Why Human-Centered Approaches Are More Important Than Ever – with Darin Dawson

Darin Dawson is on a mission to rehumanize the planet and wants to start with your business. He believes that human beings have intrinsic value. Each person deserves to be seen, heard, and understood. That’s why he co-founded BombBomb. BombBomb enables everyone in their organization to easily record, send, and track personal videos so that they can break through the digital noise, build human connection, and get a “yes” faster and more often.

What is BombBomb: The inspiration to establish the video-sharing platform came about in 2006. They sought to create a platform for sending marketing videos and text and making presentations while maintaining the human element in the communication. Their ideal customer profile was individuals with complex products and technological know-how but depended on other professionals for marketing communication. These included real estate agents, mortgage professionals, insurers, and lawyers, among other professionals. Other clientele include landscapers, consulting companies, and some Fortune 500 companies. Today, BombBomb has a large geographical reach in about 48 countries with over 100,000 companies. 

Unique features of BombBomb – BombBomb allows the user to know if the recipient actually received the sent message/email. It thus helps the marketer figure out their engagement and tailors the message appropriately. In addition, BombBomb gives the user greater confidence with their video message because they focus on the human dynamic in front of the camera. The user’s confidence grows with time as they create more and more bomb bombs. It reflects the growing importance of leveraging new communication media in the digital space to position as a known trusted source in a given niche.

BombBomb users’ usage curve: Our guest expert underscores the role of human reciprocity in today’s digital communication. Video content-sharing platforms such as BombBomb strive to eliminate the robotic feel of messages, whose authenticity ensures that the recipient offers feedback. As such, more people are willing to reciprocate the communication with more BombBomb usage. (There is no reciprocity for robots).

The journey of BombBomb products over the last five years: Darin says that they have experienced an increased uptake over the previous 5 years. During the Covid-19 pandemic period, the product experience increased usage because many people were forced to use video communication from their homes. However, the inconsistent nature of human beings meant that people returned to their old communication habits as the pandemic eased. (Consistency is how we win in business, but people are not often consistent). The company has introduced a new feature of BombBomb that offers marketing automation with evergreen video sequences with a human feel.

The role of artificial intelligence in BombBomb: Our guest insists that they are keen on maintaining the human element in their video and text communications. As such, they leverage artificial intelligence to be more efficient, consistent, relevant, and timely. For instance, AI can help generate video scripts for the target audience. Also, AI algorithms can help with transcribed data and comparing transcripts to figure out the most suitable for a given video. (AI is crucial in helping people to become the best they can be on the go for their industry using best practices).

The key metric for BombBomb: Our guest reveals that the key metric for BombBomb is the percentage of video played, which determines how much of the message the recipient received. As such, the company pays greater attention to the client’s recipient than the client. This is because the client desires to elicit more feedback from their target customer, and BombBomb helps in that regard.

Other areas of usage for BombBomb: Darin explains that BombBomb is also used on LinkedIn, Messenger, YouTube, and text. He says that their new feature enhances client experience through personalized messages. Also, they have integrated automated, real-time video where one email sequence can deliver different personalized emails to each recipient.

BombBomb in the next 5 years: Our guest says they seek to go a different direction of AI and automation by rehumanizing the way of doing business. In this regard, he desires to have his brand synonymous with human reciprocity without the robotic aspects that most organizations fall for. (Sales entails the transfer of passion and enthusiasm, which is a uniquely human being ability).

Key Time Codes

• (0:01) Introduction to today’s topic and guest expert
• (0:45) What is BombBomb:
• (04:57) Unique features of BombBomb
• (09:11) The curve of usage of BombBomb users
• (12:35) The journey of BombBomb product over the last 5 years
• (16:00) The role of artificial intelligence in BombBomb
• (20:16) Key metric for BombBomb
• (23:05) Other areas of usage for BombBomb
•  (25:25) BombBomb in the next 5 years (27:17) Darin’s contact information
• (27:38) Darin’s choice of brand ambassador

