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Episode #275
George Bryant

How To Design A Customer Journey In Your Consulting Business

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Summary

Consumers are an essential part of any consulting business. Ensuring they have the best customer journey will help you keep going and growing. How do you consistently deliver an excellent experience to them when they get your services? In this episode, Michael Zipursky welcomes George Bryant, the host of The Mind Of George Show. They discuss how to design the best customer journey and why marketing is a two-way value-based long-term relationship. Learn how to create an equal ground endowed on a relationship agnostic of the traction with George Bryant today! Tune in, take notes, and start driving your consulting business toward success.

I’m very excited to have George Bryant join us. George, welcome.

Thank you. I’m stoked to be here. I was half-chugging my cold coffee because I didn’t leave myself enough space to drink.

I called upon you at the exact moment. You’re taking a big swig.

It’s like when you go to restaurants, you ever notice that as soon as you take your first bite, they always ask you how your meal is when you’re still chewing. I was like, “You don’t want the real answer. You’re trying to get a drive-by in. All was horrible.” Perfect timing.

Let’s get into it. For those who aren’t familiar with you and your work, you’re a New York Times bestselling author on a very different topic than maybe some might expect. We’ll get into that. You have your own podcast. You’re a digital marketing consultant with real expertise in building and implementing customer journeys. Before we get into your story and into all the stuff that people find helpful in terms of growing their businesses and looking at how they can make improvements, explain what a customer journey is and why it is so powerful in the world of business.

For me, a customer journey is the intentionality of designing a journey that helps our customers achieve the desired result and understanding that the relationship doesn’t end when the transaction takes place. The relationship begins and only ends when the result has been achieved. That’s how I define the customer journey. When I think about it, think about it through the lens of when I make a promise to somebody like, “I’m going to help you lose 5 pounds, double your revenue or get 80% open rates in your email,” my promises don’t carry any weight. They’re the wrapping paper to get them to open the present.

My true value and measure of success are not when they understand that I can do it but when they do it for themselves and get a taste of that result. It might not be 5 pounds. Maybe it was 3 pounds. A customer journey is designed to help people and give them the best chance of success at what we’ve promised. That, in my opinion, is the strongest foundational way to build a legacy business that stands the test of time.

None of us walk up to our friends, and it’s like, “Mike, I’m good to see you. You’ll never believe it. I bought this course from this person and didn’t get the result, but I’m so stoked to promote it for you.” It’s the intentionality behind it. I love that people talk about it now because a few years ago, everyone was like, “You’re nuts. What’s a customer journey? That’s silly. That’s stupid.” Now my phone’s ringing off the hook. They’re like, “Remember that thing you told me a few years ago?”

People want the results that we promise. I feel like it’s not out of ill intent that people don’t do it. It’s out of being a byproduct of the paradigm that’s happened in marketing for the last several years and how fast things have moved. In the name of the information game and information marketing, and even product-based marketing, what ended up happening is that there was this shift that everybody focused so much on frontline revenue and acquisition.

They didn’t realize how much they were negating their own business by creating these anti-marketing machines for people that didn’t get the results or didn’t use the product. That’s a ripple that’s almost unmeasurable, but when you feel it, you can’t recover from it. It’s a lot easier to build a relationship the right way than recover from one that started the wrong way. That’s how I see the customer journey.

It’s interesting that the way you defined it and the focus you placed around the word of the customer journey is what happens once you begin working with someone. For most people who tend to think about the customer journey, their focus is more on what happens from the marketing, the awareness or the brand building that you’re doing up to the point of acquisition, like getting the client. That’s interesting to me. The work you do is the focus once somebody becomes a client, or are you also helping more on the acquisition part and getting something to become a client?

It’s both, but I’m speaking in blankets, and forgive me. I’m speaking in generalities. Most people start at the front and then the back as an afterthought. I start in the back, and the front handles itself. What ultimately sells? Confidence. Not confidence in your offer. Confidence that someone can get the result, but if all you’re doing is working on an offer, then you’re not going to be confident in the first place, and marketing gets hard. When I know that every 100 people that come through are getting results, it’s easy to market my product because I worked on that journey first.

They’re both equally important, but when we think about it, I always used monogamous romantic relationships. In the lens of this, it sounds like, “We should do this.” I was like, “Yes,” but you would never date somebody who gets engaged, and then the moment you get married, move out and never speak to them again and expect your marriage to work. Yet, somehow in business and entrepreneurship, that’s how people were taught to do it without realizing the fallout on the backend.

Marketing is a two-way value-based long-term relationship. Click To Tweet

I said this probably years ago. Jonah Berger wrote an incredible book called Contagious. At that time, over 86% of marketing was word of mouth. What dictated what they said was based on their experience. One of the things I say is that, “If you don’t tell them what to say, you won’t like what they say.” That simply comes from the intentionality of having this. When I think about that, marketing, in its essence, like how I define marketing, is a two-way value-based long-term relationship.

Regardless of transaction, product, and service, there’s a human being that’s making an emotional-based decision. That human being is what we’re building a relationship with. Whether you realize this or not, when you’re in the game of business, you’re sometimes building hundreds of thousands of monogamous relationships at scale.

When you take the relationship as the priority and not the transaction, human beings only need three things. They need to feel seen, heard, and respected. Once that happens, you have a solid baseline and deep endowment to a relationship agnostic of the transaction, which increases their ability to do the work, get the result and ask for help because there’s a solid foundation which it’s been built upon.

For me, when I think about like, “We have this new offer or this new lead magnet,” the first thing I do is, “Lead magnet’s great, but how can I ensure that people get results with it?” I’ll spend an hour mapping out the customer journey, and we’re all like, “When that’s done, my marketing’s handled because I turn it around and tell the world what we’re doing.”

One of the analogies that I give is that a lot of people are out here selling bridges. They’re like, “Here’s the best bridge in the world.” You have to realize that your product or service isn’t the solution. It’s a bridge to the solution. Nobody is out here like, “I’m going to buy this supplement because I want to lose 10 pounds. The supplement is my end-all-be-all.” No, the supplement is a tool to help them achieve the goal. If all you do is focus on the tool, then all you have are features and benefits and one-night stands, for lack of better terms.

