Episode #018: What Your Customer Craves with Nick Webb

Jeff: You know, it’s one thing to think about customer service, or about customer experience, or about what customers really want, but it’s another thing to talk about what customers crave. Let’s get into that on today’s episode of “The Buyer’s Mind.”

Announcer: Welcome to “The Buyer’s Mind,” where we take a closer look deep inside your customers’ decision-making mechanism to reverse engineer the perfect sales presentation. Now, please welcome your host, Jeff Shore.

Jeff: Well, welcome once again to “The Buyer’s Mind,” where we’re investigating exactly what’s going on in the brains of prospects who are considering a purchase decision. This podcast is all about taking a stroll through the buying brain, and today it’s about determining what customers crave, what they want from the core of their being. I like it. I think you’ll like it, too.

I’m your host, Jeff Shore. You could read the full bio in the show notes, or you can visit jeffshore.com. Make sure you sign up for our Saturday morning newsletter. It’s free, a little Saturday morning inspiration to start your weekend off. As always, joined by our show producer, Paul Murphy. Murph, how are you doing today?

Paul: Hey, doing really great. Good to be here.

Jeff: Let’s start with context here, Murph. What pops into your mind when we think about the word “crave”?

Paul: I guess I think about two things. Pregnant women with pickles and ice cream. The other thing is food, just food in general, right? So I’ve had the opportunity to come out to California a few times, and In-N-Out Burger is what I crave.

Jeff: There you go. There you go. A good man, good man. I’m privileged to live not that far away. It is interesting though when we think about cravings for food, because that sounds like it would be a physical thing. It’s really an emotional thing, right? We crave in our brains. We get to that point where we’re like, “Oh, I’m jonesing for a, you know, Double-Double,” and I’ll just dial over at In-N-Out, or whatever it is. But it largely speaks to the emotion. And I think, when we’re thinking about what our customers crave, that’s where they come from.

They wanna be satisfied on a deeper level than just check the boxes. A lot of people can check the boxes, a lot of companies can provide you a solution that will check the box, but, boy, how about when you get to that higher level of what customers crave? And that leads to our quote of the day from Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO at amazon.com, and here is what he says, “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”

I love this idea, because when you look at Amazon, first of all, they already have a strong customer experience. I am shopping at Amazon all the time, because it’s so easy. But what are they saying? “We see our customers as invited guests to a party.” And let me just challenge you with that right now. How do you see your customers? Are they prospects? Are they targets? Are they combatants? Or do you see them as opportunities for you to improve someone’s life, to provide great experiences, to give them what they want even on an emotional level?

And I know where I stand, and I can tell you this without any reservation, taking really great care of our customers is really, really fun. I mean, seriously, the most enjoyable thing that we do as an organizations is exceed our customer’s expectations, and when we get that call, we get that email, I’m telling you, we blast it around the company saying, “Look what our customers are saying.” It is so much fun to exceed expectations. It is so much fun to surprise and delight our customers. It is so much fun to give them what they crave.

So it’s one thing to look at it and say, “Well, this is the right thing to do for our customers.” And it is, and that should be your primary motivation. But don’t miss the secondary motivation, taking great care of your customers by giving what they crave, it’s fun.

And we wanna let you know that the podcast is brought to you in part by our friends at HomeStreet Bank. This is our show sponsor. This is also my lender of choice. Having used HomeStreet in my last home purchase, it was an incredibly smooth transaction. Everyone that I’ve talked to at HomeStreet is professional, dependable, great rates, great service. If you’re a real estate professional listening to this today, you’re not gonna find better people to work with in taking care of your clients. And they could do it all, banking, home loans, credit lines, you name it. Go to homestreetbank.com to learn more. That’s homestreetbank.com.

Before we get to today’s interview, I wanna give you our tip of the day. And today’s tip right along the lines of what customers crave, think plus one. That’s your tip today. Think plus one. Here’s how it works. I need to do this thing to take care of a customer request. What if I could do that plus one more thing? What is the simple plus one that would exceed the expectations?

