Future of Work: Job Disruption in Sales and Marketing In Web 3.0

The Future Of Sales and Marketing in Web 3.0

The Future of Work is changing. Disruption is coming to the sales and marketing professions. Are you ready?

In this video, we explore the future of work in sales and marketing and how to prepare for the coming changes. We discuss the impact of technology on jobs, new ways of working, and how to stay ahead of the curve in your career.

I am joined by special guests Mark S A Smith and Tom Leonard, you can watch the video below the audio.

Mark S A Smith
After a successful career in helping bring billions of dollars of disruptive technology to the market, Mark S A Smith now works with Visionmakers to turn market challengers into market leaders. He works with C-Suite leaders determined to transform their business from a market challenger to a market leader in 3 years or less.

www.NimbilityWorks.com http://MarksOnLinkedIn.com http://MarksOnTwitter.com

Tom Leonard
Creator and Host of the Gamers Change Lives Podcast, a show highlighting how esports entrepreneurs worldwide can create jobs in their community. MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Marketing experience in entertainment – Netflix and Warner Bros.

https://www.gamerschangelivespodcast.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomeleonard/ https://www.facebook.com/GamersChangeLives

The full transcript can be found below.

Nathaniel Schooler

00:00:23

I’m guilty as charged.

Nathaniel Schooler

00:00:25

What can I say? It’s a real pleasure today to be joined by Mark SA Smith and Tom Leonard as well. Thank you so much for joining us. I’ll just give you, give you guys a quick introduction. So mark has had a successful career in helping to bring to market billions of dollars of disruptive technology. He now works with vision makers to turn market challenges into market leaders. And he’s at work with C-suite leaders determined to transform their business from a market challenger into the market leader in three years or less. And we will share the details on his website at the end of the show. So Tom Leonard is over in Burbank, California, and he’s the creator and host of the gamers change lives podcast. A show that highlights how eSports entrepreneurs around the world can create jobs in their community. He’s got an MBA from Stanford graduate school of business marketing experience in entertainment at Netflix and Warner brothers.

Nathaniel Schooler

00:01:27

So as part of the series that we’re doing right now, the fifth series on influential visions, we’re gonna be basically talking about jobs and really in the technology space as a whole. But obviously, you know, you, you guys, we kind of talked a little bit before the show about perhaps talking about sales and marketing jobs. And I think that’s probably a good, a good place to kind of focus this conversation around to be, to be honest. Cause I think, you know, with web 3.0, with, with all of this hyperbole of excitement, that’s kind of happening right now. I think that sales and marketing jobs are probably gonna still be there, but I think they will probably change in some in some way. So what do you think mark, are you, are you excited about the sort of changes that are happening at the moment or are you a bit kind of bored? Like a lot of people like myself as well,

Mark SA Smith

00:02:24

All change, all change is good, just because it flushes out those who have become complacent and we can never advance the state of our being, unless we are stepping outside of our comfort zone. Alright, enough of the blah, blah, blah, RA raw stuff. The reality is that that marketing is the most, most misunderstood word in business. What is marketing? Oh, we have a website. No, that’s not marketing. Oh, we have a, we have a PDF brochure. No, that’s no, that’s not marketing. No pray, not. Well. We do cold calling to reach out to customers, which is one of the things that we’re getting more and more automation around. No, that’s, that’s not, Nope. Not that’s not marketing. Well, what the hell is marketing? It’s everything you do to trigger a conversation with somebody who’s likely to buy from you and everything you do that lets them know what the hell it is that you can do that changes their life. So they want a conversation with you. That’s marketing. All those things I talked about are tactics. The strategy behind marketing is to trigger a conversation either with one of your people or with your web property. And if it doesn’t trigger a conversation with a person or a web property, you are throwing your money down the toilet, send it my way.

Nathaniel Schooler

00:03:44

Yeah. That’s that’s a good explanation. So what do you think, Tom, are you, are you kind of excited about web 3.0 and, and the changes that are happening or are you not?

Tom Leonard

00:03:54

What are, what I like hearing what mark was talking about? The definition of marketing is really, really good because it is misunderstood and everyone’s like, oh, I’m in marketing. Oh, okay. It’s like, and then, you know, you, and I think one of the, one of the things I like hearing him say, it’s, it’s about starting a conversation. And I think maybe I heard him say start a conversation, which is really, really good because it’s not like it’s not a one time deal. Good marketing is something we used to do it, you know, all the time. Whenever. I mean, I, I started in email marketing before I, I was doing email marketing before there was spam. I mean, that’s how long ago it was, but we always called it a dialogue. It’s like, we weren’t doing the email marketing. I mean, that’s what we we’re sending emails, but we really wanted to create a dialogue and start talking to people via email in that case because it’s, it’s, it’s not something that happens just once, hopefully. And you know, it, it more and more people are, you know, you wanna build that relationship over time.

