Minter Dialogue with Jay Baer

Please send me your questions — as an audio file if you’d like — to nminterdial@gmail.com. Otherwise, below, you’ll find the show notes and, of course, you are invited to comment. If you liked the podcast, please take a moment to rate it here.

To connect with Jay Baer:

• Check out Jay’s eponymous site here
• Find/buy Jay Baer’s book, “Time To Win,” here
• Find/follow Jay Baer on LinkedIn
• Find/follow Jay on X (formerly Twitter)

Other mentions/sites:

• Drift.ai
• Kuki.ai
• First interview with Jay Baer in 2019

Further resources for the Minter Dialogue podcast:

Meanwhile, you can find my other interviews on the Minter Dialogue Show in this podcast tab, on Megaphone or via Apple Podcasts. If you like the show, please go over to rate this podcast via RateThisPodcast! And for the francophones reading this, if you want to get more podcasts, you can also find my radio show en français over at: MinterDial.fr, on Megaphone or in iTunes.
Music credit: The jingle at the beginning of the show is courtesy of my friend, Pierre Journel, author of the Guitar Channel. And, the new sign-off music is “A Convinced Man,” a song I co-wrote and recorded with Stephanie Singer back in the late 1980s (please excuse the quality of the sound!).

Transcription courtesy of Flowsend.ai, an AI full-service for podcasters

Minter Dial:

Jay Baer back on the show we last had you on five years ago. You are a titan, a lovely man, good friend, and you’ve written this wonderful little book, but big in power called Time to Win. In your own words. Jay, for those who don’t know you, who is Jay Baer

Jay Baer:

Thanks for the opportunity to be back on the show. I can’t believe it’s been five years. That astonishes me. Always good to see you. I am a business growth and customer experience researcher, author, expert and advisor. I’ve been doing these things for some three decades. I started in digital marketing, in particular, when domain names were still free. So, I started very, very early and have had a series of global professional services firms helping the world’s most interesting companies level up in the eyes of their customers. And now I spend most of my time writing, giving presentations and advising the world on the best tequilas they should drink.

Minter Dial:

Hopefully we’re going to slip some tequila talk in there in a moment. Can do the idea of naming or branding and the URL, obviously when you write books, to what extent are you looking at the dot coms or the cos or whatever URL’s when you write a book, is timetowin.com a part of finding it? That’s the title I want. Or is it something sort of anecdotal?

Jay Baer:

Great question. And a lot of my books are sort of snappy. Titles like that, Talk Triggers, Hug Your Haters, et cetera. So, usually that is the second piece. So, first piece is what is the actual premise? What is the advice that I’m trying to impart to readers in this sort of two-to-three-year period is sort of how I think about it. I’m not a futurist, I’m not a genius like you. I am just somebody who can translate the near future to the present day. And I recognize patterns really well. So, what I try to do is find a pattern that businesspeople can use to outperform their competitors over a defined time horizon. Which is why I’ve written books about social media and content marketing and social business and customer service, et cetera. But all of those things have already happened. Now, people did the things that I advised, and so now it’s always, what’s the next thing that I can explain to somebody that they should do that maybe they haven’t thought yet that they can capitalize upon for a window of 24 to 36 months. So, I start with the idea and it’s usually recognizing a pattern. And I have a very specific reason why I came up with this idea. And then once I have the premise, I’ll come up with some very terrible, vague, not usable title ideas and I’ll just sort of let that soak around in my head until I come up with the title. And then, of course, as you point out, that it’s the mad dash to domain registry to hope that something is available.

Minter Dial:

Time slash or time hyphen to win.

Jay Baer:

Exactly. Yeah. Time to Win. Yeah, you really start to. But we’re lucky. This is the Time to Win.com. So, we got lucky with it.

Minter Dial:

I did want to just hearken back to your Hug Your Haters, and something that I feel is ironically also useful is hug your lovers.

Jay Baer:

Yep.

Minter Dial:

It feels like there’s so much loneliness out there that there is so much fear out there and contact and, and actually physical moments. We’ve forgotten the art of hugging, no.

