The Secret Sauce That’s Missing from Your Messaging – Jay Acunzo
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Jay Acunzo Episode Transcript
Rich: My next guest helps experts become stronger public voices. He began his career in marketing roles at Google and ESPN and worked as head of content at HubSpot and a venture capital firm before earning a living from stages as a keynote speaker and show host.
Today he’s a consultant trusted by executives, entrepreneurs, and brands like MailChimp, Salesforce, and Wistia, to turn their thinking into IP, and their advice into memorable speeches and stories that move the market.
Today we’re going to be talking about how you can develop your own premise and differentiating yourself by your perspective with Jay Acunzo. Jay, welcome to the podcast.
Jay: Rich, good to speak to you.
Rich: So I guess my first question is, how do you manage that three-day shave look that you’ve mastered? Every time I see you, it’s the perfect length. I don’t know how you do it.
Jay: Yeah. Some stereotypes are true. I’m Italian, which anybody who can watch me speak can tell by the everything of me. It’s hands, hair gel, facial hair. So it’s like the three H’s of my Italian-ness. So this is practice, my friend. That’s the only way I can answer that question. It takes great care and great practice to have facial hair this bad.
Rich: I’m going to try harder to get my facial hair to look like yours.
Alright, shifting to unimportant things, how did you first get started in helping people with their presentations and their storytelling?
Jay: Unexpectedly, after my stint in tech, I became my own independent man in a way, my own independent entrepreneur in 2016. And I took a weird route there. Because I think a lot of people, they start selling services, they build a firm, they build a personal brand, they get the book out in market, then they consider possibly pursuing a speaker fee and they become a paid public speaker. I started there.
And through lots of great mentors, and hard work, and a lot of luck, and a weird self-delusion, that has served me well. I think all entrepreneurs understand when you speak about that, or business owners or any creatives really, I started as a paid professional keynote speaker traveling this country and several others, giving speeches sometimes to thousands of people, sometimes to a dozen, and everyone in between, across different sub-sectors of the business world before I had a book. And by the way, still waiting on the fame part. So no book, no fame.
You’re able to do it because what I was taught was the speech and all the IP bottled up in the speech. Your big idea, your premise, your stories, your methodology, your frameworks, terminology, you define all the ways you package and communicate your expertise to resonate. And the speech is just a dense dose of that. It’s that stuff that creates a flywheel of inquiries, both to hire you for a service – although for a time I didn’t sell anything but speeches – and also to invite you to keep speaking. So I was able to create this flywheel of what they call stage side leads as a professional keynote speaker.
And I’m not alone. There’s lots of people who have done that. But in the pandemic, of course, I got punched in the mouth and I thought I would wean off of the road and build up a services arm eventually. Because we were looking at having baby number two, and while I liked to travel, I was staring at friends of ours, like a Jay Baer or an Andrew Davis or others who spend 200 plus days on the road. That was never going to be for me. I was doing about 30 gigs a year, and I knew I needed to figure out what is the second business unit that could eventually become the first and prime one.
And of course, the pandemic was a reality where there was no weaning to be had. And so I lurched around for a couple of years until I realized, I had this kind of crystallizing moment where a CMO friend of mine who gives speeches all over the marketing industry came rushing up to me at the end of I think it was 2022, maybe beginning of ‘23. And he was like, “Oh my God, Jay, I know you’re a good speaker. I’ve never seen you speak. Can you give my talk later in the day?”
And I went, oh right, we should all be asking ourselves what are the most impressive people in our networks, most impressed by coming from us. Because to me that’s premium clientele. That’s fulfillment creatively for me. That’s a need others have. And I wasn’t seeing myself clearly until a couple years after the pandemic began, where I moved behind the scenes. And I joke, I’m trying to be like the Rick Rubin for business storytellers. Like I want to be that peer-level advisor where I work with folks on turning their expertise into IP, that kind of commercialized version of their advice, and then turning them as teachers and experts into much more powerful speakers and storytellers.
Rich: It’s just funny because at the beginning of the sentence when you, or beginning of the answer when you started talking about fame has yet to come, I noticed when we were at CEX together, how many people name checked you from stage, both before you spoke and then after you spoke. I know I did only to preface the fact that I was going to basically not do any of these suggested things that you had done, because I already come up with my presentation at that point. But I needed to address that.
