Many businesses employ cutting-edge technology to hit their biggest goals. However, one important factor in achieving business success is often neglected – empathy. In this conversation, Mark Cox sits down with Minter Dial to discuss how empathy is the key competitive advantage in the 21st-century marketplace. Minter breaks down the two styles of emphatic understanding and the two things that hinder empathy from growing in workplaces. Minter also explores how artificial intelligence can be employed to help people render more emphatic messaging and build more inclusive teams.
---
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Understanding Heartificial Empathy With Minter Dial
Thanks for joining us on The Selling Well podcast. Before we get started, we’ve got a really special offer for you as a listener of the show. We’ve launched the next generation of our In The Funnel Sales Academy. The leading online training platform and B2B sales community that helps companies optimize their sales and generate unpredictable revenue growth. For the show’s listeners, we’re offering 50% off your first month for any of our subscription plans. Just go to SellingWell.com/podcast and then use the promo code PODCAST. That’s Sellingwell.com/podcast, promo code PODCAST and you get 50% off your first month. Looking forward to working with you. Now, on to the show.
Because some people say there's only one formula altogether. Others say it must be attached to compassion. For me, compassion and other styles of output are distinct from the notion of empathy which is discreetly about your ability to understand. What you do without understanding can be compassion, sympathy, or other things but it should be detached. That's the important piece because in business what I tend to preach and promote is thinking about how to improve your cognitive empathy. Teach somebody to have emotional empathy. I don't know if that's really possible, and it's certainly impossible for a machine.
I’ve always said that salespeople are bleeders. We’re almost like independent businesses at times managing or entrepreneurs managing our territories. Today’s show, it’s really relevant to us because we’ve got Minter Dial on the show. Minter is a professional speaker. He’s a storyteller and author, and he’s a consultant who specializes in leadership, branding, and transformation. In his court career, he enjoyed 16 years spent at L’Oreal including being managing director Worldwide at Redken. He’d authored four books.
The Last Ring Home: A POW’s Lasting Legacy of Courage, Love, and Honor in World War II, Futureproof: How To Get Your Business Ready For The Next Disruption, Heartificial Empathy: Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence, and then the book that we’re going to talk to him about, which is You Lead: How Being Yourself Makes You a Better Leader, features weekly podcast on leadership and branding. He’s got over 436 episodes. He’s a great guy and he’s a deadhead. We’re going to talk to him a little bit about that is the love of a grateful dad. I hope you enjoyed today’s show with Minter. I certainly did. If you do, please like and subscribe The Selling Well podcast. Enjoy.
---
Minter, welcome to the show again. It's great to see you.
Mr. Cox, it's great to have you in my line of vision.
How's the pickleball? I've been noticing a lot of involvement with pickleball online with you.
Pickle less paddle more. My Sport is paddle tennis. Both of them are greatly ascending sports in the United States. Paddled behind pickle for now, but I was just on the phone with the commissioner, the professional paddle league and he says watch out.
What were you doing on the phone with the commissioner of the professional League? Are you a professional player?
No. I'm 60 years old, so that isn't possible anymore. Of course, I play maybe in the veterans, but I know let's say a deep long-rooted aficionado pal. I've been playing since 1974. Spreading the word about the sport that came of age in the last 10 years was helped in part by the pandemic and a lot of well-known football and soccer players who have come inside. This is the sport of the future.
Thank you. I'll do a deeper dive into that.
I'll send you a link to some hot dog points. It is so entertaining to watch and the beauty of the paddle. I've just started the podcast called The Joy of Paddle Podcast. The beauty of the sport is that it's a deeply social sport. Easy to start therefore easy for beginners to wail and hoot and have fun on a pedal court right from the get-go. Then as you get better, you have to learn new tricks and trades and it gets all sorts of sophisticated and nuanced. Anyway, that's my thing these days.
Yes, I will take a look into it. I was an avid tennis player. I played a lot of table tennis. That was something we did a lot of growing up. Love racket sports. By the way, Minter, one of the reasons I was so excited to chat with you, outside of the fact that I enjoyed Heartificial Empathy, the book we're going to be talking about today. Of course, you've been on the show previously when we talked about your prior book You Lead.