Mark SA Smith

00:04:57

Well, that’s, what’s required to create the trust that so for somebody to, to buy from you, cuz when you were doing email marketing, nobody knew who the hell you were and nobody’s gonna buy in the first outreach because there’s way too much risk. Or they don’t even know what it is that you sell. And they don’t know what the benefit is to their life. And so that dialogue is required for them to get an idea of why, why should I pay attention to you? And why should I trust you? And that, that gets back to the, the best formula for emails, which is you have to answer four questions right now. Number one, why are you bothering me? I got stuff to do. Why are you bothering me? Answer that right now. The next question you have to answer is who cares? You better call me up by name or you better call me up by title. You better call me up by role. You better call me up by function. You be better. Call me up by interest. The third one is, why should I trust you? Why should I believe you? Because if I can’t believe you I’m done. And then the fourth thing we have to make sure we ask for is why should I do anything? So with those four things, you leave any amount you haven’t got any marketing.

Nathaniel Schooler

00:06:04

Absolutely. Absolutely. So do you think that that marketing jobs are just gonna continue along the same trajectory of just becoming more and more segmented in the way that they are so more and more specialists and perhaps less and less strategic kind of marketers or, I mean, I think it’s best. We talk about marketing separately to sales. Otherwise we I’m gonna get confused myself. So what do you, what do you guys think on, on that one?

Tom Leonard

00:06:35

Well, as far as marketing changing,

Tom Leonard

00:06:41

I think that’s an interesting concept to be talking about because on one hand it, it does need to change as technology changes. But on the other hand, I’m always amazed how little it changes over time. It’s like one of the things that, that, that, that we discovered, well, certainly at Netflix, one of the things, because when I was starting out, I was doing all the email marketing there to get the first 50,000 subscribers to the service, which now they’re like at hundreds of millions out there. But, but we had to get the first 50,000 to do the funding guidelines to meet the funding guidelines. So we were doing that, we with email, but it was just, it’s kind of, it was, you know, kind of the same concept over and over again. I always always call marketing at Netflix as the one trick pony. I mean, it, it’s a really nice pony, but, but you’re, you’re kind of doing the same thing over and over and over again.

Tom Leonard

00:07:36

And you know, you, you can, you can test all kinds of things out there. So I guess on one hand, I’m always surprised how little things change the tactics, the, the vehicles, the, the, the tools that you might have might change a little bit. But the other thing that also always comes to mind is that it takes someone from the outside to disrupt things. It’s, it’s like if you expect, it’s just, you know, at Netflix, you know, the example I always use there is we should have been afraid of blockbuster. Blockbuster had 284 million customers with this incredible history of rental background. And it’s like, we’re when we were starting out, we didn’t have anything, but they should have been able to take that and blown us outta the water. But they couldn’t because they had the Mor brick and mortar store stores. We knew that we knew they could not walk away from that. So we weren’t, we weren’t afraid you did. The disruption needs to come from someone outside. And the other thing I always think of, so is Tesla. I mean, you know, general motors, you know, could have made any of the car manufacturers could have made an outstanding electric vehicle if they’d wanted to, but they chose not to. And so someone from the outside that does that disruption,

Mark SA Smith

00:08:49

I absolutely agree with you, Tom. You know, we need to talk about sale on marketing rather from three different strategic managerial and then tactical deployment and strategy will never ever go away. Or you’re essentially going to, to mess yourself up. Seriously, you have to have a direction. You have to have a purpose. And if you don’t have Mar a marketing strategy, in fact, if you don’t have a defined marketing strategy, you don’t have any marketing. It is, it is chef’s choice, soup, whatever you got laying around, it’s what you’re doing. And I guarantee you’re not gonna get the results you need. So it starts off off with marketing strategy. I doubt if marketing strategy, the fundamentals of marketing strategy will ever change because we’re still communicating with human beings. And those things will never change. There might be some variations on a theme, but it won’t change. The, the next level is the managerial, which is the deployment of how we sequence out the tactics to get the marketing into play. And that requires somebody who understands how all these tactical deployments work together and how they, what they do. Each one of these things has a specific function. A website has a function. A email list has a function. A, a telephone outreach has a function. Chat has a function there’s functions everywhere to solve specific issues in creating those conversations with our customers. What I see changing the most is the tactics.

Mark SA Smith

01:10:19

And as we move into this, we’re gonna do more and more probably interruption based marketing. I’m really, really surprised that Netflix and Amazon haven’t done more interruption based marketing in the work that they do since they can create video on the fly and they can generate video that they ensu certain movies that includes product placement and holy cow, the technology exists for that. Why the hell aren’t they doing it right now? And since they know who the hell’s watching, they can do, they can do product placement. That is absolutely laser targeted to doing this. The server power exists right now to do that. So that may be one of the things that we’ll see in the future with web 3.0, and I also believe that we’ll see a lot more AI influence where we’ll have an array of, of marketing tactics in the AI based on getting to know the person that we’re targeting is going to select the one that is the most effective for them in this moment. What is the one that’s going to interrupt them the best in this moment? What’s the, the messaging we’re gonna get predictive analytics online, it’s happening now, you know, heck it happens. And Netflix, what should I watch next? You get a, every time at the end of a show, you get a recommendation. That’s AI suggesting what you should select next. And it is not random. It is based on your viewer history. That’s the kind of changes in marketing that I expect for us to see.

