Profiling & Interviewing Clients & Staff – Websites.ca Talk Ep. 49

Sean Corbett:
Hello everybody, it’s Sean Corbett here@websites.ca marketing. For this month’s episode, we’re going to take a step back and we’re going to talk about some offline tactics that you can then use to have a more effective online presence. One of the things that we always do in marketing is we have to build what we call avatars, and essentially those are figuring out who our best customers are, where they are, and how we can reach them. This kind of avatar building also applies to staffing and just basically any interpersonal relationships. So what I’ve done is I’ve brought in an expert on this sort of what he would call profiling. Our expert this month is Donn Burkholder. He’s got an extensive background in private investigations and currently works in the capacity, a law enforcement capacity with the federal government. So Donn, thanks so much for being here today.

Donn Burkholder:
No, thanks for having me.

Sean Corbett:
So before we get into some of the tactics and some of the things that you and I have done together, would you mind just telling the audience a little bit about your background?

Donn Burkholder:
Sure, no problem. So for the better part of over 20 years now, I’ve worked in both public sector and private sector, more so in the private sector. I have done a lot of investigations, and so in the capacity of surveillance and labor dispute, security operations, and then also some law enforcement, which I’m currently doing, which I won’t get into too much detail, but it does involve some investigative work.

Sean Corbett:
Again, to give people some background who are listening, you and I have worked together and we’ve talked before about, I have clients, they need to do some hiring, some staffing. Could you recommend a line of questioning, but also what should we look for? So we can talk about that at some point. But because this is an internet website show, I would love to talk about how we’ve established, we create a profile of ideal customers, how we might go about doing that, what some of your tactics and strategies are for that, because again, just so the audience gets clued in, why would we do this? When you’re throwing a bunch of money around online or when you’re hiring or when you’re dealing with anybody, there’s a time cost, and there’s a money cost. You need to know the ideal candidate of who you want. And frankly, I mean, you might find this funny, Donn, or not, but people are not so forthcoming sometimes and sometimes it’s not malicious. Sometimes they don’t even know what to tell you to show you that they’re an ideal employee. So maybe let’s start there.

Donn Burkholder:
Okay, so sure. So when you’re profiling, we’ll take it right back to where the word kind originated. It originated with the FBI, and they were using the word to describe tactics they were using to try to figure more out about certain criminals who they were on the lookout for who they were hunting for. So it wasn’t, profiling is kind of a, you’re trying to figure out the unknown, whereas when you’re doing investigations, it’s often the word investigation is something happened and then you’re trying to work backwards from it. Maybe you already have somebody arrested and you’re trying to prove something. Whereas profiling, it’s much more of an art because you’re trying to figure, you start with something that happened like say a murder, and then you try to figure out, okay, what do I know about that person who does murders like that? So it’s about pattern recognition. So I think it applies to your marketing stuff because you’re looking at the same kind of idea a person made a purchase, so what kind of person makes that purchase and what are the similarities between all the different kinds of people that purchase that item or product or service.

Sean Corbett:
And to get even more granular than that, what the audience needs to understand who’s listening is in terms of marketing, there may be several different types of persons. So at some point you’re forking off and creating profile one, profile two, and all of them are as valid, right?

Donn Burkholder:
That drills down into it more. Like for example, when it comes to my mind in FBI profiling, you had organized and disorganized criminals. So for example, you might come to one house and you’re looking for a disorganized person because the crime scene’s a mess. The crime scene is a total disaster. They didn’t make any effort to cover the tracks. So you’re looking for a guy whose car is rusted and fallen apart, his house is a disaster. Or on the other hand, you go to another crime scene and the place is a accident. The guy’s totally cleaned up. Well, now you’re looking for somebody who’s incredibly OCD. Their car looks mint, their house is in order. So these are the kinds of things, yeah, exactly. You can tell by the behavior that the person did. You can work backwards and build a profile. And you’re right, you’re going to have different kinds of profiles, different purchase, different people purchase products and services for different reasons. So yeah, you’re going to build different profiles for sure.

