38: Trends we're following.

Thanks for listening to the Make It Happen podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you enjoyed the show, let me know by leaving a review or sharing your favorite episode with your team. Good morning, everybody. It is John Barrows of J. Barrows Consulting and Make It Happen Monday, our first Make It Happen Monday of the new year. Hopefully you all enjoyed your downtime. Hopefully you got some downtime, got a chance to recharge a little bit before kicking it into the new year. I did, but not as much as I had liked as usual. So needless to say, I'm back ready to rock. This is my busiest time of season right now. So with all the sales kickoffs and everything like that going on, it is very busy for me right now.

As a matter of fact, the reason I am doing Make It Happen Mondays right now at this time, it's about nine o'clock in the morning, East Coast time, six o'clock in the morning, West Coast time is because I got a training all day today in San Francisco today. So I'm coming out to the beautiful Courtyard Marriott here in San Francisco. And then I got L.A. tomorrow and then Dublin, Ireland on Thursday. And then it doesn't stop until, shit, sometime in March or something like that. So anyways, but hope you're all ready to rock. Hope you closed out 2017 strong and are ready to kick it off in 2018. What I wanted to do with 2018 with this first Make It Happen Monday is just talk about some of the trends that we're following and paying attention to and ones I think you should too if you're paying attention to this.

My team and I got together at the end of last year, December 14th and 15th, I had my team. Now I actually have a team. I got Morgan, I got Megan, who's my COO. And I got Lucas, who's helping out with all the social. We got together just to talk about how we did in 2017 and what our plans were in 2018. And one of the big topics that came up was the trends. Like why should we be staying on top of what trends and which ones are we going to get affected by the most? And so we talked a lot about that and I wrote a blog post on it last week, but I wanted to kind of give a little bit more color to it now because you've heard me say this before. You know, if you don't evolve, you die. And right now with technology and everything else moving so fast, you better be paying attention.

And I got to be paying attention because I can see myself becoming irrelevant. If I don't, I can see this industry being shaken up to the core by some of the stuff that's going on right now. So I'm going to just hit on a couple of topics. If anybody is watching right now, I know this is an off time. So if anybody is watching right now and wants to pop on and has some questions or, you know, has anything that you want to talk about, as always, these Make It Happen Mondays are really for you. So if you do have questions, feel free to hit me up in the chat window. But I want to start off with one of the ones that I'm focusing most of our time and energy on in 2018, the trend of just-in-time learning.

The training industry has historically been, you know, very face-to-face driven in the sense that you come out, you do a one-day or whatever, week-long event. And, you know, I get everybody, you do role plays and all that other stuff. And then you might have some online stuff moving forward. And those are fine. I don't think that's ever going to go away. I think there is something to getting in front of people and just, there's just a motivational factor to it, if nothing else, to give them a spike in energy and a spike in activity. And that's why I'm so busy on all these sales kickoffs right now, because that's exactly what a lot of these companies are trying to do. They're trying to kick the year off right.

And so I come in, give them some very specific things that they can do, but also just get them motivated a little bit. So I don't think the onsite stuff is ever going to change, but there's something about training where it tends to be an event. If there's not the right reinforcement, if there's not the right management in place where managers aren't using it on a regular basis, there's not the right coaching plan. Then, you know, you do a training and two or three months later, I come back and it's like that training never happened, or maybe three or four reps are really doing it well. And the rest are maybe doing something different. And so because of that, and because our insatiable drive for access to information immediately, right?

I mean, our attention spans are just absolutely going away. I don't know anybody who has more of a tension span than two minutes right now, especially to sit down and watch a video or anything like that. So with our attention spans going down and our need for information, immediate information that can make a difference increasing. That's where I think this trend of just-in-time learning is really coming into play. And when I say just-in-time learning, I mean, I need a piece of content. I need information to help me figure out what I'm doing right now. So I'm about to make a cold call to a CFO, and I'm about to talk about pricing, and I'm at stage five of the sales process. What do I need to know?