Tom Leonard

01:11:40

It’s, it’s interesting. You’re talking about the Netflix recommendations when I started there. I mean, that’s when they started the recommendations and recommendations engine was so basic, it was just like, it was, it was, you know, we, we always tried to make it sound bigger and more, more intelligent. And, but, you know, it only took a few movies and rating a few movies and, and you were gonna get the same recommendations out of the system. It, it wasn’t so, so yeah, I think one of the things I’ve been a little bit surprised is how Netflix in particular has hasn’t used the data that they have quite as, as, as well as I thought that they probably would.

Mark SA Smith

01:12:23

Well, interestingly, because iHeartRadio uses the data listener data to predict the next hit using predictive analytics, artificial intelligence. So they’re, they’re getting really, really sharp at hit prediction.

Tom Leonard

01:12:39

Now, I, I, I believe it, no between the amount of data that, you know, Spotify or iHeartRadio or, or any of those, I mean, the amount of data that they have is just unbelievable. And it also takes organizations when you’re talking about the managerial side of it, it takes on organization organized in a way to collect the data, but also to be able to use that data in some intelligent way, because that’s two, don’t always go together

Mark SA Smith

01:13:11

Well, and it gets even a little more complex. I like where we’re going with this, because this is interesting, predictive analytics can be used for strategic purposes, such as where in general, shall we go and tactical purposes, what should I do with this particular person? You know, one of the things that will be what we can do with predictive analytics today that I think will probably probably become ubiquitous. Otherwise the companies are gonna go out of business is prediction of customer churn, which is a function of marketing, right? And so they will buy the behavior of the customer. Like for example, they start stretching the usage to one less day a week, and they’ll start to predict, this is a person that’s about to churn. And then they’ll find out out of these half a dozen churn prevention methodologies, let’s give ’em a free month. Let’s give them a free t-shirt, let’s give him a free back massage, whatever it happens to be. And then we’ll figure out that, you know, here’s how we interrupt a person deciding to leave by spending $5, $10, $15. And from marketing standpoint, that’s pure gold. Yes. That we’ll see more. We’ll see more of that.

Nathaniel Schooler

01:14:27

Absolutely. I mean, I was talking to someone the other day who, who was saying how much more expensive it is to actually get someone into a webinar. I mean, he does a lot of work with his company with IBM and Oracle and, you know, various technology companies. Right. And basically the price of getting someone into a webinar is, is through the roof. Now it’s, it’s completely, I think he, he was saying like, it’s like a hundred, a hundred pounds or something is roughly the figure he was quoting me for getting someone just into a webinar. And that’s not even like, they’re not even qu they’re not even a qualified person. Right? Like they might buy something, they may be interested. Right. It’s not even a qualified lead here. Right. So the whole thing is kind of moving into this different, different way of interruption. I think you’re right in saying that mark, I think people are, are very sick of receiving communications.

Nathaniel Schooler

01:15:22

I think that the, the, the faster we approach, you know, proper contextualized wording, we optimize the wording. I I’ve got a friend who’s working with some AI that optimizes the wording that, that people use with campaigns for, for example. So it will, it will say, okay, well, these words that you’re using are not gonna resonate with your, with your target audience. Okay. So there are all sorts of jobs that, that actually are around these kind of machine and person jobs, right? Like I know people that run chatbots, right. So, so, you know, IBM and stuff, they were talking about chatbots like seven years ago and everyone got really excited and everything, and it’s just, it has not delivered, right? Like it, it’s got to the point where, you know, you go and have a conversation with a chat bot, but actually it’s just a lot of meaningless kind of jargon.

Nathaniel Schooler

01:16:18

It. Doesn’t give you the answer to a very simple question in many cases. But I think that the people that go in and edit those, those transcripts, they are becoming, you know, much more valuable. And, and, and actually it’s kind of exciting, like the whole, the whole way that it’s evolving is very exciting. I’m, I’m kind of still a little bit on the fence about how it’s gonna work when it comes to like augmented reality, virtual reality, those things have just not even really touched the surface yet. I mean, you know, when you get to the point of, you can walk down the street and you’ve got your glasses on and you can look around and you can see what it looked like maybe 5,000 years ago, and then you can, and then you can perhaps book on a history tour right. Within the space of five minutes.

