Dr. Ty

Hey everybody welcome to episode 56 of the Easy SEO and More podcast.

I’m Dr. Ty, your host and today I have a special guest.

Armed with his four abilities, he now teaches others to bring their businesses from unnoticeable to unforgettable. Terry, welcome to Easy SEO and More.

Terry

Thank you so much, Dr. Ty, it’s great to be here and excited to be part of all this.

Dr. Ty

We talked to earlier that you didn’t know too much about SEO. So I thought maybe we’ll get into the coding of a webpage and really talk about that. what do you think?

Terry

I’m ready for that, let’s go.

Dr. Ty

You’re a great sport, but let’s not do that today.

Tell me more about these four abilities that you came up because you started out as a painter, right?

Terry

Yes. I still am a painter 43 years later. I started my business right out of high school.  I tried to get a job, but just couldn’t work for people.

I tried going to college. It just wasn’t me, I had that entrepreneurial spirit. And I suffered really bad for about eight or nine years.

It took me to figure out what the heck I was doing. I knew I wanted to be a painter and I knew I wanted to work for myself, but until I figured out how to treat my customers, things didn’t change for me for the better.

And, but once I figured it out, once I made a few key changes that I talk about in my book, my income skyrocketed in less than a year. Dreams that my wife and I had that I didn’t know that I could ever possibly do, I surpassed those many times over.

I look back at it and all it was about was taking action and understanding that your customers aren’t the enemy, they’re your pathway to success.

Dr. Ty

Fantastic. And what is then the title of your book?

Terry

My book’s titled Attract and Keep Customers for Life. Probably the better description is the subtitle, which is: Four abilities to build trust, communicate your value and charge what you’re worth.

Dr. Ty

I agree with that a hundred percent, especially with the trust part. I try to instill trust in my clients. And I do that in various specific ways, but I also know other companies where they feel like trust has nothing to do with business. And I’ve seen that very personally myself.

So I’m really glad that you’ve gotten into that subject. But why don’t you start off with what are all of the four abilities?

Terry

I kind of made up the words, although they’ve been used before. The four abilities are: Likeability, believability, trustability, and wowability. And they’re in that order. You can think of the first three as sort of like selling skills in a way.

And the wowability is what I call referrals on steroids.It’s the things you do to blow your customer away so they never forget you; They use you over and over, they refer you to their friends.

But I feel that the most important ability in my book is trustability because when you’re, as you know, when you’re trusted business is easy, life moves along much easier.

I just met a customer today and they don’t know me, but they know my reputation, so they gave me the keys to their house. I mean, before today, I didn’t know them at all, but they also know that I would never do anything to jeopardize that trust. I, at first it used to be really uncomfortable for me to do that.

But now I understand that’s just how business has to be. People gotta be places. And, as I mentioned, the businesses easy.

Life goes faster when you’re trusted. And I talk about that in my book. There’s levels to get to, in opening up with and making a connection with a customer or a prospect.

They’re not going to trust you immediately, nobody does, right?

So you ease into it first, you make yourself more likable to them. And that’s the likability piece, doing little things like returning their calls when you said you’re going to and showing up on time and keeping your promises. And, even the like, the trust is still too big of a jump.

So what I put in there to bridge that was believability or credibility. And that’s when people start to believe in you. They like you, they give you a chance to maybe learn about them a little bit, and you back it up, you back your talk up with your actions. Again, we’re showing up on time and getting them what they need and in a timeframe when they want.

And only then that you can start moving into the trust phase. But it still can happen very fast over a matter of hours, maybe days. You don’t have a lot of time when you’re selling a customer. And I don’t look at it like I’m selling, it’s just trying to walk them through it. The reason I created these abilities is so I don’t feel like I’m selling because I hated it.

And the customer doesn’t feel like they’re being sold because you’re trying to be that person that they want to hire.

Dr. Ty

I understand that very well. I actually started my my career in computers, selling computers. And I quickly learned that I was absolutely terrible at selling. People would say, “well, let me think about it.” And I’d say, “yeah. Think about it. Go home. Come back later if you, if you want to.”