But then you mentioned you were within this area, within this group of people who do presentations, you do have a certain level of fame. People know who you are, they respect you and they talk about you. And that usually comes from game seeing game, like people who are good at what they do, and they see your level of expertise here. A big reason why I wanted you to come on the show, even though we’re not talking about digital marketing specifically, although obviously there’s a lot of overflow or Venn diagram.
Speaking of which, so my next question was going to be, talk to me a little bit about the difference between creating intellectual property (IP), versus just creating content.
Jay: Yeah. I think there was a time I helped contribute to this vibe, because as head of content at HubSpot, they were “tips and tricks ‘r us” when I joined that company. And there’s no secret, I didn’t last long there. I failed my team in trying to push that organization into a deeper, higher quality, less volume-based approach. I did not succeed there.
But back in that era where HubSpot and other organizations were urging marketers and business owners to create a lot of content, it was enough, perhaps, to say I know something and I’m going to share what I know for free through content. That was a radical idea at one point. And now you look around and expertise, I’m not talking about nuclear reactor expertise or medical expertise, there’s things that should be taken seriously and should only come from an expert. But even then, there’s a lot of voices sharing content.
Publicly expertise has been commodified. Like it’s valuable, but I can get it anywhere. And the last thing you want to do is raise your hand and say, “I guess I’m anywhere.” And put me on a spreadsheet with all my competitors, and the winning pick is lowest price. That’s not a way to build a business.
And so as a speaker and author, what you’re trained in doing, it might sound surprising to people, but it is to craft a narrative argument. Like a good speech is a good argument to buy into my thinking, my big idea, my premise, and also my approach, the way I see the world. And if I can do that, if I can influence how you think, it gets a lot easier to influence how you act and how you buy.
And a lot of marketers or owners are much more stuck on, I got to influence how they buy. Maybe a little bit I got to influence how they act. Because if they’re trying to do that thing, they might hire me for my service or product, right? And I’m looking at all these people and I’m like, you have such deep expertise, and you just keep sprinting on the hamster wheel sharing generic advice just like everybody else.
And some folks are now resorting to all these stunts and gimmicks online, which I think devalues you. Where you shove more volume of content at the world, or you lace your content with sensationalism and clickbait and all that. I think that serious buyers are repelled by that. Serious clients are repelled by that. You’re anchoring yourself to basically being a louder commodity. It’s like a brighter shade of beige, or you’re writing in the sky with a drone show. I’m just like the rest. It’s like the drone show’s not the point. It’s the underlying substance and message, and there’s a craft, there’s a skill.
It doesn’t require you quitting your job and being a speaker full-time to go from talking topics to owning a singular premise to go from. Sharing a wall of smarts to having a succinct and logical argument that does the only job I think we’re supposed to do with the world when we communicate, which is not reach people, but resonate with them. And so since learning that I’ve been on this really exciting path, I think, but also maybe a little countercultural to the era of the internet we’re in to help people resonate deeper. Because then you either don’t have to think about the reach part, or the reach part gets easy. But it’s all about resonance.
Rich: All right. Let’s dig a little bit deeper on that because I think a lot of people, a lot of our listeners are used to creating content. And maybe they have a unique perspective or not.
So walk me through that process. If you’re working with a client or providing advice, what are some of the ways where we get off that hamster wheel of creating content, creating how to content. Because we like sharing ideas and we want to prove our expertise, but there’s something missing. I think that’s what I’m trying to get at. And maybe what you’re so good at is there is a missing piece here that basically transforms content.
Because you’re right, I can ask ChatGPT, I can ask Google. I can ask any expert and get an answer on whatever subject I’m interested in. But what we’re here talking about is that we’re creating something that really helps. It’s a premise, it’s a perspective. So what is that shift in mindset that we need to go through? Or what advice do you give so that we can claim a piece of land as our own?
