Joel Benge: How do you distinguish between that. You know, you, you talk about a tangible impact in someone’s lives.

We often think about that, that requires numbers, but it, it doesn’t always have to be. How can you, how can you quantify those, those intangibles a little bit? 

Lidia Axe: Yeah, for me feedback. Especially when you just starting out, it’ll not be big numbers, right? But you will hear feedback from people that they making progress, that you know, small progress. In business, building a habit, building a business, it takes small, consistent steps. So intangible is like this energy of momentum of, okay, I think I can do this. You know, I think this is my passion, so when [00:01:00] my clients start feeling the momentum and doesn’t always come from the numbers, it just from the feeling that it started clicking.

Joel Benge: My name’s Joel and I’m a recovering nerd. I’ve spent the last 25 years bouncing between creative jobs and technical teams. I worked at places like Nickelodeon to NASA and a few others that started with different letters. I was one of the first couple hundred people podcasting back in the early aughts until I accidentally became an IT analyst.

Thankfully, somebody in the government said, “Hey, you’re a nerd that talks good,” and that’s spun me off into the world of startups, branding, and marketing for the same sort of researchers and startup founders that I used to hang out with. Today, I help technical people learn how to

get noticed,

get remembered,

and get results.

On Nerds That Talk Good,

I wanna help you do the same. I talk with some of the greatest technical communicators, facilitators, and thinkers that I know who are behind the big brands and the tech talk that just works.

I am super excited today to be welcoming [00:02:00] Lidia Axe as today’s guest nerd on Nerds. That Talk Good.

I’m gonna use this time, uh, a little selfishly because she is a coach of coaches. I’m very excited about that. But, uh, Lidia has been a, high level executive at, uh, PWC, has an executive MBA from London Business School. She’s been coaching and training since 2016. And then more, more recently or in the last couple years, been coaching coaches.

And so what we’re gonna talk about today is how do you really discover the expertise that you have? You know, you have abilities, you know, you have skills and knowledge. But in order to pass that on to people, whether you need to be a coach or not, or trying to be a coach or not you have to know what you know.

So that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. Lidia, thanks so much for joining.

Lidia Axe: No. Super cool. I’m super excited. Always, you know, born ready. You know, and I like it. I think people, ’cause I have my own podcast and that’s what I do on my podcast when I invite guests, I’m selfishly extracting value out of them. So if I get [00:03:00] value, I know my listeners get value. So, you know, totally, totally cool with that.

Joel Benge: This is great. So I always like to start off with the nerd origin story. Kind of give us your background, where you’re coming from talk us through a little bit of the career and, and maybe when you got that Aha moment to, to do the thing that you’re doing today.

Lidia Axe: No, of course. And it’s been a long, long, long journey. I don’t know people look at me, you like, you look 20. No, I’m not 20, I’m 48. And people don’t realize that, uh, looking at me, which is. A blessing, you know? Uh, but yeah, it’s been a long journey. So I’ve been in corporate world. I’ve been, like you said, I’ve been in finance.

PWC been my, my home for a long time, 13 years. And I, I, but you know what? People don’t realize when I said I’ve been in PWC for 13 years, however. Because PWC is [00:04:00] such a huge organization. I moved around every two years, right? I never stayed in the same department. I was an audit for two years, then I moved to. Actually I started in corporate finance, then I moved to audit, then I moved to transaction support, then I moved to maternity leave, and I gave a birth to three beautiful boys. Then I moved back and I’m like, I cannot be a client facing staff because I don’t want work crazy hours. I want, you know, I wanna raise my kids.

I want them to remember my face. They offered me. Risk Management because nobody wanted risk management, to be honest. They said, this is the dumbest and the most hated job. I’m like, I don’t care. I wanna get out of talking to this little, little individuals. I wanna talk to real human beings. So I [00:05:00] became risk management assistant manager at that time. Then in five years, I moved quickly up becoming from assistant manager to manager, senior manager, and not just before it was just Russia, and then it became Central Eastern Europe, and then I became like a director risk management. So it doesn’t matter. I don’t know who’s listening, but people don’t be limited by a job or a title or whatever you make. It’s not the job that defines you, it’s you defined the job. They gave me the job that nobody wanted. I made everything of that job, it was good because I was not client facing. That means I could do it from home. Because when kids are sick and when kids are small, they get sick. So I could do it from home, I could do it flexible, you know, while kids are sleeping.

I [00:06:00] could do it at night. And I progressed way faster than folks in the client facing role. So I became a director, you know, I reached the top, almost the top. I wa I was in a way to partnership in PWC, but then it was like, you know what? It’s all good. I mastered this game. You know, everything in life is a game, or at least that’s how I approach it. But then I mastered this game, but it’s a game. I want something that actually makes sense. I wanna do something that actually gives me deep. Meaning and deep satisfaction at that time. I hit the midlife crisis and I know I was young. 35. You know, I, for a normal midlife crisis, it usually hits later, but I checked all the boxes. The midlife crisis hit when you check all the social boxes, the family [00:07:00] check, the career, check. house, car. Whatever, and I’m like, I want something else. So that’s why I was started looking for something else. And I will fast forward because there is a long, again, there is long story, but through experimentation I moved, I left corporate, I moved to wild west of entrepreneurship, and through experimentation I realized I really love working with people. I really, what I have my own story inspires people. So my strengths are, you know, inspirational and, you know, I can teach and I love teaching. I love inspiring I love mentoring, coaching, consulting. So that’s what I do today. I don’t do. And I know some people call them themselves coaches, and I’m fine with that, but for me, it’s just too small of [00:08:00] a box to fit in for me. I have a toolbox. I have coaching. I think coaching is great, but it’s just one, one tool, like a screwdriver. You cannot do everything with a screwdriver, right? You need a hammer and then you need. I don’t know. Help me here. You need all those tools, right? 

Joel Benge: Yeah, you need this. You’ve gotta, you’ve gotta take everything that you’ve learned and figure out different ways to deliver it

Lidia Axe: This is what I realized. I love, love, love seeing people succeed. And that’s what I do today. And I know a lot about business because last 10 years I’ve been doing business myself and I’ve been helping other people in one capacity or other. And I’m like, why not?

And I have a strong business background, right? Because I’m coming from finance, because I’ve been in the business school. [00:09:00] Strong foundation. I’ve done it myself. I have a knowledge, I have experience. So what I offer today is this toolbox. And I don’t limit myself to one I say, you know, I look at your problem and I offer you what is gonna help your problem most.

Sometimes it is teaching, sometimes it’s mentoring. Sometimes it’s consulting, sometimes it’s coaching. So I offer tool that is best for the job that you need.

Joel Benge: I, I think what’s fascinating about your, your, your journey is, you know, you started at finance really is kind of the, the nuts and bolts micro view, and then moving through all of the, your to getting that macro view and then realizing, you know, at the point, at some point you’re like, I don’t, I, I can’t [00:10:00] do client facing.

I’m not as effective client facing. You wanted to focus on that, that larger view, but then. Having that realization that now I have this toolbox and all of these skills that I’ve, that I’ve acquired over time, and I am able to go back down to maybe that, that more personal view you know, you were saying, oh, I don’t wanna be client facing, but coaching and teaching and mentoring is all client and you’ve been able to take that broad perspective and, and build that expertise and then, and then focus it very, very sharply on maybe day to day or the, the very close personal challenges of business 

Lidia Axe: but you need to understand there is 10 year gap.

Joel Benge: right?

Lidia Axe: Like, my boys, that time, when I was not ready to be client facing, at that time, my boys were like.

They were small, so they needed way more attention. Today [00:11:00] they’re 20, 22 and 24. Okay. So it’s just important. Important to know your values. And for me, family, my kids you know, is my top value, right?

Joel Benge: I find, I find from an entrepreneurial perspective, it gives you that ability to have that, that flexibility. And, and now you know, you’re at a different, different point in your life that you can look back and say, look at all the things that I’ve done. How do I, you know, at, at different times? How do I use them now?

Um, I’d, I’d like to, to dig in a little bit about right now you’re, um. You know, you’re, you’re positioning more as the, the coach of coaches and helping people do that same thing that you’ve done, which is, which is phenomenal. And I think a lot of my listeners whether they’re, they’re they’re coaches or technical people, you know, they’re getting to that point where they’re like, I need to be able to talk about what it [00:12:00] is that I do.

It’s not enough to do anymore. And I, I think that’s becoming larger in our, in our society. It’s not enough just to be able to do something. You have to be able to communicate it. You talk, you talk a lot about like not wasting a lot of time if you don’t have to on social media, which I absolutely get in that trap.

And my LinkedIn views are absolutely garbage right now for some reason. And I’m like, should I be focusing on getting those views up or should I be focusing on building out the, the. The systems that I need. So can you talk me a little bit through who you’re working with now and just broad strokes, kind of what your process is with them for that?

Lidia Axe: of course. Yeah. Yeah. And I hear you. Yeah. The problem with social media is you hostage. You are hostage of algorithm. And you are hostage of trends and you know, you’re just a hostage. And my philosophy is I don’t wanna be hostage. I [00:13:00] wanna be in control. And maybe I’m a little bit control freak, right?

