Ep. 1478 Polly Hammond: Standing Out | wine2wine Business Forum 2022

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Don't forget to tune in every Thursday at two PM, Central European time, or visit point wine dot net for more information. My name is Alice Wong. I'm a financially Italian wine, ambassador and educator based in Hong time, and I'm very honored today to be here with Paulie Hamid, on her topic, how to stand out in a noisy world. So, Polly is a CEO and founder of a award winning company, five Forest she has a global network of clients, splitting her time between three continents, in Barcelona, in New Zealand, and also in Napa. A great deal of her work not only involves, taking her clients from the traditional world to the digital to age, but also to make sure that their business strategies are profitable to make sure that people can remember their brands and their products. So I know we're running a little bit behind schedule, so I'm gonna go ahead and let, Polly start her session. Thank you. Okay. So Alice needs a great big round of applause because she's come from Hong Kong. She's tired, and she's absolutely rocking it all through a very long day. Hi. We are the last session. I am the last person standing between your dinner, your glass of wine with friends, and, your chance to ponder all that you have learned today. I'm gonna ask that everyone forgive me. I'm gonna be working between two clickers today, which means at some point I am invariably gonna screw something up, but that's okay. We will make it work. So here we go. Alright. Wine Twitter. Who are my wine twitterers out there? Raise your hand. I know from my daily feed that there are more of you. Anybody wanna hazard a guess how many million tweets, Elon Musk, notwithstanding, are sent every day. How many tweets per day? Don't make me calling you. I I know some names in the room. I absolutely can't do that. Alright. There we go. Six hundred and fifty million tweets per day. Instagrammers? Who prefers Instagram for their daily fix? Yes. Wine loves Instagram. How many Instagram posts per day? I wish. I wouldn't. Alright. Stories alone. Are three hundred and fifty thousand stories, and I have to tell you, I'm not posting that many stories. I know that our, our Italian wine podcast team posted off a lot of them, so good on them. Alright. Email. Just even a ballpark guess. Three hundred and thirty two billion emails per day. And that includes your daily feed of don't you wanna buy these shoes and aren't these towels the best one you've ever seen. Google searches, there are ninety nine thousand Google searches every single second, which equates to roughly eight point five billion Google searches per day. We're data consumers. We're loud noisy people. We create two point five quintillion bytes of data every day, and I have to tell you, my brain can't even fathom what a quintillion looks like. And by the end of this year, especially in light of the pandemic, seventy percent of the world's GDP will have undergone digitalization. So no matter what we believe about attention spans. And actually, people do have attention spans that are longer than a goldfish. And no matter how you feel about tech, no matter what you think about the future of digital, the fact is that we have always been noisy. We marketers are particularly loud and noisy. And it has only gotten worse since March of twenty twenty. So how do we stand out? How do we make certain that we marketers, communicators, businesses that we're a part of the signal We're a part of the useful noise. We're a part of the sound that gets heard and not just the clamor. And it's not just the noise itself that's a problem. It's that the noise, the digital noise, the digital noise pollution has created some unique circumstances for all of us in the room for anyone who wants to be heard, not even necessarily loud. So the first one is there are more and more jobs for teams that are not growing at the same pace, we now have everything from digital analysts, social media marketers, content creators. Oh, what else? SEO experts, video production. Look at how much of it we have in this room. So while the adoption of digital has been an absolute god send for the wine industry, it's also meant that an industry that even before March twenty twenty was often spread too thin with too few resources now have more jobs that we have to pack into busy days and over allocated funds. So Here's the question. How can we actually stand out? And that's that's what we're gonna be looking at today. How can we possibly keep up with the increased demand and the not necessarily increase market, margins? The other problem we have is that we have a seemingly infinite changeability to our marketing environment. Right now, Europe is at the heart of privacy legislation And yet, when I speak to European communicators and producers, the desire, and this is gonna be very hard to do with a microphone, and, clicker in my hand. Is to put our fingers in our ears. We don't wanna hear about it. We don't wanna tackle it. How are we expected to become experts on digital rights, platforms, and tech requirements when we are at risk of simply getting our mess of not getting our message across? The laws are driving unswervingly toward a loss of easy, meaningful data. The way that we have learned to understand our audiences is changing every day and The financial and labor costs of alternatives are actually quite frightening. I don't know if anybody in the room has followed what's happened with Google, Facebook, of course, GDPR, but we know that we are not prepared as small, medium, and independent businesses, and in many cases, large businesses to deal with this. Along the same lines, those platforms are constantly changing. All we have to do is look at the diminishing demand for Facebook to look at