Having this conversation, you strike me as over in North America here we have a commercial about Dos Equis beer. There's this interview with the world's most interesting man. You always strike me when I read your books and we have these conversations. You strike me as a real Renaissance man, the world's most interesting man. I know our discussion today is going to go in lots of different areas. Hey, thanks so much for joining again.
My great pleasure, and I'm guessing and embarrassed by the idea of the greatest Renaissance man. Definitely like lots of topics though. I can say that.
Writing The Book
Today's topic a Heartificial Empathy putting hard into business and artificial intelligence. As we jump in and do a little deep-diving, do you want to read a couple of the testimonials of this book? Right off the top, we hear in our Heartificial Empathy, Minter Dial, masterfully makes the case for why empathy is not only learnable but a requirement for success in business and life that came from Charlene Li bestselling author and founder of Altimeter. Another one empathy will be the key competitive advantage of the 21st Century.
Dial captures the full essence of that one special quality that makes us truly human. Nell Watson, AI and Robotics faculty at Singularity University. We talk about singularity a lot on this show. Then a third one, they're all over the book but a third one, I jumped out at me and in a texture-driven society empathy is an increasingly rare and valuable skill. That came from Dorie Clark author of Entrepreneurial You and Stand Out.
Artificial empathy lays out this business case and a path for putting more heart and heart and empathy into business and machines for a healthier and more profitable future. Given the diversity of some of the other books you've written. I think there's some tie of course into You Lead. What prompted you, Minter, to go down the path of this topic? Of course, we're on the second printing of the book. I think the first printing was in 2018, if I'm not mistaken.
That's correct. There's the let's say nominal reason which I will more often than not talk about which is that my observation was having worked in business working with lots of people and this is pre-pandemic that there was a constant failing in businesses with regards to the humanity of management. It was a great focus on productivity, efficiencies, effectiveness, and all that at the cost of how you speak to each other, and how you listen.
That's the nominal reason. The actual reason which is much more personal was that my best friend killed himself. At that time, I was writing another book, it became my therapy to figure out because I accompanied him through the last six weeks about empathy and how it can be also extremely pertinent, practical, and important in person not just in work.
I'm so sorry about your friend. You said you accompanied him in the last six weeks.
On the phone mostly. I mean obviously in person as well in interspersed, but that was it.
Wow. What an experience that must have been. Hopefully from something like that, when we read this book some great good can come from it. Minter, I really enjoy your writing style. I find it so engaging and so interesting. Frankly, it's just so smart being someone who's writing a book right now and having a pretty tough time of it. At some point in time in the first chapter, you say, “Continue reading if.”
If you think satisfying customers is important or you think you want employees to be more engaged or if you're contemplating or implementing an AI strategy or you want to improve your innovation pipeline or design a new product website or office space? You go five or six other things here?
Defining Empathy
Anybody listening to this show should maybe turn up the volume because frankly, you identify at the beginning of this book this ideal client profile for the book, which is virtually everybody in the universe. I can't believe there's anybody in business technically today small, medium, or large enterprise who doesn't want to do some of these things. Let's start with the core of this topic empathy. All of us hear about sympathy and we hear about emotional intelligence and we hear about compassion and all these different things. Let's define empathy. What is empathy?
Right, so there are lots of misconceptions and certainly there's no single definition because in the empathy activist world, there's lots of jiggling and realigning as to what what empathy really might be. For me, the way I define empathy is the ability to understand what someone else is thinking, feeling, or experiencing. It breaks down into two styles of understanding. The first is cognitive where I understand what your situation is. I see where you are and I hear what you're saying. I observe your feelings.
The second type is emotional or affective empathy and that's when you feel what the other person's feeling. You have absolutely can feel the sadness of the other person when they're feeling sad, and this is an important distinction because some people say there's only one formula altogether. Others say it must be attached to compassion. For me, compassion and other styles of output really are distinct from the notion of empathy which is discreetly about your ability to understand.
What you do without understanding compassion, sympathy, and other things but it should be detached. That's the important piece because in business what I tend to preach and promote is thinking about how to improve your cognitive empathy. Teach somebody to have emotional empathy. I don't know if that's really possible and it's certainly impossible for a machine.
