The Virtual CMO
The Virtual CMO podcast discusses growth marketing strategies for SMBs and how new technologies are improving marketing effectiveness. Hosted by Eric Dickmann, founder of The Five Echelon Group and a fractional CMO, the podcast focuses on building strategic marketing plans and executing successful growth marketing programs. It includes interviews with industry thought leaders who share their experiences and insights. The show highlights new marketing automation platforms, AI-enabled tools, and other cutting-edge technologies that can enhance marketing campaigns.
The Virtual CMO
Digital Disruption and Rethinking Business Models with Terry Jones
In episode 103, host Eric Dickmann interviews Terry Jones. Terry is a travel and IT veteran, serial entrepreneur, speaker, and author of "On Innovation" and "Disruption Off." He is also known as the Digital Disruptor who founded five startups with two billion-dollar IPOs -Kayak and Travelocity.
He has served on 17 corporate boards and his reputation has established him as a thought leader on innovation and disruption. As a speaker, author, venture capitalist, and board member, Terry has been helping companies use the tools and techniques he has developed to keep succeeding in our fast-changing world. He has presented in over 25 countries to more than 300 companies, helping companies keep up with the changing trends.
In addition to writing and speaking, Terry currently serves as a Director for SonicWall and is Chairman of the Board for the Camping and Education Foundation.
For more information and access to the resources mentioned in this episode, visit:
https://fiveechelon.com/digital-disruption-business-models-s7ep3/
A fractional CMO can help build out a comprehensive marketing strategy and execute targeted campaigns designed to increase awareness and generate demand for your business...without the expense of a full-time hire.
The Five Echelon Group - Fractional CMO and strategic marketing advisory services designed for SMBs looking to grow. Learn more at:
Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business. Hey, Terry, welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm so glad you could join us today. I'm excited about this interview. I've been thinking about it for awhile because we're going to get a chance to talk about a wide variety of topics, everything from startups and marketing to digital disruption and rethinking business models and, you know, kind of, as we get started today, I just love it. If you could give the audience a real brief history of where you come from and your real claim to fame.
Terry Jones:Well, you know I was a history major in college and I thought I was going to Vietnam. And luckily I got rejected from the draft. I would've gone if I had to, and so I didn't know what I was going to do. I had no job and nobody's hiring history majors, and my college roommate, his dad was a pilot for TWA airlines. He said, I got a free pass. And if I go to grad school, I'm going to lose that pass. So he said, I'm going around the world for a year. And so three of us spent a year going around. Which is a great postgraduate education learn a lot, came back. And I told my dad, I wanted to get in the travel business. He wasn't thrilled. He just paid for college education and I became a travel agent. And six months in, my manager said, let's go do a startup. That was my first startup. We started a travel agency focused on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. And in five years we built that into the 50th largest travel agency in the United States.
Eric Dickmann:Okay. Oh.
Terry Jones:And then I got interested in computing, and I jumped to a company that sold us our back office computer that was doing ticketing and itineraries, and reports, and that kind of stuff. And that company got sold to American Airlines. So suddenly I was in American Airlines, it's been 18 years, they're moving up in marketing, and IT, eventually became CIO. So I was CIO at American Airlines and I lost my hair doing that, managing all those computers. We had a little online product called Easy Sabre. Then we've been on AOL and CompuServe and Prodigy, and you could make a booking, but you couldn't get a ticket. You had to go to a travel agent to get a ticket, cause travel agents were our distribution. And the travel agents finally woke up after about six years and said, you know, you're selling bullets to the enemy. You really should shut that down. You don't want to do that. And Bob Crandall, our CEO said, No, we're going to keep it, but give it to Jones. He's over in IT, he used to be a travel agent. We'll hide it over there.
Eric Dickmann:Okay.
