Attached is the transcript for In the Loupe season 3 episode 6. Listen to it on Spotify here.
Michael Burpoe:
Welcome everyone to In the Loupe. What is up everybody? My name is Michael Burpoe. Thanks again for listening to In the Loupe this week. I'm joined by Ryan Blumenthal from Clientbook and if you haven't heard of Clientbook yet, they are a clienteling app that enables sales at your store to have better follow up and follow through when it comes to turning customers into clients. It was a really fun talk, all about the process of clienteling and humanizing the sales process. I think it was a really good episode and a very special thank you, goes out to Clientbook for sponsoring this week's episode. So please enjoy. This episode is brought to you by Punchmark the jewelry industry's favorite website platform, whether you're looking for better e-commerce performance, business growth or campaigns that drive traffic and sales, Punchmark's website and marketing services were made just for you. It's never too late to transform your business with a user friendly point of sale integrated website platform designed for growth and results. Sign up for your free trial demo at punchmark.com.
This episode is brought to you by the Smithee group, a digital growth agency that helps leaders and businesses dream bigger and achieve multi-generational integrity. Through insights and intelligence, digital market and advertising solutions. We help businesses expand their reach, grow their revenue, and make an impact. TSG has helped hundreds of businesses surpass their goals and believe that whatever your business, whatever your story, we will make it matter to your audience.
And now back to the show. Welcome back everybody. My name is Michael Burpoe and I'm joined by Ryan Blumenthal. How you doing today, Ryan?
Ryan Blumenthal:
Hey, Michael, thanks for having me.
Michael Burpoe:
Absolutely. So Ryan is with Clientbook who we are really excited to be speaking with today. Also sponsoring this week's episode, which is really cool. Maybe, could you set up Clientbook and what you guys do for the people that are listening?
Ryan Blumenthal:
Sure. Clientbook is a mobile app built for today's retailer to help them facilitate clienteling in their retail jewelry store. So it helps associates stay on top of what they need to do on any given day; either make a sale, build a relationship, give topnotch service, and we collect all the data that you could possibly need in order to do that and we put it in one easy to use app and yeah. We're seeing tremendous results from it.
Michael Burpoe:
That's awesome. It sounds like it's really, I like to think of like the term, "enabling" and kind of greasing the runway for people as much as possible. I think we do it at Punchmark, if something will make you 1% more efficient, then we'd be silly not to, you know, whether it's a program or something, it would be silly not to buy for you because 1% it pays itself off in a month. And then it's all gravy from there. That's what I imagine the Clientbook app to be.
Ryan Blumenthal:
Yeah. I mean, you know, when you think about the daily life of sales associates - and that's who we built this for - is it, they have a busy life, and they're on the sales floor and yeah, we'd like to think that they have time to organize their day in such a way that they'll have all these clientele reach outs and stay on top all of their sales opportunities.
Michael Burpoe:
Yeah.
Ryan Blumenthal:
It's really a cumbersome task in most stores when in their current state. So it really is a personal assistant to them. It keeps them on track. It enables the right behavior every day. And that was something that was really kind of lacking in the industry.
Michael Burpoe:
Yeah. You know, it's also not the, I guess the fun part of making sales. You know, everybody loves to be in that one-on-one situation where they're actually selling, but the organization and the follow up and follow through and you know, sifting through the extra part, I'm sure someone enjoys it, but I certainly don't.
Ryan Blumenthal:
It's a different muscle. For sales associates, the typical scenario is people walk into the store. And that sales associate does a great job; Makes a sale and fingers crossed. We hope they come back to the store. And in today's world that's just not the best we can do as retailers. The best we could do is not only do that, but then create this kind of client retainment model in our store that we know that they're gonna see 'em again. We know that we've bonded them to our store. We're gonna maximize kind of second and third time opportunities with them. And I really think that that's gonna be needed in the years to come in order for us all to continue to be thriving.
Michael Burpoe:
Yeah. It's funny, I think during our ad read - when you sent it over to us - you used the term, the differentiating factor of a client versus a customer. Maybe could you put that into your own words in what the actual act of clienteling is because it was a really kind of new way for me to look at it, but one I really agree with.
