and the employee experience are two sides of the exact same coin. And that the customer experience is the outflow or the overpouring or the outward expression or better yet, the peek behind the curtain of what the employee experience is really like. It's interesting.

easy to put a smile on when you're miserable a couple of times, but it's impossible to do it all day, day in, day out, week in, week out. If people feel valued, appreciated, challenged, engaged, all the better. And so, yeah, I guess that. Keep the employee in mind. It is one of the things that I talk about, teach about, coach about, because it's

It's just, it's so, so important. I've built and led multiple customer facing teams. And if they don't feel engaged and supported and that they have a home, you know, with their, with their team, it shows with the customer. It's, it's so connected. So thanks for bringing that one up.

Good. Thank you so much, Ethan. This has been such a great conversation talking about evangelism and human-centered communication, AI and everything in between. I've really enjoyed it. For those of you listening, if you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe and you'll get more of this very soon. So thank you so much, Ethan. Thank you. I loved it.

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