How to Create a Model of Your Customer’s Mind

good morning good afternoon depending tuning in from but it's great to connect with all of you and I want to get right to the question on the screen how can we transform our results by developing a wholesome cohesive theory of the customer I'm smiling at Dan Paul is not with us today dan Burstyn who oversees all of our editorial content and senior marketing leader is is right here with me and you may be hearing from him I'll be talking to him off camera as he supports us during all the work right now Paul is on vacation and if you'd like I'll tell you exactly where he's staying that way you can call him at all hours today and ask him questions about your marketing and I'm sure you'll appreciate that in the meantime I have taught on customer theory before many of you are asking me about how do I get that piece that you taught before and we had a technical issue so I'm going to be touching that content again but in a very different way in one moment I'm gonna ask you a question about this test if you're just tuning in keep an eye on that you've seen this test before because again I'm going back to create a recording for you for a missing piece of our approach however I've got something more interesting I want to share right at the start cliffs shift me to the to the to the infographic now for the last three weeks I've been teaching in the 21 psychological elements of of page design and we create an infographic that ties all the content together I want to shift to the infographic right now and show you a new infographic that I'm going to be teaching from that will help you think about the holy grail in marketing now this graphic let's Dan move it around or shrink it give them a chance to get a sense of it but it follows a series of steps do you see this and you can download this it's a wall poster you can use it to think about your marketing assets keep it at that particular piece so if you're just joining us everything I talked about today is gonna unpack those five steps but to set you up for that I want to show you a page many of you have seen this page if you're new you haven't take a look at it I want you to see the original page right there and ask yourself all right how is this approach different from the approach I'm going to put in front of you right now now I want you to see that this is the content this is the original control and now you're looking at a new page and it has a different approach more importantly it has a different way of thinking more precisely it has a different hypotheses and as I cache in the hypotheses you're going to start to understand something critical in marketing but for a moment just take a look at this page the original and say what would you do to improve its performance and why you think about that if you are experienced in terms of my teaching we're going to still take you and do new territory today but we're going to tie it to a subject that you hear me talk about a lot it's a subject that I think is most misunderstood in marketing and it's the concept of customer theory it's the holy grail in marketing let me begin by making some statements that probably some will find offensive marketing has lost its way it's lost its way because we use it interchangeably with the word sales we don't know the primary difference we go to a university and get a MBA in marketing and we still can't bring it we still can't present a cohesive theory most of the time if you go to take and get an education marketing it's sort of like this let's call this the universe of possible things to know you get a dot here and a dot here and a dot here and there's some electives so you pick up these pieces and somehow you put all this together and this becomes what you walk away with from the university education it's woefully inadequate what instead you need to understand is how all these pieces connect into a comprehensive whole we need to stack learning so that we can create depth now if that would be the case if that were how would we approach today it might be easier to begin with the end so let me ask you a question what is the most important element in marketing what is the place where we derive and set our compass from what canvas do we always begin in if we're trying to think about marketing effectively as you're asking or answering that question I want to suggest to you that the answer lies on that infographic and and I'm going to take it and unpack it in reverse order today let's go back to the infographic for just a moment and then we'll switch over to the deck and look at that case study the key is in step 5 where it says integrate findings with customer theory a customer theory is a predictive model of your customers decision process and there is no greater way for you to establish sustainable competitive advantage then for you to aggregate through testing and other methodologies a cohesive understanding of what matters to your customer and how they make choices the holy grail in marketing is a customer theory and we work backwards from that because if you get a copy of this book which we haven't released except on our site it'll be released next year everywhere else you know Amazon and book stores and so on the marketers philosopher what you're going to see is basically 30 years of research tied together in 40 reflections with an essential series of propositions that define a whole new way to think about your marketing paradigm the essence of marketing is not the channel it's not the budget it's not the spanned it's not the brand the essence of marketing is the message and the essage of the message is the value proposition and the essence of the value proposition is the exchange sum that's the difference between perceived value and perceived cost now there's only four components in marketing a cinder a receiver a message and amines all marketing can be understood through this once you take the paradigm that we present in this book and now think about how it applies to customer theory what we're essentially saying is to get your message right you have to begin where marketing always begins in the mind of the active customer now if what I've just said seems a bit disjointed today is different I'm presenting a mosaic I want to tie multiple pieces together and it'll all make more sense as we start to unpack the pieces but let's begin by demonstrating what looks like an embarrassing research result so there is the control and here is the treatment we'll shift over to the deck now and as you look at the treatment you're going to see that we employ a four-step process for hypothesis development and some of you have seen this many of you have not but if you were to cash in these four statements what you're going to see is that by approaching them we learned what we should be changing on the website the problem with testing today is that we try ideas that is a horrific way to invest