In the Loupe
In the Loupe
Maximizing Client Retention ft. John Liebler of Clientbook
John Liebler, formerly of Signet and currently VP of Operations at Clientbook, shares how independent jewelers can maximize sales through client retention strategies and relationship building in the digital age.
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Welcome to In the Loop, thought it was kind of epitomized by I had about a three minute conversation with John before we started recording and in that time he just asked me a little bit about myself, where I'm from. You know what? I was wearing a jersey. He asked me hey, what jersey are you wearing? And I said, oh, it's my favorite team, la Thieves. He's like, oh, what kind of team is that? And little did I know and he brings it up later in the recording that he was kind of doing some client research on me as well, learning a little bit about me. That he later made some cool points. I thought it was a really interesting conversation and he brings up a lot of ways that independent jewelry stores can maximize and also increase their sales through these retention methods and just an overall kind of strategy. It was a really cool conversation. I hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2:This episode is brought to you by Punchmark, the jewelry industry's favorite website platform and digital growth agency. Our mission reaches way beyond technology. With decades of experience and long-lasting industry relationships, punchmark enables jewelry businesses to flourish in any marketplace. We consider our clients our friends, as many of them have been friends way before becoming clients. Punchmark's own success comes from the fact that we have a much deeper need and obligation to help our friends succeed. Whether you're looking for better e-commerce performance, business growth or campaigns that drive traffic and sales, punchmark's website and marketing services were made just for you. It's never too late to transform your business and stitch together your digital and physical worlds in a way that achieves tremendous growth and results. Schedule a guided demo today at punchmarkcom. Slash go.
Speaker 1:And now back to the show. What is up everybody? My name is Michael Burpo. I'm joined by John Liebler, the VP of operations at ClientBook. How are you doing today, John? I'm good. How are you, Michael? So well, I'm really excited to get a chance to speak with you. Clientbook, making some news. I just got a chance to meet your team at JCK. We had a booth right next to you guys, just in the Edge Village space. It was really cool getting a chance to talk with your team about everything that's going on. Could you maybe give me like a little background on your industry experience as well as kind of what led you to your job at Clampbook?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'd be happy to, and I'll give you the four-minute version. I can't make it any shorter than that.
Speaker 3:I apologize because I am not a millennial, as you so introduced yourself a couple of minutes ago when we learned all about your gaming career. So when I got into the army I didn't need to buy. I was going to buy a young lady a ring and I didn't have a job. So I walked into the mall and I walked into Belden Jewelers and I said I need a ring and they sold me a three eighths of a carat, a radiant cut and a twisted band for $750 to give to Lisa. Lisa unfortunately said no, which is the sad part of the story. But the happy part of the story is I said are you hiring?
Speaker 3:And they said sure, so I started my jewelry career in 1989 at Belden Jewelers, right before Valentine's Day, and on that day, mark my manager, handed me a little plastic notebook and said, john, this is your PT notebook and this is how you will define your career. Jewelry is not about selling an item. It's about building relationships and selling generationally right. It's about the guy buying the necklace for his girlfriend that soon becomes his fiance, that then becomes his wife, that then becomes his 50th anniversary and all their kids. And that really resonated with me and I was very coachable, so I just started using my PT notebook. That was a fortuitous decision to take that job because Belladons got acquired and then we acquired somebody and by the end of my career, I was the division vice president of strategy for Signet. So Jared Zale, kay Peoples, mappins and I ran stores for about 20 years. So I ran the Kay division and then the last five years I handled all the logistics, strategy, real estate, training, blah, blah, blah for Signet, but I left in 2018.
Speaker 3:I've spent the last seven years built my own consulting gig, but it's just me, so I'm like I have a big, a big thing, and during that time I took on other jobs with companies, so I did some time in workforce management because and and and and time studies while doing my own consulting. I was the head of stores for Shinola for about 18 months and then, through my consulting business and some of my software uh companies that I worked there, that I had the opportunity to work with Helzberg, uh Icebox, diamond Watches, uh Hanush and just a myriad of other jewelers I bumped into ClientBook uh. In January they asked me to come on as a consultant to help build out their brand program, which we can talk about in another podcast, and um fell in love with the company, fell in love with the people, and they asked me to stay and they sucked me out of retirement. And here I am.
