Welcome to the latest edition of the Before You Market Podcast, where we challenge you to “Rethink Marketing” by bringing in some of the brightest minds in the business. This week, we’re excited to feature Jay Baer, a marketing visionary known for his insights on customer experience, empathy, and speed. Jay’s extensive work includes influential reads like Youtility, Talk Triggers, Hug Your Haters, and his latest, The Time to Win. Each book offers valuable lessons, but today, we’re diving deep into how businesses can balance the increasing demand for speed with the human touch. Here's what we cover:
(edited for readability and humans)
Jon Bailey 00:03
Welcome to the Before You Market podcast. My name is Jon-Mikel Bailey. I will be your host. This is where we challenge you to rethink marketing, to help us in this endeavor, we've invited some of the best marketers in the business to enlighten you on your path to marketing glory. I've been a big fan of Jay Baer since he wrote the Now Revolution with future Before You Market podcast guest, Amber Naslund, who I will be talking to tomorrow. All his books are must-reads. Youtility, Talk Triggers, Hug Your Haters, and his mini book The Time to Win are all worth your time. Trust me on this one. So Jay, please take a moment and introduce yourself to these fine folks.
Jay Baer 01:11
Great to see you. Jon, thank you so much. Delighted that you're talking to Amber soon my book spouse, from our first project together, probably, geez, a decade, more than a decade ago. Now, she is fantastic. That was a really, really fun project, and it's funny, as is true with a lot of my work. It's, it's more accurate, valid, and vital today than it was when we wrote it. And that seems to be a theme of my books. I'm like, I think I write them all two years too early, but that's, that's okay, better, better that than too late.
Jon Bailey 01:44
Yeah, it's funny. I was thinking the same thing, because, as I was going through and coming up with, you know, the questions and everything, I was thinking, man, he really nailed it, like, way ahead of his time on all of these, all of these subject matter, all of the subject matter. Are you from the future, Jay?
Jay Baer 02:01
And I'm not like, I'm not a futurist, I'm a present, right? And so, you know, for many, many years, I owned and operated one of the world's most prominent marketing and customer experience consultancies, and that was a real, a real boom, because we got to work with really big brands and understand what their problems and challenges were and help them solve them. And so the way I write books is that when I work with clients who are asking questions, and I think, oh, that's not the first time I've heard that question, and I wonder, well, okay, if these biggest companies in the world don't know the answer to this, nobody knows the answer to this, and then I'm like, well, if nobody's actually created the answer or developed the antidote to the snake bite, maybe I'll do that. And that's why, when I look back at my career, like all of my books were sort of a lesson on what you should do to outperform your competitors in that moment in time, right? So there's a book about social business, there's a book about content marketing, there's a book about customer service, there's a book about word of mouth, and now a book about speed and responsiveness. And what I've discovered is that all the things I recommend in these books, everybody ends up doing right like everybody does content marketing, everybody emphasizes customer service. Now people are starting to pay more attention to word of mouth. So I say that on stage a lot. I'm like everything I tell you today, you're gonna do eventually. It's just when do you start? And so that's what I realized, is sort of my role is to identify a pattern and give you something that you can capitalize upon for a while before you're the rest of your competitors figure it out, and then I gotta figure out the next thing to tell you, and then the next thing after that. And so that's why every three years or so it's like, well, here's the new thing that you can leverage for your advantage. Well,
Jon Bailey 03:45
Well, you've, you've been consistently on your game. And I, for one, appreciate it, because the answers to those questions have been very helpful, just to me personally. But I know, you know, anyone that reads these books is going to walk away with a lot of tips, a lot of ideas, and a lot of sort of, you know, ways to challenge their conventional thinking about certain things, although conventional thinking seems to Be a flash in the pan these days. But, I believe this is our third interview. I think I interviewed, yeah, I interviewed you once in writing, and the second on video, and this is the third and we are on video.
Jay Baer 04:33
The fourth one will be telepathy, if the, if the technology path we got. we're waiting for the chip, yeah, so our AI avatars will interview.
Jon Bailey 04:41
We're waiting for the chip, yeah.
Jay Baer
Our AI avatars will interview me.
Jon Bailey
Wouldn't that be so much easier? So yeah, are you ready to dive and provide some more answers? All right, let's go. Let's go. Let's go. So practicing empathy and embracing you know humanity have been common themes in all of your books, but in your new book. This struck me. This, this quote in the time to win your new book, you ask, how empathetic is a chat bot? Yet about 1/3 of customers prefer a chat bot. Why it's the need for speed. So are we edging out the need for humanity in the interest of speed, or is there still a balance needed?
