Branding Is Everything: How Branding Affects Your Sales, Your Employees’ Efficiency, And Your Customers’ Perception Of You With Jason Byer - Episode 93

Branding Is Everything: How Branding Affects Your Sales, Your Employees’ Efficiency, And Your Customers’ Perception Of You With Jason Byer

I’ve got another great guest for you. His name is Mr. Jason Byer. He’s from Crowdspring at Crowdspring.com. We’re going to talk about branding in a way that you probably have not heard before. This is a relatable conversation to how you and your company – or if you’re a solo entrepreneur out there selling – how your personal brand and company brand is created, perceived, should be, and should not be.

In other words, your brand affects selling. What people are thinking about you when you’re not around is your brand. What people are thinking about you when you’re in front of them is your brand. What people are thinking about when they’re interacting with your company, if you are the seller and you’re not there, is the brand.

It all relates to expanding sales down the line one way or another, whether it’s referrals or whatever mechanism to re-expand that potential sale or to get that sale initially. Your brand is so important. Whether you like it or not, you have one. You have a brand even if you’re not trying to create one. Let’s go to Jason and talk about this. Get the pen and paper out, the digital notepad, or whatever you’re taking notes on, and please start creating your brand. Get into the top 1% of sellers and earners worldwide. Let’s talk to Jason.

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Jason, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here. I appreciate it.

Thanks, Doug. I’m looking forward to it.

We’re going to talk about how to build a business brand and ramp up the identity of the person who owns the brand on this episode. You have a company called Crowdspring at Crowdspring.com. Why don’t you tell everybody what you do so we can set the tone for this?

We help businesses build better and stronger brands that lead to sales. We do that in an affordable way. We’re not an agency, but we have 212,000 creatives on the platform and they help in 33 categories of branding and design. Everything from naming a company or product to building that core visual identity to all of the marketing materials that support that brand.

Did I hear you have 212,000 people using this?

We do. We scale very nicely depending on how many projects people need to post. We’ve been doing this for several years. We’re used by a lot of agencies that outsource work and small business owners directly for their brands and folks within marketing and sales teams that need to increase their brand.

Let’s talk about brands. A lot of people think they know what a brand is or think a brand is this, but what would you deem a brand to be?

It’s literally that simple. A brand is every single interaction that somebody has with your company. When you break that down, you start to realize it’s your email signature, voicemail, how quickly you respond to calls and emails, your return policy, how your website loads, and if anything goes wrong, that’s customer experience. It’s every single interaction.

This is why it drives us crazy when we’re on the phone with a larger company and they say, “Your call is very important to us. We will get to it in 37 minutes.” There’s a disconnect. It’s clearly not important or you would’ve staffed the company to handle my call. This is why it’s important for us to make sure that our brands we’re saying the right thing. Going back to that example about, “Your call is very important to us. We’ll answer it in 37 minutes,” there’s a reason why somebody is not answering that call quickly. Maybe they’re prioritizing pricing, so they’re a low-cost solution, which means they can’t staff up their customer service team to answer your calls soon as it rings.

This is why somebody like Amazon, we can reach them very quickly and we expect to be able to chat at any time of the day or night because they’re a customer service-focused team, but there are other things we don’t expect of Amazon and they’re not telling us to expect those things. When we think about our brand, we want to make sure that we’re talking about the things that we can deliver and the things that will set us apart.

When we think about our brand, make sure we're talking about what we can deliver and what will set us apart. Click To Tweet

If customer service is not an area, we’re prioritizing and we don’t have 37 chat aids and help answer calls and do that quickly, let’s not tell people that’s important to our brand. Let’s focus on the things that we can control. Maybe that’s the return policies, pricing, or things like this, but that’s the brand. What you might be thinking is, “What about the logo?” Typically, we think the logo is the brand. The logo is part of your brand identity. The brand identity is everything visual about the brand. This is your logo, website, and colors and fonts that you choose to use.

What we’re doing here is the logo is the visual shorthand. It’s how we process things thousands of times faster than text is through imagery. The logo serves as that visual shorthand to represent the brand. When we see this logo, we immediately think of all of the brand’s positive and sometimes negative attributes. When you see the Nike Swoosh, you think about athleticism, fashion, and high-end. These are all positive words and that’s what the brand is trying to communicate. These words create the brand. Does that make sense?