Transcription

[00:00:03.550] – Intro

You’re listening to the Merged Marketing podcast with me, Jason Hunt. The mission with this show is to discuss all things marketing, sales, and mindset. It’s my hope for entrepreneurs like you to get the most from your efforts so that you can focus on what you do best. Let’s go. You’re listening to Episode 185 of the Merged Marketing podcast. And in this episode, we’re talking about why human centered approaches are more important than ever. My guest on today’s show is Darren Dawson. Darren is on a mission to rehumanize the planet, and he wants to start with your business. He believes that human beings have intrinsic value. Each person deserves to be seen, heard and understood. That’s why he cofounded BOMBOM. Bombom enables everyone in the organization to easily record, send, and track personal videos so that they can break through the digital noise, build human connection, and get a yes faster and more often. I’ve used BOM BOM for years. In my previous agency, we lived on BOM BOM, a great platform for having that human interaction through email with our leads and our clients. There’s no better guess to talk about the topic of why human centered approaches are more important than ever.

[00:01:15.490] – Jason

With the emergence of AI, Darin is on the other side of the fence in focusing and driving hard and driving it home on why human centered approaches are so important, and they are always going to be a part of the future. Without further ado, let’s kick it to my chat with ,Darin Dawson

[00:01:15.490] – Jason

Darin welcome to the show.

[00:01:34.510] – Darin Dawson

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. It’s good to be here.

[00:01:36.910] – Jason

Yeah, definitely. Prior to going live here, we’re actually talking a little bit about the history of the company that Darren co founded, which is Bombb om. We used to use that platform ourselves, my agency back in 2017. And it’s funny, the connection that we just made there, my brother in law was actually one of the first original partners with Darren in launching it with some of the embedded platform.

[00:01:56.710] – Darin Dawson

What’s up, Tyler? If you’re listening. Yeah, I.

[00:01:58.790] – Jason

Have to share it to my brother in law, Tyler. Awesome. Let’s start, Darren, maybe tell us a bit about the inspiration behind BOM BOM and maybe give our audience an idea if they don’t know already what BOM BOM is.

[00:02:09.690] – Darin Dawson

Sure. Yeah. Bomb Bomb is a video messaging platform, so we make it very easy for you to create and send a video wherever you’re sending a text communication and then track it all. I think that’s important. So you might think, Create a video on my phone. You can, but your phone actually makes a very big video when you send it out in different ways. Sometimes it has a hard time getting to the other side, so we take care of that for you. And we help you know that the message was received by tracking how much the video is watched, when did they watch it, we alert you to all those things. Imagine a video message anywhere you’re sending a text message that’s LinkedIn, social media, email, text, Salesforce, HubSpot, any place you’re trying to send a text based message, we enable you to add video to that and track all your results. We had this idea back in, really in 2006. When I was like to do this, let’s take a role back in time. Imagine yourself back in 2006, you’re carrying a flip phone. The iPhone is thought it’s like Gen 1. It’s in September, I think of that year.

[00:03:12.420] – Darin Dawson

Other things are popular right now are this, what they call it, it was a camera. Do you remember this? With a USB sticking out. You didn’t really have digital cameras. All these things were new. Youtube was privately held. It was not yet purchased by Google. It was new. You were on My space and not Facebook, and your major search engine was you, Yahoo, not Google. That’s where we were. We thought, Connor and I, Mike, you’ll probably already thought, man, we were both in sales and marketing, and we thought it’d be better to send videos because we thought we were better in person as salespeople. We thought it’d be better to send videos than just text emails. We wanted to give our mini presentation on a video and use passion, enthusiasm, all these characteristics that salespeople have and transfer that. But at scale, how do we scale our time was basically the problem we were trying to solve. We thought somebody must be doing this and no one was back then. No one that wasn’t around. We’re like, We should do this. We’re always very entrepreneurial. We owned a business, we owned a marketing company together before.

[00:04:13.270] – Darin Dawson

We thought, Oh, God, we should do this. It’s going to be amazing. We knew nothing about tech startup or anything. Back then, you couldn’t go to school for entrepreneurism. You couldn’t do that. There wasn’t these tech startups like there is today. Saas wasn’t a term that was used. We set forth to build a tech company with no knowledge of how to do that. We do a bunch of our own personal cash and process. But at the end of the day, we figured it out and we created a bomb bomb. The idea there is be face to face more often, send videos instead of text, and be more human in your communication with folks. It’s interesting. It’s gone through some evolutions. I think it’s more relevant today than it even was then. Even with all now videos more ubiquitous, a lot of people using video in different ways. But we were early, to say the least. We started in real estate where I met your brother in law. We really worked a lot. We found very early that people who had a complex thing that they sold depended on repeat and referral business and were integral in the transaction, those three elements, that became our ICP, our ideal customer profile.

