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Navigating the Customer Experience

Join host Yanique Grant as she takes you on a journey with global entrepreneurs and subject matter experts that can help you to navigate your customer experience. Learn what customers really want and how businesses can understand the psychology of each customer or business that they engage with. We will be looking at technology, leadership, customer service charters and strategies, training and development, complaint management, service recovery and so much more!
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Now displaying: June, 2020
Jun 30, 2020

Ryan J. Lester, Senior Director of Customer Experience Technologies at LogMeIn. Ryan and his team own the strategic development and implementation for the go to market plan for Customer Experience and Digital Engagement offerings across their platforms, Chatbots, Virtual Assistant and Workforce Optimization (WFO) products.

 

He is passionate about making new technology easy and helping any sized company unlock the potential of AI and bots. Prior to his role at LogMeIn, Ryan held various sales, marketing and product positions at Intel Corporation, Cisco Systems, and Eaton Corporation. He has a passion for making new technology accessible and approachable.

Questions

  • Could you share a little bit about yourself? You seem to have a diverse background, sales, marketing, product development and now you're into customer experience technologies. Tell us how your journey has been and how it has gotten you to where you are today.
  • So could you share with us maybe three to five things based on your experience that if you have a digital platform, that you are facilitating to your service deliver or product delivery through, how you can make that an effortless are frictionless experience for your customer? What kind of things do you need to look at in your journey to manifest that kind of result?
  • Could you share with us maybe a few things that companies could do to find out what the problem is? Is it case where they need to ask, how would you know what a problem is?
  • Could you tell us a little bit about LogMeIn, what it is that they do? What problems are they solving for their customers?
  • How do you stay motivated everyday?
  • Can you share with us what's one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
  • Can you share with us maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? It could be a book that you read recently or maybe something you read a very long time ago, but it still left a very indelible mark on your success, on your journey.
  • Can you share with us one thing that's going on in your life right now - either something that you're working on to develop yourself or your people?
  • Can you tell our listeners where they can find you online?
  • Do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will revert back to this quote are saying, it kind of helps to refocus you on just keep you channeled.

Highlights

Ryan shared that even though he’s an only child, he’s very much a people person, energized by people. He loves solving problems, the way he really describes himself is kind of the head of an engineer and the heart of a marketer or a customer centric person.

 

So, he loves tackling new challenges, but he also loves staying close to the customer, because at the end of the day, you want to solve their problem and you want to make their life better. And that's what keeps you in business and drives your organization.

 

And so throughout his career, he started out in the world of sales and really learned a lot there. And he started spending more time in the product world and then really kind of landed on this intersection of customer experience where understanding the customer's journey, the friction points, why they buy from you, how you can make that experience better really is something that drives his passion.

 

And so he has been doing this for a number of years, and he really loves doing that at LogMeIn, really helping them as a company, one, create better experiences for their customers, but two, create technology that customers of theirs can use to deliver better experiences.

 

So, it's really a wonderful space. He finds there's lots of big challenges to solve and it gives him a lot of interesting work to do each day.

 

Me: So everybody pretty much, globally, many businesses are forced to even if they didn't have a digital presence, they're pretty much forced to create some level of digital presence or if they had digital presence, but they maybe weren't optimizing it in its best form. They pretty much have to be putting a lot of energy in that space now because people want to minimize on their face to face interactions just for being safe.

 

I found, just based on my experiences, sometimes these digital experiences that we have, they cause you to have to exert a whole lot of energy and it's not a smooth experience. It's not effortless.

 

Ryan stated that that's an excellent question. He thinks it’s spot on that there's two reasons why digital really maybe hasn't kept up or often can feel like a second class experience. And the one reason is because oftentimes it's under invested or it's not a top priority. So, we focus on things like in-person and phone and email because those are all the more established, higher volume.

 

But too often we don't approach the right problem. So, we often say, well, we have this new technology, we have chat or we have messaging channels or we have AI and we try to just take the technology and then go just apply it versus being very specific about the problem we're trying to solve.

 

And it goes back to just good customer experience practice. At the end of the day… What is the thing that the customer needs help with?

Where are those friction points or where is that high customer effort?

And let's go understand the problem first, and then try to understand the solution.

 

And so he thinks that's often where companies get caught up, is there they're taking technology and just looking to apply it versus saying rather, what's our problem and how can technology make it better?

 

So, to give some real examples of that, one really simple thing we've seen in the challenges around Covered 19 is that information and policies are changing at a very rapid pace and something as simple as maybe the hours of your office or what are the rules around coming into a physical branch or a physical store or even of your return policies change or your shipping policies changed?

 

In the current state, that's not really a great thing to have somebody to call in to find out. People don't wait on hold. They don't have to go through the effort. So either you have a customer that's churning because they don't want to go through the effort or you have an upset customer because they went through the process and they can't figure out an answer.

 

So one simple thing you could do is to say, let's modernize our FAQ page, we all have that kind of old grandma's attic, we all have that part of our website where it's like frequently asked questions and it's meant to be helpful, but oftentimes it's really not focused on, it's under invested. And so, now we can take a technology like AI, maybe even something like a like a simple bot and we can really spruce that content up.

 

And it's not to say we need to update all of it, so we don't need to take every single article, every piece of content and breathe new life into it, but maybe we take our top 10 intents or questions coming into the contact center or to our customer service teams and we put that into a better, more AI powered support center page or a simple bot. Now, all of a sudden, all those questions are being answered in more real time. So, people are getting faster, more consistent, 24 hour answers. And now our teams are freed up to spend time on more interesting things.

 

So it really comes down to think about what's a problem you want to solve and how can this newer technology, digital technologies make it better. And there's other examples, for example, leveraging things like messaging channels.

 

So, WhatsApp is very popular, Facebook Messenger, it's very easy to stand these channels up and put something like a very simple bot or even have your live agents leverage those channels so rather than making the customer find your website and look it up and wait on hold, they can ask some simple questions over a messaging channel they’re already in that they're conversing with their loved ones who maybe they haven't seen or that they're posting the latest image of them making maybe something fun in their kitchen.

 

But they're already there. So now, rather than forcing the customer to come to where you are, you're going to where they are today. There are lots of these great examples of once again, understanding the problem, is the problem access to information? Is it engaging the customer where they are today? Is it consistency, being clear on what's the problem and then applying that right technology to solve it?

 

Me: So, Ryan, could you share with us maybe a few things that companies could do to find out what the problem is? Is it case where they need to ask, how would you know what a problem is? Should I just sit down in my office as a customer experience strategist/specialist at my company and say, “Okay, I'm going to think of what I think the problem is and make a solution or should it be a case where the customers, you're kind of watching what they're saying, listening to what they're saying, identifying based on previous conversations, what they're asking for, and use that data to inform your decisions to solve problems.”

 

Ryan shared that both are correct, it's probably more 80% the second and 20% the first. So he thinks certainly there's lots of information out there. We can take call records; we can take survey information. If you have something like web chat already, you can take all those web chat logs and look through that data. So there's a ton of information that we already often have around our organization.

 

And then now becomes using that data to then drive our decision. And it's not always that the data will tell us the answer, it's sometimes that the data will just tell us what's the next test we want to do in the world of scientific method. It defines our hypothesis.

 

So we say, “Oh, based on what we're hearing from our customer service agents, our customer service employees, these are the top five things that they feel like are the most friction, that they get a lot of call volume on or that customers feel frustrated.”

 

And then we can say, okay if that's what you think is the problem, let's build a hypothesis. What do you think could be causing it? And then let's go try and test that, both validating that the problem is really there. And then two, ways we can correct the problem. So he thinks it’s spot on that things like NPS scores, post interaction surveys, transcripts. There's a ton of information that often we already have or are very easy to stand up that can help point us to that challenges.

 

To the original point, it also isn’t back to just sit have those moments of reflection to say, well, here’s something I think is a problem because often times we’re very much in the middle of things, we’re kind of in the weeds and so, it can be nice to say, “I think there's a problem, let's go once again, try and test it.”

 

So, he thinks we have a challenge maybe around how we do traditional customer service or how we do returns. It feels like there's a lot of effort and energy around that from a customer's perspective. Let's go set up a test and try that out. So, it's not always going to come to light immediately from the data we have, it's also okay to kind of have as an expert your perspective and then go test and learn.

 

Me: And in terms, you mentioned just testing and developing a hypothesis, it's critical for us to solve the problem because all businesses go into business to solve a problem. If you see a product or service, you're really solving a problem for someone. So we're operating in his new realm and employees play a critical role, especially if you have employees in the business, they are a lot of times the front facing persons who interface with the customers on a daily basis.

 

How about integrating them into the solution as well? Asking them to help you solve the problem? Because I think a lot of times they have the solutions themselves, but then they're not the change makers or the policymakers.

 

Ryan agreed and shared that there's an interesting project they had done with a white goods retailer, so someone that sold like refrigerators, ovens, etc, in the U.K. they're called AO.com and they're rapidly growing. And many of their frontline employees, to your point, the people working with those customers had a really good perspective.

 

They had really good sense of where the challenges were, where it was hard for them to get their job done, where the customers felt pain, and they created a project where they got them actively involved and what they did, this is a little more advanced, it's certainly something most people could do. But it would be more for like a mid-sized business is they created a technology that faced the agents, so an improved knowledge base.

 

And they actually put a chatbot in front of it. So, rather than having something that faced the customer and the customer question this answered their frontline employees’ questions. So, if someone said, “Hey, I have a question around the return policy for this product.” or “Does this product come in stainless steel?” or “I see it comes in electric does it also come in gas?”

 

As they're on the phone or they're interacting with these customers, they could quickly interact with this bot and get a very quick answer, it's wonderful. And so one, to your point, they identified the problem, they started to find the solution but then two, was really nice out of this is they also started to curate the content.

 

Everybody has great experts across the organization incur what it's often like, you go but bumped your elbow up to the person and say, “Hey, I got this really tough question, I know you're going to have the answer.” That doesn't scale. So the nice thing is by leveraging something like AI or a knowledge base is now all of a sudden when that expert enters the right answer. Now, everybody, not just the person next to them that can bump them with their elbow has access to that information.

 

So to your point, he thinks you really hit on something critically important one, they know where the problems are. Two, they often have the energy and enthusiasm to fix it. And three, they often have the expertise to fix it. And then the question becomes, how do you turn that into a micro fix versus a macro fix where it impacts every employee?

 

Me: Agreed. Wow. That's a beautiful knowledge base and having that resource material and you're right. Sometimes it's just that one person who has all the information, but sometimes they're not always accessible. So why not have that information accessible to every single person in the organization that they can type in and get that information in real time on pass it on to the customer, I love that!

 

Ryan stated that what's exciting too is there's this great reinforcing loop that happens where one, now every frontline employee has access to that so they feel like their job is better and easier and they're getting what they need to be successful. But two, as employees enter in that information, they're feeling empowered because they're helping the whole organization. So it's a great flywheel effect of people feel empowered, they feel energized. They're getting what they need to do their job better.

 

But then they also can help the next round of employees as they're making that content more accessible and better over time. So, they've seen really great results of that. And once again, that could be an employee facing a sort of content; it could be customer facing content. And it's relevant to the digital world; the physical store is that kind of reopens and certainly the contact center. So, there's lots of great directions as a CX practitioner you can kind of point this technology and these capabilities to drive improvements.

 

Me: So in relation to chat bots, I was listening to a webinar recently, some of the panelists were customer experience practitioners, as you mentioned. And one of the things they’ve said, I've never had to experience myself, but I can see it happening where you start a conversation on someone's website along your journey into experience with the chat bot and so it has gotten to a point now where it needs to be escalated, the bot can't continue that interaction anymore.

 

And so when it's escalated to human interaction, it's almost like the customer has to repeat everything they told the bot, all the information that the bot would have asked them for they're basically having to regurgitate all of that information over again.

 

How can companies ensure that when they implement these systems, they implement it in such a way again, that you don't feel frustrated? Because that would be the equivalent of me calling a company, speaking to somebody on the phone, being transferred to somebody else and I have to repeat myself all over again. It's just happening now in digital experience to human.

 

Ryan shared that it’s spot on. They use the term at LogMeIn called harmony. And it's a harmony between the bot, the agent and the customer.

