Talking Clienteling with John Liebler - Part 1 of 2

[Music] Hello everyone, I'm Brian Amaral and welcome to the Clientelling Podcast. In each episode, we'll be talking to the retail industry's most knowledgeable and successful executives, those luminaries that are creating value with the intersection of retail and technology. In every episode, you'll hear about new, innovative and transformational customer-centric ideas that are redefining shopping and creating high-value customer experiences. If you haven't already done so, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and let your friends know by liking us on social media. So, let's get on with the show. [Music] Well, hello, and welcome to the Clientelling Podcast. We have a very special show for you today with an industry leader that's going to be sharing some very valuable insights into what it really takes to implement initiatives that are going to empower your sales team and help you create extraordinary customer experiences. So, today we have the honor of having John Leibler, I'm a Clientelling Podcast. We'll tell you a little bit about John. He has over 30 years of retail experience with broad-based store operations, strategy, logistics, customer experience, and store technology. I've seen John in action and he is one strategic and collaborative business partner. He's really operates at that nexus between retail operations and IT execution. John has a very long-story career in retail. He started out as a full-time salesperson, held nearly every position in the field operations. I think he was a division of vice-president store ops, where he was responsible for over 700K jewelers field locations. He eventually transitioned over into operations administration role. He was a source strategy and logistics for a six-billion-dollar specialty retailer with over 3500 locations throughout North America. That includes Zail and Jarrett, the gallery of jewelry and people's jewelers. And in this role, John managed retail at scale. He really was building a big business and was responsible field communications, field training, field repair, new store openings, corporate policy and procedures, and even the store technology. So, John has served an executive little positions for multiple companies and specialty retail, and working with a very hip new brand that some of you may know called Shainola. He's worked in and around luxury retail and of course technology consultant. I've always been very impressed with John. He's one heck of a motivational leader and he really builds highly engaged customer focus teams who believe in the power of optimism and the importance of that amazing customer experience. He is passionate and he's dedicated and he's a real believer in creating a world-class customer experience by embracing a customer-centric customer first mindset. This is a man that knows an awful lot about what we're going to be talking about on this program and future programs. So, help me welcome John Lieber. Welcome to the show. John. Thank you, Brian. That was a wonderful introduction. And the honor is really mine. You are one of the most passionate people that I've met as it relates to retail and obviously clientelling. And so it's always my pleasure to discuss it with you. Oh, well, thank you, John. It's been a pleasure. We've known each other for a while here in full disclosure. We've had the opportunity to do some work together over the years. And I've just enjoyed every moment of it. So, you know, John, you've had, I mean, quite a career, right? I mean, the background is pretty extraordinary. You've run stores in North America's largest jewelry group. You've done some work with a trendy small lux brand that sells across a lot of different diverse categories. I have so many questions for you that I think would be interesting to our audience. But maybe you can share a little bit about your experiences in leading customer-centric transformation and more specifically around the client telling initiatives that you've seen at these companies. And if you could add a little bit in there about what it was like to drive that business case to get a company to consider making the investments, what were the key things they were thinking about? And perhaps you could tell us a little bit about the process of how you went about building a case in those businesses in order to get these initiatives to happen. But now, I'll kind of leave it to you. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your experience in doing this? Sure. I think the first thing I'd like to do, Brian, is sort of talk about why clientelling is so important to me. A little bit about what it is. And I want to go back a little bit and tell a couple of stories. First and foremost, what is clientelling? There's many definitions, but simply put. It's just a technique that retail sales associates can use to establish one-on-one long-term relationships. And these relationships based on knowing the client, knowing what their likes and dislikes are and then helping them make the right decisions for themselves and for their loved ones. It requires sales people to really build a human connection. And this is something that is a bit of a lost art form as technology is sort of taken over retail. I think there's people lost sight to a certain degree of how important it is to still have that individualized connection with the guest. And because it is a lost art, it's amazing how surprised a customer is when you really take an interest in who they are. Now, I learned this a long time ago. So I was, it was a story here. I was fresh out of the army looking for a job and I got a job at a store, building jewelers and main. Portland, Maine, while I walked in looking for a job, and they were kind enough to offer me one as a full-time salesperson. I had never really sold