EntreLeadership - #235: Andy Cunningham—6 C's of Positioning a Brand

Episode Date: December 4, 2017

When it comes to crushing your competition, marketing strategist Andy Cunningham says that, above all else, you need to be one thing: authentic. That advice is as true today as it was when she helped Steve Jobs launch the original Macintosh once upon a time. But, the cofounder and president of Cunningham Collective warns, that’s pretty much impossible to do without first decoding your company’s DNA. It’s that information—who you are and why you matter—that helps you position your brand successfully in the marketplace. Easier said than done? Luckily, Andy has a six-step checklist to simplify the entire process. Tune in to find out how it works. Also, in the spirit of the upcoming new year, enjoy a can’t-miss bonus lesson on goal setting from Dave himself. entreleadership.com/podcast Goal Tracker Tool The Ultimate Content Marketing Planner for Small Business Owners Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is Andre Leadership. Now, here's your host, Ken Coleman. Coming to you from the Music City, this is the broadcast of leaders by leaders for leaders. Thank you so much for joining the conversation. Our feature conversation is with Andy Cunningham. She's the author of Get to AHA. Discover your positioning DNA and dominate your competition.

We've also got some teaching from Dave Ramsey on the all-important topic of goal setting and free resources. So let's go. Well, folks, it's always a treat when our founder, Dave Ramsey, is featured on this broadcast. Today we're going to give you an excerpt of a talk that he has given many times on goal setting. This is a guy who understands how to set goals and achieve goals. And with the new year, almost honest, I can't think of a better time to be able to soak and learn on this topic. Dave's going to share his process and so much more. Here he is, Dave Ramsey, on goal setting. There's a lot of words thrown around in business vernacular and in sales and in

entrepreneurship, dream. You need to have a dream. You need to be able to dream. You need to have a vision and you have vision statements. And there's all these things thrown around and honestly to the point that I think it's a little bit confusing and a little bit cluttered in the marketplace. So we had to kind of narrow it and define it so that internally, with our leadership team, with our whole team, for that matter, we could clarify exactly what these things mean. The first million-seller motivational talk ever done recorded was called the strangest secret by Earl Nightingale. If you've never heard it, go find it somewhere and listen to it because my dad played that for us in the back of a 67 Impala. I mean, that was like church for us.

You all know what I'm saying. And one of the things that Earl had this great voice. voice. He passed away several years ago. He had this wonderful broadcast voice. He said, success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or idea. Well, that's true. See, success is not money. Success is not accolades. Success is what we call winning, isn't it? As a full-time mom for 27 years, I would say my wife is an unbelievable success. People ask, you know, how'd you turn out with such great kids? I said the nurturing of their mother and the fear of their father. is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or idea. If all you're looking at is making it until Friday, all you're looking at is making it through this Q1, all you're looking at is making

your short-term numbers, you're not looking past the nose on the end of your face, you're not thinking out there 12 months, 12 years, where there is no vision, you die. That's pretty extreme. But, I mean, none of us. in here would really disagree with that, would we? If all you think is tactically, in other words, and never think strategically, you only think about the next task instead of getting above and do a 30,000 foot fly over and go, wait a minute, we have the ladder against the wrong building and we are climbing. You never do that. You're going to die. And so you've got to think about things like this more than just making payroll Friday, more than just collecting that receivable, more than just

closing that next deal. For your goals to have a long-term positive impact, they have to include goals in virtually every area of your life. Now, as we enter this part and really this whole lesson, let me encourage you that many of you have seen some of these materials before. And let me encourage you to take them back and talk to some of your team about some stuff like this goal-setting stuff that we're getting ready to wait into. Because people, again, I've seen this stuff since I was 12 years old. I grew up in the motivational sales world.

