Rick Denton (00:18)
Welcome back, CX Passport listeners. Today's guest is Greg Wasserman, head of relationships at rss.com. Greg came up through media sales and has spent his career in one of the most relationship driven corners of the business world. These days, he's helping podcasters grow, monetize, and think strategically about their shows at one of the biggest podcast hosting platforms out there. Everything he does is about the relationship between the creator

and their audience. When you get at the root of it, every listener interaction is really a customer experience. just happens to build those experience without the CX title attached.

Greg, welcome to CX Passport.

Greg Wasserman (01:02)
Hey Rick, thanks so much for having me.

Rick Denton (01:04)
It's gonna be fun. I know it's a little bit early out there in Los Angeles, but ⁓ sometimes the brighter starts are and the earlier starts are some of the most energetic and fun starts. So we're gonna have a good time today. I talked about that idea of relationships in the introduction and your career has been in media and relationships, not a traditional customer experience role. But the way I've heard you talk about podcasting, community, humanization.

Audience connection sounds a lot like customer experience thinking, how do you see it?

Greg Wasserman (01:35)
I mean, think every role, every, every role in any company, we don't have a company unless we have a customer, right? So at the end of the day, we are here for serving the customer. If I look at, ⁓ my, my roles in partnerships, what I love about the partnership side is like, hold on. We're thinking about how two companies can come together to serve a common customer.

And if we are only thinking about our own KPIs, we're only thinking about whatever the bosses want us or our own jobs, then we're, missing the actual point because these, partnership doesn't work unless we're thinking about the customer and sales. I am in this case, trying to sell something to a customer. got to think about not about what I'm trying to sell them, but ultimately what is, what is, what is it that they need? How do I

How do I help solve their pain points? So I'm always thinking in a sense, there's always a customer experience that you're going for, regardless of just the UI UX experience that, you know, when I work on the startup side of things, I'm always thinking about that. ⁓ so yeah.

Rick Denton (02:26)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

That, that idea of relationship. And I actually want to pull a little bit deeper at the thread of, know, Hey, every role recognizes there's no business without a customer. That's one of those kind of insider pool, insider baseball kind of talks that we have in the CX world of this debate between everybody should be focused on the customer. But then if everybody's focused on the customer, then nobody's focused on the customer. Have you found that approach of

Hey, look, we're all in this for the customer to be something that's making you sort of stand out as the odd one, the one that's sort of screaming out into the wilderness or have folks there really embrace that idea.

Greg Wasserman (03:21)
I think from a, if I looked at corporate, when I worked in the corporate side, it's your standard 20,000 people like I worked at Yahoo, right? So there's thousands of people. And if you take a day off, technically no one misses you even though if someone misses you, right? Like there's that viewpoint. So are we always thinking about the customer? There's just so many silos. There's so many different business units that it.

Rick Denton (03:26)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah.

Greg Wasserman (03:48)
that the customer sometimes kind of gets lost and we just focus on our own KPIs, our own division, making sure that we don't get headcount reductions or whatever the case may be. Go into the startup side of things. I remember and ⁓ props to my coworker, Mark. He's a heart of a product here at rss.com. And he said in a Slack message to me, he's like, Greg, I know this isn't part of your, ⁓ your, your, ⁓

Rick Denton (03:51)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Wasserman (04:17)
your job description or whatever word he said. But I appreciate X, Y, and Z. I'm like, Mark, we're at a startup. As long as you're asking me not to program something, because that's not, I couldn't do that if I tried. We're all rolling together to try and make this company better. Right? So I think, I think you see that very differently when you're at a startup or a, a, a entrepreneur minded company than the big corporate beast where

Rick Denton (04:19)
Mm-hmm.

You

Right, right.

Mm-hmm.

Greg Wasserman (04:46)
You're a number. You're, you're, may not be thinking about the customer to the same degree because you're trying to keep your job or you're just happy to punch in and do a nine to

Rick Denton (04:55)
Yeah.

