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161. Connie Whitman: Turning Experience Into An Intellectual Property Business

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Your individual experience is a business asset. Life is teaching us more than we sometimes realize. An insightful analysis of what we’ve experienced, combined with purposeful translation, can generate unique intellectual property on which to base a unique approach to business. Connie Whitman joins Economics For Business to share her experience and her development of a thriving, resilient, and adaptive coaching and training service.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Experience is an asset that reveals our business superpowers.

Life teaches us whether we fully realize it or not. While climbing the job ladder at a firm may seem like the pursuit of credentials and titles, it’s better understood as an accumulation of knowledge and learning that can be applied in the future in entrepreneurship.

Connie Whitman enjoyed a 20-year career in financial services up to the SVP level. It was her customers who pointed out to her what “superpowers” she was developing — a distinctive capacity to assist all parties in a complex collaborative contract to fully understand the benefits accruing to each one of them individually and all of them collectively.

We all can have these superpowers, but we don’t always realize them until a third party points them out, through asking for input or advice or seeking us out or praising us. It’s important to learn the right kind of self-assessment — and to learn to listen to others’ assessment of us — so as to be able to understand our own superpowers.

We can translate our experience into intellectual property that forms the basis for an entrepreneurial business.

Connie Whitman transformed her experience into both a brand philosophy and a scalable methodology.

Connie knew from her experience in business that the function entitled “sales” is often viewed negatively: sales activities and salespeople might be accused of rapaciousness and avarice, however unjustified such accusations may be. She intended to develop a service in coaching and training in the sales field, and so it was important to distance herself from these misperceptions. Her counter was selling from a place of love: relationship selling based on love, respect, and integrity. Selling is the construction of an “everybody wins” proposition. It’s an honorable implementation of the entrepreneur’s ethic of service. Anyone using Connie’s techniques would evoke for themselves a feeling of pride and self-respect that the critics of the sales function try to deny.

She crafted a methodology for selling from a place of love in the form of a seven-step selling process. It is replete with Austrian principles of subjectiveness, empathy, and customer sovereignty.

Preparedness: Planning in advance to assemble all the knowledge and understanding available to make you informed and ready; anticipating what the customer will want to know and is likely to ask.

Connecting: Using empathy to connect on the basis of what’s important to the customer in order to establish credibility.

Exploring: Asking questions to learn as much as possible about the customer’s needs and preferences in the context of their current circumstances.

Active Listening: Connie’s phrase is “be present” — listen intently and indicate that you have heard accurately by asking follow up questions to further explore customer needs.

Presenting Solutions: Framing all value propositions as a solution — reliving customer unease.

Confirming: The process of closing the sale, actively asking the customer for their business.

Following up: Consistent, persistent, and respectful (CPR) follow up to confirm satisfaction and potentially extend the relationship.

Connie’s method has evolved and improved over the years — nothing is ever fixed, and all businesses adapt and learn. Yet this intellectual property developed from experience has proven to be solid capital generating both revenue flows and client satisfaction, not to mention word-of-mouth recommendations and references.

Business-building is a function of your network — another piece of intellectual property born of experience.

You meet many people in your professional career and you make many connections. Your network is another IP asset. It’s one you should groom and keep fresh and active, turning it into another business asset.

An IP business can be lasting, but you may have to refresh the infrastructure.

Connie’s in-person, face-to-face business model was challenged during the COVID pandemic. When business travel stopped, and a lot of sales training budgets were cut. The IP remained valid. The market signal was for her to digitize the business. She took classes and hired consultants to learn how to achieve domain authority. She educated herself on the technology required for digitization of her individual business model, and the processes for digital engagement that were consistent with her 7-step process and principles. The result has been further growth, and the continued fulfillment of pursuing her business goals, and realizing new ones.

Your entrepreneurial IP business can become your most fulfilling experience.

Connie describes her entrepreneurial experience as immensely fulfilling — the most rewarding thing she has done in her life. It’s the realization of the value accumulated over a career, and the new value shared with clients in providing service to them. It has been tremendously hard work, of course, and has required some challenging resource allocation decisions — of both time and money — but the reward greatly exceeds the sacrifice.

Additional Resources

“Connie Whitman’s Seven-Step Sales Loop” (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_161_PDF

ESP—Easy Sales Process by Connie Whitman: Mises.org/E4B_161_Book

Connie’s website: WhitmanAssoc.com

Changing The Sales Game podcast: Mises.org/E4B_161_Pod

125. Steven Phelan on Innovation In Contracting

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Entrepreneurs seek to provide markets with new value through innovation wherever they can identify an opportunity. Their vision is broad enough to include free market institutions such as contracting, where they identify new and better ways to expand the mutuality of value and better relationship models than those in the traditional legal approach.

Download The Episode Resource “Contracting In The New Economy” (PDF) – Download

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Traditional contracting starts from an adversarial mindset.

