Welcome to the dive locker podcast, the podcast for dive professionals where we bring you the latest and diving industry resources that make you excellent at teaching techniques, risk management, and dive business. I am your host Tec Clark, and welcome to this week’s episode everyone.

Industry News

We’re going to start with some industry news here, Hurricane Dorian, that I’ve mentioned in the last few episodes, devastated The Bahamas. And that GoFundMe campaign, that relief fund is now over $35,000 in donations. Thank you all for the efforts that you’ve done there. And the reports that we’re getting are absolutely devastating from The Bahamas, but there is something that is amazing. Two things. Number one is the support that they are receiving from everywhere globally to build and rebuild and provide immediate support that has been tremendous to see and to witness the humanitarian side of us as a, as a people. And the second thing is to look at the country of The Bahamas when you look at their resilience and their strength to get through this and their faith and their hope.

Oh my goodness. It is truly something to, just touch the soul. It really is. So our thoughts and prayers still go out to all of those that are still suffering from the effects of Hurricane Dorian. Keep them in your thoughts and prayers as well. Also, on September 2nd, 2019, the liveaboard dive vessel Conception was engulfed in flames while anchored in California’s Channel Islands of the 39 passengers and crew onboard 34 lost their lives. This tragedy has been felt through the dive community and beyond the dive community. I’ve even had students and former students come up and want to talk about this and understand it.  It’s really a tragic, tragic event, but in the effort to help the families of the victims of that fire, there have been numerous organizations that have risen up and have started donation funds and campaigns to raise money for these victims and their families.

DAN has started a program. They’ve donated actually $10,000 to kick off theirs, and right now at the time of this recording, they have gathered over $177,000. And that is with partnering with many of the organizations in our industry that have come together for this one. Also, if you go to dema.org, you will see, in their press release on the Conception tragedy that they have numerous organizations listed, many relief funds. All that, you can read about and see who are the organizations that are, that are doing them and, and promoting them. So there’s many out there. And, I just want to just give the biggest condolences to everyone that has been touched by this because it’s not only those families folks, it is the countless numbers of you that have been diving with that boat and that company and in that area, even maybe with a different boat or those of us that love liveaboards and now we’re thinking differently. It’s just such a hard thing from this.

We know that many things will be looked at and there may even be changes to policies or procedures or whatever that is within maritime or, the diving industry or whatever that is. But, again, thoughts and prayers are out with all of the people that are affected by this, not only the victims and their families, but also everyone that’s just touched negatively by this. So it’s been a rough few weeks here for our industry I think with all of these disasters that are going on. So again, keep everyone in the thoughts and prayers. Now let’s get to this week’s episode.

This week we are going to be talking about value selling part two, competing with value. Remember value selling part one was last week. This is going to be part two. We’re also going to discuss a risk management procedure that might assist you in defendability for your dive briefings. So here we go. Let’s get this episode kicked off. Ready dive, dive, dive

Value Selling Part 2

Hey, today we are at value selling part two. Last week’s episode was value selling part one and a reminder value selling is to sell or compete against value that you offer versus selling or competing against price and pricing. And so some of the things that we went over last week that there’s a lot of instances in our industry where we’re seeing that discounting is going on. Now, discounting in consumer driven economies is not necessarily a bad thing, but when it comes to services like those that we offer in scuba education and training, that can be problematic because so many corners wind up getting cut to be able to make ends meet or to not lose as much money as possible when the services are being given. So this is the value selling part two and we are going to actually look at what it means to sell on value.

I love this quote from Oscar Wilde. “The fool knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Now here’s another quote that I love from billionaire businessman Warren Buffet. “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” So think about that. That’s pretty cool. Now, Brian Tracy, a sales guru says this, he says that the “value is the difference between the price you charge and the benefits the customer perceives they will get. So if the customer perceives they will get a lot of benefit for the price they pay, then their perception of value is very high.” So the good news is that you can control this by showing benefits and measuring on value. The individual will change their purchase decision making process based on the value that you offer. And the good news is you get to control the value that you offer in all the services that you do.

So let’s illustrate this using a different business model, a full service lawn company. So let’s say that you have a full service lawn company and you are in the market and you’re in the neighborhood and you’re advertising your services and whatnot. Well what happens when a new person gets a pickup truck and a lawn mower and comes in and wants to break into that market, they are going to undercut the competition. And so what happens now? There is a knee jerk reaction to which other lawn service folks are going to then lower their price to start a price war where everyone is competing with each other on prices. Well, you are going to be the savvy business person. You are the one that’s going to have the full service lawn company that stays above that price war. You’re not going to engage with that pull down of pricing that’s only going to hurt.

