EP156: Focus on Over-Delivery

“It costs five times more to get a new client than to keep one you already have.” Today, Rick Elmore, Founder and CEO of Simply Noted, elaborates on his commitment to customer retention and to his company’s practice of over-delivery with our Market Dominance Guys’ host, Chris Beall. Rick believes that building relationships with clients is vital to any company’s success, so he begins by onboarding each new customer himself, answering all the frequently asked questions, and personally checking back to make sure the customer’s initial experience with Simply Noted’s products and services is a happy one. “When you’re truly on your client’s side, they’ll hear it in your voice,” Rick explains. Listen to this podcast, and you too will hear the commitment to customer retention in Rick’s voice in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Focus on Over-Delivery.”

About Our Guest

Rick Elmore is founder and CEO of Simply Noted in Tempe, Arizona, a company that utilizes software and robotic technology to create personalized handwritten notes for its 300,000 monthly users.

Full episode transcript below:

Announcer (00:06):

Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys. A program exploring all the high-stakes speed bumps and off ramps of driving to the top of your market, with our host Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell and Corey Frank from Branch 49.

(00:23):

It costs five times more to get a new client than to keep one you already have. Today, Rick Elmore, Founder and CEO of Simply Noted elaborates on his commitment to customer retention and to his company’s practice of over-delivery with our Market Dominance Guys’ host, Chris Beall. Rick believes that building relationships with clients is vital to any company’s success, so he begins by onboarding each new customer himself, answering all the frequently asked questions and personally checking back to make sure the customer’s initial experience with Simply Noted’s products and services is a happy one. “When you’re truly on your client’s side, they’ll hear it in your voice.” Rick explains. Listen to this podcast, and you too will hear the commitment to customer retention in Rick’s voice in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, Focus on Over-Delivery.

Chris Beall (01:20):

Pretty fascinating. Here’s a modern problem. So we have this massive work from home thing that showed up in 2020. We actually got to watch it, the day everybody went home in our customer base. We knew what day it was. It was like everything still worked, which was pretty cool. We thought that was amazing. Our people who navigate these phone calls all went home too. That shocked me that that worked. We dodged more than a bullet that particular day, because at 200,000 plus dials navigated a day by human beings. You got to have people who can navigate those styles and suddenly there are centers they were working at. We didn’t know that had happened. But now I’m kind of looking at it going, okay, everybody’s going to work from home. My wife’s book, Love Your Team, A Survival Guide for sales managers in a hybrid world, in a hybrid world means a bunch of people are working from home.

(02:06):

How do you solve that problem of knowing how to get to them working from home? People send stuff to me in my office in Los Gatos and I will go there, something on the order of twice this year maybe. Partially because when you set foot in California, they tax you for that day of work, but for some other reasons too. What do you do there? How do I get my customers or even my team? So my innocent team right, there they are, I got 10 SDRs and I got 10 AEs and they’re talking to say 85,000 people a year. How do they get that physical note to the right person?

Rick Elmore (02:43):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (02:43):

How do they get the address part to happen?

Rick Elmore (02:45):

So most of our clients have addresses already. Work with tons of nonprofits, political affiliation, political action committees, real estate, mortgage, insurance. All these people usually have those addresses, but there are a lot of creative ways you can find people’s address. What we’ve seen people do, we don’t do it, is they’ll find a list of people they want to contact, at least the city they live in, and then they’ll hire VAs to scrape list off of Reference USA match names and addresses or Data Axle or PropertyRate. I mean there’s tons of ways to find someone’s address, but I would say majority of our clients already have this information. But if there is a need to find it, you can get creative and find it. It’s just a little extra work but [inaudible 00:03:30] off of Upwork or Fiverr, give them a list, tell them here’s the three web addresses to use to scrape and match names in cities, and they do it. They do a good job.

