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Jason Friedman, a former theater enthusiast who is now a serial entrepreneur and coach, is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs and small business owners grow and scale their businesses. With a flair for dramatics and a master of storytelling, Jason has founded and exited five successful companies. As CEO of CXFormula, he’s now teaching businesses how to captivate their audiences using his proprietary Kinetic Customer Formula™.
He’s also at the helm of Spotlight Brand Services, guiding e-commerce brands to success on Amazon and beyond.
Join us as we dive into the insights of a leader whose strategies have earned him accolades like Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year, and propelled multiple companies to the top of the Inc. 5000 list.
Guest Links and Info
- Website: cxformula.com
- CX Formula on LinkedIn
- Jason on LinkedIn
- CX Formula on Facebook
Links to episode mentions:
- Recommended books:
- Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
- Pre-suasion by Robert Cialdini
- Favorite game: Clue
- Free gift for the Engagers: gift.cxformula.com/engagers
There are many ways to get in touch with Professor Game:
Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,
Rob
Full episode transcription (AI Generated)
Rob:
Hey, engagers, and welcome to another episode of the Professor Game podcast. And we are very excited to have with us today Jason. But Jason, we need to know, are you prepared to engage?
Jason:
Dude, I am ready to engage. Let’s do this.
Rob:
We have with us Jason Friedman. He’s a former theater enthusiast who’s now a serial entrepreneur and coach dedicated to helping entrepreneurs small business owners grow and scale their businesses. He has a flair for the dramatics and a master of storytelling. He has founded and exited five successful companies. He’s now the CEO of CX, standing for customer experience formula.
Rob:
So CX formula. He’s teaching businesses how to captivate their audiences using proprietary kinetic customer formula trademark. He’s also at the helm of Spotlight brand services, guiding ecommerce brands to success on Amazon and beyond. And you can join us as we dive into the insights of a leader whose strategies have earned him accolades, like the Ernest and Young’s Entrepreneur of the year and propelled multiple companies to the top of the Inc. 5000 list.
Rob:
So Jason, many exciting stuff going on. Is there anything that we’re missing that we need to know before we dive right in?
Jason:
I have three dogs and two amazing children. So other than that, I’m ready to.
Rob:
Do this very important stuff. I completely agree. So, Jason, what does a day with you look like? You’re at the top of the mountain right now and we see this ideal person. We want to see the real person.
Rob:
What is the stuff you do look like in a day to day basis?
Jason:
Man, that’s a great question. Thank you for that. You know, my day starts off very protected. I protect my mornings and it’s something that I think as an entrepreneur, it’s really important because if I wake up and the first thing I do is I check email and I start engaging with other things. Everyone else sets my day.
Jason:
They set the tone of my day. They set the agenda for my day. And I need time for me to set my agenda and to do my routines. So I meditate in the morning, I do some exercise, I spend some time with my kids and my dogs and things like that. So my mornings start out.
Jason:
I have a ritual every morning and I protect that ritual as much as I can. Of course, I travel and I do some other things, but 90% of my time I am on point with my morning ritual. From there, I’m probably like a lot of other people. I have a calendar that I run my day by. As you know, sometimes it gets a little messed up.
Jason:
I messed up our time for recording today. You were so amazing to allow me to do that differently, but I try and show up and be as present as I possibly can for whoever I’m interacting with, whether it be a client, an employee, doing a podcast interview, whatever I can do, I want to be present, and I’m there to serve that audience. And so my days, I’ve been fortunate enough to be in a business coaching program myself for many, many years. My coach was Dan Sullivan from the strategic coach. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of that group, but he taught me very early on.
Jason:
There’s three types of days. You have free days, which are days that are 100% for doing things that are fun for you, that are rejuvenating, that are relaxing. You have focus days, which are 100% focused on the most business appropriate activities. If it’s revenue generating for you or if it’s relationship building, whatever it happens to be, it’s 100% of what you do on those days. And then you have buffer days, which are the days that you use to plan great free days and great focus days.
