Listen to the podcast above, watch the video, or read the script below.

Dennis Collins: Welcome to another episode of Connect and Convert, the sales accelerator podcast, where each week we share insider secrets of how to grow your sales fast. I’m joined by Leah. I’m Dennis. We’re back again. We have another special treat.

I hope that you caught a previous episode with our guest Craig. Why are we talking to Craig? How to Win the Hearts, The Money, and the Loyalty of Profitable Customers. 101 Relational Marketing Principles. A Wizard of Ads Marketing Guide. Wow. I love the way he introduces himself in the book. “I’m an Aussie. I love a good glass of red, a joke, and a laugh. I love spending time with family and friends. I take my work seriously, but not myself.”

Please let me introduce, ladies and gentlemen, a fellow Wizard of Ads partner, a colleague, and a dear person, a man who has decided in his life to make a difference. Please welcome Craig Arthur.

Craig Arthur: Thank you. Boy, that was another big entrance.

Dennis Collins: Well, you know, you’re a big guy! You represent the entire nation of Australia. And New Zealand, probably, too, and maybe the Asia Pacific, I don’t know.

Craig Arthur: Just take Fiji in there, too, and New Caledonia, I’ll add them all. Tonga.

Dennis Collins: You should. Tonga, that would be my favorite. Yeah, Tonga.

Look, I hope that we have some of our listeners and viewers who have seen and heard you in our previous episode. So we’re not going to backtrack on that. We want to cut some new ice, as they say, up in Canada. So I particularly liked that you have a lot of great quotes in the book — a very quotable book.

And we were kidding about Confucius, you know, whenever you don’t know who said something, Confucius said it. But here’s a quote that caught my fancy in the book. Sending men to war without training is like abandoning them. And you have rephrased that for the current day, sending staff to help customers without training is like abandoning them.

Really? That’s pretty heavy. Abandoning them. So your conclusion is that staff training is good marketing. Help us with that.

Craig Arthur: You summed it up nicely because we always say these are the people that are going out representing you and you don’t train them. So what does that say? The first impressions that people are going to have of your business are of untrained staff.

Now, in Confucius’s time, they just got killed. In modern times you miss the sale, purely from the fact that your staff aren’t up to speed.  If people can watch the first episode we did, if you’re running relational ads — ads about the customer and helping the customer — and your sales team are doing something different, more transactional or they’re not trained, then there’ll be a disconnect.

And in any business, the minute there’s a disconnect, people stop. So you need that flow. A good example is there were ads on Australian TV for a company, I won’t mention the name, but it was an insurance company. And the little guy in the ad was so likable and lovely, he was just this really nice guy, and they sat in a car with customers and talked to customers about the money they saved.

I just felt good about these ads. And I just kept watching these ads and I felt good about them, so guess what happened at the time to renew my insurance and car insurance, what did I do? I thought of these people first, felt good about them, and called them. They were relational ads and the first person that I dealt with was a hard-sell salesperson who was exactly the opposite of what their ads were.

Dennis Collins: It’s interesting you say that. I had a client that was doing lovely relational advertising. It was award-winning stuff. But when you dive into the sales team, it was all transactional. No good. You’ve obviously been there too.

Craig Arthur: Conversion rates just plummet when that happens.  It’s like your friend, you’ve got a friend who’s lovely, and the next time you see them, they are completely the opposite and it’s like, “Whoa, what’s going on? This is crazy stuff.”

So I just hung up on this woman. And every time I see the ads now, it just reminds me of the experience I had with this salesperson.

Now there are two problems there. One, the company has projected an image that’s not really them or their sales team hasn’t been trained in that particular section of the company. And so that salesperson has just reverted back to her normal training, which means that they haven’t trained her up.

Dennis Collins: As you know, that’s what we do. We try to take salespeople who tend to go to the transactional and try to make them relational. Leah and I do this every week. Maybe you have some thoughts on it, Leah.

Leah Bumphrey: Well, it makes me go back to something else that’s in your book, Craig, and something that Dennis and I talk about a lot, and it’s the core value.

The other way we express that is that is the Sword in the Stone, which makes me think of Wizard Academy, of course, whose co-sponsors are this podcast. But honestly, that sword is so important because you know what your business is about and you want your people to know about it. What would you expand or how would you expand on that?

Cause I know that’s a big part of your belief system is laid out there.

Craig Arthur: Sword in the Stone core values: that’s where this salesperson, if she understood the core values or the company had trained her in the core values, she wouldn’t have approached the sales process like she did. Why we call it the Sword in the Stone, think back to the Arthurian legend where only the rightful king, Arthur, could pull the sword from the stone.

And, to do that, they’re your core values as in, “I will always do this as a business, we will always deliver on what we promise.” And it’s also all the things that we will never do. We will never ever make a sale at the cost of hurting the customer or, you know, the customer has to win as well. So what are the things that you will never ever do?

