Self-Publishing a Highly-Visual Book on Data w/ Ben Salmon
Ben is the author of Your Number’s Up! Getting a grip on Data and Measurement to accelerate your Direct to Consumer ecommerce sales. Ben is highly qualified to write this book, having held global roles with leading marketing technology companies like Unica, Chordiant, smartFOCUS, and Pitney Bowes Software, as well as leading the data charge at big agencies like RAPP and DDB. Now he works directly with brands that want to take control by using data to identify where to best focus efforts to help them grow rapidly. Ben works with these brands to bridge data, technology and marketing with commercial and common sense thinking.
In this episode, Ben talks about why he won’t create his next book using presentation software, why he chose to find a book printer instead of using a print-on-demand service like Amazon KDP, and how he used LinkedIn to connect to the people he interviewed for his book.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Josh Steimle: Today, my guest is Ben Salmon. Ben is the author of Your Number’s Up! Getting a grip on Data and Measurement to accelerate your Direct to Consumer ecommerce sales. It's a bit of a niche, but that's great. And we're going to talk about why that's such a good thing. Ben is highly qualified to write this book, having held global roles with leading marketing technology companies like Unica, Chordiant, smartFOCUS, and Pitney Bowes Software, as well as leading the data charge at big agencies like RAPP and DDB. Now he works directly with brands that want to take control by using data to identify where to best focus efforts to help them grow rapidly. Ben works with these brands to bridge data, technology, and marketing with commercial and common sense thinking.
Ben, welcome to the show.
Ben Salmon: Thank you, Josh really appreciates it.
Josh Steimle: And full disclosure. I had a tiny hand in helping Ben with his book while he was writing it because he was interviewing a ton of people, which we'll talk more about how he got this book written and how he relied on a lot of people to give input into it. And so it's fun to be on this side of things now because I saw the book while it was being written. Now I get to see the book on the other side after it got published. And now we get to hear the whole story of how it happened.
But, Ben first, perhaps can you take us back a little bit through your professional career? When did you first get interested in beta? How did you end up getting to this point where you're writing a book about this topic?
Ben Salmon: So first and foremost, thank you so much for your help on an interview and time and stuff when writing the book. Everyone was mega. I'll try and do a quick peppered history.
I started off on the software side working in the marketing technology space. I did that for a few years. And then I realized very quickly that it's great having theory about data and technology, but I hadn't actually ever implemented it. Using the technology, sounds ludicrous, doesn't it? But, implementing this technology and never using it, and I'd never been a brand side or agency side. So I decided to stop selling the dream and live the dream, to a certain extent. So I went agency side and worked, as you said, with RAPP and DDB to really understand the marketing universe with clients.
And then after a period of that of getting tired of too much marketing stuff. I went back to kind of the software technology world. And I've been doing that ever since. I think the big change is when I first started off which is amusing, I can't believe we're saying this, but it was like database marketing life before email marketing, doing direct mail campaigns and things like that. And then I think as time has progressed, more and more data are coming through digitally. And where I've ended up focusing is looking at digital data. But trying to try and unpick all of this digital data, which should make it easy cause it's all the same. A visit is a visit, a session is a session, a conversion is a conversion.
But where you can spend the money and where you can reach customers is so much harder than when I did email campaigns or when I did direct mail campaigns, cause they would land on someone's doorstep.
Josh Steimle: And so when did you get to the point where you said, “I've got knowledge and I
need to turn this into a book” or “I want to write a book that covers this topic.”
Ben Salmon: So it was born out of two things. One, it was born out of frustration. So there's tons of awesome books about technology, marketing technology, all sorts of implementation technology. There's loads of stuff that's really cool about how to sell on Amazon. And there are really, really good books on go to market and all sorts of stuff.
But the one thing that kept coming back to me is no one's measuring this stuff. So you're spending all this money and a major agency is telling you how many clicks you got. Don't put that on your annual report. You put like how much money you made on your annual report. So the idea was born out of frustration. And this time last year was COVID chaos. So, we started writing the book and there were four of us involved. So I wrote the content. Peter Abraham did all the typesetting and design. Tim Shaw was a technical advisory on having worked with the Google Analytics API and LinkedIn API, and some of the other platforms. And Jess Calkins did all the copywriting and editing. And I hatched the idea of maybe we should just write about this measurement stuff.
