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What you’ll learn in this episode:
Are you working harder but not necessarily getting better results? Do you feel like business (and life) has lost its fun? It might be time to rethink your approach.
This week, we’re diving deep into the power of play, effortless marketing, and making work *actually* enjoyable with Mike Montague—a speaker, game show host, author, and AI marketing strategist who’s cracked the code on blending creativity, fun, and smart business growth.
Mike has built a career at the intersection of entertainment, business strategy, and cutting-edge technology, and in this episode, he shares his best insights on how business owners can stop grinding and start thriving.
If you’re ready to create a business that feels like a “Hell Yes” and learn how AI can actually make things *easier* (not harder), this is the episode for you.
🎧 Hit play now and get ready to rethink how you work, sell, and market—while having a whole lot more fun! Let’s Go!
In this episode, you will learn to:
- How following what’s fun can lead to success in your business and life
- How play boosts productivity, creativity, and even sales (backed by science!)
- Why the best offers and business ideas should feel obvious and easy (Hell Yes!) and not complicated.
- The biggest mistake business owners make when it comes to AI and marketing
- The surprising truth about AI: it’s not here to replace humans, it’s here to make you a better version of you
Mentioned in this episode:
Get Mike’s book Playful Humans for free: playfulhumans.com/freebook
Take the Play Personality Quiz: playfulhumans.com/quiz
Learn more about AI marketing: Avenue9.com
Connect with Mike on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mikemontague
Watch Avenue9 on YouTube: youtube.com/@Avenue9ai
Work/Connect with me:
About Mike Montague
Mike Montague is a pioneer in Human-First AI Marketing, helping businesses leverage the power of AI without sacrificing the personal touch that makes their brand unique. Mike is the author of LinkedIn The Sandler Way, Playful Humans, and host of the Human-First AI Marketing podcast. With over 25 years of experience as an internet marketer, public speaker, and sales and marketing thought leader, Mike has become a LinkedIn Top Voice on Artificial Intelligence.
Jessica Miller
00:01 – 00:08
Hello, everyone. Welcome to this week’s episode of the It’s Your Offer podcast. Mike, I am so happy to have you here joining us. Welcome.
Mike Montague
00:08 – 00:17
Jessica, I’m glad to be here. I think this is going to be a fun conversation and one that I haven’t had on a podcast yet. So, I’m excited for it.
Jessica Miller
00:17 – 00:24
Oh my gosh, it’s going to be so great. Mike, for our audience, tell them a little bit about you, introduce yourself, about who you are.
Mike Montague
00:24 – 00:58
Well, I am a little prolific in what I do. So, it’s a long story, and I hate kind of telling it this way, but unless I tell all three parts, it doesn’t really make sense. So as a nerd in high school, I was really good at designing websites and I started, like, making 50 bucks an hour designing corporate websites in high school when I was a teenager. And it’s not that impressive now, but in the nineties, it was a thing. I did it for the Chiefs Radio Network. I’m from Kansas City and a lot of other big companies and stuff, but I didn’t want to be a nerd.
Mike Montague
00:58 – 01:30
I wanted to be cool. I wanted to be on the radio. So, in my 20s, I was Romeo on Mix 93.3 and 105.1 Jack FM here in Kansas City, and was the prize guy and got to do all kinds of radio broadcasting. And it got me into social media then. So, when social media blew up, I was actually on the radio and had tens of thousands of, you know, connections and followers and stuff in the early 2000s where that wasn’t a very big thing and started an internet radio station and podcasts and stuff back then.
Mike Montague
01:30 – 02:08
And if I had kept those original ones going, I could have been Joe Rogan by now. I’m kind of mad that I gave up. But the third career is in sales training and marketing. So, from radio, I went to marketing. My dad was a sales trainer for Sandler, and I spent the last 14 years at Sandler doing sales and management, coaching, training, and consulting for them. I moved all the way up from an associate with my dad to the head of franchise strategy for over 205 locations for Sandler over those 14 years.
Mike Montague
02:08 – 02:09
So,
Jessica Miller
02:09 – 02:10
wow. Oh, my goodness.
Mike Montague
02:10 – 02:34
Those are the kind of three backgrounds. I’m a nerd that loves to do entertainment that also does sales and marketing consulting. And that brings us together into, like, basically an internet marketer that loves to do content stuff like podcasting, writing books, making videos, any kind of community engagement, content creation stuff.
Jessica Miller
02:34 – 02:47
I love that. Oh my gosh. I think we’re probably the same age. I remember those radio days. I lived in New York. I’m from New York. And, you know, I have 104.7 and I always hear the voices. And I thought, oh my gosh, these guys are celebrities. This is so amazing.
Mike Montague
02:48 – 03:25
Well, the funny thing about being on radio is that nobody knows what you look like. So, you can be a quote, local celebrity. I don’t know if they can see it on the video or not, but this is my celebrity soccer jersey. I got to play at the Sporting Kansas City, a halftime celebrity soccer game in, like, I don’t know, 2007, something like that. But nobody really knows who you are. You can walk down the street and turn the corner and nobody knows. So, it’s really a pretty good deal. I would be in places where a commercial would be playing on the radio, like at the gym, and it’s my voice over the top and I’m talking to the person and they still don’t even notice.
