The Book of Business Awesome: How Engaging Your Customers and Employees Can Make Your Business Thrive

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UnSelling: The New Customer Experience

“Good afternoon!”

It was the start of an exchange that would set off a chain of events and would shift our opinion of a billion-dollar establishment with one simple act. Let us explain. It's no secret we “enjoy” Las Vegas. After going there 15 times in the past four years, we consider ourselves unofficial tour guides and residents of Sin City.

A place that you definitely cannot miss on the strip is the Wynn—very fancy, very pretty, and very expensive. Because the place cost $2.7 billion to build, we assume selling 99-cent hot dogs isn't going to make that money back. We really didn't care about the Wynn—not in a negative way, it just wasn't on our radar. After getting comfortable staying at MGM Grand, the Venetian, and other places, we didn't really see a need to change, until that Saturday.

We had a meeting at the Wynn during the BlogWorld conference. We strolled in through the majestic doors. As soon as we walked in, we spotted a man (Wes) using a large carpet-cleaning machine. He wasn't in our way, so we really thought nothing of it, but he thought differently. He stopped what he was doing. He looked up and smiled. Not one of those “it's part of my job to smile” ones, but a genuine, warm, authentic smile. And then he said, “Good afternoon, and welcome to the Wynn, please enjoy your day,” all the while looking us right in the eye, like it was his mission to ensure that we knew he meant business.

His welcome changed our entire perception of the Wynn. Almost $3 billion went into making this mega-casino resort, and it was one guy who made us want to stay there. He made us want to tell the world about it—made us want to blog about it. The carpet-cleaning dude. We have passed hundreds of people cleaning in casinos in Vegas, but we've rarely been given eye contact, and not once felt welcomed. As a matter of fact, we have never, ever been greeted like that by anyone in Vegas. It is wonderful and sad at the same time. This gentleman, who made us feel welcome at his place of employment, was not only exceptional, but he was extremely rare.

Casinos (and probably most of you in business) all have the same stuff for the most part. All accountants offer accounting services, all coffee joints serve coffee, and all five-star resorts have fancy smells, spas, and pretty patterns. But only one resort has Wes.

Marketing is not a task.

Marketing is not a department.

Marketing is not a job.

Marketing happens every time you engage (or not) with your past, present, and potential customers. UnMarketing also takes it one step further—it is any time anyone talks about your company. Word of mouth is not a project or a viral marketing ploy. The mouths are already moving. You need to decide if you want to be a part of the conversation, which is why we call it UnMarketing—the ability to engage with your market. Whether you employ thousands or are a one-person show, you are always UnMarketing. It's what comes naturally, not being forced to do things that make you ill. ¹ It's authentic, it's personal, and it's the way to build lifelong fans, relationships, and customers.

If you believe business is built on relationships, make building them your business.

That's the one line that you need to believe to UnMarket. If you don't believe that, return the book. Trash-talk us online.² Tell us that cold-calling is a great tool if you know how to do it right. Just put the book down.

If you don't believe that your business is to build relationships, then tell us that the foundations of some of the greatest businesses in the world were built through cold-calling. What worked decades ago does not work as well today, if at all. Getting a 0.2 percent return on your direct mail piece isn't cutting it anymore. Placing an ad multiple times in a newspaper³ because “people have to see something seven times before acting” is a crock.⁴ You need to return this book if you say, “I don't have time to build relationships online!” and yet will drive 45 minutes to a networking event, stay three hours, and drive 45 minutes back home.

You need to read this book if you've had enough of the old-school ways of marketing and want to believe there is a better way. You are the person who wants to believe that if you are your authentic self, you have no competition. That even though you may have thousands of providers in your industry to compete with, you bring unique things to the table (which you do).

Let's focus on building relationships and still building a business instead of throwing aside those who don't want to buy (Buy or Good-bye) and build lifelong relationships and a profitable lifelong business, today. Being authentic has nothing to do with being cheesy or passive, and you don't have to sing “We Are the World” and hold hands. Being authentic means that you focus on what you bring to the table. That is what separates you from others in your industry. If you are your authentic self, then you have no competition. We know you have been told to act like other people, talk like other people, and market like all the people, but it is time for you to unlearn everything and start to UnMarket yourself.