Yeah. And I've been in both worlds. They're been in the big company, been in the startup and I've felt some of that same vibe. It's really kind of special when you're at a big company that actually has that not just poster version of heart of the customer, but actual like drive towards the customer. Cause then not only you get the attitude, you get the resources for it. So it's not that, that startup mentality. I'm kind of with you too. Don't ask me to code. Although now with vibe coding, you know, maybe I could dab a little bit, but we'll, we'll leave that to folks who know it better than I do. I want to.

Greg Wasserman (05:48)
Yes.

Rick Denton (05:59)
talk about this idea that you have mentioned where community as customer experience, community as CX, not just an audience, but something more intentional. What's the difference there? How does a company know when it's built a community versus, well, just an audience?

Greg Wasserman (06:20)
I think the audience community, there's a huge distinction there from where I've sat to the last two companies that I've been at. the first one they had a, mean, I came and joined them when they had what I think was a hundred or a thousand dollar MRR. So was like the first month of MRR and it already launched a Slack community. And in that regards, can you say was an audience was a community? I think it was more of a community because engagement,

Rick Denton (06:25)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Wasserman (06:49)
For me, it ended up becoming the thing I ran the most because your best resource, and this is why when I came to RSS.com, the first thing I wanted to do was launch a community. How else are you supposed to talk to your customers? So from a marketing standpoint, great, I can send newsletters from a, take an action. can use a campaign and start promoting whatever messaging I want.

Rick Denton (06:49)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Greg Wasserman (07:17)
We all know not everyone reads your emails. What, right? You can go ahead and do social media. So it's stay in the marketing department here. You can continue to do social media and let me go ahead, promote. can create blogs. We can create what we call knowledge base articles, right? So your FAQs, you can do all those things, but as consumers, no matter what, even if you give them all those resources, they're still going to go, I want a human person. Think about our own behaviors and

Rick Denton (07:20)
What?

⁓ yeah.

Greg Wasserman (07:45)
If I call up and I'm trying to get a answer to my question and it's like, press this for this, press this for this one. like, I'm going to just keep hitting zero. Cause I just want to talk to a person. from a behavioral standpoint, we just want to talk to someone. But if it was a company, you're like, Oh, and that's a resource constraint. So I'd rather just give you all the resources you can so that I don't have to talk to you, but we're lazy at the end of the day and we'd rather just talk to someone and ask that. if I can go ahead.

Rick Denton (07:55)
Right.

Greg Wasserman (08:13)
and create a, what I chose was Slack, choose a Slack community and go, great, here's a place for you to come in. If you have FAQs, perfect. If you have technical stuff, I'm sending you into the tech support side because once again, I'm a technical. You do not want me, A, you don't want to give me the access to that, but from a community standpoint, there's so much that you can start because we're always trying to understand our customers. So how else are we supposed to have one-on-one conversations?

Rick Denton (08:25)
Yeah, right.

Greg Wasserman (08:39)
create a place for them to answer, ask those questions, to engage with each other, to not make it just you answering all their questions, but each other going, Hey, Rick, you're in CX, XYZ. And as opposed to me going like, ⁓ well, this is my company. So I'm going to respond. Rick's able to chime in. so it'd be curious as environment. It's so much different.

Rick Denton (08:58)
Yeah.

I want to ask you more about that because to me, it seems like you're almost describing three tiers here. One is the, like we got information, you can consume it. That's it. Then the next tier is, Hey, we have a place for you to interact with us, the company, but the human side of the company. And then tier three is your peers are going to be supporting you. And we see that in software, right? There's plenty of groups that I'm a part of. Heck, the software recording this on Riverside has a very active group that's

that helps solve problems even before Riverside officially steps in to answer those questions. Yeah, well, yeah, big shout out to Kendall. that third tier seems like you and I just kind of raved about it for one particular brand. How does a company migrate from, all right, look, we've got the human to human connection, but really get into that community space where

Greg Wasserman (09:33)
Shout out to Kendall.