Terry Jones:Well, I got it and it was 1996. The first thing I did was put it on the internet. And it took off like a weed in the spring. It was just those tremendous demand. So I did that for, I eventually said, I don't want to be CIO anymore, I want to run Travelocity. And they said, oh, it's only 12 people, you know, it's kind of stiff. I said, no, I think it'll be big. So eventually I ran that full time. We spun it out of Saber, we took it public, and I ran it for six years. And then Saber eventually decided to buy it back because they thought it was critical to their future. I left because I was pretty sure they would screw it up, which they did. We took it public for 1.2 billion. They eventually sold it to Expedia for 280 million.
Eric Dickmann:Oh, wow.
Terry Jones:So they screwed it up because they that's a story in itself. And then I went on and I was a speaker and an author, and I was working at a VC firm and we had the idea of vertical search and travel. Why isn't there just a search firm? And the VC, a great guy, Joel Cutler said I'll fund it. And we went out and find a great CEO and CTO, and that became kayak.com. And I was a chairman there for eight years. And we took that company public, and then we sold it to Priceline for 1,000,000,008. So that was another fun run.
Eric Dickmann:Oh, I bet.
Terry Jones:I've done another startup in AI. That one ran for about four years and failed, didn't work. So you know, I've had five startups now and two unicorns. And today, I'm an investor and a speaker. I speak on innovation and digital disruption. I've got two books, one is Disruption Off here. It doesn't look too good with a green screen, and it dissolves. I help startups, I was just on the phone with a travel startup a little while ago last hour working with them, they're just about to launch. So I've had a lot of different careers and it's been a ball, and I'm still learning and doing new things.
Eric Dickmann:It sounds like it you've had a chance to be part of some companies that are really household names. And what's interesting to me is you know, working with startups today, and I know in my business, I work with a lot of young companies too. Not everybody realizes that they have something that is going to end up being disruptive. When you first kind of took your product to the internet, took Travelocity out there. Did you really see the disruptive potential of that product, or was it later on that really it kind of came to be?
Terry Jones:Well, we didn't think it would be as big as it became.
Eric Dickmann:Yeah.
Terry Jones:We knew that people liked to book online and we have proof of that because we'd had Easy Saber around for years and we had maybe 300,000, 400,000 customers. But you know, pretty soon with Travelocity had 40 million people using it. Um, We didn't have that idea and Wall Street did not believe it at all. We played to empty rooms. So when we went public, I mean the stock held up, but they didn't think it would be big. Everybody saw, oh, it's going to be E-toys, it's going to be E-bay. It's going to be shopping, it's going to be something else, or the delivery companies that were very big. I'm trying to remember the name of the ones that went bust. Travel is the largest part of e-commerce. It's harder than the next three categories combined. It's so big that they don't even put it in the list anymore. It's just separate from retail, which is retail. So no, we didn't know it'd be that big, but we knew it would be. And it just took off like a weed in the spring because what had happened, remember people used to book their own travel, pretty much airline travel because prices were fixed, every airline charged the same price. Then with deregulation, traveling has doubled the number of them because you needed to go to a place to get priced. And that's why we put computers in travel agents, but those agents were adding a lot of value. They're just listening and typing, and giving you a price. They weren't the people who explained what it's like to go to the Riviera and those people are still around, but the people who just typed they're all gone because customer said, well, we'd rather do it ourselves, it's easier. And that's why it took off. It's a business where the price is very volatile. You only do it a couple times a year. It's pretty easy to get online and you know, you could see a picture of a hotel. Which a consumer could never do. They didn't have the hotel book, they couldn't see the pictures, they didn't know what it was going to look like. They relied on the agent to explain it to them. And sometimes the agent just might've distorted it.
Eric Dickmann:Well, I also find it interesting that you talk about the fact that it got spun off into a separate company and then later on was reacquired. And I see so often that sometimes larger companies don't seem to know what they have. That sometimes innovation inside a larger company, just can't come to fruition because they're too hooked on their established business models. so was that the fact that they bought it back
Terry Jones:They're addicted to it.
Eric Dickmann:Yeah.
