Excerpt from episode 214
Blindsight, with Matt Johnson & Prince Ghuman
The Attention Merchants, with Tim Wu
Excerpt from Episode 175
Sell The Way You Buy, with David Priemer
Excerpt from Episode 175
This book’s premise may get a ‘duh’ reaction out of you, but much in sales is dictated by how a buyer feels. Reality is, few of us have the EQ to know what we’re feeling, and our lazy brains don’t want to think too hard about a purchase. To Priemer, it’s the salesperson’s job to help the buyer work through their own thoughts & feelings.
Elements of this book reminded me of ‘Stumbling on Happiness,’ ‘Making Websites Win’ and ‘This I Know’ and none of those is a sales book.
Love this line “Sellers operate as though their buyers are out there sitting idle, just waiting for a solution like theirs to appear on their doorstep. Of course that is (sadly) not the case.”
Another nugget, “most companies think they are selling a pain killer, but their messaging sounds like they’re selling vitamins.”
One of the book’s major messages is that beliefs matter. “First, consider what your organization believes to be its key offering, the thing that differentiates it from your competition. Next craft a statement or series of statements you can use across your sales and marketing efforts, beginning with the phrase “We believe” or “At our company, we believe that” to tell the story…..And if your customers believe what you believe, they will undoubtedly lean in and say, “Tell me more!”
When you insert your own product into the ‘beliefs’ story, say how it solves the problem in a way that circumvents typical solutions (e.g. throwing a lot of money at a problem). By doing so, you’re pre-emptively handling their objections.
His scenarios on Discovery Questions and Objection Handling are excellent. I’d recommend someone who needs practice (and who’s not getting it through real world experience) to read this book.
Friction, with Soon Yu
This is an excerpt from Episode 175
Just Evil Enough, with Alistair Croll
Episode 218
In 1985, Robert Fulgham published a book that has gone on to sell 7 million copies. That puts it in league with nonfiction books like the biographies of Princess Diana, Nelson Mandela & the Diary of Anne Frank. In “All I Really Need to Know I Learned In Kindergarten,” Fulgham lays out a handful of rules we all internalized on our way to adulthood. They include…
- Share everything.
- Play fair.
- Clean up your own mess.
- Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
- When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
You’ve probably noticed the problem with Fulgham’s syrupy homespun advice. It’s not the world we live in. kindergarten class bear no resemblance to Capitalism— which is more like what you see in recess on the playground. From a marketing perspective, there are critical qualifiers we must add to Fulgham’s rules to make the applicable to the Big bad world out there:
Share everything? Sharing sounds noble… but capitalism says if you come up with an idea and patent it, those whom it’s shared with have to pay you for its use. Sharing doesn’t automatically mean you lose your competitive edge
Play Fair? Sure, play by the rules. But know that the biggest rewards go to whoever understands the rules best. If your competitors are using a playbook, you should change how the game’s played, and beat everyone else in the process.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours? You shouldn’t steal, of course… but marketing is literally the legal appropriation of someone else’s audience. History’s full of greenfields where pioneering R&D created a category…only to see it harvested by a fast moving disrupter.
To sum up, being a producer in this system is trying to outdo your fellow producers to win a consumers’s business, you should use every exploit capitalism allows to win.
Our guest has been in and worked with many startups, showing them how to bend the rules in their favour. He has run conferences that have brought thousands of companies together to share these unfair advantages. He’s also co-authored a book showing how to identify growth hacks using analytics. And in 2025 he and his co-author released the book “Just Evil Enough”
Let’s go to Montreal to talk with Alistair Croll.
Chapters:
0:00:00 Intro: Kindergarten Rules Don’t Apply to Capitalism
0:02:55 Redefining Marketing: Attention, Behavior, and Medium’s Role
0:07:21 Embracing Disagreeability and Psychological Nuances in Business
0:13:55 Leveraging OODA, Bug-to-Feature, and TRIZ for Advantage
0:19:50 Analyzing Markets with Objective, Subjective, and Collective Lenses
0:27:01 How Novelty and the Overton Window Drive Change
0:33:54 Navigating Ethical Lines and Disrupting Incumbents Responsibly
0:41:54 Embracing the Underdog Advantage and Promoting Subversive Ideas
People, Products and Concepts mentioned in the episode:
“Don’t be Evil” by Alistair Croll and Emily Ross
Construal Level Theory and Klaus Fiedler
Product-Market-Medium Fit:
“How Minds Change” by David McRaney with Objective / Subjective / Collective lenses
Enshitification (coined by Corey Doctorow)
Andrew Chen’s Law of Shitty Clickthroughs
Alistair and Emily’s Recon canvas