Dear UnMarketers,

We bet you never even thought we could write one book, did you? And yet, here we sit four books later¹ writing the second edition of UnMarketing. Back in 2009, when we put together the first version we never imagined where it would take us. Stages and college classrooms around the world, opportunities to travel and meet countless entrepreneurs and business people, both virtually and in person, who we've come to call friends and colleagues.

Everything has changed. In 2009, we could complete a social media conversation by looking at Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We called into tele-seminars, checked in on Foursquare, and seemed obsessed with everyone and every business being on social media. QR codes were found on stock boxes and inside toilet tanks, not websites, and we could write 40,000 words without the word app being one of them. Oreo had never dunked in the dark during the Super Bowl and no one had ever dumped an ice bucket on their head. At least not for charity, anyway. Our moms weren't on Facebook and our kids weren't on Snapchat.

Nothing is different. Today, great content has value and stealing someone else's is not only illegal, it's unethical. We share the things that move us. We trust honest reviews from people we know more than any ad. Our favorite videos are still those we can't help but share, like a woman who loves Star Wars like us and has a laugh that can't be missed. We still watch TV shows, read books, and listen to songs—no matter where we bought them—and we still struggle to understand the generations before us and after us, no matter what we call them. We love whatever is new, in social media and at the Apple Store.

Everything has changed and nothing is different.

There is never going to be a lack of tools and choices for your business online or off; that's why in the following chapters we've kept most of the original content of UnMarketing intact, while adding new content and commentary to reflect the rapidly changing landscape. You'll find these additions in text boxes throughout and notes to let you know when chapters are new or have been mostly rewritten. The principles have never changed. Create great products and services because without that, no amount of marketing will ever be able to help.

Scott and Alison

P.S. from Scott:

You may have noticed Alison Stratten is the coauthor of this edition of UnMarketing. In reality, without her the original version would never have been completed. With two weeks to go before submission, I had less than 40,000 words of the required 60,000—and a poor 40,000 at that. Alison took the garbled mess and made it into the best-selling book that's been read by tens of thousands and used in over 50 curriculums in universities and colleges around the world. She is the co-creator of Awesome at UnMarketing Inc., the cohost of our UnPodcast, my cohost in life, and now officially the coauthor of UnMarketing.

We surveyed more than a thousand business owners to ask, “Why do you buy?” See Figure 2.1 for the results.

When the need arises, customers buy first from people they know, trust, and like. The higher on the pyramid you are with your market, the less competition you have. We take it from the top down:

• Current satisfied customer. Obviously, people are going to buy from you if they already do and are satisfied. The key term here is satisfied. Even though customers are current, this doesn't mean they are happy.
• Referral by a trusted source. The first thing we do when we need something we don't already have is to ask people we know and trust if they know of a provider, which is easy with sites like Facebook and Twitter. We can get a pile of recommendations in minutes. Are you on the tip of the tongue when someone asks for recommendations within your industry?
• Current relationship but have yet to purchase. Potential customers know you, trust you, but have yet to buy from you. And that's okay. The key here is that when they have the need for your product or service, you are in the front of their minds.
• Recognized expert in the field. You've built a platform and are consistently in front of potential customers with helpful advice and tips that relate to your industry. You want your market to say, “This guy/girl knows what he/she is talking about! I need to learn more about this person.” If done right, this leads them into “current relationship” status.
• Search through ads, random searches, and so forth. We get close to the bottom of the barrel here. Potential customers don't know anyone who provides the service, and have never met anyone, so they randomly search for a business that can help. You're not only at the mercy of a search engine here, but price now becomes a huge decider to the point that you almost become a commodity seller. You don't want to be here.
• Cold-call. Most of your market isn't sitting around saying, “You know, I need an accountant to help my growing business, so I'm just going to sit here until someone randomly phones me to offer me that service.” Cold-calling is time-intensive with horrible results. Companies encourage it because it has a “low cost” up front, but what's the cost of annoying 99 people in a row to potentially talk to someone who may hire you based on no trust and price alone? We're starting a movement to change the phrase from “cold-calling” to “telespam.” That will put a stop to the courses; no one is going to sell an e-book about “The Top 10 Ways to Better Telespam!”¹

So the question is simple: Where on the pyramid are you focusing your marketing efforts? The lowest point with high competition and low margins? Or the middle, while aiming to get to the top?