Chris Beall (03:39):

Interesting, interesting. So in the B2B world, we live in B2B right. We have a couple of customers use ConnectAndSell for B2C. We’re not hugely enthusiastic about it, even though it works great because the regulatory surround on phone is non-trivial, right? And on business call somebody. So B2B is kind of funny because getting their work address is probably easy, getting it to their desk is probably easy. Are they ever at their desk is probably an unknown. Now I suppose we could ask them, but what do you see in B2B? I want to get it to their home probably, I think. Who’s doing B2B and how are they doing it?

Rick Elmore (04:15):

B2B is a lot of medical software, corporate gifting. A lot of those types of companies, they usually have addresses and they’re sending straight to the buildings. But if they want to get addresses, we just point them in the direction of how to do that. I’m trying to think of a good case study of somebody going B2B. Yeah, we had this CRM company for veterinarians and what they did is they just sent a handwritten note to every veterinarian office and just said, dear office manager, dear doctor, whoever was registered at that address. But if you have a more specific question on B2B, what type of industry, I can probably pull up an example of some client we’ve worked with over the last four or five years.

Chris Beall (04:53):

Sure. We can always be pioneers.

Rick Elmore (04:54):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (04:55):

I mean in this space we may as well try yours, right? No reason not to. I think it’s fascinating actually. I mean we’re all about this human touch element and breaking through the noise with the human touch. So this what you’re doing, we’re doing it with the human voice, which goes straight into somebody’s mid brain.

Rick Elmore (05:10):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (05:11):

I mean you can’t turn off a voice once it’s coming in your ear and now it’s down to your skill. It’s down to your tone of voice. It’s down to you. Do you have a message that works? Do you know the psychology of the first seven seconds of the cold call? All that kind of stuff.

Rick Elmore (05:24):

Yes. The psychology behind a handwritten note is a hundred times more impactful than you believe. People appreciate it. You stop them in their tracks for seven to 10 seconds, right? You’re engaging them on a level that they’re not being engaged by anyone else. You’re competing somewhere, no one else is competing. But it’s super impactful when you put something down that’s tangible that they can hold in their hands and that’s shelf life too.

(05:46):

So we’re going into the holidays right now. We’re sending out tens of thousands. I think we’re going to do somewhere near half a million holiday cards in the next six weeks. These have six to eight week shelf lives. What piece of material can you get in front of your customer’s hands that’s going to sit on their fridge, their counter, their mantle for eight weeks. Where they walk by and they’re going to constantly see that and be reminded of you. Like that’s real estate you can’t buy in any other type of marketing form. And it’s personal, it’s impactful, and it can be measurable if you get creative with the QR codes and call tracking and driving traffic to landing pages and stuff like that.

Chris Beall (06:20):

That’s fascinating. It’s fascinating. I really like it. Gosh, you got my little tiny wheels and my little tiny brain turning here. As you look into the future, you’re doing pretty big numbers already. How big is this? You’re attempting to bootstrap your way into what looks like a billion dollar TAM. Is that, am I getting that right?

Rick Elmore (06:40):

So we’ve been completely bootstrapped so far. We should make that aim 5,000 this year pending a couple orders. But the purpose of never getting funding was for a few reasons is one, how big can this be? I didn’t want to give up too much too early. I knew that this was something that could be special if it was built right. And we’ve laid the platform for getting the engagement, the footprint. We have the largest web traffic of anybody in our niche going to our website every single month, plus the technology. But my goal is to get it to somewhere close to eight figures in yearly revenue before we go get funding. But in order to go from eight to nine figures in revenue, we’re going to have to have a much more advanced platform and have more product offerings outside of just handwritten notes. A little bit maybe more gifts or something more digital. Something that’s more built out as an engagement platform where the handwritten notes is one of the tools that we offer.