Sean Corbett:
So what I’m hearing from you then is you still need, in the business world, you still need some event to work backwards from, and you use the example of a purchase. Obviously we can say X, Y, Z person bought a T-shirt from us, so now we’re going to forward project and say, who else would buy the T-shirt? And I think that’s pretty straightforward. And I know we’re jumping around a lot here, but again, I want to give people the idea of a scope of how they can use these skills pretty much anywhere in their business. So flipping quickly to staffing, would you say, okay, I’m going to do some interviews for a new staff member. Obviously nobody wants to have churn in their staff. You want to get somebody who’s going to be long-term. So maybe we can talk about screening for loyalty and long-term stay. I would love to hear your thoughts on that. But I guess where we’ll start on that topic is do you basically look at an existing employee and try to work backwards from their profile, or would that not be helpful too specific?

Donn Burkholder:
I think screening is where this would be more useful. So when you’re looking at prospective employees, I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt either in the, because when you have an existing employee, you’re always considering promotions and lateral moves and that kind of thing. So it’s not totally useless, but I think it has the most bang for your buck when you’re screening.

Sean Corbett:
Okay. So in other words, like going through a pile of invoices

Donn Burkholder:
Or a pile of resumes or Yeah,

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. Pardon me. Yeah, resumes,

Donn Burkholder:
Yeah. If you got a bunch of applications and resumes and you’re trying to do some screening, but you kind of leaped from one technique to another right there in your last segment there, because there’s profiling and then there’s investigative interview, and those are kind of two different things because when you’re profiling, you don’t have a subject in front of you. You’re just looking at something that happened and you’re trying to figure out more about the unknown person that did that thing. So that’s what a profile is. When you’re doing investigative interviewing, it’s almost you’re taking the next stage, taking your profiles, your different profiles that you may have come up with, and now you’ve got a subject in front of, you’re doing some investigative interviewing. You’re trying to figure out, well, which profile do they fit in? For example, earlier when I was talking about the different kinds of crime scenes, well, now you’ve arrived at a subject’s house. Well, now you’re looking at his car, you’re looking at his house, and then you’re going to do the next step, which is asking him questions. And by the interviewing and the questions that you ask, you’re going to try to figure out, just to keep going with my earlier too, is he a disorganized or an organized person? And questioning with an investigative interviewing is going to help you to determine which bucket to put that guy in. But first of all, you have to make buckets, and that’s what the profiles are.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. Okay. I got you. I gotcha. And so that’s an important distinction that I was not making. So the investigative interviewing, I believe that once you’ve come up with your, let me put it this way. Could you make this circular and say, go to your best existing customers and interview them in an intelligent way in order to gain data, in order to make profiles to, okay, perfect.

Donn Burkholder:
Yes. Or even better. I think you and I talked about this earlier last year sometime when we first started talking about this subject was like you said that this would make surveying much more effective

Sean Corbett:
Because

Donn Burkholder:
For example, you use these techniques when you’re just surveying random people. When you do these things, when you bring them in, you offer ’em some kind of prize or incentive to do your survey. But rather than just hack up a bunch of sort of hack questions, you sort of put some thought into it and try to say, okay, well, when we’re doing these surveys, let’s try to put these people in buckets and see how many go in this bucket, how many go in that bucket, or maybe even the whole process to determine the buckets. There’s all kinds of different value you could get out of surveying the general public event,

Sean Corbett:
Right? Yeah. You could basically ask them, why do you care? Why did you buy this? And then listen, probably your answers are going to cluster if you ask enough people around three or four common reasons.

Donn Burkholder:
During my law enforcement training, they did a scenario that was interesting where they had a bunch of random actors that they pulled off the street, pretend to be people who had been on trips before, where some of them had actually been on the trips, and some of them were making it up. And we had to, through our questioning, determine which ones were telling the truth. But the imaginary scenario was you’re bringing in people from the general public, you work for a tourist agency and you’re offering them a free trip, but the condition is they tell you about a real trip that they’ve been on, and it’s your job as the screener or say to determine whether or not this person’s telling the truth and you’re going to give them a free trip.