All these people keep asking what does cost per acquisition means? What does bounce rate mean? What does average order value mean? And obviously all the acronyms, Josh, that everyone seems to use interchangeably and not know what they mean. So it's like we should put this in paper to help Senior leaders and junior teams have a go-to book that they can read as really a reference, coffee table book so that they can slap on their desk so that they can go back to it time and time again, around measurement. What does this mean and how to grow their business?
Josh Steimle: Yeah. And talk a little bit more to us about the ideal audience for this book, who is the person who's going to profit the most from reading and understanding what's in your book?
Ben Salmon: Yeah. I would say that we originally wrote it just for senior leaders and we thought, actually, we should give it to senior leaders and they'll pick the book and they'll use it. The reality is actually it's for the middle managers that are trying to better articulate the value of digital to their bosses and their bosses don't get it. So great example, but you walk into the boardroom, you're having a conversation, you're talking about cost per acquisition. And then you're looking at maybe sessions to the transaction and why the average order value seems to be lower on Facebook because the retargeting campaign isn't working. It's just an example.
Josh Steimle: Like, what does all that mean? Yeah
Ben Salmon: Exactly.
Josh Steimle: Of course the senior leader has to look good. So he nods his head and says, “Oh yeah, I got all that. Yeah, no problem.” But in reality, he has no clue what was just communicated to him.
Ben Salmon: Exactly. And I've tried to not use any acronyms. I've tried to use some of the language that maybe a middle to senior manager would have presented to the board. And the board goes, “What does that all mean?” So it's actually saying, “Look, there's probably 200 metrics you could talk about, but actually to get your point across, you need to better articulate the things that matter.”
So this is for middle to senior managers. This is what you need to say when talking to senior leaders, talk about outcomes, not about clicks. Outcomes like revenue, lifetime customer profit, repeat customer order rate, and things like that. Cause that's what's driving the business growth, but also, Josh, I think a lot of the craft has been lost in our trade around measurement. Like when we ran, showing my age, when we were in print campaigns, they were pretty expensive. You made an error or mistake on a large print run, you have to get things right. So you measured lots of stuff like response rate, and actually weirdly the journey was really disconnected.
So actually the idea is to bring some of that kind of measurement skill and knowledge back, but in the digital space. So the junior teams are going and challenging the people that are buying media, internally or media agents and going, “Yeah, it's great that you've got a click through rate of 2.4%. That's fantastic. How many sales did I get? And by the way, was my cost of sale profitable based on my cost of goods or allowable margin?”
So that target audience is that middle management that can maybe give it to their senior leaders, but they're probably not going to read it, but help them better engage with that senior team and then the junior team to better understand what they should be measuring.
Josh Steimle: So why did you decide on direct to consumer versus B2B or other spaces that you could've gone after?
Ben Salmon: I love that question. So B2B is the next target on the list.
Josh Steimle: Now, I know the future.
Ben Salmon: Yeah, we can collaborate on that one as well. I think direct to consumer in the early part of kind of the COVID outbreak, just had this monster explosion, a huge number of brands going direct to consumer. You saw the likes of: Hershey, Oreos, Nike… going direct to consumer. Lots of brands going direct to consumer, but it was just like, Wow, having worked with a couple of different, I would say, traditional brands that have gone direct to consumer, Unilever group and Reckitt Benckiser, I was really surprised merchandising and product research and product ranging like price point and analysis, they knew inside out. But they'd never directly interacted with the continuum because they'd always wholesale their stuff.
So actually I thought, you know what we should try and give them a manual, a book that they can use as a reference point. So hence the direct consumer bit and the e-commerce bit, because what I love about e-commerce is there's revenue at the end. So you can argue as much as you want. You can say attribution and all sorts of clever words and talk about stuff. At the end of the day, if you spent more money than you've made that's loss-making. If there is a sale at the end and if you can see that sale or that revenue number at the end, you can absolutely see whether you've been successful
Josh Steimle: And that's something even a senior manager can understand.
Ben Salmon: Yes, Absolutely. 100%. Exactly.
Josh Steimle: So what was your vision when you started working on this book? We already answered why you wrote this book, who you wrote it for, but what did you want this book to do for you and for the other people working on the book? What was the incentive? Because we all know you don't really make that much money off of book sales. So what was your angle? What were you trying to accomplish by putting this book out there?