When you focus on the after state, and you realize that’s 1 of 10 tools that could get them there, they have an endowment and a relationship regardless of the product. Even if the product doesn’t work or they want something different, they don’t go shopping somewhere else. “I’ll try something else.” It’s founded on a relationship.

That’s interesting. It’s so common to see, especially in the world we live in, working with consultants and the whole consulting industry. There’s so much focus placed on the acquisition or when people think about like, “What’s the best way to grow my business?” the default, the status quo is, “I have to get more leads, more clients, build a pipeline,” and all that’s important. All the data points that the best source of new business is your existing clients or the people that they know what’re the referrals, the introduction, doing great work, and creating that word of mouth.

It’s very interesting to see. That’s where most people put their folks. In the example you mentioned, “I’m a lead magnet.” For those that aren’t familiar, a lead magnet might be somebody who comes to your website. You offer them a free PDF, a video or something along those lines. You give something of value away for free in exchange for them giving you their name or email address.

This is accurate, and I know that we are also, at times, probably in the wrong about this. It’s like, “Let’s offer something of value.” We give people access to a book, a video or something of that nature, but we don’t necessarily spend a lot of time thinking, “How can we make sure that they take what we offer them and have the highest chances of implementing that or benefiting from it and seeing the result that they want? What they want is not just the PDF. They want the outcome that the PDF will give them. How can we create that journey or that experience?” That’s what I’m hearing you say, and it should be a light bulb moment for many readers who maybe we’ll join us. Probably most of us are guilty of not putting that level of thought into the equation.

I have a note on that too. I said this before. I was like, “All of you out here fishing, and I’m trying to stop the fish from jumping in my boat.” If we own a business, we have a product. We have a service. They’re not coming into our world like, “Our life is great. Everything’s working,” but they’re like, “I want to change something.” No matter what, whether that’s they give us their email or buy our product, what they’re looking for is a result. Everybody focuses so much time and energy on the less than 1% of people that say yes. They miss the other 99% of people that are only one step away from being a guest without having the “sell.”

What typically would tilt somebody from, “I don’t feel safe to make this purchase. I don’t know if this is going to work for me,” to a, “Heck yes,” it’s giving them a taste and a tangible result, which moves them closer to their goal. We are the byproduct that got them there. Naturally, they’re like, “If this is what it was like for free, can you imagine what it’s like if I pay?”

It changes the paradigm from like, “I have to go sell,” to, “My job is to enroll people into a journey that gets them one step closer to their vision. If that involves a credit card, great. If it involves an email, great. If it involves a social media post, great.” If I understand that in simplicity, I’m Jack and Jill, and my job is to lay out breadcrumbs that help people get one step closer, the game gets easy.

CSP George Bryant | Customer Journey

 

If you think in the lens and even in this like, “I’m a very high-level consultant,” but then on the other lens, I turn around and give it all away for free on my podcast, I was like, “I don’t understand why people pay you the absurd amount of money they do.” The information’s the same. It’s the journey that I designed to help them get the best results and implement them.

What people focus on is they focus on that 1%. “I need more buyers. I need more emails.” What they don’t realize is that if I took 1,000 people that came into your ecosystem, and I said, “How many of you 1,000 people had a positive experience and felt better when you left?” only literally ten hands would go up, and it would be the 1% of buyers. What happens in most businesses when people don’t buy? We moved on to the next, yet we still invested the time and energy to tell them that we had a solution and wanted a relationship with them.

The moment they didn’t buy, they became transactional trash, and we got rid of them. I’m like, “How many of you people had less than positive experiences?” Nine hundred ninety hands go up. When you understand marketing and 86% of word-of-mouth marketing and 8 to 10 brand recommendations or non-recommendations, in a 60-second conversation, you realize that you’ve been creating enemies of your brand as a byproduct of only focusing on the 1%.

Instead of everybody having a bad experience, let’s say somebody fills out an application to work with you, and they’re not a good fit, amazing. It doesn’t mean you throw them back in the ocean like, “You’re not a good fit for our programmer consulting, but when I heard you say this, this will be valuable. Here’s a 30-minute video that you should use, implement, and put into practice that will help you.”

When you get to the point of, “Here, call me back,” all of a sudden, I’m turning 990 noes to at minimum neutral and, at best, neutrals to yeses. Those are the people that are spreading the message and engaging on my social because I was willing to go one step further and understand that there’s a human, not a number. One of my Marketing Laws is that everybody feels seen, heard, respected or valued, whether they give you their credit card or not.

I was like, “George, how do you get these million-dollar deals, and you don’t do anything?” I’m like, “That’s Tammy. Tammy emailed me four years ago and said she couldn’t afford to pay me, so I gave her the course for free. Now Tammy works for a startup, and they needed my help. They called me and paid me $200,000.” They were like, “What?” I was like, “It’s not my job to control the ripple. It’s my job to ensure that the ripple can happen.” It happens through a lens of which I’m proud of that. The other part of the customer journey that’s so important is that a customer journey is not predicated on a transaction.

Every time somebody sees you, hear you, see you on a podcast, on social or on your email, that’s all a part of a customer journey. We would never have a brick and mortar business and be like, “You can only come in the store if you pre-commit to buying. I won’t talk to you unless you give me your credit card,” yet it tends to be the way in which people do business online, and they’re always like, “George, how are you able to double my business in a week?”

I’m like, “It’s because you were trying to find the 1%, and I built a relationship with the 99. The moment I was able to build a relationship with them by acknowledging them, by seeing them, by answering their questions, guess what they did? They felt subconsciously safe enough based on that experience to whip out their credit card, and we doubled your business. It requires that we look at the ecosystem as a whole.” I’m sorry I’m on a tangent, but I’m going to give it away anyways.

