Jason Mlicki (00:01.672)
So Jeff, I haven’t decided yet how I want to approach this conversation. I don’t know if I want to really challenge our guest hard or if I want to really activate his best thinking.

Matt Dixon (00:13.336)
It’s not too late for me to hang up, Jason, just so you know.

Jason Mlicki (00:18.05)
That’s a fair point. It’s a fair point. I should be very careful. Should be very careful. Well, we have one of my favorite guests back for the third time. so Matt, Matt Dixon is back with us to talk about the Activator Business Development System and talk about scaling insights is kind of the working title for this. But Matt, thank you for coming back. yeah, if you want, that was not much of an intro. So if you want to do more of an intro, go free.

Matt Dixon (00:19.244)
Yeah.

Matt Dixon (00:37.548)
Yeah, it’s great to be here. Thanks, Jason. Thanks, Jeff.

Matt Dixon (00:44.206)
Well, I think we had a great conversation last time about some of that research you referenced, the Activator Research, which you can go back and dig out of the archives. I don’t have the exact date or episode number in front of me, but I’m you can put it in the show notes. And we talked all about the research. might, this is sort of a part two maybe to that conversation though. I guess you don’t really need to listen to the first one to get value out of this one, or at least I should say that we haven’t recorded it yet, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be valuable to folks anyway.

Jason Mlicki (00:54.91)
Thank

Jason Mlicki (01:10.718)
We’re going to find out in about half an hour. We’ll get back to you. Well, yeah, and really, that’s actually the starting point for this, at least for me. I wanted to get an update on kind of how it’s going, because really, we caught you before, right when you started to release the research and you published a few HPR articles and before you published the book. And so I feel like we were lucky in that we caught you very early in the cycle.

Jeff McKay (01:10.852)
Yeah.

Matt Dixon (01:13.941)
Right, right.

Jason Mlicki (01:38.071)
and you’re having a lot of success with it as we all kind of expected you would. So talk to us about kind of where you are in this journey now and then we’ll go from there.

Matt Dixon (01:47.074)
Yeah, so in just for those who didn’t listen to the first episode, the very quick recap is I’m a co-founder of a firm called DCM Insights. We provide research-backed business development training for partner level professionals as well as pre-partner level folks in professional services firms. So we focus about half our business as law firms. And then the remainder is accounting, consulting, executive search. And then we’ve got a couple of…

We do a little dabble a little bit in the wealth management space as well, working with financial advisors. But the research really is, it was a database study. We identified a winning approach. call it the activator approach for developing client business in today’s market, a market where clients are much more fickle and a lot less loyal than they once were.

And so we’ve kind of isolated behaviors and the things that, as we say in the book, today’s rainmakers do differently. And we built a training program around that. And so we started this in the business in 2021. The HBR article came out in 2023, the end of 2023. And the book came out just last year, the spring of last year, 2025. And so, yeah, it’s about, we’re going on a year since the book came out. It’s been…

Great. was talking to the guys here before we started recording that I’ve been spending a lot of my life on airplanes, which depending on the airplane, depending on the destinations, either a good thing or a bad thing. But, you know, it’s been fun traveling around the world and sharing this research at partner retreats and with executive committees of professional services firms, large and small. We tended to focus a little bit more on the larger firms, but

Jason Mlicki (03:16.542)
Period.

Matt Dixon (03:31.246)
I think there’s interest in this research across the board. We have a lot of inbounds even from kind of solopreneurs, folks who, you the independent tax advisor, the independent lawyer or accountant who wants to know how this work can help them grow their book of business. So it’s been pretty exciting that the business has grown pretty rapidly. I shared this with you guys before we recorded, but we were in the Inc 5000 last year. We’re number 112 in there, which is…

I think is a good testament to one, the fact that professional services firms need help getting their partners to, if you will, sell more effectively, though I know that’s four-letter word for a lot of firms. And then two, I think it’s a good lesson in terms of what you can do when you develop an insight that’s data-based. It’s an insight that changes the way that people think about an evergreen problem, like how do I get my partners to sell more effectively or grow client books of business more effectively?

And it leads to a solution that ties cleanly to the research. So in some ways, it’s sort of an Escher drawing. It’s an object lesson of the thing we’re going to talk about today, which is how do firms build and scale insights.

Jason Mlicki (04:44.542)
Yeah, I want to just recap one thing. If you want to understand the Activator business development model, mean, there’s so much out there right there. Obviously, you can buy the book, you can read the HPR articles, you can grab our previous podcasts, which we’ll include in the show notes. So I don’t want to spend a ton of time on that. But I do want to make sure that people know where to go looking for that. It’s not hard to find. It’s great thinking when you shared it with us. fact, I’ll

I’ll say, but before you even released anything, you said, hey, Jason, we’re working on this thing. you want to come talk about that? I’m like, yes, I want you to come talk about it. So I was glad we caught you when we did. And I’m not surprised by the success at all. And I’m excited to hear it. So Jeff, where do you want to start? Where should we start today?

Matt Dixon (05:16.526)
Thank

Jeff McKay (05:30.165)
I will. Why turn this into a firm? Why not just go with the book? Why turn it into a firm?