Jason:
It’s the days that you put. I think of them as, like, the junk drawer day. It’s where you put all the other stuff that you don’t know what to do with it. You just kind of slam it into the buffer days. And so I’ve run my life that way since 2002, believe it or not.
Rob:
Wow.
Jason:
And it has transformed my life. So I have specific intentions about the days and how I handle those days. I have specific intentions about free time off, because what Dan taught me is that if you think of a free day or a day off or what have you as a reward for doing hard work, that’s what most of us do. But what if you thought of it as the day to rejuvenate and set yourself up for the best productivity when you come back? And so I think of those as rejuvenation days in advance.
Jason:
They’re preparation days so that I can be super relaxed, super happy, super fulfilled, and then I come back with a vengeance, ready to do my focus days and my buffer days. And that’s why you need a buffer day to plan a really great free day. And so, yeah, so that’s what my life looks like. I love, I speak on stages. I do a lot of public speaking.
Jason:
As you mentioned, we have an online training program. We also have, like, immersive boot camps that we run. I run a couple masterminds. And so my whole mission is helping entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial business owners create freedom through growing and scaling their businesses. And I love it sounds like there’s.
Rob:
A lot of exciting stuff going on, Jason. Plenty. You know, you’re doing this since 2002. I have a lot of personal questions. I will probably ask you about how you manage those, especially now, knowing that you have kids and dogs.
Rob:
That makes it a lot more exciting. But I want to dive, at least for now, into a question, which is, you know, one of those things that we learn the most from it, and it’s from those fail moments or first attempt in learning.
Jason:
Right.
Rob:
We want to be there with you, especially if it has to do with your customer experience formula or customer experience methods in general. Because as you know, we are a podcast focused on gamification, which is all about the customer or the user or the player experience. So we want to be there with you and figure out what happened. Now, do you get out of it or what did you learn? At the very least?
Jason:
Yeah, I’ll be very candid. I’ve not failed much in customer experience. Now, that doesn’t mean that you don’t start an initiative that you think is going to go well, and it didn’t, and you have to pivot. But the very nature. So the way.
Jason:
Let me just define customer experience so that we’re all talking about the same thing, because it’s a big word, right? So customer experience is the perception that your customer, or your user, whatever you want to call it, of their perception of their interactions, with your brand, with your business, with your game, with your program, with your whatever, it’s how they feel after the interactions. Okay? So customer experience is about feelings. There’s a great quote by Maya Angelou, the famous poet, that said, people will forget what you did and they’ll forget what you said, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.
Jason:
And that’s incredibly true. And so a lot of people think that you deliver a customer experience, and while you do, the experience is the effect. It’s not the cause. It’s what happens after they had all the steps across your journey. That’s what that experience is.
Jason:
How do they feel? And so we can take people on a better ride. And we love gamification. Right? It’s something I teach within our programs.
Jason:
It’s something that I help people implement because there’s so much important stuff that comes out of game strategy, game design, game thinking that we miss. But going back to the customer experience, here’s the thing. When you start to focus on your customer as if you were your customer, like, you step inside their shoes and you start to experience their journey from their vantage point. And you make things better for them, you make things easier for them. You remove what we call friction points, obstacles out of their way.
Jason:
All of a sudden, everything improves. It can’t not improve. And so when I say, like, we haven’t really failed, our whole focus of our entire business, everything we teach, everything we support people with, is how do we make it easier for our customers to win, period. And that doesn’t mean that I want in, like, games, like we want to. Obviously, we want them to have some challenges.
Jason:
We don’t want it to be so easy that they don’t have to put in effort. But, I mean, we make sure that they’re moving forward, they have momentum. We remove the things that are stopping them from continuing. And so it’s really important to understand the perspective from the user, from the customer. And what I found in almost every business that I’ve worked with is that it really is one sided.