your energy and your money if you want to achieve m4l if you want to get the most for the least you've got to test a cohesive theory the problem of multivariate testing is it just scrambles elements without a human being leveraging the power of intuition we are still not anywhere near in the development of AI despite all the hype you hear of the Machine capability of presenting meaningful hypotheses as it relates to a human beings decision process this still requires you and I integrating with our tool sets so that we can put together a cohesive theory in this case we begin with an if statement if we emphasize the process of a value proposition now that is the primary difference this is the if statement summarizes the big thing you're doing the essence of your hypothesis now if you don't know what process double value prop is you need to tune into one of our other programs or we can teach you that it will send you a link or ask us about that but ultimately there's four types of value propositions and process level is related to your buttons and your forms and your downloads things that move you forward in the process so we shifted in the new treatment to a process level value proposition we remove form fields in the first step we added free-trial copy and we removed vague imagery and you may have heard me teach this before it's called the ark principle all you can ever do to a webpage is add remove or change so applying the art principle and defining it with the buy statement we're now telling you what physical changes we're making to the illusion of a page as we manipulate zeros and ones in order to create a new impact on the mind an impact that's built around processed of a value proposition and so we change the headline and and we use specific features and benefits that are utilized to express the core value and then the page emphasizes free access and then we ensure that the value is being communicated in subsequent steps in the page so that we're emphasizing over and over again the value of the process of a value proposition now as you think about that with me you're able to do the third step now I'm going to pause for my can you switch me back to the diagram Dan and I want you to drill down on the page over there in number two having observed customer behavior in the data sets using the discovery triad which I'm going to come back and talk about in a moment we develop a hypothesis framework that we that helps us build something that will actually add to our wisdom the world is full of information and it seems the more we get less wisdom we acquire there is some sort of inverse and strained relationship it feels like the more you overload me with facts and data the less wisdom I tend to have in fact the less time I have to reflect because I'm always organizing so what does that mean and how does that connect to us I don't need some more data I need wisdom so I just used the data to purchase wisdom and in this process what we're doing is we're we're applying step 2 of the framework and I'll show you how that works out in just a moment then I'm come back and work through the framework okay so go ahead to the to the will statement now back to the back to the deck we're able to focus on what we think will be the physical in the world what will physically change because we add and remove and change the pieces in the by statement remove form fields in the first step add free trial copy and remove vague imagery now we have summarized in a critical and this is very important to summary step that if statement is very important we have spelled out how we're accomplishing the intent of the if statement and now we're adding a prediction to what's going to happen as a result because we believe that this behavior change is related to something important in the mind which brings me to the most important and fourth step in hypotheses which is the because statement so because the customer just wants to try the software for themselves as quickly as possible now those four pieces combined give us a set up for learning they put us on a stage where we can actually acquire viable information about the customers mind now I'm looking at David carrier online who we're working with in them in a series of experiments David is great to see you on here i I have this cool note from Andrew Hatfield and Andrew I'm going to tie all this in and show you the results of this test but Andrew just told me that he's in from Brisbane Australia and this is the first time he can participate live and and so Andrew we're glad to have you on the program he's in San Francisco right now and and there's a question from Victor that I'll try to get to later but what I want you to do now is think about what happens when we run an experiment comparing the control the treatment what are we trying to accomplish with this new hypotheses now be careful because you may give me the wrong answer if you're not careful but go ahead take your chat feature and tell me if we run a test using this carefully articulated hypothesis control against the treatment I'll show you the two side-by-side tell me what are we trying to accomplish what's the most important thing that can happen when this test begins all right Andrew we're glad to have you I'm watching this these pieces coming in all right so talk to me what do you think is the most we get more leads Dave said very important all right what else anybody else have a thought on this page what happens what is the desired outcome of this test clicks on get free access someone has said any other thoughts reducing customer confusion says uh says moose all right so those are all people in the audience talking and and I want to bring you back to the point I'm trying to make the essence of marketing is the message the essence of the message is the value proposition and in order to fill the proper value proposition I've got to understand the mind I went up I want to gently argue with you for a moment I want to suggest to you that the most important thing that can happen in this test is that we learn whether or not our hypothesis in particular the idea that a process level value proposition will produce more leads will produce the desired behavior it's the most important thing that can happen in this test is that we learn whether or not that's the key factor you say well what about a lift isn't that what we're really after aren't you confusing the means with the end no I'm not because the end is a deep understanding of the customer the ended customer wisdom with that I can get this lift and another left and another lift I can change products I can transform the business the value proposition is the compass but to set your compass right true north is in the mind of the prospect so what happens on this test well it's a bit deceptive we run the test and we get what a twenty four point five percent drop now in most marketing departments that's a moment that you