14 Strategies For Acquiring & Keeping Customers For Life (1 of 2)

Imagine the following. You just stepped into a brand new position, and in that position, you're seeing the company's growth. You're seeing new customers come in every single day, and you're seeing your old customers that have been around and stick around for a while, but maybe don't stick around nearly as much as you would like. The question is, who do you focus on? Do you focus on acquiring or keeping? Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today's episode is uniquely special. We get to listen to Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer themselves as they talk through the principles of what is most important and what priority you should give to each. Now, I'm not going to spoil which is which, but I will tell you this is part 1 of 2, and there's a lot of principles here. So we're going to be going through 14 different strategies for acquiring and keeping customers for life, but we're going to start with 6 principles of why your customers are leaving in the first place, because you definitely want to make sure you don't have a ridiculously leaky bucket. And let's start there.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.

The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.

They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by.

Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like.

Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless.

His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The As we know, it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing. Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

Hello everyone, this is Bill Glazer, and I'm joined once again this month with Dan Kennedy. And, um, we've got another great topic for you this month. The topic is how to get and keep customers for life. And obviously this should be a very important topic for everybody on the call because, uh, not enough thought usually in a business is given to keeping customers. I've often said that when people ask me what I do at Laser Kennedy, I always told them I only do two things. I get new members and I keep members. That's my job, is to get them and to keep them. So the same thing that you should be thinking about in your businesses is your job is to get new customers and to keep them. And too many people think only about getting new customers and they don't think nearly enough about keeping them. And I guess, Dan, let me just sort of throw sort of a question over to you, but the, the thought process in keeping customers— I mean, it's sort of a, it's a real softball question, but it's worth asking. Why should people be paying so much attention to why they should keep customers?

Well, I, I think now more than ever, you know, the, the difficulty of getting a new one and the cost of getting a new one. Both of those lines are trending to the worse.

And he—

in any economic group, affluent, not affluent, one of the things that's true in a time of restrained or restricted or hesitant spending is that consumers tend to continue spending with those those they already have good relationships with and are more likely to delay, postpone, avoid spending with brand new businesses, vendors, providers. So that, that makes the getting of a new one even more difficult, the cost of getting a new one even higher, and the opportunity value inherent in the ones you already have greater and particularly greater from a net profit standpoint. Beyond that, generally speaking, you know, the equity of the business is in the retained and active customer, really in most businesses, not in anything else. And you really see it either under pressure like the economy or like with a business that suddenly has a the roads ripped up around it for 8 months that make it extremely difficult for people to get to it. How well they do or how poorly they do during those 8 months is revealing really of how good a job they've been doing on the relationship with customers for life side of this equation versus the get a new customer, get a new customer, get a new customer and take for granted the ones we have.