Rick Denton (09:50)
The peers are helping each other.

Greg Wasserman (09:52)
So for me, I've always looked at it and this was like the quote unquote pitch to rss.com when I was consulting with them. I'm like, you guys need to create this because you need to give the humanization. And as you, think you mentioned, like I look at the humanization of software. We don't want to just be a product. We don't want to be like, ⁓ in this case is we talked about Riverside. It's a platform for recording rss.com. It's a platform for hosting whatever your

Rick Denton (10:21)
.

Greg Wasserman (10:21)
software is, whatever your company is, it's about people. It's about the relationships you're building with your customer at the end of the day. So if I just said, we built this an amazing software and it's, it's incredibly technical and it answers all your questions. It's still just software. There's no human component to it. But if you create the community around it, now it's, wow. I'm actually able to talk to the employees at this company, whether it's in our case,

Rick Denton (10:28)
right.

Mm-hmm.

Greg Wasserman (10:51)
Our co-founder jumps in and he'll respond to customers, not just me, our marketing team will do it. So everyone kind of rolls up their sleeves and answers. And it's also then allows ⁓ the, the engineering team to see what's going on directly, because most of the time they're behind closed doors and they're like, I don't really know what's going on. And now they're able to see that. it's humanizing your company instead of just software. It's humanizing the work that everyone's doing, but now

Rick Denton (10:55)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Greg Wasserman (11:20)
to your point or to your question, should say, it's now, how do we bring our customers into a place where they can feel heard, where they can learn from each other? Because no matter what your product is doing, they all want to learn how to do something that your product provides. And they don't want to know, am I missing something here? And you might be, and I could be the answer to that question, or they may be the only answer to that question. And you're like, great.

You guys are the one using this. You're the one that are doing whatever your day to day job is that's using this product. You're the one that should be answering the question far more than I should.

Rick Denton (11:55)
You think about that because so much of, especially when you're talking about software gets designed inside the product team, they're in their huddles, they're doing that. And it's amazing how often, and I saw this at companies that I worked out in the past, you put it out in the world and you're like, wait a second. No, we designed the use case to be X and it's not that the user is doing Y, they're doing like blue. Like it's just a completely different category of use of that product. You mentioned the engineers getting that direct

access to the customer input. How do you balance this direct access to customer with there's still the need to prioritize, there's still the need to roadmap, there's still sort of a vision for the software. How do you balance that flood of unfiltered raw input with company direction?

Greg Wasserman (12:47)
I guess the same way you would normally do with most things in your life. You take it with a grain of salt. Like, all right, this one person said X. Am I going to change my entire roadmap because of that? No, but if like 20 people started and we we've debated, we actually had the debate this week. that do we want to actually make our roadmap public and allow people to vote up, vote down based on initiatives?

Rick Denton (12:52)
Okay. Yes.

yeah.

Greg Wasserman (13:14)
It's, it's, it's something we've talked about in the last year I've been here. It's something that's came up recently again. That's always a tricky one. Other companies I've seen do it, but it's, just a, an internal, do I want to do that? ⁓ I would, I would just go back to you're going to get the surface level. This would be a great idea. And 20 minutes later that that is done and the engineers done it. Sometimes it's no, this is a bigger lift.

Rick Denton (13:15)
That's tricky.

Yeah.

Greg Wasserman (13:44)
rate.

Let's discuss internally just because one person said this is this something we want to do. You always then put in your mind if one person saying this there's probably another percentage of people that would probably want that. But how big of a lift is this. Where does this fit into our road map. Is this going to make or break. And then of course we go back to our why we're all in the business of actually making money because we've got to sustain so that we can give a product that is valuable to our customers and.

keep our company going, but I think that's the biggest thing. ⁓ for me, will surface most comments that are valuable to the company and going like, Hey, everyone, this is what was just said inside our, ⁓ our community. Take it with a grain of salt. Sometimes they'll be like, Nope, that's not good. Or like, ⁓ wow. I've never thought about that.

