Episode 174: Jay Baer, The Time to Win How to Exceed Your Customers’ Need for Speed

Ken

Hey everybody, this is Ken Tucker with the Marketing Guides for small businesses podcast. I'm joined by Ian and Paul Today, co hosts, and also with a very special guest, Jay Baer, who is the author of Time to Win, how to exceed your customers. Need for speed. There we go. It's an incredibly important topic. One of the things that we're excited about, Jay, is that you based this off of data that you had collected. Wanted to just kind of get started and you know, I, I think, you know, understanding the relationship between responsiveness and revenue I think is something that a lot of businesses kind of, they, they haven't really delved into, they haven't had the data. They may hear some buzzy statistics, you know, about how important it is to respond. But I, I love the fact that you backed it up with some data and, and also can, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that, but also just to talk about the sea change that we've seen over the last couple of years in regard to, you know, the importance of responsiveness and the need for speed.

Paul

every book project that I undertake is always first grounded in research. I don't want to spend a couple of years standing on stages telling people that something is true unless I know that it is actually true. And so I spend a lot of money and a lot of time on deep, comprehensive, first party research to validate my assumptions about what works in business. And I've written seven books now and I think almost every one of them, maybe every one of them, has had at least a section on speed as a business imperative. But my observation coming out of the pandemic was that people care about their time more than they used to, that they, they don't want to spend time commuting and they want to bring their kids on the vacation with them because that's efficient. And Major league baseball games are 26 minutes a night shorter than they used to be and on and on and on. And so we validated that with the research. And in fact, it is true. People care about their time more than ever. And, and I don't know that there are a lot of small businesses out there who are like, yeah, we don't care about time or we don't care how fast or slow we are. We think it's unimportant. I don't, I don't believe that to be common. But what I will say is that businesses need to move responsiveness up their list of priorities because their customers already have. And what we found in the research is that two thirds of customers say that speed is as important as price. And say that again. Two thirds of customers say that speed is as important as price. Now, honest question. Do you run your business as if that were the case? And the answer is typically no. And that's what we're trying to fix.

Ken

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a stunning statistic right there. I mean, I hope every. Every business owner and marketing manager out there listening to this podcast caught, you know, caught that and takes that to heart because it's, like you said, it is so critical.

Jay

Well, we've all heard the saying, time is money. Right. It's been around for decades.

Ken

Right.

Jay

But it wasn't actually true. But now it is. It actually is finally true, right. That. That if you give your customers time, they will give you money. And the research is very clear on that. If you cost your customers time, it will cost your money. Research is very clear on that as well. So there is a direct financial correlation between responsiveness and revenue. This isn't a. Yeah, that might happen. Or that might work. No, it will happen. It will work. Like it is proven that. That if you are faster, you will not only get more customers, but you'll keep more the customers you've already earned. Because for customers of all kinds, time actually is currency.

Ken

Yeah, absolutely.

Jay

Hey, Jay. How you doing? Yeah, I think that's something a lot of small businesses haven't really. I don't know that they don't believe it or if they don't, just haven't recognized it, but you've documented some really interesting statistics regarding the speed of response. Can you talk about what you found?

Jay

Yeah, it's interesting. Half of all customers will hire whomever contacts them first, regardless of price. Right? So this happened to me after I wrote the book. I got this house painted, the house I'm in right now got three bids, as you do. First painter got back to me in, like, four hours. And like, Jay, I can't paint the house today. Obviously, I can't even give you a quote, but based on what you told me in your voicemail, here's kind of sort of what I think it might cost. And here's when I can come out and give you a firm estimate. Cool. Second painter got back to me in two days. Third painter got back to me in 11 days, at which point I'd already had the house painted. So a little. A little too slow. Now, I hired the first one was not the least expensive, in fact, was the most expensive. But I didn't care. And many Customers don't care because we live in an era where not only do we value our time, but we interpret speed as caring and we interpret responsiveness as respect. So let's say you need to get an appointment at your dentist and you call the dentist's office and you leave a voicemail. If the dental front office folks get back to you in an hour, that makes you feel a particular way. If they get back to you in two days, you feel very differently. Because we interpret responsiveness as respect. And that's why we're willing to pay more, even a lot more, if we are able to work with a business where it feels like they respect our time. And that's the, that's the light bulb that has to come on for a lot of small businesses. Right. Because what small business says typically is, hey, Jay, we're short staffed, we got a million things to do. We're, we're doing as fast as we can. You know, we're, we're not trying to be slow, but, you know, we just can't be any faster. And I say that's, that's not true. There's definitely ways that you can be quicker. It's just, you haven't prioritized it. Right. Because you don't, you don't understand that it's a direct relationship to revenue. And so like, yeah, we're, you know, we're doing good enough. Good enough is not enough. Not, not anymore.

Ken

Right.

Paul

Hey, Jay, if I can follow up with a quick question?

Jay

Sure.

Paul

So we're small business are concerned, you know, they're open 8 to 5, whatever it is, and someone calls after hours. Yes, you can do a missed call, text back. But does this. If someone calls a local business after hours and they know they're calling after hours, does that change how they feel about speed of response is getting back? Do they need that missed call text back? I think they do. Or if they get back to them the next day when the business opens. How, how does that affect how people going back to. What you said about respect.

