Monthly Archives: October 2019

October 30, 2019 · 12:42 pm

Something For Nothing

I went to one of the warehouse club stores yesterday to make some bulk purchases. If you’ve ever been in one of them – Costco, BJ’s, Sam’s Club, etc. – you know that one feature of walking around the place is that there are usually free samples. You can taste the latest and greatest in meats, cheeses, and frozen things to cook while you’re too busy to make something yourself. That got me thinking about the fact that you really don’t see a lot of sampling elsewhere.

I’m a fan of the free trial. It gets customers walking through your door and using your product. What I don’t particularly like are those “free” trials that require you to fork over your credit card. Free means without strings, right? In particular, if you’re a business that is built around what I think is the gold standard – recurring revenues – you ought to be spending a good chunk of your marketing dollars on free trials.

It’s relatively simple math, right? What’s the lifetime value of a customer? What does it cost you to offer up a free trial – a visit, a free month, whatever? What is the conversion rate of those freebies – how many of the trials become regular customers? Recurring revenues are predictable and generally pretty stable. I bet you’ve signed up for subscriptions of some sort and forgotten you’ve done so or don’t use them as often as you thought you would. For a business, that’s a customer without costs, and that’s a nice margin!

When I talk to people who are looking at franchise opportunities and who don’t have a particular brand or industry in mind, I usually talk to them about the businesses with recurring revenue models. Things like cleaning services. Not a sexy business, but very profitable and that, in part, is because of the recurring revenues. Same thing with spa businesses or some hair salons that feature memberships. Are those businesses that can offer a free trial? Maybe if you’re an out-of-the-box thinker. Giving a converted customer the ability to give away a free trial to a friend is another great way to expand your base at very little cost.

Here is the thing about free trials leading to recurring revenues. As with any business, you have to maintain a high level of customer service. After all, when someone’s credit card is getting dinged each month and your business appears on their statement, it’s an opportunity for them to reconsider.  If they walk away, no amount of free sampling will get them back most of the time. Everyone loves something for nothing. The opposite – nothing for something – is very much NOT true!

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October 25, 2019 · 3:51 pm

Harder Than It Is

Happy Foodie Friday! I was menu-planning the other day (an absolute must before the weekly trip to the grocery store) and I came across a dish that I know to be pretty easy to make yet which appears way more difficult. I’ve served it before and people are always all “oh, that must have taken hours” about it when it’s really about a 15-minute prep. As an aside, there are many other dishes I know – really good Bolognese sauce, for example – that take way more time than you’d think even using a pressure cooker to speed things up.

Seeing that dish got me to thinking, in a roundabout way, that we humans have a tendency to think things are way more difficult than they are in many cases. In fact, I think some of us go to great lengths to make it that way. I’m not talking about a particular type of person I’d run across in business every so often. You know the one – they create problems so that they can solve them and be the hero. No, what I’m talking about is that we love to make things harder than they actually are.

Think about it. What things did you do today that purposefully made your life more difficult ? It was probably so small a thing, or something so ingrained in you, that you didn’t even notice that you did it. Maybe you didn’t set your alarm to allow for enough time to be someplace. Maybe you sat on a task until right before a deadline and you couldn’t get it done on time because something unforeseen happened.  Or maybe you just enjoy the drama. It’s sort of the same thrill as riding a roller-coaster, right? You put yourself in danger and when you survive, you feel a thrill.

Here’s my take. Life can be like some seemingly-fancy dishes – much easier to pull together than meets the eye IF – and it’s a big if – you have the skills required, leave adequate time to complete the task, and don’t make it harder than it has to be. All of us make our lives both in and out of business harder than they have to be at times and unless and until we recognize the times that we’re doing it, nothing much will change.

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October 23, 2019 · 11:18 am

Learning From Leads

Like many businesses, I purchase leads to drive revenue. Leads are everything in the business I’m in now and without them, you starve. When I went to our consultants’ convention last July, nearly every conversation I had with one of my peers eventually turned to the subject of where we were sourcing leads and how productive those sources were. As an aside I’m having Glengarry Glen Ross flashbacks as I’m writing this:

These are the new leads. These are the Glengarry leads. To you, these are gold; you do not get these. Because to give them to you would be throwing them away.

In any event, following the convention, I tried out a couple of new lead sources and one of them has proven to be quite good. The reason I’m writing about them today, however, isn’t so much the quality of their leads as it is the quality of their customer experience. They do some things that are instructive for any business that has customers (and find me one that doesn’t!). If you don’t think it’s important, remember that Oracle found that 86 percent of consumers will pay more for a better customer experience.

First, although they sell packages of a fixed number of leads, they let me put together my own package as a test case. They were flexible and focused on my needs rather than on “this is how we do things.”

Second, they are generous with “freebies.” Sometimes the leads are actually not real people – the phone number is bad and the email bounces. Sometimes someone is playing a prank on someone else by sending their information in without their knowledge. Not only have I never had an issue getting the company to refund a lead because of that but they will sometimes throw me an extra couple of leads because I had a less than optimal experience. Let’s face it – who doesn’t love something for nothing?

Third, they follow-up. I get asked regularly if I’m happy with what I’m getting and if they can improve my experience in any way. That’s big because I know they’re listening and that they care. Of course, it’s imperative that if the customer does come up with a suggestion that you communicate back to that customer how you’ve handled it (and just tossing it in a drawer isn’t acceptible!).

That leads to another thought. We should always go overboard when correcting mistakes. Yes, they happen, but if you’re transparent about it and more than makeup for the error, people can be quite forgiving and what was a negative can become a positive.

It’s really about being customer-centric and showing those customers some love, isn’t it?

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