And this is where I believe we're going, which is, I think, all the bite-sized nuggets of information that are out there, because there's so much information out there. You add that to machine learning and artificial intelligence. And I really do believe that we are getting into a point where, when I need information, I'm going to get it. And I'm going to, and not only am I going to, I might have to request for it in a short period of time here, but it's going to start to get prescribed to me. So I know LinkedIn Learning is actually already doing this, for instance, where if you sign up for LinkedIn Learning, which used to be Linda, and you have a LinkedIn account, obviously, what it's starting to do is actually starting to prescribe content for you.

It's like, hey, you're an SDR. And you know what? Other SDRs, just like you who are getting promoted to AEs or whatever, they're actually watching this content. So you should probably start watching that content. And that's just based on your profile alone. Forget about your activities and what you're doing. So because I believe this is such a valuable trend and a trend that's just going to be everywhere, that's what we're positioning ourselves for here at Jay Barrows, where we're taking our content and we're cutting it up into all sorts of bite-sized little nuggets. Right now, if you go into my resource library, by the way, and by the way, I don't think enough people, we get a decent amount of traffic on my resource library, but I don't think enough people know about it and leverage it.

Because I put, I'd say about 80 to 90% of what I do out there for free. And most of it's on that resource library, like tips, nuggets, that type of thing. But what I'm doing is I'm taking that to the next level and I'm creating this product and the solution called Kitchen Sink, which is every single piece of my content and Morgan's content in bite-sized little nuggets tagged based on industry's role, stale stage, whatever it is, so that any platform, it doesn't matter what platform there is out there, whatever LMS is or CRM or any of it can grab that content, put it into there. Platform and serve it up to their users when they need it. And so, you know, it's just hard to ignore that trend of what's going on, again, with our attention spans and everything else.

So that's why I put myself in that position to evolve. You know, I used to kind of pretend like we were a platform company because I was creating these platforms to put my content on. But now I realize that I'm not a platform company. We're not a technology company. We're a content company. And that's where I want to get to, where we want to distribute content that makes a difference when reps need it. All right. So that's number, that's trend number one that we're paying attention to that I would too, if I was you, just because from consuming it, you want to be able to consume it where and when you want with whatever platform you're on. So try to look for that content that you can bring in.

I always say, if you can get information to come to you, it's way easier than it is if you got to go out and find it, right? It's the same with information on customers, any of that stuff. That's why I like tools like Owler and those types of things, because I can set up my list and have information come to me and ping me every morning about what's happening with my target accounts. So that's one thing. The next one that we're paying attention to is voice and audio. And I'm going to recommend everybody, I got to assume if you're watching this or listening to this, that you're paying attention to Gary Vaynerchuk, because I talked about him a decent amount, so does Morgan. And actually, Gary is one of the ones that I use to help stay on top of what's going on, because he's usually two, three, four steps ahead.

He's got this thing he's bragging about these days about how he invested in Bitcoin, I think, in some like 2014. So he put like 25 Gs into Bitcoin. I can't imagine what that's worth right now. So good for you, Gary. But anyways, he stays on top of the trends more than I do. And so I pay attention to him. And he's been talking about voice forever. He's been talking about voice for at least two to three years, yeah, about a couple years now. And he's convinced, and I agree with it, that we're all going to be in the future, we're all going to have a personal like Alexa sitting next to us at our desk. And we're about to make a phone call or about to get into our day and be like, hey, Alexa, I'm about to call into Salesforce right now.

I want to prospect into them to see if I can find some business. What should I know? And Alexa will be like, well, Salesforce recently, they acquired this company, they got this funding, their profitability, their earnings report just came out. Mark Benioff just tweeted about this. And based on our solution, we should probably have this conversation with him or at least mention this because, and it's going to be telling us what we should know so that we can then take that and then put our context around it. And again, that's another thing I steal from Gary, right? Context content. You've heard me say this before. I'm going to say it again, because I do believe this is the theme that's going to keep us relevant in sales, which is, you know, everybody talks about content.

Content is king. Content is king. He says, fine. If content is king, then context is God. And to me, that's marketing versus sales. Marketing is content. Sales is context. If we are not putting any context around that content, we're no different than marketing, right? And it's the same thing with this information that's going to be given to us. Right now, it's really cool because we've got tools like Nudge or Charlie app or any one of these tools that can kind of aggregate a bunch of information and serve it up to us for our meetings and text format. I just, the next logical step is take it to the voice level. Because time is the most valuable asset any of us have. And that's why podcasts right now are exploding because videos are cool, but I have to watch a video.