Jay

Let me answer it slightly differently. It's not about, it's not about during or after hours. It's the most important thing you can do beyond being faster is to set expectations. Because all the data is based on this. If you are slightly faster than customers expect, they love that. But in order for you to be slightly faster than they expect, you have to give them an expectation. The problem is what a lot of small businesses do is they don't set any expectations. Because unless you tell a customer in this modern era, that, that 6 after 6pm is after business hours. They don't know that to be true. Right. Because for a lot of companies, they don't do that. It's always business hours, especially larger companies. Right. And so you have to set an expectation that you know you can exceed. That's how you sort of play this game effectively. Because the reality is today, if you don't set an expectation, the customer will always believe that you can do it instantly because they've been trained that that's possible. Look, I can grab my phone right now and press a series of buttons and have almost anything show up in this office. I can get a car, I can get food, I can get another computer, I can get sex, I can get whatever I want instantly.

Paul

Right?

Jay

So it used to be that small business and also certain types of businesses were treated differently by consumers. People would say, they would literally say this. You guys have heard people say this. You know what? That's pretty fast for a small business. That's pretty fast for a local business. That's pretty fast for a bank. That's pretty fast for a healthcare company. That's pretty fast for B2B, pretty fast for a manufacturer. Nobody uses those words anymore. They don't care. It doesn't matter how big you are, it doesn't matter what you sell, it doesn't matter what you do. People want it now. And if you can't do it now, you better give them a reason. So to the, to the actual question, the way I would handle it is make sure that my customers know that after point in time, at night, it's a different experience. Right. You just got to massage their understanding of the difference. That's the, that's the key.

Ken

And just to add to that, if you do, if you do, tell them, you know, we're closed right now, but we will call you back when we open, you know, between 8, 9 o' clock tomorrow morning as part, you know, you're setting the expectations. And if you deliver on that, you know, for a lot of, a lot of consumers that's probably fine. Unless it, unless it's like, you know, water damage restoration or emergency plumbing services or something like that.

Jay

Yeah, I mean, the thing is, some of that emergency work can actually be a guide for us all. One of the principles in the book is to offer a fast pass. Yeah. And the idea of a fast pass is to give customers the ability to jump the line to sort of get instantaneous service, but you charge them for the privilege. The research shows that one in four customers will pay as much as 55.0percent more to not wait. And, you know, emergency plumbers and emergency H vac people have been doing this for decades. Right? But. But it applies in every business. Let's say you run a daycare and you're totally full, and a parent's like, I got to get my kid into daycare. Like, okay, you can be next instead on the waiting list, but we're going to charge you 20% more than somebody who we didn't move up the list. You should absolutely do that. Now, not every customer is going to want this, but those who do want it are going to want it desperately. I will say I was talking about this at an event recently, and somebody asked a question, said, well, Jay, what. What happens to the customer who was. Who was going to be next? But now you bump them down the sequence, right? Because you had somebody pay to jump the line, essentially. I said, well, here's what you do. You charge the parent that's next 20% extra, and then you go to the one you bumped back and say, hey, we had to take somebody emergency basis, but we're going to give you a 5% rebate. You okay with that? They'll be like, great. So everybody's happy. You keep 15% for doing nothing.

Ken

Yeah, that's awesome.

Jay

I mean, I should have been doing it. I used to own a big global consulting firm that help big companies with marketing and customer experience. And. And we had a team of eight strategists, plus myself and a bunch of other support staff. And so we could take, you know, at any given time, maybe four or five big projects at once. But these projects would take 75 to 90 days to complete. And so we'd get a big company like CVS or somebody come in and say, hey, we want to give you an enormous amount of money to help us with our digital marketing strategy and be like, cool, love you, CVS, but we can't get to it for 90 days. And now I realize, man, that was dumb. I should have said, sure, we'll do it. We'll start tomorrow. It's just going to cost you 35% more than if we started in 90 days. And, you know, sometimes it takes you a while to figure out your own lessons. I'm not immune to the advice of my own book, put it that way.

Ken

Yep, absolutely.

Ian

That's awesome and great to have you on the show today, Jay. I really like the example that you used about the painter and your experience. Experience with that, because I think that lends itself really well, to other service based businesses like marketing agencies that we are in. And yeah, I take that to heart as a great example where you know, we don't always have to have a, a completed quote to hand off to a prospect right away. We just need to respond quickly, guide them through the process, give a ballpark so that they feel a level of comfort. That's what, at least that's what I took away from that.

