Learn about how to use conversational commerce to scale your online education business with Paul Ace in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Paul is coming to us from the UK, and he works with conversational commerce to scale and really eradicate roadblocks for course and membership site growth.
There’s a famous quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. that says, “You don’t need to see the whole staircase. You just need to take the first step.” We can look at the customer journey in the same way. So instead of looking at it from a perspective of trying to get prospects from the start point to an end point, you can focus on how you can get them to the next stage of the customer journey. What happens when you start breaking that down is that you can see more clearly where people are dropping off in the process and understanding how you can enhance the customer experience.
Paul has a seven figure audit tool. You can use that resource to go through your business checklist and what your score is to see what you may be missing from getting to the next level. If you’re at six figures wanting to get to seven figures, or even seven figures and you want to get to eight, this audit will be for you.
You can also connect with Paul’s team over SMS or over email about your results. And you can book a call off the back of that if you’d like to connect further. If you feel like you’re burning a lot of money in your business, head to amplifyccom.com. Click the video at the top to watch that, and then click Book a call to schedule. You can book a call personally with Paul, and if it’s a good fit, you can do something together and make some magic happen. To check out Paul’s podcast, be sure to head to www.amplifyto7figures.com or search on iTunes Amplify to 7 Figures. And you will be able to see Chris Badgett featured on there, too.
And at LifterLMS.com you can learn more about new developments and how you can use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us!
Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett, and I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Paul Ace. He’s coming to us from across the pond over in the UK, and we’re going to get into an awesome topic today, which is how to use conversational commerce to scale and really eradicate roadblocks. And before we get into the main event here, Paul, welcome to the show.
Paul Ace: Super, super cool to be on the show, Chris. It was great to have you on our show the other week. So I thought I’d return the favor and give some value back to your audience as well.
Chris Badgett: Absolutely. And Paul is over at amplifyccom.com. And what’s the name of your podcast show? I just want to make sure we get that right.
Paul Ace: Yes. Amplify to 7 Figures. You can check out amplifyto7figures.com and you’ll hear Chris’s episode dropping in about three months time. I think something like that, depending on your listeners.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And your interview was really good. It was a no brainer for me to get you on here. Let’s start at the core for everybody because when I learned this and then I realized I had a lot to learn, I still do. So I’m sure I’m going to learn something for you about the customer journey and how important that is. For the new person out there, who’s getting into online courses or coaching or training based membership sites or the agency owner or somebody who’s already moving and thinks they have a good business, but they’re kind of stuck at a ceiling and they want to scale, if we really zero in on the customer journey, what is that?
Paul Ace: Yeah. So there’s a famous quote. I think it was by Martin Luther King that says you don’t need to see the whole staircase. You just need to take the first step. So we look at the customer journey in the same way. So instead of looking at it from a, “Okay, cool. I’ve got to get them from this start point to this end point,” you just go, “How do I get them to the next stage of the customer journey?” Because what happens is when you start breaking that down, then you can see where people are dropping off in the process and understanding how you can enhance the customer experience.
So what is the customer journey? Well, it’s every step that someone takes. So imagine like a staircase. Imagine the top of the staircase is where the end goal that you want people to do. So that might be a sale. It might be an up-sell product. It could be that your high ticket backend product. So imagine that at the top of the staircase, and then you’ll have that customer starting at the bottom. They’ve never heard of you. They never know anything about you. What are the steps that they need to get through to get to the top of the staircase with you?
Then how can you hold their hand through that process so they don’t go and fall down the steps or fall off the steps. And they feel like that experience of walking up the steps is like have you ever seen those piano steps that you can get?
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Paul Ace: So it’s a magical experience, right? So the journey of climb, not the steps is a magical experience. That’s what we’re looking for throughout the whole customer journey to improve conversion rates and referral business, because people love it.
Chris Badgett: Do we need to, like, it’s super clear on our customer avatar? If we’re going to really map a customer journey, I find, especially newer people they’re really focused on, “Okay. It’s about me, my course, or my membership, my contents all around sales.” But it’s not the full journey. So how do we get started?
Paul Ace: Yeah. Here’s the best way to know your avatar, ask him. There’s this disconnect between online and offline. So you see a lot of brick and mortar businesses. What would happen if someone walks into your store or you go, “Hey, how can I help?” What happens when someone walks into our online store or course, or whatever it is, they go, “Can I automate that?” He’s like, “I don’t want to speak to anyone. I just want this laptop lifestyle where I can sit on a beach and money just magically rolls in.”
So what we look at is, well, how do we create that feedback loop right from the customer? So it’s like, “Oh, why are people dropping off at that stage?” Well, ask him. Well, I haven’t got time to go and ask every single customer why they didn’t buy. Yeah, you have. You can automate that part and then take the responses in a manual way. So we look at this 80% human like experience where let’s use the words that we would use if you’re having a normal conversation.
