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How to Turn Your Customers into Volunteer MarketersHere we go. How to Turn Your Customers into Volunteer Markerters . One thing that is true about everybody on this session is they all want to grow their businesses, each and every one of us want to grow our businesses. Sometimes when we try to grow our business we want to rely on advertising. Advertising can be difficult, it can be expensive. One thing I know is the very best way to grow your business is to have your customers do it for you. To turn those customers into volunteer marketers. I live in Indiana south of Indianapolis. 91 miles further south of me as a town called Santa Claus Ellie Indiana . There are four things in Santa Claus Indiana, three are corn and the fourth one is this place, Halliday world splash Safari is a combination waterpark and [indiscernible] Park family-owned . Like many of us they have strategic disadvantages. First in the middle of nowhere , I cannot emphasize that enough, a poor choice of location for amusement park. The second is it's family-owned so not a tremendous budget, and third they are independent. They don't have Harry Potter or Mickey Mouse or Spiderman. They have Christmas lights and Thanksgiving land. And Halloween land, that's how it works . but holiday world has a particularly astute understanding of how to turn guests into marketers. They do it two ways . First we walk in the holiday world/Safari and you see a hut or building, and you think maybe it's a restaurant. Upon further inspection you realize it is a free sunscreen station . Unlimited supplies of the cheapest possible sunscreen, North Korean surplus. Totally free and people apply it to handfuls at a time . a lubed up and shiny audience at holiday world. And then further you see a slightly larger hut. Also not a restroom . it is a free soft drink station. Unlimited supplies of Pepsi's, fruit punch, water, tea, coffee. I will suspect many of the thousands tuning in today have been to an amusement park at one point, and you will know usually a soda, soft drink cost approximately $16,000. One bit coin is what they charge , really expensive. These guys given away for nothing, why ? It gives their customers a story to tell. Holiday world/Safari is one of the higher rated parks in the country. Amongst the thousands of five-star reviews, every review on trip advisor says you have to come here for the free soft drinks. They are giving their audience a story to tell. You also need to give your customers a story to tell. This is more important than ever, people have the power , we trust each other more than ever and we trust businesses and organizations less than ever . 50 percent of all purchases are primarily caused by word-of-mouth . Open your wallet, open your purse, let your money on your desk. Half of that money came to you primarily because of word-of-mouth . It has been this way since the beginning . Word-of-mouth was the original marketing, when cavemen's found rocks in their caves, word-of-mouth was Aro -- all they had. It has been important since the very beginning, yet none of us have an actual word-of-mouth strategy . This is the crazy thing. You probably have a marketing strategy, a digital strategy a content strategy, perhaps a social media strategy . a public relations strategy or crisis strategy, nothing but strategies. The one strategy you don't have, a word-of-mouth strategy . We just assume our customers will talk about us, will they? What will they say ? One organization that does have a word-of-mouth strategy is the cheesecake factory restaurant . Many of you I suspect have been to a cheesecake factory. What you may not know is cheesecake factory spends five times less on advertising than any other restaurant. In their competitive sect. How is that, how can it possibly be true. This is how it is true. Here is a tweet . My daughter said her English class required 1000 pages of summer reading and I went to the cheesecake factory and handed her a menu. People will understand this tweet, their menu is absurd. I had my intern permanently borrow a cheesecake factory menu. It turns out it is 5940 words long . That's 14 percent as long as the book I just finished on the same topic . Being a waiter at the cheesecake factory is the worst job ever did you say are you guys ready to order and the answer is no, we are not ready. Chicken is made 85 different ways. That is unnecessary. They will make chicken out of anything. Try our aquarium gravel chicken, it's extraordinary . But it is so oversized, their customers actually talk about it. 38 percent . I have talked to hundreds of cheesecake factory customers and 38 percent of them, have without being prompted, told somebody else about the enormous menu in the past 30 days. Related question. When was the last time you saw a cheesecake factory at? And add pics you probably haven't because the menu is the ad. The customers are volunteer marketers. What this giant menu is, it is a talk trigger . A strategic , operational choice that compels