don't look forward to it's a moment we tell your boss well around the test but we didn't get a lift that's our third one in a row without a lift and but we think the next one's going to be good you're slightly embarrassed you're trying to explain yourself you've got to justify the budget the spin the dev resources and all the work that was done David carrier has a test run right now I don't know whether it's going to produce a lift or not I suspect it will but I already know what I want to test second in third and it's more important to acquire the wisdom as fast as possible so we can get the most money in the shortest period of time so let's talk about that for a second as I look at this result now I could for the sake of entertaining you talk about how our brilliant scientists grew conversion negatively by twenty four point five percent and it's funny but the truth is this was a good test with a good outcome that produced the real result I needed to understand the real result we needed to understand and what I'm going to share with you is how we leverage that but look up in the corner do you see that little triad I'm gonna come back to that try it I'm gonna show you how by spinning that triad around we figured out what to test next and so we we we we think about this in a new way here's the same company but here's what we do that's different new test protocol eighteen twenty five now we're going to test a different approach in fact I'm gonna skip through this piece you've seen that one before and I'm gonna come back to this one all right so remember that so here's what we do next we take a different part of the site with less traffic but the same traffic profile so that we can run a good sound experiment without risking too much financial downside we don't want them to lose twenty four you know a percent on their home page but now we use this other page that had the same approach and as the home page and we begin to apply the discovery triad which I'm going to come back to to design a new test we do use one of their SEO pages it's offering the same product as the home page but dealt with smaller subsets and we can test you without negative consequences so we now create this page it's not a beautiful page it's not the best page not the page we're running now but it is employing that that unique approach to hypothesis development that we embed in our testing system and now I want you to notice the difference it says if we emphasize the product level value proposition a hold on a second that's a code we use to P words product and process but is the gigantic difference in approach here's what we're not doing we're not sitting around a room looking at the results of that and saying gosh I don't know what happened you know what happened and then arguing about it and then finally the boss coming in and saying let's try this we're not generating some ideas we're not thinking you know I think the imagery was off or I think if we just changed this word or I think you know I ran a test six years ago and here's what I discovered all that's valuable as a preliminary conversation but it doesn't tie together a cohesive understanding that you can test and glean wisdom with and so we apply that four part hypothesis again if we emphasize the product level and product level value proposition means instead of talking about what you're gonna get with a free trial on the download that's the process we're gonna actually talk about the product not the company the product not the prospect type other you know segments but the product that's our approach that's what we're testing so by adding a product value copy in energy so what are we gonna do all we did is add a product value copy and we added pragmatic imagery that's the main change we made to this page we'll come back to it side by side in a moment here's the headline difference okay it focuses on the product and specific features and benefits are utilized to express the value to codify it and now we expect again what we want to see is a behavior change an increase in leads but we want to know why did I have your change or this whole thing is just a crapshoot the idea here is that customers don't what we said in the regional test it's not that they just want to try it but they want to know more about the product before they sign up to try it see the difference in the sequence of thought see the difference in the approach see what's at stake here with this experiment if we get this right we learn something that has transferable power so go back to the diagram if you would Dan and and so all I'm walking through is the real-life application of this this wall chart that I want to give you and essentially what it's doing is we're following we are observing the results from the previous test using the discovery triad which I've taught on in the past I'll bring it back into this conversation in a few minutes then reforming a hypothesis then we're testing the hypotheses and then we're integrating the findings with our customer theory and here's what we're gonna learn and by the way this is a question you should ask before you run every test what do I learn if I don't see a conversion left what do I learn if I do see a conversion lift if you can't answer that question you're not ready to push the button and go yet okay so back to the pieces now I have two pages and I want to test my audience if you're tracking with me tell me what do I learn if B wins if you've been following me you're gonna be able to answer that in a single short sentence do your best I'm watching the chat features and I know it takes a moment for you to get your responses in what do I learn if B defeats a anybody have an idea yakov asked why you're answering a let me answer yeah coughs question why not test all four types of value propositions in parallel because to test all four Jakov you have to a we would need to use four specific treatments and that would create a much higher number of actions to be measured we were able to eliminate two of those by looking at previous data and we were able to shorten the test time by keeping our treatments down to just the control and a B version and so we got to an answer faster sometimes I would run all four and I've done that and I've got an example in this deck where I did that but right now that's what the idea is all right product is more important to customer than company so so hey sue said product is more important to compliment to two so that's almost it remember in the first test we were testing process level value problem many times we put a download on the page but we don't talk about it in such a way as to make it wonder why our conversion rate is low many times focusing one objective we talked about this when I taught the 21 elements the 21 psychological elements of page design the objective 70% of your objective need to be focused on one thing so our strategy here was should we focus on the