High Velocity Radio Show with guests Dr. Steve Bistritz and David Eckoff

On this recent High Velocity Radio show Stone Payton and Todd Schnick had such a content rich show that I had to have Karen Galambos with Right Type Pro transcribe it. First Dr Steve Bistritz shared some amazing information from his new book Selling to the C-Suite. then web entrepreneur David Eckoff shared some insights on customer experience. David's newest venture is called Spitter, which is sports on Twitter.

 

High Velocity Radio Show

www.highvelocityblog.com

with

Stone Payton and Todd Schnick

Guests:  Dr. Steve Bistritz and David Eckoff

August 17, 2009

Stone Payton: Welcome to the High Velocity Radio Show.   This is Stone Peyton with my personal commitment to you that as soon as the voice over guy gets out of rehab we're going to have him back in the studio, have him cut a new intro because there's a lot going on.  A lot has changed.  My partner and now co-host, Todd Schnick, is in the studio with us each Monday morning.  What's happening Todd?

Todd Schnick: Having a great day.  You know my contract stipulated a new voice over on Day 1 and it's been about a month now.  (laughter)

Stone Payton: When we get him cleaned up we'll get him in here and we'll get that handled for you, okay?

Todd Schnick: I appreciate that.

Stone Peyton: So what's going on this week?   A lot happened over the last few days.  Get us caught up.

Todd Schnick: Well gosh, I think the two biggest pieces of news is that the High Velocity Radio Show now has a flagship sponsor, PSI, the digital media experts.  We're really excited about that.  You can find out more about them on their website which can be found at highvelocityblog.com.  This is the very beginning of this relationship with PSI.  We have some big things planned down the road but we're excited to have them as a part of this family.

I think the other exciting news, Stone, and we've got Lee with us here in the studio, our producer.  Radio X had our first awards last week and Amy Otto, the host of the Atlanta Business Radio, was our first winner.

Stone Payton: Yeah, big surprise there, huh?  We were gunning for her.

Todd Schnick: Well that was our target in the campaign but she did a great job and has a great show and a big following.  I spent the weekend, Stone, counting up all of the money we raised for the Furniture Bank and the Furniture Bank was the true winner of the campaign.

Stone Payton: How did we do after you took your cut? (laughter)

Todd Schnick: We had like $5 left after I took my cut, but the great news is that we're going to be able to provide beds to children in two families.  And so the dramatic impact on those lives is very special to all of us and I appreciate everybody who participated in that event and donated that money.  Next time we'll do more to steal more votes.

Stone Payton: That's right.  We'll be back in the fall, won't we?

Todd Schnick: Yes we will.  Yes we will.

Stone Payton: Well thanks for getting us updated.  We have a marvelous show for you this morning.  I'm delighted to let you know that at the top of the show we're going to introduce Dr. Steve Bistritz who has a new book coming out in just a few weeks, I believe.  Very anxious to share some news with you about that and really dive into the mind of this gentlemen and find out what we can about how and why some people are meeting and serving senior level executives far better and far more effectively than others.  And then after we visit with Dr. Steve Bistritz, we're going to have technology entrepreneur David Eckoff on.  I don't have a clue what we're going to talk to him about, but we'll unleash Todd on him and see what we can learn from David Eckoff.

Todd Schnick: Yeah, we'll figure that out.

Stone Payton: But first up on the High Velocity Radio Show this morning is Steve Bistritz.  Welcome to the show Steve.

Dr. Steve Bistritz: Good morning.  It's great to be with you this morning, Stone.

Stone Peyton: We are delighted are to have you on the show.  So tell us why did you choose to write a book about selling to executives?

Dr. Steve Bistritz: Well Stone, there's a lot of literature out there on selling to executives, but most of it was written by salespeople from an anecdotal perspective.  Selling to the C-Suite highlights the research we did with CXO level executives where we asked about their relationships with professional salespeople.  So from that perspective we think it makes a significant contribution to the sales profession because it speaks from what the executive was really looking for in their relationships with salesmen.

Stone Payton: So what did you ask them?

Dr. Steve Bistritz: Well we asked them a lot of key questions.  For example, we asked them when and why they got involved in the sales process or the decision making process.  We also asked them what has to happen with sales people for them to think it was an effective meeting.  When they had a meeting with a salesperson, what did the salesperson do so that it was an effective meeting from the executive's perspective.  And lastly we asked them questions about what do salespeople have to do to gain credibility with them.

Stone Payton: So what was your favorite part about conducting these interviews?  Did you learn anything particularly new or something that surprised you?

Dr. Steve Bistritz: Well, you know we did, because when we talked to executives, and we asked them those questions, we got some interesting answers, but more interesting was the perspective we got from those executives.  For example, in one of the interviews I had with a CXO level executive that's a senior executive in the client organization, I asked him why would you ever meet with professional salespeople.  And I’ll never forgot his answer.  He told me that "I meet with professional salespeople because often they can offer me advice on issues related to my company that even my own people can't come up with.  So I want the benefit of their experience and knowledge because they've seen it in other organizations and I want to hear about their experience, what they've done, how they've solved some of those problems."

Stone Payton: So you've hit the big time, you're on the High Velocity Radio Show, you've got this new book that is being published by a little upstart in the New England area called, what is it, McGraw-Hill or something like that?

Steve Bistritz: Right, right.

Stone Payton: So…

Steve Bistritz: Go ahead, I'm sorry.

Stone Payton: Well I'm just interested to know, how does a person get to this point?  You know a lot of our listeners, Steve, are aspiring authors.  They are and want to continue to be thought leaders, they want to get published, how does one get to this point?

Steve Bistritz: Well that's a great question and let me tell you exactly how it happened because it was really easy, but then again I think we hit the right point without the book.  And that's the key.  I think you've got to have a book that the publisher thinks is going to appeal to some audience out there.  And that's what happened with us because I'll tell you exactly what happened.  In September of last year, in 2008, we sent proposals, blind proposals to four different book publishers and we didn't have a contact within those publishing organizations.  We didn't know exactly who to get to.  We sent it to four publishers and two of those publishers, McGraw-Hill and John Wiley came back to us and said "We have some interest.  Tell us more about the book."

And then the other thing we did is we had the book almost finished, sent it to about 40 or 50 people out there who have some interest in the sales profession who are recognized sales professionals and they came back to us with comments and we included those comments in the book proposal.

So it's really about Number 1, getting the right kind of book.  Number 2, just getting your proposal in front of some publishers and then 3, having some people that are recognized professionals out there give you some input on what they thought about the book.

Todd Schnick: Steve, what I'm looking forward to most about this book is this concept of this relevant executive, the relevant client executive.  Can you shed some more light on that?

Steve Bistritz: That's a great question Todd.  We define what we call the relevant executive as the executive who stands to gain the most, or lose the most, as a result of the application or project associated with the sales opportunity.  You know that is so key, but it's so simple and most salespeople neglect it.  They overlook it.  They're talking to some contact in the client organization who's telling them that they're doing great, they've got a great proposal in front of them and there is some executive in the client organization sitting out there talking to some of their competitors and you've got to find out who that relevant executive is.  And again, it's who stands to gain the most or lose the most as a result of the application or project associated with your sales opportunity.  Find that person and that person can really make the buying decision.

Todd Schnick: So it might not necessarily by the CEO.  It could be a different C level executive in that organization and the trick is identifying who that relevant executive is.

Steve Bistritz: You're exactly right because when I worked for IBM and I spent 28 years with IBM in sales, sales management and sales executive positions, the mantra with IBM was Sell at the Top.  Always get to that CEO.  You don't always have to find that CEO.  You have to find that relevant executive who is really on the line for the application or project that's associated with your sales opportunity.

Stone Payton: And I get the idea that the target reader for your book is the business to business sales executive.  Have I got that right?

Steve Bistritz: The business to business salesperson, sales manager, sales executive, anybody who is in the area of business to business selling is the top candidate for this book.  Now I think other sales professionals can get some insight from the book, but it's really aimed at the business to business salesperson or sales organization.

Todd Schnick: Steve do you think, you and I pre-show were discussing the power of the internet and where we still think that the internet and what it means is still in its infancy.  The internet, as we know it, is only 15 years old, do you think there's a role to play using social media in this space?

Steve Bistritz: Absolutely, because one of the things in the book is that internet marketing is really playing a key role today and it's going to play more of a role as we move forward.  That's Number 1.  Number 2, client executives out there, they're using the internet to find out information about the different organizations that are selling to them.  So when a salesperson makes contact with an executive in the client organization, that individual has already done some homework on you.  More importantly, the salesperson has to do a lot of homework on the client executive.  And one of the ways to find out more about the client executive him or herself is to use things like LinkedIn and other social media, LinkedIn I guess is more of a business example, but social media will play more and more of a role.  Facebook and some of those other social media will be more important as we move forward.

Todd Schnick: I'm thinking that those tools could be helpful in pinpointing that relevant executive.

Steve Bistritz: Absolutely, the thing about identifying the relevant executive is you can't do that in one call.  You can't do that with one observation of the client organization.  You've got to do a lot of work to identify that relevant executive and then start triangulating your information so that you get to that right person who can help you win the deal.

Stone Payton: Well, my advance copy of the book got lost in the mail, Steve.  But as I understand it, you did release some advance copy to a few people in the sales arena that are well respected and some of us might recognize.  One name that I saw that maybe a few people might recognize is a gentleman by the name of Neil Rackham and I wanted to read a quote, because you didn't just get Neil Rackham to blurb your book.  I mean this guy invested the time and energy to write the forward for this book.  I want to read this quote and it's just one small snippet from a really well written, well thought out forward.  Here's the quote.  "This is a refreshing realism about the author's advice.  No gimmicks, no tricks, no smoke and mirrors.  Selling a C level is hard, thoughtful and strategic and the book offers none of the usual unrealistic silver bullets."  I mean that is…what an endorsement.  How do you go about even getting a Neil Rackham to even crack your book open?  Give us a little history on that whole thing.

Steve Bistritz: Well, one of the things we had to do in kind of researching how we were going to publicize this book was finding out some of those sales professionals out there who we thought had credibility with publishers.  And obviously Neil Rackham is one of them.  When we had the forward written by Neil, I sent it to my kids and none of them have ever heard of Neil Rackham so I tried to explain to them that Neil Rackham was to sales, or is to sales, like Tiger Woods is to golf.  So getting Neil Rackham to endorse a book on selling is kind of like Tiger Woods endorsing a book on how to play golf.  But what happened was we sent the book to him, the pre-release copy early version of the book, and it wasn’t totally completed and he saw it and the first thing he did was he sent back a note and he said "You know I get so many of these requests.  I review about 10 or 15% of the books that are ever sent to me so I'm not sure I'm ever going to be able to get an endorsement to you."  And about two weeks later we got an email from Neil and he said "I really loved the book and here's my quote."  And he sent it to us and a little bit later we said "Hey Neil, would you be willing to write the forward for the book?"  So just by asking him to do something, he did it for us.  He wrote the forward for us, he was very generous in doing that.  But that also played a role in getting the book published because when McGraw-Hill obviously saw that quote from Neil, they had published his book on spin selling, they thought quite a bit of Neil Rackham and they said "Hey, we've got to get on this."  And they did and the rest is history, as they say.

Todd Schnick: Tell us about some of the other initial reviews you've gotten.

Steve Bistritz: Well we got reviews from people like Chip Brubaker who is a key executive of CA, Computer Associates.  We got reviews from other sales executives who probably wouldn't be as recognizable as Neil Rackham but they are significant sales executives at organizations around the world, some in the United States, some in Europe, some in Asia, some in Australia.  So the book has a global perspective and global executives have seen it and endorsed it and have really liked it.  They said that it's something out there that's going to give salespeople some insight into how to do a better job of selling at the executive level and that's what the book is all about.  Selling to the C-Suite.

Stone Payton: Selling to the C-Suite is the title of the book.

Steve Bistritz: Yes.

Stone Payton: And where can people get access to it, buy it, read about it?

Steve Bistritz: Well right now you can go to my website www.sellxl.com and you'll see on the homepage, just click on the book and there's more information about it.  You can preorder it today at any of the online bookstores and you can preorder from my website so I look forward to people reading the book, and not only reading the book, but getting value from it so that they can go out there and close some of those key deals that they're working on.

