The Power of Connection To Create Memorable Pitches

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew, and it’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You ever noticed how the smallest changes can make the biggest impact on Nudge you learned simple evidence, back tips to help you kick bat habits, get a raise, and grow your business. In a recent episode, Phil tested a thousand dollars on some marketing principles, some work, some don’t. Uh, guest Nancy Har Hut, who’s been a guest of the show as well. And Phil put these principles to test in a set of real life experiments. You’ll learn what works and what doesn’t. Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Diana Kander. She’s a keynote speaker on Curiosity and Innovation and a New York Times bestselling author. She’s a serial entrepreneur who has entered the United States as a refugee at the age of eight, and she has launched and sold millions of dollars of products and services. Today we’re gonna talk about a book she co-authored called Go Big or Go Home: Five Ways to Create a Customer Experience That Will Close the Deal. So, Diana, welcome back to the show. This is at least your second, maybe your third time.

Diana Kander (01:30): John, thank you so much. I hope this isn’t two forward, John, but I was so excited to be on this show. I created a jingle for you, . You’ve been in business for so long and I, I feel like it might be the only thing missing. So let’s, can I share it with you? You’re,

John Jantsch (01:47): You’re gonna way no matter what I say anyway, so , I’m ready.

Diana Kander (01:50): Alright, here we go.

John Jantsch (01:52): Okay.

Diana Kander (01:55): Duct tape.

Diana Kander (01:56): Woo.

Diana Kander (01:58): We’ll make your branch shine like new with duct tape. Woo. We’ll make your brat stick live glue with duct tape. Woo. Marketing is tried and true with duct tape. Woo.

Diana Kander (02:14): . Did that sound good on your end?

John Jantsch (02:16): That sounded amazing on my end. Yes. There’s

Diana Kander (02:18): A little muffled in my headphones,

John Jantsch (02:20): But it’s to, I wanna know how, I wanna know how you did it.

Diana Kander (02:22): It’s to the theme of Ducktails, of course.

John Jantsch (02:25): . Oh, well, I’m sorry. I’m too old for that. Oh, no, I think my kids are too old for that is what I really mean. So I wasn’t familiar with that. Okay. Sorry.

Diana Kander (02:35): Very popular cartoon. Sure. In the nineties when I was growing up, and I just thought, what a perfect match.

John Jantsch (02:42): Well, I certainly appreciate all of the effort that went into that. I bet you didn’t even have to use chat g p t to write that. Did you?

Diana Kander (02:51): Uh, chat g p t was kind of helpful, I’ll be honest. I’ll be honest.

John Jantsch (02:54): , yeah, I believe it. So that was, that was like, you’re going big, wasn’t it,

Diana Kander (03:01): At the very beginning. John, I wanna show you that this interview is gonna be different. People are gonna get a lot more than they’re used to out of it.

John Jantsch (03:09): So as I said, you’ve been on several times. This is kind of a, this is a, I don’t know, is this a different hack? Would you describe this book as being very different from your books on, say, curiosity? I mean, obviously you’re talking about pitching things and you know, you have some, I was gonna call ’em crazy ideas. Um, , that’s not what, that’s not what I really meant, but outrageous in a good way. Ideas. So I, I guess the first logical question is, you know, what kinda led you to this idea Right now?

Diana Kander (03:40): I didn’t want to do this book. Actually, my co-author, Tucker Trotter called me. We had a mutual connection and he was like, Hey, I wanna write a book about my company Dimensional Innovations. They create experiences for like sports stadiums, universities. And I was like, good for you. You know, you enjoy that. I am so not interested. I, I did the call on my treadmill walking my dog, like, just could not have shown less interest, you know? And he said, Hey, will you come take a tour? Like, I get it, you don’t wanna do the book? And I said, fine. And so I went and took a tour of their 200,000 square foot facility, which is like, so impressive. And then during the tour, he tells me that they have this move to close big deals, this move where their usual close rates like 45% when they do the move, they close 90% of these huge hard to win deals. Right. And that got me really interested. And

John Jantsch (04:36): So I said, well, at least had to know what the move was. Right. .

Diana Kander (04:38): That’s right. . And so I, I talked to a couple more people and then I talked to some of their clients, and then I became obsessed with it. And I was like, well, other people must be doing this, and why does this work? What is the science behind it? So by the end of it, I was begging him to co-author this book. I just had to tell other people about how this works. Yeah. So I, I had to tell this story. It’s a slight departure from the innovation work, although I do think it’s a way to innovate how you sell your products and services. Yeah, for sure.

John Jantsch (05:05): Completely. And quite frankly, there’s a huge element of curiosity, I think, to the framework. So that’s how it works for me. Yeah.

Diana Kander (05:11): .

John Jantsch (05:12): So in the subtitle, five Ways to Create a Customer Experience that Will Close More Deals. You want to, you want to kind of dive into a couple of the elements. So people need to buy the book if they want them all, but Sure.

Diana Kander (05:22): Uh, for your TV viewers Yes. The five elements spell out the word magic, and we’re basically creating magic inside of our presentations. We don’t want them to be instantly forgotten as soon as we walk out the door, which is literally what happens. Right. And so there are five things you can do to help increase how memorable your presentation is and how actionable it is. Do you want me to tell you what they are?

John Jantsch (05:46): Yeah, I mean, let’s start with surprise.

Diana Kander (05:49): That’s the best one. .

John Jantsch (05:50): ,

Diana Kander (05:52): You gotta do things that they don’t expect. John. And did you see my mug?

John Jantsch (06:00): Yeah, of course I did.

Diana Kander (06:02): For the audio listeners, you gotta tell them what’s happening.