what has happened in Twitter this week, and to look at the changeability of media types as it were on Instagram to understand that we cannot become over reliant upon external platforms to drive our messaging home. We have conflicting external data. We've had a lot of data presented even here in one day alone. Some of that data has to do with statistics. Gen Z. Maybe it's low alc. No alc. Is it cans or is it bagnums? Is it tourism? Is it carbon consumption? Is it shipping? Is it e com? The fact of the matter is that for every positive we hear about changing data, there is equally a negative. How are we supposed to know what works for our brands and more importantly, our audiences, especially at a time, just to be fair, when fake news, statistics, and science, algorithms mean that faith in experts is waning. So quick show of hands. Gonna make you do it. Ex extroverts in the room. Raise your hand if you consider yourself an extrovert. Wow. We kinda lined up on this side. Okay. Raise your hand if you consider yourself an introvert. Oh, see, that's why you're in the room because we are, we are habitually quiet people who don't necessarily want to be in your face all the time. So How do we stand out? And it's not just the introverts, but the extroverts we know have a little bit of an edge on us. So how do those of us who are not naturally loud? How do we make a difference to our brands, our bottom line, and our people? How do we transition from shouting? Buy my shit, buy my shit, buy my shit, buy my shit, which has been the history of digital marketing to whispering the right message to the right people at the right time. And the answer to this is something that we call radical listening. So we'll hear a lot about active listening. Radical listening is a little different, and it's actually very important for the wine world to get behind this because radical listening means we set aside our own biases, our prejudices, our judgments, our beliefs, and we actually hear what our audience is saying to us without stereotypes, perceptions, and the filters that so often we carry with us in all of our communications. We place the emphasis when we radically listen on understanding the point of view of the other. And hearing what is said, and sometimes what is not said in order to build a strategy that's based on real insights that are applicable specifically to our brand. So to listen radically, we must start by being curious. We must want to understand what are the motivations of our people, what are their hopes and fears and dreams, Why do they wanna engage with us, our brand, our spaces, our messaging? We need to know how they feel. And why? Why is this important? Why is radical listening that the step that is going to get us over this hump of the very, very noisy world. And the answers are are manifold. First, trust. Have you ever just had that friend that listens to you so well? You know, you know that they're looking at you. They're hearing what you're saying. They're taking it on board. And two years from now, when you come back dating the same guy, they're gonna look at you and be like, we've been here before. What the fuck are you thinking? Right? Okay. The point is that that memory lives on, that trust lives on. We know that we're safe with those people. We know that they respect what we are and what we bring to the equation. We know that they can confidently believe what we tell them. And at a time when trust is at an all time low, trust building in our relationships between a brand and our customers is one of the most powerful things that you can do. I, I really appreciate the people taking screenshots. This is actually intended so that you guys are listening to me and not the background music and not the video behind me. Alright. Here we go. So next, Here we go. Product development and white space identification. There are innumerable stories of using active listening and what I'm proposing radical listening in tech development to actually understand what it is that they want and they cannot find. What is what it is that they thought something would be, but it's actually not. Where they can't find a solution? So I'm gonna give an example that I run into all the time that anyone who handles social media for brands might also notice Every single social media management platform has one thing less missing. It's not the same thing, but it's always one really important thing. The digital and the marketing community talk about this online And yet, years and years later, there's still no solution that's listening and saying, we need a, b, c, d, e, and f. If you ever were an Evernote user, you'll know that this was actually how Evernote built their brand early on, is that they spent a lot of time listening to what their audiences were saying, not about them, and this is important. But about their competition. So again, radical listening, but transformed to pay attention to different voices, different sounds, different names, not just our own. Okay. Content marketing and advertising. I know that this has come up time and time again in a conference about communication. The purpose of content is to provide value. It's to add meaning. It's to solve problems. Well, how are we supposed to do that if we're the ones who are talking and not listening? How do we know what actually is going to matter to them? What's going to get them coming back to our brand? Again, a course of, in this case, Digital radical listing listening is the solution to the problem. When we as marketers open our ears and shut our mouths, we are much better able to meet our audience where they are at a given point in their customer journey with our brand. We create less noise. When we speak, we're worth listening to, they open our emails, And suddenly, we're not a part of the clamor that draws their attention