Learning Without Scars
As a third-generation educator, it is easy to say that teaching and training are in the blood for Ron Slee. From his beginnings as a coach, through his time at McGill University, Ron developed a foundation for the work he does today. From working within dealerships, to operating a consulting company, creating a training business and running twenty groups, Ron has been directly involved in this Industry since 1969. Ron has been known as the industry expert for years, and has brought this expertise to bear through his training programs. Today, Ron provides specialized, job function based internet based subject specific classes, job function skills assessments, as well virtual seminars and webinars. These courses are designed for manufacturers and their dealers, as well as independent businesses in the construction equipment, light industrial, on-highway, engine, and agricultural industries through Learning Without Scars (www.LearningWithoutScars.com). This platform is a continuation of the work begun by Quest, Learning Centers which was established in 1996. This training is aimed at improving dealer parts and service operations through qualified people that are knowledgeable in using operational metrics and current market and operational best practice methods.
Learning Without Scars
Decoding Marketing Mastery: Uniting Strategy, Culture, and Innovation with Stephanie Smith
Embark on a transformative journey with Stephanie Smith of the Grind Marketing Collective, who illuminates the intricate dance between marketing strategy and blue-collar grit. Our enlightening conversation peels back the layers of today's digital marketing maze, revealing the necessity of over sixteen touchpoints to engage with today's discerning customer. Delve into the heart of what it means to align sales and marketing, while fostering emotional bonds that leave a lasting impression on clients in an ever-competitive arena.
The fabric of a company's culture is deftly woven by its employees, and it's this very tapestry that customers come to trust. We explore the symbiotic relationship between a content workforce and a satisfied customer base with insights from seasoned experts Kurt Pease and Ron Wilson. Stephanie explains how the right internal marketing can galvanize a team around a shared vision, highlighting the evolution from 'personnel' to 'talent management' and the magnetic pull of transparency in cultivating both loyalty and attracting future stars.
As we peer into the crystal ball of business and technology, brace yourself for an electrifying forecast of trends that will shape our industrial landscape. From Ford's revolutionary approach to electric vehicle sales to Amazon's conquest of convenience, we dissect how these titans are not just predicting the future, but actively sculpting it. Wrapping up our session with Stephanie, we extend wholehearted thanks for her wisdom and encourage listeners to keep an ear out for her upcoming insights, reminding everyone that, in the end, it's the human connection that continues to bind us all in the market of life.
Visit us at LearningWithoutScars.org for more training solutions for Equipment Dealerships - Construction, Mining, Agriculture, Cranes, Trucks and Trailers.
We provide comprehensive online learning programs for employees starting with an individualized skills assessment to a personalized employee development program designed for their skill level.
Hello and welcome to another Candid Conversation. Today we're joined by a particularly interesting lady who has talent oozing out of every pore. Her name is Stephanie Smith and she's just embarked on a new venture called the Grind Marketing Collective. So two things, Stephanie if you could introduce yourself to our audience and tell us what the marketing collective, the Grind Marketing Collective, is and where you're going with us.
Speaker 2:Awesome, awesome. Thank you so much, ron. I'm so excited to be with you today. As you mentioned, I'm Stephanie Smith from the Grind Marketing Collective. We are a new startup marketing. I don't want to call us a firm, we are a new startup marketing.
Speaker 1:I don't want to call us a firm. Call us more of a consultancy dedicated to blue collar careers and industries, trying to help people understand new ways to capture mindshare and market share and really taking a holistic look at go to market strategies and helping them penetrate the markets that they serve. Marketing is very little understood, isn't it? It definitely is. You know a lot of people in my generation. It's trade shows, it's brochures, it's stuff like that, and prior to us recording, we were talking about the touch points and the relationships. Maybe you can and you're a very young looking woman for the years of experience you've had so talk to us a little bit about where we've come from and where we are now relative to relationship marketing.
Speaker 2:Definitely so. Things have evolved over the course of my career. I've been in the marketing space for about 20 years, always serving blue collar industries, from manufacturing to agriculture, to heavy equipment and construction and similar I started in. Majority of the marketing applications were very hands-on, in-person trade shows. Everything has always been based on a relationship, and it's still the same, but the relationship and the means of how it's forged has changed a little bit.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of different ways and pathways that people can engage with you as an individual and engage with your company.
Speaker 2:If you think about all the different social media channels that are out there, all of the different online venues that are out there, and then you're still coupling that with traditional media as well, there's just a lot of noise in the marketplace, and so you have to figure out different ways to differentiate yourself through creative marketing strategies to even get in front of people anymore, because you are fighting for mindshare as well as market share, and so one of the big statistics that we were talking about before we started recording was, I think 17 years ago, the amount of touch points that it took to warm up a prospective customer was only four touch points.
