The End of the Leads Trap: Reclaiming Humanity in Modern Business

In this episode of Value First Humans, we explore how businesses can escape the “leads trap” — the habit of reducing people to metrics — and return to genuine, human-centered growth. Chris and George unpack what it means to honor human wholeness in an age obsessed with speed, efficiency, and automation.

What You’ll Learn

• Why efficiency without empathy always costs more in the long run

• How reducing humans to data points destroys trust, loyalty, and creativity

• Practical ways to reconnect your organization to human wholeness

• Why “time to value” should really mean “time to trust”

• How replacing measurement with meaning transforms customer relationships

• The power of language: rethinking “leads,” “contacts,” and “pipelines”

• Why slowing down to the speed of trust creates sustainable growth

In This Episode, We Cover

• [00:00] Why “leads” dehumanize the business process

• [05:00] The trap of valuing efficiency over empathy

• [10:00] From transactional work to transformational impact

• [20:00] The false scale of digital business and lost personal touch

• [30:00] Redefining CRM: from systems of record to systems of relationship

• [40:00] Replacing measurement with meaning

• [50:00] Discovery calls, content, and designing human-first systems

• [1:10:00] How AI and natural language can bring humanity back to CRM

• [1:20:00] Audience → Researcher → Hand Raiser → Hero: a new lifecycle

• [1:30:00] The mathematics of one: valuing impact over scale

Tools and Ideas Referenced

• Superhuman Framework — inspiration for the Value First model

• HubSpot CRM — examples of systems that can humanize or dehumanize

• BANT — an outdated qualification model that replaces context with criteria

• Audience–Researcher–Hand Raiser–Hero — a reimagined lifecycle for relationships

• Slow Down to the Speed of Trust — the idea that trust compounds over time

• Johnny Appleseed Mentality — putting good into the world without expectation

• AI & Natural Language — how technology can amplify empathy when used right

Key Takeaways

• Business is meant to be personal. Trust, emotion, and energy—not data—are the true foundations of growth.

• Efficiency without empathy is expensive. It burns out teams and erodes loyalty.

• Redefine what you measure. Measurement isn’t meaning—focus on genuine value created for humans.

• Change your language. Replace cold business terms (“leads,” “contacts”) with natural, human language.

• Create space for real connection. Whether through conversations, content, or systems, give people room to be whole humans.

• Meet people where they are. Stop forcing conformity; build experiences that adapt to them.

• Start small. Replace one qualification question this week with one that honors human wholeness.

Transcript

Chris: Good afternoon, LinkedIn friends, Value First Nation. Welcome to episode two of Value First Humans with one of my favorite humans, George B. Thomas. How you doing, man?

George: Oh man, you're one of my favorite humans too. Brother, I'm doing good. It's a Tuesday, end of the day. Get to go get a haircut. You know, one of those human things that I enjoy—getting out of my house for a while and talking to another human and seeing how they're doing. But I'm super excited to be here with you right now and see where this conversation continues to go around all of the things that we as humans should be thinking about—in the future and right now.

Chris: Yeah, I'm right there with you. I did take a five-minute trip to the mailbox earlier just so I could enjoy this nice-degree weather for this like three or four weeks of fall that we get in Houston, Texas. Yeah, we're here.

Today, we're starting with—we've got seven commitments that we talked about in Value First Humans last week. We talked about how the Superhuman Framework was very inspirational for me to start the Value First Framework. And this was one of the first pillars, because the framework again started with traps, right? Because the whole viewpoint is like: how could something as awesome as the Superhuman Framework make so much sense? We know that leaders are going to be like, “Yeah, it sounds great. I'm looking at my organization—I have no idea how we'd be able to pull that off.” We've got KPIs, we've got metrics, we've got this whole structure in place to just prevent us from changing.

So it started with—the first trap was the Leads Trap. And of course, that talks about de-humanizing basically all of our processes related to B2B and, you know, trying to make money.

And so if we want to counteract de-humanizing, right—we want to be human. Humanizing. We want to do human stuff. That’s where Value First Humans came from.

So commitment number one this week is: We will honor human wholeness rather than partial utility.

We believe people are complete humans with complex lives, dreams, and challenges—not just potential transactions or business functions.

We commit to seeing and engaging with the whole person, recognizing that their relationship with our organization is just one aspect of their multifaceted life.