I was never a hard sell person. But if anybody had a problem, I was right there. And that’s actually how I got into fixing computers was that I would sell computers. Then people would have an issue with them and I’d go to their house and fix them.

Terry

Oh my gosh, that’s what it’s all about. Those supplying a service and being there to help your customer. Maybe it’s not the way you planned on helping them, but it all makes a difference in the end and it builds momentum really fast.

Dr. Ty

I noticed that. So you’ve talked about how trust is the most important, but it’s also the most difficult thing to get. Are there ways to get that trust quicker?

I look at it as you’re always on stage, you’re always being judged and at no time more than when you’re at someone’s home. I’m in the service industry and I go to people’s homes. So no time, more than when you’re coming to someone’s home, you’re going to be around their family and their kids.

And you’re right. I mean, Put on an air. That’s how it worked, how con artists got their name, from building confidence. But there are other things that I do. I have a website that’s just peppered with testimonials of customers, just like them, that had great things to say about me.

And I put that into the section of my book of wowability, but it’s a big selling point because when people see other people who are like them that have used your service and it’s worked out for them. I mean, and not just one, if you looked at my website, you can scroll for a long time and see literally hundreds of testimonials I have on there from past customers that were happy.

I found that to be so valuable to build trust quickly. I even created a form that I give away free in my book about how to collect testimonials without even having to ask. Just hand it to them and they give you the testimony. It’s very easy to do as long as you treat your customers right. That’s the key.

Dr. Ty

That’s very important. And it’s funny that you say that because before we started recording, we talked about how you know very little about computers and SEO and that kind of thing.

But testimonials is one of the best ways to do SEO also, because generally when people do testimonials, they’ve got those keywords for your business in there as well.

So you’re doing the techie stuff and you didn’t even know it.

Terry

Yeah, you’re right. The words trust are coming up. And that surprised me. It helped me with my selling down the road because as I started seeing what people said on my form. I only asked two questions and they’re both asked in a way to elicit a positive response; tell me one of the things you like most about working with us and name one or two things that we did that really stood out to you.

And very seldom did they talk about the work. I thought they would say something like, you guys are great painters. You have nice straight lines, you’re in and out and do a nice job and you clean up nice.

But it wasn’t that. The things that they say were things like you’re easy to talk to, you showed up when you said you would; you cleaned up after yourself; your crew was very polite.

It was all those little things that really aren’t part of the skills. And a thing I say over and over in my book is that your interpersonal skills will speed your success faster than your technical skills.

And for me, that’s just been something that I’ve learned over the years and it rings true for me still every day.

I guess the biggest thing those first eight or 10 years I struggled and the big takeaway for me and what I kind of want to leave you with.

The biggest takeaway that I learned is that people are not necessarily looking for the best or the cheapest price, the best painter in the world or the lowest price. They just want someone that’ll do what they promise and stand behind their product and are willing to create a relationship with them.

It was all about building that relationship and the success part seemed to happen all by itself.

Dr. Ty

I agree with you completely. Relationships are number one. If you don’t have a relationship, all you have is have a transaction. And if you have the relationship, to me, this is one thing that I’ve learned over many years of running my business as well, is the relationship will make it easy for people to refer you and referrals are going to be one of your biggest forms of getting new customers, especially if you’re a smaller company or more specialized.

Terry

Right. Yep. And I, and I like to boast, I, if you read anything I’ve done, you’ll probably see somewhere in there that I haven’t advertised since 2012. And that’s why I feel like what I’m saying makes sense and works because I don’t advertise. And I haven’t for a very long time, I have a website, but that’s really just a video brochure for me, the way I look at it.

But, no advertising, all of my business is repeat and referral. So I probably get 95% of the jobs that I look at. And it all comes down to one thing and that’s trust.

Dr. Ty

Yeah, that’s awesome. Hey Terry, thank you so much for being on Easy SEO and More!

Go to Terrybegue.com, and download his freebie, seven ways to grow your business without spending a dime to get more customers.

Click here to learn more about his book, Attract and Keep Customers for Life.