Ben Salmon: One is an ambition really for our sector or our market in terms of the marketing universe, one is pretty self-fulfilling. So the kind of ambition was I want to see digital revenue as a percentage of total revenue, or if you like e-commerce sales as a percentage of the total retail sales on every annual report. So shareholders have complete transparency to see how much is being invested and how much digital is growing and country contributing to the business. So it was really about getting digital on the annual report. It's this kind of sideline, or you get silly things like we'd have 300% year-on-year growth, but if it represents 1% of your business, 300% is not good.
So first and foremost, it was about raising the awareness of digital revenue as a percentage of total revenue.
Josh Steimle: But tying it back to you, how would this benefit you? Are you trying to get speaking gigs? Are you trying to grow consulting engagements? What did you want the book to do for you personally?
Ben Salmon: Yeah. Yeah, it's a really good shout. So as you said, you make no money from book sales. So what I want to do is have a consultancy business and I want to work directly with brands that want to change and grow. And the easiest way for me to do that is to write the book to you show the knowledge and expertise, but also connect with brands that also have the same ambition. I've really struggled when the brands are like, “Yeah, yeah, but digital is not that really important. And I know you want to do all this measurement stuff, but you know what, it counts for like, well, we don't even know how much for sales it accounts for, but it's just a rounding error. So we don't really want it.”
So I wanted to use it as a way of a) reaching these brands and engaging with these brands and b) saying, “Look, this is my philosophy. This is what I'm about. If you're interested, fantastic. Let's work together.” It shortcuts everything. If they don't agree with anything in the book, then you’ve already cut them out.
They're reaching out saying, “Actually, we've got this issue. We really want to take measurements seriously.” So it is self-fulfilling right. I want to grow the consultancy side of the business.
Josh Steimle: Yep. And you reached out to a lot of people as you were writing the book. Recently I interviewed a guy here on the podcast, James Carbary, and he wrote a book called Content-Based Networking, which is about using a tool like a book to connect with the people you want to connect with. Because when you're writing a book, of course, you can reach out to people and say, “Hey, you want to be part of my book.” And then they say, “Yes.” And now you're developing a relationship with that person who, they're going to be in the book, they're going to help you write your book or make it better, but also maybe they're a potential client or partner or something. Did you leverage that at all, as you were writing the book? Did you reach out to people and say, “This person not only can help me make this book better, but it might turn into a partnership or a client relationship.”
Ben Salmon:Yeah. So the short answer is no, I wasn't looking at people as a potential client.
I was looking at people who had authority and knowledge in the sector that would help provide me a more well-rounded view. Of course, with people's networks and the kind of that conversation that's going on and me chatting to you now, I don't even know, is it six, eight months later? People have been very kind to help promote the book, but that wasn't the sole purpose. The sole purpose was to get that kind of a well-rounded view of what's going on in the market.
And am I just living a dream and believing that measurement's important or do people not believe in that at all?
Josh Steimle: So it's more about how do I contact the right people to write the best book possible and if anything else comes from talking to those people, that's great, but the first priority was let's write a great book.
Ben Salmon: Yeah. Absolutely
Josh Steimle: So now that the book's out… when did the book officially release?
Ben Salmon: We went out in September.
Josh Steimle: Okay, so we're recording this in December, so it's just been a few months. So since its release, have you seen results from it already? Have you seen the results that you wanted coming from the book being out there in the marketplace?
Ben Salmon: I would say it had a fairly good start to begin with. As you would expect with the noise out there or people sharing it and things. We've had a couple of client engagements on the back of it, which has been great. I think the feedback's been really interesting. The feedback, maybe, cause I don't know, I set the bar too low, has been really positive. Like people have said, “Yeah, no, it's really good. I'm using it. I love some of the humor and the way that you're approaching data and trying to make it really accessible.” And that was the goal.
What I'd like to see more of is trying to get it in front of more people so that more people can agree or disagree with the role of measurement in business. It might not be something to everyone. But for those businesses that want to grow, I firmly believe that measurement is the way to go. It's one of many things, it's not the only thing, but I think in terms of where I'd like to see is it's on me to try and create more awareness to get the word out there.
Josh Steimle: So you've already had some client engagements from it though, which is great, because it's just barely been out a few months. Have you gotten any feedback that was unexpected or not quite the kind of feedback that you were looking for?
Ben Salmon: Yeah. We had one guy come back to us and say, “Wow. It reads like a PowerPoint slide deck.”
Josh Steimle: Is that a good thing?
Ben Salmon: And I was like, that's a really random thing to say, but the whole point of writing it was everything about it was meant to be not traditional. So like the format, it's a square format.