away and frustrates them. We're a part of the brands that they trust to be useful every time they engage with us. So another way that I think is quite valid in the context of content marketing is that we hear a lot of discussion around personalization. What is personalization? I'm gonna send a personalized email. I'm gonna use AI to figure out the most personalized thing that this person wants in their next shopping experience. Right? We we try to hack all of this with technology, but the reality is that good personalization is a real person understanding where another real person is along a journey, a decision making process. And sometimes that journey is they're not there yet. And if you've ever signed up for one dinky little newsletter and then spent the rest of your life getting marketed to about something that you weren't interested in you know that brands are not listening to you. Alright. Here's an internal one. We gotta learn to say no. We have a big problem. It's not just wine. It's everyone, which is My nephew told me that I needed to create reals. My granddaughter mentioned that Substack is the next best place. My uncle told me that my website needs animations, whatever it is. We get caught up in this onslaught of, oh my god, there's a new product. And yes, if we buy this, we absolutely will solve all of our problems. And it actually just compounds because now we ourselves are creating internal noise we're creating a lot more work and we have no idea which of these are serving us or our audience. We can learn to say no by understanding where our audience. And I mean, literally where our audience is. Are they on Facebook? Are they on Instagram? Are they on emails? Do they find us through Google searches? Is it Vivino? Is it wine spectator? Where is the point that they come to us and we can be ready for them? Alright. Another one that's gonna get a little bit geeky, and so I apologize for that. First party data. Alright. So the days of broad markets, data that is useful are rapidly coming to an end, thanks to Google, and thanks to legislation, and thanks to ongoing privacy regulations. Right now, And if there's one thing you take away, that's valuable, I I hope it would be this. Brands who wanna be competitive in the next three, five, and ten years are looking right now at better ways to, to acquire their first party data. And listening, the ways that we're going to talk about listening, are actually going to give you a competitive advantage over all of those are the brands who don't rock up to conferences like this. And then put their fingers in their ears because first party data and data legislation is really scary and none of us understand it. So you don't have to. We just have to care to listen. Alright. Future proofing and emerging trends. We've had some pretty big ones happen happen recently. Obviously, Elon Musk and Twitter was a a huge one Facebook and data security. We had a few years back. You know, whether it is the political climate, whether it's the effect of tariffs, whether it's an upcoming legislation. When we engage in radical listening with our audiences, we can understand which of these external factors matter to them. Because otherwise we're at risk of taking a wide, a a widespread approach that tries to get us to solve every single one of those problems or address them, and that is simply neither feasible nor is it pertinent to our audiences. So the ability to focus on our macro environment, but in a more precise way is one of the gifts of radical listening. Alright. Last one, scary one, crisis prep. We've just come out of the two most chaotic years. I think we've ever had. Whether you're worried about Gen Z is not drinking wine, which they are or whether you're concerned about tracking your own online reputation and an era where things can go wrong very, very quickly and spiral out of hand, whether you're concerned about the kind of reviews that you get. Whatever it might be, again, adopting a radical listening approach as opposed to a constantly talking approach will afford your brand accuracy and immediacy in dealing with any crisis communications. I actually have a story about this from one of my clients. So they have, they have a a bustling tasting room with thousands of people every year. And with thousands of people, come some negative reviews. And we were trying to figure out how do we solve the problem of negative reviews in their Google My Business or Google Review spaces. And what they found out was that by adding one line to their request for review email, It shifted all of that. All they had to do was say, did you have a problem? Email us directly at and it was the name of the CEO of the business. All the negative reviews came in by email. They had a chance to respond personally. They could hear what the problem was. They could correct or decide if it was necessary. The Google the negative Google reviews stopped. Super easy. Okay. So how do we make this happen? One of the things that I wanna talk about with wine and, radical listening, it always amazes me because when you talk about things like focus groups or customer interviews, businesses just start to cringe. But in wine, we have both of these directly in front of us all the time. A customer interview is simply someone in your tasting room. Talk to them ask them meaningful questions. Why are they there? What matters to them? What was the first wine they ever loved? Who will they share it with? On what occasions do they drink? Focus groups are group tasting experiences. You know, you get eight people in a room and they're sharing their own stories between themselves. We can sit back and listen to what they say to each other. It's not stalking. But we also can ask questions directed at groups. So This is not hard, and it's something we do every day. But maybe we need