Mike Montague
03:25 – 03:25
So it’s funny. And you look at
Jessica Miller
03:25 – 03:29
the guy next to you like, this guy’s pretty awesome on the radio. I don’t know.
Mike Montague
03:29 – 03:32
Yeah, exactly. I love it when it’s pre-recorded. That was my favorite part.
Jessica Miller
03:32 – 03:56
Oh my gosh. So that’s really fascinating, you know, because you have this intersection of, you know, all of this sort of technical skill and then this sales skill and the ability to connect with people and talk with people. And so, you’re putting all this together and you’re thinking about what you’re going to do next. So, tell me, after you sort of stopped working in your dad’s company with the franchises, what happened next to compel you to do your entrepreneur journey more?
Mike Montague
03:57 – 04:39
I think I’ve always been entrepreneurial. So, I’ve had a couple of side hustles going the whole time. I kind of mentioned I started an internet radio station. I was DJing in bars and clubs. In the entertainment world, it’s kind of all 1099 work. You know, you get different commercials or plays. I’ve been a game show host, a karaoke host, a TV, like American Idol knockoff show host. And all these things were kind of 1099. And so, while I was doing the day job, either marketing or sales, I would always do entertainment stuff at night or I’d be building my own side project or writing a book and stuff.
Mike Montague
04:39 – 05:37
I tried some e-commerce things over the years, and they all did okay, but nothing really took off until playful humans in the pandemic was really kind of my pandemic baby. I’m like, if I’m going to sit around here and inside and not be able to go out and entertain people, I need to make something cool. And so, I started a podcast and then wrote this book, Playful Humans, that was a number one bestseller in the happiness category over this past Black Friday. And I really enjoy the psychology behind adulting because I think so many of us give up on having fun and we just think this is a job. We have to have the job, we got to climb the corporate ladder, and I can’t say I made it all the way to the top, but I work for a couple of big corporations. And I think I made it high enough up the ladder to know that it’s not really leaning against anything.
Mike Montague
05:38 – 06:24
And there’s not anything up there. There’s just more ladder. If you want it, you can keep going and keep climbing. But I kind of really felt this mission to tell people to rediscover the power of play and fun and connecting with themselves and doing something that they love and finding a work-life balance that works for them. And then this year with AI coming out and the opportunities that are here, I was like, I need to practice what I’m preaching. I need to go do this thing, start Avenue 9, design a life that is fulfilling and fun and gives me the kind of day-to-day life that I want and also lean into all of my strengths in all three of those categories rather than just one.
Jessica Miller
06:25 – 06:58
Yeah, I love that. Oh my gosh, there’s so many things I want to say, but I want to just jump off on this idea of fun because I agree with you. You know, when I created my Hell Yes offer model framework, it was driven by the Hell Yes part. I mean, you could have a great offer and there’s all those logistical things in there that need to be on point, but the hell yes part, that energetic piece is so important, not only for your clients, like they’re picking that up because business is energetic, but it’s for you, like you’re sold on it first.
Jessica Miller
06:58 – 07:06
And that energy transitions everything in your business and your life. And I really think the key is more fun.
Mike Montague
07:07 – 07:40
I agree with you, but I’m actually gonna go a slightly different way because I think I told you when we first reached out that I love the hell yes or no book. And that philosophy is part of playful humans in one of the chapters. But I think there’s also this thing that I kind of say in the marketing world that a really great offer is obvious. I’ve made a lot of stuff and a lot of stuff that didn’t work and then some that just work instantly and you kind of think, oh man, I wish it was all that easy.
Mike Montague
07:40 – 08:12
And it really should be when you come up with a great offer or a job. And when I kind of tested this idea for Avenue 9, this human first AI marketing is what I call it. Like it’s not just automating and replacing human people with AI robots to do your marketing, but how do we take a human first approach to use AI to expand your voice, amplify what you’re into, like take out those hell no parts of your job and leave more of the hell yes parts, right? And I was like, I think there’s an opportunity here.
Mike Montague
08:12 – 08:50
I talked to a few people while I still had the day job and everything. And I got three clients within three weeks of talking about it. And I was like, well, it was a hell yes for them. This sounds like a hell yes for me. And I kind of been looking at different opportunities within the company and other jobs and stuff. And I was like, no, this is the hell yes thing. It’s supposed to be easy. It’s supposed to go. And when you create a really great offer, it’s kind of obvious. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out, or you don’t have to look deep into the metrics and go, oh, this AB test is doing 1% better than this other one.
Mike Montague
08:50 – 08:58
No, it’s ten times better. It’s a hundred times better offer. You don’t have to be really great at math to figure out what a hell yes opportunity is for you.
