Episode 53 Transcript - Jay Baer

Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Jay Baer

Julie Littlechild:
Welcome to another episode of Becoming Referable. Steve and I are with Jay Baer today to discuss real strategies that will get your clients talking about you, but in a good way. Jay is a six time author. His most recent book, Talk Triggers, was just released and it is, I believe, a must read for financial advisors. He is a popular speaker, one of very few who are in the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame. In his spare time, he’s the Founder of Convince & Convert, a firm that focuses on digital strategy consulting that drives true growth.

Now if you are not familiar with Jay, I think you’ll fall in love with him just a little bit in this interview. He’s funny. He’s smart. And he’s an incredible storyteller. The stories that he shares get to the heart of effective word of mouth marketing. We talk to Jay about what characterizes a talk trigger, how they’re different from the typical strategy we see of surprise and delight, and why talk triggers are so critical to referrals.

He breaks down a step-by-step action plan to create your own talk triggers. What really makes the talk trigger strategy so powerful and so different is that it’s not just a way to get some clients talking about you some of the time, but it’s about operationalizing a strategy that gets most clients talking a lot of the time. It’s absolutely worth a listen. I hope you’ll enjoy the interview as much as we did. With that, let’s get straight into the conversation.

Well Jay, welcome to Becoming Referable. We’re absolutely thrilled to have you here today.

Steve Wershing:
Welcome Jay.

Jay Baer:
Thank you so much Julie. Thanks Steve. I appreciate your time and the opportunity to become referable.

Julie Littlechild:
Indeed. Well we’re going to learn-

Steve Wershing:
And it’ll happen right here on this program. Right here.

Julie Littlechild:
Right here, folks. Watch this space.

Steve Wershing:
Right in front of your eyes.

Julie Littlechild:
Look Jay, we really wanted to talk to you for a lot of reasons but in particular because of your new book, Talk Triggers. We’ll dive into that but there’s an obvious burning question to kick things off. Clearly, that’s why there’s two llamas on the cover. Can you tell us why that is?

Steve Wershing:
Julie, Julie they’re alpacas.

Julie Littlechild:
Oh. Sorry. Why are there two alpacas on the cover?

Steve Wershing:
And I only know that, by the way, because my wife is wild about alpacas-

Julie Littlechild:
Oh dear.

Steve Wershing:
So thank you Jay for putting that on. It’s a marketing book. I’ll be able to get her or read it for that reason.

Jay Baer:
I love it. I’m glad that you recognized that. You know, it’s a bit of a story. The original cover that Daniel Lemon, and my co-author were presented was not good. It was just not very-

Julie Littlechild:
There were no alpacas to start.

Jay Baer:
There were not, for sure. He and I said, you know, if we’re going to write a book about word of mouth maybe the book should be a little different than your typical perfunctory business book. We were just messing around and Daniel found that image of the one alpaca seeming to whisper to the other one. He mocked up that cover and he sent it to me. I thought, well that’s awesome. I love it. But there’s no way Penguin’s going to approve that. It’s too crazy. He was like, “Well maybe.” I’m like, “No.” He’s like, “Well maybe.” I think people were on vacation or something, and so I sent it over there and they’re like, “Sure.”

Julie Littlechild:
Sure.

Jay Baer:
They’re like, “Yeah? Yeah, yeah.” And there you have it. So we kind of snuck it past the goalie somehow.

Julie Littlechild:
Awesome.

Steve Wershing:
You needed something you could spin a yarn about.

Julie Littlechild:
Exactly.

Jay Baer:
That’s right. That’s right. Whoa, well done. Nicely done, yes. Well the byproduct of all that, of having a book with alpacas on the cover, is since the book came out which has been what, five weeks now or something like that, I have received no fewer than 30 alpaca themed gifts or acknowledgments from friends.

Julie Littlechild:
Oh no.

Steve Wershing:
Prepare for it.

Jay Baer:
My whole office is like festooned with alpaca stuff now, which is great. I’m not complaining. I just didn’t see that coming.

Julie Littlechild:
You might have rethought the animal if you’d known that was the case.

Jay Baer:
Yes, it would have been tequila on the cover-

Julie Littlechild:
It would precisely.

Jay Baer:
Had I really thought it through.

Steve Wershing:
Exactly.

Julie Littlechild:
Look, I mean obviously the cover is a great example of what we’re going to talk about, and that is Talk Triggers. So let me just start there and ask you to tell us what is a talk trigger?