Jay Baer 05:21
It's a great question because I have a different answer now than when I wrote the book. My thesis during the book was that efficiency, largely is the enemy of empathy, right? That it's kind of hard to do both, and that in our need to match customers escalating expectations for speed and responsiveness, we will, by definition, become less empathetic, and as AI plays a larger and larger role in customer communications that will, of course, have to be less empathetic. However, since then, I have done a lot of exploration of AI technology and working on new projects in that area. And I gotta say, I don't think that's true anymore, or won't be true very long, because I have seen a lot of technology that exists today. This isn't like, you know, near future stuff. This is today stuff where where there are voice activated chat bots, et cetera. AI agents that are actually programmed to be more empathetic than a human, they actually listen to your words, they listen to your cadence, and they respond in a way that calms you down, that matches your own inflection. It is extraordinary, not to mention the fact your AI customer service agent never gets tired, never has to go to the bathroom, never had a bad day. You know, their kid never yelled at them on the way to school, right? Like it's it's really amazing. Now, you know that kind of technology is a little ways off from being in place in all businesses, but I have to say, I think there is an argument to be made that AI can make for a more empathetic business climate, and I literally wouldn't have said that six months ago.
Jon Bailey 07:10
Okay, two things. One, that makes a lot of sense. And two, I really want to try to annoy AI now, make it my mission in life.
Jay Baer 07:19
The human relationship side of it is coming so fast, right? That movie Her is all of that is happening as we're having this conversation. One of my favorite AI examples right now, which kind of tells you how far we've come already, is again. This is not imagine someday. This could happen. You could do this right now, like you could log on right now and do this. There are two different online dating companies that are AI powered. So what happens is, you go on there, you set up a profile. I like this. I like that. I got a podcast, whatever I'm into marketing, blah, blah, blah. Love dolphins, like whatever you're jamming, right? And then the system builds an AI clone of you, right? So, so the robot, AI Jon Robot AI Jon goes on virtual dates with robot AI other people and the robots do first date and then second date, okay? And they literally have conversations the whole the whole thing, right? Then, if after the second date, robot AI Jon is like, you know what? Robot AI surely is pretty dope. You get a notification in your app that says, hey, I think you and Shirley should actually like meet in three dimensions. So the the AI tool handles all like the awkward first and second date, which is always where relationships go, go off the rails. And so far, early days, the results have been like, amazing. People love it. It's crazy.
Jon Bailey 08:49
That's nuts. Obviously. That was dreamt up and developed by introverts who clearly hate first encounters. Hilarious.
Jay Baer 09:01
Yeah, I mean, but you think about, okay, if you can, if you can do that modestly, well, today, right? Okay, where, where is that going to be in three years? Yeah, it's just.
Jon Bailey 09:13
AI job interviews.
Jay Baer 09:14
Totally. I mean, that's that is, that is already happening. Yep.
Jon Bailey 09:20
I'm gonna need to soak on that for a second. So also in the time to win, you say, and you talk a lot about the right now. So you say, the right now is when you deliver faster than customers expect, so slightly faster, but not so fast that they question the quality of your enchiladas. So yeah. Can you explain the reference so people understand the relationship between trust and responsiveness? How
Jay Baer 09:45
How we got into this project was, as we talked about at the onset of the show, my role is to figure out what's the next thing that you can use to defeat your opponents, right? And coming out of the pandemic, my observation was that we seem to care about time and. We spend it more than we used to. All the things that we were talking about in that 2021 period, 2022 you know, great resignation, quite quitting. You know, working from home, like all of that, is really the same trend, which is, we care about time and how we spend it. But as I always do before I work on a big project, I want to validate it with, with meaningful research. I don't want to just be like Jay says this is true, because what if I'm wrong? So we did a huge research project. It's the largest study ever undertaken on the relationship between responsiveness and revenue, and we found Jon that indeed it is true that people care about time more than ever, and it has huge consequences for business, both in customer acquisition and in customer retention. And so in the book, which is very, very small, it is, it is literally a booklet. You can read it in 45 minutes. I started off writing, you know, another full length business book, but then I was like, Wait a second, I can't make people spend six hours reading a book about speed like that seems that seems like the height of irony. So I'm like, what if I wrote a very small book that people can actually read and will actually read, and so far it's been great. It's really successful. People love the format. But anyway, one of the key parts of this is I really wanted to disavow people of the notion that the remedy here should just be faster in everything, like you probably should be faster at most things, most businesses don't understand how important speed is to customers, and so they don't fully give customers what they want in that area. That is all true. We've got the research to back it up, tons of case studies, but the advice is not just be as fast as possible, because when you're too fast, it actually decays trust, right? So the example you refer to is I live in Indiana now. I'm from Arizona, but I live in Indiana now, and I went to a Mexican food restaurant here in town, which, you know, it's not really the core cuisine of Indiana. But you sure? You know, I'm from Arizona, you gotta scratch the itch, right? So I go to this restaurant, I order chicken enchiladas, and they brought me chicken enchiladas in like 90 seconds. They just manifested it. It was, it was astonishing. It was like, Jetsons. I'm like, how what?
