In episode 109, host Eric Dickmann interviews Erik Newton. Erik currently serves as the Vice President of Milestone Inc., a digital marketing software and services company and has recently published a management and self-development book, called- “Hack the Corporate Fast Track.”
Milestone Internet Marketing Inc. aims to organize and amplify digital information to reach the right audience through digital media advertising, social media. SEO, and analytics.
Erik is a prolific writer with more than 175 blogs to his credit.
For more information and access to the resources mentioned in this episode, visit:
https://fiveechelon.com/specific-tactics-customer-obsessed-s7ep9/
A fractional CMO can help build out a comprehensive marketing strategy and execute targeted campaigns designed to increase awareness and generate demand for your business...without the expense of a full-time hire.
The Five Echelon Group - Fractional CMO and strategic marketing advisory services designed for SMBs looking to grow. Learn more at:
In episode 109, host Eric Dickmann interviews Erik Newton. Erik currently serves as the Vice President of Milestone Inc., a digital marketing software and services company and has recently published a management and self-development book, called- “Hack the Corporate Fast Track.”
Milestone Internet Marketing Inc. aims to organize and amplify digital information to reach the right audience through digital media advertising, social media. SEO, and analytics.
Erik is a prolific writer with more than 175 blogs to his credit.
For more information and access to the resources mentioned in this episode, visit:
https://fiveechelon.com/specific-tactics-customer-obsessed-s7ep9/
A fractional CMO can help build out a comprehensive marketing strategy and execute targeted campaigns designed to increase awareness and generate demand for your business...without the expense of a full-time hire.
The Five Echelon Group - Fractional CMO and strategic marketing advisory services designed for SMBs looking to grow. Learn more at:
Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business. Erik, welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. Very glad you could join us today.
Erik Newton:Thanks! Glad to be here.
Eric Dickmann:I love our topic today because we're going to really talk about the customer and being obsessed. And how do you know if you're an obsessed business about your customer? And you know, I don't want to lead things off here by being overly pessimistic, but I think as a consumer, it's pretty much assumed that most businesses are not going to be very customer obsessed that they're not going to focus too much on me as a customer. What do you think is the state of the customer today with most businesses?
Erik Newton:You know maybe like a lot of things, it's a standard distribution of excellent to average, to poor. So maybe there's 3% in that first standard deviation and 13% that are getting a B+ or better. But I think the society is organized into making money. And now, you're a public company, you're supposed to be making profits, you're supposed to be making the stock go up. So you get focused on money and maybe you forget that the place where the money comes from is the customer. So if you want to think about money and you want to be, you know, profitable and successful, I think you can't go wrong being customer obsessed. Everything about the customer is helpful for your business. Everything you do, any kind of service provider, but particularly if you're in a subscription business where people are staying with you month to month or quarter to quarter, you have to renew. It's like being an employee that's on a shorter contract, right? If your contract as an employee got renewed every month, you would really be focused on what you got to do this month to get to the next month. But I think people lose sight of that. And I heard this term customer obsessed from Forrester, and it helps because I work in Silicon Valley. You know our agency is a product and service company. And when we go to talk to the analyst, when we do briefings and inquiries, They say, well, you know, prove to us that you're customer obsessed. Like you know, they're helping us organize the communication and the presentation lead with the customer, lead with the customer's problems. It's more fun. There's always a time and a place to talk product or solution, but it's usually not the beginning. It's usually sort of the middle of that process.
Eric Dickmann:Yeah, I agree. And I think you know being from Silicon Valley, you certainly are in the hub of technology. And I think a lot of technologists are engineers at heart, right? They are looking at things from a product standpoint, not necessarily from our customer's standpoint. Give you a great example. I just got a message the other day from a provider. I had a bill that I needed to pay so they sent me a text reminder. I go to their website and they say, well, please enter your bill number. Well, how the heck do I know what my bill number is? I'm responding a text message, you know? But that's the way their system is probably indexed to know what to do, but it's completely outside the realm of what I, as a customer have available at my fingertips. just wonder.
