Episode Description:
COVID-19 got your business down? This was originally intended to be the first episode of this podcast. The passing of time made it feel irrelevant, but a review exposed a realization that tragedy can strike businesses every day. A pandemic is the ultimate challenge and while tragic, can provide the stepping stone for repositioning, reorganizing, or reinventing a business!
Action you can take right now:
The goal of this podcast is to provide marketing and service insights, but also to provide actionable items that can occur right away without much thought. This episode explores the opportunity potential when businesses shutter from a crisis.
- List out your favorite businesses that closed as a result of the pandemic.
- Does the need still exist now that the we are reopening?
- Already in business? Look for competitors that have closed – find tools, inventory, capital equipment and more at fire sale prices.
- Thinking of something new? Start used – can you furnish, stock shelves, or purchase needed equipment at a huge discount from a defunct competitor?
After-Show Thoughts:
It’s incredible this was recorded nearly a year ago. My own analysis-paralysis got in the way of me releasing the podcast much sooner. I recorded a few episodes, than got bogged down with other things but eventually listened to my own advice. The amazing part is once the ball really got rolling about two months ago, I found the episodes just started to come one after another, editing became much easier and the entire process has become much easier.
Like anything in life, experience does matter! The more you do something, the faster you will become good at doing it. The problem is, like I experienced myself, you have to resolve to actually DO SOMETHING!
Transcript from Episode 2 of the Marketing and Service with Justin Varuzzo podcast.
Hey, Justin Varuzzo here. This podcast was originally recorded a few weeks after the shutdown had started in 2020, and it was originally the first episode of the podcast that I was going to do. But after recording several of them, I realized that this content may be better suited for later on in the series of initial episodes. I was tempted to skip it entirely, but I feel there’s still a lot of good content in here. Uh, there is very little relevant to the shutdown, just a few minutes in the beginning. So please don’t think it’s outdated or irrelevant right now, this episode is all about leveraging opportunity from a marketing and service perspective. So I hope you enjoy it.
Hey Justin Varuzzo here from marketing and service.com marketing and service.com. Think of this as your small business marketing toolkit . So I’m here today and I’m recording this on April 2nd, 2020, and we are two weeks into , uh ,
I guess what you could call the American shutdown , uh , in the state of New York being a non essential business. We are a shelter in place state , uh, and , and we are just wrapping up week. Number two of this with what certainly looks like at least another two to three weeks, possibly more , uh, throughout the end of April, we could be locked inside, unfortunately, with the spread of the coronavirus . Uh, obviously businesses are suffering. Uh, some are suffering terribly , uh, some going to get by , uh, others are winning. Uh, there’s always some winners in every down economy and inevitably many businesses, especially small businesses will have to close permanently , uh, there’s expenses that occur that are fixed on monthly basis. And as the weeks and the months go by , uh, it’s unsustainable to have those expenses. And , uh, surely many of these businesses will close.
However, there is one guarantee and that is that the world will, at some point be it three weeks, three months, or maybe even three years get back to normal. And when we do get back to normal, the needs will return. Uh , you can take a small example, like a dry cleaner , uh, right now I can’t even leave my house. I’m certainly not getting a dry cleaning done for , uh, a day job and neither are many other people, so that dry cleaner may very well go out of business. But once things return to normal that need will return for people to have dry cleaning. So I guess what I’m really trying to say here is that from this a devastating event will surely result in endless opportunities for new small businesses. And the reality is there probably will never be a better time to start a small business.
Uh, you can imagine that rents will be less than they’ve ever been as , uh , renters are desperately seeking tenants vendors will surely , uh , have a desire to sell merchandise that has been sitting on their shelves for several months. Uh, if you are a retailer of any sort or thinking about getting into that , uh, your product will likely come at discounts that you may not see again for a long time. So there is a little bit of a silver lining, I think here , uh , in terms of opportunity, which brings me to why I am doing this , uh, marketing and service.com marketing and service.com. The reason I’m doing this is because I have been in sales and marketing my entire career. And one thing that had always struggled with and continue to struggle with today is seeing how businesses will often completely separate their marketing efforts and their service efforts. Uh, and this happens at every level of business , uh , large corporations down to small businesses. And I think that there is a opportunity for service , uh, and whether it be customer service or , uh , post sale service , um, service provided on a product, a service that is provided in relation to a service, I think by executing service properly, you give yourself an incredible marketing opportunity. And I think for those who are missing out on this overlap, which seems to be many, there is a huge potential for improvement in increasing sales, increasing , uh, your current customers , uh, sell through rate and their customer lifetime value.
