Jay Baer on Customer Experience and Marketing – What You Need To Succeed

Mo asks Jay Baer: How can people become great at business development?

The challenge with business development is that technology has made it so easy to create contacts. It used to be that you could stand out just by having a better toolkit, but now the volume of business development messaging is out of control.
Competency does not create conversation. The best way to grow any business is for your customers to grow it for you.
There is a time and place for advertising, but in many cases the most successful brands advertise the least because their customers and clients spread the word for them.
Even though word of mouth is the #1 way of generating business, fewer than 1% of companies have a word-of-mouth strategy.
If you want your customers to be a proactive word of mouth engine, you have to give them a story to tell, which means you have to do something different in your organization.
What if, instead of sending your proposal as a pdf attachment in an email, you send your proposal in a completely unique and unusual way.
Doing the normal thing is often more risky than doing something that's a little bit different. Just because you're in professional services doesn't mean that you took a vow of boredom.
Every single person and organization can have a talk trigger, but we're are often afraid to stand out.
Start with a pilot program and roll out your talk trigger to a certain subsection of your customer base and see how things go. Once you see the results, you can roll it out to the rest of the organization.