It hurts your margin and hurts your income; you’re living, your livelihood. No Way. Instead we’re going to go the opposite direction and don’t turn in that whole competitive market on competing at price. You’re going to compete at value. So here’s how we do it. We’re going to look at the six steps of value selling. Here we go. Number one is identify the customer’s problems. Picture an infomercial, remember the late night infomercial, right? And so you’ve got people that are showing all the things that are negative that you have to deal with and it’s always shot in black and white. Have you ever noticed that? And so people are sitting there and, “oh, it’s so hard to deal with, washing dishes and blah, blah, blah.” And there’s a frazzled housewife and it’s black and white and oh, she just looks disheveled and everything. Well, that’s the kind of stuff here.

We’re going to look at that in what we’re talking about in this full service lawn company. You want to be saying stuff like, “Hey, are you tired of having a bad looking lawn? Are you sick of mowing your lawn on the weekends and not spending time with your family? Are Your sprinklers a problem? Do you hate weeds?” Whatever that is. These are all called pain points. And these pain points are effective at identifying what problems the customers have and that you can solve them. So number one is identify the customer’s problems.

Number two is illustrate the better outcomes. So this is where you get the opportunity to identify every one of your customer’s pain points. So now with your help by being with your full service lawn company, they’ll have more time with their family. They won’t have to do their own lawn mower repair and maintenance, nor will they have to go out and buy oil and gas. They don’t have to go to the store and buy pipes and sprinkler heads. Okay. So now you’ve identified where you come along and help make their life easier and more enjoyable by eliminating their pain points. That’s number two, illustrating the better outcomes of doing business with you.

Number three is clear, compelling, and memorable differentiation. Differentiation is how do you differentiate yourself from your competitors? You see, it would be things like this, “we’re a full service lawn company and here’s what makes us different. So you may work from home and you might need quiet in order to make conference calls, or you might have little kids that take naps throughout the day. Well, we will only run our equipment when it’s convenient for you. For that reason, we have a special handy-dandy scheduling app that allows you to schedule our lawn service. Oh, and after we do your lawn, we check the sprinkler system every time to make sure we haven’t knocked off any sprinkler heads and if we have, we repair them on the spot.”

“Also, if we ever notice weeds or see brown spots, we immediately mix the right amount of product to put on your lawn and take care of it right then.” All right, you see what you’ve just done. You’ve now positioned yourself as a business that cares about its customers and that becomes a very clear and compelling differentiation from the competitors. No other competitor cares about. If you’re at home on conference calls and no other competitor has this app, that is differentiation. That’s number three, clear, compelling and memorable differentiation.

Number four is proof of value. Now you want to support your claims by sharing your scope of success. That means what have you done? That means point to the great things that you’ve done. So you’ve done award-winning houses in the neighborhood, maybe you serve the church down the street and do their lawn. Maybe you do the local country club and the country club is gorgeous and everybody goes, “Whoa, if they do the country club, wow!” Right? And then what do people say on Yelp? We want them to look at Yelp and say, “hey look, there is no better lawn service company and here’s why people are saying that we are so good.” See, you want to show that you have talent and that other people trust you. This is social proof. So that is important to show the value that you offer. That’s number four. Proof of value.

Number five is cost of inaction. Now, this is a reminder of the pain points of what happens when people don’t use your company, but it’s done in a little bit of a different way. “If you don’t use us, then you’re gonna miss out on football games. You’re going to miss out on time with the family. You’re going to have to continually do lawnmower repair. Now think of this one too. If you decide to do all of the services that we offer, but with different companies, you could have a sprinkler company, a weed control company, a lawn mowing company. That’s three different companies, three different schedules, three different bills. We do it all in one.” You see the cost of inaction stimulates fear of missing out, so we want to put that in there. Number five is the cost of inaction.

And then number six is the return on investment. This is when you get to show financial return in the investment of doing business with you. Now, let the people roll through the numbers. “Have you ever had your sprinklers knocked off by a lawn service and wasted a ton of money because the water just ran and ran and ran or that you have to call people out and fix it.” Okay. There’s cost in that. What about, “what could you be doing with your spare time on weekends while we’re handling your lawn needs? How much would you save in equipment in maintenance, in oil and gas?” Right?

When you start to add all these factors up of the savings of time and hassle and energy and actual raw dollars, now that return on investment starts to have a price associated with it, so when your monthly price is, let’s say $50 or even $100 more than your lawn service competition, the customer isn’t shocked. The customer thinks, “if I go with you, I get fewer hassles, I get more free time. I have a great looking lawn. I’m the envy of the neighborhood and I don’t have to pay for all these other charges. Oh yeah, this is worth it thing.” Dang, you have just done value selling! Those are the six points ending in the in that number six, their return on investment.

