Jeremy Weisz 15:00
What are some of the pieces in, we’ve talked about the customer journey, and that you’ve thought through because you’ve crafted CX Formula, which is what have you built into CX Formula? Because you eat your own dog food and fit this that help them with the customer journey of CX Formula.
Jason Friedman 15:21
I mean, we try and give people that amazing experience. Now, one thing I’ll point out, and this is true for all of us, is that, Murphy’s law exists, right? It’s a real law like something, if something can go wrong, it will go wrong at some point. So in my world, creating great experiences, not that everything goes right. It’s how you handle it when things don’t go, right. So we do our best to make it smooth and frictionless and amazing. And if something is not, we step up to the plate, and try and not only triage the situation that just happened if it happens if it goes wrong, but also improve the process so that in the future, that doesn’t happen again.
So we learn from those mistakes, right. So like, for example, like when people first join, we have a program called the Kinetic Customer Formula. And I can talk more about what that actually means in a second. But when people took that, so last year, we launched that new program, it’s really like what we’re most proud of the work that we’ve done over the last 30 years of our lives, Jeremy like, it’s really kind of like a masterpiece of what we built. And it’s improving, right, it’s always getting better. But we did this through three-day immersive workshops, where people would fly in, and we take them through this journey. And when I tell you that every single moment, from when they first said, yes, the emails, they got the conversations, we had the calls they had to their arrival experience, and all the way through the workshop, every moment was crafted and choreographed.
Like there was nothing that happened by accident for the whole thing, now, there were some surprise and delight moments that we thought of as we were going. And so those happened on purpose. And they were kind of planned in as we were feeling the vibe of the group that was there. And we were tailoring the experience of that audience, we would add some cool things and some features, right? So for example, we actually had a group of entrepreneurs from Portugal come all the way over to the US to take this program. So no. I mean, it was expensive to just fly here and the logistics of travel right, which was on them, we take care of everything else. But part of our program in the workshop series in these intensives is that we provide meals around all the meals we provide a welcome reception, we do all the things to make it really cool. And even when they come into our space, it’s really awesome.
Like it’s set up in a way I don’t want to spoil a surprise if anybody ever decides to take me up on it. But it’s a cool vibe space. And it’s got unexpected things that happen or even just the layout, and the furniture and the surroundings are not what people expect when they come to a workshop. So there’s a little bit of a wow factor surprise just when people come in. But like these guys, they had never been to a Japanese hibachi restaurant, like where they cook on the tables like most of us in America. We’ve been there, right? We’ve seen it whatever, there happens to be a really amazing one here. And so we accidentally found that out and we switched our reservations, we changed our contract. And we brought them to that place because it was going to be something that none of them had ever experienced. It was going to be a new wow, kind of experience for them. Is it earth-shattering?
No. But it was earth-shattering to them. And we brought a couple stretch limos out to actually take them in the stretch that was because they had never been in a stretch limo in the us all and most of them had not been to the US before, I think two of them had and maybe had been a limo. But they don’t have gigantic vehicles like that in Portugal, they’re there, they just don’t have it. So it was just a way to like as we are learning who they were and what their experiences had been in the past, we made some pivots to actually custom tailor and kind of customize the experience to that audience. And so they were blown away. So in our experience in our journey, which we call a kinetic pathway, like you have a journey now we transform it into a kinetic pathway by removing friction by inducing and adding what we call momentum boosters, or momentum inducers.
And we use those to help propel people through the difficult parts or even to get an extra spurt of wow, if you will Extra Booster Wow juice into the mix. But it’s like little things like that. They were all taking videos of it. They were putting it on social media, they couldn’t believe how cool it was. And again, it just took a little bit of thought it wasn’t crazy expensive, more so than what we were planning previously. And it was just part of the journey and they were thrilled. So what are the moments that you have like getting to a restaurant for a bunch of people that are out of town, it could have been like a big boss, it could have been Ubers, it could have been anything. We chose to do stretch limos and we had certain music playing in the limos for them that was kind of cool and setting the mood and whatever. When they walked in the restaurant, they were all greeted. And it was a very lovely evening.
Jeremy Weisz 20:08
Like America is amazing.
Jason Friedman 20:12
Of course, right. And they really left thinking like, oh my gosh, like, we need to open up one of these in our country, like, I probably created some entrepreneurial like seizures for them that night.