Matt Dixon (05:33.61)
great. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a great question. know, I, so I had some, this is the fifth book that I’ve been a part of. And I think one of the things I’ve learned about business books is that they, there are people out there for sure who have businesses that are really based on writing books and speaking about those books and maybe doing some.

kind of executive workshops on those books. actually there are some people who hit that tier. I think of like the Dan Pink’s of the world, the Heath Brothers, you know, these are prolific writers of really great books that have a lot of relevance to business leaders, both in and out of professional services. And these folks just, you know, are in high demand. Their problem is really which speaking engagements and which workshops do I agree to and which ones do I turn down because they’ve got, they don’t have enough.

hours in the week or days in the year for them to fulfill all the demand. There are even fewer business book authors that make money strictly on royalties. So there I’m thinking about like, it’s like the Malcolm Gladwells of the world, the Marshall Goldsmiths, know, folks who have achieved that kind of demigod-like status and anything they write will sell like a gazillion copies. So, and then there’s like everyone else. so for everyone else, I think, and I’d include us in that category,

You know, books are actually more of a, I think are more of a marketing tool than anything else. Like we don’t, if I look at our company’s revenues, we don’t really make a ton of money on the book royalties. We do make some money on speaking, but really what we’re trying to do is use the book as a piece of IP in order to go sell a product or a productized solution to our clients. And that’s how we really, if you will, monetize the IP. I think it depends a little bit on

on what the IP is. also depends a little bit on your brand and where you sit in that space. think if this were a solo, and by the way, just I think Jeff, to answer your question, the other example, and I think we’ll hit on this research as well in this conversation, of the five books that I’ve been a part of, I would say two of them, maybe two and a half of them have led to big businesses on the backend.

Matt Dixon (07:49.198)
The other two were two and a half were probably like the trees that fell in the woods that nobody was around to hear. They’re called classics. They didn’t sell a lot of copies. People read them, loved them, but you know, it’s like there’s not a lot of business tied to it. But the ones I’m referring to that have been successful are the Challenger sale, which came out in 2011. So we wrote that book when I was working at CEB, which was later acquired by Gardner Group.

Jason Mlicki (07:57.153)
Yeah.

Matt Dixon (08:14.592)
Off the back of that book, we actually built a $60 million B2B sales training business, which eventually Gartner, after they acquired CB, sold for a bunch of money to a private equity firm. And I think it’s now changed hands again. In fact, Richardson recently acquired the Challenger business and the IP. Yeah. And they’re one of the biggest players in B2B sales effectiveness and sales training in the market. So I think we had that kind of front row seat to how do you actually take this IP?

and turn it into something more than just infotainment, if you will. Which it certainly could be, you know, it’s certainly challenge, or if I look back on it, it has made a lot of money in speaking and book royalties. And it’s not a bad living, but certainly not at the scale of the training business that was built. That’s very risky, of course, because then you got to put the resources in there and you got to do the marketing and you got to build a sales team around it. You’ve got to have all the delivery operations, all the infrastructure to be able to deliver training at a global scale.

But that was the experience we had with Challenger. And that’s what we’ve tried to really replicate with Activator is, how do we take this really interesting story and turn it more into something more than just a presentation that occupies an hour at the partner retreat? We want to turn it into a proper business.

Jason Mlicki (09:29.383)
Yeah, no. That’s exactly what I want to talk about today. So I’m glad you described it that way. So let’s, you one of the things when you and I were when you and I were setting this up, when I reached out to you and said, hey, Matt, I want you to come on, I want you to give us an update on how things are going. I want you to I want to talk about scaling and insight. And one of the things that you kind of threw out there was that there’s there’s you’ve built a frame of a structured way of thinking about

Matt Dixon (09:48.27)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mlicki (09:57.19)
You know, and you’ve differentiated insights and commercial insights and thought leadership. So talk us through kind of like what you mean by that. When you say you want to distinguish this, what are we talking

Matt Dixon (10:04.3)
Yeah.

Yeah, so that framework or that idea, I keep dredging it up because it’s in one of the cult classic books that nobody read. So that idea of thought leadership versus insight versus commercial insight, which I’ll talk about here in a moment, is in a book called The Challenger Customer, which was the lesser known sequel to The Challenger Sale. The people who read it loved it, but it definitely didn’t have the market uptake that the original book did. one of the ideas we… So that book is…

Jason Mlicki (10:15.518)
I’m

Jason Mlicki (10:22.93)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Matt Dixon (10:36.822)
in part about how do you build commercial insight. And I think one of the things that we found after we wrote the Challenger sale is a lot of sales and marketing leaders really struggled with this idea of what is a teachable insight? What is a challenger insight? And so we created this framework and we call it the insight egg. So you can look it up in that book. We talk about this a little bit in the activator advantage as well, because I think it’s a pretty powerful concept. But if you…

If you go from the outer edges, if you think about a nest, like a Russian nesting doll of, of information out there on the farthest outreaches, you’ve got what I would call kind of, generally accepted information. you know, generally accepted information is just kind of facts stuff that people generally know. You don’t get a lot of debate about it. I wouldn’t even call it particularly a thought leading.

Jason Mlicki (11:06.814)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Dixon (11:27.214)
But the bar for generally accepted information is it’s just got to be true and it’s got to be kind of generally interesting or relevant. It’s about leadership. It is actually, it’s actually surprisingly high bar. I didn’t think it would be, but turns out it is. Yeah, turns out it is a high bar. So back when we wrote this book, it was not a high bar. It was like, oh, how can we create the lowest bar possible? We thought factual accuracy was pretty low bar. No, I, yeah.

Jason Mlicki (11:35.758)
Pretty high bar these days, Matt.

Jeff McKay (11:40.093)
Hahaha

Jason Mlicki (11:46.974)
Who knew that was going to become the highest bar in society? But anyway, keep going.