Nathaniel Schooler

01:17:05

Right. Because you’re interested in some, in some signage or something. That’s exciting for me, that that I think is, is the way that we are heading. But is it gonna be fast enough to actually gain critical mass? Or is it gonna be just this, this case of just board fed up people with promises that, that this amazing world of VR is gonna, is gonna, is gonna happen for them. Right. Because AR is different. You know, that’s a, that that’s a separate, it’s a separate thing. So what do you guys think about, about that sort of space

Mark SA Smith

01:17:36

Taking away, Tom?

Tom Leonard

01:17:37

Well, what are the things I was gonna ask you guys is when we’re talking about predictivity and AI and the use of AI, is there anyone out there outside of the, the streaming entertainment side of things, is there anyone out there that’s doing it right. That you’re looking at? And you’re saying, wow, those guys, those guys really know what they’re doing. And totally Amazon,

Mark SA Smith

01:18:02

I think Amazon does a damn good job making me buy more stuff.

Nathaniel Schooler

01:18:06

Absolutely. And it’s not an, it’s not in an intrusive, pushy way. It’s in a way of it’s in a way, oh, actually I need that. So I don’t have a problem. I don’t have a problem if I’ve got the money right at the time. And someone says to me, oh, I think you, you need this. And I’m like, actually they know, like I need these motorcycle gloves. I like, I, I need this oil. I need, I need some brake pads and I need, you know, whatever it is, doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t matter what it is. But if it catches you at the right time, I think it’s wonderful. It’s absolutely wonderful. It’s a superb way of doing business. And Amazon are the company to watch really when it comes to this, to be honest.

Mark SA Smith

01:18:44

Well, they, they do upsell by showing you something with a few more stars and they do cross sell with this is usually bought with and son of a gun. If those recommendations often aren’t solid. I bought my girlfriend a new pair of EarPods, cuz I wanted to hear her better. And the recommendation was to add the charger. And I said, the charger’s not included. Hell yeah, we’re getting the charger. You know, the transaction just was bumped up by 10 points because of that. AI.

Tom Leonard

01:19:16

No, it’s, it’s, it’s not rocket science. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s pretty basic stuff. That’s why it’s always interesting to see who’s out there already, already doing it. And I did, part of it is always amazes me is just the amount of data that’s required to do those things. Yeah. I mean that, of course Amazon can have all the data in the world, but, but just to, to be able to collect that the, all those data points is pretty amazing. Well

Mark SA Smith

01:19:44

To, to do a good job training AI, you need 70,000 experiences, 70,000 transactions to train the engine. And then after that, it’ll, it’ll have sufficient algorithms to do better than, you know, flipping a coin kind of response. But the good news about predictive analytics is it doesn’t have to be my data. I can go out and open source data or I can buy data about things that I wanna know. I wanna predict that I have not yet been collecting data on. So the real secret is data augmentation to success in predictive analytics. I can go out there and buy. I can go buy and go out there and buy a record on, on any one of us that is extremely deep and complex. That’ll let the world know that I do things like scuba dive, let me know. I have a four wheel drive truck. And then we can make correlations between a temperament for people that have four, four wheel drive, scuba trucks, you know, and then from that, we can get some, we can get some predilection. For example, people know that scuba divers, aren’t afraid to take risks. They know how to risk mitigate four PE four wheel drive truck drivers usually know how to mitigate risks. They’re willing to take risks, but they know how to mitigate it. So just we can extract psychographic data from a person’s experiences and we’ll see more and more of that by people that are going to dominate the market.

Tom Leonard

02:21:10

Yes. Well, one of the things that I had played around with before is with Facebook advertising and when it comes to, if you, you know, if you have an audience that you can bring in and then you, you can do the lookalike audiences, which, you know, it’s just, I, you know, I haven’t been able to spend enough time or money to figure out exactly if the, if it, how good they are, but just the whole concept of, of then just like you’re saying not using just my data, but taking my data and then using everyone else’s data that is similar. And then, then getting me to spend more money on with, with them, with advertising, with them. I think that’s just, just phenomenal.

Mark SA Smith

02:21:55

And if you get the lookalike parameters, right. You know, the lookalike has to have the critical parameters that align and cuz you can get lookalike audiences where the key parameters doesn’t exist in the lookalike. And that’s the part that you have to be very careful about is am I getting the meaningful lookalike alignment? And otherwise you can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars searching for something that is not there

Tom Leonard

02:22:25

And they, they’re more than happy to take your money while you’re, while you’re learning.

Mark SA Smith

02:22:29

Exactly. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Nathaniel Schooler

02:22:36

So, so what, what do you think about the next kind of wave then of, of, of jobs in, in terms of, you know, in terms of marketing jobs within, within technology as a whole? I mean, I think from where I’m sitting, I think, I think it’s gonna, I think it’s gonna come, it’s gonna come to a lot more strategic roles in, in terms of like the way that they are managing the data. I mean, you can’t just, you can’t just have a machine do it, you need to, you need to have that augmented approach where, you know, the data scientists and data trained people, they don’t necessarily have to be coders. They, they just need to actually have a, an analytical way of looking at things. I think it’s gonna be quite interesting in the way that things are gonna evolve. I mean, there are those guys, there are the, the creatives as, as well are always, you know, we’re always gonna need creatives. Yes. There are programs that can create imagery and everything else, but you still need people to direct those things at the moment. Anyway, do you think mark?