I don’t work with customers or businesses that I don’t believe in, that I don’t trust and I wouldn’t deal with myself. Now, that costs me money. If you believe in a North Star or core values — they are only core values if they cost you something. If it costs you a customer, that’s a true core value.

If it doesn’t cost you any money and you just move, that wasn’t a core value at all. I met a young guy once, back in the day when you had webmasters, and he worked for a media station. He said, “We don’t have a sword in the stone, we have a sword in the mud.” The sales team moves it wherever they want to go just to make budget.

So now we only deal with relational owner-operated companies. Now the beauty is that the owner can say, “You know what? We don’t have to make budget this month. We’re not going to make budget at the cost of compromising what we believe in.” That’s when you know that it’s a true core value.

At Wizard Academy, there is actually a tower where you stand and look up and there’s a sword set in the top of Wizard Academy because it’s such an important part of what we teach and what we believe in at Wizard of Ads. And if you stand there on these two feet that are set in the stone in the ground and look up, at the top of that sword, you’ll actually see the North Star that we discussed in the first episode.

So the North Star, the sword and the stone, and the entrepreneur is where they are now looking up. They’re the things we talk about that are so important to our company and our training facilities. They’re actually built there and it’s part of our logo as well. The child with the sword and the star.

The child represents the business owner who has that childlike quality of, “I’m going to get knocked down, but keep getting up.” As a kid, Leah, you’ve got three boys. They’ve probably done some crazy stuff when they were kids where you get on a push bike – I used to have a dragster back in the day. I’m 62.

So back in the day, you had a three-speed dragster with handlebars up here and it would look like a chopper bike. Yeah, I was tough. And I’d set up a ramp that was wobbly and go down this ramp and all of a sudden, you know, you’d crash, but you’d back up and do it again.

Now, why do we use a child representing the entrepreneur? They get back up all the time. As a business owner, you’re going to get knocked around, but you get back up. So a child has that constant curiosity, that constant wonder, they’re looking at the world. Most people, unfortunately, as we get older, tend to get belted around and we lose our confidence. There’s been some songs, we just do it for the man and we just make the money and go to work.

The entrepreneur looks at things in a different way and it doesn’t matter how old they are. They still have that sense of wonder, curiosity, and constant learning. They’re just looking at “how can we make the world better? How can we do things better?” So again, the values become important. My values – curiosity is a big one.

And I think I’ve heard you guys discuss curiosity before as a salesperson. As a salesperson, curiosity is asking questions and learning as much as you can about the person that you’re trying to help. Empathy is something that I learned way back. And that was my story as a kid – empathy, fun. I just love to muck around and enjoy life.

I like to be serious, but you need to have fun and laugh. Simplicity is a big thing, and that’s when I put my book together. I made sure that I simplified a lot of, well 101, plus it’s actually 112,  relational marketing concepts, and reduced them down into one page that was so simple to understand that it’d fit on one page.

And Dennis And Leah, you said it before too, each page is like a seed where it’s the seed of an idea that you can turn into a blog post, a podcast, it’s something that you can take with your business and try and implement it forever, just on one page. And there’s one idea, if you take nothing away from the book, there’s one idea that says, if you want to build a relational customer-centric business, focus on one question, does this help or hinder the customer?

If it helps, do it. If it hinders, dump it. Now that’s like a North Star. Everything we do, if you’ve got your sales staff and your frontline staff trained, all they need to know is, “Does this help or hinder the customer?” If it helps, do it. If it hinders you, don’t. And so you don’t need a mission statement because if you lined up mission statements, a hundred people, most people wouldn’t know what the mission statement of their business was, but a North Star is something that everyone should understand.

We’re going to help the customer. If it helps do it, if it hinders don’t. I think sometimes people get confused with mission statements and North Stars, but a mission statement is just a whole heap of ad speak. It’s a whole heap of buzzwords stuck together that makes it sound good, but no one can remember them.

Leah Bumphrey: You know, Craig, what I am loving when I’m listening to you is your passion for this. And I just visualize you sitting down with just a blank screen blinking as you try to put this all together because the format is simple. It’s designed to help. It’s your core values at work here. And that I think is what’s so spectacular because it’s tangible and usable.

You’re not just showing off how much you know, which you could have easily done in the book. What could have been “this” thick? Instead, it’s “Hey, this is stuff I know, and this is what I’ve experienced, and here are stories, and this is what you should do.”

Dennis Collins: Craig, could I ask you a question, maybe you’ve been asked this before, what was the most surprising thing, or the most unexpected thing, or maybe the funniest thing that you learned while researching and writing this book?

Craig Arthur: The thing I loved about researching this is something that I’ve been doing all my life. Because, if you look at it this way, I love collecting things. And be it quotes or be it ideas, the trouble is that I’d never really had anywhere to put all these in one place. I had them all over my desk and in my head and this is something I thought “You know what? I need to put all this down into one book.”