Jason:
As business owners, as entrepreneurs, as practitioners, whatever your business happens to be, we look at it through the lens of our business because it’s our eyes. That’s what we’re seeing. But you mentioned in the beginning, my background is in theater. I started doing theater when I was eight years old. Believe it or not.
Jason:
I was backstage. I was behind the scenes guy. Sets, lights, sound, props, you name it. But you learn. Everything you do is for that audience.
Jason:
Everything is for the audience. It’s to get a reaction. It’s to make sure they understand the script. So we enhance it with all the senses, all the different dimensions. It’s not just the words they’re saying.
Jason:
It’s the costumes they’re wearing while they’re saying the words. It’s the props that are in their hands. It’s the backdrop behind them. It’s the way the lighting hits them. It’s the music that’s underscoring what they’re saying.
Jason:
It’s all the things. And they’re all choreographed so that we guarantee the reaction that we want. And so in business, that’s what we help people do with customer experience. We help them remove the distractions and figure out what are all the pieces that have to be in play to help people have that experience, to go on that journey where they will feel what we want them to feel when we want them to feel it, so that they do get to the finish line, so that they do level up, so that they do what we call have the ideal result, which is that they rave about the experience they had. They return to buy more products and services from you.
Jason:
They renew their ongoing subscriptions or memberships with you. And most importantly, they go out there, and they don’t just refer people to you. They recruit people to you. They go out and they tell people, you have to go work with Roberto. He’s amazing.
Jason:
His program, fantastic. Like, it changed my life. And then those people say, well, if you said that, it must be great. Let me go find out how to join Roberto’s program. And so that’s how we think about this.
Jason:
So, like, I fail in a lot of ways in my life, and I love failure in that. I think you’re either winning or you’re learning. I don’t think of it as failure. And so my failures have been the best education I ever got. I used to joke around with my dad.
Jason:
He’s like, you know, I paid for college for you. I’m like, that’s awesome. I said, I have paid for seven PhD from all my failures and all the things that I’ve learned doing that. So I’ve spent so much money. I’ve had a couple failed businesses that just didn’t work out.
Jason:
They should have. They had all the right ideas and all that, but they just didn’t work. And so I learned from them. Like, why didn’t they work? What were the reasons why?
Jason:
Because it seemed like a solid concept. And so I take the time to analyze. The value is in the debrief of what was working or what wasn’t working. And it’s either you’re winning or you’re learning. And when you can take that on as a gestalt or a way you operate, it is one of the most freeing and liberating things you could do, especially with your whole team.
Jason:
Also, like, as an organization, it changes the culture of your business, and it’s such a powerful way to frame things up. What did we learn? And then people start to look for that. And success leaves clues, and so do mistakes or failures or there’s new opportunities that arise from that. And so when I have issues and we do a postmortem every time, we call it experience transformer.
Jason:
And when we go through that, we’re like, okay, if we had to write five laws of what thou shalt not or thou shalt always, what would they be from this experience? And we learn and we document it and we live it. And so we’ve gotten better and better and better because we believe it. We practice what we preach, and that’s what we teach our clients, as well.
Rob:
Makes a lot of sense. I love it. I liked it. I love the way and you say it as well to frame that there’s no such thing as failure because failure is not final, it’s not fatal, at least most of the times. And we’re not in the medical sector, at least not you and I.
Rob:
There’s always something that you can sort of something that you can do about it, so to speak, which is what we’re after. Is there maybe quickly one time, as you were saying, you know, it was not final, it was not fatal or anything like that. That one of the mistakes that happened. And how did this mindset that you’re mentioning right now help you get through it and actually, of course, actually get something good instead of something bad out of such an experience, which is what people would be expecting usually.
Jason:
Yeah, that’s a great question. Right. So my biggest company, we did over 150 million in sales. We had a team of over 2000 full time equivalents in countries all across the world. So it was a big company for me.
