JTF 044: Satisfied Customers Could Be Sabotaging Your Sales

Customer expectations for online coaches, educators, and experts are changing.

It’s not enough to have satisfied customers, you need transformational offers to stand out in your industry.

Many entrepreneurs settle for satisfied customers because they don’t feel they have the resources or knowledge to make their offers more transformational. But the truth is, they don’t have to look very far to get started.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU’LL LEARN:

• Why satisfied customers are sabotaging your sales
• What makes offers stand out in a crowded market full of "solutions"
• The first step to make your successful offer more transformational

Free workbook: Maximize your offer's value proposition and customer revenue

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Transcript

0:00

Hey, hey, welcome to the journey to fans podcast. Today, we're talking all about why satisfied customers are sabotaging your sales. Here's the thing, expectations for coaches educators and experts are changing. Gone are those days where it was enough to just know something better than someone else. First, there's an increased connectivity and social media use. As a matter of fact, 62. 3 percent of the world's population now uses social media. And two of their top three motivators for using social media are to find out information about businesses and brands, and to even keep up with news in the world. They're asking each other for recommendations about who they need to do business with, or they're developing their own relationships with business owners well before they have to make a buying decision. Also, in the past, you only had to compete with people's ability to Google information. But with machine learning, artificial intelligence, all of those things, the GPTs of this world, the distance between unaware and well versed is getting shorter. Even when people don't know all you know, they may know enough to solve their problem. Of course, there's still the concern about misinformation, but AI use is increasing year over year. Also, if you think about it, attention is valuable currency in the digital economy. Platforms are already saturated with so much information, and some of the information and stuff we're actually looking for, others, we really could do without. People are looking for more human connection with the businesses that they work with. Authenticity is what's stopping the scroll now. You also have to realize that customers in 2024 are not the same as those in 2016. They've been through some things, investing in training and development that didn't end up solving their problems, present company included. Realizing that what they had been taught in the past wasn't true or even ethical and watching the leaders that they trusted most fail them and their profession. There is so much more mistrust because of all these experiences. And even though none of it is your fault, you do have to be aware of the fact that trust isn't easily given anymore. To piggyback on that last point, the coaching and digital education industries are still highly unregulated. It's actually a wonder that we're all able to do business without actually having rules and regs for how to do it. This again increases the risk to the consumer, since there aren't many tangible consequences that creators face when something bad happens. More often than not, it's the consumer that has to sign the super long contract that details all the bad things that will happen to them if they don't fulfill their payment obligations. Now, don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying that you shouldn't have a contract that protects your time, your intellectual property, and ultimately your business. You absolutely should. I'm also sharing a perspective of risk that should be acknowledged and appreciated on the customer's part. For all the reasons I've mentioned, and perhaps even more, just having a product that produces results is not enough to give you an advantage over your competitors. This is where, in my opinion, the traditional funnel fails us. With the funnel, the win is the sale. So it's easy to assume that everyone you sell to will be a satisfied customer. And it's very easy to settle for this result. Here's why a lot of entrepreneurs do this. One, it's a short term goal. Once the entrepreneur has convinced their hot leads to invest in their product, it's easy to assume that they will be satisfied. I mean, after all, they built it. Especially if those customers don't share any negative feedback. But as you know, silence doesn't necessarily mean satisfaction. And customers may not share feedback directly with business owners, but they will share it with future prospects. Second, it requires less effort. Ensuring that a customer is satisfied with their product takes way less effort than earning a customer's loyalty to their brand. Sometimes, business owners just don't want to go through the additional hassle of it all. But if they don't, they will have to pay the price on the front end by investing in getting new customers so that they can hit their next sales goals. And the bigger the goal, the harder it becomes. There is a third reason why it's easy to settle for this result. And I'll talk about that a little bit later in the podcast. Just know that having a satisfactory solution, an offer that does what it says it will do, is pretty much table stakes for being an ethical business owner. It's nothing to applaud people about. And that is a good thing. You should expect to satisfy your customers. You should expect to solve the problem that you promised to solve. Again, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but just having satisfied customers is not going to grow your business. For one thing, satisfied customers have short term memory. If your relationship is solely based on your offer solving their problem, if it's solely based on how well you did in your last transaction, they'll quickly forget about you when something newer, shinier, faster, or whatever er is most appealing comes along. And at that point, you have no choice but to either embark on this endless pursuit of entertaining and pleasing your customers just to keep your retention rates up, or investing heavily in acquiring new customers who have the same problem that your satisfied customers did. And that's just an endless revolving cycle. But as we all know, increasing customer acquisition is way more expensive and time intensive than maintaining customer retention. It is in fact cheaper to keep them. But there's something that makes other offers sticky. It gives brands lasting value to their customers, even beyond the sale. And that's transformation. And now I'm not talking about transformation and the way we were taught when we first started online business. Oh, okay. Maybe I'll just speak for myself. I remember when coaches would ask in these coaching calls I was in, What's the transformation? Every time someone pitched their new offer idea. And the answer would inevitably be something like, I want to help them make 100k, or get 10, 000 followers on Instagram, or hit their five figure launch. While these things are impressive, they're milestones. They don't define true transformation. Look in the dictionary. The dictionary defines transformation as a change in identity, character, or condition. It's