Jay Baer:

Doubt both metaphorically and actually, I think that’s very, very true. And you know this well. You see the artificial empathy right behind you. We unfortunately live in an era of empathy deficit. And I’ve talked about this before, like, so I come from a very, very long line of entrepreneurs and small business owners. My family’s been self-employed directly straight through since like 1842 or something. And love that. It’s crazy. I’m a 7th generation entrepreneur founded in 1842. Doesn’t sound entrepreneurial, you know what I mean? I know, exactly, exactly. It’s a series of businesses. But in my whole life, never had a conversation with my dad or my grandfather, both now since past, about treating either friends or customers or associates or family with dignity and respect and kindness and love. Never a single conversation because it wasn’t a conversation that you ever had to have. It was de facto, it was assumed. And I don’t think just in my family, I think in most families, but somewhere along the way, we kind of lost our way and now we’re in this empathy deficit period, which makes me very sad as a human being, and I think you as well. But I will say as a business strategist, it’s a huge opportunity because customers expect to be treated so shabbily now that if you just do a modicum of anything right, it stands out like crazy. You get so much extra credit for being 1% above mediocre in terms of your empathy level that it’s a huge opportunity.

Minter Dial:

All right, well, I would like to just lean into that in a moment for, as in, why is it that companies don’t do that? I mean, how is it that we’ve gotten to a position where commercially supposedly viable businesses only can spare a modicum of time to do the strict minimum. I mean, how is it that they’ve lost the plot? What is it that’s pushed them off the right north?

Jay Baer:

I mean, I think it’s praying at the altar of efficiency. I mean, almost by definition, true empathy is circumstantial, right? Because the definition is, yeah, it’s understanding and sharing the feelings of another person. That’s the actual definition of empathy. And so, that is absolutely driven by the person that you’re interacting with and what their situation is at that time. And so, it’s very difficult to say this is exactly how we’re going to handle all the things, all the times when those things and the people necessarily change. And so, it does potentially cost more time, more human capital, resources to be empathetic. And you can’t document a process and a procedure as tightly as perhaps some organizations would want. And then there’s a larger sort of western business culture problem, which I wrote about a few times, which is this idea that service, customer service, client service, any sort of service line item, is typically viewed as a cost, not as an investment. And so, those costs want to be shaved and reduced, not invested in. But what’s hilarious about that is, you well know, the documentation on the Roi of high levels of service and the Roi of disproportionate empathy is almost inarguable. And so, the case studies are there, the numbers are there. But yet ultimately, when it comes down to spreadsheets, people say, well, how can we save money on service?

Minter Dial:

Well, the thing about service, oftentimes, I think, is that there are humans involved, and humans are messy, messy people, right? At least at the very minimum, there are people behind the keyboards providing the service. Maybe in the future it will be AI. But the idea of empathy, love, I mean, in my business, we had this unofficial title of a woman called the director of love. And can you imagine going to some rational CEO and saying, well, I want to hire a director of love. What is the Ira Ri of that? You know, screw you. Get with the program. Let’s go with efficiencies. And it doesn’t seem like we have time for love. We don’t have time for empathy or listening or relationships.

Jay Baer:

Yeah, that’s the, and that’s the tricky part about this, about this new work. The Time to Win is that efficiency can be the enemy of empathy, but it doesn’t have to be. And that’s one of the things I try and point out in the book and in the public presentation surrounding this work is that, yes, the data is very clear on this. People care about their time more than ever. They want things faster. That’s not going to change. I really don’t foresee a period of time where people say, you know what, I’ve been thinking, and I think next time, why don’t you just do that more slowly? I just don’t see that as a practical scenario. Consequently, we’ve got to lean into responsiveness is really a way to separate our businesses from competitors. And you raise a really smart point. We’ve got to be able to do it in a way that customers still feel some kind of connection to the brand, because if they don’t, then that differentiation will be lost as quickly as it’s won.

Minter Dial:

So, I want to get to time later for the bulk of what we talk about. But you wrote to win and it made me think about actually what is success and how do you evaluate the winning part as opposed to the time part.