We wanted it in color. We wanted it very visual. We wanted the language, so we don't use any acronyms throughout the whole book because we want to make it accessible. So in a way it's like one of these random things that someone says. And I don't know whether it was a good thing, Josh, but I took it like for me, personally, complimentary because I wanted the whole thing to be visual. I didn't want the thing to be pages and pages of words, because I personally can't process that myself. So I wanted it to be in a slightly different format, but yeah, they said it was like a PowerPoint book in paper, which I just found a bit amusing.
Josh Steimle: So I guess that brings up an interesting question. Which is, are you going to do an audio book version of this or does it just not lend itself to being an audio book?
Ben Salmon: It hadn't even crossed my mind. The one thing, so bearing in mind, this is about digital data and I would describe myself as someone that works in digital and it's to help digital businesses. We actually created the book in physical format, cause we thought that was the best format for it. Weirdly, I'd say it doesn't lend itself as well in a digital format, like in a digital book, like the double page spreads don't lay as well and you don't get that kind of impactfulness and kind of reminder. And not to say the eBook is rubbish. I just, as a format for me, I feel like it really had the investment in physical.
Do you know what? If I was to create this as a thing, Josh, and I'm not going to, because it's going to be like a huge amount of time, effort and money, but I genuinely think taking the physical format and turning into an app that's interactive, that has video, that has audio, that allows people to use tools and sliders and see scenarios and download data, would actually be the way to go. Rather than taking the artifact and just putting it online and digitizing it.
But audible. Yeah. I think an auditory book is a very interesting idea, I don't know who I'd get to voice it though. Emily Jackson or someone like that would be awesome.
Josh Steimle: But yeah, it is tricky when you have a very visual product to transform it to the visual sense, because then you have a chart and you say how do we talk about this chart in such a way to get the point across? And maybe it just doesn't work. Maybe it has to be physical.
So tell us a little bit more about the process of writing the book. We've brought up multiple times now you reached out to a lot of people. You talked to a lot of people. Can you talk more about that process, who you reached out to, why you reached out to them, and some of the challenges of dealing with people, when it comes to the book?
Because some people are like, “I'm going to sit down, I'm going to write a book. It's all coming out of my head.” And they write the book. And then, you and I, me with my CMOs book that we mentioned before recording and you with this book, we're doing interviews, we're talking to a lot of people and it's an entirely different dynamic of collecting content for that book.
Ben Salmon: Yeah. Like to start with, none of it was like a planned, organized, regimented process. And I don't treat this as a bad thing, but I'm dyslexic and I have ADHD. So I'm all over the place. And my spelling is terrible. But for me, I see it as my super power to get stuff and get my energy going. So weirdly I started in the middle, writing a glossary because the questions I get asked regularly with clients is what does this mean? Why is it important? How do I use it? How does it relate to other metrics? How can I use it to grow my business? So I started in the middle. And I really struggled to write long, long form content, like 2 or 3000 words in a word document. I'm quite visual in how I work through it.
The mistake I made and I'll say it's a mistake, I decided to write the whole thing keynote and I laid out everything in keynote on the left page or the right page. The process was actually fine, but translating keynote into InDesign is an absolute nightmare. So next time I'll do it directly in InDesign with a preset number of templates. With all that heavy lifting stuff done up front. So I guess the way I would describe it is I started working in, working out, like up to the introduction and down to the conclusion. But I did everything in keynote, so I did all the kind of data analysis and pits outside. But all the results, the charting, the presentation, the visualizations, all the copy, everything was in keynote and it allowed me to quickly go, visually, are there too many words on this page? I didn't want a whole page of text. It’s too crazy. So I just wanted it to be short and snappy and then have something that's relevant on the left-hand side, whether it's a headline, a table, a chart, an image, a visualization.
Josh Steimle: Well, now that you're telling me all these details, I'm understanding the comment from the guy about why it felt like looking at a PowerPoint presentation, because it was created as a presentation to begin with.
Ben Salmon: Yeah. Yeah. And the whole idea was, I've worked in data for a little while and a lot of people I have worked with or interacted with, that are not data people get switched off by data. They find it boring or not interesting or whatever. So the whole idea was to turn the subject of data on its head and make it visual and make it design led and make it more interesting because you can.
So yeah, that's probably right, why that guy said that.
Josh Steimle: Yep. So I know that you interviewed Brian Solis and some other people. How are you able to get ahold of the people that you wanted in the book and what were some of those challenges getting people scheduled?