Sean Corbett:
Now, does that come down to basically the human lie detector test? At that point, you’re looking for body language and hink, as the detective might say, right?

Donn Burkholder:
That’s part of it. That’s part of it. But the problem with that is it’s never foolproof. It’s never a hundred percent. So it can always be, you can always go deeper. You can always interview longer. And what you’re looking for when you’re doing that lie detector, like you’re saying, it’s very subjective to the person because the first thing you have to do with every single person is figure out what their baseline is. And then those little hinky things you’re talking about when they do little looking sideways or doing this or that and the other thing, it’s different for every person, but what it is, what’s the same when every person is, they’re deviating from their baseline, but you can’t tell what their deviation is until you establish what their baseline is. So you have to spend time with the person to get to know them, to figure out who they are, what profiling helps you do.

Sean Corbett:
Perfect. Yeah, I mean, obviously there’s some people when you begin a social situation like that, they might be flustered simply because they’re not good in social situations, so you have to allow them that time. You could

Donn Burkholder:
Have cultural differences or there could be a language barrier, so many hurdles that might have to be overcome.

Sean Corbett:
That brings to mind that great line from the movie Glen Gary, Glen Ross, where they have a break in and the guy’s all mad and he says, why are you so worked up? And he said, well, I get nervous when I talk to police. And he goes, good, who thieves.
So you hit on a point, and you’re right, we had talked about this before, that particularly bugs me when it comes to assisting businesses in doing this sort of thing, and I wouldn’t have even thought to ask you that, so I’m glad you brought it up. I hate surveys. Every client I’ve ever had asked me, should we do a survey? And my answer to them is always the reason why I don’t. And again, that’s why I brought in somebody like you to help just not my skillset, but the reason why I don’t trust myself to do it is I have never been able to come up with a question or a line of questions or a way of determining that there’s no, if you just ask somebody over an email over the phone, Hey, would you do this? Or would you buy that? You’re not actually asking them to take the action. So it’s so much easier for them to say yes. Oh yeah, I would consider that. Yeah. But if you actually said, okay, wire me 20 bucks tomorrow and then I’ll send you the thing. Oh, well, and then they start coming up with objections. Yeah, I would like to talk about that with you a little more right now.

Donn Burkholder:
And the thing that jumps out at me immediately is what you just said earlier, maybe people aren’t trying to conceal information from you for malicious reasons. For example, you offer somebody a donut to do the survey. In their mind they’re thinking, I want to give this guy the answers that he wants because he’s giving me a donut.

Sean Corbett:
That’s

Donn Burkholder:
Right. Instead of you’re not realizing, no, he’s giving you the donut. He wants the truth. People don’t think that way.

Sean Corbett:
Well, that’s why I think starting off surveys by giving gifts or giveaways, of course it’s going to increase your uptake because you’re giving them something. It’s not going to increase your accurate answers. And so

Donn Burkholder:
That’s why the scenario that I talked about was so brilliant because it’s like, we’ll give you the free trip. If you tell us about a real trip you’ve been on, now you’re going to obviously get people that come in the building who’ve never been on trips, who have been on really crappy trips that they don’t want to talk about. So even when the person’s there for good reasons and they’re trying to help you, they’re still, like you said, some lie detection. You should still, it’s like, for example, when you’re a detective and you arrest a guy and you know that he did the murder, right? I’ve got buddies who are former homicide detectives, and when the guy finally confesses and says, yeah, okay, I did it, the next thing they say to that guy is, alright, prove it to me. You act like you don’t believe him, and then you make ’em. So you got to get into more of these sort of challenging kind of situations if you want these surveys that value.

Sean Corbett:
Well, in fairness too, I mean a lot of schizophrenics claim to do murders just because it gets them attention. So even that, I don’t think people realize that when there’s a murder that police stations get so many calls claiming it’s them. Okay, so let’s drill down on that then. Is the implication of what you’re saying that if I truly want to build a really good profile that I can use for years in my marketing or my staffing or whatever, that I may have to actually interview some customers or what have you in person? Not over the email. Okay. Yeah,

Donn Burkholder:
Because I’ve talked about, you and me have talked about this before. There’s signal intelligence and there’s human intelligence. So when you’re building profiles off of online data that you gather, that’s what we call signal intelligence. You’re just gathering cold data and you’re trying to figure things out. The human element of things is always going to be on another category. It’s a different level. When you’re interviewing people, you’re going to be constantly learning, you’re going to be constantly adopting your profiles, and the only way you’re going to do that is with human.

