The Age of the Customer: Are You Prepared for the Moment of Relevance?
Listen to Episode 2:
Episode 2 Transcript:
Chris Curran: Growth Igniters Radio, Episode Two, “The Age of the Customer: Are You Prepared for the Moment of Relevance?”
This episode is brought to you by Business Advancement Inc. – enabling successful leaders and companies to accelerate to their next level of growth. On the web at businessadvance.com. And now… here’s Pam and Scott.
Pam Harper: Thanks, Chris. Hi, I’m Pam Harper, founding partner and CEO of Business Advancement, Incorporated, and with me is my business partner, and husband, Scott Harper.
Scott Harper: Hi, Pam. It’s wonderful to be here today. I’m just reminding people that the purpose of Growth Igniters Radio is to spark new insights, inspiration, and immediately useful ideas for leaders to take themselves and their companies to the next level of success. Pam, what are we focusing on today?
Pam Harper: Well, for as long as we can remember, Scott, I think we’ve been talking about the fact that companies of all sizes talk all the time about how important it is for customers to be at the center of their focus.
Scott Harper: Customers are everything …
Pam Harper: Customer-centricity, right?
Scott Harper: Yeah, right.
Pam Harper: And yet there’s a shift that’s going on in the world that has never happened before. Our guest today, Jim Blasingame, refers to it as “The Age of the Customer.” Very intriguing. Jim is the author of the award-winning book “The Age of the Customer: Prepare for the Moment of Relevance.” He is one of the world’s foremost experts on small business and entrepreneurship and is the creator and host of the weekday radio program, “The Small Business Advocate Show,” on the air since 1997. I have to say that it’s been nine years since I’ve been on his program. A pleasure. Welcome, Jim.
Jim Blasingame: Hi, Pam. It’s good to have you … good to be on your show. Hi, Scott. Congratulations. You guys are turning the tables on me today, aren’t you?
Scott Harper: That’s right.
Pam Harper: That’s a turnabout.
Scott Harper: In fact, you started to say, “It’s great to have you on the show,” but you’re on our show now.
Pam Harper: That’s right.
Jim Blasingame: Yeah. I was just thinking how proud I am of you guys. What I want to say is I know this is your second program in your inaugural Growth Igniters Radio Program, and I want to … My first thought is to congratulate you, and then having been in radio for 17 years, my second thought is to say, “God help you.”
Pam Harper: I thought you were going to say, “Are you nuts?”
Jim Blasingame: “Are you out of your mind?”
Scott Harper: You’ve been a great, great example to us, Jim, and we figure now is the time.
Pam Harper: It really is, because one of the things that we’ve been finding is that our customers, our clients, are increasingly mobile. You talk a lot about the importance of being relevant to customers, and so what I thought we’d start out with is to ask you firsthand − what is the Age of the Customer and how is it different? I mean, we’ve all been talking about customer-centricity for a long time now.
Jim Blasingame: Well, of course, all my long career … I mean, you guys have seen me. You know my gray hair is not premature. I’ve been around a long time. A half-century ago, I was learning about how important customers are, but that was during a period of time that I call the “Age of the Seller.” That was because, even in those days with as important as customers were to businesses, the customer still didn’t control most of the elements of the relationship.
Of the three elements in any business and customer relationship, you’ve got the products and services; you’ve got the information about those products and services, both of those two controlled by the seller, by the business. Then the third one is you have the buying decision, which has always been controlled by the customer. For 10,000 years, the relationship between buyer and seller… between customer and business… has been two to one in favor of the seller, in favor of the business.
Pam Harper: It’s been controlled, right, controlled like that.
Jim Blasingame: Well, because of technology, because of the internet, because of all the things that have been empowering customers over the last 20 years, the customer has now gained control over that second element. The customer now co-owns, if not owns, they co-own the information that they use to make a decision.
So now the ratio is the seller still owns the product. The customer still owns the buying decision, and they either share or the customer dominates the information in the middle. The reason why I say that the Age of the Seller is going away and the Age of the Customer is emerging is because the customer is now largely in control of two of the three major elements of the relationship.
Scott Harper: How is it that the customer is in control? What are they doing that puts them in control now?
Jim Blasingame: Scott, when I was a pup coming up in the marketplace, one of the things I did was I worked for Xerox. I carried my kit bag out into the marketplace, and I’d walk up to a business. I’d knock on the door, and I’d say, “Hi, I’m Jim. How do you like me so far?” They would say, “Jim, please come in. You know stuff we don’t know. We need to know what you know so we can make a decision about our copiers and et cetera, et cetera.” I was their internet in those days, as were all of our sales people, all the sales people everywhere. Scott, you may remember that. I know Pam doesn’t. She’s too young.