Speaker 1:Man, what a rollercoaster. That's a very impressive resume. I mean you even mentioned, you know, like a life before even working in jewelry. That's pretty impressive Now when you talk about Signet. So, if you don't mind me, just kind of staying on this topic for one more second, I sometimes feel, when it comes to, like, going to a jewelry show, I sometimes feel like there's a independence versus these big box kind of I don't want to say race, because it's not competition where it's like head to head. It's more like we're racing ahead and we're trying to see, um, you know what we can do the best. It seems like climb book is about optimizing, um like the reach and the strengths of, uh, different stores and especially for independents. Um, is that kind of something that was by having your experience with these big box places, uh, it's kind of like allowed you to see what's what can be done differently as an independent jeweler. Is that's kind of like allowed you to see what's what can be done differently as an independent jeweler? Is that like kind of part of it?
Speaker 3:Michael, that is an incredibly insightful question. Seriously, Thank you. You know when, look, if you look at the totable, the TAM right, the totable addressable market for jewelry, right, I think it's somewhere around $73 billion. Right, you've got Signet, which is six, 7 billion. Right, you got got Signet, which is six, $7 billion. Right, you've got Tiffany's in there, you have Helzberg, you have some other big players, but then you have everybody else. Right, you've got somewhere on 20,000 independents that do less than a million bucks a year. Then you've got this grouping of 10,000 to 15,000 jewelers that do between a million and 100 million, and so, literally, you've got Signet, a couple other players and then everybody else.
Speaker 3:And when I left and I'll be very, very transparent about it like I walked out going on, the number one ops guy there is, and I learned quickly, yeah, and then my first gig was Barnes Noble and I'm like I have no idea what I'm doing because what Barnes Noble does. And then, as I've developed over the last seven years and I've been on an adventure and I've said to yes to so many things, what I've learned is I was the number one ops guy for a publicly traded $6 billion jewelry company, which makes me qualified to do one job Right, and running an independent is far more complicated. Yeah, I mean, look, I had a team of 75. It's great. I was talking to somebody once and they're like what would you do as an interview, what would you do to do this analytics? I said I'd call Rich in my office and say do this analytics for me, right?
Speaker 3:So, as I've learned this not only independent jewelry, independent businesses, because I've worked with a lot of small and medium businesses this business owner, as you well know, has to be great at everything, or has to be great at hiring people, or has to have a great system that they can rely on. That's number one, what makes jewelry very different and actually we had an executive meeting today and we're talking about it very different, and actually we had an executive meeting today and we're talking about it it is really the last vertical that exists where there aren't one or two giant players that have gobbled up the market right, the number one player only has 6%, 7%, everyone else and so you have to be able to cater to the independent mindset of every business owner if you want to be successful as a technology company in this market.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting, you know, you're right, I'm thinking about it and they are. It really does seem like jewelry is about. Again, it always comes back to this relationship building and what I always think about is that we have to adapt to that too, because punch marks so we do websites for jewelers, even though we are B2B. The fact is jewelers, they want to be treated the way that they treat their clients when they are B2C, which is to say, very deep relationships, very high touch, lots of handholding, which honestly is great.
Speaker 1:High touch, lots of handholding, which honestly is great, makes it difficult to scale sometimes because when you hold people's hands you kind of need someone on the other hand doing the handholding. That can be difficult. But I guess, where do you kind of see this big topic of client retention working into it? Because in the end, when we talk about jewelry, it is sort of a, I guess it's a non consumable luxury good, which is to say, if you buy that ring it should last theoretically forever and theoretically they should never need another one of those again. So where does that retention kind of aspect start to work into the the, I guess the equation of it all?
Speaker 3:sure um? Are you married? Uh, no, sir. Do you have a significant other?
Speaker 1:nah, unless anyone out there is listening all right.
Speaker 3:well, I won't go down that that path with you. But the reality. First of all, I want to go back to one thing. The other interesting aspect of independent jewelers is so many of them are multi-generational and so you have to take not only the jewelry as a product and the emotion behind it. You have to take a family business at scale, and that's what makes it really interesting, for because the the passion, the desire and the love of the business is ingrained generation after generation after generation. Right Now, client retention, this is. I could talk for four hours on this, and so feel free to edit. Let's lock in, I'm in. Let's lock in, brother.