The main reason people don't focus on the middle is because it takes time. There, we admitted it. Building trust takes time. Fostering relationships takes time. So if you're looking to make the quick buck, go ahead, slide into the greasy bottom level, and enjoy. Just take a shower afterward.

Let's think back to what we learned from the hierarchy of buying. To successfully UnMarket your business, your goal should be to get to the point where you are a recognized expert in your field. You can choose to be recognized for a certain discipline, whether it's time management or sales or marketing in general. You can also aim to be recognized as an expert in a specific industry. What you have to realize is that there is an important difference between somebody who is selling something and somebody who is an expert. This is one of the problems when you use advertising or direct mail for your marketing: If your potential customers do not have an immediate need for your product or service, then you are potentially turning them off and losing them for the future. When you position yourself as an expert with useful information for people, your marketplace will always have a need for that information. You have successfully pulled people into your funnel, you have their attention, and now you need to do something great for them.

Contrary to popular belief, we are not opposed to advertisements or direct mail. It is just that in general these methods are executed poorly. They are almost always doomed to fail, and companies put too much focus on them. Advertising or a listing in the Yellow Pages or (cough) even a cold-call can “work” if whoever is in contact with you at that very moment has that exact need. And therein lies the problem. You have to blast your message to tens, if not hundreds of thousands or even millions, of people in a spray pattern just to try to grab a few. When you position yourself as an expert in the field, your message is not only in front of people who want to see it, but they have asked to learn about it.

One of the mistakes we see new business owners make, especially in the service industry, is that they don't consider themselves experts. Countless times we've spoken to new clients who balk at the idea of being known as an expert. They tell us they're not ready for that yet. They are adamant that they need to do their work longer to call themselves an expert in their field.

Webster's dictionary defines an expert as “having, involving or displaying special skill or knowledge derived from training or experience.” You have to be an expert to run your own business. You're not going to be an accountant or a nutritionist or even a virtual assistant if you don't know something about your industry. Sure, you may not be the expert in the field, but you can certainly be an expert.

People who claim to be the top expert in a certain field often do it in a way that excludes everyone else. In declaring the top spot, these people claim they know the most and everything there is to know about a certain thing. Really, nobody can claim that. Most industries are ever-changing and evolving, as are marketing tools. Of course, customers are always changing, too, as are their needs. A self-proclaimed expert in social media, the one who says that he or she is the expert in social media, in a field that didn't exist a few years ago should best be avoided.

Pause when you consider hiring someone who calls themselves the expert. We understand because we also get uncomfortable sometimes with getting that title of an expert or guru in social media. Scott is one of the experts in relationship marketing and social media and is a great tool to use for that. But for him to claim that he is the expert would be doing a disservice to everybody who is involved in the field.

What is stopping you from calling yourself one of the experts in your field? Being an expert is not an official designation. You don't get a certificate in the mail, nor do you get a cookie. You are an expert when you say you are one. You know how Scott became an expert in relationship marketing or UnMarketing? He said he was one! This doesn't mean you can become an expert in something you know nothing about. An expert has experience or training in a certain field. Once you have that base set, if you don't have the confidence to call yourself an expert, then you really need to look at yourself. You have to ask, “Why would my customer try to hire me if I don't think I'm great at what I do?”

Once you've accepted the fact that becoming a recognized expert in your field is one of the things you need to do to launch your business off to a great start, we now focus on the term recognized. It doesn't do anybody any good to be an expert only in your own mind, although this does happen to many people all the time. You don't become an expert by just telling people you're an expert—people tell you and then they tell others. When you are great at what you do, other people will say it for you. So focus on positioning yourself with the knowledge you've obtained and set out to help other people with it unconditionally. Use what we lay out in this book to help put you on the right path to not only positioning yourself but also staying as a recognized expert in your field for a long, long time.

Why do you buy the things you do? Turn the mirror on yourself for a minute and think about how you make choices about your own purchases.

Trust is one of the main drivers of that hierarchy. The higher the trust, the more likely it is that someone will do business with you. This is an important point in service-based businesses that many business owners fail to recognize. One of the biggest challenges is to get someone to try a service for the first time, so companies offer ways to get you to try it “without risk.” Unfortunately, we often equate this with giving something away for free—but this does not always address the issue of trust.