Jon Bailey 12:15
They're gonna like, Star Trek food generators.
Jay Baer 12:18
Yeah, is there a machine? I actually think that somebody else ordered it and then they got the wrong one, and they were just like letting it sit there till then. Oh, he ordered them and brought them out. It was so fast I distrusted the enchiladas. Now, I did eat them because Beggars can't be choosers. Sure, Mexican food Indiana, but I didn't trust it the whole time. And the same is true for lots of other businesses. There was a time where I went to go get LASIK, right? And instead of having glasses, I was going to get the eye surgery. And I called the the eye doctor, and I'm like, Yeah, I'm thinking about getting LASIK. When can I get in for a surgery? Thinking, you know, it's going to be weeks, whatever. What are you doing tomorrow morning? Oh, and I'm like, Okay, if you're, if you're that available, like, I feel like you're not the choice for me. In a more practical example that everybody can relate to, everybody I'm sure uses, or has used some kind of chat bot we talked about earlier on a website. So all of those chat bots have an intentional delay. So drift, drift is a very popular provider of B to mostly B to B chat bot software. They actually tested this, and, you know, the first touch is almost always AI. Now, right? It's not a person, it's AI. You ask your question, you hit the button, and the bot can respond. I mean, literally, blink of an eye, it's it's already responding as you're typing, right? But the problem is, when you get the response that quickly, you're like, Nah, that's got to be AI. Nobody actually read that. I don't believe it. It's like, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. That that's, that's like the fake delay, so that you then actually believe you're like, Oh, well, okay, yeah, a real person must have actually, you know, considered this and contemplated it, and trust goes way up. So you mentioned the right now, so that's what we're looking for in business, is, is like the Goldilocks zone for responsiveness, right? So not not too fast, because then you're like, I don't trust this, but certainly not too slow, because then you're annoyed,
Jon Bailey 14:30
So, speaking of kids, so you also discuss how expectations regarding speed can vary from generation to generation. But this surprised me not how most would think. In other words, boomers are far less patient than Gen Zs, which was nuts. What else surprised you you while you're researching for this book?
Jay Baer 15:03
That was probably the the most shocking stat, right? That the younger you are, the more patient you are. The other thing that surprised me in the research is is how much people expect a quick response, even for something as seemingly un urgent as as a Contact Us form on a website, right? It's something like 20, I can't remember the exact number, 20, 30% something like that. Of people expect a response to a Contact Us submission within four hours. That's crazy, and there's a lot of people out there, like a lot, who are not responding to contact us submissions within four hours, because you typically assume like, well, if it was really important, you'd call or email or cost hostage note or something, right? You just think that like, contact us is the least urgent mechanism. But that's pretty shocking, that people still are like, what's where's my answer, right? So there is differences in, you know, people expect a quicker response to an email than a contact us form, but still, you know, four hours is a pretty tight, pretty tight turn.
Jon Bailey 16:32
Yeah and also, I think, and this is, this was one that really, it didn't surprise me, but it validated a lot of my thinking and something that got me thinking was, you know, one suggestion in also in he time, the time to win is to answer customer questions before they're asked, ideally, within two clicks on the website, which I thought was a genius suggestion, and it's a great example of utility. Y-O-U tility. So you and I have talked about conversion optimization before. I think we talked about your live, actual conversion assessment on your website at one point, which was pretty wild. But do you think should businesses also prioritize utility optimization on their websites?