Mark SA Smith

02:23:45

Yeah, I think that, I think that what’s gonna happen is we’re gonna have fewer jobs at the tactical level and more jobs at the managerial directive level. The jobs at the strategic level will stay about the same cuz that’s the chief marketing officer’s role is to come, is to come up with a strategy with the CEO and the rest of the, the C-suite. And so what, what has to happen though, is that if you’re going to really do this right, you have to understand what strategy is. And so strategy is the second most misunderstood word in business you’re can ask. As I have done, you know, on a webinar, 15 CMOs would his strategy and they all had a different answer. And so one of the challenges is strategy is something that has to be taught to you. It’s not innate strategy is a skill that is not natural to the human being. We are hunters and gatherers. It’s wired into our DNA or, and, and so for most people, that strategy is a mystery and sometimes they, they have no idea how to go about it. But the reality is strategy is looking into the future and creating a path into the unknown and that scares most human beings.

Tom Leonard

02:25:02

So I really curious mark on the, when you’re talking to these CMOs, are they, are they apprehensive about the future? It it over time, what have you, what have you been seeing over time? Are people at, at that level more apprehensive or more excited about

Mark SA Smith

02:25:21

What’s going, they’re actually, they’re actually more excited than apprehensive. Now, keep in mind when you get to the sea, the chief suite, your job is to foresee the future. And if you can’t, you have no business having a seed title. That’s why I say chief joy officers. Aren’t a thing, but keep, but keep in mind that a chief marketing officers horizon is quite short. It tends to be one to two years. Whereas a CEO’s horizon is gonna be five to 10. And if they’re really good, 20 chief revenue officer is gonna be one to two, depending if they, if they have real estate acquisition in their future. And that might be a little further out and chief off operating officers typically have one to two years, horizon, chief marketing officers, I’m sorry, chief revenue officers, their horizons very short one year, maybe a little longer if they’ve got some serious growth plans. But for, for most of these people, they’re not looking for far enough, far enough out into the future to really be afraid. It’s the chief’s executive officer. That’s the one that, that, you know, usually has to pull their pants on and buckle their they’ll belt tight because they’re being asked to lead into a future that’s chaotic, unpredictable. They have to direct the, the, the company to where the money the customer will be spending money in the future. That is really fundamentally the job of a CEO and to essentially rip off Wayne Gretsky.

Nathaniel Schooler

02:26:52

So, so when it comes to, I mean, I, I just out of interest, you know, I was looking into NFTs the other day, not to buy any, but just, just noticed an article about, I think it was Prada who actually had, they’d launched like a, a very interesting limited edition series of t-shirts, which were accompanied by an NFT. I don’t know if they sold the t-shirt first or the NFT first and it came with the t-shirt. I’m not quite sure, but I think that that, that kind of digital and also physical approach is, is working quite well. And you’ve the reason I love NFTs is because actually the creator of that NFT will get paid for life. I, if they resell that item, I think that that is quite an exciting prospect for, for creators, how that is gonna work when it comes to marketing and sales jobs, I think is gonna, it’s gonna be interesting.

Nathaniel Schooler

02:27:49

There’re gonna be some obviously strategic people who come up with this scarcity offer that is out there because that’s in essence, that’s what we’re talking about here. Right? It’s like create a product, make it scarce, sell it for, for some good money. And, and then you’re creating something that gives the press something to talk about. You’re embracing a new technology, right? So I don’t know, I’m kind of looking, I’m looking at this and I’m saying, well, how, how do we make this connection with sales and marketing is, are marketing jobs, taking away sales jobs? Are there gonna be more sales jobs because of marketing and the way that marketing is changing? So then, you know, there are gonna be more account directors who need to explain what the hell is going on in marketing. I think from where I’m sitting that, and what we’ve just talked about, you know, account directors are probably gonna grow. Whereas people who, who do the tactical work may shrink. So the middle, the middle management, or of actually the agency world. And it may, may change in, in that department. What, what do you guys think on that? Mark? What do you, do you wanna go first on

Mark SA Smith

02:28:57

That one? I I’ll be glad to when it comes to NFTs, essentially, it’s the new beanie babies. My ex-wife has a huge collection of very, very valuable beanie babies with absolutely nothing. It’s forced scarcity into a market that was created by forced scarcity. They always, always, always fall apart. The tulip, bald mania and Holland back in the 18 hundreds, the NFT is the latest version of the scam to make people fear the fear of missing out, cause people to part money with the people that are creating the markets and FTS have zero intrinsic value Z row. There is zero, at least beanie babies was a toy you could tos to your dog.