download David should we focus on the workshops going back to your situation should we focus on one of the other elements in your offering or focus primarily on the overall value of the organization those questions have huge impacts on results if B wins will understand that product level value proposition may be more powerful to this audience more impactful Drive more of the right behavior than process the polite problem now you could come to me and you could say I'm a master in marketing and I would be grateful to meet you but I still wouldn't trust your judgement as to which one of those is going to be the answer because the only person who really knows is the person I'm serving and you're not the person I'm serving not when I'm in the role described for this experiment I'm serving the customer and if I serve the customer well I will serve the company the business well also if I serve the customer poorly I will serve the business poorly I've got to figure out how to serve the customer better than they're currently being served and right now they weren't being served well enough because they couldn't get the information they need to make a good decision this product has a strong value proposition and all they needed to do was get that decision right so let's go fullscreen for a moment all right and what you're looking at is the two side by side and I'm gonna share with you the difference here it is B produces a 548 percent relative increase did you hear me are you registering that that's science that's validated that's been certified that's no exaggeration do not trust most of the percentages you see on the internet every time I get into those experiments and test and there's so much hype so much nonsense such poor science such exaggeration but that's a real number and step level click-through went up by look at that number thirteen hundred and twelve percent you said you must have made a lot of money no we didn't we got something better than money see we could have we could have got some money and said wow this is awesome but since that was a narrow part of the funnel where there wasn't as many people coming let's uh let's let's on a scale of one to ten I'm just gonna I'm gonna make a ratio let's say that that has a two in terms of impact on revenue now if you think about it that way even a smaller percentage on a fatter pipe where there's more people going could produce more net revenue so what is the value of five hundred and forty eight percent I'll tell you the value it indicates there's a big powerful impact on the mine when we focus on product level value proposition and that my friend is the difference between dollars and something the the Greeks would say is and I'm gonna I'm gonna write it like this Sinise's and it means right seeing for the first time we're seeing into the customers mind and in doing so we have something more valuable than the immediate dollars we have wisdom and that wisdom can be translated into dollars and that my friend is what happens when you build a customer theory right now this is just one step in a customer theory imagine this is just like one lever in the mind that we're learning to pull okay but I want I want all those levers pulled properly and and if we can get them pulled right and we pull each one we're going to be able to drive enormous value we need each one and we need to stack our learnings that's where this graphic it comes that I want to teach and help you learn but let me just pause there for a second so here's how customer theory pays off we learned one thing it's funny just one important thing I'd like to learn 100 more but the one gives me an advantage over the competition already so look what we did we went back to the home page remember that we lost 24% what did we do with that 24% we laid a 548 % concept now that's the next win but all we learned was something about what matters to the customer and we applied it back to the homepage what did that do for us ninety-eight percent now listen to me that's 90 percent on the big fat pipe the revenue impact for that is almost double let's call the value of that wisdom let's call it an 8 compared to a 2 when we think about its its multiplier impact on top-line revenue marketer if you listen to me by the way marketing is phenomenal don't buy into the negative connotation of marketing understand that what you're dealing with is the essence of human nature and it's the most fascinating way you could spend your life you're learning about yourself and you're only about everyone around you when you study this type of thing and what I want you to see right now is that you need to realign your entire set of objectives for your business you need to focus on acquiring over the next 12 24 months deep customer wisdom and then you can take that customer wisdom and cash it in just as sure as you can chips at a casino you cash in those chips and they translated the dollars and had we set this experiment up wrong we could have been bragging about a 548 percent lift with a multiplier impact of 2 now just to be clear I'm making up the two and I'm making up the eight to create a ratio differential in your mind I haven't done any math to actually arrive at those numbers but the point is the same 548 percent lift would have made everybody feel good but it would only put a little money on the books instead we designed the experiment to teach us something not just to get a lift and by doing that we we achieved an eighth type impact and we had a huge impact on the revenue and this company went public so I'm gonna back up now because I want to teach how this diagram all comes together and help you really start to see the pieces what I want to be careful of is I have a mixed audience people that are new a lot of people are tuning in to the psychological 21 psychological elements it's growing fast I'm grateful it's a good time for me to say do a couple of things for us if you would like this right now if you can because by doing so we'll get higher search rankings and get more people to watch and share with a friend I was talking to a group on the phone yesterday I was so impressed the CEO put his marketing came together and they watched the three of these last YouTube lives all on the twenty one psychological elements with the download three times as a team each one three times then extracted it and applied it that's the point here I don't want to cram things into your head I'm gonna change the way you see invest I want to change your results and I want to build a meaningful relationship with you because we're studying things together and helping each other learn and by the way I'm not the only person here with answers you're learning everyday things that can make us better and can help this community and what we're going to do is sure your year is we're gonna build a remarkable community now if you're not familiar with us we already have nearly 2 million people a year