(07:33):

But yeah, I mean we’re 11 full-time employees. We’re small but mighty and I think we’ve only had one employee leave our company in the last three years. So everybody’s really committed. It’s a really strong family atmosphere here. Everybody looks out for each other. We use tons of VAs. I have this method, trying to remember who it was, but they taught me basically like you mind dump all your information you need done about a job, you wait 30 minutes, you come back, you reorganize it, you build systems and processes and just scale your work that way versus trying to come on and try to hand teach everybody. So Michael E. Gerber Built To Sell really impacted me work on your business versus working in your business.

(08:09):

So yeah, we’re just excited. We’re way too early to think about funding because we’re just getting done with a huge project of building our machines into manufacturing now 30, 40, $50,000 checks I was cutting for engineering. Now we can put that into operating expenses, growth capital, PPC. My PPC budget’s been only $800 a month for the first four years. Literally nothing. We have people who spend $50,000 a month. So we’re excited. We’re just scratching the surface of our potential for sure.

Chris Beall (08:40):

Well fantastic. By the way, our PPC budget is zero, so.

Rick Elmore (08:43):

Oh really?

Chris Beall (08:46):

Yeah. I remember we met with Google once, we were once called over to Google and they wanted to talk to us about something we’d done for them and something we’d done for them actually helped them shut a business down. So they prevented themselves from going too far down the road. Because when you talk to people, you get quick intelligence as to whether a business makes sense. And they finally decided not to compete in that particular space as a money loser. So they wanted to tell us, this is Google’s idea of an award. They wanted just have us come over and say, “Hey, you’re our vendor of the year.” What do we get for that? Well, nothing we just wanted to tell you.

Rick Elmore (09:21):

That’s what you get yeah. [inaudible 00:09:23]

Chris Beall (09:25):

Yeah. It was funny because during that conversation their very, very, very, very senior guy who was there said, “Do you realize you’re the only Silicon Valley company that we’re aware of that doesn’t pay Google one penny?”

Rick Elmore (09:37):

Wow.

Chris Beall (09:37):

And I said, “Yes and we intend to keep it-”

Rick Elmore (09:39):

I had a mentor once, tell me Google is God. There’s a lot of power there, but a lot of scary power. They have the power to take away a lot of traffic. I remember two years ago we signed up an SEO company, just organic stuff and they were doing some shady backlinking and we actually got dinged and they literally tank you. And it’s just overnight we are getting all this traffic and it goes down to 90% less. It scares you.

Chris Beall (09:39):

Oh yeah.

Rick Elmore (10:01):

And Google did it. They just stop indexing your stuff. They take it off, they push you down rankings and it’s just like, oh my gosh so yeah.

Chris Beall (10:08):

Yeah, it’s tricky and then there’s an element of independence that you want to keep from that but you need it anyway. We’ve avoided it because the nature of our, we just call people.

Rick Elmore (10:17):

Yeah, relationships. Yeah, that’s the thing. You got to get people to believe in you. Buy into you.

Chris Beall (10:22):

Yeah.

Rick Elmore (10:22):

And that’s the thing, we’re really lucky… we don’t have a… you do have people that are price shoppers, but my background was building relationships. I obsess when we bring on business accounts, I call them, I onboard them personally and it’s probably not the right thing to do, but I have to make sure everything goes good and call them after the order. What did you like? What didn’t you like? Obsessed to make sure everybody’s happy.

Chris Beall (10:43):

Well to me, you’re doing it right. It’s obvious I’ve been doing this stuff for three quarters of a million years and I still am involved at that level in the business. Somebody the other day was saying, “We kind of like CEOs that put their feet up and look out the window and think big thoughts.” I’m going, well when I put my feet up and look out the window, I have a blank mind. But when I engage with something like why is this person getting hung up on? I had one yesterday. Guys getting hung up on. Mind you 200 and something thousand dollars a day, there was a lot going on. But there was something about this one that I just thought, this is not a tech problem. There’s a subtle problem hiding in there and I won’t learn it unless I jump in and have a look.

