Full Transcript for How Apple, Yeti, and Stanley SOLD Feelings - NOT Features

what's he gonna try to do to get me to buy today? Like, we've all gone to the car dealership, and the guy comes back, he's like, hey, just talk to finance. You're not gonna believe this. And whenever they say you're not gonna believe this, it's like, Oh yeah, I'm sure, right? And as soon as they say that, and I'm like, what, they're like, we're gonna get you a special discount today, right? We're like, $500 off right now for the down payment, if you signed it, you can drive it off the lot, right? And we feel that, and inherently, we just feel icky. There is something to your point transactional. There is something like, you're just kind of like, and granted, it is a, it's a transactional sale, but just the idea of like, that's what you're trying to do, just trying to you're not selling value. You're just lowering your price. It just feels weird and slimy and just not good, right? As as a buyer as well. So I say all that, what's one of the things as you're kind of going through, and you're, you're working with, with companies, you know, they don't want to be seen as the transactional sale. So how are, how are you able to take some areas where it's a traditionally very transactional type of motion and make it not feel like a transactional sale? Speaker 2 6:50 Well, you know, Brian, I've come to learn that everybody is transactional in the way that they purchase until you give them a reason to be relational, right? Until there's a reason for you to be relational. There's absolutely no reason why the only measuring stick shouldn't be price. Ultimately, that's where the terms and conditions, the offer everything, come into play, and you have to work really hard to get that deal. This is the epitome of the car industry, like you said, right? Which is, which is, which is something that most people would would know and recognize and have gone through, whether it be new or used? Well, we don't have to do that. We could instead replace that with relational style selling, where people will pay you a higher price for the exact same product because you made them feel right about it, even when you were describing what you do and and the very complex sales solution that you're coming up with, the more complex the solution, of course, the often, the longer it takes, and the more, the more attachment there is to getting it right, right. But it always comes back down to one thing, how you made them feel and in this case, what you needed to do and figure out and solve was how to how to remove the uncertainty. Are they going to have the reports they need? Are they going to have enough stations to do the thing that needs to be done? Are they going to have enough data bandwidth to be able to process the volume of calls that are coming in and going out at any given time? Are they ticking all of the boxes, and that certainty is what has them feel whether or not they've made the right decision or not, even when you're not the cheapest solution. Because the cheap solution often removes some of that solution well, it also removes the very intelligent people who have to go about solving that problem, because the really intelligent people are solving problems and getting paid well, and that's part of the process, is the cost of training and understanding and being able to navigate this in the right way. These are all oriented to feelings, which ties right into exactly how we orient our culture around the operations of our business. And this, this ties right back to brand, because at the end of the day, the brand is what makes you feel. And in the absence of a brand, you have a business, and in your business, you can be transactional, or you can be relational, but the brands that people know like and trust, those that are relational in nature, like Apple, make infinitely more money for selling the same products that Dell sells now, Dell sells it for just shockingly less money, but doesn't make half as much cash as Apple does, and certainly on a not on a per item basis. Why? Because we've attached feeling to it. We've associated the representation of that brand with our identity, how we feel about it, how we feel it within ourselves, to the signals that it sends to our loved ones and to the greater tribes that we're trying to impress upon that we are of value in this universe, amongst the the tribes that we're that we're interacting with. Brian Nichols 9:59 Yeah. Yeah, so you brought up Apple because I shared with you before we hit record. I'm currently finishing up my reread of the Steve Jobs biography from Walter Isaacson, and it just, it's an all time classic. I cannot recommend enough for folks to go ahead and read that when they get the chance. But one of the things I wanted to talk about about price specifically, because when you see a company trying to enter into a specific marketplace as a disruptive force, there is this knee jerk reaction to almost enter in with a low price, right? That's how you become the disruptor. Ryan and and this was actually brought up. It's funny that we're having this conversation today. I was literally just reading this when they were talking about the iPhone and the idea that somebody would pay $500 Mind you, this is the the 2000s when they're having this conversation, like the mid 2000s the idea somebody's gonna pay $500 for this, this, this, at this point, is the iPhone that the beginning of the iPhone, and one of the folks that Steve Jobs was collaborating with when they're going through and having this kind and having this conversation, was like, we had to drop it. We had to drop it. And Steve was like, adamantly, no, we are presenting this built on value, right? And and what we're doing for the in this case, the customer, we're creating an entirely different environment for them to not only now, it was supposed to be a mobile iPod was the idea first, that could also do phone calls, right? That was the entire vision. But now it's turning into something so much more.

