470 | You Are Treating New Customers Better Than Your Best Customers. Joey Coleman on Fixing That.

You close the deal. Your team is high-fiving. You are ready to deliver. Meanwhile, your new customer is sitting at home in an emotional hole, doubting the decision they just made, wondering if they chose the right company, and the only sound filling that doubt is their own voice.

That gap between when a customer buys and when you actually deliver is one of the most expensive moments in any contractor's business. Most companies never think about it. Joey Coleman has spent 20 years teaching companies like Zappos, Whirlpool, Hyatt, and NASA how to fix it.

In this conversation with Chaz Wolfe, Joey breaks down the six communication tools available to every business owner, all eight phases of the customer journey from first impression to raving advocate, and why most companies are only getting three or four of those phases right. This is Part 1. Part 2 applies the same framework to employee retention.

Key Takeaways:

• Every business interaction is H2H, human to human. Not B2B or B2C. When you remember the person on the other side is a human with feelings, motivations, and fears, every interaction changes.
• The six communication tools available to you: in-person, email, phone, physical mail, video, and gifts. Each one serves a different purpose at a different phase of the relationship. Deploying the right tool at the right moment is what separates average companies from memorable ones.
• Phase 1, Assess: Your prospect is already evaluating you before any conversation. Your reviews, your social media, your website, your LinkedIn, all of it is being read before they ever raise their hand.
• Phase 2, Admit: The moment they sign and hand over their money, the chemistry in their brain changes. Dopamine floods in. Joy, euphoria, excitement. This window is short. What you do in the next 24 to 48 hours either capitalizes on it or wastes it.
• Phase 3, Affirm: Buyer's remorse is real and scientifically documented. As dopamine recedes, fear, doubt, and uncertainty replace it. Most businesses are high-fiving when their customer is in an emotional hole. Close that gap aggressively with communication, reaffirmation, and reminders of why they made a smart decision.
• Phase 4, Activate: The first moment of truth. When they get the product or have the first service call. Most companies are decent at this. The problem is what happens the next day.
• Phase 5, Acclimate: Day two through weeks and months. Most companies over-index on day one and disappear after. This is where retention is built or destroyed.
• Phase 6, Accomplish: Every customer has a vision of what owning your product or using your service is going to create for them. Find out what that vision is. Track their progress. Celebrate it with them when it happens.
• Phase 7, Adopt: Your most loyal customers are the ones you take for granted. They are already sold. They are not listening to competitors. And yet most companies run promotions for new customers that make loyal customers feel punished for staying. Stop doing that.
• Phase 8, Advocate: If your growth is not driven in part by customer referrals, you do not have advocates. You have adopters at best. Advocacy is earned by getting every other phase right.
• Death by a thousand paper cuts is how you lose customers. Rarely is it one big moment. It is the small slight, the broken promise, the missed follow-up that stacks up over time until trust erodes completely.

If you are a contractor business owner doing $1M+ and you feel stuck in the day-to-day, we built GTK for you.

Through peer mastermind and 1:1 coaching, we help you:

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Visit www.gatheringthekings.com for information on how to apply.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Are you a driven entrepreneur that says they want it all? But when you look yourself in the mirror, you know that you've made deep sacrifices in other areas that you shouldn't have. If balance is a myth, then what most entrepreneurs are missing is a roadmap to have it all. What if you could achieve exceptional success in your business while also experiencing fulfillment in your family, in health, faith, and lifestyle? My name is Chaz Wolfe, and this is Driven to Win. I'm a serial entrepreneur leading a mastermind community of high-performing entrepreneurs in pursuit of the exceptional life, which is characterized by winning in all areas business, family, health, faith, and lifestyle. You see, what I've learned is that growth in business doesn't have to come at the expense of other areas of life. I've made it my mission to help you win in all areas. On this podcast, every week, we will be sharing interviews with successful entrepreneurs and subject matter experts, supplemented with solo episodes and co-host discussions. By tuning in, you'll learn strategies for business growth and tips for winning in family, health, faith, and lifestyle. Not only is it my belief that you can have it all, but you must have it all. Your family, your business, and your community are counting on you. Some episodes are going to be solo episodes where I walk you through a framework or cover a specific topic. Other times, I'll feature guests who have also achieved success so that they can share with you exactly how they did it. So if you're a driven entrepreneur who's looking to achieve growth and win in all areas, go ahead and subscribe to Driven to Win. And pretty soon, you'll be well on your way to achieving the exceptional life. As a business owner, can you relate to the following? You sell your product or service to a customer, and both of you are excited. But when it comes time to actually deliver, they don't respond to your messages or emails. In fact, they might even ghost you. You're left wondering, what went wrong? Today, we welcome Joey Coleman to the show. He's an expert on what it takes to win in customer retention. Joey wrote a book, in fact, called Never Lose a Customer Again. When big companies like Whirlpool, NASA, Zappos, and others want to keep their customers around long term, they call Joey. And he's here today to give you the tools that you need to keep your customers longer. Joey gives us six ways to communicate better with customers and eight steps of the client experience. This is exactly what he teaches to keep customers coming back time and time again. So if you want your customers to love your business and tell everyone they know about it, keep watching. You don't want to miss this episode. You have a wide range of experience. You've written some incredible books and just material that's helping companies really all across the country. And I would love to hear your words on what you specialize in.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