Rick Denton (14:41)
Greg, a little change of pace here. I'm take a little break because all that community work can be a little exhausting. And I imagine knowing your schedule too, you also find yourself on the road supporting that community, supporting this world that you have been a part of and helping create. So let's take a little break here. It's kind of nice when we travel and we'll stop off here in the first class lounge. We'll move quickly here and have a little bit of fun. What is a dream travel location from the past?

Greg Wasserman (15:08)
from the past. ⁓ Buenos Aires, Argentina. I almost moved there. ⁓ Was there in what? six row eight. Loved it. Almost moved there in 11. ⁓ Busted my knee, never made the trip. So I've not been back.

Rick Denton (15:13)
Ooh, tell me more.

Okay.

That's a big statement, yeah.

no, no.

Tell me what was, cause this was a place that I was actually tempted to go. It was really crappy weather here in the Northern hemisphere. And I was like, you know what? I kind of want to enjoy some summer in January. So I was actually looking at Buenos Aires. Tell me a little bit more about your experience there.

Greg Wasserman (15:47)
⁓ I love wine. ⁓ when I was there in my earlier days, I don't think I loved wine as much as I do now, but, ⁓ being able to, mean, the country is massive when his RS is just a gorgeous city. ⁓ that was my first, it's, it's very European. ⁓ I didn't know this at the time, but they don't speak Spanish Spanish of what I grew up learning in Spanish class.

Rick Denton (15:50)
the

Yeah.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

you

Greg Wasserman (16:15)
I

learned an entire new, I'm like, I have no clue what they're saying. We did not learn these conjugations in, in, ⁓ in grammar school. Right. So, ⁓ European ask, ⁓ clean, massive, beautiful. I don't know. I it was just, yeah. And then you can go in and explore the rest of Argentina going from Patagonia or to the mountains or go to the lakes.

Rick Denton (16:32)
Love it.

Greg Wasserman (16:41)
There was just so much to explore in Argentina that I would love to, hence why I wanted to move there.

Rick Denton (16:45)
Yeah,

that's the Patagonia is the one that I really want to spend some time exploring and doing some slow travel there. So it's something that I haven't been to yet. What's a dream travel location you've not been to yet?

Greg Wasserman (16:56)
Number one on my list would be Machu Picchu. I've been wanting to go there for nine or 10 years. Almost went once and then it didn't happen. Now they keep talking about how they'll close it because there's just so much foot traffic and it's, it's impacting the, uh, the site, but that is number one on my list to go do, um, to go do that. Yeah.

Rick Denton (17:16)
So question for you, when you're

going to Machu Picchu, are you interested in the Inca Trail? Are you gonna take the train? You're gonna... Oh, that's awesome. Oh yeah. So when I've been there, we did the train. It was with my family decades ago. Loved it, amazing. You should absolutely make it top of your list. The Inca Trail though is something that I didn't get to do and would want to have that be the approach. I think that'd be sort of magnificent. You mentioned wine. Well, wine obviously pairs very well with food. What is a favorite thing of yours to eat?

Greg Wasserman (17:21)
Yes. I would do, I would want to do the trail. Yeah.

⁓ see, this is where everyone that's listening is going to hate this answer. I eat to live. So for me, food is its substance. So my favorite thing would be ribs, but, ⁓ pizza, Chicago pizza, right. But like, for me, I'd rather go like, what's the cocktail? What's the drink? What's the wine? ⁓ what? Yeah, exactly.

Rick Denton (17:57)
Okay, that's not a bad.

What am I pairing with this nice rib?

I can't like that. Well, at least, you know, it like you said, you know, just tofu salad or something. I mean, you did say ribs, so at least that's a good one. What about growing up? Was there something you were forced to eat growing up and you hated as a kid?

Greg Wasserman (18:15)
Ribs, yeah.

Now, I'm not a picky eater. My brother's a picky eater. My mom's amazing cook whatever she cooked every day be like, all right, amazing. ⁓ I'll eat it.

