Building a great customer experience through marketing with David Baer

Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Phil Risher and on today's episode we're going to be discussing building a great customer experience through marketing with David Baer. Thanks so much for joining us today, David.

Phil, thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited about our conversation.

Yeah, likewise. So David Baer is the co founder of the Prepared Group, a consultancy that helps businesses move beyond random marketing, tax tasks, tactics, excuse me. And build a clear strategic approach to revenue growth. With a background spanning theater production, wine industry and digital marketing. And David has spent years helping small and mid sized businesses develop sustainable marketing systems specializing in guiding business owners away from random acts of marketing and towards a strategy first approach that actually drives results. I was on David's podcast yesterday talking about home service marketing and different strategies and I can tell you he has a wealth of knowledge and he's going to share a lot of good nuggets on this episode. So David, can you tell us a little bit like how did you even get into marketing and systematizing and doing all this stuff?

Yeah, I mean it's a journey. It's not a different, very different journey from the one that you had because you were in the marketing world and you recognized that there was a problem and you came in and fixed it. Right. And so I had a similar thing. I was a marketer. I started out as a marketer in the theater industry. I actually was a stage manager in New York City in the theater business. Got into running venues and I had to market the venue. Right. So that's where I first learned about marketing. I'm also side note a huge collector of playbills, like the programs it shows and I have 14,000 plus of them. And what I found fascinating like first I started like, you know, going back and looking at the cast lists and everything, but then I started looking at these older ones and looking at all of these old ads and that sent me down this rabbit hole of a fascination of direct response copywriting. So that's really probably the first place that I got interested in marketing because of the structure and style and ways that ads have been written over time has just always fascinated me. Fast forward to moving from the theater industry to the wine industry where I was a marketer running events. That's how you sell wine to the trade is you do a lot of trade shows in the case of wine tastings. Right. And so I ran big tasting events, got into digital marketing as it started to become a more and more important component in the marketing world. Back in the early 2000s and started a Facebook ads agency. This was before they changed their name to meta back in 2010, 2011, that time period. And then I realized what a lot of marketers do is they specialize not in marketing. I'm using air quotes for those. But they specialize in promotion or advertising, which is really, in my definition of marketing, really one narrow aspect of marketing and doesn't complete the picture. We talked about this when. When we had our other conversation yesterday, and it opened me up to recognize that I understand what needs to happen after some somebody clicks on an ad or responds to an ad in the newspaper and picks up a phone, goes into a business to help the business move that person from curious or interested to becoming a customer, and then an ongoing repeat customer, and then a champion of the business. But my Facebook ads agency isn't structured to actually do anything about it. So that's when in 2018, I shifted the entire business to focus not on marketing per se, but how do you grow revenue overall? And that's what I do today.

Yeah, I love that. And yes, it is very similar to my journey of. Yeah, it's not just pray to the Google gods and get leads and then, okay, that's marketing. Like, that's one component of running ads. But there's so much other stuff, and in particular, the direct response copywriting. So the people listen to the show are home service businesses, 1 to 10 million, usually those people. So direct response copywriting, most of these people just kind of gloss over that. But in home service, when you think about customers taking action and doing things, it's a really big part of actually, like getting your copywriting your copyright.

Correct.

Can you talk a little bit about, like, what's good, what's bad, or some of those types of things?

Yeah. So I think when I talk to a lot of local businesses, service businesses in particular, and I hear them say things like, well, we just got to get our name out there, or we got to be seen. Or I was talking to somebody last night who said, oh, I have a home services business that's interested in billboards. And I sort of cringe. And I imagine you would cringe too, hearing that question, and here's why. Because there are a lot of ways to get your business and what you do and what you solve for a prospective customer in front of them. Some are really direct, and that's the concept of direct response, which I'll touch on in a moment. But most are the things that we see modeled by the big businesses that we see advertised everywhere. Like if you think about super bowl ads or billboards or magazine ads, where it's the product or the name, or maybe sometimes not even the name, but the colors tell you, oh, this is a Coca Cola ad, even though it doesn't say Coca Cola anywhere. And because when you start a business, nobody teaches you the stuff about like, how do you grow your business? How do you get your name out there in a way that's going to be efficient and purposeful in getting, you know, the phone ringing. You tend to look at these things that big companies are doing and start modeling that, oh, I own Joe's Plumbing. I gotta get a billboard that says Joe's Plumbing. Best plumber in Portland, Oregon. And you know what you forget to put on there, how to contact you, what region you serve, except Portland, Oregon. Right. Any of the other things that are going to drive business. And then you forget to think, is this the most efficient way to spend my money to get that phone ringing, get the, you know, the appointments or the emergency calls or whatever else we're trying to do. And it's not. So if you look at the other end of the spectrum of marketing, that's the direct response stuff, which is how do you get what you do in front of the ideal customer who wants your service and is going to see that offer right in front of them and go, oh my gosh, this is exactly for me. So, I mean, in the home services world, you talked about your text idea that you shared with me yesterday, I thought was brilliant and I'd never heard that. But there are very similar things that are historically very common. Like when you're out at a property doing work, especially if you, if you specialize in something like higher end homes, right. How can you get in touch with all of the nearest neighbors and direct mail, door hangers, all these other things, yard signs, things that are totally old school and can be highly effective in putting a direct offer in front of somebody that leads to not only we were here, but we were here. And because we are here, we'd like to extend a special offer to you. And here's how to take advantage of it. Call this number, use this coupon, go to this website, et cetera. That's direct response.