Speaker 2:In today's landscape, it's 16 plus, and that's not 16 emails, that's not 16 job site visits, that's not 16 social posts. You have to hit people at a lot of different angles even to get them to consider you today, and that, I think, is something that people don't really realize that you're not just fighting for the attention of the person that you maybe have started doing business with, you're fighting to keep their attention in today's marketplace as well.
Speaker 1:That's the, I think, the biggest change Loyal the word loyalty has disappeared. It's kind of what are you going to do for me now, not what you've done for me, but what are you going to do for me now? And it's it's. It's a little distressing if we look at best in class performance, stephanie on share of market, and we started the equipment and we'll just go generic. We'll kick out the really big stuff and we'll kick out the really little stuff, like lawnmowers. But in the middle, best in class equipment market share whether this is washing machines in your house, cars, tractors, whatever, best in class will be around 40%. Then if we move over to parts that go to that equipment, best in class is down to around 40%. If we go to service, best in class drops down to about 20%. So in every single aspect we are not the dominant player, no matter what your brand is. And that's the best. And there's only one of them. And those positions change.
Speaker 1:It wasn't that long ago General Motors was the largest car company in the world. They're not even in the top three anymore. It used to be. If you had a leading position, you brought out a new product, you had 20, 30 years that you could run with that before you had to really upgrade it. Now it's maybe 15 to 30 months. This is, and I don't think those of us and that includes me really understand how do you market Marketing and sales. It should be one the salesman. He or she is the relationship driver. That's another thing. That's changing. Women are much more involved in our industry, which has been chauvinistic as hell for so long, which has been chauvinistic as hell for so long, you know. But this is that's why what you're doing now I find so wonderful, because we are in such need and there aren't very many people that are doing what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I I well. First and foremost, thank you.
Speaker 2:Oh, you've earned that really I appreciate that there's definitely opportunity within our industry and I think one of the biggest opportunities you brought up sales and marketing running hand in hand with each other. Whatever marketing language is out there has got to match whatever the salesperson is delivering and vice versa, and there's got to be consistency and continuity in that. But at the end of the day, there really also has to be some emotional tie between sales, marketing and the customer, and that's what really kind of is the glue that keeps it all together. Even if you've quote unquote won the business. There has to be some emotional tie that continues to drive some sense of loyalty, whether it's at 40%, 20%, 90%, you know whatever that looks like.
Speaker 2:And I think that the emotional tie gets lost sometimes because there's so much work that has to happen, day-to-day work that has to happen in order to just compete in today's landscape, and so you're constantly trying to entertain people, you're constantly trying to educate people and you're trying to invoke some sort of emotion. And today's buyer, regardless of industry, they want some sort of connection with whoever they're doing business with. That creates a sense of confidence for them and certainty, so that they're not worrying whether or not they made a good decision and they feel excited about the people that they're doing business with. So I'm seeing a lot of people want a lot of personalized engagements, whether that is person to person or email or content that is written specifically for them based off of the algorithm. So there's a lot of different ways to show up in today's market in order to try to attract your customer and then also retain them for for any period of time you, you mentioned uh, you, you used a magic word to me algorithm.
Speaker 1:one of the things that we have that nobody really pays attention to is data. Yeah, we have data on everything, on everybody, going back forever, and nobody uses it, or at least very few. Let me change that. And those algorithms, you know it's really interesting. The size of the transaction in the parts business determines the time distance to the next one.
Speaker 1:As the time of transactions increases, the level of trust that the customer has with the dealer increases. Or, excuse me, it goes the other way distrust. And we're not geared that way. We've never been geared that way. For instance, stupid little illustration then I'll let you drive, but why don't we have salespeople that cover customers that don't have any of our equipment? Why do we let that competitor go off free? How did we get ourselves in the position that we only do 5% of the maintenance on a machine? I mean, these things are wild and it's true with everybody and until you arrive, there's very few people that are paying any attention to that, including the manufacturers. This is going to be a real uphill struggle to get we're too invested in the status quo.
Speaker 2:I think sometimes, if you're looking specifically at parts or service, it's easy to get into what's known as what's comfortable right, and one of the phrases that I've heard a lot over the years is well, it's the way we've always done it.
Speaker 2:And sometimes you have to be willing to challenge anybody who says that, well, it's the way we've always done it, we've always done 5% in service, or we've always done 5% in parts, and oh well, you know, I mean Joe Schmo, he's always had. You know the business there. They're never going to change, and what you really need is people who are willing to shake things up a little bit and say well, why not? Why can't we go there? Why shouldn't we go there? I'll be honest in saying that that's actually a label that I've gotten throughout the years is I like to shake things up a little bit and ask the questions that people aren't comfortable asking good, bad or indifferent? I think sometimes we have to be willing to ask those questions and then also be willing to go there if it means servicing a customer in a different capacity, because it's what they are either accustomed to or they expect, and that might be the point of differentiation that helps you with longevity with somebody, by doing things that are not necessarily inside the box.