Erik Newton:Maybe they've gone backwards here. At first, you might've been happy to get a reminder that this bill is due and it's a good time to pay. And now you feel like you got given homework. Which is the things I like to say, don't give your boss homework and don't give your customers homework. Make things easy, right? Where my job as a marketer is to be packaging things so that they're ultra consumable and we're maximizing that the benefit and the esteem, and the value that that customer perceives. Same with your boss, you don't give your boss a bunch of half-baked stuff. I mean that never works out. Your boss wants things polished and finished, right?
Eric Dickmann:Yes. Well, I love this idea of homework because I think that that's so true. I see this particularly in service interactions where it seems like the first response to a service interaction is to ask the customer to do something more. It's not bad enough that they're reaching out for a problem. It's that now that you're asking them to do something more to sort of prove that they have a problem instead of accepting it at face value, it's very irritating.
Erik Newton:A big form that should be auto filled out once you know my address, because I'm a customer. I shouldn't have to fill out 10 more fields. How about when you are really upset as a customer and you submit something to get help and the email that comes back says- No reply at. at, At your provider. And it says nobody is monitoring this. Nobody will reply to this email. I'm like, Hmm. I'm not sure. I'm not sure I wanted to know that about you.
Eric Dickmann:I know. That's exactly right. I've noticed that as well. I think a great example is I called into a doctor's office recently and you know, you get the automated voice response system and it goes through the choices, right? You know, press number one if you're another physician, press number two if you're a lab calling, press number three, if you're not. You know, you go through all the numbers and like number nine, if you're a patient, press number nine.
Erik Newton:The patient, people who pay our bills,
Eric Dickmann:Right. Shouldn't that be number one? It was like, no. And it just shows sort of the mentality, the thinking of an organization like that. Like patients are our last priority, which is, it's so. sad.
Erik Newton:Yeah, it's not good. We wouldn't put them in the top standard deviation of providers. But I'm sure there's people who are doing it right in medical care. You know, I'm sure there's people that have figured out in dent dentistry or plastic surgery, or people who are getting regular skin treatments and stuff. They probably figured out better ways to do that, to get the maximum amount of recurring visits from their customers.
Eric Dickmann:Competition is a beautiful thing, right? If you're an optional service, you have to really work for it a little bit more. But you know, this is a topic that we could literally spend hours going through examples of bad customer service that we won't subject the audience to that. But I know at Milestone, you guys have thought about this a lot. You said you're a platform and an agency, but you came up with an acronym that I thought was really interesting. And I'd love to go through that with the audience today. This acronym that you came up with was TEAM. First of all, if you could just sort of give us a high level of what that means in your mind and then let's sort of go through it step by step.
Erik Newton:Yeah. So in order to you know, not give homework to the audience, let's put this in four buckets- Team Track, Engage, Appreciate, and Mobilize. So we're going to talk about 15, 20 ideas in the next 20 minutes, and they all fall into Track, Engage, Appreciate, and Mobilize. So tracking. You know that good, Peter Drucker, everybody you know, you can't fix what you can't track. You know, you're not going to grow if you're not paying attention to it. So what's in your dashboard? You know, what's in your dashboard about your customer? Whether you're a small company or a big company, if you are a subscription business, most of your revenue, 80% probably is coming from recurring business. So shouldn't that be where the report starts, but it often starts with sales. Who are we competing against? Where can we win another contract? Where can we win more business? The dashboard itself tells you something about your orientation,and the first step to solving this problem. Or first step to getting more customer obsessed is figure out what data you're even paying attention to. That's the first. So the order of revenue I just mentioned is usually about 80%, recurring 20% there's a chunk that is upsell, which is also a really important metric.
Eric Dickmann:It's amazing like how many organizations don't even have a dashboard. They're not really tracking. It's some simple spreadsheets or it's a lot of gut-feel, these are our best customers, this is the kind of thing that people like to buy, this is when they like to buy it. But they really don't have any empirical data behind it.