Jason:
It’s not a publicly traded company, but it was a privately held company. And we grew from me and my living room as an employee one to that. So it was significant. One of our biggest clients was a very well known financial institution in the US. I’m going to leave their name off to protect the innocent and the guilty.
Jason:
But they had just recently purchased a big bank, but a smaller bank in the northeast of the US. And so they were in like from Massachusetts down to DC kind of area in that kind of northeast corridor. And so we had been working with the smaller bank. And when they bought them, they loved what we were doing so much. Like one of the reasons they bought them was their growth strategy was working.
Jason:
We were a big part of that. And so they were having this kind of coming out party, if you will, as the new brand. So they were going to launch it. And so they were building a couple new branches in Times Square, New York. And so if you’ve ever been to Times Square, it’s very flashy, trashy, it’s got lots of like led screens, jumbotrons, lights.
Jason:
Like it’s busy, it’s touristy, it’s a crazy area. And so the storefront for this brand new store, the whole signage, everything, was this gigantic led video screen that we were going to be able to play games on and interact with and announce the opening. And then they were going to be able to like win prizes, all sorts of great stuff. And so all this had to be there for what we called customer day one, CD one. And we had months and months of planning, like probably more than months and months.
Jason:
It was probably a year in planning, if not even longer than that, maybe. But, like, we were coming down to it. One of our responsibilities, we did all the in store technology, we did all the media, the content strategy. We also supplied the jumbotrons, the leds. And so our vendor was lying to us about where they were in the process.
Jason:
And we had paid them a good portion of their money. And as I mentioned, this was actually the storefront. This was what separated the inside from the outside. Like, without this, there was no security. There was no way to stop the cold from coming in or the heat.
Jason:
Like, it’s stopping burglars. Like, this was literally the front part of the facility, and it was all the marketing and the signage and the messaging. And so we found out the vendor was lying, lying, lying, and then finally something seemed fishy, and we started interrogating further. And then it was being made in. It was in Utah.
Jason:
I may be misspeaking. I think it was in Utah. We flew out there and it wasn’t even started. And we were four weeks away from opening. I met with the team.
Jason:
I said, listen, I am not going to them and just telling them that we mess this up. What are we going to do to not affect customer day one? This is on us. How are we going to solve this? We came up with 20 different options.
Jason:
We use this crazy idea, which actually, I’m going to give your audience a free gift later. I’m going to tell them this way to think about stuff. This is a strategy we used here. It’s really awesome. Anyway, we brainstormed using this special technique, and we came up with a lot of ideas, like I said, and we whittled it down to, like, the three best.
Jason:
And I flew down to meet the client, and when I got down there, she was like, uh oh. I’m like, what’s up? She’s like, you don’t come see me unless I ask you to come see me. What’s wrong? And so it was like one of those, like, and I probably looked nervous, like, I didn’t feel good about this.
Jason:
And. But we literally trusted our suppliers and we believed them, and we were sharing appropriate information. Anyway, I said to her name was Michelle. I said, listen, michelle. I said, we’ve been partners for a long time.
Jason:
We just found out that our vendor has not been fully transparent with us about where they’re at, and they are not going to be ready in time for customer day one. And she’s like, oh, my God. I said, I know that was my first reaction, too. I said, but I brought our whole team together, and we came up with three options that let us have a solution for customer day one, and then a solution to retrofit what we’re going to suggest to you as an option. And it’s all on us.
Jason:
It’s our cost. Like, it’s not going to cost you a nickel, but we want to make sure that this works. And before I even showed her the solution, she’s like, that’s what I fricking love about you. You don’t come to me with problems. You come to me with solutions.
Jason:
Thank God you’re on my team. And I hadn’t even showed her the options. And we looked at the options, and we came up with a hybrid of, like, a little bit from one and then something from three. And that was great. And so the experience that we created for her was one of trust, respect, responsibility, creativity, and that we are a partner.