Stone Payton: Well Steve, it's been an absolute delight having you on the show this morning.  Hope you got a heads up on this, but before we let you go, we do have a little tradition here on the High Velocity Radio Show.  We like to ask each guest if they would like to share a mistake at some point that they've made in their career, and more importantly, what they've learned from it.  Can we con you into doing that for us?

Steve Bistritz: When I was a young IBM salesperson and new to sales, I didn't always focus on executives in the client organization who had the most influence or power.  I had no idea that politics was in play in client organizations.  I was very naïve.  My focus was on the contact person that I had already gotten, the person that I was comfortable calling on.  And that person may not have had any influence or power on the sales opportunity I was pursuing there.  My mistake was in not spending enough time identifying what I now call the ‘relevant executive’.  What I learned is that by identifying the relevant executive and aligning with that person, that is the single most important thing you can accomplish as you pursue sales opportunities because those people can help you navigate the complex structures of the organization and can help influence the decision process in your favor.  That's the one thing I tell salespeople today, in the business to business environment, go out there and find that executive that I'm talking about.  That ‘relevant executive’.  You'll reduce the time it takes to close the deal.  Very simple.

Stone Payton: I can't wait to get the book.  I'm sure my advanced copy will find it's way through the mail in the next day or so, but I'm so interested and enamored with this idea of identifying the relevant executive and then exercising some of the strategies that you learned from doing real work research as opposed to some guy just thinking through theory around all this.  So thank you so much for being on our show Steve.  Can you hang out with us while we interview our next guest?

Steve Bistritz: Absolutely.  I'll be right here.

Stone Payton: Alright.  Well next up on the High Velocity Radio Show - I am delighted to introduce to you technology entrepreneur, David Eckoff.  I met this jean-clad, t-shirt wearing entrepreneur some weeks ago.

Todd Schnick: He's our kind of guy.

Stone Payton: Yeah, he's got the backpack and the whole bit and we talked about all kinds of things that really interest me and, candidly, sometimes befuddle me.  I just have to admit up front you're going to find out very quickly, this guy has got several IQ points on you and me.   I can't wait to dive in and find out what he's up to and learn what we can about where this world and where the business environment is headed with respect to technology.  So with all that said, please join me in welcoming David Eckoff.

David Eckoff: Hey Stone, it's great to be here today and hear you remarking about my t-shirt and jeans-clad entrepreneur dress.  I really enjoyed hearing Steve and your start of the segment today.  I got my start at IBM also, and after too many years wearing white shirts and red ties, it's great to be an entrepreneur and I spend a lot of time in the Silicon Valley and the Bay Area and it's I think standard dress for the black t-shirt and jeans.

Stone Payton: Well we all have an IBM connection.  That's how my mortgage gets paid.  My wife has a real job with IBM as a consultant, so thank you IBM, our second sponsor. (laughter) I think mostly what we want to talk to you about this morning is innovation in customer experience.  Can you expand on that?  Tell us what that means to you.

David Eckoff: People ask me all the time, "So David Eckoff, you're a technology entrepreneur, why are you so interested in customer experience and why is it so important?"  Well, a decade ago there was a big gap in product quality between the Number 1 and the Number 2 and the Number 3 players.  And today that gap has closed.  So the key question that we need to ask ourselves as business people is how are you going to differentiate your product or service?  I believe a great opportunity is to differentiate based on customer experience.  Jeff Bezos who is the founder and CEO of amazon.com, he makes the distinction between customer experience and customer service.  He says "Customer experience at Amazon includes having the lowest price, the fastest delivery and being reliable enough so that you don't have to contact anyone."  That's their customer experience.  And he says "You save customer service for the truly unusual situations when things go wrong with the customer experience.  This is when you as a customer interact with Amazon employees."  And he views this, and his company executes on this, as it's the exception not the rule.  So customer service is a subset of the overall customer experience.  And Bezos said something that really got my attention.  This is so important, what I'm about to tell you.  “Fixing customer problems builds loyalty with people.”  Think about that.  It's so important I'll say it again.  Fixing customer problems builds loyalty with people.

Todd Schnick: That's my favorite thing about social media, David, is that my clients say, "Oh, I don't want to get involved in the social media space because I'll rope myself up to getting criticized on line."  I say, "That's the best opportunity you have to build a long term loyal customer, when you can publicly fix and solve that problem.  You're more likely to build a loyal customer long term than if they came in and had an average experience that you never really knew about."  So a lot of people talk about customer experience and there's a lot of ways to impact that.  How does technology play a role in there?

David Eckoff: So technology can play a role in multiple ways.  A couple of examples, and I've been paying a lot of attention to customer experience just as myself, as a customer, so I'll talk about things from my own personal experience.  I'm interested in hearing from your experience too, what you've seen.  So technology, a couple of examples…I just ordered an item on amazon.com recently and before it had even arrived, the price had declined.  I got in contact with Amazon and on the technology side, they've got something on their website where they make it easy to get in touch with them.  They don't just publish their phone number, but all you have to do is enter your phone number and click and bang, they call you right back.

Stone Payton: Oh that's cool.  I didn't realize that.

David Eckoff: But it gets better, Stone.  It gets better because at this point you can imagine as a customer I'm not too happy that the price went down.  I didn't even have the item yet.  So I asked them "Could you issue me a refund for the difference."  And I didn't really think they would but I figured it was worth talking to them anyway since they made it so easy to get in touch.  And you know, they did.  They said "Hold on.  This particular item is with one of our divisions.  We want to connect you to somebody from that division."  And of course what happened when the person connected me, they disconnected me.  (laughter) So technology can have its ups and its downs but here's where it gets really so much better is within a few seconds I got an email automatically kicked off to me from Amazon saying "We noticed you just had a customer service call with Amazon.  Did this call resolve your problem?  Click here for Yes.  Click here for No."  So of course I clicked here for No.  And then an amazing thing happened.  They gave me the opportunity to call them back on line or they called me back and I was connected automatically.  Because I clicked "No, the problem wasn't resolved" I wasn't just connected to a first line customer service rep.  I was connected with a specialist who handled customer service problems that had not yet been resolved and she, on the spot fixed it.

Stone Payton: Nice.

David Eckoff: How impressive is that with technology to have that happen so quickly?  And Amazon is clearly a company that's thinking through that customer experience and how to win people over when things go wrong.

Todd Schnick: What do you think about Amazon buying Zappos?

David Eckoff: I'm a big fan of Zappos.  Tony Shea, the CEO of Zappos, he spoke at South by Southwest this year and I've been studying what he does and a couple of things that… we'll talk about Zappos in a minute but how do I feel about it?  I'm a passionate fan of Zappos.  Zappos for those of you who don't know, they're an online ecommerce site, they're primarily known for selling shoes but they've branched off in other things like clothing, accessories like sunglasses, etc.  My own experience with Zappos, I went to buy a pair of sunglasses.  They're really cool sunglasses.  I couldn't wait to get them.  Being the cheap SOB that I am, and as an entrepreneur, I did not put the most expensive shipping.  I opted for the slowest shipping.  And guess what?  Zappos, one of the things they do for the customer experience, they want to wow people and they surprise upgraded me to overnight shipping.  How cool was that?

It's things like that that win customer loyalty.  So it's not just when things go wrong that you can win loyalty, but also it's when things happen unexpectedly, positive surprises.  So just in this room, how many of you like surprises?

Stone Payton: I do.

Todd Schnick: I do.

Stone Payton: Right.

David Eckoff: So Zappos is all about good surprises.  At South by Southwest, so if you really want to understand how to do customer experience, you really want to study zappos.com.  There are some great videos online from South by Southwest that you can watch.  One thing I learned at South by Southwest from Tony Shea, the CEO of Zappos, is he talks about how Zappos doesn't just sell shoes.  They don't think that they just sell shoes.  Zappos sells happiness in a box.  Put yourself in the position of the person who is ordering those shoes.  Of course they want the shoes, but at the end of the day, what do they really want?  They want to be happy.  They want to feel happy.  So Zappos makes sure that they sell happiness in a box.

Compare that to other businesses.  Cold Stone Creamery, have you ever been there?  It's ice cream.

Todd Schnick: Yes.

David Eckoff: Do they sell ice cream?  Of course they sell ice cream.  As a customer do I go there and get ice cream?  Sure.  But at the end of the day what do they really sell.

Todd Schnick: Happiness in a cone. (laughter)

David Eckoff: Happiness in a cone or a cup.  You got it.  I spent some time this past week talking with the president of Cold Stone Creamery, Dan Beem, who's a great guy and who has a great vision for their customer service and customer experience and he talked about how their goal is to WOW you at Cold Stone and to make sure… We talked about that with Zappos.  He thought that was so cool.  He was like "Happiness in a cone.  Yeah.  That's it."

Stone Payton: So you're finding rock stars in this arena that are doing it well and that what?  You're going out to your client base and helping them replicate that success in helping them develop some of these strategies?

David Eckoff: Well Stone, I divide my time between a couple of things.  One of them is that as a tech entrepreneur I'm developing and launching my own technology business.  In fact today the open beta for my newest startup Spitter.com is launching.

Todd Schnick: That's what I want to talk about.

David Eckoff: We'll get to that in a minute.  I figure less people are interested in Spitter unless they're sports fans but spitter.com, think of it as a great place for sports fans to be able to get all the news and all the fan discussion.  There's so much of it and it's so spread out over the web, we aggregate that into one easy to scan page stream.  So think of it a little bit like sports, maybe a little bit like Twitter, that's Spitter.  That's open data starting today at spitter.com.  Great place for sports fans.

Stone Payton: I thought it was just solely dedicated to baseball when he said Spitter.  I didn't know. (laughter)

David Eckoff: The other part of what I do, I divide my time between that and I work with select high technology start ups, in particular high potential start-ups.  I've worked with companies like Zazzle, Kleiner Perkins company in the Bay Area, youstream.tv which is kind of like youtube except it's all about live streaming video.  Great group of people over at youstream. And Chris Klaus here in Atlanta.  Great local entrepreneur with 3D Virtual World Kaneva.  I'm really impressed with what Kaneva is doing and Chris is an outstanding entrepreneur.

But I also work with them in some ways with customer experience but my focus on customer experience is really about learning best practices and going out and putting them into play in my own businesses.  You mentioned social media before.  Social media, you also mentioned Zappos.  Tony Shea, the CEO of Zappos, he's on Twitter ALOT! More than anyone I know, he's a Twitter rock star.  So you guys are all on Twitter, right?

Todd Schnick: Yes.

Stone Payton: Yeah, I think so.

David Eckoff: And out there in radio land, if you're not on Twitter really check it out.  It sounds like the dumbest thing.  I thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard of when I heard about it.  Like "Why would you want to Tweet about what you're doing?"  But it turns out it's an ultra powerful way to connect with people.  Jack Welch, the CEO of former CEO of General Electric, even he's on Twitter and he said something "Twitter makes me smarter."  Well, I've got a lot of respect for Jack Welch and when Jack Welch says "Twitter makes me smarter." I think there's something there.

Todd Schnick: The cool thing about Twitter is that people like you and I can connect with Tony Shea.

David Eckoff: Yeah.

Todd Schnick: He's active.  He's very engaged in Twitter.

David Eckoff: And not only can you connect with him, but Tony Shea, how cool is this in terms of customer experience?  He goes out there on Twitter and he says, this is like last year sometime, and he says "Hey, if you're a Zappos fan and you're going to be in Las Vegas anytime over this weekend" that's where their company is headquartered "We're having our company picnic on Sunday and we'd love for you to come by to our company picnic."  Now how amazing is this.

Stone Peyton: That rocks.

David Eckoff: If you're a fan of the company and the CEO says if you're going to be here come to our company picnic, I mean this is just like unprecedented.

Todd Schnick: It might be the coolest office working environment I've ever experienced or ever seen.  If you ever get a chance to get online and see digital pictures of the Zappos headquarters in Las Vegas, it's a pretty amazing place.  Talk about building happiness, it's a fun place to be.

David Eckoff: Not only can you see it online, but Tony makes this promise.  If you come out to Las Vegas and you're out there, get in touch with them and they'll take you on a tour.  They'll even pick you up at your hotel and bring you there.  This is a company that's dedicated to building great relationships with their customers and I read that Jeff Bezos said he was so impressed with Zappos and how they do things and that's one of the things that he liked a lot.