So, for example, suppose you’re selling designer furniture and a customer asks you for some detailed information on a sofa. You do some research, you provide those technical answers, the plus one is when you include an article from a prominent designer that talks about trends in sofas in what’s up and coming. Now, look, that’s not difficult. It only takes a few moments of your time. The toughest part of this is just adapting the plus one habit. But when you do that, you’re providing some really memorable experiences.

And here’s something I’m gonna ask you to do, I’m gonna ask you to think about customer’s that you are working with right now. Think about one customer that you’re working with right now and ask yourself the question, “What is a plus one for that customer? What is one thing I could do that would make a difference for that customer?”

And before we get to our interview, let me tell you about an opportunity for real estate sales professionals. It is our 4:2 Formula Academy. This is an intensive training program. It includes live training for 3 days, but a weekly training over the course of 13 weeks. This is a very detailed program that equips real estate sales professionals with modern selling strategies and skills specifically designed for today’s buyer, today’s market. You can find the 4:2 Formula Academy and other exclusive training events throughout the year for sales leaders and sales professionals. Just go to jeffshore.com/events.

All right. Let’s get to our interview with Nick Webb, one of the more interesting people that you’re gonna come across this week, I assure you. Nick is an innovation strategist and futurist. He’s the CEO of Lassen Scientific. He’s got over 45 patents awarded to him. So this guy has got some intellectual fire power, but he works with companies to improve their customer experience. And what happened was a client of mine recommended Nick’s book “What Customer Crave.” I picked it up. I loved it. I called up Nick, let’s get him on the show. Welcome, Nick Webb.

Nick: Thank you very much. Good to be here.

Jeff: You’ve got just such an interesting biography here, so let’s just simplify it down. You’re at a cocktail party, and someone asks, “Hey, what do you do?” How do you answer that question?

Nick: Yeah, it’s tough. I used to sell pharmaceuticals, and I used to be able to say, “I’m a drug dealer,” which was far more interesting. But, you know, unfortunately, it’s kinda complicated. In fact, when my children were in kindergarten, they used to have a day where they would present what their parents did, and my daughter asked me, “Dad, could you kinda give me the ‘Reader’s Digest’ version of what you do?” And I explained to her, “Well, I’m in the innovation business, and, as you know, innovation with failure. And so I just help people mitigate their failure.” And, you know, equipped with that dialogue, my daughter went to kindergarten and stood up and proudly said that her father was a failure. That’s what she took out of it.

So I have a weird but interesting life. I spend about 10% of my time as an adjunct professor of innovation at a Southern California medical school. I also run the Center for Innovation at Western U, which is a really exciting project for me. I’m just loving it. At Lassen Scientific, I’m the CEO there, and what we do is we work with top brands around the world to help them drive innovation. And what’s interesting about that is that, you know, I started researching this book with the idea that I was writing a book on innovation, because I realized that innovation went from bright shiny objects to things like Uber, where people were not inventing new things, they were inventing better human experiences.

And that was fascinating. It continues to be really fascinating to me that you can rule the universe if you can apply innovation principles to deliver beautiful human experiences. So I spent three tough years researching this book. When I turned in my innovation book to my publisher, he said, “Dude, you’ve written a book on sales and marketing.” I’m like, “Wow, I’m that guy? Really?” And now it’s a number one best-seller. It’s Mashable’s top customer experience or actually top marketing books to read in 2017, and the book has just really taken off like crazy.

So it’s really been exciting. Anyway, that’s, believe it or not, the short answer to what I do.

Jeff: And that’s great, and I wanna talk about the book, but I’m just looking at sort of how you approach life. I’m trying to get inside your head a little bit, because, apparently, you missed that day where the career counselor in a school said, “You get one job, and you just do that job and go home happy that you got a paycheck.” It sounds like you take a little bit more of the buffet approach to life.

Nick: Yeah, you know what? And that could be, you know, the subject to bad traces, right? I think what I’ve done is I found a career path way for my ADD, and, you know, it sort of worked out. I mean, I think, at the end of the day, one of the things that I really wanted to do is I wanted to build a business around my family, instead of a family around my business. So I moved to Northern California, built a compound here with a state-of-the-art office that looks like the NASA Control Center with a complete R&D lab, and 3D printers, and you name it. And from my little perch here in northern California, I get the privilege of being able to do cool things with really cool people and sort of live in this awesomeness of the intellectual property sandbox.