Speaker 3:So the reality is, at best, conversion in a jewelry store is 20%, okay, and that's pretty much a standard number you would see from the NRF or other things. Somebody's going to go oh, I'm at 22. And someone, but let's use 20 as a number. That means of 100 customers that walk in, only 20 of them buy. That means 80 people walked in, they got out of their car, they walked in, they greeted blah, blah, blah and they left. Or they were walking through the mall and they turned left and walked into a store. It has changed who's buying jewelry. Right. For years it was 98% of all rings were bought by men for women. It's now probably 94. But the predominant buyer of jewelry is still the male buying for a female or a self-purchaser, or a female buying for herself, right, and you've got all these categories in there. But most men A were horrible shoppers, right, and I try not to speak in absolutes.
Speaker 2:So for all those people listening, the good shopper guy out there.
Speaker 3:I apologize if I offended you, but for the most part, we're not good, right? I can't speak for everyone, but I've got my wife's birthday, my wife's anniversary, I have Valentine's Day, I have Mother's Day, I get blessed with Hanukkah, so I have to come up with eight gifts, right? So I don't know how many. Is that? 10 gift-giving occasions I need to come up with. Trust me when I tell you the engagement ring was not the last piece of jewelry I ever bought. Yes, right. And so when we talk about client retention, I'm going to ask you to think and if I had a whiteboard I'd show you, but break it down in your mind 100 customers of them came in and bought nothing. We paid to get them in there. You charged a jeweler money to build a website to get them in right. They did something to get a Google review. They threw up a billboard. That customer walked in. The term is CAC, right. You know CAC is probably better than I do, right?
Speaker 3:Customer acquisition cost Not all of them are going to buy. The bridal buying cycle is four touch points. It's over the course of a year. She starts thinking about it way before he does. She comes in and investigates. He comes in three months later. We need to be able to capture that customer and retention starts before the purchase. That's the biggest mistake. That I see is everyone's like well, I'll capture them in my POS, but that relies on a transaction and 80% of your customers are not transacting the first time they walk in your store Post-transaction.
Speaker 3:First of all, I want to thank you. You want to stop returns. Send out a thank you note. You reduce returns by 70 to 80% if you simply send out thank you for coming in right. And then you want to nurture them, give them additional information through outreach and then help them find gifts for their life events, for those ones I mentioned, for their promotions. And the more you can personalize that and it's not mass messaging the more you will retain those customers.
Speaker 3:One last piece, and then I'll pause. You got your 80% of the people who don't buy. You've got your 20% who did Split them down the middle. Half of them are loyalists. They love you. They're going to come shopping with you all the time. It's probably a little less than a half, but we'll just say half. The other half only buy from you. Once it's me driving home needing a gift and pulling off to the left because I saw the billboard Great job on your billboard right. Or I did a search for jewelry and you popped up I walk in, I buy it, I walk out. That customer, that's the one you want to capture, that's the one you want to reach out to and go. Hey, john, by the way, I hope she liked her birthday gift. We did mention that her anniversary, your anniversary, is two months later. Why don't we get her the matching necklace? All of that is how you retain customers.
Speaker 1:So it sounds like it's a mixture of both ends. You know like when they talk about being having more margin, they talk about you either have to reduce expense or you have to raise your gross, and I think that it sounds almost like when you're talking about that. You know this theoretical 100 customers or potential customers that walk through your door and how you either have to close more of them so go from 20 to 25, or you need to have more of the original 20 come in more frequently.
Speaker 3:Do you find or there's one other, or sell more higher ticket to the one that you sold to, right. So you've got conversion right. You got of the 100, can I take it from converting 20 of them to 21? Can I get more people to come back in? Or can I take my AOV, my average order value, from 1,000 to 1,100? Yes, Right, Well, 100 bucks more times 10,000 customers, that's real money. So those are your three buckets. Sorry to interrupt.
Speaker 1:No, no, that makes a lot of sense because for me it starts to some of those things I just feel like are not always in the cards of those three. Some of them don't feel within reach very often when it comes to every store so we're dealing with. We have just short of 500 clients across North America and some of our stores we are very aware are dealing with a different clientele and demographic than some of our other ones. We have some clients that are in San Francisco and the average, the AOV, is through the roof comparatively to these people in these other parts of the nation or in Canada. And do you find that that is something that all three of those branches are worth tackling? Or is there usually like go find the you know the most within reach, attack that one first and then save the other? I guess more difficult to accomplish ones and get those ones later.
Speaker 1:Or is it best to do all of them at the same time?