And I would also say that most businesses, the customer value goes up the longer that you have the customer. I know that, like, if I go back to my roots, which was menswear retailing, when a customer would come back the second time, the third time, the fourth time, they would always spend much more in, in most cases than they spent the first visit. You know, because there's more confidence now with the business they're dealing with, and they found this sort of their home that they want to now spend their money with. And so, certainly, you know, the longevity of it, that customer becomes more valuable to you in most businesses. I know one of my favorite, favorite Dan Kennedy-isms, make sure I don't screw this up, is while most people think the purpose of a customer is to get a sale, we think that the purpose of a sale is to get a customer. So, once again, once we get the customer, now we want to figure out how we would market to them and keep them for life so that that customer value would be much greater. I think in moving into today's topic, I've put together 13 factors that contribute to customer retention. I think that list is going to be very valuable to everyone. But before we do that, I just want to spend a moment and talk about why customers actually do leave. And it's very, very valuable to think and sort of to know this information because most people put too much emphasis on the wrong reasons why people leave. So like on my list, and I have 6 of them, and I'm sure there's more than 6, but these are the 6 that are the ones that I paid the most attention to. And I'm sort of going to do it sort of David Letterman-ish, which is, you know, the top 10 list, which is a countdown from 10 to 1. So I'm going to go from 6 to 1 because I believe the number 1 reason why people leave is actually the most important one, which is the area that unfortunately people don't pay enough attention to, but number 6 on my list is price. People leave because they find a lower price provider, which is the area that I find most entrepreneurs tend to focus on the most, which is not the next 5, but is the fact that price, so they think that they need to be the lowest price provider in order to keep their customers. Number 5 on the list is that people, for geography, they move away. I mean, we know that in local marketing, your proximity to the business is often a real advantage. So when I was in the menswear business, in my store in the suburbs, we clearly would be marketing— I mean, we would clearly— most of our customers would come from a 3-mile radius. We reached out to 5 miles, that probably was about 90% of the customers. So a lot of businesses, they move away and therefore you can lose some of your customers. That's something that many times you don't— that's the more difficult thing to control. Next is they get lousy service, so they're not— they don't have a good experience with you. People leave because of that. That is something very much in everybody's control. Next is that you deliver a lousy product, so there's not— Delivering of products or services is an exchange for money, which actually moves back to the price thing, which is if price is your only— if being the lowest price provider is what you're trying to do, the way to overcome that is to figure out how you can deliver a product which would, then be able to substantiate the price. And so, and that doesn't necessarily mean change the product, that just means change the experience that you have with consuming the product or buying the product, et cetera. So again, on my list here is lousy product is a reason why people leave. The next one is they get a new resource. So they find somebody new to take, to, to provide them what you are providing to them. And the last thing on the list is probably overwhelmingly the number one reason why people leave, and that's simply because they forget. Uh, at the, uh, at the Super Conference, I know many of our Diamond members were there, I presented— well, I talked about, um, lost customer reactivation, and I mentioned there that it's not your customer's job to remember to do business with you, it's your job to remind them. So the reason why, once again, a lot of reasons why you lose customers is because they just forget that you're there. And you're just not doing a good job to remind them. So let's start, Dan, if you would, we'll move into our list of the 13 factors that can contribute to customer retention. And the first thing that we have on the list is offer a truly superior product or service. So again, that goes back to the list of why people do leave is to offer a truly superior product or service. And there's a lot of sort of things that you should be thinking about when you think about how can I provide a truly superior product or service. I mean, one of the things that I often tell people to do is to do survey. And it's to survey, you know, your customers, your employees, your— look, research your competitors. And to do some surveying to actually figure out what are your customers saying, what are your employees saying. Oftentimes your employees know things that you don't know because they are the frontline people. Again, moving back to my menswear days, I would often be asking questions to my salespeople because they were the people that were face-to-face every day with our customers to get their input. So be doing survey that way, surveying that way.. But also doing some kind of research also in order to find out what— how you can provide a truly superior product or service, which would mean to my look at your competitors. Look what other people are providing that are competing with you and see what they're providing and see how what you're providing stacks up to them or if there's some kind of a gap that nobody's providing that we can now become sort of the provider of that. So the next thing on my list, which is under— truly superior products or services, the almighty unique selling proposition helps you a lot there. And obviously, to the point that I just made about the gap, the Domino's Pizza story, which again, Dan, I first heard you talk about that in the context of USP in 1995 at the Success Seminar. And the gap that the Monaghan figured out was, you know, delivery of the pizza. People weren't doing that at the time. And so he figured out how to deliver a better experience for the people by developing a USP which actually delivered something that people were not doing in that particular niche. Another thing that I would often recommend people to do, again, we're still on this topic of offering a truly superior product or service, is to overdeliver. Whenever you can, which the overdelivery oftentimes can combat the lowest price provider thing. I mean, Dan, I'm going to just ask you to talk about that for a second because, you know, people that are thinking that, gee, I've got to be the lowest price provider, what are some things that you often think about tactically in order to combat lowest price competition?

Well, first of all, I think if you— You know, if you get them that way in the first place, I mean, if your means of acquiring the customer is dominated by lowest or cheap price, you set yourself up for this problem in retention. But having said that, as you develop relationship, If— I mean, the virtue, the value of developing relationship is to be liberated from always having to have the lowest price. So you take— I was in a few days ago a little local independent bookstore that has been in this community since, you know, the beginning of time, and We were talking about they had just had an author event and it was productive but not as productive as it was a few years ago because they know that some people come to their author events but— or come to their store and look around and browse and then go home and order on Amazon at a price that they can't compete with, but that their business is still prosperous because they have great relationship and provide a variety of added values, which is what you're alluding to, like 14 different book clubs and author events and field trips and all sorts of things that, that make a customer knowingly pay them more for the actual commodity they sell than they might have to if they went elsewhere. Because of the overall, you know, relationship. So the complexity of the relationship is the escape from the brutality of price, particularly when the core product is a commodity that you don't actually make, that you don't have exclusivity to in selling. And I think you were absolutely right that when you placed it 6th on your list of 6, you know, that people obsess over this price thing and think that they can actually buy retention and loyalty with low price, which is rarely a successful strategy. The other thing that occurred to me as you were talking is, you know, when you think about product or service, or both. There's, I think, two levels. There's the essential level. There's the things that, you know, have to be true. If we go buy a pair of socks at a store, when we get them out of the package, they can't have holes in them. And it really doesn't matter whether we're buying the socks at Walmart or we're buying them at Gage Men's or we're buying them at Neiman Marcus. That's sort of an essential foundational part of the product. If we're going to a restaurant, it kind of doesn't matter what level of restaurant we're going to. There's a base level. The food has to be cooked enough it doesn't poison us. What's served on the plate has to come close to matching what was described in the menu. I mean, there's a base level that has to be met. And a lot of businesses aren't even very successful at this. But then Above that is the level of what causes preference, what now makes the person want to do business with you versus everybody else in the category and want to do business with you more frequently rather than spreading the business around, want to refer others, bring others with them. All of that gets to that second level above the base, but you definitely got to have that's the base in place. And the second level, what causes preference and what counters price, has at least as much to do with who the customer is, who you're selling to, as it does with what you are selling. And so if you go back to the bookstore example, the independent book— store as a whole in the entire country has virtually lost the bulk buyer, the sales manager who would come in and buy 8 copies of the new Napoleon Hill book for his 8 salespeople. That business is gone. They haven't been able to hold onto it. It's price-driven, and that sales manager knows he can go to Amazon and get 'em for less than he can get at that local bookstore, and he's gonna do it. But they have been able to hold on to the, the personal book lover who really wants a bookstore with humans in it who also read and can talk about books and are interested in the books that they sell. And so if they're not reaching out to that customer, they're going to be in trouble with the product/service scenario they have to make their living with. And on the other hand, if they're getting that customer and not delivering the product/service scenario that customer wants, they're going to be in trouble. So the, the customer drives this as much as does the product or service. And so your words deliver a truly superior product or service. It's a very judgmental thing, what is superior in the eyes of the customer.

