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About the podcast
The Digital Utopia Podcast is for SMB Marketers and Business Leaders looking to align their Marketing, Sales, and Service departments so they’re part of one powerhouse growth team.
Each episode will dive into the strategies, philosophies, and tools that will change your approach to organizational growth, give you renewed focus and clarity, and allow you to build a brand that not only helps you stand out—but win.
The Digital Utopia Podcast is produced by Digitopia and hosted by Frank Cowell and Joseph Freeman.
Episode transcription
Frank
Hey gang. Welcome to the digital utopia Podcast Episode Two. I'm your host, Frank Cowell. and I'm joined by my co-host,
Joe
Joe Freeman,
Frank
Joe, so excited to be here today because, you know, we did our intro, the last time we kind of covered what you know, the digital utopia methodology was about and digital utopia podcast and what we're doing. Today, we're gonna dive into one of the five core philosophies. And it's philosophy number one, which is one of my favorite, it's the service mindset. You might hear me say, customer service mindset, but it's the service mindset. And so the reason I'm excited about this is because I would love for everyone listening, to start changing their their mindset, I want them to have a paradigm shift, when they think about what it means to be a marketing organization and a sales organization, within a company in a operations organization within a company, what I really would love to see happen is that people start to view themselves as services organizations within the larger organization. And so that service driven mindset is what we're going to talk about today. And so I want to hear your thoughts, because I know, when we work together, we do a lot of collaboration, I'm out in the marketplace, talking to people, and then you and your team ended up you know, executing for people. So want to hear your thoughts on service mindset. And let's jump into it today.
Joe
Let's do it. It's it's an important thing to think about as a company, because so often when we work with a company, when we get in bed with a company for the first time, we asked them, what they do, who they serve, you know how they do it. And you hear it time and time again, it's all I we, I we it's very seldom focused on they, them the customer, right. And this is the moment where, you know, in this industry, we talk a lot about empathy. We talked a lot about, you know, understanding the other side and seeing it from their point of view, and we talked about it, we get excited about it. But I don't know if a lot of people in organizations actually do that. And this is a moment to sit and think through that. And think through what is the experience the customer is having on the other side. And when I say customer, I don't actually mean customer, I mean, the prospect, but we need to be viewing them as customers, we need to be assuming that they are customers already, we need to be envisioning them as customers, because that is what's going to make us take the actions, you know, and and make the moves that will make them feel like a customer once they feel that once they believe it, they will move into being a customer.
Frank
Yeah, you know, the phrase I like to use is, you know, they're your customer. They just don't know it yet.
Joe
Yeah, exactly.
Frank
And so if you treat them that way, and as a marketing services organization, you wake up to serve that audience as if they were already a customer. You know, I would ask you, how would that change? the campaign's you think of how would that change your ideas, and I think that would radically change them. When most people start thinking this way, they stop thinking about how to be clever and cute. And stop thinking that it's about the next great campaign, which by the way, is like a huge pet peeve of mine, anybody who sits down and talks with me, you know, knows that, you know, this idea of kind of being addicted to campaigns and thinking that, you know, we're going to give it a try for 90 days and see what this campaign does. campaigns won't change your life campaigns won't change the way your organization goes to market and experiences growth. However, a mindset shift throughout the entire organization will and so that's what we're talking about, it really starts with the service mindset. And so you know, when you produce content, when you produce your offers, when you produce things for your audience to engage with, that service mindset is really critical, because it needs to come from a place of, you know, what if my job wasn't to extract $1? You know, or or an action from them, but what if my job was only to help them move forward in solving that pain point that they so desperately want to solve? And so that's the kind of service mindset that we're talking about.
Joe
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, you know, even if that prospect that I've been calling a customer never actually becomes your customer, they are part of your marketing, because they will go out and they will talk about the experience that they had, and they will talk about it with somebody who actually is a right fit for you. And they will be a walking billboard. Right. So this is an extension of your marketing. When you take this customer service mindset. You are creating customer customer service. Let's call it Juju, it goes out there into the world and works for you.