So what do I think about the purchase from Amazon, I think it was about 800 million roughly, I think that's a great combination of companies.  I'm a big fan of both companies.

Stone Payton: Okay so how does the guy with the little 3 million dollar consulting firm that really buys into that whole approach, what kinds of things does he do to replicate or she do to replicate that same type of practice that you see with the Amazons and the Zappos.

David Eckoff: I think it's looking at each point of interaction that you have with your customers and looking at it from the customer experience.  I'll give you an example.  Cold Stone Creamery, this is how I end up talking with Dan Beem, the president of Cold Stone last week… as I see things go right "I'm interested in understanding that and replicated it."  As I see things go wrong "I’m interested in understanding what things led to those things going wrong so we can learn from that and maybe avoid them."  So it was my birthday a couple of weeks ago and there's this one ice cream from Cold Stone that I just love.  It's a creation called Mud Pie Mojo and I'll tell you what, I just love this Mud Pie Mojo.

Stone Payton: Sounds good.  Sounds so good for you too. (laughter)

David Eckoff: I'm sure it is.  Those folks on the air that know me know that I eat a lot of organic salads and I pretty healthy, but I've got a weakness for this Cold Stone Mud Pie Mojo.  So all day long, on my birthday no less, I'm thinking of what?  That Mud Pie Mojo and I'm just like "I can't wait to get in there."  I looked up online at coldstonecreamery.com to see the little store near me what time are they open till. They're open till 10:00 at least according to the website.  I show up at 9:30 and the door to the store is locked.  I reach out and pull the handle.  I tried a couple of times.  I tried it again a couple of times.  And it's still locked.  Can you imagine the look on my face?  And of course the people at Cold Stone Creamery employees are in there closing up and they're like "We don't want to open the doors."

So, this is part of the customer experience.  It's not just when you're in the store, not just when you're getting ice cream in this case.  It's really the whole end to end customer experience.  If you look at that WOW factor from Zappos that they're trying to have, or from Amazon, you really don't want to be disappointed customers like that, particularly not on their birthdays.  On your birthday, you can spend your birthday anywhere.  So out of the infinite number of places I could have spent my birthday, I decided to spend it with Cold Stone Creamery to get my Mud Pie Mojo.

I had a good conversation with Dan Beem about this and some lessons learned from this is Dan Beem, president of Cold Stone nationally, he has a vision for the customer experience that's dramatically different than that.  I think what we see there is one of the things that can go wrong it is the classic example of the executive and the executive team that has a vision for things being one way, but then the execution of that plan either being a lot different or a wide variation.  It goes to show that it's important, it's critically important, to have the communication channels open so that you understand when things go wrong so you can make them right.

In this case I thought "I'm going on this radio show with Stone talking about customer experience.  Let's try this out.  Let's see if it happens like Amazon or not, just as an experiment. And what can I learn from this that I can go back and apply to my own businesses?"  And here's what I found...So Dan said that I have three lines of defenses or three pillars.  The first thing is the person who's at the front line.  The person who's the staff person making ice cream.  They should be able to solve any problem and make things right on the spot.  If that doesn't happen then the store manager or the franchise owner should be able to handle things and turn things around on the spot.  They want you to have a WOW experience, not a what happened experience.  And the third line of defense is they have a national 800 number and you can call into and they should be able to solve things and turn things around on the spot.

My experience in this case is none of those three worked.  All three of them failed.  So again further disconnect between their vision and the actual execution.  But having spent a lot of time with the folks from Cold Stone over the past week at an executive level to talk with them more about this and seek to understand how things are going with that, I have no doubt in my mind that they are absolutely committed to changing the execution of their plan.  That's impressive and I have a lot of good things to say about the folks from Cold Stone at the executive level and the focus they're having.

So what can we do as entrepreneurs?  I think it's put yourself in the shoes of the customer.  What does the customer really want?  They're looking for that happiness in a box, the happiness in an ice cream cone.  I read this recently.  I thought this was great…I wrote this down and highlighted it in yellow.  I recommend that you write this down and highlight it in yellow yourself.  Put it somewhere that you can see it.

Stone Payton: We're going to record it. (laughter)

David Eckoff: Outstanding!  "People don't always remember what you say to them but they almost always remember how you made them feel."  So again people don't always remember what you say to them, they don't always remember what you do, but they almost always remember how they feel.  So how do you want your customers to feel before, during and after their interactions with you?

I'd say start with that and then design everything in your execution to make that happen.  Have some methods in place so you can know if that's on target or not on target.  A few ways that you can know if it's on target or not on target is there's something called Net Promoter Score.  I don't know if you're familiar with this.  This is a customer satisfaction measure.  When I was at IBM, Steve you're from IBM also, we put a lot of focus on customer satisfaction and measuring it.  We measured it quarterly, we looked at the scores.  We put a lot of focus on that.  Well a funny thing, some smart consultants at Bain, Bain Consulting, studied us extensively.  Statistically they found that customer satisfaction does not necessarily statistically correlate with profitable growth.  That's interesting.

What else might you want to focus on as a metric to measure?  How about customer loyalty or intent to purchase?  Well it turns out, none of these things statistically correlate to profitable growth.  But the folks at Bain, these smart rocket science kind of guys, they did discover one metric.  There is one metric that they found that consistently statistically correlated to profitable growth for the company.  When I heard this and heard that GE is focused on this and I heard great companies like Intuit focused on this, I thought "Maybe I should learn about this and focus on this."  This metric is one thing.  "Would you recommend this product or service to a colleague, family member or friend."  When you measure that, all you have to do is ask that one question and the follow up question was "Why do you feel that way?"  If you can understand that you'll know pretty much everything you needed to know.

Now a quantitative person like myself, MBA, so not just mega bad attitude but also the degree. (laughter) I put a lot of focus on measuring.  I'm kind of a detail oriented person and so when I thought "You can only ask one question to find out everything you need to learn?", that's pretty amazing.  I like the simplicity of that.  It's simple.  It's powerful.  You can have that as an operating metric for your business.

But what does this mean for your business?  The score is from ten to zero, ten being:  Absolutely, you'd recommend to friends, zero being:  not at all.  How does this work?  You take the percentage of people who said ten or nine, those are called promoters.  Those are people that are out promoting your brand.  You want these promoters.  Then the people that are eight and sevens, these are neutral.  Throw those numbers out.  It's not that they're unimportant customers but they're not promoters and nor are they the next step which is six, five, four, three, two, one, zeros.  These are people who are detractors.  These are people who are out, they're so unhappy with you.

Stone Payton: We've got to hush them up.  We've got to quiet them, right? (laughter)

David Eckoff: Well it's not so much that you have to quiet them, we want to listen to what they have to say.  There's that great commercial from Direct TV, I think, where they're poking fun at saying "Those customers who are trouble makers, we need to quiet them down" or something like that.  Well it's not so much we need to quiet them down, we need to learn from them.  But we want to turn them from detractors into promoters, so turn things around.

But to use the metric you take the percentage who are promoters, minus the percentage who are detractors, that's your net promoter score.  A perfect growth engine for a company would be having what percentage promoters?  One hundred percent.  For every customer you bring in, they're out recommending to friends and bringing more people in to your business.  That's a perfect growth engine.  What would be a perfectly bad growth engine?  What percentage being net promoters?

Todd Schnick: Zero.

David Eckoff: Zero.  Correct.  So Steve, a surprise to you? (laughter)

Stone Payton: Can you tell who in the audience is educated?  I mean I'm really enamored with this concept.  I'm really glad we decided to record the algebra.  But we love the idea.

Todd Schnick: Yeah, we're not into the math thing.  That was a problem. (laughter)

David Eckoff: Do you know any companies that have perfectly bad growth engines with like 0% promoters?  Or even like negative net promoter score meaning they're creating more detractors than promoters on a daily basis.  I know some companies, I know some entire industries like that.

Stone Payton: Huge government agencies maybe.

David Eckoff: Yeah, maybe industries like airlines.  Maybe certain cable companies that should remain nameless at the moment.  I think in all our experience we see this.  What does that mean for business?  It means you're always having to spend a lot of money on marketing and you're having to work really hard and spend a lot of money with marketing to attract new customers all the time because you have a leaky bucket that's constantly losing customers.  Why would you want to do that?  Wouldn't you prefer to have a bucket that's constantly filled up with customers who are going out getting more customers.

So this is something that I've experimented with since I was at Real Networks in Seattle, implemented at Turner Broadcasting when I was VP for new product development at Turner.  All my clients I work with use the net promoter score.  Chris Klaus, a great entrepreneur here in Atlanta with keneva.com.  When I explained that net promoter score to him, he's a brilliant guy, he instantly saw the potential for this.  As a consultant, one of the things that just makes your heart - you just feel really great, is when you make a recommendation and the client company actually goes out and does it and they do it in a big way.  So they've put a lot of focus on the net promoter score.  They're learning.  It becomes a metric, it's a benchmark.  And no matter what your score is, good, bad or indifferent, no matter what the score is, every quarter you try to increase it.  So wherever you are, and just like in life, no matter where you are in life, keep improving.  If you can improve just 1% everyday in anything you do, by the end of the year, just do the math on that, you'll make tremendous gains.  Same thing with net promoter score.

Todd Schnick: I love this concept.  Let me tell you, David, an example of how one of my clients puts it in action.  I do marketing for a local restaurant and we solicit customer feedback.  We have cards on the tables and they are invited to fill those out and put them in the confidential box.  It's my job to go through those and measure and quantify the data.  Every now and then someone has an experience that's not up to their satisfaction.  We naturally take steps to address that and solve that problem.  But fortunately for us, more often than not people say "This was a wonderful experience and we're going to tell all our friends about it."  Well we take steps to encourage that.  We then just don't say "Thanks."  We send them Buy One Get One Free cards and we thank them and we take other steps.  We don't just want to reward people who are complaining.  We want to reward people and say "We're going to take the next step and help facilitate them to be promoters."  So it's a phenomenal concept.  So I thank you for sharing that with us.

David Eckoff: I really like that and as we were talking about you put a lot of focus on listening to your customers, there are two companies I wanted to call out as great examples that I've seen during the past year.  I've worked with them as customers myself.   They provide a great example I think we all can model.  They're both on Twitter.  One of them is Dell, Dell Computers and the other is Comcast.  So I've got to say my experience with both of those companies with their standard customer service channel has been abysmal.  Michael Dell are you listening?

Comcast, I already know you're not really listening but…

Stone Payton: They'd listen on Twitter though, right?

David Eckoff: But standard customer service channels are so abysmal.  Everyone I talked with in preparation for this radio show asking about companies that do it right and companies that don't, I mean there are certain companies that happen pretty often to come up in conversation, but those two, their standard customer service needs a lot of work.  But they've got some folks who are pioneers doing some great things.  So at Dell, Richard Bernier, who's on Twitter at rich_@_dell.  Rich, though I had some issues that weren't being resolved and I said "You know what?  I bet Dell has got some folks in social media.  I'll get in touch with them and see if they can help?"  Rich is just out there on Twitter all day long and what's he doing?  He's looking for people who have problems with Dell computers and their Dell experience and he's like, along with the rest of his team, he's helping people one at time to solve their problems.

Stone Payton: How cool is that?

Todd Schnick: That's great.

David Eckoff: So when I had problem with my laptop and standard channels weren't helping, in fact it was a miserable experience, he said "You know what?  I'm going to help you get this done and here's how we're going to do it."  And I thought that was tremendous.

And Comcast, a company that I just gotta wonder with their standard customer service, they've got somebody who is like that.  I think everyone of our companies needs someone like this.  At Comcast, they're on Twitter at comcastcares.  His name is Frank Eliason and he is Director of Digital Ecare.  If you just say anything about Comcast like "I'm having a problem with Comcast."  So last night, the season premier of Mad Men was on, so one of the people on Twitter who I follow was having some problems with his Comcast service and he's upset because he's not going to be able to see Mad Men.  He put something into Twitter of course saying "You know, problems with Comcast."  What happens next is something that completely surprised him.  Comcastcares on Twitter gets back in touch with him, just out of the blue, they're monitoring what's going on Twitter with the conversations looking for opportunities to help customers and they said "How can we help."