Speaker 1:You're saying that's not the way we do it here or you know that we're comfortable doing this. All of those things are true and it's amazing the the people that come in as new employees. And we've had the last two podcasts and this one kind of tops it. We've been focusing on employees. My granddaughter calls it quiet quitting she's 22. You know that term is this generations. There's all kinds of little acronyms and terms that come forward, but what that is is somebody, an employee, is only going to do as much work as they need to do to keep their job so that they can get out of there and go enjoy the life that they want to have.
Speaker 1:And I was hired on a contract for a year to fix something, so it was a specific entry and exit and I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do. Most people don't get the opportunity to do that, to think about it. So the first in this series of podcasts, if you will, was with Kurt Pease, who worked with John Deere for years and then a John Deere dealer in his latter years. And we're talking about rewards for employees such that they feel that they're part of something, because that loyalty issue we talked about is not just with customers, it's also with employees. And then we follow that up with Ron Wilson, who was a vice president of product support for a Caterpillar dealer for most of his career, and he's really out there, even though he's in my age block, and we had a discussion about tool belts.
Speaker 1:So all of a sudden, the jobs and the people that we employ are doing jobs across multiple industries now. So the employees have a choice of doing whatever it is they want to do, but they can do it across a broader swath of the workforce. And so now you come along. We need to have the loyalty for the employee. They have to have the knowledge, because the customer has to trust us. And it isn't about buying things necessarily, it's about advice, which means we've got to have a really knowledgeable group of people touching customers. And that's in the written word, that's in the podcast, it's in the blog, it's in, it's every aspect of it. We're not ready for that, stephanie, are we?
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot to unpack there, Ron.
Speaker 1:Sorry about that.
Speaker 2:No, it's good. It's great. I mean, let me address one thing first your employee retention and your employee satisfaction goes hand in hand with your customer retention and your customer satisfaction. Hand with your customer retention and your customer satisfaction. I don't have the exact numbers in front of me right now, but there's all kinds of studies out there that suggest that, and you can feel that Culture is real. You can feel it when you walk into any organization, whether it's going to be an organization that you want to sit down and spend your time in, or if you are cringing to get out. And so one of the things that I think organizations have to look at is how much are you investing in your employees, because that does have a direct return on whether or not your customer retention rates are going up.
Speaker 1:Let me break in there. Don't lose that train of thought. Marketing is internal as well. Correct Salary, skills, performance reviews, job descriptions, standards of performance. We fail at doing a lot of that, don't we?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's creating the right expectations for people and then communicating. You know, you're 100% correct that marketing is internal and external. It's also become such a universal term. You know, I'll date myself a little bit, but when I was in college you could get a PR degree, you could get a communications degree, you could get a marketing degree, you could get a digital marketing degree. The list was just endless. But now we just lump it under one big unique thing and say, oh, marketing. And for some people marketing is just here to make things pretty, and for other people marketing is the four Ps, and then for other people marketing is just communication. But I think there's a disconnect between what marketing does internally and what marketing does externally, and how a comprehensive marketing strategy across the board to make sure that you're setting the right expectations and you are giving people purpose and constantly communicating with them what that purpose is. You can win or you can fail real fast without having communication.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I did when I started in the consulting world was operations reviews. I would go into a business and kind of give them a checkup from the neck up kind of deal. Have you done any of that? Where you go in and you mentioned culture, which is, you know, it's a magic world. Let me do a little evolution also. Personnel became human relations, became HR, now it's talent management, became HR, now it's talent management, and there is a 100% correlation between employee retention and customer retention and the numbers are rather staggering.
Speaker 1:And we're seeing much more separation today from people that have been around 10, 20, 30 years. And a lot of that relates back to what people tell me is called legacy management, command and control, which, forget it, it doesn't apply, you know, or if it ever did. You talked about the why, why not? That's why I'm still in the business, because I always was put into places. Hey, we got a problem there. Go see if you can find out what it is and fix it. So the starting point for marketing is making people realize that there's a problem that needs fixing. When they're fat, dumb and happy, they're very comfortable in what they get. They've never made as much money if they own the place. They're way beyond their expectations and they're really invested in the status quo. They're risk averse and you need to take them down. A diving board, the gangplank you know what would you do if you weren't afraid sort of thing right. Does any of that make sense in where you're at in the grind marketing collective?