So just think back to anytime that you’ve sent an email out in an autoresponder, did you write that in exactly the same way as you wrote it, if you were just reaching out to someone normally, right? So if I were just sending you a message to say, “Hey, Chris. Listen, I’d love to have you on a podcast. I saw you did this and this and this. We’re great to have you on.”
It’s very different from the way a lot of people go, “I need to write in this very particular way. When I write on emails, I need to sell the benefits and structure everything in this way.” So we break that process down and go, how do we create the feedback loop from our customer? Where, for example, the first message, let’s say, someone comes to your site, they opt-in to watch a webinar, and then they don’t go and buy.
So instead of just going, “Hey, you missed the webinar or go back and watch the webinar. Hey, we just wanted to see, what did you think of the webinar?” If they watched a little bit of it, “What did you think of what you watched? I’d love to hear your thoughts.” Or, “Hey, I noticed that you missed a webinar. Did something break or something that work? Just let me know. I’ll get it fixed.”
Super, super simple. And then what you can do from the customer support team, whether that be you, if you’re small or whether you’ve got a customer support team on hand is then say, “Hey, take that information, put that in a Google sheet, and then we can analyze that. And then we can see what is the exact, not just what are the problems or the challenges that people are facing, but what is the exact language that those people are using and who are they? Right?
So then you can take more detail from that. So if the customer service person wants to say, “Oh, curious, what business are you in?” And then you can go, “Okay, fill that in.” Then suddenly, instead of going, “Who’s my avatar?” You go, “Well, who am I attracting right now? And then how can I position my messaging based on what those people are telling me to improve the conversion rates and improve that buyer experience?”
Then you take that information and then automate some of that. So if someone’s saying over and over again, that the number one reason is we’ve got a client at the moment in the mom niche. We take a swig out of this one. So let’s say you work in that space. What mom’s got a lack of a lot of the time? They’re coming back to you saying, “I’ve got lack of time.”
However, instead of they might not be saying to you, “I’ve got a lack of time.” They might be saying I’m really busy all the time. If we went on the sales page and put in the headline, even if you’ve got a lack of time, moms go, “I haven’t got a lack of time. I’m just really busy.” Right? So then we look at the emails that we’re sending out afterwards, and then we start automating objection handling videos and objection handling emails based on the exact phrase and the exact wording that they’re using, rather than what we think they’re saying.
Chris Badgett: I love that.
Paul Ace: That’s the customer journey process.
Chris Badgett: I love that. When people ask me how to increase conversions, I like to say optimize for conversations, not conversion. And conversions will follow. But it really ties into what you’re talking about there. Is this predominantly coming through email replies, forms, chat, talking to people, if you go to a conference or just all of that? Where do you get it all?
Paul Ace: Yeah. You hit the nail on the head.
Chris Badgett: Social media too. I’ll just throw that out there too.
Paul Ace: Yeah. So like any place where you can talk to your customers, go and talk to your customers. Yet if you’re at scale, you might not be able to get on the phone with every single customer for 15 minutes. However, I would recommend at the very least having exit surveys that go at the end of your show respondents to find out why people didn’t buy it. And then send one as well to the people who did buy. Because a lot of the time we focus, “Why didn’t people buy?” But we all should be focusing on why people did buy. So then to answer that question, looking at email, SMS, messenger, personal video messaging, personal images, voicemail drops. We’re just putting in a process at the moment where, when someone buys a $37 product, that then will trigger an automation that manually calls that person’s phone, like the onboarding specialist phone and it says, “You’ve got a new person who’s just bought the call desk. Press one to accept.”
So instead of that delay of like, “Oh crap, I need to ring that person. They’ve just bought.” It goes straight to the phone. So then they just go, one accept. Hi, no issue. Just purchased. And then they ask him a few onboarding questions and then make sure that they get their login access, make sure they get in everything. And then we can guide them to either the next product or introducing them. We’ve got a concierge process that we’re building at the moment for a client as well. Then we guide that concierge process where it guides them through the whole steps of the customer journey, which is again, 82% human-like, 20% human.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.
Paul Ace: I know you should write that one down as well.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. We’re going to get into conversational commerce and kind of your three pillars in a second. But before we do that, I got to ask for the audience, and this is going to be like a broad generalization, but in your experience, what is the… We were talking about… Your sweet spot, I think is really helping people at seven figures scale up to eight figures. So pretty much what that means is if you’re making a million dollars with your course or your coaching program or your info products or whatever they are, getting to eight figures, like $10 million is hard.
You need help from professionals like Paul Ace here to unlock your next level of growth. There’s kind of a saying is what got you here, won’t get you there. And in the spirit of that, if you could just paint some broad brush strokes on the difference between somebody who’s making zero, somebody who has achieved a milestone of six figures, which is awesome. And let’s just call that like 70K or 120K or something. And then somebody who actually gets up to a million which is the seven figure, and then that really scaled out a figure. What’s the difference there? What have you seen in these different avatars here?
