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[0:33] In this episode, I'm joined by Michael Gerharz, a communication coach and a former computer scientist who's spent nearly two decades helping people say what they really mean clearly and effectively. So let me ask you this. Have you ever created a campaign or a website page that seemed like you're following all of the best practices with the content, but it just didn't land, like it didn't resonate with anybody. Or maybe you've spent hours in meetings kind of guessing what your audience wants, only to end up with messaging that feels off.
[1:16] So Michael helps us flip the script. Instead of trying to persuade harder, he shows us how to resonate stronger. This episode will help you move beyond tricks and tactics and into real connection with your audience by asking better questions, listening for the words customers actually use, and learning exactly how to spot when your message really clicks with people. We also talk about why marketers often resist having real conversations with customers, and why skipping them can be a costly mistake. Plus, how to create content that aligns with your audience's needs. If you've ever wondered, why isn't this message working? How do I know what my audience really cares about? And is there a better way to grow without pushing so hard? Then you're in the right place. So stay tuned for this conversation with Michael Gerharz and be sure to subscribe if you like what you hear.
[2:20] So I explored Michael's work a little bit before we got into the interview and a couple of things really stood out to me. So one was how he approaches testing your messaging, not with a spreadsheet, not by looking at your SEO and your Google Analytics, not by analyzing headlines, but by observing and noticing within yourself what sticks with you. He says a message resonates when you can't shake it. When it makes you pause, rethink something, or feel like you finally put into words something that you always knew but never said out loud. And then when you share it, other people don't argue with you. They actually lean in a little bit closer and pause and reflect. Sometimes they even say your words back to you. And that's when you know you've hit something real. And so when we got into the interview, the first thing I wanted to know was, how did Michael land on this idea of testing and refining your message until it truly connects with people? And so when I asked him this, here's what he said. I think a couple of things played into this, like perhaps from unusual places. First might be like my time at the university. So my PhD is actually in mobile communications. I'm a computer scientist.
[3:47] That might have contributed in unexpected ways. So what kind of frustrated me during my time there was when I, for example, went to a conference where like a hundred researchers were in the room listening to what might have been a brilliant researcher speaking about a brilliant research idea or research project that they conducted. But somehow none of the 100 experts in the room, understood a word about that because, well, that researcher that was presenting was just speaking in his own language, from his own perspective, speaking about what made sense to him, not thinking a second about, so how can I open that up to the audience? And I thought that that was.
[4:38] Really a waste of resources, right? So when we just obsess over precision, but in a way that others cannot kind of find a point of attachment to that, cannot resonate with that. And that's something that I just didn't want for my own projects. Yeah, that makes sense. So you went from computer scientist to public speaker and a communications coach. See a little bit of a disconnect there. How does one get from one place to the other? I know. And that is a very common, that is a very common reaction that I get when people learn that fact about me. Yeah. But I think one of the contributing factors and one of the things that that's easily overlooked is that computer science obsesses over structure and prioritization. And that is something that's crucial to good communication, right? You need to find the pattern. You need to find, So what's the most important piece of information here? And how can I structure and prioritize the message in a way that inevitably leads to that? So it was kind of like come out of school, say computer science isn't for me, and then become a communications coach?
[5:53] No, I think it was a journey, right? So it really started from that frustration that I saw so many good ideas just fail because they weren't communicated properly. Deciding for myself that I didn't want that. And that led me to look for a better way. So I read books and blogs, went to workshops and tried to find better ways to present my own ideas. And that resonated with people. I got really great feedback. I mean, first of all, it shocked my colleagues who kind of cautioned me, that you cannot do that. It's not supposed to. Presentations in a scientific context aren't supposed to look like that.
[6:34] But of course, the people who actually were in the audience, they appreciated that there was someone who ditched the jargon and dared to use simple words to explain complex thoughts rather than what most everyone did the other way around, use complex words to express simple ideas, right? And so that encouraged me. And at some point, I started to write a blog about communication. And that's how the first client reached out to me. And that's where basically everything started. So that must be like 17 years ago or something. yeah you know what i remember hearing about that when i was in college they were talking about how there's like the expert jargon way of communication and how experts will only understand the jargony words but both experts and non-experts understand like the the simple language framing and sometimes that could even be a little bit more helpful to use that because you don't have to kind of fire on all cylinders
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of your brain in order to understand what's going on.