Jeff: That’s awesome. It’s great.

Nick: Yeah, it’s an amorphous life, but it’s really been fun.

Jeff: It sounds like, to just some extent, you’re taking sort of an Elon Musk approach. I was talking to somebody recently about Elon Musk, and my take on Elon Musk is that this is somebody who sits around asking the question, “What problem needs to be solved?” Right? Because he approaches it on the very, very big problems of the world that need to be solved. Where are we gonna find our energy? And what happens if the earth is no longer habitable? Right? Or, even worse, how do you solve traffic problems in Los Angeles? But that’s how he does, and he looks at it, and he says, “What problems need to be solved?” Is that a fair way to describe how you sort of approach your career and your life?

Nick: I think so although I think I’ve evolved from that. I mean, the great, amazing artist, Picasso, famously said that, “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” And so we hear this word today in business almost weekly, disruption, disruptive innovation. And so it used to be where we could figure out ways to fix problems, but, unfortunately, that sort of produced incremental improvements.

Today, what I’m just fascinated by is disruptive innovation, and what that means is, rather than trying to fix stuff and optimize stuff that’s lame, why don’t we just destroy it and replace it with something that’s far more beautiful? A good example of disruptive innovation is Amazon. You know, I mean, Amazon destroyed our way of looking at shopping, and it leveraged digital ubiquity, and connection architecture, and communities of users to be able to make better choices.

Look at, you know, Uber. Uber didn’t change and reinvent the taxicab. That would be the concept of looking at ways to improve. What they did is they looked at it from the perspective of Picasso, or the disruptive innovator, “Why don’t we destroy that lame model of taxicabs and replace it, leveraging digital connectivity with a beautiful consumerized experience of getting from one place to the other?” That’s really what I think the future of innovation is really about. It’s more about disruption than it is about finding betterness.

Jeff: Let’s talk about the book. It’s an outstanding book, by the way, just tons of great insight. But let’s start by talking about customer types, because your premise, if I’m reading this right, is that customers’ cravings are gonna vary widely according to customer types. Does that sound about right?

Nick: Yeah. Well, I mean, you and I went to school, and we learned about market demography, that we can take a look at demographic analysis through economics, through their ethnicity, through their generation, through their economic status. We look at those kinds of stereo things to determine how we would target that customer or, more importantly, how we would deliver better innovations to them. It turns out that one of the biggest shocking moments for me was to realize that there’s no such thing as a millennial. There’s no such thing as a baby boomer. There’s no such thing as a 23-year-old Hispanic female in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In fact, you can argue that that was a tremendous insult to 23-year-old Hispanic females in the Bay Area, because we’re more than that. And the way we express ourselves is the things that we hate and the things that we love. And when we can understand our customers across a range of these personas based on the things they hate and the things they love, then we can identify their customer type, and from that, we can give them perfect experiences.

Now, I’ll give you an example. When you go into the Apple Store, what most people don’t realize is that they are politely probing you, as they put it. And they’re politely probing you by asking you comfortable, thoughtful questions to find out your persona. Once they identify your persona, they immediately begin the process of delivering to you the perfect experience for who you are, not by a market demography, but by customer type.

And for an example, I mean, I’m a transactionalist. I love the Apple brand, and I love their stuff. I know it extremely well. So when I go in there, I’m not lonely. I’m not there to visit and hang out. I just want my stuff. So they identify that, and they go, “Nick, hey, thanks for coming in. Oh, I see. You’re that guy, the transactionalist. So, yeah, just download our app, get whatever you need on the wall, and, you know, walk out.”

And then if my wife would go in there, who is really a people person, you know, she loves the connection piece and the socialization piece, you know, to her, they would be a nurturing type. And so they would identify that she’s a nurturing type, and they would give her once again a perfectly pre-embedded experience and send her over maybe to the genius part or just sit down and talk to an associate, so the associate can spend the time to give her what she needs, because she needs to be nurtured in that dialogue.