Frank
Absolutely. I think in one of the I think in the last episode we talked about, you know, if there is any magic elixir to be had in any of this, it's having that commitment and consistency across philosophies like you know, service mindset and hyperspecificity, which we're going to get into in another episode, but absolutely that you're right that that is the magic elixir that is available to you. And that would be the only time I would say there's something you know, magical and interesting that happens there. You know, one of the things I like to tell people is that another way you can view people as your customer before their customer is, you know, when you're engaging with them through your "marketing", they're paying you, they may not be paying you with, you know, paper money or digital money, but they're paying you with their time and attention, which in today's world is a form of currency. And we need to respect it as such, you know, attention spans are very limited. And it's a valuable commodity today, you know, you get a guy like Gary Vee, who talks a lot about this, right? Like, where attention goes is where your energy should flow is essentially what he's telling people. And he's been talking about this for a very long time. And so hopefully, I can, you know, use Gary to underscore this point, which is that that awareness is not something that should be taken for granted. It shouldn't be Cavalier, I mean, that is a form of currency. And especially if they, you know, give you contact information, let's say you have something for them to engage with, through your digital properties via some sort of lead magnet or, you know, deep dive content or whatever, when they start exchanging information. That's another form of currency. Right? And you need to price it as such. So I would just encourage listeners today to really think about that, that that engagement is, it's a form of value.
Joe
Yeah,
Frank
that they're giving you.
Joe
Yeah, and we see this in basic human behavior, right? If we take it out of business completely, and just look at our home lives, right, our children, my children get an allowance, but I guarantee you, they would rather give me their time and have me give my time to them, then get the money, they you know, that they earn from allowance to go buy the toys that they want, when they grow up, they will definitely look back and say, I spent time with my dad, not I bought the boogie board that I want to buy with my allowance, right?
Frank
By the way, just I'll take money from you. You just want to
Joe
but but but the point is, there's reciprocity, right? If I give I get and that's just how the world works. That's how humans work
Frank
for sure.
Joe
And so we learn that at a young age, you know, with his children, and you know, the example I just gave, we grow up and in business, we take it with us.
Frank
There's, I remember, there's one of my favorite TV shows when I was a kid, or something you said reminded me of that. If anybody here remembers the TV show called them what's happening?
Joe
What's happening?
Frank
Did you ever watch it?
Joe
I did not watch it. I know what it is.
Frank
Oh, my God, I watched that show religiously as a kid,
Joe
right? You're like, 10, 12, 15 years older than me, right?
Frank
Uhm, I don't look it
Joe
No, no, the books looking good.
Frank
But But you know, there's this one episode where D, the little sister who just was this real snarky little kid. And she says, if you don't give you don't get that's what it is in America. And you know, what she said is really interesting, because it's so true, right? Like you have to give first, and I think that's what the service mindset is about. Yeah, I want to talk about, I want to talk about we've talked a lot about marketing, as it relates to service mindset, I want to talk about sales and service, you know, or sales. And in most companies, they would call that operations, right, especially if you're any sort of b2b organization, usually under that operations, you know, GL, if you will, that's, that's your service organization. So I want to talk about how the service mindset applies to not just marketing, but sales and service. And so let's touch on that. And then what I want to do is I want to circle back again to marketing and go through all three. And let's talk about specific examples of what the service mindset looks like in marketing, in sales and in service.
Joe
Okay,
Frank
sound good?
Joe
great.