[7:45] But a lot of times experts just kind of try to communicate to other experts especially in like research or academia. Since you've been learning how to resonate with people over a long career I guess, could you explain why this is relevant in a marketing context? Why focus on resonating? How is this insight different from other tips about marketing or communication? Another great question, because, well, that's a perfectly normal reaction. I mean, what could possibly be wrong about persuasion? It feels like the whole industry, the whole communications industry, marketing industry is about persuasion, right? Because as marketers, we want to get people to do something that they originally might not have wanted to do. And that is exactly what persuasion is, right? Get people to do something that they originally didn't want to do.
[8:46] Now, there's two ways that we could do that. And the first is what's usually taught in persuasion books, persuasion courses. And that is about using all these psychological tricks and hacks and twists and tweaks to kind of trick people into your perspective, right? To getting them to finally give in and check your message out or check your product out or check your offer out.
[9:16] But if you care for a second to look from the other side, now you're the customer, you're the audience, you're the reader, and someone tries to persuade you, what happens inside of you? How do you react the moment you sense that someone's trying to persuade you? You immediately kind of put your defenses up. You get kind of skeptical. You wonder, so what is that person or their business not telling you? And well, it immediately creates kind of a resistance. In trying to force people to check out our offerings, it inevitably creates kind of a counterforce. And the problem is that as soon as that force stops, like the energy from our side stops.
[10:03] People stop caring people stop engaging so the the engagement with our offers stops it's much like like pushing a stone uphill the moment you stop pushing it won't get any further yeah that that actually makes sense to me because it reminded me of this when i was reading like a product page for crm system or something but you know as i was reading like the product page they have like one of those comparison charts where they compare features like against each other and then they compare like their features of their product from like the features of like similar products but like the categories they were using to compare across I was like iffy on those categories I was like okay it was like a chart with like seven or eight categories and then they said this our competitors one other competitor and then they made sure that there was like a green check mark and all of the boxes that relates to their company. And I'm just like, okay, but who chose these seven categories? Like what other like categories of features are there?
[11:13] Like, do you have the green check marks everywhere? Or are you just telling me the best pieces? Like, how am I supposed to know that this is all I need to know about a product before I invest in it? So it actually made me like less interested. Like, oh, I need to go out and do more research because there's something that they're not telling me yeah and and and resonance is very different here so person that that kind so what that business did was it would it gave you all the reasons why you should check their product out what they didn't ask themselves is why would you check it out so they built that product and then they went looking for all the reasons for all the good reasons that you should check it out rather than ask, so what is your actual problem and why would you check their solution out? So build something that perfectly makes sense and perfectly matches your actual reasons for caring for those things. Rather than a table, it could be a simple question. So have you ever struggled with.
[12:24] Whatever that software was dealing with. And if they hit the sweet spot and find exactly that struggle that you're struggling with each and every day when you're sitting in front of a computer having to kind of do something in a database with customers in your customer relationship management or whatever system you're using, when they've nailed that, that might be all it takes because then they've hit your real reason. And then all the good reasons that they could give you are just reinforcement of the decision that's long been made. And so rather than pushing that stone uphill, you found the slope where it rolls down on its own. And once it gets speed, well, it rolls on its own and it finds its way. And that's the difference that you want to find. Not having to push and keep pushing and invest ever more energy, but finding that slope. Where is the alignment with our customers? Where is the slope that makes sense for both the business and the customers? And when we hit that, we've hit resonance. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I think...
[13:32] In that example, I was using a CRM and it was just kind of clunky and kind of like awkward to use, even though it worked and I wanted one that worked equally as well, but wasn't clunky and hard to use, like had a good user interface, but it didn't say anything about that. And it's like, who wants to put in their email and like sit there for hours testing out like 10 different systems before you actually get something? So then I don't think I actually ended up switching. I just like did something totally different rather than get like another actual CRM software for a long time until somebody else recommended it to me.