This means we will:

• Engage with people as complete individuals with their own unique context and needs, rather than demographic segments or buyer personas.

• Consider the human impact of every process, policy, and interaction rather than optimizing for internal convenience.

• Design experiences that respect people's time, attention, and autonomy rather than maximizing our data capture.

• Recognize that people's priorities and needs extend far beyond our offerings rather than assuming our solution is their primary focus.

• Measure success by the genuine value we create for humans rather than just the transactions we complete.

Is that a commitment we can make?

George: It’s over. Thanks, ladies and gentlemen—just go follow that!

Yeah, I mean, it is, Chris. And it’s interesting because when I hear you say those words, right, my brain goes to, like, man, this is really important. I hope people, one, rewind and listen to that. I hope they’re writing it down and that they understand how important it is.

And also I hope they realize that this is—while we’re talking in the context of business—this isn’t just about CRM, and it isn’t just about lead scoring.

It literally, Chris, is how we define value in modern-day business.

Because if you step back and think about what’s been happening for decades, organizations—not in an evil way—but they’ve rewarded efficiency over empathy. And I’m talking internal and external when I say that.

And the systems that we as humans have historically built to manage humans quietly—it began as, “Well, we want to get a view of the people.” And then it turned into something way different than that when you think of what’s happened in CRMs and lead scoring.

It’s less about viewing, right? We’ve gone awry. We’ve gone adrift, if you will, from the potential beginnings of, “We’re going to create these things,” to where we are now.

This conversation, I feel, Chris, is important for us to have today because when we reduce humans to metrics—and I want you to think about that in your organization and the systems that you have in play—HubSpot, Salesforce, whatever—the systems and processes—if we reduce humans to metrics, one, we create work that feels transactional instead of transformational.

And when you’re helping for help’s sake, if you go back to what Chris said there—that might go way beyond our offerings—well, then it has to be transformational at the cost of everything.

And so the thing that my brain goes into is—we have this fractured way of being. And what we need to talk about today, and what organizations really need to think about, is reconnecting to wholeness and what that means.

Ladies and gentlemen, newsflash: business is meant to be personal. Business is built on trust. Business is built on emotion. And it’s built on energy. It’s not just built on data points that you get when somebody converts and becomes a lead—to be entered into your pipeline to go through stages so that you can raid their wallet. Not.

Chris: Yeah. And by the way, this is how it’s always been. It’s just—once digital business was created—it gave us this kind of false scale that, you know, beforehand maybe there were telemarketers and you could call people. But especially in a B2B context, you had to meet with the person at some point to get the deal done.

George: Right. Without a doubt. Like now—a handshake and a conversation.

Chris: Yeah. And in that handshake and conversation, you were building relationship. And because of that, you were actually listening. You were understanding. You were empathizing. And you were solving together the problem that they were facing.

George: Yeah, and this one goes deep. I guess the Leads Trap—maybe as biased as that sounds coming from me—it’s just, it’s very indicative of a process that you could not humanize.

Like it literally came from a place of, “Oh, we have these things we can do to get email addresses—to get just a mountain of leads in the door.”

If you’re a human being on the other side and you’ve got 200 names to get through that day, you cannot care about who they are, what they do. You can’t care about their humanity.

Like if your job is to get through those hundred names or else you might lose your job—which is the case—you’ve got to detach yourself.

And we talk about customer-facing teams and all the people involved—like, full empathy for the positions that everybody’s been put in.

And this is why we’re doing this content, this framework—because it’s painful to watch really good human beings have internal conflict knowing that they’ve got to choose between getting the next five calls done and letting the conversation go for another five or ten minutes because that’s where it needs to go. They need to help that human right now—that’s what’s in everyone’s best interest.

Yeah—but the metrics they’re measured on—so as an example, no matter how good you are at, let’s say, just business and CRMing—I guarantee one of these is going to hit.

So how do we fragment people and turn them into data points?

We have demographics that replace understanding—industry and company size—we make decisions based on those things alone.

We do outreach instead of understanding actual challenges.

We have behavioral scores that replace conversations.

I think I’m hitting this in every piece of content I do right now—the fact that we can’t just say “hand raiser equals somebody who raised their hand.”