Frank
So let's jump into that. So when we talk about service in sales, you know, what we're really talking about is continuing that experience that your new customer is having with your brand, right? And oh, by the way, make no mistake, they're developing a relationship with your brand. Even if they haven't dealt with you one on one yet, a relationship is forming the moment they read that blog article, the moment they start, you know, watching that video you posted on LinkedIn, a relationship is forming with your brand. And so we have to, we have to realize that that service mindset is creating a relationship. Even though it's digital, it's creating a relationship. And so as they move into a sales engagement with your brand, and now they're possibly talking to a human, maybe you might have some things early in your sales process where it's still digital and, and self service, if you will. But as they move there, that service mindset needs to continue. And so it's imperative that your sales teams and your sales process are in lockstep with what's happening in "marketing". Because the worst thing that could happen is for this person to be served really well through content and information and engagement tools and resource tools, and then move into sales and for sales, the sales team, the sales organization, to just completely ignore what you've learned, what you've consumed, what your experience was. And so I want to talk about that too when we get into sales examples, because you Not only are there some physical things you could do, but there's some technology too, that we want to talk about that can help enable that. Yeah. And then finally into operations, which is where you actually service them. So again, continuing that continuity, so that way you understand the journey they've been on because, you know, they were aiming to solve a pain point at some point, you know, early on in the process. So having that continuity along the way is really critical in honoring that, and continuing to service them. I think, when you talk about people who already you're paying customers, right, like, yeah, it's a no brainer, you're supposed to service them.
Joe
Yeah, and I think the other thing to remember is when marketing does their job, they put on their smile, right? They put out the best foot and, and they do what they're supposed to do. But then they hand it off to sales, and their job is done in their minds, right. And then sales kind of does their job. And then they hand it off to operations and their job is done. And then operations takes over. And even though that actually might, you might be offering good customer service at every single step of the way. If it's not continuous, you talked about continuity, if it's not continuous, you gotta remember again, going back to empathy that the customer on the other side is experiencing one long transaction to them. It's one long thing to each of your departments. They're doing their job, and then they're, you know, wiping their hands clean at the end. That is not the experience that the customer is having. Yeah, right. They're having one long experience. And so you got to make sure that it's in alignment. Even if everybody's doing a good job already. They've got to be doing a good job and in lockstep, so that from one handoff to the next. It's a fantastic and cohesive experience.
Frank
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm going to read something from my book, building your digital utopia. It's a contribution before we get into some of the examples because I want to jump into marketing, sales and service examples. But before we do that, I want to read a section of the book, building your digital utopia. This was a contribution by one of my friends named Dan Tyre. He's one of the primary sales directors at HubSpot, and he's like the number five or number seven employee at HubSpot. So he's a HubSpot OG. He's definitely got a great following was an honor to have him, you know, give a contribution to my book, but I had him talk about this idea of service in infusing a service mindset into organizations. I'm gonna read a little bit and because I think it's an important share, it states from page 31, one of my associates, Dan Tyre, Sales Director for HubSpot, and co author of the book inbound organization, shared his own perspective with me on a service oriented mindset. Here's what he said, "everything changed when customer buying habits moved online. As customers became more educated, they began relying less on salespeople for information. But at the same time, they began expecting a more personalized approach and a higher level of service, the companies that leaned into an inbound philosophy gained a huge competitive advantage. As they discovered more, they were discovered more often by new buyers looking for help the companies that greeted prospects with helpful information, earn trust, and made it easier for prospects to buy. Do you remember the good old days, I'm referring, of course to 2006, and the good old days of 2006, people had reasonable expectations, less noise, and more time to consider a purchasing decision. Today, the competition, the number of channels that companies have to navigate in order to connect with people in the world of instant gratification are forcing companies to improve their game. If you're still running your business, without understanding how to meet the increased demand of the market, it's only going to get more difficult. And so the reason I wanted to share that is that last point that he makes, right? So if you don't want to hear it from Frank and Joe, right, here's, here's a guy, Dan Tyre, you know, very experienced lots of clout in the industry knows what he's talking about. And you know, in his view, in my view, things are only going to get more difficult. And so this is where the service mindset is really going to be the differentiator for your brand, and how you can, you can infuse that across the entire organization. So let's dive into that. Let's dive into some specific examples. So Joe, you work with a lot of companies, and helping them actually implement execute, I get the benefit of just like talking about it, you actually have to help them do it. And so you and I have a very cool and interesting relationship that way. And I would like to talk about some of the specific things that people are doing with a service mindset and marketing. So let's talk about that. What are some of your clients doing when it comes to employing a service mindset in marketing?