But worked for me before and not working for me now, it’s what I’m, teaching and helping my clients with. I’m saying. You don’t need to be. Now I’m saying you can still use and social media, I’m not saying it’s not helpful. It’s good and you can use it, I think if you rely on social media as your only source of leads, clients, then you are hostage.

You, you give up control, which I don’t like. Alright so my philosophy, and that’s how I built my business. It’s funny, I just had a really cool, discovery call a few hours ago and they’re like, look how your first coaching business to off? And I said, look, first, actually I didn’t have my, you know, when I moved from corporate [00:14:00] to entrepreneurship, my business was brick and mortar. I created kids club because you know, when I went through business school they teach you like, what’s your business should be about something, you know a lot. And I’m like, um, okay. I know a lot about finance, but I hate finance and I know a lot about kids, so I decided, because I know a lot about kids, I have three kids, you know, that’s a lot.

At least in Russia it was a lot. I created kids club and it was not just kids, but it was kids and mom club. Because I was so upset when I would see moms bring kids to some classes and the kid in the class and the mom is sitting in corridor just either bored to death or

Joel Benge: Mm-hmm.

Lidia Axe: phone, scrolling, doom crawling. And I’m like, I wanna create a place where the kid is doing something useful. The art. Dance, you know, whatever. We had all sorts [00:15:00] of classes and the mom doing something that develops, you know, not just, you know, doom crawling or you know, just bored to death. And then three years later, I realized I had enough kids at home. And I love my kids, but I don’t like other people, kids, you know, sorry to them. But I really love. Talking and working and helping moms, women adults develop. So that’s how the whole thing started. And, but at that time, you know, I told the guy this morning I announced my first challenge. Soon I sold my club, you know, the club that I started brick and mortar. I’m like, I’m done. You know, it’s too much. I don’t like it. I sold it. But then I started something and I said, I started my first challenge and I got 50 [00:16:00] signed up. And he’s like, how did you make it? I’m like, because I had this three and a half, four years of my club, I was reaching out to people. Yes, I was posting, yes, I had a website. Yes, I had social media and I had some posts about what’s going on, but I also spend amount of time, insane, dunno 15, maybe more a day. Reach out to people and I would post to mom’s groups because I know this is my audience. I would post and I would look for the questions there. And questions didn’t have to be about exactly the club or the problem that I’m solving. There were just questions The moms asked, you know, newly moms, and I know everything about being a mom, you know, with three kids. [00:17:00] they were saying, oh my God, you know, I have the rush, or I have the high fever, or, you know, I don’t know what to do with this and that.

And I would just reply, give value. So they start to see my name popping in again and again and again. Look, oh my Godly. She’s just given value. She’s just, she seems to be very knowledgeable. She seems to be. I don’t know. Trusted. I love the word trust ’cause that’s the method I used. And then I would run something in my club, for example, new Year Party.

And in Russia New Year, the kids New Year party is like something big. And then I would post in this group saying, Hey, we have a new year party in my club. My club was called Mama’s Dream. Mama’s Dream. name, and I’m like, we’re having a great New Year party. Do you wanna come? And they say, yes, we had hundred people come to my new [00:18:00] year party, you know, which is, who Huge. And then once I left, so I sold the club and I told them, I’m like, okay, I’m selling the club. You know, and I explained, I was always very transparent and authentic. And then I’m like, now I had my fourth child at that time. Which was hard new business post child, not a good combination. like, okay, I need to lose some weight. Who wants to do it with me? 50 people signed up in a minute. One post.

Joel Benge: So you had, you had spent a lot of that time not just doing, but, but delivering the value. Giving value away, and I think a lot of people are, and connecting and building that platform. Yeah. Yeah.

Lidia Axe: ask simple question like, what do you do if my kid, have a rash? What do I do? And I tell them, I don’t give them advice. [00:19:00] I say, Hey, you need to check if there’s this, do this if not. You know, go to a doctor. And I keep, and they’re like, oh, it has a you know, which studio which, so they ask, you know, new moms have a lot of questions, and I just share my experience.

It wasn’t necessarily even the expertise. It’s just been. Helpful genuinely helpful to these people. So they start considering you as authority, as someone authentic and as someone you can trust. I really love the world trust.

there is this know and trust factor, right? So the know and trust factor, if you can bring it up. Then whatever you announce. And for me, it was when I sold my business, I announced my first challenge. I said, look, I just had my fourth child. I’m 38. I was 38 or [00:20:00] 39 at that time. I need to lose some weight. Who wants to do it with me? I was not even like a health coach or a health professional. I just was the in, you know, inspirational coach. I wasn’t even a coach at that time to be honest. they’re like, yes, we wanna do it with you because we’ll know and trust you. And I had 50 people sign up right away.

Joel Benge: Yeah, know, like, and trust is a, is a, a pillar of what I do with my clients and, you know, I talk about emotion. So starting a liking first, understanding, and then that gut level feel of just, do I, do I have a good trust base? And, and that, that is almost more important than. Do you know your stuff? It’s like, do I trust them to, to give me good advice and to, to direct me in the right direction?

I’d love to ask you how you made that transition then from, you know, saying, well, I wasn’t even a coach. You were coaching people. But I think to [00:21:00] be a coach or to be an expert and then to sort of position yourself formally, you have to formalize what your own knowledge is and you have to have your system how did that come about to you or how do you help your clients figure out, okay this is now a repeatable thing that I can do, because I think a lot of people are like, when they step into this realm, they’re like, I’ve done a thing. I, Just pay me to talk about the thing that I’ve done and I will help you.

And you know, that’s not coaching. That’s maybe it’s mentoring that maybe that’s the, that’s the jump from mentoring to coaching. But what do you consider a coach to be?

Lidia Axe: Correct. so I started this, I think it was 2015, 16. But because I came from this corporate world and you know, I was a certified accountant, obviously I got my degree and you know, so I’m like, okay, it seems like what I’m doing is coaching. I need to get. [00:22:00] need to get certified, I need to get education.

And obviously, maybe not, but for me, I always go for the best. I don’t know. That’s me. So Ericsson International at that time, Ericsson I did the research was the best in the world. Ericsson International in Canada. I signed up for their course 2017. So I took the. The professional coach certification, six months solid. And I highly recommend, I know there is a lot of discussion. I do. I have my own podcast and I have guests who says, you know, that, you know, certification is bullshit. Unfortunately, and I, I’m gonna say it, unfortunately, coaching is unregulated industry I think, I don’t think it’s helping. you know, I’m not gonna go into that in detail anyway.

I got the certification ’cause I needed to [00:23:00] get the best, you know, that’s me. You know, I got my MBA from London Business School, the best in Europe. And then I got my coaching degree best. think it’s one of the best in the world. ICF certified, coaching certification 2017. And I knew what coaching is about.

But then when I went through it and then I started coaching I realized that is not a profession. And again, some people will not agree with me. I think coaching is the tool. I’m coming back to my earlier point in the toolbox. Because, you know, clients keep coming to me with the question, I knew sometimes all they need is a simple instruction to do. [00:24:00] They didn’t need coaching. They need, I don’t know, teaching or consulting, right? sometimes I need to share a story from my experience. And that’s mentoring. very soon, pretty soon I realized that coaching a great tool, but it’s not, I don’t wanna be limited by it. So I didn’t go to the path. I’m gonna become, you know, just the, the ICF certified coach.

I’m gonna stick to it. I went. An alternative path because I said, you know what? I was in corporate career where everything was set. You go like PWC, you go senior consultant, assistant manager, senior manager. Everything is so scripted and you need to fill the boxes to go. I don’t want that.

That’s why I left corporate. I wanted more freedom. I wanted more creativity. [00:25:00] I wanna help people. And I think when people come and sometimes that’s how I felt, you know, sometimes I felt oh my God, you know, when I come to someone for advice, they say, I’m gonna give you this, but for other the pieces, you need to go find other people.

And I’m like, I felt. I felt lost. I felt, you know, I didn’t feel good. So what I wanted to provide a holistic approach. I wanted to solve, I wanted to solve a problem, And I wanted to give people, I wanted to use the tool that to solve the problem. I didn’t wanna dictate it from I’m a coach, I’m sorry, I’m not giving advice and I’m not gonna give you this and this because I’m, you know, because of the rules or whatever. I went outside corporate because I didn’t want to be following the rules, that. [00:26:00] So that’s me. And I know it’s, again, I made this comment earlier because we don’t have regulation of coaching industry. It creates. It creates some tension, it creates there are some people out there that call themselves coaches.

They don’t even know what that means. They have no basic understanding. I have under, I think, you know, I understand very well when I’m putting my coach hat on, or when I put my consulting hat on or my mentor hat on, i, and sometimes I even tell my clients, you are in one session. I’m like, okay, Joelle, now I’m gonna put my coach hat on and you know, let’s do this now.

Or, okay, now you ask me that question, this is your problem. I’m gonna put my teacher or mentor hat on and I’m gonna tell you what to do. Because [00:27:00] there is 1, 2, 3, 5. I know if you’re gonna do this, you know you’ll succeed. I don’t wanna waste time on asking you what is the best way to do it. Do I think you can find, you know, I don’t wanna waste time on that. And unfortunately some people even know because they never got the education, the proper education. Yeah But you know, that’s me.