That’s the level of surgical significance that the best brands in the world do. It’s companies like Trader Joe’s, and In-N-Out Burgers, and MAC Cosmetics, and Snap-on Tools, and Ford, and many other companies have really adapted some incredible tools to be able to get really good in understanding their customers at that level of what they hate and what they love, and by identifying their personas, that’s the need that… You know, one thing I’ve learned as an innovator is that innovation, the genesis of innovation is understanding what to invent. Sounds obvious, but inventing is easy. Inventing what people want, that’s the tough part, and that’s why, out of the 3,000 patents that are issued each week, only about 2% are ever successful.

Jeff: So the formula says, “What I hate plus what I love leads to my customer type.” How did you determine that? And then how did you test it once you came up with that hypothesis?

Nick: Well, we do this in… We have hundreds of clients, ranging from large pharmaceutical companies to, geez, you just about name it, you know, from the fast food industry to retail. And each company really needs to identify their own personas, because their market, their range of services, all are very, very different.

You know, another, a simple example of this would be, you know, there’s a burrito place here in town that makes good burritos, but they have long lines. And so I don’t go there, because I hate long lines more than I like good burritos. My wife goes there, because she loves good burritos more than she hates long lines, right? So that sounds corny, but it’s that level of stuff that we look at in order to identify how to build out those personas.

We’re doing some work in the drug space, for an example, where we are instantly figuring out these what we call “prescriber personas,” and, you know, that’s a really cool thing, because, you know, it allows us to understand what these people that are prescribing medicines, what they love and hate, so that the drug companies can do a better job of communicating to that analytical buyer, to that patient-centric buyer or prescriber.

So each and every project is different. But if you’re in the real estate business and you’re selling high-end real estate, you’ll have people that they only care about the grandness and the ego dynamics of having the biggest house in town and that house being the one thing that really is their brand reference in their community. And when you can identify that they’re an egocentric real estate buyer, then you can start having very thoughtful messaging to that buyer, specific to, “You know what? The Johnsons’ house really has thought to be one of the best houses in town until this thing came available. I think anybody that lives here would be considered really at the top of the heap.” You know, you may say that and package it in a way that’s appropriate. The point is that, for real estate, we, you know…and there are people who are just cost-centric. There are people, you know, that the kitchen is the determiner. There are people that their garage are the determiner. The best real estate agents are identifying who their buyer is based on identifying four to six personas.

If you’re selling used cars, if you’re selling, you know, insurance, you will easily be able to identify by listening to those customers and doing what we call contact point innovation and doing innovation so far as. You can really begin to understand what these various type people love and hate, and then, from there, you can go into ideation mediums with your team and start categorizing it.

In our workshops, we actually put people through a couple-hour program where they actually do journey mapping, and they do persona identification. At that end of that workshop, they’ve identified who their personas are, they’ve identified what matters across each of the five touch points across those personas. And, boy, I’ll tell you, once they go through that, they just really make a major impact on revenue and profitability, social ratings. Even quality of work life goes up when you do this right.

Jeff: Let’s talk about the touch points, because that is the core of part two of your book as you talk about mapping out the customer’s journey. You didn’t invent the word “touch point,” a lot of people have used the phrase “touch point,” but you’re approaching it in a fairly different way. Largely, because when you’re thinking about touch point, it’s not necessarily as predictable as some people would make. And my take as I was reading the book was that a lot of companies, they’re not really customer touch points that they’re talking about. They are company touch points that the customers fit into, right? And you’ve kinda transfered that around and said, “No, no, no. Let’s look at the customer’s journey if we’re gonna figure this out,” right?

Nick: Yeah, and everybody has a different… So one of the things that’s interesting, I get the great privilege of working with literally the top brands in the world, and I’ve worked with one of the largest automotive manufacturers in the world. And I took a look at their journey map, and it had 2,200 touch points. And, to your point, it had more to do…it was sort of an internal-centric view of the universe. Now, who’s gonna look at a map that has 2,200? I mean, it’s an interesting academic document. It might be a good PhD, doctoral thesis, but it’s certainly not something that has actionable insights.

So what I wanted to do is to take the macOS approach and take the Uber complexity of customer service and turn it into something that any from a pet shop to a multinational corporation could apply these principles. And so I break the touch points into five touch points. These are the types of touch points that you need to invent around.

