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Dennis Collins: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Connect and Convert. The Sales Accelerator podcast, where every week, you learn insider tips, and insider secrets to grow your sales. I’m Dennis Collins, and as always, I’m joined by my colleague. Say hello, Leah.

Leah Bumphrey: Leah Bumphrey from sunny Saskatoon up in Canada. Good to see everybody.

Dennis Collins: Sunny Saskatoon, this is going to be a fun episode. We’re gonna do something a little special. We normally don’t do this, but only when we have someone special as a guest. “How to Win the Hearts, Money, and Loyalty of Profitable Customers“. Wow. That’s a big promise. 101 Relational Marketing Principles, episode one.

A Wizard of Ads marketing guide. We know the guy who wrote this. This guy is a colleague of ours. There it is. He’s also, no one’s perfect, but he’s an Aussie. We love Aussies.

Leah Bumphrey: Well said. We’ll take him anyway.

Dennis Collins: But I like the way he describes himself.

“I’m an Aussie. I love a good glass of red. Doesn’t every Aussie? I love a joke and I like a laugh. I love spending time with my family and friends. I take my work seriously, but not myself.” Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce to you a man who has decided in his life to make a difference. The man from Down Under, Craig Arthur.

Craig Arthur: That was certainly a big intro. Thank you very much Dennis, and thank you, Leah.

Dennis Collins: Well, we’re glad you’re here. I mean,  it’s tough. We have people on, in three different countries, two different continents. This is hard to arrange. Producer Boomer had to do a lot of stuff to make this work, but I’m glad you’re here.

Craig Arthur: Thank you. And Paul might have to put subtitles underneath my accent so that you can understand what I’m talking about.

Leah Bumphrey: Oh, we love it. We love it. I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s being accused of having an accent today.  And you spell colour the same way as I do, so that’s good. I’m glad.

Dennis Collins: Yeah. You guys do have a lot in common. Well again, I must tell you, Craig, I am fascinated with your book, from the first copy that you sent me back in late 2023. I have just looked at every page. We could do a whole podcast on every page. It’s self-contained. It’s complete. We could do a whole podcast on it, but we don’t have time for that.

So tonight we’re gonna have to figure out what to leave out because I wouldn’t wanna leave out anything, but unfortunately, we’re gonna have to leave something out.

101 principles. Wow. No fluff, no BS. One principle per page. That’s what I like. One principle per page with bonuses. Ah yes, special bonuses.

Apply a principle to your business. Then pick another. Leave aside what you don’t like, what you don’t need. Love it. I would like to kind of start off with some of our viewers and listeners who probably don’t know too much about relational and transactional customers. I know the first time I heard that concept, I think from Roy Williams back in the Dark Ages, I said, wow, that explains a lot.

I see your book as a kind of manual for relational marketing. So why don’t we start with a definition first? What is relational marketing? What is transactional marketing? Why are they different?

Craig Arthur: Transactional and relational basically come down to – well, if you look at customers, I get my hair cut every four weeks for the last twenty-four years from the one barber or the one hairdresser.

I pay more. My wife’s always saying, “Why do you pay so much?” And it’s like that is a very relational purchase. I like the guy, I like the way that I get welcomed, the way that I have my cup of tea there, the way that they wash my hair, the way they do everything, and the way I look. I look exactly the same when I come out 24 years in a row.

So I’m willing to pay more because I feel good about this business. And I trust him and I believe he’s the best in the business for me. That’s very much a relational purchase. Now, when I go to the shops and buy shaving cream, I tend to buy what’s on special. Because to me, shaving cream is shaving cream – I have no feelings towards any particular brand.

Look, they’re all gonna do the same thing, so I’m just gonna buy it on price. So I am transactional. We’re not just one way or the other. I’m transactional in lots of things and relational in lots of others. I have a Mac, so I’m very much a relational buyer when it comes to computers.

Do you have a Mac, Dennis?

Dennis Collins: Yeah, that’s all that I use. That’s it. Leah?