Joel Benge: That distinction is, is extremely helpful. So I would ask you if, if you’re talking to somebody or working with somebody who is an aspiring coach or they’ve got the experience and people, you know, I, I find with me, I would say what I do is more on the mentoring mentorship side. And I have a lot of people who, who recognize and come to me and say, will you help me out with this problem?

Right? And so that, that is a little bit more organic. But for somebody who is. Trying to position as a coach in the marketplace and understanding that we don’t have the regulation and how do they, how do they build [00:28:00] that trust? If they haven’t had the, the benefit of being a part of a community or they’re you know, they’re building their outward facing.

Call it marketing materials, but it’s more on building their their platform. How do you sniff out a good, or maybe one that’s not as, not as solid foundation, if they don’t have that, that certification, maybe they’re working on it or maybe they just don’t post about it. It’s not on the front page. Do you, have you developed a NOS for, for the coach and say, this person really knows what they’re talking about?

And has the, has the program and the skills.

Lidia Axe: Yeah. Yeah. I recently, I think I recently posted because I had the question, I talked to a friend of mine. I’m doing a lot of outreach ’cause you know, I always you know, do what I preach. I always take my own medicine. I do a lot of outreach. So I’ve been talking to a friend of mine and she’s you know, Lidia, I’ve been on Instagram and I received so many inbound [00:29:00] inquiries, like from coaches. Who says I’m gonna help you. So what I do, the coaches who help coaches, you know, and you don’t, how do I know if I can trust them? So exactly the question that you ask. And so I created a post. Now don’t exactly remember what I said there, but I think few things. Few things, right? First of all, I think good. Starting point is testimonials, right? Look, you know, how many months, how many years they’ve been on the market doing this thing

Joel Benge: Mm-hmm.

Lidia Axe: this problem that they’re solving with? And when you look at the testimonials, you know, these days, unfortunately, it is so easy to fake testimonials. So look look up these people. You know, do they have the link to their profile [00:30:00] on LinkedIn or Facebook? On Instagram? Are they real people? They contact one of them, at least one of them. See the real people, right? So that’s what I would do. I would, ’cause that’s what I’m trying to do right now. You know, my testimonials from my clients who are real people and I link their LinkedIn profile or the YouTube profile, the website.

So you can go and check them out. I ask, did you really? the video, like what I’m leaning into the video testimonial, right? is harder, and again, you can still get them. let’s not be, let’s not be naive. You can still hire someone on fever or Upwork or whatever, and someone will record a testimonial for you. Okay? So first, check out the testimonials, right? Secondly, just see if the promises are not [00:31:00] overinflated and that’s, you know, ’cause you know, if the promise in you, the moon and the stars in the next 30 days, know, come on guys, you know, building a business takes time.

Joel Benge: Yeah, and it’s the same with with all project products. I see so many products which are like, we’re gonna 10 x your revenue. It’s like, no, you’re gonna make my processes more easy. You’re gonna make my processes easier. It’s like the 10 xing of the revenue is still on the client to execute. And I, you know, I work in cybersecurity and they say, you know, we stop the hackers.

I’m like, no. You’re an alarm that tells me hackers are, are happening. I still have to take the action. And so I, I think you’re right. I think there’s a lot of movement towards sell the outcome, if you promise the outcome that’s too big or too downstream or removed from what you’re actually delivering, that can [00:32:00] be a, that can be a red flag.

So that’s good.

Lidia Axe: know, look, the inflated promises obviously. Weird or fake testimonials. And then yeah, talk to them. I think there need to be a way to connect to those people life, especially if you’re paying high ticket, right? And coaching is high ticket. So yeah, see if you can connect to them one-on-one like this. I think through this conversation, like we talking right now, right? You can sense the energy is this, you know, is this a person? What’s you can sense, was the offering, Is this something, you know, would you be comfortable? Is this, the energy is matching? Is the personality matching values are matching? So I think yeah, get, to get a real call before [00:33:00] paying, definitely high ticket. You need to have some sort of a connection call, discovery call some sort of a connection to that person. And once you get on a call, I think. You know, I think you can get sense if this real person authentic ask questions. Yeah that’s how I’d go about it.

Joel Benge: That’s, that’s very helpful and that, that leads to something that I, that I like to do in my discovery calls. I, I offer a, a free 15 minute I call myself, so. Talk about un unregulated. I call myself a “message therapist”. I don’t have a therapy certification, but there’s no such thing as a message therapist, so I can get away with it.

But what I use in my, in my workshop is the MessageDeck. And I, I, I warned you about this. So what?

Lidia Axe: I love love cards.

Joel Benge: And there, there’re so good for, for coaching and, and consulting. So talking about, again, about emotion, logic, and credibility like, know, and trust and how we build that out. [00:34:00] Um. Then taking people through my, my process is helping them build out this, this messaging stack.

So with your permission, we talked about this earlier, I didn’t wanna spring it on you. I wanna give, I wanna do a really quick mini message therapy session with Lidia Axe and have you answer some of these, some of these.

All right, before we get to the mini, uh, message therapy session with Lidia, which is fantastic, stick around for that. I, I had a great time. Uh, I just wanna say hi, uh, I’m back. Welcome back to Season Two of Nerds That Talk. Good Look. Took a little bit of a hiatus there. Um, been working on some, uh, uh, some talks and, uh, promoting the book, the book.

Which you can go out and get, which please do. And if you buy it, please leave me a review on Amazon. Um, but I just wanna say hi. I’ve been sitting on a whole bunch of amazing episodes and I’m cutting them together right now. I’ll be releasing them every couple weeks. Uh, gotta slow down a little bit. I got a little, uh, aggressive, but thank you so much for being there.

Thank you for all the support. Uh, and uh, head on over [00:35:00] to NerdThatTalksGood.com/podcast for this episode. Uh, and also don’t forget to go back and listen to some of the other ones. If you’ve missed them. There’s homework at every, uh, every page. So, uh, let’s get back to this mini Message Therapy session with Lidia Axe.

So the, the very first at the top is our, our Big Ideas. And I think what I want to do.

For you. This is good. So in the coaching, in the, oh, don’t be scared. In the, in the coaching world what is the inspiration to action? I don’t know if my auto focus is working. There we go. What is the inspiration to action in your industry? Why do you get up in the morning and why does your audience get up in the morning?

 It’s a tough one. It’s a tough one.

Lidia Axe: Okay. Okay. But I love, you know, I love the challenge, you know, I know I’m a Certified Values Coach and I’m really into values. I think everyone needs to know the key values. So I [00:36:00] tell you one of my top three values is daring. I told you one, which is family obviously, but second one is daring. Daring. So any challenge, you know, is good for me. Um all I think that’s one of reasons I moved from the corporate world because I never felt, when I was in corporate world, I never felt what value I bring to this world like I never felt. And once I moved to the. Business, you know, kids club, even the kids club. And then the coaching. It was so obvious, you know, I could feel the value. It was so immediate, you know, every coaching session, almost every co, I mean, there are different coaching sessions, but almost every coaching session, the client comes out with some insight and then there is [00:37:00] even more. And then there is a ripple effect. just the client, but the kids and you know, the family. So I wake up, this is my this is my thing, you know, understanding that the impact that I make on my clients, and sometimes I don’t even, it doesn’t feel in the moment, but then. You know, they tell me, oh, you know, I make this one conversation.

Like I’m currently I’m working with someone who is doing the one conversation a day challenge and they come back to me. I just did one more. I just did one more. And I understand, I see the excitement building up and I know there will be a ripple effect. So it’s the impact. And it’s so immediate and it’s so effective, but it’s also the ripple effect that I know it’s gonna make because he’s contacting other people and [00:38:00] then the people around him and then the people he contacting, and it’s becomes like this huge effect. and it’s. I don’t know. For me it’s tangible. It’s very tangible. The effect I’m making on people. And I think my clients as well, and my coaches are different. I have a relationship coach, the dating coach, she’s helping women to start dating again using dating apps, which might be an absolute nightmare. I don’t know. I’m married 25 years, so I don’t have to do this, but she helps women. To start dating via the dating apps. You know, that’s the reality. I have a coach who is a health coach and helps people over 50 build the resilience strengths and energy and, you know, amazing So they have such a purpose and a passion. I don’t know, that’s a real fuel to my life. 

and that’s what wakes me up [00:39:00] every day.

Joel Benge: I love, I love that because you actually went through almost, almost the entire stack of, of cards. Just from that one prompt. The the, the next one, I’m not gonna even go through all of them, but the next one would, would’ve been a story, which is like painting a picture of your client from the, the before and after.

You just went into that so seamlessly and, and beautiful. What, what I, what I would, what I would prompt though is. Put a name to the industry bad guy that nobody talks about. What’s, what’s maybe a deep, dark secret in coaching that you are helping to combat and put in like an actual name to it? Because if you can name it, you can claim it as they say.

Lidia Axe: Oh yeah. I can, don’t even get me started. Yeah. I keep saying I keep pointing the finger at them. I am not afraid of this. There are so many. you know, people who are like coach, the coaches who, who [00:40:00] throw those inflated promises, unrealistic expectation. They say, my God, you can become six figure coach, seven figure coach in 30 days or 90 days. These are these people, you know, they destroy trust. They destroy. People’s lives,

Yeah.

