The Best Way to Answer “So What Do You Do?” (2025) – Clay Hebert | 054

[00:00:00] Clay Hebert: Nobody wants to be pitched, especially like in a small metal box. They can’t get out of them. They can’t get out of them. Kill the elevator pitch.

[00:00:06] Narrator: Meet the expert in million dollar opportunities. Keynote speaker and marketing strategist, Clay, is revolutionizing how we introduce ourselves.

[00:00:13] Clay Hebert: We get asked this three times a day, a thousand times a year.

[00:00:17] Clay Hebert: Why do we get it wrong? We never get taught. Before you can get the phone number, before you can close the sale, figure out what story do I want to tell. Using this little formula called VERB. Their noun, it becomes a great headline, a landing page, website, headline, name of your course. And

[00:00:34] Nathan Barry: so the ability to capture someone’s brand in three words is remarkable.

[00:00:41] Clay Hebert: The perfect intro. It’s not about you. It’s about who you help. The reason it works and the reason it spreads and the reason that makes them the money they want to make and this is going to throw a few people is. Oh, that’s interesting.

[00:00:53] Nathan Barry: Yeah.

[00:00:58] Nathan Barry: Clay, thanks for coming on.

[00:00:59] Clay Hebert: Of course. Stoked to be here.

[00:01:00] Nathan Barry: So what we’re going to do today is in under 60 minutes. Yes. We’re going to teach the perfect intro and try to give a masterclass on how to introduce yourself. Because not only do you introduce yourself in conversation, but also creators are introducing themselves You know, dozens or hundreds or sometimes thousands of times a day through their content.

[00:01:21] Nathan Barry: Let’s dive in. Totally. All right, let’s go.

[00:01:23] Clay Hebert: So the question is, so what do you do? Okay. And we get asked this three times a day, a thousand times a year. That’s in person, not to mention all the digital times we introduced ourselves. So it happens a lot. Yep. So why do we get it wrong? Number one, we never get taught.

[00:01:42] Clay Hebert: You never get taught how to introduce ourselves. I don’t know about you, where you went to school, but I certainly did not have a high school or college class on how to introduce yourself. For reason number two, We get taught poorly, which is this thing that I don’t like called the elevator pitch. The idea is someday you’re going to get in an elevator with an important person and you’re going to hit the 68th floor.

[00:02:04] Clay Hebert: And by the time the elevator doors open, you better have pitched them and close the business and close the sale. It doesn’t happen. We’re not going to get an elevator. We’re going

[00:02:13] Clay Hebert: to go from cold meeting to deal closed in. 60 seconds. Yeah, or you have

[00:02:18] Clay Hebert: to pitch your business. Nobody wants to be pitched, especially like in a small metal box that they can’t get out of until the door opens.

[00:02:24] Clay Hebert: So I want to recruit everyone here. To help me kill the elevator pitch and when you hear people say, you need an elevator pitch. The answer is no, you need a perfect intro and we’re going to explain why. And three, the reason is we believe in the three myths of introductions. That’s why we get introductions wrong.

[00:02:40] Clay Hebert: So that leads into the next part, which we’re going to jump into now. So the three myths of introductions. Myth number one, and these myths aren’t horrible things about introductions. They’re just sort of the way that we get taught to think about introductions. And. Myth number one is that it’s about you.

[00:02:58] Clay Hebert: Okay. Your intro is actually not about you. It’s, it should be about who you help and why. And even that flips it from, I mean, you talk a lot about copy and messaging and talking about your customers. Not about yourself, right? This is, this is the introduction version of that. The best headlines on a kit landing page talks about the customer’s pain and problem.

[00:03:22] Clay Hebert: This is very similar. Okay. myth number two is that it should be 100 percent complete. Okay. Again, like I said, these things don’t seem bad or wrong in a vacuum because there are lots of things that should be 100 percent complete.

[00:03:37] Nathan Barry: Well, so completeness is normally seen as a good thing. Right. So, And so if you were to do something and you’re like, Hey, Clay, could you do this?

[00:03:44] Nathan Barry: And yeah, I come back, I’m like, 80 percent done, right? And that’s my kids, right? They’re like, Hey, could you vacuum up that mess? Oh, yeah, sure. Come back. I’m like, all

[00:03:54] Clay Hebert: right. Not fully done.

[00:03:55] Nathan Barry: So we want 100 percent completeness. Normally in life, but in intros, you specifically do not want a hundred percent completeness.

[00:04:01] Clay Hebert: Exactly. When you look at poor introductions, and sometimes this is when you ask someone, so what do you do? And they tell you their life story. That means it’s probably too complete. They included too many details, et cetera. And the last part is, and this is going to throw a few people is that it should be a hundred percent accurate.

[00:04:22] Clay Hebert: Okay. Now I’m not saying to lie. But I’m saying that our desire to be 100 percent accurate typically causes us to use boring, clinical words, buzzwords, etc., and we’ll get to buzzwords later. So these things, like I said, if you look at it, this is sort of how we get taught to introduce ourselves. Make it about you, try to make it complete, try to make it accurate.

[00:04:46] Clay Hebert: I think it’s our Like our 8th grade English teacher who teaches us these things, right? Yeah, the perfect intro instead is structured sort of differently. It’s not about you. It’s about who

[00:04:59] Nathan Barry: you

[00:04:59] Clay Hebert: help.

[00:05:00] Nathan Barry: Okay, so we’ve covered the myths and there’s the typical intro that really follows the myths here. But the perfect intro about who you help.

[00:05:09] Clay Hebert: Yeah. And the reason it’s about who you help is because the goal for an introduction is not to present all of your credentials in a resume format. It’s to create a human connection. The best conversations in the world create real human connection. So before you can get the phone number, before you can close the sale, before you get anything that you want to happen out of that conversation, there has to be real human connection.

[00:05:37] Clay Hebert: The problem with introductions and part of the reason we get that wrong is They’re not designed to create real human connection, and that’s what the perfect intro is really all about is Let’s get to real human connection Let’s make a connection and from that you might be able to get the phone number meet your soulmate close the sale, whatever Okay, can you do any of those things if you never pass the point of human connection, right?

[00:06:01] Clay Hebert: So let’s design for it So You make your intro about who you help, instead of being complete, so, you’re right, so the typical intro is these things. Instead of trying to be 100 percent complete, you want it to be interesting. Okay. Think of your favorite movie, it probably doesn’t open with something boring.

[00:06:21] Clay Hebert: The first, maybe the first 10 seconds, 30 seconds, minute, it’s probably an interesting conversation. So, great storytelling is often not linear.

[00:06:30] Nathan Barry: So if we’re going, like thinking about completeness, accuracy, all of those things, we’re thinking in terms of, start at the beginning, tell it from there, but yeah, you’re right.

[00:06:40] Nathan Barry: We’re thinking about the movies that we watch. They have that scene, and then for the rest of the movie, they’re giving you clues that unpack that scene. Then you realize like, oh wait, that scene hasn’t happened yet. That’s coming up. We’re building up to this moment.

[00:06:53] Clay Hebert: Totally. Totally. If you do something, I don’t get nervous when I make coffee in the morning because I know how to make it because I’ve made it thousands of times.