So I've spent the last 20 years teaching companies how to keep their customers and how to keep their employees, all built around what are the kind of experiences we're creating for the people we want to be in relationship with. So on the customer side, what are you doing all along the customer journey to create the kind of experience that makes them want to come back for more? On the employee side, what kind of environment and culture are you creating and what kind of remarkable interactions are you delivering to keep your people engaged and retained, as well as turn them into recruiters, bringing you new top talent as your business continues to grow and develop?

SPEAKER_01 3:36

What is the client journey or even kind of employee journey? I know that they're very, very different from each other, but generally they're the same. What is the definition here that we're talking about?

SPEAKER_00 3:44

So I believe that every customer goes through eight phases, from the time they first hear about you and think about doing business with you all the way to the point where they're a zealous fan raving advocate. The same is true for our employees. They first hear about an open position or a possibility to work somewhere. And then they go through a series of phases, again, eight phases in total, before they reach the point where they're a raving fan employee who is not only loyal and committed to you, but is helping to recruit and spread the good word about the work that you do. I think at the end of the day, the thing that ties both of those journeys together is that they are very humanistic in their approach. It's not just about what are the tactical conversations and interactions, but rather what are the emotional feelings that are also tracking along in this journey and the fact that it's all humans, right? So at the end of the day, I believe a human is a human is a human. We all have some very similar motivations. We all have some similar wants and needs and desires. And wherever, as leaders, whether that's leading a business to sell to a customer or leading a team to work with fellow colleagues and employees, whatever we can do to lean into the feelings aspect of it, we're gonna have even better results.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

Yeah, I love the idea that that the other person is a human. Like I've said in sales training for many, many years, it's like, hey, don't forget that when you pick up the phone or when you're calling someone, the other person's a human.

unknown 5:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

And it's easy to do. And I empathize with it. You know, we're we're operating quickly, we're operating at scale. It's easier to think of folks sometimes as a number than as a human. But I think that a lot of businesses today are overly fixated on whether they're B2B or B2C. Like, oh, Joey, you don't understand. We're B2B, it's a little different. I'm like, I appreciate there are nuances, but at the end of the day, if you're thinking you're B2B or B2C or B2G, that would be business to government, you're H to H. You're human to human. You are one human trying to interact with another human and convince, persuade, encourage them to take a specific course of action, whether that's do business with you, come work with you, build this project with you, buy this thing from you, kind of doesn't matter what we're trying to convince them, as long as we remember that they're a human being, there are a lot of paths and shortcuts we can do that dramatically increase the likelihood of getting the result we want.

SPEAKER_01 6:08

Once you've kind of eliminated all of the nuances, if you will, and we realize it's just H to H. And whether I'm in the sales process or whether I'm in marketing or whether I'm in, you know, the fulfillment side or whether I'm all the way into finance and I'm collecting, like whatever part of the business I'm in, or whatever section of the client journey that I'm a part of, I'm dealing with a human. What are my tools here now? If I if I know that the other person on the other side of the call or the stream or the desk is a human and I want to create an experience, what are my tools? What's my bag look like?