Speaker 3:This is something that I talk about rarely because it can get confusing. I actually use a number called visit value. So conversion, right, 10 people walk in, one person buy. My conversion is 10% Average order value and, by the way, $1,000,. You're right, I've got some customers. Average order value is 5K. A lot of it's 250 bucks, right, if I sell Pandora. Right, it's going to be as much lower if I'm selling one. So to me, don't get hung up on the AOV, it's a question of can I take $20 to $22? That's a 10% increase. I do that across every customer. I just increase my revenue by 10%, by 10%.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's a great way to look at it.
Speaker 3:Right, but visit value is basically what's a customer worth. So if 10 customers walk in and my total revenue for the day is a thousand dollars, the value of each customer was a hundred bucks with me?
Speaker 3:I think so. Okay, if one customer spent a thousand, or 10 customers spent a hundred, the value, the total value, is still $1,000 in revenue. And so what I teach my teams is I don't want them focused on one metric, I want them focused on the customer. Every customer has a story. Every customer has a need. They're not there unless they have one, and I want to maximize their value based on their need. The rest will take care of itself.
Speaker 1:That's really a great way to kind of put it, and I am starting to see it. So we had just mentioned earlier, though, that there is this like retention and relationship kind of aspect, the handholding and this how. Jewelry is all about building up the relationships. A lot of times, we're both tech companies over here, so I feel like a lot of retailers balk at the idea of leveraging technology when it comes to this thing. That has been, very traditionally, the absolute antithesis of technology, which is to say, very personalized.
Speaker 1:How do you start to talk and like broach the subject of leveraging technology when it comes to client retention? Like I still had, I had a JCK, we just had this one. People were like, yeah, we don't sell online because we want to make sure that we build a relationship and we get a return you know, customer out of it. We want them to come into the store, and sometimes I just have to be like yeah, but like if you make the sale, you can encourage them to either come back or maybe they become a recurring customer online, which is, you know to say, just as loyal of a customer If you do all of the things along the way appropriately, which is to say, like you know, send good tracking information, set a thank you, include stuff in your box. What's the conversation like on your end when you start to have the discussion about client retention through technology?
Speaker 3:Well, I know I'll actually respond to the thing you just said. I mean, I'm old enough to be. We remember sitting in the room like when we were debating acom and I was a district manager, and saying it's going to destroy my business, like no one's going to shop for me anymore. We can't like I was. I'm a very passionate guy and I'm like like no, no, no. Well, the reality is, multi-channel sales is the way to go, and somebody very smart stood in front of the room and showed us all of that. And you're right, you are so right. Look, buy the thing online. And then I that says hey, michael, I saw you bought this thing, congratulations. Come on in for a custom fitting. When you come in from the custom fitting, I'm going to show you 17 other pieces that you didn't think about and sell you a bunch of like it's. It's. That's the mindset that people have to have to take and you can't do any one channel exclusively. You have to have them all work together.
Speaker 3:In response to the technology question, I'm seeing something very interesting happen in the industry. The generations are turning over, right. So you know full disclosure. I'm about to be 60 and I my son is probably your age. He's 30. He's a brilliant guy. If I ran my own business, I would hand him and my daughter, who's 26, my business in a heartbeat. They're going to have new ideas. I'm a traditionalist, yes, I'm a technology guy, but I still believe in certain things. Right, and I don't use Instagram. I know what it is and my marketing vice president tells me I should pay attention to it, but I don't, right. And so what I'm seeing, michael, is that there's this dynamic going on where the generation my generation is turning over the business to their kids. The kids are wanting to bring it forward from a technology standpoint, but they want to honor the traditions of their parents. Right, and you know, I promised you I wouldn't make a sales pitch about client book, but I am going to make a sales pitch about technology and client telling. Client telling does bridge that, right, because what all I'm doing with clientelling is digitizing the PT notebook that first thing. I told you, where I filled out my little notebook with my pen and my paper. Well, five years later, I built it in Excel and I just had my computer on the counter. I typed people's names in, but I still had eye contact to you. Well, now it's on an iPad, right, but what it's doing is making the relationship stronger because I can stay contacted with you, I don't have to rely on my memory and I can keep my promises. I can make you a hero. Every single time I reach out to you and say, go get her something or congratulations on your promotion. So the best way.
Speaker 3:I was once giving a talk at a conference and someone asked me a very similar question about technology, and I explained it this way. I remember the first time I got in my car to go to work and Google said to me or my phone said to me I don't know if it was Google's somebody said you're 28 minutes from work, and I went oh my God, that's so creepy, like, really. I came home that night. It's so creepy. The next day I got in my car and it said you're 38 minutes from work. However, if you take this route, you'll save 10 minutes. I went oh my gosh, that's amazing. I love it. That's amazing, right.