(11:23):

So I went in and had a look, listened to his conversations. It turned out, on his follow up calls he was getting hung up on the easy calls. Why? Because he was so confident on the easy calls. He was talking for eight to nine seconds before he let the other person say anything and he was getting hung up on. Is he aware of it? Of course not. So I made a little coaching email for him, showed him the wave forms. This is where you’re talking. By the way, when you’re on a cold call, you let him talk in three quarters of a second, actually it’s about a second half. But on these follow up calls, the easy ones, you’re going too far. I learned something, which is now I’ve got one of my data engineers looking through all the data for a particular pattern of short call, long call, but nothing in between. And we’ll go find those and then we’ll be able to proactively help those customers. I don’t think you learn anything in business by having somebody else do something and tell you how it went.

Rick Elmore (12:15):

You got to get your hands dirty right. You got to have that experience. So when you talk about it, you can talk confidently about it. So you talk from an understanding, not from just memorization or somebody else telling you what to say.

Chris Beall (12:26):

Yeah. When people put together presentations for you, you know the purpose of the presentation right? And it’s not to move the business forward. So that’s all there is to it. I mean you’d love if it were true, but what’s in it for them? Well, you’re the boss. As I say, we belong to the lonely minds club here in the CEO biz. At the lonely minds club means people think we have no hearts. We do, but we don’t dare to let them simply rule. Bring them out, but you can’t let them rule. And second is, it’s lonely because everybody who works for you, regardless how close they are to you personally or professionally, is obliged to lie to you at the margins in ways that do not feel like lying. They’re obliged to because you have this concentration of power that’s fundamentally corrupt and there’s nothing they can do about it except adapt for their own safety.

Rick Elmore (13:14):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (13:15):

It’s a problem. It’s a problem.

Rick Elmore (13:16):

It is. I like that lonely mind club. I like that analogy.

Chris Beall (13:21):

That’s what we’re in.

Rick Elmore (13:22):

From being on the other side to not being on this side. I totally understand what you’re saying.

Chris Beall (13:26):

Yeah, well some of us can’t kind of handle that thing where we’re reporting to somebody, whatever that means. I always thought that was a funny term anyway. What am I reporting to?

Rick Elmore (13:35):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (13:35):

What am I supposed to not know it myself? As you look at the next stage of this, you mentioned adding products, that’s one kind of thing. Do you operate truly globally now? Do you feel like people are writing notes in French and everything else under the sun? Is all that happening?

Rick Elmore (13:51):

Yeah, we can. I would say 99% of our business is here in North America. But yeah, we definitely would have to expand globally to reach the ambitions that I have for this company. But to do that we would need to expand globally as well. So we would need a production facility in the UK, Australia, China, just so these are not having national stamps on them. So if you ship from the US to Australia, it has a ginormous international stamp right and that’s a problem because it’s be like, why did this handwritten note from John who lives a mile from me be shipped from the states and it took three weeks to get there, but then it takes three weeks and it has a big international stamp on. It doesn’t make sense. So in order to expand globally, revenue’s going to have to be a lot higher. We’re going to have to have some channel partners spread out throughout the globe to make sure that happens. But yeah, that’s definitely a vision.

Chris Beall (14:41):

Yeah, it’s always so tricky to get to that unit of expansion. When you’re expanding globally, it’s suddenly you’re carving out part of the overhead of the core business. You’re adding a lump of pure overhead because it’s always going to take a while to get going. And then you’re also adding the risk of unfamiliarity. The things you don’t know that you will find out. How you’ll know if you don’t know them.

Rick Elmore (15:02):

And that’s the thing, I think we would expand through acquisition because there are some smaller little mom and pop companies trying to do this across the globe, but they’re using really outdated technology. And what we would do is basically come in and basically give them a business in a box and say, “Hey, here’s our technology, here’s our systems, here’s our software. This is how we have built an eight figure business.” More like a franchise and say, “Hey, we’ll start feeding you business, but we’re going to acquire you in your business but we’re going to make your business a lot better with our technology and our platform.” So yeah, I mean that’s definitely the pie in the sky where we want to go. But there’s just so much business just here in the US. I mean there’s like 60 or 70 billion with a B, pieces of first class mail sent here in the US and that’s not including marketing mail. So if we get to 50 million pieces a year, it’s a fraction of a fraction of possibilities.