Jay Baer:

Yeah, great question. What we’ve found, not just in my research, but in the research of others, is that experience is now the primary decision tree that people use when they buy goods and services. That product differentiation and even price differentiation has been reduced in importance. And experiential differentiation is what often carries the day. And that can take many forms in many contexts. And so, when we say the Time to Win, it’s almost a double meaning there. Number one, obviously it is about time and about responsiveness. But increasingly, if you are the fastest in your category, that will yield disproportionately positive business outcomes, both in net new customer acquisition and in customer retention and churn reduction. And the documentation on that’s in the book, and it’s pretty clear you can meaningfully outperform competitors if you are the fastest in your category. But as I mentioned earlier, you can’t do that forever because every single thing, and I say this with as much modesty as possible, everything that contained in this book is going to happen. Everybody is going to do it. Every recommendation in there you’re going to do, because eventually you won’t have a choice. Customers will simply demand it of you. So, the choice is pretty clear today. You can either start on this now and lean into speed as a competitive differentiator and outperform competitors who will wait, or you can wait and then be the laggards that have to figure out how to catch up two years from now. And so, the businesses that are like, yes, I get it, companies like lemonade, for example, the insurance organization that’s AI powered, that processes claims in a matter of seconds. The most profitable insurance company in the US. Highest average revenue per employee, highest customer satisfaction ratings. Their whole company is built on speed. They have already figured it out. So, it is simply a choice, but it’s a choice that you won’t have much longer because you’ll just be forced to do it.

Minter Dial:

You write, and I think it’s the choice between fast, best and cheapest.

Jay Baer:

Yeah. Isn’t it something good, fast cheap is how we say it in the US. Yep.

Minter Dial:

Good, fast cheap. And you can only take two, but it feels like fast is becoming the sine qua non.

Jay Baer:

Yeah, yeah. And you can be fast and good, or you can be fast and inexpensive, but you better be fast. That one is becoming non-negotiable.

Minter Dial:

Right. Well, so things like taking care of people’s time, being a steward of their time, but also being aware of their expectations or setting expectations, because, I mean, as much as we might be in Millie, whatever split moments of a second in certain latencies and technologies, if we set up for always being the fastest, the split second, you know, like a trader who’s trying to say, well, I have the least latency on my bandwidth, someone’s going to going to go faster, or maybe your system will fail and it feels like it’s going to always have to teach her on a razor blade the long term success when fast is your supposed competitive advantage.

Jay Baer:

William so I think there’s two pieces to that. One is the setting of expectations. And what we found in the research for this book and then subsequent work once it was published, is that the delivery of responsiveness versus expectations for customers is actually more important than the raw speed. So, being slightly faster than they anticipate is more important than being ten minutes faster. The key to that, though, is knowing what they anticipate. Because if you don’t set speed expectations, so many things now are so fast in a way that they didn’t used to be. I mean, Amazon’s a perfect example that if you don’t tell people how long it should take, they will assume it can be milliseconds, because in many other parts of their life it is. I’ll tell you a funny story about that. So, my friend Don is an airline pilot, and he’s so great at this idea of sort of under promising and over delivering with responsiveness. So, he gets an his headset, right, and air traffic control says, oh, there’s a plane behind you. You can’t back out of the gate. We expect a twelve minute delay. So, he gets on the intercom and says, hey, it’s Captain Don. Welcome. The flight Phoenix to Philadelphia. There’s a plane behind us. Air traffic control says it’s going to be a 15 minutes delay. He always increases it. And then when they get back on, okay, you can leave, like, well, guess what? It’s only been eleven minutes and everybody’s, everybody’s delighted, right? He saved us four minutes. It is such a, it’s such a simple but effective trick, and a lot of it is just customer psychology.

Minter Dial:

I love that story, Jay. I mean, it does remind me, because I worked in the travel industry a lot, how the airlines announce their arrival times, and it is such a cushion of margin for delays, if you will, within there. We’re on time.

Jay Baer:

What?

Minter Dial:

Are you kidding me? Yeah. How many freaking times have you canceled or something and so forth? You see that? But I mean, the issue is with this time, if you haven’t got. It feels like if you don’t have artificial intelligence humming already, you’re going to be behind the time.

