Stop Chasing Shiny Objects and Build Aligned Sales Systems with Changemaker Impact Co.'s Holly Jean Jackson

Josh Elledge (00:00): With us right now is Holly Jackson. Holly, you are the CEO and founder of Changemaker Impact Co. You're found on the web at changemakerimpact.co. You are also the author of the book Inspiration Contagion, which we'll talk about a little bit, and the host of a podcast called Inspiration Contagion. Holly, it is so great to have you. Thank you for joining us.

Holly Jean Jackson (00:28): Thank you. It's great to be here. I love the high energy. It's the middle of the day here. I got to like get energized up to keep up with Josh here.

Josh Elledge (00:34): Oh, well, listen, you are on the right podcast for that. I cannot help myself. But Holly, you do some really cool stuff when you're not at work. And we were kind of talking about that briefly. You're inspiring me because, well, tell us what you do for fun when you're in the great outdoors.

Holly Jean Jackson (00:55): My obsession and passion is rock climbing. My partner and I do a lot of traveling locally and internationally to go rock climbing outside specifically. Obviously we train at the gym to securely do that as much as possible because rock climbing is inherently dangerous. And I love in particular multi-pitch climbing, and I'm working towards doing my first trad lead, which means on your own gear.

Josh Elledge (01:21): What was the multi, what did you say?

Holly Jean Jackson (01:23): Multi-pitch climbing. So that's where a single pitch would be, you have a rope that goes to the top of a route and you come back down, you clean the route, and you're securely, you're ready to go home. Multi-pitch means you'd go to the top and, like, the end of however long your rope is, it could be 120 feet, it could be 200 feet, and then you are transitioning and creating an anchor, and you're doing another pitch. So you're going higher and higher up the mountain. A lot of the accidents that you hear about, people having issues, are transitioning, and it's oftentimes lowering and rappelling. And when they transition there, that's where if you're not securely doing that, you make mistakes and human errors and it can mean you die. I love multi-pitch climbing because there are less people, it's less crowded. It's just you and the rock and the environment. And it's extremely exposed because you get higher and higher and you're summiting the mountain.

Josh Elledge (02:19): Wow. Okay, so I got to get down the YouTube rabbit hole, but you mentioned you had an interview with someone. For anyone that's interested in this topic, who did you interview?

Holly Jean Jackson (02:28): Yeah, so Hazel Findlay is one of my, I want to be her when I grow up, even though she's, I think, younger than me. She's a mother, she has a business, she's also one of the most powerful female climbers in the trad climbing community, which means you're placing your gear, you're climbing on your gear. She is an all-around badass human. And we had her on our podcast to talk about her business and the metaphor of, she has a class around fear of falling, and we kind of translate that to fear of failure in business or fear of failing in business. And so we use that metaphor and had some really interesting discussions around not just peak performance, but peak form and how you show up each day. And it's one of my favorite interviews.

Josh Elledge (03:11): Wow. Well, Holly, let's talk about the work that you do. So I've got your website pulled up right now, changemakerimpact.co, and the headline pops out to me: stop chasing shiny objects. What? Who's chasing shiny objects?

Holly Jean Jackson (03:28): Probably everyone in both of our audiences, right? We have small business owners, we have people who want to change the world. People are trying to make a difference. And like, it's a beautiful thing. It's a beautiful gift to chase shiny objects, but if you don't complete the shiny object and you keep chasing the next thing, nothing gets done. And so visionaries, founders, leaders, people that have brilliant ideas, they're really good at the ideas. They're not as great at implementation. And when we don't create success and systems around how we can cohesively have a business that actually works, I see a lot of founders and business owners drowning in busyness instead of actually having a successful business.

Josh Elledge (04:12): It is. I mean, it's a gift and a little bit of a curse to be kind of more of that visionary idea founder because of our ability to, you know, we see problems. You're like, I can fix that. Oh my gosh, look at that. I can do that, right? Like we recognize, and I don't know where it comes from, obviously just an enthusiasm to make a positive impact, and yeah, probably good business, and maybe there's some excitement there. But this isn't just people saying, oh, I need a new tool, oh, I need to buy a new course. That's how it manifests for junior-level people that are new to business entrepreneurship or that sort of thing. But senior leaders that you work with, or founders that have been around the block for a decade or more, still have to deal with this brain that allows them to see maybe sometimes what other people don't see. Can you talk maybe just a little bit more about that more senior-level leader, how it might show up for them, and what might be some better ways to explore? You know, that's like, oh, this is really exciting. Do I bring it to the team? Do I munch on it first? I'm sure there are visionaries, wait, this is a long question. I'm sure that there are visionaries that have brought things to their team, and then the team might be kind of like, okay, let's see if they're serious about this, let's wait a couple of weeks. I think that can happen if you're bringing too many ideas to your team and not enough, you know, kind of follow-through. But let's get your take on this.