SPEAKER_00 6:41

Well, I would posit that there are six communication tools we can use when interacting with our customers or our team members. Those six tools are in-person interactions, emails, phone calls, physical mail or snail mail, videos, and gifts and presents. And depending on where we are in the journey, where we are in the relationship, we can bring to bear each of those different communication mediums or different communication tools to create a different experience. Very few people, if you were to ask them, tell me about the best email you received this week, are going to say, Oh, let me tell you, I got a great one. This was an amazing one. No, it just doesn't happen. Whereas if we counterbalance that against, for example, text messages, you know, the typical email gets read within 48 hours of receipt. The average response to read and response time is 24 to 48 hours. The typical text message gets responded to within 90 seconds. Now, some people hearing that might say, oh, get all of our customers' phone numbers and we'll just text them anytime we need. No, we don't want to do that. And we've all been on the receiving end of those texts, and we hate getting those texts. We want nothing to do with those types of organizations. But depending on the business, depending on the relationship, depending on the personal and emotional connection that you've not only built in the past, but are trying to build going forward with the recipient of the message, different communication tools can get you to those goals faster.

SPEAKER_01 8:09

Yeah. Understood. Okay. And so I'm I'm going down the journey, and maybe we'll nuance here or we'll separate client from employee. Let's go client first. That's typically as business owners, that's that's seemingly our first focus. And so we'll start there, even though maybe it shouldn't be. We'll get to that in a second.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

I'm positive that we probably, as employers, need to start thinking about the customer first and think about our team member first, but I'm happy to focus on the customer first, just to illustrate that point and satiate some of those people who are just like, I just want to talk about customer experience. I want to hear what that part of the podcast is.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Yeah, I no, you're 100% right. I think that we're on the same page. Once you start really first off, I think that the listener right now may not even they may not have even thought about their client journey, right? We just we just do our business. What are you talking about? And so I think first off, the client journey will help them understand, like, oh, okay, cool. Like there's steps along the way, and we're gonna get into it. But when you really start like studying this, you realize that, oh, it's actually my team that's doing this, and I should probably focus here. So we'll get to that. Okay, so client journey, what does that look like? You said there's eight steps, you kind of just overviewed it for us. But generally, are most companies doing this half, half in, half out? Like what have you found?

SPEAKER_00 9:19

Yeah, most companies are paying attention to three, maybe four of these eight phases. And with your permission, Chaz, what probably makes sense is to give an overview of each of the eight phases and kind of a whirlwind approach, and then we can dive deep into whichever ones you find most interesting. I'll preface this by saying all eight of the phases start with the letter A. And the reason for that is not to confuse people, but it's rather to help folks understand that if you focus on getting all eight of these right, it's like getting straight A's on a report card. Your customers are happy, they're getting good grades, they're giving you good marks, they're happy with the results, they're gonna keep coming back for more. That's great. So the first phase is the assess phase. In the assess phase, a prospect is assessing whether or not they want to do business with you. They're checking out your marketing materials, they're probably participating in some sales conversations or interactions, they're on your website, they're on your social media, they're talking to other people that might have done business with you, they're reading reviews. All the things that you or I might use to describe as sales and marketing is happening in this first phase. So at the end of the assess phase, they then move into the admit phase. Now, in the admit phase, a prospective customer admits that they have a need or a problem they believe you're going to be able to help them with. They sign on the dotted line, they hand over their hard-earned cash, they transition from being a prospect to being a customer. Almost immediately after that happens, they move into phase three, the affirm phase. In the affirm phase, the brand new customer begins to doubt the decision they just made. In common parlance, we often refer to this as buyer's remorse. Their feelings of joy, euphoria, and excitement when they made the purchase start to go away, and those feelings are replaced by fear and doubt and uncertainty. What if this doesn't work out as well as I hoped? What if this product or this service isn't everything I had hoped it would be? In the affirm phase, we want to reaffirm their choice. We want to remind them why they decided to pick us and reinforce that feeling that we're going to take great care of them. We then come to the activate phase. This is phase four. The activate phase is the first real moment of truth. In a product selling business, this is when they receive the product. In a service business, this might be the kickoff call or the first time that we start to deliver on the service. In the activate phase, you want to energize the relationship. You want to let this brand new customer know that doing business with you is going to be unlike any business experience they've ever had. Now, let's be honest, Jazz. Most companies are actually pretty good at the activate phase. They're pretty good at that first moment, but where they start to fall apart is in the next phase, the acclimate phase. This is the second day of having the product or what happens after the initial service call. Most businesses overindex on focusing on that first impression while missing the opportunity to reinforce it with the second, third, fourth, tenth, twentieth impression. The acclimate phase starts on that second day and runs for weeks or even months as the customer gets used to your way of doing business, your cadence of a project, using the product, whatever it may be, there's this ramping up stage as they acclimate to your way of doing business. If we continue to hold their hand through the acclimate phase, we're lucky enough to, in the sixth phase, have them reach the accomplished stage. In the accomplished stage, the customer accomplishes the goal that they had when they originally decided to become a customer. See, every customer has a vision of what owning your product or partaking of your service is going to create. And it's not just, oh, I own the shirt. No, they have a vision of wearing the shirt out on a date and the date going well. So what are they trying to accomplish? How are we tracking their progress towards that accomplishment? And what are we doing to celebrate with them when they actually achieve the goal? Yeah. We then come to the seventh phase, the adopt phase. This is when the customer becomes loyal to you and only you. They're not listening to the competition. They are committed. If you make it, they're going to buy it. They are bought in. These are our true fans, right? We love these types of customers. The problem that most organizations have is that they take their adopters for granted. They just presume they're going to buy everything and presume they're always going to be there. And as a result, we don't care for them the same way we cared for them in the beginning when we thought we had to hustle to keep the relationship. Last but not least, if we've done all these seven phases well, if we've held their hand through all the previous seven phases, we have the right, the privilege to invite them into the eighth phase of the relationship, the advocate phase, where they become a raving fan, singing our praises far and wide. That's how you know you've reached the full magnitude of the customer journey when they become an uncommissioned salesperson bringing you more business from other friends and people that they know because they've had such a remarkable experience as a customer, they can't help but tell everyone they know about it. I love that. So those are the eight phases. And as I mentioned, most businesses are paying attention to maybe three, four of those. There might be folks listening in who are like, I never even thought of that phase. Or I heard of buyer's remorse before, but we don't have a system and a process in our business to address buyer's remorse. And yet, cognitively, I know it's a thing. I know it exists. That's why paying attention to the customer journey and every step along the way is so powerful.