Paul Ace: So if you’re just getting started, let’s start at the start at the first stage of ladder, and then we’ll work our way up on that. If you’re just getting started, the first thing we want to do you just start having conversations with people. Our role is not to figure… I want to talk about figuring out the message and I don’t want this to get confused of, “Oh, but I thought that’s what you do.” Yeah, but we don’t want to go, “Okay. Who’s your avatar? Let’s figure out if the product has got a market fit.”
Your first role in that is finding a product that people want. We used to have a bridesmaid’s dress business. And we started that from zero because I’ve built this dream in secrets box, which was essentially an info product and we sold it for 1295. I think we get free shipping with it as well. So it was basically, we had about seven pounds to acquire a customer. And we were breaking even on that because no one else in the space was doing it. So while I was doing them, reinvest in every sale and bringing them into a Facebook community. Then we have three and a half thousand brides in this Facebook community. And then we did a poll. We just went, “What do you want?” Ask them what they want, give it to them. So they said, “We want bridesmaid’s dresses at a reasonable price.”
Then we built a whole business around that because we’d built the community first and then asked them what they want and give it to them. So something that’s key when you’re first getting started is just having those conversations with people and build relationships. For example, with those, we’re not a mass market product at all. We are very, very particular about who we can fit. So we’re more of a, “Hey, all I want to do at the start is start a conversation with people.”
So I’ve not got massive lead flow because I don’t need it. I just need the right people coming through. So when they come through, I don’t go, “How can I sell them?” I look, “How can I get a response? How can I get someone to raise their hand and respond to that first message?” They don’t respond to the first message. Wait three hours, try different angle. Can I get them to respond to this message? All of these are not sales messages, they’re just conversational messages. Right? So it might be like, “If you went through the audit, what did you think about your score you got.” Right? Or “Hey, I’ve got the resources.”
Chris Badgett: Good questions.
Paul Ace: Yeah. Just questions, questions, questions, questions. Because as soon as you get the first response, then everything else starts to come into play. So if you’re just getting started and you’re between that zero to 20K a year, then you want to be looking at just having the first automations. I’ve been a basic autoresponder of like, what went wrong? Or asking them a question, what business are you in? Or whatever that is. So in your email responders, rather than trying to do these big drip sequences and automations, just ask questions. Send three, four line emails that ask questions to your audience. Get them to engage with you because, here’s the thing that’s going to put your email open rate right up and also deliverability writeup, because then it’s going to be a lot like, “Oh, wow. Look at all these people responding, and responding, and responding.”
So do the legwork yourself when you haven’t got the cash. So you’ve either got cash or you’ve got time. One or the other. So when you started, focus on the time piece and just put as much effort in as you can, then when you get to the six-figure level, then you want to be looking at, “Okay, how can I automate a little bit more of that?” And maybe bring on one customer support person to start handling some of that.
One of the big things there is starting to SOP out as much as possible, because the more that you start to SOP, so a standard operating procedures, the more… so we have a system that every… and we still want to get better and better at this, but everything in the business needs to be a system. I very rarely record an SOP myself, the team do it. So if you do something that you’ve never done before, you record a Loom video. That Loom video gets sent to our customer support person. She then turns that into an SOP, then sends it back to the person who recorded it. So then they can check it to make sure that it’s got everything in there.
Then what happens is it enables you to scale faster because not everything is relying on you as a hobby. You will get stuck at early six figures if everything goes through you all the time. And then when you want to bring on another team member in the same kind of role, then you can do that because you’ve got the SOP. So you just go, “How do I do that? Is it in an SOP?” So have you read the SOP? If not, let’s go and create one. So that’s the six figure level where the big difference is in the conversational side of it.
When you get to seven figures, then you move the conversation down the flow a little bit. So that the amount of personalization moves down the journey. So what I mean by that is the start of it, right? You might bring on a customer support team and expand that out and have that what went wrong email and things like that on the front still. But the owner is not going to be dealing with those what went wrong messages because they haven’t got the time or the inclination to do that because they want to focus on strategic things.
So then, well, where does the owner get involved in it or the CEO? They get involved further down the pipeline. So when you look at a customer journey, you want to be looking at, let’s say someone’s paid a $500 deposit for your high ticket program, but hasn’t paid the 10,000. So they’re stuck at that pipeline stage at the moment. So remember, we’re talking about the steps with Martin Luther King at the start, right? So they’re literally two steps off the finish, but then they’ve just gone, “Oh my foot is stuck on some gum. I can’t get it off.”