Sean Corbett:
So give the audience a few tips then if you could. Let’s say that, okay, we’re going to schedule a week or two weeks to interview our best customers. We’re going to bring them in person. So maybe there we do give them reward. Their time is valuable. Maybe that case a reward makes sense. We bring them in, we ask them some questions. How do we know? Let’s say what to discard. So in your scenario, the person comes in to tell you about their trip, and you find out right away that they’re lying would be the same as me asking a potential customer, you’ve bought a hundred dollars item from me, would you buy a thousand dollars item? And he says, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And he’s lying. I need to be able to tell that he’s lying because I don’t want to include him in his answers in my future profile. So how do you have any tips or tactics to what do I throw away right away off the bat? Oh, that’s not good information. Throw that away.

Donn Burkholder:
I don’t think any information is bad information. I think a better way of looking at it to shift the paradigm a little bit is the buckets. So for example, in that trip scenario, the hypothetical, you’re making two buckets. You’re making people who’ve been on good trips, who are giving you valuable information that’s going to be useful to your company. And there’s people who are either lying or they don’t have a lot of experience in being on trips. So the different buckets, so your answers to the questions are not necessarily useless depending on the answers. You’re figuring out which profile or which bucket to put your customers in. Some of your customers, I imagine, are going to be people who are big spenders and they’re really high value targets that you want to hit. So you’re going to figure out, is that person in this bucket or is he just your casual customer that you’re not going to really spend a lot of time and effort developing marketing to because they just don’t deliver the juice for the squeeze, as you have said before.

Sean Corbett:
No, that’s interesting. Do you think that there’s any way there any way for someone to leverage the stuff that we’re talking about in a sort of mass marketing online scenario? I know we just said the best thing to do would be to bring people in person. Okay.

Donn Burkholder:
Well, I think the first thing, even before you started thinking about bringing people in, the first thing to do is to get together your staff and have a brainstorming session and develop the profiles
That has value, even if you never interview anyone, because at least then you’ve got your staff thinking about, okay, who are our high value target customers and who are our lower value target customers? And you sort of develop these profiles, and then you’ll naturally interview people in your day-to-day life and put them in these categories. But until you’re all on the same page, that was the FBI’s big move in the profiling was getting all the agents on the same page so they all understand what an organized killer is, what a disorganized killer is, and then they can all sort of work from the same playbook. That’s where the value comes initially.

Sean Corbett:
Oh, that makes sense to me. Yeah. So you start with a staff brainstorming session. Now you have at least theoretical buckets. I like to use the term, right, theoretical buckets. Now you can go start talking to customers even if you can’t talk to them in person and test those theories.

Donn Burkholder:
And then now when you’re having meetings, you can say, oh, this guy’s an A bucket, and Oh no, that guy’s a B bucket. Now you have a lingo that you can use, and it makes meetings more effective and more they deliver more value.

Sean Corbett:
Right, okay. Yeah, because today we’re just going to talk about bucket A and not buckets B and C, and then everyone gets on the same page another, and again, it’s just like a neurotic impulse that I have, but I’m always worried also when people can always take any tactic too far. And so they start to, in my family, we used to call it the roof rack syndrome, where when you get a roof rack for your car, all of a sudden you see roof racks everywhere, and they were probably there before. You’re just noticing them now. So I’ve noticed sometimes, especially with sales teams, if you tell them, okay, we have three buckets and the person usually fits into one of the three, sometimes they’re going to work really hard to shove a human being into a numerical checklist, and they’re not going to be watching for changes and stuff. So again, do you have any thoughts or,

Donn Burkholder:
Yeah, I know what you’re talking about there. I immediately got where you’re going. That’s the dark side of profiling. It’s when you forget that profiling is an art, and you start to believe that it’s a science, and that’s where there is a danger zone there. And you can see it. I don’t know if you remember, there was a couple of, do you remember the beltway shooters? There was these two guys were living in a car and they were sniping people around the Maryland.