Jay Baer:
A talk trigger is a strategic operational differentiator that you employ to create conversation and turn your customers into volunteer marketers. It’s something that you choose to do differently. It’s not like a classic marketing example, something that you would say differently. A talk trigger isn’t a campaign, or a coupon, or a contest, or a product, or a promotion. It is an operational decision that you make to do one thing differently that people are like, “Oh, that’s really interesting. I didn’t expect that to happen. I should tell somebody about that.”

Julie Littlechild:
Can you give us some examples of that? I know there’s a lot in your book-

Jay Baer:
I can.

Julie Littlechild:
But I’d love to hear some.

Jay Baer:
I will allow you to select from the Wheel of Examples. Would you like a small business example, a big business example, a B2B example, or a B2C example? Your choice.

Julie Littlechild:
Jay, Jay, Jay, let’s go small business. Let’s go small business.

Steve Wershing:
Can I refine that a little bit, because there are such good examples in the book. Could we get a small business one, but one from a service business?

Jay Baer:
Yes, indeed. Here is my favorite small business service example. It’s from Jay Sofer who is a locksmith in New York City. Jay is the highest rated locksmith in New York City on Yelp. He’s also, if you can believe this, one of the top five highest rated businesses in New York regardless of business type.

Julie Littlechild:
Wow.

Jay Baer:
That’s a pretty high bar.

Julie Littlechild:
That’s a good-

Steve Wershing:
That’s pretty high, yeah.

Jay Baer:
He runs a heck of a business. But one of the secrets to Jay’s success is his impactful talk trigger, his operational choice that creates conversation. It works like this: Jay comes to your house, and he finishes re-keying your apartment or whatever. Before he departs he does a free security audit of your premise. So every door, every window, makes sure everything is tip top. Also, oils the locks. Then any tips he receives, he donates them to animal rescue. It is a very, very effective differentiator because most locksmiths do not provide particularly great service. That’s just the locksmith business.

Jay also does nights and weekend calls for free. He doesn’t charge extra for nights and weekends. He’s just really, really great. It has propelled his business forward. It’s the decisions that he makes in his business. Anybody could make that decision, it’s just that most people don’t. Now, I’ll tell you one of the things I like about Jay’s story, that his talk trigger, his key talk trigger: the security audit, is very relevant. Relevancy is one of the four ingredients of a talk trigger. So it’s a locksmith that does a security audit. It all makes sense. That all ties together.

So does one of the classic word of mouth talk trigger examples, Doubletree Hotels, where every time you check in they give you a warm chocolate chip cookie-

Julie Littlechild:
They so do that.

Jay Baer:
They’ve been doing that every day for 30 years. 30 years. 75,000 cookies a day they give out. It’s crazy. It is the propellant of their brand. Now, it makes sense for them … warm chocolate chip cookie, their brand positioning at Doubletree is the warm welcome.

Julie Littlechild:
Right.

Jay Baer:
So they want to be really, really good at that first eight or nine minutes that you’re on property and the cookie ceremony, and it is a ceremony, it’s not a pile of cookies. They hand you a warm cookie. That’s a big part of it. So warm welcome. Warm cookie. Locksmith. Security audit. Right? You see how those things are relevant.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah.

Jay Baer:
But Julie and Steve, imagine if those two were reversed. Imagine locksmith, Jay Sofer, comes to your apartment, finishes re-keying your apartment and then says, “Hey, before I go, Julie would you like a warm chocolate chip cookie that I made in my locksmith van?”

Steve Wershing:
Yeah, of course.

Jay Baer:
You would say, “I would not want that.”

Julie Littlechild:
No.

Jay Baer:
“I would not want that at all.” I do not want that and now I’m concerned about how these cookies are being manufactured. And, if you worked at the Doubletree Hotel, and they gave you a room key and said, “Steve, before you get to your room could we do a thorough security audit?” You would say, “If that’s required, I’d like to check out now.”

Steve Wershing:
Yeah, that’s why I have TSA, so thank you very much.

Jay Baer:
That’s it. That’s it. So the talk trigger has to make sense in the context of who you are and what you do.

Julie Littlechild:
You said it’s something we do versus something we say, which I think is something I want to underline because it’s such an important … We all say a lot of things. It’s the doing.

Jay Baer:
Yeah.