We’re like, “Okay, cool. How do we do that? Are we going to just encourage them? Or are we going to use a blowtorch because they’re going to soon get things moving. Then we we look at the personalization there of, well, what if we recorded a personal video message of that stage? So then we trigger anyone who gets to that stage and doesn’t move to the next stage. After 24 hours, then the owner can go and record a personal video message to that person. So like, “Hey, Chris. No issues submitted to get your deposit. Really excited to have you as part of the customer, have you part of our community.
I know you haven’t submitted the full deposit at the moment. I know you might be getting the funds together and putting all that together. But listen, if you want any help at all with that process, just let us know. We are here to help and to support you on your journey. Congratulations, all the action that you’ve taken so far are looking forward to having you a part of this journey. Now that little bit of personalization, then people feel understood. They fit in the field. They’ve got the know, like, and trust, and then it speeds up the sales cycle.
So that’s what we do is seven figures. We go, how do we get into the next stage of the journey? And where can we put the owner in that so it doesn’t put too much pressure on them? Then after that, when you get to eight figures, then it’s all about the numbers, right? So we have this tri-factor of psychology, technology and datarology. So the psychology is a lot of the stuff we just spoke about. If understanding the customer’s language patterns, what are they using? How are they using it? The technology is then how do we leverage that to automate 80% of that? And then the datarology is while they dictate the decisions.
So when we look at the KPIs on a weekly basis, so what’s the conversion rate on the front end? What’s the conversion rate for a high ticket sale? How many people are dropping off in the middle of that? So look at each conversion point. Where do we need to put that focus over the next seven days? And then we also understand then from a lifetime customer value, and Chris, we were talking about this before. So we just had a client go from $180 that someone spends with people in the lifetime of them being a customer to $450 in the course of, since March.
So we’re now July. I know that doesn’t make very good evergreen content by saying the date, but it’s like about four months. So improving that month to month to month to month, because we know if you can spend more money to acquire a customer, you win the game, right? So if a customer’s worth $2,000 to you instead of $500, then you can spend four times as much to acquire a customer and still break even. So that’s what we look at then, that seven figure to eight figures. A big difference is then how do we apply this conversational techniques and understand where we need to apply them? So it’s kind of like, “where’s the pain? Where’s the pain on the body?” And then go, “Okay, I’ve got the perfect thing just for that to solve that pain.”
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. How do you define high ticket? What’s that amount of money or what’s the range for a program to be high ticket?
Paul Ace: Yeah. High ticket has got a bit of a weird connotation that a lot of people talk about different levels of high ticket. Personally, we’re looking at something that 5K onwards really is why we want to be looking. A lot of people call high ticket like $25,000. Plus we see it as… another way of phrasing it is frontend offers and backend offers. So frontend offers might be $37, $7, $97, maybe even up to $497. But then above that, then you’re looking at backend office.
So the journey is different than it is on the frontend office. Someone’s not just going to come to the sales page and go, “Yeah, I’m going to drop five grand. I’ve never seen you before.” They need some nurture there. So a backend offer is something that needed nurture before it got there to get to that sale. Or if you are selling 5K straight off the bat with that, and you nurture, then what you find is your refund rate is usually higher because you’re selling on high.
Chris Badgett: For a backend offer, high ticket offer, what is the ideal… I know there’s different ways to do it, but what are the best ways that are more effective to nurture and convert at the high ticket price point? There’s calls, webinars or sales pages. There’s strategy sessions. I don’t know. What works for high ticket these days?
Paul Ace: Sure. So we did quite a lot of stuff with challenges at the moment.
Chris Badgett: Challenge funnels?
Paul Ace: Yes, challenge funnel. So we’ve got one client we’re just onboarding at the moment. They do a free challenge on the front. We’ve got another client that just a $37 challenge. We took that average order value from that $42 to $81 within like, I think it was about six, seven weeks. So we were like, great. We’ve now got double the amount to acquire a customer. So then we look at the backend part of that and go, “Well, what’s the best way to bring them through that customer journey?”
They didn’t have a sales team when we came in and we’re only just building out for them now and just helping them and guiding them through that process. So we were like, “Well, what if we close these sales over SMS?” $5,000 sale over SMS. When we first tried this for a live launch that they had, we were like, “Okay. Let’s take the people that haven’t applied, haven’t submitted a deposit, haven’t done anything.”
So they haven’t responded to any of that process. What if we sent them a message on SMS to all those people? So I think there was just over a thousand people on that list, started a conversation with those people and then close them over SMS. It was like, “Cool. Let’s give it a go.” Made $75,000 over the course of about three or four days with just having no sales calls that was.
Chris Badgett: And that was people who were in the challenge or had done the challenge?
Paul Ace: Yeah. So they’ve been in the challenge, but they hadn’t applied for the high ticket. So we have an application and then we have a deposit and then we have to submit the full amount. They hadn’t applied. They haven’t raised their hand and said, “I’m interested.” Then we took those people, had the conversation with them over SMS and made an extra $75,000. [crosstalk] Yeah. Those kinds of things are really, really effective. Bear in mind, that was only a list of a thousand people on SMS. It wasn’t crazy. What were you going to say?
