Jay Baer on Being the World's Most Inspirational Customer Experience & Marketing Expert

Jay Baer shares insights into marketing that will transform the way you think about business development and will allow you to spend half the time creating content while generating 10x the results. Learn how to inspire your customers to market for you, why marketing your content is more important than your actual content, and a simple strategy for creating extraordinary and memorable client relationships.

 

Mo asks Jay Baer: How can people become great at business development?

• The challenge with business development is that technology has made it so easy to create contacts. It used to be that you could stand out just by having a better toolkit, but now the volume of business development messaging is out of control.
• Competency does not create conversation. The best way to grow any business is for your customers to grow it for you.
• There is a time and place for advertising, but in many cases the most successful brands advertise the least because their customers and clients spread the word for them.
• Even though word of mouth is the #1 way of generating business, fewer than 1% of companies have a word-of-mouth strategy.
• If you want your customers to be a proactive word of mouth engine, you have to give them a story to tell, which means you have to do something different in your organization.
• What if, instead of sending your proposal as a pdf attachment in an email, you send your proposal in a completely unique and unusual way.
• Doing the normal thing is often more risky than doing something that’s a little bit different. Just because you're in professional services doesn’t mean that you took a vow of boredom.
• Every single person and organization can have a talk trigger, but we’re are often afraid to stand out.
• Start with a pilot program and roll out your talk trigger to a certain subsection of your customer base and see how things go. Once you see the results, you can roll it out to the rest of the organization.

 

Mo asks Jay Baer: How do we create and close more opportunities?

• You have to focus on the problems you solve, not on the services you offer. People don’t want services, they want a fix to the problem they have.
• You also have to really understand who you are selling to. This can become more challenging as time goes on as the number of people you are selling to grows, but it’s vital to growth.
• Figure out a way to rank your potential clients against one another and create an asset around that and they will beat a path to your door. It’s important to provide value instead of selling to them. If you provide enough value, the client will sell themselves.
• Figure out the marketing plan for the asset before you build it. When you do that, you will build a better marketing asset.
• You have to atomize your content. The individual asset (report, whitepaper, survey, etc.) can be broken down into additional bite size chunks. Everyone is besieged with opportunities and information, so you have to give them a short, easy intro to lead them in.
• Increase your conversion rate by merchandising the findings of your report in smaller pieces of content. It’s the little things surrounding the asset that drive people to the landing page.
• Every single slide of your webinar is a potential social media graphic, blog post, video, or infographic.

 

Mo asks Jay Baer: What is your best advice on deepening relationships?

• The more transactional you think the relationship is, the more transactional it’s going to feel. If your motive is based on getting paid, you’re not going to develop deep and rich relationships.
• The best way to go about building relationships that matter is to build relationships that you want to have on their own. If you get paid, that’s great. If not, that’s okay, too.
• Be there before the sale. Build the right relationships now, even if you have nothing to sell or are not the right answer for them. Someday you might be.
• Most people suck at business development because they are not patient. Have conversations with people that are not about business and eventually they may lead to a commercial deal down the road.
• If you’re trying to figure out what relationships to build today, it should be the relationships that you might try to monetize in 2022.
• If you want to build deeper, more valuable relationships that will eventually yield victories, it is your responsibility to add all the value to the relationships.
• Business development is like practicing your serve, you should just keep sending value and adding to the relationship.
• Who you are is infinitely more interesting than what you do. You have to add your personality into your interactions with people if you want them to remember you. It’s okay to treat people like people.
• How can you add value to someone if you don’t know what that person cares about outside of business? Do the work to get to know the person.
• It’s very hard to tell if a professional is 20% smarter or better, but it’s really easy to tell if they genuinely care.

 

Mo asks Jay Baer: How can we hack our own habits and be working efficiently at business development even when we are yanked away by other demands?

• The first step is you have to enjoy the process at some level in order to put real time into it.
• If you hate social media, you will suck at social media. You have to find the relationship nurturing schema that you actually enjoy so that you can stick to it. If you don’t derive satisfaction or pleasure around it, you are going to invent a bunch of excuses for not doing it.
• You also have to batch your relationships. Write down and organize your relationships into tiers and figure out what your idealized communication cadence for each tier.
• You have to schedule relationship time, just like everything else that is important in your life. Once you’ve organized your relationships, add them to your calendar.
• If you wait until you have absolutely nothing else to do and nothing better to invest in your relationships, it’s never going to happen.
• Everybody has time, the question is “How are you prioritizing your time?” If you don’t spend time investing in your relationships each week, it probably goes back to either not liking the process or you don’t believe it’s worth it.
• The best way to stay top of mind is to add value. The best way is to study what they are doing and then comment, amplify, or add value to what they are doing. People tend to underestimate the value of amplification for other people. If you’re not sure what to say, share what your tier 1 relationship is saying and act as their cheerleader.
• Sometimes all you have to do is schedule time each day to tell other people how great they are.

 

Mo shares his insights from the habits of Jay Baer.

• Market your marketing. Most experts put in the time to create some content, but they would be much better served by taking half that time, creating less content overall, and spending the other half marketing that content. Doing this allows you to spend half the time and generate 10x the results.
• There are three components to marketing your marketing: the plan, the lead up before the launch, and what you do after the launch.
• Whatever you are creating, you should spend quite a bit of time upfront developing the outline of the content, who the audience is, and think about the marketing of that content.
• Start with what your audience needs to know and how you can create something that they would die to have. Jay’s example of creating a report on the top 50 university’s websites is perfect.
• If you’re the person that has the data, information, or algorithm, it makes you more magnetic to your prospects.
• Narrow down your audience to specific people. That will help you tailor the content directly to what they care about.
• The goal of your pre-launch is to break down your big piece of content into smaller, bite-size pieces as you can. Get as many people as you can to help promote them and get the word out for the official launch.
• The post launch step is the most important. Your big piece of content is not the finishing line, it’s the start. Post launch you should organize an effort with your strategic partners to funnel people into a meeting with you on how the content impacts them.
• Seize the momentum of your launch to get the meetings where you can actually get hired.
• Most people only do one or two parts of the three steps of the marketing your marketing process. Put all three into practice and watch your results explode.

 

 

Mentioned in this Episode:

GrowBIGPlaybook.com

talktriggers.com

convinceandconvert.com

jaybaer.com