Speaker 3:Technology works when you make it make sense to the person who's using it and you make it important to them. You can't shove it down their throat, right? And so that's the bridge that everyone seems to struggle making sometime. We probably don't have time to talk about AI in this podcast, but that's the next like I'm all into AI. It makes sense to me, well, podcast. But that's the next like I'm all into ai. It makes sense to me, well, it's.
Speaker 1:And it's invasive, it's taking your thoughts away no right, like thinking about your thoughts in the way that I feel like, uh, a computer is taking away your thoughts. It's like almost like a. It's a tool, and I mean theoretically I could hand craft my entire house for me, or I could have a tool that would craft the house for me as well, and I think that the end result will be faster and probably more efficient. And I think it's like a.
Speaker 3:It's the medium, I think, but I think I'm with you all I know is that I dropped out of college to join the army. That's why I went and bought a ring at the mall, because I got out of the army and you can't do anything when you go to the army and you blow up tanks. You can't very well like go get a job, yeah, you'll figure something else out. Had we had ai when I went to college, I'd be a physicist. Oh right, because the way my brain processes stuff, it didn't work for me, right? I couldn't look up things in the library, I couldn't sit in a lecture hall. So technology is a tool, just like a hammer. You have to choose how to use it and you have to use the right tool at the right time. To use your analogy when you build a house I totally agree.
Speaker 1:Wow, what a concise and beautiful way to put it, john. We're going to take a quick break and when we come back I want to talk about the retention flow. So everybody stay with us.
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Speaker 1:All right, everybody still speaking with John Liebler from ClientBook. So, john, we were talking about the kind of retention flow. So I'm interested when it comes to online shopping. I've been doing a lot of online shopping just because there's not a lot of department stores around here. So I'm interested when it comes to online shopping. I've been doing a lot of online shopping just because there's not a lot of department stores around here. So I have to get a lot of my stuff online and I do try to avoid buying everything I do from Amazon. But I do find that some of these brands there's like almost like this, this flow, or like race to it or like this kind of I guess a journey to actually decide to buy this, and what's really interesting is they are absolutely not all the same.
Speaker 1:I just bought a man. I got this targeted ad. It was incredible. It was so right on. It was this horseshoe crab blueprinted on this beautiful plate and I bought it off Instagram. It was this horseshoe crab blue printed on this beautiful plate and I bought it off Instagram. It was $100, which is more than I probably would buy a plate you know, like a serving tray off of. But it was exactly what I wanted. It was so my aesthetic and they nailed it and I bought it, bought it with Apple Pay, took one second bang done.
Speaker 1:But then there are other things. I've talked about it in the past with my. I have a series called Breaking Down the Best and one of those series was about I hemmed and hawed about this $300 jacket for like a year. I thought about it nonstop, but they kept on getting in my inbox. They kept on sending me new things. I was kind of waiting for a little sales coupon to come through. It never did because they probably knew I was on the hook.
Speaker 1:Those relationships I did convert at the end and, yes, they are kind of difference in values but still no less valuable to me. I love my jacket. I love my horseshoe crab plate. I think they're both beautiful and a great utility. Now, how do you kind of see the flow you mentioned? Engage your Rings starts maybe even a year ahead of time. It goes through, then through the sales cycle and then the actual kind of relationship management and retention process which I usually see as post-sale. What does that flow look like and what are the key checkpoints? What does that flow look like and what are the key checkpoints?
Speaker 3:Well, there's a lot there that's good, it's really good. I would one encourage everyone and this is probably people are going to go. No, it's crazy, just take the value of the item out of the equation. People seem to think that higher value important as the person right, buying the $20,000, whatever, or $15,000, $100, right, and so I've always attempted to treat these relationships the same when it comes to value of the product, because the value is the person buying the product, right. Then you put on top and from the jewelry, and if it's a gift, it's an emotion. Even if it's a gift for yourself or gift for somebody, jewelry represents an emotion. By the way, are you wearing an aura ring?
Speaker 3:No just a what do you got there?
Speaker 1:Just a regular old signet ring engraved with my family crest there you go, what's your family crest? I actually designed it for myself. It's a series. Yeah, one of our listeners actually engraved it for me.
Speaker 3:I love it. What, what, what metal is that?