Jason:
We’re in this with them, and we are going to do whatever we need to make this right. She knew immediately that it was going to cost us a ton of money to do this, and so we ended up going with this hybrid situation. Basically, we had to build a special steel frame that would go in and plug the hole that would allow us to put a rental unit in that’s different than the actual one and make that all work. And then when the actual one’s ready, we’re going to have to pull it out, get street closure permits, and do it like in this, like, crazy overnight union crazy fees and whatever we had to do, but it was on us. And obviously, we passed a lot of that onto the manufacturer of the screen.
Jason:
But, you know, we solved it, and they had a customer day one, on the day they wanted. It was awesome. Nobody in the world knew that it wasn’t the real thing except for us. And, like, it’s in theater, the show must go on. You sell an audience, they’re coming there.
Jason:
Failure is not an option where I come from. And so with a client, with an employee, whatever, I will do everything I can to meet our obligation. I will do everything I can to meet their expectation. And one of the big pieces of what we teach people is about setting and managing expectations. And so to me, if you don’t set an expectation, somebody has one on their own.
Jason:
So whether you set it or not, they have one. So if you set it or when you set it, you have a good chance of meeting it. So we set an expectation with them, and then I wanted to live up for that, to that expectation of, we’re going to deliver. But then I’m also going to go above and beyond. I don’t like people to chronically over deliver.
Jason:
Some people think it’s always over delivered. I always over deliver. Well, guess what? When you always over deliver, you’re actually setting the norm at over delivery. So it’s not special anymore.
Jason:
There has to be a lower level for there to be a higher level. Like, if the tide’s always higher, higher, there’s never low tide, so you don’t know it. And so what we do with people when we help them map out this journey and start thinking about it, it’s like, let’s establish a really great rhythm, because we think about it like a choreography or a symphony. It has highs and lows. It has soft and loud.
Jason:
It has faster and slower and has different voices of different instruments. And altogether, it makes music, and it takes you on a journey. You feel something, and I want your experience to be out there in that way, too. So I want to surprise and delight you with an over delivery moment, because that’s like when the orchestra does something very loud and punchy in it, you feel it, and I want you to feel that in the experience, but I don’t want that to be all you get, because what happens when you always over deliver is you also overwhelm. And so it’s that fine balance, and that gives us all the ability, just like in, like, gamification.
Jason:
I’m sure what you teach, you get to be an artist. You’re a creative. You get to design how your customers experience this stuff in a way that helps them have more fun, have more impact, get to the results that they want most want and why they came to you in the first place. And most importantly, helps them move towards that result at every possible juncture. And that’s what we do.
Jason:
And that failure, like, when I rallied the team and I went down there, I was very clear what I wanted her to say to me was, thank God you’re our partner. Like, I knew that going in. That’s what I wanted the result to be, that the three options that I brought there, I had the other 18 or 17 options that we came up with in my bag also, but I didn’t want to overwhelm her and have her not come up with anything, so I had more. And I said to her, look, I said we came up with 20 or something different options, but I think these are the three. Knowing you guys, having worked with you as a partner, I think these are three of the best, and maybe there’s some kind of hybrid or we’ll tweak it together.
Jason:
But I didn’t want to come here empty handed just saying we can’t do it. And so I decided what that was. And one of the strategies I teach people in our programs is just that, reverse engineer it. What do you want your customers to say at the end of whatever the interaction is, a meeting, an entire journey, a round of your game, a certain level, whatever it is, what do you want them to say about that experience? And so I knew what I wanted her to say, and I went in there to get her to say that, and I had to earn that, and I did.
Jason:
And so that deepened our relationship. After that, they probably gave us, man, I’m making this up now. It’s a long time ago. This is back in my other company, but probably 20 million more dollars of business, right? Or more.