Rick Denton (18:24)
Okay. Look at you. I love it.

Look at you, model

kid there. All right, well done, well played. Well, it's time for us to leave the first class lounge. What is one travel item, not including your phone, not including your passport, that you will not leave home without?

Greg Wasserman (18:40)
these days, ⁓ that what do call a sleep mask? I don't know why it's taken me so long to figure that piece out, but I'm like, this makes life so much easier because nothing's worse than that. That little slit of light that comes through the blinds because they never actually

Rick Denton (19:08)
comes through where you can't get it pulled together. I have actually pulled out a chip clip and gone out and bought like clothes pins to close that in a hotel that I was staying at longer term because of how annoying that can be.

Greg, I want to get back to that idea of relationships. You know, when you and I had talked before the show, that was a key part of who you are, but it wasn't the approach you've always had. There was a point that your approach to relationships really changed because, well, what you said is what you were doing before wasn't working. What wasn't working and what made you decide to scrap it and start over?

Greg Wasserman (19:44)
when I was at Yahoo and I started my sales career there, you young kid, you got a goal, you're getting a hustle and do whatever you can to try and go hit that goal. ⁓ And there was something about not feeling

Rick Denton (19:53)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Wasserman (19:59)
good that you you weren't you were selling.

without thinking about the other person on other side. Yes, my product will work for you. Yes, this is what you're looking for. ⁓ It gets me to my goal. It gets me my sales.

And because the environment was, in a sense, churn and burn, ⁓ whereas like I needed to go get sales, it's not my issue if this person churns, I'm getting paid on that. It's the customer team side to maintain once you've closed them. ⁓ I quickly, I'd say in a few years after that, moved into management about a year or so later and realized the value of, on.

We keep these customers longer. If we keep the revenue longer, how do we hit? How do we go from a million dollar business to a $50 million business? Well, if you're always trying to turn through customers, you're never going to get to that $50 million because you're, you're, you're, always trying to play, fill up the bucket, even though there's a hole in it. So big hole in the bottom. And then I guess once I left Yahoo and truly entered ⁓ a different realm of my sales career,

Rick Denton (20:48)
Yeah.

Right.

Mm-hmm. Big hole at the bottom, yeah.

Greg Wasserman (21:16)
the whole mindset of hold on. I may not have be the right product for you, but I understand because I've seen it. You're probably going to leave this job. I'm going to leave this job. Even if we leave this industry, let's assume we all stay in it. If you like each other, then when the right solution comes along, you're going to answer the call. You're going to go, you know what, Greg? Yes, I haven't bought from you before.

Rick Denton (21:39)
Yeah.

Greg Wasserman (21:43)
but I like you, what do you have now? And that's the hardest thing to just get a meeting. So if someone's never giving you the meeting, how do you keep that relationship? So for me, I became, I had a nickname as I was the chocolate man because I would take this bar of chocolate. Yeah, I would take a bar of chocolate from Trader Joe's, same bar of chocolate. They stopped it, I would tape my business card on there.

Rick Denton (21:51)
Yeah.

Interesting. Nice.

Greg Wasserman (22:09)
And then anytime I met with someone, it doesn't matter. I met you five times or met you once the, ⁓ the person behind the front desk, when you walk in, they would always get a chocolate bar for me. So the cost of that was a little much, but the relationship, the, the, the change in mentality of like, right. Greg was here and nothing was better than when you joined and you came met a team and the other team that you normally meet with. Wasn't available.

Rick Denton (22:21)
Nice.

Greg Wasserman (22:39)
where they saw your chocolate bar on the other team. like, Greg was here. we wanted the chocolate. And like all that was relationship building.