The first one is the pre-touch. And the pre-touch suggests that virtually all companies are losing about 30% of their revenue because they’re not relevant at that pre-touch moment. So the pre-touch moment is the research phase. Ninety-eight percent of customers, if you are in the real estate business, the automotive business, if you’re in a BUC business, it doesn’t matter, 98% of the time, a customer is going to use their connected device to find a new product, a service, and they’re gonna search for you.

Jeff: And before we go on, because I wanna hear from all of these points, but I find this so fascinating, because we tend to think as sales people, if the customer is not standing right in front of me, or I’m on the phone with them, then the sales process isn’t really happening. That’s ridiculous. That sales process is well underway.

Nick: Absolutely.

Jeff: We’re 90% of the way, and the sales person doesn’t even know that customer yet exists.

Nick: Absolutely, and it’s spooky, right? Because 30% is a lot of money, and so we don’t even get the…you know, there’s so much deflection in waste, because people are not choosing us that we’re in front of that, we’re actually making that true first touch points. So, yeah, the sales begins in the search process, and the search process is principally digital. Now, there are some pre-touch moments, you know, based on the way you’re…if you’re a restaurant, what your restaurant looks like? If you’re any kind of a physical building, what that building looks like is what we would consider to be a physical pre-touch moment.

But the digital pre-touch moment is the most important, and that’s where you really need to make sure that you’re not just looking at SEO strategies and pay-per-click strategies to get people to find you. You have to make sure that your website is a value dispenser. Its only purpose is to deliver free gratuitous value. It’s not there to sell them. It’s not there as a floating brochure. You have to be much more thoughtful about the way you architect your digital property. For some companies, it’s the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. And so that’s that pre-touch moment. That’s the beginning of this journey.

Then if they decide to choose you, that first touch point, the way that that phone call, the walking into your business, that is heavily weighted. In fact, we know that if that first touch point is an exquisite, it’s almost impossible to pull the nose back up and avoid a complete disaster.

Jeff: And yet…

Nick: Sorry.

Jeff: I’m sorry to interrupt you, Nick, but I’m coming out of my chair, because I see sales people who are unemotional, lackadaisical. It’s another customer walking through the door, they have no idea how much of an event this is that you as an organization made the cut after all these other companies had been eliminated, something special happened just happened when this person walked through the door.

Nick: Absolutely. And what we have to do is we have to have that moment to be remarkable. It literally has to be remarkable, and when I say remarkable, I mean so good that they wanna share that experience digitally. The best companies that I researched had tremendous amounts of customer promotion, tremendous amounts. It’s the least expensive way to grow your business. And, in fact, there’s a study now that says that 89% of the top brands in the world are going to use customer experience, get this, out of all of the things that are in a marketing department’s toolbox, 89% are going to use customer experience as their primary growth strategy for 2017 and beyond. That’s amazing. That really shows that we have a tipping point now where when you can buy anything, anywhere, at any price, the differentiator is the way in which we architect human experiences. That first touch is heavily weighted.

Jeff: And it’s fair to say, I think, that there are companies out there that are not only leading the way, but this really is disruptive innovation, right? If you can do something in a completely different way, then you can force entire industries to move to you. And you mentioned In-N-Out earlier.

I’m like you, a northern California guy, and I remember the very first time I went to an In-N-Out, and the thing that was most amazing was that my mindset when I pulled up was to say, “I’m at a drive-thru window at a fast food place, and what I’m expecting to hear is, ‘Can I take your order, please?'” “What? I’m sorry what?” “Can I take your order, please?” And what do I get? I get this young lady who’s bright and cheery, “Hey, how are you today? And are you gonna eat in the car? Are you gonna take it home with you?”

We’re not talking about moving heaven and earth here for a great first impression. It might just be a matter of saying who do you have there that’s representing the company, and, by the way, they are whether you want them to or not.

Nick: It’s so true. And then, look, I mean, what most people don’t realize about In-N-Out Burger, back in 1957, when they first opened up their business, they realized that having crisp, clear two-way communication between the order speaker and the person that worked in the restaurant was critical. So they actually megaphones initially, because they found that there was no way that they can mess up the order if they could actually hear the people and the people on the other end could hear them.