These ideas that I’ve been collecting, these quotes that I’ve been collecting. Most of this isn’t my stuff, it’s just stuff that I found that works, it’s stuff I believe in. It’s stuff that we apply for our customers, I’ve applied it in business before, so everything’s been something that works. So I’m a curator, a collector of things. Instead of teapots or tennis rackets, I like to collect ideas and quotes, and this I found was a really good way to put them all in one place. I’ve got a whiteboard up here with a lot of them stuck on the board, because, you know what happens is, you have so many ideas in your life and you forget so many and I like to go through the book every day and go, “Yes, I need to apply that. I need to keep applying it.”

So if anything else, the fun thing for me was just getting all this stuff in my head down on paper and learning as well – and highlighting other people because I’ve highlighted some partners and other people I know in the book, because again, there’s so many smart people out there.

And it’s just shining the spotlight on them. And that’s what I like to do as well. I’m like the man behind the curtain. I don’t like being out in center stage. I like to be behind the curtain, helping a business person or helping someone else succeed. And the whole idea of this book is: just do these things and you will succeed, it’s just a matter of applying these things.

Dennis Collins: That’s the hard part, isn’t it? I kind of have a slogan with some of our customers. It’s not about what you know, it’s not even about what you learn. It’s about what you use, and what you put into action. But I highly encourage people to pick up the book. We could spend hours on this, how to win the hearts, the money, and the loyalty of profitable customers. This is my highly marked-up copy. I’ve got lines and arrows and I mean, I’ve just devoured this several times. I’ve also provided it to several of my local colleagues here in Florida and they are loving it. So, what can I say? Good for you. You did a good job here.

Even more, you shared with us. We appreciate the time. I think this is going to be very interesting to our listeners, to our viewers. I hope someday we can do this again. When Episode Two… I noticed on the cover of the book, Episode One, so I’m hoping that there’s an Episode Two.

Leah Bumphrey: Maybe he’s going to announce that to us today, Dennis.

Dennis Collins: Well, he has every opportunity. I’m going to shut up and let him announce right now.

Craig Arthur: Episode Two is coming. And that was the message to myself more so than anyone else – that I need to have the second book. I put volume one on there and I was having coffee with my good mate that we meet every Saturday and discuss stuff. And he said Volume One sounds like an encyclopedia. And they died like the dinosaurs and so I said, “Okay, Star Wars, let’s make it Episode One.” So he went to the bathroom. When I came back, I said, “Look, I’ve changed the cover for you – Episode One.” But it’s because I now want to do a book a year moving forward.

Leah Bumphrey: And we can say “We knew him when…”,  Dennis.

Dennis Collins: We knew him when…We hope he’ll still talk to us after he reaches the highest of fame and fortune, maybe he’ll remember us. I don’t know. I have one closing thought that Craig wrote that I want to capture and share with our listeners and viewers.

“One day, a little voice in your head will say, I’m fed up with my business not growing. I’m sick of wasting money on advertising. I want more profitable customers. That’s when people call Craig Arthur.” How can they reach you? Tell us the best way to get in touch with you.

Craig Arthur: The best way to get in touch with me is my email, craigarthur@wizardofads.com, or you can go to my website, wizardofads.com.au

Dennis Collins: I hope all of our listeners and viewers love his accent. We could just listen to that all day.

Leah Bumphrey: Absolutely. That’s kind of why I wanted you on the podcast. I mean, I like the book, but…

Craig Arthur: As I said, I’ve been practicing this accent for 62 years.

Dennis Collins: You’ve got it down, mate. Leah, I would love your thoughts here as we close this session out.

What are you thinking?

Leah Bumphrey: Well, you know what, it is just such a pleasure to see someone who had the idea and actually did the deed. I mean I don’t know how many hours, I don’t know how much brain space, but it’s a lot to put it down and then be able to share that with people. Cause when you talk to someone, you talk to one person. When you write a book, you talk to generations. So bravo. And we can go on Amazon, we can order this.

Dennis Collins: Anything else, Craig, that we missed? What we should talk about before we sign off?

Craig Arthur: No, I think the important thing is, as you said, it’s just the daily, once you’ve got a destination or a goal in front, get a process to get you there and just focus on the process. Focus on the daily things that you need to do in sales or in business and just keep focusing on doing those things well and you’ll get to where you want to go.

Leah Bumphrey: And we know we’re having you back on again.

Dennis Collins: We’ll save a space. I mean, we’re a very busy podcast, but we’ll save space for you. Thank you.

Craig Arthur: Thank you very much.

Dennis Collins: And thank you for listening and viewing. This is Dennis Collins and Leah Bumphrey saying so long!

Connect and Convert. We’ll be back next week with a new episode. Tune in, connect and convert. Thanks, Craig.

Latest posts by Connect and Convert (see all)