Joel Benge: That’s really good. You, you, you already touched on sort of the differences between a tangible and an intangible solution. Maybe talk a briefly a little bit about how do you distinguish between that. You know, you, you talk about a tangible impact in someone’s lives.

We often think about that, that requires numbers, but it, it doesn’t always have to be. How can you, how can you quantify those, those intangibles a little bit? 

Lidia Axe: Yeah, for me is this feedback. And yeah especially when [00:41:00] you just starting out, it’ll not be big numbers, right? But you will hear feedback from people that they making progress, that you know, small progress. ’cause this is what it is. In business, building a habit, building a business, it takes small, consistent steps. So intangible is like this energy of momentum of, okay, I think I can do this. You know, I think this is my passion, I think. think, you know. This is what I, you know, again, this is from my clients. So when my clients feel, start feeling the momentum and doesn’t always come from the numbers, it just [00:42:00] from the feeling that it started clicking, it starts in working. Either they, you know, they contacting the hearing. You know, just working the hearing goods, words. Yeah, so I think it’s the energy, which is, it’s hard to measure. So it’s energy of building momentum. Is the movement, is the progress progression, pro progress? Yeah. I really like, and I encourage and it flows, fuels my excitement and my motivation to help them.

Joel Benge: That’s great ’cause that leads right into the next card, which is, you know, what customer, what phrase do you hear from your customers often and matching that to what do you find yourself repeating often? So, you know, just to, just to play a little message therapist. You can say, look, we, we may not promise huge results, but we’ll promise momentum and progress.

[00:43:00] Small wins, lead to big results. And that, that’s kind of a way of countering that, that over over inflated way. So I love that story that, that you’re, you’re, you’re building there. let’s see. Ah, here, this is a good one because I often talk in my Proof Points about testimonials. Testimonials very important, but.

What are things that you wish people would say about you, and how do you set them up for success so that you can then ask them for that? I think that’s another thing that people miss out on, is if you don’t have a testimonial, you have to have an eye on what you would, what you wish people would say about you and be delivering it.

So maybe, maybe thinking now, maybe outside of even your, your direct sphere, how do you, how do you identify that? With, with someone that you’re working with?

Lidia Axe: Yeah I wish people see me [00:44:00] as, you know, and a friend of mine uses this metaphor and really like it, you know, in bowling for kids they put this rails up.

Joel Benge: Mm-hmm. The bumpers. Yeah.

Lidia Axe: yeah, so when they pull, you know, it’s still, it might not get. 10 out of 10, it might not be the strict or whatever you call it, but it’ll not go completely off. So I want to be someone described at this rails, like I’ll be there. I don’t know. I’ll be there guiding you.

Joel Benge: Hmm.

Lidia Axe: Along the way and we set, you know, we set I’m big on strategy, so we usually set the strategy, but I think it’s, I don’t know, 20%. ’cause 80% for me is like execution. Okay, you need to go out and do the thing. But, so I still wanna be, and I think that would be [00:45:00] the most rewarding that I was there along the way, helping them. Not to go completely off the rails,

Joel Benge: Right.

Lidia Axe: and get, you know, become a victim because I do this, you know, I still to this day sometimes get derailed by self-doubt perfectionism, by imposter syndrome, and all the other negative self-talk.

 of going straight, I just. I just stop. I just don’t go, so I wanna be someone for my clients that help them hit their goal. It doesn’t have to be perfect. I’m fine.

Joel Benge: Mm-hmm.

Lidia Axe: if it’s not 10 of 10, okay, but I wanna be there for them to hit the goal they’re like, yay, I got it.

Now we can analyze it and then do it again. And do it again. And do it again. And do it [00:46:00] again. Yeah.

Joel Benge: I getting better all the time. Like you, you know, we’ll, we’ll accomplish it and then we’ll keep going. Yeah. There’s no, there, there’s no end. I. The, the cards. This deck of the cards is really more for the technical products, but what would you consider is unique, not special about you, but unique because they say, you know, every sandwich shop has got a special sauce.

Having a special sauce is not special. But if it’s a, if it’s unique, what is, what is unique about what you bring or how you, how you approach your work.

Lidia Axe: Alright, two things. I know you choose or you tell me. One I’m I’m a big fan of movies. So I bring movies up as a metaphor ’cause I love movies and I’ve been trained actually as a movie therapist or a movie coach, Oh yeah. You know me, if I left [00:47:00] something, I go deep. And I know that, you know it, it’s just so easy to see the patterns and to recognize things.

So I use it, but I don’t use it heavily. Maybe should do more, but I try to inject in my coaching sessions the kind of used examples, the characters, the things. And you know, I had a funny, I had a funny conversation. I had a client. And I think it was third session, and she’s Lidia, I have to confess.

I’m like, sure, go ahead. You know? And she said, the first two sessions I was very concerned because you used so many kind of the movie examples. And I’m like, you wasting my, you know, you wasting because there is one hour you wasting time, you know, telling me all the stories and then. Only after the second session, I realized that I remember [00:48:00] what we talked, 

Joel Benge: Yeah.

Lidia Axe: used the story because it’s so remarkable.

It’s so vivid. It’s you know, I remembered it because of the movie. You know, you asked me what we talked about last session. I remembered because you used the example from the movie and she’s I hate it first, then I liked it anyway. So I think my unique sauce is I like to use stories whether it’s a movie, whether it’s fun anecdote or something.

‘ cause I want a visual. I want you to get, you know, I want to get you visceral experience. I’m very. Kinesthetic person. You know, there are, there is people some people are audio, some people are visual. So I’m kinesthetic. So for me it needs to be very kinesthetic. So I guess that’s one. And second one I’ve been through a lot. my story, you [00:49:00] know, I had a lot. parenting, you know, marriage, the career, business, moving countries, being in the war zone had a lot of experience. So whenever people, you know, whenever we talk about something, I have a real Maybe it’s connected. The first one I share it, so I always have, I can relate. So the empathy is not because I’m just empathetic with you, but because most probably I experienced not maybe something like that, but something similar and I share my story and you can like, oh, and you can learn from my story. Yeah. And um, so I think that’s it. I’ve been through a lot. I have a lot of experience and I share it openly. With my co coaching clients. So yeah, I don’t know. I think that’s it.

Joel Benge: [00:50:00] I think, I think both of those are intertwined. I think sharing stories that that you have personally experienced and that empathy, but then also I would say using that’s. You know, universal language of story, and, and if someone hasn’t experienced it, they may have seen the movie and we experienced through that.

 As we wrap up, how do you, outside of your coaching, I mean, are you, I guess you’re a movie buff you know, what are the things that keep you engaged or, or keep you refreshed? As, as you know, your day-to-day life.

Lidia Axe: Hmm. Yeah, it’s a tough one. And, you know, uh, my sister, my sister was visiting me yesterday and she’s like. You, you know, I was complaining, oh, I gained some weight. And it’s like, well that’s because you’re stressed. I’m like, yeah, I’m stressed. We’ve just been during the war with Iran, you know, I am stressed.

And she’s like, you need to meditate. I’m like, nah, [00:51:00] meditation is high for me. She’s like, what are you doing? I’m like, I’m cooking. So yeah,

Joel Benge: Hm. 

Lidia Axe: I’m cooking. And. For me, I just found it surprisingly, you know, I never cooked until I was, I don’t know, 45 or something. Cooking was not my strongest. So, you know, I cooked, obviously I had a family but I cooked something very basic. But now I. Sound cooking. I’m, I’m, I have the whole Notion database. I’m a big notion, uh, fan. So I have the whole Notion, database and now saving all my recipes. And it is like I’m doing fermenting, I’m doing. Yeah. You know, when I go into something I’m going hardcore. So it’s like I’m doing gyms and then, you know, I’m doing, I’m doing some crazy, crazy things, but I forget, I’ll lose [00:52:00] myself into it.

So when I’m going in and I’m like, you know what what I like is like I’m cooking and then, you know, it’s something good for my family. It’s healthy. ’cause I’ve always been to healthy, healthy eating, healthy lifestyle. For me and my family. So I’m cooking something, you know, veggies and fermenting and, you know little bit obsessive, but you know, yeah.

So cooking, I found that um, I lose myself into it. It’s like a meditation, but it keeps my hands, uh, busy. And, and I enjoy doing it. And I usually. Because of my DHDI usually listen to something. I listen to the podcast while I’m doing this, so listening new chat g PT technique or listening to new, you know, new email marketing.

So I’m learning always, always, always learning something for [00:53:00] myself and for my clients. And my hands are busy, so I’m cooking something great for my family, something healthy. So the salads, you know, the, the, the not baking. No, I’m not in baking. baking is not, not that healthy 

Joel Benge: a science. Baking is a science 

Lidia Axe: no I don’t do that 

Joel Benge: Cooking is like jazz. Yeah. My wife, my 

Lidia Axe: Oh I love it 

Joel Benge: is, is a 

Lidia Axe: I love that metaphor. I love that metaphor.

Joel Benge: Well, it’s true. I, I, I can follow a recipe, but if I don’t have an ingredient, you know, we don’t have ketchup. Well just grab some to tomato paste and, and vinegar and make your own ketchup.

My wife is an amazing baker because she never deviates

Lidia Axe: Oh, no, no. That’s not me.