Matt Dixon (11:56.846)
So the next ring is what I call thought leadership. Thought leadership is different from generally accepted information because it’s much more newsworthy. It’s on the latest topics, the latest trends. I’ll just throw out some examples. If you think about, I mean, you can’t swing a stick without hitting somebody who’s written a white paper on like agentic AI, or LLMs or whatever, right? But that is, there’s so much content out there on these topics.

Jason Mlicki (12:17.896)
Yeah.

Matt Dixon (12:25.802)
It used to be moving to the cloud and it used to be big things like that or, know, sock compliance or whatever. But the, you know, the market goes through these waves where these big topics and everybody wants to speak into those topics and have a point of view. And I think I’m not going to, I wouldn’t suggest that it’s unimportant for companies to do that because certainly you want your companies, your customers to see that you are engaged in the dialogue about these huge trends that are buffeting the market.

Jason Mlicki (12:46.686)
you

Matt Dixon (12:55.426)
But the goal of thought leadership is really to be seen as kind of smart, relevant, again, newsworthy by the market, that you’re engaged in the latest topics. Insight is different from thought leadership, and that’s the next kind of Russian nesting doll insight. you take off a layer, the next one inside would be insight. Insight is different from thought leadership because it is

factually true and accurate, just like generally accepted information. It is newsworthy and relevant, just like thought leadership. But it’s different from thought leadership because it’s frame breaking. So it doesn’t just kind of engage in the latest topic like gen AI. It presents a different point of view and it creates a different reaction from the reader or the consumer, the reaction often being a furrowed brow and

scratching your chin saying, never thought of it that way before. That’s a very counterintuitive approach or perspective on that issue. Now, the, in the, the inner, the smallest doll in the Russian nesting doll is commercial insight and commercial insight is different from regular insight. it is also frame breaking, but it’s frame breaking in a way that leads to the supplier or leads to the vendor. So what you’re doing is basically, opining or S or speaking into a relevant.

newsworthy topic, you’re presenting a different way to think about it, and the different way to think about it gets your client to say, wow, not only have I never thought about that before, but who could help me solve for this problem? And it leads uniquely to you as a vendor. So if I were to differentiate, I think where people get caught a little bit actually is the difference between first, it’s thought leadership versus insight. And what I always say the shorthand is thought leadership is designed to show the market that you’re smart.

Insight is designed to show the market that they’re wrong. And those are two different things. Insight does the job of showing that you’re smart, but it also reframes, it breaks the mental model that your customer has about how to approach a risk or an opportunity and presents a different way of approaching it. Commercial insight, that’s the second thing that people get caught in is the difference between insight and commercial insight. And what I always say is insight can actually be like free consulting. You’re just presenting a different point of view.

Matt Dixon (15:15.32)
for the benefit of the market or for the reader or the consumer, commercial insight presents a different point of view that gets the customer to want to buy your solution. And ideally what you’re really doing is creating a fire for which you are the only vendor of fire extinguishers to put that fire out. Getting to that is very, very hard. It’s hard in B2B sales. I would argue it’s even harder in professional services for reasons we can talk about, but that is…

That framework, I think, is very powerful for people to think about. Because once they start thinking about that stuff, they can look at everything that they’re putting out there. They can look at the LinkedIn posts. They can look at the white papers. They can look at the infographics, the webinars, the podcasts, the pitch decks, and they can start to slot it into those categories, which things are just generally accepted information or thought leadership, which things are actually insightful, and have we really crystallized the lead to element that we can say this is actually commercial insight.

And I think what most firms, most companies find is there’s very little that fits into that commercial insight category when they apply that screen pretty ruthlessly.

Jason Mlicki (16:21.148)
Is there anything that’s in the category? Go ahead, Jeff.

Jeff McKay (16:21.409)
I would argue that

That way of thinking doesn’t even exist. Well, that’s unfair. But to say that, that’s not a lens that people normally look through. They don’t make that linkage.

Matt Dixon (16:28.142)
Yeah.

Matt Dixon (16:35.363)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Dixon (16:40.334)
Yeah, would say in actually Jeff, I think you’re right. I was probably being charitable when I said very little, was fighting that that buckets fight empty. And like you said, it probably for most firms that they didn’t even think about that. I think the hardest thing about getting that right is you have to be able to answer the question. Why should the client buy from you instead of your competitor? That is the.

Jason Mlicki (16:41.789)
No.

Jeff McKay (16:48.596)
Ha!

Matt Dixon (17:07.096)
Holy grail. Like if you can answer that question and you answer it in a way that is not a platitude, like, we’re more client centric than our competitors or we’re more innovative or we’re more global or we’re older, we more offices, whatever it is. And you can really crystallize and say, they should buy from us because we do this or we do this better than everyone else. Or we have this unique combination of skills and capabilities across our firm that nobody else can touch with the barge pole. Once you’ve identified that,

then the next step in building these insights out, these commercial insights, is asking the question, what would have to be true for your client to want to pay you for that capability, for the answer to that question, and ideally pay you a premium? And I think answering those two questions correctly is really, really hard for firms. And so not only have they not thought about it, but even when they start to think about it, it makes a lot of their heads hurt. They say, go back to thought leadership and infographics, because it’s kind of easier to put that stuff out.

Jason Mlicki (18:03.166)
So I’m hearing two stumbling blocks. Stumbling block one is basically we have thought leadership, we have a point of view, we’re sort of relevant in the marketplace, but we really haven’t learned anything new that nobody knows. And we haven’t really got to the core of a real insight. And stumbling block two then is, well, okay, we have that insight, but we haven’t actually designed anything unique and differentiating beyond that insight that would make someone have to buy the

execution of that insight from us versus buying from anybody off the street who reads the book and says, yeah, I can help you with this.

