****Please forgive any and all transcription errors as this was transcribed by Otter.ai.****

Joey Coleman 0:00

Hi there. I'm Joey Coleman and you're listening to A Shark’s Perspective.

(Music - shark theme)

Kenneth Kinney 0:22

Welcome back, and thank you for joining A Shark’s Perspective.

Kenneth Kinney 0:25

I'm Kenneth Kinney, but friends call me Shark. I'm a keynote speaker, strategist, a shark diver, host of the show in your Chief Shark Officer.

Kenneth Kinney 0:33

Are all of your customers getting a remarkable experience? Not some. But all. Most businesses say they want to create a great experience for everyone, but they find it hard to make that scalable to fit all. To do that you'll need to invest some time and dollars into the experience for new customers that you spent so much time and dollars in acquiring them. But do you even know what percentage of customers you have that will leave you in the first 100 days? Some research shows for many that it's as high as 70%. So what would you do? Where would you invest your time and money in order to never lose a customer again,

Kenneth Kinney 1:06

Joey Coleman is a speaker, a consultant and the Wall Street Journal Best Selling Author of "Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sale into Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days."

Kenneth Kinney 1:17

And on this episode, we'll discuss creating remarkable experiences that keep customers coming back for more being a criminal defense attorney and creating loyalty and in prisons, creating remarkable experiences scaling care, and eight phase methodology for identifying customer emotions, looking at emotion in the experience of navigating the sale. Research on customer fall off in the first 100 days communicating the message of scale, living your brand voice rebranding is MoFo, justifying money on CX, lots of root beer, Octonauts, the H2H base, performing like a scarecrow, Fighting Irish, and a lot, lot more.

Kenneth Kinney 1:51

So let's tune into a joey and a shark, neither of whom are Australian, but I do love their waters, on this episode of A Shark’s Perspective.

[intro music]

Kenneth Kinney 2:02

Well, Joey, welcome to A Shark’s Perspective. Would you please give us a brief overview of your background and your career today?

Joey Coleman 2:08

Oh well, thanks Shark. Excited to be here. And thanks to everybody who joined in and listen, for the last 20 years, I have helped companies keep their customers and employees. I'm a speaker. I'm an author. I'm a consultant. And I basically taken all of my career today, which included stints as a criminal defense lawyer, as a fortune 100, consultant, and salesperson, as a promotional products representative. As somebody who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service in the White House Office of Counsel to the President, I've taken all of those experiences, and combine them into a philosophy and methodology and an approach to creating remarkable experiences that keep people coming back for more. So whether that's your customers, so you worked so hard to acquire your employees that you work so hard to recruit, at the end of the day, they're all humans. And so what can we do to convince, persuade, encourage them to do the things we'd like to do, which is to stay around maybe to spend some more money with us on the customer side to be super engaged and productive on the employee side, fill in the blank, about whatever type of experience you're hoping to get from them, what experiences are you going to create, to kind of pull that out of their approach their ethos, their philosophy?

Kenneth Kinney 3:30

So you said something when you were growing up in your career, if you will, you were a criminal defense attorney.

Kenneth Kinney 3:36

Yes.

Kenneth Kinney 3:37

To what you do now. Why....when you were a criminal defense attorney, were you worried at that point about how the criminal justice system was creating or not creating loyal customers?

Joey Coleman 3:46

Oh, well, a couple of couple funny things, people are like, wait, you are retention guy? And how many times would you represent a client? I'm like, well, as many times as they were wrongfully accused, let's just put it that way. But you know, at the end of the day, when I was practicing law, the job was very similar to what my job is today, which is, how do I take this audience? In that case, it was 12 people sitting in jury box or a judge and convince them that the thing they're predisposed to do, which is fine, my guy guilty, because let's be candid, it was always the guy. And most people believe if we've got gotten to court, there's probably a likelihood that the person should be found guilty. How can I convince them that they're predisposed action that I don't want them to take? is actually not what they should do. And instead, they should take this other action, which is fine, my client not guilty? And what would I need to do to convince them that that was the better path for them to choose? In the same way that as we think about our customers, how can we convince them to part with their hard earned money which they don't want to do, to invest it to spend it with us, which we have a belief that that will be in their best interest? So how do we show them that? How do we lead them that way?

Kenneth Kinney 5:03

When you get this book, never lose a customer again, turning any sale into a lifelong loyalty in 100 days? What was the impetus for the book? What made you write this book at this time? I mean, obviously, customers we've said before customer service isn't getting any better in most places in general. But what made you want to write this book?