SPEAKER_01 14:47

Yeah, let's let's go right to that affirm stage because I've been a part of businesses, you know, that sales and marketing journey, it's always super fun. And you get a lead and you work it, and you got a sales guy and you get the contract, and that whole process is very enthusiastic, usually, at that the first two phases there. And so inside of that purchase, and then now we got that buyer's remorse section. I have those same organizations that are super enthusiastic over here, even if it's just a day or two or three or seven, it is a long time for your customer. Talk about this affirmation. What are some of the tools here that you use?

SPEAKER_00 15:23

Well, let's look at why this time period. The biggest change to kind of what was happening in the affirm stage has happened in the last 20 years because of Amazon. So here's the interesting thing. We go on Amazon, we make a purchase. What happens? We immediately get an email after the purchase confirming our order. We then get a text message or an email when it ships. We get a text message or an email when it's out for delivery. Once it's been delivered, I, you know, I work from home. There are times where I will get a message that is a picture of my front step with my Amazon package on it. I'm in the house. They never even rang the doorbell. And I have proof that it's already here. Compare this to the typical experience that someone has in a business other than dealing with Amazon. We buy the product. Well, when are we gonna get it? Well, it says it'll ship in one to three days. Well, which is it? One to three. And then when it does ship, do I get tracking numbers? When's it gonna arrive? And how's it gonna come? Is it coming postal service? Is it coming FedEx? Is it coming UPS? Is it coming some third-party freight? I don't even know what it is. And on the service side, it's not much better. On the service side, we have all the whining and dining as you alluded to. We have the sales conversations, we have everybody getting excited about it. And then all of a sudden, we find ourselves in a scenario where wait a second, when is the next kickoff? When is the the thing we're gonna do? When is the interaction gonna actually start? We're gonna have the kickoff meeting. Oh, it's two weeks after we signed the paperwork. Well, what's happening in those two weeks? Is there any communication? Is there any reaffirmation? Is there any discussion about the fact that we're actually a customer now? Or is the company waiting until you show up for that in-person meeting and then they're gonna razzle and dazzle you? Well, the reality is if our emotions have fallen, if we've gone into that fear, doubt, and uncertainty stage, and nothing has been said by the company that sold us what this new service is gonna be, the only sound we're left with is the sound of our own voice doubting the decision we just made.

