The #1 Reason Customers Stop Using Your Business (It's Not What You Think) with Jay Baer

I'm holding up your book for people on Apple or Spotify, and it is The Time to Win. And you just gave me the great lead-in because my GEICO experience, it was fast. And I've heard you say that the speed of response is even more important than the speed to resolution.

Yeah, that's true.

And you've—

you—

I read the book and it's, it's a great— this, just because it's small and just because it's very affordable doesn't mean that it's not packed full of action. I've got the whole thing highlighted here. So talk to us about some of your insights on time because I found them to be very unique and absolutely intriguing.

Thank you. Yeah, it is a very small book and, and, and that wasn't the initial plan. As always, when I do a new book project, we did a tremendous amount of first-party research. It was the largest research project ever in the United States on the power of speed and responsiveness in business. And so I had a lot of, a lot of data. And so I sat down to write a book and it was, it was going to be, you know, what we'd consider to be a full-length business book as I've done many times in the past. But I started to write the book and I got into it. I'm like, wait a second. This seems weird to make people spend like 6 or 7 hours reading a book about speed. Like, that seems to be the opposite of what I'm trying to talk about here. So it just, it just felt like that's not really on brand for this message. So let's instead make a very small book that you can read very quickly, which then includes all the really important stuff and none of the, none of the fluff that certainly accompanies many business books. And it's been really popular. People, people, you know, they get them at conferences or they buy them on Amazon. And as you As you said, it's just a few dollars and then you can read the book in an hour. And because the way we designed it, you get all the stuff that you would need in an hour as opposed to 6 or 7 hours. It's also nice in events because people can put it in their pocket. It's always hard when you're doing a book signing and someone's trying to carry around a hardcover book and a glass of Chardonnay. It's just a hassle. So it's actually worked really well from that perspective.

I know which one they're going to keep if it's my book.

Yeah, there you go. There you go.

That book's going right in the recycle bin.

So what we, what we started off with was, was again, an insight, an observation was that coming out of the pandemic, our relationship to time and how we spend it changed. That was the initial insight that people were making different behavioral choices than they made pre-pandemic because the value of time had gone up. And a lot of the trends that we saw coming out of the pandemic, you know, quiet quitting, great resignation, people wanting to work from home, they have to spend time in a car commuting, leisure travel, which is where you— the combination of business and leisure travel, you bring your kids to the conference and double dip the trip. Baseball, right? Baseball started the pitch clock and now the games are 25 minutes a night shorter. Record attendance, record TV ratings. People didn't want to spend 25 extra minutes a night watching somebody stand around and scratch their nuts, as it turns out. All of these trends are the same trend, which is that we care about our time more than ever. And so fueled with that observation, we then did this big research project and said, well, what's the ramifications of that? If you, if you give your customers time, will they give you money? And if you cost your customers time, will it cost you money? And the answer is very clearly yes. Two-thirds of customers say today that speed is as important as price. 2/3. How many of us run our business as if that were the case? Very few indeed. And that is the opportunity. That's why the book is called The Time to Win, because it is your time as a business owner and entrepreneur and executive to use speed and responsiveness to outperform your competition before they realize.

Next year for our brands, and we at Homefront Brands build property service franchise platforms, And I was— I have my quad— I'm a very big Jobsian quadrant person. So what am I going to focus on for next year? One is accuracy. And if it's not 100% right, it's wrong. And another is simplicity, reducing the number of places people look to get the accurate information, which actually has an undercurrent of speed to it. Another one's capacity. We're driving more bids, business, and more leads than our franchise owners can produce. and they have to be drowning in business before they'll, some of them will add the next truck, add the next crew, add the next salesperson. So, you know, a lot of our conversation needs to be around capacity.

Even dilemma for sure.

Yeah. I mean, so we gotta help 'em. I mean, it's great if we can drive X dollars of business, but if they can only produce half of X, then we're gonna do half of X. So the other thing, but I actually dedicated a box after reading your book to speed.

Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Because I appreciate that very much.