Before speaking at a professional organizers conference, we researched a bunch of their websites and noticed that many organizers were offering a “Free Consultation” of their potential customers' home organizational needs to get their foot in the door. By focusing only on price as a barrier to making the first purchase, they were missing something important. Of course, we do understand that price objection is a legitimate issue with many potential customers. However, there is also a tremendous trust gap. This is the amount of trust you have to earn before your potential customer will consider buying from you. The trust gap can be practically nonexistent, like buying a newspaper, but even then you have to trust that the content will be good. For many service-based businesses, the trust gap is much wider.

So coming back to the professional organizer example, allowing someone into our home requires a lot of trust, which is not established by simply making it free to try. Then on top of just letting you in, you want us to let you see how horribly unorganized we are? Tack on another huge gap. We'd say right about now, the gap is as big as the Grand Canyon. Focusing on price as the only gap between us is misguided. Taking price away as an issue is like stepping a foot closer when you're two miles away.

Instead of focusing on the cost, let's look for ways to decrease the gap. As potential clients, we really want to get to know and trust you before we have you in our home and give you access to our mess. If, however, we regularly read great tips on your blog and we get updates via an e-mail newsletter that we signed up for, then we will begin to get to know you.

This is also a great opportunity to look for products you can create that would require less trust and be more scalable.¹ Why not reduce your customers' hesitations and come out with an e-book titled 30 Days to a Clutter-Free Home? Get out to network and meet other people in your industry or local market and let them know about your business. Local businesspeople can become clients and can recommend you to others, which is very valuable.

Just please, for us, don't put the “Free Consultation Offer!” on the back of your business card. It's like going out on a singles night and letting people know you have a “Free Make-Out Offer!”² You are not going to this event with the goal of landing a client; you're there to build relationships. We are going to speak often in this book about the difference between your goals and your results. Your goal always needs to be engagement; business will result.

The same goes for a business where your market is made up of solopreneurs—companies that are a one-person show. If, for example, you are a virtual assistant³, most likely your website talks somewhere about “freeing up your time.” As entrepreneurs running a business, no one knows better than we do that we're overworked, and we know we need the help—that's why we're looking on your site. But for us to give away part of our business responsibility is like dropping your kid off at the first day of school. We're protective and territorial about it and won't just let a person who offers us “One Hour Free!” to step in and represent our business.

On the other side of that, if you are a solopreneur reading this book, remember that because all points of engagement between your company and your market are potentially UnMarketing opportunities, the people you hire have to be as good as you when they represent it.⁴

Other areas that have a huge trust gap:

• Accounting
• Anything to do with kids
• Wellness practitioners
• Life insurance
• Counseling
• Life coaching
• Lawyers
• Many, many more⁵

Your entire focus when you try to attract new clients in these areas is how you can build trust to reduce that gap. When was the last time a cold-call increased trust for you? We thought so.

Beside a fortune-teller, in a strip mall in Vegas, we found the best donuts in town. Well, technically, Yelp found them. We simply bought 10 dozen and bribed our way to a 9 a.m., standing-room-only, live UnPodcast audience.

Create great content and the audience will come.

Create great content and feed everyone Ronald's Donuts, and a packed room of hungover marketers will come.

We got back from Vegas and into the studio, raving about Ronald's Donuts. We shared our Yelp story of how the donut shop with over 500 reviews and 4.5 stars caught our attention and our hearts. Just what we needed: another thing to miss about Vegas.

Fast-forward a few months later to another studio day. We were just getting ready to leave when Alison noticed a box sitting on our doorstep. A box of Ronald's Donuts, with a note attached from someone we'd never met—Petrus Engelbrecht, a real estate agent from Sotheby's.

Petrus had attended a talk Scott gave to real estate agents and decided he wanted to be our Realtor. The talk gave him all the tools he needed to get noticed, so he decided to do a little research. He listened to the podcast, heard about our love of Ronald's Donuts and decided to have a dozen flown in by a partner in their Las Vegas office. And then, he just left them on our doorstep.

Now, one of us would never eat random doorstep donuts (Alison) and one of us had eaten six before we got to the studio….

We weren't in the market for a house. We hadn't even mentioned looking for one online. Too often in business we focus only on those ready to buy. If someone isn't ready, with money in hand, we ignore them. It's buy or good-bye. But great marketing is about more than that. It's about staying in front of your target market, so when they're ready for your product or service they choose you.