Joe
Yeah, so here's a real tangible example. This is from a probably the smaller end of a midsize company, right? their service company and
Frank
like what are we talking like a 10 10 million,
Joe
actually even smaller than that. So like somewhere between five and 10
Frank
gotcha,
Joe
right. And they have a very valuable consult that they give right and this takes hours that they'll get on the phone with you and they will dive deep and then they will actually employ their team to go do additional research and deliver you back in an amazing report. As you can imagine, that takes I think it takes like 15 hours, they probably should be selling it for money, right. And that is at the very kind of end of marketing's job, right? That's when it gets handed off to sales. There's somebody actually talking this, this isn't a customer, you know, quote unquote, customer yet. But it is the first step to becoming a customer. Well, as you can imagine, they can't do that for everybody, right. And so I've seen a lot of companies out there where they offer something like that. And they actually say, this isn't for everybody, some of you will be screened out. And of course, they don't say it that way. But you know, that's the sentiment, well, they have to do that, too. They have to screen people out, because otherwise, they're going to be spinning their wheels, just giving away this this time, over and over for people who probably aren't that qualified. But what they've done taking the customer service mindset is, as part of the pitch, they say, this is an amazing offer, we're happy to give it away for free. But as you can imagine, we can't give it away for free to everyone, however, fill out the form anyway. Because if we feel that we aren't going to be a perfect fit, we actually still feel that there's a lot of value we can give you and we've come up with a 56 page, you know, version of what we do that has examples that has exercises that you can do for yourself. And while our team can't take the time necessarily to do it, you're not going to walk away with nothing you you will have the tools to do it yourself, if you still feel after doing it, that there is a fifth and give us a call. And I think that's a great example of taking, it's kind of the icing on the cake.
Frank
So I'm going to want to challenge you on this particular example. So help help our listeners understand how this is different than somebody who has a request a free consultation button on their website.
Joe
Yeah, so request a free consultation is, you know, fill out a form, get on the phone, it's a veiled sales pitch, right? It's a, we're going to console you. But you know, at the end, we're going to be actually getting you to buy. And obviously the point of what this company is doing is is to get people to buy. But they're not getting people to buy just because they're trying to make a sale they're trying to get people to buy because they actually want to help them. And so the best way for them to prove that is to actually help them, they're actually helping them. And if this person never decides to buy from them, they still walk away with 1520 hours worth of very valuable information that they can take and execute on their own, or they can take to another firm, it doesn't matter. And they're very transparent about that. But what happens is through the collaboration, there's a relationship that's formed, right, and the, the salesperson, it's not just the salesperson actually part, they start to dip their toes into operations at that point, because they're bringing in people from the service team to deliver on this. So that quote unquote, customer that's still a prospect, but almost a customer is getting to experience the transition, they're getting experienced what's going to happen on the other side, should they become a paying customer. And I think that's very different than a console.
Frank
Yeah, you know, this reminds me a lot of one of my, one of my friends and favorite entrepreneurs and favorite marketers guy named Ryan deiss. He's the CEO of a company called Digital Marketer, fantastic guy, one of the smartest guys I know, when it comes to just business vision, you know, marketing strategy, one of the things he talks about is this idea of splintering and splintering is when you look at your core offering, and you take a small sliver of it, a small splinter of it, and you start bringing it down into the sales process. And then you take a sliver of that and bring that down into the marketing process, such that what people are experiencing, is actually a part of your core offering. And it's a really friggin cool way to give value, but do so in a way that creates that continuity that we were talking about. So that we as you step through that process, and you experience more and more and more. It's like, Whoa, that was just part of this core offering that they deliver. So I love that example you gave because that really reminds me of someone who's done that, you know, those are things that have to be done if you're going to be a client anyway. Yeah, so why not? Let's splinter off some of that and see how we can either do some low cost or free, you know, free value there.