Which we’ll get to and I think it's a good example instead of clarifying you just shared this unfortunate personal story of your pal. Automatically, I would default to this cognitive empathy or almost sympathy where I don't know what that feels like, but I do have sadness or concern for you having gone through it. Is that cognitive empathy or is that sympathy?
If you feel sadness, that is affective empathy. Where you're reflecting or mirroring my sadness which is deep. Of course, it's now been six years but every time I talk about the book. It is an opportunity for me to think about Philip and I love the idea of giving pause to be present in the moment even with some past figure. I'm writing a new book about conversation and one of the amazing conversations I had was with a Native American Indian who had the presence to speak to her ancestor seven generations ago. That's where my monkey brain just took me. The idea is being present with conversation you can do with trees, you can do with ancestors. In this case of my dead pal.
To whom you dedicated the book.
Yes. Actually, the second edition, I also dedicated it to a lovely fellow empathy activist who unfortunately died of cancer Jackie Atro. She was just a light in my life. Unfortunately, she expired too early.
Learning Empathy
Circling back now to empathy, we've defined it. Then you did talk about. Hey, I think maybe we can develop and learn cognitive empathy. I'm not sure that we can do the same for emotional empathy. When you were talking about, can it be learned in the book? Being a sales trainer and a consultant, I immediately aligned with this thought that you can't teach anybody anything if they don't want to learn it. There's nothing worse than running a sales workshop where there's 10% of the class just doesn't want to be there. We always try to make them optional when clients engage in our services because we just don't want that person in the room. How do we learn it?
Like you say, you need to want to learn it. Once you have that appetite, then there are various ways you can improve your empathy. The key point is what willingness and curiosity to learn about the other person. If you don't have that, in other words, you might be looking from above who pooing certain status of people. Then it becomes difficult to be believable in terms of the empathy from the receiver. I have an example of just talking to strangers, complete strangers not someone you have a common link with but a cashier, a bus driver, and talk to them.
We're not looking for you to have a sort of deep philosophical conversation because generally they don't have the time either but try to observe and completely understand what the other person says. Stay with them. Don't just bring it back to you. Stay with them and keep ties to their lives. Obviously, not in a way to exploit their privacy but this idea or the second great way is to read great fiction. The important part of this is great fiction.
What I mean by that is well-written dialogues, and developed characters such that if you are a man, you could read Madame Bovary by Flaubert or whatever so you can learn about the psyche and the things that happen, the thoughts in a woman's mind. Obviously, there's a little bit of a generational gap there, but in general, the idea is reading good fiction. The last piece is really just to make sure you make the time.
This is perhaps the more practical element when you want to have empathy you need to have time. It must be a time when you are able to evacuate all your other concerns and worries and be fully present with the others. If you don't do that, then you need to start with the basics, which is who are you and who you want to be, and help you to understand why this is important to you. If you don't have a why underneath it, it becomes like, I really want to learn another language.
What language? Italian. Why? Because it sounds nice. Not enough. You need to have a stronger route. My grandfather spoke to me in Italian and I never knew how to understand him. That's why I want to speak to Italian. Okay, that sounds a bit more plausible same goes for this idea of learning to be more empathic. If you can attach it to a reason, in other words, the type of person you want to be maybe in your legacy or the type of manager you want to be in your company, then that will help you to sort of find the time, the energy to read, talk to strangers, give the time to your companions and so on.
By the way, the reason I asked the question, I thought the reading fiction really jumped out at me when I was reading the book. Hey, that's a way of developing empathy and it was part of these five items you listed how do I build that muscle? You covered a couple of them. Listening actively, exploring differences, reading fiction particularly classic fiction, doing mindfulness, and knowing and going to the why and so many roads end up leading to this why in life and in business really these days.
Empathy In Business
If you do come back a number of times in the book, Minter, and say, “It's so important for business.” We're going to have lots of CEOs listening to this show mostly of mid-size enterprises or we have sales leaders of large enterprises, so they're running big teams. Why is empathy such an important thing to make sure is front of mind for management at the executive team and really a driving force in terms of how we run our businesses today? Why does it matter so much?