Terry Jones:You know my first book, which is still out and it's available on Amazon in paperback and in the audio book in Kindle, it's called On Innovation, and iit's a 72, 3 page chapters. It's a very fast read, it's very snackable. And it talks about culture and team, and funding, you know, the typical topics. But there's a whole section in there about how Travelocity managed to survive inside America. And it was having our own culture, moving out of the building, having a separate budget, really, they allowed me to treat it as a separate business. And a lot of people tried to kill it and we were losing money and they were making money. And they wanted the money, our money, so they could make more money, and the chairman protected us. So it's very hard for large companies and I've been lecturing about this for years and I go to companies to try to teach them how to do it. Cause it's hard. It's like a new plant that you plan in the spring. You gotta put it in the greenhouse, you got to protect them from the snow and once it grows up, then you can decide where you're going to plant it. Am I going to spin it off? Am I going to make a division? At REI, the head of e-commerce told me, when e-commerce grew up, we disbanded the internet division and poured it into the organization and everybody was responsible for it. And that's the way it should be in retail today. But in the beginning they had to keep it separate because people wanted to kill it. Walmart does a famous story that Walmart for a while, put walmart.com and all the plastic shopping bags and the retail stores threw those bags away because they didn't want the.com to succeed.
Eric Dickmann:Really?
Terry Jones:Yeah, because it competed with them. They thought, instead of saying, Hey, we're all in one company here. So it is very hard to do and on innovation can help you learn how to do it.
Eric Dickmann:Well, and I also see and read stories where a situation like what you described happens, you build up a company, you end up exiting the company, something happens to it. And then founders oftentimes go out and recreate that company all over again. And did something similar with KAYAK, but it wasn't the same. When you decided to go into that next business. What did you see that had changed that made you sort of pivot your thinking in a way to find that open market space? Well, that was kind of what we were talking about before we went on the air is you know, how do you penetrate it in a saturated market? Yeah. We had a dinner one night and it was the former number two at Orbit, the former number two to Expedia, and me to the CEO of Travelocity and VC. And we talked about the fact that you know, most e-commerce companies only converted at 5% of arrivals into sales. Now, if Walmart had a big back door that was 95%, the size of the front door, and 95% of the people walked out without nothing, their stock would crash. But in e-commerce is like, oh, that's okay, which is crazy. But that's the way it is. And we say, well, where the hell do those people go? Most of them were using us as a search engine, but we're more comfortable buying directly from the airline or hotel. So we said, well, why don't we just create a site that does that? A site that searches everything, but when you click, you buy direct. And consumers loved it because they saw all the comparative prices, but they got what they believe was safety and security that you weren't dealing with an agent if their flight got screwed. You know they weren't that the airline wasn't saying, well, you'll have to call Expedia. They liked the idea. And we also differentiated that ithe product can have a very high virality because it was screamingly fast. It was way faster than the competition. And you know, microseconds make sales on the internet. And we also had all the filters, you know? You want first-class, you want coach? What time do you want to go? What time do you want to get back? I'll see all that stuff could be nobody else had. So we were differentiated, we were fast, and we looked at what the customer wanted and that's exactly what they wanted. Well, it's interesting to me about what you said there is a lot of times people go into a certain segment of a business. You were in travel, but they look at it so holistically as opposed to looking at. what you have just described which was a very specific niche, you know? We could provide a product that does searching, but lets people hook it through the platforms that they're most comfortable with. When you advise startups and younger companies today, do you see that as a problem that they're looking at things too holistically, they're not sort of looking at where they can find that niche?
Terry Jones:You don't have to change the world. Look, Apple did not invent the MP3 player, the cellphone or the watch. They're the leading seller of all those now. They just made it better
Eric Dickmann:Yes.