Chris Badgett: If somebody is not familiar with a challenge funnel or what we’re talking about here, how would you describe a challenge if somebody wants to put that in front of their main backend offer sale?
Paul Ace: Yeah. So a challenge is someone would go through… it could be a five-day challenge, seven-day, 30-day challenge, occasional personal seem to have a 90-day, but that’s kind of crazy. And then what happens is each day you watch a Facebook live or you watch something in a member’s area and then you get homework or actions to complete. And then each state is bringing you further towards the goal that you want.
The psychology and the strategy behind the challenge is to break through people’s limiting beliefs in a drip-fed format, where over the course of the first two or three days, it’s all about the mindset side of things because you sell people what they want and give them what they need. So you sell them the fact of, “Hey, this is the outcome that you want.” First, two days of the challenge, you sell them about all the mindset side of things and then we go into, “Okay. Here’s how to take the next stage of the journey.”
So then when you get to the last day of the challenge, you can pitch your high ticket offer and they’re already pre-sold. So you’ve already took them down the customer journey. Imagine the Jeff Walker product launch formula, but done just in a different format, or imagine it like a webinar that’s broken up over the course of five days or seven days.
Chris Badgett: That’s cool. If we’re looking at customer journey, what might somebody put even before, earlier than a challenge?
Paul Ace: Yeah. Our experiment at the moment, for example, I can do a day one preview. So it’s a sales video, but at the same time, it gives them like such a strong tangible that then they look at it and go, “Okay, while that process works, I understand the concept.” Then they start to sell on the idea. Another way you could do it is lead magnets. Quite often, the challenge does become the frontend, but then just looking at different ways, we can do that. So at the moment, I think we’ve got lead magnets, we’ve got day one previews, we’ve got go and buy get a free hat and then we’ll give you the offer for the challenge. So we’re just trying loads of different things to see which converts the best. And then we track all that data to go, “Okay, which one is creating the best lifetime customer value and the best ROAS, ROI.”
Chris Badgett: So ROAS, return on ad spend, there can be a lot of pain around that. People run ads that don’t produce, or they can’t figure out how to make it positive. What are some tips you have around… let’s just say Facebook ads is a specific example around making a campaign or a strategy that’s likely to have a decent return on ad spend or ROAS?
Paul Ace: Yeah. So number one thing is track because if you’re just using Facebook’s tracking on its own, then-
Chris Badgett: Like the pixel?
Paul Ace: Yeah. If you’re just using that and you’re not looking at the lifetime customer value, then you might have the best funnel ever, but you’ve switched the ads off before you’ve even got it to profitability. Let’s say for example, someone on average, it takes someone five days to buy your frontend product. Now, you look at your ads after 25 days and you go, “Okay. I’ve spent $200 to acquire a $30 buyer.”
You’d look at that at the front and you go, “Well, that’s broken. I’m going to need to switch that off. I need to switch that ad off.” But then let’s say after 30 days, that lifetime value with that customer, because you know after 30 days they’re going to buy your high ticket. Then that customer then becomes worth $400.
Now, you’ve got a 2X ROI on your ad. But most people when you’re first starting out, too scared, or haven’t got the cashflow to go and do that and actually understand what the 30, 60, 90-day process is. So if you’re just getting started, I don’t recommend going 90 days and go fingers crossed. Let’s hope it works. Because you haven’t got the cashflow for that. However, do that in an organic way to start off with look at the organic acquisition channels that you can bring in. Is there anyone you can partner with? Is there any affiliates that… Giving them the lion’s share of the call, just to understand your numbers and your funnel.
So you could say to an affiliate, “I will give you 95% of the frontend sale, and I’ll give you 20% of the backend.” Because it doesn’t matter if you make any money, you’ve acquired a customer for free. Because if you know, then over 30, 60, 90 days, that you’re going to make another $400 from that person, you pay 100% of the frontend all day long, right? And the only reason you don’t say 100% is number one, refunds, and number two, strike fees and things like that at any general cost of goods.
You give people 90% on the front, you know within 30 days that that person’s worth 10 times more than what you’ve just paid out, then you’re onto a winner. So do that first, then grow on cold traffic once you know that funnel works rather than going planting loads of money into cold traffic and then go on, “Oh, crap. They don’t turn into backend buyers.”
Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Good advice there. I noticed when you start working with funnel and getting professional with your marketing and strategy and stuff, I see people sometimes get a little disorganized. Do you have any tips on how to map a customer journey and how to visualize a funnel? Are we using spreadsheets? Are we using whiteboards? Are we using some funnel software? How do we keep all this organized without just ending up in a spaghetti mess?