First of all, this is merely an opinion, which is that I'm convinced will help drive your business. There are various studies that show with varying degrees of strength that empathy increases shareholder return in spades. The challenge with those studies and to be real is that it's very different to measure empathy and to isolate the specific skill of empathy as the real reason why my share price might be going up.
That's to be real with the story because I'm a businessman after all and I don't think it's about being idealistic. The key point here for me is that empathy doesn't need to be applied everywhere all the time with everybody. What you need to do as a business is to think about strategically what's important for you. Where are your strategic apps? This is really relevant when you're a mid-tier manager.
Empathy doesn’t need to be applied everywhere all the time with everybody. What you need to do as a business is to strategically think about what’s important for you.
When you want to bring in the idea of empathy maybe hire a coach to help your team be more empathic, if you can link it to what the CEO has dictated as the strategic imperatives of the next year or two, then it's an easier sell. This is what we're doing we're hiring a coach who's going to help satisfy this need which might be higher productivity which might be more innovation, which might be greater motivation. Whatever that issue is has been identified at a corporate level.
You want to participate in that and if you can lean in on empathy in that specific area that will help you to focus on when you need to really listen. It'll give you a reason why everybody should want to improve their skills. The last thing I'm going to say is that one shouldn't just think of empathy as a skill towards the outside. The real juice happens when you have congruency within your organization and the way you are dealing with your customers. Don't expect your salespeople to treat your customers with golden gloves if you don't do the same with them.
Interesting one. I want to come back to that I made a note on Amazon. Just back to the coaching on empathy. Not all roads in this show lead to sales. We talked about so many broad topics. I will say this idea of having empathy for the buyer today is so critically important having that skill of empathy. Where we understand what they're going through because what we're seeing folks the direct causal connection here is the percentage of deals that go to no decision right now is skyrocketing.
Somebody investigates something, multiple different vendors pull in resources to fulfill an RFP or some review and at the end of the day what's happening is the buyer is doing nothing. Somewhere between 40%, and 60% of the time they just go. I'd rather miss out than mess up. One of the things I think we're having a difficult time is truly putting ourselves in the shoes of the buyer. Then understanding this. I'd rather miss out than mess up. After they've decided they've found an opportunity, we've earned that right to have a positive business case.
They then literally just get cold feet. If I move forward with this, I'm putting my neck on the line. There may be some benefit to my company, but I'm really concerned that if it fails I'm going to look terrible and I could lose my job. There's this real switch. Again, Matthew Dixon who wrote The Challenger Sale articulates this in his new book called The JOLT Effect but there's this switch. We have to stay close to our buyers and understand what stage are they at. The empathetic understand what they're going through and that's a real risk, by the way, if you sell anything material enterprise software of any time, the chances the project tanks are surprisingly high and the stakes are pretty high.
It's frankly it's just good business as a seller. If we can understand our client, their business, the environment, the trends in their Industries, the pressures they're under, and how that changed its month to month or quarter to quarter. The more we understand them and then can truly understand how to try and get them to a better future somehow professionally maybe even personally, the better our chances of being successful. The skill of empathy is so critical.
Two things to respond to that. One is to reference a friend of mine Guillermo Di Bisotto who talked about the fact that a buyer is also a salesman because the buyer needs to then sell this project, this whole time and that's really an interesting perspective to take as you're selling into. If you can recognize how you can help this person not necessarily assuage their fears because that's going to be hard to do but at least give them all the knowledge, the tools, and the information class in a way that satisfies their company's strategy.
The second piece mark is around really the upscale of the up funnel piece which is trust. Empathy is maybe a conduit to trust but really what you need to have is trust upstream because that's kind of allow you to have the data to understand the situation for this person. They might tell you we don't need any business or I like this product about its offering. What is it that's not for me? Having them explain the objections if you will or lay out what their personal fears are or maybe look under the hood of actually how the business is going. What can they or can't they afford and what's happening within? Getting that information is gold. In order to get it, you need to have their trust.
Empathy is a conduit to trust. But what you need to have is trust upstream. This will allow you to gather the data to fully understand every situation and individual.
