[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to Big Ticket Pros, the podcast for agencies, coaches and high end service providers who know what it takes to thrive in competitive, competitive markets. I'm your host Ana Gonzalez and you can find me on social media at Annabell Prime.
Our guests share insider tips, strategies and sometimes cautionary tales to help you close bigger deals and scale your business faster.
Big Ticket Pros is sponsored by Conversational Funnels, the new way to close deals in 2025 that does not rely on any of the old traditional methods everyone hates. We use this method to book 121 qualified sales calls in 10 days without any ad spend, outreach or endless social posting.
Download the free Step by Step blueprint that shows exactly how we did
[email protected] that's conversationalfunnels.com Today's guest is David Fradin.
David was classically trained as an HP Product Manager and was then recruited by Apple to bring the first hard disk drive on a PC to market, and later became the Apple Business Unit Manager at the same level as Steve Jobs. He is the author of Building Insanely Great Products, Organizing and Managing Insanely Great Products, and the widely published Successful Product Design and Management, all available now on Amazon.
He has trained companies such as Cisco on these topics worldwide. So David, welcome to Big Ticket Pros.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Glad to be with you.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Thank you so much for being here. So what is the best piece of advice you would give to someone just starting out in your industry?
[00:01:44] Speaker B: To focus on what the customer wants to do, what they want to do, why they want to do it, how they want to do it, where they want to do it, what's standing in the customer's way for getting that thing done, and how satisfied are they with the current way of getting that thing done.
So if they focus on that, then they'll understand what kind of product or service they should build. So let's suppose that someone works in services or support by understanding what it is your customer wants to do. Then when a customer calls you and says they're having a problem in this area or that area, you'll have a good background as to what they're trying to do and you'll be able to help them satisfy that customer need better and faster than the competition.
About 35% of all new products and services that are introduced each year fail, which represents a waste of about a trillion dollars a year, primarily because companies and individuals don't understand what it is that their customer wants to do and they build a product that doesn't satisfy those needs. And as a Result, they fail in the marketplace.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: Wow.
How would you. I mean, getting to know what your customer wants and needs, that's part of like a. Like a triaging process, am I right?
[00:03:18] Speaker B: Yeah, but it's at a lower level than want to deed or need.
Steve Jobs and Henry Ford, the inventor of the low cost automobile story, legend has it that he went out of the streets of Dearborn, Michigan, not far from where I grew up, and he asked people if they wanted a car. And they said, no, we want a faster horse.
So you can't ask them what they want or what they need.
But if he had sat on the stoop of one of the saloons in Dearborn with a mug of beer in his hand and watched people beat their horses with sticks to get through town faster, he realized that what people really wanted was to move themselves and or their goods from point A to point B faster. And hence, that perhaps is the reason that the first automobile, a car, was called a horseless carriage.
[00:04:12] Speaker A: Ah.
And also I. I imagine that every. Every time that something new comes, some new piece of technology, some new idea, it's always received with pushback from people like, why would I need a car if I have this great horse? Like, my. My horse is not as loud as this car, you know?
[00:04:34] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that happens all the time. Because people generally are not receptive to change and generally not receptive to something new.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: Right. Everything that is unknown creates fear.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: That too.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: But what. What you're telling me then is that don't focus on the what? Well, I don't know how to put it. I guess that the best way for me to put it is focus on the results that. That people want and need.
[00:05:10] Speaker B: Yeah, that. The results of things that they want to do, which is a subset of jobs to be done, which is a subset of outcome based innovation, a more granular look. And it is what they want to do.
Give an example of this. Back in the day of the caveman and the cave woman, they came up with a desire to leave behind in their cave a drawing or a painting or some words.
So they took a piece of bird wood from the local forest fire and they scratched it out on the surface of the cave.
Then they realized that their hands got dirty from this charcoal, so they had to wash their hands all the time. So they wrapped it in wood and they called it a pencil.
Then they noticed that the charcoal in the pencil would wear down and they'd have to constantly sharpen it.
And so they said. So they invented the fountain pen because they found the quills from the local ducks dipped in ink would be useful, but they kept spilling, knocking the ink well over onto their paper or papyrus that they had invented by then and gotten away from the slate that was kind of heavy to carry from cave to cave.