Jeremy Weisz 20:22
What else should people know about the Kinetic Customer Formula?
Jason Friedman 20:25
Yeah, and thanks for asking. Like, I think, Jeremy like, here’s the thing, right? We have customers that have potential if you go back to science class, right, there’s two types of energy, there’s potential energy, which is energy that could do something that has the ability to do work, but it’s not in motion. And then you have kinetic energy, that’s energy in motion, right. And so I use an analogy, a lot of a rocket ship, you have this ship sitting on the launch pad, it’s got all the fuel, it’s got everything, but there’s no rocket ignition yet, that has a massive amount of potential, it can go to the moon, right? But it’s not. It’s just sitting there. It has inertia, it has gravity holding it down, when they light those rocket boosters, and they ignite the flames and they start to take off all of a sudden that all that potential is transformed and converted into kinetic energy, energy and motion.
And in the very beginning, it takes a lot more energy to get that rocket ship off the pad, because it has again, the forces of inertia and it has gravity holding it down like glue. As it gets further and further up, those rocket boosters, they all kind of fall off. And now you have this rocket that can just almost easily move around. It doesn’t need all that same momentum boosting it. Now it’s in a kinetic state, and it has so much more ability to be flexible and move through it. Your customers are the same way. They come in and they have potential but they’re not taking action, they’re not in momentum. And it’s our job to defeat that inertia to get them in action to get them getting results and to induce and boost them with momentum. And that rocket fuel to the point where now we don’t need as much energy, we just have to keep directing them and guiding them when they’re already in that flow.
That is a kinetic customer, that and the pathway when we really take what is your kind of historical journey, whether you’ve designed your journey or not. Your customers have one, right? Newsflash, right. So better to do it by design. And by default, right. And when we do it with intention, when we design it, we choreograph it, we put all the things that we teach in that program into it, then it’s a kinetic pathway. And it will almost fluidly move and effortlessly move your clients through that with a little bit of that hard work upfront in that onboarding phase to overcome the inertia and the gravitational force that’s stopping them from taking action in the first place. That makes sense.
Jeremy Weisz 22:46
Yeah, you’re bringing back in my science and physics says, I wish you were my teacher, maybe I would have actually done better in physics, if you taught me like that.
Jason Friedman 22:55
I mean, like, it’s interesting, I had a lot of fun and physics. Drew, my partner and I both we enjoyed physics. But the point is, like, we just, there’s laws, right? These are like, like, universal laws of how the world works. And we don’t take them into consideration when it comes to our customers. And it’s a shame, right? And, and there’s also a lot of psychology that comes in this too, right? So in our program, the science part of the lesson’s pretty short, right? We don’t want you to feel like you just got a bunch of it, right? Like, we’re not going to be jargony. But there are some kind of base fundamentals that I think everyone has to understand in order to get us to that next level. Right? So we talk a little bit about the gravitational kind of challenges, right? And what is friction?
What is momentum? And how does that play in. And then we also talk a lot about psychology, right? There’s these cognitive biases, which are things that are like tricks that our mind plays on us, in order to use less energy, right, so our brain likes to find shortcuts. So it can spend its calories, doing other things. So we have habits, which hopefully make things like more second nature, so we don’t have to think about them all the time. And we also have these cognitive biases, their preconceived notions based on past experience, or things that are happening that like, allow our brain to not spend so much energy. And it can be really detrimental to our, as an individual our success, it can be the things that kind of stop us from taking action or make us misunderstand something that might be good for us. Because we had a bad experience in the past.
And we’re kind of hanging on to that. So we really go into some of the psychology behind it to so that, as a business owner, when you start to understand these fundamentals, you start to be able to really step into the customer’s mind and understand them on a deeper level. Right. We put out a document years ago, a few years ago, it’s still relevant. It’s on our website. It’s called The Seven Customer Experience Killers That Are Destroying Your Bottom Line, right. And so, one of the killers is what we call an expectation mismatch, right? It’s the expectation mismatch trap. Like, if you’re not setting the expectations that your customers are going to have, and setting them at the right time, then they’re going to have an expectation that will not be matched up. And more often than not, their expectation is higher. And so they’ll be disappointed. And so now you’re battling disappointment, instead of battling satisfaction, or even joy, which is obviously the Holy Grail.