It makes total sense because then, if we see a swastika, then we see the evil in the brand right then and there. Everything you said is spot on and made sense to me. My company brand is everything that basically the client experiences in dealing with my brand. It’s how my people and I answer the phone, do we call them back in a timely manner, how our website flows, and everything that touches the senses of the human being and they get a thought. That thought will be how they perceive our company, that’ll be the brand, is that correct?

Exactly.

Our brand identity is all of the visual aspects of what they see, like the logo. Is it audio if I had an audio meme or something like that? Is that also brand identity or is it just visual?

It could be. It’s everything that they’re interacting with. It’s the things that are the cues to make you think about the brand. Here’s the important thing to realize is that a brand is being created for a company whether or not you are engaged in that process as an owner, manager, or director of the company. A lot of smaller companies think, “I don’t have a brand. A brand is for Amazon or Apple,” and somebody like this.

Amazon and Apple can’t tell you what to think about their company. They can only guide you. This is an important process of brand marketing for larger companies, but we can use those lessons for smaller companies. These companies are trying to influence you to tell you what to think about their company, but they can’t tell you. You have to think about this.

Apple can’t say, “You have to think our products are high-end. You have to think that they’re beautifully designed.” They have to guide you in this process. Over the years and billions of dollars spent, they’ve done a pretty good job of guiding us in that process. The important lesson to take away from that for smaller businesses is that your customers and prospects have an opinion about your company and your brand. They’re shaping that opinion.

The problem is most of us are not involved in that process. We’re not helping to guide them into how we want them to think. We’re letting it happen naturally. We’re using the default voicemail for a program like Zendesk without thinking about, “What is my customer thinking when they hear this?” We’re doing things on autopilot and we’re not helping to guide that conversation around our brand.

It makes total sense. You have 212,000 clients, which is a staggering number of clients. Congratulations to all of you. Small business, medium business, large businesses, does it matter working with your company?

They all pay the same amount. Pricing is publicly available. It’s a 100% money-back guarantee. We get large companies that will come to us to get ideas. The important part is every project you submit on our crowdsource projects comes with dozens of different custom designs created specifically for you. What large companies appreciate is the ability to get a lot of different creative insights around a brand that might feel a little stale. They’re looking for some unique ways to position the company.

Small businesses are not designers or this is not their job. They get to see their brand come to life and see a lot of different ways to communicate their message because we make it very simple for somebody who’s not a designer or a creative to say, “Here’s my company. Here’s why I’m different. Here are some colors that I like.” What can I do to create an effective visual brand?

I want to give a few examples of things that happened to me and give people an understanding of whether you’re a small company, a large company, or a midsize company. It doesn’t matter how important a brand is to the perception of the buyer. As you know, we teach people how to sell and be in the top 1% of earners.

I was talking with a company. I was looking for a shed because we have to store all our stuff for the winter and we didn’t have a shed in this house. We just rebuilt this house. I go see these sheds. I pull over to the side of the road and I’m looking. I’m like, “These are great.” The pricing was right and everything was good. On the shed, it had the name of the shed company with a phone number. I called the tag versus the phone number, it picked up and he goes, “Hello, this is ABC consignment company. Thanks for giving us a call.” It was a voicemail. In my head, I went, “What do consignments and sheds have to do with one another? I must have the wrong number.”

I was like, “Okay.” I left a message and no one called me back that day. I’m like, “I got to figure out who owns these sheds.” That’s their brand at this moment in my brain. The second thing that happened is my daughters came home, they found a new restaurant and they’re like, “Dad, these people are so nice, helpful, and unbelievable. We’re going back again this afternoon to get another meal. You should check out this place.” That’s their brand that they’re helpful, wonderful, and awesome people. Who in a restaurant doesn’t want to go back to people who are treating them amazing versus the person we walk in they go, “Pick your menu item. Number seven, come pick your food up,” that type of thing?

There are also two big ones. We’re going to Europe. We need to fly from England to Warsaw on business. I went up to the company’s website, LOT Airlines. It’s a Polish Airlines and it was a direct flight. That website felt like I was on dial-up. It took forever for that thing to come up. I’m like, “Just go on British Airways.” I’m automatically off because the brand, to me, is if they’re going to be this slow on their website, what is my flight experience going to be like? I called British Airlines and spent 37 minutes. It was almost to the exact number. “Your call is important to us, but we’ll get to you in…” whatever it was. It was like an ungodly time.