Jessica Miller
08:58 – 09:27
Yeah, totally. I think simple is so important and we are just kind of, the rhetoric out there is that it needs to be more and harder and more complex, and that’s gonna give you better outcomes, and it’s really the exact opposite. I think the danger, because we’re so, as adults, not conditioned to follow that lead of fun, is that you hit it, it’s like a lightning strike. You’re even like seeing it happen, but then you’re like, it can’t be this easy. Or maybe it’s something else. I think a lot of people
Mike Montague
09:27 – 09:59
discount it for that reason, right? They go, well, I can’t get paid to goof around with my art or my, you know, I want to travel the world. I can’t get paid to travel the world. That seems like a cheat code. And you’re like, no, those are the ones you want to lean into. That is a cheat code, because what’s fun for you is not fun for somebody else. And so, there’s a ton of people that will pay for you to do that for them or to know what you learned along the way, because they weren’t willing to take that journey.
Mike Montague
09:59 – 10:10
And I think that’s really what’s fascinating for me. So yeah, to circle back to the play part is it’s almost sometimes such a hell yes that people don’t believe that it’s possible.
Jessica Miller
10:10 – 10:10
Yes.
Mike Montague
10:10 – 10:33
And that’s what I love to encourage people for is like, you can find a way to make money at it, or find a way to work it into your life, even if you don’t get paid for it. There are just some things that you need to do. And then that, that hell yes energy gives you all of these other assets and synergy and the rest of the stuff that you’re doing that’s extremely valuable.
Jessica Miller
10:33 – 11:04
Yeah. It really dials up your creativity. It just makes everything so much more fun. It really does. It’s that kind of key link. I love the idea of the book. So, let’s talk about this because you’ve done a lot of amazing things with books. Each one of those books has been a hell yes for you and subsequently been a hell yes for a lot of people. So, talk about, what made you, did you think I need to write this book? Were you compelled to write the book or was it an idea during the pandemic that you’re like, I’m going to put into this book?
Jessica Miller
11:04 – 11:08
And then how did that spiral into other books? Like talk about that a little bit.
Mike Montague
11:08 – 11:46
So yeah, let me roll back to the first book because I think it kind of explains where I was coming from. So, in about ten years ago, I was working in social media and marketing in the sales training consulting. And I was looking for a book on social selling, how to use LinkedIn for a salesperson, not for a marketer. There was a ton of books out there for marketing that’s like, hey, you post a whole bunch of times, you join 50 groups, you get as many connections as possible, and then you blast posts and hopefully someday somebody buys from you.
Mike Montague
11:46 – 12:19
And so it was the gist of the advice at the time. And I kind of thought, well, that’s great, but I’m working with a sales team that has a hundred people in it. We can’t have a hundred influencers in the same company. So maybe the CEO could take that approach, but then the rest of these sellers need to do something else. They need like a social selling approach. And I read every book there was to read on the subject on Amazon. It was like around 30 books or so. And all of the books ended with the chapter, and now you engage the audience.
Mike Montague
12:52 – 13:23
He gave me a book deal and said, we’ll publish it. But our legal department doesn’t know if we can put LinkedIn’s name on the cover. And I said, well, yeah, but we did the sales training for LinkedIn. Sandler is a big international sales training company. I was like, we know LinkedIn. Why don’t we just call them up and ask them? And they said, we’ve been looking for a book like this, too, because we know it doesn’t exist. So, if you write the book by August 15th, we’ll send it out to every Sales Navigator subscriber on LinkedIn for free.
Mike Montague
13:23 – 14:02
We’ll send them all a notice and an email that they can download this PDF of the book for free. So, I had to write the book. I wrote the book, and some interesting things happened. It’s called LinkedIn the Sandler Way. And one of my offers is if you go to sandler.com/LinkedIn-secrets, I’m no longer at Sandler or anything, but you can get the book for free and get the PDF for free. And that offer was downloaded over 80,000 times in the first few years. And then after that, we kind of stopped keeping track of the stats, but it was one of the top 10 bestsellers for Sandler for the next 10 years.
Mike Montague
14:02 – 14:17
Last time I looked, it was still one of our top 10 offers 10 years later and generated millions of dollars for the company, but also for me and all of our locations around the world. So that was really fun. And then—
Jessica Miller
14:17 – 14:52
Can I just say one thing too about this, Mike, that I just love because this is, when it comes to offers, one of the most common things that I see with people is that what they’re creating in the front-end piece, at their lower ticket, lead magnet, whatever, is disjointed from the paid offer. But this is a perfect and beautiful example of how they are literally like hand in glove. And when you do that and you have a powerful partnership and it’s very focused, it is just people fly through that customer journey and things are awesome. And that I think is such an important piece.
Jessica Miller
14:52 – 15:03
And I assume based on your discussions with LinkedIn and working with them and where Sandler was positioned, that you did that very intentionally. You looked at both pieces of the puzzle here.
Mike Montague
15:03 – 15:03
Right.
Jessica Miller
15:03 – 15:07
What is the best book that we can write to make that thing just soar?
Mike Montague
15:08 – 15:42
And LinkedIn had a social selling expert named Coca Sexton who added stuff to it. So just like you said, they were like, okay, we can give you stats that nobody else has because we’re LinkedIn. So, we’ll tell you exactly how the algorithm works, exactly how these, you know, percentages work and the results we’re seeing from our clients and stuff. So, they added to it. And that does kind of dovetail to where to take us back to Playful Humans in the next book is some interesting things happened along the way. One, we gave away the book for free to everybody, so the royalties and stuff were not great.