And it turned into really an entire brand of smartphones that we have everybody has in some way, shape or form. So I just want to start here with this idea of not using price as a disruptive force. What are some other methods you've seen? Maybe you could use Steve Jobs as the example with the iPhone, or other examples you've seen where price wasn't the number one factor for a brand to become a disruptive force in the respective market. Sure. Speaker 2 11:55 Well, you know, and in a lot of these things, and even in the apple with a $500 iPhone back in the day that was that was groundbreaking, and it was disruptive on the high side, right. Rory Sutherland, the VP of Ogilvy in UK, once had a problem to solve in South Africa with Kentucky Fried Chicken, and he didn't say to lower the price to sell more chicken. He said to raise the price to sell more chicken. The reason he said to do that wasn't because he was greedy and wanted more money for the chicken. It was because people perceived Kentucky Fried Chicken as a treat, and you don't pay a little amount of money for a treat, you splurge and treat yourself with a little bit more expensive thing. This is the truth about Haagen Dazs and Ben and Jerry's. This is the truth about a lot of different things that we can choose to to use, and how that price might reflect on them. But if we just separated ourselves from price and talked about disruption, the number one reason why you're going to disrupt a market is because of the story you tell and how you make people feel. It has absolutely nothing to do with the price that you charge or how good your product is. Quite frankly, most people don't want the best product. Most people want something just a little bit less shitty than what they have right now. Brian Nichols 13:15 Very, very, very true. I'm thinking of some of these brands too that are out there. They're they were very disruptive, and they came, came out of nowhere, seemingly, right? So we think of coolers, and igloo was the cooler brand everywhere. And then all of a sudden, this no name company called Yeti, who was making these really good cups, started making coolers. And now that's like the go to cooler, right? So like, you see Yeti, you, you see this, I mean, Hydro Flask, right? Or what's the Stanley's, right? Stanley goes from being just kind of this every man brand, where it was more for your average, everyday guy, and then it turned into this, like, high brow, like rich, white woman, kind of, not utensil, but in this case, a cup, right? Like it just, it's silly that that's all it took. Was a change in the approach for the brand. But you're right. It's, it's all about how it made people feel. There's a status of when you have the Stanley right? There's, there's the status of having the Yeti cooler when you have the Apple phone, there's this feeling of like, I still get shit on because I have an Android and I don't show up right in the group chats. Brian, you're the am I the green one?