[00:05:20.800] – Darin Dawson

And that was realtors, mortgage professionals, insurance professionals, lawyers, all those types of things. You know about these things, but you hire someone to do them. And in turn, those people depend on repeat and for all business. So that was the genesis of how we started going. Canada, Europe, United States. So we’ve really jumped around a lot. And I think we’re now in 48 countries, over 100,000 companies using Bobb on them.

[00:05:45.640] – Jason

Wow. And so is it still predominantly real estate agents and mortgage brokers that are using the platform?

[00:05:51.520] – Darin Dawson

I would say that’s 40 % of the business. We have the landscaper and we have the Fortune 500 company and everywhere in between. So it’s a very large consulting companies that everyone knows by brand. And then we have an individual real estate agent or your landscaping company that uses BOM BOM.

[00:06:10.740] – Jason

So what would you say are some of the most unique features of BOM BOM compared to other platforms out there? You said the watch time, I think that’s very interesting, capturing the watch time of the videos of the users actually engaged in watching that video follow up. What are some other features that BOM BOM offers as a competitive advantage?

[00:06:28.280] – Darin Dawson

I’ll just stick on that for a second if I can. The idea when you send an email, you do a ton of email marketing, right? When you send that email, you know if they opened it, but you really don’t know if they read it. If it’s a text, right? Text email. What we can do for you is you can know your message was received. Now, if it was received and you didn’t get a response, you might want to work on that messaging to get a better response because that’s what we want out of marketing is response, usually, or we want engagement from that. I think we help what your engagement is and make that better to iterate on that with a better message down the road. So video does that for you. Bomb bomb does that for you. I think for bomb bomb, one of our biggest unique sign proposition is that we help you get over your fear of video. We’ve worked with hundreds of thousands of humans, and we realize that this is actually the problem. This is actually why you haven’t gotten a lot of videos in general in this type of business communication because people still worry about how they sound, how they look.

[00:07:29.170] – Darin Dawson

They want to make sure they come off professional. I think BOM BOM, we do. We’ve written two books on this topic. One’s called Rehumanize Your Business, one’s called Human Center Communication. We really focus on the human side of this, that voice inside your head that says, You don’t sound like that. You don’t look like that. We all feel this as human beings. In fact, right now, as I talk to you, the way I hear myself is not how you hear me. Then if I play this video back, my brain goes, You don’t sound like that. It’s almost like that. Creates this visceral, anti reaction to it. What I’m talking about right now, we talk about with every company we bring on to help them understand it’s okay. Send the video, get the reply. The reply is where the value is. If I send a video and I get a response that’s favorable, it actually releases endorphins. What’s even better is if you get a video in response because people love seeing and hearing. They like this human interaction. We actually get juiced from it. Like us hanging out talking before this, that’s the human interaction.

[00:08:34.660] – Darin Dawson

Oh, you know your brother? What? Like a small world. That’s human. What I want to do is help bring that in your business because I think I don’t know what you think about this, Jason. I bet you agree. People still buy from people they know and trust. At the end of the day, if you got two landscapers, talking about landscapers, you got two landscaping companies show up at your house and they’re both same price, same equipment, same design, whatever, it’s the same. How do you decide which one you’re going to go with? You like one more. And so if that’s sometimes what it comes down to, we got to change it up. We got to show up and build their own trust.

[00:09:16.690] – Jason

I love that. I preach that all the time, the importance of using social media to become that known, like and trusted source in your niche. And it’s a matter of leveraging tools, whether it’s Instagram Live, whether it’s BOM, using those tools to try to position yourself as that know like and trusted source. Darren, I think a byproduct of what you offer to a lot of those people that do not have confidence in front of the camera is the fact of the repetition and the practice that people get time and time again and getting comfortable in front of the camera. It’s interesting to see that person from the initiation stage, from creating the first bomb, to three months down the road creating bomb bombs, let’s say, daily for three months straight. You must see a huge curve in terms of the effectiveness of those videos and the confidence that they elicit in those videos.