[00:06:58] Clay Hebert: You’re not like, oh, she’s out. What do I do? Oh no. What if I screw this up? Right? Yeah. I know how to make my coffee. It’s not a big deal. You can make your intro equally not a big deal. Then you can play with it. Then you can have fun telling the story. Right. Ask the person questions and be engaged and create that human connection.

[00:07:16] Clay Hebert: Yeah. Number three here, then it’s confident. Yes. So you want to be interesting and you want to be confident. Okay. So those two things combined, like I said, think of your favorite actor, actress, Clooney, Jennifer Lawrence, whoever you like. They are, George Clooney was not a confident one year old. It may seem that way now because he’s so confident.

[00:07:36] Clay Hebert: But he has some of the best writers in the world writing a few lines. He memorizes them to the point where they’re in his bones. And then he delivers them and gets a few chances at it. We all have the same opportunity. Right. We’re going to do some writing in advance. We’re going to craft some words.

[00:07:49] Clay Hebert: We’re going to craft your intro, do it in advance, practice it, and then rehearse it and test it in these different reps. You can go to Crafting Commerce and introduce yourself 20 times. And practice it and see what feels good. Try this on, but so we’ll start with the base for me. I’m going to jump to that.

[00:08:06] Clay Hebert: So the base formula, this is sort of the, I don’t, I won’t say boring, but it’s sort of the basic white rice. of this. And then we’ll add some spices and sauces. And

[00:08:16] Nathan Barry: so in the base formula, this is better than the generic intro.

[00:08:20] Clay Hebert: It’s better than the elevator pitch. Better than a generic intro. So I might

[00:08:24] Nathan Barry: like, what’s a common intro that you would hear some like, so what do you do?

[00:08:27] Clay Hebert: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s a great question. So what’s bad, right. Common, but bad, common, but bad is. Your industry, your role. So say industry.

[00:08:36] Nathan Barry: I’m the VP of, oh, industry. Industry is like, I’m

[00:08:40] Clay Hebert: in real estate. I work in medical sales. I’m in medical sales. I’m in finance. I’m in industry.

[00:08:46] Nathan Barry: Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah.

[00:08:48] Clay Hebert: It’s not wrong, right?

[00:08:50] Clay Hebert: It’s accurate. And it’s not complete, but it’s accurate. But it’s boring. Yeah. Someone could say I’m in, I’m in real estate. Okay. That tells me almost nothing about you because even within real estate, there’s a hundred different things that you could be doing because you never know who you might be sitting with.

[00:09:07] Clay Hebert: Kit works with creators, typically younger people, not all, but typically younger people. You might sit next to a 70 year old lady on a plane and You might be like, well, she’s not a good customer. So, and I’m busy. I got some work to do, but you never know. She might have six kids or her daughter might be a huge YouTuber or something.

[00:09:25] Clay Hebert: Right. It could be who knows what connections come up. Jason Fried had a great quote and he said, I think Jason Fried and then maybe Steve jobs had a version of it too, which is like, you can only connect the dots looking backwards. Right. Of where we are now and Kit Studios and everything else and you’ve written a lot about this, the connections and then I met this person that led to this person that led to this person.

[00:09:44] Nathan Barry: Well it’s the idea of like luck. Yes. And it’s in your luck surface area. That’s a great term. And so, you know, people talk about like being lucky or creating opportunities for luck. Yes. You know, and so if you’re having a random conversation with someone on the plane or at a conference, like that’s a little bit of luck surface area.

[00:10:01] Nathan Barry: Yeah. You know, something could happen here. Yeah, probably won’t, but there might be

[00:10:06] Clay Hebert: an opportunity. Speaking of luck, surface area and serendipity and, Tony Hsieh used the term collisions, you know, with Zappos, and Steve Jobs would architect them at Pixar. It’s a great story. When Steve Jobs got to Pixar, the original design for the buildings was like we’re gonna put the animators in one building and the engineers in another building, different admin teams in another building, and Steve Jobs was like, absolutely not, because he wanted to create that locked surface area and serendipity and collisions.

[00:10:36] Clay Hebert: So the story goes, He built this big atrium and he put the bathrooms off of the atrium, but you were not allowed. You could not park in the far part of the parking lot and sneak into your cubicle through the back. You had to come into the front. You had to come in through the atrium and you couldn’t have architected and predicted like this film in three years is going to be.

[00:10:53] Clay Hebert: But everyone who worked at Pixar during that time can remember. Oh, yeah Toy Story 2 or whatever came from me meeting this person or I was waiting for the bathroom or whatever these these lock surface areas So the perfect intro is not a physical atrium, but it’s a tool set to create better conversations To maximize the opportunity from each of these things.

[00:11:12] Clay Hebert: Yeah, come on. Yeah, so the base formula Is a better version of, of any of those perfect intros formula is the white race version. And then I promise it’s going to start very basic and simple, and then we’re going to make it fun. It’s I help people. So we’re 75 percent done. Can I, I need your help on this last part.

[00:11:35] Clay Hebert: Okay. Achieve a result. We’re going to help people do or achieve or become something. And if we can, yeah, right. Achieve a result up there, if you’re able to. frame the achieve a results using this little formula called verb. Their noun, that’s going to make it a lot of things easier and have some kind of fun magic tricks later on with regard to your landing page and stuff like that.

[00:12:03] Clay Hebert: So this can be verb, their noun could have left you a little more space there, but, and what I mean by verb, their noun is. Your customer has a noun they want verb. And what I mean by that is I used to do a lot of stuff with Kickstarter, crowdfunding, Indiegogo, all that other stuff. Right now, a terrible intro would be I’m in crowdfunding or I’m a Indiegogo guru, or I’m a Kickstarter expert.

[00:12:28] Clay Hebert: Those are common intros, but they’re terrible. The best one is I help and we’ll customize people in a second, but I help entrepreneurs. Fund their dream. Okay, fund is the verb. Yep And dream is the noun. They have a dream. Yeah, if you were launching an app For you, it’s your dream to launch that app. Someone else that might be a film, someone else It might be a hoodie.

[00:12:51] Clay Hebert: Jake Brownstein had the 10 year hoodie, right? That was his dream So the magic of turning noun from the specific object of the app or the film to the dream It brings it up a level and funding is what they want. So anyone who is hoping to get their Kickstarter or Indiegogo project. You know, raise money on that platform.

[00:13:11] Clay Hebert: All of them have a dream. They want funded. So what is the noun that your customer wants verbed? And what does that VR? So dream applies to all of it. Funding that dream is what they want. And so reverse engineering that. Yeah. So for Kim, I’d say I help people grow their audience. That is perfect. And we’re going to jump ahead actually, because the verb, your noun thing, I like what you said changed there to your.

[00:13:37] Clay Hebert: What does it say? Grow your audience. Pretty good headline for landing page, grow your audience. And then, you know, with kit or whatever, right. This works magically because you change your, you change there to your, and it becomes a great headline, a landing page, website, headline. Name of your course fund your dream was the name of my kickstarter course back in the day I crown funny course back in the day

[00:14:00] Nathan Barry: What you’re saying is the interchange of there and your you change

[00:14:04] Clay Hebert: there to your and it becomes a headline Or a course name or whatever that makes grow your audience is the great name for a book a headline, whatever, right?