Julie Littlechild:
How do you differentiate those two examples from the many interesting things a firm might do for its clients?

Jay Baer:
I think it depends on whether that is interesting enough to be talkable. There’s a lot of things that people do that are interesting, but do they cross the threshold into talkability, which requires it to be remarkable? The definition of that word, which is worthy of remark. The challenge that most small service providers have is that they believe that competency creates conversation.

Julie Littlechild:
Right, yes.

Steve Wershing:
Right, right.

Jay Baer:
And it doesn’t. Being a good business helps you keep customers, but being a good business doesn’t create stories. This is all about getting your customers to tell your story. Like I don’t know everybody listening, I probably know some of your listeners, but I know this for sure: Nobody has ever said, “Hey, let me tell you about this perfectly adequate experience I just had.”

Steve Wershing:
Yeah.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah.

Jay Baer:
We don’t say that because that’s a bad story. Here’s another example of a professional services company. There’s an accounting firm in Indianapolis called Bogdanoff & Dages. A small two man accounting firm, a couple of associations. Their talk trigger is responsiveness, which is one of the key talk trigger opportunities that you can have out there. They respond to every email from every client in five minutes, and they return all phone calls in five minutes.

Now as a small accounting firm, that is an operational choice that they have made to be that responsive to their clients. Is that a story that their clients tell? Oh, it is. If you look at the Google reviews for this business, every single Google review is like, “I can’t believe how fast Paul answered my email. I can’t believe how fast Greg called me back.” That is the story that people tell about this business.

Julie Littlechild:
It’s an interesting challenge just for when you mentioned competency isn’t a talk trigger. In our industry, which you know a lot of our listeners, or probably all, are financial advisors. That’s tough because there’s such a deep technical expertise associated with that. But I guess it’s the equivalent of saying the hotel room had clean rooms. No, no, the cleanest rooms. You just expect that. The lock worked. It kept bad people out.

Jay Baer:
Yes, that’s it.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah.

Julie Littlechild:
We can’t rely on that, can we?

Jay Baer:
I went to the wall and I flicked this switch and the lights came on.

Julie Littlechild:
They did.

Jay Baer:
Amazing. No way!

Julie Littlechild:
And look, you’re telling us about it now.

Steve Wershing:
That’s right. Definitely, yeah.

Jay Baer:
Yes, yeah. The problem is that we don’t talk about good.

Julie Littlechild:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jay Baer:
We talk about different. We talk about things we don’t expect. The things that we all expect are important to us and if you don’t do that, they’ll definitely leave. That’s why I say that competency keeps customers, it doesn’t create customers. If you don’t deliver on those basic tenants of business, you can certainly turn your existing customers off but by executing well, it isn’t necessarily something they’re going to go out of their way to tell their friends about.

That’s where it has to be unexpected, which is why one of the big key process steps in developing talk triggers is to actually interview customers and ask them what they expect. Because once you know what somebody expects, you by definition know what they don’t expect. And the gold in the river, the talk trigger, is always located in the place that they don’t expect.

Steve Wershing:
Jay, let me ask you something to elaborate on something. You talked about the accounting firm and their responsiveness separating them. A lot of advisors that I talk to, talk about that kind of thing. One of the challenges is that can be self-limiting. I mean if you want to scale, there’s only so fast you can get back to everybody. It sort of leads to that idea where so many advisors subscribe to this sort of surprise and delight kind of strategy as a way of differentiating, and you make a point that that’s not necessarily operational and it’s not necessarily the right way to approach this. You tell a story about Ritz Carlton about that. I wonder if you would share with the audience, because I think it’s really instructive.

Jay Baer:
Yeah, it’s just … surprisingly it’s a big part of contemporary marketing theory, this idea that you take one customer in one particular circumstance and you treat them manifestly differently than you’d treat most of your customers day to day. The idea, the hope, is that this largess, this munificence, has such an impact on that customer that not only does it cause a behavior change in that customer, but more importantly they share the story somewhere usually in social media and it’s so outlandish. It’s so outrageous. It’s so unexpected that other people share it and it sort of “goes viral.” You see it in hotels all the time.

The Ritz Carlton did one with Joshie the Giraffe, which was a stuff giraffe that a guest left behind and then the hotel took the giraffe to different places and took photos. Or you know, if somebody checks into their hotel room and there’s like a live panda bear on the bed, and a bamboo tree in the corner. You’re like, “Oh my God, there’s a bear in here,” right? That might work, or you might just have a hotel room full of bear scat. Like, you don’t really know. That’s my problem with surprise and delight and is that it’s not a strategy. It’s a lottery ticket. I’m not a big believer in buying lottery tickets and calling it a repeatable strategy.