you know all those people that taught that stuff and have done such a wonderful job but i taught this lesson and a 42 year old guy with an MBA that works on my team with a masters in business came up to me afterwards and he goes that stuff i've never seen anything like it that's life changing and he was just he was just jazzed man like he had a conversion experience it was unbelievable and i'm like dude i've seen that my whole life how do you get an MBA and not see this he's said well you've never seen like it is incredible so don't just assume that everyone because you've seen it has seen it. I'm always amazed at who hasn't looked at basic goal setting and done that in every area of their life. You have to do them. It's how you change anything in your life. When you say

it's specific, it's measurable, it has a time limit. Goals that work must be your goals. You can not impose goals on someone else. That's corporate quota crap. And now you're bossing, you're not leading. Can you sit down and show someone and persuade them that this is a good idea? Because at the rate, your call volume is, your children are going to starve. You've got to do this. You're not going to make it. That's, you know, these are the realities of the marketplace. Can you tell people that? Yeah. But am I going to come in and go, corporate says we have to have our Q1 at so-and-so, so stock price maintains? Oh, brother. That's the worst motivation in the world. And nobody stays in an environment like that except people can't find a job anywhere else. They're too scared to leave. It's the only reason

they're there. And those aren't valuable people. So, you know, you're just, you. You got to be motivated by, I care about this. I want the team to win. I am going to put forth the effort to put the ball across that line. It's that simple. And goals have to be in writing. If you don't write it down, it never happened. You have to write it down.

And I'll tell you, when you do this, I'll be honest with you. 20, 30 years of doing this, it gets weird. It's just weird. I'll give you an example. This is my personal prayer journal from the 1990s. My goals that I had written out. Very weird stuff. And there's all kinds of wonderful things in here.

People I was praying for that I've now forgotten since and all this stuff. What's interesting, July of 1993, I wrote this out. There's three Roman numerals here, tiny Roman numeral in the middle, Roman numeral two, has basically three things. It says, high touch, support group concept, combination seminar counseling. That's all it said. Because I had become frustrated with doing one-on-one financial counseling because it wasn't working. I would teach people what to do, and I would take their money, and they would promptly go home and not do it. And I was really frustrated with the results. They were not getting out of debt. They were filing bankruptcy.

They were crashing, even though I'd shown them exactly what to do, and they were still not. not doing it. And I figured out that information wasn't enough that somehow walking with them in a support group concept, high touch support group concept, combination seminar counseling, what it was going to take. That's what I wrote down July of 1993. And then I have pages of what I was going to do in July, August, September, October to make that happen and other things on this list happen. One of those was the financial peace book and getting it out there and so forth. In the following April, I opened a little office with 800 square feet, and we started a little counseling company, and I launched a class with an overhead projector and a bad suit. Four people came the first night.

And the class was called Life After Debt, all because this was written down. April of 1993. Six months later, we changed the class to where it's called Financial Peace University. when I think about that that started with that little thing and then step-by-step implementation, tactical steps to do in 1993, and I can find that written down in this book, it gives me the willies. That's how powerful this is.

I was out there striving, clawing, scratching, doing what it took to hit the goal, and it took me on this journey that's called my life. How wonderful is that to look back and touch that and say, God really did do this. we really did do this. This is pretty amazing. Be careful what you write down.

Be careful what you dream. And be careful that you care enough about it to write it down. And then keep it because you'll want to show your grandkids someday. You'll want to show them that out of little acorns come big oaks. If you keep watering them and keep feeding them and don't let them die. Hey, one of our most popular resources coming out of Dave's teaching, is the goal tracker tool. Now, Dave just talked to you about goal setting.

So how about a resource that's absolutely free from our team that's going to help you with tracking your goals? This goal tracker tool is going to help you create unstoppable momentum. So two people benefit from this great resource. One, you need your own goals, but then you need to empower your team to create their own goals. And here's what's great. You're going to figure out how to do a goal, an action plan,

and a target date. And not only going to be more effective, you're also going to see your communication, interpersonal communication, team-to-team communication, corporate communication, improve because of this great resource. So two ways to get it. Text the phrase, goals 2018. There's no spaces there. The word goals, then 2018. No spaces. Goals, 2018. Text that. The 33-444. That's 33-444. Or you can get the link. At Entrayleadership.com, click on podcast and go to this episode's show notes. Well, folks, this is a great treat to talk with Andy Cunningham. Now, she's a Silicon Valley veteran of more than 30 years.