Nathaniel Schooler

02:29:44

So, Tom, what do you think about

Tom Leonard

02:29:47

No, I’m, I’ve, I’m on the skeptical side of NFTs. The, but the best one that I saw recently was an NFT of a Corvette. So you could buy this, this NFT, this little image of the Corvette, and they would give you the car. It’s like, that’s how much they were going to. It was, it was such a great marketing Gibbick there, you know, on one hand, I always think that, you know, who’s, you know, are these things going to be valuable in the future? And I always go back to the video games that are, it’s like, if someone told me that, that you could create an, a battle Royal game out there and never charge for it, but only charge for people buying things to make it look better, not to enhance the experience. If you didn’t the, the, the person that’s not spending a dime, it has the same ability to play, but they just don’t look as good.

Tom Leonard

03:30:45

And when you think of how much money, you know, Fortnite brings in and all, all of the, all of the, the huge video games that are free to play. And, and so that, that kind of show told tells me that, you know, there’s certainly some kind of market out there and, you know, the, the things that you buy on Fortnite, it’s not NFTs. It’s not quite the same thing, but it’s still, people are interested in buying something there. And I think it also goes back to something that, that maybe you mentioned early on there that was about creative. It’s like the creative side of things, or maybe it was you mark, but it’s like the creative side is always gonna be important and Noma, no matter what, and it’s it. And you know, content is king. I mean, that will, that will never change.

Mark SA Smith

03:31:32

Absolutely true. Tom, I think you’re onto something. The place that NFTs may happen is inside the gaming world, because gamers are all about prestige. It’s all about leveling up. It’s the infinite game. And, you know, you’ve identified that all the, the up levels are all based on increasing a person’s prestige. Well, they can sell NFTs within that environment very easily because the market already expects a level of prestige rareness. So thank you for revealing to me that potential marketplace. I don’t see it existing outside of any other passionate market space where, where prestige is the driving force for other behaviors.

speaker 6

03:32:17

Very interesting.

Mark SA Smith

03:32:19

Very interesting. So getting back to the question that you asked, because I, I wanted to go down the MFT route.

Nathaniel Schooler

03:32:25

Yeah, yeah. I know you. I know you guys did. And I was like, okay, I’ve asked two questions there. So we’ll see what happens. Right? So back to the sales jobs, guys, come on back to the sales jobs. What, what do we think about the sales jobs and how

Tom Leonard

03:32:39

They’re gonna

Mark SA Smith

03:32:40

Change? What’ll happen is tactical sales jobs will disappear. They’ll be replaced by chatbots. And a tactical sales job is somebody who says is, is providing information about a known commodity that the person is buying. It’s not a sold product. It’s a bought product. They’re showing up to buy something. They have some questions, chat bot takes care of them. We don’t need anybody to help us with that. Strategic sales will always be required because we’re talking about complex communications and we’re talking about a lot of moving parts. And so for example, IBM, HP, Oracle, NetApp will all re, always require a, a sales professional because they have to navigate the complexity of the purchase. And many times they have products that are sold and sold is something that’s sold is where the salesperson is initiating. The conversation products that are bought the customer is initiating the product conversation.

Mark SA Smith

03:33:36

So products that are bought, yep. We don’t need you anymore. That’ll all be automated products that are sold, at least at the higher end. The more mission critical products will still need humans. Although I suspect that the AI is gonna get pretty darn good, but keep in mind when, when we’re selling a product, that’s mission critical. The underlying factor that makes the decision is trust. And I don’t know if we’re gonna get to a point where AI is going to engender trust in somebody for a while. That may happen in a few generations, but I don’t think we’re quite there yet. Tom thoughts I’m gonna hear from you.

Tom Leonard

03:34:07

Yeah, cuz I, no, I just, I agree with you when you’re talking about the, the tactical sales jobs are, are going to be disappearing, but I always go back to years and years ago when I first got outta school, I went to work for a department store here in, in Southern California called bullocks. And I was fortunate enough to get to work at bullocks Wilshire, which has this huge art building. It was the first suburban department store in the United States. And it was, it’s like, you know, just blocks from downtown, but they called it that it’s just, just an incredible building. But when you look back what it was like when people shopped there, when it opened in 1929, it’s like the customer, the patron went in and they sat down and the, and the merchandise was brought out to them. I mean, it is just like, the reason I’m bringing this up is we’ve been going down this road for years and years and years. I mean, you know, I have to go over here. I have to play checker, checkout person over here at pavilions. You know, it’s just like, you know, they, they pretty much force you into that, that they, you know, they, they don’t like it when you, you’re not very good at it sort

Mark SA Smith

03:35:10

At at least you’re not, at least you’re not stuck behind some grandma writing a check.

Tom Leonard

03:35:17

Yes. Yes. So, yeah. So, so see, see, you’re the glass half full person I can tell here.