Jay Baer:

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I don’t know. Humming but certainly, I think certainly you have to have a pathway towards adoption and integration now, or certainly this summer, or you really are going to start falling behind in most industries. You’re not going to have it all figured out. You’ll probably never have it all figured out because the pace of change in AI is rapid enough that I don’t know that anybody will ever be able to stay at that pace. But pretty quickly, we’re going to start to see haves and have nots in terms of business performance. There’s organizations now that are replacing huge swaths of their customer contact teams with AI. And you’d think, oh, those robots can’t do as good of a job as people. And actually the outcomes are as good or better. And I hate to say that, but the rumored job loss and skill retraining is all true. It’s going to happen. I really believe that it’s going to have manifest consequences for labor in every country or every developed country, and I think it’s going to happen sooner than we anticipate.

Minter Dial:

Well, you write about speed, but you also say too fast is not necessarily good. With you talking about your enchiladas and all that, there are a few things I was thinking about, but one is I have a friend who’s a person in the United Kingdom who’s made a chatbot that is absolutely stunningly amazing. This won the Loebner Prize, which is essentially the Turing test, something like six out of ten years time.

Jay Baer:

Wow.

Minter Dial:

And it’s an amazing chatbot called Kuki. And the oddness is that it replies so quickly.

Jay Baer:

Yeah. Just have to think about it.

Minter Dial:

Yeah. And you therefore know it’s not a human being forgetting the typing speed. And that speed of reaction is inauthentic, felt as such. And if you want to, for example, I talk or work a lot around the ideas of a therapeutic AI, and if you want to have a proper engagement, you don’t want an immediate answer to everything.

Jay Baer:

Right?

Minter Dial:

Just by once you’ve typed, you type in your message, I’ve got a situation. I’m feeling anxious, so I’m digesting that as I write that, if immediately the bot says, oh, tell me about your anxiety. Wait a second. I’m still digesting as I’ve typed. It might be the right question, but you kind of need to have that human pause. And somehow, in our world of high-speed interactions ever going faster, this notion of the almost artificial pause.

Jay Baer:

Yes.

Minter Dial:

Or maybe chaotic mistakes almost make for.

Jay Baer:

A more real interaction, no question proven to be true, in fact, and I don’t think I have it in the book, because I think I discovered it afterwards. But the chatbot company drift, which is a very large provider of B2B maybe the largest, they actually program in an artificial delay in their interactions because they’ve tested it, and they had problems with the Kuki example, where it was so fast, people’s belief in the veracity of the answers plummeted because it was so quick. They knew a human being couldn’t conjure it that quickly. They knew nobody could type it that quickly. And so, they plugged in a three second ellipsis, like dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. Oh, somebody’s actually thinking about this. They’re pondering it, they’re typing it, whatever. And customer satisfaction and sort of trust in the data went up dramatically. So, now it’s just part of the software is they are intentionally doing it more slowly than they had to. And as I’ve said in the book and other places, like, there are scenarios where speed is not the best. Right? You don’t want to go to the fastest tattoo artist in town. You don’t want to go to the, you call an eye surgeon to get Lasik, and they’re like, what do you do in the next five minutes? Like, well, that’s. How are you that available? That concerns me. Right. So, there is this premise we talk about that there’s sort of a magic window for responsiveness, and we call it the right now. And the right now is defined as just slightly faster than people expect, just like, because if you’re too fast, they don’t trust it, and if you’re too slow, they’re annoyed. So, the middle, the sort of the Goldilocks zone for responsiveness is just slightly faster than they expect. However, as we talked about a moment ago, in order to deploy that, you have to have a sense of what their expectations are. You can’t just guess. You got to have a sense for, well, how long does it take? How long would they feel is appropriate? And then just ratchet it up a little bit better than that.

Minter Dial:

All right, so let’s talk about that, because I have this in my mind, a story where, I mean, it comes from a real experience, which was, well, we want to set an expectation for our responses on social media. And the idea was actually a website, contact us. And we said, well, we’re going to set 48 hours. Every time they’re going to, we’ll come back to within 48 hours. But it turned out to be completely unrealistic. And the reason for that is that a lot of the questions that came in the social media manager managing that contact us would not have the answers and therefore needed to go to the experts within the company who might have the answers, but those experts wearing long titles and big salaries and rather than, uh, you know, big egos, would say, who are you? Oh, I’m the social media manager. Well, you know what? I have more important things to do than answer your email, little, little intern. And. And therefore, that 40 hours just doesn’t happen unless you have, um, a concerted, you know, configuration that allows for that 48 hours to happen and everyone’s aware of it.