Now I’m not suggesting that surprise and delight can’t work. We see evidence of it working all the time, but what’s the longstanding impact of that? It doesn’t pay dividends into the future. You look at Doubletree’s talk trigger with the warm chocolate chip cookie. They’ve been doing that every day for 30 years and they almost never advertise because the cookie is the ad and the guests of the hotel are the marketing department in a lot of ways. So I’m a bigger believer in let’s do one operational thing differently every day for every customer, and allow that to work its magic over time as opposed to this, “Well let’s shoot the moon and do something crazy. Let’s rent an elephant and walk it down Main Street.”

Julie Littlechild:
Well and expectations go wild with this stuff. I mean, my son left Floppy Bunny in a hotel recently and I found it stuffed in a little plastic bag. I’m like, “That’s not Joshie. Where are the photos?”

Jay Baer:
So well said.

Julie Littlechild:
I’m still waiting for that, but the poor-

Jay Baer:
Where is my panda bear?

Julie Littlechild:
Poor Floppy was in a plastic big with a security guard all night. Let’s get down to this operational piece because I think this is so important for everyone. You talk about different types of talk triggers. Can you tell us what they are and the distinction between each of those?

Jay Baer:
Yeah, and you’ll notice that these are all operations. It’s not marketing. That’s an important distinction. A talk trigger isn’t marketing. Not really. It’s operations that create marketing advantages.

Julie Littlechild:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jay Baer:
So generosity is the one you see most often: free chocolate chip cookie, free security audit, there’s a litany of examples in all sorts of industries. That’s the one you see most commonly because it’s the easiest to envision in your business, in most cases, to say, “Oh, well we would could just give somebody something extra at this moment in time.” So that’s the one that you’ll notice most often in the wild. But it’s by no means the only type of talk trigger. You have talkable responsiveness, which we mentioned earlier with Bogdanoff & Dages, the accounting firm in Indianapolis that answers everybody within five minutes. That is a responsiveness talk trigger. That is, “We are going to be faster than people expect.” You have the empathy talk trigger, when we are kinder, more human, more compassionate, more warm than people anticipate you to be.

That’s an option. You have the usefulness talk trigger, when you are more useful than customers expect. The last one is the attitude talk trigger, which is where you’re just a little wackier than people anticipate you to be. Like the Sip & Dip Lounge is a good example of an attitude talk trigger. It’s a bar, it’s been around for 55 years, it’s in Great Falls, Montana, which is out of the way even by Montana standards which is saying something. It is really, really far from anywhere. It’s a country bar. They’ve got Pabst Blue Ribbon and they got a T-bone steak special and they have a piano player, named Piano Pat. She’s been playing piano there for 51 years.

Julie Littlechild:
Awesome.

Jay Baer:
51 years on the piano, which is amazing. But that’s not the talk trigger, although Piano Pat’s pretty amazing. This bar, Sip & Dip was named one of the 10 bars that you should buy a plane ticket and fly to by GQ Magazine.

Julie Littlechild:
Okay.

Steve Wershing:
Wow.

Julie Littlechild:
Tell us, tell us more.

Steve Wershing:
Go ahead, tell us. Lay it on us.

Jay Baer:
Their talk trigger is every night between 9:00 and midnight, it’s a big long bar, kind of a typical bar you’d see in a small town, kind of a country bar, long wooden bar. Behind the bar they’ve got their regular bottles and stuff, but then they’ve got this giant black curtain. Every night only between 9:00 and midnight, they open this curtain and on the other side of the curtain is an enormous acrylic-lined swimming pool. So it actually functions like an aquarium. From 9:00 to midnight, live human mermaids-

Steve Wershing:
Because, you know, Montana.

Jay Baer:
Swim behind the bar. Yeah, because Montana.

Julie Littlechild:
Because Montana. Natural habitat for the mermaid.

Jay Baer:
Is that a story that you would tell somebody if you stumbled into that bar at say 9:10 in the evening and you looked up from your beer and there was a live human mermaid swimming by. Yes, that is a story that you would most definitely tell. And by telling that story, it increases awareness, etc. for Sip & Dip, which is in fact, the nature of a talk trigger.