Erik Newton:No, no. So look at what you're tracking. If you're not tracking anything, I've got some ideas for you. One popular, it's getting a little bit dated now, but NPS- Net Promoter Score. So a Net Promoter Score means how many people are not indifferent about your business? What percent of the people that fill out that surveys would say, I like this podcast, I'd recommend this podcast. This is good stuff. And you get a score of between 20 and 50, typically for most B2B businesses. The problem with NPS is that it is a lagging indicator. It is an indicator of how happy your customer was last week or last month, but it doesn't tell you how you're doing right now. And it's sort of a cumulative, somewhat backward looking. Another indicator of how you're doing, and it's a pretty easy number. And it's one that people are interested in is upsell. Are your customers buying more stuff from you? If you're a store, are they coming back to your store? If you're a service provider, are they extending their contracts? If you're a platform, are they extending their capacity of license? You know, Salesforce has fantastic and upsell. They buy all these companies and they add on small companies and small features, and then they come around and tell you about them. But you got to like what you're getting from Salesforce to buy more, to buy more of that. So upsell is really important. I think it's under emphasized. You know, I've recently been more active on accounts. And I've been like executive sponsoring accounts, I see upsell opportunities every other meeting. From accounts that I work on, I want to see them every week. And if we don't have a lot to talk about, we'll get off the call in five or ten minutes. So upsell is huge. Renewal is obviously renewal, attrition, churn. This is what so many tech companies in the valley are you know, that's where so many of these big valuations come from on the SaaS companies. But what's the renewal rate? Are you renewing? And are you expanding the accounts? And the calculation itself is a little bit, you know, a lot of thought needs to go into what you're going to measure. Let's say, a simple one is if I had a hundred customers last year at the end of December, the following December, how many of those original 100 are still with me? How many of them renewed? So do I have 93? I've got 7% account churn, then there's revenue churn and product usage trends, so on. But that's tracking, that's the T in teams.
Eric Dickmann:I think that's so interesting too, because especially when you're talking about renewals and all these subscription-based businesses, it's so common for them to have a first year promotion. You know, the cost is about half of what it normally is on the renewal. And then those renewals come along and all of a sudden, you see mass cancellations because maybe people enjoyed the product at half price, but they're not going to see the value at full price. And you've got to watch that.
Erik Newton:Yeah, it's always the problem with discounting. I mean you'd always rather add value and communicate value, and build relationship. And that's part of being customer obsessed as they like you too much to fire you. right? Probably like, you bring them on podcasts, you cover them in your blog, they speak in your events, you go out to dinner with them. All these things I'll talk about in Mobilize. But next in the acronym is E for engage, meet regularly. I never can understand any ongoing relationships that don't have recurring meetings. You know, Outlook makes that really easy for us. I don't think of a once a month meetings going to do it. If that problem is going to be stale and they're going to be frustrated. And you're, kind of bleeding goodwill if it's three weeks of not addressing their problem. I like to see customers every week. Like I said, if you don't have something to talk about, you can sign off early. I email my customers a couple of times a week between meetings and what I'm doing there is when I'm rreading, I'm researching, I'm looking at what's on Forrester, I'm reading blogs. When I find something that's relevant to one of those customers, one of those Milestone customers, I just send it over- is this helpful? And I ask for that feedback and you know, am I filling up your inbox too much?
Eric Dickmann:But you're not asking them for something, you're providing some value. Yeah. And yeah, and it's even more than that, Eric. I want them to know that I'm thinking about I don't have a lot of customers. I'm executive sponsor on a couple of accounts, three accounts right now. And I think about them everyday. And one of them calls me almost every day. Yeah.