Joe
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, a known name that's doing this, you've already mentioned HubSpot, right, we reference them a lot, because they are doing a lot of things right. And, and they do something very similar, where they've got Academy courses where you get a ton of value, you learn a ton in these Academy courses. And they offer some of them for free, right, you can sign up for that. You can take them and you can get a certification that you could probably as somebody you know who's maybe junior to the world of marketing could do that they could do it for free, and they could take it and probably get a job showing that they know what they're talking about.
Unknown Speaker
And sales courses too, by the way, and sales, marketing, maybe they're doing some amazing work there.
Joe
Right. So they are taking what is part of their core product, which by the way, they don't really sell that part of the product, but it comes bundled in when you do start, you know paying for the the full service. But they take part of that they carve it out, they splinter it off and they hand it to people and you have to believe that a huge percentage of those people are never going to turn into their actual customers. But it doesn't matter. They're giving a ton of value to these people, and allowing them to do whatever they want with it.
Unknown Speaker
So you touch on something that we're really not going to get into deeper into the show. And maybe it's for another episode. But you know, what I've been talking to organizations about, especially service organizations about in software organizations Lately, I've been talking to them about this need to have a three pronged a three pillar approach to their offering. So today, it's not enough to just say, I've got software, or I've got a service, it needs to be much more, it needs to be rounded out. And so if you look at organizations like HubSpot, they have their software piece, but then they also have education. Right. And then I would venture to say their third prong is community, right, because they gather the people that are, you know, using their software, and trying to accomplish the things with their software that the community has. And they put those people together in a community. And so if you look at hub spots, and I'm not in their boardroom to know if this is their three pronged approach, but outside looking in, you could say, you know, maybe their three pronged approaches, you know, software, training, and community. And so I really think that organizations need to be thinking this way, you need to not just say, Oh, you know, I've got, I've got my service, you know, we go out and we service, the building, and we do this thing, and or we've got our software, and that's what it is you buy it and you use it, I think you have to be looking at how you address the whole customer? And this is that service mindset, that, are you just trying to sling a product? Are you trying to service the whole customer, I'm not suggesting that you start getting into service line items that detract you from your core. But certainly there's a way to round out what you're doing. So that way, it's a complete service. So that way, it's a transformational service. And so I think what we're talking about is, you know, a way to make that happen, and you know, how you use service to, to service people before they're your customer. Let's talk about some other marketing examples. You mentioned something that I would call a foot in the door opportunity, right? providing this, this amazing service for free, and you're gonna engage and demonstrate as a splinter of your core offering. What are some of the other examples that you've seen are really great examples of service mindset in marketing, you know, whether it's through content, or, you know, we talk often about like lead magnets and tools and resources that can that can engage people. What are some other examples that you have?