Paul Ace: Yeah. So the first thing we do when we go into any business is map out the customer journey.
Chris Badgett: So what do you do that in? What kind of tools?
Paul Ace: We use Funnelytics. We use Funnelytics a lot of the time. When I say map out the customer journey, most people would just go and map the funnel steps. Right? So they just go, “Okay. They go there, and there, and there and then that’s the end.” We go, what is every single email, every single SMS, every single communication point that is going on in that customer journey? What are you already doing? Then we go, “Well, what’s working?” Okay. That’s working great. We’ll keep that one. Or that one needs a Monday. The positioning was that one isn’t positioned in the sale. And then we find majority of the time there’s only tax blasts going on if they aren’t doing any SMS.
There’s no conversation on SMS going on. So it might be like, “Hey, join today.” And that’s about it, right? Rather than how do we position that in a more conversational way that we can guide people to the sale set and we go, “Okay. Well, where could we put SMS? Where could we put voicemails? Where could we put personal video messaging?” And then how can we then improve that customer experience down the whole journey? And then for example, if you’re looking for analytics, if you’ve got… let’s say you’ve got a 15-minute sales video and a page, then you look at the analytics on that. And the average time on that page is five minutes.
You’ve got a problem because no one is getting to the pitch. And it’s the same when you actually look at the video analytics. If the average watch time is four minutes and no one actually knows what the offer is until you get 15 minutes, then you’ve got a problem.
So you either go, how do we make the frontend part be more engaging to get them to the 15 minutes? Or how do we make the video short, so they see everything? You’ve always got one or two options there. So yeah, that’s the mapping the customer journey is understanding every single communication piece that is happening. And then get that into the project management when we use Monday, and then we’ll have a set process of everything that they go through. And then from a client perspective, in terms of the onboarding, we send them over a slide deck when they get onboarded. So that slide deck goes, this is your first four weeks. This is what’s going to be happening. This is how it’s going to be happening. And then they know exactly what the customer journey is for them as they’re going through our process.
And that’s really, really important because then you don’t end up with the… The last thing you want is people go in what’s happening. I don’t know what you guys are doing right now. Rather than every single call that you’re on, you’ve got this regular cadence. So first thing we’re going to do, we’re going to set schedule that meeting to be in the same time every week, all the time. So you can be updated on the progress.
Hey, cut short. And we only need this 10-minute call. Great. That’s fine. We can enjoy the rest of the day, go and have a party. But the first thing we want to do is make sure we got a regular cadence because an aspect of someone else who’s a Facebook ads agency, they said their retention went from 90% down to 50% when they stopped doing weekly calls. Which is crazy. Hopefully that answers for you in a long way.
Chris Badgett: No, that’s good. That’s what I was looking for, specifics. So what I’m hearing is, if you don’t map it, you can’t manage it. So Funnelytics helps that. Then once you have the map, you need to be able to diagnose every single step to see if it’s working. And that could be watch time. It could be open rates. It could be sales happening. It’s not just sales. What else do you track that would indicate success?
Paul Ace: [crosstalk] customer journey.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Paul Ace: Yeah. So every conversion point. So opt-in rates. Let’s say it’s a webinar. So we could have opt-in rate, short rate, amount of people that booked a call. How many people showed up for the call? How many people bought off the back of the call? How many people bought the second product? Every single stage of the customer journey, then we put that into weekly KPR report as well as it’s red and green.
So if it’s trending up, great. We’re probably not going to focus on that quite as much because we know we’re doing something in the right direction, or we might look at it and go, “Great. What we did last week worked. If it’s in red and it’s trending in the wrong direction, that’s where we need to focus.” And then that’s the focus for the next seven days.
Chris Badgett: If you could just propose like a simple customer journey for somebody, who let’s say they have a course and then a challenge and then maybe a membership on the backend. What could be a possible funnel flow for that?
Paul Ace: Yeah. So opt-in to the funnel in terms of opt-in to get access to the challenge. Let’s say it’s a free challenge. So opt-in to get access to the challenge. Then you’re going to have upsells in there to recoup some of that ad spend.
Chris Badgett: To the course?
Paul Ace: To be like a VIP thing.
Chris Badgett: Okay. Oh, like you’re saying you can do a free challenge and you can do a more premium version of the challenge that costs money? That’s cool.
Paul Ace: Exactly. So those kinds of things. Just laying all those things out where if you’re going to do a pay challenge, you want an order bump on that. Right? So there’s some way of getting them to buy more because our order form take rate, we tested some price points. We found $27. You hit about 50% take rate based on-
Chris Badgett: On a challenge? On a paid challenge?
Paul Ace: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: Okay.