one thing to find a solution to your problem. It's another thing to become a better version of yourself. And I don't know about you, but there are a lot of people that hit milestones like that every day and don't have to transform to do it. If you're thinking about the transformation advantage, a really great place to kind of think about that is the fitness industry. They have really great examples of this. This is how fitness brands like Peloton have been so mainstream. Because it's not about the bike. Obviously, there are other brands. Bowflex, Schwinn, NordicTrack, and, If you want to make a Peloton rider mad, you may also bring up the Echelon brand. We're not going to talk about that. There are a lot of options if you're only looking for a piece of exercise equipment. But the Peloton community wear gear, they attend live classes, and they go to other community events. They even help their instructors complete their first marathon. Go check out to Natunde on Instagram and see her story about this. I heard this story also about a Peloton member who was able to recover from a neurological condition that left her paralyzed from the waist down. She started with upper body workouts. Then she graduated to the bike and eventually the treadmill. She also brought the rest of the community with her. She posted her progress so we could celebrate with her, and she shared her setbacks so we had the opportunity to support her. If it were about fitness equipment, she had many other options, but there was only one that helped her, in her own words, get her life back, Peloton. I also think about financial movements like Tiffany Aliche's Live Richer Academy or Ramit Sethi's Promise of a Rich Life. These programs foundationally give their communities the tools they need to budget, save, and spend wisely. But the promise doesn't end there. Their students are promised a transformation of a richer life. Whatever that may look like for each person. That's why transformation has the advantage. Because while solutions may be hard to remember, transformation is very hard to forget. And you may not think your offer provides a drastic identity change, but that doesn't mean you're not capable of guiding true transformation. For me, transformation that I've experienced through programs and courses that I've been in, look like the first time I knew that I would make it as an entrepreneur, or when I first realized it was okay that my offer didn't look like others did, or the first time I discovered that my impact could reach far beyond just the person I was coaching or mentoring, or, when I realized that I've been blessed to understand and teach concepts that activate purpose and mission in others. And that I didn't have to shy away or be afraid of that. I may not remember every single module that I took or what the deliverables were from the coaching engagement. But these transformational memories will be etched in my mind for a long time. So earlier in the podcast, we talked about reasons why entrepreneurs may settle for having satisfied customers. And I promised to talk about a third reason. Well, here's that third reason. They don't know. They don't have additional knowledge or resources. This is where I optimistically hope most business owners are. They don't do it because they don't know how to do it. They want to give their customers the best experience. They want their own community of loyal customers. They just don't know where to start, or they doubt whether they have the resources to focus on this now. So they do the best they can with what they currently know. But if you've achieved significant success in terms of your offer sales, meaning you're not surviving from launch to launch. If you have a great offer that's recognized and a sales and marketing system that brings you consistent clients or students, then it's time to make your offer transformational. But how do you do that? It starts with creating what I call a Transformation Target. This target is where the solution is best suited to facilitate transformation. Don't just think about all the accomplishments that your students or clients can achieve after working with you. Think about who they could become as a result of the new tools that they've been equipped with. We talked about some examples already of what transformation may look like, but I'll share some more here. Maybe you're teaching people how to leverage video in their marketing because you want them to be better or more confident communicators and influencers in the digital space. You're tired of the digital space being cluttered by misinformation and by ideas that aren't even worth listening to, and you want the people with the best ideas to be at the forefront and leading the charge. Maybe you're teaching people how to leverage email marketing, so they can find and own their voice, not just in business, but in life. Maybe you're helping people build a compelling personal brand so that they discover that they are indeed worthy of respect and emulation. With a transformation target in mind, the offer is no longer the end, but the means for what you're actually trying to accomplish. And the Transformation Target becomes that guiding light that you use to make decisions on how to deliver your offer. So how can you figure out what transformation your offer is best suited to support? The good news is you don't have to look very far. Here are four places you can start your search. Call them the four Ps. First, your Principles. That's what you value most. Second, your Passions. What lights you up? Third, your Past, who you once were. And fourth, your Purpose. What drives you? When I walk my clients through this Transformational Target framework, we actually draw a target. So I'm gonna invite you to do that right now. Draw a circle with a cross in the middle, not like the store logo, but the spotted dog circle with a cross in the middle, middle, one line going up and down the other from left to right, the cross will divide the circle into four parts or four quadrants. You're going to write the four P's in each quadrant to start your own target. So each part of that circle will have Principles, Passions, Past, Purpose. And then you're going to set a timer for at least 10 minutes for each quadrant and just write down anything that fits in this list. Don't edit, just go. And then look at your offer. Think about who you serve, how they start, and how they usually end up. And find where what you've written aligns with how they succeed with your offer. You can circle those words in each quadrant or highlight them in a different color and start looking for patterns in what you're seeing. Discovering your Transformation Target will help you think more strategically about how you can move from providing solutions to guiding transformation with your offer. And it'll get you one step closer to making your offer unforgettable to your loyal customers. Listen, I've got so much more to say about making your offer more transformational. I have put some good stuff in a free workbook for you though. So if you want to learn more about that, go to desola davis. com backslash workbook, or click the link in the show notes. if there's one thing I want you to take away from this episode, it's this. Don't settle for satisfactory when you can make it transformational. Thanks, as always, for letting me join you on your journey to fans. I'll talk to you soon.