“I’ve got a small business and midsize business brand doesn’t matter.” Small business or large business, the reason I bring these things up is a lot of people because a brand is one of those things that draws people toward us or pushes them away.  Can there be neutral in a brand?

No. They’re moving forward or moving back. There’s a lot to unpack in some of those examples. They’re very relevant, even though nobody on the call might be in. Using that first example about the phone number, what this does is it creates doubt. When you’re looking at your logo and how it might look outdated, it’s creating doubt. It’s creating doubt in the minds of the consumers that maybe this person isn’t investing in their company.

It costs so much to get a new client. We have to go through so many prospects to get new clients in many industries. The last thing you want to do is create doubt. That’s suicide for your business with these clients. You always want them to be excited to have the conversation. Looking through the lens of how your consumers view you in these early interactions, so call the number yourself as a business owner, marketing manager, or sales leader. Call the numbers and see how the customer service team or the salespeople treats you.

The last thing you want to do is create doubt. That's suicide for your business. Click To Tweet

A lot of times, we’ll have BDRs in the early stage and these are lower-level positions. They’re meant to nurture the sale before we get it to more of the higher paying salesperson or executive, but by nature, these people being a little bit less compensated or lower-level employees, they’re going to need a little bit more work. How are they presenting themselves? How are they dressing in the world of Zoom? How are they engaging? Are they excited? What type of energy are they creating for your company? These are the face of your company. It’s crazy that some of the lowest-paid people in the sales organization are setting the tone for how this prospect is going to think about your brand. Think about that.

When we realize that this is the public face, the lowest-level employee in the sales team, we need to give them some education on branding. We don’t need to chastise them. We need to explain to them, “Here’s what having a grainy video, confusing backdrop, or presenting yourself in a way that doesn’t align with our customers. This is why it’s impacting our brand,” so providing that education.

The last insight I wanted to share on your examples is LOT Airlines. A lot of times business small businesses are making tradeoffs. They’re saying, “I can’t afford fast hosting and making payroll.” That’s tough. It’s life. As you see with LOT, even the larger companies struggle with this. Look at somebody like Spirit Airlines in the US, where they poke fun at the fact that you don’t get a free drink or snack or something on the airline because they’re trying to keep prices low. This goes back to the idea about customer service. If you can’t afford to staff your customer service team fully, don’t say you provide strong customer service because you don’t. Lean into your strong points well and let customers know you can’t have everything.

I was on a call with someone and he said, “There’s the you that you see yourself, there’s the you that other people see and then there’s the you that you are.” I was like, “How powerful is that statement?” When we look at a brand, it’s you that other people see that you are in their minds, whether you are or not at that point.

I can imagine the hate mail I’m going to get on this one, but think of the Department of Motor Vehicles in any state in the United States that you have to go in. Very few people in those places are cheery people. It’s bad enough that you got to wait in line forever or whatever’s going on, but then they’re very curt and to the point and that’s their brand. People joke and poke fun at the DMV for that reason.

I remember That ’70s Show did a whole episode on the DMV. It’s one of those things that that’s a brand. You take Spirit Airlines. It’s not necessarily going to be a 6-inch cushion seat, and that’s okay because we, as a consumer, accept that in the brand if we’re going to fly with it.

What I’m hearing is we have to align our brand with the expectations because the brand is what people are thinking about us even when we think they’re not thinking about us. We have to align our brands and be that you that we want to be and let our own internal being be part of that brand but be truthful to it and represent that in the truth. That’s the message I’m getting through our conversation so far. Is that correct?

Exactly. As executives and owners of these companies, we have to take that driver’s seat to understand what direction we’re going to take that brand so that we are offering something unique in the marketplace. Take our industry as design. We have Upwork. Many people have heard of Upwork. God forbid Fiverr, the lower priced version of Upwork, where you can get any service that you’re looking for.

The challenge with this is that it’s up to the business owner to take on all the risk to sort through the crap and make this guess, “Can this person do what I need them to do on time and on a budget?” The market that we’ve carved out at Crowdspring is to say, one, we’re not going to tackle every service a business needs. We’re going to focus on design and branding. Two, we’re going to take on the risk for the business owner. Instead of the business owner taking on the risk of trying to understand if this works, we’re going to take it on. We’re going to do that by heavily curating all of our creatives on the platform. We are going to offer a money-back guarantee so that if we do fail, you’re not at risk there.