to turn our ears more to what toward what they're saying as opposed to what we want them so desperately to hear us say. So in a digital sense, we've got things like website behavior and intent, which I know that Pauline talked about today. What brought them to our site? What are they trying to accomplish? We can actually use radical listing in a digital space through effective analytics. Social media. First, social media shouldn't be a place where we talk. It should be a place where we listen. This is such a beautiful opportunity to engage in conversations with people who are super interested in what we do because wine is fun. Wine is fun. It's romantic. Felicity Carter is sitting here in the audience. I'm gonna tell a story that has to with Felicity. We were at a conference in DC a couple weeks ago, talking to a bunch of student journalists. And they discovered that we work in wine. Wow. They were so interested. We don't sell tires. You know, we're not bail bondsman. We sell a product that people want to talk about and they love it. So let's get on board with having those conversations in our social media spaces. Alright. Online reviews. Really, really untapped opportunity for you to listen again to what they're saying. But for you to join into that conversation, if you've ever gone on to a review site, and you've wondered, well, why didn't the brand actually talk back? Why didn't the brand really say something to them? Why didn't they make amends, apologize, or say we're so glad you had an excellent experience. We can't wait for the next opportunity to welcome you back. Servways. This is another one that make people cringe because it kinda goes back to the days when we were given, like, NPS scores. And those god awful emails, please. If you send those emails that have, like, the five faces and some are really grumpy and other ones are really happy, No. This is not the way to go. You know a great way to run a survey these days and and get to the heart of what people think is an Instagram poll. It's engaging. It's delightful. It's very low key, so we're not in their face about it. And if you wanna talk about getting to your gen z and your millennial customers, it's a really, really good way to find out what they think and feel about your brand. Alright. Another scary one, live chat on your website. Does anyone have live chat on their website? Okay. Alright. You did. You did. Why do you not have it on your website anymore? Alright. So so, and I don't have it on my site because it would not work on my site for the most common reason of all, which we're addressing today. Don't have live chat. If you can't manage If there's not anyone there to answer it, if you can't engage with your customers, don't have it. But if you've got a large significant team and you can actually run relatively around the clock or at least consistent, live chat office hours. It's a great way to let them ask questions and for you, more importantly, to answer and ask back. Remember, curiosity is one of the key features of radical listening. Alright. Along that line. Request for feedback. Nobody likes to do it because it's so scary that we're gonna ask them, and god forbid they're gonna say something we don't wanna hear. But you know what? Setting aside our biases and our preconceived notions. The point is, maybe we wanna hear the things. Maybe we need to hear the things that we don't really, really want to know from them. Find out. Are you enjoying this podcast? There's so much more high quality wine content available from mama jumbo shrimp. Check out our new wine study maps. Our books on Italian wine including Italian wine unplugged, the jumbo shrimp guy to Italian wine, sangiovese Lambrusco, and other stories, and much much more. On our website, mama jumbo shrimp dot com. Now back to the show. Go forward. Pick somebody on your staff who is completely immune to, to rejection anxiety. Have them, assign them all of the feedback emails. Let them compile them, turn it into a report, address it. Alright. We're gonna now, how do we do this? This is the big takeaway. If we wanna be radical listeners, because I think that we wanna call ourselves active listeners, we wanna say that we're really good at this, But it actually does take some practice to do it. The hippie Buddhist in the room is gonna talk about this. So first, as marketers and as businesses, we have to slow down. Marketing is a marathon. It is not a sprint. We are currently living in an era. Yeah. We're we are currently living in an era where marketers are expected to create content, value, messaging, product ideation, at such a rapid, rapid pace. And we cannot do this if we wanna ever sit back and understand how what we're creating actually resonates with our audience. Alright. Listen to the right people. This is really important. Number one rule of marketing is you are not your customer. This is something we see in wine all the time. We love to gather together in big rooms and talk to other wine people and other wine marketers. All about who our audience is. When the reality is, if we wanna know about our audience, if we wanna understand their motivations, their dreams, hopes, their fears, their desires, all of that, we actually have to go out into the world and talk to the right people. Now I can't get past the speech without bringing up personas. So I will do it to say you need to use proper buyer personas, and please not stereotypes. I can't tell you the number of personas that come across my desk. I'm gonna tell one, actually, that the it was for a premium wine brand and their persona. Was a young tech startup entrepreneur making a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year and living in San Francisco. Does anyone live in San Francisco? Alright. Hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year living in San