[14:11] So if they had said, you know, oh, is the CRM you're using like really clunky? Like, would you like a really simple interface? then i probably would have like leaned in and paid attention yeah and instead they they were giving you an urgency campaign and probably discounts and all the
stuff to to convince you harder to persuade you harder to try something out that somehow didn't really click for you your your brain might have said yeah that could make sense but your gut definitely didn't say yeah that feels right and that's the sweet spot that you want to hit like like that those clicks together it makes sense but also does it feel right and when both falls together then then we're onto something so how do you do this as a market like if you had to go like step by step what advice would you give to help us really understand how we can resonate rather than and switch away from this persuasion mentality i can't count the number of meetings i've been into where hours and hours were wasted thinking about what the customer might say or might think or might want instead of just picking up the phone and bringing one customer up.
[15:34] Or meeting one for a cup of coffee, going for a walk with them, having a Zoom call. So get out of that meeting room and have actual conversations with your customers. I think that's one of the most baffling things to me. Okay, so that's step one. Get out of the meeting rooms. And then what's the next step to start resonating after that?
[15:59] Listen to what they have to say. because most people listen for reassurance they have like that gas and they ask so do you like that and then they like look for the signals that would reinforce that rather than really pay attention to what are they actually saying are they really agreeing or is that just a polite not and internally they are actually skeptical and then pay attention to the actual words that they use because that's another pitfall right right so so many marketing campaigns aim for like the fancy wordings like the super fancy vibe that we've built something that's super creative here when in fact what resonates best with most customers is just the plain and simple way of stating their problem and that is often not something that we craft in a meeting room, but that's something that one of our customers says in one of those conversations.
[17:06] And picking up those words, the words that our customers actually use to speak about their problems, that's going to help you resonate so much stronger than forcing your words onto them. Okay. So getting out of meeting rooms, actually paying attention to the specific words they're talking about and being patient and thinking about what they have to say. Are they really agreeing? And so how does that translate then into how do you pick out what you're going to use in your messaging or your marketing copy? I think it's a cycle, right? It's like a continuous process. You start with a gut feeling and a gut intuition about what could be right here, and then you're testing that. But then you're paying attention to how people react to that. And then you take that and think it through and try to come up with a better version, which you then test again, which creates reactions, which you then take as feedback to refine your thinking once again.
[18:13] And, well, I think it would be a mistake to consider that process like a strictly sequential thing, like where first you do the thinking, then you do the messaging, then you do the measurement. Rather, like, interweave those and intertwine those and look at that as even perhaps an infinite game where you're probably never 100% finished because there's always a new perspective to be found in the next conversation. But like the more you learn and the more feedback you get, the more you pay attention to that, the more aligned those perspectives will become and the more certain you will be off the path you're on. So do you have like a specific or concrete example? like as you were coming up with a message that resonated?
[19:09] So at some point I saw that pattern that many of my clients face like that same challenge where they, well, they have that brilliant strategy and, And they come home from their strategy retreat and they make a big announcement. But like a couple of weeks later, nothing really happened. So everything faded. And that was often not because the strategy would be bad. It was actually brilliant, but it wasn't communicated well. So and I worked with many of my clients on that specific thing. I looked at, so what do we actually do together when we're in the room? And how does that work? and what methods do we use? And actually, the first acronym that I used to build that into a concise framework was a very different one from the one that I eventually ended up with, like the PATH acronym, which stands for those four basic principles that I finally nailed it down to plain and simple, actionable, transformative, and heartfelt. But that was something that I, well, that first of all, I induced from the work that I did with my clients, but then I tested it out in conversations. I was speaking about that acronym that I came up with and the methods that were included. And then I was just paying attention. So how do people react to that? Do they lean in or are they kind of looking skeptical? Is there even that blank stare moment?