Traditional contracts are written in anticipation of conflict. They aim to anticipate everything that can go wrong. Then they try to put every contingency in black-and-white. Clauses are inserted to give one party the upper hand over the other. This approach fosters negative behaviors that undermine the relationship and the contract itself. Often, little room is left for flexibility when conditions change in unexpected ways, leading to costly problems like litigation, mediation/arbitration, renegotiation, churn, and shading (withdrawal of effort by one party due to lack of trust).

A new form of contract called a relational contract aims to address the problem.

A relational contract approaches negotiation not from a transactional perspective but from a relational perspective: what are the best provisions to ensure a lasting and mutually beneficial relationship between the two contracting parties? Instead of focusing on how the value pie is divided between two parties, the shared goal is to maximize the total amount of value that can emerge from the partnership. There is a genuine good faith effort to align the two parties’ interests and to develop a fair and flexible framework to handle unexpected changes and events in the future.

The relational contract is designed to try to solve what economists call the hold-up problem.

Contracts refer to future events, and specifics (such as delivery times) can never be determined with certainty beforehand. The contract is said to be incomplete — not every contingency can be specified. The hold-up problem occurs when one party uses this situation to extract concessions from the other party, knowing that it would be costly for that party to change the arrangement.

Defense contractors, for example, are notorious for under-bidding costs and then adding to their revenue and profits via change orders. A contract may call for “best efforts” but this can never be defined specifically or completely.

The new approach is said to produce healthier and more sustainable partnerships.

In the article A New Approach To Contracts, the authors call for a “what’s in it for we” partnership mentality in contracting, where both parties have a vested interest in the other party’s success. Included relationship-building elements such as shared vision, guiding principles, and “robust governance structures” to keep the parties’ expectations and interests aligned.

Our guest, Steve Phelan, has written extensively about expectations management in negotiations, and concurs that contracts can perform as instruments of expectations management. However, they can’t be perfect, and the authors’ integration of trust-building mechanisms into contracts (e.g., regular scheduled trust-building meetings) seemed to him to be a bit artificial.

A better approach is to focus on identifying good-faith actors — those who work hard to follow both the letter and the spirit of the agreement. As is always underlined by the “Think Austrian” approach, subjectivism (in this case good-faith actors) brings better business solutions than hard and fast rules and mechanisms regarding how to build contractual trust.

It’s important to get there by the best route, since trust lowers transaction costs.

The new approach to contracting extends to psychological contracts.

Psychological contracts are unwritten relationships in which an individual holds a belief in mutual obligations between themselves and another party. An often-cited example is an employment relationship. There may be a written employment contract but, beyond that, an employee may have tacit expectations about job security, personal development, recognition, promotion, growth, personal well-being and respect. If these are not met, they may withdraw effort. Employers are well-advised to empathize with the unwritten expectations of the psychological contract in order to optimize employee motivation.

A brand promise can be a similar psychological contract. Brand make overt promises regarding the benefits they claim to bring to users. In turn, users create their own expectations — as we always emphasize, value is subjective and customers engage in a value learning process when they interact with brands. Their subjectively-defined expectations undergo continuous change, especially as they make comparisons with alternative offers and alternative sources of satisfaction. It’s imperative for brand owners to monitor the evolution of customer-perceived mutual obligations. Customers hold a strong perception of how much consumption work they have to do to receive the benefits that the brand promised, and if the equation gets out of balance, they’ll withdraw their effort.

Additional Resources

“Contracting In The New Economy” (PDF): Download PDF

“A New Approach To Contracts” (PDF): Download PDF

67. Trini Amador: The Business Tools to Shift Customer Behavior in Your Favor

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Every successful business is built on empathic understanding of customers’ preferences. As we know from the theories of Austrian economics, the preference scales of every individual are highly subjective, idiosyncratic, context-dependent, and highly changeable. How does an entrepreneur develop the appropriate level of understanding? Can this understanding be a source of business-building advantage?

We talked with Trini Amador, a returning guest and an in-demand global branding and marketing consultant who has developed an effective process for every entrepreneur to achieve a breakthrough level of insight into customer motivations.

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

Customers bond with businesses and brands they love and trust. The choices they make have their own internal logic. Entrepreneurs must develop insights into their motivations.

Insights are the lifeblood of any brand- or business-owner, says Trini. Why do customers behave the way they do — especially in buying or not buying? Insights tell you. They become the difference between “just a business” and a brand that successfully delivers against the needs of their customers.

Insights are the entrepreneur’s understanding of customers’ motivations, values and attitudes.

They’re the “Why” in why people act the way they do. Always emotional, always subjective. Entrepreneurs who understand “Why” can design stimulus or communication or innovation to motivate buying behavior.

There’s an insights generation process. It starts with identifying the people you wish to serve.

Trini recommends a focus on your “core target” audience — not a general definition of who might buy, rather a highly specific profiling of your most likely and best prospects. Mark Packard, in episode #62, called them “high knowledge” customers. They know what they want, they know the category and they’re precise about what experience is satisfactory and what is not.

