Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:51 — 9.5MB) | Embed
I have spent more than a decade helping other people communicate clearly. Which makes it a little embarrassing to admit that I once talked for thirty minutes straight and never said the one thing that actually mattered.
My wife stopped me with a single question, and I didn’t have an answer for it. It took me a few years, a rebuilt website, and a coach to finally understand what she was really asking, and it changed the way I sell, the way I explain things, and the way I ask questions.
Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday, this is episode 711, “Don’t Sell the Plane.” I’m Darrell Darnell, the longest flight I’ve ever taken is from Honolulu to Houston, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
I don’t think I’ve ever once won an argument by explaining the logistics.
You would think I’d know that by now. Communication is my business. I’ve spent more than a decade helping people sound clear, credible, and compelling. And still, a few years ago, I sat down at my kitchen table and tried to talk my wife into a vacation by walking her through a spreadsheet.
I’m not even kidding. My family can vouch for how much I love spreadsheets. I had tabs open. I had flight prices, long term parking rates, and a layover option that would save us hundreds of dollars if we were willing to add a few more hours to the travel day. I had the rental car figured out. I had the cancellation terms. I had figured out that if we left on a Tuesday instead of a Thursday, we’d save enough to cover an extra night.
I was proud of that research. It was thorough. It was accurate. It was, in my opinion, compelling.
My wife listened the way she always listens, patiently, letting me get all the way to the end without interrupting. And then she asked me one question.
“So what would we actually do there?”
I really thought about that. I mean, not in the same way I’d thought about all the details on my spreadsheet.
I had spent half an hour describing how we would get somewhere and not one single second describing the somewhere. I had never mentioned what the air feels like when you step off the plane in a warm place in February. I never mentioned sleeping past seven. I never mentioned reading an entire book in one sitting because nobody needs anything from you. I never mentioned coming home rested for the first time in years.
I sold her the plane. I never told her about the island.
This is a mistake I’ve not only made when planning vacations, it’s a mistake I was making in my business without even knowing it.
For most of the life of Pro Podcast Solutions, our ideal client was an entrepreneur or a personal brand. Think of somebody earning well into the seven figures with a small team around them. They were smart, busy, and already convinced. Nobody had to sell them on podcasting. They either had a show already and were drowning in the production side of it, or they were about to launch one and knew from day one that they had no interest in touching the editing software.
So our messaging never tried to convince anybody to start a podcast. That would have been like handing a diagram of the fuselage to someone already buckled into seat 23A.
Instead, we talked about relief. Our headline was “Your Podcast, Perfected. Your Time, Protected.” We told people we’d save them five to ten hours per episode. We said, “You record, we handle the rest.” We asked them what an hour of their time was actually worth, because every hour spent hunting down filler words was an hour stolen from coaching, or course creation, or being present with their family.
That messaging worked because it was about the island. The island was margin. The island was a Tuesday afternoon that belonged to them again. The island was hearing your own show and thinking, that sounds like a real broadcast.
We didn’t lead with editing techniques. We led with the feeling of being taken care of.
A while back we made a decision to shift our ideal client profile toward enterprise organizations. Financial services firms. Law practices. Healthcare. Tech. Big companies with marketing departments, compliance teams, and executives whose calendars are protected like a valuable asset.
And almost immediately I learned something powerful. The messaging that had served us beautifully for years was suddenly the wrong language.
This new client is not already convinced. An entrepreneur with a personal brand doesn’t need permission to launch a podcast. A marketing director at a bank does. She has to walk into a room and defend the line item. She has to explain what the company gets for the money. She can’t walk into that room holding a download report, because her boss doesn’t care about downloads. Her boss cares about qualified leads, pipeline, and whether the executive team is going to lose eight hours a week to a microphone.
So when we built the new site, the language had to change. Not the values. Not the craft. The language.
Now the headline reads, “Your Competitors Track Downloads. You’ll Track Qualified Leads.” We talk about a measurement framework built before the first episode publishes. We talk about integrating with HubSpot and Salesforce, and about UTM tracking, custom landing pages, and unique attribution codes. We talk about the fact that their executives invest six to eight hours per month total and we handle everything else. We talk about turning one episode into more than twenty strategic assets. We even publish the investment range, because a person building a budget needs a number, not a vibe.
Same company. Same team. Same care for every episode. Completely different island.
That’s the part I want you to think about, because it would be easy to hear this as a story about rebranding. It isn’t. It’s a story about the fact that the destination is not something I get to decide. The destination lives in my client’s head, not mine. My job is to find out what it looks like and then describe it clearly enough that they can see it.
Author and speaker Brian Tracy said something that put words to all of this, and I’ve thought about it almost every week since I read it. He said:
“People don’t care what your product is. They don’t care about you. They don’t care about your company. They don’t care about the background of your company, and they don’t even care what the product is. People don’t care. The only thing they care about is what this product or service does for me. What do I get? What’s in it for me? And what they want is a change in their life. They want an improvement in their life. A result, a benefit, or highest of all is a transformation. They want to be transformed. Here’s the rule. Fifteen percent of buying behavior is determined by the past, eighty five percent of buying behavior is determined by the anticipated future. What is going to happen as a result of me buying?”