Speaker 1:It's actually just a silver.
Speaker 3:Okay, so a couple of hundred bucks, right, less than that, probably a hundred bucks Exactly, and yet it's probably the most important thing you own.
Speaker 1:Yeah, probably it's up there.
Speaker 3:it's definitely one of those things I'm gonna, I hope, to pass on one day correct that conversation, that understanding you can't ever possibly get from amazon or alexa or whatever it happens to be. So to sort of answer your question, look, I, I can like sometimes I'm on zoom calls, I order stuff for people on a call. I'll say, hey, alexa, me dog food, and I'll speak in the back and order dog food, right? You can't do that with jewelry and people have tried, right, and certainly you know there's the last minute shopper, the one who got too much, going to leave their house. But jewelry is still emotional and having someone that helps you define those emotions and then express those emotions that humanity is still incredibly important. Now you still have to be efficient, right. You have to help people get in and out. You can't waste their time asking the same kind of questions and that's why when I first meet you like I've written down since you and I've talked Michael, your favorite sports thing is thieves. You're into e-baseball, right? You?
Speaker 2:live outside of New York.
Speaker 3:City. You you have like I know all this stuff about you, right. The next time I see you, we're going to have this conversation You're going to make oh my God, this guy's amazing.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm not amazing, I'm going to put it.
Speaker 3:I'm going to put it in my phone. I wrote it down. I'm going to put it in my phone Before I see you Right, that five minutes of my time. You and I will be friends forever and if I was your, if I was your guy selling you something, you would buy it for me a million times. If I sent you a message coming off of this and said by the way, I can duplicate your the crest on your family ring and a really nice necklace, you'd probably go oh, let me see it. I don't know if you'd buy it, but you know right.
Speaker 3:I consider it so we would have a conversation and I'd tug in your heartstrings in a way. You would go because you can wear the family crest close to your heart and that would mean a lot.
Speaker 1:And when you're doing the thing. Yeah, thank you, yeah.
Speaker 3:So I didn't even know what your question was anymore. But but it's, it's convenience and price are the lazy way to sell. I see Okay, if I make it cheaper or I make it easy, I don't have to build value. Great salespeople build value. Now, if I can build value while making it easy and saving a couple of bucks, that's fine. But you never build brand loyalty by making it easy and making it cheap. You build brand loyalty by you know me and I know you.
Speaker 1:Wow, what a great way to put it. Because I do think that when you start comparing on price I mean just the nature of numbers they can always go up, they can always go down, until you get down to zero, essentially, and then it's just like no one's winning.
Speaker 3:I mean, you're getting cheaper, but how close are you to the lab-grown diamond market?
Speaker 1:I follow it. Yeah, we just lab-grown diamond market. I follow it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we've done lots of episodes on it, but that's a great example. It is the example, right. There's all this natural and everybody's like lab-grown is going to destroy the industry. But then somebody jumped in it and everybody got excited and there was a 30 or 40% disparity in the pricing. But that was okay. Customers weren't trading down, right, they were getting bigger. So if I had a budget for one carat, I'd buy a two carat. Well, now the disparity is so great, my daughter's 26. She's not going to get a five carat diamond from her boyfriend, it just she wouldn't want one, right. So now she's trading down. And so what it's doing, right, that value proposition is so great that people are now shifting back to the more expensive item, and that illustrates it more than anything else you can mention when you talk about. Don't spend your life discounting, right. Build relationships, build value.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's a great way to look at it, especially when you start talking about the I guess maybe the word is congruous incongruous where, like you're comparing one thing to another and they're kind of sort of have that, like you were saying, oh, it's like one carat equals two carats when it comes to price and like two carats within reach. But when it comes to, like these numbers that start to not make a ton of sense, where it's like one equals, yeah, like five and a half carats, suddenly it kind of breaks the illusion and then suddenly you start to figure it out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and it diminishes the value. And I can sit here all day long and tell you how they're chemically the same. It doesn't matter, because it's the rarity of the piece that matters. Right, that's what's really telling the story.