Mark SA Smith

03:35:23

Oh no, I’m the glass completely full of a mixed, a mixed solution of air watered,

Tom Leonard

03:35:29

Whatever. Yes. Yes. So, so, so yeah, so I, I, I think you’re right. But the other thing is, I think even the, the big complicated sales I think are shifting because people are buying cars now in ways that they weren’t buying them 20 years ago, it’s like to think they would, that people would actually go and buy a car online without seeing it. It’s like, I mean, that, that, that, would’ve never been a, that’d been crazy before. It’s like, how do you know you’re gonna like it? And, but now, I mean, and I think even the really big, complicated, personal purchases, but, but like, I, I guess it also goes back to just exactly what mark was saying. It’s trust. It’s like, I’m not gonna buy a car online from, you know, Joe’s used car website sort of thing, but I, I might buy it off of CarMax because I’ve bought cars there before and I trust them on what they’re on, on, on how they, on the cars that they, they handle. So, so there’s a Tru there’s a level of trust there. So I think you’re on the right track. There it’s that it’s that level of trust that is so critical to make, make it work

Mark SA Smith

03:36:37

Well, a and also CarMax gives you the guarantee. You have five days to drive the darn thing. And if you hate it, hand us back the keys and, you know, you don’t even have to wash it. I think that in these online situations, the person has tried on the car someplace somewhere before that they, before they bought it or they have a friend has a car and they have a, they maybe they’ve bought, you know, like I, I love Audis and Toyotas and I’ll buy anything from Audi and Toyota, cuz I know it’s gonna, it’s gonna blow my mind for different reasons. And so I could go online and select that. I could do that, but that’s just because of the history that I have and the trust that I’ve already built. So I think online complex sales is going to happen only after the brand is firmly established and with a great parachute that prevents the buyer from incurring any risk whatsoever from that online purchase.

Nathaniel Schooler

03:37:34

Yeah. That, that, that makes a lot of sense. So, so we sort of agreed then that marketing jobs are gonna become more strategic, more interesting. People are gonna hopefully have to work less is, is my personal opinion. I, I think we’re, you know, I’ve been talking a lot about this recently we’re in a productivity revolution, we’re actually in a technology revolution that people, people seem to think is, is kind of finished. But I think we’re right at the beginning of this. And you know, for example, you’ve got these AI copywriting tools that are, you know, incredibly good and they, you know, you can write amazingly good content using these tools. We’ve got all sorts of amazing transcription tools whereby you know, you can have a note taker in your, in your meetings and, and that note taker, you can mark very interesting moments during the, the, the meeting and it will, and it will save those specific moments, which I think is just so great.

Nathaniel Schooler

03:38:34

Cuz it means, it means you can also have a proper conversation without saying, well, hold on a minute, I’m gonna write a note and you completely got distracted and you made a note, right. But actually you could just click insight or, you know, review item or whatever, whatever tag you’ve got on that particular space. Right. But those are only two things that we’ve, that I’ve mentioned. Right. And there are, there are infinite numbers. So in my opinion is for what it’s worth is I think it’s gonna become a lot more segmented in, in experienced levels. I think that that, that people, people who are doing these tactical jobs are gonna become a lot more specialist in those specific jobs. And I think that they’re gonna be, they’re gonna be a lot more like boot camps, which is like, oh, okay, I need to learn this new skill for this new job.

Nathaniel Schooler

03:39:24

I’m gonna go away and I’m gonna, and I’m gonna learn this new skill. And when I come back, I’m gonna be, you know, two weeks, two weeks full training and I’m gonna come back and, and my mind is gonna be, you know, at one with, with the machine that I’ve kind of been working on in, in my, in my opinion. And I think that it’s gonna be quite exciting. I think that being in a marketing job right now is very exciting. I wouldn’t wanna be particularly in a, in a sales job right now, unless I was like top of my game in that particular space. I think that it would be quite hard, but that’s my opinion right

Mark SA Smith

03:39:59

Now, keep in mind that mission, critical sales people are some of the highest paid people in the planet. Yeah. And so get over yourself if you don’t wanna make that kind of money. Yeah.

Nathaniel Schooler

04:40:11

Yeah.

Mark SA Smith

04:40:16

I think that you’re right in that the tactical jobs are going to essentially be pushed into the hands of our, you know, single digit VAs, single digit dollar VAs who are really good at learning a specific, specific tactical skill. And they’re really good at staying up to date on that. And the whole thing is it’s a moving parade that tactical level is rolling at about a 12 to 18 month cycle where what you learned 18 months ago, ain’t worth anything to you right now. And so yes, those jobs will continue and a lot of those will become automated. If you can give a person a checklist and they can get the task done in five minutes. Yeah. AI is gonna do that for you.