No, that’s not me 

Joel Benge: The, the, the creativeness of cooking. I think cooking and stories are probably the two things that, that bring us back to make us the most human. So, and, and, and I, you know, I. [00:54:00] Have so enjoyed our conversation, and I mean, this humanity comes through. The drive, the, the boldness to step out there and help is, is just incredible.

How, how can people follow up with you? You know, I’ll put links and everything in the, in the, the, the resources and the homework section of, of the podcast. But if, but if, if people really wanna get more into what you’re about where can they find you?

Lidia Axe: Thank you. So LinkedIn is a place where I try to hang out every day. So Lidia Axe, that’s me. Hopefully there will be links below, but also Get It Done Coaching, ’cause that’s me, you know, I’m all about getting the results. So getitdonecoaching.com. Get there. There is a newsletter.

Thriving Coach Sunday Yeah. Yeah, just, just sign up. It’s totally free. Every Sunday, I send some practical tips, advice, you know, how you can build a thriving coaching business. ’cause [00:55:00] I am passionate to make more coaches. Coaches, consultants, you know solopreneurs. Uh, succeed financially. ’cause I think there is such a ripple effect that we’ve been, we’ve been talking that they can create that, you know, hopefully this can help this messed up world become a little bit better.

Joel Benge: Every little ripple that we can create can, can be for good. So, thank you so much for coming on. It’s been an absolute pleasure. I will be signing up for the the newsletter immediately and dropping all the links and the resources. Lidia, thanks for joining me today.

Lidia Axe: No, thank you so much. It was a pleasure to be here.

Joel Benge: If you want links to the resources mentioned on the show, head on over to the episode page. And for information on booking a Message Therapy workshop, getting your hands on the MessageDeck, to check out my upcoming book, or just buy me a coffee, go to nerdthattalksgood.com/podcast. 

 Until next time, [00:56:00] happy messaging.

 Remember, you don’t have to speak well, you only gotta learn how to talk good.  

[Musical Intro]

Joel: My name is Joel and I’m a recovering nerd. 

I’ve spent the last 25 years bouncing between creative jobs and technical teams. I worked at places like Nickelodeon to NASA and a few other places that started with different letters.

I was one of the first couple hundred people podcasting back in the early aughts until I accidentally became an IT analyst. Thankfully, someone in the government said, “Hey, you’re a nerd that talks good.” And that spun me off into the world of startups, branding, and marketing, for the same sort of researchers and startup founders that I used to hang out with. 

Today, I help technical people learn how to get noticed, get remembered, and get results.

On Nerds That Talk Good, I want to help you do the same. I talk with some of the greatest technical communicators, facilitators, and thinkers that I know who are behind the big brands and the tech talk that just works. 

Joel Benge: Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Nerds That Talk Good. This is a real treat for me. I am thrilled to be welcoming another Joel to join me today, somebody that I’ve been following for a very long time, Joel Klettke.

Business copywriter, founder, best looking man in the world. We’ll, we’ll get into that. And another bald guy with glasses. So I can, I can attest to that similarity. Joel, thank you for joining us.

Joel Klettke: Yeah, thanks for having me on a special edition of Joel’s

Joel Benge: This is, this is, it’s like, it’s like I’m staring into a mirror. What I wanted to bring you on about is because of your background, and I think you come at, at communications and, and Speaking a little bit differently than than my typical guests, which, which are technical practitioners and are those nerds who are looking to talk good.

I’d love to have you give a brief introduction to your background, how you got to where you are and, and we’ll dig into maybe some of those stories.

Joel Klettke: Yeah, so early on in my career, I started out in an agency doing SEO. That was my first real, you know, I fell backwards into that job. I didn’t even know SEO was a thing until it was my responsibility to do for clients. But I learned a lot about the agency world and the web and how things kind of worked then.

And always loved to write, never saw a career path in it until sort of the last few years of the agency, the whole industry kind of turned its head towards content and copy and how do we communicate and all of a sudden it became Important to have something to say not just be able to build a thousand terrible links from directories and that played to my skill set pretty well. I went out on my own on 2013 originally focused on the content end of things– blog posts and white papers and in very short order within two years, I’d finished pivoted to focus on landing pages and copywriting and ads and everything on more the sales side of things.

And with that came positioning and messaging and some of the things you get your hands dirty with too. And then about eight years ago, maybe more now, while I was doing that and consulting and working on that side of things, I rolled off A side project with a partner called Case Study Buddy. And there we were putting together customer success stories end to end and really tackling all the nuanced, nitty gritty, really tricky pieces of what happens when you have at least three different stakeholders in the mix on one piece of content.

Our client, their client, and us. And so, you know, I’ve seen a lot from helping really technical companies like AI companies years ago before it was in vogue, try to explain to people what they do in a way that was compelling to marketers, but also compelling to buyers and average Joes. I’ve worked with the enterprise of the enterprise, multi billion dollars.

I’ve worked with mom and pops. I’ve done just about every type of writing you can do. And also have the adventures and misadventures of building a company and selling that. And, and yeah, navigating, you know, all of this difficult communication stuff in a lot of different contexts. Lots we can press into, and yes, the former “best looking man in the world” but we’ll see if I can make a resurgence.

Joel Benge: Awesome. Well, I, I definitely want to dig into that in a little bit, maybe in the, in the personal projects stuff toward towards the end, because that’s a real fun story. What I’m really interested is you sort of came at this like, like I mentioned backwards from where a lot of people do. You started helping other people find their voice; telling other people’s stories then became a founder yourself, and then, you know, I, I think we, as, as marketers ourselves, sometimes talking about ourselves is the hardest thing. So I, I, I will dip into the founder journey, but I’m, I’m interested in some of the challenges that you’ve seen when you’re trying to make technical content accessible for general audiences on behalf of somebody else. Tell me about that experience.

Joel Klettke: I think a lot of the time, what’s so difficult, especially as a technical founder or someone so close to the building of the thing or, you know, the technical components of the thing, is it’s so easy to forget that not everyone thinks like you, understands like you, buys like you. It can be really difficult to recognize that.

I think a lot of technical people are so engineered towards well, as long as the specs on this thing are good, the features are great, as long as the product is great, it’ll sell itself. That’s one of the dumbest lies that’s been perpetuated, you know, to, to founders, not just technical founders, but that, that, oh, we’ll just build a great thing and it’ll take off on its own or that people will even understand it.

I think a lot of the time, you know, when I would come in, it was playing translator. It was helping, you know, these, these, Individuals, these founders, these product marketers, these technical, you know, data engineers, even at times really understand through a different lens, what it is they’d built, what is the value that they had created to someone else and through someone else’s eyes and helping them understand what language they could use to really express that to people.

A lot of the time, it’s doing this balancing act between, you know, what it is that the company believes and what they view as their value and what they view as their differentiator and doing a lot of work on the opposite side of things to balance that out with, well, what do customers and prospects think?

How do they talk about it? So kind of translating in both directions to arrive at something really clear. I think the other challenge, is even within the same company, different, you know, it’s, it’s kind of like that tale of the blind people and the elephant. Everyone’s touching a different piece of the elephant, describing it a very different way.

We all have different priorities and we’re all inevitably going to lean into our own bias. And so again, for someone very technical, they’ll care about the technical. For someone in marketing, they often care so much about the sizzle, they forget about the steak. And so it’s, You know, a lot of the challenge comes from just being in the middle and trying to unify this language, this story, and translate it ultimately for an audience that needs to make the decision for this great thing to continue to exist.

So I think that’s one of the biggest challenges is just anytime you have people involved, technical or otherwise, we all have our biases, we all have our ways of speaking. And we have to find a way to bring that out, preserve the value of that, find what’s meaningful, and express it in a way that the right people will get it.

And that really has been the heart of, you know, at least on the copywriting and conversion side of things what, you know, what I’ve done. I think to marry that up with the customer story side of things too. I think, you know, when we’re telling a customer story, again, we want to lean into the things we think are great, we think are meaningful, learning to help, you know, I think helping founders and companies step outside of themselves.

And again, view this through a new lens. That that’s really been the heart of, of how I come at that. And, and a lot of the, the wins and successes that, you know, we’ve been able to create as Case Study Buddy or, or you know, my own consulting side of things.

Joel Benge: I love that, that metaphor of touching the elephant and describing it differently. And I think I see that a lot with my clients and their internal teams is, is not everybody has an opportunity to to speak up and share. And sometimes you’ve got that developer or that product person who’s quieter in the background, and they’ve got a really great perspective that can enhance or lend itself to the overall message, and they don’t feel comfortable sharing.

And so I wanna, I wanna pick into that just a little bit. What techniques do you find help when you’re trying to, and I’m talking about it. internal team alignment on messaging, develop that, and then we’ll flip to the, the customer validation and the case study side, but just figuring your own stuff out first as a company is a challenge as a company grows.

So when you see that founder, that’s like, ” my, vision of it is infallible,” how do you pop someone’s bubble just enough to allow them to let some other outside perspective come in?

Joel Klettke: Yeah. I mean, don’t, don’t bring opinion to a data fight. I think it’s kind of, you know, what it comes down to. I think at the end of the day, part of the job is creating an environment of empathy where you can have these, for me, it’s always been one on one conversations first. Everyone needs to feel heard before they can feel like they can get on board with a new direction.