Mike Montague
15:42 – 16:14
I didn’t actually make a direct dollar off of sales of the book, but I still made over a million dollars in consulting fees and speaking fees and all kinds of stuff over the next 10 years. Sandler made a ton of money, like you said, directly consulting on social selling and sales training and stuff that came from it. LinkedIn was using that to get more Sales Navigator subscribers. So, it was a win-win for everybody involved. They took my name off the cover of the book too though, because they branded it published by LinkedIn and Sandler, two big corporations.
Mike Montague
16:14 – 17:03
And I also tell people that by the time it was actually published and two, you know, international companies edited, I probably wrote 70% of the book. There was a lot of editing and back and forth and people involved in a big project like that. But that kind of gave me this feeling that I wanted to do it again, but do it for myself. With Playful Humans and the pandemic, I had been studying this play research, which is fascinating. There are just a ton of studies and every chapter in Playful Humans has some amazing psychology and neuroscience tips and everything that says people that play live longer, they’re happier, they smile more, they laugh more, they’re more productive at their jobs. Salespeople sell more.
Mike Montague
17:04 – 17:39
I mean, you have more sex, you make more money, you lose weight. Like it’s ridiculous. It’s like the magic pill for everything on these stats. And the downside is really probably just a little emotional. Like maybe there’s a status thing to it or you’re afraid you might look silly or it’s an emotional risk in play. But really other than that, there’s not a whole lot of downside depending on what you do for fun and play. So, I was like, I want to do something to contribute to this conversation. And I want this to be a hundred percent me this time.
Mike Montague
17:39 – 18:22
I want my name on it. I want to self-publish. I’m going to hire the editors. I’m gonna pay for everything. I’m not doing a book deal. I’m not getting everybody else involved. I want this to sort of be my personal mission statement and manifesto. And like I mentioned at the top with all the things I’ve done for my career from DJing to game show host and everything, I think this is my book and a little bit of a legacy piece that I wanted to do. So, it was kind of the opposite of the LinkedIn book. And once I found that I had something to say, and I had this podcast where I interviewed over 200 play experts and performers and people that play for a living even like website designers that travel the world as digital nomads and have a travel blog and stuff like that.
Mike Montague
18:22 – 18:57
Anybody that I was like, oh, that’s cool. They’re living the dream. I wanted to learn from them. And then I collected these 52 lessons from the 200 interviews and came up with the book. And then that sort of really amplified the project for me. That is so cool. But again, all I make money from Playful Humans is on speaking events and engagements. So, I still make tens of thousands of dollars for somebody to, you know, fly out. I’m Lego Serious Play certified. It sounds funny to say sometimes, but I get to play with Lego with adults and get paid for it.
Mike Montague
18:57 – 18:59
That’s a thing.
Jessica Miller
18:59 – 18:59
Yeah.
Mike Montague
19:00 – 19:40
And so I was like, this feels like a cool thing to do. And I don’t know anybody else that’s doing it. You can get that book for free at playfulhumans.com/free-book. Or if you go to playfulhumans.com/quiz, there’s a fun BuzzFeed-style personality quiz where there are 10 different play types that people don’t know about. So, you know, a lot of people think play, they think sports because it’s kind of been monetized and it’s out there, but there are explorers, creators like painters, people that love social events like party planning and cocktail parties, and all kinds of stuff like that, community engagement.
Mike Montague
19:41 – 20:09
There are people that like puzzles and games. There are people that like, you know, all kinds of different stuff, telling jokes, comedians and such. So, you can find out what your playful personality style is. That has been a great offer to drive newsletter signups. Then the newsletter sells the book, and then the book sells the podcast, and the podcast sells my services. It really creates a nice funnel for what I’m doing, and it’s all kind of built on each other and works together in a cool way.
Jessica Miller
20:09 – 20:26
Yeah, you have to tell me, when someone wants to hire you, what is your pitch to them when you talk about coming in as a speaker? What would you say to someone to have them invite you in to speak to their company or their team? What’s that pitch that you give them?
Mike Montague
20:27 – 21:11
It usually goes back to my core strengths. I love what you said about keeping it simple earlier, which is you’ve probably got a lot of great speakers. You know, I always talk about this arborist conference, you know, the tree trimmers and planters and gardeners and such. And everybody on their list was either like a motivational speaker who climbed Mount Everest or someone super nerdy like discussing oak mites or some sort of tree fungus, with scientific data and things. And what most conferences hire me for, or even events and sales kickoffs, is, we need somebody to change the energy.
Mike Montague
21:11 – 21:51
We need a break for fun after lunch. We need a closing keynote that’s going to leave everybody happy. It’s going to get the audience out of their chairs, wake them up, play some games. So, a game show or, in smaller groups, the Lego stuff works. Or even just a humorous keynote that’s about how to be and not sort of what to do or overly business-like. It really seems to move the needle in these conferences. The energy change it creates allows the meetings to be longer or more productive and really changes their outcomes.