Speaker 2:You know I think culture is so key in everything and you know I don't want to sit here and be an imposter by any means. Like I said, marketing can take on a lot of different forms. But just as much as I said that marketing and sales have to be running in tandem with each other, so does marketing and HR, and there has to be a unique pulse on what the culture actually is, because people have a high BS meter, whether they're internal folks or they're external folks, and regardless of what you put in recruitment flyers or what you put in sales brochures, people are either going to relate to it or they're not, and they can sense whether or not the culture is good just by taking a look at your LinkedIn at your website. They don't even have to come on site anymore in some regards, and so it's become one of these things, especially with the Gen Z generation coming up. They are very purpose driven and if you can't articulate what the purpose is for them and how they are going to be able to be contributors in providing value to others or what their service nature is going to be, then they immediately check out.
Speaker 2:You know you mentioned the term quite quitting before and I think a lot of that has to do with they can't find the meaning for them, so they disengage quickly. And so that goes back to making sure that you do. It sounds cliche. Mission, vision and values those are non-negotiables. You have to have those in an organization. But not only do you have to have those, you have to be willing to walk the walk. So whatever you put on paper, it has to be what your leadership team and everybody from the top to the bottom, from the bottom to the top, is willing to live out loud every single day. And so, yeah, I've been a part of organizations where I've gotten to do rebrands and where I've gotten to help out with mission, vision and values, and it's really exciting when you finally provide that for people. But I think it's even more rewarding when you're consistently providing some sense of purpose throughout the course of the year, not just because you decided to rebrand.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I found over my career is there are people within the business that are hidden diamonds, that know what the heck to do, have the capability to do, but they're really not ever asked or tasked with things. I used to have an exercise that I would sit. This is when I was an employee and had teams and we'd sit down every six months and I'd have three questions what do I do that you like that I do, and you want me to continue? What do I do that you don't like that I do and you want me to continue? What do I do that you don't like that I do and you want me to stop? And what do I do that really doesn't make any difference for you? Now, the latter is the easiest one anything that didn't make any difference. I've tried to figure out how I could offload that, because that would free my time up for me. If it was something that I was doing that they wanted me to continue. Same thing I wanted to pass it off to somebody else because obviously this was working. It was when it didn't work. Was it my style? Was it the task? Was it knowledge? What was it? So, all of a sudden, we were able to narrow in a little bit and then I had a subsidiary exercise that was, we'd get the group together and we'd spend an hour and we'd do this a couple of times, depending on where the company was.
Speaker 1:What about your job would you like to change? That would make life easier for you, the employee, and write down three to five things. And then, what about your job would you like to change? That would make a huge difference for the company. Three to five things, and what are those things that are a real pain in the butt to do? Three to five things, and we take all of those in a whiteboard or a blackboard, whatever the hell it was. We'd get it up so that we had common language, because a lot of them were the same and we would find things that were make your life better, make the company better, and at the same time, we're a pain in the butt and I always used to ask the question how come we haven't fixed it? Because we all know what it is. I think that's a huge opportunity, like in marketing, selling relationships, trust, culture. There's some questions you can ask that really expose things that are very wide, and you probably already do that or some form of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when's the last time you talked to your customer, and not just talk to your customer, but tell me what are the three things that you know about them that they would be shocked to know that you know about them. It comes back to just being tapped into what's actually going on not just in your business, but what's going on in the people who surround your business.
Speaker 1:It's in their lives, isn't it? It's being part of their lives.
Speaker 2:Every single day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the people that win are the people that surprise their lives, isn't it?
Speaker 2:It's being part of their lives Every single day. Yeah, and the people that win are the people that surprise their customers, not because they're surprising them intentionally, but because they just they listened and they genuinely cared. I think that that you know, we talked earlier on about breaking through the noise. One of my favorite quotes right now is we are a society that is drowning in information, and yet we are craving wisdom. Another way that that is said is we are also a society that is drowning in social connections, social media, air quotes and yet we don't have the actual human touch anymore.
Speaker 2:And so those people I'm going to kind of talk out of both sides of my mouth, right Like yes, you need marketing automation, you need digital marketing, you need to be in social, you need to be all these in all these different places just to have relevancy, but you still also have to figure out a way to have some sort of a personal touch. It doesn't have to be in person all the time, but you have. That's how you differentiate yourself right now by actually caring, by knowing if somebody's kid is going to have surgery in a week and you send them a note, or you send them a meal or you. There's all kinds of different ways that you can do it. We are such a globally connected world these days you don't have to spend a lot of money or, you know, spend a lot of time on it. You just have to genuinely pay attention.
Speaker 1:I think you're so right. You know grounding and data. You know people that are curious have never had better tools to find the truth. But with all of the noise out there, it's a hard thing to know what is the truth, and caring is critical. You know, in the state of Oklahoma, this is a number of years ago, there was an equal number of the horses as marriages, which bothers me a little bit as a person Sending the meal, asking about the operation or congratulations on their valedictorian, or they passed, or they've got a degree or whatever the item is, and you got to look for them. You got to find something that you can praise or congratulate or wow, and you know you gave me one a couple years ago.