[20:37] And yeah, and that led me to realize, oh, that might not be the best choice here. That's actually That's actually not a good way to frame it. And so I dug deeper. And in hindsight, I'm very happy that I did because I think that the metaphor that I ended up with, that path, is just so much more appropriate to that topic. It's also just a very appropriate metaphor for strategy because, well, strategy is about the path that we're on and making the right choices along that path, right? And so it's just so much more aligned with what actually matters for the people who it's for. And that could only emerge because I had those conversations with people. Okay and so as you were talking and like giving your your steps and everything and you said get out of meeting rooms like actually go talk to people and like not just like sit there and try to figure it out that was actually
kind of funny because I was just very recently over the past couple weeks trying to like revamp my podcast a little bit like do a new rebrand and I've been going through this program like for podcasting and one of the top things that it said was go out and like talk to like 12 potential people who would be in your like target audience and write down all their insights and like.
[22:06] He's like, don't skip this exercise because this is really going to tell you like what people need to know. And of course, what's the very first thing I do? I skipped that exercise.
[22:16] I don't want to talk to people. This is very, very consistent. And I'm trying to like dredge up all the reasons why I didn't want to talk to people. And as I'm thinking about it, I think it's because like I didn't really know where I was going yet. I didn't really know what the new podcast format was going to be. I didn't know what the result of this rebranding was going to take shape as. And so I already have resistance to wasting people's time or going out and pinging my network. And I'm asking for a favor from someone to spend 20 minutes with me chatting, whatever, to tell me their insights. So like on top of like not knowing exactly what the audience is, I don't want their insight to like go to waste or like that time for them to go to waste or that relationship to kind of be like, oh, well, now you just wasted 30 minutes of my time because you didn't even end up going in that direction.
[23:19] And then also I want to be able to like ask the right questions during that kind of meeting or like frame it correctly when I reach out to them like oh this is going to help me do my new podcast but I kind of need to know like who I'm talking to and like why so I can craft that outreach message correctly and then ask the right questions during the the the chat so it's kind of like I want to do all the thinking work and like get it all ready and like be really really sure about who I'm talking to and then reach out to people I realize that's kind of backwards because theoretically you would like talk to people and then build your product so you know you're building the product that's going to help people but there's just this but that means you gotta like go out and waste a lot of people's time essentially and like that's just like a really like, yeah challenge i would challenge that okay please do because then maybe i'll have a better process for this and i'll build better products.
[24:21] Because, yeah, that's kind of an assertion from your side that you're wasting their time. But who says that they would agree? Is it your assessment or would they actually agree to that? Because it could very well turn out for them to be a very enriching conversation because you asked brilliant questions. You allowed them to think about some of the work they do and the topics they're interested in in a way that they would never have thought about themselves and they might have just helped someone even if the specific their specific words didn't end up like shaping the final product but it helped shaping what it was not and building it into something that was meaningful so that alone means that it's not wasted time.
[25:16] I think that you said something very profound earlier on that, that desire to be right, that's something that haunts so many of us. And that might be a leftover from our time at school where good grades are only awarded to those who are right and even to a degree where children are basically discouraged to speak up if they aren't sure that they know the right answer, rather than the other way around, encouraging them to speak up in any case so that they can create a desire to figure out the right answer, rather than.
[26:01] Being the ones who have to have those answers. And then I think in many corporations, that's actually the same story all over again. Many corporations are still built on a culture where being right is awarded and the will to figure it out, to get it right is discouraged. But I think if you look at most of the successful people out there and all the successful marketers out there, those are rarely the ones who are stuck with being right, those are the ones who are committed to getting it right.
[26:36] To figuring it out eventually, not having to be the one that shows up with knowing the right answer immediately, but the one who knows how to figure it out eventually as they go. And that inevitably means asking better questions, asking more questions, and first of all, asking questions rather than having only answers um and i think that's an important switch yeah you know as you were saying that i was thinking like that's exactly how i was in high school yeah that's a pity it's the same with my kids currently i'm just well i'm just baffled that it's that that hasn't changed yet yeah yeah like i would not speak up or raise my hand unless i had like the right answer and i was like really really sure it was going to be right like even though like raising your hand is supposed to be like so you can keep the discussion or lecture going or or whatever it is and like encourage learning but yeah yeah maybe maybe now I'm thinking like oh no those habits have carried with me till now I'm an adult and like now I can't do anything until I'm like very sure that everything's going to be right so thank you because now I have to question my whole life I'm sorry.