We can’t agree on that! It’s like, “Oh, did they view these pages or watch these videos? Maybe that means they’re kind of raising their hand.”

Like no—have we had a conversation? Did they ask for a conversation? Have we had it yet?

Qualification criteria replaces context. So BANT—Budget, Authority, Need, Timing—versus understanding the organizational complexity.

Just a great show—Value First Data—with Clement and Casey talking about this stage where there are buying committees and all these human dynamics involved, but we just want to streamline it. “Did we get these objections? Did we handle them? All right, then we’re good to go.”

And then we don’t know what happens when the deal just closes lost out of nowhere.

And then lastly, process stages replace natural development.

The data tells us over and over that this is not a linear journey—yet every process we put in place in our CRM is linear.

George: Yeah. So here’s the thing. And again, I know some of the stuff I talk about may be counter-cultural, counter-business historically.

But the problems I see—and what I’ve tried to fight against as I’ve been in business with Sidekick Strategies for almost the last four years—is where people are getting this wrong, Chris, is most teams confuse measurement with meaning.

I’m going to let that sit in there for a second, ladies and gentlemen: measurement for meaning.

They think that knowing what someone does—job title—equals understanding who they are. No.

They live in this world where they believe it’s easier to automate a funnel than to cultivate a relationship.

But the relationship is where the magic is at, right?

When you skip the relationship because you’re just trying to drive to revenue, that’s when you miss this—I’ll call it sacred—because it’s so important.

And I’ve seen the way we’ve closed deals at our organization trying to battle against this. There’s this sacred complexity of human context.

Who the frick are you? What pain are you feeling? What’s the purpose? What’s the passion? Why are you doing this?

Again, I can go back to the Superhuman Framework—and if we’re going to go about this focused on wholeness in a world that’s so dang fast—like you and I complain about in the most positive ways—HubSpot updates, AI updates, and the older we get, the faster time flies.

But if we’re going to focus on wholeness, it takes more time. It takes more listening. It takes more patience.

And in this culture obsessed with speed—especially business cultures obsessed with speed—what you’ll hear is, “Well, that’s inefficient.”

Well, no—not really—because efficiency without empathy always costs you more in the long run.

Because you’re trying to optimize yourself to a turd instead of optimizing yourself into the place you need to be.

This speed thing—this not building a relationship, this not being able to close deals out of reciprocity from the value you gave—that’s how you lose loyalty. That’s how you lose creativity. That’s how you lose culture.

And Chris, going back to our original conversation—the Superhuman Framework—it’s literally warning against those patterns.

It’s talking about the relationship versus the transaction, the conversation versus the conversion, the human instead of the contact.

And it’s a shame for how many organizations I see out there that humanity is their blind spot.

Chris: Yeah. Let's dig into that a little bit. It's probably part of the answer to this question, but what do you think—with people that you're interacting with right now—because a lot of people, when they say they want to get more out of HubSpot, this is an inevitable conclusion. Like, if we can get them around these ideas, they will get more out of HubSpot, I guarantee. Right? So what do you see happening when teams are spending their days processing leads?

George: Yeah, well, so processing leads versus cultivating relationships—two different things here. They can happen in set—both can happen inside of CRM—but if you're cultivating leads, what I've seen a lot of times is you're burnt out and you're confused because you're trying to follow a system that you potentially might know in your heart is not a human system.

It is a manufactured set of processes and steps that some consultant got paid twenty thousand dollars to come in and say, “This is the way you should build it, this is the way you should do it.” Or some leader of the organization went to a talk at a conference and now we need to change it. Chris, I think you felt that pain by the smile and how your head dipped, right?

And so, like, this ability to burn out your humans and create something that, in the name of efficiency, is actually countercultural to the way that they could be extrapolating the most growth and having the most fun and being the best employee—to then give the best to the people that they’re trying to serve.

This happens when you actually build relationships, when you give space and time to be you.

The amount of times in sales conversations, discovery conversations—all the conversations—that I’ve allowed for them to talk about just their life, or me to share something funny and attach to the heartstrings and the headspace…

If you can attach to the heartstrings and the headspace in the system that you’re building—the CRM—you’ll be far better off than if you’re trying to just optimize pipeline stages to a “closed-won revenue generation” moment in time.

Chris: Oh, man, that’s so good. Because this is all—in Value First—is all in an effort to help you transform your organization.