Helped a lot of companies, all shapes and sizes. I would think something that's most impressive on her resume is she helped launch McIntosh. You know that guy, Steve Jobs, very good relationship with Steve, worked with Steve. You'll hear a little bit of that in our conversation. and this book, Get to Aha, discover your positioning DNA and dominate your competition. Some extremely practical insights.

The book itself is very, very valuable as it walks you through several different ways for you to get clarity. Andy, we'll talk about that in our conversation as well. So, get ready to listen and learn. Here is Andy Cunningham. Well, Andy, it's a pleasure to have you with us, really excited about talking about the book

and so much more. The title, Get to AHA, with a giant exclamation point. Our audience knows that I have ADHD, and so I really respond well to great book cover. So congratulations on not just the way it looks, but it's great messaging as well. That's a little bit of what you talk about in the book.

Discover your positioning DNA and dominate your competition. So before we dive too much into the content, why aha? Because you're saying this can get you to aha. So why that? So aha is really the important concept. and so thanks for asking that question. Most branding people deliver what I call tadas.

They go away in the dark room, come up with a creative answer, and then they show up to the client or to their boss, and they say, ta-da, I've got a great answer for you. And it's not a tada exercise. It's an aha exercise, which means it's something that you have to do as a team with the senior people involved in the company, and you have to get to that place of aha where you know who you are and why you matter.

So what does that process look like? So we've got people listening. They go, okay, sounds good. We need to do that. They lock themselves in a room. What happens? Well, instead of locking yourself in a room, you should lock yourself in a room with the senior team from the company you're trying to do this for, whether that's your company or whether it happens to be a client company. And it starts with this.

First, there has to be an understanding that positioning and branding are two different things. Branding cannot be done without positioning having been done first. And positioning is the dry, kind of boring, but very factual answer to the first. those two questions, who are you and why do you matter? It's identifying your role and relevance in the marketplace. And the framework for doing that, I'll get into in a second, but there is a whole framework for figuring that out. And the book talks about that whole framework, and it primarily dwells on the most important part of that framework, which is what we call the core positioning DNA. But once you get your positioning done, then you can do the branding part,

which is the expression of the emotional side of a company's identity. That's the first thing to understand, and then when you get that positioning, which is the rational side, should come first, and branding is the emotional side, and it should come second, you go about the exercise of conducting the positioning, which is the framework that I talked about. I can go through that for you in a minute whenever you want to. Yeah, yeah, I want you to. But, I mean, let's talk about this concept. Where did you come up with this idea of the corporate DNA, or, as you say, on the cover of the book, positioning DNA? So I have always been a person who has treated companies like people because they're made of people and they serve people. They build products and services

for people. So what happened one day is I had a client that wanted me to deliver an answer to them about what is their role in relevance in the marketplace. They were competing with a very big player out here in Silicon Valley and they wanted to know how to articulate their differentiator, their role, their relevance against this big competitor. And the client asked me, how do you go about doing that process? And this was before I developed the framework. And I said, well. I do what I do well. I listen to you. I take some notes. I interview your customers and I lock myself in a room and I come out with a great big, ta-da, here's the answer. And he happened to be a finance person, not an engineer and not a marketing person. And he said, but how do you come up with

that answer? I want to know how you do it. And so I then said, I have to go home and figure out exactly how I do that. You know, when you're really good at something, you just do it and you don't really know how you do it. Like, does Steph Curry know how he makes such good shots? So I decided I had to figure out how do I do this process. So I closed myself up, really, in a dark room over the course of a rainy weekend in Palo Alto. And I reverse engineered everything that I do when I help a client get to this aha. And I came across a couple of things in that exercise. The first thing I came across was that all the companies that I had worked with and studied for this particular exercise that I had myself doing over the weekend, they all fell into only three categories I noticed. And those categories

were product-oriented companies, customer-oriented companies, or concept-oriented companies. I tried to find companies that didn't fall into one of those three categories. And frankly, I couldn't if I looked at the hundreds of companies that I had spent the last 10 or 15 years working with. So that was the first thing I discovered is that, oh, there is a specific kind of DNA, which I ended up calling positioning DNA, or sometimes I call it corporate DNA, for a company. You're either product focused, customer focused, or concept focused. And the importance of knowing that, and I'll just take a second here to say, you need to know what your DNA is as a company so that you can market yourself authentically.