Julie Littlechild:
And so you mentioned usefulness. What do you mean there exactly?

Jay Baer:
Here’s an example from a services organization from a real estate company. My buddy, Joe Manusca is a realtor in Tallahassee, Florida. He’s a bit of a different kind of realtor, Joe, because he only represents sellers. If you want to buy a house, he doesn’t really do that. He also only represents sellers who have homes between $200,000.00 and $400,000.00. So relatively modest homes.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah.

Jay Baer:
In that price point, it’s fairly common. Julie, Steve, you may know this. If you’re $200,000.00 to $400,000.00, your mileage may vary. But chances are you probably don’t have a ton of upside equity in that home.

Julie Littlechild:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jay Baer:
What’s very common therefore in that segment of the market is that people think, “Well I could use a realtor or hey now, I could try to sell this sucker myself and I could keep the 6% commission.”

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah.

Steve Wershing:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jay Baer:
Right?

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah.

Jay Baer:
It’s just like ETFs-

Steve Wershing:
Sure.

Jay Baer:
Or whatever. Same idea.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. You could also cut your own hair-

Jay Baer:
Joe understands this.

Julie Littlechild:
But it’s probably not good. Not a good idea.

Jay Baer:
There’s a lot of things you could do. There’s a lot of things you could do. Joe understands this. Unlike fundamentally every realtor, every advisor, every insurance broker, every doctor, every lawyer, every consultant like me, every professional service provider frankly in the world has a website. They all have the same website. Now the words may be rearranged a little bit, but everybody’s website says the same thing. It says, when you read between the lines, “Behold the awesome power of my expertise. I know things you could possibly never know. I’m actually trained to do this. Do not try this yourself.” That’s essentially what the website says.

Julie Littlechild:
Yep.

Jay Baer:
Except Joe’s website. Joe sat down and wrote a 60 page free downloadable PDF document. You can get it all over his website. It’s called How to Sell a Home On Your Own in Florida. It’s exactly that. Step-by-step. Paperwork to fill out. Who to call. What to do. I interviewed him for a book I wrote once. I said, “Joe, I don’t quite understand this because it seems to me that you are giving people exactly what they need to not hire you.” He said, “Jay, I understand why you think that. But what you also don’t understand that people get to about page 19, and they say ‘Holy cow is it hard to sell a house on your own. I want no part of this. What was I thinking?'”

It’s his number one source of customers, you see. His name, email address and phone number on every page and not only does he get that customer, it’s a talk trigger that yields additional customers again, and again, and again because if you have a home between $200,000.00 and $400,000.00 that you have thought about selling yourself, who else has a home in a similar situation? Most likely, all of your friends because all the data show that home pricing is a very strong correlation in adult friendships. So all your friends are in the same situation. They say, “Hey Jay, weren’t you going to sell your house on your own?” Like, “Yeah, dude I was. But don’t do that. Don’t even think about it. You’re going to get to page 19, and you’re going to realize it was way too hard. You should just call my man Joe. Here’s his number.”

Steve Wershing:
Interesting. Interesting.

Jay Baer:
Talkably useful. One of the best things to do in the services business is to essentially just take everything you know and give it away one bite at a time. People are really reluctant to do that, right? But one of the ways that you can become referable is to give away what you know, but you have to understand something that’s really important: a list of ingredients doesn’t make somebody a chef.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah.

Steve Wershing:
Right, right.

Jay Baer:
So don’t be concerned about telling them what you know to the degree that they won’t have to hire you. Because typically, the opposite happens. When you tell them what you know and you give them what you know, just like Joe does, it actually creates customers. It doesn’t take away from customers.

Julie Littlechild:
Absolutely.

Steve Wershing:
Yep, that’s a very interesting point.

Julie Littlechild:
We’ve talked about these five different types. For advisors, or anyone really who’s thinking, “Okay, it’s time to take some action,” can you give us a roadmap in terms of what I do?

Jay Baer:
I can.

Julie Littlechild:
What?

Jay Baer:
Not only can I, but I will.

Julie Littlechild:
Oh, thank goodness because it would have been so unsatisfying had you just said yes and then nothing else.

Jay Baer:
Well I could just say, “Buy the book-”

Julie Littlechild:
You could.