 

And you have to have all of them kind of singing the same song or working off the same sheet of music. Yanique is spot on and so that's a terrible experience. And just to your point, it's just like if you call into a call center and you talk with someone and it’s like, “Oh, I need to transfer you.” And then you get to the next person and they're like, “Hi, how can I help you?” It's maddening.

 

So, what they specifically do at LogMeIn, that's actually one seamless conversation. So as you're in that little chat window and that could a chat window that's Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or could be inside of an app like, for example, if your bank had an app or it could be on a website. If the bot starts a conversation and it's set to do certain things and if it can't accomplish those, it can then pull in a live agent.

 

What's nice is when a technology is done correctly is that agent then can see the transcript of all the things that have happened previously and they can look through and say, “Oh, I see where we're at now.” Also, what what's interesting about technology is it also should be working in the background so the bot doesn't go away. It's just that when the agent's talking to the customer, the bot now is working behind the scenes helping the agent.

 

So if a customer asks a question around, “I have a question about a certain type of checking account.” The bot has information, it knows about that account and can pull that information up. So one, that can just be a good reference for the agent so they know or if they're chatting in chat, they can copy and paste that information in and not have to go look it up for themselves.

 

So, Yanique’s spot on that the right way to do this is how we all have one seamless conversation and that when the agent is pulled in, they’re given the context and the background on how that customer's doing, where they're at in their journey and what problem they're trying to solve. So that is the best way to do it.

 

And really, if a platform doesn't offer that capability, he would really kind of second guess them because really any of the kind of best in breed platforms offer this capability around that seamless integration between bot and human.

 

Ryan shared that LogMeIn, it's a fun company. It was founded in Boston where he lives and went public in 2013, a little before that. And they have three different businesses.

 

They focus on communications and collaboration. So products like Go To Meeting and Go To Webinar, really focus on how they help people work better together. They have an identity and access business which is focused on how do you connect to devices securely and that has a product call LastPass, which maybe you're familiar with, but it's a great product for organizing all your passwords across all different websites you go to, it's called Last Pass.

 

And then he works in their customer engagement support business is really focused on technology around helping brands better engage with their customers. And so, they have a product called Bold360, which is focused on digital engagement.

 

So, in many cases, people have phone capabilities, they have maybe e-mail capabilities but digital is still new and emerging. And to an earlier point, Covid-19, is accelerating that.

 

But they have a platform that really helps companies rapidly accelerate digital. So that could be chat, it could be messaging, it could be AI based support center pages or dynamic search bars. But basically it’s saying there’s all this wealth of capabilities that comes in digital and the nice thing about them is they’re usually more readily available. They're available 24 hours a day; they're more extensible, so you can put them in more places like in an app or in social channels.

 

And they're also often less costly to manage in the sense that either agent can do more, so they can be more conversations at once or they're just lower costs to deliver. And so, there's a really a kind of a net, it's like a win, win, win of the customer wins because it's easier for them to use it, the agent wins because they're more productive and efficient and the brand wins because it delivers a better experience.

 

And so, they've been in this space for a number of years. And he likes to say, “We drink our own champagne.” So, they have our own chatbots and experiences on their website and so Go To Meeting has a chatbot and Last Past has a chatbot and their Bold 360 project does. So, it's also fun for his as a practitioner because he has his own little test beds where they can try different things and different experiences and test and learn and share those insights.

 

Me: So, you basically provide that integration for the companies that you serve as it relates to the different platforms that they maybe communicating with their customers on, so one central place where you can navigate on that customer experience.

 

Ryan agreed and shared that basically, all of those digital engagements are housed in one location. Once again, for you to get insights out of improve the content, improve the customer journey so you can think about it kind of as your one time investment to really accelerate your digital experience.

 

Me: So, we'll definitely have the link for Bold360 in the show notes of this episode for any of our listeners who have businesses that want to take advantage of this wonderful software that exists. And I imagine you service customers not just in the United States.

 

Ryan stated that they have global customer base all over. So, all over North America, Europe, Asia, India. So, they certainly service customers, they support 50 languages natively with the chatbot in 88 languages more broadly. So this technology can work quite well in many, many applications.

 

Ryan shared that he mentioned earlier that he’s a people person, so he loves interacting with people, so that is a huge motivator for me. So just, inspiring those around him and bringing the best out of them and passing that energy back and forth. So that's one.

 

And two, he really loves solving customer problems. So he gets very energized around thinking about their customers challenges and improving how they can solve them today and into the future. And then three, he really loves consuming and creating content. So, he also does his own podcast and he really enjoys listening to podcasts. So he finds that the creation and consumption of content really energizes him as well. His podcast is called CX Next.

 

They recently just changed it; they were doing a podcast for an AI and they were talking a lot about CX topics and then so about two months ago they changed it from AI IRL to CX Next. So the podcast is a little new, but they love it, he really enjoys it.

 

They also do a weekly video series also under the CX Next name, CX Next Live. But he finds like these kind of conversations are just once again, very energizing and interesting and you get great perspectives doing them very good. Ryan shared that the lives are housed across all but most of their engagements on LinkedIn. But they do also post them to YouTube and Facebook as well.

 

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Ryan shared that he actually has two, ones older. Well, not old, but one that he used for a long time and one's newer.

 

He loves a tool called Asana, he’s a big project manager in person. So his team loves and hates Asana because he’s always putting things in Asana, but he really loves it. It can be a little complicated at first. They may not like hear him saying that, but there is a little bit of a learning curve, but it's a wonderful way to organize work across a team, especially a cross-functional team.

 

So that's one. And then just recently and recently being in the last like two or three months, there's a new tool called Roam Research. He was in a beta program and he thinks they just now started to offer a subscription, but it's basically creating a knowledge graph of information. It's a little bit hard to describe, but it uses like tagging and hashtags to start to better organize information.

 

And if you're into research, he does a lot of primary research, it's an amazing tool for organizing your work and your thoughts and you have a lot of ‘aha’ moments out of it side. He highly recommends if you're into the world of research and doing research or even if you find you're writing a lot and you're trying to organize thoughts, Roam Research is wonderful.

 

Me: So, is it Roam Research is using tags and hashtags to kind of bring data that you are pulling from the web together? Or is it more so kind of putting your thoughts in order based on what you plop in the application?

 

Ryan agreed and shared that it's more the latter. It's more of a tagged based tool for organizing, disparate information. So, think about it more as like, how would you organize the thoughts into your head into a kind of a more structured mechanism.

 

But it's very good in the sense of, so for example, they've been doing some primary research on different buying centers and value drivers for those buying centers and experience like customer journey mapping and some other things. And often they'll do three or four different research projects. And sometimes the connection between research projects is hard in the sense of they may have different goals and the data in that may be a bit different.

 

So, Roam can sometimes help with taking those disparate pieces of work and better mapping them together. And they have these visualization tools like how is this project connected to this project and connected to this project….

 

And it starts to open up your eyes to connections, and going back to your point of sitting at your desk and having that ‘aha’ moment, Roam can sometimes be quite good at helping you think through some of those things.

 

Me: I actually was looking it up while you were speaking a while ago and the description that they use on their website is it's a note taking tool for networked thought. So, I guess as you said, you put things down and then they're able to kind of integrate and map and connect an easier flow so that it gives you a better, a bigger picture or a clearer picture of what it is that you're trying to put together.

 

Ryan also shared that they give you a daily page and he actually find that's one of the best things they do for a number of reasons. One is, you have a page every day that appears and then for him, he’s like, what are the three things he must get done today? And he wants to get more than three things done, but what are the three things he knows he’s going to get done?

 

And then also you can then map forward and back of, “Here's what I want to get done tomorrow” or “Here's what I thought I was doing three days ago and why didn't I do it?” So he can start to create a really nice cadence of like giving you a little more discipline in your days and then your programs and in your research. He really enjoys it, it takes some getting used to also, but it's been very powerful.

 

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Ryan shared that two books that are very different, but both had a big impact on him.

 

So, one is a book called Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. And it's really about how do you think about products and it extended to more human experiences that are very sticky. So things that people remember, they want to come back to, they really kind of love. And so, he thinks it's a great book. Often times we get caught up in a single wow moment like the monument versus the thing that drives people to come back.

 

And so to him, it's like the journey through the Super Bowl ad, which is one time and memorable versus that experience, that people will just crave, they always want to come back for more. And so, he really feel like Made to Stick is a great way to think about the world of building product solutions, experiences that are very sticky and drive your customers to want to come back.

 

And at the end of the day, even if you're in customer service and your goal is to reduce inbound, reduce costs, you still want to make it a great experience so someone remembers it and wants to come back again the next time.

 

And the second one is, it's actually an older book, it's more of a psychology but Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy. So, he wasn't trained as a marketer, but now he spends a lot of his time in the world of marketing. He loves these older books that survived really well and a lot of it's around psychology of how people think, why they make decisions. But why he likes Ogilvy on Advertising, if you read a psychology book, oftentimes they're hard. It's not an easy thing to process but Ogilvy on Advertising, it's the world of advertising and we all can relate to advertising because every day we're giving ads.

 

So, it's a really nice book that kind of talks about the science behind it and why people make decisions they make and the psychology behind decision making. So it's a classic that he thinks is definitely worth reading, because he thinks it also very much applies to the world of customer experience where it's how do people think about decisions? How do they weigh factors? What's the psychology around decision making? Because we often get caught in the tactics, the journey map, the average handle time, there's always metrics we are caught up in.

 

But at the end of the day, people make decisions oftentimes based more on themselves and their psychology than they do around the journey map we've defined for them. So, he thinks that's a great book and good perspective.

 

When asked what is one thing that he’s working on right now to develop himself or people, Ryan shared that with everything going in the world right now, it's a timely question. Their specific team is working a lot on how do they help to bring more diversity into the world of tech and specifically into LogMeIn. There's a lot going on right now in the U.S. specifically related around violence with the police, especially toward minorities or people of colour.

 

So he’s spending some time trying to get more involved. There are great organizations in Boston like Hack Diversity and others. They have a black employee’s organization at LogMeIn. So, they recently did a really challenging but really impactful discussion around being a black employee and being someone of colour.

 

So, they're spending time at LogMeIn, certainly the U.S. has made some strides, but there's still a lot of work to be done on helping to improve diversity, improve access and improve people's lives where they don’t have to fear about going out their home and being killed. So, that's a really recent one and he thinks is really important.

 

And then outside of that, he has two small kids, so he’s always thinking about the broader world in education and everything else. “And as you can hear, one of my interns is yelling. I think she has an important thing for me to work on.” he says jokingly about his daughter.

  • Ryan shared listeners can find him at –

www.bold360.com

LinkedIn – Ryan J. Lester – Mister Lester

www.cxnext.com

 

When asked about a quote or saying that helps him to refocus, Ryan shared that there's a short version and there's a long version. So, the long version, there's a Mario Andretti was a very famous race car driver of Formula One race car driver in the U.S. and he has a great quote that says, “If you feel like you're under control, you're not going fast enough.” And he always feel like that for him is very much a case of like if you feel like everything's fine and calm, especially in the world of technology, you're not probably not moving fast enough.

 

And so the short form version of that with his team is always, he would say, “Ship it.” And so for him, it's like if they say should we do this? He’s like always there on the side of shipping it, get it out there, let the market tell you if it works or doesn't work. You obviously want to have some quality control, but often times better air on the side of let's get in front of the customer and see what they think versus trying to make it perfect before we get it out the door.

 

So those are his words of advice to the team of if you feel like you're completely under control, you're not going quick enough, so let's go ship it out the door.

 

 

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Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!

Jun 23, 2020

Matt LaClear is an SEO expert and Founder of the marketing agency Your Ad Squad, LLC. Matt’s team pursues the very best referral prospects available in any given industry with the purpose of doubling the size of a business. They are experienced in working with the big fish, yet they love small businesses and never act like a candidate is above working with them. They help their clients to set their sites on the biggest referral targets in their industry resulting in huge dividends. It forces clients to up their game to the next level and grow business. Rainmaking!