It's all about authenticity. And in today's world, authenticity is the only thing that really matters, because if you're not authentic, it gets found out right away. So I love this idea of understanding who you are at your core, whether you're a human or whether you're a company, and then leveraging that for your success. in the marketplace. So it starts with understanding what your core is, and that's your positioning DNA. And you've got to decide which one of those three kinds of companies you are. Now, the reason I know there are three is because each of these three kinds of companies do things differently.

They structure themselves differently. They measure success differently. They talk about different things in meetings differently. They hire different kinds of people. They compensate them differently. They're very, very different. So examples are Zappos is an example of a customer-oriented company, whereas Uber is an example of a product-oriented company. So is Microsoft. Concept companies are like Tesla, FedEx, Apple in the early days. So you can see that these companies, they kind of structure themselves differently and do things differently. So if you start by understanding what your core is, then you've got a really good place from which to be authentic in your marketing. And then there's five other things you have to look at. Let's get to that in a second,

because I really want to come back to that. But I want to think about some of the listeners who are hearing you break down those three different DNA types, right? Product, consumer, or concept. How do you help clear up any confusion as to what their main DNA is? Because I love the examples you gave. But for people sitting there going, well, I'm not sure. Andy, we kind of are a product. But then, like, we really are consumer. And have you run into that before? And how do you help them delineate what the true DNA is? Yes. And there's a test in the book. So you can figure it out for yourself. So that's, that's the good news. But basically, like I said, it's product-oriented companies, which I call mechanics, customer, not consumer, but customer-oriented companies, which I call mothers, and then the concept companies I call missionaries. So I gave them each of these nicknames. And they do things very differently. So you examine, and this is what the test in the book shows, but they structure themselves differently. They talk about different kinds of things in meetings. They measure success differently. For example, a company that is a mother, let's take Lyft. Lift is a great example of a mother. So is Nordstrom. So is Disney. These are companies that care at a very fundamental level about their customers, and they

measure their success in terms of relationships with customers. Whereas if you look at a company like Oracle or Microsoft or even Walmart, customers is not the important part. It's the service or the product that they're delivering that is the most important part. And then concept companies, well, they exist to change behavior on a fundamental level. Elon Musk is trying to change behavior. Steve Jobs tried to change behavior. And so those kinds of companies, also structure themselves differently and talk about different things. So if you take the test in the book,

you can figure out which one you are. Now, here's the thing. A management team, 50% of the management team may think one thing and 50% may think something else. And that's where this exercise provides an excellent opportunity for a management team to become aligned

on something that's very important to their future. So it opens up the door for discussion, and I have been through so many great discussions with management teams about this. And what happens is you have to decide as a management team. If you're 50-50 split between two of them, you have to decide which one you're going to focus on. And then that should become the facing DNA of your company. It doesn't mean it's not supported by the other two things, because it is, just like human

DNA. There's a facing, I have a facing color and facing hair color and facing eye color. But behind that are supporting genes that add to the flavor of who I am, but the facing one is the one I go to market with myself. Same is true with the company. Now, you kind of touched on this just a bit, but I want to have you dive into this a little bit more. For young companies or, let's call it, smaller companies that are kind of working their way up and they're growing, they're iterating, they're innovating, changing. Right. Is this an exercise that you need to kind of revisit? Because inevitably, companies change.

It's like people change. I love that. That's what you said. You kind of think of companies like people. Well, we as people change. So how often, you know, in a process of growth or change, should a company come back and revisit this? make sure they know what their DNA type is. So people do change, but they don't change their DNA.