word-of-mouth. It makes word-of-mouth involuntary , your customers cannot help themselves. They have to tell somebody about the special little thing you do. A giant menu . We will learn more in our time together. I want you to understand one thing, I talk trigger is not marketing . It's not a contest or coupon, not a price or promotion. It is an operational decision that creates downstream marketing advantages. The giant menu isn't marketing, and operational choice , it is an operational choice. The best word-of-mouth works just like that. You can't just come up with any idea, any random differentiator , and say this is our word-of-mouth strategy , our talk trigger . your talk trigger has to include these four requirements. Every good talk trigger, every operational can differentiator that compels word-of-mouth, every good story your customers tell on your behalf has to include these four things . The first is it has to be remarkable. In the true definition of the word, worthy of remark. I don't know all of you who have dialed in today but I'm sure I know some of you did I do know this for a fact, nobody and I mean nobody, has ever said let me tell you about this perfectly adequate experience I had. We don't say that. Why ? When we are passing information along, when we are recommending and referring, engaged in word-of-mouth , we want the story we tell our friends to be interesting and different. Novel in some way some is just science . As human beings we are physiologically wired to ignore things that are average, and discuss things that are different. That is why same is lame. Your talk trigger will not work in a system your customers do not expect . if they have seen it before there's no need to talk about it. This doesn't have to be difficult you don't have to have 85 different kinds of chicken to have an effective talk trigger . it can be much simpler. There's a restaurant called Skip's kitchen in Sacramento California . counter service Representative from -- -- restaurant. When your food is ready they bring it out here table. Skips however has a line every day. Just name the 29th best hamburger restaurant in the United States by USA Today newspaper did however they never spent a single penny on advertising ever in the 10 years they have been open. How is this true? They have an amazing Talk Triggers. You place your order before you pay, the counter person whips out a deck of playing cards from under the counter. He spreads them out facedown. Andy says pick a card. You select a card and if you get a joker , your entire meal is free . Whether you ordered for yourself or the soccer team. It is an outstanding Talk Triggers . On average three people a day when. They will win. They make comments on yelp, trip advisor, so much so you see in the picture, the sign of skips is hard to miss. In Sacramento many people just call it that joker restaurant. The second thing your Talk Triggers must include is it has to be repeatable. Everybody gets free sunscreen at holiday world. Everybody at the cheesecake factory gets the menu . everybody gets to play the joker game at skips chicken kitchen. The talk trigger must be repeatable this is different than what you would see in a lot of marketing presentations. Because what we talk about today in many cases is surprise and delight. Surprise and delight is when you take one customer in one circumstance and you treat them disproportionately well, because you hope that customer will share on social media and it will go viral. Hotels tend to do this. When customer checks into a room and there's a live panda bear on the bed with a eucalyptus tree. That can work. But that is a gimmick. It is not a strategy. Surprise and delight is a stunt, a lottery ticket, not a strategy. It's something you hope will work , but you can't rely on that day after day. You are much better off having your Talk Triggers be something different you do that your customers notice, every day. This is one of my favorite examples. Just told me a couple of weeks ago, I gave a presentation and someone told me the story, there is a physician in Seattle who only does vasectomy surgery. His name is Dr Snip . That is pretty memorable in and of itself. It is not actually the Talk Triggers did the talk trigger is every patient on the way out the door gets this silver pocketknife that says the vasectomy clinic . So you have your pocketknife with your boys, or on the golf course, and they say where did you get the knife did I say it Dr Snip's vasectomy clinic . Everybody at Dr Snip's gets a knife did not just the 100 patient, not just on Friday, everybody gets the knife. It has to be repeatable. The third thing your talk trigger must be is reasonable. Sometimes in business we think all right, we are fighting for attention and attention is hard to come by now. What we have to do is come up with something really big, really brash, really bold. We have to give away a panda bear, or someone can win an island or something. You don't have to do that . None of the things I've told you about our dramatic, they are