Matt Dixon (18:36.386)
Yeah, you’re right. This is another kind of just thought exercise for folks. But if you really got this right, here’s the litmus test, is you could build a pitch deck, right? A PowerPoint deck, whatever, that you would present to a client. And you could take the logo of your firm off of that deck and just present it in a firm agnostic way. And if you did that and the client heard that story, they would still come back to you and buy your solution.

because you have actually led them to care about a problem and look for solution that only you solve. Now, again, that’s very, very hard. It’s very hard in general. I think it’s particularly hard in professional services where what a lot of firms are selling is expertise or collections of expertise, right? Whether you’re a tax advisory firm, you’re an investment bank, you’re a law firm, a consulting firm. And it gets really tricky for firms to differentiate like why are

the IP litigators at our law firm really different from the IP litigators at another law firm. What is it that we should be leading to, if not just the fact that we do this and we’re pretty good at it?

Jason Mlicki (19:44.136)
Yeah. I had this belief. I’ve said this for years. I feel like there’s a couple of different types of firms culturally. There’s sort of marketing driven firms where the stuff we’re talking about here manifests itself as content and that the marketers are just flooding the zone with anything. We got to get something in the newsletter by Friday. Like that’s the mentality. There’s sort of thought leadership driven firms that want to step back and they really want to have a relevant and differentiated point of view.

Matt Dixon (20:03.448)
Yeah. Yep.

Jason Mlicki (20:13.618)
But to your point, often, it’s still just sort of, we need to have a position on this so that we can be relevant and engaged. It seems to me that the firms that actually would fall into the cluster of insight-driven firms, ones that actually want to build real commercial insight, is a much smaller slice of this broad universe of professional services. Would you agree with that, or do think I’m crazy?

Matt Dixon (20:35.97)
No, no, I think that’s true. think in terms of, know, Jeff, I think as he said before, it’s probably that last category I think is very, very small. But I think there are certain firms we can all think of across segments where you say, if you have this problem or you call these guys, you know, and I think what’s really interesting is, well, why? Why do people, why does the market immediately conclude that it’s those guys who are the best in the world at solving that?

Jason Mlicki (20:53.522)
Yes. Yeah.

Matt Dixon (21:03.626)
And that’s probably some combination of deeper expertise, a better track record, a better market knowledge and insight, or maybe it’s some combination of skills. Like you do this, but you do it globally, or you do it in these jurisdictions or markets, and that’s a differentiator. Or it also could be for some firms, I think is interesting is you go with these guys because they only get paid on outcomes or the way they price their services is very different from what other firms do.

You know, there are, I think there are certain firms again in every segment of professional services that you can say they’re the guys you call when you have this problem. And I think only sometimes it’s because they’ve got the biggest brand or they’re the highest ranked. think a lot of times there’s a more niche or boutique firms where everybody knows those are the guys you call. And I think that becomes a really interesting question to say, well, why is that? What have they defined in their capabilities?

And then how would they communicate that to the market to teach the market that if you are engaged in this risk or opportunity, you call us or we’re always gonna be on the short list.

Jeff McKay (22:09.763)
There’s almost a purity that needs to go with the commercial insight. It can’t be tainted by a bunch of other noise, if you will.

Matt Dixon (22:14.018)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Dixon (22:19.724)
Yeah, yeah, and that’s so hard. You know, it’s funny, I have this, I used to say this when I presented Challenger, I still do, and it gets some, it used to get laughs and now it just gets groans from people where I say, you know, even for those companies who think they’re pretty good at like, we know exactly why customers should buy from us, it never fails that the first four slides of their pitch deck are all the same. It’s the first one is their mission and values and what they stand for. The second one is like,

Jason Mlicki (22:43.262)
You

Thank

Matt Dixon (22:47.884)
the brand, especially for B2B companies, would be the logos of their best known products or technologies or what have you. The third page is their brag sheet of customers. And the fourth page is a map of the world with a bunch of dots on it to show how many offices they have. And it’s always the same. like, it always gets it in like usually the CMO sitting in the front row and he or she is like, their head in their hands. And you know, it’s like that stuff is to your point, Jeff, it kind of, it’s, the anti-purity. just kind of.

gums up the story. And it’s not to say that those things don’t matter, but I think increasingly today, that’s not the reason you’re on the short list. It’s not the reason the clients reached out to you. They already know all this, that stuff. The reason I reached out to you is because you have the, all the offices in the long history and you won all the awards and you work with all the top clients and you’ve got these name brand solutions because of what you stand for. Like dispense with that stuff and then make the conversation about the client and get to the thing that is really crystallizes. We do this and we do it.

Jason Mlicki (23:17.374)
Thank

Matt Dixon (23:44.002)
better than anybody else. And that’s why the shortlist should be just us, right?

Jason Mlicki (23:49.758)
So at its heart, a commercial insight is a reframe. It’s a fundamental reframe of how a client thinks about an important business problem, business issue, that leads to you as the sole solution provider. So when did you know you had a commercial insight? When you’re either with challenge or after? Yeah, when did you know? This is something. This is going to be something. When do you know and how?

Matt Dixon (24:03.576)
Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Dixon (24:11.278)
you mean for us? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matt Dixon (24:19.534)
I think with Activator, had the benefit of, again, previous experience with Challenger and with some of the other solutions. I will tell you just, I think it’s instructive to walk through those books kind of quickly, but Challenger, we already talked about this. Challenger was a study of B2B salespeople. led to this Challenger profile and we sold a training program to teach salespeople to be Challenger. So that’s a very clean kind of walkthrough.