I think the green one, right? Like I'm the one who doesn't match the the iPhone family. And it just, it's funny, because, like, you're it's not, there's nothing about that that's logical or reason based. It's all feelings, right? Like, I have my phone because I was, I just, I like Android, I've liked the operating system, and I like, you know, the new features and functionality and stuff, and I try to fact and figure and logic and. Reason why I have the phone, but the end of the day, I go back to, well, I just, I like it. It's a preference, right? And it makes me just feel a certain way. Now I'm actually, I'm becoming more open to Apple. I got a new iPad for Christmas. Merry Christmas. Brian. So like using the iPad, I become much more familiar again, with the operating system. And I'm like, Oh yeah, forgot. Mac is actually, or Apple is very, very clean and just it's very smooth. And I was telling my wife, I was like, you know, maybe I'll actually get an iPhone when I get a new phone, just to see what it's like to have that all in one ecosystem, from iPhone to to Mac to to iPad. So I say that it's again going back to, yes, I'm trying to justify with facts, figures, logic and reason. But it is all feels right. It is. I've used this example on another podcast I host called a CX without the BS, where we talk about customer experience. And I call it the warm and fuzzy beater, right? Like, yeah, sure you can do your customer satisfaction scores, which sure, like, those are all I'm as a KPI. I'm iffy on CSAT scores, but neither here nor there for our conversation. But I like to use my my TM warm and fuzzy meter, which, again, not really objective at all in the the warm and fuzzies. But it's just, it's that thing you feel right like it. You can't put it into a number, you can't put it into words. It's just, it's something that it just hits you in a certain way. It's like, when you're sitting down, it's Christmas time again. I told you, I love Christmas, and you're watching those old, nostalgic commercials that will pop up every now and then, like, the one with the kids in the he's in the snowman. He's a snowman. He's eating the Campbell Soup, and he starts to melt, right? Or, then there's the one of the two, the 2m and M's. And, like, I don't know, I haven't even met the guy. Oh, he does exist. You do exist, right? Like, there's those commercials, there's the the Hershey Kisses, where they're jinging, they're the jingle bells, and they're dinging the bell each one, right? Like, there's all these commercials that need to feel good. They did. There's something about them that's why they keep airing them. And I guess I say all that, like you're so right, that the feel part is so important, and it's, I wanted to emphasize this, because that goes to mentally. We always think of the transactional, physical thing we're buying. But in 2025, Ryan, a lot of the stuff we're buying, it's not a tangible thing. It could be a service, like a software. It could be, it could be, like, you know, an actual, like, you know, a service that you do. So you're selling a service. Like, you know, you know, maybe you're doing something in your community, right, and trying to get out there more, not just selling a product, but trying to do something for folks. So, like, how do you help get that warm and fuzzies, right? The feeling part of it beyond, because there is no physical thing now they're taking away. You have to make that warm and fuzzy feeling continue after your service is done. So like, what does that look like? And what have you seen be successful? Speaker 2 17:52 Well, you know, when you start to study both the psychology and the biology and the outer neuroscience of it all, to just hyper simplify this well beyond how simple it actually is, but to give a clear path to how to solve this is, is a couple of things you've intuitively tapped into. A couple of things. Brian one is that that you really have only two things that make people want to spend more money, they will give you more money when they have exclusivity, right? So when there is that cachet of them ranking up amongst themselves, their inner self, their loved ones and their and their greater tribes, the people in your text message group, shame you because you haven't you haven't committed to the status of the blue bubble, right? Which then brings them all the green bubbles, and you end up becoming this pariah. This is very intentionally done by by Apple, who is telling the world that you're not poor, and whether that's true or not is inconsequential to what the world is being perceived in how it's told. In the absence of status, in the absence of exclusivity, you only have one thing left, and that's convenience. So convenience satisfies the uncertainty that you're that you're worried about, the things that in service worlds. It's like, how do I remove that uncertainty. How do I remove that discomfort? We really live in a world of duality. It's not, it's not all hierarchies and and and archetypes and all of these things. It's really much more of a of a this versus that. And it is a spectrum, but it is. It is a clear spectrum of one or the other, the yin and yang, the the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, the rank up or rank down, right? I want to be seen when I'm buying a productivity tool that I am proficient and smart with my time right, that I am that I'm wise with how I use. My energy and put out my effort. And that energy and effort taps into whether or not I'm below the baseline of happy or above it, and I'm always trying to pursue pleasure and remove pain, right? And it's it comes back to all of these very root basic psychological concepts of of duality, of seeking pleasure, removing pain or or eliminating pain in some way, punishment, whatever the case might be. So when we when we recognize that, we start to recognize, how do I move the needle and as a seller, whether I'm selling or if I'm going further up top of funnel and and