So let’s apply this to your dive business. How does this work and what does it look like using these six steps of value selling? Let’s take a look at that. First thing you want to do is identify your customers problems. “Are you frustrated with not knowing where to get certified because of all the different options out there? Is your equipment old and in need of repair? Has it been a while since you’ve been diving and think your skills may be rusty? Do you want to travel? Do you want to see underwater images and wish you could be there?” You see these are the pain points that people are going through and if you can identify those problems you have now hooked them into your story. How are you engaging with them? You’ve just peaked their interest. “Yes, I have always wanted to be certified. Yes, my equipment is old and in need of repair. Yes. It’s been awhile since I’ve been diving and I might need a refresher.” You’ve just stimulated discussion.

Next, illustrate the better outcomes with your help. So it is all about that. “We will turn you into a confident, well-trained diver, not just a certified diver, but a confident, well trained diver. You’ll enjoy satisfaction of diving worldwide. You’ll get to increase your bottom time because of better air consumption. You have skills that your buddies are envious of. You get to enjoy pain free diving with your ears because you know how to equalize. Lose your anxieties and be excited to go on every trip with our refresher course that will help you with that.” You see, these are the promises that need to be made so that the customer decides to come with you. They are better outcomes with your help.

Number three, we’re going to position ourselves against the competition through that clear, compelling and memorable differentiation. Now here’s something to know. You are going to need to know your competition to succeed in this area and I mean really know your competition. Yes. If you have dive centers, dive shops, dive businesses in your neighborhood, in your area, in your, your market, you really need to know what they’re offering. Don’t be shy to understand fully every detail of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it from anything: pool time, classroom time, sales, equipment offerings, repair. You need to know them well so that you can differentiate. So you want to say things like, “we are your full service diving professionals.” When you throw that term out there, they start to go, “well, if they’re full service, are others not full service?” You start to get some questions there. You see, “we offer custom schedules that accommodate your busy lifestyle. We are all inclusive. We have no hidden costs. So you’ll have no pressure decisions to make.” It’s simple to do business with us, right?

“We focus on areas that abbreviated training leaves divers lacking.” Oops, did I just say that? Aha. Because I get so many questions of people with different agencies that say, “how do I compete with the dive shop down the street that’s doing an abbreviated course for 99 bucks?” Well, this is where you compete on that. Remember we’ve got to take that whole thing of the c-card being the commodity and we need to change that into the value offering of what they get. So here’s where we’re going to say that. “Yeah, that abbreviated training can leave divers lacking. We will get you to be a comfortable and skilled diver. You will be comfortable and confident underwater. We will get to know you and your strengths and weaknesses and we will develop you so that you have total comfort and mastery of all skills as a diver.” Now, there will be people that that resonates with. There will be people that say, yeah, I get that. Especially if it’s refresher training. And they went, “yeah, I really never learned that very well.” This is important. You need to have clear, compelling and memorable differentiation from your competition.

Number four is your proof of value. Remember, proof of value is also known as social proof. They want real examples of how your promises work out. So you’re saying things like, “hey, these are some of the best divers that have taken our classes. They’ve gone on to be professionals. In fact, we have tons of dive professionals that come to us to get their professional training. We have a customer who’s an accountant and he relieves his stress by diving with us. We have a homeschooling parent that took our class with our kids to teach them an underwater science curriculum. We had a customer that took our refresher course and told us that he learned more in our refresher course than in his beginning class at another dive center.” Don’t mention the dive center by the way.

“Many dive pros come to us for their training. We certified the mayor,” Yada Yada, Yada. You get what I’m saying? So getting these type of testimonials also from other customers is great and if you can do it on sites like Yelp, give your customers some type of reward. If they go to Yelp and say, “Hey, this is what I experienced,” not for a great review, just a review in general, just say, hey, “we want everyone to go to Yelp. We are transparent and open and accountable. We want you to tell everyone about your experience because we’re that confident with our own service offerings.”

Number five is the cost of inaction. All right. What happens if they don’t use your dive center or don’t take your classes? Well, you can point out here “someone else may not give you the same quality time honing your skills under water. This can lead you to feeling anxious or uncomfortable when diving. Plus you may need to watch out for additional fees. Abbreviated training won’t adequately prepare you for diving and is leading reason why divers drop out.

You don’t want to be faced with those issues after such an important investment.” Yes. Use that term. Remind customers that investing in diving is truly an investment in themselves and their recreation, which can also relate to their wellbeing and their happiness. So if people have already gone out on board and gotten their equipment, remind them of that investment, they’ve taken their open water diver course, remind them of that investment or they want to go travel the world, remind them of the investment in taking proper training and getting the proper equipment. You see it’s all about that investment piece and point them to why it is important in making that purchase decision, which again is number six, the return on investment.