in our community visiting our site and then our social media and our lists but I'm building a much more intense community focused around understanding the holy grail Metanoia and to do that here's what's going on and I'm gonna shift to the diagram we we did something weird years ago we we ran a series of experiments in something called experimental philosophy which no one even knew about back there now it's a popular thing I'm really not a scientist but we get accused of that but we're an experimental philosophy and on the piece of that what we discovered was the next big plank is psychology if you get the philosophy of marketing right you can stack the psychology on top of it and when you get that right you can put the art into marketing the true art which is phenomenal it's these three layers that I want to work with you on I want to get the philosophy right I want to get the psychology right and then I want to do hard together and and that's the only kind of people I'm trying to appeal to on YouTube live if this isn't for everybody this is for people who what I think deeply about their work in their life who want to have meaningful work and meaningful relationships all right now with that in mind I want to go back to the diagram and I want to begin to teach so I'm gonna work you through this and we're gonna linked you to resources but I want to make a suggestion for everybody that's taking the time to hang out with us this is how you should be focusing your entire organization for the next 12 months everything should be about step 5 building this predictive model if I were to go back in our deck I'll just show you the CEO and I of this company are really good friends in step 5 I'll show you how this works with one more really short example but I love this example and I love this guy's name is 19 choco he was the CEO of Piran newswire did the merger with scission very successful very smart took over tlg he has 50,000 travel agents working for him now and I think they drive somewhere between 40 and 50 billion with a B dollars in travel we started a new research project together called travel marketing science where we studied them the industry but before we did that and the reason we did that because the success we had here with PR Newswire and what I want you to see is only one moment of this some of you seen this but I'm going back to the chart I just wanted you to see when I mentioned aim for this with your marketing efforts here's what I'm trying to tell you we did not know when we began testing value proposition whether a PR Newswire is the highest authority in the industry whether PR Newswire has the the fact that it's the best network or the fact that it has the best customer service all of those were facts it invented their industry 60 years ago it was the market leader but you can imagine that the digital age heard it the same way it hurt the newspaper for business and so they had to reinserting everyone I'm imagining I hear you answering me now the essence of marketing is the message and the essence of the message is the value proposition in fact here's what you're gonna see in my approach we just read finished five experiments in facebook I'll show those to you well we'll put them in another program but Facebook itself will be replaced someday by something better but what we're learning about the mind will be true a thousand years from now and was - a thousand years ago and we have a principle here in our lab we only study what will matter a thousand years from now this is the essence of how human beings select choose decide and thus survive thrive or not getting this wrong can have a huge impact this this question see the screen this question which one of these will produce the highest response rate and you'll notice we tested a page it was identical except for the message at the top of the page and each one of these messages stressed a result now if you were to come in here and say oh I know it's this I'd be I'd be pleased with your confidence but I'd question your judgment because I wouldn't know and maybe you know what an I do that's very possible I'm not saying that rhetorically that's really possible but here's what I know most of all I know how to get an answer and I don't trust my own answer until I verified it by getting inside the mind of the customer and so following the methodology we're teaching we tested all three of these and the one that I didn't think would win one the one that I thought was just a threshold but the one that out pulled everything on a vast audience of millions is three number twenty one percent and by the way we found that the other message resonated with certain segments better than the stochastic largest sample size so there was value in all of those messages but the one that resonated and should have been on the homepage was t3 now why is that important because once you know that you know all sorts of things you don't know one thing you know many thing and a wise man learns many things one thing really well so let's go back to the graphic and and by the way Dan often does broadcasts interviews his backgrounds radio it's really fun having him be engineering today because I like ordering him around and and see to make faces at me do you guys know Dan because he's not in here a lot but he'll receive all content and he's been with us with me for about 150 years I think we met in a civil war come up here Dan and just for a second and then I'll shift down I just want you to see Dan because he's always talking to you this is Dan he's dressed up for you today you'll notice that he looks taller than me but in real life he's not I'm I'm much taller he has to bend down to me so I don't look so bad anyway this is Dan Burstein and he's helping us today you'll see his name on lots of things he's brilliant at marketing he knows everybody in the industry and he oversees alright he's like a writing machine he replaced like a team of 30 anyway thanks Dan so all that being said I want to go back over to here and say what you should be doing this year saying I'm gonna figure out my customer I'm gonna figure out the three to five most important things about their mind that will change my business going forward that will transform results and even helped me when I think about products this is just as true for product development as it is for web development now let's go from five backwards so what do you have when you have a customer theory what do you really have what you have is an understanding of which message resonates most and provokes the most action ie it produces a strong conclusion followed by the right yeses in a decision that leads to the action you're after and that may be things like this what matters most to my audience so I'm picking on David because he's my he's become my new friend we met through YouTube live but we've spent a lot of time together he's flown here we've talked understanding in in