SPEAKER_01 17:27

Yeah, it's crazy that when you hear that, you're like, Man, did you walk into a dark room, a valley of sorts? Like, what happened? But it it is so real. You hit the you hit the button, you're excited for a little while longer, and then like poof, all that disappears, and now you have fear. And this is I think if cut if if entrepreneurs just slowed down enough to like just put themselves, really, this is put themselves in the shoes of the customer the whole time, right? This is how you do this. But if if they just thought about it for a second, it's like, oh yeah, I kind of do. Like when I went there, yeah, like it took a while and then I was unsure. It's like, wow, uncertainty does not breed confidence and does not breed a raving fan at the end of this. So tell me about I mean, without going into each individual one's let's kind of go back high level. How does like, for example, in this firm stage, if I miss that opportunity, how much harder are the other ones because now I have this like blemish? I don't even know it as an entrepreneur, but I do. Right.

SPEAKER_00 18:27

Yeah, I mean, what happens is you're digging out of an emotional hole that you don't even are aware, aware of. Exactly. So at the beginning, when they make the purchase, the customer's brain floods with dopamine. They feel joy, euphoria, and excitement. This is the product that's going to be the answer to my prayers. This is the service that's gonna take me to the next level. But as that dopamine recedes, those feelings of joy, euphoria, and excitement are replaced by fear, doubt, and uncertainty. Meanwhile, we're back at the office high-fiving. We landed the client, we're getting all ready to either deliver the product or have the first call and the kickoff with the service, and we're walking into that meeting jazzed about what is to come. They're walking into that meeting in an emotional hole. So the first few days, weeks, hours, whatever comes after that, we're trying to pull them out of the hole instead of getting them up to speed running with us and climbing to new heights. And so this is where not acknowledging where the other party is emotionally creates a giant delta or a difference between the emotional states that if we don't close it and close it quickly, we're fighting against that for the rest of the relationship.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

Yeah. And things can be challenging. Not only is it challenging to come out of the hole, but you could say one thing that might be slightly off that might in a normal circumstance have not been a big impact to them. But because they're already in the hole, it's it's an exaggerated moment. I was just talking with one of my companies, this was maybe two or so weeks ago, and we were walking through a scenario like this. I'm like, no, no, no, no, this isn't the problem. Let's back up. What happened here? What happened here? What happened? Oh, see, right here is where we first lost them. And they're like, really? It's like, yeah, look, look right here. This is what this is what we did. We should have done it like this. This was the response, and and it didn't look like it in the moment, but three steps later, it showed up with you know, lack of trust and fill in the blank, right?

SPEAKER_00 20:22

Absolutely. Rarely is it one big thing. Rarely, you know, lots of business leaders they're like, well, if we can just guard against making the huge mistake. And while we certainly don't want to have a business filled with huge opportunities for mistakes, more often than not, it's death by a thousand paper cuts. It's this small thing, this small slight, this thing that we could have been better at, this broken promise, this over-exaggerated claim. And when we start to stack all those things, they're all chipping away against the trust and credibility and any attempts to build the relationship.

SPEAKER_01 20:56

Yeah. Let's let's skip down the line back to the customer who's been around. I don't remember the exact name to use for, but been around for a while, not quite to the end. The seventh one. The adopter. The adopter. We we forget about these and we let them just do their thing. We're appreciative of them, but we're not taking good care of them. Why do you think that this is, and what can we do to guard against that?

SPEAKER_00 21:18

Well, I think there are a couple reasons for this. Number one, I think there's a biological imperative that as a general rule, humans like the chase better than they like the catch. This is why, as a general rule, dating seems more exciting than marriage. We take it for granted. I'm not, I've been happily married for 14 years. I'm not anti-marriage. But what I am saying is lots of times when you're in sales and marketing mode, when you're trying to convince someone to spend their time with you, you're more cognizant of the words you're using, the type of little interactions you're having, the small special gifts, all these various things that are designed to accelerate the relationship. But once you've been in a relationship for a while, be it a year or five years or 10 years, we start. Start to know the other person's habits. We know the other person's picadillos. And often we take those for granted as opposed to using them as an opportunity to deepen and enhance the relationship. So where this often shows up is companies run a big promotion where they say, Hey, if you're signing up to be a new customer, we're going to give you the first three months free. Now, the person who's been a loyal customer for 10 years sees those ads, because by the way, we're not doing a good job of only making sure those ads go to prospects. They're getting mixed in with existing customers. And now we're saying, well, wait a second, why does somebody new who's not been in a relationship with you get a better deal than I do? And I've been here for 10 years. That's right. And usually it's a significantly better deal. So we can turn this on its head by saying everyone gets the same deal. We can really turn it on its head by saying the longer you're with us, the less you pay. That's when the conversation really gets interesting and can change to something more meaningful and more informative of the depth of relationship given your time.