Terry Jones:Way better to use. So you know, you can win by disrupting experience, Apple disrupted Nokia, Spotify disrupted Apple, Uber disrupted Yellow Cab, you know? How did they do that? By changing either the quality of the product or the way we use the product. So kind of to change the world and most inventions are built on the backs of other inventors. So Travelocity was built on the saber system, which was in travel agents. We just put a consumer coat of paint on it and made it consumer-friendly. KAYAK was built on those same engines. You know, but said, Hey, we're going to do it a different way. And we're going to connect directly to the airlines to make a booking. Airbnb said, well, there are always hotels out there, you'd call them vacation rentals. Let's make it easy for people to book those, they already exist. Uber did not change the experience of sitting in a limo. I went once and spoke to the American limo company in the early days of Hulu, and the first question was, how do we compete with Uber? I said get some bloody software. Yeah, of course you have the drivers, you have the brand, you don't have any software. got to call you, you send me this paper confirmation I, can't find your guy at the airport, he's holding up this piece of his daughter's homework with my name on it. Come on! It's the experience all you have to do.
Eric Dickmann:And people want to know what they were going to be charged, right? You know, they didn't want that
Terry Jones:Yeah. they wanted to know the price upfront and when you're going to be here. And where I can find you, and what your rating is, right. Are you a good driver, bad driver, I mean look, I was working with a startup earlier today and they have a product. I won't tell you what it is, but it can be inserted in someone else's website in one line of code. And it really changed the experience. And I'll tell you my last startup changed the user experience, but we made the hotel really change their website, and nobody wanted to change it even though they could get more smell. We got a list of things to do. We said, Hey, it's one line of code, try it out. They might have done it. So you gotta make it drop dead easy. I mean think about how Salesforce was successful because their product was so cheap that I could sit in the sales department and buy it, and put it on my expense account. I didn't have to argue with IT. I just paid$25 a month and I could use Salesforce. It was super cheap on the individual license basis that allowed them to sell from a boiler room, right? And get people directly. And then it became a behemoth cause they snuck in without having to go through the gatekeeper. Sometimes, that's really important because if you're going to sell through the gatekeeper, he's gonna not let you in. His purchasing job is to not let you buy stock.
Eric Dickmann:Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast. But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level? If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO consulting service may be a great fit for you. We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step. We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads. How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers. How to strategically package and position your products and services. How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business. To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services. Now back to the podcast. Well and you know, when we talk about things like disruption, you know we're talking about disruptive technologies, new ideas that create some really innovative things in the marketplace, but we also have all these external disruptions, right? We're living through a 2020, which was COVID locks down, changes in the economy, and this year it's been even more disruption in different ways, chip shortages, whatnot. So when
Terry Jones:I just got off the phone with a board of the CEO of a company I'm on the board of, and we were talking about chip shorts. you know, he made his numbers for the quarter, but he said, I don't know what I'm going to do in the fourth quarter. And think about it, one of the issues is everything today wants to be cloud connected. Everybody looks at Tesla and says, look at how they delight their customer. Tesla is not the best, most reliable car out there, but everybody loves it because like I have one, I get new a new car every month. So you're seeing connected trackers, connected thermometers, connected everything, which means everything has to have a chip in it that didn't have a chip in it, and we're running out of chips. So, you know, it's been interesting to watch the reaction to COVID because I, for years lecture on disruption and I get people to try to see the disruption is coming and they don't believe it. Well now they all believe it because it was a burning platform is a do or die moment. There was a major retailer at a 10 month program to get to a curbside delivery. They did it in two days.
Eric Dickmann:Hmmm.
Terry Jones:So you know, the boss won't forget that.
Eric Dickmann:Yes.
Terry Jones:You know people are making decisions, breaking the glass, getting it done because they had to. Well, that's an attitude you should try to have all the time.
Eric Dickmann:Do you think that's the key to really being effective when disruptions happen? You know, because business is cyclical, right? It has ups and downs, peaks and valleys, and you have to sort of understand whether this valley is really just that and it's gonna pick back up, or if it's a trough and you've got to make some real changes, otherwise you are never going to come back up again.