Holly Jean Jackson (06:00): There are a lot of different ways we can slice this. So the symptoms, we'll start with that first. How do you know that you're chasing shiny objects instead of finding a shiny object or an idea that's brilliant and implementing it with grace and ease for your team? Symptomatically, this will show up as high turnover on your team because they're so exhausted. You're giving them so much. You also might do an employee assessment and check in on what you think their job description and what the reality of their job description is, and it's totally different because the leader has piled so much onto them. And there's a massive expectation gap in between reality and what actually is. The other thing you might see is, in particular, this happens a lot when leaders are struggling to solve a specific pain point. It could be they've hit a plateau of cash flow, or they are struggling to outsource a new part of their business because they've grown to a specific level. And their solution to that is all these ideas and adding more workload onto their team without hiring more people for their team. And the problem with that is, of course, you have high employee turnover, which directly impacts your client experience. You're going to have churn with your customers. You're going to possibly have reputation issues as an employer, as well as somebody who's providing a service. And so there's just massive misdirection, misguidance and expectation gaps that you'll see. How do you do this more gracefully and identify as a leader? Gosh, like, this is a brilliant idea, and this is one that I should put on my wish list, and when we have the resources and time, we can strategically as a team discuss when we can take these out of the parking lot. So you haven't lost the idea. You're not saying it's not a great idea. You're saying it's not the right time right now. So you can put those together on a list as a team. You can discuss and engage the people that you've hired, hopefully to fill in the gaps where you are not as skilled as a leader, which hopefully, ding, ding, ding, should be implementation, task management, project management, if you're really good at the founder creation ideation side. So they can keep you in check and in balance. And then of course, making sure you're hitting your current key performance indicators, and that should include customer experience, employee experience, before piling on and going back to evaluate the wish list. And then if you're seeing a plateau issue or a gap in revenue, going to the wish list and saying, gosh, what one thing should we tackle this quarter that we think is going to get us the closest to and the fastest to, with the most ease with our team, to our goal that we're trying to hit, so we can break through that plateau? I hope that answered your question clearly.

Josh Elledge (08:50): Certainly. And I'm looking at your services too and how these fit with that. You offer through Changemaker Impact authentic marketing and messaging, which I think, again, is badly needed when I think we have the temptation to use such great AI tools. But again, sometimes, well, with AI, we kind of lose that authenticity. And as a writer and an editor myself, it just drives me crazy when I read AI speak. I mean, it's just as much slop as someone churning out some yucky image and representing themselves with it. But you also do aligned sales systems. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by, I mean, I can kind of give my interpretation, but what does authentic marketing and messaging look like? And how does that then lead to aligned sales systems? So what's an aligned sales system? Sorry, that was a big question. We'll see how you do with that.

Holly Jean Jackson (09:53): You're giving me all the big questions. I'm used to it.

Josh Elledge (09:55): Wow.

Holly Jean Jackson (09:56): So, you know, authentic marketing and then how that leads into aligned sales systems. Well, it starts with the leader and the vision, mission and values of the company. And so the first thing is we want to make sure that whoever is the, if it's a sales team, if it's just the solopreneur or the person who's the founder that's doing the sales process, we want to make sure the marketing aligns so that when they go to close it, it's not like, oh, wait, the whole experience for that potential customer is disjointed and setting off alarm bells. So authentic marketing, where it's aligned to what the company's about. The worst thing you can do, and we got so many people that have invested with marketing agencies and they've had zero return on their investment. And it's because they don't have a sales system or the marketing campaign is completely misaligned with their zone of genius, their superpower as a company, or there's no values alignment. So they're getting really terrible customers that in the long run are going to reduce their capacity, but also just deplete their energy. So we want to create our marketing plans and make them authentic so that we are attracting those perfect clients. You don't need thousands and hundreds of thousands of customers. For most of the clients we work with, they're small business owners. You need hundreds, right? Or maybe 100 or less for some folks that have high-ticket offers. And so if that's the case, why are we not casting the net to be super specific, super authentic and be a magnet for those people? So we really dive into what is the best way to market to your particular niche. And then of course, there's so many marketing things you can do out there. How do we build a relationship in a way that feels authentic? I actually just did an episode around creating intentional friction in your sales process so that you don't get really bad customer fits.