Stone Payton: That is awesome.  David we're about to run out of time but before we let you go, a couple of things.  One, how can people get in touch with you to learn more about your work, about innovation in customer experience and maybe apply some of these ideas and strategies to their own work.  What's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

David Eckoff: You can get in touch with me via email at davideckoff@gmail.com.  That's D-A-V-I-D-E-C-K-O-F-F @gmail.com or my blog davideckoff.com or you can check me out on Twitter.  On Twitter I'm davideckoff.

Stone Peyton: Or just howl at the moon and you'll be there, right? (laughter)

David Eckoff: Something like that and I do monitor Twitter for people talking about me and I've got alerts on Google if you mention my name out on line, I'll see it and I'll be in touch.  I like to be real accessible and would love to hear from folks and talk business.

So I'll leave with this closing thought.  Another area where companies seem to go wrong is with, and I see this, is how they treat their employees.  Think about this.  How you treat your employees, your employees will never treat your customers any better than you treat your employees.

Stone Payton: Wow.  You're so right.

David Eckoff: So raise the bar on how you treat your employees.  Zappos does a great job with that.  Amazon does a great job with that, and many other companies.  If you're looking to have those WOW experiences for your customers, think about how you treat your employees and that can make a big difference.

Stone Payton: Well said.  Hey one last thing.  We'd love to put you on the hot seat for a moment if we can.  Of course you heard us as we were asking Steve Bistritz to share a mistake that he's made at some point in his career and what he learned from it.  Could we get you to do that?  A personal mistake that you've made in your career and what you've learned from it.

David Eckoff: Yeah.  Since we're talking customer experience, do I have 60 seconds to tell the story?

Stone Payton: You're good.  Go ahead.

David Eckoff: Okay.  So I just told someone about this the other day.  It's kind of funny I think for customer experience.  So I used to publish a sports magazine called Inside Carolina, covered University of North Carolina basketball and football.  A great way to go to a lot of games and a great fun business to have.  It actually put me in an entirely different path in my career that I never could have anticipated.  But I owned the domain name northcarolina.com, a pretty sweet domain name to have.

Stone Payton: Yeah, really.

David Eckoff: By owning the domain name northcarolina.com, surprising things happen.  You get people who are thinking about going to the Outer Banks on vacation.  They email you, just email into info@northcarolina.com "Can you tell me about the Outer Banks."  Or little Timmy in Jr. High is doing a book report and he emails info@northcarolina.com saying "Can you tell me the state bird of North Carolina." (laughter) People say "I'm moving to North Carolina, can you tell me more about housing?"  And I'm thinking can't they see on the website that it's a sports website.  It's about basketball and football.  They don't see this?  So then I put down frequently asked questions, I actually put answers to "What is the state bird?" "What is the state capital?" "What's the population?" "Tell me how to get in touch with people about travel and tourism, etc."

Stone Payton: (laughter) That's funny.

David Eckoff: Everyday these would come in, everyday for like seven years.  By the end of seven years this was starting to be kind of comical.  Except I really didn't have a lot of time to be dealing with all these questions.  I did my best to point them in the right direction.  Well one day I got an email from someone and it was like the straw that broke the camel's back.  I must have been real busy and aggravated that day and who knows what and she asked me a question about the Andy Griffith show which is set in North Carolina.  I thought "It's a sport site.  She's asking me a question about the Andy Griffith show?  Are you kidding me?" And against all the best judgment I hit reply and I wrote a scathing email back and hit send.  Of course you never want to do that but after seven cumulative years of entering little Timmy's book report questions and…

Stone Payton: They wore you down, huh?

David Eckoff: Two minutes later I got an email back from this person who is probably like a senior citizen and it's probably like her first time getting on the internet or doing email and she said "You don't sound like a very nice person." (laughter) I felt so badly and I wrote back to her and made that right afterwards.  The lesson learned from that is everyone has a reason why they do things.  Some times the reasons don't make sense to us but there's always a reason and I think having empathy for other people and treating other people as you'd want them to treat you, no matter what the situation, is the way to go.  It's something we all know and sometimes I think the lesson learned is that even when you're in the most stressful situations, take a deep breath, think about how you respond because there is a real person on the other end of that even in the impersonal communication channels that happen online.  I think I come across pretty sociable most of the time but it really showed that every interaction that we have with people, everyone one of them, is a real human being on the other side of that no matter what the experience is.  I think we want to have our actions consistent with how we'd want our own personal brand known.  My own personal brand I'm really looking for people to have those WOW experiences and for people to say "That was spectacular."  So your execution has to be consistent with your vision.  I'll throw that out there as a time something didn't go right, but I've hopefully turned that around.

Stone Payton: Well for what its worth, David, having you on the show today has definitely been a WOW experience.  We have thoroughly enjoyed it and I hope you'll come back sometime.

Todd, anything else to add?  What did you think about this show?

Todd Schnick: Oh, it was a good one.  It was a good one.  I look forward to listening to it again.  Two wonderful bright guests.

Stone Payton: Well we have to go back and listen to the Algebra anyway, right?

Todd Schnick: That's just not worth my time. (laughter)

Stone Payton: Until next time this is Stone Payton, Todd Schnick and the entire Radio X family saying we'll see you in the fast lane.

END

Georgia Business Coaches Show Transcript of Mariette Edwards and Kim Gay Interview

A few weeks ago BevAnn Bonds interviewed Mariette Edwards with StarMaker Coaching and Kim Gay with Match Healthcare on her Georgia Business Coaches show. This show gives you a lot of insight into the coach client relationship. Once again, a big thank you to Karen Galambos with Right Type Pro for this transcription.

 

 

 

GEORGIA BUSINESS COACHES SHOW

ON BUSINESS RADIOX

with

BevAnn Bonds

and

Lee Kantor

Guests

Mariette Edwards  - Star Maker Coaching

Kim Gay - MATCH Healthcare

June 9, 2009

BevAnn Bonds:  Good Morning. Welcome to the Georgia Business Coaches Show. I am

BevAnn Bonds and I am joined in the studio with my co-host, Lee Kantor.  Good Morning, Lee.

Lee Kantor:  Good Morning, BevAnn. How’re you doing?

BevAnn Bonds:  I am doing great!  It is a glorious day out today and we have two fantastic guests. I am really excited about this.

Lee Kantor:  I know, this is going to be a good show.

BevAnn Bonds:  It is. We are joined in the studio today with Mariette Edwards of Star Maker Enterprises and Star Maker Coaching and with Kim Gay of MATCH Healthcare consulting.  Good morning, ladies.

Mariette Edwards:  Good Morning.

Kim Gay:  Good Morning.

BevAnn Bonds:  We are really excited to jump into everything but we have to do a couple of things before we really get into it.  Each week on the Georgia Business Coaches Show we feature top businesses which provide our listeners with the opportunity to learn more about coaching, how it can help their business and the tools that coaches may use.   Today, we will be finding out about Mariette and how she works with clients and a little bit about what Kim’s business is and how her relationship has been with Mariette.  That’s going to be great.  Before we do that, we have to thank our sponsors.

Lee Kantor:  Today’s show is brought to you by Business Support Solutions, the virtual assistant organization providing administrative bookkeeping and marketing support to small business and, of course, Business RadioX, the radio marketing weapon.

BevAnn Bonds: Thanks again to our sponsors, Business RadioX and Business Support Solutions.

Mariette, you have a very dynamic background. You work as an executive coach, you have a real insider’s perspective on how businesses can really make decisions involving people.  Part of that ties to your background, so can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Mariette Edwards:  I originally am from New York.  I spent 20 years in human resources management, in executive roles here and in New York City. I left that corporate world back in 1989 and since then I have done a variety of things.  I was president of a radar test and threat simulation business, I worked in a variety of different industries while I was trying to find out what I wanted to do next in my career.  I landed in coaching quite by accident, actually, in 1996 and that is when I started my coaching practice.

BevAnn Bonds:  That is definitely at some of the forefront for coaches - changes.  I know that you’ve seen a lot over the past years.

Mariette Edwards:  Absolutely. There were only three coaches in Georgia when I launched my coaching practice.

BevAnn Bonds: You are one of the founding members of the Coach Federation?

Mariette Edwards:  The Georgia Chapter of the International Coach Federation.  I co-founded it with my coach at the time. I am not involved with the organization any longer, but I was right at the very beginning.

BevAnn Bonds: That’s great. You have a lot to give your clients, between the changes that you’ve seen in industry and during these times that is going to be really great and very helpful for them.

Lee Kantor:  Mariette, how do you see coaching changing over the years from when you started to the people who are getting into coaching now?

Mariette Edwards:  It is interesting because coaching is ranked as one of the hot careers to choose. When I started there was very little in the way of training opportunities. I worked with a Master Certified coach when I made the decision to go into this kind of business. At that time the only opportunity for learning was Coach University which had been started by Thomas Leonard, who has now passed on.  Now you can learn coaching in universities, they have programs for it. You can become certified in special certification programs that are offered by different colleges and universities. There are also full academic programs that prepare you for that. I think it is more in terms of corporate coaching, which is not where I focus my particular practice.  It has changed quite a bit and it has become much more organized, more formal than when coaching first started.

BevAnn Bonds:  Mariette, can you tell us a little bit about your coaching practice and what your specialties are?

Mariette Edwards:  I specialize in three practice areas. The first is Career Packaging. The second is Executive Evolution and the third is Communication Coaching which includes pitching, presentation and all types of communication in high stakes situations.

Clients hire me, for example, in Career Packaging when they are in the job market or want to move up in their organization. We work on strategies to help them stand out.  Executive Evolutionary clients are like Kim, who is with us today. Clients who want to achieve more in their business, perhaps move into a different kind of business, change careers altogether. Finally, in Communication Coaching what I focus on with those clients are pitch strategies primarily.  Those pitch strategies might be anything from selling a new piece of business to changing the way the company sees the role that you play within that organization.

BevAnn Bonds:  Where do clients, for these three areas, come from?

Mariette Edwards:  Generally, my clients come from two places. One is from referrals, from other clients. Of course it takes a while to build up a practice where you get client referrals. Secondly, when people hear me speak…I get a lot of business that way.

BevAnn Bonds:  Is there a typical way that they engage with you when someone is working with you?

Mariette Edwards: First of all, what surprises a lot of people is that I don’t actually meet with my clients. Most of my coaching clients are clients who are in Atlanta, New York, they are in LA or sometimes in Europe or Australia.  It is all done over the phone. I generally have  never met the person that I work with, but that is really not relevant to producing the results that we co-create.

Lee Kantor:  Can you walk us through what one of those sessions looks like?

Mariette Edwards:  For example, I just had a new client contact me two weeks ago. He works for one of the big entertainment companies in New York City. He had made a mistake, an error in judgment; he went to his boss last year and said, “You know, I’d really like to do more. I am not happy with what I am doing now. Please help me.”  What ended up happening is that his boss thought about that and felt that if he wasn’t happy, he didn’t want him there.   That isn’t what his goal was. Honestly, if we had been working together he would have handled that completely differently. He is on a very short string right now, he is going to be out of a job on July 1^st.

He hired me to help him position himself better within the organization to find a job for himself. He had an opportunity, this speaks to your question Lee, he had an opportunity for one of the departments in his company to create a job for him.  He couldn’t convince the guy that he was somebody that should have a job created for him.  So, I said, “You know, we need to pitch it. We need to pitch him on what that job might be and what you could do for him.”  We created a whole pitch around five clients that he could bring in as a sales organization.  Five clients that they had never approached or been successful in bringing in before using all the tools available to them in this very high profile entertainment company.  Absolutely, blew the guy away. It was an amazing experience. He came out of that meeting and couldn’t believe it. Everything that we had intended to do is exactly what had happened.

We did it all on the phone, reviewing his Power Point which he sent me. We practiced. We tweaked the pitch.  We had a lot of follow up on strategies for what to do at the end of the meeting and so forth.

Lee Kantor:  How do you immerse yourself in his business so you really understand to help him achieve his goals?

Mariette Edwards:  That interesting, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in.  I understand how business works, especially in entertainment; but, it is really the same.  Entertainment is particularly relationship driven.  But, I have been in almost every business that you can imagine.

Lee Kantor:  And the same rules apply?