Leah Bumphrey: I’m not talking to you guys. I don’t have a Mac. My husband never did, he was an IT guy. He’s told me all about you Mac people, man. Now that I know that, I don’t know if I can continue this under good conscience here.

Dennis Collins: We’re under attack, Craig. We’re under assault here.

Craig Arthur: Well, see? We believe we stand for something and we stand for what MAC stands for and we’re attracted to that. Mac is very much one for creatives. The computer is for people who are a little bit different, they like to do things differently.

Not the boring office workers.

Leah Bumphrey: I saw those ads. Just to be clear, I have an Apple phone. Moving on from the whole computer thing, I’ve got a question for you, Craig. The first time you went to your barber, why did you go the very first time?

Craig Arthur:  This comes down to relational because I used to be looking for someone I could trust and I kept going to different people and I wasn’t happy.

But how do we get word of mouth? At work, I said, look, I’m looking for someone to do my hair. And my sales manager at the time said my friends do it here. And that’s how I ended up there because we tend to trust people who are close to us, don’t we? So from a sales perspective, that one conversation led to – I’ve bought this guy a car with what I’ve paid for my hair.

So he has had a small car for over 24 years. It all came from that one conversation and I trusted my sales manager. But mind you, they lived up to what she told me. So getting back to the relational or transactional shopping mode. As I said, we were in both transactional shopping modes. I have no predisposition to any business.

I’m just looking for the lowest price, or I’m just looking for convenience. Transactional, you can just be – “Look, I don’t particularly like this fast food place, but guess what? It’s the only one here. So, I’ll buy from them.” But relational is when you are looking for a long-term commitment to a business. That’s why I buy a Mac long-term. I’ve had a Mac now for 23 years. So relational is very much a bit like friends. We tend to have friends that we like and trust. Now, Dennis, I met you personally last year and we talked about tennis and we had a connection with tennis. And I liked the way you talked, I liked your whole demeanor and I just felt comfortable around you.

So to me, that’s a relationship and I just felt good about being in the conversation with you. So my father is extremely transactional at everything. He just goes for the lowest price and then he has lots of dramas afterward, only from the fact that he always gets the lowest price provider and he gets what he pays for. But I’m looking for someone I like and trust, looking for the brands that I know I feel good about. So a business can be relational or transactional. I worked in radio and I think both of you guys did as well. And indeed the company I worked with was very transactional in their staff. They didn’t really care about their staff. They were just like cannon fodder. It was, “We can just replace you easily.”  The customers were like that as well. Just sell to sell, and we’ll just get another one if they don’t buy. And so that to me was against my values because I was very relational.

How can I help these business owners succeed? And so I actually suffered more or less like a breakdown. One day I literally cried in my cornflakes because of my values – do you have cornflakes in America?

Dennis Collins: Yeah. We’ve got cornflakes.

Craig Arthur: There’s nothing worse than having soggy cornflakes, especially with tears in them.

So why I was crying in my cornflakes was really because my values of helping people, long-term commitment, delivering what we promise went against the values of the company I was working for, and that caused stress. That caused me angst. It caused like – depression. I just couldn’t work there and that’s when I actually found Wizard of Ads. ‘Cause I was looking for something – how does this work? And I’m looking for an expert I can trust. And that’s how I found the Wizard of Ads company, Roy H. Williams, who wrote the bestselling trilogy. I went to Wizard Academy. And I know that they’re a sponsor of your program. and so I found them very relational and I’ve been going back there for now – I’ve been a partner since 2001. So I’ve been going there for 24 years.

Leah Bumphrey: You were the first partner actually.

Craig Arthur: Yeah. I was the first partner. It was just timing. Timing was a good thing.

Dennis Collins: You must have been someone that Roy liked or you wouldn’t have been.

Leah Bumphrey: It would be more than timing, knowing Roy. He saw you as being the right person.

Dennis Collins: While you’re on this, you’ve opened up a bunch of doors that I wanna try to go in, but, there’s one in particular. Let’s talk again about relational customers and transactional customers.