That's a pretty difficult shift. Now, sometimes you can make a purposeful DNA shift. Like I like to think of Amazon as a great example today, that is going through a purposeful shift. They started off as what I call a mechanic or a very product-oriented company, and they are very slowly, but very purposefully shifting that DNA to what I call the mother DNA, the customer DNA. And how did they start this process, this very purposeful process? They acquired Zappos. They didn't acquire Zappos because Amazon couldn't figure out how to sell shoes online.

They acquired Zappos because they wanted that customer-centric culture because they really wanted to make a shift in the company's culture. They wanted to become a more customer-centric company. And if you look up Amazon's mission today, which is different from what it used to be, it is to be Earth's most customer-centric company. So Amazon is going through a very purposeful, shift in its DNA. On the other hand of the equation, you can look at a company like Apple, where the DNA shift is happening, but it's happening to Apple. Apple is not purposefully making this shift, and it happened because they lost their missionary founder in Steve Jobs a number of years ago. So what's happening to Apple is Apple is moving from a missionary company or a

concept-oriented company to a mechanic, to a more product-oriented company. So what we've seen coming out of Apple over the last seven years are iterations on the same products that they did before. They're better, and Tim Cook has done a great job of increasing the asset value of that company, but it's all been through product. Now, I wish that Apple were doing this purposefully, but I think Apple still would love to come up with the next big thing, but that doesn't seem to be in the future anytime soon. It's a very good point. Okay, I held you up, and you gave us some great stuff. Let's get you to what you call the six Cs you write about in the book, and you're going to walk us through those. So take us through those? Sure. So the first C is core, and that's your DNA. So first you have to understand what you're

made of so you can make something of it. That's the first part of it, and I think the most important part of it. The other Cs are as follows. The next one is category. What category are you joining or are you in? Are you refining that category? Are you segmenting that category? Or are you building a new category? So that's a very strategic discussion that has to be had with the management team. The third C, after, so there's core, there's category, the third C, the third. third C is community, and that stands for who are you serving. Of course, your customers are part of that, but there's a whole lot of people who are influential to the buying decision of any product or service. So you need to understand who those people are, where you can reach them, how you find them,

and what they care about. So that's community. The fourth C is competition. You really need to understand how your competition is positioning themselves so that you can position yourself in a differentiated way. So if you don't understand how they talk about their role in relevance, you'll never be able to find your differentiated role in relevance in the market. The fifth C is context. It's very important that when you launch a product or service in today's world, that it rides the wave of something that's happening today. For example, if you're a software company, you're not going to launch something these days that's not in the cloud. Any kind of software product that's being launched today must be available in the cloud. And that's part of the wave

that you have to ride as a software company. And that is very critical to your relevant and C to the target market that you're going after. And the final C is what I call criteria, which is a slightly different C from the other five. This is the one that enables you to check to see if you've got the right positioning statement in the end. So what we ask our clients to do is to come up with five or six or seven different criteria for what a successful positioning statement might look like. For example, if you're serving the millennial market, you might want to make sure that your positioning statement has something about sustainability in it. You might want to make sure that it has something about work-life balance in it. You might want to make sure

it has some form of coolness or hipness associated with it. So we want you to write down what that criteria is so that at the end of the day, you know whether or not you've hit the nail on the head. And if you've hit, you know, seven-eighths of the criteria that you've laid forth, then you know that you've got a pretty solid positioning statement because it's doing what you want it to do. And then it's time to launch that positioning into the marketplace. Now, the book has a little Madlib exercise in it, that once you've examined those six Cs, then it sort of helps you through the process of actually writing that positioning statement and writing that elevator story. And once you've got that, then it's time to go public with it through the process of

mastering all the channels of message distribution that we have available to us today, which are our owned channels, everything we own, our social media, our sales pitches, our recruiting materials, our websites, the earned media, any PR or analyst, relations work that you do. And then, of course, owned media, which is all of the advertising channels that you own, that you have complete control over. So you want to master owned, earned, and paid channels of message distribution with your key messages that come out of that positioning exercise. So I know it's kind of a long process and complicated, but the framework guides you through every single step along the way to get you to that final, aha. Yes. I love that. Now,