Ben Salmon: So, you know what, LinkedIn was an absolute godsend? So some of the people I knew already, but like Josh, we never met before. And the connection on LinkedIn. You were incredibly kind and came back straight away and you said, “How can I help?” And then we scheduled a call and actually, if anything, I underestimated the power of LinkedIn. Cause I had a ton of messages, probably 75 to 80 messages of which I wanted to find the right people and then schedule a call, which not everyone could do. And ended up with I think it was about 15, 16 interviews I ended up doing.
But I also use LinkedIn to do some quantitative data, through surveys to understand where people are and how good they are and a real mix, but predominantly experts in their field, to see what their challenges are, because they're all familiar with the terms and everything else.
With regards to Avinash and Brian and some of the others, they were people that I've either done a speaking gig before with, or I've met, or engaged with on emails. So that was like really old fashioned. And it was like, send them an email and every single one of them was incredible. Like, Avinash particularly was mind blowing. Like you would send him an email saying, “Oh, Avinash, I'm writing a book. I'm thinking about this and this. Oh, by the way, in your last newsletter, I was reading this and I thought about this…”
Instantly. Came back really quickly, “Oh my Gosh, let me know what I can do to help.”
And then, so I said, “I'd love it if you could write the foreward.”
“Yeah. Yeah. What do you need? I feel really privileged to write it.”
“I feel privileged that you're offering to do it!”
So it was really funny and they just gave up their time and they didn't have to do that. They didn't have to help me. But they did, so, very grateful.
Josh Steimle: It's interesting that you brought up LinkedIn as the tool, because for me too, with my CMOs book, it was LinkedIn. That was the thing that got me the most appointments with the people that I was trying to interview. I was trying to interview 30 people. And at first I was trying to reach out directly, find an email address, find a phone number, and I couldn't get past the gatekeepers. There are these gatekeepers. I'm trying to get the CMO of GE. So there are like 10 levels of gatekeepers to get through to this person. I tried even going to PR firms and saying, “Hey, you do PR. I'm trying to get your client into my book, help me out here.”
And that worked with a few, but LinkedIn was where I got more than 50% of the interviews I got. And I got CMOs from Spotify and Target and Home Depot and GE and PayPal. Like more than half of the interviews I got, it was LinkedIn. And it was just sending a direct message to the person. No gatekeeper, immediate response. And I was just blown away by that. I just thought, and I'm a big LinkedIn guy, I just wrote a book on LinkedIn and still, I was surprised. I was like, “I can't believe that this was this easy.”
Ben Salmon: I don't know why, I can't unpick why other than I think… I wasn't selling anything and I wasn't asking for anything other than someone's time. And everyone that's helped has been referenced in the book, by the way, where they'd given me permission. But, yeah cause it's just a slightly different approach and everyone wants to help, they're not being sold to, I wasn't selling them anything. I just genuinely wanted their input to make the book a better thing.
And the way I used it, I didn't answer your question early on, I just remembered. So the way I used the interviews is I actually wrote the book first and then when I spoke to the interviewees, I used to validate market trends. And I created a whole section in the book about market trends. So people are saying this, so what's the measurement angle on this? What does it mean? There's a whole load of topics around Google analytics, everyone's talking about it. It's in kind of in attribution or online, omni-channel online to offline.
So lots of people came up with things. But what was interesting is there were like four or five topics that were like super hot that people were talking about and actually kept coming up.So I used that to then actually write a topic, write a whole load of stuff on that particular areas.
This is what the industry experts on the market is saying at the moment, what's in Vogue. It'll probably be out of date tomorrow, but that sort of thing.
Josh Steimle: That's interesting and speaking out of date. You're writing a book about data and technology, and this is cutting edge stuff. And often one of the concerns with writing a book on technology is by the time I get this published, is it going to be outdated? And so I assume, did you guys self publish or did you go through a traditional publisher?
Ben Salmon: We self-published actually.
Josh Steimle: And was it for that reason, just that you could get out faster or was that just the easiest or what was your decision-making process in determining whether to self publish or try to pursue a traditional publisher?
Ben Salmon: Two reasons, actually, one of my business partners, Peter Abraham, that did a lot of the work and the design, has also written a book before and he had published. It was twofold. One complete ownership of your product. You had complete control. Now, arguably there's less quality assurance going into it cause we're doing it. Although, we had a copywriter and editor that we use to make sure that the content was good. So it’s complete control of the product, was number one.