Francisco. You're probably not gonna have enough money to buy super premium wine. You're living in a flat with four friends. So it's the idea that that the stereotypes that we believe in that someone who is uneducated doesn't know. So education versus knowledge. Income. We like to use income markers, but it's not about our income. It's about our disposable income. And finally, the one that I love as a gin Xillennial, I think that's what Dan Simms calls us, is age versus tech adoption. Please stop thinking that the boomers don't know how to use the internet. And that Jinzee doesn't read email because all of these, frankly, are bullshit. Alright. So next up, dig deeper, listen closely, and again, be curious. Ask the uncomfortable questions. I know it's really hard to do. We wanna ask the questions that affirm our beliefs, but just taking it a little bit be little mini journalist. Just taking it that much further and asking the harder questions will get you to the answers that will help you understand more about where those consumers are relative to what you're selling. Alright. So the next one is hear the person and not the problem. I think it's really easy when we're problem solving for our clients or for our customers that we get into problem solver mode. We're going to we're gonna fix it. We're gonna you know, get to the heart of it. We're gonna give it to our customer service team. We're gonna find the policy that can we can create so that this never happens again. But, actually, stop and listen to where that person is right now. Are they confused? Are they overwhelmed? Are they exasperated by the by the process? They may not even be able to tell you in normal language what it is that's troubling them But if we can move beyond listening only to the problem and actually hear the language and the emotion in their voice, often we can identify what has really brought them to this phone call, this email, this live chat, this DM. At the same time, we have to listen to their language and not just their message. I think this is something that in wine, we're we're getting a lot better at since we first started discussing it. God knows how long ago. But if we want to speak to the people who are important to us, we need to hear the language that they're using to talk about our product, service, and experience and then we need to be willing to meet them with that same language. Here are the emotion and not just the response when you're asking questions. Are they And they're talking about how they feel about your product. Are they overjoyed? Are they proud? Do they feel safe and secure? Do they feel clever? Again, when we filter out the noise, we're able to better understand the emotions that motivate our audience. Alright. Watch. If you happen to have an experience or a space, where you can interact with them, not virtually. Non verbal communication works. I have a story about this. That's a personal one. I used to belong to a co working space. And it was lovely. And it was lovely, and it was probably overpriced. And they'd made a lot of beautiful decisions that if anyone had ever sat back and watched how people used their spaces, what they would have realized is their seating was uncomfortable. Nobody could find an outlet to plug in our computers. We were checking our watches to see how long it took for a coffee to come. There's a lot that we can learn when we completely get silent. And just watch for the nonverbal communication. And I've said it before, but I'm gonna say it again. We need to check our own biases at the door. We need to not be judgmental. We need to be impartial and neutral when we are listening to our consumers, our future consumers, and even our never consumers. And again, I love the data. I love the statistics, but I do feel like as a marketer who works with that all the time, Sometimes that that information is simply a part of the noise. Pause. Pause. Don't jump into a conclusion. Pause and reflect on the whole of what you've learned, what you've heard. Were there any patterns? Were there arcs and waves in what they were talking about? What were they really expressing to you? Were they expressing the problem, and we've all done this. Right? If you've ever dealt with a bank, we've all done this. Were we expressing the problem, which is I can't get into my account, or we're expressing the problem of you control my money and you make it too freaking hard for me to do anything. Right? What is the exact problem? It's not always the problem that they conveyed to us. And then you need to have systems to share this within your organization. To collectively think about this within your organization. And then finally, to act upon this within your organization. So what does it take on an organizational level to make this happen? The first thing is, involve your entire company. Do not silo this information away. Do not have a customer service, you know, caretaker guru, category, happiness office, or whatever it might be. Make certain that everyone in your organization understands that one of their jobs And in a good way, not in a, you're gonna write it in their job description way, is to listen to what they're hearing on the floor, in the cellar, in the ladies room, where's Jill who was saying we needed blue paper in the ladies room today, make certain that we're listening to what's going on, and that we have an ability to convey that across the team without fear of reprisal. And that's really important because especially when we're dealing, sorry to say it with younger workers. The idea that we might report something that someone could come to us and say is our fault. Is very, very intimidating, and that information won't always make it to the needful people. Make certain that there is a repository to collect this information in. Because one review, one