Because we’re in a different time. You’re in a different paradigm. AI exists. This is the age of AI, not industrial mode, right?

And if all you’re still doing is rote BANT exercises, AI cannot help you figure out who this person is.

Whereas if you open up the conversation—you care a little bit—it’s not going to be easy for you necessarily. I guarantee it’ll feel a lot better, but you might not be able to say, “Okay, they said these things; that’s going to go in this spot where we’re used to it going.”

And then that’s going to equal—like, no, that’s not going to happen out of the gate.

But what can happen very quickly is AI can help you figure that stuff out and what it means for your business.

Because we’re not just saying like, “Oh, we’re just all going to live happily ever after, and you don’t have to care about putting food on the table for your family and getting your commissions and doing all that stuff.”

But what we see—and this has been proven over and over too—is like, the industrial ways, they’re broken.

And if we can’t get you to do things like this—let’s say discovery, right? What this looks like in practice: discovery call. Like, walk me through what’s driving this exploration for you as a question.

What’s the broader organizational context that this sits within? Who else’s perspective matters in how you’re thinking about this?

George: It’s almost like you’re reading an article I wrote.

It’s almost like you’re verbatim reading an article that I wrote about the fact that we’re going to be doing this conversation. I don’t want to call it an interview—it’s just a conversation we’re having.

Because yes—the way that the questions that you ask redefine the way that you allow yourself to act moving forward.

And Chris, I want to—I’m going to shut up here in a second—but I want to circle back to something because you said a word that I care a lot about, and that is care.

And for me, in the Superhuman Framework, everybody knows—well, you will now—that for me, that’s love. But we’re going to keep it the word “care,” okay, just for the audience that we’re talking to today.

Because when you as a leader, a sales professional, a marketer can say, “I care more about understanding you than categorizing you,” there becomes a huge shift.

It’s less about segmentation lists, deal tags—you see what I’m saying?—property dropdowns.

Because when you can say, “I care more about understanding you the human than categorizing you the opportunity,” it shifts how we lead, it shifts how we sell, it shifts how we market, how we serve.

And again, we slow down to the speed of trust.

Now, one last time I talked to you about value or time to first value, okay, so hopefully people go back, they watch the episode—it’s time to first value.

Well, time to first value is really related to—and is—the slow down to the speed of trust.

Because trust is a crockpot. Trust is not a microwave.

And so many organizations out there are hitting one-minute microwave moments for their sales opportunities, and it’s not going to hit where you want it to hit.

Chris: Yeah. Listen, we humans—and I’m done here—we humans can tell when we’re being honored, and we can tell when we’re being handled, right?

And we don’t like the feeling of being handled through scripts and processes.

Yeah. And we’re not going to say that out loud, right? Like in these exchanges where we’re trying to get information, we’re trying to understand value, we’re trying to build new relationships on the other side, right?

But we’ll feel all of these things.

And what’s fun is that I’m actually reading from a doc—I did pull up your article just to see what section you were talking about.

But when I started doing this framework, it seemed so fluffy in the clouds, because it’s the opposite of what we’ve been taught about how to go lead a thousand leads, then a hundred discovery calls, and then ten opportunities, and we close them.

Like, it’s the opposite of this, right? We’re basically giving people the space to be human throughout the process.

There’s only so many ways to do that, right?

So as I started doing Value First stuff, and no matter which AI I was asking about this, whether they had context or not, we’re getting to the same place. It’s value. It’s trust.

Those are the goals here, right?

And you say time to value, right? A lot of the mistakes that are made are feeling like you need to create something—you need to give something tangible—when in reality, the best of us—even not even the best of us—you’ve had these moments where it’s like, the person on the other side says, “Oh… oh, nobody’s ever asked it like that before.”

That’s value.

Yeah. Like, you’re giving them the space—and it’s not a yes or no question where they can’t think or feel or be who they are.

It’s not like “three months or six months, pick one.”

And it’s not certainly not dollars.

Right? It’s just “tell us what’s on your mind,” right?

People don’t get to do that very often in their daily lives.

And when you come up and give them that space, that is a way to add value for them.

George: Yeah. So it’s interesting, Chris, because you’re—I could say most humans, but because we’re on a professional podcast interview conversation, I’ll say most professionals—were raised and/or created environments that praise what you produce more than how you show up.

