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Customer Psychology, Marketing, and Growth With Bob Serling

Bob Serling

Bob Serling is the Founder of Licensing Lab, a consulting firm that helps companies understand why customers buy and how to create marketing that drives more sales. He is a buying behavior specialist known for uncovering the real motivations behind customer purchasing decisions. Bob pioneered the Customer Created Framework, a customer-driven approach to developing products, offers, and marketing strategies. He has spent more than 35 years helping businesses improve customer experience, increase conversions, and accelerate growth.


Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:


  • [2:16] Bob Serling discusses how Licensing Lab is helping companies uncover the real reasons customers buy

  • [5:56] The importance of talking to customers every six months

  • [8:06] Who should own customer insights inside an organization

  • [11:22] Building a customer-focused culture inspired by Zappos

  • [13:04] Creating the ideal customer outcome and experience

  • [15:12] Bob talks about achieving a 68% product success rate through customer research

  • [21:35] Three questions to uncover what customers value most

  • [25:36] Using customer feedback to increase program revenue by 700%

  • [30:14] How AI can support customer research and market analysis

In this episode…


Many businesses struggle to understand what truly motivates customers to buy. As a result, they create products, services, and marketing messages based on assumptions rather than real customer insights, leading to missed opportunities and underperforming campaigns. How can companies uncover what customers actually value and use that knowledge to drive growth?


Bob Serling, a buying behavior specialist and founder, explains that the key is regularly speaking with customers to understand their experiences, frustrations, goals, and buying motivations. He recommends asking what challenges led customers to seek a solution, what alternatives they tried that failed, and which aspect of a product or service they would never want to lose. Bob emphasizes that businesses should focus on customer experiences rather than features, incorporate customer feedback into marketing and product development, and use AI as a research tool to supplement — not replace — direct customer conversations.


In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Bob Serling, Founder of Licensing Lab, about uncovering the real reasons customers buy and using those insights to improve marketing and customer experience. Bob discusses why most marketing offers fail, how customer feedback can dramatically increase revenue, and the role AI can play in supporting customer research and market analysis.


Resources Mentioned in this episode



Quotable Moments:


  • “Almost nine out of ten times the reason you think your customers buy is very different than the reasons they really do.”

  • “They judge it by their experience with it. So it can deliver the best results possible.”

  • “If you don't continually talk to your customers in a meaningful way, then you're not going to know what's motivating them.”

  • “The reason why was simple. It was that they misunderstood their customer's needs.”

  • “You never know what it is, whether it's a winch or somebody who wants to meet the expert.”


Action Steps:


  1. Facilitate regular customer interviews: Schedule customer conversations or surveys every six months to uncover changing needs, motivations, and expectations so your products, services, and marketing remain aligned with what customers actually want.

  2. Ask customers what prompted their search for a solution: Understanding the challenges, frustrations, or goals that led customers to seek help enables you to create more relevant messaging and offers that address their real needs.

  3. Identify the most valuable part of your offering: Asking customers which feature, benefit, or experience they could not live without reveals what drives loyalty and purchasing decisions so you can emphasize it in your marketing and product development.

  4. Use customer feedback to refine your positioning: Analyzing what customers love, dislike, or wish was different helps you improve the customer experience while increasing the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts.

  5. Leverage AI to enhance customer research: Using AI to analyze reviews, identify patterns, and uncover additional insights after speaking with customers allows you to make better-informed decisions without replacing direct customer conversations.


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Episode Transcript:


Intro: 00:02 

Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn, grow their business.

 

Richard Walker: 00:16

Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Artem Koren of Assembly AI, Dan Leivins of ShareOne and Trunal Bhanse of Clazar. Today, I'm speaking with Bob Serling, founder of Licensing Lab, and today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms. Instead, get Quik! using Quik!.

 

You'll be able to generate completed forms and get back clean, context rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quickforms.com to get started. All right, I'm excited for today's guest. Bob Serling is a buying behavior specialist who helps companies identify exactly what makes customers buy and how to make sure they prefer to buy from you. Bob has leveraged a deeper understanding of why customers truly buy to become a monthly marketing columnist for success magazine.

 

He's best known for having pioneered the customer created framework, which is the process of customer driven development of marketing and products. Bob, welcome to The Customer Wins.

 

Bob Serling: 01:39 

Hey, Rich, thanks for having me. I'm really happy. And I, as I told you earlier, I love the title of your podcast, The Customer Wins because that's what it's all about.