Jay Baer:
And just disconnect the call. I could do that. But no. I will tell you how to do it, but you should buy the book because the book itself has a talk trigger as well in addition to having alpacas on the cover as Steve adroitly pointed out at the open-

Julie Littlechild:
Yes.

Jay Baer:
The book itself says, on the book it says, “Satisfaction guaranteed. If you buy this book and don’t like it, go to talk talktriggers.com and send the authors a note,” that’s me, “And we will buy any other book that you like.”

Julie Littlechild:
Awesome.

Jay Baer:
And that’s true. So if you don’t like it and you want you a first edition Bible or something, like okay we’ll put our best people on it. We’ll figure something out for you.

Steve Wershing:
Signed by the author.

Jay Baer:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. This is from Paul. So yeah, there’s literally no financial risk in purchasing the book because if you don’t like it we will take care of it and then some. Anyway, back to your question. First thing you do, and I’m summarizing the steps. The first thing you do is create a customer journey map. Document all the different touch points that you have with your clients. They can be a website. They call you. You call them back. There’s a proposal maybe. They investigate their proposal and then you get a monthly meeting and a statement. Or whatever. Like all the different touchpoints. Write all of those down in order, okay?

Second step, you interview ideally 18 customers. 18 customers, in three categories, six of each: New customers, people who have not been with you very long; Longstanding clients, people who have been with you for a while; and Lost clients, people who are no longer with you. Ideally, you have six conversations of each. In those conversations you ask them all the same thing, you kind of review the customer journey map with them, and you say at each of these points, “When I sent you a proposal, what did you expect would happen?” Because what you’re trying to do is collect customer expectations at each of these inflection points.

Because as I mentioned earlier, once you know what people expect, you know what they don’t expect. Your talk trigger has to be what they don’t expect. Once you’ve done these interviews, you will have some insights. You will have some understanding about expectations. Then you brainstorm and come up with a handful of potential talk triggers using the formulas in the book. Now at this point you will have a list of … we usually do 10 to 12 when we create talk triggers for clients, but we also do this for a living. Realistically, you might come up with five.

So you’ve got five decent ideas that you know your clients don’t expect. You know where in your touchpoint map you would deploy these talk triggers: Early in the relationship, monthly statement. Late in the relationship, portfolio review. Whatever. Then you take the one that you like the best and you test it. This is very important. You come up with a way to deploy the talk trigger to only certain customers in a way that you can control it. It might be only new customers, only customers that have bought a certain product, only on Thursdays, only at a particular office location.

There’s a lot of ways to do that, depending on how your business is set up. But you test it. You test it for a little while and then you look for evidence of talkability. If people are talking about it, then you’re like, “Aha, there’s a there, there,” and then you roll it out to everybody. That’s how you do it.

Julie Littlechild:
Awesome. I mean the first two things that you talked about are so core to any great client experience, never mind just the talk trigger. I mean they’re fundamental to that. So I love that you can do those two steps and then leverage it to not only create a talk trigger, but to really look at your client experience overall.

Jay Baer:
Yeah, thanks for pointing that out. I think it does pay dividends beyond just a word of mouth strategy, getting into the habit of doing those kind of interviews and mapping your touchpoints will make you a better business person regardless of whether you employ the talk trigger.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah, yeah.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, yeah. When we talk to advisors about referrals, and in fact when we talk to clients about if they did refer, it often comes back to this idea of well I didn’t know who to refer. I don’t know who need my financial advisor. Or maybe simply by telling them that I work with somebody and I’m suggesting they need financial advice which could be provocative at best. But it strikes me that this whole strategy just gets rid of that whole problem in a way because you’re not worried about-

Jay Baer:
That’s right. You’re just telling a story.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, it’s just-

Jay Baer:
And that’s why … yeah, that’s why John Jantsch, a good friend of mine, wrote a terrific book, The Referral Engine, about being referable and recommendations and those kinds of things. He’s very smart. It’s a really good book. But I like talk triggers because the reasons that you just articulated. It’s not quite as linear as a referral. It’s a story that then people who are receiving that story can then decide what to do with that information.

If I tell you about the warm chocolate chip cookie I got from Doubletree Hotels, and I will tell you because I did the research on this, 34% of their customers do tell that story-

Julie Littlechild:
34%?

Jay Baer:
Which means that 25,000 … 34%, which means-

Steve Wershing:
That’s huge. Yeah.