Jay Baer:

Yes.

Minter Dial:

So, there’s an internal expectation component, or at least in internal cohesion component, in order to be aligned with that external expectation.

Jay Baer:

Yep. There’s a couple ways to get around that or try to address it. One is this technique that we talk about called responding without answers.

Minter Dial:

Oh, yeah, I like that piece.

Jay Baer:

And so, the idea is that today, what typically happens, and not just in a context scenario, but really in your whole life, if somebody has a question or needs something, and if you don’t instantly know it, you got to go find out. You look it up, you ask the executive, you do whatever you need to do to conjure the necessary information, and then once you have attained it, then you respond, but we shouldn’t do that because the entire time that you’re figuring it out, the person who asked the question is freaking out. And today it’s very common that because we are getting more used to people answering with some degree of rapidity. If you don’t get that answer, the assumption isn’t often they’re working on it. The assumption is they didn’t get it, especially all the different inboxes we have now. This would never happen because you and I correspond. But if I sent you an email today and I didn’t hear back for, say, two days, what people would start thinking is, do I have mentors email wrong? Did it go to spam? Did I have an attachment on there? Is he on vacation but didn’t set out of office? Is he mad at me? Should I place a phone call? Or does that make me seem sad and desperate? You like. You, like, walk down. It’s like a chutes and ladders shame spiral. And you’re like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. And you spin yourself into the ground, and meanwhile, everything’s cool. You got it. You’re just working on the answer. But I don’t know that. And so, the best thing you can do, and I will say, I think I talked about in the book. I’ve been doing this now for about three years in my personal life, uniformly with my wife, with my kids, with my friends, with the mailman, like everybody responding without answers. Here’s how you do it. Somebody asks you something, doesn’t matter who it is, and you can’t instantly answer. You answer anyway, and you say, thanks very much. I’m going to work on that, and I’ll get back to you. And then you do it. And then you answer with the information necessary. And two important things happened. One, their perception of your responsiveness goes through the roof, because they never have that anxiety of, did he get it? Is he working on it? Because the second that you say, I got it, it goes off of their to do list, and they can place it on your to do list. And the second thing, quick trick is it actually buys you more time to respond, because what we’ve learned in the research around this is that time to response is more important than time to resolution. Because the first one is about psychology and the second one is about information. And once people are satiated, like somebody’s going to solve this, for me, it just makes a big psychological turn for the good. So, it really does work, and I really recommend people try it, not just in business, but in their life.

Minter Dial:

All right, two questions. First is, how do you manage that now ballooning list of to dos that you’ve said to everybody. Yep, I got you. I’ll be back. What’s your process for managing that because, I mean, I know I have a list of things to do, and tacking onto those things, excuse me, can become onerous when it’s all my. Now it’s on me. So, do you have a better assumption?

Jay Baer:

I don’t think it’s actually any more things to do because my assumption is that you would answer them anyway. You would still answer them. It’s just you’re answering them twice. So, the first one is simply, I got it. And then you’re going to do what you would have done anyway, which is you will eventually get the answer when you get around to it. So, you’re essentially just satiating them psychologically and buying yourself more time. Now, if you would have just deleted it anyway and never gotten back to them, well, that’s a different story entirely. In a different book, that would be a Hug Your Haters, principle, which is you should answer everybody every time.

Minter Dial:

Yeah, including the hate your haters. But my trick has been to reply and then start the response and leave it in a draft. So, if, in terms of depends on where it’s coming in. Because if I saw WhatsApp, you don’t have that option in terms of dealing with the flow back. And when you are trying to respond to people, you want to get back to them in the same channel that they reply to. How important is that? The key as well?