Joey Coleman 5:20

Yeah, well, really two things. Shark I mean, number one, I agree with you, you know, the bar for customer experience is lying on the ground, despite the fact that there are wonderful speakers and presenters and authors on the topic, you know, and I include folks like you, our mutual friend, Ian gagis, our mutual friend, you know, Jay Baer, Shep Hyken, and Scott McCain, I mean, the names we they just roll off the tongue. The moral of the story here is, it still doesn't seem to be fully moving the dial as much as it could. And when I looked at the marketplace, what I realized is that most businesses want to deliver better customer experiences, or at least they say they do. But lots of times, they get caught up in this idea of, well, if I have to treat everyone exactly the same. And I have to give these hyper personalized, customized interactions to every single one of my customers, there's no way that that's scalable, you can't scale caring. And I would respectfully disagree, I think there are systems and frameworks that you can put in place that make sure that all of your customers are getting a remarkable experience. And then you can add icing on top of that if you want to, to go above and beyond in a particular situation. The impetus for the book really came from the fact that for 15 years, I ran an ad agency, my job was to drive attention, get folks to buy, sign up, get our widget, you know, enroll in our service. And we were really good at moving the dial for our customers, people were signing up the clients were very happy with the results. But when I would talk to them two months later, three months later, six months later, and say, you know, well, how much is the business grown now that we've gotten all these new customers on board, the response was never as great as I wanted it to be. And as I dove deeper into the reasons and the rationale for that, I realized that a huge percentage of the new customers, we were getting to come to the door to buy that first product to sign up for that first service weren't staying. In fact, when researching the book, I looked at industries around the world, small, medium, and large online and offline product and service. And what I found was that somewhere between 20 and 70% of new customers will decide to stop doing business with you before they reach the 100 day anniversary of becoming a customer. Now, shark that was staggering to me. But what was more terrifying was that when I started talking to business leaders and business owners, they had no idea what their percentage was. It was somewhere between those two, and the fact that they weren't even aware of it or doing anything to address it, I felt created a huge opportunity to change the conversation.

Kenneth Kinney 7:57

Sure. Well, businesses are busy with all the things they do and we get that. But do you think most brands at least understand what their new customers and even their current customers really want and expect from them in the first place?

Joey Coleman 8:12

I would posit that the majority of brands don't. The majority of brands have gotten very clear on what their offer to the marketplace is. I think the majority of brands haven't spent as much time thinking about what is the actual applicability of our product or of our service in the marketplace, that is going to resonate the most with the customer. And I say this respectfully is a guy who spent a lot of time in marketing, you know, we come up with these beautiful campaigns, these great ideas, here's what it's going to be look at all the cool things you're going to be able to do check out the benefits, check out the features. And the reality is we would be better served to sit down with two dozen customers and say, Hey, if you owned this product, how would you use it? What would it result? What results could you create in your life? If you had access to this? Is this interesting? Is it valuable? At what level? Is it value? Valuable? How does it help in ancillary aspects of your life? I think those conversations lead us to have a better understanding of what our customers are trying to accomplish. Additionally, when our customers achieve the goal that they had when they originally decided to buy our product or sign up for our service, what are we doing to celebrate that? Because see, lots of times we buy a product from someone and that's the last we hear from them, or we'll hear from them again, because they want to send us a coupon to buy more product. They don't actually check in and say hey, you purchase these weight loss pills. Did you lose weight? Hey, you purchase this exercise bike? Did you actually go out and use it and you purchase this shirt? Can you send us a photo of you wearing the shirt? We'd love to see how it looked on you. Hey you purchase This book, did he actually read it? Or did it just go on the shelf, there's not as much of a feedback loop between customers and the providers around the practical usage and potential completion of the usage of the services and products we sell them. And I think that's a missed opportunity.

Kenneth Kinney 10:18

Well, in the book, you open with an eight phase methodology that will help you identify your customers motional needs, guarantee their desired outcomes and turn passive customers into raving fans, what are those eight phases? And how did you come up with them.