Jessica Miller
21:51 – 22:15
So when someone consumes your offer, what is the result they’re getting in their company? What is that outcome? What would you say that is? Like, I’m going to hire you, you’re going to come in and talk to my team, and the result will be: are they more productive, happier? The meeting’s going to be better. People are going to be talking about it for 10 years. What is that thing that would like sell me on bringing you in? Because I love this. I mean just the energy of it is awesome.
Mike Montague
22:15 – 22:45
Yeah, it’s funny. I would say probably 80% of the time it is really just fun. It’s not that complicated. They’re like, we have a Christmas party or an event where we want to do something fun, and it’s just like you would hire a DJ or a magician or, you know, any type of performer, a band or something. It’s like, well, why don’t we do something different this time for our team building, instead of the usual trust falls or escape rooms? Let’s try something else.
Jessica Miller
22:45 – 22:47
Yeah, like raising the fun factor.
Mike Montague
22:47 – 23:04
Which is fine. I don’t mind being in that bucket at all. I do think that the fun and the energy change is a great value. The other 20% of the time, though, is what I think people don’t realize: it’s a perspective change.
Jessica Miller
23:04 – 23:04
Shifter.
Mike Montague
23:05 – 23:38
Especially with the Lego Serious Play Workshop, we’re working in two dimensions. We’re on a flat screen right now. You’re writing on a flat sheet of paper. We’re all at home. Everybody’s working on their own perspective in their own way. And when you build with Lego, you can build together with other people, like you can walk around the thing, it’s three-dimensional, and you can work with your hands, and you’re actually building something that’s very foreign to what most of us do for a living these days. And then the fourth dimension on that is storytelling.
Mike Montague
23:39 – 24:10
We kind of use improv games and other things to be like, okay, based on that Lego model that you built, tell me the story of how this applies to our project or our work culture or where you’re at in your career, whatever problem we’re working on. It becomes fascinating. You can all of a sudden, kind of like they do with child play therapy, get people talking about the real issues through their designs. It’s like, well, in your team here of Lego, why did you put your leader Lego figure up on the top and all the people on the bottom?
Mike Montague
24:10 – 24:27
Do you think the leader should be with the team or do you think that’s a separate higher level? And why do you see leaders that way and stuff? You can start asking really interesting questions that just don’t happen if you bring in like a productivity expert to talk about time management.
Jessica Miller
24:27 – 24:56
Totally. Totally. Yeah, this reminds me of a time I worked in corporate America for 20 years and I worked very closely with the sales team. I was in sales for a little while, but I was more on the medical side, but we had a big launch sales meeting and they brought someone in to basically do sort of like this team-building mixer between the departments and franchises or whatever. I was like, oh gosh, here we go. Like you said, it’s going to be like a relay race or something, like, shoot me now. You know, it’s like in Arizona, my hair is going to be frizzy.
Jessica Miller
24:56 – 25:22
All these things are going through your mind, which is not leading to the outcome people are trying to create. But anyway, what they decided to do was they created this chili cook-off. And what they did was they broke the whole company into these teams and they gave you the ingredients and you had to come up with this chili recipe together. Then you needed to design a commercial for the chili and act it out or present it.
Mike Montague
25:22 – 25:23
That’s awesome.
Jessica Miller
25:23 – 25:39
It was the best. It was so fun to your point, like all of this mixing of different personalities, you lose your kind of traditional role. You get all the different types of strengths within the different groups in the company working together. I still remember it. That was like 15 years ago. So, it’s
Mike Montague
25:39 – 26:07
just a really, really good thing. Yeah, I think that’s exactly it. And in the book, Playful Humans, I talk about four different benefits of play. Creativity and innovation is one. Confidence is another. A lot of people don’t realize that success is a terrible teacher. You learn confidence through failure, and you have to have a safe space for people to play and fail. And the chili is a great example of, okay, if we make a bad chili commercial, nobody cares.
Mike Montague
26:08 – 26:43
If we make a bad commercial for the company, if we had gone straight to making a commercial for the company, everybody cares. Our jobs are on the line, our sales are on the line. And that stress makes for really poor play and really poor creative decisions. So having the confidence to try and fail things and to get good at stuff and have enough room to practice is huge. Physical and mental conditioning is number three, which a lot of people don’t think about. But unless your brain is trained to come up with creative ideas, like comedians can write jokes not because they were born funny, but because they practice writing jokes every day.
Mike Montague
26:43 – 27:12
The same thing with physical activities. If you go out and you hike, you’re gonna be bad at it the first time, but if you hike every single day for fun and you love it, you’re gonna get better at it and you’re gonna get your physical conditioning over time. And then the last part for me is really like the culture and the community that’s built around it; the connections that are made through play are different than the ones that are made through work. We all have work friends and we have personal friends and rarely do those things.
Mike Montague
27:14 – 27:51
Right. But when you have fun with somebody, you create these positive emotions and chemicals that actually change the way you relate to other people. And again, it takes out all those pressures and outside influences that there’s real positive benefits for your company, as well as preventing burnout and quiet quitting and all the other issues that are plaguing corporate America right now. So, I think a play routine or habit can be really powerful in those things. And a lot of people don’t understand that the productivity actually goes up. My favorite stat is that they did a study on programmers at Microsoft in California.
