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Hey there - it's Brian 👋

Everyone says you need to “stand out.”

But does anyone show you how?

Today, let’s get into a real example:
Zappos

I’ll show you how Zappos realized online shoe shoppers were afraid to shop online and stood out by focusing on trust.

This focus took them from running out of money, to being acquired by Amazon for $1.2B in 2009.

All by creating 10x trust with their customers, through the world’s best customer service.

Here’s 8 ways Zappos became the most trustworthy shoe store on the planet.

Let’s make your business an outlier: 👇

Want more examples of how you stand out?

You can find this example (and many more) in my free giveaway below.

Check out the full guide here for free (no opt-in required): 👇

🛠️ How Zappos stood out by focusing on customer service

1. Best customer service employees

Choose not to outsource because international call center reps wouldn’t understand US cultural references

Their focus on culture means they have no shortage of people signing up for a job. In a 2010 interview with Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh, he said they had 25,000 job applications for 250 roles.

They make sure to hire only people they would enjoy hanging out with after hours.

2. Call centers are the core of their business

They contemplated having call centers as a satellite office. Then realized a remote location for call center doesn’t send the message that customer service is core to their business.

They moved headquarters to Las Vegas to engrain customer service into their culture.

3. Customer service on their website

Most companies bury customer service numbers deep in a few pages.

Zappos puts the customer service number up top, on every page of their site to make it easy to call.

4. Free shipping (both ways)

Zappos spends over one-third of their revenue on shipping. They spend it happily as a marketing expense. Anything to make the customer experience seamless.

Customers will buy 5 pairs of shoes and return 4. But they become customers for life.

5. No upsells

They believe upsells annoy the customer. They go to the extreme for customer experience.

6. No scripts

They expect customer service reps to build a genuine connection with the customer. Genuine connections happen organically (without scripts).

7. Change typical call center performance metrics

Most companies have an “average handle time.” This means success is handling a customer as quickly as possible.

This means customer service reps are thinking about how quickly they can get the customer off the phone. That’s not good customer service.

Zappos intentionally removed this metric.

8. 365-day return policy

Most companies do 30 day returns. 365 days is back to extreme customer experience.

So how can you stand out?

Now imagine your customer isn’t as excited about your solution as you are.

How can you get customers as eager to buy from you as they are from Zappos?

Here’s 4 questions to ask yourself:
1. What does your customer crave?
2. What do they value in a solution?
3. How are they missing that value today?
4. How can you give them that missing value?

Perfect!

Get these questions right (and test your theories with your customers) and they’ll get as excited about your business as you are.

So I want to help you walk through each step of the process to stand out and get raving customers (like Zappos).

To do that, I’m building out a course to walk you through each step of the process for how I’ve helped clients stand out.

I’d love to make sure I don’t miss anything that’s valuable to you.

One ask: I’d love if you could reply to this email with your questions and topics you want to focus on:
What questions do you have on this process? What excites you the most?

I’m excited to hear from you!

See you next Thursday 👋

Brian
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🛠️ Outlier Links

1. HBR: Tony Hsieh (CEO) on how extreme customer service made Zappos a success

2. Timeline of how Zappos went from $0 - $1.2B

3. Interview with Zappos CEO - “why I sold Zappos”

4. The biggest startup pivots of all time (e.g., YouTube was a dating site)

5. Case study: How Notion used community-led growth (to grow to $10B)

🙋‍♂️ Vote: Next Week’s Topic

People like you make this community amazing.

So I want to give you the opportunity to pick the topic that will help you grow your business the most (vote to choose next week’s topic below):