Joey Coleman 10:32

So I'll go through these kinds of quick, sharp because there are eight of them are right. And some folks are like, Oh, my gosh, this, this is a big framework. But the good news is, it's a framework that you're familiar with as a consumer as a customer. So as I'm going through these, don't only think about it as it relates to your business. But if you get into it, think about the most recent purchase you made, whether again, it was a product signing up for service, some of both, it doesn't matter. And you'll be able to see that your customer journey tracks with that as well. Now, each of these phases starts with the letter A. And the reason for that is because if you get all of these phases, right, it's like getting straight A's on your report card from your customers, they love you, they're excited about you, we got to move them from one phase to the next. It's a sequence. And our job as the brand or is the business or the organization is to hold their hand as they navigate from one to the other. So the first phase is the assess phase. This is when a prospect is considering whether or not they want to do business with you. They're looking at your marketing materials, your ads or checking out your website to tap into people that are already customers of yours. In common parlance, we call this the marketing and sales part of the conversation. In most businesses, they put all their emphasis right here. And as soon as somebody buys woohoo, we're done. Let's go market and sell to someone new. In Joey's version of the customer journey. This is about phase one of eight phases. Phase two is the admit phase. This is when the prospect admits that they have a need or problem they believe you can help them with, they sign on the dotted line, they hand over their hard earned cash the transition from being a prospect to a customer. In that first 100 days model that I mentioned earlier, this is day one of the first 100 days, they immediately then go into phase three, the affirm phase. In common parlance, we call this buyer's remorse, they begin to doubt the decision they just made to do business with you. Now what's crazy about this shark is Meanwhile at the company, the organization, there's high fiving going on their bells being run, somebody just won a trip to Napa, I mean, we're excited we got the new customer, but at the customer's house or business. They're wondering, did I make the right choice? What if this doesn't work out as planned? Maybe I was just overly enamored with the salesperson and it wasn't that quality of a deal. Who I should have asked for a better price and negotiated more what if this goes south? Will I be able to get my money back if I'm in a business setting or a b2b setting? What if this goes south and I got fired for picking the wrong vendor? See that delta that difference between our emotional state is the person who sold them the product or service and their emotional state is the person who bought it is the difference between a really high elated state and a really low, anxious, worried fearful, you know, immersed in uncertainty and doubt state. So what are we doing to close that gap? We then come to face for the activate stage. This is when we have the first real moment of truth. We want to energize the relationship, the product arrives, the service starts, what are we doing in that first real interaction to let them know that they got everything they asked for and more. And this is going to be a remarkable experience. We then come to Phase Five the acclimate phase. Now the acclimate phase, I'll be honest with you shark is where most businesses start to fall apart. And the reason they start to fall apart is they've delivered the product. So they're like, Oh, well, they must be good to read it because we included directions in with the package. Folks, I say this respectfully, a bunch of you don't read the directions. So why do you think your customers are reading the directions? A bunch of you get little things included in the mailing that say, oh, go to this website to watch installation videos, you actually go watch them? Some of you do, but the majority of you don't. So what are we doing to make sure that our customers are acclimated to our way of business there's they're getting the value out of the product or the service they signed up for. They're getting used to our cadence, our rhythm, our rituals, we then come to phase six the accomplish phase. This is when the customer accomplishes the goal they had when they originally decided to do business with you. I mentioned this earlier, every customer has a vision of how they're going to use your product or their service. If we don't track what they're hoping to achieve, if we don't track track their progress towards that goal. And if we don't celebrate with them, when they accomplish it. It's a huge missed opportunity to because they probably won't celebrate it on their own. And then they never get the full endorphin release of realizing the potential of what they were hoping for. We then come to phase seven the Adopt phase this is when a customer becomes loyal to you and all To you, they're not going anywhere else they're fully bought in and committed. And last but not least phase eight, the advocate phase where the customer becomes a raving fan, singing your praises far and wide referring new business, they become your uncompensated, non commissioned sales force, bringing the perfect fit prospect to your door. Now, if we do this, right, if we get the eight phases, right, we earn the opportunity to rinse and repeat. What do I mean by that? Well, we can go to our advocates and say, hey, guess what, we've got a new product, we've got a new service. Now they go back to that first phase one assessment, well, is this a product or service I want or need, they go through the eight phases again, Now, ideally, they'll do it faster. And ideally, you'll reach that advocate stage, in a much more meaningful and rapid way. But that's the opportunity that's available to you, if you help your customers navigate through these eight phases of the customer journey, you started

Kenneth Kinney 15:54

off talking about how marketing and sales often failed to consider the assess phase experience. Elaborate, if you will, a little bit further on what you mean by that?

Joey Coleman 16:04

Yeah, sure. So the operative word in that sentence, for me, at least is experience. See, I think marketing and sales all too often thinks about the copy. They think about the imagery, they think about the call to action. What they don't spend as much time thinking about is the emotional experience of being immersed in our messaging in our copy in our advertising, and our marketing and our sales process. What I mean by that is there are lots of folks and I don't mean this to be clear to be disrespectful of anybody in marketing sales, because that's how I came up in this industry, right? I spent a lot of time driving, you know, new business, focusing on prospecting, those type of things. The challenge is, we often think about the emotions our customers will feel when they use our product, when they sign up for our service when they're, you know, kind of immersed in it. What we don't think about is the emotion they experience when they're navigating the sales process or the marketing process. Let me give an example of what I mean by that. Have you ever had a scenario where you went somewhere, and you knew what you wanted to buy, and you were ready to give them your money. And it seemed like they wanted to do everything possible to delay that from happening, or to prohibit that from happening, right? They got so caught up either in the script they need to read or the upsells they need to make that they lost you in the muck and mire of a negative experience, when you would have happily done the thing that is actually their end goal.