Mike Montague
27:52 – 28:07
The ones that worked more than 60 hours a week for more than six weeks in a row slowed down so much and got so burnt out and tired that they produced fewer lines of code at the end of the six weeks than people that had just worked 40 hours, went home, and had fun.
Jessica Miller
28:07 – 28:08
Yeah, wow.
Mike Montague
28:08 – 28:39
They came back recharged, energized, thinking clearly, and were in on the project, and they were able to continue at the same rate of speed than these people that were trying to grind and burn and put in twice as many hours as the other people. And so, I think especially over the course of a career, but a company that wants longevity, there are short-term trade-offs. You can do a quick sprint and pull one all-nighter to finish a project, but you can’t do that two nights in a row. You can’t do that for two weeks or two months or 20 years in a row.
Mike Montague
28:39 – 28:45
You gotta figure out what your happy place is there if you want to be sustainable and successful.
Jessica Miller
28:46 – 29:13
Yeah, and how much of this is tied to the human factor, which I know is such a key component of your business now, which is that doesn’t happen, like the computer doesn’t own it, right? This is a human thing, a human interaction, all of the things that come out of that. Fun and easy is such a huge thing, and it’s only something that you can experience as a human. So, I think that’s really—
Mike Montague
29:13 – 29:52
Yeah, so I think as we kind of wrap up here, that brings us full circle to the AI marketing and stuff. So, if I take my technical background and I understand what AI can do, and then we look at what humans do that gives them energy and how they’re successful through play and creativity and all the stuff we just mentioned. Now we can look and decide with a cool AI strategy of what is a robot job and what is a human job? And that’s basically my role now. So, I love to do AI strategy consulting for companies, and that’s my main introductory offer.
Mike Montague
29:54 – 30:29
The marketing part and the content marketing and creation is my regular offer. That’s for my ongoing clients on a retainer basis. But to start thinking about it, I think I’m uniquely positioned from all of this to look at it and say, there are jobs we don’t want humans doing, like hazardous mining or bomb disposal, or certain dangerous jobs, right? Those are robot jobs. If we can have a robot do that, we should do that, 100%. There are also human jobs where maybe it’s like, you know, taking your spouse to dinner on your anniversary; you don’t want to send an AI robot.
Mike Montague
30:29 – 31:17
You probably want to show up for yourself, right? That could cost you more than one night apart. So, there are uniquely human jobs. There are jobs that require empathy, understanding, or creativity and knowing when to break the rules and stuff that robots are not good at. Flexibility and things. And then there’s this huge, messy overlap of stuff in the middle. And we’re really at this point where I think chat GPT can write a better email than most humans at this point. So now we have to decide with these new capabilities, should I write that email, and should it write the first draft or the last draft or a middle draft and stuff.
Mike Montague
31:17 – 31:57
So I decided to take this human-first approach that if we put our ideas, our voice, our creativity and we do our thinking first, then we ask AI to edit it. I happen to be a terrible speller who’s written a bunch of books and more blogs than anybody can count or read. Grammarly is a great AI tool for spell checking and grammar. And Chat GPT is a better physical writer than I am. But I think I understand the message, the branding, the marketing, the connection, the heart of the message that’s being written better than AI does.
Jessica Miller
31:57 – 31:57
So
Mike Montague
31:57 – 32:23
if I do that work first, then I have AI and I go back and forth and fight it out and talk about it. And then I think also it’s human last. I need to take another pass. I need to read everything that’s created. I need to think about how does this fit in my marketing strategy? Where does it go? Is this what I intended to say and do a human last approach, I think that’s been getting the best results for me and my clients so far.
Jessica Miller
32:23 – 32:39
Yeah. I think also in a lot of the instances that you’re talking about where there is no room for the computer, it is human to human. You can’t be like, hey, wait, hold on a second. Let me ask chat, DBT what I should say here or how I should finesse this.
Mike Montague
32:39 – 32:39
Yeah. That’s
Jessica Miller
32:39 – 33:11
interesting too. It’s getting this information and then making it your own so that you really own it and can deliver it. Whether you’re a guest on a podcast like this, or you’re giving a talk on a stage, or you’re talking in a sales call to a client, there are places where, to your point, it can help you be more you. It’s like you 2.0, you know what I mean? With all of that help. And then, then you grow alongside the technology.
Mike Montague
33:11 – 34:03
I spent a long time in the sales world. And I think if you use a salesperson as an example, it’s really easy. That AI can talk to your clients now, you might not want it to do that. Maybe what a better use of AI is to have AI play the prospect and train the salesperson on how to interact or some of the questions that might come up and make the human seller better. Also, we know most salespeople are great at connecting with other humans, building consensus and stuff that AI is not great at. If you have a buying team, AI is not going to, you know, change the pitch and the messages for the purchasing agent or legal versus the buyer and the end users and all this kind of consensus sales, especially in enterprise sales, really complicated things that humans have been doing for a long time.