Erik Newton:To make the inbound to me when they need help. But you know, I just want them to know I'm thinking about their business. The next time I get on the call, it's sort of like, naturally, how can we make, how, what else can we do for you? And it, it expands the relationship. So to me, it's about caring. It's about empathy that I think about you. And I think about your business. She told me she was going to Las Vegas and I saw on TV, some of the new things that were in Vegas. So I researched them for her, put together an email and said, Hey, here's some new stuff in Vegas. Nobody's been to Vegas in 18 months cause it was COVID. You know, sent them over to her. I'm like, you might want to check these out. And she just,
Eric Dickmann:It's a personal touch.
Erik Newton:want to be cared about. It's personal. That can go a long way to improving the retention. You know, you can't cover for a product that's not working, but you can cover some of the edges. How about texting? Can you text or team chat or Slack your customers? How many of your customers are in your speed dial? And if you text them, will they text you back? That's a totally different relationship. If somebody is managing a big book of 30 or 40, this engagement at a text level. Text is obviously more intimate than email, right? Email is this kind of industrial place where I'm doing a lot of my desktop workflow, but my emails on my text is on my personal phone.
Eric Dickmann:I love that. You know, just to that point, it's interesting because I work with clients, I work with vendors all the time, and every once in a while, I haven't heard from a vendor in a while, so I want to reach out to them, just, you know, ping them. So maybe I'll ask them a question. And it's interesting, even though some of them have been excellent to work with, they don't respond because it's not a request for business, right? It's a question. And it's like, you can't do that. You know, you have to quarter of keep those lines of communication, you want to build that relationship, so when business does come along, there's an easy opening to sort of present that business.
Erik Newton:Yeah. You're top of mind. But you're not only are you top of mind, you're top of heart. You're so familiar and you're entering into the friend zone. Is sorta my style, like you know, my ancestors are from the Mediterranean, I have a real warm engagement style. And I think that serves well. And customers like, everybody likes attention, it's validating. And when you're communicating like that, you can find problems so early, right? The earlier you find the problem, the smaller it is, the less, you know, the less loss of goodwill that's happened cause they haven't been frustrated for a long time with it. Here's another idea about engagement. Do an interview just like this, Eric. You know, like I'm not saying to do a podcast, but to do a qualitative interview, NPS scores are a little bit weird, they're a little bit unnatural, they tend to go to the platform user, not to the executive. But, you know, you can do a quarterly business review, but what about just, Hey, like, could I schedule 15 minutes of time? I want to hear how it's going, I want to hear what your perspectives are, I want to hear challenges. You know, what can we do better? What can I do better is so humble. There's nothing like that in the NPS. NPS is this, you know, dry cut number. But are you interviewing your executives, you know, your executive customers. It's easy to do, it's qualitative research, right? If you think about how we do marketing on the outbound side, we love quantitative research, we see things in bulk in the thousands. But you know, if you do three or four qualitative interviews, you're going to get a different and better read, a different read certainly than the quantitative.
Eric Dickmann:Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast. But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level? If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO consulting service may be a great fit for you. We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step. We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads. How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers. How to strategically package and position your products and services. How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business. To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services. Now back to the podcast. Well, one of the things I really like about that is that we are bombarded by surveys. And I think for a lot of people, surveys have become an annoyance rather than a real opportunity to provide feedback because businesses have dropped the ball quite frankly, and they survey their customers too much and people get the impression that nothing is going to happen as the result of this survey. You're simply trying to make some customer service agent feel better, you know? Because their performance report will be better because they scored.
Erik Newton:Homework, right, Eric?
Eric Dickmann:Yeah, its homework again.
Erik Newton:You're making me do homework. I don't know what I get out of that.
Eric Dickmann:Yeah. If I know, I'm going to call them next day.
Erik Newton:NPS.
Eric Dickmann:Yeah, right. No, you do need, it. But I mean, if I scored somebody low on NPS, and then I got a call the next day saying, Hey, we're really concerned, you know, the score. Can we talk about this in more detail? That would be meaningful to me. If I score somebody low and I never hear anything from the company. you just wonder what the point was.