noticeable. They are not enormous . If I say to you you get a car and you get a car and you get a car, who does that? Oprah. Who else? Nobody else . You would not believe it if somebody else did it. When you deliver to your customers experiences that are two grand it doesn't create conversation it creates suspicion . People say wait a second, they don't have an island to give away, what are the rules. What you are looking for is a talk trigger that's in the Goldilocks zone. It is interesting enough to be talk about but not so big it is untrustworthy. You want something in the middle. For example if I show you this picture, who knows what hotel chain I am talking about? Some of you right now are thinking Doubletree and you're exactly right. Doubletree hotels by Hilton has been giving out warm chocolate chip cookies to every guest, every day , for 30 years. 30 years. On average, they give out 75,000 cookies every day. A lot of cookies. I interview -- interviewed hundreds of customers and 34 percent of them have talked about the cookie to somebody else in the past 30 days . Which means on average about 25,500 people a day talk about this warm chocolate chip cookie. When was the last time you saw Doubletree at? You probably haven't . The cookie is there add . the guest are volunteer marketers . If you go to twitter, search Doubletree plus cookie, you will see a tweet after tweet, photos, videos. Here Diane, from Kentucky , these are the best cookies in the world, which they are not by the way. They are good, don't get me wrong. In the pantheon of cookies given to me by a hotel, they are the best. But Diane goes on to say I try to stay always at Doubletree just to get them. Let's analyze this. Here is a person who is sharp enough to have a twitter account . Sharp enough to write a tweet that uses correct spelling and punctuation. Yet this person , who is rational, is making a hotel choice based solely on a chocolate chip cookie. Not location or price , or do they have a restaurant, bar, pool, comfy bed. It's based on a chocolate chip cookie. It is just a cookie. You don't have to overthink your Talk Triggers . It doesn't have to be giant, just talk about. And the fourth thing is must be relevant, to make sense in the context of who you are and what you do. The pocketknife vasectomy surgeon makes sense. >> J silver is a locksmith in Manhattan, he is the highest rated locksmith in Manhattan. One of the highest rated business in all of New York City which is a pretty high bar to clear. I would go ahead and say that Jay probably has the best hair of any locksmith I am aware of. Like a soap opera act an actor that works on locks. A perfect Talk Triggers . When he finishes working on your business, he does a security audit of your business for free. And he oils every single lock, window and door, for free. This is an actual review of J on yelp. I almost want to get locked out again. Yeah, my experience was that great. That is a strong testimonial . His Talk Triggers worked because it was relevant . He was a locksmith. If he does a security audit and oils your locks, I get that. But turn the tables, imagine he comes to your house and re-keys your front door. Before he leaves he says do you want a warm chocolate chip cookie that I made in my van? You would be like no . that is creepy and weird and probably you. Yucky. What if he says I just finished your house, would you like some sunscreen for free? That is strange. Or if Doubletree said would you like us to do a security audit of your hotel room? Should I be concerned? Your Talk Triggers has to be relevant . Not just about conversation, if you just want conversation if somebody a life panda bear. That's how your customers will tell a consistent story day after day, be consistent. >> So I told you about the four ingredients your differentiator must have. I would like to share with you today for styles of doing this. The first one is what we talked about the most. Talk about generosity, when you do something more generous than your customers expect, or anticipate . Oiling your locks is generosity, so is the free cookie. The easiest to architect in your organization , many of the examples I have show you, are from business to consumer companies. You can do this just as well and perhaps better, because it's less expected. I would like to introduce you to Windsor One . this is a manufacturer of high-end wood trim. Crown molding , wainscoting cocktail rails, nice work -- chair rails, nice work. As a manufacturer they have a challenge that is consistent with manufacturers. They have a pretty big product line . How do they tell their prospective customers all of the things they sell? What they used to do was spend a considerable amount of money on magazine advertisement. Each featured a number of different products, like a brochure . They weren't getting any phone calls. It wasn't generating demonstrable leads or sales. They decided to go a different way and use a Talk Triggers . Now every single Cheesecake Factory 12 Windsor One board includes this stamp. Prime all cuts, then