And no one has demonstrated this better than Petrus.

Scott has lived in Oakville his entire life, surrounded by ads for Realtors. Their faces on benches, the backs of buses, flyers in newspapers, and on lawn signs. Now we're just spitballing here, but we'd say there are about 10,001 real estate agents in our town whose faces we've seen (and sat on from time to time), but when it came time to look at houses, there was only one we wanted to talk to. Not only had we never seen Petrus on a sign or business card, but he was new to the area, to the continent to be exact. And he was new to real estate.

Not only was Petrus' approach creative; he gave without asking. He didn't check in the day after dropping by our house to see if we wanted to buy a house now. He had an idea and took a chance, and it worked. A few months later, we bought our dream home and Petrus got his Return on Donuts.

Since then, Petrus and his family have become friends and we've referred him to many others. He is a great agent, which is actually the real point here. No amount of donuts in the world will help your business if you're not great. The donuts opened the door (literally) but it was his passion, intelligence, and skills that kept it open.

He took the whole thing up another notch when he brought over a gift for Scott during the holidays. Knowing Scott's passion for comic books and specifically Wolverine, and his hatred of QR codes, Petrus had a one-of-a-kind piece commissioned by local artist Mike Rooth, as you can see in the image provided.

When you open a new location-based business that relies on a specific geographic clientele, the biggest hurdle you have to overcome is getting people to come to your business the first time. New customer acquisition is where start-up businesses spend most of their marketing dollars. Why not get people to come by using the foundation of human nature—making people feel special?

A friend of Scott's who runs a graphic design firm brought him in to speak with one of her clients about marketing a new restaurant. She was designing the restaurant's menus and had been asked if she knew anyone who could come up with some unique ways to market the place. He was excited to work with a place that was open to doing things differently. Well, he was wrong about that.¹ But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

They sat down together for an awesome lunch,² and they told Scott about their vision for the restaurant. They were in a downtown location on the western outskirts of Toronto's core, which is an area with many restaurants. They knew it was going to be a battle to build a customer base.

They discussed a few different things and ideas that they had. They all agreed that their biggest challenge was going to be getting people in the door to try out the food for the first time. The owners had a lot of faith in the quality of their food and service and knew that if we could accomplish getting people to try out the restaurant that they would come back for more.

Perfect! Let's get ready to UnMarket!

Here was the proposal:

We need to get a buzz going about the place, but also make people feel exclusive. People love to be made to feel special. Two new condo towers just opened a block away from here, filled with potential customers. I will approach the property management company and let them know that we are going to set aside one night each for the buildings where the residents would have exclusive access to your restaurant.

So far, so good. The owners were smiling.

Here's the kicker. You won't charge them a cent.

Previous smiles were now gone.

You will have two sittings on each night, and people who are interested will have to reserve in advance. When they arrive, they are given your chef's choices of a variety of your best dishes. Not full meals, but enough collectively so they will be full and content. Since you can seat 40 people at a time, with two seatings a night, we will get more than 150 people in here on two weeknights, which wouldn't be busy anyway. These two nights are going to be a great success and get that word of mouth moving.

They just stared at him. Scott assumed it was because of the shock that set in due to the sheer brilliance they just witnessed. Nope. One replied: “No offense,³ but that is going to cost us a lot of money! This is a little far-fetched.” When he asked them how much it would cost in food, they mentioned maybe a few thousand dollars, which resulted in this exchange:

How much did you guys spend on that magazine ad this month?

About $5,000.

How many customers did it bring in?

We don't know.

It was his turn to stare blankly at them. They weren't biting, so he even offered to guarantee it would work and to withhold any consulting fee until they met an agreed-on attendance rate for those nights. The food cost and the fee would have been less than the amount they paid for that ad, plus the guarantee! No dice.

In the end, they decided not to go with the plan and are no longer in business.⁴ Sometimes you've got to think like a customer. Why would someone go to your place if they have never heard of it? Trying out your food and service is going to cost them money, and they have to take all the risk. This is amplified in a market where there are tons of competitors, and all kinds of choices that I already trust are available. The value of having a packed restaurant would also have affected people walking by, seeing a busy new place filled with people—that is the kind of restaurant they would have come back to try.