Kenneth Kinney 17:45

And this is this exists on digital channels to forms. Yeah, 100% Yeah, this show me another infographic and bore me to just fill out the form,

Joey Coleman 17:54

please tell me your fax number. I'm like, stop it. Stop it. I don't No one uses faxes anymore. Please stop asking for that. And it's also the case where one of the things I always do when I work with companies. And they're like, oh, we have this great, you know, prospecting magnet. And I'm like, awesome. I'd love to see the last 300 email addresses. And they're like, why do you want to see the email addresses? I was like, because I want to see if you're getting really nails, or if you're getting their dummy email. So spoiler alert, for all of you that may not know this most savvy folks in 2022 have at least two email addresses they have the one that they give to people they like, and then they had the one that they fill in on forms to access your download or to access your quote or your materials. Now often, that dummy one people have written that email address to indicate that it's a dummy one. It's like don't call me at Joey coleman.com or not this time folks@yahoo.com or whatever it may be. And when I look through that list of emails, I will know whether your marketing and sales experience has gendered enough trust that you get the real email address. And often, that's not what's happening. And so it gives us a chance to step back and say, Well, what is the experience of your marketing and sales process? And how can we tweak that and enhance it in a way that makes people want to give the actual data, the actual information that your business wants, as opposed to giving you dummy information?

Kenneth Kinney 19:30

What are your thoughts on the way people are communicating their message to people especially with all the automation and technology tools out there? It's a topic I discuss a lot on stage and what I'm working on my book that it will eventually get finished but going beyond just the service How are you seeing brands build loyal fans or not with how they're communicating their message to customers?

Joey Coleman 19:52

I think the challenge for brands and I and I empathize with this challenge because it is a daunting one is to do things scale without having it feel like it's being done at scale. So the secret there is you can, I'm not opposed to automations, I am not opposed to email sequences, I am not opposed to funnels. What I am opposed to, is to creating a scenario where someone feels like they're in automation, or they feel like they're in a funnel. That's, I think, the fundamental challenge that most businesses struggle with today. And so to me, the answer one of the potential answers to that is to bring a level of humanity and playfulness to the interaction in a way that lets the recipient know, a real live human being with a pulse. And a personality is on the other side of these communications. Let me give you an example. I'm working with a company in the financial services space. And as we all know, the financial services space has a tendency, not always to skew a little more conservative in their communications, then maybe say the web three space, okay, where it's, you know, craziness and fireworks and, you know, dancers and models. And that's not usually what you're seeing over on the conservative financial services space. So one of the things we've been talking about in their messaging is, how can we make the leader of this organization, the product they offer is one that people are very drawn by the personality of the leader. But what's interesting is when you get into the communications, which are supposedly emails that he's written to folks, a lot of the personality goes away. And part of the reason it goes away is because people are saying purchasing or selling financial services, like they, they don't want the personality. And I'm like, actually, the reason they were drawn to this business in the first place is the personality of the leader. So we need to let more of that come out, we need to let more of that voice be part of the communications. So I think the best organizations in the world are the ones that not only are clear on what their brand voice is, but they live their brand voice and all the communications now the problem I think shark is that often brand voice is determined by a small group of marketers and branders in a meeting, and then that is rolled out to the rest of the enterprise. And people are told, Hey, speak with this accent, speak in these scripts speak in these tones, right. And I'm not saying they actually do an accent. But the the point I'm making is, they're implying that the personalities of their employees should be subjugated to the personality of the brand. I think the most interesting companies are the ones that say, our brand voice is our people. That's how we're gonna hire. That's how we're going to onboard and train. That's how we're going to promote from within, we're going to create an environment where the more you show up as who you are, as a human being, the more you are rewarded in our enterprise. And the more you are encouraged to share that voice share that perspective with the customers we serve.

Kenneth Kinney 23:02

Well, in a lot of bigger brands, I'm sure you see this as well. But a lot of bigger brands or messaging gets a stamp of approval or scrutiny from an attorney. And then it's filtered through often a third party agency, no offense to former attorneys. And

Joey Coleman 23:18

for I hit both of those shark, exactly. Attorney and former exactly,

Kenneth Kinney 23:22

I get it and agencies, God loved them as much as they are been in that life as well. As much as they are tied to it. It's not the same experience for the customer. And a lot of times what I found with messaging to your point earlier, you know, without the personality, it feels like it's being written by AI now, it's like a computer wrote it and had no emotion. And so it doesn't resonate with people. And the most emotion you get is from, you know what somebody has just taken a script and used and it's just something that needs to change. Let's talk a little bit,