Paul Ace: 50% take rate on the order bump. If you put it on to $47, it goes down to about 29%. Now, you’d look at that and you go, “Oh, the conversion rates have dropped.” Yeah, but you’ve made more money.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Paul Ace: Right? Don’t look at the conversion rate on its own. Look at the conversion rate alongside the price point. Because if you triple the price of something, but only half conversions, you’d still make more money. And that’s why a lot of people are afraid to that. It’s called price elasticity. Right? How far are you prepared to go in terms of the price point? So for example, we went, “Hey, what about if your second OTO was more premium? Can we put a $500 offer on that for a client?” And they went, “Yeah, cool. Here’s what we could do for that. Great. That works.
So bear in mind, that was not an offer. There was no opportunity there. So we’re like, “Well, if 2% buy it, that’ll work.” First week, about 2% bought it. Great. That’s fine. Then we keep optimizing it and optimizing it. And then we went, “Well, what if we had a six pay into that?” Oh yeah, that’s a good idea. Now, we’ve got 10% of the people buying that five products off the first same product.
So what that means is the average cart value has gone up $49. So that means every single person that you send to that site who buys is worth $49 more than they were before. So is it a game of, “Oh, how do I target the best audiences on Facebook and YouTube?” No. It’s how do I get someone to buy more stuff? So it doesn’t matter what they spend on Facebook because it’s just going to work. Because you’re making so much money from every customer that comes in.
Chris Badgett: That is cool.
Paul Ace: That’s the process.
Chris Badgett: Do you have any just recommendations if people should try a webinar for sales versus like a one-on-one call? Is there a certain price point where one will likely work better than the other? Or just any tips around… I call them conversion tools. You have like a webinar, you do one-on-one calls or just a sales page and no conversion tool? How do you know what you should do or should you just test everything?
Paul Ace: Yeah. Number one, test everything.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Paul Ace: Number two, preference wise, and what I’ve seen that’s worked well is if you go above that 495 price point, then if you’re not doing some kind of conversation or communication, that’s got that back and forth elements too. Right? Whether it be a sales call or whether it be even an SMS back and forth or a messenger back and forth, whatever that is.
Chris Badgett: Or even an Application form, right? You can’t buy it. You got to apply. And then that creates a conversation.
Paul Ace: You got to apply.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Paul Ace: Exactly. You can, one, create the conversation and two, creates people… For example, we just put our house on the market. Right? We put a house in the market and we already know there’s a house that we want to go buy. However, I can’t go and buy it. So I found a buyer for mine. So I’m like saying to the estate agent that we signed up with yesterday, just go in, get it on the market, get it on the market, get it on the market. Now, what’s happening over the course of this week. It’s making me want the house more and more because I can’t have it.
Chris Badgett: Right.
Paul Ace: So the psychology is the same with the application. So if you’re going to do apply and then you just go, “Great, you’re accepted.” Nope. It’s not a good idea. Right? You’re going to apply. We’re going to review your application. Then we’re going to come back to you. It might be eight hours later. It might be 24 hours later. You don’t want to leave it too long because then they drop off. However, just that little bit of waiting time can be really helpful. We have the phrase, removal friction, then add the friction back in. So removal friction to see what the lead flow is, how you can get as many people through the journey. And then how do we qualify more through the journey by adding the friction back in?
So we did this with a client last year, which was really surprising. It was costing him $250 for what calls. So it was like a 20 minute VSL. And then they were putting him to a book call. $250. We went, how much friction can we remove? So we were like, remove that page, remove that page, remove that page. We removed the amount of questions at the [inaudible] and everything like that.
We took the book call cost down from 256 to 46, in three weeks. Then we went, okay, great. We’ve removed it down. Now, let’s start putting more questions back in and more friction, more behavioral task in throughout the sales process to get them to take more action before they get on the call with us. So remove all friction, then add it back in.
Chris Badgett: I love that. And that’s actually a really good strategy around pricing too. You mentioned price elasticity. If your product’s newer you can discount it and then keep testing the price points and then even go higher after you’ve been established for a while. Price is friction. Steps is friction. I don’t know. What are all the different types of friction would you say that you could remove to just test a concept?
Paul Ace: The best ways to understand what friction you could remove or what you could do to optimize the journey, there’s a book called DaVinci and the 40 Answers. And here’s the great thing. It’s free. There’s only 40 ways in the world to solve a problem. That’s it.
Chris Badgett: This is cool. This is cool. This is a learning audience. They’re going to love that book recommendation. I’ve literally never heard of that book before.
Paul Ace: You probably won’t have. So I went to an event in Austin. So it’s a secret place. I wont even say the name of it. However, he was one of the speakers that we got the whole day with him. We start drinking wine at 8:00 AM in the morning because it helps with the creative juices. Everything is designed in a perfect way for learning even the way like they have the curtains and stuff. So the guy who spoke, he was the youngest chief engineer at NASA, 31 years old, chief engineer at NASA.