Ladies and gentlemen, sometimes the humans that you interact with—they just need you to show up.

Because here’s the thing: when you replace presence with performance, you stop posturing and you start connecting.

And humans can feel like, “Hey, they’re showing up for me.” They actually flip their phone over so there’s no distraction. They’re listening to me.

And what we need more of is this idea of presence.

And again, I’m just going to keep whipping a dead horse here—I’m telling you, we’re moving into this world, we live in this world where it’s so fast-paced that we need to focus on slowing down.

We need to focus on listening deeply.

We need to resist the urge of producing—meaning fix and qualify.

Because if we can resist those urges, we can come from the place of love and purpose, rather than where a lot of people, I feel like, many times—especially again, most professionals—I could use most humans—but most professionals, instead of coming from love and purpose, they’re coming from fear and scarcity.

They’re trying to hit that number. They’re trying to produce enough. They’re trying to be the person so that their spouse will love them—oh, I’m sorry, wait, this is a professional setting, right?

But to do these things—to come from love and purpose, to not live in fear and scarcity—you’ve got to be like genuinely curious about that human instead of the goal behind them.

Chris: I love this conversation so much. So let’s talk about—so that discovery conversation is what we used there, right? That’s a one-to-one synchronous conversation.

Let’s talk about content, which is meant to be asynchronous communication, right?

We’re not there to handhold and say everything the exact right way.

Which is again why, if you take this different approach to content—like how do you create these spaces?

A lot of the content that I’m doing right now is: how do you create these signals that we’re saying, like, you might not know what it means, but AI will be able to help you.

Right.

Different approach to content.

We write for humans—with complex, multifaceted lives.

So that’s not writing for humans, “Okay, George is in my target market. He likes red hoodies and he’s white, he’s in his fifties.”

Right? Like, that’s—if I nail that, George is going to convert.

Right? Not doing that.

We acknowledge what you can’t solve—like the bad-fit stuff—not just what you can.

And in genuine ways, right? Not just the ways that are like, “Oh, well, if you don’t want to be a better human, then this is probably not for you.”

Like, no—like, real. “These people are a fit. This is not a fit.”

Creating value independent of transaction intent.

George: Yeah. Oh, man. Like, I remember the first time I saw—it might have been georgebthomas.com—and I saw the whole ass human line front and center.

And that’s where it’s like—if I know George doesn’t feel a need to be somebody he’s not or to put on a different face, then that means it’s going to be okay for me to do that.

Yeah.

Right? And even there, like if we didn’t—first of all, that builds trust and that leads to the relationship. But even if it doesn’t, it’s like, “Oh, there’s somebody else just being themselves.”

Like, there’s value there. Like, he doesn’t—I don’t need to transact to feel value from that. Just reading those words on the screen.

George: There’s a level—and nobody will ever come and say this to me in a meeting or after reading the website—but there’s a level of, I believe, psychological safety that happens when you’re in the presence of me.

Zero judgment, zero expectations. These are two rules that I try to live by. Zero judgment because my Bible tells me not to judge others—it’s not my place. Zero expectations because I just need to do things that move my needle. And if it moves everybody else’s needle, then that’s a good thing.

Chris, it’s no different—like what you’re explaining is like, why did I create HubSpot tutorials for almost ten years with really no personal ability to drive revenue from those tutorials?

Because I fundamentally cared about the pain that most new HubSpot users were going through. And it was my way of expressing my talents to the world and helping people along the way.

Why did I write an article today for an interview I was doing tonight? Because there was value, and I wanted to be able to get it out to the world. Do I think somebody will read that article and convert into a potential opportunity that I can help? I don’t give two shits. Like, that’s not why.

And again, this goes back to that—I do have this mindset, by the way, this is for many, many things other than marketing content or sales content or being a business owner—but I have this Johnny Appleseed mentality of life: that if I put good into the world, and I quoted Dan Tyre, I think, on the last episode, of like—his goal is to put as much good into the world as he possibly can, and good things will return.

So if I can be Johnny Appleseed with whatever it is that I’m talking to people about or creating for humans—this is why, by the way, we create a faceless channel that’s not to be mentioned right here today—to just impact people’s lives because it doesn’t have to be about me.