My goal is to share many of the things that I’ve learned , uh , both in real life and , uh, uh, opposite of most people. Uh , after about 20 years in sales and marketing, I went back to school and got a bachelor’s and a master’s , uh, and it was interesting to see the intersects between real life and academic life , uh, at that stage in the game. But there was a lot learned and I want to, I want to share these things. I want people to be successful. I think a lot of people are going to be starting a new business and they have a lot of questions and there’s a lot of opportunity that’s going to exist moving forward. I think this is a great opportunity to share the things that I’ve learned over the years and share things that I’ve seen that work. And , uh, more importantly share things that I , I see that do not work. And hopefully you won’t repeat those mistakes and you’ll have a better chance at really harnessing your marketing programs and service programs. So a synergy exists between the two.
One of the other opportunities that we have right now is time. Uh, commonly, most people will say, I don’t have time for this. I don’t have time for that. And it’s easy in today’s hectic world to have things every single night and have events on weekends and obligations every day. And it’s hard to find free time. I feel that I’m also guilty of this. Uh , I don’t have as much time as I’d like to have. However , uh, one of the benefits , uh , if there are any of Corona virus and being locked inside, is that , uh, outside of , uh, the day job working from home, I have no obligations at night or the weekend because the words of green day, there’s nothing to do and nowhere to go. So I can either stay home and be sedated, or I can stay home and be productive. So my hope is that , uh , this is the impetus that I need to move forward with a passion of mine, which is a small business podcast.
And that’s why I’m doing this. And that’s why I’m here today. And I hope you enjoy it . I , the way I’m going to break these down, I don’t think that you’re going to listen to these back to back, but I think when there’s a subject matter, that is pertinent to you, you should definitely take a listen. And hopefully we can help out just to give a brief history of my background. Uh, I’ve been in sales and marketing since I was about 14 years old in some capacity or another. I worked retail very early on. I had my own computer business early on. Uh, I spent a few years at a , a large corporation, corporate America , uh, and I’ve , uh, I’ve worked in a couple of different industries and , uh, for the last 20 years or so , uh, I have been , uh , in marketing, I’ve had the opportunity to participate both in a lot of , uh , one-to-one sales transactions. Uh face-to-face uh , and I’ve also had the opportunity to start and grow several e-commerce websites , uh, that have been successful and brands that have been successful , uh, over the years. So I’ve, I’ve gotten to dabble in a lot of different software , uh , a lot of different sales scenarios. And , uh, I want to share what has worked for me and what has not worked for me. I think one of the biggest things in sales on the sales side of this equation is trust.
So customers have three measures that they use when making a purchase decision. Uh, first and foremost , uh, they’re looking at a product and, or a service, and they’re going to ask, do I need this? Do I need this product or service? And do I trust that this product or service will help solve the problem I have next, they’re going to look at the company and say, do I trust that this company is going to provide value in the product or service in which they are trying to sell? And lastly, the sales person is the sales person trustworthy. Is this someone that is adding value to this sale? Any one of those three things can really derail a sale quickly and whether you’re selling face-to-face or whether you’re selling online , uh, it really doesn’t matter. These three things are always a consistent factor.
Uh, Zig Ziglar is a great sales motivational speaker from the seventies and eighties. And , uh , he really built , uh, the pillars of what many, many books rehash today. Uh, and this is one of them , uh , Zig Ziglar would talk about , uh, that relationship between the sales person , the company they work for and the product that they are selling. If you’re interested in this with a modern twist, you could take a look at Jordan Belfort, his book that came out probably about a year ago, that was called the way of the Wolf based on Wolf of wall street. He takes this approach and gives it a little bit of a twist. But at the same time, he talks about, you know, building rapport to help create a level of trust for you, the company and the product that you or service that you’re selling. So with those staples in mind, this will always be the root of what I get into. Uh, when I’m talking about marketing and service.
These are things that when we perform a service function, if a customer has an issue, if they have a problem, if they have a return, if they’ve got broken merchandise, if there was a missed appointment for service call , uh , all of these things, I think perpetually move the needle on those three trust factors. And I think it’s important post sale to continue to monitor those three meters and ensure that you are always maximizing the trust at every level. We see it all the time, especially in, in larger corporations, you have a sales team, sales team will say anything to close the sale. They get paid, the sale is closed. They move on. And now you’ve got an engineering team perhaps that was made all these promises that cannot possibly come to fruition. And this is an example of where you may have been a trustworthy salesperson , uh, but you, you were not , uh, you were not, you did not accurately portray you are a product or service. You said what you had to say to close the sale. Now it moves to the engineering department who has to develop this product or service, and they say they cannot do the things that you were promised. Uh, and then in the end, it, it causes a lot of discontent. And the trust for your company goes down a lot , uh, as does the trust for that salesperson and maybe that personal linger on because that particular product or service is something they’re desperate for in their business. And they’re going to deal with the nonsense just to get by, but this is not the ideal way of running or an operating a business. And it’s certainly not the most profitable way to run or operate a business.