So before we move to the second factor on this list, let's just, again, in keeping with this conversation about providing superior or truly superior products or services. Let's not totally abandon the conversation about price, however, because when you do indeed have a pricing advantage, what are your thoughts about that?

I mean— Ah, I think you have to be very careful about it because it tempts one. To rely on it. And almost all pricing advantages are temporary. So it is possible to have one, but virtually all such advantages are temporary. And so the temptation when you do have one is to be pretty lazy and sloppy about everything else because you offer the lowest price and everybody knows it. And so the assumption takes root that that means they are not going to go knowingly pay more than they have to, to some other vendor or provider. And yet Obviously, if that were true, if that governed behavior, then everybody would go to the $9 walk-in haircut place, and everybody in town would be driving Kias, and there'd be no other car on the road, and, and, and, and nobody would ever buy socks at Neiman Marcus. So, you know, it's empirically not true, and yet there's almost a religious belief in it. And when one does have temporary price advantage, the temptation to rely on it is enormous. The outcome of relying on it historically, taking a broad view, a long view of business history, not a short view of business history, but historically, the outcome of relying on it is always extinction. And so I think if you have it, you want to exploit it, but at the same time, you want to be cautious about it providing some false sense of security or permission granted to ignore all of these other elements, including the development of the asset that matters, that is sustainable, which is a quality relationship with the customer. If you view them as, as if I have one asset, I don't need the other, that can be true of the quality relationship, but it's never true of price. I mean, if you stop to think about it, virtually everybody on the call currently buy certain products and services that they know a comparable and in some cases identical product and service is available somewhere convenient and accessible for a lower price. So why do they do that? And the very fact that they do it tells you how dangerous it is to rely on price advantage.

Well, let's move on to the second factor, and the second factor is one which actually you alluded to a moment ago when you talked about the who you're selling to, but actually this is a little different way of looking at it, which is sort of the source of it, which is where— how you acquired the customer, the source that you acquired the customer, and, you know, There's a lot of factors that go into that. Obviously, well, let's talk about, again, your magnetic marketing presentation. When I first heard about it, you told the Al the plumber story and you talked about the fact that I believe he got a, it was somebody, he got endorsed mailing from somebody to their list, if I'm not mistaken, and the relationship that that person has their list. So let's assume that it was a CPA and he sent a letter to all of his customers saying that, you know, you've got— you have a problem issue, you've got to talk to Allen Plumber. As a matter of fact, you probably do have a plumbing issue in your house that's festering right now. You really need to have him come in and do a 17-point safety check. And now if it's my CPA that's sending me that letter, who's already a trusted advisor to me, I'm, I'm very, very apt to take his advice on, on trying Al the Plumber. Plus the fact I'm, by virtue of I'm a customer of the CPA, there's some biases that are, that I already have that would probably make me a very good loyal customer to Al the Plumber. As opposed to if Al the Plumber went online And he used pay-per-click advertising for his new customer acquisition strategy.

Well, you are so much a better customer for Al the plumber. It isn't even funny.

In terms of the CPA?

