How to Build & Succeed at Customer Loyalty from Jeffrey Gitomer

0:00There's three words that you have to think about in terms of selling and they have nothing to do with sales. Help customers win. So the Jeffrey Gittema, he's written like a dozen books, things about trust, customer service. I'm writing a book for millennials. It's called Pick Up the Phone. How do I teach that to my kids who won't even pick up the phone to call me? I think that you're gonna have to adapt and adopt to your world by allowing more people to have easier access. I'm about follow through, not about follow up. The guy's a genius. He keeps going and keeps going. This is the one Jeffrey Gittema.

0:34What is the Jeffrey Gittima formula? How does success happen? I have a philosophy. I give value first. I help other people. I strive to be my best at what I love to do. I establish long-term relationships with everyone and I have fun and I do that every day. And I try to make 10 people smile every day because when they smile at me, it ends up I smile back. And I perform one random act of kindness every day, no matter what. No one pays me back for that random act, but the world pays me back. And when the world pays you back, it's times 10 every time. That's my evolution. You know, that's part of the core of life is who are you proud of, but who makes you proud?

1:17How much of a difference did that make in your life, knowing that, you know, I need to become? It's the essence of life. I wake up every morning and I do things that other people don't do. I have a routine of five things that I do every day. I read, I write, I prepare, and that causes me to think and create. And I do those five things sitting in my office or sitting in a hotel room somewhere around the world. I've done that for almost 30 years now, every day for an hour. How do you succeed at sales in this day and age? What are the keys to being a successful salesperson nowadays? There's three words that you have to think about in terms of selling, and they have nothing to do with sales.

2:00Three words are help customers win. If the customer feels like they have a better deal, if the customer feels like they got some kind of value or some kind of victory as a result of doing business with you, you win. And you may not win at that moment in time, but they're going to accept your call. They're going to talk to you again. They're going to go out to lunch with you. They're going to refer somebody to you. You're going to have a pool of people that will rally around you and love you. That's all I've tried to do for the last 20-something years. Why is it that salespeople hide behind social media so much these days?

2:36Because they have no balls. I'm writing a book for millennials. It's called Pick Up the F***ing Phone. That's one of the issues in selling that salespeople are waiting for the phone to ring. And it's not going to ring unless you proactively go out into the marketplace and build your brand. Your phone rings because you build your brand. My phone rings because I built my brand. That only took 20 years. How do I teach that to my kids who won't even pick up the phone to call me? We live in a different world. I think that you're going to have to adapt and adopt to your world by allowing more people to have easier access.

3:07That's why I'm using AI. That's why I'm trying to appear on more people's podcasts because you don't know who their diverse listener is. But our podcast, Sell or Die, has 3 million downloads. There's a reason. So let's talk loyalty, customer loyalty. How do you succeed at customer loyalty? You do things to serve people that they're not expecting. If you sell a machine to somebody, you're there when it's delivered. You give them your personal cell phone number and say, listen, if anything goes wrong, don't call anybody. Just call me and I'll take care of it. You want to make sure that you celebrate their victories, not just yours.

3:44And so I want to know what happens after the customer takes ownership, not just make a sale. I'm about follow through, not about follow up. Follow up is where's my money? I'm calling about the money. Is it ready? Follow through is, hey, you're probably not going to believe this, but I ran into somebody and I think they're going to be a good customer for you. Let's have lunch. I'll bring the guy. And loyalty, by the way, just let me define it for you in one sentence. Will you do business with me again? Will you refer me? That's it. Everything else is baloney. If we combine trust and service, how does that work in your mind in this day and age?

4:25If I don't trust you, I'm not going to do business with you. But there's a higher category. I have to like you. I have to believe you. I have to have confidence in you. And then I might trust you. Liking and believing and confidence leads to trust. So that's number one. Number two, the way you talk to me is going to determine how I talk to you. And keep in mind, I grew up in New Jersey where people eat their young. So I grew up in a pretty tough environment to make millions of dollars worth of sales. But the bottom line is the way I talk to you is going to determine the outcome. If you've ever called an insurance company for a claim, that person on the other end of the phone will say, have you read your policy?

5:14I'm like, honey, I'll give you$1 ,000 if you can find my policy. No one knows what their insurance policy is. Tell me what you can do, not what you can't do. And so those things combine to generate loyalty, to generate trust. If I know I can count on you. Like the customer service theory has sort of evolved into the customer experience process, and it's being proactive rather than reactive. What are your thoughts on how that change happened or what are the important aspects we should take from that? Experience has to do with how you feel you were treated. If you feel you were treated fairly, then you have a positive response.

5:57If you feel you're treated unfairly, you go on social media and make a stink out of it. Digital world is taking over. You've been leading the way into that digital world, podcasts, AI, etc. How is it changing sales? How is it changing the process of customers buying? The first thing I thought of when I saw AI is how do I monetize it? Not how do I use it? How do I monetize it? That's how I was taught. Luckily, you and I are in the same boat. We have hundreds, thousands of hours of content that we can offer to the world through artificial intelligence if the program and platform is right and we promote it right and we make it inexpensive enough to buy.

6:36So that's the path that I'm on right now. I've had my podcast for seven years and it's never going to go away. The podcast has never gone away. So I've been able to monetize our success. How does a salesperson adapt to this current digital world? How do they use it to their advantage? Well, let's take AI as an example. You may go into chat GPT or one of the offshoots and ask it how to do an email or ask it how to do a tweet or how to post something. and you get back their standard response that has no humor, that's mechanically driven to you. And you have to take that. The salesperson has to take it and make it their own and customize it.

7:15It might be a time saver, but it's not a customer earner. You have to earn that customer on your own. And the salesperson is the transition person to make that happen. It's not going to replace sales. It's going to enhance sales. And the people that ignore it are going to die. And the people that embrace it are going to win or they're going to double their income. Plain and simple. And that's the big success podcast for today. Hopefully you took a lot of notes, learned a whole bunch. And if you need to go re-listen to it, we dropped a lot of information right there today. Big success is what it's all about.

7:46And by the way, if you haven't subscribed, hit that subscribe button. So you're here with us every single week on the big success podcast. I'm Brad Sugars. That's BS. Big success is what we're shooting for. Check the show notes for all the links. Make sure you follow through. Keep learning. Keep coming back. Oh, and by the way, share this with any of your friends who you know are up for success. I'll see you next week on the Big Success Podcast. You've been listening to the Big Success Podcast with the number one business coach in the world, Brad Sugars. To learn more about how to achieve business and personal success, as well as how to level up or listen to past episodes, visit www.bradsugars.com.