Scott Harper: Yeah, well, you …
Pam Harper: No, no.
Scott Harper: So you were the teacher. You were the information source if they wanted to know things …
Jim Blasingame: Even if they didn’t buy from you, they needed you to come by because you had lots of stuff that they didn’t know. They couldn’t find it anywhere else. The company of the seller owned that, controlled that information. Well, today, look at what happens. Back in those days, I could get in any door because they knew they could learn something from me. Today, you go knocking on a door and say, “Hi, I’m Jim. How do you like me so far?” and the door probably won’t open.
Scott Harper: “I already googled you.” Yeah.
Pam Harper: That’s true.
Jim Blasingame: So now, you have to realize that the customer is much more informed, much more empowered, and when customers are empowered, businesses are disrupted. That’s the essence of the Age of the Customer.
Scott Harper: Well, we still see a lot of advertising and all kinds of information coming out from companies. Are you saying that’s less important now than it used to be?
Jim Blasingame: I’m saying that those people who rely on the old ways of building relationship with customers, like cold calling, like only marketing, like only doing traditional media, not building relationships with customers, not building communities, I should say, with customers, not using new media, are at a disadvantage … See, your program here is an example of new media.
Pam Harper: That’s true.
Jim Blasingame: See, what you guys are doing − your program is a classic example of what I call relevance. Long before your customers … Let me re-phrase that. Long before your prospects ever find out if they want to do business with you because you’re too expensive or the price is just right, they will find out through this program perhaps, whether your ideas and the way you go about your business is relevant to them. Long before you have a chance to be competitive, you will have demonstrated that you are or are not relevant to them, which is what customers are looking for. In the Age of the Customer, relevance trumps competitiveness.
Pam Harper: How they’re finding out might be while they’re on the elliptical or on their drive.
Jim Blasingame: That’s right.
Pam Harper: I mean, there are different ways that they would tend to find out all kinds of things about the people’s …
Jim Blasingame: Because they’re empowered with new options. Not only access to new information, but new methods of gaining access to that information.
Pam Harper: That’s amazing. It sounds like what we’re looking at is a really profound shift in the way that people are taking in their information, that they’re making decisions. Relevance is really in the eye of the customer more than it ever was before.
Jim Blasingame: There’s no question about it. The thing is, what I think people need to understand is, this is a shift on such a momentous scale, I should say, that this has never happened. Anything like this has never happened in the 10,000 years of the marketplace.
Pam Harper: Exciting. Well, we’re going to take a quick break right now. When we come back, we’ll talk more with Jim Blasingame about how the Age of the Customer is transforming the rules of selling. Stay with us.
Scott Harper: You’re listening to Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper, brought to you by Business Advancement Incorporated, enabling successful companies to accelerate the next level of innovation and growth. On the web at businessadvance.com.
For exclusive offers and quarterly “Harper Reports” highlighting emerging trends and issues in the business environment, click the “Join Our Community” button at Growth Igniters Radio dot com.
Pam Harper: Welcome back to Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper. We’re talking with Jim Blasingame, the small-business advocate and author of the award-winning book, “The Age of the Customer: Prepare for the Moment of Relevance.” Jim, how can people find your book and radio show?
Jim Blasingame: Hey, Pam. Thank you very much. My book is available at Amazon in hardback or e-book. You can find it also at my own website for the book, www.ageofthecustomer.com. They can get an autographed copy there. They can also get a …
If own the hardback, you can get a discount on the e-book if you want that, as well. So check that out at www.ageofthecustomer.com. Those are the best places to find it.
Pam Harper: That sounds great. I have to say it’s an amazing read. I find this book so valuable.
Jim Blasingame: Thank you.
Pam Harper: And I’ve recommended it any number of times. Jim, we’ve touched on the Age of the Customer and the Age of the Seller. Now, how are these two ages really different? We talked a bit about it, but there are some things that are just profoundly different.
Scott Harper: And how has it changed the rules of selling, Jim?
Jim Blasingame: Yeah, the rules of selling have changed a lot. The way to break it down, the way to break the selling down… And this is focused on B-to-B. I’m not saying it doesn’t involve B-to-C, business to consumer, but it’s largely business to business.
When you break down the activity of calling on someone, you’ve got the qualifying process where you’re trying to meet them, you’re trying to qualify them. You’re trying to find out if they are a prospect for what you do so you don’t waste anybody’s time if they’re not. That’s what I call step one. Step two is when you’ve determined that they’re qualified and they agree, and you go about the process of proposing and demonstrating and trying to get them on board as a customer.