Whereas a podcast, I can just pop it into my ear. And that's why we invested and started doing a podcast midway through last year, because so many people wanted to consume this content just on their ride to work or whatever, and not really having to watch anything, but be able to listen to it. And so with that, we're trying to figure out how can we get on that bandwagon early from a sales strategy tip nugget content distribution approach. So one of the things we're having Morgan do right now is he's going in and he's cutting up a whole bunch of content, like tips, nuggets, ideas, motivational quotes, stuff like that, that he's putting voice to and then going to create an Alexa app so that you can wake up in the morning and be like, hey, Alexa, give me my Jay Barrows Morgan tip of the day, or give me my Jay Barrows Morgan motivational quote or whatever it is as the start to see if we can gain some traction there.

And then again, just obviously as that industry evolves, as it relates to sales, start to be there early so we can start to create a following there. So watch out for what Morgan's going to be doing. Hopefully it's going to be pretty cool and we're going to get some traction out of that one sometime here soon. And if you're not doing voice, start paying attention to it. You don't have to create your own blog or anything like that. But I wrote a post a little while ago that the people who have left voicemails are going to be killing it in video, specifically the new trend of video messaging and stuff like that with Vidyard, those type of tools. Well, the reps who do make phone calls still, because you should, the reps who make phone calls and leave voicemails are going to be so much better positioned in the world of video, but way more better positioned in the world of audio.

And so that's why this all kind of feeds on itself. This is why you should be doing everything and anything when it comes to sales and leveraging different technologies and different means of communicating with people, because it's not just about the result that you're driving there. It's about the skill you're developing. And that's really important to understand is that you're not, yes, we all look for short term results. And that's what we need to do to make sure that we still have a job and hit our numbers. But you're building a skill set that is going to be something that you can leverage for the rest of your career. And that's why I feel so fortunate that, you know, when I was first in sales, the phone was it, right?

I mean, again, I'm 42 now, but the phone was it. It was something where you had to, you know, you had to make phone calls, right? The email was something that didn't really, at the time, it wasn't really catching on to too much, but phone was it. And so I've developed that skill. And to this day, I can still pop that off whenever I want to. And it also helps just in normal conversations with people. So that's something audio is absolutely something to pay attention to in addition to the other ones, even though I've written a whole blog post on this one is because I think it bleeds into or it supports the first two that I talked about. So with just in time learning and with audio slash voice, artificial intelligence is going to be the engine that learns when to distribute that content to you and when you're going to need it and which is the best and which is the worst, right?

So again, I think we're going to be in a world where, you know, you watch these videos and the people who are closing more deals are actually watching these videos. And so the artificial intelligence or rules engines, if you will, or machine learning is going to start to prescribe content for you saying, hey, you know what? People who watch these videos get a 30% higher close ratio on their deals than these people. So you might want to start watching these videos. And that is going to really start to be very focused on you personally, right? Based on your activities and based on what artificial intelligence is learning about you. And so, you know, I was afraid of it for a while, but you've heard me say this and I'll say it again.

You know, the more I dive into artificial intelligence, the more I feel like it's going to make good rep, good sales reps, great, great sales reps, incredible and average sales reps are relevant. It's kind of one of those, it's like Iron Man, right? Where you had, we have Jarvis, right? For, I forget what it stands for, J-A-R-V-I-S for Iron Man. And he's got the suit and the suit's fine, but Jarvis is really the key to make that engine go, right? Because he just asked Jarvis a real question in real context. Jarvis knows exactly what to do and gives him the information he needs to be, you know, to excel. And that's what I think artificial intelligence is going to do for us in sales. If you're paying attention, you're going to be able to say, okay, cool.

Here's all this, you know, admin type bullshit stuff that I don't really need to do or research and all those types of things. No, no, no. You're going to get, have that information given to you. And then you're going to have to be the one that takes that again and puts it into context. You know, when I actually, I went to Gary Vee, he has this 4D session where you can go to his office and sit down for a day with his entire team, right? You pay like 10 grand, you go, and it's only about 13 or 15, there was about 15 of us entrepreneurs and business owners. And he, every single one of his, every single one of his departments came in and presented to us, right? The same stuff they present to huge companies that they work with.