Erik Newton:Uh, Uh Yeah, I've definitely been in companies where the bad scores scores escalate only quickly because it was a subscription business and you do have executives falling up. Which is also on the verge of self-serving, right? They're following up because I'm mad, they're not following up because they care. They're not following up cause they want to help. They're just following up because they think that they're going to get fired.
Eric Dickmann:That lagging. indicator as you discussed, right?
Erik Newton:lagging. Yeah, I'm already, is it better now? Or like it's even more transactional at that point. It's better than nothing, but it's not texting you before anything went bad and just making sure things are going good. So that's T and E track and engage. Now next is Appreciate. And we've already started to touch on this, but given the gift of time, everybody's busy, everybody values their own time. Are you reaching out? Are you calling? Are you communicating? And you know, I miss going out to dinner. Customer and client entertainment is so important, it's so part of my job to spend money and my shtick at my last job was, I'm kind of a wine enthusiast. So I would connect with people about wine and I ask, what kind of wine do you like? And if they ever did me a favor, wrote me a review, I'd send them a half case of the wine, you know? I mean it's a decent gift if they drink, but it's connected to them and they know I asked and I listened. That's you know, showing my appreciation. But the other thing that needs to happen when you are giving the gift of time is to be present. That if you are going to be in front of customers, and you're the kind of exec that's doing some Siegel exec, you know, exec support on an account and you're sorta checked out during and they see it. Yeah, that's terrible. If you know like, God forbid your phone buzzes or something and you get distracted. People notice, they feel unimportant if you divert your attention from them. I had actually a CEO at a prior company, and he was the busiest guy I knew, hardest working guy. I knew I never, I went out to lunch with him a number of times as a customer. And then later as a friend and contact. Never ever saw him look at his phone during time with me,
Eric Dickmann:He was fully present.
Erik Newton:Never saw him do it. Now, when I did go to work for him and he did that all the time. He would look at his phone during the meetings and you kind of realize, okay, I'm lost him a bit here. But he would never do it with customers. He was really good at being present. That's a great skill, but it's not just the mechanism of trying to be appreciative, but like being there for them. Another thing that kind of surprises me is like, if you ask a customer for a reference, do you send a reference? Do you send a gift? Oh yeah, reference is so valuable. You're working a$50,000 contract and. they're putting their name and their brand and their logo against your relationship. And
Eric Dickmann:It's a big deal.
Erik Newton:And you know, people who are being transactional, people who aren't being appreciative, sometimes busy salespeople. Oh, was I supposed to send a gift? I'm like, what do you usually send? I said, usually a bottle of wine or a bottle of booze, you figure out what they like sometimes an Amazon gift card. but she's like, I don't know how to do that, this prior company. And I'm like, I'll take care of it for you. Just give me the email address, I got it. And then you know, I'll come in and send it. Those are a couple of those. Any thoughts or comments?
Eric Dickmann:No, that's great. One of the things that I was thinking about as you were talking is that, you know we live in this magnificent online world right now. If you want to send somebody a letter, you can go to a site like postable.com and they will send a card on your behalf, you know in something that looks like handwriting. You don't have to go to the post office, buy a stamp, stick it in the mail. There are ways to do this that you don't even have to leave your desk.So many easy ways to buy a simple gift, a gift card, just a way to show that appreciation. And it's amazing how many people don't do that.
Erik Newton:Yeah, They're not doing it and then the value. Think about if somebody is helping you close a sale, it's an hour of executive time effectively, right? Like your time, my time, whosever, and they're going to go get on a call for 15 or 20 minutes, but they're going to prep too, right? Like people don't like to just tumble into a call. So an hour of exact times, a couple hundred bucks. And you know, if you're consulting or contracting, whatever, make sure you recognize the value of their time before you ask again. Otherwise it might not work out as well. And here's a couple of more advanced ones on appreciate, make introductions. So if you download your LinkedIn network, just so you can see it all in a flat file, I've got like 2,600. It's a lot to look at and you can sort it a little bit who on this list would benefit from knowing somebody else on this list? Who would be friends? Who works in the same city? Maybe we know people in Idaho, people in Denver. Maybe they're about the same age, doing the same kind of stuff. Why wouldn't I introduce them? Now, you're enriching their life. you're showing your appreciation for what they do for you, and you're being a good friend. I started doing like small like round tables and office hours kind of things, because the Zoom fatigue is getting, you know like, webinars getting a little bit tired with this much Zoom. So you know, letting people interact. And then I could see there's three people in the healthcare industry. I'm like, Hey, you guys are in the healthcare industry. And you know, I can see your email addresses. Let me send this to the three of you. Maybe you guys want to connect. That's going the extra mile, that's being customer obsessed, and these weren't even customers, these are just prospects. Not just prospects, but valuable prospects.