[00:10:01.520] – Darin Dawson

One of my favorite things is to see a user’s first video, then they’re like, 50th because it’s such a big jump. And usually that evolution takes time. Everybody thinks that when they’re hearing this, it’s going to be like a magic pill. It’s not. It does take some time to get used to, but you can hone that crap. It’s such an edge over most times. If you’re listening, it’s going to be an edge over your competition because you’re just simply not doing it. One of the other problems that’s shown up since we started Bombb om is that everyone’s using marketing automation now. Everyone. Here’s the theory I have about this, Jason. When I get email today, after this is over with you and I, I go to my inbox and I’ll see what I got and I’ll get an email from someone. Do you ever think now that’s actually from a human being? Very rarely. We’re in the business. I’m extremely cynical, I know, but I think everyone else is onto this, too. But you don’t feel like that’s from a human. Ten years ago, if I was to send you an email, you would feel the need, even if you weren’t interested, you might feel the need to respond and say, I’m not interested.

[00:11:09.320] – Darin Dawson

That’s called reciprocity. It’s unique to humans. Humans have reciprocity. If I hit you up, you call me back. That’s built on a relationship that’s called reciprocity. What we’ve done with the proliferation of marketing automation is we diminished human reciprocity. I don’t feel the need to respond to you at all because I actually don’t believe it’s from a human, therefore, I owe you no reciprocity. There’s no reciprocity for robots. Are you with me? What you can do with a video that’s actually created for another person is create reciprocity. They feel that connection to the other person on the other side of the camera and say, Okay, I can tell I’m not interested or whatever, because they know in our marketing efforts is this good? Sometimes it’s as good sometimes as a yes. I need to know what the status is of this prospect. Do we need to continue to nurture what’s going on here? So many times it’s just not open or open rates are getting far smaller, our engagement rates are getting lower. It’s because we’ve just hit the nuclear option on just send them more stuff.

[00:12:09.200] – Jason

Yeah, I think that’s bang on because I’m in constant battle every single day in my inbox, deciphering the noise from what’s actually important. And not going to lie, I’m going to read every single email, I’ll read maybe two sentences and decide at that point.

[00:12:23.120] – Darin Dawson

Listen, no.

[00:12:24.170] – Jason

Exactly. And that’s the constant battle that I think most people are going through now is looking for the authentic mail or the mails that they actually care about. And that’s where I think there’s a huge advantage for your product. Now, Darren, I just want to go through the roller coaster that the product has probably went through over the course of the last five years because obviously, I’m sure you had an uptick in business when March 2020 hit. And then the aftermath of what happened afterwards, people then being more comfortable going out and maybe being at their computer less and having face to face conversations. Explain how that journey has went for BOM BOM over the last five years. And then it was.

[00:12:58.420] – Darin Dawson

Crazy walking this pandemic thinking, Oh, my God. This could be it for everybody. Some very well known colleagues calling me like, What are you doing? L aying off half the people? I’m like, Not yet. Not yet. But yeah, it’s tough, right? So for us, yeah, we did have a huge increase, of course, in usage in that time frame. So it turned out to be a good thing for us. People were jumping on, but you’re right, they get back into an older habit. So I really think for us, it comes down to habit forming and what are really age old salespeople problems or human problems. I believe that consistency is the undefeated champion of all time. Consistency is how we win in business, but we are never consistent. We are not. We’re not consistent as humans. You can see if I got a peloton adjacent to me right here. If I get on that thing every day, I would meet my health goals. Just even the amount that I have set for myself. But I don’t do it, even though I know it’s better for me and I know it works. So in pandemic, we were forced to use video.

[00:14:03.940] – Darin Dawson

They had to. Stuck in their basement, they got us in the video. Then I just got out of that habit, or I didn’t create a full habit. I think that’s the thing. We often in business, in sales, in marketing, whatever it might be, we don’t do the things we know we should that will make our businesses successful because we haven’t created a habit and formed a process around it and made it just how we do it around here. So I think that really… So yes, people did fall back into their old ways of being inconsistent and not doing as much as they should. What we’ve actually tried to do is of late, as we’ve rolled out a new iteration of Bomb Bomb, it’s a standalone product that you can go with that installs automation within CRMs. And so we ride the marketing automation. We actually humanize your marketing automation effort. So it allows you to stick a placeholder piece of tech in there, and then it finds the relevant video for the salesperson that needs to be shown. I won’t go into it’s technical, but we’ve tried to solve for this problem because we know it’s a human problem, right?