Yeah, absolutely. A, you're nearly unconcerned with price. Because good value is implied and evidenced by the endorsement. You are likely, as you pointed out, if the message is done right, to connect with Al the Plumber before you are dealing with an emergency, which will make you a better customer because you can be sold things when not under duress and not just wanting the toothache fixed. You— there's trust already in place. So if Al does find something wrong when he does the 17-point inspection, you will be more likely to accept and act on his recommendation. Uh, you came to Al the Plumber as a referral, and so you've been preconditioned to refer when Al the Plumber turns around and asks you to refer. So all of those things make you so much the better customer, um, than the customer obtained from cold advertising. Advertising, and probably within the cold advertising category, the worst of the bunch would be pay-per-click. Even the implied referral is better. So if you saw the Al the Plumber truck parked in a neighbor's driveway, and it happens to be a neighbor you don't like, so you never have a conversation with him, but he is your neighbor after all. And, and he's a CPA. He's not your CPA, but you know he's a CPA and he's not an idiot. And you see the Al the Plumber truck parked there, and its big wrapper offers the free 17-point inspection. And you wander out and talk to Al. You're still an infinitely better customer than if he got you through overt advertising. And yet the interesting thing about all of this is that You know, when you said up top how business owners are far more focused on, and therefore they spend more money on, pursuit of the new customer than retention and development of the value of the customer they already have. They're even worse at this. They spend all sorts of money getting customers through cold advertising and are stubbornly reluctant to spend the same amount of money or appropriately a greater amount of money getting a customer via direct referral, as in the CPA, Al the plumber scenario that you just described. I mean, I had a conversation this morning with somebody in another industry altogether who, because of my relentless nagging for months and months and a drop in response to advertising, thus desperation, the mother of compliance, finally really focused on getting referrals from clients and making it easy for clients to refer. And the very first month got 9 referrals, not just 9 referrals, 9 referred prospects who became clients. And he's telling me how much better they are in every measurement of better you would want— no fee resistance, higher purchase price, etc.— than the, than any 27 new clients he might get through cold advertising. So you're absolutely right. And I agree with the differentiation and, you know, online versus offline. But certainly, if you're driven to Al by the recommendation from the CPA, which everybody should understand in the scenario from the speech, that you heard in 1812, you know, is engineered by Al the plumber, it's not a spontaneous burst of enthusiasm on the part of the CPA, you're an infinitely better customer and therefore worth engineering that to happen.

So again, number 2 on our list is source, where the customer actually comes from. And, you know, your homework assignment, everybody listening right now, is to start thinking about all the different sources that we get customers from. Once again, at Glaser Kennedy, just by example, we have somewhere close to approaching 2,000 different sources now that we actually get new members from, and we carefully analyze each of those to see where we get the best members from. What a lot of people do, especially on the online world, is they say to themselves, "Well, I'm going to build a bigger affiliate program and so I'm going to get more affiliates to vote for me." But you got to micromanage that, say to yourself, "Okay, but who are the right affiliates?" It's not just build a bigger affiliate program. So in the course of the CPA, that's really an affiliate program that's not a—

That's not an official affiliate program.

It's just one person promoting the other, but it's still, in essence, an affiliate program. But to the point that Dan had just elaborated on, coming from that person is a great customer. So you want to look at where your sources are for your customers because that will have a lot to do with how long you keep them, is the source of them.

You know, I had a client years ago who sold Plain Community Development Investments, Canadian company. And so speaking of affiliate programs, that's what triggered in my mind is contrary to the thoughts of everybody under the age of 30, affiliate marketing actually existed long before Al Gore invented the internet. It's not an online phenomenon. And so his investment sale was problematic and difficult because skepticism for it was understandably high. I mean, you were buying participation in the development of something that only exists on a drawing out in the middle of nowhere where at the moment there isn't even water or roads or, you know, etc. And so direct marketing of it through lead generation and get a prospect and make a presentation and all that was very problematic. And so we spent months marketing to— in Canada they're called Chartered Accountants, not CPAs, but they're the same thing— marketing to CPAs to create an affiliate network. Again, not an online online affiliate network, but an affiliate network of CPAs who were each capable— none really capable of big numbers, but each capable of getting 3 or 4 or 8 or 9 of their clients to a meeting. And therefore, we didn't have to do any direct marketing, and these clients were really for all the reasons we just talked about in the Al the Plumber scenario. There, where somebody off the street being shown this proposition, their skepticism level on a 1 to 100 might be a 98, these prospects it was down in the teens and much more easily surmountable. And so we organized, I'm fuzzy on numbers now, it's been a while, but we organized I think 22, 23, 24 chartered accountants, CPAs all across Canada has participating affiliates. And then the first of these communities, we sold the whole thing out in 90 days. And sort of a norm in that industry might be 3 years to accomplish the same thing. So, you know, this whole idea of marketing through influencers rather than marketing direct is certainly not— it doesn't require the internet in order to do it. And in some businesses, it can't be done that way. And as you pointed out, it has with customers. All affiliates, all influencers, all sources of referrals are not created equal and therefore will not deliver an equivalently valuable or well-behaved or quality customer or client. And so thought has to be given to the quality of the affiliate, if you will, not just the quantity.