in in this largest stochastic sample size of David's audience check out his business its carrier law calm it's cool business real value proposition I love what he's doing to help people and my point is it needs to know first of all about these people what matters most of them when they come to you he needs to also know what are they most afraid of he needs to know what negative experiences might be blurring their perception of value or of cost ie risk he needs to know what word combinations ie articulation of our value proposition produces the highest and most positive response set when he starts to build this composite when he can get inside the mind of the customer once he gets that composite he's in a place to win the battle here and this is where it has to be won so how is David gonna get that information well he can get it by talking to people he can he can he can use that in such a way as to find out answers but a lot of times when you ask people about themselves they don't even know the answer themselves we're terrible at evaluating ourself the best way to understand what matters to someone is to follow their tracks backwards so I'm in Florida so imagine this is the beach and this is a set of tracks on the beach when I follow these tracks backwards I'm basically following the behavioural traces into the ontology of the person into the essence of their being I'm using doing to parse being and so if you'll notice back to the diagram what's going on is go buff step 5 I'm working backwards through look for I'm not testing conversion ideas I'm not testing the bosses best thinking I am not testing Flint's ideas I'm testing a hypothesis developed by our team through something we call HD hypothesis development and in such a way as to learn something very clear and very meaningful when marketing does this sales becomes redundant and I didn't say that Peter Drucker did he knew more about marketing probably after 10 - thought than many people do after 10 years of work he was one of the greatest business philosophers I think that the world has ever seen and my point for you is this go backwards from their actions into their essence did you hear that from actions backwards to essence so David I've been thinking about the tone of your copy the headline two key pieces that you built into this latest test and I'm already asking what do I learn based on performance in you know if it goes up if it goes down and what happens next and when we do this we do it through a discipline I'll show you something because I've never shown this I don't think online here before but Dan switched me to the protocol so how do you run these tests you can use a testing tool but the art here is not running a test it's getting the customer psychology right testing is is actually harder than most people think and has to be done with good science and it's being done poorly in a lot of places but there's lots of testing tools and I'm not trying to be in in that business you're looking at a testing system that we built and patented in 2006 that we use to run twenty thousand of our own treatment experiments and to extend our knowledge i've spent a hundred and thirty-eight million dollars building this i'm not selling it right now by the way but I want you to Dan pick a test the goal of this is to study and maintain move to screenshots Dan just for a second we store the screenshots in here and we this is a process that you can implement inside your business that produces the customer theory and if you go like to validity go to the validity tab but Dan just click on validity it also protects you against making poor judgments about your customer by not recognizing validity threats that aren't even showing up in your testing tools now if you're on here say well I don't have that and what is the point of showing me this you're just frustrating me what I want you to see is that you don't need the tool you need the method the tool just automates it for us I can teach you the method stay tuned to these broadcasts take some of our training get the book but you can learn this and embed it in your business we may one day release that to everybody but we haven't we have we're research and see we're not trying to compete with software companies but I have watched for ten years hoping they'd plug the hole and so far they have it all they're doing is telling showing us how to test they're not teaching us what to test and that's the missing element so let's go back to the diagram so what I'm suggesting for you is if you don't have a testing program today you need one and you've got to start getting one right away and it's inexpensive but you've got to start testing because it's the behavioral test they're gonna yield the customer insight so back to the diagram if you will cliff or someone so five follows from four and four is testing that hypothesis with a control of treatment now here's a point for all of you that have thought about testing before you know where the biggest stupidest things anyone ever said about testing when it comes to a business environment you can only change one variable at a time even the people that say that contradict themselves because they change the button but really how many variables are there in a button there's the color there's the shape there's the words there's the drop shadow or not I either the dimensional dimensionality of it I can list a whole sort of things and when they change a button they're already changing a cluster of variables in 2006 we patented variable clusters the idea here is you don't just one variable you test one hypothesis consisting of a set of cohesive variables just knowing that can transform your test results you can download this chart by the way we'll give you a link to it so that you can look at it and study it but I want you to understand the importance of that and then go back to what I taught about the 21 psychological elements and realize that's how you're going to figure out that you're controlling your treatment and I'm gonna move back into step three so what is step three apply the hypothesis to build your treatment we don't need to spend a lot of time there but what you want to do is make sure that you don't hire a designer or an agency and get some great creative ideas that's the road to destruction I have seen so many sites launched and conversion goes down worse it goes down in people don't know it it's bad enough when they realize it but the reality is you should be fielding a cohesive hypothesis and not some set of trendy ideas cool design pieces you're not trying to win an award you're trying to win a customer I mean bringing it back to - I've been teaching that in this session but the second most important thing here is to get that hypothesis right so that it yields the learning and I have other places where I teach that I'm just going to stop there and take you back to the step one observe customer behavior now step