And then the Gary comes in at the end and does a Q and A for a couple of hours. And one of the questions that I asked him was around artificial intelligence. I was like, Gary, you know, what, what does that mean for sales? And I kind of, and he jumped all over it and he was like, look, you know, don't be afraid of it. Be, be the one that, because the specific example that I use was this email that I saw where artificial intelligence bot actually created this super high quality email. And, and I mean, it was better, it was a better email, a better customized email than I could have even written. And I've been training this stuff for 10 years. And I was like, Gary, what, where does that leave us?

Right. And he goes, nah, don't, don't be the one that's afraid of that. Be the one that leverages that. Be the one that QCs the artificial intelligence message before it goes out there. Right. Because it's always going to miss something, right. Or there's always going to be something that's a little off that a human probably wouldn't do that needs a little bit more context around it. So leverage that. It's kind of like chatbots and stuff like that. You know what I find interesting? We invested recently in drift and I love drift because it's this chatbot that answers a lot of questions that people have. Like right now, if you go on my Facebook page and you instant mess and you message me and you say help, it's going to say, what do you need help with?

And then you'll say prospecting or negotiations or whatever, and it'll bring you down this tree and then it'll serve you up videos and tips of mine that are, that are in that range. And so, cause a lot of stuff that I do, like a lot of times when you all ask me questions, I've written a blog post on it. I I've, I've written, you know, I made a video about it or something. So a lot of times I'm just regurgitating that where this chatbots help and automate that and get new answers faster because I'm busy, I'm on the road, whatever. So I might not be able to get back to you for a day or two where that chatbot's going to be able to answer you immediately. And that thing is, you know, drift. What I found very interesting was about a year or two ago when chatbots really started hitting it, they, they tried to pretend like they were humans.

You know, they were like, Oh, and you thought you were talking to a human. You were legitimately like, Oh, this is cool. But then inevitably there'd be a point where you got to, and it was just like, wait a minute, this isn't a human and you felt duped. And so you were kind of pissed, right? Well, now the chatbots are like, Nope. Hey, just want to let you know I'm a chatbot. I am not a real human being. But let me see if I could help you at least to get to a certain point here. And that's why I think that that balance between humans and technology is coming to play, right? Is where the technology is the technology and we all need to accept it and understand it. And, and, but it also needs to be realistic about what it is.

And then when a human's involved, that's really where the special sauce comes in. Hopefully, is that when the rep can take that information and put some context around it and really help hit home with whatever that message is or whatever the answer you need is. And so I believe as in sales, you need to pay attention, you need to pick your head up and realize if, if you're going through the motions right now, if you're just cranking out those template emails, blasting out template cold calls, you know, asking generic questions, pressing play on demos, all that stuff. That's all the shit that's going to get erased. And that's the average reps that are going to become irrelevant. But the ones who are looking at this and saying, okay, let me see how that presented itself.

Let me leverage, let me learn how to have the machine do the majority of the work, but then put my special sauce on top. Those are the ones that are going to become excellent. So pay attention to AI. Now, this one, I think, hits a little close to home with the people, I think a lot of people that I train and a lot of people that pay attention to me, which is the evolution of the SDR role, this other trend. And I'm going to tie this to another trend, which is the SDR-AE relationship. But I first want to talk about the SDR role itself. And this, again, all these kind of trends, by the way, they build on themselves for a specific reason. If you look at artificial intelligence, if you look at machine learning, if you look at all these different things that are relevant, you know, marketing, automation, and all those different things, what's happening is, again, they're starting to get closer and closer to what a human can do, right?

That's why it's hard these days to kind of figure out sometimes, you know, what's a human, what's a computer, especially when it comes to emails, you know, that's our chatbots. And so a lot of the SDR role, the SDR role that's happening right now, and I mean the SDRs who are still, you know, the companies that are still asking SDRs to send out, you know, 100 activities a day or make 50 dials or send out these cadences without really thinking too much of it. The way that that role is constituted right now, that's going to be the average role that gets replaced, okay? So I just warn you, if you're an organization right now looking at your SDRs saying, okay, make sure, you know, make those 50 dials, make those, you know, send out those 100 cadences a day or whatever it is and play the volume game, that you're setting those kids up for failure.