[00:15:03.640] – Darin Dawson

We always have the top 10 % of salespeople that crush it. They always make their quarter. They always knock it out of the park. How can we make the 90 % actually act like them? So this is the reason for marketing automation, by the way. This is why we’re sending on these emails that say the same thing so we can test and automate it. We brought video into that and then it automated space. So you can hit that automation every time and have it be personal using evergreen type videos, videos that you record once. You can use it again and again and again in the process. So we’ve implemented that as a response to what you’re bringing up there.

[00:15:37.890] – Jason

Who’s doing your social media? Is anybody doing your social media? Why aren’t we doing your social media? Since 2016, my agency has been managing communities, creating content, and managing our clients’ social media platforms to keep them top of mind with their customers along with their prospects. Social media is probably somewhere on your priority list as a busy business owner, but it’s never going to be near the top. For us at Merged Media, we ensure your social media is at the top of our list, making sure you’re staying top of mind with those clients and prospects. If you want a creative and professional agency working on your social media, then go on over to merged. Ca and book a call today. That’s M E R GED. Ca. Okay, so now I love where this conversation is going because now we’re getting into the future.

[00:16:28.150] – Darin Dawson

Of.

[00:16:29.220] – Jason

Communication and essentially what Bomb B om’s places in that. So now we’re talking about automated sequences where, like you said, you have the evergreen piece of video content that looks like it’s evergreen. It doesn’t look like an automated piece of content because it’s human element.

[00:16:44.840] – Darin Dawson

Now, how does AI.

[00:16:46.380] – Jason

Come into the mix? Are you using AI at all in any way with Bomb B om? How is that being integrated?

[00:16:52.240] – Darin Dawson

Yeah. So a couple of things I have a lot to say on this topic. I’ll keep it short. I think here’s who I want to be in the AI world. I think that I’m not against it. I think there’s a lot of great uses for it. I’m a chat GPT for subscriber. I’m in that. I’ve been trying to think about how we could use that in our own product. We could talk about that. But for BOMBOM, I want that our brand to be associated with. When you get an email from BOMBOM, it’s a real human. I’m going to take that because I think that we can… I am not for creating videos where my shoulders don’t move and just my mouth doesn’t. It sounds like I know it’ll get better, but if you don’t… So what I’m talking about there is if you’ve seen some of these videos that are out there that are AI driven that may sound like me, but look, human beings can tell. And I think we got a lot of road to ho before. I’m not going to be able to tell. Okay? And so I’m going to take this antithetical approach to saying, when you get one from us, our company, you know it’s a human being behind that message.

[00:17:59.820] – Darin Dawson

That’s how I’m thinking about now. Where I think AI helps us in our customers is what to say on the video. If you get this message in, can we populate and promulgate a script that instantly helps you to know how to respond? Pick out the trigger points, focus on this. Because if we can read transcription of a text, we transcribe every video we have. I want to really instigate more reply with video. I want to get more people going back and forth with video, but using AI to help you formulate the best response for what they’re saying. So AI can read that entire email and be like, They really want to know about this. To me, that helps my sales team to really dial in on what to say at the right moment, right time, be relevant, timely, and be better. So I think AI needs to help us, one, be more efficient, but be better and be consistent, back to that consistency, consistent in our roles. That’s how I see it playing out for us.

[00:19:00.460] – Jason

I think that’s so important. I think you hit on a really good point there when you talk about being more effective and efficient. So whether it’s using AI to generate those scripts.

[00:19:08.820] – Darin Dawson

For.

[00:19:09.590] – Jason

Videos, which can help overcome the fear of creating the video in the first place, if you have a script to rehearse and go off of, that’s helpful. But also what about following an actual… There’s the element of communication, but almost understanding the effectiveness of a specific video and having AI compare certain transcripts to see which one actually works best and maybe feeding back to the AI algorithm to be like, here’s the optimal script for you and the audience that you’re after.