SPEAKER_01 23:07

Hey, kings and queens, Chaz Wolf. I want to talk to you about something that's super important to me. We put a lot of time and effort, we meaning myself and my team, into this podcast, into the content that goes out every single day. And if you have been getting any sort of value or insight from this, we want it to be able to reach other business owners too. So we would love if you would like, comment, share, leave a review, post, share again all of the things on social media, on all the different platforms, or even on the podcast mediums of Apple and Spotify. We would love to be able to get our content into more hands, more entrepreneurs so they can grow their business as quick as possible. Together, we are building a community of like-minded entrepreneurs who are committed to growing their businesses to new heights. So let's do this. Let's help each other grow. Yeah, Joey, this is super interesting because I have felt this way, this exact way, actually, about I don't know, any sort of television service, cell phone service, cable companies, cell phone, they're notorious for this, right?

SPEAKER_00 24:06

And you're like really you also see this with like lawn mowing service, like get getting our lawns mowed in the neighborhood. There are signs up from the people that mow our lawn talking about the new 2024 new customer pricing, which is cheaper than what I pay as a return customer coming back for my third year. And I actually called them up and I was like, hey, by the way, can I cancel and then re-sign up as a new customer to take advantage of the pricing? They're like, oh, that's not the way this works. Like, well, then how does it work that I'm paying more when you already know me? You know I'm gonna pay my bills on time. We I'm already set up in their system for auto pay. So it's like all the heavy lifting you already did in year one of me being a customer. Now we're just kind of on autopilot. You come and you mow the lawn every two weeks, three weeks. Like, what else do we need to be doing? Shouldn't this cost less than it cost the first time when you were figuring out, oh, do we need to push mow? Do we need to ride mow? How big's the yard? How many trees? All of that. You already figured that out in the first two years. It seems like the third year should be cheaper, but it's not.

SPEAKER_01 25:10

Yeah, yeah. I I think that there's a lot of intentional action that's going into these pieces. Now, as customers, we see this happen and we go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that you know, that sucks. But then when we think about our own business, it's like, oh, ooh. I I see where you're going with that. What just real quick on the pricing, you might have, you know, maybe a restaurant, you might have a marketing service, you might have, you know, different types of businesses listening. And they're thinking, well, okay, if I just keep getting, you know, my my you know, loyal customers cheaper and cheaper prices, then, you know, I I won't have a business. That's potentially what they're thinking in their limited thoughts.