[00:14:12] Clay Hebert: Yeah, because you’re speaking to their desires of what they want, which is very different than I make Kickstarter expert or whatever, right?

[00:14:19] Nathan Barry: Yep

[00:14:20] Clay Hebert: That

[00:14:21] Nathan Barry: makes a little

[00:14:21] Clay Hebert: so that’s a really really good hack I need I would recommend people, like, you can do this in a spreadsheet, you could make a little spreadsheet.

[00:14:30] Clay Hebert: We can actually, I’ll send it out to anyone who’s watching. I, and then we’ll get into the we, you can change help to a bunch of verbs, change people to a bunch of different verbs, and then verb or noun, try a bunch of different versions of that. Basically, we can break down each one of these into a column, and then you can brainstorm a bunch of different ways and sort of try different intros.

[00:14:49] Clay Hebert: But sometimes with this we’re going to talk about, is this kind of like a slot machine? Imagine your perfect intros laid out on a slot machine instead of cherries and bars in Vegas, we’re going to pull the lever now and start changing the different wheels and changing the words. To test that out.

[00:15:04] Clay Hebert: This is the thing that like every person that I’ve ever seen, that’s actually done that part, the, the relatively simple, but maybe boring part of just like searching a bunch of verbs, they’ll come up with one that they’re really excited about and proud about, because this is something you’re going to, you’re going to say a lot, you know, while you’re running this business or anything you can have.

[00:15:24] Clay Hebert: draw an infinity symbol here because one point I want to make is you can have as many intros as you want It’s called the perfect intro. It could be called the perfect intro so you can add a little s there The idea behind this don’t get stuck on I have to have one Because that’s where people try to make it 100 complete.

[00:15:42] Clay Hebert: They try to put Making one intro for everything that you do is like trying to put every item you own in the trunk of your car. It literally just does not fit. And so you can have as many as you want. If you’re going to a particular, if I’m going to craft and commerce, I would using the perfect intro. As I get out of the car or get off the plane, be like, what am I going to use at craft and commerce this weekend?

[00:16:04] Clay Hebert: Right. What’s your perfect picture I’m not going to use. And eventually, which story do I want to tell once I’m there? So the rules, number one, no buzzwords, because as we learned from, early kit client, Albert Einstein, if you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself. And I really think that’s true.

[00:16:25] Clay Hebert: If you’re, if you, you know. If your kids can’t understand, your introduction, it’s probably too complex. And what people usually do is they insert buzzwords. Now what’s interesting is they usually insert buzzwords to sound smart. And yet usually what they’re doing is it ends up being less clear.

[00:16:42] Nathan Barry: Right.

[00:16:42] Nathan Barry: Talk about the stories in Atomic Habits, you know, also like James Clear and Simon Sinek. Right. Because I think it really illustrates the point around buzzwords.

[00:16:51] Clay Hebert: Yeah, absolutely. So the way that ideas spread through culture and through the market is usually word of mouth. I do obviously a lot with marketing and branding.

[00:17:02] Clay Hebert: People think that marketing and branding is, I need a lot of seeds to seed the cloud and then I’m going to rain on everybody. Right. How do we just cover as much ground as possible? Blast everyone. People Whenever anyone says, I just, I have this great widget, this great product, this great service clay, I just need to get the word out.

[00:17:20] Clay Hebert: And I was like, what’s the word and where do you need to get it out to? Like, it’s just lazy shorthand of I’m trying to rain on everybody because they’re not doing the, the rigor of what Seth Godin calls the minimum viable audience, getting to the center of the bullseye. And a lot of people talk about like, okay, core bullseye.

[00:17:37] Clay Hebert: And then it spreads, but they don’t really talk about how it spreads. Mm-Hmm. the leap from one center of the bullseye to the next ring. And the next string is word of mouth. And what portable stories is is basically engineered or reverse engineered. Word of mouth. Codified. Word of mouth,

[00:17:54] Nathan Barry: packaging it up so that it’s easy for someone to pick it up and take them with it.

[00:17:57] Nathan Barry: Yeah. With exactly. And give it to

[00:17:58] Clay Hebert: someone else and, and spread the word. That’s what portable means is like, I can take your hand and give you the portable story and now you have it. And that’s word of mouth. So what James did brilliantly in Atomic Habits is he codified a number in a book like that Three to five is really good.

[00:18:16] Clay Hebert: You don’t need 50 But he said which I believe is a repurposed old military quote that he customized for his book is We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems. Because in that part of the book he’s talking about building systems for your habits. Pretty simple phrase, but back to no buzzwords.

[00:18:36] Clay Hebert: The most complex word in that whole thing is the word systems. It’s two syllables and what, seven letters? Right. That’s no buzzwords. Right. Yeah. And if you look at, and, and what, what the reason it works and the reason it spreads and the reason James went from selling a million books when he launched it with his marketing plan to 10 plus million books, and it will probably be more and more over the years.

[00:18:59] Clay Hebert: Because Atomic Habits was one of the most talked about and referred and recommended books. But that phrase was not buried in body copy on page 182. That phrase was highlighted in the book, and he talked about it on his blog, and he posted about it on social. So for anything that any creator wants to spread through the world, of course make it great.

[00:19:21] Clay Hebert: But if it’s greatness is buried in body copy on page 172, only the people that see that and happen to highlight that part and then take that forward, you’re reducing your locked surface area of your idea spreading. The buzzwords introduce friction to be able to tell that story further. And similar with the Simon Sinek stuff.

[00:19:42] Clay Hebert: People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it. What’s the longest word in that? People? Like I mean every that one like almost everything is one

[00:19:51] Nathan Barry: syllable.

[00:19:51] Clay Hebert: Yeah, like yeah Yeah, it’s super short and simple But when people what’s interesting is people inject buzzwords to sound smart and yet the reason atomic habits and start with why spread is People wanted to sound smart recommending that book at a cocktail party

[00:20:07] Nathan Barry: and

[00:20:07] Clay Hebert: they said someone said, oh, I’m not selling enough widgets I said actually Nathan that’s because people don’t buy what you do.

[00:20:14] Clay Hebert: They buy why you do it Most of the people that said that didn’t say as I read in Simon Sinek’s great book earlier today But when they say it enough enough karma comes back enough people get there or later in

[00:20:25] Nathan Barry: the conversation, right? Oh, that’s brilliant. Where’s here about that? Yeah, actually, this is book that

[00:20:30] Clay Hebert: I

[00:20:30] Nathan Barry: should yeah

[00:20:33] Clay Hebert: So it’s not on here, but figure out your portable stories for, and we can, we can include a little resource or something like that for that, but portable stories is, is codifying how your idea spreads.

[00:20:44] Clay Hebert: And the key thing is, it’s got to be a little bit contrarian and it’s got to be, it’s got to make the person repeating it. Say that the way the way they want to sound that makes sense. Okay, so buzzwords limited fewer words and syllables Which is sort of what we were just talking about with with James and Simon people don’t buy what you do They buy why you do it again write these out and just notice how simple they are And when you want to put you know, when someone wants to put implement CRM methodology, it’s like no No, every industry has buzzwords, right and just stop yourself from doing that and then shoot for intrigue Over info.

