Excerpts from the Introduction of "Youtility"

Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype

by Jay Baer

Introduction

For years, sales appointments had been arduous for me. I would arrive at customers’ homes and find their knowledge about pools (types, costs, accessories, etc.) so poor that I’d literally have to spend hours with them at their kitchen tables, teaching them all of this basic information, just to get to a point where we could start talking about what it was they wanted and how much it was all going to cost. But now the website had become a useful resource for these prospects, and I was finding many homeowners were incredibly informed before I ever even set foot in their homes. They were engaging in self-serve information before ever contacting us, a massive shift in consumer behavior that is illustrated and illuminated in this book.

Educated consumers are sometimes threatening to salespeople. Do car salesmen want their prospective buyers to know exactly how much the dealership paid for the car? Do airlines want customers to be alerted when fares go down? There’s no question that information changes the balance of power, but I found this to be a tremendous benefit, not a hindrance. Each time I encountered a prospective pool-buying family who had educated themselves on our website (and other sources) before I met them, the length of the sales appointment would decrease, and the likelihood of turning that prospect into a customer went up.

I decided to look deeper into this situation, and, at the beginning of 2011, I analyzed behavior patterns on our website in hopes of better understanding why some visitors fill out a contact form on the site but never advance past that point, while others eventually become customers. As I compared these two groups of site visitors, one number jumped out at me . . . thirty. It was the tipping point. If a visitor to our website reads at least thirty pages of our information before we go on an in-home sales appointment, they buy a pool 80 percent of the time. Considering the industry closing rate average is around 10 percent, this was a shocking revelation. They weren’t just self-educating, they were self-qualifying, too. By the time they contacted us for an in-person appointment, they were predisposed to working with us.

As you’ll see in Youtility, consumers’ desire to consume inherently useful information has never been greater. In 2012 the average new River Pools and Spas customer who filled out a form on the website and eventually bought a swimming pool read 105 pages of our site. When we started this journey, the entire website was just 20 pages. Today, we offer more than 850 pages of information, with more added all the time.

In a time when swimming pool companies all over the United States were going out of business, we managed to grow our market share, with more than 80 percent of all our sales coming directly from the Internet. In 2007, when the economy was going great and pool sales were easy, we spent about $250,000 in advertising to achieve roughly $4 million in sales.

In 2011, when the economy was a mess and luxury spending was in the dumps, we spent $20,000 in advertising to generate $4.5 million in sales. What changed? We became a Youtility, not just a swimming pool company.

Today, despite the fact that we’re just a little swimming pool company in Virginia, we have the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world. Five years ago, if you had asked me and my business partners what we do, the answer would have been simple: “We build in-ground fiberglass swimming pools.” Now we say: “We are the best teachers in the world on the subject of fiberglass swimming pools, and we happen to build them as well.”

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