Because if you think about the speed to which a customer can, can access the information they need, the speed at which we can coach a franchise owner to make a better decision. And it goes right along with our performance coaching and things that we've rolled out in the last 6 months. And I— but it's— I think it's so overlooked. And is that because business owners are myopic? They're thinking about what's the quality of the product that people are getting? What's the— what does it look like when it's done? Right. Okay. I'm a siding company. Or I'm a roofing business and they're like, yard's clean, the, the roof looks straight, nothing got broken, everything was as expected at the end of it. But if there was all of these service delays from the first call all the way through and poor communication, which feels like a waste of time in uncertainty, I mean, uncertainty is a waste of time. You just wasted my time because I had to try to figure out what you were trying to tell me. And, but I think it's, I think it's a huge miss for people that are running particularly small businesses.

Yeah, I completely agree. Clearly, I think the reasons are twofold. One, again, this is a different world, right? Like we, we do care about our time more than we did. So, so to, to deprioritize responsiveness in your business was not a huge mistake historically. It is now. So there is a difference in the viewpoint of your customers as to how important speed is in the stack rank of things that you can deliver. So that is one. Two, I feel like responsiveness is somehow decoupled in many cases from customer experience and customer service. Business owners, especially small business owners, tend to think that customer experience is attitudinal, that it's about being customer friendly or somehow being polite or kind or nice. And those things are true. But, but you don't get to that. You know, you don't even get to just play that card if you're not the first one to respond. I mean, the numbers are so compelling, Jeff, that 51% of customers— and this one speaks directly to your industry— 51% of customers more than half will hire whomever contacts them first, regardless of price, regardless of price. So if you're in any kind of business where people are going to shop it, if you're in any kind of business where there's a bid or a quote, you should do whatever you can to be the first responder because it will literally line your pocket with money. And then if you're in a kind of business where you have repeat customer interactions, whether it's lawncare, pest care, anything along those lines, you know, HVAC, you know, we are going to come in and do quarterly services, things like that. Any time where you're not doing a one and done with customers, the responsiveness part of it becomes even more important from a lifetime value consideration because 83% of customers, which is a shockingly large number, say that speed and responsiveness is a critical factor, not a factor, a critical factor in their loyalty to any particular service provider. So it's not just about being fast the first time somebody says, can you do a thing for me. It's the culture of responsiveness every time that customer needs to cancel, needs to change, needs to shift their date, needs to pay a bill, needs to do whatever. Not wasting their time is a huge, huge competitive advantage. And it's because in this world today, and this is really the big difference pre versus post-pandemic, today We interpret speed as caring, and we interpret responsiveness as respect. That wasn't always true. If you are slow, if you waste my time, the way we internalize that as, as human beings and as consumers in the modern age is we internalize that as I am not an important enough customer to them. Now, that may not be true at all. There may be many good reasons why you weren't able to pick up the phone at that time or answer the email or whatever, send the truck, whatever the deal is. There may be great reasons for that. But the psychology of that, the customer internalizes it as a lack of respect, and that's how you lose your customer.

Being responsive, it implies priority. It implies importance. You're important to me. When you hear, or when we don't hire somebody, it's like we've called them 3 times and they don't care enough about us even to call us back. How much are they going to even care if we have a problem with the job or exactly what the quality of the jobs can be. They might be the greatest fulfillment and service delivery company on the planet, but that's not the— that's not the messaging that we're getting as consumers.

If it's this hard to give them money, like, how hard will it be to actually get what I need out of them eventually? And that's it. That tone setter is really important. That's why this first contact responsiveness is crucial, because it sets the tone for the entire relationship thereafter. Right. And I've taught this now to a lot of people hold since we wrote the book. And it's, it's crazy how many folks get back ahold of me like, yep, Jay, we, we added more people on the phones or we changed our email response or we added a, you know, quote via text or all these different techniques that you can use to be, to be faster from the jump. And it is, it's been really, really working for people.

Can being early be as bad as being late?