Rick Denton (22:47)
You know what I'm hearing in that is not only that evolution of hey, look, the transactional into the relational. I'm also hearing your story is almost something that could be used as a metaphor for larger company story. And that is, does company focus on, yeah, this experience thing that we're doing costs something, but it's going to dramatically.

improve the experience and therefore improve the downstream revenue. Or there's companies like, we're not spending on the chocolate. That chocolate costs too much. We've got Greg already in there. don't, know, that, so that approach that can be very short term thinking as opposed to, well, we're to go with customer lifetime value. I see that a lot in just software in general, right? When we've talked, think about product teams can get very focused on features and functionality.

But that's not the same as experience. When you've been working specifically with podcasters, where do you see companies getting this experience side of software right, and where are they missing?

Greg Wasserman (23:55)
to.

There's the, me build a feature, let me try and communicate that feature. But what am I actually doing to show that feature and how it's being applied? Right? So sometimes doing a webinar, sometimes doing that video, actually, I'll take a step back, doing that video, like, hey, Rick, create this video to let people know about this new feature that we've got. Sometimes it's actually better. You know what? Let's do a webinar.

Rick Denton (24:09)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Greg Wasserman (24:29)
And bring the customers in so they can watch this, so they can engage, they can learn about what we've just released as opposed to, let me just show you in a video. Now that video, their webinar is going to live on. You put it on your YouTube, you'll chop it up, whatever it may be. ⁓ but the real value is, is sometimes that, that extra, let me, let me, let me engage with my customers instead of just creating the one too many pieces of content.

Rick Denton (25:00)
Absolutely. That idea of, what you're describing is thinking about, okay, what does my customer need to absorb this new functionality? I'll give you kind of a yes. And everything you said to me, there's a yes. And in there, and that is I've seen product teams fall when it comes to, always have to be delivering something new and leaving folks behind that are like, I'm actually quite content with what we got here. Don't load me up. Don't break me. Don't break what I'm doing today by bloat.

and certainly don't take away the functions that I'm using today. And I've seen that because it's all about the features, the functionality of the new where, and there's some brands that I have fired because they continue to advance in their product journey, but they left me behind because I was quite content with what I was doing and where I was doing it how I was doing it.

Greg Wasserman (25:50)
And it's interesting. I mean, as we record this on Riverside, you know, that's one of the things I've heard from people going like, Riverside just keeps adding too much that, that I don't need all of this stuff. And then we always have to, or at least I do on the, on the sides that I work in going like, Hmm, yes, but they're going to make more money from the enterprise clients.

Rick Denton (26:03)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Wasserman (26:15)
So if we think about it, that's always where a lot of things will go. It's like, all right, if I can load in more of these functions, I can charge more because the enterprise client, but you and I and the sopreneur side of things, like, I don't, I'm not going to pay now $500. I'm just throwing a number out there for, for, for this. Like that's just too much. So then you're going to be like, all right, I'll go find another product that did what I needed.

Rick Denton (26:32)
Yeah, right.

Mm-hmm.

Greg Wasserman (26:41)
and, keeps the cost at what it should been. And they'll know that a percentage of you will drop out or a percentage of you are like, all right, I'll stay and I'll learn and this will get me in. And, and sometimes that's just the business decision and economics, which we always have to keep in mind of they're going to lose us. They know they're going to lose us. They're also thinking they'll keep the percentage of us and, that's just it.

Rick Denton (27:05)
Yeah.

And what I like about that is, and this is why I like to talk to somebody that's not, know, formerly CX is that you're like, well, hang on a second there, customer experience guy. Yeah, you're right. Sometimes we are going to force some people out and that's called business. And I think that reality is something that many of us, myself included, need to hear, even if I might grumble about it on my way out the door. I want to close with talking about podcasting because RSS.com is obviously

clearly podcasting focused, right? That's who we're talking about. There is something very intimate about podcasting, especially the audio podcast, but not exclusively so, because you're plugged into the ears. You've got this direct line into someone's brain while they're driving, while they're working out, while they're cooking dinner. How are you thinking about that intimacy in the context of customer experience asset that maybe brands overlook?