Terry Jones:Well, look, innovation and disruption are two sides of the same coin. The only reason you call it a disruption is because you didn't do it. If you did it, it would have been an innovation, wouldn't that be nice, but you did. And you know, I talk about that in Disruption Off, so you can't wait for the train to run you over. You have to be experimenting and that's what's so hard for big companies is to do what we did with Travelocity, and lose a bunch of money before we made a ton of money, it's hard because you've got quarterly earnings and you want to squeeze that lance out of productivity, out of the factory, instead of saying, I'm going to take$20 million over here and I can blow it. And you have to kill projects, not people because you put a bunch of people on a new project and it failed, you don't demote them. It was probably a bad idea or what's the number one reason startups fail? Market fit. The market didn't want it. Well, that's not my fault. We thought the market wanted it and we didn't. So go take those people and promote them, and then you'll get more experimentation because look, VCs know now that's 7 out of 10 startups fail, and only a few were huge hits. But corporations don't think that way, you know every product has to be a success. It won't be. And when you're in the midst of a disruption, you've got AI and 3D printing and drones, and all the new technology that's coming, this the fourth generation of industry. You got to change and experiment, or you're going to die.
Eric Dickmann:You're kind of preaching to the choir here. We've talked about on this show, how the CMO is one of the shortest lived executives within most corporations, because they're
Terry Jones:close to CIO
Eric Dickmann:close to CIO, especially in this day with ransomware threats and whatnot. But it's often because they're not given enough runway to experiment, to try different things, to see what works.
Terry Jones:Well, that's right. Although CMOs probably experiment more than anybody else in the corporation. My last startup, we were using natural language search in travel. So instead of saying, having to say, where are you going and when? I want to go to Aruba, June 6th, you could say, you know, I want to go into the Caribbean this fall and I want to have great golf in a good spot. And boy did that change conversion, I mean it really works, but we were selling to CIOs, and they had a list of milestones. So we finally dumped that and instead we built conversational commerce into ads. So you could have an, uh, an a double-click size ad frame next to an article about Aruba, and it would say, Hey, want to talk about Aruba? And you can say, yeah, I want to go to river the fall. We'll give the answer, you can book it right there. That started to take off, unfortunately, we're already out of money in the company because CMOs do experiment. They're always trying to figure out which half of their advertising dollar works and what I can do better. So I think they're more risk takers than others, maybe that's why their term is short.
Eric Dickmann:Yep, I think so.
Terry Jones:But you do have to experiment and I think. But you also have to really focus on the value of the product. A lot of people, when we started Travelocity, we were doing brand advertising on radio, TV, billboard cause that's the way the world was in 1996. We could buy banner ads online, but there was no search. And people would come to me and say, oh, let's go to France and have a great ad. And we'll show people why they should go to France. I said, I can't afford to get people to travel. My aunt has to be about why Travelocity is a better way to book your travel. And of course they didn't want to do that because the crew wanted to go to France, right? Well, have wonderful hazy pictures and all that. And I came out of an ad family. My dad was an Executive VP at Leo Burnett. And you think of their ads, I mean he had the Maytag account, the loneliest man in town is the Maytag repairman. We're reliable. We had an Allstate account. You're in good hands with Allstate, you're safe here. It's about what the product does and you know, even in beer, they focus on taste, right? And sometimes you lose that, I want to be so creative within the Clio that you don't have a solid ad. I mean we talked with Travelocity about what it did, and then you're the first out with seat maps. You can click and pick your seat.
Eric Dickmann:Something so simple, right?
Terry Jones:You can see a picture of a hotel. You could even see a live, I had the first web cam at a hotel ever. You can see it live. Yeah. that stuff is very important.
Eric Dickmann:You can't underestimate the power of the user experience.
Terry Jones:Well, the experience are what it does for me. You know, why is it better? You know, you think of those flex seal ads, a guy builds a boat for God's sake, but it gets the point across.
Eric Dickmann:Absolutely.
Terry Jones:And Travelocity, last year we did a lot of PR. And startups, you know, a PR grill marketing is a great way to go. I mean, we build a map for Travelocity that was deepest snow fall with the lowest airfare. Where can I go to ski? Loved it, got all this press. Not many people used it, but man they get impressed. You know, we did a lot tons of Beatles. Like we invented flight paging. We're the first people to page you when your flight was late. And it was pagers in those days.