[00:21:18] Clay Hebert: Okay. You want to shoot for intrigue over information. Kind of back to the, the movie scene thing. one of my favorite perfect intros, my great friend. Shoot for intrigue over? Over information or info. Info is fine. You can get to info later on. You can get to info deeper in the conversation. Back to our sitting with someone on a plane example in the exit row.

[00:21:41] Clay Hebert: If you have a great intro and they say, so what do you mean? And then you have this great conversation. The info can come later. You’re going to be an hour up in the sky and now you’re getting into the intro. Don’t we got to get intrigued? Yeah. Yeah. You’re going to get, well, you’ll, you’ll eventually get to the intro inch info if you start with intrigue, intrigue creates the conversation and eventually you’ll get there.

[00:22:02] Clay Hebert: People are worried that if they don’t dump all of the information, we sort of create these conversations, like we’re like sending emailing in a resume, right? Like it’s not a back and forth. like we’re sending it all the information. But we want it to be like the pickleball match last night with this nice back and forth.

[00:22:19] Clay Hebert: You hit it over, I hit it back and ask a question. And that’s what a good conversation looks a little balanced, right? Just like a great, a great podcast. You have eventually, you know, some back and forth.

[00:22:30] Nathan Barry: Yep. That makes sense. What’s an example of, Perfect intro that really creates intrigue.

[00:22:36] Clay Hebert: Yeah, so one of my favorites is Doug Brackman We teach people how to meditate at gunpoint if you meet Doug on a plane He says you say so what do you do?

[00:22:46] Clay Hebert: He’ll look you in the eye and smile and I’ll say we teach people how to meditate at gunpoint and slight pause after meditate So he used guns and long range sniper shooting. It’s all very safe. Nobody’s has a gun pointed at them Yep, to teach how to calm your brain because you’re not going to hit the pie plate at 925 yards If your whole brain and body isn’t calm and he teaches you how to breathe and how to exhale when you’re shooting the gun and stuff So essentially but we teach people to meditate at gunpoint is better than We created a feedback loop for meditation.

[00:23:17] Clay Hebert: That’s like right to complete right and maybe now isn’t true or

[00:23:21] Nathan Barry: typically he’d say, you know I’ve said like well I used to be an army special forces sniper and So then I got into the world of entrepreneurship and then I decided that I really kind of fell in love with medic, you know

[00:23:31] Clay Hebert: And that’s actually better than what most people would do, but still but it’s only better Yeah,

[00:23:36] Nathan Barry: because the content of his life is so interesting,

[00:23:38] Clay Hebert: right?

[00:23:39] Clay Hebert: But the at gunpoint thing opens this loop that you know You can’t just ignore the person and go back to your phone or your computer. It’s such a blasted open loop. And that’s part of the goal of the perfect intro. It’s not to shock the person. The goal is not to be so contrarian and shocking, but if it can open a loop that they’re curious about, they’re going to ask you a question and now we’re going to pull the slot machine again and we’re going to change the word people.

[00:24:02] Clay Hebert: So we changed, we’re going to change the word people to who it is that you help. So for kit, this is pretty clear. You guys help not just people. You don’t help three year olds in Africa. You help creators, right? That’s the word that you guys own. Actually, I’m glad that came up because people think personal brand is about number of followers or, you know, subscribers or email subscribers or anything.

[00:24:32] Clay Hebert: No, a personal brand is about owning a word or a phrase in the marketplace. And you guys have spent a lot of time and money and effort and attention to own the word creators. You wrote a book called I am a creator, right? Yep. When people think of creators, they think of kit and that is very intentional.

[00:24:49] Clay Hebert: So for everyone out there, it’s a slight tangent from perfect intro, but if you’re trying to build a personal brand, don’t wake up and only think about I need to increase my number of Twitter followers or Instagram followers or tech talk or whatever. Think about what word am I owning in the marketplace?

[00:25:06] Clay Hebert: Back when I used to do the crowdfunding stuff, I was the crowdfunding guy and the phone would ring off the hook. Because people would be, kind of you or Dan Martell or somebody was there and like, I’m trying to get funding for my app, right? Indiegogo this or Kickstarter that. There was 20 Have you talked to Clay?

[00:25:20] Clay Hebert: Yeah. We just come Talk to Clay. He’s, he’s the guy. He’s the crowdfunding guy. So if you’re trying to build a personal brand, pause on the followers for a second. You’ll get the followers if you get really clear on the word or phrase that you want to own. Back to like the change people. Creators. Now creators is kind of the top level of who you serve.

[00:25:38] Clay Hebert: But there’s sub. Within that, what are some words under creators of types of creators that you serve?

[00:25:44] Nathan Barry: Yeah, we could be YouTubers, authors. It depends on the context of where we’re going.

[00:25:49] Clay Hebert: Right.

[00:25:49] Nathan Barry: If I’m showing up to a conference where I know most people are written content creators, then I’m going to say authors are bloggers.

[00:25:56] Nathan Barry: If I’m going to VidCon or VidSummit, then we’re going to be talking about video creators, YouTubers.

[00:26:02] Clay Hebert: Totally. Yeah. I can totally see you guys. It’s probably going to, let’s say a writer’s conference or an author’s conference specifically. It’s not incorrect or, in any way ingenuous to say we help authors because you guys do help authors.

[00:26:17] Clay Hebert: You have a ton of authors. And if you’re at an author’s conference, we help authors, right? Right. Easy. so now change help to a different verb. If you want help is great. It’s kind of like creators. It’s sort of at the top, but you might do something different than how we’re both friends with Jason Gaynard from MMT.

[00:26:35] Clay Hebert: When I think of Jason, the verb that comes to mind is connect. He’s a connect. Yep. Right. So you could change how to connect. I connect incredible entrepreneurs. When Jason says that it automatically doesn’t make it about him. He’s the one doing the connecting. But the adjective amazing is on the entrepreneurs, right?

[00:26:54] Clay Hebert: He’s like, man, I’m just the, I just introduced, you know? so change help to the, the different verb you do. It could be unlock, right? Unlock is something that feels like it’s inside of you. I just figured out the combination or the code, right? now back to the formula. I help people, or let’s just say I help women unlock their best body or whatever, right?

[00:27:19] Clay Hebert: If you’re a personal trainer that works with women and then again, change there to your unlock your best body, not a terrible headline.

[00:27:27] Nathan Barry: Yep. so when other examples, right, we’re talking about, teach was one we used, right? Doug. Right. So there’s all kinds that you could put in there. you were mentioning one last night of decode.

[00:27:39] Nathan Barry: Yes. Right? That’s one. If we’re going for intrigue, that’s a more interesting word than like

[00:27:45] Clay Hebert: Explain

[00:27:46] Nathan Barry: or

[00:27:46] Clay Hebert: whatever, right? Or articulate. Yeah, like, if someone said, I decode personal finance. For a lot of people, personal finance is a complex thing and they’re scared of it or money issues or whatever. or you could even say, I decode stock market for a lot of people, you either work in the stock market or the stock market is confusing to you or you don’t want to deal with it.