turning that into a marketing message. The answer is, is has been studied, but in a completely different field, and it's anthropological field, where what what they're studying is how people perceive others in a group. So socio, the socio, the social impacts of things. I'm not spitting out the words right tonight, but really, what we're thinking about here is is first and foremost. Is this person warm? Right? In other words, the terms that we would hear in today's vernacular would be empathy. Do we feel their empathy? Do we understand or perceive their empathy, and the empathy always has to come first. If we don't feel their empathy, we're not going to go into the cave with the with the caveman with the big club, right? Because we'll die in our sleep. So the first thing we have to figure out is, is this company, is this brand? Is this person representing the brand, empathetic? And then, and only then, will we give them permission to show their competence. Now, notice I didn't say confidence, I said competence. And that matters a lot, because you don't have to be competent to be confident, right? You just have to be really, really convincing. So at the end of the day, they want to see competence which instills confidence, right? And ultimately, those are the first two signals of trust. So as a brand, if we're trying to make a customer feel something about us, we need them to first feel empathy then our competence, but not competence before our empathy. And that means we have to make them laugh, cry or angry. Now, not angry at you, but angry at the injustices that you're fighting as a hero fighting the villain, right, the villain of the industry, the villain of the competition, the villain of the bad thing that happens when you don't have this thing. Brian Nichols 22:32 Yep, I'm just laughing because So for folks who, again, are aware of my day job and playing along in the home game. They've seen my career and kind of my approach to things. So I just again to refresh folks I work in the go to market space, where, in this case, I'm basically activating what are called channel manager, or I'm a channel manager, I'm activating folks in the channel who are sub agents, who are basically bringing me and my company opportunities in the unified communication space. And I just recently got my company into what's called the TSD channel, a technology service distributor channel. Now, just to help give context, my company is one of literally hundreds of Unified Communication vendors that are out there, and in this specific TSD channel that we're in, there's around 90 or so you it's called UCAS unified communications as a service. You cast vendors that are out there. So we are now one of 90, right? And in going basically David versus Goliath, because the reality is, my company, we don't have millions and millions of dollars to go toss our name and our logo everywhere, right? So we kind of have to approach things differently. And what I've been doing is much

more, really, it's funny, like I've been following kind of the approach you're talking you're talking about, like we lead with really two number it's really two big differentiators in our industry. Number one, we have 100% US based support, right? So we lead with that as a differentiator. You're going to call and get a live answer in under 10 seconds, and it's gonna be a real person who can actually help fix your issue, not a tier one support. So that's huge. But then the other piece is to and you were talking about competence, right? Will lead to that confidence? We lead with no contracts, so we are literally month to month as a UCAS service that is traditionally open to locking customers into three to five year deals, right? So if you have a terrible experience in the first six months. Oops, sorry, you're stuck with us for another two and a half years, if not longer, and if you want to leave, you got to pay all these early termination fees, which is going to be, usually, the rest of your contract in one big lump sum. So the fact that we are showing our competence by doing well every single month instills confidence in our customers, and it has been such a differentiator when I'm competing against all the other 90 vendors that really what it comes down to is I don't need to be the number one vendor that every single technology advisor brings to the table, but I want to be on that list of five or six, right? I want to be top of mind. So how do I stay top of mind? I. Consistent, I really highlight where we differentiate. And I think the other piece too is we, as an organization, my day job, are a phenomenal culture, and that really shows when we're differentiating from some of these ginormous Leviathan organizations that are out there that just kind of go along to get along, because that's what they've done every single every