Eric Dickmann:Right.
Terry Jones:Um, Or we did one, what is a fare war? You know, what does it mean? I showed people fighting over dresses at Macy's and said, yeah, it's sort of the same thing, but you don't hear it in travel. So we'll send you an email when there's a fare war going on. And we released that info and cable news is so hungry to run anything. They would run it. 9-11, I realized that people wouldn't know how long the security lines would be because security profile have changed totally. So I put guys in 20 airports with stopwatches and they were timing the lines and we had a moving graph on the homepage of Travelocity. Well, I got picked up by CNN and they called me and said, would you come on TV every hour and tell us about what's going on at the airports for two days or so? Oh, let me think about that. Yeah, I'll do that.
Eric Dickmann:That's incredible.
Terry Jones:And you know, one of the things you think about, and I've seen that Zebra is doing this and the Zebra, the insurance side is run by a guy from KAYAK. We were the first site to have data. So we knew where everybody was going. Airlines knew it, but only on their routes, we knew it for the whole country. So we would release data all the time. Where's the lowest price that everybody's going after today? Where's the hottest destination in the US? All of that stuff. We could turn that out and I built a TV studio in Travelocity way before the easy way we'd built ours during COVID. This was like an ISDN.
Eric Dickmann:Oh, yeah.
Terry Jones:But I could go online in 60 seconds if somebody called and say, what's the best fare in the world today? would be there on TV. If you have unique data like the insurance industry or somewhere else where you're a consolidator, use that in your PR to get noticed.
Eric Dickmann:So yeah.
Terry Jones:lGo ahead.
Eric Dickmann:No. I was going to say, you know you mentioned AI before and that you did a startup around their natural language, speech recognition, things like that. Big data, you know of all these kinds of technologies that you're talking about here, what gets you most excited? What do you really wish that you had when you started Travelocity or KAYAK that you think would have even propelled those products further?
Terry Jones:Well, I think AI is the most powerful technology coming, and it's like, BASF used to have ads that say, we don't make the carpet, we make it stronger. We don't make repaint, we make it brighter. Well, AI is an additive to lots of products. So AI plus 3D printing is exceptionally powerful, right? AI and drones makes them much more useful. And AI in the consumer interface is extremely powerful. I mean, voice is the new UI. And you think of the questions we ask Alexa. Well, but you can't ask most apps that question. You can't speak to Travelocity that way and ask a general question, and get a good answer. So I think that's really important. We use natural language search, as I've said in my AI project, but we would also, when you showed up, we used AI in all millions of pictures. So we'd show you the picture of the golf course, not the front of the hotel. You want to go golfing. And then reviews would be about the spa without you having to look through a thousand reviews. It can make it so easy for the consumer. So I'm disappointed that Travelocity is sort of dead last in the adoption of AI in major industries, wish it was better. But, it's a very, very powerful, new technology that is disrupting business. And what people forget is these systems, it's called machine learning, they continuously learn. So if your competitor has ML and you don't, he's getting smarter every day and you're just sitting right where you are, and you'll never catch him.
Eric Dickmann:It's amazing how many businesses you can talk to that aren't really doing anything with the data that they're collecting today. Let alone putting it through some sort of an AI engine or anything else that is going to give them meaningful insights. There's so much that you might know about your customers or your prospects. Yeah, you've got to it.
Terry Jones:Look at Financial coming out of China, they had a big snafu with the government, but you know, they started as sort of PayPal for Alibaba and then they spun out and they organized their company around their customers. So then they started doing loans, they started doing all kinds of financial instruments, they started doing credit cards, they have like 18 businesses because they focused on the customer and say, well, this is all we know about the customer. What else can we sell them in the financial area? But so many people are organized around the product instead of around the customer relationship that they built. If you have a strong customer relationship, you can sell them lots more things. You know, you look at John Deere who has cloud connected tractors. Well they don't have to wait for the annual meeting for the dealer to tell them what they think the farmer is doing, they know every minute. And now they can say, well, we've totally automated your tracker. So we're going to tell you what the corn future prices are and we're going to help you buy the right fertilizer. And we're going to build a whole ecosystem of products and the tractor becomes a platform for a platform business.