SPEAKER_00 25:51

What would you say to that? Well, I would say one option is to give better pricing to people who've been with you longer so that loyalty has its privileges, right? But another option is to not make it about the dollars and instead make it about the experience. So, for example, I've got a restaurant that we love going to, my family goes to, it's a sushi restaurant. Absolutely love it. We go probably five, six times a year. So every other month. Not crazy, but a decent amount of time. When you think about the typical person goes to a restaurant once a year of a certain and you're hopping amongst different restaurants, the repeat visit to a restaurant that's really valuable to them. So, what's fascinating about this restaurant is they will surprise us. They'll surprise us with bringing out, you know, Japanese sodas on the house one day. Another day they might surprise us with, you know, a little bit of the tempura ice cream as a surprise, as opposed to us ordering it off the menu. The little extra touches that in the grand scheme of things don't cost them a lot and are things that have a perceived value that is much greater than the value they spend doing it. For a different type of business, this could be something as simple as just acknowledging the person's name and not making them jump through as many hoops as an existing customer as you would as a new customer. I had this happen recently with a company called Uline. Uline makes packing materials, right? They sell cardboard boxes, they sell bubble wrap, they say all kinds of stuff for kind of the background operations. And I was mailing out some mailers to some of my customers and I called them up. And this is how the call went, Jazz. I dial in, phone gets picked up. Hi, Mr. Coleman. Or I see you say it's okay to call you Joey. Is it okay if I call you Joey? Now they're using caller ID in their CRM to recognize this. I'm not one second into the phone call and I feel like I matter. And I said, Oh, actually, yes, Joey would be great. Thanks so much. How are you doing today? They're like, Oh, great, thanks for asking. And you, I said, I'm doing well. They're like, What can we help you with? I said, Well, I need to order some boxes. They said, Is this the same sized box that you ordered last time you called in? Now, at this moment, Chaz, I'm thinking, this is amazing. In the first few seconds of the call, they've called up my previous order. And they know because they sell packing supplies, the chances are pretty good I'm calling to order more of what I already ordered. And I said, Yeah, it actually is. And they're like, Do you need the exact same order or do you need more? I said, Well, actually, I need the exact same order. They said, No problem. Shipping to the same address as last time? Yes. Would you like to use the same credit card as last time? Yes. Is there anything you'd like to add to the order, Mr. Coleman? I mean, Joey? I said, No, we're good. Like, well, fantastic. What we're going to be doing is sending you an email, as you know, because you've been a loyal customer for a while, with your confirmation tracking number. You happen to call in before our 7 p.m. cutoff time, which means this is actually going to ship today. It'll go out today. And given that you're shipping to your home in Minnesota, we're showing that it'll arrive by Thursday at 6 p.m. But the tracking number will confirm that. Thanks so much for calling in again. We really appreciate your business. Now compare that to the typical interaction we have when we call up with a company we're already in business with, right? Cable companies are notorious about this. What's your phone number? Well, I'll repeat the phone number, even though I know it's showing on your screen. I'll tell you the what's your mailing address? I'll give you the address. Let me confirm your social. I'm like, are there that many people calling in to the cable companies as impostors for other accounts trying to move things around? Or I love it when they're like, what's your account number? If you were to offer me a billion dollars to tell you the account number, you'd get to keep the billion dollars. Because I'm not remembering my account number. You gave me that number. I never asked for that number. There's so many things we do in our businesses that if we step out of it for five minutes, we realize this is crazy. Why would we be doing this? Why are we subjecting our loyal customers to the behavior profiling of not only a complete stranger, but in most businesses, we treat a stranger better than we're treating the person who's coming back to do business with us again.

SPEAKER_01 30:17

Yeah. Yeah. Uh the message that I'm taking away from that, of course, the just the treating of the customer, but making it easy. I just think that there's just too many automated tools. There's too many, you know, CRM softwares that track all that that can just come right up. There's just too many opportunities for us to not be that good. And depending upon what the service is, for us to intentionally try to make it easy. The same thing with our mastermind community. I mean, these are busy entrepreneurs. These are people that did not sign up for Gathering the Kings to have a job or to do another thing, right? They're trying to sit at a table with some other entrepreneurs and like, you know, be encouraged, challenged a little bit, but then they got to go like run their business and their life. And so depending upon how we interact with them, could make it really easy or make it really hard. It's like I can I can remind you of all of our meetings, but if it's an if it's a an annoying reminder as opposed to an easy on-ramp to like, hey, we're meeting, like you should join us. There's a big difference between those two, right?

SPEAKER_00 31:20

100%. I'm involved in a couple of groups, and one of the groups I'm involved in, when you sign up, on the sign-up page, after you've signed up, you put in your credit card, it pops you to screen and it says, We're so excited to have you in the community. First things first, if you press on the button below, which identifies which calendar you use, Google Cal, iCal, whatever calendaring tool you're using, it will automatically put all of our events for the next year into your calendar. Great. Boom. Single button press. And now it's in my calendar. And what do I know about busy entrepreneurs? Most of them live and die by their calendar. And if something's in the calendar, they're not going to schedule over it versus trying to fit something into the calendar after the fact because they missed the email you sent with a PDF attachment with the 17 dates that you're going to have calls over the course of the next year. It's like, I'm I'm not going to read it. I'm not going to get it. Make it seamless, make it convenient, make it easy, and people will want to do more business with you.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

Yeah, I think we could probably just make that one line the topic of this whole thing and just make it easy. Make them feel appreciated. Don't forget about them.