There are only four things that people can do when they come into your world. I call these my four paths to the peer. On any given day, somebody can come into my world, and they can leave. They can come into my world and learn more. They can come in and opt in or come in and buy. They’re all equally important. The only difference is the amount of touchpoints they need to collect evidence to feel safe that this is the right decision, but how I make them feel at every step of that journey predicates the success that I will have in that ripple.

People are like, “They bounced.” I’m like, “So what that they bounce? They still spent 33 seconds on your website playing the field. What matters is that when they see you again, you’re consistent and congruent to that experience they had. That might be the tilt that moves them in.” Most people only focus on the people that are going to buy and miss 99% of the pie. That guarantees you the success that you couldn’t even tangibly measure. That’s it.

I can’t help but think what you’re describing is almost like a reverse Pareto Principle. It’s the 80/20, but you’re talking about the 20/80. That’s very different from what most people tend to think about. You gave a really great example of somebody, let’s say, coming to a website, filling out an application to join a program or whatever it might be. Most people tend to put the folks on whether you’re a fit or not. “If you’re not a fit, I’m not going to spend much time with you.” That’s a very common mindset.

You gave a great example of that. What I’m wondering, this show is all about featuring successful consultants like yourself, but our readers are consultants. In the field of professional services, many of the dream clients, the ideal clients, and the consultants are going after are executives in organizations. They’re not active on Instagram, TikTok or social channels as much. They’re not necessarily the CEO of a large organization that is probably not searching on Google and clicking on ads and making a buy-in decision based on that.

Your product or service isn't the solution. It is a bridge to the solution. Click To Tweet

How do you feel? If at all, does this approach the mindset around the customer journey, what might be an example of applying this best practice and this framework and approach to more of professional services setting with a more seasoned or a decision maker that’s making a bigger decision than somebody buying a course online?

It is 100% the most powerful place for the series. One of the reasons that I became one of the highest-paid digital marketing consultants in under a year, by the way, I didn’t even know consulting was a thing. My buddy’s like, “You should consult,” and then twenty people in the room of this talk I gave were like, “We’ll hire you.” A year later, I’m working with billion-dollar brands and getting paid 6 figures a day in a matter of 11 months. No models, no nothing.

When I think back about what the secret was is the secret that I built relationships agnostic of transaction. I didn’t care if you paid me or not. I cared that I helped. In my world, I, quite frankly, hate losing, so I built models that guarantee me to win because, at the end of the day, a lot of people lose this game because they go straight for the close at the bar. They’re like, “I want to take you on a date. I want to take you home.”

We missed flirting, courting, conversing and common ground. You have to realize that a lot of these dream clients that people are going after are getting transacted with every day. They’re getting pitched, getting offers, and living in this transaction world. The moment you show up as a human, you create equal ground endowed on a relationship agnostic of the transaction. Perfect example, I’ll give a few of them. I gave one of my first ever keynotes, and the CEO of Men’s Health or Rodale came up to me, and she’s like, “I want your help. How much do I pay you?”

I’m like, “I don’t know. I’ll do it for free.” She’s like, “What?” I’m like, “How’s this? I’ll come and help you for four days, and if, in the end, it’s worth it, you can write me a check.” She’s like, “You’re a psycho.” I’m like, “Yes, but I don’t know if I can help you.” I was honest about it. That’s Pennsylvania. I spent four days with the whole team of Men’s Health and Women’s Health prevention. I had 70 people in a room for four days. I finished, and they wrote me a check a couple of weeks later. She said, “I saved the company.” I make it almost impossible to pay me.

Michael, if you call me, “I have a question about my model in consulting.” I’m like, “Dope. What’s it going to take? A Zoom link? Let’s get on Zoom. Let’s help it.” One of the principles that I live by is that in order for me to win, you have to win first. This requires that I build a relationship and understand where you are and who you are. In the world of professional services like consulting, they’re not hanging out anywhere but on LinkedIn. I’m banned from LinkedIn for life, and I’m so happy about that because I hate that stupid platform anyways.

They’re all done through relationships, either networking events you’re at or similar events. You’re speaking to them. We’ve all been there. You give a talk, and somebody comes up in 1 or 2 buckets. They either want the answers in the transaction or connect with you as a person. Which ones do we remember? We remember the ones that wanted to connect with us as a person who didn’t make us feel like a transaction machine. You have to understand that when you’re finding these things, the greatest weapon you have in your arsenal is a relationship. Not the transaction.

What I’m constantly looking for are ways that I can help, like book recommendations, introductions I can make, and pieces of knowledge or tidbits. I make it almost impossible to even know you can pay me because I’m so focused on building a relationship. I just want the relationship. I love helping people. It just happens that when you help somebody, and then eight months later, they’re like, “Here’s a point in my $100 million company.” I’m like, “For what?” They’re like, “As a thank you.” I’m like, “I’ll take that deal all day.”

If I went in like, “Give me a point in your company and then I’ll give you this.” “Every time he called me, I picked up the phone.” I’m like, “I would do this. Let me jump on with your team. Let me help them with this.” All of a sudden, everyone’s like, “You got a $20 million payday.” I was like, “I earned the $20 million payday.” That wasn’t on my radar. The relationship was on my radar.

I have to play the devil’s advocate for a moment. I know people who are reading, going, “That makes sense.” I can see that you are of an abundance mindset. You are providing as much value as you can, but how do you do that when you get busy? Let’s say the consultant. They are the founder. They’re running, and they may have a team or not have a team. If they say yes to all the opportunities that come around them, and if they’re just giving-giving, how do they have any time to make money to build a business? Walk me through how you see it.

I love it. It makes my heart happy. First, you have to understand that if you’re a consultant reading this, all you are is a professional relationship manager. That’s all you are. All the rest of it takes you out of your power. If you’re in your email, you’re losing. If you’re writing models, you’re losing. If you’re in the crappy mundane calls, you’re losing. Your job as a consultant is to be a master of relationships, but yet most of them live in this world of transaction.