Challenger customer was probably, it was insightful. And again, as I said, the few people read that book were like, man, this is great. It’s even better than the first one, but they didn’t really lead to any unique solution. Actually, there was nothing on the backend other than a keynote or an interesting conversation to be had. We wrote a book called the effortless experience. That book was about client experience and about customer service. And that again, very powerful set of insights that

You can’t drive loyalty upward by surprising and delighting customers, especially when things go wrong. The better thing to do is make those experiences easy to reduce customer effort. That was a very powerful insight. But on the back end, again, we didn’t have a whole lot to sell. We never managed to turn that into a product or solution that could be purchased. And that just really became a popular keynote and book.

We wrote a book called The Jolt Effect. The Jolt Effect is one I’d say we’ve done a pretty good job where we’ve actually crystallized a new set of capabilities that today’s high performing salespeople use to deal with what we call customer indecision. Those customers who ghost you and hem and haw and never seem to get off the fence. How do you get those customers moving forward and lower your no decision loss rate? We have built a training program around that and we launched a separate business called Selling Innovations that sells that program. So that’s a

Jason Mlicki (25:44.402)
Yep.

Matt Dixon (26:09.838)
a good example of a commercial insight and then Activator being the most recent one. So I think it’s hard even when you do this stuff for a living as we do to get it right. you know, I always feel better when I look at like batting averages of major league hitters. Like they do this for a living, they get paid a lot of money and they still miss like 75 % of the time, you know? And that’s kind of true. It’s like getting this right is really hard. And so I think you don’t, you don’t really, there are a couple of tells maybe.

Jason Mlicki (26:26.962)
Yeah.

Matt Dixon (26:39.616)
I think if you take Activator as an example, when we first started shopping this with clients and this idea that all partners in professional services fall into one of five statistically defined business development profiles, that was very intellectually appealing to folks. And then when we showed them that not only do the legacy approaches most commonly associated with the expert or the confidant approach, again, you can learn more on the first podcast.

and we show them the, the alternative, is the activator approach and the reaction you get from clients, which is not that you’ve just showed me that CAT really spells dog. wasn’t that kind of reaction. was more of a like head slapping. Like I knew it. I knew that what we’ve been saying to do for a long time, that that wasn’t working anymore. And this, you guys have crystallized and given a name to and put data behind the thing. My top partners, my top rainmakers are doing. And then.

to actually have a program that has people coming out of it saying, taught me how to do this. And it gave me a tool set, you know, to go to market with. Getting all those things right is hard. And at any point in that journey, things can fall apart, right? can have, I mean, we did, I was, and we still do, we still do a ton of research. We have a new research initiative going on today.

This study is building on the activator study, but it’s specifically focused on key client relationships. So I think one of the biggest problems for big firms is that how do I get our top clients to buy more than one or two lines of service from us? Like how do we actually cross-sell and collaborate more effectively? How do we manage these large scale accounts in clients differently and deliver different experience? How do we incentivize and reward our key client, like our lead partners, client lead partners differently?

and create more of a team-based operating model. These are very atypical motions for a professional services firm. And firms have really struggled with it, yet it’s their biggest commercial opportunity is to grow their footprint with these big enterprise relationships. And so that’s our new study, but there’s lots of ways that that could fall apart. What we say could not be particularly insightful. We don’t know yet. We’re still doing the research. Maybe we don’t, it is insightful, but it’s not sticky and it’s not, it doesn’t have that head snapping,

Matt Dixon (28:58.646)
reaction like Activator did or Challenger did or Jolt did, or maybe we just struggle to actually turn it into something that helps partners get better at this stuff and helps firms get better. So I think there’s lots of moments in that journey where we kind of pull up and say, are we on the right path or not? those, despite the fact that we did five books, we probably did, I was probably part of a hundred plus different research projects, none of which made it into HBR or into book form.

So there’s a lot of cutting room floor material. There’s a lot of getting it wrong before you get it right. It’s hard. So that’s my say.

Jason Mlicki (29:32.348)
Yeah, that’s reassuring.

Jeff McKay (29:33.901)
The thing that all of these have in common though is they’re all data based.

Matt Dixon (29:39.336)
Yep, yep, yeah, that’s right.

Jeff McKay (29:41.505)
And I think that that is the wild card for so many people. Either they don’t have those chops or they don’t have the money to invest or the time because it takes time to do these studies.

Matt Dixon (29:50.744)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Dixon (29:58.83)
It does. does. You that’s, you know, you guys were talking about this a little bit earlier, but I think, before we hit record, but I do think part of the reason that firms struggle with this is they don’t, they, and back to what you said before, Jeff, think the having data and having science behind what you’re saying, like we talk about in Challenger, the idea that it’s one thing to reframe, but then two other things or three things have to happen. One, you’ve got to validate what you just claimed with data.

Jason Mlicki (30:20.168)
Okay.

Matt Dixon (30:26.614)
It’s got to be a rationally appealing or validated for the client. can’t just say something outlandish in the, in the name of like reframing the client’s understanding. But if you can’t back it up, you know, say, don’t let the door hit you on the way out. You just say it’s like clickbait. You just said that to get my attention and get me to accept the meeting, but you got to be able to back it up. Then the next step is you got to make me care about it. And that’s tricky, especially in big clients, because the CFO might look at this insight very differently from the CTO or from the.

you know, the chief legal officer or the head of marketing. And then of course, you’ve got to be able to lead to your solution. So there’s a lot of stuff that has to go right. so I think firms do lack the chops or the budget or the capability to do this kind of database research. But I think the other thing is you said it takes time. And you know, it’s one of the real struggles, I think, especially in this world of of Gen. AI. And it’s like why I have

Jason Mlicki (31:16.787)
Yeah.