single year, and it pays all their bills. So I say all that going into the idea of culture, right? You know, my main company right now, my old company, back when I was out in the Philadelphia market, we used to have a slogan, good people, bring out the good in people. So when we were going through the hiring process, it was entirely focused on building a culture of good people. So I've seen it myself. Culture is huge, Ryan, but for some organizations, I hear culture just being an afterthought. Yeah? Well, we'll talk about culture when, when sales improve, yeah. We'll talk about culture when we stop losing customers. Yeah, we'll talk about culture when dot, dot, dot, right? So talk to us about building a strong, winning culture, and what does that look like in your world? Speaker 2 26:01 Well, the crazy thing about what you just said was that the reality of it is, is they don't realize they have a culture. I promise you, they have a culture. Every company has a culture. They just have a shitty one. So at the end of the day, do you want to have a great culture, or do you want to have, do you want to have a take over the world culture. Do you want to get just just good enough culture? Or do you want to have a culture where it's constant turn, constant headache, constant grind, constant fight, constant mediocrity to the until you sell the business or close its doors, because you just can't keep up with all those other big, slick companies who are bigger than you, well, they're bigger than you because you suck. So at the end of the day, you got to do something that's going to matter first and foremost, right? So making a commitment, for example, to a full American based Call Center team with rapid response as an operational standard has a consequence to it, that costs more, right, but that cost makes it worth being a part of it, right? That's what makes the value. So, yes, will somebody pay more for that? Well, they should, right? Because the alternatives are, they can talk to AI and get disappointed there, or some IVR horrific, you know, mess of a phone tree. Or they can, or they can talk to a real red blooded American soul who knows and understands what the situation is on the ground, just like you do living your life every single day. So I'm going to pick my poisons, the confidence that you instill by showing how comfortable you are, not putting people on to contracts. These are cultural operational decisions. What I've discovered is that there's really about 12 key things that create friction and resistance in a company, and if we just kind of sat for a moment and philosophize about about a brand for a second, and just said, Hey, imagine your brand has a soul, and the people that interact with the soul of your brand, the expressions of your brand, they come from the policies that you make and the products you choose to sell, the way that you choose to show the pricing, the way that your employees show up for work every day and want to work or not want to work, the quiet quitting or the ambitious, energetic meetings that you have every day, the customers who are naturally drawn to you and having their souls touch your brand souls? Well, most companies are soulless, right? And then if you sell it off to private equity or some other Viper or vampire, you're going to have your soul suck right out of you and destroy everything that you've ever built. Well, that's a choice for money, and that's certainly you know, you can sell your soul to the devil like anyone can, and they're the devil in those industries where, ultimately, a long purchase cycle is being replaced by a short selling mindset and breaking the community and the culture that drove that to its success in the first place. But if you have a private equity company that has a short selling philosophy, and they're buying a short selling model, hey, there's a winning operation there, we'll both make money, sure, but more often than not, and I mean three out of four times more often than not, they're going to fail, And they're going to have the 25% supporting the 100% remaining, or the 75% remaining. Why does

this matter? Well, because you're you can't just say you have a culture and then expect us all the sudden a culture to appear. The truth is, is that your brand is your culture, and your culture is. Your brand, and no matter which way you you hope for it to go, what your people choose to do is precisely what your brand is. So fix your people first, serve your people first, and then those people are going to deliver the brand that you intended. That's the advertising that we do after the fact from those people, the customers and the co workers that you work with that drive more interest and impressions and and and sales and revenue to your business, because you've built a system that is both compelling to the to the consumer, but equally as compelling to the employees who want to work there, not just be forced to work there, because there's no better place. Brian Nichols 30:48 Ryan, I've really enjoyed today's conversation, and I actually had a gentleman on the show a while back. We did an episode called iceberg selling where you talk about like the tip of the iceberg and you discover what's below. I feel this is kind of the tip of the iceberg in terms of all the different areas that you can really help organizations as they go out and try to better their sales processes and build