Yeah, I think for a lot of business owners, they just get into the grind of doing everything and they don't think about, well, you, you're constantly coming into contact with potential people all around you. And how can you layer in some type of direct response as you're doing jobs or going places or driving Trucks or whatever that might be, which I think is very important. One of the things that I definitely wanted to hit on was this systematizing or you said franchise, it ties.

Not my word, not my turn.

Not your word.

Yeah. Want to credit Michael Gerber, the great Michael Gerber, author of the E. Myth books.

Yeah, franchise it ties the customer experience. Because most of these home service businesses, they are looking at it like, you know, a lead comes in. I booked a job, I go out there, I do the work and usually it's pretty much done there. Maybe they have some email or text that they do at a certain point. But is there like something that you would walk people through to figure out their customer experience or a customer journey process or what does that look like when you're consulting or coaching people?

Well, one of the things that I mentioned as I was going through that explanation of direct response was specializing in something or having a differentiator for your business. And one thing that we see a lot in home services is the differentiator is either the logo or availability or service area. But it's not things like we specialize in. I give the example of higher end homes. We've worked with an electrician who specializes in homes that again, I'm in Portland, Oregon, which is why I used it as an example earlier. And we, we have a lot of century old homes here and I live in one. My home was built in 1912 and it probably is in need of some upgrades when it comes to the electrical infrastructure of the home. Well, that is a specific need that a lot of people in this region have. But very few electricians are positioning their business around that kind of thing. Right. So. So there's this ideal opportunity to differentiate by positioning in something very, very specific. Now I've gone off on this tangent and I've forgotten the question that you've asked me, but that's the setup to answer the question. So remind me what the question was.

Yeah, I was asking you about systematizing the customer experience of what that looks like. And I think it kind of starts with what are you, what's your unique proposition to the marketplace? And the worst one is price.

Yes, totally.

So you need to figure out what that's going to be. And I'm guessing once you kind of figure that out, then you can know what your customer journey or experience would look like through the lifecycle of a client, getting the client, managing, relationship, cross selling, that kind of stuff.

So just, just to circle back on this positioning concept and your comment about price, the there are Two things that are really, really, really hard to position around, right Price because it's just a race to the bottom. And you think about what businesses out there do position on price. Walmart was sort of the famous classic one and they even moved away from it. It used to be lowest prices, now they're low prices always. But if you are positioning around price, you have a really tough time because somebody else is going to try to undercut you, then you have to undercut them and you're dealing with that. There was a book written back in the early 80s by a guy, 2Gu, Al Ries and Jack Trout. It was called Positioning Battle for the Mind. And it was all about how do you position your business in a way that gets when somebody thinks of a safe car? Right. Back then it was Volvo. Volvo had the position of safe car. Right. How do you capture that in somebody's mind? Right. So that they know immediately, oh, if I want a safe car, I'm going to buy a Volvo. So if I want that, the electrician who knows how to upgrade century old homes, I'm gonna go to Upgrade my home electricians.com or whatever. And so this is a key part of the systemization or franchisitizing which I'm gonna get to in a moment of a business. Because if you know that what you're doing is dialed in perfectly for a specific audience, the systems that you create can be built around making them recognized from the very moment that they either raise their hand saying yes, you're the ideal service provider for me. You can be super specific in the way that you do your follow up after an inquiry, the things that you put in front of them in terms of why you and nobody else or why act now. So stuff that we would do generically in business and this is stuff you teach all the time. Yeah, yeah, right. If you can get even more hyper specific about that stuff, it makes that conversion from a prospect to a customer that much easier because you're not competing with anybody else in your market in their eyes.