 

Richard Walker: 01:52 

Well, and you're going to be the perfect guest. I mean, talking about behavior and understanding, oh my gosh, we want to do this. So for those who haven't heard my podcast before, I love to talk to business business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience. And the challenge is to growing their own company. So, Bob, to understand your business a lot better, how does your company help people?

 

Bob Serling: 02:16 

Well, it's pretty simple. What I do is, is kind of what you said in the introduction. I help customers and customers. I help my clients identify exactly why their customers really buy. And it's very interesting that almost nine out of ten times the reason you think your customers buy is very different than the reasons they really do.

 

And once you understand why they really do, then it's far easier to create offers, positioning and copy that's going to make them prefer to buy from you. And it. The main thing is it really helps you service them better in the way that they would prefer to be treated in service. So that's what I do know.

 

Richard Walker: 03:07 

I love it, you know, all the times I talk about customer experience, it often comes from the standpoint of better user interfaces or taking friction out of the process or streamlined activities, things like that. But we're not really talking about why is it people buy from you and therefore, what's the experience they want to have or should have?

 

Bob Serling: 03:28 

Exactly right.

 

Richard Walker: 03:31 

So how do we get there? How do we help people see it from that perspective?

 

Bob Serling: 03:34 

Well, and that's the exact point, you know, when if you think about the way that most people have been taught to create a product because the product or the service, I and I use those terms interchangeably, but that comes before the marketing material. But the way you're taught to create that product or service is to come up with 3 or 4 ideas for it. Have your customers or your subscribers look at it? Tell them. Tell you which they prefer best and then you create it.

 

But if you've ever done that, you know that probably eight out of ten times it falls way short of your expectations because that's talking about features and benefits. And that's not how a customer really judges a product or service. They judge it by their experience with it. So it can deliver the best results possible. But if it's an absolute pain in the well, pain in the elbow will say to use, then it just doesn't matter how good it is.

 

And companies tend to overlook the experience and they think instead about, you know, features and benefits. And those are important, but those are downstream. Further away, you've got to get to what the customer wants to experience. And prior to that, what they were experiencing that made them even look into your solution in the first place. Once you start to understand those things, you can begin to communicate with people on the basis of what they really want and need, and even in terms of their own language.

 

Richard Walker: 05:22 

All right. So oftentimes I feel like the captain on the ship, and because I'm the captain of the ship and I know my ship really, really well, I think I know the customer experience because I talk to so many customers who had a great voyage with me. I think I know the customer, and I feel like it's a struggle to get more people in the company, to know the customer at a level that truly can translate into better services and products. How do companies do it? How do you get more people engaged?

 

And not just once. I talked to a customer once and now I got all the answers type of thing.

 

Bob Serling: 05:56 

Well, and that's a great point because answers change. Let's say if you knew your customer 18 months ago and that's the last time you talked to your customer. Think of how much has changed just because of AI, the things that people are nervous about these days, the things that people think they can benefit from, and just the way they're building their products and services have changed so much with AI that if you don't continually talk to your customers in a meaningful way, then you're not going to know what's motivating them at that time. So, I mean, there's no hard rule, Rich, but I like to tell people that they should be speaking to their customers in terms of what they're experiencing, not what features and benefits do you want? What are you going through right now?

 

And I tell them, you should do that every six months and you can do it in person, or you can do it with a properly written survey. Both work really well, but the important thing is to do it. And most companies, you know, you get busy and you tend to overlook those things, or you put them off a month and a month becomes three months and then a year. But it's pretty simple. It isn't magic, you know.

 

Richard Walker: 07:29 

All right. But I'm going to make it more magical. Okay, great. When I think about a company structure now, look, if I'm a sole proprietor, it's my job. If I have a four person team, it's still my job.

 

If I'm the one selling or delivering a service like Financial advisor might. But if I'm if I'm a company structure and I've got a support team, I've got a product development team. I have a sales team. I have a marketing team. Right.

 

Whose job is it? Who owns that role? To really understand the customer every six months and and come up with the surveys and do the outreach and feed that information back somewhere. Who who do you think owns that role?

 

Bob Serling: 08:06 

You know, it depends on how the company handles it. But I have a good friend named Robbie Richmond, and Robbie was the head of customer happiness for Zappos when Zappos was still in business. Yeah. And Zappos was so successful because of their level of customer service. You know, they they did all their sales by phone because they started just when the internet was getting going and ordering online was just, it was havoc.