Jay: I like to joke with clients… so I’m a whiskey drinker. My early interactions with clients is what I call the two-drink minimum version of you, where I don’t want to hear you try to wordsmith or come up with a tagline or come up with anything particularly tight or public facing. All I want is brutal honesty about how you see your space. Because everyone out there is talking about the same topic that you are. That’s not differentiating. There’s something about your perspective that is, and we just take that for granted. And you have for years.
We’re like, yeah, I know myself or my team or my organization. We are different. We are special. And the problem is, I’d need an hour or two over coffee or drinks to really understand that I’d walk away getting it because I’d have to discover it. How do you make what’s normally discovered, readily apparent?
I actually think it starts by turning deeper inward to yourself as the individual voice and figuring out what in the hell am I really trying to say to the world? How do I actually hear or say what I’ve been trying to say? Frankly, through my content, through my messaging in my public thought leadership, everywhere I go, one-on-one or one to many, or everything in between. I haven’t tried to put good raw material out on the table to synthesize into something good later.
So I mentioned Rick Rubin before, he’s this kind of famous name in music. His job is to be a peer of artists and extract from them, not impose on them. And that’s the role I play where I’m saying, okay Rich, you’ve been talking about this space for a while. You’re surrounded by a lot of people who also talk about that space. Let’s come up with an argument for why somebody should care about the way you see it.
And as a speaker, you learn that’s actually the operating system of your keynotes is a good narrative argument where you anticipate what is it the audience is asking, and then how do I respond with that? Then they have a follow-up question, how do I respond with that? It’s like a lawyer saying, if we agree to this, then logically this, if we agree to that, then logically that. And you move them from where they’re at to where you want them to be.
And so the result of this is you could pitch your perspective with something I call the “XY premise pitch”. It’s like this is a service. This is a business, a product even. This is a podcast. This is a speech about X. That’s your topic. Unlike those things about X, only we Y, and people really struggle with the differentiator. Only we what? If you’re a podcaster, you’re like, only we get to the actual practical advice. No.
For me it’s, I have a show called, How Stories Happen, it’s a show about storytelling. Unlike other shows about storytelling, only I make the assertion that you don’t experience stories, you have to craft them. You experience your life. You craft stories bit by tiny bit. So on the show, we ask amazing storytellers like Seth Godin, and up and coming voices you’ve never heard of, and everybody in between, to deconstruct a single story and how it came together. Because that’s a better look at the craft of storytelling than a generic interview with a luminary voice, right?
And so we make assertions all the time, but what you need is a real narrative argument behind your perspective. And you can tease out your premise by constructing a good argument. And there’s myriad ways to do this, and I can get into that. But that’s the first starting point is be brutally honest with what are you arguing for? What are you asking them to do differently? How do you really see it? Because that’s actually why they care, and we mostly don’t get in touch with that.
Rich: How do we know they care? Or is that an assumption that we have to make?
Jay: I do think there’s a little bit of an overemphasis or unnecessary amount of value that we place in business on the market’s response to something. Or more likely, what will they respond positively to, I’ll say that. What’s the best practice on that channel? I’ll show up like that. And that’s hard because even though you’re like if I just know, I can say it. So is everyone else. Anyone can do it or say it that way. So it’s hard because now you’re on the hamster wheel racing faster than the million competitors who sound like you.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have what I call “inside out thinkers”, where they’re like, how do I see it? What do I uniquely have to say? And it’s hard to articulate what you uniquely have to say, but also it’s hard to figure out how to get them to arrive at the same conclusion. You need good IP, you need good frameworks and stories and ways of saying things, and memorable phrases, and the thought leaders that we admire, right?
And so it’s hard either way. It’s hard to be a commodity. It’s hard to be a leader. I would rather be a leader, because it’s very defensible and you can charge a premium. And also, people tend to seek you out. You don’t have to chase attention as much. And I think that’s really the benefit of all this stuff we’re talking about, Rich, is can we stop chasing attention and become the one others seek? Because ultimately, that would be better.
And so I think what we need to start measuring, you asked about how to tell if you’re connecting and if others care, is not what they’re already talking about or searching for. But I have now put in front of you my strongest way of articulating this. Did I compel a response?