Joe
You know, I think with customer service, customer service is almost all about people to people interactions, right? It's getting to know the people that are going to be servicing you, automation can support that technology can support that. But at the end of the day, if you don't have a face, if you don't have a voice, if you don't have humanity behind it, it doesn't really feel like customer service, it feels like you're in a queue, right. And I think actually, something we do right at at digit topia with our own Ascension funnel is something that we repeat for a lot of clients because it works and, you know, that is carving out of our core product, a tool that allows someone to attempt to do it on their own. And there will be people who can do it on their own. And there will be people who tried to do it on their own, and it's just too overwhelming, or they don't have the resources or the patience or whatever it is. But you know, that's carved out as a downloadable piece, that they can use the tools to do something on their own right to accomplish something, they've had a pain point around for a long time. As soon as they get that the next step is to start to put in that customer service and that humanity, right, they get follow up emails with calls to action that get them to a video. And the video shows people how to use how to use it shows people how to use it shows people showing people how to use it, right, you start to see the humanity behind the company, you start to see the smiles and the jokes, then the coughs and the the real person, I hear that a really great looking guy that delivers those videos, again, out of the box, great looking, you know, he, he now you've got me all flustered. I tend to do that. Alright, so let's move on from that. So you know, you start to see the people, you start to see how to tangibly take this tool and use it, right. And then of course, the call to action after that is to actually talk to that person or somebody similar. So there's a progression, but very early on in that experience within you know, within minutes of the first real interaction, they start to experience the humans and to me that is customer service.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, to you know, again, we're using our an example. But to brag a little bit there, I guess is, you know, the approach that we've taken is that we are literally going to train you on how to do what we do. And we're gonna give you a tool for free, the same tool we use with our paying clients. You can have this tool for free, and then you can watch a series of videos that show you how to use that tool for free and So I think that's the kind of thing that we're talking about, how can you make your customer better before they've paid you money? Right? Right. That's the value in advance value. First thing that we're talking about, when it comes to a service mindset is to give before you get, remember, D set it, right, you don't give you don't get, right. And so that's, that's the mindset that we're having, by the way, for those of you who are listening, shameless, self promotion here, building your digital utopia.com is where you can get the blueprint tool that Joe just referenced. And it's the tool related to the methodology that we often talk about throughout these episodes, building your digital utopia.com, go there and grab a copy. Again, it's free, and you can get some follow up information. If you don't like it, you can always hit on subscribe. Let's talk about sales. Alright, so let's, let's talk about the service mindset inside the sales process now, and I think we're gonna start to hopefully, that was an interesting conversation, if you haven't thought of your marketing that way, I would suggest that a lot of organizations I've talked to don't even think of their sales as a services organization. And not only by the way, not only you servicing the external audience, you should be thinking of those or internal organizations as servicing each other as well. And each of them having a mission to each other. So for example, what we say here at digit topia is that, you know, marketing has a mission to deliver to sales, right, a steady flow of qualified leads to sell. That's their mission. It's a simply stated mission, but it tells you that they serve someone else. And sales has a mission to deliver a steady flow of quality clients, to operations, right, it's a mission that clearly identifies that they serve someone else. And so that service mindset needs to permeate the entire organization. And it's not just your customers, it's each other. It's all people involved in all components of the system, right? And so, in that, like, you should serve the system, because when you make the system healthy, then it benefits everybody, right? So that service mindset is so important. So let's talk about sales. And let's talk about some examples of some clients that you're working with, or companies that you've seen, where they've infused a service mindset in sales, quote, unquote.
Joe