The next factor on the list is actual consumption. So again, the topic is how to get and keep customers for life. And we know that in really in every business, I don't care what business you're in, whether you're in the business of being in the restaurant business or you're in the business of providing auto repair or you're in the business of providing, Marketing and money-making advice by Glaser Kennedy. If you don't get your people to consume what you sell, then it's very, very difficult actually to keep them. So everybody needs to be thinking about how can they actually get people to consume the things that we provide to them. And there is one of the things that I often tell people that they need to think about in getting consumption in their businesses of any of their products or services is to very clearly give people a real explanation of the thing they got to do first. Or oftentimes the thing they got to do, but the thing they got to do first. So a lot of people don't even know what to do. So you really got to really almost take them by the hand in many cases and tell them how they can actually consume the product or service that we give them. The other thing that you want to also do when you're providing a product or service to somebody under this line of consumption is you're trying very hard to get them not only to do something first, but do something fast first. So what's like the one thing that they can do right away that will get them on the road of consumption? And so, for example, a couple of things that we often see from businesses is we want them to attend something. So, if you're a professional practice, you want them to come to your office. You want to come to your business. If you're in the information marketing business, you'd like them to come to a seminar or a webinar or a teleseminar. Do that staff. If you are sending them something, you want them to open up the package. Just opening up a package will get them to be doing something. So it might be sending them a letter in the mail, might be sending them some kind of a box they have to open up, but you want them to do that. If you want them to call an office, if you want them to go to a website, you want them to download something, you want them to implement something, so it's just getting them them to do something, but consumption is just so critical in getting customers to stay. And again, this works in, in B2B, this works in B2C, this works if you have some kind of a small business in an area, and this works if you're in a service provider business, whatever. So the whole consumption piece is absolutely critical in getting people to get customers and also to keep them. Anything you want to add to that, or should I move on?

Very quickly, I do have a couple things, and I see the clock, but, you know, maybe this should have been two calls. The, you know, we do a lot of, we're doing a lot of work right now with this, with Proactiv, because here you have a product that works if people use it. It solves a problem that is meaningful to them, which is acne. Just because they bought it doesn't mean they open the box, open the jars, and use the product when they get it. That cannot be assumed. Logically, it could be, but it can't. And so, you know, you are right on with it doesn't do any good to have a good product or a good service if you don't get the buyer quickly upon purchase or getting it home or whatever receipt if you don't get them actively engaged in using it. And a big mistake, which you also put your finger on, the first big mistake is assumption that just because somebody bought it, They leave the seminar room with their audio CD package. If you assume they're going to open it up and pop one in when they get in the car on the way home, it's a bad assumption. And so the first mistake is assumption. The second is not clear instructions to make sure that they are able to use it. So the other day, a leave me a tour tells me of going and buying a new pad. An Apple, somebody else's pad, and gets it home and opens the box ready to use the pad and is perplexed to discover there's no instructions. And now frustrated, the next day she schleps back to the store and says, where's the instructions? And is told, well, there are no instructions, it's intuitive. And her answer, which would have been my answer, is, well, it may be intuitive to you, but it ain't so intuitive to me, nor do I want to spend, you know, and so the further answer is, well, you just play with it until you figure it out. This is not a way to really get use from everybody that you sell the thing to. As a matter of fact, it's a great way to get one return for a refund. Now Apple's solution to solving this is now the Disney Guide answer. So they now have private tutors who for some ungodly sum of money per hour will one-on-one teach you how to use the stuff that they sell you, which is at least an answer and is apparently a profit center. So I think you want to avoid this assumption that it's going to get used because it got bought, and you want to make sure that there is clear directions and assistance to get it used. And then the last thing I would say is under ideal circumstances, you'll create a mandatory pattern of consumption. And so with chiropractors, for example, for many, many years I taught and some adhered to, but our model was the mandatory a new patient class in the office the first week you became a patient, and you had to attend with spouse or buddy. And if you didn't, you kind of got a warning and a notice to be at the class the second week. And if you missed two in a row, you got terminated as a patient because there's no point in having a bad patient when you can replace them with a good patient. And so some level of forced compliance in many cases is really worth thinking about.