Speaker 1:The first time you and I met, we were doing one of these with john Anderson, and ever since then anybody asked me for anything. I say, yes, confuses the hell out of them. Ron, can you do this? Yep, I'd like to do this. Can you help me? Yep, honestly, it confuses the hell out of them, and if they don't ask me for something over a period of time, I come back. Okay, how can I help? Yeah, because there's so few people that do that or, even more importantly, are capable of doing that, and I think you're opening the door to that very same thing. What would you like? What keeps you awake at night? Let me take that you awake at night.
Speaker 2:Let me take that yes, yes, that single phrase alone, ron. I've heard that so many times in the last month. So I will say we've been actively at this for a month now through the Grind Marketing Collective, and that is the number one question that we are asking. What is the number one thing that keeps you up at night? Because I want to figure out a way to help solve that problem. And if it's through automation, because your systems are clunky not because I'm going to be the automation whiz, but because we're going to figure this out together If it's you want to be more relevant to your customers, let's dive deep. Let's figure that out. If it's because your revenue does not look the same as what it did last year, or the ROI that you expected on your last marketing campaign isn't giving you what you expected, let's dive deep and figure out what the actual issue is, so that you can sleep at night, and let's focus on that just for a second, because every single tool that we have to measure performance is historical.
Speaker 1:It's too late, it's done. Very rarely do we have discussions about how do we get back on track, so that stuff that's keeping them awake at night. You know I've been doing this a long time, so I get a little bit more licensed than somebody who's just starting out. But I say, well, okay, how much do you want to pay for me to fix that? You know I'll take that. You trust me to do it. Well, you do what I tell you to do.
Speaker 1:That's another issue that becomes issue as well. You know I start every class, Stephanie, and I don't do classroom work much anymore, but I used to start every class with three definitions and people don't know me. There's 20, 30 people in the room and I did this when I was teaching university with 100 people in the room. Give me a definition of ignorance, and everybody's you know they're nervous, they don't want to expose themselves, they don't know what I'm expecting. Well, ignorance is not knowing what to do. It's a very simple definition, Cool.
Speaker 1:The second one is give me a definition of stupidity. Well, some of them figure it out. They catch on. To me quickly, Stupidity is knowing what to do but not doing it, and is stupid. And then I give them the third one, which is either Mark Twain or Einstein, depending on the mood. Continuing to do what you've always done, expecting different results, is insanity. So I tell them there right, it's in the 10, 15 minutes at the beginning of every class. I'm going to give you a choice. I'm going to tell you you're not going to be stupid and you're going to know what you need to do. You're not going to be ignorant anymore. So I'm going to leave you the choice of being stupid or insane. Your call. And that scares people. This is work, Stephanie. This is hard work, it's discipline, and I think that's some of the reason we don't do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we've become a bit of a culture that likes the easy button. I saw an interesting stat the other day that most businesses fail because people aren't willing to invest the extra 1%. Same is true. There's a weird statistic for podcast, right. The amount of turnover for podcast is literally because people won't get past the first 20. And it's because people are not willing to look stupid. They're not willing to fail.
Speaker 2:And we've built such a society around us that failure is frowned upon, right. Like we get mad at our kids if they get get an F, we get mad if our if they don't do great at their basketball game, at their soccer game, at their dance recital. And sometimes we have to be willing to fail because that's where we learn the most. And I'll be completely honest in saying that I had some huge hesitancies about going out on my own for a couple of limiting beliefs, one being I didn't have I didn't have all the answers, so why would anybody want to, you know, work with me? And the other was I failed before. I had a business when I was 19 years old and it didn't work out. And man, that was terrible when that didn't work out the way I wanted it to.
Speaker 1:But then what did I?
Speaker 2:learn.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of the best things that ever happened to me and I tell this to anybody that's interested. I was a swimmer, a competitive swimmer. I was a good competitive swimmer. But what you learn in that discipline and many others, is if I stood on the blocks and there's seven other people there and I finished last, but I beat my best time I won.
Speaker 1:This morning, before I get out of bed, I go through a whole bunch of stuff and there was a little clip underneath the picture and the clip went. There's always somebody who's going to get up earlier than you to get at something. There's always somebody who's going to train harder to do. There's always somebody that's going to be faster than you, that's going to be smarter than you. There's always somebody that you're going to be chasing. I'm somebody, and that was Steve Prefontaine, who was an amazing athlete way ahead of his time. Unfortunately, he died in a car crash and he was the founder, if you will, of Nike, because Bill Bowman, the guy that made his shoes for him with a waffle iron, was the creator of Will Phil Knight of Nike.
