In episode #25, Wilco talks about the most important of every sale which is what do you once someone becomes a customer of yours.
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Hey hey. It's Wilco de Kreij here back for another episode. Today's episode is going be relevant for you and you specifically. The reason why I know that is because this is going to be very relevant for pretty much everyone who runs a business, everyone who's selling something, whether it's online or offline actually. It doesn't really matter. Today I'm going to talk about, what is essentially the most important aspect of every sale. Whenever you sell something to a customer, like I said, it doesn't matter whether it's online or offline, whether you're in B to B, B to C, or if you're running a set of servers like I do, or it really does not matter. The most important thing isn't what you do up to that point, isn't the kind of adds that you're running, isn't the kind of landing page you get, isn't the kind of emails that you're sending out. It isn't all that stuff. The most important aspect is actually, what do you once someone becomes a customer of yours.
The thing is that a lot of people are like a lot of the times, really focused on getting new customers through the door. A lot of the time as a marketer, it's focused on that aspect, but the reason why we're focusing so much time on that is because it's hard to get customers to the door. Right? Obviously I love it. I'm a marketer. It's not like you just put one message online, and you'll get 1,000 customers. You need to put in the work. You need to put in the work to get the customers in. Here's the thing.
Once someone is a customer, it's so much cheaper, so much easier to get them to become repeat customers. It's so much cheaper to get someone who's already a customer to buy another product of yours over and over again, compared to going for someone new who's never heard of you before. This goes for every kind of market. Personally, I am as a service, which means that I'm very much focused on recurring. I'm charging a monthly or yearly. Obviously, I want them to actually start using our platforms. I want them to get results that they desire because once they get the results they desire using our platforms, they're never going to leave. Right? They're going to stick around. They're going to pay us monthly, month after month after month, year after year after year. That is our goal. That is our win win. They are getting the value that they want, and in return they're paying us a monthly fee. Right?
Now, the most important part is often to get your customers to consume your product. Right? Let's take for example digital products, digital courses. There's a ton of people who sell digital courses but as you may know, most people who buy an online course, they don't go through the course. They don't. I'm going to assume that let's say you have an online course, and you create something of value. You create a course that I'm going to assume that you're proud of it, right? You created the course. You put all your heart and soul into it and you're proud of it, and you know that if someone is going through that course, it will help them. You know what else will happen once they go through that course? They will thank you for it. They will love you for it. They will respect you. They will see you as the authority.
If someone just sees and ad on Facebook and they see your ad and maybe they go through your sales page, your webinar and then they purchase your course. They don't consume the product, they just made an impulse decision to purchase your product but there's a good chance that next week or so, they don't even know who you are, or a month later or so. You haven't really built a connection. You haven't really helped them. The moment that they start consuming your course, the moment they actually go through your course, that's when things change. Now, obviously you can think, I'm doing every thing I can to sell them. I'm going to get them excited and assuming that they're excited enough to purchase my course, then they're going to consume the thing as well.
Well, that's where you're wrong. Even after they open their wallet, even after they took the credit card and made a purchase, then you sort of need to sell them again into going through your product. You need to do everything you can. I say a wile ago I was at a mastermind, and there was this guy. His name was Dean Harland. He had a genius idea for this. In his course, he's basically adding incentives for people to go through it. He basically he raised the price of the product a little but, but because of that, basically I'm just going to give you an example number. These are not real numbers. Let's say his original course was $50. What he would actually do is he would say, "Hey it's not 50. It's actually $60." Let's say it's 10 modules and then once people bought it, he would say, "Alright cool. You know what? Every single time you finish a module, I'll give you a dollar. Every single time, I'll give you a dollar." Obviously, they'll be paid at the end, because they don't want to send over a dollar every single time, because of the hassle.
Because of that, people got instant gratification. I'm not saying you need to pay people to go through your course. Definitely not. What he did is genius because it made people, even more excited not just to purchase the course, because often people just get excited to buy it because the idea of getting the results, but actually going through the course, that's another thing. He got people excited go through the course, to actually go and consume all the content and because of that, he immediately turned into the guy who helped him, and the actual authority, and the expert in his market. Because of that, it was no so much easier to then say, "I've got all these other kind of products," because now they already knew, this course was insanely good, especially for the kind of money I paid. The next kind of course is probably good as well.
His uptake on his follow up courses, they went through the roof using this method. The reason why I'm bringing this up right here is actually because we're actually going through something in our business as well. As you probably know, or may or may not know actually, one of my businesses is called Connectio.io. It's a platform where we sell various tools for Facebook advertising. For example, we have ConnectLeads. It's a tool to collect Facebook lead ads and add them into your auto spinner. We have Connect Audience which automatically synchronizes any of your email lists. For example, if you're using Active Campaign, you can create a custom audience on Facebook saying everyone who opens a certain email or everyone who did not open. We have ConnectRetarget. You can run behavioral target audiences. You can actually read target people based on for example, if they scroll to a certain section on your page, or based on how many seconds or how many minutes they spend on your site, and all kinds of behavioral things.
We got a bunch of Facebook tools and what I recently did as a test, is I bundled them all together. I sold them as a package all together. We call that ConnectSuite and based on that, they've got all these tools together. Here's the problem. Basically we said, here's ConnectSuite, and you get all these different tools. Then people log in and they saw all these different tools and they we didn't notice but as we started talking to our customers, they were sort of overwhelmed. They didn't know where to start. They didn't even, they were literally overwhelmed. They were literally like, alright, where do I start? Do I start with ConnectExplore, ConnectLeads, ConnectRetarget, ConnectAudience? What do I do first?