And by the way, back to your Apple example, which was a great example, you know, Apple, when you buy the Apple, they actually also have like these free classes in the Apple stores that help you for the consumption, which is, yeah, 'cause you get that thing and you look at it, you don't know even where to start. So, I mean, again, they're thinking strategically about how we can get you to actually consume it. And there's no surprise, which is one of the greatest retail phenomenons I've ever seen, Dan, is you walk by an Apple store and they got 60, 70 employees working in that store and they're all busy with customers. It's just incredible. So, And that's a great example of how you get people to consume. And you're right, maybe this should be a two-part call because I don't know if we're going to get through all 13 of them today. So the next one on our list is results. So yes, so we would like them to consume, but they would like them to actually get some kind of result. So again, whenever anybody buys something from you, they're looking for some results with it. So when I was in the men's wear business, you know, they wanted to look good, you know, they want the things fit right. They're looking for a result. They're looking to go into an interview and get a job, I mean, and make sure they got the right suit on for that. If you go to a restaurant, you're looking for a result in the fact that the food tastes good And the interesting thing about results, I'll just say, is— it was a big lesson that I learned, by the way, was— and I'll just sort of tell you the story of how I learned the lesson— is years ago, I guess it was maybe 4 or 5 years ago, I was at a Roy Fatt seminar, which is a seminar for the restaurant business. And we were there, which we were telling people about how to use Royalty Rewards, which is a loyalty program for many different niches, but at that point we were in the restaurant niche. And in the audience, we had several of Rory's members who were already Royalty Rewards clients, and we were showing them, using them as case studies during our presentation, showing the kinds of results they were getting with the program. And at the end of the talk, two of them that we used as case studies walked up to me and they said something to me which really made like the light bulb in my head go off. They said to me, "Bill, I didn't realize I was getting the kinds of return on investment with World Rewards that I was getting until you just showed it to me." At that point, I pulled Rory aside right afterwards. I said, "Rory, we got to make sure not only that they're getting results, but that they're realizing the results they're getting. So after that point, we actually put in a program where every month we actually show them the actual results that they're getting with the program. So I tell you that story because not only do they need to get results, but in certain businesses, it's not obvious to them that they are getting results. And if it's not obvious to them that they're getting results, it's your job to be able to demonstrate to them or show them each and every month month the results that they're actually getting with what you are providing to them. All right. I'll move on to the next one, which is in order to get and keep customers— actually, this is really more about keeping customers— is manage their expectations. And when I say manage their expectations is be very clear to the customer what he should be receiving as a customer. This sort of goes hand in glove with the last point I made about not only them getting results but to show them results. You also want to manage their expectations so that they would know what they should be receiving. So for example, if you're in the auto repair industry, one of the things that you might very likely say to your customers are, gee, in order to get an additional year out of your car, It's necessary to bring your car in every 5,000 miles for an oil change. And you come in every 5,000 miles for an oil change, you'll get an extra 12 months' life out of your car. This is a managing of an expectation that you would actually deliver to somebody. If you're in the business of providing financial services, so, you know, investing in stocks and bonds for people, so you're that advisor. It clearly then was developing a program where there is a management of expectations that they will realize and constantly be reviewing that with them and going over that with them. And that is a very big piece that will actually also get you to keep customers. Dan, before I move on to the next topic, the next bullet, do you want to mention anything at all about results and/or Matt?

Well, about the management of expectations, I mean, I think that, There's a fairly good discussion of this in the NPS Ruthless Management book. I mean, every business revolves around an agreement between the business and the customer of what's supposed to happen and how it's supposed to happen. Now, often that agreement is in the head of the customer, it hasn't been controlled by the provider. There hasn't really been any discussion of it, and the provider's kind of clueless about what's in the head of the customer. So it's a one-way agreement that the customer thinks he has and is often then disappointed about. Conversely, the provider can have in his head what he thinks the agreement is, that he has with the customer, but he hasn't communicated it. Therefore, it really is not an agreement, and therefore either he or the customer or both wind up disappointed. So I think the closer you can get to clarity on this, and in one-on-one selling and professional practices and services landscaping, etc., this really can be gotten very, very clear. In other businesses, it often has to be communicated rather than done as a conversation. But, you know, the closer you get to mutual clarity about who's doing what, then you have to do X in order for me to be able to do Y. And here's how you're gonna be able to judge outcomes, here's what not to expect. That's just as important because somebody can be very frustrated about something that's not happening if again they had in their head to expect it, and yet if that expectation is taken care of, then it doesn't frustrate them at all. So, you know, I think the closer you get to an actual enunciated agreement about all this with client or customer, the better you are.