 

In 2004 Matt had his house buzzed three times by a Apache Helicopter because of his aggressive follow-up efforts on a $3 Million proposal he had submitted to the owner. The project crashed and burned, but that encounter changes Matt’s thinking forever. It changed the way he approached business and as a result, how he helps others to grow their companies through SEO.

 

Questions

 

  • Could you share with us a little bit about your journey? Tell us a little bit about your company, Your Ad Squad, the marketing agency, how it is that you've got into this line of work? just a little bit about your background.
  • Could you share with us a little bit about your SEO squad? What is SEO, how does it work? Why is it important for your business if you don't know anything, your knowledge is ground zero. In 3 to 6 sentences, how could you explain that to someone?
  • Can you share with us maybe one tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
  • Could you share with us maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? It could be that you've read recently, or it could be something that you read a long time ago that has still had a great impact on you.
  • We have a lot of listeners who are business owners and managers who feel that they have great products and services, some of them feel that they lack the constantly motivated human capital. If you where sitting across the table from that person, what's one piece of advice that you would give them to have a successful business as it relates to their human capital and motivating them?
  • What's one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about - either something that you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
  • Could you tell our listeners where they could find you online?
  • Do you have a quote or saying that you go by that during times of adversity or challenge, this quote is something that you would revert to to kind of just remind you what you're working on and to just refocus, re strategize, get it back on track?

 

Highlights

 

Matt shared that 25 years ago he came home from work and all his neighbours were in front of his house. He didn't know what was going on and then he noticed a little girl was riding his daughter's bike they had just bought her for Christmas. All their stuff was at the curb because they were being evicted. And he was a coward at the time or at that moment at least. And instead of stopping to get his belongings and his family's belongings, he just drove right on by. Long story short, his wife ended up going back an hour later once she got out of work.

 

But by then, almost everything was gone. They'd lost all their childhood pictures, she lost her childhood pictures, there's not one left from that time. So, it was all because he wasn't a good provider at the time. And he vowed at that time that he was going to become a better provider. And he started his own business a little bit after that. And that's how he got in the business was just through that, that situation. Now, since then, he has been running a marketing agency for 20 years and a lot has happened since then.

 

But he understands and most small business owners, they get to a position where they get hit by something like that and it changes them. And that's why he likes helping small business owners, because almost every one of them has a story like that, why they got into business, why they're doing what they do. He just likes helping small business owners. So, that's why he helped them, because they almost have the same story he has, that eviction or something bad.

 

Me: And sometimes it's the negative things in our life that really propel us to do greater things.

 

And because you can always do better. “Oh, this must be rock bottom. Okay, well, I'm going to do much better and better.” And to be honest he has made some mistakes back then that he would never make now. And he wasn't making this much obviously. But he was young but that's how he got in the business. And almost everybody has that type of story negative, the rising phoenix from the ashes.

 

Matt shared that SEO is nothing more than getting free traffic from Google in the way you get that free traffic is you take care of their customers and you give them what their customers want. And if you do that, the customers end up; Google sends you the traffic for free to your website and you make a lot of sales and you don't have to pay for the traffic. So that's SEO.

 

Me: Give us an example of a business that you've had….that you've helped. Let's say maybe a mechanic store or a retail store or maybe a restaurant, how it is that you are able to use your services to transform.

 

Matt shared that it's kind of hard, in the years they've been doing this, they've had he thinks their last count was well over 13000 different businesses they worked on. So they've got all types of rags to riches stories happen all the time. They're working on a campaign right now where it was an affiliate business, of all things, and he had a hard time getting traffic and getting Google to help them and help him give them that free traffic.

 

And being an affiliate, you don't have enough money to pay for traffic. It's not like you get 100% of the sale and that's it. Usually as an affiliate, you get 10%. So, even if you make a sale as an affiliate, it's really hard to pay for traffic.

 

And they ended up, tripling his traffic for his main money pages. And what is meant by that is they find out what pages make money for a business and then they go find those pages. And then it's a matter of just making sure that they're taking care of Google's customer, which is the user. And if they do that, they can optimize that page so Google sends more traffic to it. And since it's a client's money page, it usually converts, well, better than the rest of the sites.

 

And that's how they make their clients money. It's just a matter of finding the money pages, the ones that are actually earning the business, and then get that right. And too many SEO companies, they ignore the 80-20 rule. It's really that 95/5 rule where 5% of your pages on your website are producing 95% of your profit. He bets it's 99 and 1%, he can go as far as he can in the math and keep moving the decimal point.

 

But the fact of the matter is most businesses that are surviving from their website traffic, they're doing so with just a few pages and most SEO companies, they start coming in and they start trying to treat every page as being different or as an equal, and they do SEO and all these pages. And that really hurts the campaign because a lot of the pages aren't making money. Why are we trying to rank a page that doesn't make any money, find the pages that make money, then make sure that it's in alignment with Google's user.

 

If somebody is searching the keyword for that page that's making money for you, then you just have to go and make sure that you are taking into consideration why the user is searching that, what they're looking for, what solution they need and what you could give them to take them one step further into the selling cycle and get them deeper into the funnel. And usually he can say it's only a few pages. So, they look like heroes a lot when they get hired because, “Wow, you've increased sales by X amount.”

 

And all they did was, they focused their first month on those pages. And then that creates extra revenue. And then all of a sudden, they can start working on ranking other pages and actually getting that same process moved across to the rest of the website. But anybody starting SEO and they're in business, he highly recommend you start with the money pages and just stay with it and stay with it until it converts for you, because it doesn't matter if that page doesn't convert.

 

You want to rank it, of course. You could make some money with it, it's better than not ranking, but it's better. If you really consider the user what they're looking for and take care of them, that's taking care of Google because it makes Google's product much better. Because he remembers 8 years ago, it was easy, they could rank for anything, anything and usually a couple of days and it didn't matter the quality of the website.

 

But if you remember back then, Google wasn't a very good tool, it wasn't the sharpest crayon in the box because you wanted to search for something and you could end up on affiliate sites, you can end up on click bank sites, you can end up with somebody trying to sell an e-book with. You’re looking for an attorney maybe to do a will, some estate planning. And then you search estate planning and all that comes up are how to sell estate planning leads to attorneys.

 

Well, you’re not interested in that, Google wasn’t very good back then, but now they are. It's a very good search tool. We can find whatever we need using Google. So, because of that, now we can reverse engineer the algorithm. So, let's see what pages are ranking well for our key words. Then let's study those pages because Google is placing the pages for that keyword that the people want and it's satisfying their needs.

 

And the best way to do it is just to look to see who's already ranking, don't reinvent the wheel. Find out what's going on, why is that site ranking? What is it user intent and a lot of the times the people who are ranking well, aren't going as far in the process as they could. So there's opportunity, you can pass them. “Okay, maybe they have some of the user intent, but maybe there's more I could do.”

 

You could take them deeper in a relationship, if they're searching green algae in pool, maybe they have a pool that has algae in it and they've got a party coming up, they want to get it cleaned up in time.

 

So I could then have that whole article be about it, not only talking about how to clean your pool, but how to get it done in time, how to make sure that it's going to be done by the time of the party and then end it with a checklist on how to get your pool cleaned by the time by the time of your party.

 

Well, that's going to be a piece of content that the user is going to find very useful. It's going to be something that when they click it and they find it, they're not going to rush out and hit back on their browser so they can go to the next person on the Google listing or the search result rather than find out who's ranking. No, they're going to stay at your site and they're going to get their information.

 

Google's watching all that and they know that. So they know that you're taking care of the people coming to your site.

 

And that's the best SEO tip he can give anybody, if you take care of the user, Google's always going to take care of you. Why? Because you're taking care of Google.

 

If somebody searches Google for something and they can't pull up results for it, you’re going to get in a situation where people are going to stop using Google.

 

So, Google loves finding great information that is in alignment with what the user is looking for. And because of the precision, like he said, and he'll repeat because of the precision of Google's tool now, we can use Google search tool to reverse engineer the user intent of their clients. And they just look at their competitors site that are ranking on those keywords already because the tool’s good enough where it's showing what the best user content is, what links come into play through. But that's in a nutshell SEO.

 

Me: I like the example you gave in terms of looking at what Google is searching for, what people are searching for, and then repurposing your content to ensure that it's fulfilling that particular need. Because then the ranking will definitely come further up because some people are extremely granular when they're searching for something. So, if you're granular when you're searching for something and the tool that can actually populate the specific information within the first three options that come up, it makes the experience that much better. You don’t have to be digging through three, four or five pages, sixteen different articles, or videos, or images, trying to find the information that you’re looking for.

 

Absolutely. And you can build a bridge that way too. For instance, let's say you are a pool supply company and you sell tablets. So you drop the big tablets in the pool and it makes the green algae go away and it's fast and so it happens in 24 hours.

 

Now most business owners, they're going to try to rank that product page for the keyword, because that's the page they want everybody landing on. Well, most of the people that searching the green algae in my pool may not understand that there's a tablet ready for them that can help them. And they're not looking for that solution; at that point, they’re still further up in the funnel. They're still looking for information. So, if we search that keyword and if we own that pool company, we noticed that there's no other product pages ranking for the keyword.

 

There's a good chance at their product page won't work for it either. Why? Because the user for that keyword that's searching it isn't looking for a tablet at that point. They're just saying, “How do I fix my pool?” They don't want to end up on a product page. Instead, they want to know that we understand their problem. We break their problem down. “This is why you have algae in your pool. We're not just trying to sell you a scam or snake oil. You have your algae in your pool because of this. And there's a test you can do. And this is why you get rid of it.”

 

And once we demonstrate that we understand all that, we could have a little banner on the bottom of that article that says, “You want a checklist on how to get your pool taken care of me by the time you're party.” like he says, they download the checklist, they're going to get the checklists list, it's the next logical step in their solution to fixing their problem with the pool. So what happens after they get the checklist and they go through all that and they start trying to treat it right.

 

They change the filter; they put in extra chlorine and they’re still having a little problem. And then they get hit with an e-mail from you saying, “Hey, are you still having trouble with your pool?” It could be three days after they download the checklist or two days. “Yeah, I am.” “Well, check out our product here. Just drop a couple of tablets in and it'll be ready in 24 hours.” Now, that's a real solution.

 

Now, had they just been sent straight to our product page and we asked them to buy the tablets, now we're in a situation where we're trying to rush the sale. And in SEO, we can't rush the sale. And that's the way it used to be, we would only rank product pages because they were easy to rank. But that made Google less effective as a tool. So they made algorithms that made it so those pages wouldn't rank.

 

And so that's the good news is if you see a competitor that isn't going further in the funnel, but they're taking in consideration of the user intent, but they're not adding any teeth to it, like banner ads to go deeper into the funnel for a lead magnet. And usually, if you just offer a checklist, “Hey, you want all this information in a checklist in a PDF, just give us your e-mail.” Usually that goes really well and as far as lead generators.

 

So, it's having the opportunity of knowing the user intent and taking care of the user allows them to not only rank better take care of Google's users better, but also funnel prospects that they do get deeper into the funnel and into their own funnel. They go into the funnel, hey, I got to fix his pool, by the time they get out of the funnel, they want to clean pool, they want a good barbecue, they want to have a good thing.

 

So they're looking for it, tablets are not in their mind at that point. They will be but first, they have to let them know that they understand their problem and they understand why it happened and that they are the authorities on this problem. They're not just some people that bought some tablets from overseas and now they're trying to sell it for $99.99.

 

And they're saying it fixes, cures cancer and cleans your pool up. They just want to make sure we're not that person. And that has to be done at the speed of human interaction. We would never go on a first date and ask somebody to marry us unless it was an arranged marriage and other cultures that happens. But here in the United States, no, but it's just isn't heard of. Anybody that asked to marry you on your first date, you would probably think something was strange with that person and not have a second date.

 

But marketers, we don't mind at all trying to get people to buy our tablets right away. We'd like to get people to our product page, but that's where the user intent comes in. That's where the laws of human interaction is, you have to build the relationship. And once they see your name a few times and you've answered their question, they spent some time with you on your post. They got your guide, they got your check list, they got your email, and they’re going to buy from you.

 

Who else are they going to buy from, a vendor down the street who sends people straight to the sales page and didn't take the time to do all that? And guess what? Those are the pages that rank in Google. And those are the pages that convert. So really, SEO is just a matter of solid business development.