And if you're an SDR in one of those companies, you really got to ask yourself, what is this, what does the future look like for me here? Because I think the SDR role with the automation, all the technology is actually going to start to evolve much more into marketing and operations than it is to be a feeder system for sales. And I say that because right now, the predictable revenue model, what it did was it created the segmentation of roles, right? So if you haven't read Predictable Revenue, it's a book by Aaron Ross that he came out with after he came out of Salesforce, when Salesforce was really, you know, redefining the sales approach. And instead of having one sales rep do everything, they had specializations, okay?

And that's what has really shook most other SaaS companies, specifically a lot of other organizations have followed that model to help build their SaaS and their sales teams. And the whole idea is you get a junior inside sales rep who takes inbound leads or whatever it is, qualifies them and closes them or, you know, probably just, you know, just qualifies and maybe sets up meetings or, and then they graduate to an outbound, right? It's usually a BDR or something like that where they're co-calling outbound and then they go to an AE. But with that SDR role and the technology that it's impacting it right now, you know, it's awfully frustrating for a client. And this is why I also think the SDR AE role needs to adjust because that model of inbound, outbound, closer is actually a great model from a sales standpoint, from a scalable sales standpoint as an organization for us, right?

It's not really great from a customer standpoint because if you think about the handoff, no clients like to be handed off multiple times and have very similar conversations, by the way. If it's done right, okay, but most companies don't do it right because what happens is say somebody, you know, does some research online or whatever it is and they do an inbound or say somebody co-calls them and just catches them on and says, you know, in the SDR or sends them an email and it catches their attention. And they're like, oh, this is pretty cool. And then they go ahead and have a conversation with some, you know, an SDR who, you know, and I'll, and again, I'll say it's some SDRs are better than others.

Some of them put the context around others, just flip it and really don't qualify at all, or maybe go through BANT or something like that. So they ask these questions to the client, they really provide no value. And then they flip it over to an AE and nine times out of 10, that AE is asking the same damn questions, right? So it's kind of like you ever, you ever called into your, you know, cable bill or your, you know, your iPhone or whatever it is for support. And you go through that frontline, right? That initial person that asked you, have you rebooted it? You know, and you explain your entire issue that you're having with whatever it is. And it takes you like, I don't know, 20 minutes, 30 minutes to go over this stuff.

And then all of a sudden they're like, okay, sorry, sir. I'm going to have to flip you over to somebody who can, you know, a specialist or something like that. And they transfer you over to somebody and that person gets on the phone with you and says, how can I help you? And you're like, well, didn't you, did you, did that person take any notes? Did they tell you what, you know, I just spent the past 20, 30 minutes explaining to them. Oh, well, no, sir. I'm sorry. I'm, I'm a specialist in this area. So how can I help you? And now you're pissed, right now to the person that can actually help you. You're actually, you're already aggravated. And it's the same thing with the SDR, BDR, AE handoff, where if I talk to somebody and it's like, okay, I get, hopefully I get some value out of this, but then all we get, suddenly I get flipped over and I have the exact same conversation.

That's not, and then I got to go over customer success. So I believe the whole thing's evolving to create more of a pod model where there's going to be inside sales, field sales, marketing and operations all in the same pod going after a targeted list of clients, account-based marketing, those types of things. And the SDR role is specifically is going to, like I said, be more operations and marketing where my vision for SDRs in the future is, have you ever seen the old switchboard operator, right? Where they plug things out and plug them in. That's what I believe in SDRs value is going to be is taking all this content messaging that is relevant to certain personas or triggers or whatever it is.

And then, you know, maybe some content that could be shared to them specifically to say, okay, here's contents relevant to these people. So now I'm going to go after this account. I'm going to take this content from here, this from here, this messaging from here, this messaging from here, and I'm going to put it together in a cadence. I'm going to let it run and then I'm going to tweak it and analyze it to see what's working and what's not. And that's where I think the SDRs will be able to hit a home run and become invaluable to organizations. So it's like marketing with Marketo and Eloqua, but at a micro level, very specific to certain accounts and certain territories. So if I'm sitting there as an SDR right now, I am absolutely trying to master every single technology there is out there and pay attention to split testing different approaches and being really good at analytics and figuring out what's working and what's not so that I can, again, become invaluable.