Yeah, I mean, I think it actually goes back to the example that I gave you earlier, I was talking about a very specific company that does that konsult, it's not a console, right? It's it's a value add. And that's what we've actually seen work best across many companies is when the sales team takes the time to actually deliver real value, not just deliver a deck, right, knocking on on a zoom call, and, you know, pull up the deck and show all of the capabilities and what have you and call it a console. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about actually working with listening to the person listening to their pains, and delivering back to them something that's a value. So we've got, you know, tech companies that are delivering audits, right audits of websites, audits of software, completely for free. And this is stuff that you can go and you can buy. Audience, right you can you can get paid for software, you can pay for services to go do this. But as part of the sales process, we've got people who are actually just delivering that, right. They're doing that. And they're saying, we understand that this is a paid service for most companies, and that you could walk away and never work with us. We get it. But I can tell you right now, I'm gonna make up a number, but it's a high number, right? The real numbers is a high number. I don't know what it is. But most companies see like, super credible, super good. All right, I love it. But you know, you end up seeing like, I'll just say 80% of those people continue the conversation with you pass that first call? Yeah, right. It's not a drop off. It's not a sales pitch that then you're you're constantly having to bombard them and to follow up with them. But you are actually getting them to follow back up with you because they sound sounds so much value in what you gave them. So, you know, that's an approach that's worked across many companies across different industries. For us,
Frank
I would also suggest that when you are very passionate about and consistent with this kind of process, it works to your favor, right? Because when you're unwilling to bend in your process, because you know, your value first, right, you know, your service mindset. What that does is it filters out the bad fit clients, right, like when you get clients who come along, and they want to dictate how the sales process should go, and they want to dictate, you know, how you should sell it to them and what they want to buy. Sorry, right, that doesn't work. And that's, that's one of the byproducts of having a really great consistent sales process. That's a service driven approach. Now, if your organization exists to do anything, and everything that the client may want, then hey, more power to you. But I suspect and I talked to a lot of organizations that actually wish they could do their thing their way instead of having the client kind of like lead them around by the nose constantly. And so this is one way to combat that. You know, the other example I want to talk about is I want to dig into this idea that How, like some of the technology can help power some of this service mindset? So it's not so manual, it's not so time consuming, you know, for example, you know, I have a friend that runs a an agency, Brad Martin now, six division out of Arizona, and they do a really great job of using videos in their process all the way from the very beginning. And they have these videos provided at just the right time along the way. So that the customer right before they paid you, they're there so that they don't have to question what's about to happen next. And it's seen in seemingly, every one of their questions and needs are being met before they even have to ask them. And so you can leverage tech, you can put together that content, and then leverage technology to deliver that at the right time, to the right person, or at least at minimum, give your sales people these tools to leverage. So they don't have to, like come up with a new video and a new explanation explanation every time. So videos, you know, pre canned content. And you can use tools like a HubSpot, for example, to enable your team to deliver this service in a way that your competitors, you know, just aren't investing and they're just not doing it.
Joe
By their it's a great point. And I think technology does even one better than that, because you kind of started to touch on it there. When you have a video, let's say you have a sequence of videos that introduces a prospect into your company, your product, your service, whatever it is, and it's delivered, you know, through email, and they can click and they can watch 30 seconds and it kind of takes them to the next step. And then the next email comes to three days later, give them another video, take them to the next step.
Frank
Those videos are purposeful in that part of their journey. But as a company, you can reuse that in so many ways you can use that in your marketing, if you want to. You can use that as a training tool for new employees that come on. Oh, you touched on one Absolutely. Like one of the things I think companies are just not doing enough of is indoctrinating their employees in the sales process, like making the employees sit through the sales process and learn what customers are saying, right and learn what the sales team is saying, right? Because I'm the sales teams and most organizations, you know, they often get a bad rap because they promise things that you know, make it hard for us to deliver is kind of the you know, the feeling about most sales teams. But I will tell you, most sales teams are a wealth of knowledge. They're highly experienced individuals who are great at solving problems. And so I think organizations are absolutely missing an opportunity to indoctrinate new employees. You know, with that team, sorry, I go off on a tangent. But that, to me is like a huge opportunity for people.