Speaker 1:So this work piece I think we have. There's so much talent out there. Now, you know, I look at my daughter, way smarter than me my grandchildren. It's scary. So if only we open up and say, gee, I don't know what do you think? And have them be able to say whatever the hell they want without the fear of getting whacked up the side of the head oh, that's stupid. You know, you got an F, congratulations, you know. Okay, how do you make that better? I mean, there's so many positive things we know now and the next generation of leaders, the 40, 50-year-olds they're there, they want to do this. The transition is delayed, but I think we've got the audience that's ready. We just need to open up for it.
Speaker 2:I would 100% agree with you, and so when we first started the conversation, you know we were, we were talking about legacy and we were talking about next gen, and that was really the thing that got me excited about starting the marketing collective, because I have a ton of people within my network that are at different stages of their marketing career some very, very early and my favorite thing to do is to just pour into people right now, because they are hungry to learn, they need to learn and they need people who are willing to sit down and share what they know, and so that is the one thing that I said is a non-negotiable for me in this business, or starting this business, is we have to be able to share what we know, whether that is transparency and data, the good, the bad and the ugly, with our clients saying, hey guys, this worked, this didn't work, this is what we learned.
Speaker 2:The transparency within the collective of people that were employing hey guys, this worked, this didn't work, hey, let's change this. And then also just being able to really tap into a different network of people to match with the right company. Everybody's got different preferences and everybody has different thresholds of curiosity, and so sometimes it just takes being able to match the right person or the right set of people to unlock the right things within organizations as well.
Speaker 1:We're taking our classes and if I'm working within a company, we're going to have a Zoom meeting or a Teams meeting after six to 12 people have finished a class and we're going to chat about it for two, three hours. And I still learn from that, they learn from that. We learn to communicate in a different manner because it's two-dimensional. Now. It's not face-to-face, sitting in the bar having a beer, which is the old days, but once you get the synergy of that kind of a group going and I would imagine that that'd be something on a subscription service that would be good for you to create a bunch of teams. You know the collective on social media, the collective on relationship building, the collection on changing culture. You know whatever they are and because all of this, there's people that are thirsty for it and the younger people clearly are. You mentioned the Gen Z. If they're not learning, they're gone. If they're not feeling respected or don't feel that the job is worthwhile, they're gone. And it's just a question of how long it's going to take them to find a different place.
Speaker 1:You know it used to be that everybody talked about well, they left because they didn't get paid enough. The statistics has always been they left because the boss didn't treat them well enough. And that treat them well enough today is. You know, I got fired five or six times at the beginning and the guy that fired me if he was still alive and he said he was in trouble I'd just ask him where he was and I'd be on my way Because he was passionate about what he did. He didn't let you settle for poor performance and we have that happen every single damn day. A customer that leaves having an exit interview with employees is pretty common. How about exit interviews with customers that you've lost? We don't do that. Such a simple thing. We're going to say it's a human thing. What do I do?
Speaker 2:But even when it's good, we don't ask them what we did well, and that's a huge opportunity. I mean, the stat feels very stale because it's the same stat that I've been quoting for the last three years. But 85% of people, even in the B2B space, they start their journey out online and what? One of the very first things that they do is they're either looking you or your company up on LinkedIn, but then they're also looking at the reviews of your company. And so if we're not even asking people when we're having a positive they've had a positive experience to share their positive experience, and most of the times, people won't share their positive experience unless there's a story to tell around it and not your story. They want to tell their story, so it's got to be personal again, but it's got to have relevancy to you know when they're at the bar with their friends and whether or not they actually want to bring it up, whether or not they write a review, but we don't even ask. Even when it's good, we don't ask.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's no, that's a perfect thing. The illustration I use always on leadership is the conductor of an orchestra. They are clearly some of the best musicians on the planet, but they're the only musician that has their back to the audience, the back to the customers. They are totally dependent not on their skills but of the skills of the orchestra in front of them. And just getting the first level supervisor the first time somebody is a supervisor of other people.
Speaker 1:My grandson was in the ROTC. He's in the Navy today and I don't think he's unusual, but in his junior year he was the commander of the ROTC. He dropped out in his senior year because he wanted to take art in different classes and he said Poppy, I hate it. I said why. He said they don't do what I tell them to do. They don't do what they're supposed to do. How do you get that to change? And this is a 15-year-old kid telling me this. And this is a 15-year-old kid telling me this. You know it really is interesting. How do you get people to do what you want to do when they don't know Like I want?