Sean Corbett:
Was that Maryland? Yeah. Yeah. I think that was what, late nineties, early two thousands, something like that. Yeah, I do remember

Donn Burkholder:
That. Yeah. And it turned out it was two black guys and every FBI profiler prior to that incident pretty much told you that all serial killers were white,

Sean Corbett:
Especially snipers. I remember that. Right, because earlier than that, you had the bell tower guys in Texas and stuff.

Donn Burkholder:
So the point of that story is that doesn’t mean the profilers were wrong because they had their statistics.
The problem when the profiling fails, everyone wants to murder the pro profiler because they forget that the guy’s an artist. He’s trying to give you information to help you. He’s not telling you take this as gospel. You have, that’s what you have to grasp about profiling. Sometimes people can get too caught up and think that it’s magic and that it solves laser fusion. It doesn’t. It’s just helpful. It’s a helpful exercise. Like that exercise I talked about doing staff brainstorming. That’s very good for team building and building communication between people, even if you never use the profile. But it does have value just for, like I said, the idea alone. You can see in police meeting rooms when they all have the same lingo, they’re all speaking the same language, it just facilitates communication that much better.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, it’s what I always think about, especially working with remote teams where you can do zoom calls like you and I are doing right now, but when you have a remote team, again, the temptation is to take the framework that the company gives you what we sell to person A, B, and C. We take that framework and then you start to fit all the pieces into the existing framework rather than, because what I’ve seen great marketers do is they keep in touch with their customers, and then they’re very attuned to when a good customer indicates to them a potential new niche or pocket of buyers they could move into that they’re not serving. And that’s where I say people have to be aware that the profiling has to be sort of an open net. Because often sometimes someone will tell you, they’ll send you down a path if you’re listening to even more profitable alleyway that you, right. If you insist, no, these are the streets, this is the map. I can’t go off this map. I have to fit everything into the map. You’re going to miss out on those giant opportunities. So again, I wondered if you had any thoughts, are there mental exercises one can do, or what are your thoughts on that?

Donn Burkholder:
Well, any kind of art, any kind of art at all. Because art, it sort of humbles you playing chess. What you have to learn is that you are not infallible. It is a lesson about yourself if you want to be a good profiler. So you have to think about these profiles you’ve made. They’re like pictures you’ve painted, but a picture that you’ve painted is only as good as the perspective that you had when you painted it. So you think about catfishing, right? When you’ve all seen the catfish pictures where you see the girl with a really pretty face, but then when you zoom out, she’s obese. So your profile was probably terrible when all you could see was her face. So that, yeah, profiling is fluid and it has to always be open to revisions, and it has to be constantly ongoing. And that’s why having a team that’s constantly brainstorming and meeting and saying like, okay, you know what? Maybe not all snipers are white guys, right? Because we had this beltway thing, and you’re always updating and using the new information.

Sean Corbett:
There you go. So the Occam’s razor answer is that your suggestion of a meeting is not a one-off. You’re coming back again and testing those profiles off. Okay, cool. Yeah, I mean, I think obviously we could talk for hours about this, and it’s been ongoing for most of human history, so we’ve covered it on a pretty good 40,000 foot view or bird’s eye view. Do you have anything that you want to tell me about it? Maybe an unknown, unknown where I didn’t even ask you a question related to something that’s important?

Donn Burkholder:
Yeah, I think that when you do the profiles, if you do take the next step to getting to interviewing real people, that can be a very exciting stage. And what you want to do, there’s, you want to develop two kinds of questions. Well, you’re developing one kind of question and you’re leaving yourself open to the other kind of question, which kind of ties into what you were just talking about. You’re going to build, say you’re doing a survey, your survey is going to have what we call mandatory questions. So it’s going to be like, we’re going to ask every single subject these questions that’s going to help us put them in the right bucket. And then you always want to leave yourself open to the idea of what we call additional questioning. And there should always be additional questions because those first initial mandatory questions should get you to a certain point where you’re comfortable with a certain kind of bucket. And then your additional questions, like you said, should help you refine it. So that’s the real arc. Like a talented interviewer thinks about a survey or an interviewer or whatever. In that stage, in those sort of segments, the questions you have to ask and then the questions that you might ask. Yeah.