Jay Baer 17:25
Yeah, I don't know if I necessarily frame it like that, but Right. But for sure, and and it's one of the things I talk about when I do the stage presentation of this material, is, you know, if I asked you right now to write down the 25 questions that your customers have most often about your business, every business owner, every manager, every marketer, can do it right if I said, Okay, what question? You know the questions, but then you look at your website and it's like, well, how many of those questions can people get answered in two clicks? Yeah, out of the 25 when I do it live in workshops, the average is seven. Now, seven out of 25 that's a lot. And I'm like, Okay, what about the other 18? Right? You just told me that you know that people often have that question, and you also are now telling me that you know that people then have to reach out to get an answer. They got to talk to sales, they got a chat bot, they got an email, they got a call, they got whatever, uh, why? Again? Like, what? Like, you know, it. I've been railing on this for a long time, like 20 years, this idea that people have either, either actual or or essentially an FAQ on their website. There's not nearly enough queues. You know, the average FAQ, if you look at it, has, you know, whatever, 6, 8, 10, questions. I'm like, Okay, there's way more questions. Like, why are you not like, trying to to address those easier for people. Now, you know, if you've got a good chat bot, it helps in that regard, because it you can program it with answers to the to the most common questions. But of course, some people don't want to use a chat bot. They just want to self serve it, right? They just want to, like, find the web. Like, find the web page. So the fastest you can be, and I think this is an important premise, the fastest you can be is predictive, like, the fastest you can be is to give somebody what they need before they have to ask for it. That's just math, right? And so if you know what people need, and now you're making them hunt for it like you're setting yourself up to annoy people.
Jon Bailey 19:28
Yeah, I thought you said seven, seven clicks. I think you said was the average right?
Jay Baer 19:34
Yeah, that could also be true, but you on average for 25 questions, people have seven that they can get answers for.
Jon Bailey 19:39
Seven questions, which is not a lot, so I misspoke, but yeah, it's, it's, and it's kind of, you know, we talk about this when we go through brand assessments with people. Is, is, you know, reframing your thinking from from the customer standpoint, it seems obvious, but so few businesses actually do it. Yeah, and, and there's, and they're also not doing it when it comes to being that resource and answering those questions ahead of time.
Jay Baer 20:09
So, you know, I started, I started in the website business in 1993 well, when domain names were still free. Yeah, right. So I've been doing this a while, and, and it's, it was true, then it's still true now that that people tend to dramatically overestimate how simple and usable their own websites are. Why? Because they're on the website all the time, right? And I think people forget that websites are uniquely terrible, in this way, more so than any other form of media or or information that exists in the world. Every single website has a different organizational structure, right? Every single website. Imagine if that's how books worked, yeah, you get this book. The page numbers on this book go right to left. The page numbers on this book are prime numbers. The page number on, you know, on this book are random numbers, right? That's how websites work. And so when you're like, and I've been in these meetings and I know you have too Jon client says, Well, I don't know why it's so hard for customers to find that you just click here and then you click here, and then you click here. It's like, bro, you do that every day, like, drop somebody's random mom onto that UI, and be like, how do you find it? And they they make one click. That's why, that's why mouse tracking and cursor tracking is so useful, right? You see their mouse going everywhere. They're trying to figure out where to click. And they're like, Ah, screw it. And they either used it, they use chat. They go to search, they click the site map, or, worst of all, they call or email, which drives up your costs.
Jon Bailey 21:45
They should, they should force business owners to navigate their own website to find information with a gun to their head and, you know, someone screaming in their ear.
Jay Baer 21:57
Actually, here's, here's a great idea for a podcast. I actually thought about this a while back when I was a commit to convert. We're going to convert. We're going to do it with a sponsor. We never did. I think you should do it now. You know the show Drunk History. I'm actually going to New York in a couple of weeks for my birthday, and we're going to drunk Shakespeare, which is the same idea, where they have actors, and then they spin a wheel and one of the actors has to do five shots, and they do a Shakespearean play, which I'm super excited about. I want to do a podcast, or I want you to do a podcast more appropriately drunk navigation, so you just get a random person and you say, Okay, this is the Oracle website and five shots, and then find, like, a product data-sheet, right? Like, that's, that's my idea for a show. I think it'd be huge.
Jon Bailey 22:40
Oh, my God, I might have to do that. That's, that's very awesome. In fact, I think that should just be SOP for website Q and A.
