By Heike Young

13 Marketing and Service Quotes from Jay Baer That You Need to Hear

in Customer Service, Marketing, Marketing Cloudcast

“Before you go spend a bunch more money on marketing, make sure you’re at least decent in your category of customer service. Because otherwise, you’re just running in place.” -Jay Baer

This week on the Marketing Cloudcast, the marketing podcast from Salesforce, Jay Baer joins the show.

If you’re in marketing, you‘re familiar with Jay’s work. He’s author of the NYT bestselling book Youtility and the most retweeted person in the world among digital marketers.

In this episode of the Marketing Cloudcast, Jay explains the cross-departmental disruption behind his new book Hug Your Haters. Jay explains why marketers must lead the transformation toward better customer service for every customer, be they brand lovers or haters. He also shares his top social media and presentation delivery tips.

If you’re not yet a subscriber, check out the Marketing Cloudcast on iTunes, Google Play Music, or Stitcher.

Take a listen here:

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Here’s a collection of 13 of the best quotes and soundbites from our conversation with Jay (and it was tough to pull just 13! You’ll get much more wisdom in the full episode).

1. “The book Hug Your Haters was supposed to be totally different. My original hypothesis was that speed is the most important thing in business now—that if you’re faster, you win. But my research with Edison showed that speed is important, but the most important thing is just showing up. Today, one-third of all customer complaints are never answered.” -Jay Baer

2. “Somewhat puzzlingly, almost all of [consumers’] unanswered complaints are in public: social media, review sites, discussion boards, and forums where everybody can see you’re ignoring them.” -Jay Baer

3. “For generations, customer service has been a necessary evil in business because there were no financial incentives to be great at it and no financial disincentives to be terrible at it. But now that customer service is increasingly a spectator sport, the ramifications for this have changed a lot. That’s why I say that customer service, in many ways, is the new marketing.” -Jay Baer

4. “If I say to you, ‘Who’s really great at customer service?’ you can come up with two or three companies right of the top of your head. Why? Because they’re so rare.” -Jay Baer

5. “Before you go spend a bunch more money on marketing, make sure you’re at least decent in your category of customer service. Because otherwise, you’re just running in place.” -Jay Baer

6. “Culturally, you either believe in customer service at the very highest executive levels or you don’t. If you don’t truly believe that one of the ways you’re going to differentiate and stand out in your category is by being genuinely better at customer service and caring more about your customers, you’ll never be great at this, you’ll always be just mediocre.” -Jay Baer

7. “I think you should answer everybody, even trolls. That may sound bizarre, but let’s remember that ultimately you are not really talking to that person, you’re talking to everybody. The crazier the trolls or crazy complainers are, the more rational you should be—because it makes them seem even crazier in context. Then the whole community understands that you actually care.” -Jay Baer

8. “Just 3% of all customer complaints and brand mentions actually tag the brand. So you’ve got to listen harder if you really going to find all the places that you can hug your haters—so software is required.” -Jay Baer

9. “It is way easier to teach somebody Twitter than it is to teach somebody your business. So this concept that we’ve got to get young people, for example, because they ‘grew up with this stuff’ to put them on the social media team doesn’t really hold water with me.” -Jay Baer

10. “The more you say, the worse your speech. Take what you think you want to include in [a marketing presentation], throw away half of it, and you might be pretty close to as much content as you need.” -Jay Baer

11. “We have opportunities in marketing that were literally unthinkable five to ten years ago—unfathomable. The power that we have at our disposal with tools like Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, and beyond is stuff that we could only dream of a short time ago, and I’m old enough to remember those days. But it’s not about the wand, it’s about the wizard.” -Jay Baer

12. “The technology is outpacing marketers’ ability to understand how to use it— and the confusion about what’s out there, how do I deploy it, how does it work with customers is a real problem. We have more power than we have knowledge.” -Jay Baer

13. “Unless we can keep marketers and customer service professionals really understanding what is possible [with technology], all the software in the world is not going to save them.” -Jay Baer

Want to learn more from Jay about how marketers can transform the service experience and start hugging their haters?