We don’t offer everything to Upwork. We offer something different. We found that market and this is our brand. This is what we’re going to focus on. As critically important for the executives and owners of these companies to define what that is, lean into it, and realize you can’t have the other things. Going back to your topic about the you that you actually are as opposed to how you think of yourself, we’ve baked that idea into the platform of Crowdspring. We created a tool called Focus Groups.

We found the best way to get feedback on a design. A lot of people will get multiple designs they like in a Crowdspring project, but typically, you can only use one per project you’re trying to do. You can only have one logo for your company, even if you like three different designs. We said, “Why not get feedback from your clients, customers, the people in your team, coaches, and all of these people that know your brand or are going to purchase your brand? These are the best people to get feedback from.”

We created this tool called Focus Groups, where you pull together multiple designs you like and then share it with a group of people through email and direct link, saying, “Give me feedback. Which one do you like? Which direction should we take?” We want to get feedback from people who are going to use our brand.

That makes so much sense. Many people do it the opposite way. They’ll build a product, service, logo, or whatever. They’ll throw it out there and have no idea until the market says, “I’m not buying that.” It’s like, “No, I invested $35,000 into this thing or $380,000.” It’s not moving. What you’re saying is go to market first, figure out the market, and we’ll tell you exactly what you want and don’t want.

We’re not the customer. We are the owners, operators, or managers. We are likely not our customers. We may use the product, but we’re not designed as customers. We’re seeking that one out. It’s like prideful to think that what we’ve designed that we like is going to be liked by somebody else. It’s the wrong market. We’re not that customer. We have to design brands and the visual brands, the logos, and the marketing materials to speak to the actual customer, which normally is not us.

I fully agree. Let’s talk about salespeople because you brought up BDRs, business development representatives. Customer service is also a part of the brand. It’s disheartening or enlightening when we get to say to a customer service department that the brand has been consistent all the way through and then dropped at customer service or all the way through and then heightened by customer service. What I’m hearing is we need to set our sales teams or salespeople by dictating the brand to that sales team. It’s like handing them the baton in a race. They’ve got to now take and speak about the brand and the capacity of how we want to represent it.

There are so many conversations that I’ve had personally with these folks. You realize that they understand their quotas, product differentiation, and the price difference between their competitors, but they lack an understanding of branding, what they’re truly great at, and being honest about what they’re not good at.

This is where we want to make sure that we’re educating them. As you mentioned, these are the humans that are representing the brand where we’re going to have a one-on-one conversation with them and it’s going to dictate how we feel about this company. It’s imperative that salespeople and customer service understand the core brand that we’re trying to communicate.

Salespeople and customer service must understand the core brand that the business is trying to communicate. Click To Tweet

If they don’t, then there’s the bait-and-switch feel. Therefore, the brand becomes bait and switch versus what the whole initial conversation was supposed to be about.

We have that feeling underlying when we have a conversation with a salesperson, and they said, “Yes,” we can do this because they want to close.

The brand becomes a liar if they can’t deliver. “Mr. Byer, we can deliver that in four weeks. No problem,” and then four weeks later, you’ve got the whole construction crew on site.

We have four to twelve weeks. We hit four weeks one time.

It’s important for salespeople to be speaking a big proponent of this when I talk with companies as well because you can have the greatest product in the world and your salespeople can completely mess this thing up. It isn’t going to hurt the salesperson except for that one thing until maybe you fire him over it, but it is going to hurt you on social media. It is going to hurt the long-term reputation of your company. Imagine Mickey Mouse by Disney World comes out and he’s holding an alcoholic beverage, smoking a joint, and cursing like a sailor. What’s going to happen to Disney’s brand?

It’s easy enough for people to get that visual and say, “That’s terrible for the brand equity,” and what we have to do is we’ve got to find those much smaller nuances. We’ve got to find those smaller examples that are not so obvious, but they’re still causing long-term harm. This is why it’s imperative. Sales and marketing are doing the same thing, which is both helping the company increase profits. They’re both helping the longevity of the brand.