Ryan Blumenthal:
Yeah. You know, we use that term to point out are you a retailer is just either transactional or they're relationship-based selling. And so transactional could be, you know, Walmart. Or Amazon. It's very one off and they're not going to focus on the relationship with you. You know, it doesn't mean it's bad necessarily. It's just not their business model. Whereas relationship selling is a higher level of service. People actually do like dealing with a sales associate in the store. And what are you gonna do to facilitate that? You're the one that should be the store that they go to repeatedly. So, everybody has a guy for certain industries or a girl for certain industries to give you an example, outside of jewelry would be, you know, the guy that I would buy my suit from, by the time he would invite me into the store, you already have the suits picked out. He knew what I bought last. He knew what was gonna fit, right. What I was going for. And he would get out of there at great sale. And then he would follow up with me to make sure I was happy. And he knew that if he did that, the next time I was gonna buy a suit, you know, I could go to Nordstrom. I could go to this store. I could go to another store, but I'm probably going to go see Joe. And I'm probably going to give him the business because there's a relationship there. And that's because I was his now his client and not just a customer. And that's why we point out the difference between a client and a transactional customer. And your goal, you know, the retailer's goal should be clients, you know, people that think of them come to them over and over again.
Michael Burpoe:
You know, and it's so important, I think, especially in the jewelry industry and both of us, you know, Punchmark and Clientbook are focused so heavily on the jewelry industry. It's what we do. I do think that there is this constant push and pull of that personal relationship. I think that jewelry, again, it's a luxury item. And I think that what goes into that is more than just the transaction of money. I think that there is like this weird feeling that you have to feel in order get wrapped up in the fact that - let's be real - jewelry, it's not a utility. You're not using the diamonds to like suddenly, I don't know, run faster. That's not how that works. It's a luxury item. And as a result, you're pulling on the feeling and the emotion. And I think part of that is the sales process too. Right?
Ryan Blumenthal:
Yeah. And we're just, you know, outside of being VP of sales for Clientbook - I own Corinne Jewelers, right. I'm a lifelong retailer. And I tell my staff all the time, you know, we are so lucky that people, they wanna hold this in their hand and they want to hear about it. They want to work with a sales associate. They still want that kind of interaction. So we should embrace that. We should double down that that's our single biggest benefit to our retail environment and what can we do to facilitate that even better? So yeah, the jewelry industry as a whole is incredibly lucky.
Michael Burpoe:
So you just mentioned briefly there that you are a jeweler and that you do have a store. How has that informed, kind of, your work and also just Clientbook as a whole? And, I mean, that's gotta give you at least some type of unique way of seeing into the industry.
Ryan Blumenthal:
Yeah. I mean, I tell everybody I'm a retailer. I'm that. You know, everybody that works at Clientbook knows that. You know, "what's Ryan's position?". Well, I'm a retailer and I understand what goes on in stores and I feel uniquely positioned to help my industry because of that with great technologies. And it's shaped my thinking. I mean, I remember coming into this industry and I read two books that really blew me away. One was,"The Nordstrom Way" and the other one was "Delivering Happiness" the book about, you know, the founding of Zappos. Both of them are incredibly service oriented organizations, and that's where they kind of doubled down their efforts on. And it reminded me so much about why people always came to my family's store. It wasn't that we had more rings than anybody. It wasn't that they were gonna get the lowest price, but rather they were gonna get the very best service. So, I always had all of my processes at the store kind of around that, and always felt that clienteling was a way for me to achieve it. I had these kind of frustrations of scale when it came to clienteling that I could get one sales associate to do it well, but I really couldn't get everybody to do it well, you know? I couldn't scale it because it was so manual. It was hard to have eyes on it. There was a lot of frustrations in that state. So when I met the founders of Clientbook, when they were first coming into jewelry, for me, it was a kind of immediate connection to the product then what they were trying to accomplish and been with the company ever since. And really we come to it from just a retailer's eyes of, you know, what were the problems in making this happen? And if we were to solve those problems, what a great environment that store would be, what a great clienteling environment it would be.