[00:28:08] Clay Hebert: Right? So if there’s a thing, if, if you’re serving an audience that wants help with something that they deem as complex, but they would like to understand it, decode is a really, really good word. That makes sense. Yeah. We’ll sneak that in. And again, you can Google just verb lists online. It’ll alphabetize a through whatever and there’s a spreadsheet with five columns.

[00:28:30] Clay Hebert: Yeah. We’ll create a little spreadsheet and send it out to people. I like it. change I to we. So introduce your company. There’s a great article in courts years and years ago. I haven’t heard courts in a long time. Yeah. They

[00:28:42] Nathan Barry: used to put all kinds of great articles,

[00:28:44] Clay Hebert: qz. com or something like that. Yep. So, the headline of the article, it said.

[00:28:49] Clay Hebert: Startups can’t explain what they do because they’re addicted to meaningless jargon. And I was like 20 people sent me that article that day about perfect intro, but it’s not just startups. I think one of the examples in there was. We visually organize your cloud based content for cross platform synergy and distributed access.

[00:29:07] Clay Hebert: That’s like the buzzwordy, you know, it’s just put buzzwords in the Vitamix and dump it out. And that’s your intro. Terrible. who wants to invest in that? You don’t even know. You’re not going to get money or customers if they don’t know what they’re doing. As you talk about sometimes You have to get to the point where you have to get past clarity to know if they want it.

[00:29:26] Clay Hebert: People think, Oh, I have a poor conversion rate because people understood it and they didn’t want it. But really it’s upstream at, they didn’t even understand it.

[00:29:34] Nathan Barry: When the number of times that someone doesn’t understand something and then they’re like, Yeah, it’s not worth the effort to try to understand it always like I don’t want to look dumb Right, maybe everyone else understood it and I didn’t exactly I don’t have time Right, if I ask you to explain this thing, then you’re like well actually dinner starting and if you know Yeah, there’s all kinds of reasons right when if you had just Spent 30 minutes to improve your copy.

[00:29:59] Nathan Barry: Yeah. Right? You could have gotten something that I would understand or would intrigue me enough that I would want to ask more.

[00:30:05] Clay Hebert: Back to like James or Simon and those most complex words being people or systems or these simple words, simple to understand. I’m a big fan of, I love clever copy when you can get there, but it’s got to be clear first.

[00:30:17] Clay Hebert: Yeah, that makes sense. So

[00:30:19] Nathan Barry: going from I to we, you’re basically saying as an individual, I help, but really as a company, we help, we connect, we decode, whatever

[00:30:29] Clay Hebert: it is. And if you’re on a, you know, you can swap these out and choose whatever makes sense in the context. You could, you know, if you’re at a conference introducing the company, you could be like, a kit, we, you know, and then that makes sense, right?

[00:30:39] Clay Hebert: Yeah. That makes sense. So, we’ll talk about a few alternate formulas, because like I said, we started with sort of the white rice, basic, peanut butter and jelly, change out people to who you help, change help to a different verb if you want, and then there’s a couple of alternate formulas that I like a lot.

[00:30:55] Clay Hebert: The analogy, which is, I’m X for Y. Okay. So, I’m X for Y is where X and Y are both things that the person you’re talking to knows. But they’re typically not paired like that together. So it’s not peanut butter and jelly. Yep. So if I said, if I was introducing a startup and saying, I’m building Pinterest, but for guys, you can close your eyes and imagine what that is.

[00:31:21] Clay Hebert: It’s not wedding dresses, it’s leather bracelets and whatever. so in the intro version, you could say, we all know what a personal trainer is. We all know what productivity is. You could say I’m a personal trainer for productivity, right? Personal trainers come to you. They work with you one on one.

[00:31:41] Clay Hebert: We’re not talking about a group class and productivity. You know, they could even carry the analogy through and say, you know, we all know what it’s like. Maybe after Thanksgiving and we haven’t worked out, we let ourselves go a little bit. Or maybe you did that with your inbox or your downloads folder or your desktop or whatever, right?

[00:31:56] Clay Hebert: Your, your morning routine.

[00:31:58] Nathan Barry: We know exactly what the service is.

[00:32:00] Clay Hebert: Yeah.

[00:32:01] Nathan Barry: Wouldn’t go back to the idea of you. Referrable or portable or any of these things? Yeah, then I’m either like, oh I need that Yeah, or I know someone who needs that and then when i’m going to talk to I’m like, Hey, you got to talk to my buddy Clay.

[00:32:14] Nathan Barry: He’s a personal trainer for productivity. And it’s one of those lines as it even rolls off, I’d be like, get this. He’s a, you know, and you’d say it that way and people would be like, oh, yeah, either they would say, I have no need for that. I’m God’s gift to productivity, where they’d be like, oh my gosh, that is the thing that I need more than anything.

[00:32:34] Clay Hebert: Yeah. So think of the two that’s, that’s spot on and being referable, you can even write that down right here. Being referable is one of the most important reasons why this works and one of the biggest benefits of the perfect intro is because of what you just said. There could be someone who’s just as talented with productivity, but if their intro is this four page long thing.

[00:32:59] Clay Hebert: And the people close to them don’t really understand what they do.

[00:33:02] Nathan Barry: Yep.

[00:33:03] Clay Hebert: extra R there. That’s right. Bonus R. Yeah, exactly. This personal trainer for productivity. Once you hear it once, you’re like, you could recommend that person all day. So you want to be the person who’s recommendable. sometimes I’ll, I’ll tell people like, You know, we’re all building our brands, building our email lists, website traffic, et cetera.

[00:33:21] Clay Hebert: And some people get into like, you know, if you’re on Twitter at all, you get people pitching you for cold ads or a high converting landing page or whatever. Most people have a phone and in that phone there’s at least 500 contacts, people you actually know in real life, friends, family, the circles of, of your actual relationships.

[00:33:38] Clay Hebert: If they all knew what you did as well as Nathan’s a personal trainer for productivity, you would probably have as much business as you want, especially for a lot of creators, anyone who’s service based, who’s trying to get their client book full. You probably don’t need paid ads. You probably need the people that already know and want to send you business to understand.

[00:33:58] Clay Hebert: And it’s funny because like, I see people being proud on Twitter and social media of like how poorly their parents understand what they do. And I get it, but like, Why

[00:34:08] Nathan Barry: parents don’t even understand it like yeah, how does your target market on it’s like

[00:34:12] Clay Hebert: being proud of bad handwriting or it’s like Or you could fix that and be booked out.

[00:34:17] Clay Hebert: That’s up to you. Yep.

[00:34:18] Nathan Barry: That makes sense.

[00:34:19] Clay Hebert: So we go the analogy to the transformation the transformation is we turn X into Y and This could be like we do a lot You and I both know a lot with like books and publishing and stuff like that This could be as simple as we turn ideas into books Right X is ideas, Y is books.

[00:34:41] Clay Hebert: If someone wants to write a book, you have books, and you’re writing another one, I have a book, I’m writing this one. Like, you have an idea, you want to turn it into a book. Right. That is the idea. Is a good perfect intro and a pretty good headline for a publishing company, right? Yep. so that’s a simple example.