[27:56] Yeah, I also I wanted to dig in a little bit to like some like day to day content writing tips for marketers, because that was another application I potentially saw for this idea of resonating stronger, because we kind of talked about sales pages so far. And you talked about like presentations, like back when you were, you know, a computer scientist giving like research presentations. But what about writing content because you've written over a thousand blog articles you've written books and so when you're talking about like on a day-to-day basis if
you're creating something like blog posts like how much time do you spend figuring out what's going to resonate with people before you put out this type of content because it's got to be a little different right this is kind of like a shorter form day-to-day kind of thing like how do you manage when you're going to spend a lot of time really thinking through and crafting your message and making sure it resonates before you put something out there versus when.
[29:08] Do you spend time just saying i've just got to put this out there in whatever form that it is well first of all here's a bummer you'll never know beforehand you'll never you're never going to be certain the no matter how how much care you you put into like crafting that perfect last line that perfect hook the perfect argument like the rhythm of the pose the wording the metaphors that you use no matter how hard you try to nail it you never know when it hits people and what happens in the world around them at that moment in time when they finally see it pop up on linkedin instagram in their news in their mail application you just you just don't know and so one piece could resonate today but totally fall apart the other day and it's it's the exact same piece and that's why i try to not overthink like the perfection part of it to really perfect it to a degree where i try to be certain that this is the way that it has to be and that it this is the only way because that's almost never the case that there is the perfect way to craft a piece the truth is that it very much depends on kind of the.
[30:36] The piece that I'm writing. So as I'm writing daily, I have a ton of material that I'm just keeping in my notes folder. So whenever I notice something, like for example, from a podcast that I'm having or from a conversation that I had with a client or just at a conference.
[30:56] Or maybe there's a conversation that strikes a chord. And then when I go home, I will just put it in my notes folder. So there's always a ton of stuff.
[31:06] And sometimes that's something that immediately clicks, where I know that that is something that struck a chord in that conversation that's totally worth writing, and then I can just write it down immediately. But sometimes those ideas will sit in that folder for like half a year or longer before I finally find the angle where it fits into like the things that I've been writing about lately or where I find an angle where I think that that makes actually sense not only for me, for my own curiosity, but for my audience's curiosity. Okay so it sounds like you're just always collecting ideas and then every so often like one of the ideas from your very long list is just gonna like click with you somehow like it just really makes sense for that moment in time or something that you're thinking something your audience needs or like you know maybe you've come to some big realization and then you're like oh yes that idea perfectly encapsulates it and then you're able to just kind of you know write it pretty quickly. Is that kind of accurate? Well, sometimes it's quickly, but sometimes, well, sometimes it's quickly and then it's a, it's total, total crap, right? And I ditch it and rewrite it completely or, well, push it back and it will resurface like a couple of weeks later. Some ideas never see the light of day.
[32:29] And so how do you manage that on a day-to-day basis? How do you manage your time to make sure that you're actually creating the content that needs to be created? I actually publish daily, so Monday to Friday. And when I started with that, I actually, well, very early on, I moved to a cluster way of writing. Like I would write for a whole week in one sitting.
[33:01] But lately I've moved away from that because well I'm now so much in the habit of writing that it makes much more sense for me to like, come up with those posts more as a reaction to what the conversations that I'm having both online and offline, and perhaps even as a reaction to what's happened on the post of the day before. So I try to set aside a little bit of time each day to actually sit down and either think through things or preferably write about those things that I think about because I tend to think that writing it down forces you to commit in a way that hardly happens while you're circling thoughts in your mind.