So see how this seamlessly ties in together with the cost of inaction and our return on investment with our course? “We have convenient scheduling, we have no hidden fees, we have plenty of time spent training you to be safe, confident, happy, make the right investment in you, make the right investment in your safety, make the right investment in your comfort and enjoy a lifetime of scuba diving adventures.” You see, this is that closing and this is where the person does not care about price. In this moment, you have just done six steps to show them why you have a greater value in your offering than other businesses. And here it is. It’s time for the price, okay, and now the sticker shock isn’t there because they see that you are a far greater value than the other businesses. That is how we sell on value instead of price.

And I’m telling you folks, this is the truth. When you talk to dive professionals that say, I am the highest priced dive center in town and we are doing just fine. It’s because they’ve got this right. They have got value selling down and they’re able to articulate it and they’re able to sell their customers on that value and their customers love them and are loyal and are dedicated. Do you see a customer that doesn’t do value? “The fool knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.” When people don’t engage in your discussion, in what you can add to their lives, in the value of them doing business with you, they will only compare you on price. Make this a priority, make value selling a priority and get together with your team, your management, your staff, every employee, and go over this in detail. Know your competition, study your competition and find the areas that you can out value them. Not undercut them. Out value them.

Defendable Dive Briefings

Okay, so now let’s turn our attention to risk management. You know, my family goes to North Carolina every year and we love to go whitewater rafting. Well, when we go whitewater rafting, we go out with a company called Nantahala Outdoor Center, and it doesn’t matter what river we’re on, what level we’re on. The service and risk management principles and protocols that they do are just outstanding. Now being in the business that we’re in, you know, whenever I go to an outdoor recreation or a high risk type of activity, I’m paying attention to the risk management side of things. I mean, I’m really paying attention to it and so these guys have been doing it right for a long, long time and that’s why we continue to return to them because they’re so good and they do such a great job. Well, one of the things that I honed in on that really stuck out to me was in their briefings, they do something that is very unique.

Here’s what they do when it’s time for their briefing, they show a video and then after the video, the guide, the main trip guide, gets up and gives a detailed safety briefing. But here’s what they do. They hand a piece of paper to someone in the audience. That piece of paper has a checklist on it. The checklist contains the big major areas that they are going to cover in that briefing. And what they do is they ask the person to check off the list as they say the different things that are on it. And so what happens is they do their briefing, the person is checking off the items that are discussed, and then at the end they collect that, the individual signs it and they sign it and then they attach it to their trip roster for that day. And that gets hard filed. And that’s it.

Well, there’s a kind of a science to this and I thought it’s brilliant on the legal defendability side. Here’s what I mean. In my many years as a forensic dive accident investigator, I remember going to do interviews with individuals and even depositions with individuals where they would be questioned on what did they say during their briefing. And now if you can think about this, maybe you have this or maybe you’ve seen it on different boats or whatnot. Some of the dive briefings can be said in one’s sleep, right? It’s just the same thing. You’ve said it so many times, it’s just a hundred percent memorized and you think that there’s no way that you could miss something because it’s what you do. It’s what you say. It’s what you always say. Here’s the problem under an investigation and an interview or a deposition, you’d be amazed how many dive professionals start to blank out on that memorized narrative that they say for their briefing.

And when one can’t articulate that, that becomes an issue whether or not it was really said and whether or not other people heard it and so forth. So when you look at this from a defendability point of view, the way that Nantahala Outdoor Center is doing this with having this very accountable level of transparency for making sure that that guide, no matter how many years that guide has been working there, no matter how well they’ve memorized that speech, they’re still ensuring that those top items were covered and that that audience heard that those top items were covered. And then that was accounted for by the sheet of paper with the checkoff boxes and the person name. And they sign it and it gets attached to the rosters. I think this is a wonderful, wonderful defendability tool.

It’s something for you to think about whether you decide to go into this type of an action for your own briefings on your, on your dives or on dive boats, whether or not you do this, it’s at least worth a thought to sit there and think about are you really saying what you need to say? And would everybody agree if everyone needed to be interviewed, would they all agree to all the things that you said? And then if you’re under stress, would you be able to say the briefing that you always say if it’s not one that doesn’t change much in that kind of thing, or if it changes, do people know the change of that day? So this is where having that kind of accountability checklist to go along with briefings can be a really, really cool risk management tool. And I give a ton of credit to Nantahala Outdoor Center doing this and for putting that in place.

Well, that does it for today’s episode my friends. Thanks for listening, and all of the items discussed in this episode will be available on the show notes page over at scubaguru.com including links to the fundraisers I mentioned, as well as my article, The Value of Value Selling at Dive Center Business. Remember to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes. That way you’ll be notified of new episodes as soon as they go live. You can also listen to this podcast on Google Play and Stitcher, and please leave a rating. Thanks again. We’ll see you in the next episode. Safe diving and take good care of my friends.

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