The next one on our list is speed of delivery. And speed of delivery can oftentimes improve your customer retention. As a matter of fact, I think, Dan, it would be safe to say that you also fall into this category, because I know I do, that I oftentimes I'll be looking to be dealing with people that I can get things done real fast. And because, you know, when I look at time, time to me is a very valuable commodity. So I don't want to be spending a whole lot of time waiting in a repair shop waiting room waiting for my car's oil to be changed. An obvious business, which is a very great example, by the way, an obvious The most obvious business that has built a huge billion-dollar business on the back of speed of delivery is Zappos. And the reason why it's such a great example, because when you talk about price, Zappos is not discount. So they're not leading at all with price presentation. They're actually built a billion-dollar business based on sort of benefits. So the benefits that you have dealing with them is number one is you go to their website and they've got a huge, huge selection. You know, you just see— can't help but find what you're looking for. Number two is, um, the fact that if you get it and you don't like it, they make it really easy to return it. And number three is if you buy You order it today before such whatever time, you'll have it tomorrow. So, you know, if you ask people about Zappos, and like my wife Karen is a Zappos buyer. I mean, she'll tell you, you know, she'll order something today and it arrives by UPS tomorrow. Just, it's, you know, she, that's a benefit that's just huge to her. So the whole speed of delivery, and in every business you can actually be thinking about, you know, how can you provide speed of delivery to your customers where best case scenario is they're talking about it.

It's the smartest thing Zappos has done. And I have this battle with direct marketers, I've had it for years and continue to have it, that when you buy something at a distance, shoes, book, audio cassette, whatever, you wanted it the minute you bought it. That's why you bought it. And so time to the buyer, it moves now rapidly, and time to the person doing the fulfillment moves slowly. So to them, a week is perfectly reasonable. I can gang all the orders and ship them on Friday, and And to the person who bought it, they're looking in their mailbox and on their doorstep the following day hoping that it's there and becoming increasingly disappointed as each day passes that it's not. And so if it arrives 6, 7 days later, they've lost interest in it. Their disappointment has built up and now they don't like that shoe when they look at it or they aren't interested in that information product when they get it out of the box. And I've had this fight with people, heck, for 30 years. I mean, and like, when I show up on the stage as a speaker, if I'm not going to have the product there, which is the correct thing to do, and there's going to be a delay in shipment, the one thing we do is we get out the pre-sale letter, this confirmation and stick letter, the next day. I mean, I did it the whole time I was on the road with the success events with paper order forms, 300 of them sometimes, faxing them so that the very next day everything could be going out the door. And there was not even the FedEx delay of getting the forms to the office because I knew it affected refund rates substantially. And, and there's some semblance of this, you know, in in every business. Your example of waiting time is a good one. I mean, it's the number one complaint of people with doctor offices and lawyer offices and other kinds of professional practices is they have a 10 o'clock appointment and they're getting seen at 10:20, 10:30, 10:40. And they're not happy. The car rental business, you know, switched from going in, doing a bunch of paperwork, then waiting waiting for them to bring the car to you to National's thing of go out and pick any car you want and be on your way. So I think this is a really, really important retention factor that often customers don't voice, but they're watching the clock. And if you are— if you're beating the clock, you have a much better chance of keeping that customer with you for a long period of time.

The other example that I think I mentioned was on the call.

Yeah, I did.

I talked about Domino's. I mean, again, that's another business that was built all on the back of speed of delivery. And you know, you've often done a very funny bit when you speak and talk about how these kids in college were craving carbohydrates. And at that moment, speed was very, very important to them. FedEx is another great business, has built on the back is when it absolutely, positively has to be there. And they have different levels of speed of delivery. So if you need it there tomorrow, you can pay a premium for speed, which is another very valuable lesson, which is people will pay extra for speed. When I was in the menswear business, we used to charge for alterations and we had two prices. We had one price was if you could wait a week a week, we'd pay this price. And then there was a second price, is if you needed it in less than a week, you'd pay 50% more. And it was a big profit center for our members, or again, people would pay extra for that speed to get it the next day. Sometimes they would actually wait for it while the tailors would do it for them. And so speed can be a very big, big strategy in customer retention. The next one is, and I might actually break this into two calls, Stan, because I think this has been so valuable and I don't want to rush through it. But number 7 on our list of 13 is, and this is a really big one, and this one gets like a big star next to it if you're making the list, which is keeping them engaged. Engaged. There's probably one of the most powerful strategies to get people and keep them as customers is to get them engaged with you. So for example, you know, if you go to a dentist, which is amazing to me because I just did a special coaching group and I had dentists in the coaching group and I looked at them and I said, I said to the dentist, I said, I'm sure that before your patient is leaving, you're scheduling the next appointment that they come in. And he looked at me and he says, no, we used to do that, but we got away from that. And so, but there are a lot of businesses that are just logically have this opportunity to keep them engaged by scheduling the next thing that keeps them engaged with us. If you have a service business, it's easy to keep them engaged.