So you may have heard this about the power of why . And I think that , uh, the first thing you should consider listening to this podcast is why you want whatever it is that you desire. Why do you want to start this business? Because so much is wrapped around that. Why ? Uh, and one of the main things is passion. If you’re not passionate about what you’re selling or what your business is doing, you will never be successful. There has to be passion there. That passion is going to be what fuels and motivates every single day of your life. So ask yourself, why do you want to start this business? If you’re opening the dry cleaner that I mentioned before, went out of business during the shutdown , uh , you should have a passion for people looking good when they go to work suits that are well pressed clothes that need to be cleaned. Uh, that’s something you should be excited about. It’s something you should be proud of and happy to provide. If you’re not, you’re going to really struggle day to day, waking up and loving your life, doing something that you’re miserable doing. Even if you think it could be profitable. And even if it is profitable, it’s going to be hard to sustain a desire to do something if you’re not passionate about it. And I think a lot of times the Y gets lost in the equation of whether or not you should move forward and do one of these things.
The reason why I’m doing this podcast is because I do love marketing. I love the ideas behind it. I love the concepts. I love the psychology. I love the history of it. It’s absolutely fascinating to me how companies use marketing and service throughout the journey of a customer. I think we all have personal experiences with companies, both positive and negative, where we are either pleasantly surprised or shockingly pointed, but either way we can usually look back and have a pretty clear idea of where things went wrong. And if you notice it’s rarely just a single little thing that goes wrong. Uh, generally if you have a really bad experience with a company, it’s not because of one person or one issue, it’s usually because there’s been multiple issues. And it just seems like failure after failure after failure. And these failures add up over and over again , uh, maybe waited on hold for an hour. And then you got hung up on the second time. Then the third time you called for this problem , uh, you got someone who was really helpful, but then they never followed up after the call and nothing ever happened . So your problem was never resolved. So then you had to call again and all these things keep happening to prevent you from getting the result that you’re looking for. That’s where most businesses make the mistake. Uh, I think a big part of it is taking ownership , uh, and enabling employees and enabling your staff to take ownership of a problem. Uh, but it’s, it’s disappointing to see when you do enjoy a product or a service, and then you have to deal with the company or you have to deal with a sales person . And that ruins the entire experience. The other side of this is looking at a company , uh, especially large corporations companies that will spend , uh, a tremendous amount of money on customer acquisition. Uh, and , and without calling out specific company names.
At this point, I I’ll mention , uh, credit cards, for example , uh, how many credit card offers do you get in the mail every single day, these companies will spend endless amounts of money for customer acquisition. However, after they acquire the customer, usually you don’t hear people talking about how incredible their credit card company is. It’s not typical to go to a cocktail party and someone come up and say, Oh my God, you have no idea, no idea how amazing my visa card company is. I mean, they just, wow. They blow me away. Every time I have an interaction with them, you just never hear that. It’s always disappointment. It’s always mistakes. It’s always trying to find an I gotcha . So you pay a late fee or they can tack on a little more interest, and it seems like there’s complete disregard for you as a customer. Once you are acquired, it’s always stumped me. Why a company will spend so much time and so much effort on acquiring a new customer and then will actively do everything they can to try to lose that customer after they acquire them. It just doesn’t make sense. I think a big part of this is that disconnect between the marketing component of the business and the service and support component of the business, quite frankly, marketing and service.com two very, very popular keywords. And the fact that I was able to register that domain name in 2020 , uh, is quite shocking that those two words are available and that nobody else took that, which really shows to me there is a void in this space of really seeing how service can result in your , uh, achieving your marketing goals. So with that introduction, I, my goal is to keep these podcasts , uh, into small bite sized pieces , uh, between 15 and 20 minutes long. I’m not looking for hour long , uh , sessions here. I want to give you advice that you can use quickly , uh, and, and digest easily. And , uh, I certainly encourage you to visit my website, marketing and service.com or I’ll post articles.
And you can email me if you have questions, but I hope that I can be a help of you. And I hope that this podcast is helpful. The one thing I’d like you to take out of this podcast today is planting that seed for opportunity. If you’ve had a business in your head or an idea that you’ve wanted to get started for a while, and you’ve been procrastinating it because you didn’t have enough time, or you didn’t have enough money, or you didn’t have the right resources. Now is the time do it. Now is the time to take massive action and make your dreams a reality. Take that business idea, put pen to paper and make it happen. There has never, ever been a better time for you to get started than right now.
Go out there, live your dream, be successful. Take this time to do those things that you’ve procrastinated for such a long time,
Live that dream. And hopefully if I can help at all, then I’ll know that what I’m doing is successful. Please leave me some feedback about this, obviously my first one, but I hope to help you enjoy the other ones that are coming. Thank you a great day.