Scott Harper: So they’ve gone from suspect to prospect at this point.
Jim Blasingame: That’s exactly right. In the Age of the Seller, getting in the door was easy. Remember, we used to call it the screen. Getting in the door was easy. I was good at it. If 10 people tried to get through the screen to call on a business decision-maker, seven people would get through. That decision-maker would then have to deal with seven proposals and meetings and all that kind of thing typically. The reason was, was because… It was a longer process. Part of that process, Scott, was, as we said earlier, they were trying to find out information from us.
Scott Harper: So it’s educational.
Jim Blasingame: They were educating themselves, and they couldn’t educate themselves unless they talked to us. In the Age of the Customer, if a prospect learns about us, about our products and our company, before they ever let us in the door, they can become very knowledgeable about us and so …
Pam Harper: …There are many more ways to find out this information.
Jim Blasingame: That’s exactly right, and just getting in front of a prospect is harder now because nobody takes calls like they used to. No business owner wakes up in the morning, like they used to, knowing that they’re going to talk to six or seven vendors today. Most people go to work thinking they’re not going to talk to any vendors today, and if they do, it’s only going to be the ones who they have determined are relevant to them.
What that means is that you’ve got to get to know these people. You’ve got to make them believe, before you ever try to sell them anything − before you ever tell them what you’re selling and how much your products cost or whatever − you’ve got to convince them that you are worthy of five minutes of their time to come meet with them face to face. Once you get in the door … See, the screen in the Age of the Seller, the screen transformed in the Age of the Customer to what I call the relevance firewall. That’s the word I was trying to [crosstalk 00:13:15].
Pam Harper: The relevance firewall − I like that.
Jim Blasingame: The relevance firewall.
If 10 people try to get through the relevance firewall in the Age of the Customer, only about three get through because the other seven haven’t demonstrated their relevance to the prospect. But guess what? Maybe only two get through. Maybe only one gets through.
Pam Harper: All right, Jim, I have to ask you a question, though. Scott and I were having a debate about this before we got on here with you. Is this really just more about commodity services, or does it apply to every single industry?
Jim Blasingame: Everything. Everything. I don’t care what you’re doing. I don’t care if …
Pam Harper: So all the people who say that we’re one of a kind, we’re special, we’re not a commodity, so of course we’re relevant, right?
Jim Blasingame: They’re dinosaurs waiting to become extinct, every one of those.
Pam Harper: Oh, Scott…
Jim Blasingame: Every one of those.
Scott Harper: Well, we’re going to have to keep doing what we’re doing here and do it even better. Jim, the question … You said over and over, “You have to make yourself relevant to your prospective customers.” All right, how do I do that as a vendor or seller or business?
Jim Blasingame: Let me give you an example. You’re a business owner, Scott, and I want to sell you something. You buy this, but you don’t know when you’re going to buy it again, and I don’t know when you’re going to buy it again, but I sell what you’re going to buy one of these days. You’re a busy person, and I want to be able to sell you what you’re going to buy whenever you’re going to buy it. Why would you …?
Scott Harper: I need a new color laser printer, for example.
Jim Blasingame: Okay. There you go. So why would you take the time to meet with me if you’re not ready to buy from me? Well, if I know you’re a prospect, then I’m going to try to meet you somewhere. I’m going to try to find out where you go and I’m going to try to just say … I’m going to ask for a referral. I’m going to get somebody to say, “Do you know Scott? Would you introduce me to him?”
Then I’ll just say, “Hey, Scott, I’m Jim. Here’s my card. I just wanted to say hi. I’ll see you later. Would you mind if I have your card?” I take your card, and then maybe I try to get you to follow me on LinkedIn, and I wouldn’t do anything but get you to follow me. Then I’d find out what you like to do. Let’s say you like to fish.
Jim Blasingame: If I found something that might interest you about fishing, I might send it to you. I might do that for a week. I might do it for a year. This is in the Age of the Customer in the … I’m trying to get through the firewall because one of these days, either tomorrow or a year from now, I’m going to call you up and I’m going to say, “Scott, I’m going to be in your area. Can I come by and visit with you?” Now because we’ve already connected, because you’ve already said, “Yeah, Jim. Yeah. By the way, thank you for that article you sent me,” I’m going to say, “Sure, I’ll give you five minutes.” Now when I come by …
Scott Harper: Okay.
Pam Harper: Because there’s already a value established.
Scott Harper: Okay, all right.
