237: Find Your ‘Talk Trigger’ to Spark Powerful Word-of-Mouth, With Jay Baer of Convince & Convert

Jay Baer was born to be in business. As a seventh-generation entrepreneur, he always knew he’d start his own company one day.

Over the years, his ventures have run the gamut—from an early internet company to a design firm to his popular marketing consulting firm, Convince & Convert. His clients have included Hilton, Cisco, Nike, and Oracle, just to name a few.

And if that weren’t enough, Baer is a New York Times-bestselling author, with six books under his belt. His latest, Talk Triggers—co-authored by marketing expert Daniel Lemin—dives into the power of word-of-mouth marketing and how to use it in your own business.

What is a talk trigger? According to Baer, it’s a “strategic, operational choice that creates conversations.”

Take DoubleTree, for example. Their talk trigger is the warm chocolate chip cookie given to every guest who checks in. Baer and Lemin interviewed 1,000 DoubleTree customers for this book, and that’s just for one of the 30+ case studies you’ll find inside.

If you want to acquire customers faster and cheaper, listen in as Jay Baer shares his marketing know-how to help you identify your business’s talk trigger.

Key Takeaways

• The origin story of Convince & Convert
• How he came to work for an internet company before he even knew what the internet was
• How he sold the Budweiser.com domain name to Anheuser-Busch for 50 cases of beer
• His latest book, Talk Triggers, and why word-of-mouth marketing is so powerful
• How to create a word-of-mouth strategy that will win over customers
• DoubleTree’s genius strategy of giving a warm chocolate chip cookie for free to every guest (their talk trigger)
• Why small businesses are perfectly primed for a talk trigger
• UberConference’s on-hold music talk trigger example
• How to (and how NOT to) find your talk trigger
• Why Baer invests in several companies
• How to use content marketing and inbound marketing to grow your business