Matt Dixon (31:21.61)
sort of a love hate relationship with that technology. think on the one hand, I love it because it’s, makes grunt work a lot faster. Like I’ll give you an example. When I, Ted McKenna and I wrote the jolt effect, we spent, I don’t even know how long reading like 30 years of cognitive psychology journal articles, which is a fate I would wish upon nobody. It’s just like really, really boring stuff. just trying to find these nuggets, which we then eventually surfaced the difference between

Jeff McKay (31:41.901)
Hahaha

Matt Dixon (31:50.166)
As we talk about in the book, status quo bias and omission bias and why that explains a lot of why clients go dark on us. but that took a long time to surface that. It’s so much easier now to just drop that into Gemini or chat GPT and say, Hey, teach me everything that’s been written about like indecision and why do no decision losses happen? And like it would just surface up those insights really quickly. It makes that part of research, what we call secondary research a lot easier.

The problem is by definition, Gen.ai is a synthetic machine. It is taking existing knowledge and synthesizing it and framing it up for you in a way that makes stuff like secondary research much faster and more efficient. But it cannot come up with insights because insights haven’t been, nobody’s come up with them before, right? Nobody’s done this original research or primary research. ChatGPT isn’t going to go launch a survey out into the market and then come back with original insight for you.

but it can tell you everything about all the surveys that have already been conducted in the market. coming up with that frame breaking insight, that unique point of view is hard and takes time and it’s pretty manual, you know, even in this world of LLMs and gen AI. And so I think it’s because it takes so long to get to is a big part of the reason a lot of firms don’t go after it. Cause they’re like, we could spend a year trying to come up with a database reframing insight.

Jason Mlicki (32:53.95)
Mm-mm.

Matt Dixon (33:12.202)
And it may not be that insightful or seen as that insightful by our clients, or it might be like sort of a dud, or maybe it doesn’t lead to our, maybe the research says something that doesn’t tie to our capabilities. And now what do we do? Now we’ve just done a bunch of free consulting, but it hasn’t actually helped us sell anymore. So I think because of that, that’s, those are some of the reasons firms don’t ever pursue this. I think they, some leaders know they should, but they just don’t because it’s very risky and expensive.

Jason Mlicki (33:39.006)
Yeah, I was going to say it’s a function of what you just said, perceived risk, it’s, even kind of lay out it out real well. It’s like, I’ve been part of hundreds or thousands of research projects that sort of went nowhere. So they see that and then patience. It’s not only the time, it’s like, they don’t have the patience. Like lot of the firms that we interact with, when I suggest we go down this types of paths, they’ll kind of look at me and say, well, all they care about us hitting the next quarter’s numbers. And it’s like, you’re talking about a three to four year journey here, Jason.

Matt Dixon (33:50.051)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (34:08.7)
have the patience for it. They would never say it that way, but that’s really what they’re saying.

Matt Dixon (34:10.168)
Yeah, you know it’s.

It’s very easy, think, in retrospect to look back at the examples that worked really well and say, oh, well, of course. Clearly, these guys, they figured it out, but it was always there for the finding. But I think, again, like you say, you look at all the trial and error that happens along the way and all the great research studies that are not seen by the market as particularly reframing or insightful or that don’t tie cleanly to a solution and help the supplier or the vendor sell any more of their stuff.

Jason Mlicki (34:20.284)
Yes, yes.

Matt Dixon (34:43.374)
The road is littered with those examples and I think they can be very costly. Again, they can be very time consuming and resource intensive and so therefore firms kind of shy away from it. Even if they know it would be the right thing to do, it’s kind of easier to just crank out the quarterly white paper, the monthly piece of thought leadership.

Jason Mlicki (34:59.262)
Thank you.

Jeff McKay (35:04.823)
It’s almost a way of being. It’s because if you look at you and your co-authors, co-researchers with this, you’ve been doing this for years and you’ve had success and you’ve had lack of success. But when you look at the last decade, how many hits have you had? mean, you’ve had some significant hits.

Jason Mlicki (35:04.968)
So.

Jeff McKay (35:30.115)
But it’s a way of being sure there’s a flywheel that you have to get up and turning. But once it becomes a way of being and activator didn’t take as long as the challenger sale, I’m assuming. Right. And the ideas that you got to and what to do with them, because we haven’t even talked about the commercialization part of it. Your, your ability to commercialize.

Matt Dixon (35:43.374)
True. Yep, no, you’re right.

Matt Dixon (35:54.018)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff McKay (35:57.922)
was significantly better by the time you got to Activator as well.

Matt Dixon (36:01.378)
Yeah, yeah. So you’re right. The reps and the experience certainly help. I think it helps in as much. Yes, there are the skills and the behaviors and like you said, the way of thinking and approaching opportunities, but also the spidey sense you developed about whether this is we’re down the right path or not. So we’re we’re better able to pull the plug on things sooner because they’re like that this this dog won’t hunt, you know, and and we because we’ve seen we’ve seen those those

Jason Mlicki (36:21.774)
Yeah.

Matt Dixon (36:31.188)
examples of failure in the past and so we can pattern recognize, I guess, moving forward.