Jay

Is that absolutely one of the key principles in the book, which is on Amazon, $9. You can also find the research that powers the book and a bunch of other cool stuff, infographics, quotes, etc@thetimetowin.com thetimetowin.com One of the key pieces of advice in the, in the six piece framework that we developed is this technique to close the uncertainty gap. People hate to wait more than ever, that's clear. But what they hate almost as much as waiting is being under informed. It used to be, now you guys are old enough to remember this, so am I. Like back in the day, pre Internet, if somebody had a question, okay, like literally the other night we were watching something on TV and Cher came on and my friend says, how old do you think Cher is? And I'm just like, siri, how old is Cher? Right. Literally this information was delivered to me instantaneously. But we were commenting on the fact that back in the day you would have to get in your car and drive to a library and meet with a reference librarian who theoretically would have a book on celebrities and their birthdays and you would determine that Cher is, you know, 78 years old. And of course we didn't do that. We just said, I don't know, I don't know. What do you think? 78, 85? I don't know. Somewhere in there we like, I don't know. That information is unknowable was like an acceptable response. And now of course it's not because information is instantaneously accessible. So now when customers, especially young customers, millennials and Gen Z, when they don't know what's going on, it creates a ton of anxiety. So how I define the uncertainty gap is the difference between what you know about your business and what's going on and what the customer knows. And increasingly one of the best ways that you can increase the perception of your responsiveness is to make sure they understand what's happening at all times. Now, speaking of marketing services, this is also an area where I was terrible at this. I realize now after the fact, after I sold the business, because as I mentioned Companies would give us a bunch money to do a strategy for 90 days and we would build a strategy and everybody loved it. The work was great. Very successful in Inside the business, okay. My team and I, super detailed project plans. Like, we knew exactly what we had to do. Every day we did this. I ran the company for 13 years and we never missed a client deadline in 13 years. Never. So we had it dialed internally, but we never exposed any of that to the client. And I realize now that CVS was like, are these guys actually making a strategy? Did J just take my money and move to Barbados? Like, do they need anything from us? Like, what the hell's going on here? Because we were so wrapped up in our own process, we were really bad at communicating to them about. About status. Right. So if I had to do it over again, I do weekly, if not daily status updates, which sounds patently obvious to many people, but we just didn't do it. We were just focused on the work. Right. And it doesn't matter what kind of business you're running, making sure that the customer is fully informed is one of the best ways to impact how responsive they feel you are.

Ian

Awesome. Awesome. And this one might not be a long answer, but can. Can a business respond too quickly?

Jay

Oh, absolutely, yeah. Not very often, you know, not very often. But it is true you can be too fast. What happens is there's actually a psychological continuum here. When you're too fast, it actually reduces trust. When you're too fast, it reduces trust. So many folks I'm sure either have on their websites or have used a chatbot. Drift, which is one of the companies that powers many of the chatbots out there, they actually program in a fake delay into the chatbot because it's all AI, right? So the second you put in your your question, boom, they can deliver an answer. But when that happens, people are like, oh my God, that was so fast. It must be a robot. I don't trust this answer. I want to talk to a real person. Terrible results. So they put in the fake 3 second delay. You've seen this. It's the animated dots. It's like the animated ellipsis gif. It's like, then the exact same answer. People like, oh, well, sure, a human being must have read this and typed out this response. I totally believe this now has a huge difference on customer psychology, because otherwise, when it's too fast, you don't trust it. So there is a situation like where you've got to kind of find the Goldilocks zone, which is as I said before, the perfect amount of elapsed time, we call it the right now in the book, is to be slightly faster than customers expect. That's where you want to be.

Ken

Yeah, yeah. You also mentioned in the book, I think it was ordering a quesadilla or enchilada or something like that at a restaurant.

Jay

I got 90 here in town. I live in Indiana, which is not home of authentic Latino cuisine to begin with, but I ordered chicken enchiladas, and they brought them in 90 seconds.

Paul

Wow.

Jay

And at first I was like, wow, cool. And then I was like, wait a minute. Is there, like, a machine that I don't know about, or did somebody else order enchiladas? Oh, no. I wanted the beef, not the chicken. So they took them away and put on the hot window, waiting for the next guy to order it. And I was that guy. Do they have a psychic who just knows I'm going to order? It was very confusing. I literally distrusted the enchiladas because they were brought to me so quickly right now. I still ate them because beggars can't be choosers in Indiana. But I didn't trust it. Right. And that's a lesson. Lesson for us all.

Ken

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. So I love the framework that you put together. And in the Time to Win book, you know, just real quickly, I wanted to kind of go through and kind of explore each one of those six. You know, so perform a guided audit, answer before they ask, respond without answers, set speed expectations, some of which we've already talked about a little bit. You know, close uncertainty gaps and offer the fast pass, which. Which the latter, I think is absolutely brilliant, and I'm really excited to explore that a little bit more. But as we, you know, as we go through this, I'd like for, you know, Paul and Ian to kind of jump in and. And explore the different components of the framework with you.