Greg Wasserman (28:01)
The answer to that one is an easy one. Everyone should have a podcast. And I truly believe that because part of the reason because of what you just described, you now have the full attention of this person in their ears getting to share whatever it is you wanted as a message. So that could be an internal like an internal podcast going like, right, how do I shine light of our different employees? And so it's only going to be for our employees. And now you get to meet Rick and CX. I get to meet

Reagan sales, I get to meet Sally in marketing and go like, here's the people of the company that you are. Companies are so siloed. It doesn't matter what size you are. We're I think maybe 30 people. ⁓ I've worked at thousands like a Yahoo. We're all siloed. So if you could do an internal podcast going, all right, meet the other people in other departments, other teams that you never would have been able to do great. Then you can look at how do we get the message out there to

Rick Denton (28:40)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Wasserman (29:00)
customers or to the industry. For me, I'm always a big proponent of on the sales side. Podcasting is the greatest relationship engine and it's the greatest business development tool. So if I can go ahead instead of of trying to cold call and, bring chocolates to people or whatever the tactics I may need to try and get my foot in the door forever. ⁓ sales I'm trying to get. Let me start a podcast, bring those clients on.

If it's a CX one rate, you can bring on and let's learn from other CX leaders at other companies. Let me go talk to the sales and marketing team going, Hey, who would be good people? Like there's so many different components. That's why I say everyone could have a podcast. And then if you go a little step further and keep in mind, it's not about downloads. It's truly about relationships.

Rick Denton (29:32)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Greg Wasserman (29:50)
And there's a lot

of work. mean, you know, and I'm just launching my own. There's a lot of work that goes into a podcast. You can also make it very easy. You can make it easy. It's taken me six months to finally launch mine. and I, part of that is because I work in the industry, I'm trying to make it better than, than what I think it could be because I'm in it. I'm like, ⁓ there's the judgment side, but everyone should have a podcast. And so if you are anyone that's listening to this,

Rick Denton (29:56)
Preach. Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Greg Wasserman (30:19)
Whether you're a consultant like you, whether you are running CX at a company, whether you are any role at any business, have a podcast. It's going to, and we go back to the relationship side, it's going to build the relationships. If I can bring on 50 different guests, whether they are prospects, whether they're testimonials, whether they're clients, whether they're internal employees, whoever I'm getting to have, you're building a relationship. And then always keep in mind, it's not about a pitch slap. It's not about

Rick Denton (30:28)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Wasserman (30:48)
How do I sell this person right afterwards? It's always about how do we engage? How do we keep this conversation going? Instead of just a record, edit, publish next guest and go through the cycle. that's exactly how I would say have a podcast.

Rick Denton (30:50)
⁓ yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely.

have a podcast. Well, I can tell you this, after 250 plus episodes, it's a lot easier to get people to say yes to, would you like to be on a podcast as opposed to, hey, can I buy you a coffee and sit with you for 30 minutes, even though the conversation tends to be just about the same. And I am with you on everyone should have a podcast. Greg, this has been fun. It's been all kind of all over the place, kind of a little bit of relationship, a little bit customer experience, a little bit podcast, you folks wanted to get to know a little bit more about you.

a little bit more about your approach to relationships, about rss.com, where should they go to find out?

Greg Wasserman (31:38)
live on LinkedIn. I'm the do as you say, not as I do, right? I don't have the newsletter. I don't have a website. I live on LinkedIn. I've lived on there since what, 2006, 2008, whatever it's been. ⁓ That's the best place. I post content about podcasting. I post content about relationships. My favorite stories are exactly how I get to meet someone and then years later that turned into this and then turned to that and just trying to always help people remember.

Rick Denton (31:45)
the

Mm-hmm.

Greg Wasserman (32:07)
You don't know where today's conversation is going to take you. So have that conversation. And then five years from now, maybe you see that fruits of the labor, but it had to start somewhere. So start today.

Rick Denton (32:18)
We're gonna end right there, Greg. That is fantastic. Greg, again, I learned a ton. I know the listeners and the viewers have learned a ton today. Thank you for sharing your time. Thank you for being on CX Passport.