My lens is easy. I use the term that I coined as containers. I build containers on everything. The way that I do it is I am a yes to everybody. I will give everybody 30 minutes of my time for free, if that’s video messages back and forth, answering emails or whatever. I’m not saying don’t run the core functions of your business. Let me collapse this into the customer journey. When I teach customer journey, one of the most important things I teach is that you have to feed the children you have now before you can adopt any new ones.

CSP George Bryant | Customer Journey

 

The amount of people reading this who are only focused on getting more clients, yet the ones they have are getting underdelivered, is blowing my mind. Guaranteed, if I went into every one of your businesses and I was like, “You have a hundred clients. I’m going to get on a Zoom call with every single one of them and ask them a couple of questions. How happy are you? How fulfilled do you feel? Do you feel seen and heard? Are you getting the results that you want?”

Most of their answers are going to be no, and then they’re going to tell you exactly what they would need to feel a heck yes, to then recommend you to other people. You have to focus on the children that you have first and make sure that they’re getting the results and that you’re fully fulfilling what that promise was. Once you have that information, you have the cheat codes for every other relationship that exists.

You move from the people that are in to the people that are almost in. You have a relationship with them. They’ve shown interest. They’re a part of your world. They’ve shown some stuff, and then instead of trying to close them, you build a relationship with them, and you’re like, “What can I do? I’ve been on calls with you three times. I would rather do this. I’ve asked enough, and there are three things that are bothering me about your business. Would you mind if we jumped on Zoom and I mapped them out for you so you guys can do them and get the results? Even if we don’t work together, I want to know that I improved upon your silence.”

They’re like, “Yes.” Nobody ever says no to that, by the way, for the record. You’re there, but then once those buckets are full, then you get into the acquisition bucket of, “Where am I going to develop and build these new relationships?” When you build those relationships, it requires that you be a master of your time and relationships. I’ll give an example.

I gave a keynote at a big event in Austin as Firestone was speaking. Gary Vaynerchuk, everybody, and I were speaking. What does everybody at that conference have? They have a back table. “If you want more, go to my back table.” I walked up on stage, and the first thing I said is like, “I will never have a back table, and I’m the only speaker that wasn’t paid to be here because I’m only here to help. I’m going to give you an hour talk on the customer journey in scaling your business. I will be here for the next two days, and I won’t leave until I’ve answered every one of your questions.” That’s it. I then gave the whole talk. I answered questions for about fourteen hours.

I knew when somebody came to ask me questions that they were going to go in 1 of 2 buckets. Bucket one is I could help them on the spot and give them some advice, and bucket two is I could help them, but I would need more information. Bucket one, I answered every question. Bucket two, I was like, “I can help you with this, and I’ll give you 30 minutes of my time for free, but I need you to write me an email. Use this exact subject line and send me this information. If you do not use this subject line, I will delete your email because if you can’t listen to me enough to write that subject line, nothing I share with you is going to help you in your business anyways.”

That day, I got 51 emails. It took me about 30 days. I responded to all of them. I made Loom videos and did blank. I give everybody about 15 to 20 minutes, and of the 51 or 52 emails, 43 of them closed. It was $2 million in revenue off of a free keynote that I wasn’t paid for. Not because I sold but because I had a container about where I choose to spend my time and knowing how that moves the needle in my business.

I told them, “You don’t have to pay me. Do this.” One of them implemented what I did and didn’t talk to me for eight months. I didn’t hear a word, and then I got an email with a subject line that said, “When can you come to Chicago? I need your routing and checking information to wire you these six figures. I need to know what day you can come to Chicago.” I was like, “What?” They’re like, “It worked. We want more.” My job isn’t to control that. My job is to control myself and to know where I spend my time and what moves the needle.

In my world, relationships move the needle. I live in a world of executives. I have billion-dollar business partners. I own companies with some celebrity entrepreneurs and things like that. They always never understand me. They’re like, “You’ll go to dinner, and we won’t talk about business once.” I’m like, “I want to know your kids. I want to know your pets. I want to know your wife.” They’re like, “You send us custom dog treats for my dog, Fido. Who are you?” Six months later, when something pops up, they pick up the phone, and who do you think they call? Me. Not because I’m the best customer journey or marketing guy, which I am, but because I don’t care about that stuff. I care about you because what I understand is that your business might change tomorrow.

You might close it and launch a new one. You might change your offer. You might change your market, but if all I am is the expert in that area and there’s no relationship, then I’m transactional, and I’m nothing more than a high-end prostitute. I don’t want that because it doesn’t help me. It’s about mastering my time. I’m not saying, “Don’t make money in your business or don’t do whatever.” A lot of people fall into this trap of, “I need more,” when all the more they need is already inside their business. They’re like, “My customers are happy.”

I’m like, “Great. Let’s talk about your team. This last time we got on a call with every one of your team members and asked them what you needed to fill their bucket, ‘How is their bucket? How are they full? Are they embodying what you teach? Do they feel the same way?’ You’re like, ‘Crap.’” I’m like, “There’s always a hole.” When you solve it from the inside, everything on the outside gets easy. When the inside of a company is aligned, then everything that gets transmitted on the outside gets reflected, and people want to be a part of it.

Everybody falls into this trap, myself included, for years of like, “I need more people on the front. I need more revenue. There are only seven people in here. I need to blow these seven people out of the water. Once I’ve done that, then I can take that energy and direct it to where there’s something else.” I love devil’s advocates here, but no matter which way you slice it, at the end of the day, a human being makes a decision. Not a robot, not a transaction, not an AI. No AI is putting in that credit card and making the decision to work with you.

'It's not my job to control the ripple. It's my job to ensure the ripple can happen.' - George Bryant. Click To Tweet

A human being is making the decision to work with you. One of their filters is how safe and untransacted they feel with knowing that you are so confident in what you do and how you do it. You don’t have to sell yourself. How you show up in the world is what sells them everything they need to know. One of the things I say to people all the time, and I say this very directly, is that, “Your clients’ results will tell them everything they need to know about you, not what you say, not what you’ve done but the results that they achieve in their life.”