Jay Baer 22:53
The last thing we do before we, before we put this out on the live server, is we do both navigation.
Jon Bailey 22:58
Oh, that's awesome. That's great. Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna run that up to flagpole, see what I get. So our last question is, is from one of our our awesome, amazing strategist, Sarah Pattisall, and she asks, In your years of public speaking, what's the most memorable audience interaction or question you've encountered, and how did it impact your perspective on your topic?
Jay Baer 23:27
Okay, well, there's been a lot. Okay, so the one that's the most memorable, I don't know that I would, I wouldn't if I would classify it as audience interaction, but the one that was the most memorable of all of my more than 1000 keynote speeches. Is I was doing an event for AppFolio, which is a very popular software company, primarily in the rental real estate business. And I was at their annual convention in Santa Barbara. And it was their it was their employee meeting. So they had all the employees. There probably 1000 people at the time. And it was the morning kickoff. The CEO was doing his kind of, you know, we're awesome, and it's gonna be great year. And now here's Jay, so he's up there, and I'm in the back of the room with the meeting planner, like, getting ready to go on. And it was big ballroom, because, you know, you gotta have 1000 people in there. And they had the pipe and drape behind the stage up to the roof, right? He's front of the stage talking to the troops, getting ready, rah, rah, rah. And you can see, like, the first six rows of people start making like, a weird face, like a little bit alarmed, like, eyebrows are going up, etc. And you can see that he notices that they're looking weird, so he's like thrown and he turns around and the entire like 40 foot long steel pipe and drape is falling into the audience from behind the stage like potentially deadly cat. Strong. This is like a 30 foot high ceiling, right? So this, things are heavy. Oh, my God. I mean, it would have been collect the hundreds, 1000s of pounds. And, you know, there's no stopping it. There's no, like, ropes and pulleys, right? So it just, it just, it's coming, right? So, fortunately, it didn't just, like, boom, it came. It came very slowly. And it was one of the greatest examples of real time teamwork. I had ever seen. Everybody stands up in the first section. And instead of fleeing, they all stand up, put their hands up right, and like a stage dive, they all like, catch it as it comes down, right. And then, you know, strong people hold it. Other people didn't leave stage hands come take it off the audience like it was, it was unbelievable, like people could have been killed. And I went on three minutes after they fixed that. I was like, Okay, time to rewrite the opener, right? So, yeah, I was like, Okay, now let's talk about teamwork, and how you talked about teamwork in abstract. And everybody knows teamwork when they see it, but it's hard to do it intentionally, because it feels forced, and sometimes it's just forced upon you. And so I had to, like, redo the whole first 10 minutes of my talk just based on, you know, you can't, not, you can't, you can't not address that, right? So it was actually really, really great. And I do a lot of MC work, and that requires you to work, at least when I do MC work, a lot of times it's unscripted. And so I really enjoy bringing that kind of thing to the stage. I don't get to do it very often. And it was just really a remarkable, a remarkable scene that could have turned tragic and ended up being an incredible lesson.
Jon Bailey 26:41
So this is, this is, this is my impression of Jay with all with every stage hand at every talk after that. All right, guys hear me out. So here's what I want. I want. I want the backdrop to slowly fall forward. Now, if nobody runs and catches it, you guys can catch it, but I just want to see what's gonna happen exactly.
Jay Baer 26:58
Yeah, I did think about that. And I also thought about making sure that those are appropriately sandbagged, yeah, from now on, because I don't want to be the guy that falls on either. So yeah, it's, you know, you're out there on the road and you got to be prepared for everything.
Jon Bailey 27:15
Well, that's, that's where those are words to live by. And Jay, thank you again. I'm looking forward to our telepathic.
Jay Baer 27:24
Can't wait. Yeah, we're gonna send our AI robots on a podcast page. Yeah, it'd be great.
Jon Bailey 27:30
Everybody out there, please. I cannot recommend these books enough. Talk, triggers, utility, the time to win. It literally is less than an hour read.
Jay Baer 27:38
And nine bucks on Amazon too, because, yeah.
Jon Bailey 27:43
It's a fantastic quick read, and it's got a ton of great tips in it. Hug Your Haters. Another one, all good stuff. Jay bear.com, yeah, thank you. Thanks, Jay.
Jay Baer 27:57
Thanks for I can't wait for drunk navigation. Keep me posted.
Jon Bailey 28:01
Yes, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make it happen. All right, awesome. Bye, everybody.