Jim Blasingame: That’s the relevance, because now I feel like you’re the kind of person … I have a value. Maybe I’ve even gone on your LinkedIn page. Maybe I’ve even looked up your name online to see if I even like what you have to say about things. Maybe you would have gone on my website and watched one of my videos or listened to one of my podcasts that I put on my blog that showed how I like to deal with customers.
Pam Harper: So actually what you’re saying is it’s almost like the buyer and the seller are partnering with each other more, in a sense.
Jim Blasingame: Well, that’s it, but here’s the thing. Here’s the way I think of it. In the Age of the Customer, the prospect is pre-qualifying you and self-qualifying themselves. Scott, Pam, that never happened in the Age of the Seller.
Scott Harper: Yeah, yeah, true.
Jim Blasingame: They’re pre-qualifying you and they’re self-qualifying themselves before, and here’s the scary part, guys, maybe before you even know they exist.
Scott Harper: Yeah.
Pam Harper: Wow, that is …
Jim Blasingame: If that doesn’t break you out in a cold sweat, I don’t know what will.
Pam Harper: I’m sweating right now.
So we’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, we’ll talk more with Jim Blasingame about what leaders need to do better or differently to thrive in this increasingly powerful Age of the Customer. Stay with us.
Scott Harper: You’re listening to Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper, brought to you by Business Advancement Incorporated, enabling successful companies to accelerate the next level of innovation and growth. On the web at www.businessadvance.com.
If you like what you’re hearing, go to www.Growthignitersradio.com, select Episode 2, and use the share links at the bottom of the page to tell your communities all about us. We welcome your comments on iTunes, Stitcher or www.Growthignitersradio.com, and encourage you to subscribe to the Growth Igniters Radio series so you won’t miss an episode.
Pam Harper: Welcome back to Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper. We’re talking with Jim Blasingame, the small-business advocate and author of the award-winning book, “The Age of the Customer: Prepare for the Moment of Relevance.” Jim, how can people find your book and radio show?
Jim Blasingame: Thank you, Pam. It’s at www.ageofthecustomer.com. It’s a website for the book. They can also find my radio show at www.smallbusinessadvocate.com. Or if they just remember my name, www.JimBlasingame.com will get them there. They can find the book at Amazon. By the way, Pam, the book sold almost 40,000 copies.
Pam Harper: Forty thousand….
Scott Harper: That’s tremendous.
Pam Harper: So this is a significant accomplishment. Congratulations, Jim.
Jim Blasingame: Thank you.
Pam Harper: This is fantastic. In the last two segments, we’ve been talking about what is the Age of the Customer versus the Age of the Seller, and how selling is very different. Now let’s shift a little bit and talk about what leaders need to do better or differently to thrive. This is a different kind of leading, isn’t it?
Jim Blasingame: Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly. The main thing … Let me give you a real inside-the-four-walls, down-and-dirty example of what leaders need to do. They need to believe that the Age of the Customer is real, and they need to look around their operation and see what it is about their operation that is still operating as if it were in the Age of the Seller.
Here’s a good example. Pam, if you walked into a store, retail, B-to-B, whatever the relationship is − you’re a business buying a business product or you’re a consumer buying a consumer product − if you walk in, what are the chances that you’re already going to have done some homework, some due diligence on this purchase before you get there? Pretty good, right?
Pam Harper: Very high. Very high.
Jim Blasingame: Okay, so you walk in, and they walk up to you and say, “Oh, hi, there. Come on in here. Let me show you about this product,” and they start acting like you’ve never heard of the thing before. Not good. Your sales people have got to be prepared and trained to find out where your customer is, at what level are they at, so that you don’t insult them; you don’t waste their time. That’s all part of relevance. That’s one …
Pam Harper: So sales people actually have to be trained in a different way …
Jim Blasingame: That’s exactly right.
Pam Harper: … the whole organization.
Jim Blasingame: That’s exactly right, and sales people … This is a big problem for all companies right now, large and small. Major corporations are still, most of them … I’m going to say 95% of them still don’t understand the Age of the Customer, what’s happening in the Age of the Customer. Another thing to remember in leadership is, as the CEO of your company … Pam, you and I have talked about this many times, about the CEO accountabilities. As the leaders of our company, we have to make the proper resources available to our company going forward. One of those is you have to understand this truth: nothing about your past was mobile, but your future will be dominated by mobile.
Pam Harper: Wow.