 

It didn't work that well. So most companies have a limit of it's something like 6.5 minutes that you can talk to a customer. And Zappos much because of of Robbie's leadership coupled with Tony Hsieh, the founder of the company's leadership, they said, no, our customer service people are our order takers can talk as long as they want. They can get to know the people. They can get to know what styles of shoes they want, what styles they don't like, whether they have a wide foot, a narrow foot.

 

They can talk about their kids sports activities. They can talk about, you know, how they got sick at a restaurant last weekend. They can just be human with people. And but circling back to the answer. There isn't one.

 

It's not fixed. You can't say, well, the chief marketing officer should do it or this or that, but you should pick someone, whether it's formalized, like at Zappos or less informal, but nothing gets done if something isn't responsible for it. So another way to back into the answer is, because I don't want to leave it vague, is that it often, it's often best to have somebody on your customer support staff had that up because they're talking to people every day. They're doing that anyway. They know what people call in and complain about.

 

They know what people call in and want help about what people call in and have questions about. So it's pretty natural when you're going to select one person for it to fall on someone in that department.

 

Richard Walker: 10:48 

I love your answer, Bob, because it actually is telling me two different things. One is like, like Tony Hsieh did, if it's not part of your company culture, it's not going to be ingrained in how everybody thinks and acts already, right? Right. Company culture is a big part of this. But the second thing is, I'm wondering how many companies have a role dedicated to this, a voice of the customer role, a type of thing.

 

And if they have somebody just dedicated to how do we get more feedback from customers and learn their problems and go on site, do anything it takes to understand the customer? Have you heard of that?

 

Bob Serling: 11:22 

I can tell you pretty accurately from having worked with clients for 35 years now, that 99% don't have someone formally in that role. And worse than that, most companies, I don't know the exact number, but it's very high. They never talk to their customers other than to send out a survey form like, you know, do you like product A, product B or product C better? Okay. You like product B will create that.

 

Well, why didn't it work? And so, you know, kind of tying into this Harvard Business Review and LinkedIn did separate studies of why most marketing offers fail or what percentage of them fail. And both of them came to the same number, which is that 90% of all marketing offers fail. They either fail completely, but most likely they fail to meet your expectations and often by large margins. And then Harvard looked into the reasons why.

 

I don't remember if LinkedIn did, but the reason why was simple. It was that they misunderstood their customer's needs. And again, how do you find out what your customers really need? Well, the best way is to talk to them. It's just that simple.

 

Richard Walker: 12:50 

Okay, let's take this to a different level. Now, Bob, if if this is what you're focused on, if somebody were to become really adept at understanding their customer and they got it right, what's the benefit? What's the outcome?

 

Bob Serling: 13:04 

Well, the benefit is. There's, there's multiple benefits. The benefit for the customer is that you're truly understanding what they experience, what was bothering them, or what did they want to achieve that led them to look into your product or service in the first place? What other things did they try that didn't deliver on on the results they wanted? And then with actual customers of your own.

 

What's their experience with your product or service? What you know, is there something that could be done better? Is there something that's done so well that if it wasn't there, they wouldn't keep using it or buying it? And so I'm always looking at it from the standpoint of how do I deliver two things. The ideal outcome, number one.

 

And number two, the ideal experience when getting that outcome that a customer wants. So once you do that and you're, you switch to being customer oriented instead of company oriented, the company benefits just fall into place because now you're able to communicate with them on exactly what they need and want. You can make minor changes to your product or service that better help them. Your offer is going to reflect exactly what they want and out of your offer. Your positioning and your copy and communications are all going to be speaking right to the heart of what your customers want and in their own language.

 

So everybody benefits.

 

Richard Walker: 15:02 

Yeah. And I'm thinking about that Harvard study. I mean, if 90% of your marketing is failing, can you turn that into 90% of succeeding because you got the message right?

 

Bob Serling: 15:12  

You can significantly, I'll give you an example that's a little outside the realm of this discussion, but one of the things I do as both a hobby and kind of a long term business is I invent products or develop products for large corporations. So, according to the US Patent Office, fewer than 2% of all patented products ever make it to market.

 

Richard Walker: 15:44 

Wow.

 

Bob Serling: 15:45 

But I have a 68% hit rate with my products. And I'm not smarter. I'm not better. I certainly have less hair than most other developers, but I once had hair. But.

 

But the thing is, I talk to the customers, I go out to where they are, and I observe what they're doing when using the type of product or service I'm developing and I talk to them, I show them my samples before I ever show them to a company. So and then beyond that, I talk. So with big companies are always selling through purchasing agents. I talked with the purchasing agents and I show them the models. And I said, if a company was to develop this, would you order it?