So this guy is pretty damn smart. And there’s something called DaVinci and the 40 Answers where you write the book on. There are 40 ways to solve a problem. So what happens is when you look at problems in these different ways is over time, then you start coming up with stupid answers or funny answers because what do we do? We exhaust all the normal answers that we could come out with to start off with. So it’d be like… let’s take the friction thing. So you just said like change… Let’s ask the question, what could we remove?
Chris Badgett: Price points, steps, having to talk to somebody in order to get in. I don’t know. There’s three.
Paul Ace: Right. So we could remove the sales team. We could remove the high price. We could remove a step. They’re all the generic things. Now what happens is if you do that in a brainstorm situation, because I remember we did this and there’s like 15 others around this whiteboard and we’re just writing it all down, writing it all down. And it gets about 15 minutes in. Maybe sometimes sooner. And everyone just goes, “What else? What else?” You’re like, “No, I’ve got nothing left. I’ve got nothing left.” You have silence in the room for about two or three minutes. And then someone just comes out with the most stupid idea and it will be like, “What could we remove? Remove the wallets?”
“What do you mean remove the wallets?” “I don’t know. I just felt…” And then everyone has a little chuckle. “Okay. Well, how could we?” And then you go back to the stupid answer. It’s like, “What could we remove?” “I don’t know.” “Remove the funnel.” “Okay. How would we do that?” Right? So then you start asking these different questions. And like I said, there’s only 40 different answers. That’s like three days of training and I still haven’t got them all ingrained in here, but just that one, if you just ask that question, what could we remove? Or the opposite, what could we add in? Right? And then all the things that you could add in, I don’t know. And then you’ll end up with something like a trip to Hawaii.
Chris Badgett: A gift box in the mail.
Paul Ace: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: How could we do that? I don’t know. What could we add in? I don’t know. Morgan Freeman. [crosstalk] Yeah, exactly. Or you could be like, “Well, what about Cameo? What if we couldn’t have Morgan Freeman, but we could have a Morgan Freeman impersonator on Cameo or something that sends a video to every person who buys?
Or we buy his training on masterclass and send it to people. You just build on of each other.
Paul Ace: Yeah. You build on it and just see where it goes. So I’m encouraging our team at the moment because we were like, “Hey, we’re starting to look at problems in too much of a technical way. And then we realized sometimes it’s a simple answer. So I was like, “What I want you to do over the next seven days as a team is write down all the things that we did try, and then what thought process we used to do that? So one of the ones we used today was a side-by-side comparison.
Okay. Let’s see what’s working over here. And then what are we doing differently over here? Why is that tack thing not working? And then when we did that, we realized we didn’t even need to solve the problem because we only needed to flick one button and it all worked, but there was nothing, no information anywhere that you could do that. We had to find it out. So when you look at problems in different ways, then you can improve your conversion rates, right? All links back to the same thing about the customer journey. Just look at the problem differently, and then you can remove the friction and everything.
Chris Badgett: I love that. Dare to make mistakes or fail, but also give yourself permission to be creative. The book is called DaVinci and the 40 Answers by Mark Fox. So check that out. Paul, you’ve been a legend today. He’s at amplifyccom.com. Any final words for the people? If someone’s listening to this and they’re like, “You know what my course is doing really good or my coaching program and I’m really a perfect fit kind of scale up phase,” what would you say to that person? How could they connect with you? Or how could you help somebody like that?
Paul Ace: Yeah, So we’ve got a seven figure audit launching in the next few days. So you can go through your business and go through all those things that we spoke about and basically, go through the checklist of what is my score? What am I missing from getting to the next level? So if you’re at seven figures and you want to get to eight, then, great, this audit will be for you. If you want to get to seven figures, then great this audit will be for you. So just go through and you’ll be able to check off what that is. And obviously, there’s some processes behind that as well, where then we can have a conversation over SMS or over email about your results.
And if you want to book a call off the back of that, great. If you’re the kind of person who’s an action taker and is like, “Listen, everything you just spoke about, we need in our business like yesterday. We’re missing out on burning so much money right now,” then just go to amplifyccom.com. Click just under the video at the top, watch that and then click book a call. You can book a call personally with me and if it’s a good fit, we’ll do something together and make some magic happen.
Chris Badgett: Paul, thank you for coming on LMScast. I really appreciate it. It was fun to jam with you today. You dropped so many nuggets for everybody listening. And if you could just plug your podcast before we sign up again. If you’re listening to this in your earbuds, go to this podcast next.
Paul Ace: So go to www.amplifyto7figures.com or search on iTunes Amplify to 7 Figures. And you will soon be able to see the wonderful legend that is Chris Badgett on there too.
Chris Badgett: All right. Well, thanks for coming today, Paul. I really appreciate it.
Paul Ace: Appreciate it, Chris. Have a great day.
Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