Eric Dickmann:Yes.
Terry Jones:So, it's all based on data. So if you can convince your company to really have a really nice data ocean instead of the data swamp, and you know, use AI and machine learning to get at it and convince everybody to put the data together instead of keeping it in their little castle and marketing doesn't share it with sales and sales doesn't share it with customer service, and certainly not with any other department. That's a recipe for failure today.
Eric Dickmann:Yeah, I agree a hundred percent. And I know you like to get out and evangelize about this stuff. What are you doing in the coming months over the rest of the summer and into the fall when you can't necessarily get out and speak like you want to?
Terry Jones:Well, actually I'm going to New York for a speech. I was sort of hoping they cancel but it yeah. But my wife is immune deficient so I have to be really careful, but I've been speaking a lot about vaccine passports.
Eric Dickmann:Oh, okay.
Terry Jones:The controversial topic in the US but around the world, they're just being adopted, you know? So we're thinking they're crazy and the world is using them. And so I'm going to speak to 500 meeting planners about okay, if you want to have an international meeting, what do you got to So ISo I, I just thought I wanted to involved in it, I think it's a smart idea. I think you know, knock off and fake credentials are all over the place, but I turned it around and said you know, that's going to get me in front of 500 people who booked me.
Eric Dickmann:Yes.
Terry Jones:And I convinced the people people who hired me because I said, look, I want to have a 60-second commercial in the air for what I normally talk about, which is digital disruption, we're touring the middle of. So it's a way for me to go market my product, even while people aren't having meetings. And I've gotten a gig, an interesting. narration gig where I'm narrating a couple of thousand video clips, predictions from CIOs, they're two minute clips with a two minute intro. That's been really fun. have got my narration before,
Eric Dickmann:Yeah.
Terry Jones:And I'm still doing virtual meetings as I build a studio here in my house last year. But it's high quality production, so I'm at the little guy in the corner. And we talked about this off air, it's a hybrid world today. And I had a client who's hired me to do webinars. Well, I'm not gonna know I can do this next webinar because people are tired of him. I said, I'll be blunt, they're tired of the way you produce them. They're terrible. You have terrible PowerPoint with little people up on the corner. We're competing with TV. You need a lower third, you need a crawl, you need to do interviews, you need to have surveys, you need to make it interactive. Come on!
Eric Dickmann:You need to step up your game.
Terry Jones:Look at TikTok, look at what people watch all day long. Up your game. know you can't do it the way you like. It's not like being in a meeting. TV is different.
Eric Dickmann:A white PowerPoint with bullet points is not going to cut the muster anymore.
Terry Jones:No, it won't, it's boring. The nice thing about zoom is you can see when people tab away from it to go do their email.
Eric Dickmann:That's true.
Terry Jones:Sort of an instant Nielsen. If that happens when Larry comes out, well, Larry's out and you know, I've worked with companies to say, let's work with your CEO if he's going to speak cause he could be a great speaker in an auditorium and he will suck on TV. It's very different. And they don't want to rehearse, but we've convinced them to. So I'm off doing that and working a lot with startups and you know, maybe I've got another book in me, we'll see. But I probably have to update disruption office two years old. So disruption is changing at such a speed.
Eric Dickmann:Oh, my gosh. Yes.
Terry Jones:You have to update, update the examples, But you think about it's not only technology. We have so many new business models. I mean, think about the subscription model, it's taken our software of course. It's X as a software, as a service. But who would've thought we'd subscribed to Razor's, right? Billion dollar company, right? So I think people are looking at how can I just change the world, not through a new product, but by totally changing the business model, whether it's a platform or a subscription. There are a dozen new business models that people are using to change old industries.
Eric Dickmann:I'm a fractional CMO. So I'm a subscription-based employee, you know?