Mike Montague
34:03 – 34:38
On the other hand, we know most sellers also are really bad at updating the CRM, and you give them a spreadsheet and it’s their kryptonite. And they’re like, nope, no thanks. Well, robots can do that. Robots can listen to the call now, take notes, update the CRM, move the deal along, you know, note the different specs and products that were mentioned and contract terms and write the legal contracts or even make really cool proposals and stuff. Most salespeople are bad at PowerPoint and the other creative things that us as marketers know how to do. But now we can give them tools to make that easier.
Mike Montague
34:38 – 35:03
Like, hey, here’s the brand template. Here’s the voice. You just tell it what you want it to do and it’ll make the whole presentation for you in a couple of minutes. And now we’re talking about really cool things that make the human seller better, but also uses AI in a way that we should be using it rather than trying to replace a human seller and have a robot talk to a human buyer of ours. I don’t think that’s going to work.
Jessica Miller
35:03 – 35:39
Right. I think what you’re talking about, which I love wholeheartedly, and I’ve been saying it for a long time, which is that I think really powerful AI allows you to use your human resources better. It’s not getting rid of them. It’s not replacing them. It’s not filling in those spots where you need a person. It’s freeing them up for the best use of that resource. And I know in my work, the way an offer works in a business or the way you look at your business growth if you’re a bigger business, it’s about finding where the best opportunities are, and where to best use those assets.
Jessica Miller
35:39 – 35:51
And when you can take off the other stuff, that’s the minutia of the 80% and focus on your 20, everything gets better. And it’s a hell of a lot more fun, I promise you. It just is.
Mike Montague
35:51 – 36:31
Yeah, two quick things on that. Especially in sales and marketing, there may be other jobs that are outsourced by AI, like we mentioned, but in sales and marketing, I haven’t met a company yet that said, we want the exact same amount of sales, but with fewer people. Right. No, they want, if we can 10X what a person can do, they want 10 times the sales, right? They’re not gonna get rid of the human part of that. They’re gonna want 10 times as much. The other thing is, I think it’s funny with DeepSeek, and I don’t know how much you’re following AI, but China just released an AI model for free that is as good as our best-paid models we had had so far.
Mike Montague
36:32 – 37:00
And it turns out AI isn’t going to take human jobs. It’s going to take the other AI jobs. So, we’ve got that going for us so far. But robots will replace the other robots. Oh my gosh. It’ll be interesting to find out. And I think it’s a cool challenge for me to help my clients do as we go forward. I think for the foreseeable future, combining the human and AI in your business is gonna be a fun challenge to figure out.
Jessica Miller
37:00 – 37:09
Yeah, and you mentioned earlier before we got on here that there’s like a book rolling around in there in this capacity too. Where’s your head at with that now? What are your thoughts?
Mike Montague
37:09 – 37:52
Yeah. I think it’s in this AI strategy. So, I’m trying to figure out what my offers are here for Avenue9. I’m only four months in. It’s going great so far. I haven’t needed a whole lot of marketing and stuff to keep it going and growing. But I do think that there are people struggling out there, small businesses and medium-sized businesses that are afraid of what’s coming with AI, but they don’t really have a strategy and haven’t thought through how to do it. As somebody that’s been a techie my whole life, a lot of people are just like, I don’t know, I hope somebody else figures that out because I’m not a computer person, I don’t know how it fits, or if you’re selling something completely non-technical, like I’ve worked with cement companies and
Jessica Miller
37:52 – 37:53
stuff before.
Mike Montague
37:54 – 38:36
They may have some backend bookkeeping or inventory programs and stuff like that, but they’re not really thinking about AI and sales and marketing or in customer experience and stuff that they, I think they just aren’t thinking about those strategies in a way that’s gonna come back to haunt them a little bit. And then there’s also the upside, which is, I think AI levels the playing field for small and medium-sized businesses. Basically, outside of the big people that are making their own AI, like X and Google and Facebook, I think now small businesses can compete with pretty large organizations because of AI.
Mike Montague
38:36 – 39:11
So if you want to start a podcast, it’s cheaper and faster and easier than ever. If you want to write a blog, you can write a blog with one person and a few minutes. I can make as much stuff as you want to make. So, in an era where we can make anything, the strategy and the question is what should you make? And it’s really the theme of your podcast here, right? In a place where you could make any offer, if you could add any white paper, any book, any video, any, you know, event, webinar thing that you could possibly imagine.
Mike Montague
39:11 – 39:51
You want to make a movie, you want to, you know, write a fantasy novel with your product embedded in it, whatever you could possibly imagine, you can make that now for your business, even in a small business budget. Under a million-dollar business could make whatever they want to make at this point. So, the question for me becomes, what should you make? Yeah. What’s the strategy that helps you amplify that magic of your business, the hell yes and the irresistible offer of your business? And then how do we make that stuff? And I think the how part is easy, but the part that I think is the book is what’s that strategy?
Mike Montague
39:51 – 39:53
What are we making and why now?