Jason Mlicki (36:36.924)
I want to hear your thoughts on that. What’s your advice for people that are wanting to get on this path and are afraid of that failure? What advice do you have to help them sidestep it? How do you sidestep that inevitable failure that they’re feeling or fear afraid of?

Matt Dixon (36:56.066)
I think for every vendor out there, can, or professional services firm, this is broadly I think across B2B sales and professional services. If you ask yourself the question, maybe a couple of questions. One is, what is the thing that you know that your customers need to know, but they don’t yet know? And I think that there’s always a list of things that anybody, whether it’s a law firm or whether it’s a tech

company in the B2B space, they can articulate things that they know about their space, the risks and opportunities they help clients get after, and things they know about the right way and wrong way to approach those problems that customers don’t really appreciate. And they don’t appreciate because customers and clients, they only go through these decisions once in a while versus the vendors and the firms, they eat, sleep, and breathe this stuff all day long. So they’ve got their own pattern of recognition. And I think that’s always a really interesting

conversation. I’m thinking about there was a round table we ran, like one of our training cohorts, Activator cohorts, with a group of law firm partners in Europe. And it was like a mid-size firm, and they were really struggling with this concept of insight and reframing and leading to me versus leading generic kind of free consulting kind of stuff or thought leadership.

Jason Mlicki (38:19.013)
Yeah.

Matt Dixon (38:21.346)
really struggling with it. And I think what I saw happen, I was just an observer, the facilitator kind of got them back to first principles and asked the room, what’s a piece of really interesting work you did recently for a client? And one of the partners, a partner from Spain who did employment law said, I’ve been working with a couple of clients on this, how they are responding to this recent EU labor law change or regulatory change.

You said, interesting, what did you do? And so they talked a little bit about it. Why was, why was this something that the client was unaware of or that we were unique? here’s why we were uniquely positioned for it. That’s interesting. Do you think other, like what other clients would be interested in that insight that this regulatory change matters? It has real impact and you need to approach it in this way to solve for it and prepare for it properly.

partner’s response was, that would be every single company that employs people in Europe. So you’re talking about like millions of companies. So yes. you’ve just, and, what was interesting is the room again, really struggled with, you know, there’s nothing we have to say that other people aren’t also saying there’s nothing we do that’s totally unique, but they could each individually, the other partners then started listing their own. I did this kind of and A work, or I did this kind of IP litigation work.

And they could start listing out those things. And sometimes, you know, the daylight between the way they did it and the way somebody else do it is pretty small. And then the question is like, how do we make it feel bigger to the client? And then how do we get the client to really focus in on that? Yes, everyone’s probably saying this, but they’re not saying this piece. that’s, therein lies the difference. And that’s why you should hire us because this piece actually counts for this much of the, whether this goes right or this goes wrong. And so I think getting them to kind of anchor first on why they win and why they lose.

and what they do now that delivers value to clients, they’re like, if you will, the stem cells of insights. I think, or if you think about this from a B2B company, I talked to a lot of tech companies, and I think the bane of the tech companies existence, especially SaaS companies, are those clients who buy their products and then don’t use them as much as they should. Then the CFO comes along and says, are we paying for

Matt Dixon (40:37.358)
know, 100 seats of this thing that nobody ever logs into and nobody uses, not driving any outcomes and they, they access it. So I think the question for those firms often starts with, look at your very best customers. Who are the customers who would like never ever, ever cancel their subscription to your platform? They would cancel everything. They turn off the electricity in the building before they’d cancel the subscription to your platform. What is it that they see in what you do? well, those guys are using us for this and this and this and this.

And here’s why it’s so much better than what they were doing before. And here’s why, here’s the difference they see in our solution versus other. Why wouldn’t they just switch to whoever named brand competitor? because this is what they see in us that they don’t see in them. Great. How do you teach everybody else to see the same thing? And I think, again, it’s every company out there has some, there’s some sort of differentiator. even, if you go to the most basic example, I worked with a company a few years ago that is in the rock salt mining business.

That is a very commoditized business. charge the same. They take stuff out of the ground. They put it on boats. They ship it around the world and they charge the same exact rate as like every other mining operation in the world that does in the space. But what it came down to for them was the way they, the way they, the service wrapper they put around it, the supply chain management advice they were giving to their customers. And that was a differentiator. And so we really tried to get the sales pitch focus, not on the thing they’re selling, which is

Jason Mlicki (41:37.085)
Yeah.

Matt Dixon (42:03.798)
Rock Salt, which is the same Rock Salt everyone else sells at price the same way, but the consulting layer, the advisory layer that wrapped around that product. And they didn’t really see it that way until you kind of got them focused on it. But I’d say every company out there has something they’re doing better than others or some way that their best customers see them that’s different from how non-customers might perceive them. And you just really got to isolate that thing. And then how do we turn that into a story?

Jason Mlicki (42:35.134)
Well, we’re running out of time here, which is incredibly disappointing. Jeff, what’s one question you have for Matt that would be a good one to end on that we’ve.

Haven’t touched on.

Matt Dixon (42:53.388)
You’ve set a high bar with the last question. I’m going to have a higher bar, which is answering it in time. We’ll see.

Jason Mlicki (42:53.47)
And if you don’t…

Jason Mlicki (42:58.083)
yeah.

Jeff McKay (43:00.355)
Well, you know, as I’m listening to you talk, Matt, I’m thinking about my own intellectual capital. And I think it’s pretty unique and different, but it’s not data-based. It’s 30 years experience based. And nobody talks about marketing and growth in professional services firms quite like

Matt Dixon (43:17.496)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff McKay (43:30.073)
I do, maybe that’s arrogance and I don’t want it to sound like that, but I don’t hear people talking like I do. Um, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that. And some of our listeners that have unique experience, but it’s not database. What kind of you give people like me.