So that’s one of them. Another one is really not knowing how deep to go with your customers, right. And so when I talk about the expectation part, like if they have expectations, because you really didn’t understand them, that’s one level. But if they have all these cognitive biases, like if they bought two online courses before to use that same example. And now each of those courses, one of them they never logged into, because they just couldn’t get past the initial onboarding, the other one they logged into, but they thought it was such basic information that it was like a waste of their money. And they even asked for a refund. And so they’re like, all online courses suck.
I don’t know why I just bought this, I got excited in the moment, but I’m not even gonna waste my time. That’s a cognitive bias, your course might be the most amazing thing ever were like, literally the person that just didn’t log in, would be thinking, if they did, wow, looks like he made this course for me, or she made this course for me. But they didn’t get there because they have this preconceived notion that’s stuck. And so when you can go deeper on really understanding your customers, and we use some theater tricks to help you do that. And ways like, Matthew McConaughey, Robert De Niro, like actors used to get into character, we give you some of those tips, tricks, tools, so that we can really go deeper into understanding our customers than most people do.
Everyone talks about avatar or persona, everyone has a way to do it. And they all get you a lot of the basic, I’ll call geographical and demographical information. But if you had to step into the character, and play them, portray them on stage or in a movie, and really kind of be able to articulate the words are saying, I’ve got you, I can show you how to do that very easily. And again, it’s the way that actors have been doing it forever. So we bring some of that crazy background that I have in my partner who has been to the course. And we use theater as a kind of a model and a metaphor to help you have some hacks and tricks and tips that will like really help you get where you need to go.
Jeremy Weisz 27:26
Jason, what’s an example of a theater trick?
Jason Friedman 27:31
Well, so one example is like, how do you get into character? Right? So I mean, this is going to be another one of those kinds of like, seems like a science lesson, right? But essentially, there was a Russian theater director by the name of Constantine Stanislavski, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, who was kind of an actor and a director, and was just kind of frustrated that whenever somebody would get on stage, they weren’t believable, like when they were acting on stage, you were just like, okay, this is garbage. This isn’t good. And so he built a way to get into character. And it’s by going through different kinds of role-play exercises, and really understanding that person.
I won’t get into all the boring details right now. But it’s pretty cool. And so then that got kind of expanded out later with what they call the method acting. And so that was kind of like Stanislavski on steroids. And so that’s like, how, like Matthew McConaughey, he was trained and De Niro and some of those guys, right. So what it really is giving you an actual way to step into the shoes of the customer, and believably be able to portray them. Instead of you having to portray them, we have you believably be able to understand what’s going on in their head, because that’s how you portray them, you really get the, one of my friends calls it like the itty bitty shitty committee inside the head, the things that are talking them down, or it’s what’s like the inner conflict, the inner struggle that they have, that’s not having them take action, they bought 40 other products before 40 other courses, or they’ve tried on their own for five years. And they’ve never gotten that. Why?
Because if you can understand some of that, or you can understand what questions to ask to help them unlock that. All of a sudden, there’s going to be massive improvement when they go through your program, right? Having them feel understood is so important. And you can’t do that when you don’t really understand them. And what we find is like we have this kind of, like contrast between interesting and interested. And so we coach people stop trying to be so interesting, like you don’t have to be this like guru or whatever. Be interested if you know who they are and you understand them deeply, showing that you understand them and that you can support them and help them is far more impactful in terms of relationship building and trust building than you saying I have all this experience, I’m amazing, I know what I’m doing. You have to build the authority for sure.
But you don’t have to get braggadocious. And by understanding them and be able to articulate what’s going on for them in words that they would probably use themselves but couldn’t find those words, you’re gonna have a customer for life, right? Lifetime value just went through the roof. And so this is one of those ways, like when we talk about avatar, it’s on such a different level than other people are talking about it, because I want you to really get them on a profound level.
Jeremy Weisz 30:33
Jason, what’s the format? I know you’ve done immersive experiences. Is there a digital only what is the formats people engage with this?