If I am at a conference and you and I happen to be speaking together, and people are coming up like, “How can I work them?” you can’t. They’re like, “Why?” I’m like, “It’s because I don’t know if I can help you yet.” Based on what I stayed up here. I’m like, “What’s your business? What’s your thing?” I’m looking for ways to help. I focus on having them win first. At that point, if somebody comes to me for a piece of advice and I give them an answer in ten minutes that changes the trajectory of their business, there’s only 1 person that can hire in 6 months. No matter which way they slice it, their subconscious has already made the decision.

That’s how the endowment works. That’s how human psychology works. They’re going to be like, “Crap, I got to call George.” I get the question, and it’s not an advocation of our responsibility to drive our company and our team, but it’s to focus on what moves the needle in those areas. The reason I say this is because I didn’t use to be this way. I’d go to an event and be hanging out with billionaires and celebrities, and the first thing I would do is like, “Nice to meet you. Here’s what I do.” They never talk to me again. I changed it to like, “Let me connect as a human.”

Why the change? Where does this mindset come from? You’ve shared that you weren’t always this way. You didn’t always approach things in this way. What happened in your life? What was that light that you saw? What caused you to shift, how you approach conversations and the mindset of full-on abundance?

I lost everything. I lost it all, millions down the drain. My wife left me. She was eight months pregnant. We were three weeks away from bankruptcy. My friends wouldn’t talk to me anymore because I was a toxic transactional human, masking it as, “I’m here to help,” but it was impossible to help when I had agendas because I hadn’t done my own work.

I wasn’t coming from a place of like, “I want to help.” I was coming from a place of you are meeting my empty holes, wounds, and needs that I won’t address on my own. Even though I had every intention of being transformational, for lack of better terms, I was transactional because everything was fitting a narrative. I was getting all my edification from the business. I was deriving my identity based on the results I created. I lost it all, and I didn’t lose it all once. I lost it all three times.

I’m the type of guy that, if the universe smacks me in the face once, I won’t listen. Twice, I won’t listen. The third time, I’m like, “I should probably listen.” That’s been the path of my life. Every time I lost it all, what I was reminded of was there was always this core group of 5 to 6 people that were there for me no matter what results I had, how I showed up, or even how big of a jerk I was.

I was like, “I’ve been missing this secret the whole time.” The business doesn’t matter. The results don’t matter. The strategies don’t matter. It’s the people that matter. At the end of the day, they’re the ones that, regardless of the business or where they are and what results are coming or the ones that are going to be there. I was like, “I haven’t been building relationships with anybody.” I’ve been building transactions.

Was that scary for you once you made that decision that, “I’m not going to focus on generating revenue or profit as quickly?” The focus is not just on transactions. The focus is on relationships. Relationships, in most cases, are a longer-term mindset. It could take, as you mentioned, in some cases, many months or years for somebody to first have that conversation with you and then write you a check. At that time, in your words, you lost everything. Now you’ve made this decision to shift focus more to long-term, more to relationships, but you still got to eat. How did you kind of deal with that? How did you approach that? What was the mindset like once you made that decision?

It was scary as crap, and it still is to this day because it requires much trust. There are also many people that you’ll walk up to in a bar or on an airplane, and you become instant best friends. People don’t give enough credence to how fast relationships work. It wasn’t necessarily that I wanted to build relationships with everybody. It was that I wanted to add value first. That was one of the biggest distinctions. The fear was like, “I’m not going to get paid. This isn’t going to work.” Do you know this magical thing happens when you add value to somebody’s life? Things happen fast.

Instead of this lens of like, “I can’t wait to get on this sales call. I can’t wait to close this. I can’t wait to teach the model,” and then went to, “I’m going to help.” Instead of getting on a call and pitching the model and where the holes were in their business, I’m like, “I already did it out of your whole business. This one hole is driving me nuts. Can I fix it for you?” They’re like, “Yes.” I’m like, “Seriously, no agenda. Hit record. Get your team on the call.” They’re like, “Holy moly.” I realized that it was one of the best sales strategies in the world because rather than sitting there and pontificating about all these things, I was like, “Here you go.”

In that world, I can’t lose because the worst thing that happens is that I get on a call with somebody, I fix their business, and it works, and they don’t need to hire me. That is the best thing that could ever happen because they’re going to remember who did it and tell everybody who did it. The second thing is I get on the call, they implement it and are like, “We want more of this.” The third thing is they’re like, “We can’t implement this without you. Can you please help?” There’s no way to lose that game. It comes down to practice.

CSP George Bryant | Customer Journey

 

That doesn’t mean that I wasn’t working on closing deals or finding them, but I was changing the way in which I approached them. I still do this to this day. To this day, I’m getting on a flight where I had a buddy call me. He’s like, “I need your help to take this company to a $100 million. How much is it going to cost me?” I’m like, “A plane ticket.” He’s like, “Really?” I’m like, “Yes.”

I went out for four days and was like, “I’m not done.” I went back for another 4 days, and another 4 days, and then on the 16th day, he’s like, “This is insane. I have to pay you.” I’m like, “No, I’m not done yet.” He’s like, “You’re a psycho,” and I’m like, “No. I’m committed. I feel it. I want the result.” He’s like, “Fine, take part in the company.” That’s also me weighing and understanding the needle movers in my life and business. Relationships are the biggest needle mover in my life, business, revenue, and goals. I prioritize those over everything else. My life and my day are designed around protecting relationships.

When I record a piece of content, I don’t do anything else with it. All I do is manage 200 DMs a day, get on phone calls, send Loom videos, and check in with people. My job, in Mike Michalowicz’s terms, like clockwork, my big needle mover is relationship management. That’s all I do. I ensure that I protect that over everything else. I don’t do my calendar. I don’t book my flights. I don’t do distribution. I don’t edit anything.

I’m a ventriloquist puppet for my team, and then I handle relationships. That’s what I protect over everything. When I do that, it guarantees that everything moves forward. Everyone’s like, “George, how come every time you do an event, you have literally $10,000 gift boxes for the people that paid you $500 for a ticket?” I’m like, “I just pick up the phone.” They’re like, “What do you say?” I’m like, “I’m doing an event. I need $10,000 a product, and they’re like, ‘Okay.’” They’re like, “Have they ever paid you?” I’m like, “No.” They’re like, “Have you ever paid them?” I’m like, “No. I helped them, and that’s how I get paid.”