Eric Dickmann:No. I love that idea because it doesn't always have to be something tangible. It can be that introduction which could be extremely valuable. But again, it's a great way to show that you're thinking about your customers, that you understand their interests, and you understand why somebody else might be valuable for them to meet.
Erik Newton:Yeah, intellectually that's right. But it shows that you care. Like it's so differentiate, I mean like, you know, handwritten notes is good, but you know, this is like a handwritten idea of I could give you a new friend and I've heard so many times that mathematically the connections of your connections are the most high potential part of your network. So you personally know about 400 or 500 people, but they each know 400 or 500 people, and it's in that second network that you have a lot of reach out into the social graph. So that's one. Another one is giving leads. Do you buy things from your customers? Do you like, well, we're going to switch, we are going to switch vendors so that we're giving business where we get business. That's part of it. And do you help them build their business? You think about somebody else you might know that could use their services. Do you just make introductions? Hey, I thought these guys might you know, need your consulting or your product or your service. So those are some of the
Eric Dickmann:I love that. Yeah.
Erik Newton:appreciate, so we're in the T, the E, the A, and now, we're going to the M, and that's mobilize. And I got a couple more M's in this mnemonic.
Eric Dickmann:Perfect. Okay.
Erik Newton:Meet deadlines. You can't miss deadlines. Like the customers asking for your commitment and they're judging whether you hit it. So you have to meet all deadlines, a document, an email, a response, and be clear about whether you're talking about this Thursday and tonight at midnight or does Thursday and tonight at 5:00 PM Eastern, you're East Coast and I'm West Coast. It's two, o'clock my time, you know? Meet that deadline, meet SLA.. SLA is service level agreement. You know, your contract often says- I will do these things within this amount of time or I'm effectively in breach of contract. You have to meet the SLS. You gotta be conscious of them, your team has to read their documents, you guys have to refresh yourself. This is what we said we would do and this is how we be a good teammate here with our customer. We meet our SLS, make it right. This one's pretty obvious, when customers are mad and they escalate, something's got to get fixed. I guess the other M here would be, Make Good. You know if something's broken, you give them something extra, you give flexibility, you give more product, more service. But you have to make it right for people, you have to mobilize your company. And some of the great stories of the customer, the original customer obsessed, Nordstrom, Southwest Airlines, people being able to fix things, people at the great hotels that are able to just, they've got some budget to take care of stuff. Oh, you need batteries? I'll send somebody to the store to get them for you. Oh, you need, if you need a new pair of socks or something like that. Giving people the ability to make things right is, that was the original, the Nordstrom model. Those are a couple of their
Eric Dickmann:No, I think that that's really interesting because I'm a huge believer in empowering employees to make things right. I also am a believer in that the customer is not always right. There can be some difficult customers that are never satisfied and you can turn your organization sort of inside out trying to make them happy, and they will never be happy. And I think there does need to be a point where you look at a customer and say- Is this you know, good time going for something that Is never going to work out? Yeah. is this a good marriage? That's exactly right.
Erik Newton:Maybe we don't do it next year.
Eric Dickmann:And you know, these are few and far between. But I think the bigger issue there is the empowerment. And too often in an organization, people are just not empowered to make something right. When you look at it and say, why not? You know, what is the hindrance to giving them the autonomy to make this right?