Jay

You bet. The first one is to perform a Got it Audit. And. And that's a. That's the one that you probably should do first. The rest of these, the other five are not necessarily sequential, but. But the Goddard audit probably should be the first one you tackle. And they Got it Audit essentially asks you as a business owner to figure out, how long does it take your customers to get it? How long does it take them to get whatever they need? How does it take them to get a price or a delivery or an invoice or a question or all the things that they need from you throughout the whole customer journey? How long does that take and that sounds pretty obvious, but when you actually talk to business leaders about this, what they typically say to me is, well, Jay, usually it takes two days, but of course it's over a weekend, it's five days. If Bob's on vacation, it could be six days. If everything goes perfectly, we might be able to do it in the next day. And I'm like, whoa, wait a minute. That, that is not data. That is a collection of stories that you tell yourself. And if you're going to use speed as a competitive business advantage, which is the whole point of this exercise, the whole reason why this is called the time to win, is that you can use speed as your advantage over your competition. Everything we're talking about here you're going to do. I, I fully believe that every single thing we're talking about, you're going to do. Eventually you, you're not gonna have a choice. Your customers will force you to do it. It's just a matter of when. I believe if you do it now, start working on this culture of responsiveness, you've got about a 24 to 30 month head start in my estimation. 24 to 30 month head start before the rest of your industry is gonna be drug into this kicking and screaming. But if you do it now, you've got two plus years of head start over your competition where you can eat their lunch on this all important area of speed and responsiveness. But in order to do it, you first have to actually understand how long it takes you today. If you're going to optimize around responsiveness. You have to know like, is it, what's the Average, is it 38 hours? Is it 77 hours? Like we have to put actual math around this, not just stories. And, and that's going to require a little backwards looking analysis to actually figure it out and set your baseline so that you can optimize against it over time. That's the first one. The got it audit.

Ken

Yeah, yeah, that's, you know, I, I think it's hard for a lot of business owners. You know, I speak from my own personal experience as well, to, to get it. I mean, I don't know how fast other marketing companies in the area with the, you know, customers that I typically serve are responding. I don't have any way to, to benchmark that. And, and I probably haven't measured that myself. Right. So, so there are two opportunities and you ment to 30 months or so. I mean, honestly, there are going to be businesses who are not going to survive that window because you, they Are there are going to be businesses that take advantage of everything you're talking about and nail it and drive those other businesses out of business?

Jay

Well, and meanwhile, we've got new companies that are coming online that are built for speed from the beginning, right. They're, they're, they're AI at their nucleus. They are organized around the principle that speed is going to be their competitive edge. I'll just give you a quick example. My son just moved to New York, his first, first job out of school. And so he had to get renters insurance. And so we used a company called Lemonade. And I know about Lemonade because I use them as a case study sometimes. So they, they specialize in renters insurance. It's all mobile app based. So you, if you have a claim, so when you, when you sign up, you hook up your, your checking account so they can take out your premium every month, 30 bucks or something like that. And then if you have a claim, they can just direct deposit whatever they owe you. Cool. Well, if you have a claim, it works like this. So this is an actual story that I sometimes tell. This guy Paul had a really expensive Canada Goose kind of parka jacket. $975 jacket. He was also in New York, went to a bar, jacket got stolen. So he gets on the phone, presses the app, right? Lemonade pops up. Tell us about what happened. Shoots a video. 20 seconds. Hi, it's Paul. I'm in Brooklyn and I went to the bar and had my jacket, it was $975. And I went to the bathroom, came back, jacket was gone. Submit. That's it. 20 second video submit. On the back end, Lemonade has all these different algorithms that look at his history. It does some really interesting emotional intelligence and kind of lying detection cues that analyzes the video itself. I've moved eye movements in the video, tone of voice. It's pretty crazy.

Ken

Wow.

Jay

They determine that yeah, this probably happened. This is probably true. They don't even ask to see a receipt on the jacket. Like you said, it's 975 is probably 975.

Paul

Right.

Jay

And they use some natural language processing to be like, okay, Canada Goose Parka. 975. Yes, that's plausible. Then they deduct his deductible, which is 250, right. So 725 is the balance. They wire the $725 to his bank account and then pop up a message that says your, your claim is approved, your money's deposited. Okay. This all happens on screen. There's no people or no messaging that entire process. Okay. Once he shoots the 20 second video and hits submit the entire process, including he has the money.

Ian

Right?

Jay

Three seconds. Three seconds. That's how long it takes. Now, do they have a higher level of fraud than other insurance companies? Of course. But one of the things that we're learning now, it's okay to be a little bit wrong if you're a lot a bit fast, because they are the number one insurance company in customer satisfaction, also the highest rated, the highest average revenue per employee and a bunch of other metrics that you would gladly choose. So this is where we're going, right? So, yes, you can outperform the businesses in your own category that already exist that are not going to want to get behind this. But what we really got to watch out for are businesses that are being created right now with this principle at their core.

Ken

That's a great point. Because having to carry legacy and shedding the legacy ways that you've done things can be really, really difficult. I mean, I've done a lot of business process re engineering and you know that that's oftentimes you don't even get started because you don't even know how to shed that legacy.

Jay

Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes you just gotta, you know, we talked about think outside the box. It's such a cliche, but it's really true. Right. There's a. Another company in New York that does auto repair and maintenance, Paragon. They're affiliated with Honda, but they work on all vehicles. And Paragon's super smart because they realize that they had a real challenge in New York. People bring their car in and it's just really hard to get to a dealership there. Right. It's like you got to go across town and rush hour and traffic's bad anyway. And then how do you. When you pick up your car after work, and that's a big hassle and it's just transportation is tricky. And it's also really expensive to get real estate.