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So back to this discussion about this flow. So you're selling for the value and a lot of the times there's so much relationship building that kind of comes together. Relationship building that kind of comes together. Is there a way? Again, this whole question comes down to how do you keep the human touch while still scaling it, and I have found that I would love to have done this a study to see the like number of stores, number of locations, and I feel like they always kind of stall out right around. I think it's like five is probably the max that I see, but a lot of the times it's at two locations and I feel like it's because the retailer, the main owner kind of, still needs to keep that relationship and it just starts to become unmanageable. Now I do feel like ClientBook is probably positioned in a way to help ease that. How do you get this relationship management and retention tool in people's hands but not let them lose that human aspect? Is there a way to do that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, it's the core of any robust clienteling system, right, and we could talk about client book. You could talk about salesforce, right, salesforce is basically a clienteling system on on steroids. That's super complicated and cost you a whole bunch of money and a lot of money, and you need 14 administrators to help you to do it, and yada, yada, yada so. So client book and other systems like it are basically taking the concept of of, you know, your traditional CRMs. Where I'm going to, I'm going to get a lead and I'm going to capture that lead, and then I'm going to turn that lead into an opportunity and then I'm going to close that opportunity right. Where it then becomes another step forward is you've said something very interesting in the beginning of this podcast right, you buy an engagement and you're done. No, you buy a software system and you're done so for you, you sell whatever it is that you sell at your company. Well, I'm not going to buy another website, I only need one website. Right, jewelry, you buy three, four or five times a year and you buy every single year. And so what we need to do and what ClientBook does is makes it scalable, and it's not location Locations don't matter, it's number of customers. You can have one location. We've got customers with one location doing $70 million right. And then I've got customers with 10 locations doing $20 million. So it's not the location, it's how many clients are coming in and how many customers can my team create a personal relationship with, right?
Speaker 3:Well, that means creating opportunities. That means creating reminders. That means giving me the ability to create personalized messages at scale. That's not sending out mass texting. I hate mass texting. I hate getting a text that's like it works for some businesses, but that's not what we can do it. But that's not what it's about. It's about me saying to everyone that I know that has, you know, an anniversary in this month. How do I message that group of people and make it personal and make it real?
Speaker 3:Okay, and you know, this is not a client book pitch, but the system, a good system must have an easy way to capture on the sales floor, not at the POS. It must have a way to create an opportunity and then build information. So what jewelers really want is what's their favorite ring size? What's their favorite stone color? Right? What occasions do they're coming up this concept of relationships? Right? He's buying for her. How do I capture her information within the application, right. What occasions do they're coming up? This concept of relationships, right? He's buying for her. How do I capture her information within the application? Right?
Speaker 3:And then you have to make it rich enough from a task management system where the teams don't have to think, they don't have to hunt and peck. They can open up the app and in the morning they've got a message and it says these seven people have this thing coming up next week. You need to send them a message, right? Or this person's repair is due. You might want to check on it. If you can make that piece easy, then they can spend all their time building the relationship. Does that help?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I do actually understand. Yeah, it's about making it seamless. I always laugh about like uh, I've increasingly been, I've been seeing my parents a lot more lately and what we always talk about is like first language versus second language when it comes to tech literacy and tech fluency, and I don't really know how to explain it sometimes to them. How like, oh it's about because I do user experience and I don't really sometimes even know how to put it into words that it was about like oh, it's so seamless, and they're like I guess I don't really understand. It's like yeah, have you ever used something where it's just like it feels great and it feels like it feels like swimming and they're?
Speaker 3:like. It's like you get in your car and you're going to drive the car, but my seat automatically adjusted for me, my phone connected automatically the apple maps I you know what I mean. So there's all this technology around me, but the technology is making it easier for me to do what I want to do, which is drive the car yes, right, it's not necessarily making the car drive for you, which I mean if it will, but it's about making the entire thing, yes, better.
Speaker 1:I understand. The experience is better, it's convenient. I the entire thing make it better, I understand.
Speaker 3:The experience is better, it's convenient, I don't have to think I can focus on the most important thing, and that's driving the car I can focus on. Clientbook makes you focus on the most important thing, which is the customer sitting across from you or the customer at home who needs our help.
Speaker 1:That's a great way to put it. Man, bottle that one up and we'll send that over to ClientBook. Start. Bottle that one up and we'll send that over to client.
Speaker 3:Books that run in that little ad clip.
Speaker 1:That's great. One last thing I'd be remiss to kind of leave this one. I am starting to think we use this word omni-channel all the time where it's. I always say, as above, so below, so it's like your digital presence should also match your physical presence.