I don't know if it's as bad, but it can be a problem. Now, look, There is a circumstance where you can be too fast. Okay. Many of us have experienced it. The example I use in the book is that I live in Indiana, not necessarily home to the most pervasive and authentic Mexican cuisine, but I'm from Arizona originally. So you got to do what you got to do. So there's a Mexican restaurant here in town. I went in there and I ordered chicken enchiladas and they brought me enchiladas. I'm not even kidding. In 90 seconds, it was astonishing. I like basically started talking to my wife, turned back enchiladas placed in front of me. And I was first like, really? I'm like, wow, that is some service. And then I thought, wait a second, that's really fast for enchiladas, even in a Mexican food restaurant. And I was like, what, what is the deal here? Did, did, do they have an enchilada machine of which I'm not aware? Do, did somebody else order enchiladas, but they wanted the beef? And so they just put it on the hot window and waited for the next guy to order it. And it was me. And like, this is already made. Or do they have like a fortune teller who checks you in and they already know what you're going to order? The whole thing was very puzzling. It was so so fast that I literally distrusted the enchiladas. Right. And, and I, I ate 'em anyway. Right. And you know, they were fine, but I distrusted it. I was many years ago, I, I tried to get LASIK for my, for my eyes. We're, we're both wearing glasses. Yeah. And I went to the eye doctor. This is when I lived in Phoenix. And I said, yeah, I'm thinking about the LASIK. And he said, yeah, okay. And, and I said, well, when, when could you do the procedure? And he's like, I don't know, 45 minutes from now. And I was like, nope, this, nope, I'm out. Not if you are that available. That is not the guy that I want cutting my eyes open. Right. You don't want to go to the fastest tattoo artist in your town either. Right. So there are scenarios where, where speed is a problem only because it, it, it decays trust. There is a sweet spot there. We call it the right now. In the book, which is the right now is the perfect amount of elapsed time in any customer interaction. And we define the right now as slightly faster than customers expect it to be. Slightly faster than they expect it to be. If you're way faster than they expect it to be, like, do you want an eye surgery right now? They're like, I don't trust you anymore. And obviously, if you're way slower, then they're annoyed and you've wasted their time and all the things we talked about a moment ago. So there's like a Goldilocks zone for responsiveness. That's the right now. And this gets violated sometimes in some of the scenarios that you're talking about, Jeff, where you might make an online inquiry of a service provider and then, you know, 30 seconds later they're calling your phone, right? We've all had that experience and it's like a little too fast, right? It just feels like operators are standing by, right? And it just, it doesn't—

the—

it just feels weird, right? So there's a— there's almost like take a beat, not a long beat because you might lose the opportunity, but a beat, right? So instead of calling them in 30 seconds, call them in 15 minutes, right? So there's just like a slight delay there that is That makes it the right now.

Stories are critical. And you, you, some of your work has to do with, um, um, under, you know, letting people understand, like, it's not necessarily about the product all the time. It's around a story around the product. Or I've heard you use an example on a podcast where it was a story about, uh, a restaurant that lays a deck of cards out when people walk in.

Yes.

And that was, and I thought that was like one of the best examples of somebody that created a story that people would talk 100% of the time that these people would talk about. And it just drove massive business to their restaurant. It was the simplest thing that they could do. Can you tell us that story?

Sure. It goes back to what we started the show with about the power of word of mouth. And if you tell, if you ask a business owner, any business owner, any, is word of mouth important to your business? 100% of the time they will say yes. If you ask a business owner, any business owner, do you have an actual word of mouth strategy? The research shows fewer than 1% do. Fewer than 1%. Isn't that a strange dichotomy? You know, we all know word of mouth is important, yet we don't have any plans for it. How is that true? Why is that true? Well, I know why it's true because I wrote a whole book about it. It's true because we, and when I say we, I mean all business leaders, have made a colossal blunder for the last 100 years. And that blunder is that we believe wrongly, as it turns out, that competency creates conversations. And it does not. Running a good business prevents your customers from defecting. It does not by any stretch of the imagination create conversations and word of mouth because all human beings in the world are wired the same way in their head. We are wired to discuss things that are different and ignore things that are expected. So you delivering on what the customer paid for is satisfying for the customer, but they're not going to tell a story about it. This is why, just incidentally, this is why you never see 3-star reviews. Mathematically, you just don't see very many. What do you see? You see 1-star reviews, which is a story, a sad story. And you see 5-star reviews, which is a story, a happy story. You don't see a lot of 3-star reviews. Why? Because it's not a story. Yeah, I paid them and I got pretty much what I thought I was going to get, 3 stars. Nobody even writes that review because it's not a story. So if you want your customers to become volunteer marketers on your behalf, and you absolutely do, you've got to give them a story to tell. And that story, and this is really important, is not, never ever, the thing you actually sell because that's what they expected it to be. So in the case that you mentioned, it's called Skip's Kitchen. It's a restaurant in Sacramento, California owned by Skip and his wife. They used to be the managers of all the Chili's restaurants in Northern California, but they decided to do the entrepreneurial thing, be unemployable and do it themselves. And so Skip's is a very good hamburger restaurant. It's counter service. So you walk up and there's a menu board there and I want a patty melt and I want onion rings and I want a chocolate shake. And then they bring it out to your table. We all know how that works. That's not remarkable in the least. But what they do, it's called a talk trigger in my work. It's a talk trigger is an operational choice that is designed to create conversations. That was my plaid suit. So we talked about earlier. So the talk trigger at Skips is after you order, but before you pay, the counterperson, as you mentioned, whips out a deck of playing cards and Fans them out face down in front of you and looks you dead in the eye and says, and you pick a card. And if you happen to get one of the jokers, your entire meal is free. And it doesn't matter whether you're there by yourself or you've got a whole high school baseball team in tow. And about 4 people a day on average win this game. And when they win, they go batshit crazy, right? They're calling their mom. They're putting it on Instagram. They're writing, you know, Google reviews. It's a crazy situation. But you don't have to win to tell the story because everybody gets to play. It's not only on Tuesdays. It's not only on your birthday. It's every customer every time. And what's amazing about it, if you look at the reviews, people talk about it constantly. And in fact, colloquially in Sacramento, people don't call it Skip's Kitchen. They call it that Joker restaurant. In the history of their business, they've now been open, I think it's 12 years, they have spent a grand total of $0 on advertising ever. And there's a line to get into this place every day because this game is the advertising and the customers are the sales team.