Joey Coleman 23:53

if I may. Here's the secret as it relates to the lawyers and this is coming from a recovering attorney. Okay, first steps admitting you have a problem. There's, you know, an additional series of steps after that. Get your attorney involved in the conversation sooner than you are. The attorneys should not be the iron glove red pencil that takes your final script, hashes it up, and your two days before you go to shoot the ad. And so as a result, that's what you have to go with because there's no time to go back and forth. Get your attorney involved from the beginning. Back in the 90s. When I was practicing law, there was a big law firm in Washington DC named Morrison Forrester. Okay, and what's really interesting is they decided that they wanted to really go after the Silicon Valley entrepreneur tech startup as their client right now. Roll back the clocks, folks. I know I'm dating myself a little bit but late 90s This is before the big internet boom, like things are kicking up. It's getting exciting, and they're a law firm and there are two Additional law firm, and their name is Morrison Forrester. So they rebranded as MoPhO. Not Making This Up, they rebranded as MoPhO. And I kid you not, in the coming weeks, months years, they drew huge interest from all of these companies that were run by 20 and 30 year olds, who were interested in taking it to the man and blowing the world up and changing the way business had been done. Because the lawyers branded themselves as understanding that voice and understanding that perspective. So here's the thing, if your lawyer right now, whoever you work with, doesn't get your voice feels like a wet blanket on your creative conversations. Get a new lawyer, it's that simple. There are lawyers out there that are just as creative, if not more than creative as you that are just as willing to find interesting ways to do things legally, but still have fun. As you are. It we've reached the age where we we think nothing of saying, Well, you know, so and so over in marketing just isn't pulling their weight, they're not creative enough, we got to get them out and get a new marketing person or this agency just isn't doing a good job, we got to get them out and get new creative in here. Why don't we do that with our lawyers, with our accountants, with our advisors? Why don't we say hey, you're, you're kinda not on board with what we're doing. And that's fine, you just get to not be on board at all, then we're going to move in a different direction.

Kenneth Kinney 26:33

Well, in last story for me on this, I worked with an agency several years ago, who had a young person that was writing a lot of the copy and content and for something in the company, the brand felt like they understood the voice of the customer. And this was more blog content than anything, this person left the agency they were working for. And it wasn't because that person left, but this agency got fired. And they were replaced by another agency. Turns out the same person they liked went to another agency, it was the new agency that that brand hired. And so I started asking, wait, who understood the voice of the customer? The agency you thought understood the voice? Is it you? Is it just a singular person who's moving from agency to agency, because that happens a lot in the business. It's just It's funny how few people really know what their voice really is, sir.

Joey Coleman 27:24

It's so true. And if I'm the person running that business, my next move is to hire that copywriter. Yeah, and bring him in house. And that should just say, hey, we want you to be part of our marketing team, part of our strategy team doing? Absolutely. I mean, the reality is when we learn to voice, the folks who have the ability to learn a brand voice to take on a brand persona, are really rare. And when you find those people, oh, goodness, create a solid have a relationship with them as possible. I've got a writing partner for my books, she is absolutely incredible. And she, I can give her four or five bullet points. And she can write six or eight paragraphs that are what I would say, on those bullet points. I will work with her until she's no longer willing to work with me. And then I'll try to convince her to stay longer, right? Because finding somebody that can speak your voice is not only important, and rare. But it's crucial. If you want to continue to drive your business drive your organization forward,

Kenneth Kinney 28:30

amen. So let's talk a little bit about cost. A lot of people don't move in this direction, because it's the fear that they're going to lose out on customers. It's the FOMO of not living with your churn and burn. And it's hard to convince a lot of CMOS for example, or or anybody at the C suite or marketing director to move in focus in this direction, because the CFO may see the numbers turn. So how do you help them adopt this and really be able to measure it so that they can invest in it?

Joey Coleman 28:59

Oh, Shark I love this question. Because there are customer experience folks out there who are like, Oh, it's all about the feeling and the touchy emotions and you know, hug them and that kind of thing. And that's important. Don't get me wrong. But if it's not going to be manageable as it relates to the financials and the bottom line, we don't even get to have the let's be kind and loving and nice conversation right or not in the same way.

Kenneth Kinney 29:21

Well, from a business perspective, you got to touch the heart of the customer, but you really have to touch the heart of the CFO. Right?