Jay Baer:
34% unprompted. A larger percentage will mention if you ask them, “Hey, do you know the cookie story,” but unprompted, unaided, 34% will tell that story every 30 days which means that on average that story is told 25,500 times a day. Now does that mean that 25,500 people are going to show up at Doubletree tomorrow? Well no. Some of them will never show up at Doubletree. Some of them never even travel. So sometimes the story is told not on deaf ears, but on ears that you can’t monetize. But that’s okay.

A talk trigger is about a story that then somebody can decide what to do with that story. When you’re saying, “Refer me” and I’m not sure whether I should refer you to my financial advisor because maybe you already have one that you like, or maybe I feel that sounds like I think you don’t know what you’re doing with your money, the nice thing about a talk trigger is just to your point Julie. It takes that away. It’s not a, “I think you should call this person,” it’s just a story and if you choose to call them, fantastic.

Steve Wershing:
That’s where I think the power is in this, is that lots of people are reluctant to refer because we, as a society, tend not to talk about our wealth with our friends, and we don’t talk about all of the financial issues an advisor could help you with, with our friends. But this doesn’t require that, right? So this is just a story that you find interesting, right?

Jay Baer:
I’ll tell you how this works okay? The only category where people are more reluctant to talk proactively about their successes than financial services is health. Nobody wants to … unless your sort of a, “I love Orange Theory”, or Pelaton, or whatever your kind of cult-like exercise regime is. But if somebody has … part and parcel, most people keep that kind of stuff to themselves, but you can still use a talk trigger. Here is one of my favorite examples. It’s not in the book. Exclusive to your show.

Steve Wershing:
Excellent.

Julie Littlechild:
Here we go.

Jay Baer:
I learned about this a few weeks ago. I was in Seattle giving a presentation about Talk Triggers, and a guy comes up to me after my talk and says, “Jay, do you know this example? It’s from Right Around the Corner.” I said, “No, I don’t think so because I don’t have any Seattle stories.” He said, “Okay, well here’s how it works. There’s a doctor here in town.” “Okay.” “He’s a surgeon.” “All right.” “He only does vasectomy surgeries.” “Hm, go on.”

Julie Littlechild:
Okay.

Jay Baer:
“Do tell.”

Steve Wershing:
Now you’ve got my interest, okay?

Jay Baer:
His name is Dr. Snip. Dr. Snip. That’s fantastic right? So I’m laughing-

Julie Littlechild:
That is awesome.

Jay Baer:
And he says, “But Jay no, that’s not the talk trigger.” I’m like, “Oh, now please do tell me more-”

Steve Wershing:
Oh boy, here we go.

Jay Baer:
“-Of this story.” He said, “Here’s the way it works. Dr. Snip. Every single customer, every single patient, on the way out the door gets three things. They get insurance paperwork. They get postoperative care instructions, frozen bag of peas, etc., etc. And they get a small black box. Inside this small black box, available only to patients of Dr. Snip, inside this small black box is a tiny silver engraved pocketknife. It reads: Dr. Snip, Vasectomy Surgeon.”

Now you can imagine how effective this is when you’re on your boat or you’re playing golf, or you’re watching football with your buddies and you open a beer with your Dr. Snip knife. And your friend says, “Hey Lennie, that’s a sweet knife bro. Where’d you get it?” “Where’d I get this knife? I got this knife from Dr. Snip, Vasectomy Surgeon.” Because just like-

Steve Wershing:
Well and that’s sort of … go ahead, I’m sorry.

Jay Baer:
Just like the real estate story, birds of a feather, right?

Steve Wershing:
That’s exactly what I was going to say.

Jay Baer:
If you have had a vasectomy-

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah.

Jay Baer:
If you have had a vasectomy, chances are your buddies are in the market or at least the wives of your buddies are in the market.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, I was going to say wrong market.

Jay Baer:
That’s it. That’s it.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah right.

Jay Baer:
That is not a referral. It’s not like, “Hey, you should go to my guy,” but it creates the story that then may yield that conversation.

Julie Littlechild:
That’s awesome.

Steve Wershing:
That’s great.

Julie Littlechild:
You’re right. You can’t get a better example of someone who would otherwise not be referred unless you were asked directly for the name of your surgeon.

Jay Baer:
“Who is your guy?” Yeah. And maybe somebody was like really in the market, but by the time you had that conversation with your friend, you’re so far down the consideration funnel at that point-

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, yeah.

Jay Baer:
You’re just narrowing down options, right?