A lot of people misinterpret the goals of a business. When I think about commodities, revenue is the smallest one that I get. The relationship is the biggest one. The referrals, the edification, the favors, the connections, that’s what I’m focused on monetizing. The revenue comes as a byproduct of all of those. Another mistake that I made was that everything was focused on revenue, “How much can they pay me, and when can they pay me? How quickly can you get it?” It never led to sustainability. I was always chasing my tail.

The biggest problem is, “I love you. You can’t pay me. I don’t have the capacity, or I don’t want you to pay me. I can fix this in 30 minutes.” They’re like, “Yes, but we want.” I’m like, “No.” It changes the game. For the record, for everybody reading, it’s still scary to this day. No matter what my prices are when I do consulting, it’s typically $50,000 a day and a minimum of three days. That’s my base.

The same day, I’ll get on a call with somebody, and I’m like, “That doesn’t feel right. I’ll do it for $10,000.” They’re like, “You’re a psycho.” I’m like, “It feels best to me.” I make sure that it’s in alignment with what I want to do. I’m not romantic about what it looks like, how perfect it is, or whether it fits into this bucket. I’m willing to be in a relationship with people. That’s the most important part for me because time is the greatest equalizer that we all have. I don’t have any more than you. You don’t have any more than me but how I choose to use it is the biggest determination of what level of success I get.

In this game, what I learned is that I thought I was spending my time on the things that moved the needle, but instead, I was hiding myself in the business of things that didn’t move the needle because I was afraid to connect, add value, and be out there. It’s a big distinction, but it’s a game. It’s one that we have to play every day.

George, what advice do you have for someone who’s resonating with this mindset and wants to give and provide value? They’re maybe having trouble getting in front of the right people. How can people think about that? If they want to offer value without condition but need to get in front of more ideal clients, the dream clients, what suggestions do you have for them so they can start having more of those conversations and building those relationships?

There’s one important part about the term container. I’m going to answer your question with this because it matters. Value without a preset expectation is a guaranteed loss. When I’m open with people, when I help people, if you were to call me out of the blue and you’re like, “Someone introduced us, I’d love to talk to you,” I’m like, “I can give you 30 minutes of my time for free. After that point, we’re going to have to change the relationship.” I’m upfront about everything. I don’t hide behind it. I don’t try to bait and switch. I’m like, “No.” If I’m like, “I love your energy. I love that you’re a husband. I love what you do. I’ll give you an hour, and then we’ll see what happens after that.”

I’m always open about it. I don’t ever give or provide value with any ambiguity. I am crystal clear. That’s when it comes down to leadership. When we’re in any relationship in our life, we’re either leading or following. As an entrepreneur, your job is to lead all of them, which means leading the expectations, the containers, and the journey because that’s what dictates our authority and our ability to help people. It’s an important part.

When somebody DMs me on Instagram like, “I’d love your free customer journey training,” I’m like, “Amazing. Here it is. When you’re done with it, the next best thing for you to do is to either buy this course or come to an event.” What I’m doing is I’m setting the container that they don’t think I’m going to coach them for free. “I will sure give you 90 minutes of insane value. When you’re done with it, I’m very clear on what your next steps are.” That’s a big important part.

Leverage what you already have. If you were to sit down and scroll through your phone or your friends list on social media, you could find a hundred people that need your help, if not more. Click To Tweet

It’s a great distinction. I appreciate you making that.

It’s huge. When we think about the term container, they have a beginning and an end. It’s not a beginning and opens forever. That’s game over. It leads to overwhelm on our part, too, because we have all these open loops. We have all this unrest and the Zeigarnik effect. To answer your question about like, “I want to give. I want to get out,” this is what I tell everybody. Leverage what you already have. If you were to sit down and scroll through your phone or your friends list on Facebook or the people you follow on Instagram, you could find a hundred people that need your help. If not, more.

The goal is to figure out how you can help them and help them. If it’s a ten-minute Loom video, I’d be like, “I saw this thing.” I still do this to this day. I had somebody follow me with 700 followers, and I saw their caption, which bothered me. I took 60 seconds and recorded a Loom video. I’m like, “When you write these, do this and that.” They were like, “Why would you give this to me?” I’m like, “Why wouldn’t I give this to you?” It took me 60 seconds.

I have a fan for life, and it’s about utilizing the opportunity around us, getting in front of people, networking, and getting in front of the right eyeballs. It’s all about relationships. That’s all it is. I have an example with a very famous athlete that everybody would know, but out of respect, I won’t say his name. Everyone’s like, “How did you get him to sponsor your event, promote your products, and then never ask for anything in return?”

I was like, “I found his email and sent him a Loom video thanking him for being an incredible leader. I’m proud of his work. Him and his brothers making a big difference. I just thanked him,” and then he responded to my email and said, “Is there anything I can do to help you?” I’m like, “Actually, I’d love it if you sponsored my event.” He’s like, “Yes, of course.” It wasn’t rocket science. It was the intentionality and the willingness to do it.

That’s the most important part. It’s no different from thinking about if I’m at a conference with 1,000 people, those are 1,000 people that I could help, but if I sit in the corner and wait for every one of them to come to talk to me, nothing is going to change. It’s going to require that I’m intentional about connecting and asking questions, “What do you do? How can I help?” and then inserting a solution at that moment. For whatever reason, people on the internet think it’s some different world.

It’s the same thing. Who are three people that you can DM now to ask them a question that you can help answer? Those 3 people are going to tell 30 people and then 60 and 90 people. You end up like me, where you somehow magically DM the CMO. Somebody followed my podcast, I shot them at DM, and they’re like, “I’m the CMO of this nine-figure company.” I’m like, “Can I help you with anything?” He’s like, “We’d love to hire you.” I’m like, “Let’s get on a call.” I can’t hit the ball if I don’t take a swing.

