PODCAST - why people buy but never come back
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[00:00:00] Learning Transformed is brought to you by eLearning Partners, your guide to designing transformational learning experiences in the age of AI For millennia, human intelligence was the highest form of intelligence on Earth, until now. Hi, I'm AI. I can process more information in seconds than any human in a lifetime.
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AI is rising and so are we
Now let's dive in
I've been an entrepreneur for more than a decade, and while it took me a while to figure out the right marketing, the right sales to bring a lot of customers and clients into working with me, one thing I got right pretty early was figuring out the best way to serve clients, to serve customers so they keep coming back.
And that's why today on the show I'm gonna share with you why people buy and never come back, and I'm gonna give you [00:02:00] my three-step solution so that each customer, each client that you have worked so hard to close the initial deal with, to bring in as a customer, I want you to have exactly what you need to nurture that relationship so you can have repeat business for years.
Some of my customers have been with me since the beginning, and most of my customers have been with me for multiple years, paying me monthly for years and years and years. And you can have the same thing in your business. Your marketing and sales might be working, but something is breaking after. If this sounds like you and your business, where you are so good at getting customers to make the initial purchase decision, but then within weeks, your customers disappear.
Well, the first reason that this may be happening is that your product, your service, whatever your customer is purchasing, is failing to deliver on the promise. See, you could have [00:03:00] Amazing marketing messaging. You can have the best sales team ever, but if what your marketing is saying about your business, about your product, about your services, and what your sales team is selling doesn't align, doesn't match up with the value, with the ROI, the return on investment that your customer is actually getting, the promise falls short.
And when the promise falls short, this doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna have a bunch of customers come and ask for refunds because customers are used to being let down. And a lot of times, customers realize, "Hey, well, I should have known. It sounded too good to be true, and this is what I'm getting now.
And, you know, I got some value, but I'm not gonna spend my money with this company again." Other times, a company's promise may fall extremely short, and that's when you may have a bunch of data saying, "Okay, well, I get a lot of refunds from this specific type of customer." [00:04:00] Maybe your marketing and sales, the promise, the payoff that you are promoting works really well for some people, for one customer avatar, for one customer profile.
And maybe it doesn't work for another, but you're still promoting it to that other profile, to that other person. Here's an example. One of the first things that I go through with my consulting and advisory clients is we look at their business. So if you and I were working together, what we would do is dive into your business and see what the biggest opportunities are to plug any profit leaks that you may have.
And what we do is look at opportunity cost, opportunity of selling to one customer versus another. I believe because all the organizations I work with wanna make a big impact in the world, along with having a profitable business, one of the best ways to do that is not just selling B2C, business to consumer, [00:05:00] one-to-one, but selling B2B one-to- The many selling larger deals, serving more people in one transaction.
The thing here is we have to be really careful with our marketing and sales messaging. It's very different when you're selling B2C versus B2B, and this is something that we really need to dive into together, and we can do that one-on-one. But you can also join one of my Plug the Profit Leak Challenge group consulting experiences, and grab your ticket in the show notes or on the YouTube description, or go to plugtheprofitleak.com, and we can work on this together.
But really, the first thing you need to look at, if you're making a lot of sales, you're not retaining any customers, is what is the promise that you are promising? What is the payoff that you are saying that your customers are gonna get by using your product or using your service, and, uh, what are they actually getting?
When there's a [00:06:00] misalignment here, best-case scenario, your sales are still good, but your return sales are zero. Worst-case scenario, word of mouth gets out there, and your sales numbers start tanking for even the first purchase of each client. You may start making less sales even if your marketing and sales messaging is right because people are telling other people that, "Hey, they say that you're gonna get this payoff, this promise, but you don't actually.
Stay away from that company." So that's the first thing we wanna look at. The second thing is remember, your buyer may be different, and your customer may have different expectations not being met. Now, if you've been following me for a while, you've been watching my YouTube videos, been tuning into my podcast, you may have learned about this before, about how I believe leveraging B2B, B2B and B2C is extremely powerful for your company.
What we really wanna do is we wanna [00:07:00] automate our B2C marketing and sales, and then B2B, we're gonna automate it as much as we can. But when you and I are actually putting in our time to sell, this is where we wanna spend our time. 'Cause we can sell 100X, 1000X what we can sell in one transaction B2C, one-to-one, versus B2B, one-to-many.
The thing here, though, is when your buyer is different than your customer, they definitely have expectations that differ as well. Now, some buyers may also be the customer. When we're looking at B2B, we're talking about a buyer making the purchase decision for 100 people, 1,000 people, 10,000 people. Now, you need to not only get your messaging right for the buyer, you need to get your messaging right for the customer, and you need to leverage something I'm gonna share with you later in this episode to really make sure that your customer actually using your product is getting what they want out of it, and the [00:08:00] buyer also is.