Erik Newton:Yeah, sort of a power and control model.
Eric Dickmann:Yeah. Right, exactly.
Erik Newton:Decentralized thinking. You know, the customer's not always right, but they're usually right because they're the customer, they have an expectation, and most of the responsibility is on us to align to that expectation and to keep it right for them.
Eric Dickmann:Or we set the expectations incorrectly?
Erik Newton:Yeah. That usually leads to problems and those are some of the things you got to iron out in onboarding. And the first couple of times, there's escalations. Usually, they'll give a couple of mulligans. You know, customers will give you some space to work out these things and look at the contract and you know, have a few meetings. But after a while you gotta, you gotta do all these things to get customer obsession right. So that's reaction. What about pre action? You know, think about Minority Report, if you know the movie, a great concept of pre-crime. Well, what about pre acting? Just eliminate problems, eliminate friction that would be frustrating if you were the customer, that would be frustrating if you have a picky customer or whatever type you have. Preact to reduce these things so that you're mobilizing your organization so that there's less tickets being opened, less support tickets coming, ask for feedback. And then if all these things are going right, and you've done the team, ask for reviews. And this is a really humbling experience. The way I do this, at Milestone in a private company, as I said, can you do me a favor? You know, could you write a review about the product on G2 crowd or on Trust Radius, or. Clutch. You know, those search engine Google has reoriented the search results to be biased towards objective review sites over brands. Google prefers those sites because they are answering the question, which is the best of this and that. So you need to manage your reputation, but there's no way to game it. You know, they check the LinkedIn of the people filling it out. They often check, make you prove that you're a product user and, you know, send them a screenshot so forth. So all of these things have to be right. And within Humility, you ask for a favor. And you get a review, and it's on the internet for 10 or 20 years. It lasts almost forever. It's huge value. So that is the TEAM acronym. That's the structure of customer obsession. I've got a couple of more stories and anecdotes, but.
Eric Dickmann:No, No, I love that because you want something that's easy to understand. And I think it's a mindset shift. You know you have to move away from sort of internal focus, product focus, and start to think more about putting yourself in the shoes of your customer. And, you know, we all interact with businesses every day and we know what makes us happy, we know what makes us fulfilled. And it's amazing how often that doesn't translate into our work life.
Erik Newton:It It is amazing, you know? We get, like you said, we just get the priorities kind of wrong. We prioritize internal stuff over external stuff. That's not obsessed, that's being bureaucratic, right? That's the nature of bureaucracy that feels impersonal and doesn't make us happy. So this acronym is pretty easy to remember, but you want to be part of their team. I think we've all been in service positions or we've been on brand side or service side when people say, well, we see you as part of our team. You know, we count you as a team. You had been invited sometimes to the employee, holiday parties, stuff like that. You really feel like an extended part of the team. That's the goal is for that to be true and real and authentic that they see you as part of the team. But you gotta work at it. You know, we've just reviewed about 16 tactics that you can use to get there. You know, another construct that's really useful is the trusted advisor, which is it's getting it's a little bit dated now, but in marketing, I often train salespeople after they do product training. So they come out of product training and they talk product and I'm like, yeah, that's not really what the customer wants to hear, they want to hear solutions. And if you're selling pots and pans, you're going door to door, or let's say Cutco Knives, really good product, love the product. But somebody comes by and they're like, buy a knife. You could have this knife or this knife, or this knife. Like it's you know, they haven't figured out if I'm going to be cutting a lot of meat or if I'm a fishermen, or if you know, I need a tool for the backyard or whatever it is, they don't really know me yet. But if you're a trusted advisor, it's really about the discussion, like this kind of a discussion where you and I are exchanging ideas that help me know you and you know, me. I gave the example of I had a tax problem a couple of years ago, a complicated tax problem. And I called up some attorneys, you know, One of them just started consulting with me. She says, I'll, I'll give you some advice right now. I've dealt with this before. And this is how I would go at it. She gave about 20 or 30 minutes of lawyering. And I'd be like, well, I feel better. I feel like this is going to, and she won the business, and she did a great job. Everything worked out good. That's trusted advisor. If she had said, I have a package for this kind of real estate tax issue, my fixed package, my product, A, B and C is 3,000. 5000. and I need a retainer. She's like, you know, it's a couple hundred bucks an hour, it was reasonable. And she knew the people I was dealing with. That was great. And the feeling of talking to a trusted advisor. And when you think about it in terms of accounting or legal problems that are big, not like just knives, pots, and pans, then you get how you want to be when you're selling software. Even if your widget is only a couple thousand bucks, it's better if you communicate that value to them in and make them kind of believe in you and your product, and that you understand. It goes back to this, all the things we were talking about in customer obsession, this works a lot on in the sales cycle with prospects.