It doesn’t have to be about revenue. It has to be about what impact are you making to the humans that you fundamentally care about and love and want to see them have a better life because they have fewer problems that your products or services solve.

Chris: And bringing it back to your earlier statement of people confuse measurement with meaning.

George: Yeah.

Chris: It goes back the other way in this case where the content we’re describing creates meaningful outcomes that you cannot possibly measure.

George: Yep.

Chris: Right? And that means it doesn’t make it across the finish line for a lot of teams because they don’t know how they can measure it and show the value.

So a lot of this is like—we get it—it’s not that organizations are not built to support this. That’s why we’re here.

When at the end of the day, I kind of like—if you got humans, they are built to support this.

But anyway, we’re going to talk about this third layer, which is different system design.

Right?

George: Yeah.

Chris: And bless his heart, right? Riley Powell—we’re doing this lead scoring show on Mondays—and again, it’s a perfect opportunity to understand like, yes, this is a mountain. We’ve all been seeing it, right? Some of us have tried to climb it more successfully than others, right?

This idea of, can we break free from this—all these traps that we’re talking about?

George: Right.

Chris: And he loves to represent, or he can’t help but represent, the reality of the situation. Like, “Look, Chris, all these words are great, but when we’re in CRM, it says this and this and this, everybody’s used to this, I can’t explain all of this stuff.”

Right.

And we’ve been talking about the value path, and it goes Audience, Researcher, Hand Raiser, Hero.

Right.

And the subject came up and it’s like—if the first time you met somebody is when they fill out a form that you decided makes them a hand raiser, like, do they come in and you have to force them through the audience and researcher stages?

George: Yes.

Chris: No!

I go back to being a bouncer at a bar when I’m an owner of an agency, right?

And he brought that—he brought up a great analogy, right? We started talking about age demographics, like in “teenager” stage, right?

This is where it’s like—yeah, lifecycle stage as a concept is nice to help you understand that there’s a journey being had, but for humans, you do enter teenager stage once ever. You leave that stage, most of the time, once ever, right? Like, you don’t circle back.

So immediately, that concept breaks in business.

And so when we talk about this different system design—and again, this is the kind of nuance and complexity that AI is built to help you with if you tell it what’s up.

Right.

So allowing exploration in any order—like any order that the human chooses, because they’re going to choose any order, whether you want them to or not.

George: Yeah.

Chris: Providing context without requiring data exchange everywhere, and creating escape routes, not just conversion funnels.

Right.

It’s a different way to think about these systems.

George: Yeah. So I need you to—you said Audience, and I caught Hand Raiser and Hero. What was the other? I want people to write that down.

Audience, Researcher, Hand Raiser, and Hero.

I found another thing that I think I’m going to change inside of my CRM after our conversation, because I love that. And I love this idea of, well, they’re called this, and the words are that.

And again, this might be the first time that you’re hearing Chris and I talk, because this is something that you actually tuned into.

Contacts in my HubSpot are humans. Deals are opportunities. Companies are organizations.

When I can find out how to do it, Leads will be conversations.

Right?

And so I envision this idea of lifecycle stage to be those four pieces that you’re talking about, because I do have an audience—and that’s all they’ll ever be.

Like, there are so many humans that—I say this humbly—there are so many humans in my circle that are there because they just want to hear or see or be part of what’s happening.

They’ll never convert to a client. There’s no reason for them to be.

But then we’ve built a system, too, Chris, in version v2.5 coming out in early 2026 of the Sidekick Strategy website, where everything leads to conversation.

Not a form conversion, even though you might have to fill in some information—but it’s a conversation, meaning you will be talking to me, the human, before we move forward in any shape or form to realize: are you truly a hand raiser?

And if so, am I a good fit for you? And are you a good fit for me?

Okay, now let’s go ahead and move forward. You’re a client.

By the way, you’re a Hub Hero—I might have to change Hero to Hub Hero, right?

But you see what I’m saying there—it’s being able to change the words and the narrative of the life that you want to live in.

Oh, am I still talking about business? That’s that power that you have as a human.

Chris: Right. And if you can relate it to what’s happening—the reason that AI is being so successfully adopted right now is the concept of natural language.

George: Yep.

Chris: That we can just talk the way that we talk and not have to code and not have to figure out, “Let me look at the SLP and see—oh, Lead means this, MQL means this.”