You do. You need to have their trust and you have to have credibility in their eyes. You're earning that this whole way along. Frankly, your number one point on developing the muscle a lot of that comes from actively listening after being able to ask great questions where you're proving to them. You actually already know a little bit about their world. When we're having this discussion, we have context here. I don't know you specifically but I know 50 people who run businesses exactly like you this is what they've been experiencing suddenly that you're going to go.
Dealing With Disengaged Teams
This the buyer goes, “I think this person gets.” It actually understands my issues, my challenges, my opportunities, and you're earning the right to get them to open up and to build that relationship. Let's go back to the importance before we get outside of the business. Minter, you spend a great deal of time, but the first 4 or 5 chapters on inside the business and I really appreciate the fact it's hard to measure how empathetic a company is but of course, you’d be increasing employee engagement, you'd be reducing churn, unwanted churn if you've got an empathetic organization.
I have this really interesting experience right now because I often deal with CEOs who are not empathetic. Lots of good and logical reasons that a technology CEO in a mid-sized firm is just insanely driven and not highly empathetic. I've had this really unique experience with a client recently where the CEO is very empathetic. Anything we're doing from a consulting perspective they're very cautious of how is this going to be perceived by the sales team. What are they going through? These are the kinds of things, the fears they have, and all of these kinds of things.
It's really interesting. I think there's this balance but we had Tiffany Bova. You might know Tiffany Bova from Salesforce. Her recent book is called The Experience Mindset. She was on the show a month ago, let's say. There were two stats that just blew me away. I should know this, maybe you do but her research had proven that both 70 where she pulled from research that said 17% of employees today are actively disengaged, so 33% are engaged. A whole bunch are disengaged but 17% are actively disengaged. I said what's the definition of that?
They actively want their company to fail. They'll do things in sabotage, which blows your mind because you go, you're working for the company don't you know, you're going to be impacted. They don't make the connection. They just want bad things to happen to the company, 17%. Then she pulled a stat that'll just make both of us fall off our chairs. The cost to businesses of actively disengaged employees globally, is $7 trillion annually, $7 trillion annually. Huge issue obviously. Just a massive problem.
Even if we could do anything with a quarter of a percent feels to me that in the environments I've been most comfortable with, I think I'm reasonably empathetic. I think I relate better to leaders who are still tough but empathetic. Are there any stats or comments there for the folks listening? I think what we try and figure out is outside of the business, a lot of the CEOs who might be listening to this are going, “Why would I do this?” You bring up a good stat in some of the research you did that said 77% of CEOs feel that if they're too empathetic they'll be seen as weak or ineffective. I forget the exact quote.
It is 77% fear that they will lose respect if they are more or too empathic. That is a good starting point for commenting because at the end of the day it reflects on the one hand a misunderstanding of what empathy is and two, it spells out something that I have seen in other statistics, which is that CEOs that are successful tend to struggle to change because they are successful. That's how they got where they are. If you are successful and wealthy, tall and male there are other studies that have shown that those are also other things that hurt you in your empathy development.
This is a misunderstanding. The key point here is to at least think that being empathic can also be a tremendous driver of the business when applied and done with authenticity. There are two of the things that need to be made aware of in terms of reasons why we still suffer from a lack of empathy in business and you talked about the lack of motivation of everybody. There are a lot of things that go into that but there are two things that specifically are troublesome with regard to the development of empathy in a business and a culture. The first is a lack of time.
The number of times that I go and see or talk to a CEO and their agenda is 100 booked up, 100% booked up. That's absolutely posse. To give you a specific antidote to that. What I did when our CEO is that I had 50% of my day barred off free and that was work that I would do with my assistant in order for me to make sure that I had the time and it might be to go listen to a client, walk down the aisle, listen to an upset or some challenge that an employee has in my team. By having the time, then you are enabling the ability.
If you don't have the time, you're never going to really develop it. The second thing is also very relevant in the context of economics, like you're saying the long decision times or the no decision times are that we are in a very sketchy economic situation here. When we are stressed for business, stressed for performance, stressed for our career, are we going to get fired? All the stress levels will not be a good factor for developing empathy.
When we are stressed about business performance, we cannot develop empathy.