it says call Kurt for a shirt with the phone number. So you have us all in your like, who is Kurt? Curiosity gets the best of you. The phone rings and it's Kurt. And they say who is this, this is Jay . I'm remodeling a church. Are you a fat guy? Excuse me. I want to see what size shirt you need. Are there other guys in your group. Five. And what product are you using ? I am using this one and this one it We also make this product in this product, this variation, this size, this color. Is an audio brochure. They send out a box including shirts for everyone in the crew, and samples of every product discussed on the call . The company has grown considerably since they started this program. They spend now almost nothing on magazine advertisement . if you drive by a workplace and you see a shot a shirt that says dot would? Now you know where it came from. Got would? A timesaver, a big one. You can sometimes be quicker and answer the phone more rapidly, respond to emails faster. Or you can get more creative. There's a business called Paragon Honda also in New York City. Like most auto dealerships they make a considerable portion of their revenue on service more so than sales . in New York the traffic, it's hard to get cars to the dealership and get them back to customers, holding is a hassle. They thought maybe what we should do is build for new service centers. Each corner of the city . that is really expensive because of the real estate prices. And they said no, let's come up with something different. Wait a second, when do our customers not be there cars? When they are sleeping. What they do now, they come to your house when you get home. They pick up the car and take it to the dealership. They fix it at night like magical elves and bring it back to your house before you leave for work in the morning. If that happened to you would you talk about it? I am pretty darn sure you would. A responsiveness talk trigger. And the third type, usefulness . you are more useful than your customers expect you to be . particularly good for professional services. You can use this one with ease . My friend Joe is a realtor in Tallahassee Florida. The thing about realtors in all professional service providers, consultants like me, accountants, attorneys, advisors, even physicians . Generally speaking they have a website that says something like behold the awesome power of my expertise. I know things you could possibly never know. Do not try this yourself, you should pay me instead. That's basically what the website says. That is essentially the message. Joe is different. He only represents sellers. If you want to buy he doesn't do that. He only represents sellers that have a home between 200,000 and $400,000. It's based on the market you live in, but usually , if you have a home between $200,000 and $400,000, you typically don't have a ton of equity in the home. It is common in that segment that people think I could use a realtor . Or maybe I could sell the house myself. And I could keep the commission right. Joe knows this. Instead of having a website like everybody else that says I'm such a great realtor you should work with me, he sat down and wrote a 60 page, free downloadable PDF, called how to sell a home on your own . Word for Word what to do. Who to call. The paperwork you need, step-by-step. I interviewed Joe for a book I wrote. I said I don't get this. It seems to me that what you have done is given people exactly what they need to not hire you. I know it seems like that he said , but what you don't understand is that people get to about page 19 , and they realize holy cow it's harder than I thought to sell a home on your own. I don't have this amount of time. It is his number one source of customers because his name and email are on every page. Sometimes the best way to get your customers talking is to just give away what you know. I have learned in my 25 years as a consultant, a list of ingredients doesn't make somebody a chef. >> The fourth type of Talk Triggers is one that frankly wouldn't have made the list three years ago. It is talkable empathy . When you are more human to your customers. It should be the default, how we treated customers, with warmth and empathy. But I think, I think, we can agree that we are in an era of empathy deficit. In business, in life, in politics, the default is no longer kindness and humanity. It is something else. When you go back to that and treat your customers with disproportionate empathy, people will talk about it. There is plenty of oxygen on the high road. When you find roads to care about your customers more they will notice and talk about it. It doesn't have to be hard. Lynn is an oral surgeon in New Jersey, he operates in the Connecticut tri-state area . There are hundreds of oral surgeons in that region. He is highest rated number one highest rated , also the only one never sued by a patient. Despite the fact he is not the best surgeon, he told me this, he said I'm really good but I'm not the best. I do think I have the best relationship with my patients. How? Talkable