So I called, I made up a metric for this. I’m glad you asked. Because and in marketing, you need an acronym to be taken seriously. So the metric is this. You are our unsolicited response rate. Without gaming the system or asking for a reply, do my ideas compel a response? Because otherwise, how the hell do you know that people care? Or that you should keep promoting that content or invest in that message and stake your business reputation to it. If I put this in front of you, do you respond?
And you can actually score this all the way on the low end. You get zero points for no response, and on the high end you get six points for people responding with their own personal stories, because they’ve invested the most time and reputation that they will invest to respond to something, right?
So I’ve worked with clients to say, we need to put your ideas out there. And then see if they compel a response. Because that’s what’s worth investing in and distributing everywhere. How do we measure that response without asking for it? Did they respond unsolicited, and then how do you measure it? You can actually score it based on the type of response you get. More points for how much time and reputation your audience invested in responding to you.
And for some reason, Rich, I don’t know why we think that the only metrics worth measuring when we speak publicly is the stuff the platforms give us. But they have an advertising business model. They don’t measure resonance because they don’t frankly give a shit about resonance. They care all about reach because they monetize reach. We need to care about resonance because that’s why people take action. That’s why we drive a sale or new clients or subscribers. And so we have to get more creative in how we measure it.
Rich: I know we’ve seen movies about comedians, and they take it on the road, and they work through their material. Are you recommending that we go out and actually do presentations where it’s okay if we fail? Or are you talking more about taking some of these ideas, these original IP, putting them out onto, say, social media or even a discussion table, whatever it may be, and seeing what that URR is?
Jay: I came up in the speaking world under the tutelage of the great Andrew Davis. Who I think is one of, if not the best marketing speaker alive today, Andrew Davis. And what he taught me was the power of this one word, “aerate”. You have to aerate your thinking publicly to sharpen it.
First of all, you get a feedback loop in your own brain. Forcing yourself to communicate in any medium makes you better at communicating it. My book in 2018, Break the Wheel, was about questioning best practices and thinking for yourself in the era of advice.
And when I wrote Break the Wheel, I thought, this is me cementing my strongest way of saying this into a book forever. But then I promoted the book for six to nine months on podcasts, and by the end of that tour I was like, oh no, I say it way better now than in the book. Because the more you force yourself to show up in front of an audience and communicate first, you get a feedback loop to yourself about how to improve your own thinking and internalize that thinking and say it effortlessly.
And second, you do get a feedback loop in front of others. So I always advocate that people start this process by selecting a channel or project that represents your aeration practice where every Friday I am going to send a newsletter and I’d like that newsletter to drive some clients my way, but mostly I’m going to write that even if zero people subscribed.
Why? Because it’s for me, it’s a development tool. It’s an aeration tool. I need to create so I improve how I say it myself. And then I worry about creating so others give me a response. And a lot of us aren’t willing to do that. A lot of us think content is distribution. Content is also learning, writing is thinking, and ding ding. I’m going to say AI. Now you get all the points because you’re listening to a marketing podcast where someone says AI.
I think when people approach AI, like I can skip the messy process. I’m like, good luck. You’re skipping the process where you, yourself, tightened your thinking and discovered better ways of thinking and improved. If you want to be that influential voice someday that people run to and pay money for, and good money at that. Whether you sell a service or a product or a speech, that’s a mistake. So you need to do the comedian thing. I agree. Show up in small pockets of your audience and put your thinking in front of them, and then step back and go, how do I improve it next time out?
Rich: I remember years ago watching these high experts in Madden Football, and they were talking about like, “How did you get to the top of the game?” And one of the guys just said, “You got to spend time in the lab.” And he just meant he plays the game 12 hours a day. Now this was for a $50,000 prize, so I’m sure it was fun. I also don’t know about the ROI. Moving on from that topic.
Jay: No. Here, I’m going to say a name that maybe makes you hate me. Can I do that? Derek Jeter. I’m assuming you’re a Red Sox fan.
Rich: Yes. And actually, I don’t hate Derek Jeter. He’s one of the few. Now, had he said, ARod, this interview would’ve been over.
Jay: Oh, that’s fair. That’s ‘s fair. I’m a Yankee fan.