Eric Dickmann:Well, and I think, especially if you're in a service industry. Adding that value before you sort of aggressively go for the sale can make such a difference in building up that trust. And I've dealt with far too many service professionals that they immediately want, you know to sign you up for, like you said, a package or some sort of a service. It's like, Hey, I've just got this simple question, let's build a little trust here. And maybe there's a lot more business that could come your way. I I'd like to take a dip my toe in the water first before I go there. And some are very reluctant to do it.
Erik Newton:Yeah, that's product led growth. That's the freemium and service, right? That they're giving you a taste and you're seeing if it works, and then if you guys like working together, I had a plumber come out, and I thought I had figured out what the problem was. And so I was like, they came out and then they looked at it, I showed them some pictures, and he said, and then he said, you know, it's like$6,000 to replace that pipe. I'm like, nevermind. I'll figure something else out. He goes, and here's a bill for$179 for coming out for the estimate. Okay. You know what I did? I went back to my aunt, I paid it cause I didn't, I hadn't asked that they wouldn't do that. I went on Yelp and I told everybody, this company charges$179 to come out, be careful. That's going to be on the internet forever.
Eric Dickmann:Yes. Yeah, the power of,
Erik Newton:meIf they told me that, I would have said, I'm okay. I'm not sure I want to invest that yet on the estimate. Go ahead.
Eric Dickmann:Yeah, no, it was just, It's$179, right? But that negative review, like you said, will last kind of forever and was it really worth$179 for that guy to do that? I think sometimes the trade off that people are making is very poor. I had a recent example, myself of an accountant who did a terrible job for me. And I kept saying, you know, you're a review based business. This isn't good, you know? Let's end this relationship on a positive note and they refused to do it.
Erik Newton:Threaten him or her into doing the right thing. Right.
Eric Dickmann:And they wouldn't do it. They were so stubborn just to be right. And yeah, so it cost them a bad review, which is unfortunate. You know, Erik, I think we could talk about this stuff for hours. This is really good. I'm gonna make sure that at the end of this, we're going to write a blog. So we're going to list all this stuff in the blog, but I would love it if you could just share with people where they can find out more about you, where they can find out more about Milestone, where's your spot on the net?
Erik Newton:Yeah, LinkedIn's a good place to start. So linkedin/eriknewton, my work for Milestone Internet and a lot of resources and white papers I put together are up in milestoneinternet.com/resources. You can have a look there. You can reach me for anything. I might be able to help you with at erik.n@milestoneinternet.com. And if you come in on LinkedIn, please mention the podcast at Eric and you know, we'll be sure to connect there.
Eric Dickmann:Hey, that's great. You know, this is fascinating. Like I said, it's one of my favorite topics to talk about. There are a lot of bad examples out there, but boy, when you see good ones, it just makes you smile, right? Because you can have a lot of success if you really change your mindset, you become customer, you look at your processes and say, how can we do this better with the customer in mind? It can create some pretty big dividends for your organization.
Erik Newton:Absolutely.
Eric Dickmann:Yeah. Erik, thank you so much for being here. Really enjoyed our conversation today.
Erik Newton:Thank you, Eric.
Eric Dickmann:Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services.