one involves a triad that asks three questions its premise is this to get to how you're gonna have to go deeper so if you have a boss that says how can I get more leads how can I get more sales how kind of get more subscriptions that's your how question well you're gonna have to answer that with a hypothesis you don't know the answer to you test it but the way to build your hypothesis is to ask two other more important questions number one what does the data tell us about existing behavior you've got to use that that's the observation phase take me back to the diagram if you would for just a second and what you're going to see is do you see the customer attributes customer that whole series of bullets under observed customer behavior I am watching your behavior to determine something about your essence I am washing your actions to understand your essence I am looking at your ethos and at your practice to understand your ontology you don't need a 50 cent philosophy word you just need a deep understanding that I want to know who you are so I can serve you better but to do that I got asked another question even more profound than this in order of importance I would say this is the number two important question I'd say this is the number three and the easiest one to answer when you get the number one right and this is number one over here this is the one that unlocks the keys to the kingdom why are people behaving this way when you can figure out the wide piece when you get a sense of it might be because of this like why are they abandoning the second step of my car why are more people clicking through from my homepage whatever that behavior is it will lead you to engage the great gift of your mind the great gift that is so far not even near duplication by all the rhetoric and the scientists and the AI investments in the billions and hundreds of billions of dollars no one has been able to create a machine that can do what you do with this mysterious capability but somehow you can pull together at an intuitive level vast amounts of information detect patterns derive implications and CN sirs long before there's a rational trail that points to that answer long before you can spell it out step by step go full screen if you would cliff so for that to happen you need to observe a lot and then you allow you need your mind work and you need if you need to focus your mind with the right questions and how what why pattern gets you to think about a potential answer that leads to back to the diagram a hypothesis H and with that hypothesis as outlined in step two you build your treatment step three then you test them step four and then you take the learnings and build out a customer theory alright I'll challenge you I dare you take the next 12 months and say to yourself I'm going to end these 12 months knowing more about my competition twice as much as I've ever I'm sorry Norma I like my customers twice as much as I've ever known about my customers and way more than my competition knows listen to me forget your competition you'll see a pattern I've talked about it for years the great great businesses are not being run by people who are winners they're being run by people who are builders winners get their position by crushing somebody else and that's generally how they got promoted to their CMO role they beat people in their company or their CEO role they beat other contenders then they get on the job and they want to beat somebody so they look around for a competitor and they try to beat them terrible mindset doesn't produce value it just produces conflict I'm not saying ignore the competition I'm just telling you this your energy should be on knowing the customer if you know the customer better than you know the competitor you won't have to worry about the competitor very much take 80% of the energy you spend worry about competitors and put it on the customer but 20% on the competition and this year will be different for you so my challenge is get this on this diagram put on your wall figure out how to organize your team around it and reach out to us and we'll help you we'll put you an intensive where we'll give you training or we'll tie you up with we'll give you new free resources we developed I want to change how people think I measure success by the impact we have on people like you I know who I'm supposed to serve and I don't want to waste my life doing anything else and I want to help you be better at what you do and I'm just grateful that you give me energy and attention and care enough to be on these programs now I see a question from Yaakov I'm about to end but he's asked a question so I want to look at this what about if you start for the beginning rather than fixing what you have how does it all apply Jakob it begins by doing the kind of research that starts with let's suppose you can rewrite a book I think it's mistaken author makes is to sit down and start planning the book without deeply reflecting on who he's trying to serve with that book if he gets the critic in his mind you'll probably produce the wrong book if he gets the if he gets the industry expert in his mind he's probably gonna produce the wrong book I need a clear picture of who I'm writing for that's what happened we wrote this and I didn't write it for everybody and I said to the publisher when they they wanted to release this four years ago we won't let them I said I don't care how many people read it I just care if the right person reads it and has the right result it brought clarity to me now I say that to you because it's the same thing when you start to start always start with who so Yaakov start with what you already can discern about that customer and then design the system to constantly add information remember your first website is just a set of hypotheses that needs to be quickly iterated into the most effective highest performing version of your message you will always start with the hypotheses but the hypotheses should be built around first of all the cusp and then the message and then the value proposition I hope that answers your question Dave can I ask you guys this because I have tied together many things I've been teaching and part of that bothers me I the part of it bothers because I want to constantly be taking in the new territory but we missed a whole YouTube live session that where I taught some of this we were not able to put it on on YouTube because of technical issues with a sound and so I'm making up for that but also trying to produce this graphic so that you can tie everything I've been teaching for the last three months together in a single picture and then you can take that picture and tie it with those 21 psychological elements and you've really got the beginning of a cohesive sort of approach is am i doing the right thing give me some feedback right now and let me know if you found today helpful so that I can plan what I'm going to do next week