So, I’m a small business owner. And I find that my customers tend to act in a transactional way. Is there anything I can do to either, number one, change them to relational type customers, what is the loss I’m going to suffer if I throw them out and go after only relational customers?

Craig Arthur: It is a very good question. And Dennis, just assuming that you said you’re in business, you’ve probably been running advertising that promotes sales and discounts and short-term buys. So you are attracting the transactional mindset customer because they think Dennis is the business where I can go and get a deal. I can beat Dennis. I’m going to buy this product cheaper than anywhere else. And I don’t care whether Dennis is in business next week. I just want to win. And so it’s marketing that it deals with, Dennis.  Your marketing is attracting these people. Now, if you want to, as I said, we’re all relational and transactional in different product categories. But if you change your advertising to start talking in a relational mindset, you’ll actually start attracting the people who I call “profitable customers.” Because a relational customer is willing to pay full price. They’re willing to keep coming back and be a regular customer, so a lot of the time it happens that the business owner, the messages that he’s sending out or she’s sending out, are attracting either relational or transactional customers.

Look, you can be profitable and do well in both categories.  In Australia, there are lots of electrical, like computer shops, and all they do is just run price products, sale type advertising. Is that the same in the States? Is that typical?

Dennis Collins: Yeah. We have a long list of car dealers, and automotive dealers, and of course, they’re always the biggest. They’re the best. They have the most selection. They have this, they have that, they have everything. And these guys are in business, Craig, and they make a ton of money. Do you guys have that kind of ad in Australia?

Craig Arthur: Yeah. Now what happens – the whole category does it, so they all copy each other.

The whole category copies each other, and so they all say, well, this is the way it’s done – a transactional business, and if you’re looking at a transactional ad. A transactional ad to me is very much about the price, the product, and the business. So we’re the biggest, we’re the best. The price is very much transactional because it’s not customer-focused at all unless you want to attract a customer who wants to get the lowest price. You’re just talking about yourself. So transactional radio people – we were told to go out and we just had a proposal with “we are number one in this category. We are this, we are that” and it’s all about the company, not the customer. So that’s transactional business. They’re focused on themselves and they’re focused on the product.

A relational business and relational marketing or advertising tend to be people-focused. It’s focused on creating that relationship. It can be ads that run, putting the customer in the ad so that they can see how the product or service is gonna solve their problems, but it’s making them the star of the ad, or it’s talking about the business owners. We call them origin stories. Things that all of a sudden people listen and go, “Wow, that’s amazing. I feel good about these people.” So that to me is the difference. Most ads in electrical computers and cars tend to be very transactional because they think that all customers are like their mindset, whereas, no, there is the relational customer.

Now you can cause a problem.  I don’t know the exact details, but wasn’t it one of the CEOs of Apple who went over to a department store in America? And he tried to bring in relational customers. But if you try and do it too fast — if you’ve got a lot of transactional customers and you just change overnight — they’re going to go, “Whoa, what’s going on?” ’cause they expect sale, sale, sale. And if you take that away…

So, you asked that question. There is a transition, but you’ll find that in most categories, by being relational, you’ll stand out purely from the fact that everyone else is being very transactional. They just talk about themselves.

Leah Bumphrey: Well, it’s a process, right? It’s a process to get there, especially if you’ve been doing something else and I think of the title of your book, you’re talking about winning loyalty, winning their hearts. Yes, you can make a living selling transactionally, but that’s not where your heart was. In writing this book, you’re not looking for those kinds of clients to help them. You’re looking at the process of, let’s do this because it’s the right thing in the right way and take it away from just being about an exchange of money, you know, and the cheapest exchange of money, like what your dad experiences.

Let’s do this in a way where we’re loyal to each other, where if I know that you are looking for something, I’m gonna give you a shout. And if you are looking for something, you’re gonna call me because you know, I would do that.

Craig Arthur: Yeah, if I have a problem with plumbing or electrical or air conditioning, I’ve got a guy. I saw a meme the other day – When you get to my age, you seem to have a guy for everything. But I’ve got a guy for that that I trust, and I don’t look at price. I don’t ask price. I just got him to do it. You just do it.