Because those are the ones that I'm going to look to as a leader to say, okay, tell me what's working, where do we need to shift? Because, again, messaging shifts real fast right now. The messaging that you came out with last, you know, six months ago was probably not resonating with the marketplace anymore. You have to evolve also because of all the competition that's coming into play. There's almost no barriers to entry anymore in any industry. So if you're not sitting there saying, okay, I need to make sure that I'm staying on top of this, you're going to, again, you're going to get replaced. I think SDRs are a key piece to that puzzle. And then the SDR-AE relationship changes a little bit because now it's more about really creating very high quality content to go after and then maybe having an AE reach out based on a certain thing that the client then does once that trigger happens.

So that's where I think if I'm an SDR right now, like I said, I'm looking for companies and organizations that support me and put me in a position to build a skill set that I'm going to be able to leverage in the future. And that also puts me in a position to try different things and be creative within the structure. And then the last trend I'll touch on here is one that's kind of just more a little bit further out from an impact standpoint, I think. But I think some industries are going to be impacted this sooner rather than later. Sales to be determined, but it's virtual reality. Virtual reality is, you know, I think you guys have heard me talk. I got the Oculus goggles, probably about the Oculus, you know, artificial intelligence, I'm sorry, virtual reality set a little while ago.

And this stuff is bananas. I mean, it is, I, I, the first thing I, uh, the first game I downloaded was the rollercoaster game and it's not a game. It's just, it's rollercoaster. And you put these things on and you're on a rollercoaster. And when it came up and I saw the drop coming and when that drop came, I, my knees buckled, my knees absolutely buckled. And I hit the floor with my knees cause I was like, Whoa. And that is just right now that the, the, the fact that it's that real right now is bananas. And so I watched a movie the other night, you guys got to check this movie out. It's called other life. And it's, it's fast forward way into the future. Well, I don't know way into the future, but pretty far into the future where, um, it is virtual reality, but it's, it's, it's real.

And what they found, they came up with these nanos or whatever it is that they drop in your eyes and you pass out for a little while. But when you're out, you're, you're literally experiencing whatever they want you to experience. So you're skiing down the slopes or whatever it is. It's like a full day with family and friends. Or actually, I think it was only, yeah, at that point it was just a one-to-one thing. So you could go skiing down the Alps. Um, you could go, you know, go to Hawaii and all these things, but it was all by yourself, but you felt it. Like you felt that experience and then you would wake up after it was over and only a minute had passed. It's one of the weird kind of stoner things that I was paying attention to was, was the whole jail system and how they were using it from a rehabilitation standpoint.

And what would happen is say you got in trouble or whatever it is, and you had to be sentenced to a year in jail. Well, they would lean you back, you'd pop in some of these eye drops and you'd sit in solitary confinement for a year. Whereas like this thing would go one, two, and it would count 365 days, which would, I think that would drive me insane. It wouldn't rehabilitate me, but whatever. But then when that 365 days was over that your year, you know, that's what you went to jail for a year, you'd wake up and it would only been a minute of your life. And so the applications were pretty crazy as you started to think of them, but it really got me thinking that we are right now just at the beginning of what virtual reality is going to be able to do for us in society.

And I do believe that five years from now, you guys want to go to Hawaii right now, you want to have this conversation in Hawaii, you guys want to have a full-blown training session in Hawaii with me, cool. Let's pop on some couple of contact lenses. Let's turn the heat up in our rooms and let's have this conversation because we'll be doing it in Hawaii. And it is going to be like that. I almost guarantee it based on what I've already been watching, you know, and again, these huge goggles that people are wearing with these huge gaming servers that you have to buy to really run artificial intelligence, or virtual reality, right? I think we're all going to be laughing at those where absolutely where, you know, it's almost like the old school cell phones.

Remember the old school cell phones that had the big battery pack and whatever. Now we're laughing at those because we have these things. It's the same thing. I think five years from now, we're gonna be like, oh my God, remember those huge goggles you had to wear with that big battery pack of like check it out, right? Because it's going to be contact lens stuff. So the reason I'm paying attention to it is because I believe that in the future, I'm going to be doing a lot of my trainings in virtual reality, where I won't be having to be here in a hotel in San Francisco to do this training tomorrow. We can just, you know, roll out some, all right, everybody, put your goggles on, put your headsets on.