I guarantee you some people say, I've been coming here for years and I finally won.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah. And the beautiful— I was thinking about that today and I was like, man, but the key is after they order. So it's like the game where I'm gonna put a piece of number on a paper and slide slide it over to you and look at it and you're going to say, I'm going to buy or sell the company. It's the same thing. It's like, okay, they're going to— they might order more because there's a chance that they're going to get it for free, but they've already decided to pay for it.

So it's not like they're already— they're already committed.

They're already committed. So it's a pretty— it keeps it pretty honest that way. What a— what a brilliant, uh, what a brilliant strategy. Do you have any other stories like that that you could share?

Oh, there's— there's tons because I, you know, wrote a whole book about it, uh, with my— my good friend and co-author Daniel Lemon and have spoken about it for years and years and years. What— which book was that? Because I'm going to get It's called Talk Triggers.

Talk Triggers. Okay. Awesome.

And in fact, one of the stories, so we have to have a talk trigger for the book Talk Triggers, obviously, right? So just like my clients do. So the deal was, and it's written, you know, in the COVID of the book or inside cover, it's like, all right, look, here's the talk trigger for the book. If you don't like this book for any reason whatsoever, let us know. Here's our actual email address and we will buy you any other book that you want. Okay, that was the shtick. And we sold a lot of books and we only had 2 people take us up on the offer. And it was, it was, this is, this is, this story tells you all you need to know about, about readers. One guy emails me and says, Jay, I didn't like the book. There weren't enough case studies and stories in it. And I thought, well, that's weird because I wrote the book and there's 33 different case studies in the book and we purposely selected them. Some are small companies, some are big, some are B2B, some are B2C, some are US, some are global. And like, we had like a matrix of stories. Stories. I'm like, I don't know how many you think you should have in one book, but I think 33 is sufficient. We made the offer. And so we'll give you the book. And he wanted a book by one of my friends, Mark Schaefer, who's a fantastic marketing author. So that was no problem. Gave him a book. A month later, I get a, I get an email from another guy who says, Jay, I didn't like the book. I'm like, okay, why? He's like, there's too many case studies. And I'm like, you should talk to this other guy and you guys need, you guys need to argue this out and figure out what your unified truth is. So I had to get him a book. And this guy was a little irksome. I think he just wanted to see if we would do it. He wanted some like out-of-print rare like French cooking book. It was like $500 or something. And I'm like, well, we made the offer. So we gave him the book and then we wrote a press release about it and got even more publicity. All right.

So I'm not asking for free consulting, but maybe, maybe so. I have, we have a fencing franchise. We got a kitchen, bath and closet franchise. We got a temporary walls franchise where we rent high-end temporary containment walls. We got an exterior building washing window cleaning franchise called Window Hero, and then we have a roofing franchise with a really unique product that we can spray on the roof and extend the life of it and all of that kind of stuff. So if those are kind of the businesses we do, and if I was going to start a business, one of these businesses today and come up with a talk trigger, do you have anything in that book that you think would relate to this to give us an idea about a talk trigger?

