YOUtility – Selling by Serving

“If you sell something, you make a customer today; if you help someone, you make a customer for life.”

– Jay Baer

I’ve read a lot of marketing and sales books. Jay Baer’s “YOUtility” is one of the few that resonates with me. Why? The book is all about selling by serving. We were all put on this earth to serve. “YOUtility” shows how serving leads to relationships and those relationships lead to long-term customers.

The whole principle is about being “useful” to those you want to serve. How can you meet the needs that your ideal customers have for free? Historically, many people have provided this kind of utility by “helping a friend out” with a quick conversation or giving free advice one on one. This works and does build your reputation, but it can take up a lot of your day and doesn’t scale very well. 

Scaling is where content creation and the internet come into play. If you could provide the same advice you’d give for free in the personal one-on-one to the world by putting it on the internet, do you think a lot of people might find that useful? Do you think you could help more people that way? You sure could! And when you help people, you build trust. Trust builds relationships and relationships lead to sales. 

Here is Baer’s 6-step process for creating YOUtility:

1. Identify Customer Needs – Who is your ideal customer? This person will get the most value out of what you have to offer. You would enjoy serving them and you can do it profitably. 
2. Map Customer Needs to Useful Marketing – What needs does your ideal customer have that you can meet? What needs do they have that you cannot meet? Now, how can you provide solutions to their problems at scale? Videos, blog posts, whitepapers can all do the trick. 
3. Market Your Marketing – Your job is not done when you provide solutions to your target market. You must then market your marketing. It is a noisy world out there. If you have created something truly useful, you owe it to your audience to get it in front of them. You do this by marketing the great resource you have created. 
4. Insource Utility – Empower your employees to amplify your messaging and assist existing customers and new clients. Your employee’s personal networks reach people and potential customers that your business brand might never touch. Empower your employees to help more people in their network by leveraging and helping create company content. 
5. A Process, Not a Project – YOUtility has no finish line. You must ingrain helping those you serve into the culture of your business. The needs of your customers will change. By always listening, you can respond and amplify your response via your marketing channels. 
6. Keeping Score – Any effort taken by an organization needs to have a measurable return on investment. An internal metric that is often overlooked is learning. We only truly understand a concept when we teach it to others. By providing useful solutions to customers, your team is putting their knowledge to use. Below are four external metrics you can use to track the usefulness of your efforts:

• Consumption metrics like downloads and views; 
• Advocacy and sharing metrics like shares, likes, and retweets;
• Lead-generation metrics like opting in; and 
• Sales metrics.

The best way to sell is to be YOUseful to those you want to serve. Providing YOUtility is not a quick win, but real success never is. 

Let me leave you with a great example from the book. Marcus Sheridan of River Pools and Spas (riverpoolsandspas.com) overcame huge financial challenges when he decided to answer all the possible questions his potential customers might have and detail them on his website. His blog became very popular due to its YOUtility and netted him $4.5 million in sales with just $20,000 in advertising. Check out his website. It is full of great information!

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