The Broomstick Objection with Seth Godin

Speaker 1: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Seth Godin. Seth Godin probably needs no introduction, but in case he does, he is I think, one of the top business thought leaders of our generation. Over 20 books, a great blog, a great page day calendar, which is up in our kitchen, The Akimbo Podcast, Ted Talks, lots of other formats. Seth, it's good to see you.

Seth Godin: Well, thank you for having me Matt, and right back at you.

Matt Blumberg: So, as you know, for the short format Daily Bolster, I just ask people one question. Usually it's kind of an obvious question. The question for you is a less obvious question, which is, what is the broomstick objection?

Seth Godin: One of the great movies of all time, The Wizard of Oz, one of the only movies to feature for its generation, a powerful independent woman as the main character. And Dorothy really needs to get home, and she enlists some compatriots and they get to Oz and the Wizard says, " I will send you home if you bring me the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West." And the thing is, the rest of the movie is about her racing around trying to find a broomstick, and the wizard didn't need a broomstick. He said-

Matt Blumberg: You don't know that. I mean, maybe it was messy behind the curtain.

Seth Godin: Yeah, I've studied this pretty closely. The thing is, he just wanted her to go away, and almost all the time that we are bringing a new idea to someone, if we're bringing it to the wrong person, someone who is not an early adopter, someone who isn't inclined to trust us, someone who isn't giving us the benefit of the doubt, someone who doesn't have the problem we're here to solve, they don't want to say, " I hate you and you're ugly too." Instead, they will say, " Well, that would be great if you only had a broomstick, if you only had an endorsement from Gartner, if you only had this, if you only had that, then I would say yes." And the mistake that a lot of startups make, I made it many times myself, is when a broomstick objection comes up, we race around and try to find a broomstick. What we should do is say, " Thank you. Thank you for telling me this isn't for you right now. Good luck to both of us. Thank you." Because you don't need a broomstick when you're bringing it to the right person at the right time. The broomstick objection is a trap. And when a VC turns you down, or when a pilot customer turns you down, all you've discovered is I'm talking to the wrong person on the wrong day. Now, if everyone turns you down, then you're going to go need to get some broomsticks, but that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about the fact that you have something worthwhile, but you're getting distracted by pleasing the wrong people.

Matt Blumberg: My longtime Chief Revenue Officer at Return Path, Anita, had many great sayings, but one of them was, the second best answer is no.

Seth Godin: Mm- hmm. Yes, correct. Takes guts.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, it does. And this is such a good way of framing it. It's about the broomstick. All right, I think we leave it at that. Seth, good to see you. Thanks for joining.

Seth Godin: Thanks for having me Matt. Go make a ruckus.