you touched on this really early in our conversation, and that is the relationship between positioning and branding. So positioning has to happen first. Right. So when you're just laying out that answer, taking you back into your answer, then once we've got that positioning, is that when we then begin to focus on branding when you're taking it out to the marketplace? Right before you take it out to the marketplace. Sure. Right. Yeah. So like I said, the positioning is the definition of your role in relevance in the market. So it's very factual. The branding side, to me, is the emotional expression of that. So what is the choice of language that you use? What's the tone of voice that you're going to use? What are the images you're going to use to go along with it? What is the

brand archetype and the brand promise that you want to deliver? So all those sort of brand-oriented things are better developed and much more perfectly developed once you understand what the rational thing is underneath it. So it's like baking the cake and then putting the great tasting and great looking frosting on top of it so that you can bring that cake to market as a full identity for a company. All right. Now, I want to go into a specific sector because we have people listening in from all different sectors. But I know that you think it's very, very critical for technology companies to understand their DNA. So I'm kind of going back into some things you've said here.

But why is that? Why do they need to be really locked in on this? Well, the thing about technology companies is they are typically not run by people who have any experience with marketing. So this is a way to get them to understand marketing at a very deep level. And again, my belief is that people as well as companies need to start with an understanding of who they are at their core so that they can make something of it in the marketplace and leverage it to the advantage of the company. When you're working with a tech company, it's important that you take them through

that exercise and understand that. A marketing person might intuitively understand, oh, obviously we're a customer-oriented company. But a technology company, it's less obvious to an engineer running a company than it is to a marketing person. So, by the way, this process works for any kind of company. It's just that many companies that live outside of the tech, Rec arena are run by people who have experience with marketing and sales, and they have a better

intuitive feel for these kinds of things that we have laid out in a very specific framework. Yeah, there's so much great practical stuff in this book. One of the chapters, chapter six, it's after you've kind of walked through the six seas that you mentioned in chapter four is where you do that, and then you move into positioning and message architecture, and then activation. What have you learned and observed and taught when it comes to properly activating. Once they walk through everything we've heard so far, now comes activation. What should we do? What should we not do? A lot of times companies can develop great messaging, but they don't ever activate it properly. And then it dies on the vine and goes into a drawer

or goes into the digital trash can and nobody ever uses it. So here's what you have to do. You have to be a relentless policeman of making sure that that messaging that you've developed in the first part of this exercise or what we call the message architecture, you have to be relentless about making sure that that message architecture appears in every single thing the company says or does. It has to be all over your recruiting materials, all over your training and onboarding materials, all over your website, all over your social media, all over the white papers that you develop, all over your sales pitches, your annual report, whatever it is. It has to be everywhere. And it has to continuously repeat. A person has to hear something

at least seven times before they're going to, it's going to resonate in their body. So if you're going to take this message architecture to market resonance, you are going to absolutely have to make sure that everybody who sees that message sees it over and over and over again. And I know this is an example that is maybe somewhat frustrating for some people, but one of the people who's done an incredible job with this relentless messaging is Donald Trump. We are now in a situation where we now even know what his message memes are because he's repeated them so, so much. And that's the secret to stickiness. It's repetition and frequent. First, it's getting the right message, which is what the whole positioning exercise gets you to.

And then the second part of it is the relentless repetition of that same message over and over and over again. Yeah, I want to stay there for a second, not on Trump, but somebody that I think that, Cord, yeah, because you can't even say his name anymore without somebody looking at your crossways to see what's going on. But you had some great early experience with Steve Jobs and worked closely with Steve. Yes. And when you think of somebody who was relentless, that's the word you used to say to him. and he was relentless. You know, I read the Isaacson biography on Jobs. You know, I don't know what your take is on that biography.