 

Well, when I go into a company and say, gee, you know, here's this idea for a toy. By the way, the buyer at target said they'd stock it. That's the end of the discussion because they can pick up the phone in a second, talk to. They know who the buyer is, and they know I'd be an idiot to lie about that. I once closed a massive major multi-million dollar deal in less than 20 minutes, just because I had the buyers from three large chains who said they'd buy it.

 

And so again, I talked to the end user customer, but I also talked to the company's customer who's the purchasing agent? And that's what made the difference. And again, it isn't magic. It's just something that people really haven't been taught to do and it's reasonably easy to do.

 

Richard Walker: 17:46 

So I want to go. I want to tell you a story, and I want to go back to one of the comments you made that people don't always understand why people buy from them, and the reasons are different than what they thought. So there's a company gave a presentation at a conference. I was at the company, I believe their name is Hive Sciences, and they were talking about Land Rover and Land Rover. When they brought the defender model to the USA, were struggling with how to position it.

 

And they would do focus groups and talk to people. And everybody would say, oh, well, it's well priced, it's reliable. You know, the base, it's safe. All the basic reasons. What hive science has figured out was the real reason the buyers wanted it is because it had a winch on the front bumper.

 

Bob Serling: 18:24 

Wow.

 

Richard Walker: 18:24 

And yeah, it had 33 inch tires and it could go through 35in of water and it was all wheel drive and capable of end of the world. In other words, the buyer imagined themselves in the worst of dire circumstances, having to survive. And that's why they wanted the defender, not because it was safe or economical. It's not.

 

Bob Serling: 18:41 

And it's it's so much different than what they thought. And, you know, when we talked last week, I told you about a well-known marketing expert who I worked with. And this this is across the board for a number of well-known experts. They build all these components into their programs, and those programs fall short. And when I interviewed their customers, it's like if you were to ask Tony Robbins highest level customers, the ones who pay $35,000 to spend a week weekend in Fiji learning from him, what's the number one reason they went.

 

Well, it isn't for the advanced techniques. It isn't to be in Fiji. It isn't for the set. It's because they want to spend some time with Tony in person. They want to touch the source.

 

And I found that with multiple experts. And when we started building just a like another teaspoon of that into the promotions, but making it very clear that this was limited, that they would be some of the few people who actually meet and have access, they would have lunch with the expert and this and that. Sales just took off so much. You never know what it is, whether it's a winch or somebody who wants to meet the expert. It's almost always different than what we think it is.

 

Richard Walker: 20:22 

How much of that do you think is human behavior to want to meet the source, whether that's the leader, the person they've seen on YouTube, or the designer of a product that they love, how much of it is they want to meet that person and be around that person? Do you think it depends?

 

Bob Serling: 20:40 

Because the truth is, very few products or services are really personality driven. Like no insult to either you or I, but I don't think our customers necessarily are dying to meet either of us. But a celebrity they are. So I, you know, unless there's some type of celebrity factor there, it's probably pretty minor. But the real point is there is something in every product or service that the customers can tell you about that you're just, you're never going to know unless you talk to them.

 

Richard Walker: 21:24 

Can we make this tactical now? What is what is the one or 2 or 3 questions you think people should ask to try to get that moment of, oh my gosh, I didn't realize that's what you cared about.

 

Bob Serling: 21:35 

Okay. Number one, I, I kind of touched on them earlier, but they're really important to, to underscore number one is what were you experiencing? What were you going through that led you to look into my product or service in the first place? Because everybody either has a problem they want to solve or a goal they want to achieve. And there's something about that.

 

It could be, you know, I tried five different air conditioner window air conditioners, and they're all too loud or they weren't strong enough or they were this or they were that. If someone could make one that was quiet and strong at the same time, and also would shut off on its own when I leave for work. So if I forget, I'm not running up the electric bill. It's always going to be something like that, and it's going to be different than what you think it is. So the first thing is what were you experiencing?

 

And then the second question is what else have you tried to achieve your goal that didn't deliver? Because that helps. Because then you can really look into those things and say, wow, I better be sure I don't have this in mind, or I have a way to overcome that in mind. And then the third question, and most important is, what's your experience been with our product and service? And especially the question I love because most people are they're concerned and it's out of the goodness of their heart.

 

They're concerned about insulting you, but. so you have to ask it in a way that they will be 100% honest. And the way I structured is if there was one thing from this product or service that was missing, that's there now that you absolutely wouldn't buy it if that wasn't there, what is it I like? And once they tell you that, then you know what most of your marketing should focus on.