Paul

Right.

Jay

Like it's, it's, you know, to get real estate close to your customers is tens of millions of dollars, literally.

Ken

Yeah.

Jay

So they said, well, wait a second, what if we just totally change the paradigm of how vehicle service works? Because we all know it as you drop it off in the morning on the way to work and then you pick it up in the afternoon on the way home, generally speaking. So Paragon said, new plan. They've got this whole team of double drivers. They come to your house wherever you are in sort of greater Greater New York City. They pick up your car at dinner, they take it to their facility, which is in the inexpensive kind of part of town. They fix it all night like a bunch of car elves, and then they bring it back to you at five in the morning before you leave for.

Ken

The office and before they get caught in rush hour traffic.

Jay

Exactly. Yeah. They literally just turn the entire premise of vehicle maintenance upside down and it isn't any actually faster in terms of elapsed time. But the perception of responsiveness and ease of use is like overwhelmingly amazing for customers. Like a magic trick, right?

Ken

Yeah.

Jay

Pretty cool.

Ken

Well, they don't have to spend a day worrying about it because they dropped it off. Then they have to worry about picking it up. I mean, it's just taken care of.

Jay

Yep, absolutely. It's really smart idea.

Ken

Yeah.

Paul

Yeah. You know, going back to something Ken said about a lot of businesses may not survive this two year period, you see this a lot in service area businesses where especially ones that have been in business for a while that they just don't seem to understand that it's not okay to wait three or four days to get back to someone.

Jay

That's exactly right. And, and a lot of times what I find is that the issue is the way they have their own communication structured in their business. Right. It's, there's, there's a, there's a hub and spoke there that, that one person or only two people can actually talk to the customer about this thing. And, and the rest of the team isn't empowered to have those conversations or make those decisions. So it's all going to run through probably the owner who's the busiest one of all. And so that's what kind of slows down all the processes. And, and that's, that just requires people working on their business instead of in their business. Right. Just being like, look, I don't have to be involved in every conversation. And if I insist on being involved in every conversation, the repercussions for that is every conversation is going to happen a lot more slowly than customers want and eventually that's going to put us right out of business.

Ken

Yeah, yeah, great points.

Ian

Great point. Jay, you mentioned the second component is answer before they ask.

Jay

Yeah.

Ian

As digital marketers, we do a lot of SEO. We're big fans of creating FAQs, frequently asked questions, both for the customer experience, but also for SEO purposes. Google likes them, but we're also big fans of doing what we would call should ask questions. So these are, you know, as experts in the field, these are Questions we think businesses should be asking about their marketing and that kind of thing. And we use that within the content we create. So in regard to time to win, why is the answer before they ask component so important? And, and does that actually play into SEO or content development?

Jay

Yeah, you're. You're absolutely singing my song. The kind of work that you do is exactly what I'm talking about. I ask business leaders a lot when I'm doing workshops to write. I give them paper and pen and say, okay, off the top of your head right now, I'm going to give you two minutes. In only two minutes, I want you to write down 25 questions that people have about your company. Company. And they can all do it. They can just start writing. Of course they can. And they say, okay, cool, we'll put your pens down. Take a look at your list again. How many of those can people get answered without talking to somebody in your business? And on average, the answer is six. To which I say, what about the other 19? Like, why are we making people work so hard to get information that you just told me, you know, that they need? Why do you make them call or email or text or send a hostage note or whatever to get this information? Like, you guys know this? Well, I mean, I don't know how many FAQs I see online that have six questions on them, right? I'm like, don't even bother. Like, you know, you're, you're making a mockery of the faq, right? So, yeah, I mean, it's. The fastest you can possibly be is when you're predictive when, when people get what they need without having to ask for it. And you can do that in lots of different areas of, of your business. Like, one of the things I like to do with clients as a thought exercise, you guys may do this too. They say, okay, well, how would you create content? If it was, for whatever reason, impossible, physically impossible for a customer to talk to anybody in your company. Right. If nobody had had mouths or hands or whatever and all. The only way you could do it is with the information you put out there, how would you, could you actually run a business? And if the answer is no, we don't have enough information, you might want to reconsider that, partially because it's much faster when customers can self serve, and partially because demographically, this is clearly the trend. Half. It's actually 44, 44% of millennial buyers, people, millennial customers, would prefer to never, ever talk to a salesperson. So we've got this philosophy in business that, well, what we got to do is put them in front of a salesperson because the salesperson can answer their questions and, and sell them. It says it right in their title. Salesperson. Yeah, except that 4 or 5 out of 10 customers would prefer to never have a conversation with those people. And so now what right? If, if sales is, is, is detracting from your close rate, not adding to your close rate, what do you do about that? So yeah, I completely agree. Making sure that you answer all the questions without people having to call, email, text, whatever, is is absolutely the best practice. Yeah.

Paul

You know what? I don't think it's just millennials and Gen Z. I mean I'm not exactly a millennial, but if I can go through this process without talking to someone, that's perfectly fine with me. And I think a lot of business owners can't get outside of their own head and realize that like you said, this is the trend. And they, they seem to think that other people interact with businesses the same way they do and they don't. Especially like you said, the younger generation that's, they interact with businesses in a completely different way.