Like, no, we don’t want to do any of that.

And fifty percent adoption rates of CRM for twenty-five years—okay, that says that we’re not going to solve for that.

And what I saw as I was doing Value First—I was focused on this Leads Trap—it’s like, why don’t I like the word “leads”? Why don’t I like any conversation that involves these words?

And I’m the type of human that starts to dig into the hard stuff.

And it’s like, if we use that word that we have to explain in every organization, in every context, of course we’re going to have confusion systems.

And when people change businesses, even though it’s the exact same type of business and they’re using the exact same HubSpot—it’s like, “Oh, leads mean something different over here.”

Can we use natural language—like Audience—that says, if you were to ask anybody in the audience, they’re consuming the content there, they would agree.

They might agree to say, “Yeah, I am learning.” They might say that, right.

They’re never going to say, “Yeah, I’m a lead.”

George: Right.

Chris: Researcher—guess what they’re saying? “I am researching.”

That’s what they’re saying.

Right?

If they’re raising their hand, you know they’re ready to buy. They’re ready to move forward. They’re ready to learn more. They’re ready to get help from you.

Right?

And then Heroes—they might not say it out loud, but they’re trying to build conviction.

“I am building conviction to be able to move forward with the organization.”

And when we can use these words that have inherent meaning outside of business, it gets so much easier to have these conversations with people and get people on board with doing—because we do need some process if we want to be successful from day to day.

George: Yeah. Can I bring up two other words? Two other words—conformity and submission.

These are two words deep in our psyche as humans that we hate.

Can I tell you—the immediate moment that I have to fill out a form to be put into a pipeline to go through stages—fundamentally, I know that I had to submit and conform to the process that you decided to build.

I had to meet you where you’re at instead of you meeting me where I’m at.

If organizations would focus on creating experiences of “how do we meet them where they’re at,” you would close more deals.

You would help more humans.

You would do more good in the world.

It’s a fundamental principle of life, by the way.

But because we’ve always done it this way—and it works sometimes, kind of, sort of—let’s keep trying to pump more numbers into it.

It becomes mathematical success.

But we just torched about four hundred humans that will never want to see our brand again.

Chris: Well, not even trying the other way that we’re suggesting then—that was always killer with Google Ads.

It’s hard to argue with, like—you spend five thousand dollars on ads, and one twenty-thousand-dollar deal hits—that’s ROI, right?

But if you put that energy—same applies to email marketing, any channel that you think is just “hit the numbers, it’s a numbers game, baby”—any of the situations that you think that that’s okay—if you took any of that energy and put it towards this human thing, this humanity stuff that we’re talking about—being present, yeah, having conversations without expectations, right, building really—if you put any of that energy over in this other direction, I guarantee, like, all the goals that you say that you have will happen easier, faster, in a more sustainable way.

So that’s why this framework exists—because even when HubSpot changed data, the ability to change lifecycle stages, we got rid of MQL, SQL out of the box—I still had “Lead” there.

There’s just not a lot of—like, you look around, it’s like, what are we supposed to do?

Like, if we’re not supposed to use those words, right?

So a lot of this is just, hey, I don’t have any data to prove that naming your stuff Audience, Researcher, Hand Raiser, like, increases your sales velocity or all that other stuff.

But I know that when I talk to people and I use those words, I don’t have to explain very hard what the words mean.

Right? They just get it. They get it.

George: So I’ve got to dump this little nugget out of my brain. I know we’re running close, but you said it’s the mathematics of it all.

And again, I think this is where I’ve just been built differently, because my mathematical equation is mathematics of one.

I’ll create the piece of content, I’ll go step on stage, I’ll come do this conversation—as long as one person gets value out of it, and they start to move in their life to be one percent better than they were before they actually interacted with that article, that podcast, that video, that event.

We’ve got to focus more on the mathematics of one. At least one at a time.

Chris: And then, like—anyway, yeah, that’s what’s going to scale.

And it’s what’s always—what scaled.

Like, the easiest example right now—we talk about SEO and the impact of traffic, right? Like, how quickly it flips to “Oh, traffic is way down,” but that traffic that does get there? It’s real. It’s going to convert.

It’s like, yeah, that’s the traffic that’s supposed to be there.

About this other traffic that you forced and tricked and you found all these different ways to get them to a place that they didn’t want to be.