It’s imperative that there’s a bit of a two-way street and that marketing educates sales on what the core brand is. It’s imperative for sales to give feedback on marketing about how the consumers react to that. What are the words people are using regularly? For example, I don’t do a lot of one-on-one conversations with folks at Crowdspring. It’s meant to be a self-service platform where you can sign in at 11:00 PM in your underwear and launch a project. You don’t have to talk to me and go through that process, but when I do have conversations, you get words that come up that you wouldn’t think to include within your marketing.

For example, a lot of people use the word fun when they use Crowdspring. Who thinks that designing a logo, name, or brand for your company is fun? That doesn’t hit like the fun list of things that you’re going to do for the day, but that’s how people describe the process. If your salespeople are learning these nuances, they can communicate this back to marketing. If you’re a smaller company and doing both sales and marketing, think about how the prospect is talking about your brand and insert that into the language.

Response time in selling is one of those enhancers and that is part of the brand. If we can get our whole sales team to respond within X amount of time and convey that, they do that. Now, it’s congruent and trust will go up. What I hear you saying loud and clear is don’t overpromise on the brand. A good friend of mine who has a very successful training company in selling used to say, “We’ll hire people who will outsell five people to one on your team,” I went to him and said, “Don’t say that anymore.” He said, “Why? People like that idea.” I go, “They’re not outselling five people on their team. They’re outselling 2 or 3 combined.” The perception is you can’t live up to your promise.

The reality is they would be overjoyed if they sold over quota every single month. They ended up adjusting their language and it settled down some refund rates. What you’re conveying is important, whether a large, midsize, small, or even a solo seller entrepreneur. How does a solo entrepreneur or solo seller, like a consultant, coach, or accountant, create a brand?

It’s almost easier because they don’t have the bureaucracy. They don’t have sales, marketing, and leadership teams with their own agendas. They are all of them. In one sense, it’s easier because they get to make the final decision. As we talked about before, you have a brand whether or not you are shaping it or not.

The analogy for the solopreneur or the solo salesperson is to look at family members. At the time we’re recording this, we’ve got holidays coming up. Thanksgiving’s coming up and you’ve got family members coming over. You’ve assigned a brand to them. There’s somebody who only cares to talk about themselves. There’s somebody who wants to talk about how great their kids are. Those are two negatives. There’s somebody who always wants to find out what’s going on in your life and is very cheerful and positive. These are brands. We have assigned an expectation and emotion to how we’re going to interact with that person.

It’s no different when you’re representing a company as a solo person. Getting back to this idea that drives me crazy of don’t be something you’re not is when you see the solo person trying to look bigger than they are. We see this in the corporate language, stock photography, skyscrapers, and big boardroom and suits. It looks awkward. We’re very good as consumers, B2B, B2C of seeing through the bullshit. We look at this and we’re like, “Wait a minute. You’re a one or two-person shop. Why the skyscrapers and boardroom?” It shows this disconnect. Lean into what you are.

People like working with large companies and the stability. People also like working directly with the owner where they can pick up the call or send a text directly to the head decision-maker, so lean into that. Don’t try to be something you’re not. From a visual brand perspective, make sure that it’s clearly communicating what you do and your service. We run into this problem with generic logos that we find, but they’re not speaking to anything specific. They’re generic. They’re using symbols for the industry.

Some industries are terrible about this. Real estate or law where scales of justice are in every single logo. It’s generic. Generic logos are not speaking to any brand. The point of having a logo is somebody wants that visual representation. We want to give them a visual representation of our brand. We want them to see that and remember that because it’s going to take 7 to 10 times coming into that contact with that brand through direct mail, postcards, flyers, and emails before they make a decision to move forward. We want that consistency. We want to be memorable. The only way you get that is by having a custom design made specifically for your brand. You can’t get that generically thrown together.

I fully agree with that and I love lean into who you are. For those people who want to be in the top 1% of earners selling, you must lean into who you are. As you said, Jason, some people want to deal with big companies and some people want to deal with one person. I’ve also found a lot of big companies want to deal with one person if you position your brand as the most important thing on the planet to me.

We’re working with a large company and they’re one of 2,006 people that feel like some of these buyers feel they’d rather have that one person because they know that person shows up and needs to be there versus, no disrespect to IBM or big companies like that, but they lose 10 clients and gain 11 now, they’re okay, that type of thing.