before. And on day one, my manager hands me this plastic PT notebook, personal trade notebook, filled with blank pages. And she said, look, if you want to be a great salesperson, your job is to get to know the customer. Make a friend, build a relationship, the sales will come. Capture that information and that way when they come in again and again and again, you can continue to service them. Be their trusted advisor. And that really stuck with me. And I was never a great salesperson, but what I was really great is building these relationships. And I just worked hard to make sure the customers got what they wanted. That stuck with me for the longest time as I moved forward in my career, became a store manager and a district manager and a regionalized president. I took those skills that I had been taught to pass them on to my teams and start great successes. This was clarified for me years later. And I'm sitting at my desk in the corporate office and I get a phone call and I pick it up and I go, hi, this is John. I hear this voice at the other end that goes, John, this is Susan from Anteller. Your wife told me to call you. So immediately I listened. Yeah, exactly. And I listened and I said, yeah, what's the matter? Is everything okay? And she goes, oh, no, no, everything's fine. I just, my understanding is that it's her birthday next week. And she kind of chuckled and said, and you might need a little help finding the right gift. I said, yeah, you can use some help. She goes, well, she's been in here. We've picked up some outfits. Why don't you come on in with Thursday or Friday night be best for you? And we'll take good care of you. So I said, sure, Thursday night. Great. See, at six o'clock, she says hung up the phone rolled in the following Thursday and there she had three outfits set up for me. Accessorized, helped me pick them out, helped me wrap them, didn't help me wrap them. She wrapped them. And I went home a hero. She called me all the time, right? And actually she became this really great advisor of mine, right? It's great. A partner in the shopping process is from the professor using your wife, right? When everybody needs. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and what was interesting about it is a couple of weeks later I was sitting at a dinner party with a bunch of friends and I said to the guys at the table, I said, look, I'm thinking of starting a business and I wasn't. But I said, I'm thinking of starting a business to where we're going to create personal shoppers. We'll charge you a monthly fee. We'll reach out to you. Find out what your needs are for anyone you want to give a gift to in your life. And we'll deliver it or you can deliver it. Whatever works. Who here would pay me for that? And every single man at the table said, I would absolutely pay for it. I went back to my team and said, guys, we can do this for free. And it really wasn't on locker and it helped drive significant revenue before we actually had the technology. Once it became available, right? Because we started off with PT notebooks. That went to Excel. But now we obviously have this ability to really systematize this and make it easy for every sales associate. That's really what took the process to the whole next level and really made some major enroads. Does that make sense? Yeah. That's a great story and a great example of how that one-to-one connection and a sales associate that really is using information about one customer's preferences can kind of create. Wow, great value all the way through that's what it's to that's a great story. So tell us a little bit more about kind of the initiatives and how you were able to kind of pursue some of these initiatives inside of the retail brands that you've done work with. Sure. So as I said, I was always extraordinarily passionate about it. And I was given an opportunity later in my career when I took over some of the more strategy technology piece of the business where I was able to work with the team to build a client telling system. Now there are many solutions available on the market now, but back when we did it, which was probably eight years ago, was a fairly new emerging thought process and technology. And we decided that even though there were systems available that we wanted to build something internally because it was critical for us that we created something that the teams would use would enjoy and would look at as a whole. Look at as an opportunity, not as just one more thing they had to do. So this is obviously full disclosure where Brian, I got to meet you because you still are, but at the time we're really one of the few people that were an expert in building out client telling systems and did a phenomenal job. Thank you for helping keep well, you know, I mean, it's we had all our team had all these thoughts in our heads what we wanted and we needed someone to help us. Put guardrails and say okay, what exactly do you want and where you're going to go from it? So I don't want to get you know too much into the details, but this was a big build right and I think number one you asked the question about how we built the value. I just wanted to make a comment that the one of the things that you did so effectively was getting organizational by getting a lot of people to feel ownership in that overall process. And in that is, in my opinion, one of the most important things that an organization needs to do whenever they look at new transformational sorts of initiatives like client telling. She really have to get people to own it and you did a grant. And those rooms were filled with a lot of people, but they all owned it. One of them was packed about the outcome that we were all heading towards. So I'll tell you, it's interesting. And we can get some day maybe, you know, the details behind of what it took to