better cultures. So with that being said, I would be remiss if I did not give you the last word here. So do us a favor, bring us home. What would you like the audience to take away from today's episode and then also give us, you know, some plugs in terms of where folks can go ahead, reach out, learn more. Or if they're saying, Yeah, my business is kind of struggling. I need some help. Ryan, SOS, we're going to go ahead and give you a shout. Speaker 2 31:27 Yeah, you can always find me at Ryan shoot calm, or wizard of ads. And wizard of ADS has a couple of websites out there, but they're all fairly easy to find. My socials are usually where most people consume my information, from YouTube to Tiktok to all the other places that you'd expect to see a human being nowadays that's all at wizardry and shoot calm wizard Ryan. Shoot outside of that. The big thing to take away, I would hope to take away from this is, you know, when you start to look inside your business and big or small, and just say, hey, what do I stand for and what do I stand against? That's really the beginning of you building out a culture that people are going to want to be a part of, because the reality is that people don't follow people who aren't going anywhere. So first thing you got to do is pick a North Star and decide what you're going to be. Brian Nichols 32:20 Amen. I really appreciate that sentiment, because, candidly, that is why I think we've had success here at the Brian Nichols show. We have always made a point to leave the audience educated, enlightened and informed. We're going to talk about issues when they're difficult issues, and we do so because it's important, right? We're going to talk about strategies. We're going to talk about things that actually move the needle. And I think there is a respect and an understanding that my audience has had where they understand we're not just going to tell them what they want to hear. We're going to have difficult conversations, or we're going to challenge them, right? Like I've told my weight loss story, from when I weighed 385 pounds to losing, you know, over 180 pounds over a two year period, without doing the surgery, just doing it the hard, the hard way, because it was important. And like, having people reach out to me afterwards saying, like, you know, Brian kind of had to hear that, because I was looking for every single excuse I could find not to do my, you know, health as a priority, and to see that it is something that we really embraced here at the show. Like just, elephant the room to folks. We get around like 200k views in total per month, which, you know, we're not the biggest show. We're not Joe Rogan out there, but hey, we're getting a really steady base of folks who are listening to the Brian Nichols show. I mean, we're, on average, reaching hundreds of 1000s of people, millions, literally millions of people every single year, and that's important, that matters. And I think you're right. It really goes back to just having a North Star. So thank you, Ryan for sharing your insights today. And folks, if you really want to learn more, of course, head down to the show notes. You'll see all of Ryan's social media and links there. So go ahead, give him a shout, and of course, let him know you heard him here on the Brian Nichols show. As for today's episode? Yes, if you enjoyed today's episode, please go ahead, give it a share when you do, tag yours truly at B Nichols liberty on X, Facebook and Instagram. As for the Brian Nichols show, we are a podcast and a video. So you can take us on the go or sit and watch with the family, whatever you would like. So you can go ahead check us out on Apple podcast Spotify YouTube music or over on the video version, YouTube, Rumble, Spotify X, Facebook, wherever it is you like to watch the show or listen, just hit that subscribe button, and, of course, hit that little notification bell, because we have a brand new episode air every Monday, Thursday and Friday. Of course, we are having this episode air after our little break here from the Christmas holiday. If you did not get the chance to check out my last episode. We talked about the recent article that came out over at compact mag, the lost generation, talking about, yes, the DEI impact on white millennial men. Very, very detailed episode. That was our one episode we aired last week. So go ahead, give that a listen. It's like an hour and a half long. So, yeah. That's why it was one episode last week. Usually we do around 30 to 45 minute long episodes. So with that being said, I'm going to go ahead and give you, Ryan the final word for today. Any last thoughts for the audience before we go ahead and say goodbye. Speaker 2 35:12 Listen, 2026. Is going to be a tough year, but it's going to be a great year. Lean in, work hard. You're going to have a great year for those people paying attention and and showing people how much they're worth their trust, they're going to be the ones who are going to come out the front runners no matter what. Brian Nichols 35:31 Here, here. Amen. All right, well, we're going to go ahead and put a pin in today's conversation with that being said, Brian Nichols, signing off here on the Brian Nichols show for Ryan shoot. We'll see you next. Thanks for listening to the Brian Nichols show. Find more episodes at Brian Nichols Unknown Speaker 35:44 show.com. You. Transcribed by https://otter.ai