Jim Blasingame: If you don’t have a mobile site, if you don’t have a mobile … not a mobile app; I’m not saying a mobile app right now, but a mobile site. If you aren’t making yourself available online to mobile users … There are people out there now who don’t even use their PCs anymore. Not so much business owners, but you have a lot of consumers who don’t even … They don’t even go to their PC anymore. Their PC has died, and they didn’t even replace it. They just use their phone or their iPad. Mobile is going to dominate your future, and if you don’t adapt, then you’re going to be left behind. Those are some leadership steps that you’ve got to take.
Scott Harper: Yeah, it seems like, nowadays, business leaders that we’re trying to reach have less and less and less time to read, to interact, but they do commute, they do exercise, and so that’s the reason that we’re doing this, which is mobile.
Jim Blasingame: That’s right.
Pam Harper: But I think there’s also something else, Jim, and you touched on it, that leaders are going to have to be willing to make some different types of investments. The technology is going to be a much bigger deal than it has been. Figuring out what kind of technology is going to be relevant is going to be its own challenge, as well. Would you say that’s true?
Jim Blasingame: Well, there’s no question about it. See, that’s what we were just saying, and we mentioned this in the previous segment, Pam, when we talked about new media and what you guys are doing with your program here. If you want to own a lawn-and-garden shop, and you do a little 90-second rude-and-crude little video showing people how to take care of their shrubs in the winter or how to fertilize their garden or whatever you do, if you do it for 90 seconds − it doesn’t have to be fancy − what you’ve done is you’ve met people in a way that they like. They like visuals. They like videos. You’ve shown them your humanity. You’re the real person here. They hear your voice. They see your face, and because you’re making it available to them, they see that as a demonstration of your values.
Pam Harper: Exactly.
Jim Blasingame: You care about customers enough to go to this much trouble. That’s a values demonstration, and values are a huge relevance factor. I wrote a whole chapter just on values.
Pam Harper: Mm-hmm [affirmative]. That’s true.
Scott Harper: This goes all the way up, not just for small companies, but for mid-size and even large corporations.
Jim Blasingame: Every company. All companies. Let me say this. Any organization that has alternatives that customers can take, this applies to. In other words, even churches, for example; non-profits have to deal with the same thing. Everybody does. Maybe the only exception is the federal government. I’m still trying to figure that out.
Pam Harper: I can imagine that.
If there were one thing that you would suggest that our listeners do differently, I mean, as soon as they’re done listening, what would that be in order to be more relevant to their customers?
Jim Blasingame: Realize that customer expectations − everything that you are going to do six months from now, a year from now, two years from now, five years from now, every level of success that you have in any of those periods of time − is going to happen based on your ability to meet your customers’ expectations. Their expectations, they’re all different. Every one of them is different. The way to find out what their expectations are is to ask them and to stay close to them through communities and just believe that, number one, that their expectations are going to be how they’re going to make decisions, based on what they’re expecting from you.
The other thing to remember is: long before people ever find out whether you’re competitive or not, they will rule you in or out based on whether you were relevant to them and − here’s the scary part − sometimes before you even know they exist.
Scott Harper: It sounds like it’s more than just having a nice website and going on Twitter and whatnot.
Jim Blasingame: That’s right.
Scott Harper: It’s really reaching out, finding out what their needs are in fundamental ways that are new.
Jim Blasingame: Well, Scott, the main thing is don’t presume … Please, folks, do yourselves a favor. Do not presume that you know what those expectations are, because that’s a loser.
Pam Harper: They’re always changing. They’re always changing.
Scott Harper: They’re always changing. Yeah.
Pam Harper: Oh, Jim, this has been fantastic. I want to thank you so much for being our guest today.
Jim Blasingame: Thank you for inviting me. Congratulations on your program, and good luck with it.
Pam Harper: Oh, thank you again.
Jim Blasingame: You’re doing the right thing.
Pam Harper: I hope you’ll come back. Well, you’ll come back I hope?
Jim Blasingame: I’d love to. I will, absolutely.
Pam Harper: Excellent.
Scott Harper: Great.
Pam Harper: Well, with that, we are wrapping up our Episode Two. Join us next Wednesday, when our guest will be Judith Glaser, CEO of CreatingWe®, and an award-winning author of the best-selling book, “Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results.”
Scott Harper: Thanks for listening to Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper. To check out resources related to today’s conversation and subscribe on iTunes, et cetera, go to growthignitersradio.com and select Episode Two.
Pam Harper: Until next time, this is Pam Harper …
Scott Harper: And Scott Harper …
Pam Harper: … wishing you continued success and leaving you with this thought.
Scott Harper: Success comes from stretching ourselves to bridge the gap between where we are, and where we need to be.