We could use examples for home services in the book. And in fact, in the book, there's actually a 6-step process of exactly how to create and implement and measure talk triggers. Because again, we developed this as a consulting firm and then wrote the book about it, right? So it's, it's like, here's the worksheets to fill out and the whole thing. It's important to understand, though, in terms of the provision of talk triggers, that it isn't really just about let's get in the conference room with pizza and a couple of beers and come up with a fun idea, right? This is operations that then has some kind of byproduct for customers. It's not really about imagination. It's about thinking through the strategy of it. So, so some of the things that are required for a talk trigger to work work, it needs to be remarkable, right? So it needs to be a story worth telling. It has to be something different enough or unusual enough that people feel that they want to use their own breath to tell their friends about it. Right. And this— that is a fundamental error that many people make when they try to do word of mouth. They're like, well, what we're going to do is, yeah, we're going to— we're going to do the roof coating deal, but it's going to be $50 off. Well, okay, but no one— that's cool, but no one's going to tell a story about that.

Nobody cares.

No one's going to talk about that, right? That is a bullet point. That's not a story. There's a big difference between a bullet point and a story. So that's, that's the first one. It's got to be remarkable. It has to be repeatable. Meaning in Skip's Kitchen's case, everybody who eats there gets to play. One of the mistakes that business leaders make in terms of word of mouth is they try to truncate it and say, okay, well, let's do it this way. We're going to give this special thing to our biggest customers. Or our best customers or our oldest customers. Airlines do this, right? They segment their customer base by value. You don't want to do that, right? Because you're trying to get as many storytellers out there telling your tale as possible. So you want to make sure that you launch this talk trigger at a point in your customer journey that every customer gets a piece of it, right? So that's, so in your case, it might be not just for brand new customers, but for all customers, even those you've already acquired. Third thing it needs to be is, is reasonable. Okay. One of the mistakes that people make is they're like, all right, we're going to try to create conversations. We're going to shock and awe these people. We're going to, we're going to give away a Caribbean island. Right. And you basically try to bribe people to talk about you. And that doesn't work. And in fact, it works terribly. What the research shows, ours and others, is that when, when the, when the, the thing is too big, people talk about it less because they don't trust it. Right? They, they don't, it's almost like 90-second enchiladas, right? They're like, eh, they're not, nobody's gonna win a car. That's, that's BS. There's no way. So it needs, it, it just has to be small. And then the fourth thing is it needs to be relevant. Okay? It needs to make sense in the context of, of your business. You know, it can't just be like randomness because then the story becomes about the randomness, not about, not about you. So there's a, there's a locksmith in New York City. His name's Jay Sofron. Offer, and he's the highest rated locksmith in New York City according to Yelp, who I did a partnership with for the book. He is one of the highest rated businesses in New York City, period, which is saying something, right? He has a talk trigger. His talk trigger is that once he finishes doing whatever he's doing, he's rekeying your apartment or whatever, he does a comprehensive security audit of the premises, checks every door, checks every window, gives you some advice, gives you some recommendations. Every other locksmith in New York City will provide the same service. but they do it for $199. He does it for free, right? He's like, you know, I just want you to be safe. And, and that is his talk for people. Talk about it all the time. And, and that makes sense, right? It's locksmith security audit. I'll give you another one that you'll appreciate in home services. There's a, a business in Los Angeles called, called Mike's Plumbing and Mike Diamond, actually Mike Diamond Plumbing. Plumbing. And he's very, very successful. He's grown from one truck that he's rolling 50 trucks now or something. And, you know, it's plumbing, right? How do you differentiate in plumbing? Nobody— it's a challenging business because everybody's delivering essentially the same services at approximately the same price. Theirs is genius. It's one of my all-time favorites. I wish I came up with this, but I did not. They did it themselves. On every truck and on their signage and everything else, it says Mike Diamond, the Smell Good Plumbers. And everybody on their team wears every day a signature Mike Diamond cologne that all of their plumbers wear. And if you look at their Google reviews, it is amazing because about every second review, somebody says, well, they unclogged my drain and you know what? He did smell quite nice. I mean, it is just, it is amazing. I'm like, that is in the, in the word of mouth hall of fame. And in fact, we actually, we did a series of awards for best word of mouth devices and that did win one of the awards that we gave out.

No, I'd be leaning right in to get a whiff of that.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Amazing.