Mariette Edwards:   The same rules apply. It’s all rules around people.  It all has to do with what people want and how to appeal to their interest versus their intellect.

BevAnn Bonds:  That is really great, because you can see where someone thought they were out of a job and that they are providing extra value which is incredibly pertinent at this day and time with the economic state the way that it is.

I do have some more questions for you, Mariette, but before we get too far into everything I would like to take the time to introduce Kim Gay who is a healthcare industry expert.  She has more than 20 years experience as a successful entrepreneur, business owner and supplier to the healthcare community.  Can you tell us a little bit about your background, Kim?

Kim Gay:  My background has been primarily with a manufacturer of specialty equipment for wounds.  I worked in that company for seven years and then started my own company where I bought  from the manufacturer that I worked with and just developed a company that hit a market in long term care and we really didn’t have a lot of competition.  After growing that company, after 14 years, I sold it to a national company that did the same thing that APS, my former company, did and  I worked with them for several months.  Then I started something entirely different. That’s where I engaged Mariette to help me in the development of my new company, MATCH Healthcare Consulting. It has been very interesting.  I am doing something totally different now and it is a lot of fun, but I am learning a lot too.

Lee Kantor:  What’s different about what you are doing now?

Kim Gay:  Well, my former company, APS, had a tangible product. We provided equipment and devices for people who had wounds, we rented that. Now, with MATCH we are in the facilities and in the corporate offices of my former clients and we are training them.

Lee Kantor:  Training them to do what?

Kim Gay:  Training them in business development.  There are a lot of changes going on right now in the healthcare market.  We are trying to develop them to help them change, especially with people… their people involved.  In long term care there has been a lack of development as far as leadership training and change management, that is the niche we are trying to develop with them.

BevAnn Bonds:  With having a successful business before and being able to sell it, which is a great thing, why would you bring on someone like Mariette? Did you not think you had enough of your own experience to develop the business?

Kim Gay:  Initially, I hired Mariette because I am writing a book. I met her through a friend of mine and we started talking about my book.  As we got into the development of my book I realized that Mariette has so much expertise in the areas that I was going in to with my consulting that she could be able to help me with the development of my new business.

I was used to running a company that had employees and we were delivering product, we were selling a tangible product out to a customer to help heal a patient. Now, we are selling consulting. It was totally different and I needed Mariette to just guide me through the process.

Lee Kantor:  Had you had a coach before?

Kim Gay: I had not.

Lee Kantor: She is your first coach?

Kim Gay:  She is my first.

Lee Kantor: So, how is it going?

Kim Gay:  It is great! She is wonderful!  She always has the answer.

Lee Kantor: That’s always good. (laughing)

Kim Gay:  (laughing) She does!

BevAnn Bonds: What are some of the challenges that you face from selling a business to creating a new one?

Kim Gay:  Selling a business that I started and ran for 14 years and developed, it was my baby. So, when I sold the business it was very traumatic.  It took me a little while to wrap my head around that I didn’t have that company anymore.  It took another company for me to get excited about something else.  I needed that to help my grieving process of getting through my other company.

Lee Kantor:  When you had your company and you sold it, was it something you were looking to sell or did they approach you and say, “I’d like to buy it.”?

Kim Gay: They approached me.

Lee Kantor:  That’s a different mindset.

Kim Gay:  Yes, totally.  Years earlier someone approached me and we went through the whole due diligence process and it didn’t happen. So, after that I kind of put it out of my head and never thought about it again.  Then this company approached me in 2007 and it happened pretty quickly.

BevAnn Bonds: That’s fantastic. Mariette, I have a question for you…I know that you started working with Kim because she was writing a book. How has your relationship evolved? It sounds like it is different now.

Mariette Edwards: It is very different now. Let me give you a little plug for what Kim is working on…She is working on a book on Ethics and it is quite interesting. We started with outlining what the book was going to be about and then getting her interviews with high profile individuals who had taken an ethical nosedive. That, in itself, was a difficult process because these people aren’t necessarily going to talk to everyone.  We were very successful in getting these individuals to meet with Kim so that she could interview them.  In fact, she is creating a program right now about that which goes beyond the book.

So, working together, there is a lot of strategy involved and there was a lot of communication involved.  Things would come up during the coaching process about the book that would tap in to some of the other background that I have. Little by little, Kim came to ask me more, “Well, I have this idea for a business. What do you think about this…?”  and we would talk about that and how we were going to structure the business and what was that business going to look like.  We’ve done a lot of brainstorming sessions and then strategies about positioning the business and so forth. It has just grown and grown and grown. I am involved with all of the pitches that Kim makes now.  Everything about how she talks about the business  has evolved.

We started in one direction and it has grown into a new direction. We started initially just for training and now MATCH really focuses on change management training and project management. But, what we are really in and what we are really excited about is that MATCH is really in the profitability business. We are in the business of helping our clients become more profitable in what they do, through how they manage their people.

BevAnn Bonds:  One of the things I want to tie back to is that you were mentioning helping her with pitches. I know one of  the things that you talk to other groups about is pitching for buy-in.  People typically think of a salesperson making a pitch, but you say it is way  more than that.

Mariette Edwards: Oh, Yeah! You don’t want to be somebody that sells, you want to be someone that people buy from.  All of the coaching and programs I do on pitching have to do with being attractive to opportunity and putting yourself in a secondary position when you are talking about whatever it is that you are pitching.  When I talk about ‘pitch’ and I talk about “Life’s A Pitch”, that’s just about everything is an opportunity for you to meet someone else at their map of the road. When you are willing to do that then you become more attractive to that individual and you become more visible to them. I think that is what really happened with Kim.  I am really interested in seeing her be successful, I am not interested in promoting my services with her. I could have said, “Hey, I can do this…then I could that for you…”, I don’t do that.  I’m really just motivated by wanting to see her successful; as I am for all my clients.

Everything I know is spilling out when I am talking to her and other people that I work with.   Some people kind of naturally go, “Oh, maybe that is somebody I’d like to work with.” That is the same way I coach my clients, because it is much more important that you be attractive to opportunity by paying attention to the people you are dealing with.

Again, getting back to pitching, it is really a multitude of situations, it is not just going in and selling a proposal. It could be that you want to get buy-in for an idea, or in the case of that client who was pitching an idea about re-creating a whole new department for himself and changing the whole direction the way a multi-billion dollar corporation does business, we created a pitch that actually landed that for her and had nothing to do with selling a service.

Lee Kantor:  So you are presenting an opportunity where your client is part of the solution?

Mariette Edwards: The client is part of the solution, yes. But the solution is tied to what that client’s interest is.

Lee Kantor: Right, the ultimate…whatever the opportunity is.

Mariette Edwards:  I want to take this a step further,  I gave you the example earlier about the fellow in New York who called me and has until July 1^st, one of the ways we did this and one of the things I always do with a client is to tell me about who you are pitching to, who is this guy we are trying to enroll in this idea of creating a job. He profiled him. He is a sales guy, he has always been in sales. I asked him a few questions about how he sees the world. I said, “You know what, this guy’s a star. When you go into that pitch, he is the star you are just in the background. So everything we are going to be talking about in that pitch has to be around how what you are proposing is going to make him a bigger deal in his company because that is what is driving him.”  I am always looking for the driver, what that need is and what that opportunity is for my client to stand out.

BevAnn Bonds:  How would you work with someone, and this may be the case for you Kim, that doesn’t exactly say, “I have this sales manager that I am presenting to or that I’m pitching to a group of people and I think these are the demographics.”

Mariette Edwards:  That is interesting because there are generally four ways that people see the world.  If we include those four ways in the pitch then we will have hit everybody in the room.  So there will be somebody in there that is a detail person and there is going to be a top end just give me the facts person. That is Kim’s style, she is a sensor style, she doesn’t want a lot of stuff she just needs to know what she needs to know to make a decision. There are also going to be people in there that are people people and there are going to be high creativity people with big ideas. So, when you are dealing with a group like that you want to go in and hit the sensor style first which is to give them a summary so that the sensor can walk out of the room when they’ve heard enough, they don’t have to stay for the whole pitch. You have to have enough  data and detail. I always recommend to bring a lot of books and bring a lot of paper, never refer to it…it just looks good.

Lee Kantor:  Like a prop?

Mariette Edwards:  I tried this a couple of times and it was very successful because people think that there is a profound amount of knowledge behind whatever it is that you are saying, it is all perception.

You need enough detail for those analytics and then you make sure that you are personable so that the feelers in the room are dealt with. Then you do a lot of “what if-ing' and blue sky stuff for the intuitive.

BevAnn Bonds: It is a lot like when you are writing an article or doing anything else, you tell people what you are going to say, you say it, then you summarize again for anyone that came back into the room that might be a sensor.

Mariette Edwards:  Yeah, but you want to make sure that you get the big deal decision maker in the room, you want to hit that person hard with whatever it is that you want to say.  Then, everything else is for all the other people in the room. As long as you know who the decision maker is in the room you can tailor your pitch for that.

Lee Kantor:  The knowledge that you are imparting now, is that stuff that you learned from your HR background?

Mariette Edwards: That’s a very good question, because I can’t point to anything that taught me any of this. I just kind of came in wired this way. I came in wired to be a coach. Coaching is what I do. Coaching is who I am. As far as communication goes, I just know. I had the experience in the corporate world, I understand it. I have been in all kinds of interesting situations, which we don’t have time to talk about but believe me they are pretty amazing. I also have a highly developed intuitive side and I just know when we are on and when we are off.

When I am dealing with a client I am listening so hard to what that person’s telling me and in my mind the wheels are turning, “We have to go this way… we have to that way…okay, this is the word we have to use…we have to hit this…we have to go this way…”

It was interesting because my client came out of that meeting and he called me and he said, “That’s exactly what you said was going to happen. It was exactly like that.” I can’t tell you that you can go to X University and learn how to do this or read Y book and learn how to do it. Some people are really just good at that. That’s what I’m good at.

Lee Kantor: Kim, as part of your evolution from having a business with employees to now being kind of ‘eat what you kill’, you are on your own and dealing with people individually; how has that changed from your personality standpoint? Are you enjoying that as much?

Kim Gay:  I am enjoying it. I’m a lifelong leaner. I am in something that is totally different and I had to take it from Kindergarten all the way up. I think I’m in  high school  now! (laughing) I want to get my PhD some day.

Lee Kantor: Have you started getting clients in this new venture?

Kim Gay: Yes, I have several clients right now and people that have approached me. I am not at the level yet where I am going out and trying to create new clients or going after new clients.  The clients that I have right now have approached me, that  has been a good development.

Lee Kantor: So you are feeling confident? You are feeling this is the right path for you right now?

Kim Gay:  I do.  If I ever get off the track a little bit, I have my coach over here…

Lee Kantor:  How often do you meet with your coach? Is it monthly?

Kim Gay:  Initially it was once a week and we would talk for about an hour. Now, our relationship has developed so that if I have a question or I need help, which I am in a process right now, I need a lot of help, she is a phone call away.

Mariette Edwards: We went from weekly sessions to speed dial!

Kim Gay:  Next week is our healthcare association convention and I am doing the CU program on Ethics and it is pretty much based on the book I am writing.  This is where I really need a coach, if you haven’t done anything like that before.

BevAnn Bonds:  It is great to know that you have that resource available to you at all times.   Right now with the economy is on the top of everyone’s mind starting a new business can be a little bit scary. Can you tell us about some of the challenges or advantages or the disadvantages that you find with starting a business at this time?

Kim Gay:  Thank goodness I am in healthcare, because the economy absolutely hurts healthcare too; but, I am in a business that we are all going to need healthcare and we are going to need people that are good at what they do and hopefully I will be able to help them.  But, it has been scary. It absolutely has because one year after I sold my business is when the stock market crashed and when you think you are set, you’re not really set.

I think that people who are starting a new business right now with this economy, it may take them a little bit longer. It may take them a lot more effort to get that client and build a good base of clients. But, also there are tons of opportunities out there right now.

Lee Kantor: Do you think it is good time to invest in yourself rather than the stock market?

Kim Gay: Absolutely!  I do. I have done that. I have not let the economy make me fearful of spending a dime to go get a certification or have a coach.  If you can do anything to grow yourself through using a coach or getting a certification you are then going to be one or two steps ahead of somebody else that is out there that is afraid to spend a dime to develop themselves.