Speaker 1:I think it was Colin Powell that said leadership is getting people to follow you over that hill when they don't know what's on the other side. You know, eisenhower is known for saying here's a piece of string. Somebody asked him what's leadership and he says just see how hard it is to push it across the table. Look how easy it is to pull. And marketing relationships, culture. It's changing people's perspective right, absolutely every single day. And you know, I don't think we're taught about that in school anywhere. We're taught to be obedient. This is your multiplication tables. This is curse of writing, if these things are even existing anymore. You know, do it this way. Our parents don don't do that. Look both ways You're going to and then we get out to work and somebody tells us what to do again. So right away we're conditioned to be obedient, not to be independent, not to think about, not to challenge and to open it up. That's hard. You know.
Speaker 1:My granddaughter gave me a book to read and she's kind of out there too. The Invisible Woman. Women got the vote later than colored people. Women still have glass ceiling. It's all. Everything about it is changing the status quo, and marketing is just a beautiful tip of the spear to change the whole thing. Are dealers going to be here in 10 years? Are we going to buy directly from the manufacturer? Who's going to do the repairs? Who's going to do trade? Who's going to rent machines? I go in front of a washing machine at my house and it's an LG or a Samsung or something and I scan the QR code and then my phone tells me what's wrong with the machine and what to do about it.
Speaker 2:Hello, oh man, you're tapping into another blog.
Speaker 1:A whole whole, another separate topic go for it, babe, we'll publish whatever you want excuse that terminology I say guys are babes too, by the way, so just well the importance of looking at what other industries are doing.
Speaker 2:I mean you, I, we, we can't stop looking and and feeling like we can't go there. People have the appetite for that. So you mentioned, you know, marketing is changing people's perceptions every single day. It all comes down to psychology, buyer psychology and conditioning. We're being reconditioned every day.
Speaker 2:Amazon started this so many years ago. Every single day, every time we rent from enterprise, we're being conditioned to expect that in terms of how we should be able to do that with heavy equipment. Every time we buy from CarMax, we're being conditioned to say, hey, why can't this be easy? Or why can't I learn what I need to know? Because I want to do the research and feel just as competent. So I don't feel like I'm being taken advantage of. Why can't, why can't I have that? And so we have to look at what other industries are doing and how they are conditioning their customers and how buyers are responding to that conditioning. Not because you, not because I want to do anything deceitful and condition people to do things that are not politically correct or correct or whatever, but because you do have a strong influence as you sit in the marketing seat and you want to make sure that you're conditioning people and you're creating buying pathways that meets their needs, meets them where they're at.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's. Joel Barker, back in the 80s, coined a term paradigms A paradigm being a pathway, a picture, a framework being a pathway, a picture, a framework. And looking at other industries, last year, 23, early year, january or February the president and chairman of Ford announced that they had a new contract for the electric vehicle segment of the car business, that the dealers were not to have any inventory, would all be shipped from a factory, that Ford was going to be able to spec out a car like CarMax or Trucar or all these other things, and they were going to give a price. And we can give you a trade-in value, we'll deliver a car to your door. You can have a test drive. If you don't like it, send it back. What do you think the dealers that were electric vehicle dealers were thinking was going to be their role down the road?
Speaker 2:That they were going to be phased out.
Speaker 1:Exactly, exactly. Now, if we look at electric vehicles in the construction space, go to Volvo. Their primary equipment is loaders, excavators and trucks. They're electrifying everything. What do the equipment manufacturers and the equipment dealers make their money on? It's parts and services, not equipment. Well, what's the parts content on an electric vehicle? If we don't look over the fence at other industries, we're really being stupid, ignorant. Everything altogether, because the world is changing so fast. Amazon, jeff Bezos. I buy a lot of books. I'd have to go to the bookstore and they never had the books I wanted. Here comes Amazon. They didn't have the books, but the bookstore didn't have the book, but I got a better price, so that's fine. And then, a couple of years in, they said well, pay us $99 a year and we'll ship for free. They're the largest retailer in the world. Now, 20 years later, 15 years later, whatever the devil it is, I go to Whole Foods to buy groceries.
Speaker 2:I don't need a credit card.
Speaker 1:I don't need money, I need my hand. I put it over when I check out. They now have carts that will automatically check you out. You know, this is really a crazy world. Our classes are all done with avatars, artificial intelligence, so it's male, female, different ages, different races. I'll send you some. I don't think you've seen them. It's remarkable. And the first thing somebody asks the customer when they call into a dealership to buy parts is who are you? Yeah, whoa, whoa.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean even just from that, ronon.
Speaker 2:We could go on and on and on.
Speaker 2:But if you, if you even think about when you call, when you call into your bank or you call in to check on your 401k, they're immediately pulling up a crm system. It's probably more intricate than just your standard crm system, but they already know who you are based off of the number that you're calling in from. It's probably more intricate than just your standard CRM system, but they already know who you are based off of the number that you're calling in from. They have your payment history, they have your address, they have your email address. They have everything under the sun about you at their fingertips before they even have to ask what's your name.