Rob:
It made sense. Right? And Jason, like, you’ve described this so eloquently and in so much detail, I love it, that it begs the question, like, when you are designing an experience or in this case, fixing a situation, I’m guessing that you run through some form of a method, a process. We want to be in your head for a little while and in a short three, maybe five minutes at most. Here.
Rob:
How do you do it? Like, what would be the steps or maybe an overall thing? I don’t know if the gift at the end has anything to do with that. I don’t know. Whatever you want to go for.
Jason:
Yeah, I mean, look, when you’re designing an experience, like, if we’re talking about an experience, you start at the end, if you like. Again, I’m a theater person, so what I most want you to do, the number one key, is that you have to deeply understand your customers better than they understand themselves. And so the best way I know how to do that and the way I teach people how to do that is the way actors do that. How do you get into character? How does, like, Matthew McConaughey or whoever your favorite star is, how do they go from being Matthew McConaughey to that actor on film that you believe?
Jason:
Is that actually that actor? It’s not Matthew anymore. Like, they use these different methods of how to really understand that customer, how to learn more about them. So most people, as we start to talk about, quote, avatar, we start to understand, like, how is it male or female? Where do they live?
Jason:
How much money they make? What’s their age, what’s their demographic? Maybe what’s their religion? Maybe what brands do they like? Maybe what do they read?
Jason:
Maybe what magazines do they like? Maybe what other games do they play? And we get to understand that that’s cool, but I want to know what’s keeping them up at night. What are they avoiding while they’re doing all these other things? And they are sad and upset and depressed that they’re avoiding that.
Jason:
What did they have for breakfast? What are they most ashamed about? And so, like, if you’re really gonna be believable, if you’re trying to become this character on stage, it takes different questions, it takes different ways of looking at them. And what most people forget is a customer journey doesn’t begin when they first meet you. That’s a big mistake.
Jason:
The journey begins for that customer way before that, when they figure, I have a problem, I’m looking for a solution, or I want that. And so they go on this whole journey before they even meet you. And a lot of times they have problems going on in their life that they’re trying to solve with your things. So they have all the noise, all the crazy, all that stuff. Then they go out into the market and they find all sorts of different competing information.
Jason:
They’re overwhelmed, they’re overstimulated, and then they find you. And we often forget about all that other stuff. Or they never even considered that there was all that other stuff. So when you can understand that customer and walk in their shoes, put on their glasses, and understand their journey, you start to become able to explain stuff in a way that makes them feel understood, and that changes the game. And so once you’re in character and you really understand them, I want you to go to the end.
Jason:
What do they really want? An example I will typically give is, let’s say that I wanted to lose 20 pounds. And I’ve tried every diet program out there, and they never all work, and I always go back to my bad habits, and it’s a mess. And then I met Roberto. And you’re selling a program.
Jason:
And my first experience was, wow, this feels different. Like, what he’s talking about makes sense to me in a different way. It’s not just eating less and exercising more. It’s other things in lifestyle that are going to make sense. So I want to try this.
Jason:
So I pay for the program and I go through it. And as I’m describing it, I’m giving a testimonial here. I’m like, from the very first moment, it was amazing. So that’s fantastic. And when they get to the end, it’s like, you know what I realized after working with Roberto?
Jason:
I’ve lost more than 20 pounds. But it wasn’t about losing the 20 pounds. It was about getting my life back. I was that guy that used to sit on the couch, and my friends would call me to go out, and I would say no because I didn’t have things in my closet that would fit, and I didn’t do it. And I got to the point where I was just not even picking up their phone call.
Jason:
Now I am the one that’s calling everybody, wanting to go out. I got my life back. That’s what you want people to feel. And so as you go through this journey as them, you can start to say, what do I need to do for them to get that result and say those words? How do they need to think and expect about things?
Jason:
What do they need to be using? Who do they need to be interacting with? And how do they feel at every single touch point along the journey? Because our kinetic customer formula takes into effect, into consideration attitudes, behaviors, friction, and momentum. And so we teach this formula.