Sean Corbett:
So is that as simple as just doing what I just did with you basically saying, okay, we’ve covered all the important stuff. Is there any in a business interview, is there anything else you want to tell me that anything else we wish we sold kind of thing?

Donn Burkholder:
Yeah, that’s not bad, but what I’m trying to say is a really good interviewer should automatically have their own additional questions. And even if they don’t, they should force themselves to think some up. Interesting. Because sometimes out of left field, your own subconscious will come up with something and don’t ever think that any, it’s like you say in school, right? There’s no dumb questions. If even have the notion to ask it, ask it. Because you’ll always find something in an interview that surprised you.

Sean Corbett:
Interesting. Yeah.

Donn Burkholder:
You have to leave yourself open to that. Your worst enemy in profiling and interviewing is your preconceived notions. That’s what I’m trying to say.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, that’s right. I dunno if you do have a preconceived notion, better to ask it. You and I talked about this offline. Sometimes if clients are not forthcoming with me on whether or not they want or something for whatever reason, maybe they just think the process has to be very agreeable. I’ll often use a really basic tactic, which is to suggest something I know they’ll hate. And suddenly they’re like, no, absolutely not that. Oh, okay. Why not that? And then it gets them talking, well, I would prefer this and this and this. Okay, cool. Why didn’t she just say that at the start? I don’t know, but okay. Yeah.

Donn Burkholder:
Or another way of saying it. I know what you’re talking about. Another way of saying it’s say something that to be incorrect and get them to correct and get them to correct you, and that they’ll tell you a lot about themselves. Yeah, that’s an excellent way of doing interviews. It’s one of the techniques in interview. There are many different techniques that I didn’t get into because this is a short podcast. But yeah, that’s a technique you can set

Sean Corbett:
For sure. Cool. Okay. So I know obviously, like you said at the start of the call, you have a lot training things that we can’t necessarily get into or talk about publicly. But I know coming up, what helped me a lot, especially with sales, back when I was doing one-to-one sales was reading a bunch of books on body language. And I just wondered if you could leave off by giving our listeners, do you have any favorite books, textbooks, learning materials that could make them better interviewers? Better profilers?

Donn Burkholder:
Sure. Yeah. My favorite of all time is Verbal Judo. It’s by a guy who started out as a rhetoric professor, a university, I believe his name’s George Thompson, I’m pretty sure his last name’s Thompson. I’m not sure what first name. Anyway, it’s Verbal Judo. It’s a famous book. And he went from being a rhetoric professor to being a state trooper, and he had had a midlife crisis, and he decided to be a law enforcement officer. And the first thing that he did, because he was a judo expert, was he just arrested everyone. If they did anything wrong, he thought that’s what you did. That was kind of the reason why he signed up, because he just kind of wanted to test out his judo stuff. But then the next thing he knew, because he wanted to show the commander of the unit, they like, oh, I can arrest guys three times my size because I’m a judo expert. Next thing you know, he was getting hauled into the chief’s office. He’s like, okay, listen, bro, you got to dial it back. You can’t just arrest everyone. You’re supposed to be out there talking to people and using its powers of communication and rhetoric to persuade people to not break them.
And then what he found, what he was pleasantly surprised by was that his earlier life of being a rhetoric professor suddenly mapped right on to being a police officer. So it’s really useful in that way because it takes a lot of the stuff that you and I talked about with rhetoric and talking about from an Aristotle perspective, it lets you apply to real life. And yeah, it’s not just for law enforcement, it’s for anything. Anytime you’re trying to persuade people, and I guess in an interview what you’re trying to do, you’re trying to persuade them to tell you the truth. And so that book, that his techniques are top notch. They’re top shelf,

Sean Corbett:
That’s great. Yeah. Verbal juah. Okay. Yeah, and I like that too, because a lot of times when people think of persuasion and rhetoric, they think of it as a speech, a monologue, a one-way dialogue. But everything we’ve been talking about here today is much more about listening.