 

Matt shared that he’s a big, big fan of Grammarly and he also uses the Hemingway Editor too. And because when you're writing, you have to write in a way that people can scan. He tries to write everything in fifth grade or below reading level, and he sells to attorneys, too. And they like to write and they send him stuff and he'll put it in the grader and it'll be like grade 24. Don't write your copy, it needs to be fifth grade. Why does it need to be so low?

 

He gets the grammar taken care of using word and then once Grammarly gives him all the good suggestions he needs, then he moves it to the Hemingway Editor and if he can get that down to a fifth or fourth grade reading level, that just guarantees that all his sentences are short, that his paragraphs are short, and that he’s not using a lot of adverbs.

 

And why is that important? Because his readers are going to be able to scan through it really fast. It's going to be like a hot knife through butter. And whenever we slow a brain down, when they're reading, it just invites distraction and that's why. So, that's his app.

 

Matt shared that he and his partner, they just went through a book study of The Power of Positive Thinking with Norman Vincent Peale, just having a positive mindset. And it's funny, right when they finish the book, the crisis started with the virus. It was like, “Oh, man, when didn’t want to have to test this so soon, we just finished the book.” But it worked and it helped them and as business owners, any business owners, as any kid in school, just kind of a positive mindset.

 

If he had had a positive mindset in school, he would've had a lot better time. But he didn't have a positive mindset, it took him till he was in his forties to figure out he needed a positive mindset. But that's a great book, he highly recommends that one.

 

Matt shared that he’s a highly motivated person. His first 20 years in business, he had a hard time with people who weren't motivated. He felt like they were in his way. And if they were in his way, they're going to get pushed out of his way. He had momentum and then once you get momentum going, you never want to lose it. Now, I'm not telling people to start pushing people your way.

 

But what he wouldn't say is starting establishing some momentum. The very thing that makes us get upset when somebody trips us up is that they are slowing our momentum down. So we're reversing that and looking at it from the other way, if we establish momentum, which will give us enough will power to get through to where we're trying to get to. And most of the people that work for us and the human condition is they are unmotivated, they don't have a desire to accomplish anything big in their life.

 

So it makes it hard for them and they kind of stray. So, he tries to get momentum going with their staff, he tries to get them training, he tries to get them excited for themselves. So they're learning things that it has nothing to do with our business. But if they can learn a skill set, it helps them when they do the work. But even if they quit later, they still have the skill set with them that they can use with their competitor even or start their own business.

 

And sometimes that happens. And it used to hurt him and make me angry and it doesn't anymore because you want people having maximal momentum in your life, because we want it in our own life and the more momentum that your workers have, the more momentum that they'll have to give us. So when they bump into it, it actually propels us forward and rather than to be stalled out in front of us.

 

So that's the beauty of having acceleration, accelerated momentum. And to get that momentum going is a lot of different things you can do. But usually it's personal development for the workers taking care of them and he doesn't mean just paying them more, just treat them like a member of the team and help them strengthen how they feel about themselves and give them something to work towards and celebrate the wins with them. And they get the momentum and sometimes they get so much momentum, they go out the door, they go somewhere else for more money but you know what, he did his job in those cases.

 

So he would just say to anybody in that position just get some momentum going, get your employees excited. There's a lot of different things you can do for them, get some training going, usually online training and it usually is a good momentum builder too for staff especially if there's certification involved, because that skill set, they're padding and their own resume. Now they're doing something not just for you because they're getting paid, but now they're doing something for themselves.

 

So that's what he would say, if he got asked that question again, he would give you the crib's note would be the short version would be. Get your employees excited about themselves. Do some personal training, help them always be padding their resumé with whether it's certifications or experience or even help them with case studies.

 

 

So they have their own case studies, helped on this and this and this with this company. So, give them personal case studies, so they're padding their own resumé as they're going along. And so they make one case study for us, this is what our agency did for this client. But then on the same time, they have the writer.

 

They can easily just say also write one for one of our employees, who was very instrumental in this, that they can put in their CV or their resume or upload to LinkedIn. And lets people know that you care about them. But more importantly, it gets them excited about their job. And now they want to do that again, they want some more padding on their resume.

 

Matt shared that they’re doing a lot of different things because of the crisis and it's forced them to do a lot of things, something that they're really excited and is getting buy in from their employees and the work they're doing, they're getting scorecards so it's not they they're going to be checking on that, but they're going to be giving them scorecards at the end of every week of what they've accomplished and what they haven't accomplished. And it keeps them from having to look over their shoulders.

 

And so, they're treating them as little mini business owners and they're giving them a lot of leeway with it, too. So, he’s excited about that, that they're having a lot more autonomy with the staff rather than everybody knocking on his door and saying, “Matt, you got a minute?” because you’re die a little inside every time you hear that especially if you got your own momentum going. So they're getting buy in and it's working and that has him excited because that's momentum.

 

 

 

  • Matt shared listeners can find him at –

www.yourseosquad.com

            Facebook – Matthew LaClear

 

 

When asked about if he has a quote or saying that he reverts to during times of adversity or challenge, Matt shared that he has it pinned right in front of him, Psalm 16 vs 5-6, “Lord, you have assigned me my portion in my cup. You have made my lot secure. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.” That makes it very easy for him to do business deals when he has that mindset.

 

Me: Wow, that's so beautiful. We need it now especially in the climate and the environment of what's going on in the world generally speaking.

 

Temporary, not forever. And our inheritance and while faith comes into play but even without faith, you could get through this. This is just temporary.

 

 

 

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Links

 

 

 

Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”

 

The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.

This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!

This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.

Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!

Jun 16, 2020

Naomi Garrick is an author, International Speaker and Personal Branding Coach that helps individuals, entrepreneurs, corporate executives and CEO’s to discover and develop their unique personal brand in order to effectively communicate their expertise and standout in their craft or industry.

 

She is also the founder of Garrick Communications – a boutique PR agency and a Certified Reputation Champion by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) with over 16 years of experience in Public Relations & Marketing, working with over 100 brands and individuals and Co-Founder of EMERGE personal development summit and workshops.

 

Naomi is passionate about helping people to see the greatness that sometimes they cannot see within themselves by helping individuals to identify or re-invent their unique personal brand in order to stand out in a noisy world.

 

Questions

 

  • Could you share with us a little bit about your journey, how it is that you got to where you are today?
  • What are maybe two or three things that you think a company can do to ensure that they maintain a strong brand especially in this time that we're operating in?
  • In a case where let us say the story got ahead of you and you were not able to do any damage control, what are some of the things that you think an organization should do in order to recover their reputation? Because one of your R's in your book is reputation. So how would you told you manage that reputation if you realize that it's becoming tarnished and people are saying negative things?
  • Can you tell us how do you stay motivated everyday?
  • Could you share with us one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
  • Could you share with us maybe two or three books that have had the biggest impact on you?
  • What’s one thing that’s going on in your life right now that you’re really excited about – either something that you’re working on to develop yourself or your people?
  • Where can our listeners find you online?
  • What is one quote or saying that during times of adversity or stress or any form of obstacle that you maybe faced with, you tend to draw on this quote or saying because it kind of helps to keep you refocused or get you refocus so that you can achieve your goal or get your mind set to on what you need to achieve?

 

Highlights

 

You are the P.R. chief, personal branding coach, so many different titles and themes that go according to your name. Can you share with us a little bit about that? And then we'll dive right into how we can dovetail locked into customer experience.

 

Naomi shared that it's funny because a lot of people now know her as the PR chick, but she wasn't always known as the PR chick, she actually studied Hotel and Tourism Management because she thought at the time that that's what she really wanted to do.

 

And that's also because at that age where you're deciding what you want to do in University, she wasn't quite sure. But her best friend was studying Tourism, she was going to study Tourism Management and people said that she (Naomi) had the personality for the hospitality industry, and that's why she jumped into that space. But even after completing for year 3, she always ended up working in the marketing or sales side of the hospitality industry, but after being in that space for about two and a half years, she realized a couple of things about herself. One, she really missed being around her family. Two, working in the hospitality industry is really a 24-hour industry, especially if you live on property at the hotel, which she did in Negril.

 

And so, she came back to Kingston not really quite sure what she wanted to do next. And luckily, she had the opportunity to meet with a gentleman in Jamaica Kimani Robinson, who had just launched RETV, which was Reggae Entertainment Television, which was really like the B.E.T. of the Caribbean, she would say, or MTV.

 

And after speaking with her, he offered her an opportunity to be a Sales and Marketing Coordinator, which then led to Sales and Marketing Manager for almost 5 years. And it was during that stint with the company, someone else had approached her about doing some publicity work for an upcoming dancehall artist. And she was a little bit confused at the fact that he would ask her to do that because she really didn't do a lot of PR for RETV, it was more of the marketing and sales side.

 

But he was so convinced that she was the person for this role. And so she said, “Okay, I'll try.” And she remembered walking to the nearest bookstore and getting all the books that she could find about being a publicist, and public relations, because she knew some of the basics but she really didn't know that much about the space.

 

And she realized when she started and she did her first press release, that because relationships is such a big driving force for her, she had really built these amazing relationships with the people behind the scenes, like the key decision makers in the media, the editors, the directors, the producers, the writers, the people that actually determine what we see, hear and read in the media.

 

And they saw her as a very credible source of information, and she had really good writing skills. She actually thinks that if she didn't study hospitality, she would have become a literature teacher.

 

And so, that's where she started doing PR work really for entertainers, the artists, upcoming artists, established artists. And she did that for a period of maybe about a year and a half while she was still at RETV. And then she became pregnant with her son in 2005. And at that point, it's like her brain does this shift. And she was just like, “I actually don't think this is the right space for me right now,” because being in the entertainment space, it required being out a lot at different types of events, at different types of hours, in the morning and in the night.

 

And she still went back to that original thought of wanting stability and flexibility to spend real quality time with her family and being in that position, she wouldn't be able to do that. And so, again, she started trying to figure out what's next for her.

 

And even doing the PR work was great, but working with entertainers would put her in that space of entertainment, which wasn't very stable for her at the time. And so another opportunity came up where a new hotel was opening in Kingston, a boutique hotel.

 

And as much as she thought she didn't want to go back into hospitality, there was an opportunity for the role of Corporate Communications Manager. And she didn't have corporate communications experience, but she had hospitality experience and she had PR and media experience. And so, she went ahead and she did the interview and she got the interview on the spot. But very quickly, after about three months, again, she realized that hospitality really is not for her.

 

She actually really loves this PR thing, especially because now, she had the opportunity to work in the lifestyle side of PR, which she really, really loves.

 

And so, she made a very hard decision to just start her own company, Garrick Communications and to just go headfirst into entrepreneurship without the savings, without a plan, really. But she knew that she didn't want to work for anyone ever again. And so, she started her company really with just her, her BlackBerry, a camera and a laptop, no office.

 

And luckily, again, because of relationships, one of the media houses in Jamaica heard that she had started this journey on her own and offered to do a feature or story about her, which ended up being the cover story for that publication and that's what led to her first client. They celebrated their 10th anniversary last year and they've never advertised their business. It has really just been through referrals, recommendations. And of course, their results as well and relationships, which is as she said before, is a massive driving force.

Three years ago, she started this new journey into personal branding and personal brand coaching, and that came out of being a part of an accelerator program for entrepreneurs. And one of the things that their coach had suggested was finding a way to make this nocturnal revenue or revenue in your sleep by putting in the effort one time. And the example she gave was a book.

 

She first start writing about PR and PR storytelling, but it just wasn't grabbing her and she couldn't get past chapter one, and then literally, she remembers watching something about using your experience and your skills to offer value and to serve others.

 

And she woke up the following morning like at about 3:00 am and she just had this idea that she had to write about personal branding, which is her personal journey to this point, because even without the degree, it was the other skill set or the other not so tangible things that really helped to propel her career over the last 15 to17 years.

 

And so, she just started thinking about some of the steps that she took and she created a workbook. And now 3 years after that, she has 3 books, she’s a speaker, she’s a coach, she does workshops. She just launched an online course and she’s really stepping into this role of personal branding coach because as much as she loves PR and she loves her agents and she loves her clients, she gets so much fulfillment from what she does right now by really helping individuals to see the greatness within themselves that sometimes they just don't see and then how best to communicate it to their ideal audience.