People are much more likely to support. You know, new messaging or new marketing or whatever it might be when they feel like they’ve had a voice in its creation. And so one of the most important things, you know, I did and founders can do, or really anyone in a company can do is facilitate conversations, structured conversations.

And so it’s really about discovering, well, how do they see the elephant? You know, like, what is it that you’re seeing? In your opinion, what would you change? How does the current messaging serve you and not serve you? If you could snap your fingers and change anything about the way that the rest of the team perceives you and your role, what would that be? I’d ask questions like this and it creates this opportunity just for a dialogue. And really I’m just collecting data points. So creating this space for these one on one conversations where everyone in different roles feels at least like they’ve had a chance to speak and share the perspective becomes really valuable.

The other side of it is popping everybody’s bubble by talking to people outside of the org. So whether that is current customers, whether that is prospects, whether that is prospects who turned out. You know, a big part of my job was always to try to get that external perspective and help weigh that against this internal perception of, well, this is what we are and this is what’s important.

Then once you’ve done that, I think now you’re at a point where you can bring people together and say, “Hey, listen, I’ve heard your priorities. I’ve heard your complaints. I’ve seen your vision for this. Here’s where you’re all aligned. Here’s where the differences are. Here’s what your buyer ultimately thinks.

And now with all of this put together, this is the direction that we can go in.” But without having space for those conversations, without coming with some data to support, whether that is survey feedback, being able to say, “well, categorically, when I look through this, here’s some of the themes we see,” or whether that’s review mining, again, looking at reviews out in the wild and seeing, well, even if you don’t have any customers yet, let’s say you’re very early stage of saying, well, here’s what people are saying.

Buyers are saying about your competitors, you know, here’s the things they like about them. Here’s the things they dislike about them. Do you think we could maybe press into some of these things? You know, for example, if you go look at reviews for a competitor and there’s just universally something that’s decried across the board and you do that thing really well, then it’s an opportunity to get people excited, say, look at this, look, we, we can crush them.

This is something you do well. This aligns with these priorities and these things you’ve already told me. Let’s move in that direction. So, you know, copywriting, messaging, positioning, marketing, at the end of the day, it’s all really a communication and a mental game. It’s really not about being the smartest, you know, or the most eloquent, and more about having the best understanding.

So bringing that understanding internal, I think, is really what equips people to go, “Oh, okay, I hadn’t thought of it that way. Okay, now that I know my opinion is valued or my perspective has been heard, maybe I’m willing to see it another way too.”

Joel Benge: That’s really great. I think, yeah, I think like you said, gently popping their bubble and showing them, you know, this is, this is where we are right now, but this is where everybody else is and we’ve got to look for those, for those opportunities in the market. I’ve, I’ve oftentimes had a client. You know, I’ll ask them, what’s your big idea?

What’s the, what’s the tagline? What’s the takeaway you want someone to have when they, when they encounter your brand and they’ll rattle something off that sounds just so corporate, just so safe, just so comfortable. And, you know, it’s one thing to say, yes, we can work with that. But here’s an alternative than to say, let me show you where everybody else in the marketplace is saying the same thing.

Do you want, you know, you do have to fit in to stand out, but do you want to look like and sound like everybody else? Which I think that’s the challenge that I’ve always found in tech marketing early on was you can be technical or you can be emotional. You can be emotional or you can be logical, and it was a very early tweet, I believe, of yours, which I’m still trying to find, so it’s back in the ether someplace, and I believe it was you were saying, “you capture attention with emotion, you justify engagement with emotion.

Logic, but you win customers with credibility.” And it wasn’t until I had seen that credibility mentioned that I realized that was the missing thing. That’s that aha moment. Which I think you get only from a outside perspective that, you know, case studies, customer testimonials. You know, so, so I’ve built credibility up as this big thing, but did you identify that as the opportunity with, with a project like Case Study Buddy or did that just organically become the thing to you?

Joel Klettke: I think, you know, my work on the conversion and the copywriting side showed me how critical it was to really understand the voice and the language of the customer and also demonstrated to me You know, there was this growing because what I was exposed to so much, I was doing a lot of work for software.

You know, I worked in other spaces, but a lot of it was software. And there is just this arms race where, okay, all of a sudden, like, you know, competitors can quickly copy your features. They can quickly copy your branding. They can quickly copy your style, all of these different things. But they couldn’t take away your proof.

The results that you’d earned were uniquely yours. The outcomes you’d won for clients were uniquely yours and yours to lose. And so I started to have kind of this idea, you know, I think early on, like I saw firsthand, first of all, the difference that it made when you had proof versus when you didn’t, how much harder a copywriter would have to work to try to bridge the gap when we really didn’t have any stories or outside proof to point to yet. And it was a constant, constant refrain. “You need to go get some more proof. You need to get some testimonials. You need to get some case studies.” I had wrapped up a project for WP Engine doing some of their core site and it had gone well. Someone on their board came to me and it was kind of, this was the catalyst really said to me, Hey, I advise this little company called Pingboard.

They’re trying to get a customer story done. Is that something you can do? And to that point, you know, I’d been exposed to a lot of customer proof. I’d Captured some through surveys, things like that. But I hadn’t actually taken on the end to end process of creating a case study. And so in the interest of learning, I said, yeah, sure.

You know, I’ll give it a go. And I did a lot of research. You know, I, I tend to just bias towards like over complication. I want to, I want to have all the information before I do anything. And so I did a lot of competitive research. I looked at what was out there. I was not impressed. Most stories were boring.

They were dry. They were self serving. And then I looked at, okay, well, what does it take to get this done? And I saw, well, there’s a ton of moving pieces here. We have to get the customer involved. We have to interview them. We have to capture it. We have to get approval. We have to manage that entire process.

And so it was kind of through doing that initial project that I thought, okay, well, there’s a massive, everybody needs proof. Every single company I’ve ever worked with. Needs proof and does better when it’s there. It’s hard to do and it’s hard to do well as evidenced by the fact that there’s so much bad proof out there or none at all.

The last piece was there is a repeatable process. I saw, even though it’s complicated, you know, there’s a lot to this. There are steps you’ll go through every single time. There are disciplines you’ll, you’ll use every single time.

And we’ll say, well, surely somebody’s kind of planted the flag and said, this is all we do. We do it really well. And that was the aha moment because nobody had. There was Casey Hibbard. She’s sort of the queen bee of customer stories. And she was definitely there first, but beyond that, there was, it was just one more thing that agencies tried to do, but obviously not well.

So I thought, well, could I build a specialized team that just, focuses on this? And that was sort of the advent of Case Study Buddy. We learned a ton as we went, but it really did start, as you kind of alluded to, in the recognition that, yeah, okay, I can write the best sales page on the planet, but the customer’s always going to be better at making this believable.

They’re always going to be more compelling with their sales pitch, you know, than even the best copywriter on the planet. You know, we’re, we’re kind of like those those fish, you know, where they have like the little symbiote fish that attach to them and like go around. Like we need each other. We, we, we really can’t function without each other.

We need proof. And, and so, yeah, it, that’s where it reallyall began.

Joel Benge: Yeah. In, in the card game that I use with, with my my workshops, I have a card called the Testimonial, which is like, you know, talking about yourself is weird. And at, at some point, it’s, It’s just not believable anymore but anything that you can get somebody else to say about you is automatically worth like 10 times more than things that you could say yourself, even if you used almost the same words.

Why is that? Do you have a, do you have a suspicion? Maybe we’re delving into psychology a little bit.

Joel Klettke: As an example to, it’ll be immediately obvious when I give this example, every company on the planet in the services space makes some claim to the degree of, we really care about our customers. Everybody and anybody can say that. There, there’s no, you know, like. There’s no barrier to entry on claims you can make.

You can say anything, but when someone else is saying it, when someone is sticking their neck out for you, when they’re saying that I have verifiably had an experience and found this to be true, that’s compelling. There’s a difference between saying you love your customers and your customers saying “they really looked after me.”

There’s a difference between saying will save you time and money. And a customer saying, ” I no longer have to go door to door in my office, delivering checks by hand anymore. It all happens automatically.” I mean, it’s the difference between a lived experience and an empty claim. If there’s no substantiating proof for your marketing claims, you can really say anything.

Customers know that. They know there’s no stakes . And so this proof, this substantiation of your claims, the fact that it doesn’t come from a marketer, but comes from somebody who paid money and took the risk and got the outcome.

Companies can say anything, but customers have the experience to, to back it up. People are getting more cynical, they’re getting less inclined to trust brands. And so being able to back up all of your claims with validated third parties, willing to stick their neck out for you, it makes all the difference in the world.

Joel Benge: I’m curious, I’m putting on my, my early tech founder hat now. And maybe I’m sitting here and thinking, that’s all great. But you know, I’m so early on, right? Maybe I’ve got a couple customers, maybe I’ve got a pilot running here or there, but I just don’t have the the track record or the book of work of successful projects and clients.

But I want to still begin to build towards that type of credibility. What advice or what techniques would you have to somebody who’s, who maybe they’re on their first pilot. But they want to make sure that it’s successful and turn it into a case study. What are the steps towards that?