John Jantsch (06:05): So she just took a drink of, I’m guessing a tequila, but yeah, , who knows? But it was in a mug that had the duct tape marking logo on it that I did not supply to her.

Diana Kander (06:17): A brand new marketing Go Duct Tape Marketing logo. Congratulations on that. Thank you. I love it. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I think you need more schwag with the new stuff on it. We do with the new logo on it.

John Jantsch (06:26): We do. My wife won’t let me get anymore though. .

Diana Kander (06:32): So Surprise is all about doing something that is unexpected. Our brains love to be on autopilot, even when we’re being pitched and they’re basically saying like, do I know what’s happening next? And when somebody’s presenting, usually it’s, it follows a very similar pattern. So when you add an element of surprise, people are like, okay, I have to pay attention because Right, right. What’s, maybe there are other fun surprises happening.

John Jantsch (06:55): Yeah. Yeah. And it’s a bit of a dis I mean an interruption too, right? I mean, just like you said, a lot of times we lull people to sleep with what they, because they have an expectation. Okay, this comes, now this is gonna come down. And it’s like, whoa, I didn’t see that coming. And I think as you said, it kind of snaps somebody back into attention, doesn’t it?

Diana Kander (07:16): Yeah. I mean, if you think about what your body does in a surprising moment, yeah. You open your hands and open your eyes and open your ears. Like you’re just taking in as much information as possible. And when we’re pitching our idea, that’s what they’re taking in all the way as opposed to putting their guard up and Yeah. Kind of taking a, a, you know, step back approach.

John Jantsch (07:38): Do you want to give an example from the book

Diana Kander (07:40): Of

John Jantsch (07:41): Crazy of using Yeah. Of a surprise that worked?

Diana Kander (07:44): No, I wanna keep doing surprises on here. John, I know that you’re a woodworker. I, and so I created this Duct Tape Marketing apron that you can use in your shop. Do you love it? ? How great

John Jantsch (07:56): Does this look? I do love it. I do love it. Are

Diana Kander (07:58): You, I’m gonna be sending it to you after. I was gonna

John Jantsch (08:00): Say, you have no use for any of this. So ,

Diana Kander (08:04): I’m gonna load you up on Duct Tape swag. Okay. After this,

John Jantsch (08:07): I do wear an apron when I do my woodworking.

Diana Kander (08:10): Now you have an extra one. .

John Jantsch (08:11): Now I have an extra one. . So that leads me, actually, unless you want to go go more surprise on Surprise. But my you’re like,

Diana Kander (08:19): What else do you have back there?

John Jantsch (08:20): Yeah, exactly. Bring it . You gonna have just like one at a time? Let’s see the whole show. All right. So, so years ago in Duct Tape Marketing, and I used to do this in my practice, I wrote about something I call Lumpy Mail, where instead of sending somebody a letter, we’d send them a box of Cheerios or something with, you know, a message that was tied to what we were trying to pitch. And you talk a lot in this book about physical objects, and I’ve seen it work, but tell me about how it goes into your Go big framework.

Diana Kander (08:49): Well, there’s just a fascinating science to why physical objects work, but basically they are like a faster pathway to our memory banks. The same things that process visual information are in the same part of our brain that process emotions, which is how we make decisions. And so if we just hear something or read something, it doesn’t have as much of a memorable impact as if we see a physical 3D object. And th this has made such an impression on me, John, that I do not enter any meeting without a 3D object of some sort. Even if we’re on a Zoom call right now, like having a mug with their logo or something that shows that you have taken this invisible idea, which is a lot of our products and services are invisible ideas, and you’ve taken it into the tactile world. It just makes such a huge impact.

John Jantsch (09:44): Don’t you also find that it, it sends a little message is, Hey, this is an important thing to me. I took some time to actually do something that, you know, not everybody else does. I mean, in the world of just mass LinkedIn connections and mass emails, I mean, just showing that you took actually a little extra time. Doesn’t that, you know, doesn’t, that actually isn’t that part of the power of it?

Diana Kander (10:05): I think that’s at the heart of the Go Big or Go Home Method. It’s showing your soul to people. It’s showing who you are as a person and that you care about them. Can I tell you that for the last two days I’ve been walking around my house like singing duct tape, woo . Like I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve been thinking about you and how excited I am to share this thing with you. And I think it shows you how much I care and how much time I took for this. It’s not just another thing for me.

John Jantsch (10:32): That’s right. That’s right. So can I see your shelf of all the other, uh, mugs that you have?

Diana Kander (10:37): all the other mugs? .

John Jantsch (10:39): I might get jealous then though, huh? Right. .

Diana Kander (10:42): It’s in a different room. The theme song is brand new. I’ve never done that. And I have certainly never created a woodworking apron for anybody

John Jantsch (10:49): Else. . And now let’s hear a word from our sponsor. You know, companies are under pressure right now. I mean pressure to get more leads, close deals faster, get better insights to create the best experience for customers. A CRM can help, but not just any crm. One that’s easy to set up, intuitive to use and customizable to the way you do business. And that’s where HubSpot comes in. HubSpot CRM is easy for everyone to use on day one and it helps teams be more productive. Drag and drop your way to attention grabbing emails and landing pages. Set up marketing automation to give every contact white glove treatment. Plus AI powered tools like Content Assistant mean less time spent on tedious manual task and more time for what matters. Your customers. HubSpot CRM has all the tools you need to wow prospects lock in deals and improve customer service response times. Get started today for free @hubspot.com.

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Diana Kander (12:51): So one of the five tools is to give the pitch in the right order. Mm-hmm. Scroll back to top