 

Me: Awesome. Brilliant. So really, really an amazing, a fantastic journey. And you touched on something that basically dovetails into what we're all about in this program. And it was actually highlighted in a webinar that I did this morning with some customer service experts globally. One of the things one of the speakers said was people who are hired for social channels must have certain skill sets that may not have existed before. And you touched them both.

 

They must be good writers and they must have public relation training. They are the voice of the company. So writing and PR training and I mean, you said it. You said it not in the template of a training that you would have gone to or something you learned in school. But basically because these are skills that you would have had naturally, as well as develop through the different experiences that you had that now materialize into a way that you can give back and help others.

 

Me: Branding is a great buzzword. I see it on the internet all the time. And you can look at branding from different aspects. You have a corporate brand and you have personal brand. Now, a client’s experience with a brand is very, very important. And it can make or break your business. We've seen a lot of negative news floating around recently, both locally and internationally when companies are not responsive, when they delete comments off of their social media pages, when they don't try to do things in a way that helps to enhance the customer's experience.

 

So could you give us maybe two or three things that companies need to be doing if they're not doing it already?

 

Naomi shared that the first thing she would say is that every single member or employee of a company is actually the brand manager for that company.

 

Every single person plays a role because every contact point that we have with a member of an organization or a company or a brand, can actually make or break our relationship or our experience or our views about that company or brand.

 

so, she would tell her clients that even the first person that you meet which sometimes is the security guard at an establishment, especially here in Jamaica. Sometimes just the way they greet you can throw off your entire mood as you are getting prepared for a meeting with someone in that organization, or it can completely lift your spirits.

 

And you end up having a super successful meeting just because your energy levels have changed just because of a very short one to two minute interaction and engagement, your employees actually become the spokespeople for your company, because when there is a crisis, a lot of times they are going to say, “Hey, let me pick up the phone and speak to my friend or this person that I know works at this organization.” And so, communication to her would be also extremely key.

 

And you start as a company first with your internal customers, which are your employees, because a lot of times when there's a crisis, sometimes your employees are hearing about it for the first time in the news or on Twitter.

 

that should not be the case, because if someone asks them, they should be able to have some kind of response that has been discussed with the company. So, they also know what to say if they are approached by just a friend, by an individual or by a client or by the media, because we all become these media/brand managers for that company as well.

 

Another thing that she would say, because you said two to three, is transparency because now we live in this digital world where we can find information about everybody and information is shared so quickly. So, you want to ensure that if there is some kind of crisis, that one, you are ahead of that story, even if you don't have a complete response yet, it's important to just acknowledge, use the same channels that the story came out.

 

So, if something came out about your brand or our company on Twitter, that's where you need to respond first and then you can use your other channels to respond. And that's why so many companies now post press releases through their social media channels first before even sharing with the media so that individuals know that this is what we had to say about this particular incident, this is our stance and we will continue to update you as we get more information. So it's very important to lead the story instead of you trying to play catch up now.

 

And to address things that may not even have been real or related but it's just because you've allowed the media or you've allowed individuals to create the story because you're not being a part of the storytelling process.

 

And so, timeliness, she thinks would be the last thing. Have to respond in a timely manner, we can't be taking 24 hours or two days or a week to respond to something, even if it's not a crisis. And as she said, if you don't have the full answer yet, say that, say…..

 

“This is a situation; this is what we know right now, we are addressing this and we will have an update for you within 24 hours or in the next two hours or continue to follow us on our social media platforms for the latest updates on this situation.”

 

And she thinks that's where we go wrong a lot of the times is we don't respond immediately. And then we end up with that “No comment” thing, which she thinks is like the worst thing ever. So when you say no comment, it's kind of like people feel that you're hiding something or like you are actually in the wrong. And then they create their own stories, which is not what you want.

 

Me: So your first was communication. Second was transparency and third was timeliness.

 

Naomi reiterates that the first one is really just acknowledging that we're all managers for whatever company or brand that we work for. We all have a responsibility to carry the correct message, which would lead then to communication.

 

Me: So it's very important for us to focus on all these areas to ensure that our customer experience is one in which is positive. Everybody's looking for the same thing, customer loyalty, customer retention, positive word of mouth advertising, testimonials. And unfortunately, even though there are opportunities for you to pay for some of these things, if it's done organically and it's being done from a place of authenticity, your customers are really your best marketing tool.

 

Naomi shared that one; she would say that personal branding is really your reputation. But they use this new buzzword. But it's not. It is your reputation. And as you said your reputation matters so much more so even now. She likes to quote Warren Buffett where he says, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and only 5 minutes to ruin it.” And if we think about that, we do things differently.

 

But in this digital world, you can ruin a reputation in seconds with a tweet, a screenshot, a voice note, a video, it can go viral. But the great thing is that that viral-ness can also help us to correct a situation. So, we have a great opportunity with social media platforms to really get our message out there in a very quick way.

 

So, yes, maybe we missed the original mark and we were behind with responding to a crisis or there really was something that we were involved with that left a not such a pleasant taste with our loyal fans or our customers.

 

And that's why it goes back to those tips that she had recommended earlier, that timeliness of response and being authentic and genuine with your audience and your customers. And so, she would recommend, and even not just doing a static press release, but doing a video, letting them see you, feel your emotions to show that you care and you actually took the time to sit down and do this, you the CEO and owner of the company, not your corporate communications manager, not your director of public relations, but you the person, because she honestly believe with leadership, when things go right for the company, it's the leader of the company, when things go wrong with the company, it’s the leader of the company.

 

And so, that's a time when a leader really needs to step up to the plate and get in front of those cameras and really share what is really happening. Show empathy and show that you care especially if you are in the wrong and you know you are in the wrong. Apologize, acknowledge the situation. Apologize for it; these are the steps we're taking to make sure this never happens again. And this is what we're doing with our team to ensure that we have things in place to mitigate a situation like this in the future.

 

So it's almost like you let them in to become a part of the process and you can even open it up to say, “If you have any ideas that you believe would be helpful to us during this time, please don't hesitate to email me directly.”

 

And you give them your personal email address so that they can contact, they can reach out to you and you respond to them.

 

That’s how you retain that loyalty from those customers, those raving fans that you had that were your ideal audience, because they are the ones now that will speak to this new experience you know, “I'm starting to have second thoughts about this company because this happened. But then when I got this email with this letter from the owner of the company and he asked for our opinion and our help. It made me feel good and it felt like this was a brand that I still want to support.”

 

Me: Agreed. Brilliant. Excellent answer, Naomi. And I think many of our listeners that listen to the podcast have small businesses. Some of them are part of large entities as well, play very significant roles. And so reputation is very important, especially during this time. As you said, empathy is so, so critical. And I like the fact that you said that they put themselves out there and put their own e-mail or contact number so that the client can actually reach in touch with them.

 

It shows that they're making themselves a part of the solution. So it's not them trying to fix it, the team trying to fix it. But I am a part of the solution as well, and I'm committed to it. And I'm here to hold your hand and walk you through it to make sure that we both come out on the positive end of this. So I really, really love that response.

 

Naomi shared that at the end of the day, we just want to connect. We're all human beings and we crave connection, significance. And she speaks about this all the time that, Tony Robbins says that, “People are not in the business of buying goods and services, they're in the business of feeling and connection and emotion.”

 

 And so that's what draws us to our brand or company more than the actual product or the cost of the product or even the service that you provide.

 

But it's the experience that you create with different people when they meet with you or they engage with your product or they engage with your team.

 

Me: And they buy you before they buy a product or service. So it's important for you to ensure that you are being very genuine about whatever you're doing because people can pick up if you're being fake. It comes over in a tone of voice, your body language, how you respond, as you said, you send somebody a message and you say to yourself, “But I know they got the message. I know they saw the message. They've been in this application for quite a few times after I've sent a message and they haven't even acknowledged that they got the message to give a response.” People pay attention to those things.

 

Naomi shared that of course, because she celebrated Brand Day last week on her birthday. She has gotten so many emails, messages, everything. And so like she’s just using this week to start going through. And she noticed that a colleague of hers had sent her an email probably on Saturday, today's Friday. She had not responded yet because she’s still going through but what she did was let me (Naomi) send her a quick WhatsApp just to let her know that she sees her email, and she will respond by end of day to day. And she responded right away saying, “I was starting to wonder what was happening. So I really appreciate the fact that you sent me this message.” So sometimes it's as simple as that.

 

And people don't know what you're going through, so they just can't assume that, it's because she’s trying to respond to everybody's email. They may think that she just doesn’t have the time to respond to them or you don't care. And she cares about everybody because everybody that she interacts with, she wants to create a positive experience with them, even if it's not to buy a product or service because it's her.

 

And so when she responded, she knew she was doing the right thing, your gut tells you something. She flags things in her email that she hasn’t read yet. And she saw the purple flag, and she’s like, she’s going to message her right now so that she knows that she didn’t just see her email and not respond.

 

Me: It really goes a very far way and it's always the little things. It's always the little thing that goes a far way.

 

Naomi shared that she doesn’t stay motivated every day that would absolutely be the most honest answer, especially during right, right now. There are some days where she still doesn't have the energy to do anything. She thanks God that she has a child and that's what actually gets her out of bed some mornings.

 

So, he is a big motivator for her. But also she leans into a couple of things when she needs motivation. So, her morning routine, it helps a lot with that because she starts off using intention cards to just set her intention for the morning.

 

She gets up early every morning and she just needs the quiet time to really sit down and not really do any work. But she’ll listen to a podcast like maybe this (Navigating the Customer Experience) podcast. She listens to a podcast or listens to a positive meditation or something just to start the day right with a great cup of coffee. That's very important to her to set the tone but also her tribe is very, very important to her.

 

And she has different types of tribes. She has tribe of girlfriends where it’s just her close friends from high school. But she also has a tribe of entrepreneurial women. Women in business who she would lean to during a time like this, because we are going through a similar experience together and just sitting down and talking to each other. We get to share ideas, share experiences, you know it's not you alone and we're always motivating and encouraging each other.

 

So that is very, very important to her. And her colleagues and her, Rochelle and Catherine, they talk about your circle of genius all the time. Who do you let into that space? One of the things that she also do for her motivation is, she’s not on social media very often, so she’s on it very purposefully because she don't want to come across maybe a post or something that's shared that maybe gives her a sense of anxiety, because sometimes she’ll go online and she’ll see other people in her field of knowledge sharing and doing the most.

 

They're doing all these amazing things every single day. And for her, she gets a little bit anxious because then she starts thinking, “Am I not doing enough? Why am I not doing all these things?”

 

And so, actually, one of the purposeful things she started doing was actually muting some of her friends, some of the people that she follows so that she’s not bombarded with that as she gets up in the morning. And so, she really goes online when she’s ready to share or to respond to queries or questions that are on her pages.

 

And so she has had to create those social media boundaries for herself to keep her own motivation up. And the last thing is that she reads a lot. So, she’s always reading and learning from other people's experiences. So that really helps to keep her motivation up for sure.

 

When asked about an online resource that she cannot live without in her business, Naomi shared that that's Canva. So she doesn't have graphic design skills. She comes from a very creative family but that gene skipped her. Canva allows her to be a graphic designer. So she uses Canva for everything, for her social media posts, for her e-books, for her on boarding emails to her coaching clients, for her proposals, for her backdrops.

 

She just saw today that you can customize your Zoom backdrops using Canva, they have a template for that now. So, it is what she uses to do all of her branding. So, she usually has someone create a really great piece of branding for her in the form of a logo and then she just utilizes the brand colours to now use Canva to create her own content, that she can use on all her digital media pages, her website, YouTube channels. And just for promotional material for her business or just basic information and creating content. Canva is her go to, it’s free and if you pay for the pro version, she believes it's like US $12.00 a month, it's worth it.

 

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Naomi shared that there's so many. But her two favorite, favorite, favorite books are The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. And that's really just about tapping into your purpose and really just understanding that your journey makes you who you are. And that's how you develop your personal legend by just starting with you. So, she loves that and she listens to Audibles as well. And she read the physical book, but she also listen to the audible sometimes when she needs just a little bit of motivation.