Because what happens is your customer's gonna talk to your buyer. And your buyer is gonna talk to your customer. And when both of these parties, and this could be a lot of parties right here with customer, have nothing but positive things to say about you, your business, your service, your product, then your buyer's gonna come back to you and buy another thousand licenses.
They may even buy more of your product the next time. That's why this is so important. That initial sale's important, but really the subsequent sales become even more important. And we get those subsequent sales by doing what I'm gonna share with you in a little bit. Number three, your customer education may be falling short.
This is really interesting. I've been in e-learning for more than a decade, and what I've found out is that the most powerful way to embrace education and learning is to use it as an adoption and retention tool. And you can do this with your employees, but you can also do [00:09:00] this with your customers. The better that you are able to educate your customers, your buyers and your customers, on how to get the most value out of your product, how to actually get the payoff, the promise that we have told them that they're going to get...
A lot of times this doesn't happen because there's an education gap. There's a knowledge gap. And you need to close this gap in marketing, in sales, but also after the sale is completed. One thing I do is I consult on multiple e-learning technologies, and I have programs built to teach my clients, my customers, how to use each of these technologies.
Because I know that even though the companies I partner with have the best technology offerings, that that doesn't mean that my customer's gonna know how to get the most out of it. So in order to cut through all that, I make sure that my customers have exactly what they need to get the [00:10:00] most out of it.
Same thing with my consulting services, with my enterprise learning partnership program. Everything that I sell has an education component that simplifies it for my buyer, for my customer. So your customer education may be falling short. So here's the solution. To start, we wanna make sure that we are integrating something that I call ROI pie into our businesses.
Now, if you wanna take a deep dive with my ROI Pie framework and get my eyes and my help on your business, then I highly recommend that you join my next Plug the Profit Leak challenge, linked in the show notes and in the description, so we can look at your business and plug any profit leaks that you may have together.
One of the concepts that I share in the challenge is ROI Pie, and what this is, is we need to align the ROI that you and your business are looking to get out of every [00:11:00] product or service that you're selling. We need to align that with the ROI that your customers are looking to get and your buyers. So we got you, your customers, your buyers.
When we align the ROI of each of these parties, including you, we get the slice of the pie that fulfills the promises for all, and we create a win, win, win. So when you're looking at your business, we need to make sure that we know what buyers actually wanna get, what customers actually wanna get, and not just with our marketing, with our sales.
Our products and services need to be about this slice of the pie. We need to actually provide the payoff, the value that we're saying that our buyers and customers are gonna get. Number two, we need to work on implementing the 80/20 rule- In our business. So once we find this pie, this piece of pie right here, I know if you're listening to this as a [00:12:00] podcast, you can't see the piece of pie, but really what we've done is we've had three circles that overlap one another.
Your circle, your customer circle, your buyer's circle. Where that overlaps is the pie that you need to focus on. And what we need to do is implement the Pareto principle next, the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule says that 80% of results are created by 20% of efforts in our business, and 20% of results are created by 80% of efforts in our business.
So once we identify the right pie, the right piece of pie to focus on, then we need to focus on it. We can take other resources in our business and allocate it to focusing on this pie, creating that experience for our buyers, for our customers that aligns with what we're telling them they're gonna get.
Now, it can be overwhelming if you sell a bunch of products and services, and you have this challenge with all of them, or with many of them. Well, this really simplifies it for you and I. Instead of looking at it as, "Oh my gosh, I need [00:13:00] to go through and make sure that I'm delivering on the promise for every single service that I offer," let's look at what is the biggest profit driver for your business.
Let's align that piece of pie first, and then let's focus on that first, 'cause you're probably getting most of your revenue from one or two of your products or services anyway. So let's focus there. Number three, let's educate our customers and buyers on how to win. It is our job to make sure that our customers know how to win with what they've purchased.
This is what I like to call leveraging education as your competitive advantage. By educating your buyers before and after the sale, you create a win-win-win. You are going to retain more customers, which when you have more customers that buy from you over and over, this decreases your marketing and sales costs of acquiring new customers.
And when you have customers bragging to others [00:14:00] about your business, you're gonna get customers that you're not even gonna have to pay to market and sell to. Your revenue's gonna go up, your expenses are gonna go down, and ultimately, your profit is gonna go up. Revenue minus expenses equals profit. If you want help with any of this, I highly recommend that you join my next Plug the Profit Leak Challenge.
Go to plugtheprofitleachallenge.com and grab your ticket to the next challenge. I'll see you in the next episode.
Thanks for tuning in to Learning Transformed. Now, if you're designing a transformational learning experience and wanna skip the overwhelm of trial and error, check out our e-learning platform finder. Just answer a few simple questions, and we'll match you with the right platform, plus an extended free trial.
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AI is rising and so are we