 

Richard Walker: 23:50 

Yeah, I like that. You know, it's interesting listening to this because I'm also I'm hearing some of my own customers and when they've talked to us, and one of the predominant reasons I feel they love us is because of our service. They constantly say, my gosh, so and so on. Your team was amazing. I couldn't believe they stayed out late on Friday night to help us out.

 

Yeah, or the response time was super fast and we got our problem solved immediately. You know, it's, it's rarely that they're like, oh yeah, your product helped me sign so many more times. Or we did this many forms. The metrics aren't it. And oftentimes, I'm not even sure they understand how much they're saving by using our system, but the service and they can't get that level of service from other companies they work with is, I think, one of those defining moments.

 

Bob Serling: 24:40 

Yeah. So that that message should be woven throughout your marketing. I mean, because it's, it's really critical. I mean, you could even start out with something like, you know, there's a lot of companies that have good forums. And then in parentheses, we think ours are better.

 

There's a lot of companies that give you good prices. And in parentheses we think ours are the most fair on the market. But nobody provides service like this. And then boom, boom, boom. Three testimonials.

 

So you're you're speaking to exactly what customers value the most while bringing up those other points as well.

 

Richard Walker: 25:25 

Yeah. So now if you've learned what somebody wants and you just touched on marketing, how do you think that translates in the sales cycle? Because you want to win more customers, right?

 

Bob Serling: 25:36 

Right. Okay. So let's the easiest way to talk about it is to illustrate it with a real example. So I had a company and they do sales training for insurance agents who are in what's called the president's circle. That's like the top 1%, and they take them even beyond that, obviously highly trained, highly successful people.

 

So they were presenting their training in a three week, I mean, a, a three day immersion training because they thought that what people wanted was to get it fast so they can go out and get more results fast. And that went pretty well. And then they would have like a monthly call, like a support call, like so many programs do. And they were looking at it and they said, well, you know, the support calls take a lot of time. We have to have people available all the time for the calls and different time zones, because people are in different time zones geographically, both within the US and outside the US.

 

So we have to have multiple people. The calls take time, we have to prepare for them. We then have to transcribe them, send it out, and they thought, well, it's a big headache. We're going to get rid of them. I said, well, before you do, let's talk to your customers, see what's most important first.

 

And he said, well, I don't think anybody cares about the cause. Maybe they didn't. The answer to that question, if one thing was missing from this program that made it successful for you, the and would make you not enroll. If it wasn't there, what would it be? And they said 90% said the support calls.

 

Wow. They thought the support calls were a throw away. They had positioned them only as a bonus way deep, deep down in the marketing message. They shifted. This is wild.

 

They shifted it. We we now made it a year long support program kicked off by a three day immersion training instead of a three day training. And that and we we increased the calls from once a month to twice a month. And I said we should double the price. And the owner said, no.

 

I'm going to increase the price by 800%. I said, wow, you've got a lot of guts. And they said, well, that's what we want to do. So we renamed the program because you cannot sell the same program at an 800% increase under the same name. But all we really did was we renamed the program.

 

We repositioned it as this year long wall to wall support kicked off by the training. And we there was one other element. What? Oh, and then we changed the copy to reflect that. And it they could only I think it was I think it was 90 people per quarter.

 

They could train. That was their maximum, because this was one of those things where it had to be accredited. And they earn continuing credits from the licensing agency for insurance agents. Long story short, they took they they kept enrolling 90 people. But now instead of it 997, they were enrolling them at like 4500 or $5000.

 

So they, they increased their profits by about 700%.

 

Richard Walker: 29:46 

Well, so you answered that earlier question even better. Now, what's the value of knowing the customer? It can be eight times the value in terms of dollars. Man, I'm running out of time, but I'm going to push this a little bit long today because there's one more question I want to get in before we start to unwind this, which is we didn't talk at all about artificial intelligence. So I just want to put one question out there to you.

 

What role can I play and understanding the customer better?

 

Bob Serling: 30:14 

What is artificial intelligence? AI can play a big role, but I think where people go wrong with AI is that they think AI is the solution and it's not. It's a tool. And like any tool, it depends how you use it. So I like to use AI downstream.

 

So I'm always going to talk to people first. But then once I find out what they value the most, what their experience is, and especially what the products or services were that they tried that didn't deliver, I'll load that into AI and I'll say of these products and services that didn't deliver. Find me other ones just like them That are highly rated by customers and make me two lists. One list is what customers say they like the most, and the other list is what customers say they dislike the most. Now, for a consumer product, you can tell your AI to do that through amazon.com and walmart.com, because that's where most consumer products are bought.