Michael Burpoe:
So did your guys' store use Clientbook?
Ryan Blumenthal:
Oh yeah.
Michael Burpoe:
Yeah. That's awesome.
Ryan Blumenthal:
They're raving advocates.
Michael Burpoe:
I think that's a really underrated part of the builder's journey kind of thing - so we noticed that with Punchmark, we obviously have a website platform, blah, blah, blah. But one thing that I noticed as someone working there was when we built our own website, punchmark.com on the version six platform, before we had it on like this kind of fancy boutique, like one-off version, and we weren't using the infrastructure we had built for our clients. I'm not exactly sure why, it was probably because we wanted to do fancier things than we were capable of. But then when we finally, you know, bit the bullet and we were like, okay, we're gonna actually build it with the same backend that all of our clients are sharing, it really revealed a lot of shortcomings to us. You know, hey, this blog editor is not cutting it for us because of this reason. And whenever I go in, I have to write the blogs for our own website, it makes me have to be a client and realize, oh, you know, this should be better or this should be improved. And I think that a lot of these kind of "founders journeys" kind of start with that. Where they just identify problems with their own process because they're the ones that have to eat their own dog food kind of thing.
Ryan Blumenthal:
You really have to walk in the shoes of your customers like with anything. You know, you have to feel, you have to have empathy for their situations and what they're going through. And so, yeah, I agree one hundred percent.
Michael Burpoe:
I was wondering about like kind of the future of e-commerce and just sales in general and how Clientbook fits into it. Because we're seeing there being a huge focus on buying online and then picking up in store or browsing or shopping in the store and finishing the purchase from the comfort of their own home and how Clientbook can make that, because obviously online can be a very, I don't know, cold place. It can feel very sterile. And is there a way that you can you know, take that client versus customer action and bring it online as well?
Ryan Blumenthal:
Yeah. I mean, it's part of the reason we partnered with Punchmark, and that we've recently announced and the future things that our two companies will do together is, you know, Brian and Ross, you know, we met each other during "The Couch Conference" a long time ago when COVID was first happening. And yeah, and we've been friends ever since. And we would talk about those sorts of things about, you know, what we were doing with associates, what they were doing with a website and, and really felt the same way that, you know, years ago it was that you have your store and then you have your online store. And you gotta have an experience online. You gotta have an experience in store. And I think what we're all starting to realize is the, they need to be combined. They really do. They work hand in hand with one another, and because they work hand in hand with each other, the sales associates really need to be enabled to work hand in hand with today's websites. And that's one of the thing, one of the many things, that working on in our partnership, but from our perspective in Clientbook, I think it's really the future we see and that data has proven out is that we need to enable sales associates better than we have in the past. Websites have gotten great. There's certain things in our industry that have really pushed forward, but have we given the best tools to sales associates in every store so that they could connect with all those things that we're doing and do it? Because they are the gateway to the customer. Oftentimes, yeah. The majority of the time, even when somebody's on your website, they're referencing they're gonna come into the store at some point or they want help in order to kind of get conversion rate a little bit better. So we really need to enable them.
Michael Burpoe:
And I think a lot of the times that sales associate kind of point of contact becomes in form of like a web chat on these stores. I think that they are just much more prevalent now than they have always been. I personally have had really positive experiences with the web chat. I've also had some negative ones where I don't love talking to a bot. It's just not really my cup of tea. However, some people do it very well, for example, I'm thinking of Bank of America, their online banking app. I mean, they just, I think it's called Alexa or Alexa, something like that. And they just do it so well that that one handles it. But when it comes to shopping again with luxury, I kind of like knowing that there's a person on the other end, I don't know if I'm kind of unique in that way. Is that something you see?