 

And then the second one is the Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person by Shonda Rhimes, because that book literally changed her life in 2017 and that's really a book about starting to say yes to everything. The things that scare you the most because they lead to so many opportunities for your life. And so Shonda shares her story about how one Thanksgiving her sister was saying that she doesn't say yes to anything.

 

And for example, at that time she hired a publicist and his job was to tell people that she can't attend an event or she can't speak at an event because she just would not do those things. And then, so her first real big speaking event was a graduation ceremony, that clip is still on YouTube because it's her most powerful thing to date. And speaking engagement and that just led her to so many opportunities to speak, to lose weight, to do all the things she was scared to do really.

 

And it has transformed her life. And so for her (Naomi), 2017 became her year of yes and that's when her life also changed in a very positive way. And then she would also say any book by Tim Ferriss, if you're a business person, is great. The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich is amazing, now is a great time actually to be reading that book because we're all kind of living in this four hour workweek life right now with this pandemic. And he shows you how to do it the right way.

 

But he also has these two big books, Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss, that’s amazing and he has another one – Tools of Titans by Tim Ferris. They are two massive books and what it is, is a collection of tips, tools, books, all kinds of information from hundreds of people, whether it’s authors, celebrities, cooks, athletes, all kinds of individuals just sharing tips on their morning routine, lessons learnt, favourite book to give away and it’s just like this massive book of awesomeness.

 

Me: Great resources, some parts of it must resonate with you and helped to advance you in some ways.

 

Naomi stated that somethings you never thought about until you read it, so it’s really great.

 

Naomi stated that she will share two things, one, during this time she has discovered that she is an expert banana bread baker. She started baking banana bread literally on a weekly basis and she just bakes them to give away to people actually. So, she has been on Amazon a little bit too much during this time but she bought these little mini baking tins so now when she does a batch, she can actually do 5 small mini banana breads and she keeps 1 for her house and then give away the rest to her friends or her neighbours.

 

And it just makes her feel good, her son is annoyed with her because he thinks she should sell them but that’s not why she bakes them. It’s actually one of her coping mechanisms during this time, it just puts her in a different place and she just loves when people calls her back to say how delicious the banana bread was. Banana bread chronicles.

 

And then also, she finally launched her online course on Building a Personal Brand and it’s something she should have done 2 years ago but she never had the time. And so, she has taken this time to finally sit down and build the courses, it’s 18 modules with coaching videos and work sheets and she’s really excited about it and the feedback she has been getting from individuals that signed up for the course last week has been so great.

 

And she loves that she can actually see their progress in the course and the respond to them in real time if they have any challenges. So, she really proud of that, it’s 2 years in the making and COVID forced her to buckle down and launch it and she is really excited about it.

 

  • Naomi shared listeners can find her at –

www.iamnaomigarrick.com

LinkedIn – Naomi Garrick

Instagram - @naomigarrick

                     @theprchick

 

Naomi shared that her favourite quote and she speaks about it all the time is, “The journey is the reward.” It’s a Chinese proverb and really it just reminds us that everything that has happened in our lives, the good things and the bad things, the things that we don’t like, the things that we don’t want to acknowledge and accept, are actually the things that makes us this person that we are today.

 

And without those experiences, we wouldn’t be who we are in this moment. And so, a lot of times, we get very flustered thinking about the future and we get anxiety and we don’t know what’s next or we haven’t achieved the goals that we wanted in our lives right now without remembering to look back at all the things that got us to this point.

 

And yes, COVID-19 is one big challenge and we’re in a pandemic, but you can think back, every individual must have had something in their life that happened, some kind of challenge that they were able to overcome.

 

And so, it just reminds you that we will get over this, when, she’s not sure but there are lessons to be learned during this time, find the lessons in the journey and then accept that this is just making you the person you are meant to become.

 

 

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Jun 9, 2020

Gessie Schechinger is the laziest salesman in America as well as Vice President of Sales for OnCourse Sales Engagement Platform. Gessie is passionate about leveraging technology and automation to surpass revenue targets so he can help protect golf and bar time for the salespeople of the world.

 

Gessie won annual sales awards at 2 different Fortune 500 companies. His 20+ years of sales experience began in an outbound call center where he averaged 450 calls per week and blew out his quota by 297%. Unsurprisingly, he moved to field sales where he travelled 300 days a year convincing the biggest companies in the United States to open their wallet. He now spends his time educating sales leaders to utilize the most effective sales tool in the world and co-hosts the mediocre podcast, TechTales.

 

Questions

 

  • Could you just share with us a little bit about your journey, how you got into sales in the first place? Is it something that you realized you were born for or were you just thrown into that initially when you started your career?
  • So you are the Chief Revenue Officer at OnCourse Sales Engagement Platform. Brilliant, brilliant platform. Could you tell us a little bit about your platform or what it really does for an organization and what types of companies can use this type of platform?
  • Could you share with us maybe one to three things that you think a salesperson needs to be successful, especially in this space that we're in currently globally? Sales is definitely changing, how do you see the really successful salespeople being able to manoeuvre through this time?
  • Could you share with us how you think the future of sales is going to look when we come out of this pandemic? Do you think things will change much in terms of how we sell to each other? Or do you think we're going to return back to that face to face experience?
  • How is it that you manage to stay motivated everyday?
  • Share with us what's one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
  • Could you share maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? Maybe a book that you read a long time ago or a book that you've read recently that's really had a great impact on you?
  • What's one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? I guess something that you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
  • Where can our audience find you online?
  • Could you share with us now as we wrap up one quote are saying that during times of adversity, you tend to revert to this quote. It helps you to refocus and maybe re strategize if you're having a challenge or an obstacle. It's just a little quote that kind of helps you to stay on track.

 

Highlights

 

Gessie shared that it's really interesting in the sense that what really drove everything for him was this constant yearning to try to cut corners, which typically isn't great. But when he was a kid, he lived down the street from a golf course and he would go find golf balls. And then he would sit at this hole that had a big lake on it and he would sell his “experienced golf balls” to the golfers that were coming by.

 

And as soon as he started making money doing that, he was like, “Oh, this seems pretty unique.” And then as things progressed in his career, he just didn't love listening to bosses, he wouldn’t say he was crazy rebellious but he just hated people telling him what to do. And so he was really just looking for like, “Okay, so how can I not be told what to do and still, you know, pay my bills?”

 

So, how is he going to figure this out and sales seems like one of those things where you're up against a number. They give you a number that you have to hit and then you go out and you hit that number, as long as you hit that number, then you're going to be good. It's like the one hand you have; you want some independence and stuff.

 

But the one thing you do learn very quickly on is that you always have a boss and that boss is the customer. And they're going to be the ones that really dictate your level of success or not. And so, being able to kind of cater to customers and keep people generally happy it kind of saved him and giving him some independence as his career went on.

 

Me: Amazing, amazing. So, sales is where the game's at. And you're right, as a salesperson, you are pretty much your own boss, because at the end of the day, as you said, you had a target. And once you met that target or exceeded it, then you are levelled up and given a new target. So to some extent, you managed your own schedule.

 

Gessie shared that OnCourse is a sales engagement platform. And it's a CRM, but it's a CRM with a couple added functionalities baked into it. So, they were at ZIB Tech, which is the company that owns OnCourse, as it started was not a very large company, very much a small business. And they were paying for Salesforce, they were paying for Outreach they had tons of these independent tools.

 

And one, the spending was just getting kind of crazy because everyone's adding users and there's a cost and everything just got kind of out of hand. And they also didn't really talk very well to each other. And so they wanted to create a platform that gave you all the basic functionality you would need to really take advantage of automation and sales without having to sign up for several different companies. And so, where they are really strong is everywhere, from entrepreneurs to businesses that are doing that 20, 30 million in revenue or maybe have like 10 man teams or less.

 

Their tool is very good because it gives you a lot of flexibility. And so, inside the tool, you're going to have the CRM functions, so that's your client record information, that's your opportunity management, pipeline management. And then also, the tool has a dialler software in it. So, you have your phone system, it can do SMS text messaging, it will also do LinkedIn automation. So, if you're selling via LinkedIn, they have a lot of great automation around how you can get that LinkedIn outreach going very effectively, as well as doing bulk e-mail, kind of that MailChimp Constant Contact type functionality.

 

Me: So, it's extremely robust and it definitely can serve a great purpose for anybody who is trying to level up their sales game.

 

Gessie shared that the funniest thing is in sales, especially his team. So, he is having the exact same challenges that everybody else is at and so they have the traditional channels which are face to face meetings, phone and email. And those three channels have been worked. But then all of a sudden you start feeling like, “Okay, well, I'm getting a lot of noise and email.” They’re always like, “What's that new channel, what are the things that are going to help?”

 

Now, LinkedIn is really good because where your email outreach but he gets all these emails every morning he wakes up and there's a part of him that just gets happy deleting them all. He has this big number and he can delete all his easy ones first. And it just makes him kind of happy, it makes him feel productive. And so, you're hoping that your sales outreach doesn't become one of those emails.

 

And so, the first thing is really trying to focus in. He thinks what a lot of people get caught up on is that they think they need to be good at every single channel. And that's not necessarily true. He will always believe that the phone will win. He thinks that the phone is the only way that you actually close business. And so the phone is something that you always have to have an outreach is something going when it comes to cold calling or your phone game.

 

Your phone game's got to be good, but then you just need to pick one other channel and be really good at it. Now, as per your point, they don't really have that face to face option, they don't really have the trade shows like all of that stuff is done. And what he would say is, figure out how you can stand out above the noise and get that LinkedIn game.

 

And he thinks the good news about LinkedIn is that you actually know that you're reaching the person that you're looking for. And the funny thing is that he over the course of his career, he has been hung up on, he has been cussed at, he has had people send horrendous emails back to him. Very, very rude is, anybody in customer service, we've all been there.

 

Something about LinkedIn, it makes people polite. He doesn't know what it is, he thinks maybe it's because you're like two clicks from their boss, not really sure how exactly it works, but everyone's super polite. He’s like, “Oh, no, thank you.” “Oh, appreciate you reaching out.”

 

And so, that has been very, very good for them. They've got to double down their efforts there and that's really helped. And the problem is, is that he kind of thinks of sales in a lot of people do, is like fishing. And so, you find like this new little spot at the lake that you think's got a lot of fish at it.

 

And so you go and that's LinkedIn. And so you're kind of coming in but now all sudden, we see like lots other boats showing up. So now tons of people are showing up like, “Oh, boy, it's starting to get noisy.” And one of the things that their company pivoted to and their sales outreach was, first of all, if you're a person out there listening; don't ever just write somebody a three to four paragraph message.

 

Nobody's going to read it and they just know that you're trying to sell something right away. And then you have like everybody, all of a sudden, everybody's concerned with his business and wants to learn how things are. He’s like, “I kind of don't think you are concerned. I think you're trying to sell me something from the start.” And so he thinks that you need to be very authentic. And then what they ended up doing was, they ended up starting doing embedded video in their LinkedIn because you might have something to say and it might be a complex value proposition, there might be a product or a service that you're representing that does take some explanation in order to convey those thoughts. And he just knows himself; he’s like one of the worst people ever, he only reads the news headlines, like only the bold, even in college, it was just the bold words.

 

It's got to be super interesting for him to get the details. So, what he found was but almost everybody will watch your video. So, if you can give it to them, get your message under two minutes, put it in a video, put it on LinkedIn, and you're going to stand out way past everybody else. And it's going to really help you cut through a lot of the noise that we're experiencing today.

 

Me: I agree with you. Actually, when you spoke about video a while ago, I was thinking to myself, I hope he says the video is going to be short because typically, if I look on it and I tap and I see 9 minutes, 15 minutes, I'm like, “Whoa, that's just too long.” So 2 minutes is good and whatever you're going to say, if you can capture it in 2 minutes and capture the attention of the person then you definitely have a winning tool right there.

 

So you said video helps to cut through the noise. And we have to definitely take a different approach as it relates to sales and we have to try and be more authentic. I like the fact that you mention that we shouldn’t be sending 3, 4 paragraphs to somebody who we don't know on LinkedIn. And as we know, LinkedIn has what, the first connection, second connection and third, some of the connections if they're not connected to somebody you know, sending a note is definitely a good thing, a good place to start. But as you said, I think maybe one really powerful statement is good enough.