get the funding and get the buy-in. Because for us, it wasn't just building client telling. It was really building a CRM, right? Client telling requires accurate data. And if your company doesn't have a robust CRM, then the data coming in, you know, dirty data just creates dirty results, right? So it was a fairly expensive system. At the time, we, as an organization, had everything was on-prem, so the whole concept of SaaS was not something we were used to. So there was that piece of change management. But I'll tell you, I remember one slide that pushed it over the top when we were presenting to the executive committee. And it was a picture of I had taken, I was visiting a store and I walked in one of the stores and Barb had eight PT notebooks spread out across the counter and was sorting through pages because we had a big upcoming event. And she was trying to alphabetize and categorize and who she should reach out to, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I just took a picture of it. And Barb was the seven figure writer. And when we presented this as the executive committee, there was two thought processes. One, how do we make Barb's job easier? She writes a million. She writes two million. All those guests within those PT notebooks and do really effective outreach without having to spend so much time just getting yourself organized. But then number two, more importantly, how do we get the 90% of our salespeople that aren't that strong at it and make it easy for them to use a system. And we kind of laid it out that in this one picture. It really resonated with the team and they understood it. So that was number one. The other thing that we did to build value is we really looked at what type of customers we had. And if I broke it down, brought it into sort of three very simple buckets. You have customers that just come and go. They just look as of the world. You had one time purchaser that came in. I made initial purchase. I left it. I've never bought it again. And then you've got those two plus customers. We looked at those one time purchasers. We could look at all of them. But to build a value case, we looked at our one time purchaser. And we said, if we could get a very small percentage, 2%, 3%, of that person who came in, we built a relationship with. We sold them something and we never saw them again. If we could get that group of people to come back and buy one more thing, what would that be worth? And that alone, and I think at the time it was less than 2% of those customers tripled the ROI on the cost to build the system. And that was not talking about second purchasers making third and fourths and juxtaposed loakers. And that's amazing what that alone could do for us. And that's how we built the value case. You know, it's funny years ago I had somebody sit me down that was former VP of store ops for one of the limited brands. And he said if we can get one more pair of socks in the basket on every fifth customer, it fundamentally changes the economics. And when you really look at the way that an income statement works in retail, you realize that just a slight movement in that top line revenue, which is driven, you know, generally by traffic conversion and average transaction size, so you get to move from one of those levers. But it makes such an impact. And the beauty of the kinds of clientelling and the kinds of proactive selling activities that you've been so passionate about that I've spent my life in and around is that we can drive that that incremental. We can drive traffic. We can drive people, you know, to come into the store to consider other purchases they had before to build that basket and to get them back again, which is the frequency side of that. So it makes a movement and that's why it has such a big impact. And what's interesting, Brian, is this was, you know, maybe seven, eight years ago, but as the ability for people to buy online has become easier and easier. Now, the other day I bought a TV while doing the rolling machine. I literally was on a rolling machine. A TV came up and I said, "Hey, Alexa, order me the TV." And it was here in three days. There was no reason for me to go to the store. The only reason I would go to the store is because it was a product that was so unfamiliar with how I wanted to touch and feel it. Or because the store was going to offer me some sort of experience. Well, experiences come in many different forms. I can put in a rock climbing wall or a fishing pit or a makeup counter. But for me, the one-to-one experience with a associate, someone I like that I want to talk to, that emotional connection, that is the core of who we are. Right? And so when you talk about increasing basket size, well, okay, that's making your purchase and adding on to it while you're there. But to give it a compelling reason to bring a customer back in just to see me. Right? That becomes magical. And then by the way, they spend more and they spend easier because they trust you. And so that was the power of clientelling and it's becoming, as technology is taking over the buying process, it's becoming now actually more important. And I'm seeing greater lifts when companies roll out a really robust client-time process. Oh, that's great. And great insights there. So let's talk a little bit about something else. When we originally worked together, I was, and I think I probably said it to you more than once. So I was really impressed with what I was calling a programmatic selling approach that you'd already developed for the business, even though it was mostly an manual system. You know, I kind of wanted you to talk a little bit about how to just think about translating that manual process into a client-tilling systems approach as we were designing a new solution. And what was that process like? And how did you think about