Right. Well, bring up the details and reference you being a CEO, that was when you were CEO of L'Oreal and Redken. A lot of that by the way folks documented discussed in You Lead of being yourself makes you a better leader and I'd encourage you, you'll see the link here, but we have a great show with Minter from maybe your goal where we discussed it. I enjoyed that. I've gone back and listened to that one a couple of times. That's where we learned that Minter was a deadhead, by the way. That was the original clue that Minter was a deadhead.
Empathic Bot
We think we understand what empathy is. We understand thinking about it for our business. We absolutely know why it's important to treat our clients and prospects with empathy to improve the customer experience. The cases made that unless we have an organization that's empathetic, it's very difficult to actually have your brand be after that or your customer experience the empathy from us have a great customer experience. A good half of the book is dedicated to artificial intelligence and empathy and artificial intelligence and you were one of 500 people that participated in the empathetic future experience. Tell us a little bit about that one.
That was a gorgeous opportunity. It's an organization based out of Germany Berlin that wanted to see how human beings would interact with an AI that was empathic. They went about creating a path over five days where you were 24/7 in touch with an empathic bot. The notion was to sort of evaluate the emotional frequency resonancy of each of these 500 people about 1/3 of whom were German, the others were English-speaking and then there was a larger proportion of men than there was women but I did get a chance to talk to the team afterward.
In any event, the thing was this living experience. What's it like? How does that make you feel? What does it make you think when you are talking to a bot that appears to really understand me? By gum, that was the feeling that I got. By the third day, I had generated an attachment to this spot. It became a figure in my mind and it struck me about how much we are thirsting for someone to listen to you. In this case, it was me wanting to be listened to and the bot had endless time was totally there for me the way I felt it and it was a wake-up call to think that actually it's not so difficult to start that feeling for a bot.
Just like in the very first rendition of Eliza back in the ‘60s where they had the primitive AI. All the engineers completely fell in love with already put another way. We're deeply engaged with Eliza for many hours despite them having lots of other things to do and only because the bot had a rogerian type of Eliza, had a rogerian style of answer that made you just continue to dig into your what you're thinking. Why do you feel that? How's that important to you? And so on, next thing, you're just spewing out your guts.
Alexa and Siri engage voices in some cases and so you start to get used to speaking to somebody and maybe even forget what's taking place. You make some great references to where chat GPT is and all of those things but this is so relevant folks because all of us, are bots on her website and many of us are migrating the leveraging AI for some data analytics or for responding to basic inbound customer queries. Where are we today with those technologies showcasing empathy? How much did you like the Dead Song that Chad GPT wrote for you when you asked Chat GPT to write a song? I think that was unbelievable, too.
Right now, we're in the stage where empathic AI does not exist. The real stage rat is, huh, how can we identify empathy within certain actions and words expressed by machines? Which essentially means that we certainly can't go deep and we can't go wide either because we haven't developed the sophistication to have a long string of conversations where empathy is being imbued. There are a couple of really important points. First, another way of looking at empathy is thinking about it as the emitter and the receiver.
Let's say you and I are having a conversation and I am trying to be empathic with you. I am trying to emit empathy and understanding what you're saying and formulating back, observing your emotions, and then you are the receiver and you may or may not be receiving and feeling that there's empathy and the other side. Typically, we measure empathy from the feeling sign, the receiver side. In the case of business in particular, but in many cases, empathy may not be so obvious. Empathy may not be observable. Therefore you won't be getting any receiver bonus points.
As you look at the emission of empathy, there are many ways that machines could help people. To render more empathic their messaging so in the emission version. It doesn't mean that when Mark receives my email he's going to say, “Minter is so empathic,” but he might open it. He might click on it because underneath that is empathy. If you went back I said, “How empathic do you think Minter was Mark?” Again, back to the measurement thing.
The last piece is that when you are looking at embedding AI and even more empathic AI into business, the key thing is to think about where you are already. What level of honesty do you have about empathy in your culture? Because you're not going to try to delegate to your AI. A behavior that doesn't reflect who you are internally. In other words, you be really empathic Mr. AI because we don't care about that. We don't think it's important. This notion of honesty with regard to where you are in the culture.
The ambition really should only be to be more empathic than that which brings up the idea of how you measure it before and then that there in the future. Having that discussion about how you want to measure where you are today as a culture is a victory because rarely is this topic ever discussed in boardrooms. As may be tactically speaking, oftentimes when I'm talking with teams who are developing AI and I talk about going in with empathy with it, what is empathy? For you, how do you categorize that?