and also if you like these graphics there are a lot of work is Maegan in here no Megan designed this for us one of our designer she spent hours many hours getting it right tying it together trying to communicate more effectively and and I need to know that you like that to me to me it's just super important that we arm you with a single picture not just a whole bunch of slides I think powerpoints when the worst things ever happened to learning we take everything apart but we know how to put it back together we don't have a big enough screen to do so I believe and the power of big visuals last thing I'm gonna do I got a page right here from D to IQ comm solutions pull it up right this is the guy from Australia and he said I'd love if you'd review my page so he's in San Francisco today and we are looking at his page team I have probably not five minutes but they're gonna be five dense well-spent minutes don't run away yet stay with me let's help one of the members of our community Andrew let's help you and and also let's learn and then finally let's apply we've been learning so somebody tell me what are the three things the top of this page has to do real quick say it really fast so Dave character there's no good headline he's right it's not a headline that you have right there all right three things three questions what are the three questions where am I that's not crystal clear there's too much white space what can I do here that's not clear at all why should I do it that's not even mentioned so in that fight and that first piece we're missing the most important information payload that needs to be delivered in the first seven seconds of that potential relationship I imagine Andrew and I hope I can be really direct because I want to help you I'm not trying to be harsh but I'm thinking like a customer imagine that you and I don't know each other and today we meet in San Francisco and for some reason I want to have a relationship a friendship let's say but I talked to you the way the top of this webpage is saying well I start by saying a word that doesn't make any sense convoy I don't know if that word is if I walk up to you and say some word that makes no sense we're not off to a good start did I say a package set of integrated operational services for kubernetes so you can get up and running quickly and easily now you haven't said a sentence by the way that looks like a sentence cuz it's a lot of words but when you have a sentence that looks like a lot of words but it's not a sentence you really got a problem because it has no subject it has no subject predicate form thus go fullscreen on that page if you would cliff it has no subject predicate form so you don't have a meaningful message being communicated and then we have another problem all right so Andrew imagine that I'm I'm meeting you I start out with a word that may be nonsensical to you but maybe maybe your prospects know this but I don't and then I say something but it's not a complete sentence let's suppose I walk up you'd say sunny with us twenty percent chance of rain and damp outside if I walk up to you and speak that way there's no way for us to establish a connector which is rapport building and which is essential to the online relationship that's bad enough but having so poorly started am I ready to ask do anything at this point so so smart people on chat tell me what's missing with the call-to-action what's wrong with it well the list is long so let me help you I see the answers coming in if I walk up to you today say in the hotel lobby use a nonsensical word make a statement like I did about the weather that is even a complete sentence and then say dinner tonight you're gonna look at me like are you crazy because I'm asking too much too soon I don't know enough to even begin to answer so here I am request free trial why did I hell what I want a free trial I don't know what it is and I know what happens when I click that button so that button has a problem that I hope everybody looking here will not only 20 help Andrew but you'll be looking at your own site and saying is there any version of this that I'm doing because essentially you all alene learn this before there's a fulcrum here with this ask perceived value perceived costs now if you want to get a lot of conversions perceive value needs to tilt this fulcrum down like my dotted line so that it's like this way there's a lot of perceived value but what happens here is there's no value so go back to the page there's no value I don't know what that really means and with zero value you start hitting me with cost you want me to do something you want me to click do you want me to take a risk I now have two types of psychological resistance forming inside of me two types psychological resistance actually and psychological concern resistance is is like built around so why you asked me to so soon what is this what happens when I click on the free trial are you gonna take me to is this kind of an email me one does it take me to an automatic download do you require a credit card I don't know what's gonna happen next when I respond and if you were to say to me in that hotel lobby follow me to dinner I'd be thinking I'm about to get robbed like what who is this guy why is he asking me for this what's he really up to that's what's being created with at button and then that's not even getting over the anxiety in its full extent so there's tons of friction and anxiety what you really have is this weighs way more than this side and so what you're seeing is the only people converting or people that already know about you or highly motivated back to the page what is the answer when I said am I in the right place what can I do here and why should I do it b2 IQ what is that really I don't know doesn't tell me anything it could be let's take that name you could put that on a piece of software you could put that on on something for educators you could put that on on a certification class you could put that on an app you mean what does the when you got an interchangeable name you already have a problem and so Rutan I don't know right now if you sell sell boats or software for sell boats or software for racing so I could spend more time on the page but I want you to know that it really doesn't matter what comes after this because most people are never going to get there so this is not a page to optimize you need to go back and start over you need to take that 21 psychological elements that we've been teaching for the last three weeks and apply them and sync with a fresh canvas and I'll tell you what if you do that you know we'll figure out a way to try to help you or something just I want to see you succeed Andrew I hope I haven't upset you I am out of time but I wanted to try and help you and I want to thank everybody who has joined us again and I appreciate your comments and your feedback and I shall be back next week with more thank you you