Dennis Collins: So the transition though, the transition is tough. It sounds like if you’re a transactional business and you say, gee whiz, I think relational advertising and relational customers is a better way to hire profit. You are going to have a painful period, perhaps. There may be some pain in there.

Craig Arthur: Yeah, it is pain, but Dennis, if you wanna get fit or if you wanna lose weight or if you want to do anything, there’s pain involved, isn’t there? Like we were discussing tennis –  if you want to be very good at tennis, there’s a lot of pain and agony and time involved in making that transition to learning how to play. So we call it The Wizard of Ads, the chickening out period, which basically is, you’re running relational advertising, you’re running relational marketing, but what happens? You don’t seem to see anything happening and you tend to chicken out when you go, “Well, you know, it’s two to three months in and I’m not really seeing any difference yet. I’m spending all this money, but they’re not coming in.”

But we always say, look, it’s like planting a crop. It’s like planting seeds. You don’t plant seeds and expect them to pop up the next day. And if they don’t come up, you say, well, that’s not working. Let’s buy some new seeds. You know that things take time. And it really comes down to the product purchase cycle, a big thing that a lot of business people don’t understand. If you are selling mattresses in your make-a-deal-with-dennis store, it could be seven years before a person buys a new mattress. Now, naturally, you might have three or four bedrooms, so they could be buying three or four in that time.

But people are listening to your ads, they’re liking your ads, they’re hearing your ads, and they’re feeling good about you, but at the moment, they actually don’t have a need for a new bed. So it does take time. Restaurants see things happen really quickly. Why? ‘Cause we eat out all the time. And so the product purchase cycle comes into that chickening out period. It takes a while for momentum to happen, but once momentum happens, then it just gets better and better and better. Most people though, like exercise, diet, and relational marketing, all pull out because they experience pain and they’re not seeing the results they expect right quickly.

Dennis Collins: I like that. The chickening out period. I think you’ve explained this as well as I’ve ever heard it explained, and I appreciate you. For those who are gonna run out and get this book, and you should – you spend a lot of time in the book talking about this and so I highly recommend, it because there are 101 principles, we can only talk about a few.

But I did wanna jump to another one that hit me. It’s principle number one. There’s the book, Profitable Customers Principle number one, your North Star, an adventure, the direction you choose. It never moves, it never changes. It’s always out of reach. It always drives you forward. You have an interesting story in the book about your North Star.

I think our listeners and viewers would love to hear that story and they would also love to hear, what the heck is all this about North Star? Why do you need to have it? How do you arrive at it? Do you look up in the sky and meditate or something? How does that happen? And tell a fair story.

Craig Arthur: Okay. Just quickly, my story, we moved around a lot when I was a kid. Dad was with construction. So the first two years of my schooling, I ended up having like six schools and I was always the new kid and I was really scared every time I walked into a school ground. I was the new kid. I got picked on a lot. ‘Cause that’s the easy thing to do. Pick on the new kid, isn’t it? And I was little. Like I’m six foot one and a half inches now, but I didn’t grow till after I left high school. So I was always picked on. I think that’s where I learned empathy and help towards other people because now when I see other people that need help, you can see in their eyes just in their manner that they need help or, they’re on the out. I like to help those people and when I say my North Star, I guess my whole life has been devoted to helping other people and in those days, help them fit in. But as I said in the book, it’s helping them stand out now because as you know, in marketing, the job is not to fit in and be like everyone else. The job is to stand out so you make it easy for people to select you or to buy from you. But the North Star – when people in The Northern Hemisphere – in The Southern Hemisphere, we have the Southern Cross – it just doesn’t have the same appeal as Southern Cross.

And the North Star is one that never moves around. It’s always in the same position. The Southern Cross moves everywhere. So it’s like, yeah, this is hard. You need to try and find the Southern Cross. But it’s a directional pointer. The North Star lines up at the center of the poles and basically, it doesn’t move.