I didn't hear anything really controversial about it. It seemed to be true to who the man was. But I want you to talk about that because he was not just relentless, and he wasn't just smart, but like he was a great message bearer as well. He really drove that home and reading the Isaacson book. You have more appreciation for Steve Jobs, the communicator as well. It may not always been pretty, but he really drove. He was clear. Right. Absolutely. And by the way, I helped Walter Isaacson with that book a little bit. I helped him find people, and I'm in there in a few pages. It's a great book about Steve. I think it captures him extremely well. And yes, Steve was relentless in every regard. He was relentless about quality. He was relentless about messaging. He was relentless about getting things done on time shipping. He used to say, real pirates ship their products, because the McIntosh Division like to call itself the pirate division of Apple.

He was just relentless in general and a great visionary and really had an idea for what people would want before they would even know that they wanted it. But messaging was a key part of his relentlessness. Yeah, just always on message. Was he just super, super clear? He's super clear and simple. You know, he was one of these people who could take large complex ideas and net them down to the nugget or the meme, as we say today, that people will repeat over and over again. Let's just talk about his personality. Now, again, if you've read about him, you know, he's got this abrasive personality,

sometimes childlike, sometimes tyrant-like, but he was a big personality. We've got a lot of different people listening here. When you've got somebody like that that's leading a company that has a, they fill the room when they walk in, what can we take away from you, somebody who's worked with somebody like that? You know, one of the greatest gifts that Steve gave to the people who worked for him was this gift of stretching you beyond your limits, beyond the wildest limits you had for yourself and your own capability. If he trusted you to be on his team,

that was a big enough step to begin with. But if he trusted you to be there, he then stretched you way beyond what you thought your limits were and made you way better at whatever it is that you do than you would have been without him. And that's just a lifelong gift. It's a gift that keeps on giving. How did he do that?

I think he was pretty good at assessing who could do what to help him. So he was very picky about his team for the McIntosh especially, and he picked people who were not only good at their particular expertise, but also they were very passionate about his product. So that was kind of a key piece of the equation for him. And what he would do is he would just drill into you, you know, make it better, make it better, make it better, make it better. And in my case, I was the communication person.

It was make it clearer, make it brighter, make it more sticky, get it out there more, see more people. And that was my role. But the guys who were writing software and developing the hardware for them, it was make it smaller, make it talk, make it do this, make it do that. And he just pushed you and pushed you, pushed you, and sometimes you would say, Steve, that can't be done. And he would say, I don't think you heard me, make it do this. He just didn't listen to it, can't be done. He didn't listen to that.

He was the epitome of a guy that could make the impossible possible. And that was such a pleasure to work with because of that, because you knew that you were doing something that no one else could do. And it just felt good every day. though, you know, he was not the nicest guy on the planet. Yeah, right, right, right. Okay, so we don't have time to break the entire book down, but I want you to give a summary, at least for our listeners, of what you take the reader through in part two,

where it's aha and action. So you really, and you've touched on some of this, but if you look at chapters 9 through 14, very specific things you're talking about, delivering peace of mind, I'm just setting you up to kind of summarize this, cutting through the noise, weapon of choice, the human interface revolution, the next big thing, charisma in action.

What are we as readers going to get in the back half of the book? Well, the back half of the book are real life stories of real life companies that have gone through this positioning exercise with us and have come to the aha about who they are and why they matter. And there's six of these case studies, and they're real companies. They're not like giant companies. They're real companies that people work for every day, and they've all been clients of mine.

And I've got six of them because I've got, two for each DNA category. There's two mother companies in there. There are two mechanic companies in there and two missionary companies in there. And I didn't get to say this earlier, but on top of the standard DNA, mother mechanic or missionary, there's also this concept in the book that I call genotypes. So each of those three types, if you're a mother, there are two genotypes that you can choose to position yourself on. If you're a mother, you can choose either customer experience or customer segmentation. So there's a case study in there for a mother, with customer segmentation as its genotype or a mother with customer experience as its genotype.

Same with the mechanic. There are two genotypes that you can choose. There's either value or there is product features. And again, there are two case studies. There's a mechanic value story and there's a mechanic feature story. And the same with the missionaries. There are two genotypes there. There's next big thing and there's cult of personality.