empathy . Every Friday you see his office staff given a list of phone numbers. Every Saturday morning he called each of those numbers and says I am Glenn. Your oral surgeon . I understand you are coming to the office for the very first time next week. Before you come in, do you have any questions? People simply can't believe it . I'm sure many of us have had an oral surgery procedure, tooth extraction, root canal or what have you. When that happens sometimes your oral surgeon will cover, call after and say how are you, are you bleeding? But you've never had a physician call you before you step foot in the office. It is simply not done. Why? Glenn told me every single day, every day, somebody calls and says I have to drive 12 miles out of my way, passing seven other oral surgeons to get to you. But I want you to be my doctor because you are the one that called my friend Shirley, before she ever came in the office. Talk about empathy . So I have showed you the four different things that a Talk Triggers must contain . and I talked to about four different types, and there is a six step process for how you, anyone, can create and implement Talk Triggers's in your business . It is the exact same process that my team and I use to build these kind of programs for companies around the world. If you go to SCORE , you can download the free six step guide that will give you insight on how to do that. A couple of notes. The wrong way to do this is to sit in a room and come up with an idea. If it was that easy you would already be doing it. The key to Talk Trigger word-of-mouth is to understand your customers, and what they expect. So what you want to do is first, document all the different touch points that you have with your customers. All the different times you interact with them, phone, face-to-face, email. Map all those points out . A customer journey map. And the best way to do this is to interview three types of customers. Five or six in each category. Interview new customers , those relatively new to your business . interview longtime customers, and interview some lost customers. >> New, old and lost. In each of those groups, what you want to ask them is for each of these test points, -- touch points, what did you expect was going to happen? Think about the oral surgeon, he called the customers and he said you made an appointment, what do you expect would happen next? Any rational person would say on the day of my appointment I would show up, then I would fill out paperwork. You make the phone calls you then understand what the expectations are. Once you understand what people expect, you then know what they do not expect. And your talk trigger your strategic operational differentiator that creates word-of-mouth, lives in that gap between what people expect, and what they don't expect. What they don't expect is what creates the conversation. So you have to map it out and understand what it is that your customers think is going to happen. And then at one point in the process you do something differently. If you go to a restaurant you would expect that the menu will have 20 options. You don't expect going to Cheesecake Factory where they have 400 options, 85 of which are chicken . They do something you don't expect in the context of that experience. That's why when people asked me, Jay I am a plumber give me an idea. Or I'm a nonprofit, give me an idea. You can't just come up with it. You have to know what your customers expect, and each of those steps in the process, and deliver one thing that they don't expect. Does that make sense? SCORE . The best way, the very best way to build your business, certainly the least expensive, is for your customers to do it for you. They will do it, they will tell that story over, and over, and over, as long as you make it relevant, repeatable, reasonable and most of all remarkable. It also has to be simple which is not one in the graphic, but what I want to emphasize, one of the things that we do in my consulting firm on these programs, is we put these Talk Trigger's through a child test. We will find somebody's kid on my team and my children are older so they can't do it. But a child like nine or 10, something like that. And we explain the Talk Trigger to the child . You go to a restaurant and they without a card, and if you pick out a joker you when your winter . If a child can tell that story to somebody else in a way that a person understands and gets it, that is a good filtering mechanism for these word-of-mouth mechanisms. You don't want to think through the thing, it has to be easy enough and simple enough , memorable enough, straightforward enough that a child can pass it on. A lot of times what happens to people overcomplicated. They try to make the differentiator, with terms and conditions. Skip told me one time, we originally thought if you pulled a joker , we would give you $10 off, or a buy one get one. It is so much easier to tell if you are just a winner. It is clearer that way. Faster, easier story to tell. Do you ever hear somebody tell a joke and