Jason Friedman 30:41
Yeah, so we have three ways we do it. So the last year, and I don’t know when you’re listening to this, hopefully, it’s soon. But if you’re listening to this in 2028, I’m talking about in 2023. So in 2023, we built this new program out, we built the workshop series, we’re just launching, or we just launched, actually, the course version, and so that you can purchase the course, you can go through the course, it’s all prerecorded videos, but there’s also a coaching component. So you can come in, you can ask questions, you can get support along the journey. And we break that kind of fourth wall of theater, right, we send you some stuff, so you get some physical stuff in the mail that will help you along the journey. So it’s a little bit more interactive than what you might be used to with an online course, traditionally. And then the third way we do it, Jeremy is we sometimes and this is very limited will come out to you, right, or we’ll do a very private workshop.
In our immersive workshops, we have usually 10 companies that are in one workshop. And it’s awesome, it’s a lot of fun, and it’s really cool. But we also will do either a private one here, or we’ll come to you and do it with your entire team. So lots of different options, like I said, the one that we come out to you, it’s significantly more expensive. And it requires like, kind of closing down your business for a few days, it’s more intensive, right. So, and we only have a few spots. So I really recommend one or the other. Because it’s been hugely transformational for people. I know for a fact, the last bunch of people that we just did this with, I think it was a couple of months back. It’s the emails that we get thanking us and sharing the gratitude that they have for how it’s transformed. It’s not just to fix your customer experience, it fixes and heals your employee experience.
It gets your employees more engaged, working more as a team, and they have more understanding of everyone’s roles and responsibilities. They have a deeper connection to their why, and your why. So we give you some training on this also. And so instead of like having a job description for your employees, we want them to have a position mission. So what is their mission statement for their role? And how does that connect to the mission statement of the business. A lot of times we have backstage employees that aren’t customer facing, and they don’t really get all the interactions and the intricacies of the business and how it works with the customers. They’re just kind of doing back office, maybe it’s accounting or warehouse or depends on what your business is, right. But when we get into this, and we start doing this work together, they have a whole different sense and excitement about the business. So it builds the employee journey and the employee pathways.
It builds the customer pathways. And ultimately, I think it gives the entrepreneurs a whole different level of confidence about what they’re doing, and a reconnection to their initial why. So often I know this is true for me. And I’m curious if it’s true for you as well. But we get into it, and we start building a bigger business. You know, we had an entrepreneurial seizure one day, we decided to build a business. And we’re doing it, we had this awesome reason why in the beginning, we were so excited about it. And then it gets harder and more difficult. And you get some client complaints, you get some employee junk that goes on and all of a sudden, it’s like, why am I doing this? When you go through this process, it fixes a lot of that because a lot of the reason why those things happen is because we’re not focused on the journey that the employees have.
And the customers that like it if they’re all having a great experience. And they’re going through, they’re getting the results and they’re having the rewards and all those other things that they want, why would it not be amazing, right? Like all the other stuff that kind of melts away. And as the entrepreneur, small business owner, I’m talking to you guys right now who listening, you end up feeling so much lighter, and you have more time to work on your unique ability to work on things that are in your zone of genius, and the pride level of what your people are doing and what your business is doing and the success your customers are having really becomes front and center. So yeah, I just think it’s a powerful, powerful process and It has been what we’ve been doing for the last 25 years.
We call it something different today than we did then. And we’ve added and refined it a little bit. And to your point, we tried to change the language a little bit so that even more people can access it. Right, because it was a little heady before, honestly, candidly, it was a friction point that we had in our previous version. And we took that to heart. And so yeah, anybody that’s interested, we’d love to hear from you, and see if we can help you for sure. Like you said, it’s a joy to be able to work with the people, like you said, that you admire, that you want to help, that you want to support. And the same is true for us.
Jeremy Weisz 30:41
Jason, I have one last question. And I’d love to hear some of your favorite resources. It could be books or mentors. It could be distant mentors, actually mentors. But before we talk about that, I just want to point people to cxformula.com. And I know that you put something together for people as a special gift. So if you want to point people there and talk about that for a second.
Jason Friedman 36:01
Yeah, totally. So this is going to be one of those like, kind of like, surprise and delight moments. Okay, so we have a strategy that I think is like one of the best tools in our toolbox, right, one of the most potent arrows in our quiver, and any other crazy way, you could say you could ask AI a different way to say it. But it’s one of the tactics, that’s also somewhat strategic that we have. And it is not something that you’ll find on our website. It’s not a downloadable PDF that you can get unless you get it through like an interview that I do. And it’s special. And I think if you download this PDF, and give it a read, it won’t take that long, it’s not going to take you hours to go through, I think it’ll start changing your thinking.