They also realized that they needed to instantly extinguish the transaction and transmute it into a relationship. That’s why the best brands like…companies like Dutch Brothers Coffee. The first thing they say is, “Hey, how’s your day going?” I’m like, “Great.” “What do you got going for the rest of the day?” “I am getting coffee and then I’m not sure, but pretty soon like…” You know, there was a time I went there at six…I’d gone there, I went back six weeks later, “Nick, how you doing?” It was a little creepy, but she actually remembered me, but you feel like they really like you and think…you know what I mean?

Jeff: Yeah.

Nick: It’s a little thing to transmute from transactionalism to personalization, but the impact is incredible, and it’s why the companies that I feature in my book are on fire. But, yeah, In-N-Out Burger also realized the complexity was bad, so they made a simple menu that only has five or six items.

Jeff: Yeah, love it.

Nick: But if you’re part of the secret order, right?

Jeff: Mm-hmm, sure.

Nick: You know the In-N-Our Burger secret menu.

Jeff: Sure.

Nick: You can go online and order thousands of things, right?

Jeff: Right, absolutely. All right, so we have the pre-touch point moment. We have the first touch point moment. What comes next?

Nick: So the core experience, this is where a lot of people blow it, you know. They got somebody to find them on the pre-touch. They got them to show up, and they set the trajectory right with the good first touch moment. But the day in and day outs of doing business with people can sometimes be…we get lazy there. And I don’t know if you’ve ever watched the TV show “Take Home Boss.”

Jeff: No.

Nick: But they take this boss, and he puts a rubber nose and glasses on, from a major corporation, and he works at the counter of his restaurants, and not surprisingly finds out that they’re treating their customers bad, their employees hate him, and their place is a wreck. That tends to be what happens. In our corporate life cycles, we go from an entrepreneurship, where we’re very customer-centric to where we move into this transactional, operational, and, even worse, company-centric view of the world, and that’s where it all fails. So the core experience is the day in and day out ways that we innovate to make that experience beautiful for our customers.

And the last touch, I mean, this is really, really important. I mean, we just had a meeting about this at our university. You know, besides giving somebody a degree and a sheepskin, what other kinds of things can we do to leave that last touch moment after they’ve invested the time and money with our university? How can we make that special? And we’re ideating around that right now to really deliver really the perfect student experience. And so creating things that are memorable like, “Wow, that was amazing,” something that’s unexpected, and that’s what the best companies in the world are doing.

When you go to Tiffany’s, Tiffany’s will sell you jewelry, which you can buy pretty much anywhere, but when they put it in the little bag, and then they put that in that perfect box, and then if you go online and research it, there is a very legalistic rules about how Tiffany must tie the bow to make that Tiffany box absolutely perfect. And then they take that box and they put it in that beautiful, blue Tiffany bag. It’s that detail, that last touch point that makes the Tiffany company. That company is centered around that bow, that box, and that bag.

Jeff: And it’s…

Nick: That’s the kind of stuff.

Jeff: It’s great branding, too. You want to carry that bag around. But that’s absolutely consistent. When Daniel Kahneman says, “We don’t choose between experiences. We choose between memories of experiences, and when we think about those memories, we think about the peak moments, and we think about the end moment.” And yet over and over again, you see, you know, retailers and restaurants, or whatever it is, you just think about when you typically leave a restaurant, “Have a nice day.” “You, too.” “Well, probably, never see you again.” “That’s okay. I’ve already forgotten who you are.” It is just so routine and yet how little it would have taken to really let that be a moment that would have lasted. It would have cost me to look back in the entire experience with a positive light.

Nick: Yeah. I mean, we’ve all heard recently of fake news. That’s fake relationship, and people do it all the time. We institutionalize fake relationship. And, look, customers aren’t dumb, but, you know, when we engage people in an authentic way, and we ask them questions, and shut up, and listen, and we really begin to create that authentic dialogue, that’s the kind of stuff that we really can do here. And I think it’s just amazingly exciting.