I live this way every day on Instagram, whether we get 30 or 80 followers. Every day at night, I record one video every night and send it to every single person who follows me. I thank them for following me and ask them how I can help. Every day that somebody engages with my social content on Instagram, I record another video and DM them all night. I say, “I know there are a lot of people you could engage with, and I want to say thanks for taking the time to comment. If you have any questions, shoot it my way, and I’ll record a podcast to do whatever.”

Whenever somebody adds me as a friend on Facebook, I don’t approve all the friend requests. Once a week, I record a video and say, “Thank you for the friend request. I don’t believe in hoarding relationships, so I want to know how you found my slice of crazy and, most importantly, if there’s anything I can do to help you.”

I don’t believe in hoarding relationships. Let me know how I can help, and my team and I will help. I’m constantly, hundreds of times a day, asking people, “How can I help?” Do you want to know what the beautiful part is? I don’t have to do market research. I have years of content in front of me. All I have to do is answer every one of these questions.

They’re like, “Can I pay you for this? Can I hire you for this? Can you speak on my stage? Can you come to my podcast?” From simply leading with a question instead of, “What can you buy from me,” to, “How can I help you? What can I support you with?” It requires effort. I tell everybody reading this. Pick 3 areas every day with 3 simple things you can do and do them out there.

If you have a friend that’s putting on an event, don’t try to get paid as a speaker. Call them and be like, “Can I come for free and speak value into your room because you have a room for launch entrepreneurs, and I can teach them these three things for the customer journey? Don’t worry about it. I just want to come and help.” Find the opportunity and put it out there. Put it together on the Facebook group.

CSP George Bryant | Customer Journey

 

Go on your Facebook and say, “I’m doing a Zoom training for 15 people for free for 2 hours. I’m going to break down these three things for free. Let me know if you’re in.” There’s opportunity abounds, but we have to be willing to ask for it. One of the most important parts is that it requires that we take active choices. We don’t passively wait for something to show up.

That’s such a great point. Very often, people are looking for what the hack is and what is the way to automate doing all this stuff. It’s because they don’t want to put in the time. What you’re talking about is manual work. It doesn’t “scale,” and it may take longer upfront. In almost all cases, if you’re going to get the actual result you desire, it’s a lot sooner than if you tried to automate something and don’t have that personal touch. You keep taking longer and longer to see any result because it’s not going to resonate with anybody. That’s a great perspective and way of implementing things.

Can you imagine if you tried to automate the relationship with your wife?

She might be happier, but no.

Think about it. If you tried to automate every text message and anniversary date, you can’t.

I’m with you 100%. I know people who try to automate things on LinkedIn or these other platforms, and I understand where it comes from. You want to use technology because you think it will help you grow and be more efficient and effective. That’s what the media, the noise all around us, is hinting that we should do, but it’s all about relationships.

I’m a very big believer in this previous consulting business that we had. In Japan, we call it Kankei culture. Kankei is the Japanese word for relationship. Relationship culture, it’s all about that. Often, everybody’s looking for a shortcut for a way to speed things up, but by doing that, it’s going to take you longer to get the actual result you want.

For sure. I have a thing for everybody. I use automation, but the most important part about automating relationships is that it starts and ends with a human. No joke. If anybody here wants to test me, shoot me a DM on Instagram and say, “I want your customer journey training.” My Instagram is @ItsGeorgeBryant.

You will not get automation. You will get a message from me when you’re like, “I want your training.” I’ll send you a message like, “Mike, I’m stoked you’re interested. I’m going to send it to you in a minute. Make sure that when you’re done with it, it doesn’t become a shelf help. Implement it and tell me what you do with it.” I then hit the button, and then the automation takes over. “Here’s the training, here’s the video,” and then if you ever respond, there’s a human there.

I do use automation in my marriage. No joke. On January 1st, I use a greeting card service and write out and have an artist’s hand draw all the big dates in my life for the year, for my wife on our anniversary, the day that we met, the day my son was born, and Mother’s Day. That is the foundational baseline, and then I enhance on top of it. I’m like, “I’m a dude. I forget. It’s going to pop up on my calendar the morning of, and then I’m going to have to.” What determines the effectiveness of automation is intentionality and authenticity.

When I recorded those videos, I used to send personal videos every day. I got to the point where I was doing 400 videos a day, and it only took 20 minutes because they were 14 seconds each. It was a little unsustainable. Now I record one, and I’m like, “By the way, you’re 1 of 40 people getting this video.” I can’t personalize them anymore, but the moment I say, it creates authentic trust because I’m being honest.

I’m not pretending that there are this many chatbots or that this AI is me. I even name it. I’m like, “This is a computer George. This is the smarter version of George.” I make jokes about it because when that is mixed with intentionality, they understand that I’m doing it because I have their best interest in mind, not because I’m trying to get them into a funnel or somewhere else.

Attention is the number one traded commodity, and everybody's competing for it. Click To Tweet

Naturally, as a byproduct, what do they all do? “I want to work with you. I want to learn how you do this. How do you do relationship scale?” I’ll give everybody a couple of hacks too. I don’t know why, Michael, but this one blows everybody’s mind. I don’t know why but this is probably my number one relationship hack when it comes to meeting people.

People meet people all the time. Let’s say we go to a conference. The biggest mistake people make is that they give out business cards. I don’t own a business card, and I’ve never had one. If I want you to get ahold of me, I’m either going to give you my email or my phone number. I’m not going to give you a piece of trash that’s going to get forgotten about.

You and I are at a conference. We bump into each other with me, and I’m like, “I like this guy. I want to connect with him. I’d love to jump on a call.” I’m like, “Do me a favor. Stand here for a second.” I open my phone and record a twenty-second video. I’m like, “Mike, look. Say hi. I’m going to email this to both of us so we remember how we met and why we met, and I’m going to email it to you,” and then I open my email. I type in your email, and then I hit send. I will send it at that moment’s notice. When I walk away, I write two more emails and schedule them 7 and 30 days into the future, saying, “Checking in. Can’t wait to connect.” It’s set up.