[00:34:59] Clay Hebert: Dr. Jeff Spencer, do you know, do you know Jeff Spencer? He was Lance Armstrong’s chiropractor for like seven tour de France victories. He didn’t know about the doping and all that, but he would get his back and you know, on the table and all that. He still works with, champions and athletes and stuff. So he’s got kind of like the entrepreneur aspect of his business and then also, athletes.

[00:35:21] Clay Hebert: So he can turn, he says, I turn, he uses I because it’s just him, I turn athletes into Olympians. Do you see like the clarity of that? There’s a transformation there. There’s a transformation. And I can picture Olympians. Totally. 100%. And you can picture an athlete that wants to be an Olympian. And you can probably picture it as training methods too.

[00:35:39] Clay Hebert: It’s also pretty ownable, sort of like we teach people to meditate at gunpoint. Yep. It’s very ownable, right?

[00:35:44] Nathan Barry: Yep. That makes sense.

[00:35:46] Clay Hebert: Have fun with it. do you know, Sean Stevenson, eat smarter, sleep smarter. Amazing dude, right? Incredible, funny, incredible podcast. You know, if he follows the rules, it could say, I help people.

[00:35:59] Clay Hebert: improve their sleep, right? Verb, their noun. And then if he did a website, it’d be like, improve your sleep. Not terrible, but a little dry and boring. Sean is anything but dry and boring. So, he could say, I put people to sleep. It’s like, what? You put people to sleep? Or, you know, Sean’s ripped. He’s got the abs on his website.

[00:36:17] Clay Hebert: He’s probably got a picture of him shirtless. He can be like, I help people in the bedroom and if you meet Sean on a plane, that’s his perfect intro. You can say, I help people in the bedroom.

[00:36:25] Nathan Barry: And you’re like, Oh, is he a sex therapist or no, he means

[00:36:29] Clay Hebert: sleep and melatonin and dark and cold and all that stuff.

[00:36:32] Clay Hebert: Right. You can have fun with it. The point of this is because it’s the beginning of a conversation. If you can start with a laugh or a smile, especially if this is on brand with your personality,

[00:36:45] Nathan Barry: right? Yep. Yeah. And that carries the intrigue through. Yeah,

[00:36:49] Clay Hebert: for sure.

[00:36:49] Nathan Barry: Okay. What do you mean,

[00:36:50] Clay Hebert: how short can you go?

[00:36:52] Clay Hebert: So, you’re in the world of creators. Let’s think of some of the most sort of legendary folks that the, if there was a pyramid, they would climb up to the mountain to talk to Mr. Seth Godin or Mr. Gary Vaynerchuk, right? Yep. When people ask Gary Vee, so what do you do? He says, I day trade attention. Okay. And he’s been saying that for as long as I know, 15 years, and he’s always said that sometimes he says, I day trade attention and build businesses, but really I day trade attention 12, 13 years after the first time I heard him say this, he wrote the book, day trading attention.

[00:37:24] Clay Hebert: So on brand and consistent, it’s also fairly ownable in that nobody else says they day trade attention, right? So that combination of words. If you do hear it, you think of Gary. And then Seth Godin, also three words, that’s three words, one of them’s hyphenated, one of them’s I. Seth has the same thing. He says, I notice things.

[00:37:46] Clay Hebert: I heard someone ask Seth Godin on a podcast, they knew who Seth was, but they said, for our audience, you know, explain to them what you do. And he says, well, really more than anything, what I do is I notice things. And then, I speak about them, and then I blog about them, and then I give speeches, and write books, and things like that.

[00:38:05] Clay Hebert: one of my favorite examples, not a Seth Godin one, but Mike Cesario, who built Liquid Death, he noticed a guy who cracked a Monster Energy backstage at a performance, and he dumped it out in the can. And Mike Cesario was sitting there, he heard, you know, it’s a very unique sound, the crack of a new can, and so it kind of caught his eye, and he looked, and the guy dumped it out.

[00:38:24] Clay Hebert: So he’s watching this blue liquid go into the garbage can. He’s like, what’s that about? Why would someone crack a new thing? And then he went over to the water thing and he filled it up and he took it out on stage And then he jumped and performed and was just doing his thing and Mike Cesario said what’s that about?

[00:38:39] Clay Hebert: Why did he dump that out and fill it with water? Oh He’s sponsored by monster energy, but he doesn’t want to be all monster jittery while he’s doing his performance on stage, but he filled it with water. So he needs to drink water. There’s no water. That’s cool. There’s no water. That’s rockstar. There’s no water.

[00:38:55] Clay Hebert: That’s edgy like that. And so it took him years. It wasn’t like the next day he launched liquid death. But he noticed that water wasn’t cool and built a billion dollar brand selling a product. That’s the same water. That’s in all the rest of

[00:39:07] Nathan Barry: it

[00:39:08] Clay Hebert: One thing that I

[00:39:09] Nathan Barry: noticed about both of these

[00:39:10] Clay Hebert: it’s

[00:39:10] Nathan Barry: been noticing things.

[00:39:11] Nathan Barry: Yes. Yes Is they represent? Seth and Gary like their personalities. Yeah, like day trading attention. It’s frenetic. It’s active. We’re doing all these things working 18 hours a day We got all the stuff going. Yeah, and I noticed things you also get a visual, right? Yeah, I get this like something you’re sitting at on the park bench and you’re like, oh, yeah, no.

[00:39:33] Nathan Barry: Yeah Yeah, and so the ability to capture someone’s brand in three words, right?

[00:39:39] Clay Hebert: Is remarkable. And what Seth does, even though he’s got 20 plus books and all these different projects, those are all the result of him noticing something. So like you said, it’s not just the energetic on brand. It’s like it matches their, you know, their energy and their heart rate.

[00:39:56] Clay Hebert: it’s also very ownable. Day trading attention. And now Gary just wrote the book, right?

[00:40:00] Nathan Barry: Yeah,

[00:40:00] Clay Hebert: that’s awesome. so yeah, so why it works referral might, might even be number one, but it’s, it’s memorable. That’s referable. it helps you stand out. There’s a lot of, you know, copywriters. You have a lot of copywriters and creators and stuff.

[00:40:14] Clay Hebert: If they don’t write copy themselves, they, Work with copywriters that do it. Think of this as a headline for the conversation that you’re about to have. And that headline is probably It can be in person or it can be digital, right? It can be an actual headline on your website, on your landing page, on your social media.

[00:40:32] Clay Hebert: That makes sense. Yeah, so. Okay,

[00:40:34] Nathan Barry: so what’s this? It’s your case story. It’s another. It stands out to me. Yeah. Cause I’m like, Oh, you meant to write case study. And it’s like, no, you didn’t. I know you’re always intentional with words,

[00:40:46] Clay Hebert: so it’s not a typo. Right. Like day trader’s attention. It’s like, which is a good lesson for your folks to name and claim.

[00:40:52] Clay Hebert: We tried to make things, we want to stand out and we want followers and we want a different brand and to be the choice. And then we look over our shoulder and try to name things, you know, the entrepreneurial scorecard. Well, 27 other people have named something the entrepreneurial scorecard, so I give it a name.