Jay Baer:

Critical. It’s top two or three things that customers hate the most. They hate to wait for sure. That’s probably number one. Number two is they hate to be under informed information. Asymmetry is a huge challenge now because we’re now conditioned to know all the things all the time. But the third one is this idea of channel shifting. And a lot of brands do this strategically. They think it’s good policy or it’s more economically effective for them or what have you. So, they will, somebody will. It’s pretty common in social media. Someone will put a post on a Facebook page and the brand says, great, please call us at. It’s like, hey, if I wanted to call you, I would have called. I know how phones work. It’s like I would have chosen. Nobody’s picking a contact mechanism on a roulette wheel like all customers. This is universally true. All customers pick the contact mechanism that they prefer and believe will yield the best outcomes. Period. So, you saying, oh yeah, I know, you purposely selected email, phone, text message, WhatsApp, hostage note. But instead of that, we are going to ask you to use this other channel, or even worse, we are going to unilaterally respond to you in a different channel really annoys people. As it should.

Minter Dial:

All right, so another annoyance, Jay. And it comes back to this notion of the quick response is, ring, ring, ring, ring. Hi. We are Brand X, and we’re very happy to have you call. Thank you for calling us. Your call is important to us. Can you touch one if you want to go into this loop? Cut. Two if you want to go into another loop. So, I’ve answered quickly at some level.

Jay Baer:

Yes.

Minter Dial:

And you end up in this never-ending loop. You end up with somebody who asks you five questions. Oh, oh, sorry. We need to pass you through to another group very quickly. You get through to the next group and, oh, listen, I need five more responses of the same question. So, this notion of efficiency, speed, but there’s the effectiveness piece, and I think a lot of companies get that piece wrong as well.

Jay Baer:

Oh. And there’s so many, so many dimensions to that set of errors. Right. One is making customers re-enter data account numbers. That drives people crazy because they know you have it. They know you have it. Right? You, obviously. I just put it in. I just clearly put it in. Um, so that’s a big mess, you know, transferring people in general. Unless you. Unless you dialed the wrong number somehow. Right. You. You messed it up. You didn’t listen to the phone tree. Whatever. I get it. But. But anytime you have to transfer somebody for any reason, the satisfaction rates go through the floor. And here’s why. Customers do not care about your chart. It’s not their problem. If you have a business card with the logo of that company on it, the customer believes, and I think at some level, rightfully so, that you should be able to help them. And this idea, like, not our department, not our division, we’re going to transfer you around, empower your people to make a decision to help somebody. And I get it. At scale, that’s difficult in some large enterprise organizations. But I just did a big presentation for a huge global company just last month, and it’s one of the things I talked about, let’s stop treating this like 160 separate companies, and let’s start treating it like one company. And I think your customers will be a lot happier about that.

Minter Dial:

Yeah, and, Jay, that’s a great point. It feels like the situation you were just referring to most often happening is because they come into it from a cost cutting perspective, not a customer centric perspective. And if you’re in a value-added perspective, you need to allocate probably some extra resources, certainly need to delegate more into your team, give them the opportunity to respond and even fuck up, because not everybody has the perfect policy list anymore. You’re allowing them to have some sort of overlap with other people.

Jay Baer:

The one thing I will say about being on a sort of mechanized phone tree that is better than it used to be is we talked about setting expectations earlier in my airplane example.

Minter Dial:

Can I just interrupt? I have a drum roll happening here. There’s something at the end of this one.

Jay Baer:

Yeah, I know it’s hard to believe. I concur. But what is better is that in most cases now, companies will tell you first, they always say, if you’re going to be on hold first, they always say, and I love this, calls will be answered in the order in which they were received. And I laugh about that every time because I always think, what was the second plan? Like, calls will be answered in order of height, in order of alphabetized. I guess you could do lifetime value, maybe, I don’t know, but I feel like what other sequence would you use to answer the calls? That was hilarious to me. But the good news, as I teased a moment ago, is that most of the time now they will tell you, estimated hold time is x, right? Estimated hold time is six minutes, is nine minutes, is 14.

Minter Dial:

Going back to your airline pilot, dawn, 15 minutes.

Jay Baer:

Absolutely.

Minter Dial:

Thinking it’s going to be twelve.

Jay Baer:

Yes. And at least you got an idea because you and I are old enough. Like that technology didn’t exist, right? So, you would be on hold and it was somewhere between one and every minute for the rest of your life. Like you had literally no idea. Like, should I cancel dinner? Like what? Like you didn’t know you.

Minter Dial:

By the way, that does still happen. I mean, my golly gosh. Right?