comment, one bit of feedback, one email does not a decision make. But if we have a collective space where we can document we can see patterns. We can understand dates. We can have baselines. Sometimes we can even set KPIs for this. We can actually make listening and a part of the culture of our organization. And then, one that I really love, make certain that there is some sort of storytelling capability within your team. Because being able to listen radically, hear the emotions, hear the responses, hear see the nonverbal communication, allows us to paint a picture of where our audience is what matters to them, what channels we can use to communicate them, communicate with them effectively, efficiently, and ultimately profitably. And last but not least. Create a culture of why, not just what. Give your people leeway to dig deeper, to be curious, to want to know more The more that we want to know about our people, the more that they feel that we care about them, and that we're interested in them, and that we're good listeners, and we're that excellent best friend. There we go. Alice, if you have a question? Thank you, Paulie. I think a big part of your message today really echoes with, one of the sessions we had earlier today. Regarding the, overproduction of wine in Italy. And we talk about how producers are in love with their own products, and they just keep making the wines they love without listening to demand and what the market really wants. So I think you gave the answer to those producers who are questioning why they make the wines they like, but nobody buys them because they're not listening probably. That's that's sad. But Nothing's already come here. Nothing's nothing's worse than making something that we love, and we all do it and and realizing that maybe there's not a market for it. Yes. Colleen. I've been in English with British people. Mhmm. And I've asked feedback about some of the things that we did, and I received feedback on from a British gentleman I read that comment in the office, and the American and the French in the room were like, yay, that's great. And the brits were like, nah, that is not good feedback because it was just very British polite way of turning me down, but I didn't understand that because I'm not Are we talking about the use of the word quite? Well Quiet. So my my question was, like, even if I try to put all my bias at the door when you listen, there's always some knowledge about cultural that I can't have Yeah. And I can't understand the language. I think, actually, you bring up a very interesting point about it, and it's where we do have challenges of small and medium sized enterprises. Is that, if, you know, if we don't have the cultural knowledge ourselves. And culture isn't just geography. Culture can be age. It can be technology. It can be, oh, I mean, obviously, not gonna yes. I'm gonna leave it at that. If we don't have that natively within our organizations, it's really important that we either build it formally or that we build it informally. So the story that you told is that you had to go out to your advisors in the room and say, I need some help understanding this. And this is why it needs to be a cultural adoption. It doesn't just need to be siloed to one person. Now how do we do that as small teams? I'm gonna honestly say, Reddit is fabulous for understanding things like this. If you wanna get honest answers on stuff, any kind of social spaces where you can go in and say, hey, anonymize it, of course. Be like, Can someone please tell me? I just got this feedback. I mean, I'm certain there must be a separated group that's like French trying to understand the British slash. Right? And I someone just said this to me, and I don't actually know if this is good or bad, can you help me understand the context of this statement? And it's one of the big challenges. I mean, I'm an expat just like you. It's one of the big challenges of working across borders. Is trying to trying to, ourselves, figure out, am I too assertive? Am I not assertive enough? Do I understand the words right? Do I not understand? Did I just say something naughty and I didn't even know it? I mean, like, all of these things can happen. So short answer. If you can, human advisors. If you can't get human advisors, trust in the power of the collective Reddit brain. Yes. Poly awesome talk. Really enjoyed what you had to say. I think it's so incredibly important, for me as a as a blind guy, doing work in in in this space. It's all about listening. It's all about really listening instead of hearing. I think is is such a good, such a good thought and, and a good presentation topic. So really valuable. And I thank you very much for it. I'm dealing with this, not at all in the wine to distribute with a different group that I work with, where at the top level, there's a huge, ego problem, which allows for the desire not to listen. And there's always the excuses. If it's not me, it's everybody else that I'm dealing with. I don't wanna hear the truth. I don't wanna hear the fact that there's a problem in this organization's going down. Clients aren't happy. No one's no one's able to be, you know, but yet the words seem to not sink in with when you have a the problem of someone at the top, I know it's a psychological battle of how to get them to turn their ears on and really listen and focus because that that's what's ultimately gonna keep their job. How do you deal with that psychology? How do you get these people that are just so focused on my way or the highway to stop and listen. Yeah. I I I think the thing about sort of this radical listening, which I've had to learn to do as you know, I've had to learn to do with client leaders, in in exactly the situation that you describe, is that first, we have to put our scripted narratives aside, and then we have to say