[00:41:08] Clay Hebert: So I call it a case story. We all know what a case study is. A case study tends to be PDF, tends to be pretty boring. It’s the Study of a case that happened, right? Your, your story of your customer, but it’s not a story. It’s typically packaged up in a boring way. often, not always to me, your case story is an interesting story about a customer that you helped because when we do this, we teach people to meditate at gunpoint or any of these interesting, you know, I’m a personal trainer for productivity.

[00:41:39] Clay Hebert: You want your intro to prompt a question, something like, what do you mean, or how do you do that? You gotta give yourself the permission to have it be not fully complete, not fully accurate, interesting, confident, right? Open that loop, and the whole point is you’re opening, you’re saying this thing that is not fully complete, so like, what do you mean, or how do you do that?

[00:41:59] Clay Hebert: And then you get to say one of the most magical questions in the world. They say, what do you mean, or how do you do that, which is a question, and you get to say a magical question. Can I tell you a story? It’s one of the most amazing things humans can say to each other because nobody’s ever like, no, I filled up on stories this morning at breakfast.

[00:42:17] Clay Hebert: I’m good. Thanks, bro. All we want is stories. All we buy is stories. Netflix is stories. Game of Thrones is stories. Billions of stories. Books are stories. I think about

[00:42:25] Nathan Barry: like, growing up in church, right? Sitting there 12 years old. You’re super bored. And then the pastor’s like, let me tell you a story. And all of a sudden you’re like, I’m paying attention.

[00:42:37] Nathan Barry: Trick up. Yeah. Or like one, Tim Grawl spoke at craft and commerce and he, he did this masterfully. First he had no slides. He memorized his talk and which I’m already just impressed by. But then when he goes out, he’s like part, part way through. Maybe, I don’t know if he deliberately did it in a spot where he’s like, oh, maybe this is like a little bit of a lull or something in the talk.

[00:43:00] Nathan Barry: But he goes, I want to tell you a story about Nathan that I don’t have permission to tell. So there’s a few things. One, the intrigue of the story. Like, everyone’s immediately paying attention. About Nathan, right? Like, I organize the conference, you know, everybody knows me. And then the line of, I don’t know that I have permission to tell this.

[00:43:22] Nathan Barry: I don’t

[00:43:23] Clay Hebert: know that I have permission. Or I didn’t

[00:43:25] Nathan Barry: get permission, you know, any of these things. It’s not that it’s a story that I would be upset about and it’s not that if he asked he thinks I wouldn’t get permission It’s just that he very deliberately didn’t say hey Nathan. Can I tell this story? Yeah, so that he could use this perfect copywriting line and get like complete attention.

[00:43:44] Nathan Barry: Perfect

[00:43:45] Clay Hebert: That’s so good. And I bet you could hear a pin drop in the room when he said that. Oh, that’s that’s a great example What do you mean how do you do this? And then you say can I tell you a story? The answer is always It’s going to be yes or smile or nod or whatever. Nobody says no to can I tell you a story unless they are literally running late for something.

[00:44:03] Narrator: Right.

[00:44:03] Clay Hebert: The structure of the story that you’re going to tell is, first of all, you’re going to tell a story of one of your favorite client or customer transformations.

[00:44:13] Nathan Barry: Okay.

[00:44:13] Clay Hebert: So somebody that your business Has helped. Even if you’ve only ever had one client, if you’re a freelance copywriter and you just started your creator business and you’ve had one client tell that story, but it doesn’t have to be your biggest client, your best client, the highest revenue, choose the one that’s the most interesting sort of before and after picture, right?

[00:44:32] Clay Hebert: Imagine you’re a personal trainer. This is like, it’s not a story, a photo, right? Show somebody who was out of shape in some way and you helped them get in shape the way they want to be. That transformation is what we’re trying to capture in this story. Right. So the light structure for this is when so and so first came to us or first found us, They were, and now you might think or you say, Oh, they were terrible and then we fix it.

[00:44:57] Clay Hebert: No, no, no. They were 99 percent amazing. They were so good at this. Then they did this. People loved their XYZ. But they had one problem. They were struggling. They were blocked. There was something that wasn’t working. It’s maybe 1 percent of their identity or 5 percent and your product or service helped remove that splinter or remove that block from their success.

[00:45:21] Clay Hebert: So you’re no big deal. And just like, they were stuck in this way. So they worked with us and we were able to do this and this. And now, so it’s like, You know, 48 percent about how awesome they were, but they were blocked 4 percent about your product or service. 48 percent about how awesome they are now.

[00:45:38] Clay Hebert: And they’ve taken off. So you want them to fall in love with who your customer was even before they found your product or service. And then you just help them remove this block. We’re all humans. We all have blocks. We all have things that we need tools and systems and people and connections to get through those.

[00:45:52] Clay Hebert: You were just, you know, Donald Miller will occasionally use the Star Wars analogy, and I think it applies here. You’re Yoda telling the story of the Skywalker, the hero’s journey, right? This is like a micro micro hero’s journey. When so and so first found us, they were amazing. They’re doing all this stuff, but there was this one thing that wasn’t quite working.

[00:46:10] Clay Hebert: And so they worked with us and we were able to help them, da, da, da, da, da. Then you tell the story of where they are today and their accolades and their success and their hat, maybe not even mom’s story success. Maybe there’s like, and now they’re home with their kids and they’re, they’re not pulling their hair out because of their business.

[00:46:25] Clay Hebert: Their business is smooth. It makes them the money they want to make. So that’s what we do. And you end the story with, so it starts with when so and so first found us, when your client customer first found us. They were awesome. They had this block. Now, oh my gosh, they’re off to the races. So that’s what we do.

[00:46:41] Clay Hebert: And if you end with, so that’s what we do. If you’ve told the story well, they’re so kind of compelled or intrigued in the story that it hasn’t been about you the whole time. And they’re like, oh. So that’s what you do. And it just makes it, it just ties it up in a perfect bow. We do a lot of this at Kit.

[00:46:57] Clay Hebert: And I can tell because in your new studios here, you got, posters down the wall, which I love. And I think every big company like this should, every company highlight your people, highlight them on your website. Highlight, like tell the stories of the people that you help. Yeah. Our gallery is, and your new website, your art

[00:47:13] Nathan Barry: gallery, the hallways here.

[00:47:15] Nathan Barry: So a creator on our homepage, her name’s Nisha Bora. She, so I guess I should tell it. Before and after, right? In the format. Let me think if I can do this. Should we do the whole thing? Should we walk through it? I won’t. So, Nisha is a vegan, food creator. Okay. Right? So she’s making, videos, blogs, all of that about, vegan recipes.

[00:47:41] Nathan Barry: And she built a successful business, was able to go full time in it. And through that process, just really hit a few specific blocks. particularly around like sustainable growth and like scaling it beyond, just her. Sure. And so she came to Kit and we were able to help her build lead magnets for each of her YouTube videos, build automations so that, when someone subscribes to her list, they could get her best content, you know, personalized to them.

[00:48:15] Nathan Barry: We were able to help her segment that audience, talk to them in the right way. And then she really needed a way to. Earn a more sustainable living than, you know, pure advertising. And so we helped her sell a digital product, which is her meal plans on subscription.