Jay Baer:

Yes, of course. But, but luckily the technology exists that they can do a phone tree scan and get a sense of how long it might take. And then a lot of times now they’ll do the you want us to call you back? Which is also a nice touch. Right? So, it’s not all bad, but it is largely still bad because they view it as a cost, not as a benefit. And Forrester has some really interesting data on this recently, this notion of the customer obsessed company. And I love the way they frame that and the way to describe it. Minter, you’ll like this. They say that customer obsessed companies are focused on providing value to customers instead of extracting value from customers. And I really like that. And the numbers really back it up. They found in a large baseline study that customer obsessed companies have a 300% lower average churn rate. That’s real money. 300% lower.

Minter Dial:

I want to get the last piece of what we’re going to talk about is time. But before that, it just occurred to me that in the methodology of getting an entire organization organized around being customer centric and customer obsessed, communication is key. And I still see and I wonder how on earth they function. People who have a little banner or badge. Sorry, on top of their icons has 1300 unread messages. Or, you know, some have worse. I mean, I’ve seen literally tens of thousands of unread messages.

Jay Baer:

Yeah.

Minter Dial:

I don’t know how those people operate and, and how many of those unanswered messages, unviewed messages, carry gold in terms of insights, carry customer complaints or friends and family that you haven’t answered. How do you get an organization, I mean, ultimately, to have communications within as fast as you want without.

Jay Baer:

Well, and it’s such a good question because one has to beget the other. I talk about this, I didn’t talk about it too much in the book because it sort of go down well.

Minter Dial:

Hey, Jay. Jay. Because you wrote one of the smallest packed books.

Jay Baer:

That’s true. I didn’t have anything in there. That’s a good point. It’s a good point. I could have included it in a regular sized book, but I did not. But this idea that it is nigh impossible to be fast externally unless you are first fast internally because in many cases, what’s holding up your ability to get the customer or the potential customer what they need is some sort of sticky wicket inside the business. I can’t get a price from the estimator guy. I can’t get a date from service. I can’t get a part from the parts people. I can’t figure out where the invoice is from accounting. It’s always some sort of internal kerfuffle that prevents you from being as fast as you want to be, even if you want to be. So, you’ve got to sand down all these sticky edges inside the company because otherwise you can do all the things I’m talking about, but it won’t really work because you’ll just be sitting around waiting for other people in the business to execute what you need to do your job.

Minter Dial:

Well, I must give you a hat tip for having a cricket analogy.

Jay Baer:

I’m here to keep it relevant.

Minter Dial:

Hey. And global.

Jay Baer:

I can’t explain the rules very well, but I can use the metaphor.

Minter Dial:

Well, it depends if it’s a five days or 20 over.

Jay Baer:

Well, who’s got the time? The books are called the Time to Win. No one’s playing five-day cricket, so.

Minter Dial:

Let’s, let’s just finish five-day test, I should say I believe is the indeed good word. Um, time. I have a general principle, which is the way you view and manage time is who you are. And I. So, let’s talk about a meal. You know, should it be the 15 minutes sandwich or the one and a half hourglass of wine sandwich? And if you, if you think about time, there’s, there was the Concorde that used to fly at sonic speeds.

Jay Baer:

I heard they’re bringing it back. I don’t know if that’s true, but.

Minter Dial:

Well, I’ve heard so too. And I would love for that to happen. It was a glorious experience to be on it. And then there’s slow time. When you go to a certain number of luxury stores where there’s no ones in a rush, you’re there to be taken time. Would you like a cup of tea? How would you like, would you like green tea? I’ll go make that. It’s going to take five minutes. I’m going to go kill the cow before I serve you the beef. And slow time, which is also a tremendous luxury. I was wondering how you sort of put that into the mix. I mean, you do talk about too fast is not always good, but sometimes slow is useful.