Terry Jones:Well, that's right,
Eric Dickmann:And who would have thought about that.
Terry Jones:Yeah. You're a gig economy as a CMO, right? And you look at how things change. I mean, I travel last year when I left, we had 3000, as in people, big customer service organization. And KAYAK, we went public with 200.
Eric Dickmann:Yeah.
Terry Jones:My son started a video and he's been in the video game business since he was 16. And he left electronic arts, you know where they spend hundreds of millions on games and four guys produced a highly competitive game. How do you do that with four guys? You outsource everything, right? And you can do that today. And you can start a company with a credit card and outsource everything. You've just got the idea, the passion to get it going. And you know, his company failed. Now, did Ben fail? No, he's now a Senior Executive of Microsoft in their gaming division. He's done great. And you know, I looked at him and said, well, you build a game with four people. I want to hire you. So you know, failure, isn't the end. And that's what I preach to corporations all the time is that, you've got to experiment, you've got to fail. That's okay. And don't kill the people, kill the product, move on, learn from it, listen, prototype. You know and keep iterating because, you know I went through a pitch deck this morning for a company I'm an advisor to, and I ripped it all apart. And if you look at those decks, you realize, they have to realize that investors invest in the product, in the market, but they also invest in the people. They didn't have a people skill. I said, look, the product you have in your pitch deck is not what you're going to build. It's going to be different. You remember that old saw that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy? Well, no product plan survives contact with a customer, that's going to change. So you have to convince the investor that it's about you, when you guys can understand, listen, change, and today, you can prototype anything. You can use a 3D printer, you can use a web prototype, there are so many ways to test. You don't have to build the factory first.
Eric Dickmann:That's right. No, I think that's so insightful. And you know this whole topic of disruption I think is huge, especially given everything that's going on out there in the world. And I know our time is limited today, but I would love it. If you could just share with people where they can keep track of you, where they can find your books, what's your home on the internet so that people can follow along as you hopefully update that book for version two or version three.
Terry Jones:Well, bad marketing. My website is tbjones.com, tbjones.com. It's very hard to buy a Jones URL. So that's the one I could get. Like Terry Jones is taken by the guy from Monte Python. And you can see lots of videos there of my speeches and hopefully if they inspire you, you'll hire me to do them in person. I highly customize my talks and love to learn about industries. My books are available on Amazon. This one is Disruption Off, my other one is called, ON innovation. And they're quick, easy reads, just you know, 73, 74, 2 page chapters. The Disruption book, the first half is about all the technologies that's coming to eat your company, that's to scare the hell out of you. And the second part is what do you do about it? How do I keep up with disruption? And the same thing is true in the innovation book. So you can reach out to me on the website if you want to connect, I'm always interested in learning about new ideas. I do mentor our companies, I'm pretty selective, cause you know, time is the only thing I have to sell right now. But if people are interested in having me speak, I'm a virtual speaker or in-person speaker, depending on where you live. I don't think I want to go to Florida this week.
Eric Dickmann:No, no. We got a storm coming.
Terry Jones:Yeah, you got Fred.
Eric Dickmann:Fred? Yeah. What a name.
Terry Jones:They really should have called it Freddy. Freddy would have been terrifying. But Fred sounds like a friendly hurricane
Eric Dickmann:It does sound like a friendly hurricane. At least so far, it's just a depression. So hopefully it'll stay that way. Hey Terry, this has been fascinating. You've got so many interesting stories, you know, what a great career, what an exciting thing to be part of those successes. And I'm sure that the wisdom that you're able to help some of these new startups with is just priceless because there's a lot to learn as you're starting a company.
Terry Jones:Well, there certainly is Eric. And thanks for having me on and you know, remember you don't have to boil the ocean, you don't have to change the world, sometimes just one thing. KAYAK was just search and we sold it for a billion eight.
Eric Dickmann:That's a great piece of advice. Terry, thank you so much.
Terry Jones:All right. Thank you.
Eric Dickmann:Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services.