Joey Coleman 29:28

And you've got to touch the wallet of everybody. Right? So here's the thing, I would suggest I lead into these conversations with questions, because I find that questions. You know, and this may be part of my law school days and the Socratic method, have a tendency to elucidate interesting answers that then give me all the insight I need. So one of the first things I would ask somebody in this kind of setting the head of marketing, I would say Okay, great. What was your marketing budget? Last year? How much money did you spend on marketing and most CMOS know that answer. And then they'll say, okay, great. What percentage of the total revenues of the business did that represent? And usually that answer is somewhere between eight and 12%. Okay? It depends on the business depends on the industry, but usually it pops right in there somewhere between eight and 12, then I will say, Great. Now, what amount of money are we spending on keeping customers? And I watch the face go blank. There's no awareness of the amount. And then we get into these interesting conversations. Well, like, you know, I mean, we have a call center have customer service reps. And so it's all that money. And I'm like, Whoa, wait a second, those customer service reps also sign up new clients, right? Well, yeah, but they also deal with times, I'm like, okay, so we can't just automatically take all the costs associated with maintaining a customer, and throw those into the customer experience bucket, because those are operational costs. Okay. And that same argument is the rent in your corporate office, part of that, because that is an expense, you have to pay for all those people that serve your customers. So is that an expense? No, no, no, we didn't take those analogies and apply them over on the marketing side. And you just told me how much you spend on ads, and on creative and on campaigns and on referral fees, you know, maybe or whatever it is. What I want to know is what are you spending to create remarkable experiences for your customers? And invariably, when they've told me it's eight to 12%, I will say, Well, can I have a quarter of a percent, just a quarter of a percent. And we'll run a little experiment, we'll take a quarter of a percent of that, ah, 12%. So something you probably won't even notice. And we will infuse that into the experiences we're creating for our customers, especially in the first 100 days, and especially for those customers that have become advocates, right, that are raving fans. And we'll run this experiment for six months. And we'll track the additional sales, the additional revenue that comes from them that you didn't have to spend a penny of marketing on, save for this quarter of a percent we brought across. And we'll see what happens. Every time we have done that experiment shark. We haven't even gotten to the six months, we've gotten about three months in and they've said, Well, Joe, we we've been, we've been looking at these numbers, and we think we should quarter of a percent is probably not too small. We need to increase the number. I'm like, Oh, great idea. What are you guys? Where do you want to take it? Let's have some fun. So I think at the end of the day, the reason why a lot of organizations get antsy about spending money on customer experience, is because it is more difficult to track. It is more difficult to track that, you know, what is the true value of sending a handwritten thank you note to a customer? Does that really move the dial on their frequency of ordering? What's fascinating to me is there are still boatloads of organizations. And this really shows up the bigger your organization gets that spend an insane amount of money on marketing that they don't know if it's working or not. You know, there's that famous adage, you know, 50% of my advertising by

Kenneth Kinney 33:08

Africa, money is spent on on advertising is wasted. The problem is I don't know which I don't know which

Joey Coleman 33:13

half Exactly, exactly. And so I what what never ceases to amaze me is that that is an acceptable reply on the marketing and sales side of the house, although increasingly with online ad spend and trackable things that's going away. But we still have plenty of people that are saying, well, brand awareness, this is helping with brand impressions. Okay, great. If you're willing to put that amount of money towards brand impressions, can I have that same amount of money to strategically appreciate our existing customers? Because if I can, I know I can move the dial.

Kenneth Kinney 33:46

I love the fact that you address this so heavily on the first 100 days. But how do you help bridge the gap to last longer than 100 days? I think a lot of people that may be listening thinks oh, we don't have a problem the first century's a lot of them don't know they have a problem, as we said before, right, right. But when you carry this beyond 100 days to six months, and so on and so forth. I mean, we're talking about companies that are trying to achieve a long term relationship with their customers.

Joey Coleman 34:11

Right, let's, let's look at the 100 days for what it is the 100 days has two key impacts. Number one, it is much more manageable to get your organization to focus on a 100 day initiative than to focus on even a six month or a one year initiative, right so you can build momentum. And you can get things going by focusing on a more discrete time period. It's long enough to produce results, but short enough not to get bored. The other thing about focusing on the first 100 days is the foundation for what you're building. I by no means will say well on day 101 You're done. What I'm saying is if you have made the deposits into the karmic bank account in the first 100 days You will be able to weather the storm that we know is coming, there is going to be a time with almost every customer you serve, where you fall short, you don't meet their expectations. If you have established that foundation, if you've made those goodwill deposits, you will be able to make some withdrawals on those to navigate rocky periods, whether that's supply chain, whether that's a person who, you know, called them and tried to sell them on something they already owned, whether that's, you know, an onslaught of putting them into an email funnel where they get the same email eight times, and they're just annoyed because they already own that product or already are signed up for that service. So I think the opportunity that's available to us by focusing on the first 100 days, is to lay that foundation. Now going forward, beyond day 100, where you really want to double down into is the personalized interactions. Now some folks look at this, and they're like, shall we put that that scaling thing again? Well, here's the deal. If somebody is still with you, after 100 days, you ideally have already earned the sort of money and relationship with them, where you're not playing with the houses money anymore, right? You're kind of into your into a situation where you're you've recouped your marketing cost, you've recouped your sales cost, you're ready to go. At this point, not only is the customer feeling more connected to you, but you should have enough info, information or insight about the customer to make more personalized messages to say, hey, shark, when's your next dive planned? Or Hey, Joey, you know, did you see this cool new Lego set that came out because I know you like Lego, whatever it may be, you've paid enough attention in the conversations that have led up to that point where you can start to connect with them on a personal level, as opposed to just a transactional or business level?