Donn Burkholder:
Yes, yes, it is. It’s about listening, and it’s about coaxing the subject to talk to you, because the worst thing that happens in an interview is silence. And another old trick I learned from my trainer was, if you’re in an interview and you get the feeling that the person’s lying to you, go real quiet. Let them talk to you. Give them the microphone, give them enough role, let them go. Let them go. Let them go. Now, that might not have as much apparent value in your setting as it does in a law enforcement setting, but I would say that it does, because if you feel like somebody, for example, in our earlier scenario, but the trip survey, if you’re trying to figure out whether this guy really went on the trip he’s telling you about or not, and you suddenly get the feeling like, no, he never went on this trip, well then let him keep talking, keep talking. So the more he talks to you, the more you’re going to have proof enough to say to this guy, okay, I’m sorry, but you’re not getting the free trip because this, this, this, and this.

Sean Corbett:
Right? Yeah. He is going to start messing up details too, unless he knows his con really well and all that. Yeah.

Donn Burkholder:
And it also helps you because you’ve got a clinic, you’ve got a free clinic in front of you. You’ve got a real live liar in his own natural habitat, so use the occasion, the opportunity to learn from that. Just sit back with a bowl of popcorn like, wow, a real liar, let’s go. Let’s see how this works.

Sean Corbett:
I think that business owners forget just how many customers are liars too, and I don’t mean that maliciously, I just mean they’ve never really sat down and thought things through. So they’ll tell you they bought something for a reason, and it absolutely was nothing close to the real reason why they bought it.

Donn Burkholder:
Yeah. Yeah. I think you’ve hit on something very, very key there, that it’s something that we have an advantage in law enforcement. In law enforcement. We just know that everyone’s lying, including ourselves. We lie to criminals to get them to tell us, but we want them to. Everyone’s lying. If you can become comfortable with that, you will increase your talent in all these things that we’re talking, these talents, these areas that we’re talking about, these skills, the profiling, the interviewing, all of that, you have to become comfortable with that fact. And that’s kind of what I’m talking about in that earlier scenario. You find someone who’s lying about you, lying to you, you find out someone’s lying to you. Your first instinct is to jump in and yell, liar, liar, pants on fire. I got you. But that’s the worst thing you can do in that situation. The best thing you can do is like, oh, really? Oh, that’s interesting. Get ’em a coffee and pull up a chair and let ’em go. That’s the idea I’m trying to express there.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, no, that makes sense. My marketing teacher would always say that you want to stir emotions. If you’re talking to clients, don’t say, who’s the best customer? What do you want to happen? It’s too logical. You start saying, tell me some stories about, if they’re a plumber or whatever, and they’ve hired you to do a campaign to help get them more customers. Tell me some stories about the most frustrating plumbing experiences you’ve had. Then they start going off, but then within that, going off, you get a story where they say, this was terrible and that was terrible, and then this one customer said he couldn’t believe that, blah, blah, blah. And you go, oh, wait, there’s my headline. Because the customer, there you go, right? He just spits out this thing that bothers a bunch of people in the industry, and now you have your pain point,

Donn Burkholder:
And all you had to do was sit back and listen. Yeah, exactly.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. Awesome, man. I appreciate you coming on today. Final word goes to you, Donn. Any last thoughts you want to have on this topic?

Donn Burkholder:
Just remember that profiling is an art, it’s not a science. And interviewing is interviewing no matter whether it’s a law enforcement context or human resources context. It’s just interviewing. And the more you do it, the better, the better you’ll get at it, and the longer your interviews are, the more value they will have.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, and I love that they feed into one another. You make a profile, you interview on it, then you feed back into the profile database, then you go back and interview.

Donn Burkholder:
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Sean Corbett:
Awesome. Thanks, brother. I appreciate it.

Donn Burkholder:
Okay. Take care, man.