Jason:
We show you how to implement it. What we do is we help you put an operating system in your business that will deliver this consistently night after night. And like I said, it’s all modeled after theater. I remember the day I learned this. It was, we were doing a show, and it was actually Jesus Christ Superstar.
Jason:
And I was on the production team. I was the assistant lighting designer, and I was also going to be on the show, doing the lighting for the show. And we were sitting there talking about, like, what do we want the audience to feel at different moments? And at the end, what do we want them to say? And literally, we had the script, we had the music, but we actually went through and, like, what has to happen?
Jason:
How does the. Like, this needs to be more upbeat. This needs to be this way. We want the audience to feel engulfed. So we want to come out and break that wall and be in the audience.
Jason:
We want to do this, and we want them to clap. We want them to jump up. We want them to sing along here, we want this to happen there. And we built that. And then they did that.
Jason:
And we went to a different city, like every other night, or sometimes it was a week, but we had a different audience in each city every other night. And like clockwork, every audience, they laughed at the same spot, they cried at the same spot, they jumped at the same spot, they clapped at the same spot, they sang with us at the same spot. And that was not an accident. That was intentional. That was by design, not by default.
Jason:
And so as you start to think about your journey, if you can write that, what I call that ideal customer script, write what you want them to really say. And it’s not just, I lost 20 pounds. It is a testimonial of their journey, of what was going on in their head, how they overcame that, what moments had them feel great, how did it help them move forward? And ultimately, what does it look like today when you can do that? That gives you the blueprint for what to do to engineer your experience, your game system, your journey, whatever it is, it gives you the roadmap to get them to that place, and that’s how you do it.
Rob:
Awesome.
Jason:
Yeah, it’s the only way that I know to do it. Absolutely. Every single time. And listen, we have some customers. We miss all of my customers.
Jason:
Like, they focus on an avatar. You might have ten avatars in your business. You might have four, you might have five. You got to do this for every single one of them because it’s different. There’s nuance between them.
Jason:
But when you do this with that kind of intentionality and with actually stepping into their shoes, your business is going to transform. I promise you that.
Rob:
I love it. I love it. Thank you, Jason, for giving us so, again, so much detail, so much insights. You’re an over deliverer saying before, at least on this podcast, which I am extremely happy about having you on so very quickly on a couple of sentence, is there a good practice? You know, anything that you would say if you are thinking about the customer experience, do this small or not so small thing, and your project is at least going to be a little bit better.
Rob:
No need for silver bullets, but something that is a good practice.
Jason:
Yeah. So number one most important thing is go through the experience as if you were your customer and take away the friction points. Remove things that make it hard, especially in the beginning. And number two, get people a quick win from the second they start with you, whatever that is. A course, a game, a workshop, listening to a podcast, whatever it happens to be the time to first value.
Jason:
The shorter the amount of time from someone starts something till they get a win, the more they will trust you, the more they will commit to staying engaged. And so what is a win? A win is a perception of value, a perception that I got some thing that was positive. It’s not everything you teach. It’s not everything they go through.
Jason:
They have to win something quickly. And then look at the next win and the next win and the next win. Those are the two things that I would start with.
Rob:
Totally. I love it. I love it. So, Jason, you’ve gone through the interview now. You kind of have a vibe to what we are discussing here.
Rob:
Would you recommend somebody for the podcast? Is there somebody that you would like to hear actually answering these questions in a future interview, a future guest?
Jason:
Wow. I think there’s a bunch of people I could introduce you to, actually. I’d be happy to. I need to think about it for a minute, but, yeah, I mean, cool.
Rob:
No worries.
Jason:
It would be my honor. Absolutely.
Rob:
And so you keep it on that thought process. Is there any book that you would recommend? And what would be that book?