Josh Elledge (11:52): Oh yeah. Oh, totally. And please do trust that filter. So when someone no-shows you, in some cases it makes sense to kind of maybe reach out or whatever. But yeah, if someone goes and they look at your website and it just doesn't resonate with them, and they're just fickle, that's good. Yeah. Oh, I absolutely love that.

Holly Jean Jackson (12:17): So from the intake form and having standard operating procedures or automations where if they answer a specific way, you cancel the call because it's not a match, to when you have a group call, maybe for the first point of contact, if they answer a specific way, they give you a bad vibe. Like if you're, whoever is doing that call, trust that if there's a values misalignment, do not invite them to a sales conversation. That's a waste of your time and theirs. And then of course, when they have objections, when we do sales trainings for folks, this is that aligned sales process. That's not a negative thing. Somebody having an objection, they're interested enough to share their objection and they're vulnerable and they trust you enough to be like, hey, Josh, I can't afford this program. And that's like, cool, Josh, can you do a payment plan? Or do you have a financing program for that? So it's creating those friction points in the sales process for there to be alignment. But then also, quite frankly, a lot of our small business owner customers, they don't have technology platforms like a CRM or ways to follow up or a project management platform to make sure that tasks aren't getting dropped. I call tasks monkeys because when we hand them off, I don't want the monkeys dying. So like when I have team calls, I'm like, we just had a monkey explode. Like, what happened? Let's figure out what happened here. That rarely happens because we have task and project management, we have automations, and we set those up for our clients so that they never drop a task again, in particular with the sales process and with customer delivery process, because human error is easy. And this is where it makes sense to use, automation is different than AI. I'm so tired of people putting them in the same bucket. I worked in technology for years before starting my own company. Automation, there are times to use that. And then there's times where you should have real human intervention, not AI. And if you're using AI, you need people that are actual humans managing that, almost like an employee separately.

Josh Elledge (14:19): Agreed.

Holly Jean Jackson (14:20): Sorry, I'm going to get on a pulpit there.

Josh Elledge (14:22): Yeah, no, thank you. Preach. All right, so your website, changemakerimpact.co, your podcast, Inspiration Contagion, our friends can find. And then of course your book is the same name, Inspiration Contagion, and that's on Amazon in all the formats: Kindle, audiobook and paperback. But Holly, for our friend that's been listening, where do they go from here? Like, I know you've got free resources and you've got some things that folks might kind of take and get more Holly in their life.

Holly Jean Jackson (15:01): Well, if you go to the website, changemakerimpact.co, we have all of our social accounts there. We have a YouTube channel with podcasting, solo episodes, lessons to learn. There's also a ton of free content there. So if you want to get to know us, want to have a lot of information around marketing and sales, there's tons of assets there. Additionally, inspirationcontagion.com is the podcast, but it's also on all the major platforms, so you can find it at Spotify, Apple, all those places. But of course, if you heard this episode and you are struggling with any of the issues we're talking about, and maybe you're chasing those shiny objects, or you're like, oh my gosh, I want an aligned sales system, or I need help with authentic marketing, we have free complimentary Changemaker strategy calls for folks that find us on any of these platforms. And that's to be a resource, because we want to help more changemakers be a light to make this world a better place and create that ripple effect. So those are all the ways you can get in contact with us.

Josh Elledge (16:00): I love it, Holly. By the way, I neglected to mention you're also a TEDx speaker. So your talk from 2022, Navigating Fear in a New Era of Uncertainty, always relevant. We are swimming in uncertainty. That's all we have is uncertainty. We don't know, right? So, well, Holly Jackson, this has been a great conversation. Again, your website, changemakerimpact.co, where there's links to everything, including your books and your podcast, everything you mentioned. Holly, thank you so much for this conversation.

Holly Jean Jackson (16:37): Thank you, Josh, and thanks everyone.