Joel Klettke: I think first recognizing not all proof has to be a full blown case study. You know, I think we put a lot of pressure on proof to be this huge, massive thing. And truthfully, you can’t force it if it’s not there, but there’s always feedback. There’s always an opportunity to hear from customers, what they liked, what they didn’t like, how things went, how it made them feel, why they chose you.

I think the simplest thing that gets missed so often is we want to leap to an end state where we have this great big case study in these massively impressive KPIs and we forget every story with a customer has something in it that will be attractive to another prospect or lead. Every customer has some facet of their story where they took a risk, they made a decision, they found some sort of value.

It doesn’t have to be the full blown, massive proof, giant KPIs to be compelling to someone who’s thinking about this decision. And so rather than try to leap to the end state and think, how can I get a case study? The question to ask yourself instead is, how can I build a culture and a system of feedback from customers from day one?

How can I open the lines of communication from the very first day all the way through? And with Case Study Buddy, we kind of, you know, I developed this idea that I called Proactive Storytelling vs. Reactive Storytelling. What I mean by that is for most companies, even the ones with billions of dollars in revenue and all the resources in the world, customer proof is still reactive.

It’s still sales goes to marketing and says, we need a story about this, can you go find one? And they go, well, who do we have in our database? And they try to work backwards. to go, well, who had a win like this and can we get by? And it’s all in reverse. You’re racing to discover the story backwards and get approval.

And the smart companies, the best and most successful companies are doing it proactively. So for example, one of my favorite onboarding experiences I’ve ever seen, I don’t know if they still have it. I hope they do. FreshBooks used to ask you as a new user, as a new customer, what your goals were, what is it you want to accomplish?

What does a win look like for you? That data point gives them everything they need to have a meaningful conversation with you from that point forward. “How are we tracking against those KPIs you said were important to you? Have you accomplished? This mission you set out to accomplish yet, if not, why, how can we help you?”

And so I think for, for companies that are early stage, take the pressure off. It’s not, you need this case to materialize out of nowhere. What you really need to do is engineer a system of feedback. How can you, from the moment someone even becomes a lead, discover what’s motivating them, what they’re looking to achieve, why they picked you, and then continue that conversation, whether that is directly through a sales or account rep.

Whether that’s just through in app feedback, “hey, could you answer a quick question” and get a piecemeal over time? But if you’re proactively compiling this story over time, now you can turn it into whatever you need it to be, a soundbite or ultimately a big story at the end. The other side of this is realizing that not all stories are created equal.

Again, we always think that we need to have this giant transformative journey, this start to finish, you know, we were here and now we’re there. Well, it’s true that a story, a good customer story needs to have some kind of transformation. Not every story has to be finished for it to be ready to be told. So for example, one of the things I would often encourage some of the software clients with was tell implementation stories.

Just getting this thing up and live is a success. You know, don’t wait for them to have used it for three years and have these big, glowing numbers. Tell the story of a successful implementation. Tell the story of a successful kickoff. Tell the story of successful adoption by somebody’s team. Because behind all of those stories are real concerns customers will have, “will my team like this thing? You know, can we trust them to help us get going? Will they show up for us?” And all of that. So, you know, don’t put pressure on it to be more than it is. Build a system of communication and make it a cultural thing where everyone on your team owns some responsibility for actually knowing what’s going on in accounts, and you’ll be way further ahead than even the juggernauts with a thousand times the budget and resources.

Joel Benge: That just sounds like, like responsible account management, just customer success, but having a place to put it, I think is, is, is probably the challenge. Where do we collect this stuff? Because in my experience, it’s always been a scramble. We finished the project. Let’s look through the emails. “Where did they say… Did they say that? Did they say that over coffee or did they say that on a Zoom? Can we go pull that transcript?” And it becomes this, this scramble for that. I’m assuming this was sort of the, the nut and built into, into Case Study Buddy, but conceptually what other components of that story that you want to keep and capture whether that’s even just like in a Notion, in SharePoint, in a document someplace that you’re always referring back to. Is that, is that something that, that is consistent or does it change situationally?

Joel Klettke: The mechanism will change, you know, what’s, it’s kind of like a CRM. The most important CRM is the one you actually use. Like, you know, it doesn’t matter. You can pay a billion dollars for a Salesforce implementation. If nobody touches the thing, it’s not going to do what you want it to.

Putting aside the mechanism for a moment. I mean, the key things you really want to know and track about a customer. First of all, what brought them in, right? How did they find you? Why did they choose you? These are two things that are very easy to discover. And honestly, with the right reminders in place and the right accountability in place, really easy to document.

It doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to say, Hey, how did you, how did you hear about us? And what made you choose us over competitors? And to document those things. Success criteria is another thing that if you can get it is enormously valuable because as I alluded to earlier, if you can Hold that, it can inform the rest of the conversation.

You can even see how their definition of success changes as they achieve those milestones over time. So, you know, what is it they want to achieve? I think throughout the story, you want to be tracking and keeping in touch with them on, you know, again, how are we performing against that success that you wanted to have, but also, you know, their experience of your product or your service or what that might be.

You know what are we doing, Really well, or what positive feedback do you have to share? You know, the type of things, it’s not revolution, but the type of things we set out in the customer feedback survey, where it’s just like, Hey, how are we, how are we stacking up? What do you really love about working with us?

What do you really love about this tool and, and what could change? It’s, it’s the kind of insight that again, normally, if you are responsible, you’re collecting throughout the life cycle of the engagement anyways. And then, yes, you do want to, you know, play an active role in helping them understand and track their success as well. 

I think too often we assume that they are going to know when they’re winning with our product or our service. That’s not always the case, right? They, they may, they’re not thinking about you and your tool or your service as often as you imagine that they might be. And so that’s where checking in and reminding them of, hey, you know, like, What kind of ROI are you seeing or what kind of wins are you having?

Or what can you, you know, one of my favorite questions, what can you do now or do better? Because of X service or tool, because you can surface qualitative kind of things there as well. So those things hold constant, you know, those are the milestones and markers of the relationship. I think on the mechanism front, one thing that’s really exciting for me is I know there’s a tendency right now to like just sprinkle AI on everything, but, but there is a lot of potential for some of this now to happen in the background where people don’t have to remember, for example, being able to pull, you know, exchanges out of email and put them into a timeline.

And those types of things I’m really excited about because there, there is this new sort of layer of potentially intelligent automation that will make it easier for us to be documenting these stories in real time and capturing these meaningful components and not having to, to race backwards. So I do think that is one interesting and really functional area where I do see a huge amount of value in AI, especially once it’s integrated into some of these platforms. But the mechanism is only valuable if you actually use it. And those other things I just mentioned are the things to be keeping an eye on.

Joel Benge: I think the, the human connection and taking the friction out is really, that’s, that’s never, the need for that’s never going to go away. As much as we automate and as much as we say we can just put something on rails and, and automate it. Something like, like, testimonials, case studies, customer success, it all ultimately is going to come back down to the, to the the customer’s customer.

You know, several, several people are removed upstream. What do you think is next though? So, Case Study Buddy launched, grew it sold to another company. What are you looking at next? Where do you see conversion copywriters and, and individuals, right? We say business is always about the individual, but we’re, we’re removing more of the individual out of business as, as these tools come on board.

Joel Klettke: I think broader trend outside of myself, you know, for all that I liken this whole period to like the satanic panic of like the, the 80s. Like. Everybody’s so worried that…

Joel Benge: I knew you were a headbanger, I just, I just knew you were a headbanger back to the 80s.

Joel Klettke: I mean, I was born in 87, so I missed some of it, but I think you know, there’s a lot of panic and fear and doubt around like, oh, well, will the human part of marketing still be human? And will we still need copywriters? And I can plug things into AI. And don’t get me wrong. I, I love The promise of AI.

I play with it all the time. There are so many opportunities and ways of accelerating your process and things that is good for all of the most respected people I know in the space, though, are the very first to admit that content generation is one of the worst use cases for AI. It’s, it, you know, like it’s, Andy Crestodina said AI is average information.

It’s the average of all information. You’re not going to get something radically new. And I think ultimately, you know, in, in seeing some conversations with Joanna Wiebe, who is my inspiration in the conversion copywriting space, there’s more demand for human led copywriting than ever, you know, the, the people that are still downcast, put their heads down and wondering where their jobs went.

They’re not paying attention and they’re not making changes. Like you have to go to a marketer to find an audience that, that’s really interested and excited about what they’re doing. I think there’s still an enormous amount of opportunity for people in communications in general to understand at the heart of it, you are not what you do.

You are how you think. You think people don’t hire you for what you do. They hire you for how you think. How do you solve a problem? How do you synthesize data? What process do you bring to the problem that, that makes it possible to solve it? How do you work through those very human problems? Like we talked about earlier of helping founders get out of their own way or helping teams see the whole picture or helping articulate something in a way different to the average in a way that stands out.

And so, You know, the more things change, the more things stay the same. I think companies across all levels still desperately need help articulating who they are. I think things are only getting noisier as our means of making more noise get easier and cheaper. And so that’s, you know, the industry on a whole, that’s where I see things largely going is there’s still a very human centric heart to doing this stuff well.

The tools are getting better to make those people more efficient and better at synthesizing some of these pieces of data. There’s less things we’ll have to remember to do. Like, again, if I can have a tool that automatically pulls these types of data points out of my email exchanges and compiles them so that I can tell a story with them, you know, that’s a huge win.