Rich: Jeter, when he dive into the audience, when Nomar was sitting on the bench for us, that changed my perspective of both players.
Jay: There you go. So Derek Jeter, I was listening to an episode of a podcast that he did recently as a guest, and he talked about the value of preparation. And he was talking about preparing to play baseball and he was talking about it in a very matter of fact way, as if there is no other way to be excellent than to prepare. And I’m like, of course.
Why don’t we think of that when we are professional communicators? Why do we think we can hire an agency or hire a consultant like me, or in our own internal sense, come up with the best story about our brand in theory, press it into a deck, not show it to anybody, and then take it to market in this big announcement fashion, or distribute it on all platforms on our website in a speech before we’ve ever put those words in front of anybody? Like, we want to be excellent. We very rarely prepare for excellence.
And to me, when you’re a professional communicator, you got to take the Jerry Seinfeld approach. His book is called, Is This Anything? That’s kind of what you’re doing. You’re putting your work out to the world, and you can do it privately with trusted colleagues or friends. You could do it with a small pocket of your audience. I think it’s a mistake to do it everywhere all at once. But you say basically to the world, you’re implying, is this anything?
What drives me up a wall is every single human being in business. I don’t care what your role is, what you sell, how long you’ve done it, how good or bad you see yourself as a storyteller, every single individual wants to resonate with a person on the receiving end. But the person on the receiving end is asking the same thing or really commanding the same thing when you show up to communicate, make me care.
And we haven’t proven ourselves to be able to say this in such a way that does like what you know matters, but what you say and how you say it is going to determine if they care. And we haven’t figured out. If our words do that, if our message does that, if our speech, if our story, if our content does that, we just expect it to and when it doesn’t, and this breaks my heart, most of all, what do we do? We promote it more. We’re waltzing the earth, going, oh, it must be a reach problem.
I’m like, you reach people now, there’s five people who got in front of you or you got in front of, they didn’t respond at all. Why is your response like, huh? The people who already like me signaled they didn’t like this, I should go put this in front of more people. That makes no sense. We think we have a reach problem, but we typically have a residence problem, and both of these things have metrics, have process, have craft, have technique. But we look at the resonance stuff of our favorite voices who resonate and we’re like, ah, I could never do that. No, this is a skill. This is a craft. We should be mastering it because all the other stuff is going away. It’s not differentiating. We can’t own it.
Rich: I feel like we could go deeper, hours deeper into everything we’ve talked about so far, about developing your perspective, about the practice. But I do want to touch on a couple other things before I let you go today.
What is the shape of a presentation? And you and I talked about this. Because I may not be at your level, but I love giving public presentations and I do it as much as I can. And I think one of the things that I told you is if I’m driving an hour to a presentation, I don’t listen to music or any podcast on the way up. I literally practice the first five minutes, so it rolls off my tongue as naturally as possible. I know you have some strong feelings about finishing and ending together. But talk to me a little bit about how you focus on the structure of a presentation, whether it’s a TED Talk or a 45-minute presentation.
Jay: So picture it like a barbell. You got the bar in the middle, but on either end, you have these big plates. Like most of the weight is on the ends, right? Same with the speech.
Studies about memory and recall suggest that people will remember the first and latest moments with any experience or person. It’s called the primacy and recency effects, first and latest. And that means in a presentation of any kind, in an episode, in an article, it doesn’t matter. It’s just very noticeable.
And I think a mistake we make in speeches, if we want to be remembered well, or even just remembered in a specific way at all, then what we need to be really over obsessing about and overinvesting in. In other words, our best material needs to be in the first and last moments. And what do you get from most business communicators and speakers, really bad openers and closers. They don’t even use those terms by the way. They just meekly start. They make all kinds of mistakes with verbal debris and filler words and meandering to the start. They talk about what they want to talk about. They don’t do anything at all to start memorably. And then they drop the momentum, if they had any, at the very end with a call to action or kind of a meandering, “Thanks. That’s my time. Any questions?”