Jay

Younger consumers really dislike synchronous interactions. They don't like to be on the phone. They don't even particularly like real time live chat, the sort of potential for conflict. And if I'm going to be on the phone, we both have to do at the same time and we got to align our schedules and all that is really nettlesome for, for those folks, they prefer asynchronous communication.

Paul

Right.

Jay

You message me, I'll message you later, I'll figure it out myself, whatever. It's just a difference of how they prefer to interact.

Ken

That's, that's interesting. You know, we, we saw, not surprisingly to me, during COVID people wanted to just self book, they didn't want to talk to anybody. I think part of it is, you know, people were kind of getting in, maybe getting into their little introverted shells maybe for the first time for some people ever, because they were working from home or they were, you know, they were just doing things differently. And, and so if they wanted to book an appointment with, you know, to get an estimate for house painting, they didn't want to talk to anybody. And, and that's only accelerated. And, and so you did see some businesses have to adapt to that during that time frame, you know, but, but it's fascinating to me that some people, they, they just can't, they can't get out of their own way because they feel like they have to have every answer for everything. And, and one of the components of your framework is, you know, that you, you can still be very responsive, but not providing the answers. Can you kind of just elaborate a little bit on that?

Jay

Yeah. And this one I've been doing now for about two and a half years. And it'll not only change your business, it'll change your life. It'll change your relationship with your friends and your spouse and your kids and your mailman and everybody else. Typically. What happens now? If somebody needs something from your house, a question, and you can't immediately provide it, the answer, or whatever they need, what do you do? Well, you go look it up. You ask Google. Yes, Sheila in accounting. You figure it out. You conjure whatever is necessary, and then once you've manifested it, then, then you respond, don't do that anymore. Stop doing it that way. Because the whole time that you're figuring it out, the person who asked the question is slowly freaking out and moving on. Yeah. You know, like, if I send somebody an email now and I don't hear back for two days, I've actually been working on this right now with somebody. I sent an email on Tuesday, haven't heard back. And so I'm playing this mental game that we all play. Do I possibly have the email address wrong? Did it possibly go to spam? Is he possibly on vacation but doesn't have out of office set? Is he somehow mad at me? Am I just getting blown off? Should I follow up the email with a phone call? Right. Everybody plays this game, right? And you're saying anxiety goes up and up and up. So the better approach. And again, do this not just in your business, train your people, but do it in your life. If somebody asks a question or needs something, you immediately respond and say, good question. So good, in fact, I don't know the answer, but I'm going to find out, and then I'll let you know. And the second you do that, the second you essentially say, I got it, it takes it off of their mental to do list and it puts it on your mental to do list. And that brings their anxiety way down. And then two great things happen. One, it massively increases their perception of your speed because. And this is really, really important, speed of response is more important than speed of resolution psychologically. Okay? So it massively increases how fast they think you are. And because of that, it actually buys you more time to respond because the second they know you're on it, if you were going to do it in Two days and they were freaking out. The second they know you're on it, you can probably do it three, four days. It actually buys you more of a grace period because they're not stressed, they know you're on it. Now you don't have infinity time, but you have longer. So. So you get two advantages there.

Ken

Wow.

Jay

Yeah, it works great.

Ken

Yeah, that's amazing. I think it probably also buys you a little bit of trust and respect too because I don't think everybody thinks that you're going to know every answer all the time. And if you do, you're like, you know, it's like the enchilada deal. Hey, wait a minute, that's coming back too fast. So trustworthy.

Paul

Yeah, this, this is a really good topic. And you know something just before I ask my question here, that the way people interact with businesses pre Covid and post covet is the reluctance we continue to run into from small businesses about having customers self book. A lot of people want to do that. They want to go on your website or whatever and book an appointment. And we have this huge reluctance from small bit, no, I don't want to do that. It's like, well, that's probably costing you business, especially if your competitor is doing it. But that being said, that the next part of this is set speed expectations. So can you talk about that?

Jay

Yeah, we talked about that a little bit earlier. This idea that, that it's not so much about how fast you are in pure number of minutes, hours or days, it's about are you faster than the customer thought you would be. That's really the trick to this game is being faster than they think you would be, not necessarily just being faster, period. And raw elapsed time. So the best way to handle that is to make sure that you do what we all know to be true. You learn this on the first day in business you are taught to under promise and over deliver. But so often when it comes to speed, we do the exact opposite. It's very common, especially among small businesses where you know it's going to take seven days. You know it's going to take seven days, but you tell the customer it's going to take five days because you don't want to disappoint them at the time of order. You're like, they'll be a little disappointed later, but we can deal with that later. And now we have their money and it'll, you know, we'll sort that out down the line. And look for a long time that strategy actually worked fine. Because people weren't that spun up about time and, and how they spend it. And so, yeah, if you fudged it a couple days, like, yeah, I understand. You know, you're a small business, whatever, you can't do that anymore. You can't fib to your clients around speed. Right. So if you know it's going to take seven, you tell them it's going to take eight. Right. You tell him it's going to take eight and he deliver it in seven. And now you're a hero. So good buddy of mine's a pilot for American. He does this every time. He's such a genius. So he gets a, he gets, you know, he's got the headset on and air traffic controls. Like, yeah, there's a delay. It's going to be, it's going to be an 11 minute delay. He comes on the intercom, yeah, it's Captain Mendeler. It's going to be a 14 minute delay. He always adds like 30 to 50% every time. And then, and then, you know, even if, even if ATC was wrong. Right. He comes back on is like, well, it's only been 12 minutes, but good news, we're leaving. And now he's a hero. Everybody loves him. Right? Just, you know, it's, you got to set those expectations.