That’s, that’s a very positive thing. But we’re still human selling for the moment, selling to humans. You know, we AI purchasing bots going out and making all our decisions, and I don’t know how close to that we really are. 

For me personally, it’s, it’s been an interesting summer, man. I sold off Case Study Buddy, and I’m not gonna lie.

There’s a lot of stress and challenge. and just things that I loved that team. I loved that client list. I’m not sad to see it go. You know, I accomplished what I could accomplish there and, and learned a ton in the process. And so for me now, it’s been a lot of figuring out, you know, what do I want?

Where do I want to find myself? And so, you know, I, one thing I know with relative certainty is I’m almost guaranteed to be completely out of the hands on production copywriting set of things, you know, I, I can’t see myself writing websites for people for a living anymore. 

I really enjoy the strategy side of it. I really love building processes. I’m a really good catalyst. I’m really good at helping people identify opportunities and things for themselves. So, you know, what I’ve been enjoying of late is helping people kind of make the leap from, you know, these successful freelancers who want to build teams. How do I know when I can do that?

How do I make that jump? How do I avoid the landmines that, you know, I stepped on so many of them. I would have needed to be an octopus to have enough legs to get through. But I’m enjoying that side of things and, and just really I’m more open minded to what the future looks like than, than I think I ever have been.

So we’ll see.

Joel Benge: That’s awesome.

Joel Klettke: I still, yeah, still love copy. Still love messaging and positioning. Just don’t see myself doing the hands on piece of that as much as I used to.

Joel Benge: Now that you have an opportunity maybe to take the foot off the accelerator a little bit and look around, what, what are you most excited about? What, what I mean, you mentioned a couple other communicators and people that you’ve drawn inspiration from, but where else do you get your inspiration? Now we’re turning into the, the introspective personal questions.

But what, what turns you on, man? And you’re like, this is, this is an interesting place I might want to dip my toe into.

Joel Klettke: I’m really fascinated by ultra successful, small, small team businesses of all kinds. I look at what Katelyn Bourgoin, I’m sure I pronounced it wrong, but what she’s done with Why We Buy and that newsletter. And I’m, you know, I’m fascinated at the empire she’s been able to build. 

Louis Grenier and Everybody Hates Marketers, which is like probably the best name. of anything in marketing. I’m fascinated and inspired by what he’s doing there and some of the changes he’s making. You know, someone posited to me months and months ago; Dan Leffelaar . he’s an executive coach at Novus Global. They work a lot with like elite athletes and I’m fortunate to know him just on a personal level.

But I was talking about, you know, next steps and what I was going to do next. And, you know, he put it to me. He’s like, “well, what if it was easy?” Because I had this limiting mindset that anything we’re doing needs to be hard, needs to be a grind, needs to be difficult, or you’re not really earning it. And he said, “well, what would it look like if it was easy?”

And that’s kind of what intrigues me now is like, how can I take all these skills and things I’ve built up over the past decade plus and, and use them in ways that are fun. And so there’s all kinds of, I have all kinds of little pet projects and ideas.

You know, I, I have an idea for in person live events for dads, where half the event is just building connection and community with other dads, because I think a lot of us are lonely.

And the other half of the event would be bringing in like a relevant subject matter expert, whether it’s a child psychologist, a counselor, a therapist, and talk about issues that dads are facing, whether that’s dealing with stress and anxiety, whether that is being able to be patient with kids, whether that’s how little kids brains develop, and like, what are reasonable expectations to put on your kid.

You know, I’d love to start something like that. I’d love to, you know, I have a friend who’s like a Scotch connoisseur, and we’ve talked about what would it look like to do private Scotch tastings in a white collar city that has almost no Scotch options. You know, so when I say I’m more open minded to a lot of different things, like I really truly am, I think I’m looking at this combination of how can I do interesting things with really interesting people and what would it look like if it was easy?

Anything worth doing obviously takes effort, but what if it wasn’t a slog?

Joel Benge: I love that, that twist on it, which is like, I know I’m going to have to work hard, but what if I didn’t? If this were a breeze, and I was living my best life, and I could do what I wanted, what would that look like? And having that, that, what if? Which brings me back to where we started, which was, you know, you’re a multi TEDx Speaker but, but one of my favorite talks of yours is where you reveal to the world, and I don’t have the proper date on this, but at least a decade ago at one time, you were the best looking man in the world and I’m sure that does not come easy was that, was that just a, a, a fluke, an inspirational thing?

Could you just Tell us that story a little bit, very briefly.

Joel Klettke: so I was working at that agency. I was doing SEO and frankly doing it for a lot of boring things like, you know, plumbing and insurance and one day I kind of sat and went, hey, wait a second. I get paid to make stuff show up in like the biggest search engine on the planet. What is the like most interesting thing I could do for this?

I was single at the time and I, I also wanted, you know, I was like, can I find something that’d be like just a lights out example we could show clients just showing what we could do. And so I went to GoDaddy and I, I, I wondered, well, what if I could, you know, first I thought, what if I could be the best looking man in the world or sexiest man alive?

So I went to GoDaddy and bestlookingmanintheworld.com was available. And I thought, well, this is a sign I’m going to go for it. So I bought the domain and put up my picture and, and wrote up a big, you know, I think the site actually probably is still alive. You can probably

Joel Benge: I’m looking at it right now. Yeah. I’ll, I’ll put the link in the notes.

Joel Klettke: Yeah. I bought the domain. I put up a picture, wrote some things up, did the same kind of level of SEO work that I was doing for clients at the time, reached out to my SEO community, got their, you know, help getting some links and things going to that. And so for the better part of like, I want to say three to five years, whenever you would search best looking men in the world, my picture would be the number one result, which was a blessing and a curse.

It was a great example. It turned out to be something that got me a TEDx talk. It was, you know, great for party conversation and to pull it up and, you know, get a laugh. And then on the other side of things, I was like, I found out later my face was used like hundreds of times to catfish people all over the world because unscrupulous people would just search for best looking men or best looking man in the world and steal that picture and create fakes with it.

I had a hat on, I’m sure that helped, you know, helped their, their chances as they did that. But yeah, it was, Really just start as a fun experiment and I think, you know, that’s also just about, you know, what I see for myself in the future. And I think it’s more of that, like most good things that have happened to me have been a result of fun experiments, whether that was, you know, I did when I was younger, I did 30 day challenges where every month I’d pick a new challenge to try to stick to, whether that was walking every single day or eating like a celiac for a month before there was all these like gluten free options and stuff, or reading. I think I tried to read 20 books in a single month or losing 20 pounds in a month and all these different things. And like people got excited about it and started following along. I published a book by accident. So a lot of the things I’ve done have been these little creative experiments that turned into something more. And I think that’s, you know, what I’m excited to kind of get back to is just seeing what happens when it’s fun, when it’s easy.

What do some of these experiments lead to, even if it’s nothing?

Joel Benge: That’s what I always try to remind my my technical founders, which is like, why did you first get into this? What was that emotion? And I think, you know, if, if you’re an experimenter, which you, which you obviously are, that it’s the thrill of just seeing what comes of something, I think and reminding people of that often can unlock some of the greatest messaging.

I want to close just asking if you had one piece of advice just to anybody, your average John, or Jane, a developer or someone who’s like, you know, it’s not my job to talk in front of people, but every time I get up in front of somebody, I just, I don’t know what to say.

So. You know, being the best looking man in the world will open some doors, but you still have to know what to say. So, advice for just improving communication skills in general.

Joel Klettke: I think, if you can do two things. You’re already doing better than most people, which is be specific and keep it short. When we’re nervous or we don’t know what we’re saying, we tend to say a lot. And so if you can rehearse or get yourself to the point that you can be specific and keep it short, that’s your North Star, the rest, it’s not that the rest doesn’t matter, but I do believe the rest kind of falls into place.

Joel Benge: Yeah, less is definitely more.

Well, thank you so much for joining today, Joel. Again, it feels like I’m looking in a mirror. How can people connect with you if they want to learn about more about what you’ve got going on. I’ll put some links in the, in the notes, but we want to keep an eye on you, man.

Joel Klettke: Yeah, I think probably the best place is LinkedIn. I kind of, I’m pretty active there. I share, you know, a lot of what’s working for me, what I’m trying out, what I’ve learned. And I don’t always answer quickly, but I do always answer, so you can send me messages and I’m happy to chat there. Less these days, but I’m still on X.

You’ll, you’ll find, or Twitter, I still like Twitter better than X, but you’ll find more about like hockey and, and me being generally cynical about different things on, on that platform, but it’s still, it’s still one where I’m active. And for now, you know, those are the two best places until I get a new set up about whatever it is I’m doing next.

Joel Benge: Awesome. I’m really excited to see what’s happening next and and to continue chatting. And when you start doing those Scotch tastings, let me know. I will fly in.

[Musical Outtro]

Joel: If you want links to the resources mentioned on the show, head on over to the episode page. And for information on booking a message therapy workshop, getting your hands on the MessageDeck, to check out my upcoming book, or just buy me a coffee, go to nerdthattalksgood.com/podcast. 

 Until next time, happy messaging.

 Remember, you don’t have to speak well, you only gotta learn how to talk good.