feature and functionality and how you were going to approach a project like this, moving people from the legacy approach of being paper-based to a twin-in-system? Yeah, that's actually a great question and probably a core piece of this entire discussion. So number one, to give full credit, what credit to do. The team that I was able to work with was the best I've ever seen, right, from the training department, from the operations team that put this all together, where they were open, they were collaborative, and really made this work. We had a very robust change management system already in place, so it made it easier. That was number one. Number two, obviously, you coming in was really helpful to help keep us on track. And then the third thing that we did, and I don't think this was strategic. You know, part of the company that I worked with, we had this sort of core philosophy of this promote from within, and then on the operations team, about a half of our team came from the stores. And so it was just natural, it was just in our DNA that whenever we built any system, we would involve the end user. Now in retrospect, to me, that's critical in any system implementation that's going to affect a store that the end user be involved. And so when we started from scoping all we do to actual implementation, we had the business partner in the room all the time, with IT. With the, you know, you were there asking them questions and whatnot. So I think that was number one. Number two, clientelling was to be truth, somewhat intrinsic to our process, even though it was an assistant ties, it wasn't like we had to teach how to build relationships. You're right. First of all, in jewelry, you over index on building relationships because you're spending a lot of money, it's a very emotional purchase. You're speaking to someone, but how you feel about them when you present this piece of jewelry. It is as emotional and involved purchases I've ever seen in any other retailer. So that made it easier. And then the build process was a learning experience, but it was amazing, right? So we sat down as a team, maybe 20 people in Rome, and as you spoke, we painted out the vision of what we wanted. And we really saw sort of the end game, what is perfection. And then we laid out, we scoped it to that and then sort of prioritized what were the most important features that we wanted. The other piece that we did as we were building the system, all of our UAT was again the end user. And we would go in and we would interview them and we would make sure that it looked good, it felt good, that it was gamified. I remember we put pictures of angry birds all up in the development program. And you were going with a team. Do you remember that? When the team first walked in. And they're like, what are these angry birds up there? And I asked the team, I said, how many of you played angry birds? And at the time it was hot. And like every hand went up. I said, did you get an user manual? No. Did anyone pay you to use it? No, why did you use it? Because it was fun. Because it rewarded me. And I didn't have to read a book and how to do it. I said, that's what we need to build here. And that was, I think, critical to the success of the system. Yeah. I mean, there was definitely an ongoing kind of a reinforcement of the message that it had to be easy. It had to be fun to use. It had to be, it had to engage the associates as much as the associates had to engage the customers. And so it was philosophically, it was really around that. And I think that that's why you get such great buy-ins. Because it really knew that it was being built for their value, for their opportunity to do a better job. And of course, when they do a better job, it means that they're bringing home more. They're living a better life. So you're impacting a lot of lives in these kinds of projects. You are. And what's interesting, if you've never worked for those listening, if you've never had the opportunity to actually work on a sales floor in a retail environment, it's the most fun job I ever had, right? Because you get to meet all those customers and you get to build up these relationships. It's also the most challenging job I ever had, right? Because you are moving a million different miles an hour. Everyone's asking you to do all these different things. I read an article recently that the average sales person now has to access up to seven different applications on their device in order to complete a sale, right? We have focused on for us and all these types of things. And so it's becoming highly complicated. When we built the initial client telling system, we housed everything. So it was one application that people could go into and then launch the other applications outside of that. And so when your salesperson ends you want to talk to a customer, the technology is important, but it can't become a distraction. And so whatever system, whether it be client telling with other, it just has to become a natural extension to something you use. And it can't be, I'm taking my eyes off the customer to look at a device. You've got to keep that connection going. And I think that's part of the reason why it was successful and they rolled it out. Yep, they came to dashboard of their day. They really, they kind of ran their life through it. That's true. Well, I want to just also contrast it. So I've been involved in a number of other client telling rollouts. And I've seen it go well. And I've seen it not go well. And it's important that the system being launched and the technology isn't just teaching how to use the technology. I commented that client telling was someone intrinsic already to our business. Well, I've seen other situations to where the core selling technique was not necessarily asking all of the other questions and building our relationships and capturing that information. If that doesn't exist within an environment, then the technology, no matter how good it is, will not be impactful. So it's important for organizations to assess what is it that their selling techniques are and the selling expectations. And then if you're going to launch a client telling system that you actually get out in front of it before the system launch and change those core behaviors. So when the system gets launched, you don't get frustration because you're now teaching how to sell. Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of people, I've seen this happen a bunch of times and I'm sure you've seen it. They assume they go out and buy a client telling solution. They pop it in the stores and all of a sudden people are actually selling differently. And it really, it really is that the problems that exist in gaining value from from any kind of client telling initiative really comes down to how effective you are at creating a programmatic approach to selling to really getting people to engage with customers before, during, after the sale and in correct ways. But that requires training to change management. It is a holistic, we're going to be talking a lot on this program about the people part of the equation. And I think that that's really been neglected. And as much as, you know, I love technology and I've been built probably more client telling systems and they out there from a technology perspective. What I've really gotten passionate about now is how do we make it really work? How do we get organizations to really focus on the teaching the right skills and getting people to engage in the right ways and how do you create a culture of that kind of, you know, personal interaction, whether it's reaching even outside the store. So, you know, those are great insights there, John. Appreciate that. You know, you've worked these big companies and you're talking about the fact you've seen some others. I mean, so you've worked with the big and the small. What do you think it takes to really kind of create that customer-centric magic at scale in an organization? What's really kind of the difference between a petite kind of small luxury business that you've done more recently and some of these bigger companies that you've worked with? So they both have their advantages and disadvantages. Obviously in a larger organization, the biggest difference is span and control. Right? How do you get 35,000 people to change behavior? And it requires users or a couple of times a very systematic approach, really great communication, tools, change management processes, and then the frontline managers, district managers have got to believe because at the end of the day, that district manager, airy manager would ever turn the use, they're the ones that are going to make that change happen in the field. And so, again, and I keep sort of reinforcing this point, we had them involved from the beginning. And so, they felt part of the build and then felt part of the process. So when they went back to their their teams, they could speak as passionately about the project as all of us who had built it. Obviously, the more challenging part is you do. You have, you know, 10% of your population doesn't believe in it, and you know, that's a large number of people who don't believe it, right? So that does make it more difficult. And in large organizations, you know, getting, there's a lot of edd tape. Let's just say it the way that's right. You're getting everyone to buy in. And if there's a lot, if it's a huge budget, getting, you know, executives who don't necessarily know the stores, right? It's part of their core. It becomes a cell. And so, I literally went to executive office to executive office and gave an individualized pitch. So when we went to the big room, everyone had sort of understood what this was all about. The smaller boutique is easier in that you can evangelize it almost one to one, right? If you 30, 40, 50 stores, if you wanted, you could call it a store. The difference is there's much smaller budgets. And so you can't necessarily get all the functionality that you want. And you have to be willing to prioritize exactly what you think is going to make the biggest change and then focus on that. And then add functionality as you go. It's, I mean, obviously, resources. Yeah. Well, that's, the resources. So I was just thinking this through. We had the first time I rolled this out, just an exceptional training department with a lot of people resources, right? And so to rely on them to be able to build out the training and then a very robust IT group that could help us all of that was there. When you're a small company, you might have a team at two, a team of three. So there's a lot of work to be done that sometimes can be overwhelming, especially if you're also launching a POS and you're launching an ERP system or what all this happens to be. So there are some resource constraints. Yeah. Now that great, great insight. You know, John, we're coming up on 30 minutes here. And what I think we're going to do is break this into two parts and we'll stop here at this part and pick up with a couple more questions I have for you. Maybe we'll turn it into two different shows. I think what you're saying is just incredibly valuable for a listener. And I know I'm excited to hear more from you. So why don't we pause it here and we can pick it up on the next show. That sounds great. Thank you. Well, that's today's show. Thank you for listening. If you like what you heard, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and like us on social media or drop me a line at Brian at retailtechexec.com. If you'd like to learn more about what we do at Clientricity, visit www.clientricity.net. Until next time, stay well and go do something amazing for your customers.