BevAnn Bonds:  I am curious, Mariette was talking about ‘pitching’ before. I know that you said you have not been actively going out and doing cold calls, but you definitely have clients. So that speaks to some of your work with Mariette. I am just wondering how she helped with some of your messaging and your pitch?

Kim Gay:  She did it.  I’m going to give her all the credit here.  I’m a salesperson, that is what I was born to do. But, I’m selling a different product now. Before I had something, a product to sell, so that was a little bit easier. Now I am selling myself and my services to help my client grow.  I absolutely needed Mariette to help me with my messaging and show me how you sell this product versus selling a different product.

Lee Kantor:  What is the time frame it takes you to get through that process? Do you get that in an hour or is it a month, six months?

Kim Gay:  It’s ongoing.

Mariette Edwards: It is ongoing.  I want to make a differentiation here because Kim moved from selling a tangible to an intangible. In my background I have worked in brokerage, finance, banking, manufacturing…you name it…hardware, software, intellectual properties - tangibles and intangibles.  An intangible sale is very different. You have to create an emotional connection with the intangible. That is what we are working on with her messaging. It is ongoing.

I think because many people see coaching as an hour a week or an hour…I have a client who is a coach and she does an hour a month with her clients. That is not how I work. Sometimes it is, but a lot of times it is the way I work with Kim, which is that I am on-call, like a 911 call.

Lee Kantor:  I don’t want to get into how you bill, but is it a retainer or is it an hourly rate?

Mariette Edwards:  For some clients it is a retainer and for some it is an hourly rate. I have an introductory package when I start with someone that is four sessions. Some coaches work with a year-long program or six month program, they have a contract. I don’t believe in that for myself. People hire me for a very specific reason. There is a very specific target they want to hit.  It is not life coaching where it may go on for a very long time. Often the client gets in and gets out. I then have other clients like Kim that go on for a years.  Those clients become retainer clients.

BevAnn Bonds: When you are talking about working with Kim having been a process and things have evolved, it is sounding like when you are talking about creating a message or pitching, it is not just making the sale…

Mariette Edwards: No, you can’t make the sale until you know what you are selling. We were basically dealing with an old phrase we used to use back in my technology days which is “Vaporware”, it doesn’t exist. It is just an idea and you have to take that vapor and turn it into something that is three dimensional.  Make it compelling for someone to want to buy. It has taken us awhile to move from the training idea, Kim is passionate about leadership and training and people, to move from simply offering a training solution to offering a profitability solution through change management, project management and training. That has been part of our messaging. It is very new, this being in the profitability business on behalf of our clients. That’s a new message that we’ve just recently created.

BevAnn Bonds:  What are some of the challenges that you and Kim have had to overcome to help her achieve her objectives?

Mariette Edwards:  One of the big challenges in achieving Kim’s objectives is that Kim is brilliant and she is passionate and she is excited about what she does. She is a life-long learner. Sometimes she will run down a path to learning that might take her mind and her eye off the prize.  So, we have to crack the whip a little bit.

Lee Kantor:  How do you keep a person compliant like that?  You know it is easy to get distracted, there are shiny objects everywhere. How do you get them back on track?  Kim, how do you get back on track?

Kim Gay:  She keeps me focused.  What she just said is so true.  I see a direction, an opportunity, and a little ADD comes in and I want to do this, want to do that. She just reels me back in and says, “Stay focused.” It’s her own messaging, I think to me. She has her own internal messaging that keeps our clients reeled back in and focused.  I don’t really know how to answer that question.

Mariette Edward: I have to say that I think that is my New Yorker…I remember interviewing for a job on once and I had to go through a whole psychology, you know a battery of psychological tests. It came back and said “Lacks tact”.  I have to be careful. But when Kim goes down one of those roads, I just say, “Whoa, Hello! We’re not going that way.  Our target is this…That’s great and you can do that later but let’s go here right now because that’s the target you are trying to hit.”

BevAnn Bonds: Kim, would you agree that when someone is starting a business at this day and time that having someone help them stay more focused is a better use of their time and resources so that they don’t get off on those tangents?  You could spend  three months researching what you think is a great idea and then finding out, “Gosh, I should have been back over here following path A.”

Kim Gay: I think everybody needs a sounding board.  It is hard to start a business on your own and be very, very productive if you don’t have somebody that is going to reel you in and keep you focused and be a sounding board.  You can’t do it on your own.

Lee Kantor:  Is that the value that you are providing for your clients? Are you helping them and coaching them in a way?

Kim Gay: Yeah, I guess I am coaching them a little bit. I think mine is more business development and I have a process that I go through.

Lee Kantor:  And you’re sharing that process?

Kim Gay: I am sharing that process.

Lee Kantor:  Don’t you have to hold them accountable and teach them?

Kim Gay: Absolutely.  A lot of that I have gotten from Mariette.

BevAnn Bonds: Mariette, if someone is doing their pitch and it goes wrong, is there anyway midstream to correct that or are they just out of luck?

Mariette Edwards: Well, if you are in the moment and you see that you are going down the wrong road there are ways to do that, but generally that has to be someone who is pretty experienced in those situations to be able to recover. We might have a strategy for that going in. If you see people, if you see you are losing them you can do this or that. But, mainly what happens is that people come out of a pitch and they are just devastated because they know they did something awful or it didn’t go the way they wanted it to.  The first thing I would tell a client who is in a situation like that is that you have to grieve the loss that you just had. You have to acknowledge…it is not like you can just get back up on the horse right away, you have to really just feel bad.  You feel really bad, eat a lot of ice cream, call a lot of your friends, go through a couple boxes of Kleenex…then we can talk about how you can recover. Often, you can recover better than if the pitch had gone right the first time.

This same fellow that I was talking about in New York, had an interview last week with another part of that organization where there is an actual job. We did a whole kind of strategy and the goal was to go into the pitch and get the second interview.  That was the whole goal. So he went in and got the second interview but he did not feel good about how he had answered a question about his vision for the organization that was interviewing him.  So what we did was we came up with a way to go back to that person and resolve that unresolved issue. It is actually going to position him much better than if he had answered the question right at the moment it was asked.  So, you have to get back on the horse but you have to allow enough time to feel bad about it.

BevAnn Bonds:  So I guess you are just telling our listeners that it is okay to feel bad. Go ahead and take the time because you are going to learn from it.

Mariette Edwards: Yeah, yeah. Look at what went wrong. If I asked you on a scale of 1-10 how did your pitch go and you tell me an eight.  I would then ask, “What would have made it a ten?”  Then you would say, “I wish I would have said…(X)?” Well if the same person says it is a two, you always know why it is. Why is it so low? “Well, I was totally unprepared…I didn’t practice…I didn’t have good intention when I walked in the room…The guy that I wanted to be there wasn’t there and I didn’t know how to cover for that.”   There are a lot of things that could go wrong in a pitch.

Lee Kantor: So it is important to do this kind of autopsy?

Mariette Edwards:  Absolutely, you have to, even if you don’t want to.

BevAnn Bonds: Kim, you’ve mentioned that working on your messaging and just staying on task or on target and writing your book…are there other ways that you are working together with Mariette?

Kim Gay:  I have one employee and she and Mariette are working great together. I think that that has helped Andrea learn and develop. Mariette has helped Andrea develop and go beyond what I thought she could do.  It has been very helpful in managing my employee.

BevAnn Bonds: Alright, that’s great to know. So if somebody wants to find a little bit more about getting the right pitch or to help manage their employees to get over the people thing, how would they go about finding out more about you or contacting you, Mariette?

Mariette Edwards: The best way to find out more about me is to visit my website at www.starmakercoaching.com.  You will find contact information for me. You can download the brochures about my three practice specialties. You can read client case studies. You can see examples of clients that I’ve worked with.  There are a number of free articles that I make available from my own archive of articles that I have written. I also have a podcast that I do for Business to Business magazine and you can listen to that.

BevAnn Bonds: Kim, I wanted to say it has been great hearing some of the changes you have had go on between selling your business and creating a new one and how well that is going and your relationship with Mariette. If somebody wanted to find out more about MATCH Healthcare Consulting, how would they go about finding out more about you?

Kim Gay: Our website is www.matchhc.com.

BevAnn Bonds: I want to thank both of you for being here. This has been great. It is great to find out about how, in today’s economy and in any economy, you need to have a pitch and not think of just selling and that you have to target your message to people. It is fantastic to find out how someone’s applying Mariette’s work and working together with her. I want to thank both of you all for being on today.

Lee, we had another great show!

Lee Kantor:  Great guests make a great show.

BevAnn Bonds: They do, every time. We’d like to thank our sponsors, Business Support Solutions and Business RadioX. Until next week, I am BevAnn Bonds and for my co-host Lee Kantor we’d like to thank you for listening to the Georgia Business Coaches Show. Be sure to tune in each week on Tuesday’s at 11:30 and to listen live. If you are not able to do that, you can go to our website www.georgiabusinesscoaches.com and listen at your convenience.

END

Launch Interview Transcript of Kristi Gorinas with Kristi G Company

A few weeks ago Jim DeBetta and Ron Reardon interviewed Kristi Gorinas from the Kristi G Company on their show Launch. Kristi created and is marketing a wonderful designer diaper bag. And on the show she took the listener through the trials and tribulations of getting her product and company off the ground. Once again, a big thank you to Karen Galambos with Right Type Pro for this transcription.

The Launch Hour

On Business RadioX

Jim DeBetta

Ron Reardon

Interview with Kristi Gorinas

Kristi G Co.

July 9, 2009

Jim DeBetta:   Welcome to Launch where we explore the world of invention and entrepreneurship.  I’m Jim DeBetta, here with my co-host Ron Reardon and our producer, Lee Kantor.  Good morning guys.

Ron Reardon:   Hello, Jim.

Lee Kantor:  Mr. Jim, how are things going?

Jim DeBetta:  Things are going.

Lee Kantor:  Big day?

Jim DeBetta:  Big day!  Great guest today too. I know I am excited. I think she is excited.  Kristi, are you there?

Kristi Gorinas:  Yes, very excited.

Jim DeBetta:  Alright. We Have Kristi Gorinas.  We have been going around here making sure we get her  last name right, I think I nailed it.

Ron Reardon:  Yes, you did.

Jim DeBetta:  Kristi is with us today to talk about her journey, about her products, her company and we are going to go through all that and hopefully she will have some good stuff for us here today for other inventors to learn from.

Let’s start it off.  I met Kristi through Lee here, she was a past guest on…who’s guest was she?

Lee Kantor:  Erik Wolf’s show, it is called Gravity Free Radio.

Jim DeBetta:  Cool. Kristi has a great line. Her company is called the Kristi G Company. Kristi, tell us a little bit about some of the products you are working on and then we will hit you with tons of questions.

Kristi Gorinas:  Thank you for having me today.  My first product that we launched is actually a handbag, or a purse, that is made to function like a diaper bag.  We designed them to look like regular everyday purses.  However, the lining is such that if you have spills in it is water resistant. Most importantly, the bags have what we call the “Easy Wipe System”, which is a stylish zipper on the back of the bag. You open the zipper and you pull out your baby wipe. It is that easy. The cool thing that I’ve learned over the last couple of months is that many women that don’t have kids or that are past the diapering days, they are buying the purses because they like the fabric, they like the style and they are actually putting antibacterial wipes in there or even tissues. It is so easy to access, you are not digging through the bag of the bottom of the stroller when you need it.  You pull it out the back of the bag and you’re done.

Jim DeBetta:  I can tell you as a father of three little ones…first of all, if you see these bags you don’t know that they are for kids or that the purpose is to carry wipes and other things in them. When you see them they look like something you’d see in a department store. That’s really cool for moms. My wife, she doesn’t want to always be known walking around with a big old diaper bag, they are usually not very fashionable. But, the fact that you have the wipes accessible through a side zipper is huge.  First of all, half the time my wife forgets the wipes. Then what to you do?  Tissues don’t work. The wipes do come in handy for other than using on the baby. Sometimes your kids have a lollipop or have ice cream…or spills in the car, that is even worse.  Having that feature, to me, is what caught my attention and I think it is a home run in terms of convenience for moms.