 

With B2B stuff, you can do it through the various professional organizations. For any industry, you know, there's always going to be a group, I don't care what industry you're in, if you're a travel agent, there's a travel agent's association. So associations and professional groups are where you want to look for that type of feedback. So AI is a wonderful tool for augmenting things. I can research that type of critical advice in literally 20 minutes.

 

That used to take me maybe 30 hours, so I like to use it as a support tool.

 

Richard Walker: 32:23 

I'm glad you didn't say, oh yeah, it knows all your personas and therefore you can trust it, right? No. Well, look, I'm getting down to my last question here before I get to my very last one. What is the best way for people to find and connect with you, Bob?

 

Bob Serling: 32:40 

Well, I've got a 60 page e-book that I'm more than happy to give to your listeners and viewers, and it's called Why Customers Buy and how to Make Them Prefer to Buy from You. And it goes into this whole process we talked about in more detail, and they can get a free copy by going to my website, it's licensinglab.com/wcb-rich, and the WCB stands for Why Customers Buy then hyphen, which I've cleverly disguised with the term rich. So that's the best way to stay in touch.

 

Richard Walker: 33:27 

I love it, I hope everybody gets it. It's a good book. All right. Here comes my last question. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?

 

Bob Serling: 33:40 

I would say. I'm going to give you two people I've met and one person I've never met, but I've I've spoken with on the I've never met in person. I've spoken with on the phone, and I consulted with their business. The first person is going back to the old, old days of direct mail. It was Gary Halbert who many people say is the best copywriter who ever wrote copy.

 

He was obviously a great copywriter. What I learned from Gary, and I'm going to try to make this as short as possible. As you probably noticed, I can get a little long winded. I was doing a live seminar with about 70 people, and Gary came and attended as an attendee. The it was a three day event.

 

The middle of the second day, he disappeared for three hours. Everybody's going, Where's Gary? Where's Gary? He comes back towards dinner time. He walks up to one of the participants who we had done a hot seat for, and he gives them a completely written marketing campaign that he went back to his hotel room and wrote for them for free because he just had so much empathy for that person and so much care for what they were going through.

 

And what I learned from him is, again, something that no AI, no tactic, no strategy can teach is that empathy is so important. And being a real human with people. I mean, he could have charged that at that time. And this goes back to the 1990s. He was getting paid $25,000 plus a percentage of each mailing.

 

And all other copywriters were getting maybe 2000. And here he just hands this complete package to this person.

 

Richard Walker: 35:45 

Wow.

 

Bob Serling: 35:46 

So that's the first person, the second person in the modern day, who I know very well is a guy named Roland Frazier. And Roland, it was he was not an original founder, but he became a principal and partner in digital marketer. And he's just a brilliant marketer and a great giving person. And he just took that company from like a couple million a year to, I don't know, 30, 50 million a year just by doing what we were talking about, by making everything they do better for the customer. And he's, he's so smart.

 

He understands the macro and the micro, but he's the nicest, humblest, most giving person. So I learned kind of that same thing, just another extension of empathy and being customer oriented. And then the third person I only met on a ten minute phone call, and then I did some consulting work for his group is Doctor Robert Cialdini, who wrote the landmark book Influence. What I like about Cialdini is he's a a researcher and an academic who doesn't live in academia. He goes out into the field and meets people, and all their research is based on actually talking with people and measuring people's response and watching their behavior.

 

So you can see throughout my answer at all, it's, it's people who are really make a deeper connection with other people and use that for the good of their customers.

 

Richard Walker: 37:40 

And they're all giving, I love it, I love it, man, I, I, I'm going to have to have every person in my company watch this episode. I've really enjoyed this. Bob.

 

Bob Serling: 37:48  

Oh, well, thank you, I appreciate it.

 

Richard Walker: 37:51 

I'm going to have to wrap this up. So first, a big thank you to Bob Serling, founder of Licensing Lab, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Bob's website at licensinglab.com. WCB dash dash rich. Get the free ebook.

 

And don't forget to check out Quik! at quickforms.com, where we make processing forms easier. I hope you enjoyed this discussion as much as I have, and we'll click the like button, share this with someone, and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Bob, thank you so much for joining me today.

 

Bob Serling: 38:23 

Rich, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it. And have to say, you, you come at questions in a really unique way that really helps expand things. And I appreciate that about you.

 

Outro: 38:38 

Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.

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