they have way too much detail. Way too much. Characters in all of this extraneous information . that sometimes what happens with Talk Trigger . Too much stuff. I just saw a question pop up, a mistake on our side, if you go to SCORE , use lowercase . That should pop up, apologies if there's confusion on that. Put it all in lowercase. Remember this competency doesn't create conversation . We make the mistake all the time that if we just run a good business, people talk about us. You know what, all of the competitors are good also or they wouldn't be in business. Everybody is good or they're not in business very long. Running a good business isn't enough to get people to talk about you. Give them a story to tell. Same is lame. Have the courage to do one thing different. One thing they don't expect. One thing that is worthy of remark. If you give your customers a story to tell, and it meets the conditions we talked about here, I can promise you they will tell it. And that story they tell about you, the thing that you do different, the one little thing that operational decision, that is your Talk Trigger . Almost every one of the stories are things people have told me about. Either an event, send me an email, found me on Twitter or Facebook. And said I have one for you. Dr Snip for example, I learned about that two weeks ago . When you create your own Talk Trigger , and I am confident you will, I hope you will because it will build your business. When you roll it out send me something to let me know. I am very hungry always for new examples, I would love to tell your story. To groups like this and all around the world. Don't forget, score , get your free six step guide . Thank you so much for taking the time and I appreciate your interest and enthusiasm, and your participation. Alexa, questions? We sure do . Jay thank you so much . we will move into the Q&A portion of the webinar. We will do our best to address as many questions as possible. In the time remaining. We do typically receive more questions than we have time to answer . If we don't have an opportunity to get your question and you would like as additional assistance, we encourage you to connect with a SCORE mentor , if you're not already working with one after today's webinar . I will be posting links in just a moment that you can click to submit a request, and also there is score resources SCORE resources in the platform. So with that, let's go ahead and jump on these questions. Jay , the first question comes from Nick who would like to know how you decide which of the different types of Talk Trigger's you will pursue . Is it just personal preference or is there a standard approach you should be using to decide? Excellent question, very perspective perceptive. It is based on the cultural DNA of your organization. Sometimes you want to be talk of Lee responsive, but that's not the type of company you are, [indiscernible]. What we discover is people come to their decision a couple of different ways. For one, what feels right in the spirit of your organization. And then number two, what is actually doable. Remember you will give this to every customer every time. Sometimes it seems like a great idea but you cannot make it work, it is a bridge too far. So one of the steps we articulate, is creating what we call candidate triggers, I recommend this approach. What you want to come up with is 4 to 6 ideas , that would be cool and we could do that. It is possible. And then we have the chart, you examine each of those ideas, on two dimensions. One is perceived talk ability. How much conversation, how remarkable if you will, is the idea. Versus how operationally complex is it to execute. What you want is a trigger that's in the middle of both. It is doable, and also talkable . It helps if you graph those out against one another . that helps you figure it out. One thing that is interesting, there's a talkable attitude . Makes you do something wacky and wild or different. Just do something unusual. The talkable with attitude is most often with business to business . Most businesses are not wild and wacky. So then it definitely stands out. The next question is coming from several folks attending today . What if you are new to business and you don't have any customers? How does this work? Great question. What you would want to do is interview , if you have a business, and you just don't have an idea that's different but if you know what business you will be in. What you want to do is talk to people, four or five conversations should suffice, who are the types of customers you think you want. Let's say, I will make something up, so you will open a new preschool in your town. What you want to do is go to interviews with 4 to 6 moms that have kids of the age that might be in your preschool. And say I know you arty have your kids in a different preschool but can I buy you lunch and ask you some questions. What you want to do is the same thing I talked about earlier. Say let's talk about the different touch points. There is a tour of the preschool, a point at