[00:19:35.430] – Darin Dawson

I think that’s key because we have all this transcribed data and we’re holding that. Of course, we have different customers that we can share it or we can’t. I think that’s one of the things that Bomb B om is the most compliant, well regulated, a lot of regulated industries and finance and mortgage and things. I think, yeah, it’s a really good point. We have all this tabulated data and I think helping people be the best at what they can be on the fly for their industry using best practices day one. Because getting the team to all act in the same… We hire these sales coaches, we hire all these things to try and get them to do it, but then getting them to do it is the hard part. Again, consistency. How can we be more consistent? How can we get the 90 % to 80 % of our team to act like that top 10 that always hits the number? Ai helps us do that.

[00:20:28.000] – Jason

If there’s one thing I swear by, it’s this. To be as effective as you possibly can be, you’ve got to focus on one thing, just the one thing. This is why I merged my social media agency with an SEO company so we could become more versatile in the digital marketing space. If you’re in the business and you’re dealing with multiple contacts for all of your digital assets and taking up a whole ton of your time, that doesn’t need to happen. Contact Merged Media and we’ll set up a call and see if there’s a fit. We’re going over to merge. Ca, M E R GED. Ca. For Bonbon, what’s the most important metric if you were to analyze a campaign or a client? What’s the top metric? Is it the watch rate or percentage watched, open rates? What is it for Bonbon?

[00:21:17.520] – Darin Dawson

For me, it’s % of video played. I know my message was received, and we spend probably far more time thinking about our clients’ recipients than we do our clients. The experience that we enable to your client, that’s what I care about the most because I know that response and the engagement is actually what you want out of your campaign. So how can I move the needle on that more? So the experience when you watch the video bomb, bomb, bomb, I have a transcription. I can do that bilingual for you French Canadians. So we can do it in multiple languages. We can have a call to action layered on top of the video. You have a comment bar for the video. You can just simply like the video. You can click on the logo. What else can we drive that gets you what you want, which is join us on this webinar, follow my podcast, whatever it might be. What’s the call to action? How can we help you drive that call to action better than any of our communication or using? That’s what we get up and figure out every day at Bomb Bump. And then how to easily use video.

[00:22:25.950] – Darin Dawson

But moreover, your recipient experience is important to us.

[00:22:29.650] – Jason

Interesting. Are you saying that you can record a bomb bomb video and have it translated to another language?

[00:22:35.590] – Darin Dawson

No, it’s the same language today.

[00:22:37.490] – Jason

It’d be.

[00:22:38.790] – Darin Dawson

Cool if we had a voiceover, dude. Listen, we’re starting to test that. So can we speak French and have it be translated into English? You can transcribe the text part, but you can’t make the video go English. But right now, we’re transcribing in multiple languages. So do you speak French? The transcription is in French. But we’re working towards the transcription being in English or whatever you want. This is big here in Canada and up there in Quebec. Imagine you’re working up there, but you have a colleague in Vancouver, they speak English. How do we help you communicate better? We’re about rehumanizing your business. I want people to build better relationships. We have to figure this out. We started to work on this with one of our customers. We’re even thinking through that French video, English transcription, if you so desire, so you can just toggle that to be our English, German, help people communicate across these things.

[00:23:38.580] – Jason

What are some use cases for bomb bomb outside of just the email? Are people using their bomb bomb videos, obviously for placeholders on their website. Are they using it for any paid advertising and things like that? Are you seeing that happen?

[00:23:49.140] – Darin Dawson

Yeah. Linkedin is a huge use case. We’re really anywhere that personal communication is going or in messenger and Facebook, of course, text. Make it easy to just text the video. Have that same experience I was describing. But I think that new product that we stood up was interesting about that is it basically enables you to put personalized videos, think about on your website in a mobile SDK. If you’re a company that shares an app with a consumer, perhaps you want a personal experience for that, that product enables you to do that. We’re really experimenting with this central depository of a to do list for your videos, but those videos live in your CRM, your website, your mobile SDK. Anywhere you want a video to enhance that client experience, we can enable that for your team to simply go in. So your team is not having… Or your admin team is not copying, pasting multiple videos, or your sales reps, your customer success reps aren’t messing around in those text stacks either. We just want one place, you make the videos and they go show up in these places. We actually had a patent on this technology back in 2013, and we called it real time email.