So Christopher Columbus and all the sailors used the North Star as a guide because once you leave the harbor, you leave sight of land. What have you got? And in those days at night, you’ve got the sun through the day, but the North Star is the guide. You can actually use that to keep you on track ’cause the waves and the wind hit you and knock you around.

And it’s the same in life. The other day I wrote a post about “Do you want to be miserable or do you want to be happy?” Now, I wanna be happy. I said, focus on what you do have, focus on past successes. Focus on your achievements. Focus on where you’re going. Focus on the process to get you there and focus on your staff and customers if you’re in business.

Now, if you do that, that’s where you’re focusing and where you’re looking. But it’s easy to lose sight of that. You can have something happen and you start to feel like, “Oh gee, I’m not good enough.” And you start to lose track of, “No, this is where I want to go.” So the North Star is just the direction you want to go.

It’s guiding you. So “I like helping people” is just my big North Star. Specifically, it’s business people.

Dennis Collins: So how does a business find its North Star? I’m sure you’ve done this with many businesses. How do you do that?

Craig Arthur: It comes down to the values of the business – what direction does the business owner want to go because everyone’s got a different North Star. What’s yours, Dennis? From listening to your podcast: Sales and Ethical Persuasion, which I love, you talk about all the time, that is something that’s guiding you, isn’t it? To do things ethically, you know, you can do the same as we pointed out, and I think he pointed out in…how do you pronounce the author of that book?

Dennis Collins: Cialdini, Robert Cialdini.

Craig Arthur: Now as he said, it’s like the force in Star Wars. You can use it for good or bad. So the North Star – I’m gonna use it for good, and if I’m getting off and starting to lose and go bad, no, I’m going back to that. So you decided to use sales, which a lot of people would probably think, you know, “Oh, salespeople…”

So you are following the good, the ethical, the “do it the right way” for the customer. So that, and I listen to Leah where it should be win-win. Whereas, I think Leah you mentioned in a previous podcast, sometimes if you get too close to a client and you’re helping them, the radio station might think, oh, you’re in their court now. No, you help. It’s a win-win for both.  You have to have a good relationship.

So I think the North Star is, where do you want to go now? I don’t work with people who want to take it to the dark side. I had one client who came on board and they were selling homes, and investment properties. And once I did an Uncovery with them and started talking to ’em, I found this is not ethical. Or it didn’t fit with me, it didn’t fit with my values, and I let them go. And I thought, I can’t help these people – promote these people – if I don’t believe in them and if I don’t trust like them. So every business person has got their own North Star, basically. Don’t confuse it with a destination. The destination is if I’m leaving the harbor, I want to get to America. Or if I want to come to the States, I want to go to Austin, to Wizard Academy, that’s the destination. They are similar, but a destination sometimes can be money. In business, whereas a North Star is more valuable, it’s always out of touch. It’s always why you can never reach it.

Leah Bumphrey: That’s why it was such a perfect match. The people who are listening and watching and that are attracted to this podcast and you are, you know, the people that would want to read your book, which is why Dennis and I wanted to interview you.

Dennis, I think we have to get Craig on again. I think we need another session with Craig just to get into some of the details. Because my heaven, we could keep going here.

Dennis Collins: Yes. We have just not even scratched the surface, but, would you be up for another session, sir?

Craig Arthur: Certainly, certainly.

Dennis Collins: I don’t want to commit to it unless you do.

Craig Arthur: It’s done.

Dennis Collins: All right. We’re there.

Leah Bumphrey: We’ll do another story. I’m holding it here so that people can see it. Which direction do I go?

Dennis Collins: That is the book, the gentleman from Down Under with the lovely Australian accent is Craig Arthur. He is a fellow Wizard of Ads partner, and the book is How to Win The Heart’s Money and Loyalty of Profitable Customers 101 Relational Marketing Principles. Every page is a gem.

This is Dennis Collins and Leah Bumphrey signing off on this edition of Connect and Convert. We’ll see you next time. Thanks, Craig.

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