which you talk about the visa preschool, then you enrolled your kid in and every day you drop your kid off . there's a report card thing . and there's the pickup did all the different touch points of preschool did ask those potential customers, people of the same demographic , characteristics of your target customers, what would you expect ? When you drop off your child, what do you expect? What you want to be doing is listening and taking really good notes . because you might say all right what you expect to happen is X, what we will do is Y. That is your talk trigger. Okay. The next question comes from Janik . Who is asking what is the relationship between Talk Trigger's and social media monitor ? >> Let me say it this way, once you have your Talk Trigger , step six in the process, once you have your Talk Trigger the best way is to amplify your trigger . The way that works is you use social media, other technology, tactics, and just occasionally remind customers of your differentiator . For example the Doubletree cookies . Every once in a while on social media, Doubletree will talk about the cookie. They put out a recipe book for how to make your own. If anyone has seen a hotel shuttle to the Doubletree Hotel shuttle is a giant picture of a cookie . They are not running TV commercials that say we make cookies, they are just reminding you on occasion of the talk trigger. Social media is a good way to do that. Social media monitoring is an excellent way, if your consumer company , to monitor and determine whether or not your Talk Trigger is creating conversation. What you want to do is monitor for all of your brand and see if people are posting pictures of your Talk Trigger, talking about your Talk Trigger . so the monitoring pieces some of the mathematical measurement. The proof point of the effectiveness of your differentiator. All right. Jay the next question is from John . would you say Talk Trigger are best kept as a surprise to customers to have the greatest effect? Yes in a way. Once they expect it, once they know it's going to happen, it may not have the same impact. However, think about it this way the whole idea of a Talk Trigger is a customer tells a potential customer. That being the case they probably have already heard about it. See what I'm saying. If I say to you guess what, when you go to holiday world you get free sunscreen. And then that's cool . and then when they go, there is the sunscreen that Alexa told me about. It is less of a surprise , but hopefully it is still not working -- noteworthy that I tell somebody else . Once it goes from the first generation to the second-generation customer, to the third generation of the surprise is not they are. Not the . but they will tell the next generation, does that make sense? The next question is from Maria. Jay at what point in your business would you recommend focusing on creating a Talk Trigger ? I would say before anything else other than your core delivery or whatever . Once you have a differentiator, a Talk Trigger , something customers want to tell each other about , it makes every other form of acquisition easier. If you have a talk trigger it makes sales easier, traditional marketing easier, social media easier, customer service easier. It becomes a foundational piece of your organization. Once you know you've dialed in whatever it is you sale, okay the operations are sound. The next thing is work on the talk trigger I believe. Okay, the next question from Erica. She would like to know how often would you recommend changing the Talk Trigger strategy ? That's an interesting question. Let me answer this way. In theory never. Doubletree has been giving out a cookie for 30 years. As a practical matter Erica, it doesn't always work like that. For a couple of reasons, for one sometimes people steal your idea . You may remember back in the day, I should look it up, maybe eight years ago. Westin hotels did the heavenly bed . The premise was they were going to have the company asked beds in any hotel the most comfortable beds in the any old Dell . in any hotel . Almost instantaneously other hotels, Marriott, Hilton Garden, they rolled out their own version . It was no longer unique enough, not remarkable enough, to work as a Talk Trigger . Sometimes that happens and you have to go back to the drawing board. And sometimes the world changes in your Talk Trigger isn't as interesting as it was. You may remember , for a number of years, I want to say 20 years, enterprise Rent-A-Car had a talk trigger. There talk trigger was we will pick you up. The idea was you could have someone from enterprise come to your house and bring you a car, take your car back to you, that was pretty neat. Hurts didn't , Avis didn't . when it's not interesting anymore is when everybody has uber , why do I need the rental car guy to pick me up? So enterprise doesn't use it anymore. Erica, if you get lucky you can use the same, you should never change it if it's working. You only change if it is not working. To reasons it wouldn't work as it got copied, or it doesn't