Paul

Yeah, that's like Scotty from Star Trek.

Jay

That's exactly right. Yeah, I wrote about that in my newsletter and I had forgotten that whole Scotty from Star Trek piece of it. Like, I don't know, it was a while ago and I've just forgotten it. And I, and I wrote about it in my newsletter and I got like 40 people emailed me back like, it's just like Scotty from Star Trek.

Paul

So.

Jay

Yeah, you're spot on.

Ken

Yeah.

Ian

You talked about the fifth component being close uncertainty gaps and you, you broached that a little bit earlier on. But why, why should this be such a high priority for any business or organization?

Jay

It, it's, it's because, just like, if you don't know when I'm going to respond to your message, if I don't know what's happening in terms of my relationship with you, you start thinking, okay, they just don't respect me, they don't value me enough to keep me informed and maybe I should, should seek another option. Furthermore, when you close uncertainty gaps and you kind of make the things that used to just be inside baseball and you make those public, it creates a lot of buy in with the customers and actually increases your repeat order rate. So I'll give you an example. I was, I ordered some shoes online, some tennis shoes, like leather sneakers, and from this factory that kind of specializes in this in Ecuador. And I made the mistake of drinking tequila while I was buying online. And. And as I am the number two tequila influencer in the world, so it does happen on occasion. And so I bought these shoes. My God, these shoes are really cool. It's gonna be great. And then I realized about an hour later, I'm like, wait a second, they're making these from scratch. Because I got the confirmation email and it said, yeah, you, you're gonna love having your shoes in eight weeks. I was like, eight, Eight weeks. I was like, two months to make shoes. What? I was very confused. I kind of missed that part of the whole buying cycle. And I was like, do I want to cancel this order? Like, two months is a long time. But I was like, ah, let's just kind of ride this out, see what goes well. Every Wednesday for eight consecutive weeks, I got an email from this team saying, jay, I want you to meet Pablo. Pablo's in charge of last at the factory. Here's a video of Pablo working on sneakers. These aren't your sneakers, but they're just like yours. Next week, I want you to meet Julieta. Julieta is in charge of tanning the hides. Here's. Here's how she does. I mean, it was literally like a documentary, one message a week about how these shoes are made. And it was super entertaining. Made the time go by really quickly. Totally close the uncertainty gap. Because if I asked you, how do they make step by step custom leather sneakers, nobody knows the answer to that, but now I do. So, yeah, it's, it's just a good, good process to, to get in. And, and it changes the way you think about time when you have information. Give you an example. If you call anybody, like the other day, I had to call my cell phone provider. Don't recommend it, obviously, but of course they're like, okay, first they say, I love this. They always say calls are answered in the order in which they were received. To which I always think, yeah, what was the second option? We're going to answer calls by height. We're going to answer like what? Of course it's answered in the order it was received. Like, what? What else? What was the runner up plan? It's crazy that we have to say that. So that always makes me laugh. But then they're like, okay, estimated hold time, 11 minutes. Right? Amazing. We didn't used to do that. You probably remember like there was a period where they didn't have that technology. Right. So it was like you're just on hold and it could be 11 minutes, it could be 11 hours. You had literally no idea. Right. Actual tons of academic level psychology studies about this that say that, that the perception of time is really different when you know, okay, it's going to be 11 minutes versus it's open ended. It's like the light at the end of the tunnel. So it's the same idea, right. Setting the, you know, closing that expectation gap and providing people the information really changes how fast it feels to them. You're not any actual faster, it just changes how fast you feel.

Ken

I don't think that that should be too surprising to people because, you know, I, I mean, well, maybe it is. But I mean for me, you know, I've, I've worked on predominantly learning this through, you know, some political campaigns and experiences I've had where if you don't say something, you're leaving a communication gap and it is going to be filled and it's going to be filled with something that you don't want. And, and then, you know, on the digital marketing side of things, you know, a real easy analogy for people to grasp here, I think is if you have no customer reviews and your competitor does, people are going to look at that and they're going to say nobody cares enough about this business. That's it to respond. I mean that is not a good perception that you want to have of your business. People are going to fill in that gap with the information that they have available. And, and you don't want to risk that. You want to try to control like, you know, you mentioned in talk triggers, you know, you need to control the narrative basically to the extent that.