[00:24:59.790] – Darin Dawson

As a marker, you’ll dig this. It was supposed to be… Imagine in the US, we have a Memorial Day weekend coming up, so you could have a Memorial Day sale when it counts down. So if I opened up that email, let’s say five days left to the Memorial Day sale, and then you opened up two days later, let’s say three days left. So it just was real time. It was always giving you the most relevant thing. So we took that and we enabled it into this, what we call automated real time video. So you could have a 1,000 sales reps on one email sequence and every recipient of it would have a different experience. It’s a big deal. We’re pretty pumped about it. We started rolling this out. Rolled out into six different industries so far. So far so good. Very cool.

[00:25:42.740] – Jason

So, Darren, if you were going to look into the crystal ball five years down the road, where’s the ball?

[00:25:48.090] – Darin Dawson

Again, I’m going to double back to that. I think now more than ever that I want to be the validated double stamped that’s a real human when you get up. I want my brand to be ubiquitous with that is people engaging with people, no robot. I’m not against it. I just think there’s a play to be the other side of that and be uniquely that you have reciprocity owed when you get a bomb video. So you’re looking at.

[00:26:21.780] – Jason

This now, the whole emergence of ChappGPT AI. This is a great opportunity for you to lean in to the core mission of bomb bomb in the first place. The other side.

[00:26:32.730] – Darin Dawson

I want to still rehumanize your business because everyone’s leaning so hard automating all of that. If you’re in the sales business or you’re trying to… The sales is the transfer of passion and enthusiasm. Now, again, we can probably get there, but look, you hire salespeople and you interview them based on their ability to do what? Build relationships, communicate it fashionably, present your product, their reputation for sales. All that is based on their ability as human beings. So I don’t get how you’re going to bottle that up. At the end of the day, someone’s got to close the deal and that’s still going to be a human being. And I think that’s done because they trust the person and trust is also like reciprocity is a uniquely human thing. Trust is going to build through humans. We really don’t even trust animals. We trust eyes. I love it. Darren, this has been awesome. We could probably talk for.

[00:27:27.620] – Jason

A couple of hours about this topic, but if our audience has any questions for you, what’s the best way for them to get in touch?

[00:27:36.160] – Darin Dawson

I’m easy to find on LinkedIn, but don’t send me an automated message. Just say, Hey, I heard you’re on the podcast. I love what you had to say.

[00:27:46.260] – Jason

And I’ll be happy to connect with you and start a community and start a relationship there. Awesome. Darren, we end every episode with the same question.

[00:27:55.410] – Darin Dawson

That question is this, if you could choose one person dead or alive to represent bomb bomb, who would.

[00:28:01.550] – Jason

It be and why? Jesus. I guess I have to say Jesus.

[00:28:05.560] – Darin Dawson

That would be the ubiquitous answer of all time, right? Yeah, for sure. Be surprised, 185 episodes and I think you’re only the.

[00:28:13.470] – Jason

Second person that said Jesus. Wow, I’m.

[00:28:15.720] – Darin Dawson

About the human experience. I think he was my banner.

[00:28:19.410] – Jason

Holder for that. Love it. Awesome. Darren, thanks again for your time. Thanks, man. Real quick, guys, if you are active on Instagram or TikTok, I encourage you to go on over and give my personal profile a follow @jhunt official, J AY, HUNT, OFF, ICAAL. Over there on Instagram and TikTok, I’m posting my favorite highlights from the Merged Marketing podcast, along with some of the highlights from my speaking engagements overseas as well as locally. Ton of value. Go on over and check it out at Jhan official. I’d like to thank you for listening to the Merged Marketing podcast and I invite you to subscribe so you never miss an episode of the Merged Marketing podcast. One of the best ways to do that is to add us to your Instagram @mergedmedia. M E D M E D IA. Go on over there, give Merged Media follow and subscribe and never miss an episode. Thank you so much for listening. We’ll talk to you soon.

Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please check out our previous episode on Strategies for Maximizing Your Time at Local Business Networking Events with John Reiser