If you—

going back to my example that I gave— or not example, but I talked about if you're providing financial services, well, you know, have the regular periodic sit-across-the-table appointment with them, and/or by phone if you have to, where you go over their portfolio. And before you end that, that conversation, you're scheduling the next time that you do that. Um, I, uh, I often tell the story about one of my clients that is— was in furniture business, and one of the things that we did was we did the— you get the warranty on the piece of furniture you buy, and in order to keep the warranty intact We have to come out once a year and look at the furniture to make sure it's in good shape and see if it needs to have a little bit of repair on it, etc. But it also brought him back into the home again, gave him a great opportunity to offer them other furniture that he could sell them and/or he has arrangements with other providers that provide services to the homes and he would then recommend other providers And he would get additional income from that. But my point about all that is that he just kept them engaged. So think about yourselves. When's the last time you bought furniture from somebody? And when do you— how have they strategically placed them in front of you— of them again, placed you in front of them again in order to keep them engaged with the fact that they're doing business with you. So keeping them engaged is a smart thing to do. There are other things that you can do also to keep them engaged. One of them is, again, going back to surveys. You can send out surveys to them. That's keeping them involved with you. You can have contests. Certainly our favorite strategy at Glaser Kennedy that we teach to keep your customers engaged is to have your monthly newsletter. A newsletter that goes out to them, because that really is all about building relationship with people, more so than content. So sending out a newsletter every month. The other thing that would keep them engaged for you at somewhat higher level is to make yourself interesting. If you go back to, gee, the talk that you did, Dan, several years ago, which I think I now I call it keeping customers for life, but it's really about making yourself into an interesting character to them. That keeps them engaged with you because now you're an interesting character. They want to know what you're up to. And then the other thing that, what I always said is your best work, is the influential communication workshop, which is now if you're a person of influence to them, That is a very strong strategy to keep them engaged as well. And here I am going to be asking you to talk a little bit about, because this is just such an important bullet of the 13, about this whole piece about keeping them engaged.

Well, I think there are a few businesses where it is much more visible, and the operators of them are more hypersensitive. Sensitive to the fact that everybody's trying to quit every day than others. I came up in one of them, which is multi-level marketing. The other one is churches. And so if you look at both of them, actually we had a term for it in MLM called the principle of dynamic engagement. And so the theory was if you didn't have them engaged every day, in 3 days they were gone. Which is pretty much a reality. Most people in the church business— actually, there's a big difference between, for example, the megachurch and the old-fashioned Protestant church, which the old-fashioned Protestant church revolved around once a week, whereas the megachurches, which are infinitely more successful, have 6 bazillion activities every day and every evening., and they're measuring their effectiveness with the total number of hours per week that somebody is on the campus and engaged in those activities rather than, gee, at the end of the month, out of 4 Sundays, how many Sundays did we get Bob and Mary here? They're looking at, did we have Bob and Mary here this week 10 hours, 15 hours, 20 hours, and they're looking for daily engagement. So in the MLM business, it was a Tuesday— it was a weekly meeting one night a week. There was at least one daytime meeting. There was some activity every weekend. So there was never any period of time more than— longer than 3 days, uh, during which there was not some sort of forced, uh, engagement of the participant. I, uh I laugh at it, but it works on most people. The doc I go to, who I just visited again, he— at the Cleveland Clinic, he's big on the 10,000 steps a day thing, and you wear a pedometer, and, you know, if you're not walking 10,000 steps a day, you're losing a year of your life for every 20 days you're not doing it, so I'm already dead. But his whole deal when he starts a new patient is you've got to call him on his cell phone every day and report your number of steps. Now, as I said, it works on most people, but what that is is daily engagement. And so I think you're 1,000% right. I think it's important It kind of slops over into something I talk a lot about, omnipresence, being omnipresent in your customer's life so that they really can't walk around their house without seeing you and being made to think of you. Ideally, there's some sort of dashboard of yours they're using to function on a daily basis. They're swallowing something out of a bottle that has your smiling name and face on it. They're drinking out of a cup. They're getting communication from you every day. They're actively checking in somehow frequently. I don't think most businesses really do a good job with this at all. Martial arts, well-run martial arts academies do a pretty good job with it, for example. And I think when you marry that with sort of the second thing you raised under the same subhead, which is making yourself an influential figure. In their life, not just a vendor or a provider or a seller. And you get those two things married well, you really do have what we used to call an iron cage. I mean, you have that customer contained because that customer is involved. And that's the best kind of containment of all.

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