Ryan Blumenthal:
No, I think, and you mentioned Bank of America, I'm sure there's some bots out there that "wow, that's impressive". Right? But by-in-large it's bad. And we think about that a lot at Clientbook too and our CTO, you know, mentioned once, yes, we're all brainstorming. They're like he said - there's so many tech companies that are trying to take the human element out of retail or out of all these experiences. And we find that completely the wrong way to go. Our job is to give them great technology to enhance that human element inside of retail. And that's why a web chat can be great, but if it's a real, even if somebody's really there helping you, it can be great. But we wanna steer clear; I think in jewelry specifically to any technologies that just kind of remove the human element out of our stores, because you have to remember, that's what built the independence is that people wanted to go there to work with somebody. They had a personal connection with them. And so whether it's on our websites or whatever we do, I don't think you could lose that. I don't think you could compromise that in any way.
Michael Burpoe:
No, I totally agree. I think that the human element is going anywhere. I think that more and more, the more bots and automation I deal with, the more I kind of crave that human to human connection. Especially for major purchases; it's kind of scary that I'm asked to do my own checkout at the grocery store all the time. However, I don't think that that is going to be, kind of the, the real future for jewelry anytime soon, at least I don't think it, at least for me, I don't know.
Ryan Blumenthal:
Yeah. Because one's totally transactional. You know, you don't feel the need to interact - as annoying as kind of having to do everything yourself is - but we're very lucky in jewelry. There's a want and a need to interact. So every thought should be, well, how do we do that better.
Michael Burpoe:
Ryan, we're gonna come back in just a minute. We're gonna stay tuned from this word from our sponsor, which is Clientbook.
This episode is brought to you in part by Clientbook. Acquiring new customers is the lifeblood of your jewelry business. However far too often customers drop in, make a purchase and then disappear. Often for good. On the other hand, clients are different than customers. A client wants personalized offers and services, and they trust you and your salespeople for product advice. So how do you turn a customer into a client and deliver personalized experiences when you have thousands of them? That's where Clientbook comes in. It's the mobile clienteling app built for jewelers. Here's how it works: with Clientbook you'll never miss a follow up or forget an important event in the lives of your clients. Birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, and more you can send automated mass or individual messages, create customizable message templates, easily solicit reviews, and capture leads through the Clientbook web chat. Clientbook lets you send professional product images via text to a client in seconds and put together personalized wishlist and collections based on products. Your clients like discover why the world's leading jewelers use Clientbook to build long-term relationships with their clients and expand the in-store experience beyond the four walls of your store. To learn more and schedule a personalized demo for your store visit clientbook.com/demo. Again that's client.com/demo. Thanks, back to the show.
All right, everybody. And we're back. So, I'm speaking again with Ryan. So I'm very interested in just data in general. Mainly because I have this whole mentality where you can't fix what you can't measure or if you can't, if you can't measure it, it doesn't matter. All those quirky one-liners that all the thought leaders tend to say, what is your guys', first of all, take on jewelry data and what kind of trends are you starting to see?
Ryan Blumenthal:
You know, they're definitely one liners, but they're a hundred percent true. If you know, you can't manage what you don't measure. And at Clientbook, we feel if clienteling is going to be kind of this core behavior of a retailer, then it needs to be measured. It needs to be quantified. We need to know if we're making an impact or not. So that's how we've set up our analytics is that clienteling doesn't need to be this thing that gets talked about. And then there's no action. Past that, we feel that there's certain types of behaviors that sales associates should be doing that a store should be doing. And if it all happens in one place, now it unlocks all sorts of possibilities for us to interact with that data. And what did it look like? So for your sales associates, if they sold an engagement ring, what does that post sale look like? You know, what are the touch points with the client? Did they execute on it? Did that facilitate the next sale? You know, there's all sorts of things that retailers can use now to ensure that kind of the number one thing that they hang their hat on, which is their service that they actually measure it that a much more than just a review. You know, reviews are great and Clientbook automates reviews and collects tons of them. But we tell people if you're only doing that, you don't have this retainment procedure and culture that can facilitate new sales over and over again, to keep people coming back. And that's the kind of thing that you wanna put in place and have staff doing, have the store execute on and then measure it. So yeah, we really like to think that we lift the veil on all that kind of activity.