Jay

Yep, that's no doubt. And I started in politics, I know exactly what you're talking about. Right. If you don't, if you don't say it, somebody else is going to say it and then you can't control it. Which is why the inoculation strategy is so important in politics. Right. If you know your candidate or your initiative has weaknesses, you're better off pointing out those weaknesses yourself than letting your opponents point it out. Because then at least you control the narrative around your own weaknesses.

Ken

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So the last components one I absolutely love and I think it's just brilliant. You know, we live in a subscription based age and you know, I think a game changer for a lot of businesses is how can they make subscription based services, you know, Just think about a painter. You know, it's like they have somebody came in, come in, or they, they come in and they paint a house, and then they won't see them for five, 10 years.

Paul

Yeah.

Ken

If you had a subscription model of some kind, you know, roofers are doing it with gutter maintenance, you know. Well, I think offering the Fast Pass is kind of a similar thing to that. And it's something that's so easy for people to consume. As a consumer we see it, it's not necessarily a Fast Pass, but it's certainly a convenience pass. You know, think about, I don't know, Paramount plus or Peacock or even Netflix. You can pay to not have ads.

Jay

Yes. So you're upgrading, which saved your time, essentially. Right?

Paul

Yeah.

Ken

And so you're getting that 35 to 50% more that you talked about. So there are other businesses that are proving that this is very successful.

Jay

Talk about, I mean, TSA Pre is a Fast Pass.

Ken

Yeah, exactly.

Jay

And ATM is a Fast Pass.

Ken

Yeah, yeah. So. So share a little bit more about, you know, anything that you've seen with, you know, the Fast Pass thing. And, and the last thing I want to say about that is, you know, a lot of people feel like they have to compete only on price.

Jay

Yeah.

Ian

And.

Ken

And I think this is just such a great exit strategy to get out of that mindset. If you can come up with this Fast Pass concept that works well for your business.

Jay

Well, let me, let me just take the second part first. We always think it's price. Right. We always think we lose on price, but it's almost never price. Right. Like, think about my painting example, okay? Painter 2 and Painter 3, who I didn't hire. Why do they think they lost? They think they lost because of price.

Ken

Right.

Jay

So what happens the next time there's a painting bid in my town? They drop their price and they still don't get hired because they're not any faster, they're just cheaper. And then they drop their price again and again and eventually they will get hired. Because even though two thirds of customers say that speed's as important as price, for every customer in the world, there is a. There's a tipping point. Right. There's an inflection where you say, hey, took these guys 11 days to even respond to my voicemail. But. So that's probably going to be a bad. I'm probably going to hate working with them, but they're so much less expensive. I'm just going to roll the dice. But if that's when you're getting Customers, you have given away all of your margin, and it was never priced all along. And the scary part is there's no report that you can run. There's no analytics or spreadsheet that you can look at that says, here's all the jobs we lost because we were too slow. It's invisible. That's why it's dangerous for business to assume that you're fast enough, because you're probably not. So it's very easy to blame price, that your competition is just fools and they'll just do it for less. It's almost never price. So that's where the fast pass comes in, because it almost flips that whole idea upside down. What really got me thinking about this was when I went to Caesar's palace and. And it wasn't time to check in yet. And they offered me to give me my keys right then if I gave him 30 more dollars. Like, they're like, give me 30 more dollars and you can check in early. And I was like, well, all right. I'll lose more than 30 in the casino waiting for my room to be ready. Like, that seems like a no brainer. And. And they're a client or we're a client. Caesar's palace is a client for a long time. So I know somebody there. And we did some projections. This is unofficial data, but they think $1.8 million this year alone just selling keys they already had. And that's the thing about a fast pass that's important to understand. Doesn't cost you anything. Literally, doesn't cost you anything at all. You're not doing anything different. You're just doing it in a different sequence.

Ken

Yeah.

Jay

And anybody can do that. Anybody should do that.

Ken

Yeah. Yep. Awesome.

Paul

So, Jay, this is. This is a great topic. Did. So did we miss anything? Is there anything you want to add on this topic?

Jay

So, I mean, other than. There's just a lot more to this and the stuff we were able to cover in this episode. If you go to the time to win.com, you can get the entire research report, which has a lot more data, a lot more insights that will help help your business. The book itself is super miniature. It's only like 60 pages. You can read the whole book in 45 minutes, which is on purpose. It's also only $9 because it's so small. I've written six other business books that are all what we consider to be regular size. And I sat down to write this one, and I'm like, wait a minute. I can't ask people to spend five or six hours reading a book about speed. It just doesn't make any sense. It's like literally the exact opposite of the advice I'm trying to put out here. So I'm like let's just make a really short book with all the the core information in it and people love it. It's been really, really popular. So grab one for yourself and your whole team and you'll love it.

Ian

And people can find that on Amazon.

Jay

Yep. Get on Amazon. You can get it on my website jbear.com and it's there's also a link to it at the time to win.com Fantastic.

Ian

Well this has been a fantastic topic. Jay. Thank you so much for joining us and thank you for our listeners joining in today. I'm sure you got a lot of value out of this. Thanks for sharing your information that people can reach out and get your survey J and until next week folks, keep calm and mark it on.