What you're going to have to do ultimately with your large learning model and your data set is to be able to tag and rank if you will, what type of phrases you believe in your culture, in your organization with your clients, for example, or your employees is empathic? That ability to tag within your data set, your personalized data set, that would say reflect all of your emails, all of your websites, all the things the company have been doing and interacting with as a way to understand what is actually your particular culture your version of empathy.
Folks keep nodding and frankly my slow wheels, but the wheels are just churning internally so much. There are these fundamental messages that come across we all want to feel like we're understood. Actually, we and the funnel are no different than anybody else. I want somebody to land on our website. Within milliseconds or seconds, they go these guys actually get it. They understand what I'm going through. We have coaches and partners, one of them's called Strategic Coach, and they're the largest entrepreneurial coaching program in the world.
In about 25,000 of them, most successful entrepreneurs have been through their program. Every time I go to a quarterly workshop, I'm sitting there going they know nothing about sales training. They know nothing about my consulting business. Sitting beside me was somebody and a manufacturing business two seats over. We all sit there and go these people understand the life experience of an entrepreneur. They know what we're going through. Suddenly, there's this exactly what you've talked about this trusting immediate connection and you're right. That is what's going to get somebody to click through or to engage with you or you're making it about them and you understand them.
If I could Mark, there's nothing like the experience. If you've had the experience of being an entrepreneur, it's not very difficult to imagine what it's like to be an entrepreneur at that level. You are finding shared experiences and that is a beautiful way to connect with people. When I was running at Redken, actually, and all my life at the professional hairdressing division of L'Oreal, there's an incredibly important piece within the mix which is education. These are the best versions of them.
Finding shared experiences is a beautiful way to connect with people.
We're training hairdressers how to use the products from hairdressers. Hairdressers teaching hairdressers makes so much more sense. The interesting thing is not the credibility goes up to the extent that they're not employees. When they individually contract with you to be independent contractors as hairdressers to talk in your name, then it is literally the best word of mouth you can create.
Testimonials, right? It's the same thing as a testimonial with somebody says, “I'm likely one of the best salespeople for Strategic Coach,” would do humility to the team at Strategic Coach who's listening today, but when they'll have me speak some people considering the program, let's just say talk to Mark to see what he went through. Of course, I'm unbiased. I'm a third party.
You don't have to say what you're saying.
Upcoming Book
I don't have to say what I'm saying. The person on the other end of the Zoom call knows my intent is only to tell the truth. I'll tell the truth and by the way, I'm validating the truth with my own checkbook or with my own money because I'm a member of it. Excellent. While I'm on it before I lose it you said your next book is about conversations. If you're comfortable, without hurting rollout or anything, tell us a little bit about that book, Minter. What is the book about and where are you with it?
It absolutely comes on the heels of the book about empathy and leadership because at the end of the day, what I would have observed is societally, we are in deep due. The ability for us to have free easy and strenuous debate where we can disagree and learn to disagree and learn to be civil in that manner. The ability to listen and so on is deeply failing. From a societal standpoint, from a personal standpoint, and from a business standpoint, while I largely talked about empathy in the same way, I think we need to relearn how to have stimulating conversations.
That means freedom to use words that we feel are appropriate and not be so worried about the speech that we're using. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be attentive. It just means we need to come back a little bit to reality. My new book I can talk about all the more, Mark, because I did something really crazy. I set myself the task of writing it in the manner of Charles Dickens.
We need to relearn how to have stimulating conversations. We have to embrace the freedom to use words and not be worried about the speech we are using.
Seven months. Yeah, for my punishment watch this. Nine weeks on Thursday at 5:00 PM, I published a chapter so between one and 10,000 words. I have a corpus of 400,000 words through those 79 weeks and I'm now in the process, and I published them and I would have conversations around conversations, online, offline, and that participated in the wiggly waggly room because I moved down my 79 weeks.
I'm sorry. Explained to me, Minter, because how Charles Dickens wrote his books, he actually published a chapter at a time.