[00:48:29] Clay Hebert: Nice.

[00:48:30] Nathan Barry: And so fast forward to today. She has grown her audience from 28, 000 subscribers to 140, 000 subscribers.

[00:48:38] Nathan Barry: Wow. She now has over half of all of her revenue. Revenue is up like crazy and half of it now is digital product sales of these meal plans.

[00:48:47] Clay Hebert: Nice.

[00:48:48] Nathan Barry: and then. Her book came out and it debuted number three on the New York times list. Wow. So that’s what we do. That’s

[00:48:55] Clay Hebert: amazing. That’s great. The

[00:48:57] Nathan Barry: ending of that is that’s super

[00:48:58] Clay Hebert: good.

[00:48:59] Clay Hebert: Yeah, so that’s what we do You can just you can just use it over and over and that’s the first time you’ve told nisha’s story, right? And you can literally, you know, take the tape write it out clean it up move it around you get better at telling it And I want to give people this ability this I don’t want everyone to leave with a perfect intro I want you to leave with A tool set that’s as easy to assemble as like red, yellow, green, before you go into any conference, but we’ve talked a lot about the intro and not as much about the story, but start with the story.

[00:49:29] Clay Hebert: Start with like, for you, it’d be like Nisha and at, at companies, you have how many people who work at KIT? 90. So 90 people can all have a favorite creator that within KIT Nisha plus 89 other stories, or anyone can choose whatever they want and get a chance to tell those stories. So now you have. Three times a day, a thousand times a year, 90, 000 times a year.

[00:49:52] Clay Hebert: Someone’s asking a kid employee, so what do you do? And now you have 90 people with not just interesting intros, the intro is great, but the whole point of the intro is to get to the story. Tell the story of Nisha and then, so that’s what we do. So that’s

[00:50:04] Nathan Barry: what we

[00:50:04] Clay Hebert: do.

[00:50:04] Nathan Barry: Yeah, and I think about the scalability of that.

[00:50:06] Nathan Barry: Cause like, right now, I’ve got team members at an event in London. they’re at FinCon in Atlanta. Sure. You know, all around. And so if we get people, our team trained on this and dialed in. Yeah. Then they go from being, you know, Oh, I work in software. Right, right.

[00:50:24] Clay Hebert: To. Yeah, SAS. Yeah. I, these transformations.

[00:50:28] Clay Hebert: All of the places. You know, social media, email signatures, even business cards. and business cards are an interesting thing right now. Cause now even with phones, you can do the whole buzzy thing. You have whatever. Everyone’s like, why would I need business cards when I can just do that? Well, that’s true.

[00:50:45] Clay Hebert: If the goal of a business card is to transmit my basic information, name, rank, serial number, phone, email. Yes. The phone is better at that, but there’s a company called Moo M O O. They’ve been doing cool business cards for a long time. The difference with Moo that you can get thicker, a nice card stock or whatever, but the back of Moo can be 50 different cards.

[00:51:05] Clay Hebert: Right. So take these different stories. So for the, let’s just say for the kit business cards. A pack of 50 should be Nisha, it should be Pat, it should be James, it should be all the creators and highlight that you do, and then a little bit of their story, or you know, it could be a testimonial. If you’re a realtor, why wouldn’t the back of your 50 business cards be the 50 best houses you’ve sold with a testimonial right next to it?

[00:51:29] Clay Hebert: Because back to like, interrupting the pattern and creating a moment. When someone’s like, Hey, can I, can I get your info? Can I have your card? You don’t just say, here is my phone number and email address. Cause the phone does that better, but you can go, Oh yeah, of course. You fan out your business cards and it’s like, pick a card, any card, and they’re all different, which is a pattern interrupt because nobody ever who has business cards where the backs are all different, right?

[00:51:50] Clay Hebert: You walk around, you put your portfolio in your pocket. It’s really magical to see

[00:51:55] Nathan Barry: what I can imagine that as a conference, even where someone’s like, well, that’s a great story. What other creators have you helped? And then I pull it out and say, actually, like, this is all that we do and I’ve got 10 right here.

[00:52:05] Nathan Barry: And like, Oh, let me tell you about, you know, Bonnie, let me tell you about James

[00:52:09] Clay Hebert: or, you know, or you just let them shoot the duck here and you spread them on the counter. People love it. They love going through. Right. So where you can use it. Website headlines. We talked about verb, your noun, take the eye out people verb, their noun, change there to your, just flip there to your, and you can use it on a website landing page, business cards, social media, and one intro touch point that a lot of people forget about is email signatures.

[00:52:37] Clay Hebert: So you’ve got 90 people, those 90 people. I’m not talking about. Kit sending out a you know subscribe your customers who send out subscriber email newsletters. I just mean External emails that kid employees send to vendors and to conferences and everything else What if there was a linked thing in the email signature that said Nisha’s story if that was that?

[00:52:58] Clay Hebert: Employees if Nisha was her favorite story, right? James’s story or whatever. And then that links to case stories all the way through everything that we’re doing, kit. com slash Asia slash this slash that you guys do a great job of that already. It’s just taking that’s a new touch point that we don’t use.

[00:53:13] Clay Hebert: Sure. And like you can see how each individual employee gets to be like, well, yeah, I’m here because of people like Nisha or everyone’s got their favorite creators, right? Our, our employees, favorite creators in their email, everywhere else. What’s this? The two most powerful words. Yeah. So to wrap up, It’s you and your, so this is the, your, because using you and yours, it’s not free, it’s not a hundred percent off.

[00:53:37] Clay Hebert: It’s not sale you and your, because that makes it about the customer, not about yourself. So this is the difference between I’m a Kickstarter expert versus I have entrepreneurs fund their dreams. And then you are fund your dream. Makes it about them. So it really goes back to what’s the noun that your customer wants verb?

[00:53:56] Clay Hebert: And then what’s that verb a really useful? Exercise is to go through your entire website landing page copy Email signatures and look for every instance of I and we and things like that Like what we do and try to rewrite it with you and you’re talking about your customer

[00:54:16] Nathan Barry: Because that’s going all the way back to the three myths of introductions.

[00:54:19] Nathan Barry: The very first one, it’s about you, and you’re saying, no, no, it’s about who you help. And so you and you’re So it’s like brings you into that, like, this is who we’re helping to see what it’s about,

[00:54:30] Clay Hebert: right? Like you said, grow your audience is a good high level one for kit, right? and you can, you can repeat the verb, your noun over and over.

[00:54:40] Clay Hebert: So people really land with it. That’s awesome.

[00:54:42] Nathan Barry: I love this. This has been a complete masterclass in basically an hour. Where should people go to learn more about what you’re doing and

[00:54:50] Clay Hebert: We’ll, I’ll put all this in a really nice clean little document and we’ll put it at clayandnathan. com.

[00:54:55] Nathan Barry: There you go.

[00:54:56] Nathan Barry: There’s even something in that, the custom domain. So clayandnathan. com. You should go check it out. Clay, thanks so much for coming on. Of course. Thanks brother. If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search The Nathan Berry Show, then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment.

[00:55:12] Nathan Barry: I’d love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were, and also just who else do you think we should have on the show? Thank you so much for listening.