Speaker 1:And we say that a lot of times when it comes to omichannel with, like, having your products synced up, so that's kind of a less you know relevant version, but I also think it's maybe there's an omnichannel version. When it comes to client retention, so there's a tech version which is as above and then there should probably be so below, are there any like I guess uh? So below, uh, are there any like I guess more non-tech or old school or versions of that where it comes to uh client retention besides, like I mean probably just an old-fashioned phone call to like some of your clients hey, I see you have a, a anniversary coming up. I've also heard people like sending box of cookies and stuff like that. Is there anything that you have heard is like really successful right now?
Speaker 3:well, I mean, it's not gonna beat the same drum all over again, but it's it's. It's not a one-size-fit-all answer, it's knowing your customer. No one's important to you. If you were one of my top customers, uh, and I would look you up and I would have created a tag that said thieves seriously, and I would, and if you had bought something really expensive from me, I would surprise and delight you and send you maybe a custom made bracelet with, like, a little thieves charm on it, or you know what I mean, but that's very personal for you, right? It's not sending out you know, claire's cookies to 8,000 people, because everyone knows that's what it is. It's not making an AI video and people, because everyone knows that's what it is. It's not making an AI video, and that's what jewelry can do for you, more than any other industry I can customize.
Speaker 3:I was working for somebody. I was working with somebody and I was on an airplane and they were traveling to somebody's house that was very, very rich I'm just choosing my words and he opened up this box and he showed me this box and there was a palm tree in there and there was I'm making some stuff up now a race car on there and there was something else on there and I'm going wow, it's amazing. He custom made this bracelet as a housewarming gift and he knew that the person liked Hawaii, that liked to race cars, that played tennis, and he made this and that was the thing he brought with him. And that's what you can do with jewelry. That's very personal. Now the problem is you got to remember all that stuff and I don't know about you, but I can't remember anything. So if I don't write it down or I put it in a system and then I don't have someone alert me 20 minutes later that I need, like I have alerts all day long to remind me to do things, and people are like, wow, john's really organized. No, I have a system that tells me what to do. That's what's missing.
Speaker 3:Everyone is trying to rely and they're saying I don't want technology, you want technology to drive the car, right. And then you, as the salesperson, personally, I will give you one little pitch for client book here. We pull in the customer's entire product catalog, right? So we would connect with Punchbox website and bring in the entire product catalog. We also actually work with a number of brands you know Gabriel and Cohen and Takori and AJafi, where we bring in their product catalog and then the salesperson can create lookbooks or wishlists from those product catalogs and then send them off as part of your messaging. So I can really personalize the experience by and create that omni-channel experience right by curating those lists and sending to the customer and then they can just click on them and come in and whatnot. So the more practical use.
Speaker 1:I think it's about that. Yeah, like the user experience. Again, it's, it's one of the things. I've been working in this role for about five and a half years and I still don't really know how to explain it for someone without showing them examples. I don't know how to show that feeling of user experience but, like you were saying, man, I bet you the user, when they got that housewarming present, man, they felt really good and what do they remember? Just that they had a really good feeling. And that that's even less about like the jewelry, it's more about the feeling.
Speaker 3:So I think it's one of my favorite quotes and I'm going to get it wrong, so I apologize for getting it wrong, but I'm close. It's by maya angelo and she said something along the lines of people remember what you said. They won't remember what you did, but they'll remember how you made them feel Nice. And I think to me like, even when I say it, like I get goosebumps because I think about it, because I have a difficult, like my speech pattern was very quick and I'm very direct and I often wonder, like, are people feeling bad when that was not my intent? And like if we all just focus on how we're making the personal crossroads feel, things get better very quickly.
Speaker 1:I couldn't have said it better myself. I love it. Thank you so much, John. I really appreciate your time. Is there a spot that we should be directing people if they want to learn more about, you know, client retention and client book in general?
Speaker 3:I was not prepared for that, but I'm guessing clientbookcom will get you where you want to go. And yeah, or look me up on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Sounds good, john. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. Maybe I'll have you back and we can discuss more of this. This is really a fascinating topic, everybody. We'll be back next week, tuesday, with another episode. Cheers Bye. All right, everybody. That's the end of the show. Thanks so much for listening. My guest this week was John Liebler with ClientBook, and you can learn more about them in the show notes below. This episode was brought to you by Punchmark and produced and hosted by me, michael Burpo. This episode was edited by Paul Suarez with music by Ross Cockrum. Don't forget to rate the podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and leave us feedback on punchmarkcom slash loop. That's L-O-U-P-E. Thanks. We'll be back next week, tuesdayuesday, with another episode. Cheers bye.