Matt Dixon (43:50.414)
Well, you know, it’s funny, because I would say, Jeff, it is database actually. It’s based on the data that comes from your 30 years of experience and working with dozens or hundreds of firms. Now, I think when people hear database, I think they immediately go to quant, right? Quantitative numbers and regression coefficients and percentages and stuff like that. Over the years, we had a number of studies where we had a lot of qualitative research. We did a lot of interviews, but we didn’t have survey data. We didn’t have, you know, real kind of traditional.

quant data. And so what we work to do is turn that qualitative data and experience into quantitative data because there is something about you could say, there’s a big difference saying, hey, most of the CMOs we spoke to said this versus saying 75 % of the CMOs we spoke to reported this. Now, they could be the same thing, but one has a different, you know, the mind processes it differently and actually sees more credibility.

in it, and that’s when there’s a number or a percentage sign afterward. And so I think if you go back and reflect on those qualitative experiences or clients you’ve worked with, and how do we turn that qualitative into quantitative, and you start to code maybe some of your experience, whether your work in marketing or your work as a consultant, working with professional services firms, and then start to be able to distill from that, it’s not just that this is the minority of firms that think this way.

I can say in my experience, it was 12 % of the firms we’ve worked with who actually see things this way. I think there is something to that. just like there’s always a differentiator, there’s almost always some sort of data. Obviously, I think it is probably cleaner and easier if you had a survey or you had some sort of instrument where you could collect some of that data in quantitative form. But just because it’s qualitative doesn’t mean you can’t code it and convert it into quantitative.

a way to depict it quantitatively because it, again, it does have a different appeal to people. And then what’s interesting is in so many of our stories, you know, there was a lot of quant research, but if you look at Activator or you look at Challenger, you know, there’s a few bar charts and a few quant graphics, but so much of the value is actually in the stories, you know, and it, it’s the, it’s the, you know, they’ve got to see the rational side of it and, and accept that.

Matt Dixon (46:13.538)
But then what they want to know is the how and the why. And that’s really where the stories come in. And so most of Activator is actually stories of what partners are doing and what they told us in our interviews. It wasn’t really from the quant data. The quant data creates that initial head snapping client loyalties on the decline. There are five types of partners. This partner overperforms and they overperform because they do these three things or whatever it is. That’s the Activator story. But that’s a small part of the book. I think by the second chapter, we’re done with the quant stuff. Or maybe in the first chapter.

And most of it is like from the conversations and the experience we’ve had in the field with firms and with partners sharing how they put these principles into action in telling their stories back to the reader. But the reason the reader’s listening to the stories is because we’ve tied it to a data point that, this matters and I should pay attention because that’s what activators do and activators perform X percent better than the other partners. But again, if you look at it, it’s almost like the quant is almost the tip of the iceberg.

And the body of the work is really the qualitative stuff. So the quantitative stuff is actually harder to get to. It’s just, do I get people to pay attention? Well, I need a data point. I need something to grab them by the lapels and shake them out of their comfort zone.

Jason Mlicki (47:21.502)
Yeah, it’s funny, Matt, in our work around thought leadership, we tell our clients all the time, it’s like, know, the data is the meat and the qualitative stories is the sizzle. And, you know, it’s the state in the sizzle. if you’re going to do this well, you have to have both. have to have both. If you only have one, then you’re always playing with an inferior deck, you know, no matter how you slice it. And I’ve served a couple of metaphors into one statement there.

Matt Dixon (47:33.102)
Yeah. You got to have both. Yeah. You have to have both. Yeah.

Matt Dixon (47:43.682)
Yeah. Yep.

Jason Mlicki (47:50.258)
But it’s just, and we’ve also found, like I agree with you, we’ve found the stories are harder to get, the really good ones. But that’s what clients ultimately really care about, is they want to hear, how has someone else navigated this? So, well, I could talk to you all day, as you know, but I also want to be mindful of your time. So thank you for coming back. Thank you for.

Matt Dixon (48:05.051)
yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (48:19.454)
just sharing your experience with us and how you’re thinking about scaling and insight and how you’ve found success in scaling insights and also being open to sharing your pitfalls, the ones that you didn’t scale. A lot of people don’t wanna do that. always, it’s like no one wants to talk about their failures. I didn’t do it so well. I hear you. But it’s great to see you. Congrats on your success. No surprise whatsoever.

Matt Dixon (48:33.388)
Yeah, absolutely. Happy to do it.

That could that could be a five-hour podcast

Yeah, you too.

Jason Mlicki (48:48.254)
love the work you’re doing. They’re great commercial insights.

Jeff McKay (48:54.231)
Yeah. So until the next book.

Matt Dixon (48:54.382)
Thank you guys.

Jason Mlicki (48:56.03)
Until the next book. Well, or the next progression of this one. The next progression of this one. So I’ll drag you back out here for something else.

Matt Dixon (48:58.326)
Until the next look. There we go. gosh, yeah.

We’ll be back. Yeah, we’ll come back. Let’s come back and talk about the key clients stuff. I think that could be pretty interesting. By this fall, we’ll have some insights around that.

Jason Mlicki (49:11.363)
I

Yeah, I would like to do that. I will. I will. Yeah, I’ll hold you to that. You know, as you know. All right. Thank you. Yeah.

Matt Dixon (49:17.454)
All right, very good. Thank you guys. Appreciate the time. All right, take care.