There is no shortage of data for you to utilize. Make sure you select the most important and useful data:

Attitudinal data: how your customer feels, especially if they are expressing dissatisfaction;

Behavioral data: behavior reveals preferences — “motivations are embedded in behaviors”.

The best sources of data are first hand observation and one-on-one conversation.

Organize your data in an insightful way.

To avoid data overload (there’s so much of it to collect!) Trini suggested  couple of organizational techniques.

One is visualization: build a visual profile of the customer with photos and notes indicating their hobbies, favorite brands, activities — visuals that depict their behavior and preferences.

A second is personalization: write a composite profile as if it were one individual and use it as a “one perfect customer” persona.

The objective is to change behaviors. Insight is the required key to unlock the possibility of doing so.

Trini cited the example of his own wine brand from Sonoma County, California: Gracianna. For example, the objective may be to get people to visit the tasting room who have never visited before. That’s a behavior change.

Why do people behave the way they do? One inquiry tool is the 5 Why’s, which is a way to examine the sequential rungs on the individual’s means-ends ladder to identify their highest value, the motivation that is ultimately driving them. Trini used the example of why some people feel better about buying a Tesla than an alternative vehicle. Ultimately, they want to feel that they are better citizens of the planet. Trini entertainingly ascends the rungs of the ladder from “need a new car” and “get from A to B” to arrive at “the feeling of being a better citizen”.

Using these tools, we arrive at a deep understanding of why customers make the choices they make — that is, an insight.

The Insight feeds the Behavior Modification tool.

The definitive “Why?” that emerges from the 5 Why’s inquiry becomes the current state in the behavior modification tool. This tool has two components:

Attitude Modification: behaviors are related to attitudes, and so to change an attitude can lead to a change in behavior. Attitude modification documents the FROM (the attitude we want to change) and the TO (the new attitude we want to encourage).

Key Marketing Platform: a marketing platform is a staging point for all initiatives aimed at achieving the desired attitude among target customers: communication, promotion, innovation, distribution, relationship.

Continuing the Tesla example, we want our prospective customer to feel that Tesla is the most progressive electric car that helps save the planet in the coolest, most prestigious ultra-premium way. If we can get them to feel that way, they’ll buy. The entrepreneur imagines the future behavior, and then acts through the marketing platform to cultivate that motivation.

How? Consider all resources that fall under the headings of communication, innovation, promotion, expanded distribution, and enhanced relationships. Experiment, experiment, experiment. Test, test, test. We’ll discuss the techniques in a future episode of Economics For Entrepreneurs.

Free Downloads & Extras

Insights Statement Template: Our Free E4E Knowledge Graphic
Marking Platform Tool: Our Free E4E Knowledge Graphic
Understanding The Mind of The Customer: Our Free E-Book

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30. Trini Amador on Brand Building

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In Austrian Capital Theory, Brands are valuable financial assets. Brands are architected in response to the subjective value preferences of consumers, and the more accurate the responsiveness, the higher, faster, longer and more reliable are the future cash flows. Brands are promises of value and, when the promise is kept, the result is delighted, enthusiastic and loyal consumers.

In the current episode of the E4E podcast, global branding expert Trini Amador explains how every business and every entrepreneur can methodically build a strong brand to deliver consumer value and unleash cash flow.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

The entrepreneur makes a promise that the consumer will experience value. The brand is the promise. Here are the principles for building a strong brand.

There are two pillars to the construction: Relevance and Differentiation.

Pillar 1: Relevance. It’s central to economics because economics deals with individuals and their preferences and their choices. Your brand is not for everyone, it’s for specific individuals. It’s important to know them and understand them deeply.

Relevance Box 1: Core Target

Many brand owners think that the more customers they target, the more they will sell. The opposite is true. Define your target audience as narrowly as possible.

Relevance Box 2: Core Needs and Insights

Strong brands are built on unique entrepreneurial insights into the motivations of their core target audience. Entrepreneurs use the deductive method: observing behavior and deducing motivations from those observations, using tools like the Means-End Chain.

Relevance Box 3: Customer’s Frame Of Reference

This component is based on the Austrian value principle that the customer finds value in meeting a need in a way that is better (for them) than direct substitutes, indirect substitutes, or than non-purchase or deferred purchase.

Pillar 2: Differentiation

In Pillar two, we build an implementation of the Austrian principle of uniqueness in your entrepreneurial offering. A brand is the ideal platform for communicating uniqueness.

Differentiation Box 1: Brand Promise

The brand promise is to deliver in a unique way the highest possible level of benefit, which is an emotional benefit, the consumer feeling that your offering assures they will achieve their highest fulfillment.

Differentiation Box 2: Brand Delivery.

Brand delivery is how the brand keeps the promise it makes.

Differentiation Box 3: Brand Character

Customers are people and they relate to brands subjectively – almost as if the brand were a person.

Building the 6-Box Brand Foundation brings clarity about what your brand stands for, defines your competitive advantage, and ensures that your entire team knows what they must deliver, and what the customer expects.

Download the set of free resources here to help you implement your own brand-building process.

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