Fifteen percent looking backward. Eighty five percent looking forward. And most of us spend our breath on the fifteen.
Then he gave the illustration that transformed me. I wrote it in big bold words in a note I keep front and center on my desktop, and it inspired this episode. He said:
“If you are selling a tour to the Canary Islands, spend ninety percent of your time talking about the destination, and only ten percent talking about the plane that you fly to the Canary Islands in. Most salespeople spend ninety percent of their time talking about the plane, and only ten percent of the time talking about the destination. Imagine if you went to a travel agent and you said, I want to take a vacation to the Canary Islands. And they said, well, let me show you how this plane works. And they take out a diagram of the airplane you’re going to fly on, and how you walk up the ramp and where you sit and the food they serve and the movie. You think, I don’t want to hear about this. I just want to know about the islands and the palm trees and the ocean and the warm water and so on. So talk ninety percent about the change that will take place in the customer’s life. Customers only buy improvement. The reason they buy is that they feel that the quality and quantity of the improvement will be greater than the cost, and the trouble of using it, or learning how to use it.”
Isn’t that great stuff?!
The islands and the palm trees and the ocean and the warm water.
My desktop note says, “Don’t get caught up selling the plane. (How you’re going to get them there) Tell them about the island. (The destination).”
People book discovery calls with me every week to learn about what we do. For years those calls had a rhythm I could run in my sleep, because our old clients genuinely wanted the details. They asked about turnaround times. They asked how we handle filler words, how show notes get written, what happens if an episode needs a rush. They enjoyed that conversation, and honestly, so did I. That’s my craft. That’s the part I’ve spent twelve years getting good at.
But our new client does not want that conversation. I’ve watched it happen in real time. I start explaining our process, and somewhere around the third detail I can feel the energy leave the call. Not because they think we’re bad at it. Because they assumed competence before they ever clicked the link. What they’re actually sitting there asking, silently, is something else entirely. How does this affect my pipeline? How do I explain this to my CFO? What am I going to be able to point to in six months?
They wanted the island. I kept handing them the seat map.
So I brought in a coach to help me get better at this. That’s not a fun sentence for me to say out loud. I’m supposed to be the communication guy. But I realized to get to the place I wanted to be and NEEDED to be, I had to get outside help. There’s a certain kind of pride that makes you want to fix that quietly, on your own, where nobody sees the rough draft. But I’ve learned that pride is expensive, and the bill usually shows up as a client who never calls back and never tells you why.
Working with the coach has shown me why the plane is so tempting. The plane is where my expertise lives. The plane is the thing I’m proud of, the thing I’ve mastered, the thing I can talk about without preparation. Talking about the plane makes me feel capable.
The island belongs to somebody else. To describe it I have to shut up long enough to learn what they actually want, and then I have to be brave enough to say it back to them in their words instead of mine.
The plane is about me. The island is about them.
Here’s what I learned.
You don’t have to run a business for this to matter. This is a marriage skill. This is a parenting skill. This is a “can somebody please volunteer in the two year old room” skill.
Think about the last time you tried to get someone on board with something. A new system at work. A move to a new city. A budget. Getting your teenager to put his phone in the kitchen at night. I’d bet money most of your words were spent on mechanics. Here’s how it works. Here’s the schedule. Here’s what you’d have to do. Here’s the app we’d use.
All plane.
Nobody has ever been moved by a boarding process. People move toward a picture of a better life. Your teenager doesn’t want to hear about screen time settings, but he might listen if you describe sleeping well enough that practice stops feeling brutal. Your team doesn’t want to hear about the new project management tool, but they might lean in when you tell them Friday afternoons could stop being a scramble. Your spouse doesn’t want the parking rates at the airport. She wants to know what it feels like to be rested.
So here’s the practical piece. Before your next pitch, ask, email, or hard conversation, finish this sentence out loud before you say anything else.
“Because of this, you will be able to…”
Whatever comes after those words is your island. Lead with it. Then, and only then, tell them about the plane. They do need to know there’s a plane. They need to trust that it flies. That’s the ten percent. That is not the point.
And if you get it wrong, which you will, that’s allowed. I’m still getting this wrong at times and working to improve. The fix isn’t to become a slicker talker. The fix is to get curious about the person in front of you and stay curious longer than is comfortable. Ask about the island. Describe the island. Let them see the palm trees.
By the way, we did eventually take that trip. Not because of my spreadsheet. Because I finally stopped talking about the flight and told her that for ten days, nobody would need anything from either one of us. For ten days, we’d be in paradise.
She didn’t pack that night. Let me be clear about that. We are not a pack tonight and fly tomorrow kind of family. We are planners. If we’re going somewhere, it gets decided three to six months out, and there will be a shared document involved.
But that night, she pulled up the calendar. And she started looking for the week.
That’s the whole thing right there. The plane never moved her. The island did.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
I want you to be a part of the next Monday Mailbag coming up in two weeks on August 31st! The submission deadline is Wednesday, August 26th. Monday Mailbag is your opportunity to Share what YOU’VE learned, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can send in questions or responses to my SILY episodes, and I’ll respond to them via Monday Mailbag episodes. You can participate in Monday Mailbags by visiting the Golden Spiral Media listener feedback page.