Jeff: That’s great. That’s great. We’re just about out of time. Give us a piece of advice for where to start with this. Obviously, I’m gonna encourage people to read the book. It’s an amazing book, takeaways that are thick and rich on every chapter. But if you had a piece of advice here for sales professionals as to what they can do first on this journey to give their customers what they crave, where would you have them start?

Nick: I really think that one of the best things they could do…well, first of all, they can download a free chapter of the book at whatcustomerscrave.com.

Jeff: Cool.

Nick: And that will get them started.

Jeff: Awesome.

Nick: I think that what really I suggest to people is just to sit back and think about if you were to just write a few notes of, “How can I divide my customers into three to four categories based on what they love and what they hate so that I can do a better job of messaging and delivering custom value to those customers?” I think building out those personas is time well spent. I believe that, on average, companies that are adapting these principles can double revenue. It’s that impactful.

The other thing that they need to do is they need to look at those five touch points. What is it like if you Google your name? Do you have a three Yelp review? Do you have people talking about how bad the experience was? Have you built customer advocates instead of madvocates? So go through the process of seeing what your customers see through a digital search.

The next thing you do is walk around your business. Invent by walking about. Live what your experience. Think about what a customer would see. Ask customers about what you can do better. Build out a commitment with your team to talk about innovation and customer experience every day to make it part of your business culture. Those are the kinds of things that really do move the needle. Unfortunately, well, this is something that most people…this is easy to ignore, it really is, because we’re so busy just trying to sell stuff. But, at the end of the day, everybody else is as well. The competitive differentiation that this provides is really, really significant. This, I believe, and so do 89% of the top brands in the world believe, that customer experience design is the difference between success and failure in a time of hypercompetition.

Jeff: Yeah, it’s easy to ignore until one day you wake up and you’re Kmart, you know.

Nick: Right, it’s absolutely.

Jeff: Right? It’s death by a thousand paper cuts. Well, there you have it. We always try to get interesting guests on “The Buyer’s Mind,” but I don’t think you’re gonna get any more interesting that Nick Webb, and I just do want to encourage you, go to whatcustomerscrave.com, download a chapter of the book. Once you read that first chapter, you will be hooked.

Nick Webb, I can’t thank you enough. I appreciate your insight. Thanks for joining us today.

Nick: My pleasure. Thank you.

Jeff: Well, Murph, as I said, there are interesting people, and then there are guys like Nick Webb, who just sort of redefine. Was your mind blown like mine?

Paul: My brain has melted. I mean, really thinking of how the fact that, you know, the great description of, okay, you’re a Hispanic lady in San Jose, California. Well, no one is that, right? Nobody fits that definition. So how do you reach people like that? And his whole way of approaching it was just genius.

Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. You can tell that he gets that contemplative time to be able to think through what does disruption really mean. And, as he mentioned, the word “disruption” gets used a lot. It may be overused, might be the better way, but when we look at disruptive innovation, it really is destroy and replace. It’s not tweak. It’s destroy and replace. And I think that we do have the environment around us that allows us to be able to do just that. And when you look at companies that have been effective on that, you kinda wonder whether or not we’re gonna see a whole lot more of that in the future, don’t you?

Paul: Well, and people use it as a buzz word, right? “Hey, we’re disruptive.” But how many are actually disruptive, right? Amazon is a great example of truly disruptive. Elon Musk, what he’s doing with SpaceX and Tesla, truly disruptive. Those are things that are tearing things down and building them up from the very bottom and doing things. Not many innovation are happening that way.

Jeff: Right, yeah. But he has clearly got it figured out. One of the takeaways that I wanna look at here and share with you, our listeners, is, you know, when Nick Webb said that 89% of companies will use customer experience as their primary growth strategy moving forward, I also wanna be very clear about this, this is not optional. I feel very strongly about this. I felt strongly about this for years. This is not optional. There are companies out there that are so committed to providing great experiences that they are gonna force you to catch up if you’re not one of them, or they’re gonna relegate you to the sidelines.