Michael Burpoe:
Man. That's really interesting. Especially when it comes to, you mentioned the engagement ring sale, that one in particular is something I've been trying to, I feel like, I don't know, crack the riddle of when it comes to especially online sales of engagement rings, it seems like it's less popular. We see a lot of fashion jewelry being processed or men's watches be processed online and less when it comes to engagement rings. What do you see is kind of like, I guess, the next step. Like for someone who might not be a Clientbook's client already, what do you see as the most common kind of follow-up so that people can turn an engagement ring sale into something more like a lifelong client?
Ryan Blumenthal:
You know, there's gonna be a mix of, one there's this big opportunity for more sales, right? Because there's two wedding bands that are at least two wedding bands that are gonna be purchased some time in the next couple months. And whether it's me saying it or somebody else from the industry that just says, well, we do terrible job as an industry following up with customers, getting that wedding band sale. It's really true, you know, most stores when we talk to them and say, you know, "what's the process around getting that customer back in?". It's all over the place. And eventually they're just like, you know, we don't have a great, procedure and yeah, we don't measure it. So that's one thing that is just like the no-brainer easy, kind of, easy money there to act on with all clientele. We tell people that you can't just follow up for sales, you know, if you just follow up for sales and that's all you're doing, you're not really creating this bond above just that, you know? You're just trying to get another sale. You gotta have two reach outs in a given year that really have nothing to do with making a sale. They're just about either thanking them for the sale or servicing them in some way. And you gotta make sure that there's two and no strings attached, nothing. It's a check-in it's a high-level of service. And then you earn the right to follow up with them for the next sale, an event that you're having in the store. Or, you know, it's a anniversary, something along those lines, but you will have facilitated that bond a little bit more to us and a sales associate than you otherwise.
Michael Burpoe:
What do those, sort of, check-ins typically look like? So is it, you know, Hey, hope your - I don't know, engagement - is going well, or what does that kind of personal touch actually kind of manifest itself as?
Ryan Blumenthal:
You know, one it's just a really sincere follow up to the purchase. Making sure that it was well received and a genuine thank you for choosing us. You know, thank you - thank you so much for choosing us. You know, that's really, you don't have to overcomplicate that, but if that could be a genuine phone call or text or a handwritten thank you note then and that checks a big box there. The next is down the road to have them come on in and have it cleaned and checked. No strings attached. But that just, you know, you always want that ring looking like new. And you know, what time on Tuesday works for you to stop in? You know, it's just something there that's, you know, there's nothing attached now as retailers, we know that the more people come through our doors, the more people that are gonna see our jewelry and we're gonna have a chance to sell. So there is an ulterior motive to those service check-ins. But, they really do work if you do 'em the right way.
Michael Burpoe:
Man. That's so fascinating, so on "In the Loupe", we've had a couple of episodes where we've interviewed ring buyers. And so we've so far we've interviewed two men. One was my brother, one was my friend's, oh, I guess now husband. And another one we had on two women who got engaged to each other and are soon to be married. And both of them mentioned how surprised they were, that there was no wedding band upsell. And when I was starting to kind of "poke around" on the internet, I was asking in a couple of jewelry forums and stuff like that. I don't know if I'm giving away the secrets of the jewelry industry. So if you hear this, forgive me. They were always saying that, oh, you know, you wanna maximize the budget on the ring sale and then let the wedding band follow up. And I don't know why, but I guess I'm surprised that that was the take so far. We've had four interviews and all four of them have been surprised that there wasn't a wedding band offer because they would've, they would've enjoyed that. And I guess maybe if there was more clear or better communication when it comes to, you know, "Hey, don't forget to get a wedding band ahead of your wedding", that would've been better.