Number two was the learnings. Cause we wanted to learn about how do you get on Amazon? How do you publish on Amazon? How do you sell this direct?
And number three, and this is going to probably sound crazy, but we wanted to promote this thing ourselves, to learn about how we promote this ourselves. And the publisher takes such a large share of the sale, that we need to make a similar amount of money. And Josh, we know that you don't make that much money from books, but to make a similar amount of money from the books we need to sell a 10th of what the publisher would sell. Now, you could argue that the publisher will get you far more reach, far more brand awareness and the impact of that is bigger. One of the things I'm looking to do next, after this trial period is which we've signed up some affiliates and we're doing kind of old-school, e-commerce living what we're writing about.
We'll do some paid advertising and we're thinking about working with a distributor, to see if a distributor can help get the book further and filled into shops, et cetera. So we've quality controlled the content we think, and we've got some fairly good quotes and names from people to validate the content.
And then the print element of it has been an absolute nightmare, but we've ended up finding an amazing printer. We've gone through four different printers. Print on demand for the type of product that we had, just didn't work at all. The quality was terrible. So we finally find found a good printer. So the print quality, we're really pleased with.
Josh Steimle: That is tricky. Print on demand is fantastic for the right product, but when you're doing a high quality color pages type thing, like you're doing, it's tough. Cause the print on demand, you see the print quality and you're just like, “Eh, this doesn't look quite like what we want.”
So now you mentioned that the next book that you're working on is going to be the B2B version of this. Is that right?
Ben Salmon: Yeah.
Josh Steimle: Have you already started on that or is it just still in the idea stage?
Ben Salmon: It's still in the ideas stage really. But, it's really funny, everything about the direct consumer brand piece, although the principles are the same, they're quite different for B2B.
So the number of sales you need based on average sale value is significant, I don't need as many sales. The amount of rich data. So we talked about LinkedIn, the data that's on LinkedIn is like hugely rich. There's so much information there from a paid perspective and from a targeting perspective. But also the complexity of the sale and the sale cycle is so long, that actually trying to work out customer profitability or sale profitability is quite hard.
And then you've got the intricacies of lead scoring and all of these other kind of business to business marketing techniques. We think that data does run through that journey. In the same way as this book, it's not the only thing to me, there's brand and there's product, there's pricing, there’s promotion, there’s all these other things, but we think in the kind of that B2B space that’s so data rich, it's so different from direct to consumer in every way. Weirdly we think a large part of it's less mature, even though the data is richer, but the maturity is less with regards to the processes people use and how they do segmentation and how they engage the audience. Just cause you know, e-commerce is a pretty well-trodden path.
You know, you look at Shopify, for example. It’s awesome in the same way, Lots of them are, but it's also, they all have “add to cart” and standardized checkout process and plugins to payment providers and there isn’t a bad part of the product. Of course you could enhance it, but it's a well-trodden path.
Now take that to B2B and you go, “How do people operate from a lead? How do people become leads in the UK? And how does that vary from the US and how does that vary from Argentina or Spain or France? And what type of content works in that market and how much am I willing to pay a lead? And where do I do my lead acquisition?”
Do I do that on LinkedIn? Do I do it direct? Do I buy a list? And all of a sudden you've got all these questions. You're like, whoa. So yeah, that's the very long answer, but that's early stages. But LinkedIn's data and Salesforce’s data and HubSpot and Marketo and Pardot’s data is just phenomenal, but they're in silos. And none of it, like from my experience, none of it's connected.
Josh Steimle: Yeah. Well, we'll be excited to see that book come out and we'll have to have you on the show again, once you get that published. So Ben, for people who want to know more about your firm and what you do, maybe want to reach out and connect, where's the best place for them to get ahold of you?
Ben Salmon: If you want to get ahold of me, LinkedIn, Ben Salmon, might look a little bit like this my face. If you want to learn more about the book, you can either search Your Number's Up book or you can connect on the website, which is wearecrank.com.
But I'm engaging with a lot of people on LinkedIn, weirdly, like we said, Josh, so I'm connecting with people directly on there and having conversations and engaging with people on that. Rather than just being salesy, promoting the book on just the website, I connected with people there.
Josh Steimle: Perfect. Thanks, Ben, for being on the show today and I appreciate everything and best of luck with the current book and with getting the second one underway.
Ben Salmon: Brilliant. Thank you, Josh. Thanks so much for having me. I've really enjoyed it. Really good.