Julie Littlechild:
Yes.

Jay Baer:
So you’re mid-funnel or lower at that point. This creates awareness, creates a story, creates recognition, creates kinship, creates preference, potentially creates a referral way, way higher in the consideration process.

Julie Littlechild:
I know we’re at time here, and this is another great conversation where I could just listen all day but I promise I won’t keep you on all day. Are there some mistakes that you see people making as it either relates to the application of this particular strategy, or others when it comes to word of mouth marketing?

Jay Baer:
Well, sure. I mean first of all nobody has an actual word of mouth strategy.

Julie Littlechild:
Fair point.

Jay Baer:
The data shows that word of mouth influences between 50% and 90% of all purchases, much higher in B2B. But yet nobody has a word of mouth strategy. You’ve got a strategy for everything else. You’ve got a strategy for marketing and social media maybe, and public relations, and hiring, crisis and everything thing. Security. But nobody has a word of mouth strategy. We just take it for granted. We just assume that our clients will talk about us. But why do we make that assumption? That’s the biggest challenge, is just people are just so laissez faire about it, it’s extraordinary.

Second challenge, as I mentioned, is that people think that competency is what creates conversation. The reality is that you have to do something different that people notice. The more you try to fit in, the more your clients actually tune out. This idea of, “Let’s play Follow the Leader and adopt best practices.” I understand why people want to do that, because it reduces risk. But it doesn’t create any stories. You have to kind of have the courage to be worthy of a story. That’s the second thing.

The last piece is that when people decide, “You know what? We should do more about word of mouth,” instead of going through the process that we touched on earlier and kind of working the process, and working the steps, and talking to customers, and seeing what they expect, they just sit in a conference room and brainstorm and say, “Okay, we’ve got an hour to come up with something cool.” If it was that easy, you’d already have done it.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, yeah.

Steve Wershing:
You know I really want to emphasize all of what you just said. Julie and I have done research and found that one of the things that is most highly associated with more referrals is having a referral system. Like you’re just saying here, you need to be deliberate about it. You mentioned John Jantsch before. He too was on the podcast, episode number three-

Jay Baer:
Fantastic.

Steve Wershing:
And he found that referrals are the biggest source of new clients but 80% of small business owners don’t have a system for it-

Jay Baer:
Nope.

Steve Wershing:
And I really want to just reiterate that the importance of what you’re saying is that you can repeat this and you can operationalize it. I think that’s where … I think a lot of advisors would really benefit from that advice because we tend to do that. What can we do for this particular client that would be special for them when talk triggers is part of the whole operation-

Jay Baer:
Yeah, it’s a system.

Steve Wershing:
And that’s so valuable.

Jay Baer:
It’s just a system. And I’ll tell you, the time to work on this is right now because we’re headed into a continued inconsistent market. I just read in the New York Times today that people are starting to pull money out of the market. I think we’re going to continue to see that. The time to make yourself talkable is not when the market is crushing it and people can’t give you money fast enough. The time to make these kinds of operational enhancements is when things are tough because that’s when you go out and steal market share from everybody else in your town who won’t do it, who won’t put the effort into it.

Julie Littlechild:
Awesome.

Steve Wershing:
Yep.

Julie Littlechild:
Well Jay, just before we wrap up, we’ll certainly get all the links on the show notes, but where can people find out more about you and the work that you do?

Jay Baer:
Talktriggers.com is the best place for the book. We’ve got kinds of free stuff there: infographics, research, videos, discussion guides, PowerPoint presentations, charts, graphs. All kinds of stuff. Obviously reading the book will give you more information, but going to the website and just downloading what’s there will give you a great head start on your talk triggers journey. So talktriggers.com is a good place to go. My main site, which is our consulting firm, our network of podcasts, 5000 free articles at convinceandconvert.com. So if you want to be a better online marketer, that’s the place to go.

Julie Littlechild:
Wonderful. Well thank you so much for your time. I love the book. Loved the conversation. Thank you.

Steve Wershing:
Thank you, Jay. Thank you.

Jay Baer:
Oh, it was my pleasure. Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.

Steve Wershing:
Hey folks, Steve again. Thanks for joining us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really helps. You can get all the links, show notes, and other tidbits from these episodes at becomingreferable.com. You can also get our free report, Three Referral Myths that Limit Your Growth, and connect with our blogs and other resources. Until next time, so long.