We thought, this is an amazing value for Facebook advertising, and it is. We see that people who are already using Facebook ads, they immediately see the value because the get it. They get what all these tools do and they get the amount of value. They get what kind of impact it has on their results. We also get customers in, who are just starting out with Facebook ads, and they're sort of overwhelmed. Because of that, they're not actually going through everything and they want to be taken by the hand and show them what is what.Because of that, because people were not actually going through everything, because people were not really consuming it, the actual cancellation rate was way too high. As I said, I'm in a software as a service, so we are depending on recurring revenue. We need to decrease our turn out rate. We need to make sure that most people are going to want to stick with us. They don't want to cancel. If people are canceling because they don't even know what we do, then we have something to work on.
I'll give you an example. Here's something we're currently working on to fix this. I still want to sell all of these products as a package because I think it's an amazing value and I know it's going to help a lot of Facebook advertisers, but because I don't want to overwhelm them, I'm actually thinking. This is right now just something that's in my mind. If you want a bit of a back story, you might actually see this later on in a webinar or somewhere in a special offer anything like that, when I'm testing it out. Here's the idea.
Instead of basically selling ConnectSuite, I'm actually thinking of creating a course which basically takes them by the hand, and then going through every step by step, how do you basically from zero to creating a profitable Facebook ad campaign. Not just using our tools, but leveraging our tools but also leveraging all the regular things that are inside the Facebook ads, all the regular strategies and how do you write your ads and things like that. By doing that, we can actually if we sell that course to potential customers, and along with that, we actually say, "On top of that you'll actually get a trail to ConnectSuite." They'll still be able to use all these tools, but now instead of buying all the tools, and in their minds they should be getting value out of all of these tools, now they are actually purchasing that course. That course has a single entry point. They have a single entry point like this is what I should actually go through. Lesson one, module one, module two, module three, module four, module five, module six, et cetera, et cetera.
Because of that, it's going to be easier for them to go through everything without being overwhelmed because it's going to be short videos one by one, and instead of confusing them with like five different options. Where do you get started. You get the point. My idea is that that's going to help a lot. On top of that, still I don't just want to assume that people are going to go through the content. On top of that, I'm currently setting up various email automations that basically will check. This is something more advanced. I'm not sure what other easy tools for this to create. I'm using ActiveCampaign so I'm a bit of a nerd. I would say so. Actually doing some checks and sending custom bags over to see if someone went through a module or not. Basically, what we're going to do is basically create a photo sequence that will depend based on what people have already been through.
If they purchased but they haven't been through the course, they're going to get certain emails. If they already went through certain parts of the course, then they're going to get emails about the parts they have not yet been going through. We're not just going to say, go through the course. No. We're actually getting them excited. We're still kind of selling them on the idea. We're showing for example case studies and what people have done using that system, or we're sending out small triggers or curiosity gaps or anything we can do to try to get people excited about the next step they should take. We know that once people actually go through and consume everything, they're going to be way more likely to actually stick around. By the end of the course, they might just have a profitable Facebook ad campaign, which is awesome. They'll also be doing that, leveraging our tools inside of Connectio.io.
Because of that, because they are not sort of dependent on it. Now they're used to it, they're not as likely to cancel because they already know if they will cancel on Connectio.io, then for example, their retargeting ads are not going to perform as well, because they don't have ConnectRetarget anymore. They will have to find another solution for their Facebook lead ads. They will have to manually create and update their custom audiences instead of ConnectAudience doing that automatically for them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
My point here is that whatever you are selling, whatever it is. It could be a service, could be B to B, could even be B to C, doesn't really matter. Make sure to get your customers to consume your product. Make sure to get them, whatever you're selling them on, whatever your product is solving for them, don't just sell them the idea of that. Make sure to actually go through after the sale. Make sure you follow them. Make sure you over deliver with even more value than you delivered upfront. If you make sure that they will go through your product, they will consume your product. If you even add more value to the product than you initially promise them, then they're going to be a loyal customer for life.
The most important thing, what you can do, when every sale happens is what you do after the sale. I'm going to be completely honest here, I haven't done that in every part of my online career. Initially I just had a couple of email campaigns and when I started out, what I was basically doing is just pitching them in the next product, next product, next product. Even though short term that kind of works. It's okay to have an upsell, but initially I was thinking, I need to sell them more. Now, I know that it's even more important to get them to consume the product, to get them to build that connection and forge that connection and then, later when the time is right, then of course, yeah, you can make them another offer if that is relevant for them, if that actually helps them. That's fine.
At that point, you already have established yourself as being a real relationship. You already have a good relationship with them. It's going to be a customer for life if you treat them well right and with respect. That's my tip for all of you today, to make sure that every single time you get a customer though the door, do whatever you can do to make them feel special, make them go through your content, make them consume your product, and just make sure you're doing whatever they want you to do and be awesome.
With that having said, I'll see you all on the next episode. Talk to you soon.
"My point here is that whatever you are selling, whatever it is. Make sure to get your customers to consume your product."
"Make sure you over deliver with even more value than you delivered upfront."
"The most important thing, what you can do, when every sale happens is what you do after the sale."
"Do whatever you can do to make them feel special, make them go through your content, make them consume your product, and just make sure you're doing whatever they want you to do and be awesome."
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