And we are in a full-blown interactive room with facial recognition so I can tell who's paying attention and who's not. And so that's why one of the big reasons I invested in the Oculus system is just to kind of see how it's going to evolve and see if I can put myself in a position where, you know, in the future, I can save my clients a lot of money for a teeny or we can get really creative, really interesting with virtual reality and keep people engaged as opposed to trying to, you know, kind of hopefully during a classroom, get everybody to be paying attention. So anyways, those are the trends, you know, and I apologize, I wasn't paying attention to the comments. So if anybody has any, feel free to hit them.

But those are the trends that we're paying attention to. And I recommend you do too. Because, again, if you're not paying attention, whatever you think, whatever you think is happening right now, you should be paying attention to it, if nothing else, to have cool conversations. I mean, one of the things that I've noticed is the more I've started to pay attention to trends like artificial intelligence and virtual reality and these type of things, the more interesting conversations I'm having with people. And this is where business acumen comes into play. You've heard me say this before, where it's, you know, you don't let business acumen be a byproduct of your activities. Take it way more proactively and start to educate yourself on what's happening out there, right?

Understand what executives care about, what people are talking about. Because the more you stay on top of that, again, when you have these conversations with executives, those are the type of conversations. They want to have interesting conversations about direction, and they want to be asked interesting questions. And you can't ask interesting questions unless you know enough about interesting things that are happening out there, okay? So please take some time, you know, set up a Feedly account, and go and start to follow some of these certain trends that are happening out there so you can have better conversations, you can be more insightful, and you can stay as relevant as possible as we evolve through, all right?

Anyways, I'm going to end it here because I've got to now prep for my training with my client today. But as always, feel free to hit me up on any of the social channels, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Instagram, all my handles there. John, M as in Michael, Barrows, all one word. Answer probably 10 to 15 questions a day on Snapchat if you have them, so feel free to hit me up on those if you've got a specific thing. Hopefully it's not too timely, though. Don't be like, John, I'm going into a meeting here in the next hour because I might not be able to get it, but I usually get it that day. So feel free to ask me questions. As always, jump on Facebook Live every Monday to ask questions about topics. If you have topics you want me to talk about, hit me up on email.

You can hit me up on john at jbarrows.com. And, you know, and join the group here, the Make It Happen group, because we're getting a lot. We reached 1,000 active users, members at the end of last year, which was awesome. And one more thing, which is the store. We launched a store. I'm putting a blog post on Thursday. We launched a store last year to drive profits so I could give 100% of those profits to charities. And I was really excited to be able to donate some money at the end of the year to some charities using that store. So go check it out. It's on my website. Looks like there is one question here from Jared. So I will pop into this. John, I'm working on starting a vlog podcast all because of Gary Vee, just trying to decide the medium.

That's a good question, man. It's what are you better at? You know what I mean? I mean, some people are better at video. Some people are better at audio. What I'm doing, just to be very transparent here, I did this. I did this Make It Happen Monday thing. And then because I like video, personally, I just like video better. And I like, you know, not just talking into a microphone. But what we did was we just took this, downloaded it, and turned it into a podcast. And that's why the podcast, that's how we have a podcast. So I think you can do both. I think you can start a vlog with the mindset of being able to rip the audio and turning it into an audio or a podcast. So I think you can do both.

But do the vlog because right now that's the easier, I think that's the easier thing to do. And you get a two for one there at that point. All right. So definitely take a look at that. And also, if you've Sweetfish Media, by the way, if you're, I got a good relationship with them over there. Take a look at Sweetfish Media. They help people start their own blogs and their own personal brandings. And they're a really good team. So if you want, I'll put that link in the Facebook group right here. All right. Anyways, thank you all very much for your time. I really appreciate it, as always. And like I said, if there's anything I can do to help you get the year off strong, please do not hesitate to ask.

It's all about sharing good content with good people. Make sure you follow Morgan Ingram as well. And make it a great week, everybody. All right. Make it happen. Make it happen. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.