Ron Reardon:  Kristi, what you talked about happens a lot with inventors. You invent something for one particular use and one particular device. Then all of a sudden when it gets out there and consumers are using it, then they start using it for other things that you never even conceived.

Kristi Gorinas:  Yeah, I never thought about putting the antibacterial wipes or Kleenex in there.  We’ve got several newspapers, the travel section that are going to be featuring the bags for on-the-go and having easy access. I am learning and we are starting to pitch it differently than just a diaper bag.  They are designed not to look like diaper bags.

Jim DeBetta:  I could see my wife, us going to dinner, having that and nobody would really know, other than it just looks like a bag that is very cool looking and stylish.

Ron Reardon:  She doesn’t have to switch.

Kristi Gorinas:  That’s great. Just this morning I was walking up here for the show and one of the gals in the building said, “I love your handbag.”

Ron Reardon:  It is…but it isn’t.

Kristi Gorinas:  It looks like a handbag, it didn’t look like a diaper bag. I am carrying it and I don’t have any kids with me.

Jim DeBetta:  It is smart. I love it.  I’ve been shopping around since we met and looking, whether it is Babies R Us, Target or even some of the department stores; you do see a few fashionable diaper bags but you know they are diaper bags.  They scream “Mommy – Baby” kind of a thing. They are usually huge and very bulky.

Kristi Gorinas:  Can I comment on that? When I was doing research for the bags, I actually had my husband at Neiman-Marcus picking up several bags, designer bags, that are the $300 and $400 bags.  He brought them home, we had about $2,000 worth of bags sitting in my living room, I think there were only four bags there.  Looking at them, they were huge and heavy. I am thinking, “How do you put anything in there?”  You would have to have a nanny to carry your diaper bag. They were so big and bulky.  They were beautiful and expensive.  One of the things we wanted to do was to make sure that the bags were very light weight.  Because, once you stuff them full of things they really start wearing on your shoulder. That is why we chose to go with a fabric so that it is lightweight, even when you stuff it full it is not heavy.

Jim DeBetta:  The clutch is a great piece. I know you have different styles but that you just never would know.

Kristi Gorinas: You can fit three diapers in there.  You can fit a small bottle. You can fit little toys and snacks. It is amazing how it expands to fit what you need.

Jim DeBetta:  Ron, you look at products every day, we know the lesson. Somebody emailed me the other day about this. They said that they wanted to bring a product to market. They went to the stores, they didn’t see anything like their idea on the shelves and so they just assumed that they were free and clear. As you know, that is a dangerous road to go down.

Ron Reardon:  Yeah, just because you don’t see it in the marketplace doesn’t mean that patent applications have not been filed for or maybe even patents have been issued for it.  It is one thing to actually file a patent or get a patent and another thing to take it to the marketplace. It is a one-two punch.

Jim DeBetta:  That is a mistake that people will continue to make because they sometimes want to find their way around hiring a patent agent or an attorney to do the proper search. Doing a search is much more than just going on Google and looking for your product. If you are going to build a business around your product, you better make sure that this is the foundation of the house. If that is not right, and I have seen t his, two or three or four years down the road they get a nice big fat Cease and Desist letter in the mail and it is lights out, so to speak.

Ron Reardon:  When I was in high school we learned a poem, the punch line in the poem was, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”   Because of the pervasiveness of the Internet and the Google patent search and things like that, a lot of people think that they can do their own search and that it is comprehensive. It is just not true. One time I did a search on mousetraps and I discovered that of the 4,000 patents on mousetraps, some of them never mention the word ‘mouse’ or ‘trap’.  So if you are doing a word search, through Google or the USPTO, because they don’t have the word mousetrap in there even though it is for a mousetrap.

Jim DeBetta:  Like the ‘Rat Catcher’…

Ron Reardon:  They will call them vermin, they will call them rodents, small animals, they will call them bait stations. Here is a patent for a mousetrap that the word ‘mouse’ and ‘trap’ is nowhere in there so you would miss that one.

Jim DeBetta:  Tricky stuff.

Ron Reardon:  Yes, it is.

Jim DeBetta:  Kristi, I don’t want to say it is obvious what your inspiration was, so I am going to ask anyway. What made you come up with this idea?

Kristi Gorinas:  Well, this wasn’t the first idea that I had. I was actually working on a different product about 2 ½ years ago after my fourth child was born, she was 2-years-old and I happened to be watching a TV show and another ‘Mompreneur’ had inspired me. She had three girls at home, I have four girls, she had them doing craft day and she was the one who came up with the Jibbitz, those little jewels that go into the Crocs.    I thought, “You know I have lots of great product ideas and I have four kids at home. I can follow through with some of my ideas.”  Honestly, that day I started sketching out my first product, which has been in development for about 2 ½ years.   It is a frustrating process being in development that long. So during that process I wanted to have a coordinating, something to go with the one product I was working on.  That is when I thought that I would do a bag. I started researching bags and I then thought I wouldn’t do bags because there are a thousand diaper bags out there.  But, after thinking about it some more, I came up with pulling a baby wipe out of the bag. I tried to find a diaper bag that was like that out there, I personally couldn’t find it. That is when I decided it was something a little bit different and I’m going to start working on designing a diaper bag that is functional, but looks more like a purse and that you could pull your baby wipe out of it.  That’s the only reason I went forward with a diaper bag, because of the “Easy Wipe System”.   If it was just a plain diaper bag, I wouldn’t have done it. It had to be different. I had to do something that was not currently out on the market.

Jim DeBetta:   That is your unique selling proposition. You are right, more and more today I am seeing more fashionable things.  Companies are waking up and saying that women don’t want to always look like they are mommies all the time. They do just want to run out for lunch with their girlfriends or wherever and they don’t want to carry a 50 lb. suitcase. My wife has the same problem.  She has this one huge bag and she doesn’t take the time to switch it out and then she forgets her credit cards and all that stuff. It is a problem for her.  “Honey, you got to get it organized.”  This is really the solution for that. You could actually even keep that thing loaded, keep a couple of diapers, some wipes; all she has to do is grab her keys and just toss them in there and she’s set.

Ron Reardon:  One of the things you need to look for is that whenever there is a longstanding problem, like needing a baby wipe with a diaper, you can count on the fact that there has been a lot of time and energy put into finding a solution for that.  You might not know that Jamie Lee Curtis, the movie star, she is now the Activia lady, she has a patent on a diaper that has a pocket for putting a baby wipe in. The diapers already come with a baby wipe already in there.  I have never seen it commercialized…

Jim DeBetta:  How many wipes are in there?  I have never used just one wipe, sometimes it is one, two, three, four, five, six…(laughing)

Ron Reardon:  I would have to look more closely at the patent. I collect trivia as far as patents are concerned, especially when it is involving movie stars. But, she did have a diaper that had a pocket where the baby wipe would be in there. I have never seen it on the marketplace but she did get a patent for it.

Jim DeBetta: Ron Reardon, patent agent to the stars!   The other thing too is that when they have the perforated and you pull one out and seven come out.  That is something that really bothers me, not that this show is about the problem with wipes…

Kristi Gorinas:  Mine doesn’t do that!  One at a time.

Jim DeBetta:  One at a time like a good box of tissues. That is important because that happens a lot. You buy wipes enough…when having kids we always told people when they asked us, “What do you want us to get for the baby?”  We never said clothes or toys, we said, “Buy us diapers and wipes.”  You constantly are buying them. It is a money pit. I think we spend more money on that than anything. In-laws and family, they always buy clothes and all that stuff; that is easy.  But, going through wipes many times I just wanted one and then you would hold the baby down and if they go to the bathroom and are wiggling and you have to try to keep them pinned down and then you are pulling wipes and ten come out!  All of a sudden you use a whole bag of wipes in three days. They are not cheap. It is one of those things when they come out of your bag, Kristi, and they come out one at a time, it may be a little stretch in a sense but it is a money saver too. It will save you from just wasting all those extra wipes too.

Kristi Gorinas:  The next thing I’d like to do is to come up with a baby wipe that is also an antibacterial wipe that doesn’t sting. I know there is liquid out there because I have it at home that is antibacterial liquid. How can they put that on a baby wipe. That way you’ve got it both. You can use it for both the bottom and your hands and you don’t have to switch it out. I’d love to get an antibacterial wipe that is also a baby wipe. I have been searching but I haven’t found one.

Jim DeBetta:  We must know a couple of chemical engineers out there that can formulate that.

Ron Reardon:  I know that when I helped with m y son, Eric, with the grandchildren…you sit there and clean them up with the wipe and everything and you get the diaper on and then there is the container with the antibacterial and then you clean your hands. It is a two-stage process.  You are on the right track.  You look for people struggling with something or something that is not really convenient or efficient and come up with a better solution.

Jim DeBetta:  Or we could just have babies change themselves, that would be the ultimate solution. Then all these companies wouldn’t have a business, but you know it would make our life easier.

Kristi, you have this idea, you have these bags. The idea is in your mind. You say that there is nothing like this out there. You send out your husband to Neiman-Marcus, he looks like a hero in the store because he is buying all these expensive bags.  You were not returning those, you were going to keep them!  How long did it take you from the moment the light bulb went off and you said this is something that has to be solved or you had to do something about it until you really saw the first prototype and it came to life for you?

Kristi Gorinas:  It was last April2008 when I thought of the idea for pulling out the baby wipe.  I had an engineer already working in China on my chair so we sourced some handbag companies and I drew some sketches of some handbags with pulling the wipe out, a little flap that you lift up and a big old hole to pull the wipe out and that took a couple of months to get a prototype from China. I worked with China factories for 7 ½-8 months, having two guys that don’t have any kids try to help design a diaper bag; and that did not work.

Jim DeBetta:  You said something that was really important that I want everybody to hear which is that it took months…there is a big misconception in the world of manufacturing. A lot of inventors feel that, “Hey, I got an idea and within a few weeks I will have prototypes. I will have everything solved for me.”  Here you are. You’ve seen what it is like. You know that it takes time and it can be frustrating and it can be slow and sometimes you don’t get the right fit. It is good to have somebody that has experience in a particular area help you design your product.

Kristi Gorinas:  It was very frustrating and it took  much longer than I thought. Quite honestly, I am not a real patient person, because I have a lot of energy and I like to see things happen. But, I’ve learned patience in the last 2 ½ months. I learned to wait a month to hear something back about getting a sample or a prototype from China.

Ron Reardon:  It takes quite a few versions to get it right. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of anybody that their very first prototype was what they went to market with.

Jim DeBetta:  Never.

Ron Reardon:  They go through five, six, ten, twenty different versions.  Even Edison went through thousands of possibilities for the light bulb before he came up with the little coiled carbon filament.

Jim DeBetta:  That’s a little long though, 2000 times, that’s a little much. We’ll let him slide, it is Thomas Edison…

Lee Kantor:  What was it like calling China? That must have been weird. Did you do it yourself or did you hire a company to do that?

Kristi Gorinas:  Initially I wanted to do the bags here in the United States. I was already in China trying to make the chair and being long distance like that I wanted to be more hands on, especially with the bags. It wasn’t as technically involved. I did search for while to find a handbag company in the United States. Nobody wanted to do business with me because I wasn’t big enough. They didn’t want to manage 50 bags at a time. They just couldn’t shut down a line in order to do that.  So, I ended up going online and looking to source my own handbag company over in certain parts of China where I had already the engineer over there.  I said, “I found two, go visit with them, meet with them and see if they can make this bag.”  Well, after eight months and fabric was upside down and it looked like you would pay $3 for the bag, I wasn’t working with the right factories. I know there are factories over there that can do the work. But if you are not over there physically, standing next to them, working with them it is not going to get done right. So after eight months of trying to be patient and a lot of money with prototypes I said, “That’s enough. I’m done with working with China.” I went back to looking in the United States and found a company and went out and met with the company and in three days I came back with samples that were almost perfect.

Jim DeBetta:  It is kind of like a good and a bad thing. It is a shame because the reality is that, although it would be great if we could continue to make products in the United States and support our own economy in that respect, there are a lot of people that still love the Made in America thing. You had somebody over there. You had an engineer over there and still you couldn’t get what you wanted. That just is a testament to knowing that when you have a relationship, like we were talking about last week about networking, how Ron and I know so many factory brokers.  They are your eyes, ears and your mind. They know the factories, they know the right places to go and they remove all that doubt. They do all the work for you.  The reality is that Asian factories,  and any factory overseas, are very capable of making great quality but you have the language barrier, you have the distance barrier. You can’t stand there unless you have a factory broker by your side, you are kind of shooting in the dark and that is a tough thing.