How do I how do I use all of the tricks as it were? How do I use this methodology with this person? Because everyone within an organization has their particular motivators for change. So the first thing that I would say in those leadership environments is, is there a way to be curious? Is there a way to phrase the question to our leaders? Okay. I'm hearing that right now, this isn't something that you want to do. If I could present a business case for it, would you consider it, or just skip over that and present a business case for it, or alternately say, What is your concern around moving in this direction? So use the employ the same Q and A that you would use with a customer. What what mattered to you? How did you get here? What is important to you? How can we make a good impression? How can we make this work for you? Start with that with your leadership. But I do believe ultimately with leadership and depending upon where they are in sort of the chain of command. You have people who are afraid. So this is kinda gonna go off peace for a moment, but just bear with me. Remember a lot of our management, that their job is to, it is god. I'm gonna get myself in trouble with managers in this room. Managers don't wanna get in trouble for making a bad decision. Elon Musk can make a stupid decision because he's the sole owner now of Twitter. He's allowed to do that. His management team will get fired for it. So we have to provide needful guidance and good business cases that their decision making practice is impeccable. For leaders, a lot of times, it's understanding what is the motivation or the emotion behind it. Is it fear? Is it fear that it's gonna cost us too much money? Is it fear that we're going to look weak? Is it don't give a fuck? Is it we can't be bothered to learn something new? And then we have to mark it what we want them to do direct to those concerns and motivations that are stopping their forward progress. Sorry, and Katrina Anderson. I was just thinking because, of course, I mean, when I helped, the wineries I helped, I do social listening, and, of course, radical listening is even better. But I was thinking so I'm thinking about wine in Italy, which is not really that much about big brands and huge organizations but rather about small wineries, and if you're lucky mid sized wineries. And, of course, I think your small wineries, it might on the one hand be easier to do, you know, convince the owner of of radical listening, but on the other hand, it might also be even more difficult to not convince him about using or him or her because they might not be into the, the digital world entirely yet. So I was thinking, how do you I mean, what are efforts to to how do you apply to this in a world that is not on the It is on a more corporate level. That that's not corporate or that isn't digital? Well, both a bit. I mean, that is a smaller, more kind of agricultural minded. Well, it's funny because, yes, we have digital tools to do this now, but we're not talking about anything other than just becoming friends with our customers. Right? So I I suppose the first place that I would start is to step out of the social media and the digital side of it and just start this in our analog spaces. You can even get them on board with. I'd like to try and experiment or if you, let's say that you're a a person who works in a tasting room and you wanna give this a try, unless you have heavily scripted tasting rooms, which we don't tend to see outside of, you know, certain specific areas. There's nothing that prevents you from you know, starting with, starting with questions, documenting what you're hearing. You might do that for three months, even, but then you might be able to go to them and say, over the past three months, just be curious. Over the past three months, we've been asking these questions to people who have come into the tasting room. And here are some of the most common answers we found. And based upon these answers, we would like to try blank. Will you support us in this? A lot of times what we find with small businesses is that they're not opposed to it. It's that they're scared of what it's gonna cost, what the resources, and what the time, and what the learning is. If you take away all of that, and you can present it as more of a fit to complete. We've already done this work for you, and we make this recommendation. What is it gonna cost me, you know, and then realistically tell them what it's gonna cost them, which probably is not gonna be a lot for something like this. They'll often sign off on it. As I do wanna say something though about social media. The problem that I see with small to midsize or the independent companies is that it really is people have told them they need to be on all of these channels. And they're spread so thin. It it's possible, and we've certainly seen this with clients, that the outcome is in fact to narrow down our where we're spending our time and our money. And if we can say to someone look right now, we are doing a poor job and here are our analytics in using four platforms. And we would like to propose an alternate strategy where we use one platform form in a very dedicated way and review it in sixty days, will you let us do this? And then you can counter all the fears. Oh, what about the people who love Twitter? You know, you can say, okay. Well, here's what we know. So I I think make it make it appear, which is true, that you're actually reducing the amount of work that's doing and consolidating it into something that's really useful. Who's ready for wine? Listen to the Italian wine podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We're on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, email ifm, and more. Don't forget to subscribe and break the show. 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