And it’ll give you something that’s immediately actionable that you can start to think about, and do in very short order. So if you want to grab that I really encourage you to, it’s at gift.cxformula.com/inspired. That’s gift.cxformula.com/inspired, I’m sure you’ll put the link in the show notes. But take me up on it. There’s no cost to you. We’re not gonna, twist your arm to buy something from us later. We’d love for you to be part of our community as well, as part of Jeremy’s. Jeremy, actually, you and I met you mentioned Brian Kurtz before legend and amazing human. But I think we met when I was speaking about kind of this kind of stuff many years ago, right? I’m not saying things that are dramatically different. I’ve got some new language for it.
But it’s so important. And the businesses that I’ve been working with, since that time, as CX Formula have had massive growth, several of them have sold their business for huge valuations. Many of them are just still growing and growing, have had better retention of their employees. So this strategy that I’m sharing this PDF, it is one of the strategies we’ve used in our own businesses, we continue to use it in our own business. If you become one of our clients, you’ll see it in action. And I hope you take me up on it and use it. So yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 38:18
When Jason puts something out, I definitely listen to it and consume it. So yeah, well, we’ll link it up as a gift.cxformula.com/inspired. And check it out. And I always just like to follow Jason does because he eats his own dog food. And I just like to learn from him from the experience itself. So for that alone, you should go there and experience it yourself. The last question, Jason is mentors who have influenced you? It could be books, it could be actual mentors, colleagues, who are some of your influences.
Jason Friedman 38:59
Yeah, I mean, there’s a ton of them. So Brian Kurtz is on the list. Of course, we’ve beat that dead horse a bunch of times. But Brian’s amazing, has been a good friend and mentor of mine in many ways, how he shows up in the world. Love that guy. Jeff Walker is another mentor of mine when it comes to online business. He’s one of the OGS of online marketing and internet marketing and I’m in his highest level mastermind group and just been a huge fan of his and friend of his for many, many years. No longer with us, but Napoleon Hill is a major mentor of mine. And one of my favorite books by Napoleon Hill is Outwitting The Devil.
Most people know about Think And Grow Rich, but if you haven’t read Outwitting The Devil, give it a read. It’s not long, or grab the eBook, The audible book rather the audiobook is pretty awesome as well. Huge, huge props for that book just really changed a lot of my thinking. I love Dan Heath and Chip Heath’s book, The Power of Moments. super powerful. I also love Made to Stick. So those are two of my that’s one of my favorite books too. Yeah, for sure. Super, super amazing books. And then also, another book that I love is Dan Ariely, his book Predictably Irrational. For those of you that are struggling with kind of pricing wars and packaging and positioning, there’s like, literally, I don’t think there’s a better book that I’ve ever read or found. It just really gets you to think about the contrast between things and how you contrast things.
So super fun. And then maybe last book recommendation and kind of mentors is another good friend of mine, Ben Hardy. So Ben had done a project with Dan Sullivan, actually, Dan Sullivan is on my list of mentors and coaches, he was a coach of mine for, oh, gosh, like 14 years, really helped me and changed a lot of my life. I’m a strategic coach. But Ben Hardy collaborated with Dan on this kind of trilogy book series. And in that trilogy, one of them that I think is really helpful for entrepreneurs, is 10x is Easier Than 2x. That’s the book. And it’s just one of those topics that I learned from Dan Sullivan. This one I probably learned back in like 2004 2005. And Jeremy, it is the path that we use to more than 10x our first business, the one that you mentioned, that had all those revenues, and people and sales and what have you.
And they’ve made it even easier to think about then when I had done it. And it’s something that I teach to people today too, as part of our program. It’s the thinking aspect of that 10x and so. I won’t spoil that book for you, but it’s another one of those that I would definitely go and snag and see if you can utilize it pretty easily in your business. It’s pretty powerful.
Jeremy Weisz 40:04
I love it. Jason. Thank you. I just finished The Gap in The Gain by Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan which is also a really good one. So like you said, all their books, just check them out. But Jason, I want to be the first one to thank you. I always am learning from you. Even when I first heard you speak at Brian’s mastermind, everyone should check out cxformula.com and also the link to the special gift that Jason mentioned. And we’ll see everyone next time Jason, thank you so much.
Jason Friedman 42:27
Thanks, man. Appreciate you.