SPEAKER_00 32:32

Totally. And by the way, sometimes making it easy for them makes it easy for you as well. Let's go back to my lawn care service. They send me an invoice in the mail at the end of every month. Now, mind you, it's a flat monthly rate that I pay. I'm not trying to bag on these guys, but the invoice comes in the mail, which means I don't always get it right away. Why? Because ah, it's the mail. And number two, I might not be home the day the mail comes, and I send all my mail to a P.O. box that I go to about once a week, once every 10 days. If I'm traveling, that can be an even broader gap. So we had an incident. I'm not proud of this, but I share this to hopefully make other folks say, we can do this too. We had an incident last summer where I was gone for several weeks and I missed paying the first invoice. And now the second invoice was coming due, and they were still owed a past invoice. So I get a phone call from the owner of the company, and he's like, hey, Joey, wanted to make sure you were getting our invoices. I was like, I was. Is there any way to email these to me? And they're like, Yeah, I it it would be a lot easier. The service we're using doesn't really work as well with email. And I'm thinking, it's the present day. 2024. 2024. How is it like and but but I'm trying to lead from a place of grace and empathy? And I'm like, okay. I said, by the way, normally you send me the invoice and I mail you a check. Do you have a Venmo or a PayPal that I can use instead? And the business owner says, Yeah. I said, can I just set you up to auto pay every month via Venmo so you can stop sending me bills in the mail and I can stop missing the bills in the mail, and this can just be charged? He's like, Well, I suppose we could do that. Now stop and think about this from a business owner point of view, Chaz. What he just did is increased the likelihood of collecting. He brought the revenue forward in the calendar month. I set it to auto-pay on the first of every month, even though there's a grace period to the seventh and then checks come in on the 15th, right? So he's getting a lot more money, a lot faster, and I feel better about the relationship because I don't have to think about the part that I don't want to think about, which is how much money I'm paying to have someone mow my lawn. Take the thing that you don't want your customer to ruminate and perseverate about and shift that to the automated conversation, and it makes everybody's life better.

SPEAKER_01 35:07

You have an incredible mind of and you know enthusiasm throughout the entire show here. I'm sure you carry that with you everywhere. But where can the listeners find you? Of course, we'll have it in the show notes as well. But what's easy to find you online?

SPEAKER_00 35:17

So the best place to find me online is on my website, joeycoleman.com. That's J-O-E-Y, like a baby kangaroo or a five-year-old, you know. Coleman, C-O-L-E-M-A-N, like the camping equipment, but no relation, joey coleman.com. My books are called Never Lose a Customer Again and Never Lose an Employee Again. They're available wherever you get books in whatever format you like to consume books. So we've got a hardcover you can write in the margins. We've got an e-book you can read and highlight on your Kindle or your Nook if you're using a Nook. Super exciting. I'd love to meet you. And we also have an audio book that I narrate. So if you've enjoyed the sound of my voice on this show, I will read both of the books to you if you'd like to have me do that.

SPEAKER_01 35:57

I love it. And we've had actually a few of our team members in preparation for the show go through one, I think one of each, actually. And so just an incredible mind. Again, there's great words. You've uh just a whole well. I could go over hours here, but I so appreciate you. Blessings to you and your family. Everyone that you're touching here this year, yeah, I can only imagine that it's going to bring blessings. So thank you so much for being here.

SPEAKER_00 36:17

Oh, thank you, Chaz. And thanks to everybody who listened in and joined us for the conversation. I hope you had as much fun and left with as many ideas as I'm leaving with after having a chance to connect and talk with Chaz today.

SPEAKER_01 36:28

Thank you for listening to Driven to Win. I hope that you were able to pull out a few nuggets to go apply into your business right away. More importantly, though, I hope that you're realizing that it takes more to be successful than just being by yourself, doing it all on your own, carrying the weight all by yourself. What I have realized, not only in my own journey from multiple businesses and multiple different industries, and now interviewing over two or three hundred other very successful seven, eight, and nine-figure business owners, is that it's tough to do it alone. And so gathering the kings exists to bring together successful entrepreneurs. In fact, we are putting together 1,000 kings, specifically who are grateful but not done. We're intentionally assembling kings who fight tooth and nail for their business, family, and communities. And here's what we believe that in the pursuit of excellence in those areas, that it ignites within us the responsibility to govern power and forge a lasting legacy. So if that relates and resonates with you, and you know that you need people around you, sharp, qualified, other, very successful business owners, I want you to go to gatheringtheKings.com. I want you to take a look at what we're doing and see if it makes sense for you to be part of our pursuit to 1,000 kings. Talk soon.