Kenneth Kinney 36:48

Well, unless you demonstrate so well, in the book, based on the numbers that you've demonstrated about how many people are leaving their brands, they demonstrated well, that they know how to screw it up. Yeah, so this at least addresses that problem, if anything, so Well, Joey, I asked this of all my guests, and I must ask, what is your favorite kind of shark and why?

Joey Coleman 37:08

Oh, there's so many great sharks out there. Not a lot in Iowa. Not a lot in Iowa? No, no, no, there definitely are not a lot in Iowa. But what I will say is, I'm going to go with the whale shark. And here's why. Because I had a particularly fun whale shark story. I was a new parent, and my son, we were at the pediatricians office. And he was looking through a magazine. And he says, Daddy, look a whale shark. And I'm thinking to myself, he's not able to read yet. We've never seen a whale shark in the wild. Where is this coming from? And my son says, Oh, I learned about it on Octonauts. Now, if you have children under the age of 10, you're probably familiar with the TV show Octonauts. And in that moment, as a parent, it allowed me to feel a little less guilt about the times that I had said on Saturday morning, okay, you want to act in knots and daddy's gonna sleep on the couch for a bit and catch up on some sleep. Because I thought we're learning something. So I'm gonna go with the whaleshark.

Kenneth Kinney 38:11

It's a good choice. Octonauts was the show that I had to watch after Bubble Guppies. So okay, there you go. And you'll once you graduate to Paw Patrol,

Joey Coleman 38:20

you'll Oh, yeah, exactly. It's a process you kind of right through it.

Kenneth Kinney 38:23

Well, Joey, it's a special time the show? Are you ready for the five most interesting and important questions that you're gonna be? I'm ready, I'm ready. All right, number one, best in creating loyalty, who does it better, B to C, or b2b.

Joey Coleman 38:41

I'm going to go B2C, because a lot of businesses who are in the b2b space, have lost sight of the fact that they're actually in the H to H space, the human to human space. So I think there's an opportunity for them. And I know there's some great V TVs out there. But I think they buy into that conservative Oh, we can't be enough. We you know this is a business relationship. Now let your personality out there. I promise the people on the buying side are going to be excited about it. All right,

Kenneth Kinney 39:09

number two, and we're doing semi finals to get here because I know you're a root beer fan.

Joey Coleman 39:14

Oh, you're right.

Kenneth Kinney 39:15

First one in the semifinals, Barq's or A&W?

Joey Coleman 39:20

I gotta go a NW classic style, you know, all right, it's in histology play for me.

Kenneth Kinney 39:26

So next is Virgil's or IBC.

Joey Coleman 39:31

Oh, I'm gonna go IBC. And what you've probably learned from both of those answers is I like a little bit less root bite in my root beers.

Kenneth Kinney 39:42

Okay, well, you can get Virgil's at Trader Joe's. So...

Joey Coleman 39:45

this is true.

Kenneth Kinney 39:46

We're doing a winner here.

Joey Coleman 39:47

All right,

Kenneth Kinney 39:48

A&W or IBC?

Joey Coleman 39:50

I'm gonna go IBC?

Kenneth Kinney 39:51

Alright, IBC is the grand champion. Alright, number three. The Wizard of Oz or The Wiz?

Joey Coleman 39:59

Oh, If someone did their homework here folks, see Shark knows that I actually played the Scarecrow in the high school performance my senior year the high school musical The Wiz. So I gotta go with the Scarecrow and the wiz great, great musical and great job personalizing the conversation.

Kenneth Kinney 40:20

I go beyond just reading the book.

Joey Coleman 40:21

That was impressive. That's you had to look for that one. That one's not easy as easily found.

Kenneth Kinney 40:26

Oh, here's here's another one. We'll see if you like number four, best representation of your alma mater Notre Dame Rudy Ruttiger....

Joey Coleman 40:35

Okay.

Kenneth Kinney 40:35

Or Newt Rockne?

Joey Coleman 40:37

Oh, that's a tough one because he I was in the movie Rudy. The group I sang with were the soundtrack and I was in some of the crowd scenes. However, I got to go with and what everybody knows is Newt Rockne, and I gotta give a shout out to the Rockne family who every year had the Glee Club, the group I sang with in college perform at their dinner they would host on campus every year for their great great grandfather, Knut. Rocky Yeah, Knut. So I'm gonna go with Knut.

Kenneth Kinney 41:08

All right, I would have said Lou Holtz, because I have an autographed picture. He's a great speaker.

Joey Coleman 41:15

He is a great speaker and a wonderful guy, you know, quick story about Lou Holtz. A lot of people don't know, during finals, he would come around to all the dorms and give a motivational speech. Now there's 20 Plus dorms on campus at Notre Dame. And he would go one after another over the course of like two weeks, three weeks, giving motivational speeches. Great guy, I'm also going to add just to show my ridiculous Notre Dame fandom, Marcus Freeman to this list. So Marcus Freeman is the new head coach at Notre Dame. He just got the position earlier this year. And he embodies the spirit he has really shaken things up. And he is really taking the brand in new and interesting places. They're actually going to be a case study in my next book, some of the things he's doing, because they're wonderfully creative and filled with energy and personality, which I'm a big fan of.