[33:49] And the moment you write something down, either on paper or on your computer screen, you just can work with that in a much more profound way. And then I also try to manage my calendar in a way that there's enough space in it for me to just have time for reflection and writing so that's just part of the game for me to to well that helps me like make sense of communication in a much more profound way and hopefully be first of all be better able to serve my clients but it of course allows me to invite other people into my thinking by writing it and making my writing publish a public okay what as people are trying to resonate stronger what What pitfalls or challenges or obstacles might they encounter? So people want to resonate, but they measure popularity, like in terms of likes or reactions or reach on social media or applause in your keynote.
[34:56] What you actually want to measure is the impact that your words or your content has on your audience. And that sometimes correlates with the likes and the applause and the volume of the applause. But it's not always the case. Just think about some of the more profound speeches that you've listened to and the aha moments that you've had throughout those speeches and the sound of those aha moments.
[35:31] That was silence, wasn't it? It was the quiet moments. And so what you should rather pay attention to is like, do people lean in? Do they really reflect on that? And then even after that, do they use your words in the way that they speak about it? And that has nothing to do with how loud they are in their encouragement, but how profound that is. Yeah, that's
excellent.
[36:01] But I feel like a lot of times marketers won't do this because it's not something that you can easily put on a spreadsheet, right? Like it's kind of hard to like count or measure like it's it's like a lot of this has to do with like intuition and like your knowledge of other people and like you know you've got to be like paying close attention on a day-to-day basis and that's hard to communicate to like your colleagues or like to your boss or things like that so exactly and i totally get that i mean yeah it just well looks good on a slide if you can like show the the likes going and that's not a bad thing. I'm not dismissing that.
[36:40] But then again, I'd encourage everyone who does that to apply that same strategy towards their boss and their team. So not try to persuade them that the campaigns you've put out there were successful, but try to understand what would actually resonate even stronger with the CEO, with my team? What truly matters to them? Not like how do we paint a picture that looks great, but what is it that they actually want to achieve through the communication and the marketing that we do? And how can we resonate with, between the two of us and which stories do we need to tell and which measurements or which, anecdotes which examples would show the ceo that this has actually been a worthwhile effort and really resonate with the ceo just as much as you try to resonate with your audience.
[37:43] Yeah that's that's that's pretty brilliant um now i gotta start doing that especially with my clients too but but yeah i would just like to ask are there any like positive results that's come as a result of this don't persuade harder resonate stronger mantra that you've seen for yourself or your clients and then if you could wrap that into like if there's like do you want to promote anything would be valuable to our listeners well one example comes to mind where i was brought into a company by the CEO who was kind of frustrated with the ineffectiveness of their marketing team, which was, and that was kind of the paradox here, which was totally unrelated to their enthusiasm and their passion, right? Because that was a very passionate team and they had tons of brilliant ideas, and they produce tons of output.
[38:45] And most of it looked really, really good from any kind of checkboxes and measures that you could apply to that. But it somehow didn't take off. Basically, every week there was a new campaign with a new idea and new creatives. And the next week, it was a whole other idea yet again. So they were spreading their efforts in all sorts of different directions. But of course, it's hard to resonate when you do that, right? And once we saw that and really tried to focus on one core theme with one core promise that was consistent over every of those campaigns, things suddenly started to click into place. And suddenly those campaigns started to amplify each other rather than taking away attention from each other. And so those effects added up and actually turned what started when we started work together as a deficit, they actually turned around because suddenly people and customers started to see the value in what they did, because all those campaigns suddenly align on a common path.
[40:07] And yeah, and that's something I think that's achievable for anyone who dares to go on that journey and look into resonance as one of your marketing tools or perhaps the way that you do your marketing. And if that's something that interests you, you might be interested in the resonance playbook, which I would like to offer for listeners to that podcast. Just head to my website, michaelgerhards.com slash resonance. It's a short PDF that contains a handful of questions that lead you there and that guide you to see how resonance could work for you and in your company with your messages and hope that resonates with you. Yes, it does. Okay. Thank you so much, Michael. This was an excellent conversation. Thanks. It's been a pleasure.