Joe
Well, no, it comes comes back to full alignment, right between marketing and sales and service. Follow alignment includes using all the same assets and resources, right. So if you've got blog articles, those shouldn't just be blog articles to be blog articles, they should be instructional, they should be educational, and they shouldn't just be used to attract new visitors to your website, even though that certainly is one of the purposes, they should be able to be picked up by the sales team when they are talking to our prospect. And they can email a blog article and say, hey, we've already explained how all this works, just check out this article, right. And then once the customer is a true pain customer, if they need a reminder, if they need a tutorial, if they need something, that blog article can be sent again by the service team, right? So they're all using the same Yeah, assets as opposed to the marketing team making a cute infographic telling the story and then the sales team having a video telling the story. And then you know, the service team having slps or documentation, why have three different versions use one that is customer friendly, and everybody can can
Frank
and on which and I would suggest that those three different versions created by three different you know, groups are probably going to say different things support and a lack of alignment, right. Here's the other great thing like oftentimes. So like in our sales process, we use this the first conversation called the Connect call, we use that as a way to actually filter out a large majority of people. So they actually don't come into our pipeline, it's the one step in our sales process where we actually want low conversion, because we consider it a filtering mechanism to ensure that nobody makes it into our client services team. Unless they're a great fit. And we feel like we can truly hit it out of the park for them. And so where content comes in, like the content you're talking about is when we have to turn those people away. We're not just saying like, Oh, I don't have time for you, we're truly trying to help them get to where they should go. That's our mindset. And so we take a services mindset with the Connect call. And we even say at the top of that deck, we even show show, show it in the with our prospective clients, we say, hey, my job here today isn't to sell you something my job is actually help you figure out where to go next. That might be us. But more times than not, it's not us. And just so you know, I'm going to help you figure out where you need to go. And if it's not us, I have plenty of resources for you. And one of those resources is the content, the information, also having partner organizations right super important. And then the other thing when it comes to technology is just leveraging it to, to do some of that heavy lifting, right? And so that way, again, it's not a bunch of repeat work. We're running on time here. So I do want to get to service right or operations, right. So we talked about alignment of marketing, sales and service. So the service mindset in operations is kind of a given people like, of course, they should provide customer service to my customers, let's go above and beyond like, the, the table stakes, what are some of the things that people are doing with content and information and, and not just content that people think of like written words, or like spoken words or video, but like, tools and resources, right, like, serving people getting a net promoter score? a knowledge base, for example, right, like using content and tools in ways that go above and beyond just reactive customer service?
Joe
Yeah, I think that, you know, there's a lot of companies out there already sending surveys already doing NPS Net Promoter Score types of surveying, I would venture to say, in my experience with working with a lot of b2b B's, there's not a lot of b2b is doing that. Well, there's a lot of bt C's, I see doing that pretty well, yeah, in b2b world, that doesn't seem to be as prevalent. And when it is, it's almost a check the box, right, I see them send out a survey, they get the results, but then it just goes into a spreadsheet somewhere, no one really does anything with it, it's a little bit anonymous, right? What we've seen work a lot better is when we start putting again, a human behind it, and it's a human sending out the service, it's not a Hey, fill out our survey it helps us out is, Hey, I'm john, and this is my job to make your life better. Please tell me the bad I want to know the bad because I'm gonna fix that for you. That type of approach, that conversational approach has been really helpful. You know, in those types of surveys, and, you know, above and beyond the surveys, and you know, kind of the internal we want to be better, there's also a huge opportunity to continue to nurture because once they're being serviced, that doesn't mean nurturing has to stop, that doesn't mean you, you stop presenting them good educational information, which can often result in an upsell. Right, it can often result in a referral, there's all kinds of things that if you put them on a cadence of consistently delivering more value than you even promised as part of the sales, you know, conversation, there's no reason why they don't take that run with it and share it with their friends
Frank
yet, look, you know, when we talk about the relationship levels, you know, what you're supposed to do with your core offering is transform your buyer, you're supposed to create the transformation that they sought, before they engage you. But it doesn't stop there. If you want to turn them into fans, your job is to elevate them, right? You're now supposed to elevate them to another level. So providing these things is important, but But what about doing things that are like, you know, continuing education credits, like your industry might have, you know, continuing education credits as a concept. But even if you don't have that formalized in your industry, why can't you provide a learning platform for your clients? Why can't you to be doing office hours that are private and exclusive to your clients? Right? Your job is to elevate them, now that you've transformed them. And so that's where I think a lot of people forget that service isn't just about servicing what you've sold right service in, what's their customer is about elevating them to a level that they didn't even know they could achieve. And with that, I want to leave you with that thought that your job is to elevate. Ultimately, what you're trying to do is elevate people. And I hope you do that within your organization. I hope you infuse this service driven mindset. We've had a blast talking with you today. We are now out of time. Joe. Thanks for joining me. We're gonna do this again soon. But come back for our next episode. Again, I'm Frank Cowell joined by
Joe
Joe Freeman.
Frank
This is the digital utopia podcast.