 

Gessie thinks you can just have one little statement. He also thinks that you got to make sure it's personal. So, here's the thing, you can send out a message to somebody and say, “I'm trying to expand my network, love to have you connect.” It’s like, “Awesome, let me help you sell to more people.” which you know is fine but if you can lead with, “Hey, I saw that we have Bill Smith in common, love to get to know you as well. Are you familiar with Bill? Do you know Bill?” Whatever, it's this much more organic and natural because if you and him (Gessie) were at a conference and Bill knew you, he wouldn't just come up and say, “Hi, Yanique, I'm trying to expand my network, want to be friends?”

 

He’s never going to do that, that's a weird thing to do. So, he’s definitely going to come up to you and say, “Hey, Bill told me about you, you've got an awesome podcast. I'd really like to talk to you about it.” That's a much more organic way of cultivating relationships. And he thinks if more people just thought about it, if you are in a bar and you had to approach somebody, lead with that line, don't lead with this, “I'm expanding my network.” If somebody came up to him off the streets and say, “Hey, I'm very worried about your business and think I can help.” Like, “Well, what are you worried about, is there a problem? I didn't know that I had a problem. You're telling me I have a problem? Oh, my goodness. Tell me about it.” It just got to be real.

 

Gessie joked that he thinks the robots are going to take over everything. But the interesting thing and again, take it for what it's worth. He’s a software guy; he’s into all of this kind of stuff. But what he sees is there's some really cool stuff about pipeline management, sentiment analysis. And so, sentiment analysis, basically, people these days use the term A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) pretty fast and loose.

 

Really what we're talking about is robust algorithms that weight certain pieces of data heavier than others. And as they see success, it just learns to focus on weight on those things differently. And so, one of those things that we're going to start seeing in sales tools is because you have a tool like OnCourse, for example, shameless plug in. So, you have a tool that's going to capture all of your action. So it's going to see that you had these meetings with them.

 

Then it's going to see the notes of how you responded, of your summaries of those meetings. It's going to see how many calls that you made with them. It's going to see how many emails it took before it goes. And then anyone who's ever used a CRM tool knows that, when you get an opportunity, you have like a percentage of closes. You're like, “I'm 80% confident that this deal is going to win.” Well, they're going to stop doing that.

 

And the computer's going to start telling us, “Hey, this guy is 70% of the way there. You need to focus on him.” And they're going to start being able to collectively look at what they're doing and use it as a guide. And that guide's going to be like, “Okay, this is what has been working for this type of customer.” And he doesn't want to get crazy because there's nothing that's ever going to be better than the personal connection of a sale.

 

There's a couple of things that happen when you talk to a salesperson. And the first thing is,

“Can I trust this guy?” You've got to be trustworthy and you've got to be relatively friendly. It's like,

“Can I trust this guy? And do I want to talk to him for the next year of this business?”

 

And so, there's going to be a lot of credibility about your reputation and how you hold yourself. And all of that is extremely important but we can use it as an assist to that to be like, there's a certain amount of work that he’s going to do in every single prospect in order to get them to a place that they're going to buy. And the challenging thing for salespeople right now, he comes from a whole family, they're just all people who just talk and sell stuff all day.

 

So, his father was a sales rep/entrepreneur. His father was a sales rep for Dupont back in the day. So, when he tells them that computers would be taking over sales, like, “How dare you? You don't know what it was like.” Yeah. Because when his father and grandfather sold, most consumers were getting their information from the sales rep, they didn't really know about this stuff.

 

Now, he’s got customers telling him about new competitors he has. And so, the buyers are extremely smart and so we have to kind of pivot our game to make sure that, like, okay, well, they're smarter than ever before. They're getting way further into the buying process than ever before by the time we're interacting with them.

 

And so, being able to track and just know some of the necessary things, the boxes we're going to have to check in order to get this person to actually buy is going to be critically helpful and he thinks technology is going to help a lot with that.

 

Me: I agree that the average consumer now is way more informed than they were before. And traditional marketing, at least for me personally, I don't think it's as effective as word of mouth. Like hearing feedback from somebody who had the experience and it was really good for them. I'm more likely to consider buying from that company or that person if somebody I trust and somebody I know and somebody I value their opinion gives me feedback on their experience versus an ad that I saw on TV or some YouTube thing that popped up while I was watching a video. Because at the end of the day, I just find that it's just annoying.

 

Gessie shared that first of all, it's certainly annoying. But secondly, they have a rule, and that is if 30% of their leads are not coming from referrals, then they have a service quality problem. So, that's what they kind of use as their measuring stick to make sure quality in service is good. Because to your point, you have to be having people refer your service and business to people. And if you're not seeing at least 30% of that new inbound leads coming from them, then there's work to do, there's improvement to be had there.

 

Gessie jokes that he doesn't even know if he is. Mentioning that we have a pandemic, he wasn't doing a great job go into the gym when the gym was open and now they’re closed and they're starting to get back. And things aren't even going great there now either.

 

But in all seriousness, it is one of those things where you have to be doing something that you can see yourself gaining ground. So, the fun thing for them in software is when you launch a new product, he thinks this goes for any service. So, you start your service and then you realize you have all of these problems with your service that you didn't even know about, you have all this stuff to solve and then you just start solving for them and then it starts getting a little bit better.

 

And then that part gets a little bit better and then, “Oh, big oopsie. Yeah, we'll fix that.” and then we fix that, then that gets a little bit better. And you're seeing that progress and being able to see how things are coming along. That's probably the most exciting thing that kind of gets you going in the morning, that and fairly highly caffeinated coffee.

 

Gessie shared that in the spirit of being generous, he would say that, yes, OnCourse Sales Engagement Platform is necessary to all of your businesses and you should sign up right away. But also that he actually love Calendly. Calendly is very effective and it just cuts through a lot of the stuff when it comes to scheduling meeting and stuff. So, that's a really cool thing to have but then again, he thinks it is important to have all your communication tools in one place, and that's why they created the tool.

 

Me: I use Calendly as well when I started this podcast, it was four years ago. I can't believe it's been all that time. And it really makes it easier for scheduling, especially for people who are in different time zones across the world. So, it sinks their calendars to the time on dates and everything and then it sinks mine and it's just brilliant and it just works really, really wonderfully. The automation makes your life so much easier with that one little link that you sent to them and they choose their time on date.

 

Gessie shared that he’s not going to say that he’s the biggest reader on Earth. He tends to start lots of books, finishing them is a different challenge altogether. But one of the ones that he actually had to because he had took a business class in college and they made them read it, but it ended up being like really practical advice was, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey.

 

And so, they actually had to do that and by chapter level and then maybe it was like osmosis, but some of it just kind of got grained in his system. And so, especially like one of the fundamental things and this is something that has served him really well throughout his entire career. It's such a little tiny thing, but it's, it says, “If the task is less than two minutes, just do it right away.”

 

And just taking that is good; if it's more than that, plan it. Because time management for him has always just been a disaster, because he tries to schedule things and then like he has great hopes and desires to the schedule, he’s going to keep and then 3 things happen and the entire thing falls apart. And so, it is a constant struggle for him to figure out, like, he can plan a schedule like a champion.

 

Living to a schedule is a whole other burden. And his approach, if you have something instantly get it taken care of, it's going to take less than 2 minutes, more than that, plan it. You’ll have these windows of times you could do things made him much more productive than he probably would have been without that advice.

 

Gessie shared that they are working on a brand new social media management tool, that's really cool. Basically allows you to just kind of look for articles that will post amongst all of your social media. It's not coming up for a while. So, probably like the next two months or so. But that's something really fun that they're working on that he’s pretty excited about just because again and all roads go to laziness, he can't be just focusing on every single social media, he needs one place and then just let it take care of the rest.

 

That and then, they do have a pretty robust product roadmap at OnCourse and so in addition to the functionality, like they're baking in that sentiment analysis type stuff, branching and sequencing and a lot more that they're doing around automation, that he thinks is going to be pretty cool. And they're taking a couple of, not very traditional views about gauging productivity in sales. And so, he thinks it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out.

 

Me: So our listeners listened to this podcast. They said to themselves, this guy is really cool, he's awesome, he's fun, I really enjoyed the conversation. And I'm thinking of connecting with him because I want to learn more about CRM and sales engagement and how to leverage sales through automation. I want to really be connected with what he's doing and how that can help my business and my own personal growth as a sales person or even as a business person in my business or a business I work for or for someone.

 

  • Gessie shared listeners can find him at –

www.tryoncourse.com

Twitter - @TheRealGessie

 

When asked if there’s a quote or saying that helps him refocus, Gessie shared that every single morning, he had two parents, his mom and his dad. His mom would come in, wake him up for school the morning. She would turn on the little light, the little light next to your bed, “Gessie, it's time to wake up,” trying to get going. His dad, a different approach, came in every morning, turned on the big light, which was very jarring, not a comfortable way to wake up. And then he would say, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Don't waste it.” And then he'd go out. That is the signature quote for him by far.

 

Me: Okay. I'm sure it's fully ingrained in the deepest part of your long term memory to never, ever forget.

 

Gessie mentioned, and if you’re a parent, turn on the little light, the big light’s very abrasive.

 

Me: When you said that I thought of my daughter when I go in her room and I turn on a big light and she's like, “Mom!” I know exactly what you mean.

 

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Jun 2, 2020

Eric Prugh oversees product, design and solutions engineering at PactSafe. PactSafe is a SaaS company that securely powers clickwrap agreements & eSignatures for businesses like Dell, Wayfair, Door Dash, Extra Space Storage, Upwork, HomeAdvisor, and more. Prior to his current rule, Eric spent 7 years at ExactTarget and Salesforce in enterprise pre-sales as well as the product organization. He is a proud Purdue grad and lives in Meridian-Kessler with his wife Liz, their 2 daughters and 2 dogs.

 

Questions

  • Could you share with us a little bit about your background, how it is that you got into product design and solutions engineering?
  • Share with us a little bit about PactSafe. How does it help to basically envelop the customer experience for your clients and of course, meet the user experience better for their customers?
  • In terms of customer experience and its level of priority for your organization and even you, just as a consumer, you know what the importance of it for you as an individual. How do you think it has changed in the last maybe 3 to 5 years? And do you foresee greater change in that spectrum over the next 3 to 5 years?
  • How do you stay motivated everyday?
  • Could you share with us maybe one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
  • Could you think of maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you?
  • Can you share with us what's one thing that's going on in your life right now - either something that you're really excited about, something that you're probably either working on to develop yourself or your people?
  • Where can listeners find you online?
  • Is there's a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenging, they would revert to these particular quote or saying to help them navigate through those rough waters or those rough times to kind of get them refocused. Do you have one of those?

Highlights

Eric shared that he has been writing code and working and design since he was 13 years old. So, it's really kind of a nerd early on and he has always been fascinated with the power of technology and the power of the internet.

 

And so, at a pretty early age when he was 16, 17 years old, he decided it was something he was really passionate about pursuing both in his college degree and his career and so he went to school for that type of stuff, web development, graphic design, became a developer out of school and just realized he’s not a very good developer and didn't have the level of detail, the attention span for it.

 

He certainly has a massive respect for software engineers and engineers of all types because it requires a ton of hard work and got into consulting. And that's when he moved into software as a service and found a really interesting consulting job at a company called ExactTarget based in Indianapolis. And that took him on an amazing journey around the world and a big acquisition by Salesforce and got to join the product team from there.

 

And the reason he joined the product team is that he became fascinated with the problems that a single cloud based product could solve for such a myriad of people and how a lot of different companies can make products their own and solve their own specific problems that ultimately become broadly applicable problems for many companies, whether it's within the same vertical or within the same size of organization.

 

And so, he really just became enamoured with building products that solve problems for people. When he was in sales engineering, it was all about being the catalysts to solve the problem, being the person that was helping customers realize the value of the product.