Jason:
Oh, gosh, there’s so many great books. One of my favorite books is actually predictably irrational by Dan Ariely, and he’s a behavioral economist. Like, if you know the book, it’s a great book. It helps you understand positioning, packaging. I think that’s great.
Jason:
I think any book by Robert Cialdini, so presuasion is one of my favorites by him, I think is awesome for people that are doing marketing and trying to understand how to help people. Made to stick by Chip and Dan Heath, I think is another great book.
Rob:
Okay. Okay. We were going for one. You gave us three over deliver. Amazing.
Jason:
Sorry, man. Can’t help it. Love it.
Rob:
No, no, I absolutely love it. I would say we have a question about the superpower. Right. So what would you say is your superpower? And it doesn’t have to be exclusive.
Rob:
Maybe other people have it as well, but that thing that helps, helps you stand out from the crowd.
Jason:
Yeah. So what I’ve been told that my kind of zone of genius, if you will, is simultaneously using the right brain and the left brain to come up with creative and executable solutions that will help people move forward. And so that’s what I, that’s what I do.
Rob:
Cool. Good stuff. And speaking about games, we haven’t gone super deep into that sort of side of things, but what would you say is your favorite game?
Jason:
The favorite one that I waste a lot of time on my phone when I’m trying to avoid things. Or in general, I think my favorite game, actually all time. And it’s a board game, but I love clue.
Rob:
That’s actually, I would say, or at least it was for a good long while. My wife’s favorite game? Board game.
Jason:
Oh, yeah. I love that game. I still play with my kids. Yep.
Rob:
Yep. So, jason, thank you very much for all of the insights you’ve given. Before we take off, of course, let us know where we can find out more about you. If you have any call to action, any final piece of, final piece of advice you want to give us, the microphone is yours at this point.
Jason:
Oh, thanks, man. So if you want to know anything more, you can definitely hop over to our website, which is at cx formula.com dot. There’s lots of resources there and you can learn more about some of our programs. But what I mentioned before, I want to give you a free gift. So you’re not going to find this gift on our website.
Jason:
There’s a special page that you can go to that’s gift gift dot cx formula.com slash engagers. It’s a special page just for this audience and I’m gonna play a little game with you. How about that? I’m not gonna tell you what it is, mystery box. But yeah, mystery box.
Jason:
But I gotta tell you this. This is the strategy we used with my client that I mentioned. It is a thinking strategy with an execution strategy. In this, it’s a PDF. It’ll take you less than ten minutes to go through.
Jason:
And everyone that I have taught this strategy to or has looked at this, it has changed fundamentally, changed the way they think about a lot of stuff. It’s fundamentally helped their business, it’s helped personal relationships, it’s helped professional relationships, and it’s super fun. So go there, download it. No cost, no obligation, no nothing. Just a pure give.
Jason:
I would love to ask two things, though. If you download it, actually go through it. Don’t let it just sit on your hard drive and be something you never look at. We put a lot of time into it and I really want it to help people. That’s why I do what I do.
Jason:
And number two, if you do something with it, shoot me an email. My email is going to be on it. I’m going to send you the stuff in an email. It really goes to me. Nobody else sees it but me.
Jason:
Tell me what you thought. Tell me how you used it. I really want to help people. And the more feedback I get, the better we get. So, yeah, that’s it.
Jason:
And Roberto, thank you so much for having me on here. Maybe we can do another one of these at some point, jump into some other strategies. But it was super fun. You created a great experience for me. Thank you.
Rob:
That’s great. Love having you on the show. However, as you know, and as the engagers definitely know by now, at least for now, and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. Engagers, thank you for listening to the professor. Game podcast, and if you want more interviews with incredible guests, please go to professorgame.com subscribe and get started on our email list for free.
Rob:
We’ll be in contact. You’ll be the first to know of any of our opportunities that arise or that are already existing, and we will have them available just for you. Please remember before you go on to your next mission, before you click continue, remember to follow or subscribe whatever that looks like on your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of professor game. See you there.
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