Yeah, I completely agree with my business. It's the same thing. We're 1 to 10 million home service businesses. If you don't fall in that, then probably not the right fit. If you do, we're probably your guys because we're the number one person. And I think for a lot of businesses it's just like I'm an electrician. Well, just because we're just using that because you're talking about. But like an electrician. Do you do generators? Are you good at EV chargers or, you know, like, are you just only do ceiling fans and light fixtures or what is you, what is your expertise then to even take it further? Do you do residential, commercial, what types of homes? How, how old are the homes? There's so many different layers to it that you want to specialize into.

Totally, totally. Yeah. And so, you know, if we think about the, the idea of systemization, I mentioned Michael Gerber and this concept that you, you shared earlier of franchisetizing. This is a word that he introduced in his book the E. Myth, which is now reprinted under the E. Myth Revisited if folks want to go out and find it. And there's actually a E Myth for contractors.

Yeah, there is the. Yeah, there are the contractors.

But the concept is basically how do you build the systems in the operations of your business as a franchise would so that you, the owner, the leadership of the business, can step out of it. And then the systems that you have built run the business. And those systems are then run by people who you hire to run those systems. Right. So the concept is if you, if you look at McDonald's, for example, right, they're hiring high school kids or, you know, you open up a binder, you have very clear instructions on what you do. And so building systems around the structure of the business is a key to the success of being able to reproduce the same thing over and over again, even when you're doing slightly different things for each client. There is a framework, there's a, there's a general overall order of operations that you follow.

That's right.

Yeah.

A basic game plan. So one of the things that you had mentioned before when we were talking was about referral upsells and cross sells and, and that kind of stuff inside of a system, which I think for a lot of people listening, you know, okay, I get the direct response, you know, I'll be in front of my customers, I'll get leads that come in and. And then maybe they have a good customer experience. But that last piece of it, the systemization of referrals and cross sells, what does that look like? What are some ideas there?

Well, I want to work my way up to that and I'll do it quickly because I want to be sensitive to whatever time we have. We systematize the front end stuff really very clearly. Right. How do you attract somebody? How do you move them from attract to capturing their information so you can follow up, nurture that relationship until they buy? Right. But then there's a sort of second half of the relationship once they become the Customer once they become a first time customer, that gives you the opportunity to build that relationship either for being a repeat customer or an ongoing customer. If you have a maintenance plan that you can offer, how do you then add value to the relationship throughout the months or years that you're continuing to serve that client? So the first thing I look at is actually what happens immediately after they say, yes, I'm going to buy. And that's this concept. We call it transitioning with ease. But basically think of it as onboarding a new client. How can you do two things at the moment that they say yes? Number one, overcome buyer's remorse. How do you intentionally get them to go patting themselves on the back? I see you're writing this down. And so you're writing this down. Everybody listening should be writing this down. How do you get themselves patting themselves on the back going, I thought it was just by, you know, hiring electrician. I can't believe that I'm actually getting what, what they've just delivered. This is awesome. Good me, right? You know?

Yes.

What an awesome first step in this new relationship that I have.

So what can people do to wow them like that? You think so?

You know, some. Some simple things that I think a lot of home services businesses already do but take for granted or don't highlight. One thing that I think you probably have riffs on what I'm about to say. Putting little booties over your shoes when you walk into a home. Right? Some just do it. Some don't do it at all, by the way. Right? Some just do it. And some make a show of it. Some layout, floor covering. And they'll be very intentional, not just about doing it, but interacting with the customer, explaining why they're doing it. We respect your home. We want to leave it better than we found it. Just that kind of thing. Hearing that, that blows some people away. Phil, you probably know this even better than I do. So I want to hear like your riff on this for a moment now.

That you shared this. Okay. So when I was in home service, we did two things. First, our guys all wore booties, but they had the logo. Our cut, our com, our company's logo on the booties. It wasn't just the standard blue ones that you would see. Typically it actually had our logos on the booty, so it stuck out. The other thing the owner did was he literally hired a graphic designer to create a customer coloring book for the kids. While, while we're at the house doing this work. It's kind of like an hour or two he left behind the coloring book and crayons for every single kid. And it had the logo on there. It had the guys doing the duct cleaning, and it was like this whole long coloring book that was literally printed out and given to the kids.

Oh, that's brilliant. And if. If people listening, do not steal that.