Jessica Miller
39:53 – 40:32
Yeah. Yeah. And how I think, you know, you have so many different avenues you can go with this too, because as you were talking about like cement companies, brick-and-mortar companies, they look at marketing very differently. Some of these things, even in the digital world, are like voodoo to them, never mind AI. So, the opportunity of like breaking and disrupting a market there, I mean, you could go that angle if you wanted, or you could go wider, you know, with a wider net. But I think the bottom line is, if somebody works with you, not only to do it for them, but to understand their business, to set the strategy and pick the point where they should focus, they will get such a huge ROI on their time and effort.
Jessica Miller
40:32 – 41:06
And for many of these people, especially in certain industries, they are constrained by human resources. They don’t have the person or the people or even the time to hire the person to teach, to go do this thing. But to your point, because everyone is doing it now and the stakes are even higher if you don’t do it, it’s the fastest way to a big result for you in your business, especially in certain industries. So, you could really niche into the market or you can niche into the framework or this could be a great book either way, I think.
Mike Montague
41:07 – 41:44
Yeah, I think it’s less about the market and the marketing and more about, like you said, a framework to think about it for me is that like, there’s kind of four ways that AI can help you in your business, the generative AI stuff and, and content creation is one everybody’s seen, right? Like, everybody should pick that up. That’s, that’s pretty easy. There’s also some stuff that we’ve been doing in automation and in marketing for a long time, but also in other parts of your business. If there’s anything that you can automate and have a robot do, you should probably go ahead and do that.
Mike Montague
41:44 – 42:31
Humans aren’t great at repetitive tasks anyway. They get bored and they make mistakes and stuff. So, automation is a really cool thing. The predictive analytics have gotten even better. So, we have, I think in the past been looking backward at, okay, how did this offer do in the past? And then use that to kind of make decisions in the future. Now, the way the predictive analytics have happened, you can predict what your customers are going to do next and kind of beat them to the punch. And so, you need to be using AI to really kind of look at trends and where the market’s going or where your customers are getting stuck in the funnel and kind of preemptively create interventions for those.
Mike Montague
42:31 – 43:10
And then finally is the machine learning, which I don’t think anybody is doing yet, but the machine learning is fascinating. You can teach it your brand, your voice, upload your customer data. You can do things on a scale that we’ve never been able to do before. It all required a spreadsheet and pretty complicated programming. But now with like Google’s notebook, you can upload up to 50 sources. So, when I was writing my book, I uploaded my 50 favorite podcasts, and then I had my 50 chapters of my book, and I asked it to compare which guest would be the most applicable and relatable to that chapter and then it does the outline.
Mike Montague
43:10 – 43:54
I had a chapter called Desbundar, which is a Portuguese word we don’t have in English, but similar to when your inhibitions drop-in play and you’re kind of in the flow state and stuff. Well, I had interviewed this Portuguese artist and a musician on the podcast that I’m forgetting all about and it matches those up for us. Well, imagine if you had this AI in the background, working in your company and it says, hey, we noticed that this customer dropped off, that they’ve been ordering every month and this month they didn’t order. And that customer has the same personality style as this salesperson over here. Let’s alert Chris to call Susan and talk about these things and give them prompts.
Mike Montague
43:54 – 44:34
There’s all kinds of cool stuff and just data or internal wikis and company knowledge that we can do that we’ve never been able to do before. And I think people are just getting ready to scratch the surface of what’s possible there. So, if we think about those kinds of four things, we can start thinking like, okay, how would I use data? How would I use machine learning? How would I use generative AI? And then how would I use automation to solve whatever my problems are or to make my business better? I think it’s going to be a cool book and a cool framework for people to leverage and lean on a little bit, to at least feel like they’re on comfortable ground in this crazy AI world.
Jessica Miller
44:34 – 44:45
Yeah. They’ve thought through it, filtered it through their own filters. Then they can hire you as an advisor and then they can hire your company to do it for them when they don’t want to do it. Sounds perfect. Sounds like a hell yes offer to me.
Mike Montague
44:46 – 45:07
Well, good. I’m glad you approve. I was looking for the, actually, I want to talk to you afterward and see how I can improve it. I’m still working on the language because it’s new for me. I think I can simplify what that offer is and the value proposition of Avenue 9, but I think the core hell yes offer is in there.
Jessica Miller
45:07 – 45:18
Yeah. Somewhere. I agree. I agree. Mike, I love this. This has been so amazing. Where can people find you on the internet? Because you mentioned a few places, but let people know where you are hanging out on the internet where they can find you.
Mike Montague
45:19 – 45:51
For sure. Avenue9 is the website, avenue9.com, and there’s a Human First AI Marketing Podcast. Since you listened all the way to the end of this podcast, you could probably check out the Human First AI Marketing Podcast if you’re into that. Playful Humans, if you want to find more fun, flow, and fulfillment in your life, go to playfulhumans.com, get the book for free, or take the personality quiz and enjoy. And then, if you’re looking for sales training, I’m no longer with Sandler, but I think Sandler is great. And that LinkedIn, the Sandler Way book is out there too if it’ll help.
Jessica Miller
45:51 – 45:56
That’s awesome. Mike, thank you so much for your time today. For everybody listening, until next week, we’ll see you there.