George: Yeah. The funny thing is, like, when I think about traffic—it’s all traffic, by the way—but everybody wants to talk about traffic and SEO.

And there’s something kind of playing around in my brain of, like, SEO used to be the freeway. SEO might now be the gravel road.

Because the freeway is now LLMs, right?

And I kid you not, but yesterday I got a new lead.

And I started to giggle. I was like, “Oh, shit,” and started just like—I was like, I want to do the happy dance because it’s literally somebody that needs help with HubSpot. They need help with data cleanup as they’re moving from Zoho to HubSpot—so migration.

And how did you find us? It was in an LLM—in AI—in like, right?

And I was like, that’s traffic.

So you’ve got to start to think about, how do all roads point to where you need them to go?

You used to be able to just pay attention to one road—the freeway.

But now I need the freeway, I need the bypass, I need the gravel road, I need the sidewalk.

In other words, I need SEO, AEO, social, sales conversations, inbound, outbound—I need it all.

But I need it all in a human way.

Chris: Yes, indeed. Maybe another way to think about it is: how can you be at the end of the roads that you want to be at—that you know these people are already going down?

I feel like we should sing a Boyz II Men song at this point and just close it out.

George: I know. I was thinking Who Are You earlier when you mentioned that. I was going to start saying that.

So many opportunities to get AI involved here.

Chris: All right. So practical challenge here—this week’s action.

Again, one at a time—like, this is not easy.

We’re not saying, “Go into the boardroom and start flipping tables saying I’m not working for leads anymore.” Like, don’t do that.

George: Right.

Chris: I mean, unless you feel safe to do that.

George: Or you’re looking for a new job—whichever.

Chris: Right.

Replace one qualification requirement with a wholeness question—with a human question, right? Like giving people the space.

If you’ve already enjoyed the fact that you can ask on forms open-text questions—because AI is there to be able to normalize the data and standardize—this is the exact same thing.

Instead of “What’s your budget?” → “What are the organizational priorities that this thing we’re talking about is connected to?”

Instead of “Are you the decision maker?” → and we all know the likelihood of getting an honest answer there—“Whose perspective matters in this exploration?”

And these are just examples, right? There are lots of different ways to use words that matter more in your space. Again, you’re understanding who your audience is and who you’re talking to.

And instead of “What’s your timeline?” → “What’s driving the timing of this consideration?”

Or just like, “Where’s the fire?” “What’s the urgency?”

Be humans.

You’re going to get the answers that you want, and it’s just going to be in a way that it’s a team sport at this point. It’s not adversarial. It’s not extraction, right? It’s like, let’s figure this out together. That’s all we want at the end of the day.

And now you mentioned the conversations part—like that’s the only way you’re going to be able to move forward, Sidekick Strategies—because they can have the conversation with AI now if they want.

Nobody’s moving forward without some kind of conversation.

And do you want to be in those conversations or not?

I know I do.

That’s why I literally have me and my clone that can have conversations anyway.

George: Indeed. So we’d love to hear about that experiment, and maybe you’ll discover some deeper conversations, some context you wouldn’t have found—people voluntarily sharing information because you’re letting them, honestly giving them the space to do that.

Maybe some better matches or some not-fits that you don’t want, that you probably shouldn’t spend more time on, you know, from an organization perspective—and trust.

It’s so much of this: can we start from a place of trust?

Right?

Like, if the answer is—if you can’t answer these questions, is it going to build trust or is it going to add value?

If the answer is no, like, why are we doing those things?

Right?

So we’ll be back next week with episode three, which is going to be Commitment Number Two—which is enabling natural growth.

And if you haven’t figured it out yet, this is all about letting go of control—but you’ve got to let people grow the way they want to grow.

Right?

And when you do that, when they do come in, when they do engage, those are the conversations that everybody wants to be a part of.

That’s what we’ll be talking about next week.

Anything else you want the good people to think about over this next week, George?

George: I think that’s plenty. I do. I want them to focus on what you said. The only little tidbit when you’re saying that is: let your “no” be “no” and your “yes” be “yes.”

And make sure you’re picking the right one for the right situation for the right humans that you’re dealing with.

Chris: Until next time, folks. Everybody have a great week.

George: Thanks so much, Chris.

Chris: Thanks, George.