Ryan Blumenthal:
The lack of follow up in-person is really a huge opportunity for us all to execute on, but we feel the same way. In fact, at Clientbook I'm the retailer, I would've done my whole life, but everybody that works at Clientbook, you know, they all have stories of "I bought a ring" but nobody followed up with me. Or I went to a store to look at a ring and I left and nobody followed up with me. And they get to tell these stories to, to people when we're demoing Clientbook for them and say, "this was my own experience going to a jewelry store." Now, if somebody had this tool and followed up with me, I would've went back. You know, I would've went back and bought the ring there, or I would've went back and got the wedding bands, but nobody did. And again, it's not that sales associates want to give bad service. They are just in the, in a zone of people, walk in the store, we give them great service, they buy something, and they should come back because we give 'em great service. And that's just not enough. They have to be invited in. There has to be follow up that goes in. And that's a part of the job that I think a lot of stores, you know, can do better executing on. And if they did that, I mean, there's tons of possibility out there for growth of business.
Michael Burpoe:
Even if 1 out of 10 takes you up on that. I mean, that's enormous. That's a 10% increase in your sales or your follow up or what have you. So I totally agree. So Ryan, one thing I wanted to ask you, I'm big on trying to make predictions and trying to project, I don't know, one year, maybe five years into the future, especially for this industry, because I feel like if you can find where the puck is going there's it's kind of a lot you can capitalize there. Do you have any kind of insight, especially with the data you guys are, are privy to, to where you think the jewelry industry is going, whether that's e-commerce or that's just in-store sales or where do you think the space is actually heading?
Ryan Blumenthal:
I think it's going to be all about the sales associate. I think that as an industry, you know, what are we doing online? What new line are we buying? What brands can we get to for the store? You know, this is where we focus in years just sitting around the table, what are we doing? How do we make this better? How do we make this better? What I predict is that we're gonna start to know just how incredibly important it is that our sales associates are enabled to fit into today's retail as opposed to retail from a decade ago.
Michael Burpoe:
Yeah. I think that the people being outfitted with the tools and techniques that they need are just so important. Especially whether that manifests itself as having your business have a great website or your website go down the next line, your website, having a chat or having an easy call to action or easy to navigate homepage. Or even you go one step beyond that, having the chat for the sales associate, be easy to use or easy to learn, stuff like that. I think that every step kind of making that better or more improved, I feel like it doesn't just kind of end there. It works its way backwards and up the chain of command. And I think it pays off quite a bit, but maybe that's just me projecting, but we've seen that Punchmark where when you make an improvement to a process that's at the end, it does work its way up because if it saves you, what 20% of your time at this one task, well, that's that 20% of time, doesn't just go "poof" into the air. It always is kind of working its way up and maybe you'll be able to pay it off in short or long term.
Ryan Blumenthal:
I think that is 100% what we're gonna see and that in the past probably 80% of our mind was what brand are we gonna have? What price is that gonna be? And that's sort of thinking as a retailer where I think now 80% of our minds is gonna be, how do we enable this kind of service in our store? How do we enable our associates? How do we enable our website? And then 20% is gonna be, yeah, you know, what brand are we bringing into the store? What the product looks like? But we have a lot to focus on the enablement of our staff and overall service.
Michael Burpoe:
That's what I thought that jewelry was gonna be all about, was all gonna be like, "oh, emeralds are in this year and, and sapphires are out", I thought it was gonna be a lot more like that. And it's a lot less of that than you'd expect. There's a lot more like how can you grease the wheels and make the, the train run a little bit smoother. So I totally, I think we're on the same page. That's great. So, Ryan, thank you so much for joining me. I really am excited for what Clientbook is working on. I think it's exactly at the nexus of kind of what we're all trying to accomplish. And you know, I think that having you guys on board and working with Punchmark is real kind of stepping in the right direction from both of us. I think it would be great.
Ryan Blumenthal:
This is great. And thanks so much for having me and look forward to working together.
Michael Burpoe:
Absolutely. Thank you everybody for listening. We will be back next week Tuesday with another episode. Special thank you to Clientbook for sponsoring this week's episode. Thank you, Ryan in particular.
Ryan Blumenthal:
Thanks.
Michael Burpoe:
And we'll be back next week. Thanks again for listening. Cheers everybody. Hey, thanks for listening. If you made it this far, remember to leave us a rating and a review on apple podcast and try subscribing on Spotify. It really helps us grow. New episodes in your subscription box every Tuesday. Thanks again. Talk to you next week.