Tom Leonard

04:41:00

Well, I think one of the things also to consider is just what this means to society. I mean, it’s just like, you know, on one hand, it’s like, I think I’m thinking, oh, all these really boring jobs are gonna go away. Well, what about all the people who have these boring jobs? You know? Well, I mean,

Mark SA Smith

04:41:18

We asked that question in the 18 hundreds, when we, when we had factories that became turned to automation in a new jobs form.

Tom Leonard

04:41:27

Yes, exactly.

Nathaniel Schooler

04:41:28

Yes, exactly.

Tom Leonard

04:41:30

Yes. But it it’s, it’s, it’s one those things that’s, it’s gonna be a concern.

Mark SA Smith

04:41:38

Well, let me let let’s

Tom Leonard

04:41:39

Consequences.

Mark SA Smith

04:41:40

There’s always consequences. Tom, let me put it this way. I do not mean to insult you whatsoever. People that are worried about the low paying jobs are completely naive. What they don’t realize is that we’re freeing labor to do other low paying jobs that now need to be done that weren’t required before. And the consequences are change and change is inevitable except from a vending machine. So we have to be able to realize that, you know, through history, through all history, we have had changes at the menial level of jobs. Always it has always been ongoing and there was always another menial job for somebody to have. And those that will always be guaranteed gainful employment. That’s interesting are those that operate at the managerial and strategic level. So yeah, there will be changes, but also keep in mind, we have a whole new array of, of tasks that we haven’t invented yet. And so I, that, and I can show you in history over and over and over and again, how that happened.

Tom Leonard

04:42:42

No, I think that’s a good, that’s a good way to, to, to explain it because it’s just like, you know, I mean, think, think what agriculture was like before all of these giant machines showed up. I mean,

Mark SA Smith

04:42:55

Yeah, half the half the population fed the other half the population.

Tom Leonard

04:42:58

Right. And it’s, and that’s just not the case and you don’t have

Mark SA Smith

04:43:01

1% not even,

Tom Leonard

04:43:04

And you, you know, you don’t have all these, these people out that are, you know, they can’t find jobs cuz they can’t work in a field sort of thing. It’s like, no, that’s not the case. No, I think you, I think you’re right. I think you’re right.

Nathaniel Schooler

04:43:14

I do. So. So just to close because I know we’re, we’re getting a bit tight on time guys and I wanna finish just before, cuz it’s always good to be on time. So yeah. I, I, I personally agree with agree with you guys. I think that,

Mark SA Smith

04:43:29

Oh, you’re such a suck up.

Nathaniel Schooler

04:43:31

No, I, I, I do though, because I’ve been thinking about this for ages, right? Like mechanized farming and you know, like all of these revolutions. Yeah. And the fact is is that unless you take the time to be strategic in your, in your thinking, unless you upskill yourself to, to learn what you need to learn, you’re basically gonna be always suffering at that bottom level of, of, of work. Right. And there will be loads of new jobs. There are new jobs already, right? And, and, and you need to basically just adapt and evolve. And if you’re not adapting and evolving and trying to learn as much as you can about what you are really excited about. Cause you look, if you’re not excited about what you’re doing, then at the end of the day, you, you, you’re probably doing the wrong job. So

Mark SA Smith

04:44:15

At the end of the day, you’re probably drinking

Nathaniel Schooler

04:44:18

Well. Yeah. And that, but is that well it’s, it’s true, right? Yes. The thing is it is, is that, is that if, if you are in the wrong job and, and you’re like, well, I don’t have any time. This is, this is what people say to me, cuz I speak to loads of people that want to change their lives. Loads of people they’re like, well, I’m too busy. I don’t have time to study. I don’t have this. It’s like, look, you can go. And you can learn about any freaking thing that you want. You can, you can, you can start on YouTube. You can go to audible, you can listen to books. And if you listen to 10 or 20 books, right in say six months or a year, you’re gonna know more than most people out there about that specific topic. And then you can go into that specific thing, but you’ve gotta start with excitement. It must excite you. If it doesn’t excite you like a child would be excited if you gave them a specific gift that they were interested in, don’t do it. And that’s, that’s my final, final close on, on the whole thing to sum up everything in jobs, you know,

Mark SA Smith

04:45:24

You’re spot on. If you don’t have time, it’s a priority issue. And if you don’t have time, you will have time very soon. Involuntarily, involuntarily.

Nathaniel Schooler

04:45:38

Yeah. Very, very true. And let’s hope that everything’s okay for you in the, in the meantime, but guys, I wanted to just say thoroughly enjoyed speaking with you and, and I can’t thank you enough for making the time to be on this podcast. I will drop the links to your, your, your websites in the show notes. And thank you very much.

Tom Leonard

04:46:00

No, thanks for having

Mark SA Smith

04:46:01

Us. Yeah. A delight to meet your time. I appreciate the conversation. No,

speaker 0

04:46:05

It’s good. Let’s go.

speaker 1

04:46:07

Thanks very much for listening to influential visions. Please make sure you share this episode with your friends and business connections and don’t forget to drop us a review wherever you listen. Thanks.