Speaker 2:And it surprises people that that's an expectation in our industry. It should be an expectation because people have been conditioned to expect that you can call about your 401k, you can call your bank, you can call any of your physicians, so on and so forth. Amazon's got it too. They know everything about you and they are taking that personalization token that is no longer just your name, it's everything about you and recommending whether it be products or services to meet your needs, based off of what they've already collected on you.
Speaker 1:I put a value on that, Stephanie, because if I bounce around the internet in all kinds of directions, but if I go into a place a second time and they don't know what I was after the first time, I kind of next, because they're not somebody I want to pay attention to.
Speaker 2:So it's that same mentality, ron, that, okay, talk about conditioning, right, and talk about the instant gratification that everybody has been conditioned to expect now with any transaction. There's that convenience factor too. People want it easy, right we were talking about people want it easy to work. People also want it easy, right, we were talking about people want it easy to work. People also want it easy to buy. And if we add any layers of complexity in it, those are questions that we should be asking, right, like why isn't somebody doing business with us anymore? They did business with us for 20 years. Somebody else made it easier for them to do business.
Speaker 2:Oh, and there's this generational shift that's taking place right now and the next generation, whether they're millennials or Gen Zs or Jim, whatever next, is that coming up? The convenience factor it is some stupid stat that it is 10 times whatever we think it is today, it is 10 times that tomorrow and 10 times that and 10 times that. So the world that we're living in, it's not getting any slower, it's getting faster. And those expectations of tomorrow's buyer they want convenience.
Speaker 1:So I agree with you 100%. What's even scarier is the population of the planet, let's say in the developed world, before we go too far. So Western Europe and North America, just to take two slices of society. A guy that we pay attention to is a fellow by the name of Ed Gordon who's got a couple of PhDs, one in economics, one in history. He's working in the education space and his comment to me is that by 2030, 50% of the American workforce will not have skills sufficient to get them a job. The American workforce is about well, let's make it easy 200 million people. So that's he's saying to me, 100 million. And that's robotics, that's artificial intelligence, that's machine learning, that's all of the technology. And we're so far behind on technology it's scary. They're 20 years ahead of me and I'd like to think I'm reasonable.
Speaker 1:I was on the internet in the early 70s, when it wasn't there, and what you can find today? Convenience, predictive convenience, predictive convenience. We had a package on the internet in 1971 that you would attach to your fridge that would deliver menus for dinner tonight, or lunch or breakfast, and would take a shopping cart out of your fridge to create the meal and then, based on your input of frequency whether it's daily, weekly, whatever here's the shopping list to go to the store and replenish your fridge. That's 50 years ago. We still don't have that. It's starting. There's delivery services now and that's going to be the convenience issue.
Speaker 1:Gee, I don't have time to cook. Let's go to the freezer Boom, and it's 30 minutes. Everything is heading that way. Make it easy for me. I'm lazy. I want to be spending my energy and intellect in other parts of my life where I have more joy. This is something I have to do. I don't want to do it anymore. Do it for me, please. It's the DIY D-I-F-Y or if you know where it is, I'm going to do it for you. I'm going to do it with you. I'm going to do all of these things. And marketeers, look at Disney. Yes, wow, I mean. We can go forever on so many different directions, but what keeps you awake at night? That's a critical one. How can I have the people involved with touching customers only concentrate on relationships, sensing and knowing when the customer's not happy? Customer service is the difference between expectations and perceptions, and we don't. They belong to the customer. If we don't ask, we will never know. And we rarely ask what is it about that competitor you like?
Speaker 1:And whatever they tell you, you didn't do it. Now it's a choice Do you want to do it or not? You're going to have a hell of a time. 19 years old is a little different than 20 years later. You've got some staying power. Now this is going to work, Stephanie, and there's a lot of people that can use your services. How do we wrap this up in a way that makes some sense and leads people on to one another one?
Speaker 2:I think it comes down to constantly being curious Curious with what's going on within your business, curious with what's going on within your industry and curious with what's next. Your customer base is curious. Your kids are curious Everybody's curious these days and then figure out ways to help solve issues.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I asked the question what would you do if you weren't afraid? What would you do if you weren't afraid? Because fear of failure is what's holding us back in many cases. And I really appreciate the time, Stephanie. I think this has been wonderful and I wish you all the best luck, and we're going to put this up in the next day or so and your blog's going to go up tomorrow night and I encourage everybody who's listening and you mentioned, you know, people staying on our podcasts are long. We've got about 130 140 of them, but we've got four or 5000 people that listen all the way through, which is really a testament to people are paying attention to what you're saying, and thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it very much.
Speaker 2:Thanks, ron, it's been a pleasure.
Speaker 1:So, to everybody out there, thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed this candid conversation and look forward to having you join us again in the very near future. Mahalo.