But here’s the beautiful news, customers will appreciate more and pay more for great experiences than they will for products and services. And if you want the perfect example of that, just think about what it takes to send a family of four to Disney World for a week. Five thousand dollars, $10,000, by the time you get through air fare, and a hotel, and the parks, and everything like that, you’re talking about thousands of dollars in investment. And your return on the investment? At the end of the week, ears, Mickey Mouse ears. That’s what you get for your thousands of dollars.

It doesn’t seem to make sense until you recognize that, well, people will pay more for and appreciate more great experiences. I’m going to encourage you go…just with your eyes open, even in your own life, what are those companies that it might be the little mom and pop donut stand, it might be the store that you love shopping at, it could be a car dealer that you’ve really, really enjoyed working with, but what are those experiences where you can see somebody was thoughtful, somebody might have been disruptive by changing the industry in order to do it, but where you walked away feeling like, “That’s somebody who has me figured out.” If you can go in with your eyes open as to what great customer experiences will look like, then it will help you to use a little disruptive innovation in your own organization, in your own sales presentation, and that’s really when we start making a difference.

All right. Well, hey, listen, as we head into the wrap-up, I just wanna talk, just for one last moment, about this whole idea of experience, and what that experience is, and how it affects our customers. And, you know, one of the things that I’ve thought about a lot over the last few years is the concept of legacy. I really started to think about legacy when my mom passed away about three years ago. It was a tough loss for me. I was very close to my mom, and I know many of you have been through this experience. It’s not a club that you ever wanna be a part of, but when I think about my mom, I think about her legacy.

You know, sometimes we think about legacy in regards to, you know, the endowments and the buildings that are left behind or whatever, or what music you wrote, or the book, or whatever you have. No, no. The legacy can be answered in one way. What lasts? What lasts? And the only thing that’s really gonna last, in my opinion, is my relationship with God. That lasts. And what I leave in others, what I leave in others, the mark that I make in others’ lives. That’s my mother’s legacy. I honor my mother’s legacy by living out the very best of what she was and what she taught me in my day-to-day life. That’s legacy.

But the other thing that I think we get wrong on legacy is when we think about it as a one-time deal that is, after we die, then our legacy sets in. I’m going to encourage you to think about your daily legacy. What do you invest in people daily? How intentional are you to build your daily legacy? Asking yourself the question, “I’m in this relationship. Maybe it’s short term, maybe it’s long term, but what lasts? What lasts?” How do you so pour yourself into the lives of other people that there is a little tiny bit of legacy that lasts longer than you might think?

All right. Hey, at the beginning of the show, I told you that we’re running an ongoing contest related to the launch of “The Buyer’s Mind” podcast, and I’m gonna tell you, you have the chance to win Bose QuietComfort 25 Acoustic Noise-Cancelling Headphones. These things, if you’ve never heard it before, they’re absolutely amazing. I love these when I’m traveling, when I’m listening to a podcast, or when I want great quality music that blocks out the noise around me. And, for the winner, you can take your choice of either the over-the-ear or the noise-cancelling earbuds.

Now, I listen to these and I love these so much that I actually own both. So when I’m working out, I listen to a podcast, I listen to music, whatever it is, and it’s a fantastic experience. So we’re gonna give away a pair of Bose headphones, but I’m also giving away several Shore Consulting swag bags. That’s five of my books, a coffee mug, my motivational CD, and a bag to carry it all in. And all you have to do is download all of “The Buyer’s Mind” episodes on iTunes, and subscribe to the podcast, and then leave a quick review.

It’s not difficult. It’ll only take you about 30 seconds. When you’ve done that, go over to jeffshore.com/podcast, and click on the contest link. It will just ask you for your email address and the name that you used when you wrote the review on iTunes so that we can pick the winners form there. And we’re gonna give away 10 of the Shore Consulting swag bags, and then remember that grab prize, your choice of either the Bose QuietComfort 25 Acoustic Noise-Cancelling Headphones or the QuietComfort 20 Noise-Cancelling Earbuds.

Well, that’s a wrap on today’s episode of “The Buyer’s Mind.” Great episode. I really enjoyed that. I hope you did as well. You can find everything that you need at jeffshore.com. We so much appreciate you listening to “The Buyer’s Mind,” to subscribing, and telling others about it. And until next time, go out there and change someone’s world.