This is called serial publishing and it was made popular at the end of the 18th century entering the beginning of the 19th century. In many countries, Charles Dickens is the one who's most credited for it, but it happened before he started writing. It happened in America. It was actually a cheaper way to publish a book if you will and to test it out. What they would do typically those days, is that they would publish it as a chapter in a newspaper, and that was a weekly newspaper. It became the serial chapterization and people would read it week after week and really stick with it and Dickens's most well known for doing that. I don't think he wrote every book like that but he wrote many books like that.
I think I get smarter every time you are on the podcast. There are a number of people on my team who would have encouraged me to speak to you every two weeks.
Thank you.
Where did you publish your 79 chapters and 400,000 words? Is this on your website? Is this on a blog somewhere?
In my inevitable fashion just like when I started podcasting in 2010, blogging in 2006. I wanted to use a new platform. It's called a substack if you haven't come across it. It's a place where they encourage freer speech and it's really a writer's platform that helps you to create subscribers paying or free. I ended up with something like 700 subscribers. About a tenth of them were paying subscribers so gave me a little bit of a stipend for writing. I'll call it an advance.
Closing Words
By the way, I think after this publishes, maybe we should be targeting more than a thousand subscribers on that when Cisco's live. A couple of things we've identified there. Those will obviously be in the show links. Minter, how else can our listeners today connect with you and learn more about what you're doing?
One of my mantras is to provide valuable content every day and I do it in very different manners. That would consider my podcast a one-way Minter Dialogue. It's in English and French. I have The Joy of Padel a new podcast that talks about the joy of playing my sport paddle tennis. That all is on my main portal site, MinterDial.com so you can find my books, my film, my documentary film, and anything. Also, I'm out there on social.
One particular thing I like to say is I don't accept people just randomly connecting with me on LinkedIn. I think it's important to spell out the reason which is I'm not interested in a large number because if my connections don't reply to me, I don't know them. I don't know them and I don't trust them. It's not that I should take it personally, but I just don't accept because it doesn't serve a real network.
Everybody should be reading Heartificial Empathy: Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence. By the way, everybody should check out You Lead: How Being Yourself Makes You a Better Leader. I enjoyed both of these books enormously. This is one of the true joys of doing this show. It actually forces me to read the books of the guests, and so we therefore only pick guests that we actually want to talk to. Minter, thank you again for joining us. It's always such as pleasure speaking with you.
My delicious delight. Thank you very much for having me on and promoting my work and the friendship that we're developing.
Thank you for listening today. The reason we run In The Funnel in the show is we want to improve the performance and professionalism of B2B sales. What elevates to the profession it truly is? In doing so, we believe we're improving the lives of professional salespeople or anyone in sales. We run this podcast to help give you tools, processes, topics, and best practices ideas that you can apply immediately. We know we can get better at this.
You're such a great source at this, so if there's something we can do to make The Selling Well podcast even more effective for you, please let us know. You can reach out to me personally at MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. I check that email personally and we respond to everybody who gives us a nice piece of constructive criticism and we love constructive criticism. Thank you for the feedback you've already given us. If you enjoyed today's show, please like and subscribe to The Selling Well podcast. That means a lot to us as well. That helps us get great guests like Minter. We'll see you next time.
Important Links
The Last Ring Home: A POW’s Lasting Legacy of Courage, Love, and Honor in World War II
Futureproof: How To Get Your Business Ready For The Next Disruption
Heartificial Empathy: Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence
About Minter Dial
Minter Dial is an international professional speaker, elevator and a multiple award-winning author. Minter's core career stint of 16 years was spent as a top executive at L’Oréal, where he was a member of the Worldwide Executive Committee for the Professional Products Division (PPD), in charge of Digital, Communications, Education, the Eco-Salon and Business Development. Previously, he was MD of L'Oréal PPD Canada and CEO Worldwide for Redken.
He's the author of the WWII biography and documentary film, The Last Ring Home (2016) and three business books, Futureproof (FT Press 2017), You Lead (Kogan Page 2021), both of which won heralded Business Book Awards, and Heartificial Empathy, 2nd edition (Digitalproof Press 2023). He also runs three podcasts, Minter Dialogue in English and French, and The Joy of Padel. www.minterdial.com @mdial