And actually, what we need to do is create a signature opener and a signature closer, and then there’s two pieces to the bar in the middle. There’s the how to think material, followed by the how-to material. And a lot of experts just shove a wall of smarts at people. It doesn’t have those four elements, or they think the how to think is a keynote, which is true. And the how-to is a breakout. No, you still need to align around how to see something, how to think, and if you’re a keynote, you still have to impart practical, tangible takeaways and frameworks and methods.
So it’s the opener how to think, how-to the closer. And so see it like a barbell where the most important, counterintuitively, is how you start and how you end.
Rich: Now there are a lot of speaking coaches out there, Jay, a lot of advice floating around there. What’s one piece of advice that you think is absolute trash, or what’s one thing that you believe in that you don’t see a lot of other speaking coaches focus on?
Jay: That’s a good question. I certainly have a different perspective than a lot of speaking coaches. I think because you can be a wonderful teacher and not have done the thing you’re teaching. I can’t disparage that. Teaching itself is a skill. But I built myself a speaking business, and so I know what it feels like when the audience isn’t responding. I know what it feels like to walk out to 4,000 people, to travel, to pitch yourself, to go through the wringer and fail and succeed. And so I bring a slightly different lens to that.
I think a lot of people, they put an emphasis on kind of two extremes. One is, you need to just do everything in your power to build more online fame and invitations to speak happen. I think that’s total BS. And on the other extreme, it’s you have to have this soft shoe, tap dance, jazz hands approach to speaking. You have to know the theatrics of it all.
But I actually think there’s something that people miss. Which is, it’s the same with what we’re doing now, Rich, but it’s really noticeable on a stage. People talk about being authentic and I’m like, yeah, but I’m performing when I’m on stage. I’m performing now. I’m performing when I write to you. I’m performing when I’m on a one-on-one call with a client. We’re performing at all times. The trick is to know how to deploy a version of you on the stage that actually grips people and delivers a message that is on premise and on brand and sparks action. That’s a lot. The stakes are really high.
And so I think a lot of people are on the technique level. When I want to stay on the person level, I want to work on the person up there where it’s not actually your big emotional gestures or where you stand or how you move. It’s not actually whether or not you have a big following.
Back to Seinfeld. He says, “I get five minutes to just be Seinfeld, but then I have to deliver on stage.” Like you’re laid bare up there, or virtually if you’re not doing travel-based speaking. And so what I feel like people miss is you can get process from anybody. Techniques, all the stuff I’m talking about, it’s not that. That’s process. But you need practice and posture. Like those three Ps are craft process, practice and posture. And when you don’t have the posture of I am going to challenge people’s thinking, I am going to try to create an argument that changes how they approach this forever. When you don’t have the posture of I can do this, or I’m the baddest mofo in this room, or whatever, it’s going to be hard.
And if you don’t have the practice of putting out your thinking to improve or firing up a webcam or going on a walk-in kind of shooting video just to practice using your voice, if you’re not practicing, if you think the first and only time you’re doing it is the best time you’re doing it, it’s going to be harder, too.
So I guess the sum up of that is a lot of people try to shove their process at you. I think whether it’s me or someone else, I think the best consultants and advisors, they’re going to try and figure out how do I improve your posture and how do I give you a sustainable practice? Because those two things have to come from you, and the rest can be handed to you, which means it’s not differentiating.
Rich: Awesome, and probably the perfect place to end. So Jay, if people want to learn more about you and how you can help them, where can we send them online?
Jay: I host a podcast where I kind of workshop material with other business communicators. Maybe they speak, maybe they’re thinking about their message, maybe they write. That’s called, How Stories Happen, and so you can get that wherever you listen to podcasts.
And my site is jayacunzo.com where you can learn more, subscribe to my newsletter, hear a little bit more about what clients say about working with me, and also see me in action. I publish a lot of coaching calls, with permission, publicly, where you can see me actually go through the process of developing a message or a speech with a client.
Rich: Awesome. Jay, this has been fantastic, whether you’re on stage or behind the mic, it’s just great content and great perspective. Thank you very much.
Jay: Thanks, Rich.
Show Notes:
Jay Acunzo helps experts become stronger public voices by turning raw thinking into IP that moves markets. Check out his podcast, How Stories Happen, grab his book, and be sure to connect with him on LinkedIn.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.