Chris Beall (15:02):

Yeah.

Rick Elmore (15:53):

Yeah and we’re excited about it and plus it’s a new tool. That’s why I always tell our clients, your clients put food on your table. We always try to tell them to work on the relationship, right? Because it costs five times more to acquire a new client. If you have good customer appreciation, you make them feel appreciated. They’re going to make repeat purchases, they’re going to tell their friends, they’re easy to upsell. It’s easy to sell a new offering to a current client who feels appreciated. And then if they don’t, they just… They’ll go price shopping and go somewhere else. So yeah, we think we have a cool tool to build relationships and build loyalty and trust for sure.

Chris Beall (16:25):

Yeah. Yeah. Might not even be a tool, might be a weapon. Never know.

Rick Elmore (16:28):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (16:28):

That’s what we’re into.

Rick Elmore (16:33):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (16:33):

Tools, that’s for gardening. We use weapons to dominate markets, right?

Rick Elmore (16:36):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (16:37):

That’s where it’s at.

Chris Beall (17:18):

So I have a question about the thing that came up last night. So I was talking to somebody who was here having dinner and for her own privacy, I won’t say who it is, and she said that’s such a cool idea. I once got a job based on one and only one thing, which is I wrote a handwritten note and nobody else did back to the person I interviewed with, but I wanted it delivered that day. So I couldn’t get that to happen easily. So what I did is I hand wrote the note and then I took a picture of it in my hand and I sent it to the person and said, Hey, I would send you this but it’s going to take too long to get there. And I just wanted express my appreciation for the interview that we did today and for the thoughtful questions you have and blah blah blah. It was something intelligently handwritten.

(18:01):

So it struck me as the most unusual hybrid. It’s in a way it’s guaranteed to have been personal because she’s holding it in her hand and taking a picture of it and yet the delivery was instantaneous and it was a B2B thing even though she was… She’s a business so to speak. Does anybody do that kind of crazy stuff?

Rick Elmore (18:22):

So that’s what I’m talking about expanding our platform is having a digital aspect, engaging them through text or email or socially. I mean there’s a lot of cool tools out there now that we can leverage APIs to scrape information and pull it into our platform to engage them with a personalized email somehow with some type of creative copy or message or picture, send a text message, hit them up on LinkedIn or their social account. So I think that’s a really creative thing to do. Write the note, take a picture, send it, right? It’s kind of witty and personal at the same time. But that’s what I’m talking about expanding our platform is doing something like that where you can have type in your message, our system would create the note, impose it on a mock up image for you where it looks like it was just handwritten and then you can send a text message. So yeah, that platform idea is definitely the future of expanding and growing this to a much bigger business. But yeah, that’s just a really cool way that that person stood out for sure.

Chris Beall (19:12):

I can think of some twists and turns around this. For instance, a book in Kindle, like when my wife Helen’s book comes out on the first right, I’ll buy a Kindle edition for 99 cents because that’s what you can do for up to the end of the week. And they have the ability to make a little poster. So the Kindle app, I use mine on my iPhone and I can highlight a sentence or whatever and then go share it and they’ll make a little poster and post it on LinkedIn and it comes with the citation of the book and a link to the book so you can buy the book. So it’s kind of a full viral loop. The posters cool, but the poster is just whatever font they have and whatever. If the poster were handwritten, if it were actually handwritten and it were a picture and it went up on LinkedIn, that would be cooler, I think. Obviously you’re doing runs of a few, I mean literally can you do a run of one where it’s completely unique?