Look at our industry with design. The agency model versus Crowdspring. An agency will charge you $5,000 for the same logo design that Crowdspring is going to charge for $300. We have hundreds of agencies that use Crowdspring privately and then upsell their clients. The difference is in those people like getting a water bottle, sitting at a table across from somebody, and shaking their hand, and what it comes down to is it’s worth $4,700 to them to go that route, whereas they could get the same product on Crowdspring for much less. It’s understanding who your clients are. We’re going to have agencies because people like getting overpriced water bottles and sitting down across from you, whereas with Crowdspring, you’re trading that for cost and net savings.

Suppose people are okay with the overpriced water bottles because, as you said, the experience is there. When I fly first class, it’s usually always full and I sometimes question this, I’m like, “It’s a two-hour flight. Why are you on first class?” Some people will be like, “I only fly first class,” and that’s fine. Fly from Boston to London. The price difference in the ticket could be between $700 and $7,000. People are going to go there, but people like that brand, the first class. They will tell their friends, “I only fly first class.” There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s what people subscribe to be their own personal brand of choice.

That’s what I’m hearing loud and clear, be your own personal brand, even if you’re a solo seller. Create your own personal brand. Even if you’re working within a company, you want to create that brand for yourself and for the company and have that be congruent. If you’re the person who’s, “I’m always there on time,” live up to it. As you said, going to the family thing, there’s always the aunt that pinches the cheeks too hard and then there’s the grandmother that wants to always teach the kid how to tie their shoes, and we love those things. We lean into who we are and I love that statement. Thank you for that gift.

As we’re wrapping up here, I want to make sure we spend a couple of minutes here talking about refreshing or rebranding because the culmination of this conversation might leave some people to think, “I’m doing some things that I need to adjust. I don’t like my visual brand. It looks outdated or oppy. It doesn’t scale well when I scrunch it down into the Facebook avatar. It’s cutting off the top and the bottom.”

If you’re noticing some of these challenges, when’s the right time to rebrand or refresh? The answer is companies do this every few years to make sure you’re staying relevant. When we look back on brands several years ago, at the moment, we don’t think they looked outdated. They look normal. Now, looking back, you look at some of the early brands and you’re like, “I’m not going to purchase from this company.” We want our age to be not a drawback. We want to show experience, not a negative persona.

Most companies refresh and rebrand every few years, but if you’re finding that your brand is not speaking to your audience, it’s time to start right now. The best way to do that is to sit down and say, “Who are we talking to?” Lean into what you are. Push away what you’re not.” Don’t try and do this yourself. Design tools don’t make you a designer. You want to have a designer and give them the information, tell them who you are, what you’re not, who your competitors are, who your competitors are not, and let them craft that visual brand that provides that shorthand for everything that you are.

For those of you on a budget, for the love of fill-in-whoever-you-want-to-believe-in, don’t try to do design work by yourself if you’re not a designer. I’ve made that mistake. I’m like, “I can do this.” I spend three days putting something together and I’m like, “I don’t like this,” and so then I hire a designer and, in a day, they bring me back ten designs and I go, “I love that one.” You have to think of your time value. How many clients can you sell in three days? You’re putting something together by yourself, even if you could only get one client and that’s $20,000, and a designer for $300 or $500.

If you can’t make that price back in your selling in a couple of days, you probably shouldn’t be in business.

Fix that problem. Speaking of gifts, I remember us talking about Brand Identity Grader.

We have a Brand Identity Grader. If some of this is resonating, you’re thinking, “It’s worth taking a look at my brand to say what other people think about it outside of my organization.” We have a free Brand Identity Grader and this is a ten-page custom report. It’s done by a human. It looks at your specific brand and scores it out of 100 and gives you very actionable feedback on different areas of your brand that could be improved. We’re looking at things like colors, fonts, and other aspects of your visual identity and providing some feedback.

It’s completely free. You’re able to use this and share it with your marketing team, sales team, or executives to say, “Here’s what we might want to spend a little bit of time thinking about. Here’s how other people perceive our brand.” If you then decide to use Crowdspring for any of our 33 categories for marketing, branding materials, and things like custom presentations where you can take the brand that you like and then insert it professionally into your presentations, but if you like your brand, that’s fine.

Thank you for that gift. I’m going to do that here with our company as well. Let’s see what comes up.