Ron Reardon:  There is really no substitute for face-to-face.  You are actually with them and they say, “What about this?” and you say, “No, turn it this way.”  From an efficiency standpoint you can get so much done in a shorter period of time if you are right there with the person working with the device.

Kristi Gorinas:  Not being a designer by trade, I didn’t know the steps and your product specifications. I should have had a 20-page product spec done for each bag on exactly the details of every piece of that bag. I didn’t know that. I lost a lot of time not being properly prepared to deal with the factory.  I was hoping that they could just take my hand sketches and they would make something up.  It didn’t work.

Lee Kantor:  Is that common, Jim? That the inventor thinks they have enough data to give the people who produce it, but the invariably don’t?

Jim DeBetta: Yeah, that is common. It is only simply because they just don’t know. They are not expected to know.

Ron Reardon:  And when you don’t know, you don’t know that you don’t know!

Kristi Gorinas: Exactly!

Jim DeBetta: But you try and you know what, I always give credit to people like you, Kristi, who went out they wanted to do it, they had an idea and they said, “You know what, I’m going to go out there and try it.” I’m sure you’ve made in your mind your own mistakes and wish you could have done things differently and quicker. But, it makes you stronger, it makes you move forward. At least now you know that you’ve been in the trenches yourself. You’ve done it and you know what you won’t do the next time. Going forward you will have a better sense of the path you have to take for this stuff.

Ron Reardon:   That’s true. It is just like when people do a sketch, they think they can engineer and manufacture it from the sketch.  No, you need engineering CAD drawings. Then when they have the engineering CAD drawings you think you can use those for the patent drawings. No, there are different requirements for formal patent drawings. There are sketches.  There are renderings and then there are engineering drawings and then there are patent drawings. When you don’t know, you don’t know.

Kristi Gorinas:  And you need money.

Jim DeBetta:  Good. See it is not us prompting that one! I am not going to ask you how much you spent, but if I asked you if you spent in the thousands, I think your answer is probably going to be “Yes”. I’m afraid to ask further how much because this is a common issue with inventors. You are going to spend money and Kristi will say that again, I’m sure if we asked, but at the end of the day it is spending your money wisely and choosing the right vendors. Time is money. So when you wait eight months along the way is that lost money in lost potential sales, is it re-designs, who knows. Along the way though, it is about being efficient.

Ron Reardon:  It does take longer than you think and it is going to take more money than you think. It is very common. What you encountered with people not wanting to do short runs is also very common. Sara Blakely, the inventor of Spanks, she went to something like 17 manufacturers and they all turned her down because it was just here, she didn’t have a company or anything like that.

Kristi Gorinas: Can I comment on Sara?  She has two of my bags. She just had a baby a week or two ago, or something or that.  I met some people that were friends with her at a networking seminar. I said, “I’ve been trying to get her some of my bags.”  They said, “We’ll get her a bag.”  I am hoping she’ll use it.  I’m hoping somebody will take a picture of her with my bag.

Jim DeBetta: Just show up at her door and introduce yourself.

Ron Reardon:  She is in town, right?

Lee Kantor: Yeah, she is here in Atlanta.

Jim DeBetta: Talk about once you had the bag in your hand, what were the challenges that happened after that?

Kristi Gorinas:  I was tired.

Jim DeBetta:   Because you thought that was it,  “I’m done now. I’ve made the bag!”

Kristi Gorinas:  I was so excited that I finally found a factory to make the bags and I got the prototypes and then all of a sudden we are in production with inventory. Then I have a thousand bags in my basement and I was like, “Now what?” It was anticlimactic a little bit for me.  It is a whole other ballgame. You get the product done and now I had to do something with it.  So, it was scary. It was overwhelming. We had the website. Just because you have a website, doesn’t mean anybody is going to go there. That is a whole other…a lot of money to take and try to market it.

Lee Kantor: These are all different mountains you have to climb along this journey.

Jim DeBetta: Ultimately, like Kristi, like most inventors, they want to make money with their invention. My dad always said, “Nothing happens until somebody sells something.”  You have all this product and now you have it and it is here in the  United States and you have a thousand bags. A lot of people, unfortunately, don’t think past the excitement. “Now I have them. They are here.”  You then take a couple of breaths and, “Oh, Oh. What do I do with them?”

Ron Reardon:  Now what do I do?

Jim DeBetta:  “What do I do with them?”  Build a website, they may not come. It is about marketing. It is about branding and it is about having those contacts and being able to reach the buyers that can buy them. These designs are great. If I saw this, if I was with my wife and we were in a department store, a high end department store, and she said, “Look honey, that bag is $300.” I would say, “Alright, it looks like that is what it should cost.”  Perception, branding, looks, style…it still means so much and where it is. If you put that bag in Odd Lot and people are going to expect to pay $10 for it. If you put it in Neiman-Marcus they will expect to pay $300.  It is interesting how having a good look, especially for women with fashionable products for babies or have kids is a tremendous asset.

How did you come up with the designs? Of all the designs in the world, how did you pick them?

Kristi Gorinas:  That was very, very difficult. I probably looked at 20, I swear this is true, probably 10,000-20,000 fabrics, thousands upon thousands of fabrics.  But, I looked at the same fabrics over and over again. I swear, 20,000-30,000 and then having to narrow that down and narrow it down and narrow it down to six. It was really hard. What I did was that I really looked at what bags were out there and what was missing. There were no purple bags out there and there are a lot of people that love purple. There were a few purple bags. It is a bag that can go with a girl or a boy. There are hardly any olive green bags. I also looked at what are the fashion trends for spring and fall, it was purple and yellow. I just tried to really find fabrics that weren’t already out on the market, that they weren’t too loud and obnoxious but were real elegant, sophisticated and smart. I asked a lot of people, they didn’t agree with me and my choices and I changed some of them. You can’t just use your own ideas.

Jim DeBetta:  That’s it, getting objective opinions. We talk about that all the time. If you friends and family weigh in they are often going to be a little slighted in your favor. But, if you ask a stranger and they say, “That’s an ugly pattern”, and you get five people that say that pattern is not a good pattern you would want to think about changing it.

Ron Reardon:  That’s right.

Kristi Gorinas:  Our soccer club has about 1200 families and I literally would take out fabric samples out to the soccer field and walk around and look for women that had babies and toddlers and I would ask them, “Would you choose your top six?”  I would go around and ask their opinion and do my own little focus group just off-handedly.  “What fabrics do you like?”

Ron Reardon:  Looking back, the initial concept was actually the easiest part of this whole journey.

Jim DeBetta:  The idea.

Ron Reardon: The idea. Because, like you said you had to make choices of fabrics and design and manufacturing…

Kristi Gorinas:  If I could also say the little plastic pouch we call the “Easy Wipe Pouch”, it looks like a pencil case, that took me eight months to get right. Eight months!  The first 5,000 I got from China were all defective. I had to throw them out. They had to send me a whole new group.

Jim DeBetta:  This is just common stuff. I am not surprised here. I am not surprised here, it happens every day.

Ron Reardon: It happens. I’ve heard this story over and over again.

Lee Kantor: Was there something that she could have done to prevent 5,000 being thrown away?

Jim DeBetta:  When you work with factories that you know, or you work with a factory broker that knows the factories that are reputable you typically don’t have those types of problems.  It is not that they can’t have a defective run of product but, when you are investing your own money and you are not a big company to get that first run and they are defective is crushing.  Sometimes if it is not a good factory they may not want to work with you to take the product back or give you a credit or redo them. They may give you a hard time and then you have to wait another couple of months.  Waiting is sometimes tougher than the actual mistake itself.

Kristi Gorinas:  They replaced them for free.

Jim DeBetta:  That’s good.

Kristi Gorinas:  It did cost $700 to ship it, though. My quality engineer, they were given five little sample bags to test and they felt they were fine.  Well, five isn’t enough out of 5,000 bags. So the testing wasn’t done correctly on my groups end. So, they paid for the shipping and the factory replaced the pouches. It was more of a time and disappointment to me.

Ron Reardon:  How much time did it cost you?

Kristi Gorinas: Probably an extra month.

Ron Reardon:  A month here, a month there…

Jim DeBetta:  She is lucky she didn’t send them to a retailer and they were defective!

Lee Kantor: That could have been Game Over.

Ron Reardon:  Good factories will have good quality control procedures. They will not test every bag but they will do random samplings, it is definitely more than 5/5000.   They will pull every other master cart and they will pull a bag and they will do very specific tests. They will not just go, “Yeah, this looks good.” They will do stress testing and drop testing and fabric spill testing, all the specific things they will do for fabrics and they will check them.  Color fastness, things like that.

Kristi Gorinas:  I’m learning this process as I go, through my mistakes.  You are right, every time I’ve said something you’ve come back with the factories in Asia are good. You are right, they are good and I plan to do future business with them because they do make good quality products. It is just that you have to learn.

Jim DeBetta: A lot of people are worried. I think one of the big fears people have with working with Asian factories is that they say, “Well, I really want to support a US effort.” But when you are in business and you’re successful by importing products, when you sell products you may hire people and you put people to work no matter what.

Lee Kantor: What’s the difference in pricing?

Jim DeBetta: It could be huge. Sometimes it is only 10-20%, but I’ve seen products 60-70-80% less expensive for the equal quality. When I ran my own companies I used to source things, I couldn’t believe how inexpensive but how well made they could be. This is what they do. These factories overseas…we support these countries in a way by all the goods we consume here.

Lee Kantor: So the lesson is to have somebody on the ground there in China that is a good quality control person that is going to make sure you are choosing the right manufacturer.

Jim DeBetta: Absolutely. I think in Kristi’s case, which is common, I think the handful of take-aways are that you have to have some money to get behind your project. If you know that you are only going to have a few bucks and then you are going to run out when it comes to sales and marketing you probably shouldn’t really jump in. You may just lose your money.  The next thing is that it takes time.  Here’s Kristi, typical example, six months, eight months, a year; it takes a long time to go through the process.  You have to try to have the best connections you can. You want to find people that know factories. You want to know people that are great with branding and patent work. When you have those you pay more up front but you will save a lot of money later. It is so typical in this business.

Now Kristi, real quick before we wrap up…I know you were interviewed by The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, that’s a huge paper for anybody that doesn’t live in Atlanta, I guess that is the New York Times equivalent of a paper down here.  It is a huge thing. So quickly, tell us about how that went and when we can expect to see the article.

Kristi Gorinas:  Actually, the article came out this morning. I haven’t seen it in print. I did see the online version about ‘Mompreneurs’. Myself and another gal in Alpharetta were featured. They actually came out to the house and took pictures of me in my own environment with the inventory in the basement and just asked about the journey a little bit and the struggles and pretty much the same thing we talked about today. Also, the benefit of being a ‘Mompreneur’, being able to work from home and go to the doctor appointments and be with the kids  and also the struggles of trying to have four kids at home and do work.

Ron Reardon: Well, now that you are published you are somebody. You are important. You’re a star.

Jim DeBetta: You’ve made it through the hard parts which is, unfortunately is not what happens to everybody. We will be posting the link for Kristi’s interview on our websites and our radio show so that everybody can take a peek and get to know Kristi a little bit better.

Kristi, we really appreciate you coming out. I’m excited. I love your products. I know you are working on others.

Lee Kantor:  What is your website, Kristi?

Kristi Gorinas: It is www.kristig.com.  They didn’t put it in the newspaper.

Ron Reardon:  What is interesting is that when I was in the AJC many years ago is that people will track you down, even though the website is not there, they will still find you.

Jim DeBetta: Yeah, they do. Five years ago it would be more difficult. They’ll just Google you and find your website. It is not as tragic as it used to be.

Ron Reardon: Kristi, thanks for coming out and sharing your journey with us. I think our listeners really picked up some great, great tips of what it is like to go from start to finish.

This has been another episode of Launch with Jim DeBetta and our producer, Lee Kantor.  I’m Ron Reardon.  Thanks very much.

END