make sense anymore. >> Okay Jay, the next question is from Robin . Are there businesses where a Talk Trigger simply isn't reasonable ? I don't think so. I haven't found one yet. Even businesses that are, let me say this. The only type of businesses where I would say a Talk Trigger could be a little dicey, are in businesses where the customers themselves are not usually keen on advertising to their friends that they are a customer of that business. If you are running an opioid addiction clinic. It is perhaps unlikely your customers are going to want to advertise how great you are to other people. However, in circumstances like that, what you want is a talk trigger that impacts the business-to-business side. A story, one of my favorite examples is a company called America collect. In Wisconsin outside of Green Bay. They are a medical collection company. Their whole business is based on calling people and chasing down debt owed to hospitals and medical organizations. Most people don't think that word-of-mouth. However they have an extraordinary Talk Trigger . Their slogan , the DNA of the organization , their entire being is called ridiculously nice collections. And that is what they are. Extraordinarily kind, sympathetic. So much so more than 50 percent of their employees are people they once called to collect from. It worked so well in the medical collections business, it's common to do what they call a shoot out. Where they take half of their debt and give it to one company and half the debt to give to another company. And this company has one 1997 of the last 2000 shootouts. Is that a talk trigger for the people they are calling, maybe. It's certainly noticeable and talk about . but if a collection company is calling you're not saying to your friends this collection company is so nice. That's probably not something you put on Facebook. But the customers, hospitals that hire them , absolutely talk about the room approach. When you might consider not doing talk triggers is when your customers don't want to talk about going to your business. You can still do it, just on the business-to-business side. Okay, Jay we have time for one last question. On this one, this comes from Carol. She wants to know if you could give a couple of examples of business-to-business talk triggers, and also wants to know if you can share your companies talk trigger. My company, I have two. On the consulting side , we answer the email superfast , the phone superfast did a special email address only clients get. We respond instantaneously. Responsiveness is one we use. For me as a speaker you can see on the screen, I always wear super crazy plaid suits . that is my talk trigger , it's on my website and my video. And I didn't realize it was a talk trigger until two years ago to three years ago. I was at an event and they said where's the do that where's the plaid suit. Now they want me to wear it. It's not an accident. So now it is a Talk Trigger . That is how we do it. What was the first part? Carol wanted to know if you could give a couple of examples for B2B. There are times in the book. One is a software company in Toronto , they use talk about attitude, weird and Iraqi wacky, hot pink . Some of you may know the business uber conference , the on hold music is hilarious. Written by their CEO. It's really funny on hold music so people really the only -- literally sign up for the hold music. There is a number of other ones in the book. As I mentioned earlier, the be to be talk triggers actually more effective, because you don't see them coming . It is rare for businesses to do that kind of thing so when you do it well it really stands out. Those are all the questions we have time for today. If we did not have a chance to address your question, we encourage you to connect with a SCORE mentor if you're not already working with a mentor to assist you. To help you apply the strategies presented today. As a reminder, we will be sending you a link to the recording of the session, as well as the presentation slide deck. The deck does include that link to the free resources for the six step guide . Just make sure you do lowercase instead of all caps. You will have that in a little bit to reference as well. And also I am excited to announce the registration for the SCORE small business success virtual conference, held November 8 . Registration just opened . For those of you who have not attended our virtual conference before, this is a half-day cup three event, consisting of nine educational webinars, one-on-one mentoring, exhibitor booths, networking chat rooms, resources and much more. We hope you will sign up and join us on November 8 . On behalf of SCORE I would like to thank you all so much for attending today . I would like to give a very big thank you to Jay Baer for presenting with us as well. Jay thank you so much for being here . My pleasure, thanks everybody. Thanks again everyone, we hope you have a great rest of your day and take care. [Event concluded] ................
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