Jay Baer:

No doubt. If and only if that’s the expectation. And that’s why setting the expectation is so critically important, because you are in charge of how the elapsed time is perceived, by how people contextualize what it is that they’re getting from you and why they’re getting it from you, etcetera. Where it gets all messed up is when you expect slow and you get fast and they give you instant green tea, or you expect fast and you get slow, which probably happens more often. So, that’s why it is really important. Yes, the bias of the book, because this is the nature of the world we live in. The bias of the book. And the work is to be faster most often, and there’s business reasons for that. More than 50% of customers will hire whomever contacts them first, regardless of price. More than half. Well, that being the case, you have to ask yourself, is my business architected for that to happen? For us to always be fastest, for us to be the first responder amongst all our competitors? And if we’re not architected that way, why not? Exactly. So, yes, the bias is to be faster, but that’s a dramatic oversimplification of the idea of Time to Win, because you can definitely succeed and outperform competitors by being the slowest in your industry, as long as the customers know that’s going to happen. And, of course, value it commensurately.

Minter Dial:

Yeah. And the challenge, just to go your way, Jay, is figuring that out. And at the very beginning, we talked about empathy and the listening, and in order to have the data which might be able to understand your expectation, especially when you’re in luxury, because these are individuals who are obviously very taxed in terms of their time and people. And, and, and when they come into the store, you need to be able to figure out quite instantly what signals they’re giving. So, there’s like this radar. Uh oh. This is a hurried Jay. I know yesterday he came in for 2 hours, but I can see he’s looking sweaty and worried or this and that he needs the ring right away. All right. So, to have the kind of a radar which is maybe a more subtle version, maybe more in a luxury environment, I don’t know how you.

Jay Baer:

It’s totally doable. It’s actually been done. It was probably, geez, I’ll bet you it’s a decade ago now at Best Buy, the electronics retailer in the States, it was under a former CMO. But this whole idea that they serve a very broad swath of consumers just because of the nature of their presence in the market. And exactly to your point, they realized that we can’t treat everybody the same. I forget which consultancy they use. But a very significant project to develop. I think it was five, it might have been six customer segments and Personas. Then they trained all their retail staff, the blue shirts, what questions to ask. So, someone walks up to them in an aisle, and they asked two or three kind of magic questions. And the answer to that magic question equals they’re in segment ABC, the busy mom, the luxury shopper, whatever. And then they would literally sell and service those customers differently based on the answers to those questions, which is clearly holy grail stuff for retail. That is exactly what we should be doing. And it failed miserably, because the people who were working retail at Best Buy are there for six months and out. Most cases, they’re very young. Its many cases, their first job ever in retail or their first job, period. They didn’t have the human capital to execute on it. The tactics couldn’t match the strategy, but from a strategy standpoint, chef’s kiss. Do more of that, please.

Minter Dial:

Well, brilliant. I think the idea there is, as usual with Jay Baer is to have pragmatic solutions that are real and successful, because there’s nothing worse than really having these ideals and wish lists that will fall flat in their face and then we go home very unhappy. Jay Baer always pleasure to listen to you. I love the way you responded to this stuff. I very much, I have to say, as I told you before we started recording, I opened your book and I laughed out loud because it was a much shorter and easy book to read. And I finished it quickly. Lots of great stuff in it. How can people get in touch with you, hire you, get you in to speak? Because you are a bundle of energy. And get your book or any of your other books or any other one.

Jay Baer:

Thanks. Jaybear.com is the main website, all things speaking and writing and so forth. The book itself you can find in all the places that you can get books, Amazon, etcetera. And the website is TheTimetoWin.com. you can get the book there. Speaking of which, research, the research that we conducted for the book, all of that is yours for the taking. There’s all kinds of graphics and infographics and videos and everything else. So, please just take it, enjoy it. We want people to put these principles into practice. But yes, it is a very short book. But that was on purpose, right? Because I didn’t mean for it to be so short. I started to write a full-size business book and I got about a third of the way through and I’m like, wait a second, the book is all about speed. I can’t make people spend 6 hours reading a book about speed. That doesn’t make any sense at all. So, I wrote the world’s shortest business book and I will tell you, people love it because they actually read it and they don’t just skim it. So, so far so good.

Minter Dial:

Well, I so appreciate that. Jbear.com the timetowin.com little hat tip to my lovely friend Sophie Devonshire, who also wrote a book about speed, but hers is a hardback and about 300 pages. Also worthwhile reading. But I’m going to send everybody to check out your book. Jay, thanks for coming on my show. Great to chat with you.

Jay Baer:

Great to see you.