 

And then he really got excited about how can he build products that are going to enable people to solve problems at a little bit higher level. So, that's how he moved into it. And then obviously the opportunity impacts that came along. One of his really good friends of a very long time had this amazing idea. He was a lawyer and he (Eric) had a lot of experience in SaaS. And so it's really a very good combination of skills, complimentary set of skills that they were able to come together and start the business and certainly been a roller coaster since.

 

Eric shared that PactSafe has a little bit of a unique perspective and when we talk about contracts and accepting contracts, generally, you're thinking about a very arduous, multi-step approval workflow, trying to get a contract signed or a contract logged or you're managing contracts for vendors. They've really created a very disruptive product that is designed from the very beginning to serve all the companies that have to do contracts at a massive scale. So, if you think about Wayfair, who is an amazing customer of theirs, doing amazing things in the market, they've completely disrupted the way people buy furniture.

 

They don't talk to their customers and have each of them go through a contract workflow to sign something. You're going through an e-commerce flow, you're buying furniture, you're buying a really nice light fixture or whatever for your home.

 

The contract is just a seamless part of the experience of checking out and Amazon, Facebook, early tech companies really pioneered that as a legally enforceable way to enter into a contract with customers. But legal teams at these big companies that were doing business in this way didn't have a way to manage the terms that were being presented to ultimately present those contracts as part of the customer experience.

 

And there were technology teams that were designing these experiences without really knowing what's the right, legal, best practice for doing so. And so, it creates all sorts of issues in the process and the bigger the company, the bigger the problem.

 

And so, that's really where the business came from in the initial problem that they solved. But what they found is that they became consultants for how a lot of larger, more don't want to say old school, but businesses that had done business in a more traditional way. They had salespeople going door to door, calling on businesses. They were doing larger contracts. Now that everything is moving online, software as a service has really kind of pioneered the way people expect to buy; e-commerce has changed the way people expect to buy.

 

And so, you have companies like Dell that are trying to figure out how best to implement the right customer experiences for doing more business, doing it faster, helping to recognize revenue for their business faster.

 

But then they have an army of lawyers that are concerned about doing business in this way because there still needs to be contracts as part of a workflow where customer engages. So, they really bring those two people together, the product person that's designing the experience and the legal person that's ensuring the right level of compliance is there. And they allow them to work in harmony and design the best experience and not worry about all the legal controls or compliance measures because they offer that out of the box.

 

And so, the product is great, it does amazing things. But, it's their people, it's their team that's helping working with these big companies to navigate how best to do these experiences in a way that everybody benefits, the customer, the end user, and the business.

 

Me: So basically, your integrated platform with a lot of these large organizations that require these contracts from a legal perspective makes the process that much easier for the end user.

 

Eric shared that you see in the largest businesses in quarterly earnings calls and annual reports in the last 3 or 5 years, you've started to see this transition of what CEOs are talking about.

 

Customer experience has always been important, but now it's talking about introducing new ways of doing business, new business models, companies are talking about. You've got Cisco, who's a huge business that's traditionally been selling hardware for networking and routers and all that sort of stuff.

 

They're trying to move towards more of a digital model where they're buying companies like Duo Security that are primarily SaaS and they're trying to bake that into their overall go to market strategy. So you're seeing a lot of big companies trying to lean into the subscription model. And companies like Zuora have been evangelizing that transition for quite some time but you're really starting to see it from even the world's biggest companies. And he thinks a lot of that centers around the way people expect to access the products that they buy, whether it's B2B or B2C.

 

They wrote a big e-book on how a lot of these big companies are trying to transition to self-service and one of the interesting stats from a future commerce report was that “72% of buyers now want self-service access to their accounts, to their orders, to their transaction history and even the ability to buy products online and that's at the enterprise or B2B level.”

 

And he thinks it's a big thing that's driving that is, as a consumer, you can do so much from your phone. Even in the last 3 to 5 months, like, wow, he really doesn't need to go to a grocery store, he doesn't need to go anywhere, really. He doesn't have to go anywhere because there's so much at his fingertips on his phone to be able to get delivered to his door, whether it's alcohol, groceries, you name it.

 

And so, that shift is like the second a B2B buyer wants to engage, a B2B brand, usually there's a gated form where they have to talk to somebody and it feels so heavy. And he thinks in the next 3 to 5 years, you're going to see a lot of companies and it's already starting. A lot of SaaS companies are moving towards self service, enabling their customers to find what they need to buy online.

 

They're being more transparent in how they're pricing going to market. You're seeing a lot of B2C companies that have traditionally done business through grocery stores, through Wal-Mart. Even PepsiCo, for example, is a great example. They just recently announced they're launching all these direct consumer sites for all their brands where people can go and order products online. And Pepsi is able this to start a direct relationship with their customer as opposed to having to work through the grocery stores of a Wal-Mart or Costco or whoever.

 

So, the whole business model is shifting, whether it's offering more subscription based products, if you've been a traditional, more on premise or hardware type company. And then you've got these direct consumer brands or these big B2C brands moving into a direct consumer model.

 

And you've seen a lot of companies like Warby Parker and you got like Casper, you got Harry's Razors. There are all sorts of companies that have established that that's a great way to do business. And primarily serving the customer directly online, being great, easy to do business with and even offering a subscription type model is a great way to go to market and people love buying in that way, reducing his upfront cost, make it something that's recurring and then add recurring value over time through a great customer experience.

 

Me: Your phone is definitely a very powerful device. I totally agree. I mean, I've seen so many changes, as you indicated, just from this pandemic. It's actually forced a lot of businesses to do things that maybe they may have had on their radar before, but they've definitely bumped it up as priority because of the time that we're going through.

 

When asked how he stays motivated, Eric shared that it depends on the day; it's definitely had its challenges. He has 2 very young kids and which has been so amazing in some aspects and so challenging in others. He thinks what has helped him to stay motivated is laser focus on priority and ultimately trying to keep his own sanity by starting his week, he just started a process where on Sunday he’s making his to do list for the week. He’s not doing it on Monday morning, that way on Monday morning he’s just going through and starting to execute on what he needs to get done for the week.

 

He hasn't hit a week yet where he’s actually gotten everything done, he’s always too ambitious, so, a good way to stay motivated, you knock out your to do list and you check everything off the list, that feels awesome. But he also thinks for him, it's about being realistic and honest with himself and okay with the fact that he’s not going to get everything done, there are going to be some things that don't move quite as fast as he'd like.

 

But ultimately, it's about managing, trying to manage what he can control and ultimately holding everybody on the team accountable and in a very similar way and understand that we all need time to go and hang out with our kids and know that ultimately there are people in our lives that we're doing this for. Whether it's a spouse, partner, family, friends, what have you, that's helped kind of bring him back to normal when things do get a little out of control.

 

But really, one thing he’s most excited about is the speed at which things are happening in all markets right now, it's a pretty inspiring kind of action, amount of action being driven in healthcare, in manufacturing, in all sorts of fields and industries that have needed that, whether it's digital transformation, whether it's innovation, whether it's collaboration around the world on a cure, on a vaccine, it's really been amazing to watch and he tries to balance the news that he intake with that sort of mentality and information and news stories, as well as like trying to stay up to date on the data on what's happening. What a long winded answer to your question.

 

Me: That's okay, it would be of great influence as a representation because people deal with things in different ways. And it's a question that we ask all our guests. It's interesting to see how different people stay motivated because what may work for you may not work for someone else, so at some point, I'm sure that maybe a blended approach or a little bit of this or a little bit of that will work for some of our audience that is listening to the different episodes. So, we are grateful for all that you shared.

 

Eric shared that they have a couple online resources. One thing that has helped him stay sane is he uses an email app called Superhuman, which he knows is an up and coming solution or product. It basically just helps people maintain their inbox and state inbox zero, it's amazing. It has a lot of keyboard shortcuts and stuff like that that helps you pound through email, which is super important to him because obviously it's more important than ever to stay on top of things, but not letting email be a huge distraction.

 

They also use Quip to help collaborate and not the toothbrush. It is actually a product by Salesforce. It's a great collaboration tool that their whole team has access to and you can build spreadsheets and kind of manage projects and collaborate really well and all that sort of stuff. So, that's been really great.

 

And then other tools that have been immensely helpful to him, they also use a project management tool for both their product design and development and his entire product and design teams use it. It's called Clubhouse and it's great for just managing, knocking out reporting on tasks across the team, so he’s not having to constantly hammer people with questions about what they're doing, it just gives me really good visibility and gives the whole team visibility into what people are working on, how we're tracking towards goals and all that sort of stuff.

 

Me: So, the clubhouse is very much like a productivity app as well for you to ensure that people are actually doing work.

 

Eric shared that he tries not to read too many startup kind of books, but there's a book he read right as they're starting the business, there are two books he read that he really liked.

 

One, for those considering starting a business, there's a book by a guy named Peter Thiel. If you've seen Silicon Valley, he's represented as Peter Gregory on the show. And he wrote a book called Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, which is an amazing book. A lot of people probably talked about this, but it talks a lot about how to build a big business when you're considering starting a company, how to think about the market, how best to carve out your niche in the space, how to expand all that sort of stuff. It's really good. Peter Thiel, he's a little bit controversial, the character but it's good.

 

And then he also read The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz, which is a really good one and definitely in times like this has been very good to go back to and really kind of think about how to work through tough times, which we've been very fortunate right now.

 

But certainly it hasn’t been easy. He’s reading a book right now called Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner. It's about the guys who created IDSoftware, which is the firm that actually created the game Doom. So it's about their story and it's super interesting and kind of a nice, crazy story, but lots of cautionary tales about building a business the right and wrong way. That's for sure.

 

Me: Storytelling and experiences is so important because a lot of us learn from other people's stories and their own experiences.

 

Eric shared that one thing they're really excited about at PactSafe that they're working on as a team is one of the things that has been not a challenge, but really trying to carve out a space is the combination of building a new product and having to explain and educate people on it, as well as really quantifying what the market is? How big is it? What types of customers can they serve? What's the story? That's challenging when you're really building something new.

 

There's no competitive set for what they do, which is a good and bad thing at times because you're not coming up against people that have bought this type of product before. So, they need help understanding how to buy it, what the value is, all that sort of stuff. They've recently partnered with a third party research firm that's going to help them kind of understand and carve out what the space looks like for them and  engaging analysts or research firms like this is a big bet.

 

It's a long, expensive endeavor to kind of help understand how best to build the company and product that's going to be unique and build a new market and help establish where they fit and all that sort of stuff. But overall, the prospects have been really good and he thinks for them, it's giving them a good perspective at a high level on how to think about their role in the customer experience, which is a huge part of what they do.

 

But they haven't done the best job of capturing the highest level of value for what they do. And then secondly, what the space really looks like. So, they've been working in startup world, you kind of work hyper focus at a very low level for what your product can do, because they don't have 5 or 10 years of research and development of a bunch of engineers building this thing out. They've got a limited set of engineers that have been hard at work for 5 years.

 

They have been very in the weeds on the problems that they solve and what these analyst firms help with. And for those that don't know Aragon Research, Forrester,Gartner. These types of firms, you're trying to look at high level macro trends and understand what's happening and what markets exist and what people are trying to do. They're really helpful in shaping what's really happening and articulating it in a clear way that speaks to the real trends in the market.

 

And so, he doesn’t advise it for everybody, but he thinks for people that have similar problems as them, they believe it's going to be transformational. So, super excited about the opportunity and it's something that his whole team is helping them sort out all the way from the CEO down to some of the product marketing folks on his team who are hard at work trying to cast the vision, if you will.

 

Me: Data is king, so the more capitalized you can get on your data to understand specifically what the pain points of your customer avatar is then I'm sure you'll be able to add value to those people if you get extremely granular about it, so the research approach is definitely an excellent technique to get specific on it.

 

  • Eric shared listeners can find him at –

            Twitter – @eprugh

            LinkedIn –Eric Prugh

 

When asked about a quote or saying that helps him refocus, Eric shared that as product person, he has always subscribed to Henry Ford's quote of, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” Because you take customer feedback on how you're building your product or your experience as a very key, important input and data point as you build out your company and product. But ultimately, as the business owner, entrepreneur, you've got all this experience and tribal knowledge and vision for where things could go. And you've been thinking about it every day, 10 times more than any of your customers really would. So ultimately, he has learned a lot by relying on that quote over the years.

Links

 

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