Kenneth Kinney 42:08

Well, Lou is a Razorback, too. And that's what I love about him. That's that's true as well. Alright, number five, and the most important question that you're going to be asked today. Okay, this gets or cornbread.

Joey Coleman 42:19

Oh, boy, that's tough. That's tough. I know that half of the audience is going to just be furious with my answer here. I'm gonna have to go because you just said biscuits or cornbread, there was no mention of any toppings, any gravy, any accoutrement that can be added. I'm gonna have to go with cornbread, because I think the cornbread more easily stands on its own.

Kenneth Kinney 42:45

This is a lot safer question than asking like, Republican or Democrat Trump or Biden, you know, biscuits or cornbread only start a fight in the south so Exactly, exactly. Well, Joey, where can people find out more about you get a copy of the book, keep up with what you're doing and more.

Joey Coleman 43:01

Yeah, I appreciate that Shark. The best place to find me is on my website, Joey coleman.com. That's J O EY like a baby kangaroo or a five year old you know, Coleman co L e ma N like the camping equipment but no relation Joey coleman.com. The books called Never lose a customer. Again, it's available anywhere you might like to find a book. We've got the hardcover version, the ebook version. If you've liked like listening to my voice today, we've got the audiobook version that I narrate. And since you're listening to a podcast and my gut instinct is you enjoy podcasts and I know that shark knows about my podcast comm check out the experience this show. It's a podcast all about customer and employee experience, that I co host with the brilliant and follically challenged to Dan pingus, who is a great human being and a good friend who I knew way, way back before either of us were grownups. He, my college roommate ended up being Dan's grad school roommate. And so I met him when he was getting his MBA. So yeah, it's a it's a fun show. Check it out. I think you'll like it short, quick. snackable delights of customer and employee experience. It's called the experience this show.

Kenneth Kinney 44:11

Awesome. And Dan is a great guy hit him on the show as well, not that long ago and just saw him a couple of weeks ago.

Kenneth Kinney 44:17

Joey, thank you so much for being with us today on a shark's perspective.

Joey Coleman 44:20

Thanks, Shark.

[music]

Kenneth Kinney 44:27

So there was my conversation with Joey Coleman, a speaker consulted in the Wall Street Journal Best Selling Author of "Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sale into Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days." Let's take a look at three key takeaways from a conversation with him.

Kenneth Kinney 44:41

First, as we discussed, there's a lot of expertise from a lot of great minds out there, but it isn't moving the needle enough. Regardless of the great advice out there though. The bar is still too low for customer expectations. But most businesses want to elevate their game there aren't any brands that I know of plotting in a backroom trying to deliver up a horrible customer expect Aren't, as Joey says, though, many don't know how to scale that individualized great experience to fit everyone. And that means that many to most customers do not stay. His research shows it 20 to 70% of new customers stopped doing business with you before the 100 day mark. That's scary. But What's scarier is that many businesses don't even know what their percentages are. So your homework is I want you to ask yourself, how many are leaving you in the first 100 days, you don't like 100, make it 200 or 365. For all I care, but pick a metric that makes sense to you in your business. And in that time, if you screw up in you will then ask yourself if you built in that level of trust, so they'll extend you some grace for forgiveness, and then you can invest more in that relationship also in some form or metric that will help you in the C suite go beyond just a transactional experience. We'll talk about those homework grades later then.

Kenneth Kinney 45:48

Second, do your customers understand what they're getting brands know what they're selling, but many customers don't know what they're getting? Or what to expect marketing and sales to often think about the packaging and the sale, but not enough about the experience. help customers understand when they're navigating the emotional experience of buying your product or service beyond just the transaction. I love the example the diet pills despite the packaging in the ads, who asked about the diet results after 90 days, for example, except when it's just for another ad helped him navigate what to expect.

Kenneth Kinney 46:21

Third, as Joey said, businesses struggle with communications and communicating great experiences, especially at scale. And I agree, but also your voice shouldn't come from the communications team only. It should come from the personality of the brand. There's a true value to their filter, but I liked his phrase our brand voice is our people. So share your distinct voice with the customers you serve.

Kenneth Kinney 46:41

Got a question? Send me an email to Kenneth at a shark's perspective.com.

Kenneth Kinney 46:45

Thank you again for the privilege your time.

Kenneth Kinney 46:47

Thank you for taking the time to listen, please consider writing a review and letting me know your thoughts on the show.

Kenneth Kinney 46:52

And the experience is not about me, but it is about you. You are the audience I serve. And please join us on the next episode of A Shark’s Perspective.

(Music - shark theme)