And then the ballpoint pen was invented, the typewriter, the electric typewriter. And now we have dedicated word processing, word processing programs that we have on our computers. And now we can pretty much dictate whatever we want to write. And with the assistance of AI, the dictation tends to get things more and more accurately, especially with better grammar than I have as a former engineer.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: That's.
Every single conversation that touches the subject of evolution is music to my ears. And what you just described of like how the, the pencil was evolving until now, we don't need. It was beautiful to me. And also makes me think, well, the fact that we have thumbs is what has made a lot of things for us easier and for, for us to be able to write or to eat or like to, you know, use certain tools. And now that we.
I'm gonna say this. Now that we don't need our thumbs to write on a paper. I mean, we needed to like type on the phone, but we don't actually need that. We can dictate it. So I feel like now we're getting thumb atrophy and it's evolving in a different way. Our thumbs, that is.
[00:08:03] Speaker B: I think over a few more generations we'll turn into cats who do not have opposable thumbs.
[00:08:15] Speaker A: I, I'm curious to, to, to see that happen.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Then we'll be able to do like cats and sleep 16 hours a day.
[00:08:25] Speaker A: Look at that. It. It reminds me of this movie, Wall E where people were just sitting. Did you, did you watch that?
[00:08:32] Speaker B: No.
[00:08:33] Speaker A: Wally. Well, it's the future where everybody lives in a, in a spaceship and everybody's just sitting in their chairs. They don't walk anymore. So everybody is just like fat and eats. Like they don't even eat anymore. They just drink their protein shakes and they're just like super atrophied in some issue happens and they need to get off their chair, but they can't walk because they haven't walked in how. I don't know how many years.
So it's like some things evolve in some things, I guess evolved backwards.
[00:09:14] Speaker B: Sounds like Starbucks, right?
[00:09:21] Speaker A: Anyways, back to the point that you were making of identify the results that you're. That your client needs.
I think that also is related a lot with.
I was asking if it was a part of a Like a triage. Because triage people, you need to know their pain, their doubt, how much the cost, because sometimes if they don't want it, it's not, it's not because of the money, it's the cost of something else, you know, or the, the how much desire they want for that.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: Well, frequently people are like a body at rest, tends to stay at rest.
They don't want to change and because they don't want to go through the perceived pain of making that change from doing something one way to doing something some other way.
So there has to be an inflection point, there has to be a catalyst to cause them to want to implement a change and pick up a new way of doing something.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
The change could be the cost itself.
[00:10:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: Being uncomfortable, our brains are wired to always look for the most comfortable way to do things and to spend the, the least energy in learning something else or something new spends a lot of our brain power for us. So yeah, of course I could see that.
So David, tell us about who you serve and how people can reach out to you.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: Well, I teach product management and product marketing, I prefer to call it product success, to companies around the world.
You mentioned earlier, my lead customer is Cisco and I and my trainers have taught about half of all the product managers at Cisco over the last 15 years.
So if anybody is interested in improving their skill sets, their competencies to enhance the chances of product success, they can just go to my website, spice catalyst.com my contact information is there.
The courses and the consulting that we offer is described there and that's how we can get into touch.
Also my books are listed there. Building Insanely Great Products, Organizing and Managing Insanely Great Products and Successful Product Design and Management Toolkit which has been published by Wiley. It's a little 796 page pamphlet used and post MBA executive management courses over six months at a couple universities in India right now.
So all of those things are accessible through spice catalyst.com Amazing.
[00:12:16] Speaker A: Well, we're going to wrap it up here. Thank you David for joining us and sharing some wisdom about thriving in a competitive industry.
You can learn more about what David does by visiting spice catalyst.com don't forget to grab his books. Building Insanely Great Products, Organizing and Managing Insanely Great Products and Successful Product Design and Management. Did I get it right?
[00:12:39] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:12:40] Speaker A: Yay.
If you are, if you are an agency coach, professional services provider or otherwise sell expensive stuff, we'd love to have you in a future episode. Can
[email protected] and once again, if you want to learn about the new way, we're booking dozens of qualified calls per week with no ad spend. Download our free blueprint@conversational funnels.com. that's all for now. Go get that big ticket punched. See you later.