Rick Elmore (20:05):

Yeah, so we help you send one, send hundreds, thousands or automated. So our website’s more like an eCommerce platform. Go on there, pick card, type your message, check out. That’s really not a big part of our business. We make some money on that, but it’s not really the money makers. Really why we do that is to allow people to try us out, send one or two, see how you like it before you really kind of dive in with two feet. It just gives them the ability to get a good feel. Yeah, I would say the majority of the people we work with are businesses. I would say it’s like the high 80% of our clients are businesses. We’re working on projects with them, they’re automating it, seasonal like things, holidays, anniversaries. Yeah, we definitely allow anybody to use our platform as of right now.

Chris Beall (20:45):

Got it. Do you follow or know Stu Heinecke? Okay, so Stu has written a couple books. He wrote a book called How to Get a Meeting With Anyone. He wrote another book, just wrote it called How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed. I think you’ll really like this book and I think you’ll like Stu. Stu is the guy who will send you a foam board with a cartoon that he’s drawn on it. That’s funny and it’s about you and he’ll send that to a senior executive to get a meeting, that kind of stuff. He’s a genius about this. He’s a Wall Street Journal cartoonist. He’s one of the nicest human beings on earth, by the way. Highly recommend. Just reach out to Stu and tell him that-

Rick Elmore (21:20):

I have to write his name down. I can we get them with this. Yeah, I’ll get that from you.

Chris Beall (21:25):

Stu Heinecke. And just seems like a lot of what you’re doing fits in with the Stu Heinecke way of looking at the world. Plus you’ve done your business his way. His point is look, weeds figure out how to grow in the middle of cracks and freeways. Get over it.

Rick Elmore (21:39):

You know what, I always look at that when I’m on runs, you’ll see those and it’s actually to me really inspiring. There’s a will, there’s a way. We’ve fought through a lot of challenges over the last four years, but I’ve always felt that way and when I see that, that is a nature’s example of exactly what I’m going through right now, there’s a will, there’s a way and that hits home for sure.

Chris Beall (21:58):

Yeah. Checked out his business, his book and check him out. He lives up on Whitby Island up in part of the Olympic Peninsula off the Olympics and the San Juan’s. Brilliant, brilliant guy, nice person, and you’re doing it, which is what’s so interesting but you’re also enabling him. I mean it’s an example of kind of a seed pod strategy. Stu is a guy who would talk about your business and that’s an awesome thing and he would talk about it in the right way too, because he’s got a huge audience. So I highly recommend reaching out to him and kind of seed podding up so Simply Noted become something that he use an example. Because when Stu uses an example of how to grow your business like a weed and it’s you, people are going to go after it and he’s kind of speaking to your audience. Those businesses that have a lot of outreach to do in order to get things to happen. So highly recommend.

Rick Elmore (22:49):

Nice. Awesome.

Chris Beall (22:51):

But I want to come by some time and watch the robots do their thing just down the road in Tucson so we’ll do that.

Rick Elmore (22:57):

Great. They’re a little pen wielding army. It’s a little army of robots you’ll love it. It’s really fascinating for sure.

Chris Beall (23:03):

That’ll be cool. And then someday we should do a little test drive. You said you’d do a little cold calling before we got on?

Rick Elmore (23:09):

Yeah that’s one of the major ways that we started this business was just getting on the phone. I mean I went through the BNI, the Chamber of Commerce, some of the EO stuff for networking, but really it’s… we’ve used our product, a lot of social, email and cold calling. If we have nothing to do, we’re on the phone smiling and dialing. I need to talk to you about what you guys are doing because it’s definitely something that is a major cornerstone in our business for growing.

Chris Beall (23:34):

Yeah, I mean what we do is so simple. We can talk about it, but it literally is you push a button, talk to somebody in your list in a couple minutes and while that’s going on, you don’t have to do anything. You can do something else.

Rick Elmore (23:44):

Yeah, I mean we have a dialer. I mean you can make a hundred calls an hour, but there’s a way to make it even more efficient.