If you respond to that first email, they get deleted. If you don’t, then you get the next one. I don’t have to think about it because if you don’t respond, there was never a relationship there for me to chase. I made sure that I didn’t get lost in the shuffler loss or whatever. Someone’s like, “What do you do when you write emails?” I’m like, “If I’m responding to an email for somebody I love, I’ll respond to the email because they email me.” I’ll schedule one 30 days later and 60 days later, the moment I hit reply.

That goes out 30 days and 60 days later, and they’re like, “Why is your inbox constantly flooded with people that want you on their podcast or to speak?” I was like, “It’s because I understand that attention is the number one traded commodity, and everybody’s competing for it.” Rather than be like, “Who can I call now? Who can I email?” the moment I’m at the inflection point, I pre-handle it and keep them evergreen as check-ins. I then send those things out.

Single-handedly, probably responsible for $50 million in business, just that alone because I become a social trigger at that point. What might happen is 30 days later, you get that email like, “I never responded to George, and customer journey is my biggest problem. I’m so sorry I ignored you.” I’m like, “I love you. I’m glad you got back to me. Let’s jump on a call.” All of a sudden, the deal is closed based on humanity rather than the transaction.

It’s intentionality. One of the things that I say to people, consultants specifically, is you’ll never be able to compete on width, but you’re guaranteed to win on depth, and depth means that you’re willing to go one step further than the next person to create that relationship. Whether I heard you say something about your dog or your wife, and when I wrote that second email, I was like, “How’s the automating your wife doing? I know she thought it would be better but is it working?”

All of a sudden, you’re like, “This guy knows me,” and I do because I was intentional about listening. I truly made it about you. As a byproduct, I only win. I’m in alignment. I’m there because I believe that. I live that way. I can take that and be intentional about it to help navigate relationships. Even my old mastermind that’s been long and gone and closed. They have an offboarding customer journey, and they all hated me for it because they would leave the mastermind after our time was up, and then 30 days later, I’d send them a handwritten card in the mail. Thirty days later, I’d mail them all their swag like their name placard, and then they’d be like, “Can I join again? I miss you guys.”

I’m like, “No, that’s not why I’m doing this.” It’s intentionality that makes the difference. At the end of the day, especially when you’re talking about consulting at a high level, the way that you lose that game is when it’s all based on features and benefits. It’s a guaranteed loss because it’s a transaction at scale, and it almost creates an unrealistic and unmeetable expectation because it’s all transactional.

When it becomes human and relationships, and I can promise the moon, and it doesn’t happen, they’re not worried about me quitting. I’m like, “We’ll go back to work.” There’s a deeper relationship that’s predicated on a connection, not the transaction, and it’s how you get 5 and 6-figure deals. In my case, some 7 and 8-figure deals by spitting on my hand with a handshake.

I’ve never signed a contract. I’ve only signed two NDAs in my entire career. I’ve never signed a non-compete. “Sweet. You want to do it?” “Yes.” “Let’s go.” Has it bitten me in the ass? A few times, but my wife’s incredible. She’s like, “How are you going to sleep tonight?” I’m like, “I’m going to sleep great. I wouldn’t change anything about how I showed up.”

She’s like, “Great, go to bed and wake up. It’s another new day tomorrow.” That has nothing to do with me. It’s an important part to understand that the faster everybody realizes that humanity and relationships are the secrets to every one of these games, the faster the game is winnable. There’s an abundance for everybody.

The most important part of any work is implementing one thing only. Don't try to plan twenty things and do nothing with them. Click To Tweet

It’s not even about having an abundant mindset. It’s about understanding what moves the needle in your business. If you’re a consultant that charges $15,000 for consulting and have 10 clients, it’s $150,000. You have 100 clients. It’s $1.5 million a year. Why are you trying to run ads to find thousands of people when you’re barely fulfilling the ten that you have?

If you are fulfilling the ten you have and you blow their mind, do you know what they do? They give you more money, and then they tell their friends about you because they’re friends. They want you to help them after they get a result because it helps edify them. It’s about focusing on what genuinely matters, in my opinion. That’s my rant on that.

There we go. George, there’s so much more that we could dive into. I feel like we’re scratching the surface. I have a bunch of questions we didn’t get to, but we’re going to wrap up.

We can do round two. I’ll do round 3, 4 or 5. I’ll do this all day.

I’m not surprised that, based on everything we’ve been talking about, that’s your response. You mentioned where people could find you on Instagram. Is there anywhere else you want to send people to learn more about what you’re up to and work?

I’m making pink cool again. My website is the pinkest website you’ll ever see. It’s MindOfGeorge.com, but I give away everything for free. Anything that people pay me for is free on my podcast. I’ve given it all away. I have a free customer journey training free email course. I have a lot of free stuff because I genuinely believe that you should win first. Go to my website. You’ll see everything there.

The podcast is there, the customer journey training is there, or because I did say this earlier, if you have any questions, if you have a specific, shoot me a DM on Instagram. I will personally respond and answer your question, but those are the best two places to go. The podcast, for sure. It should be required listening, in my opinion, given the value of the stuff I give away. I will say this for everybody reading. The most important part of any of this work is that you take one thing and implement it. Don’t try to plan twenty things and do nothing with them. Shelf help is mental masturbation.

It’s not going to change anything. You’ve got to pick one thing and put it in, whether it’s changing the way you write an email or whether it’s sending one more follow-up. My favorite hack is when I email people, I record a Loom video instead of writing an email, and I embed the gift in the email. Every email I send gets a video of me in it. I’m immediately human.

No matter what it is, whether you read it on this blog, see it on my website, or hear it on my podcast, the most important thing you can do is practice it. Put it into practice and give it the ability to win because this is a long game, but it also has short-term wins associated with it. The faster you practice and play it, the faster you’re going to figure that out. MindOfGeorge.com, and then my Instagram is @ItsGeorgeBryant.

There we go. George, thanks so much for coming on and hanging out for a little bit.

Thanks for having me. I’m stoked.

 

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