We’re gentle.

Jason, thank you for being here and bringing your A-game. I know people got a lot out of this. How do they get ahold of you?

If you need to reach out to me directly for any questions, it’s Jason@Crowdspring.com. Crowdspring.com is where you’re going to find all of our pricing, categories, and past examples. Check it out.

Thanks again.

Thanks, Doug.

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Brand Identity Grader, I’m going to take it. I’m going to suggest you take it. Here’s the reason why. We all have blind spots. Blind spots are those things that we can’t see. We’re in the business every single day. Outsiders looking in, see something on the inside. Looking out, we don’t see it because we have different points of view.

We all have blind spots. We're in business every single day. Outsiders looking in see something, but on the inside looking out, we don't see it because we have a different point of view. Click To Tweet

Something as simple as your copyright on your website. You ever go to a website and it’s like copyright 1999 or 2004 and we’re in 2023? It gives us a little bit of doubt. You might go, “That’s not going to throw off a sale.” Yes, it will, depending on the type of person that’s looking at that potential website. It might be somebody who’s hyper-methodical and looking for a high level of trust, and that little bit of breakdown can because enough ambiguity to start creating some doubt in their head.

While I agree that might be a small point and maybe you don’t want the client to be that picky, there are people out there who are like that. It doesn’t make them bad people. It makes them very particular about who they do business with. You can take something as how your phone is answered and I can prove to you that you’re either making money or losing money, we can quantify how much money you’re losing.

Think about it, if you’re a dentist or manufacturer, what is your cost of one item to sell? A dentist is probably a $2,500 lifetime value, depending on the type of dentist you are. For a manufacturer, that could be $1 million, $5 million, or $20 million, it ranges. The way that phone is answered creates an instant impression in that person’s brain that says, “This is a good thing. Not a good thing,” or, “I’m confused.”

We don’t want, “It’s not a good thing,” and “I’m confused.” I could go through example after example where I have listened to phone calls and even voicemail, like when you’re trying to buy something, you call in and the voicemail is so generic, “Please leave a message. We’re not here.” It’s like, “Who am I calling?” There’s no company name, no identity, or whatever like, “You’ve reached ABC Company, but no one’s able to take your call right now. Leave a message at the beep.” I’m trying to invest $500,000 into something so give me some identity. “This is ABC Company. We are specialists in XYZ.” Give me a little bit more credibility of what I’m leaving a message for. I may not leave a message or I might pick up and go to the next one. That’s response time.

That is another one, response time. It’s extremely important the quicker you can respond to that voicemail that came in, the higher the probability you’re going to get the sale. If you don’t call somebody back for two days, that is your brand. “We don’t respond for 48 hours, whether you like it or not.” That is your brand in their mind.

You’re doing this over and over again, then people talk. People go online. People look up things online more than ever before. If you go online and you see they don’t respond to calls for 2 to 3 days, that’s your brand. That’s the way it works. These are the things that Jason and I were talking about. He did a great job on this whole process of breaking branding down and doing a wonderful job. Check it out. Go get that grader for yourself.

If you like the subject, want a different subject, or think you might be a great guest for the show, then reach out to us at YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com. If you have a suggestion for a show, we will respond back to you one way or another and let you know, “Can we do it? Can we not do it?” If you want some subject matter and you’re like, “I’m not the expert, but I want somebody else,” again, reach out to us. If we can do this and it makes sense for the show, we will absolutely do it. We’ll find a guest. It’s not that hard for now for us to find a guest. We’re getting an average of 5 to 10 people asking to be on our show every single week. We will find the expertise.

If you or yourself, someone, your company, or you want your people to sell more profitably, being the top 1% earners through selling, reach out to me or the company at Doug@CEOSalesStrategies.com. If you’re a company looking for these elite producers and you already want them fully trained and you want to be able to bring them in, you’d have to train them in your own discipline, but they can hit the ground running. Give us a call or reach out to me again at Doug@CEOSalesStrategies.com. As always, go out and sell something. Sell a lot of it. Sell it profitably. Play win-win. Make someone happy. Make yourself happy. Make the world a better place.

Important Links

• Crowdspring.com
• Brand Identity Grader
• Jason@Crowdspring.com
• YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com
• Doug@CEOSalesStrategies.com
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/jasonbyer/