Chris Beall (23:49):

Oh yeah. A hundred calls an hour. That’s crawling. We don’t talk about little numbers like that. That’s too weak. Plus you got to pay attention when it goes to a voicemail or whatever. You got to be paying attention.

Rick Elmore (23:49):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (24:01):

You pay it no attention. You just hit the button. I was on with small business up in Canada today. We do this thing called an intensive test drive and it’s basically you get it for a full day of production and it’s live. We don’t do demos, we don’t do any of that stuff. It’s live, it’s your list, it’s your people or you or whatever. And one of the principles I asked him, “Did you hate it?” And he said, “I didn’t hate it but it scared me pretty bad and I’m still sweating.” Yeah.

Rick Elmore (24:30):

Sounds intense.

Chris Beall (24:31):

Yeah. We call it the intensive test drive for a reason. Now you’d really like it with your approach to things. You’ll have a blast with it and the fact is, that sincerity you talked about, being on their side, it comes through in the voice and it is the one thing when you kind of look at it, people don’t make buying decisions based on the facts. They make buying decisions based on one thing, which is they grow to trust you more than they trust themselves with this decision. Anthony Iannarino opened his latest book, it’s called Elite Sales Strategies and he actually quoted me without telling me which shocked me. So the opener of the book is a quote from me that says, “People buy from people they trust to make a decision they don’t trust themselves to make.”

Rick Elmore (25:13):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (25:13):

That’s why they buy. And we know that trust is a subtle psychological thing. It’s not, it’s such a big deal. It’s so dangerous to trust somebody that we’re wired to not do it, but we’re also wired to do it when it’s done right. And just listening to you and thinking about how you truly are on their side and they’ll hear it in your voice. I mean your successful career in sales, a lot of it’s got to be predicated on that. That first conversation. When they’re done, they’re gone. Hey Rick Elmore knows what he’s talking about and he’s on my side, he’s an expert and he’s on my side. I trust him more than I trust myself right so that’s what our whole thing is about.

Rick Elmore (25:55):

Yeah, I just focused on over-delivering. I’m going to make it right no matter what. Make sure you have a good experience. I remember when I first got into sales, my first manager at Striker, he sent me to a Dale Carnegie sales training thing and I learned a lot there. Like you were just saying, people will listen to people they like, but they’ll buy from people they trust. I remember that’s something they taught me. But yeah, that’s definitely a 100% true in sales. Anything in business people are going to buy from people they trust for sure.

Chris Beall (26:19):

Right and how much they trust them. This is something I’m convinced that we’ve kind of figured out. Everybody always said, you got to be trusted more than your competitor. Your competitor is always do nothing. So how do you be trusted more than do nothing? That’s really interesting.

Rick Elmore (26:33):

For me. I invest a lot in social proof. So it’s getting good reviews, getting out there and having people seeing us. People talk about us that aren’t us. So even if I’m telling you something, go out and search it and see what else somebody else is saying about us. That’s another good thing. When I was a rep it wasn’t really as that important, but when you own a business, you got to make sure other people are doing nice things about you outside of your own walls, inside your building.

Chris Beall (26:58):

Inside the echo chamber.

Rick Elmore (26:59):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (27:01):

Well Rick, thanks so much for coming on to Market Dominance Guys. Corey didn’t join us. He must have business he’s doing, he’s always off there hustling too. Us old guys continue to hustle. There’s no age limit to it. When you come right down to it, you don’t build these things to sell them, you build it because frankly we don’t know what else to do ourselves. So we just do it. And I’m super excited about your business and gosh, you don’t need my good wishes, but I’ll wish you all the best anyway because I think you’re just going to blow it all away.

Rick Elmore (27:29):

I appreciate it, Chris. It was an honor to be on your show and share this with you guys, so thank you so much.

Chris Beall (27:35):

All right, well until next time, and we have no idea what episode this is. Might be two, might be three of them. This is Chris Beall for Rick Elmore. Thanks for being on and the absent but brilliant, Corey Frank, and I’m sure we’ll see him again someday.