So we've tried to cover all of the genotypes and all of the DNA types in those case studies. and they're real-life stories from real-life people trying to figure out who they are and why they matter. So for somebody like you who's been where you've been and seen what you've seen, and as you write a book like this, here we are. It's hard to believe as we sit here today recording. We're almost done with 2017. 2018 will be here really, really quickly. What do you see coming down the pike that we as business leaders, small business owners,

entrepreneurs need to be thinking about and preparing for? Well, we are now living in a world where data is all around us and we can find out anything we want from anywhere. The analytics and the data that are available to any company today are almost overwhelming. I mean, they can get to the point where it's almost too much information and you don't know which to pick on and which to look at and which to examine and which to act on. So that's one of the reasons why I think this concept of understanding your DNA is such an important thing because it helps you manage what to pay attention to and what, not to pay attention to. And I'll give you a good example of this. There's a big, what I call customer-centric conundrum happening in the market today. There's a lot of people saying that every company has to delight their customers and the customer should be at the center of everything and it's

customer this and customer that. Well, that's not necessarily true if you're not a customer-oriented company, in my opinion. So you could look at all the analytics about customer satisfaction and NPS scores and all the rest of this stuff and find out that you, in fact, are a product-oriented company, not a customer company, and you've been wasting your time, spending all this time on analytics that are not helping you get better at what it is you know how to do. So again, if you look at Microsoft, they're a great example of a product-oriented company. Yes, they do do customer service, no question about it, but it's not the focal point of what they do every day. And that is really the key to the DNA thing. So as you look at all this big data in front of you, if you know who you are

as a company, you can filter through all that noise and you can figure out what you should pay attention to and what you really don't need to pay attention to. Well, folks, she is Andy Cunningham. The book is Get to AHA, Discover Your Positioning DNA and Dominate Your Competition. This is really good stuff. A lot to grasp here, a very practical book. And again, before we let you go, just tell folks about the process, the test in the book, how easy it is and how you'd like to see them apply it. There's a couple tests in the book. The one is figuring out, are you a mother, are you a mechanic or are you a missionary? That should probably take you 10 minutes to figure out, maybe even less. And I would also suggest that you do it with your management team so that

you can have that alignment discussion, because that's the greatest gift of that test, is that it helps you get everything on the table with your management team and then make a decision. If you're not all aligned on one type, you can make the decision about which type you're going to focus on. So it's a great alignment exercise and a great opening up of understanding who you are at your core. You know how everybody likes the Myers-Briggs test? We all like to understand who we are at our core and who is our tribe. It's a test like that. It lets you know who you are at your core of your company and what is your tribe. And then there's this other test in the book that tells you about the genotype. That's another five-minute exercise. And it just opens up the book for you,

if you will, on who you are and how you can think about your core so you can use that to leverage yourself into a more successful spot once you're in the marketplace. Well, there it is. Andy, again, thanks for being with us. We know you got a lot going on, but we're better for hanging out with you. So thank you so much for being with us. Thank you. This has been a real pleasure. Thanks so much.

Hey, folks, you can get the book wherever books are sold, or you can go to andycunningham.com. That's Andy Cunningham.com. Well, our friends in InfusionSoft are back with us again, as they always are each episode with a great resource for you. This resource, the ultimate content marketing planner for sports. small business owners. Now, I would say, even though small business owners is in the title of the free resource, anyone can benefit from this great resource. So content marketing, it's going to help you attract more leads, you're going to make more sales, and grow your revenue. But without a plan, it will literally be overwhelming for you. Content is something you've got to get in a rhythm of producing

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Folks, this is a free resource. They do everything for you. Infusionsoft.com slash content marketing planner. Where has the time gone? Unbelievable. Almost done. But I want to tell you, I am really excited about next week's episode. Dr. Michael Jervais, who's a high-performance psychologist, is my guest.

This is a guy who works with one of my favorite coaches in any sport, Pete Carroll of the Seattle Seahawks. And this content, I think, is revolutionary, really excited for you to take part in it. We also have some other surprises next week, so make sure you're subscribing to the podcast so you don't miss a thing. On behalf of Eric the producer, our engineers, Will Rutter and Jim Bab, and the entire Entree leadership team. Thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.