PODCAST - The Person Who Pays Isn’t Always The Customer
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When you buy a gift for someone, you are the buyer. The receiver of the gift is the customer. Did you know that you, the business owner, when you buy a software for your business, that you're the buyer, and your team members are the users, the customer? You may use the software a little bit, but they are the end users getting the value out of the software.
Well, today on the show, we're going to uncover why the person who buys isn't [00:02:00] always the customer, and this may be standing in between you and the success that you're looking for in your business. And it might actually be the better route for you to take with your business, to serve both a buyer and a customer or end user, and here's why.
Simple concept I like to look at called one-to-one, having a business that sells one-to-one, and a business that sells one-to-many. When we're looking at these two businesses, what we're really looking at is when we look at a sales transaction, do we want the sales transaction to have one person that we're serving when the transaction comes to fruition, or do we want there to be many people that we're serving?
Well, depending on your goals and your business, you may have an opinion one way or the other. But I invite you, even if you find yourself on the one-to-one side of things, the power of [00:03:00] serving one-to-many is astonishing, and here's why. Another way to look at one-to-one is B2C. You're a business owner. You own a business.
You can sell directly to customers, directly to individuals, B2C or B2I. There's one person on the other side of this transaction. You could also decide to be a B2B business, where you're selling to businesses. Well, when you're selling to businesses, we're talking about many customers, B2M, one-to-many. So in the same one transaction, you can charge so much more.
Businesses have a lot more money to invest in your product than customers and individuals do, and they're investing in it for more people, for more end users. Here is what my enterprise learning partnership client, CoStar, has done to grow their business. While you can buy CoStar software... Now, CoStar software is for real estate professionals, commercial real estate professionals [00:04:00] globally.
And what CoStar has done is created a software that it aggregates all the data of all these commercial real estate properties and serves it up in the most valuable way possible to serve commercial real estate professionals. Now, while you can buy their $5,000 per year software licenses as an individual, they can make even more money by selling 100, 1,000, 10,000 software licenses to large organizations like Marriott and- Do it in one transaction.
So I could either focus on 5,000 in one transaction, or 5,000 times 1,000 in one transaction. That's a lot of zeros, and it's still one transaction. What we've done together is build multiple certification programs on their software, and also sell these certifications to many people, to businesses, to universities, who are [00:05:00] businesses by the way, to hotels, to other large commercial real estate entities.
And what we're talking about is selling 100 to 200 licenses at a time, selling 10 to 1,000 licenses at a time. We're selling the same product, we're just selling it to more people in the same transaction. Another one of my clients, Cashmere, has the best product in their industry. They are a therapeutics company.
And what we've done together is built an education strategy where we're educating one-to-one and one-to-many on their product. Now, we have the one-to-one fully automated to educate patients on how to get the most value out of their product, how to have conversations with their medical providers about their product, and how to be safe with their product.
But we've spent most of our time focused on the one-to-many piece, the educating doctors piece. So on this side of things, we have patients, and on this side of [00:06:00] things, we have doctors. And really, you could say that doctors are on this side, too, but what we're really talking about here is doctor offices, hospital systems, networks.
We've set it up where doctors offices can enlist their entire staff into this program so they can start providing as much value to their patients as possible. And we've done this by aligning the ROI, the return on investment, of their business, of doctors and doctors offices, and patients. And when we align all of these pieces, we create a win-win- Win.
A win for you, a win for the buyer, and a win for the customer. I'm gonna show you exactly how I've done it with both of these companies, S&P 500 company CoStar Group, medical therapeutics company Cashmere, and how my client Celasol is tackling the global suicide epidemic with a strategy to half the global suicide [00:07:00] rate in the next three years.
So how do we set this up? Capitalizing on the fact that the person who pays for your product or service isn't always the end customer. And like I shared, this is actually a good situation for you, a great way for you to scale your business faster. But what we need to do so you can stop chasing one-to-one deals and move towards one-to-many deals, we need to align three things, and we need to use a concept that I not only teach in detail, I consult with business owners directly in my Plug the Profit Leak Challenge.
This is a multi-day group consulting experience where we look at your business and we find the hidden profit leaks that may exist I find may be costing companies like yours six figures or more per year in profit. Over this challenge, we not only identify where the leak is occurring. Together, we create a plan to plug it forever and [00:08:00] set you up to multiply your ROI over time.
And if you wanna spend even more time with me during the challenge, I invite you to grab my VIP ticket so you can ask me any questions that you have, and I can dive into your specific situation in your business. Grab your ticket in the show notes or the YouTube description or go to plugtheprofitleak.com to grab your ticket today.
In the meantime, so we can move from one-to-one- To one to many, what we need to do is look at your business, the buyer, so your buyer, that's gonna be the purchaser in this one-to-many deal, and your customer. If you already have a lot of one-to-one sales, then you probably already know what your customer needs, what they want, what their return on investment is.
What does, what does ROI look like for your customer? And remember that even if the buyer is the one spending the money, your [00:09:00] customer is still making an investment. In this situation, in the one-to-many situation, your customer is most likely investing time. Your buyer is investing the money. They may be investing some time because they may need to integrate their product into the business.
So this is what we call the investment section of the one-to-many equation. Your business, so you and your business, you're also making an investment. You're definitely investing time, and you're probably investing money, your resources, into this sales and marketing strategy. So since everyone here, your business, your buyer, and your customer, is investing something, everyone here wants to get a return on their investment.
You wanna get a return on your investment. You wanna get a return on investing in one-to-many sales. That's why you're investing in one to many, because you can sell something that maybe you were selling for 500 bucks, you [00:10:00] can sell for $50,000 'cause you're selling one to many. That your buyer wants to get a return on their investment.
Mario, the owner of Celosol, realizes that in order for a company to invest in halving the global suicide rate, there needs to be something in it for them other than decreasing global suicides, and they need to understand that this is not only a global problem, it's a problem in their company. So what we look at is what would better mental health for an organization create for that organization?
And what he's done is he's come up with specific numbers of how much money an organization can save by equipping their employees to not only have their own strategies to deal with mental health, but in order to support their colleagues, their friends, and their families with mental health. And that is what he's selling to the buyer.
What he's selling to the customer is better mental health, is supporting [00:11:00] others and their mental health. What he's selling to the buyer is how much money is your company gonna save by investing in this program? And for his business, the return on investment is it's gonna take me... It's not gonna take me much more time than it would to sell directly to one person that it's gonna take to sell to a buyer that is serving hundreds of customers.
So what we need to do is integrate a concept I call- ROI pie. And I go deep into this and how to apply this to your business in my Plug the Profit Leak challenge. But the basics here are we, each of us, your business, your buyer, and your customer all has their own pie, all have their own ROI pie, which is the return that you're looking for for your investment.
The investments are over here. For customers, it's time. For buyer, it's money and time. For you, it's money and time. What is the return that you're looking to get on these things? We align those returns, and we find [00:12:00] where the overlap is, and where the overlap is is our focus. And this is how, if you've been struggling for years because the person buying is different from the person who's your customer, this is how if you want to move away from one-to-one sales into one-to-many sales or being a B2C business to a B2B business, this is the way to scale your business more effortlessly.
When we align the ROI of your business with the buyer and the customer, we create a win, win, win. And when everyone wins, the world wins. This is how real change happens. I'll see you in the next episode.
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Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you in the next episode
AI is rising, and so are
