048. John Logar On How To Use High-Value Consulting To Increase Profitability

Books Mentioned

• How to Win Friends & Influence People

Related / Mentioned Podcast Episodes:

• Episode 001 – Neil Patel on Branding, Client Selection and Investing
• Episode 002 – James Schramko on Recurring Income Models
• Episode 011 – Dan Norris on Startups
• Episode 012 – Dan Norris on Content Marketing for Startups
• Episode 022 – $50 Million and Counting
• Episode 043 — The Membership Economy with Robbie Kellman Baxter

Key Points (Timestamps)

1:45 — Intro and background on John Logar
2:54 — How John helps increase profitability through strong acquisition and retention strategies
2:58 — One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is to treat their business like a promotion.
3:44 — Start by knowing who your customers are and then make an offer.
4:18 — Understand how much you’re willing to pay to acquire the customer.
4:43 — “If you want cash, make an offer.”
6:15 — A lot of businesses don’t invest enough in their marketing.
6:35 — What you can do if you understand customers’ buying motivations and habits
6:55 — How John uses these 2 published lists to identify target clients
8:25 — Why companies need to value the leads they generate and farm the leads properly
10:02 — Google’s study in 2009 on the zero moment of truth (google’s study relating to purchases)
10:41 — In 2016, the average customer uses 18 frames of reference before making a decision. You need more engagement with your target audience. More touch points required to make a sale.
11:21 — If you have 7-8 touch points with the same customer, you’re 80% more likely to make sales.
11:44 — Intra podcast summary of key points so far
12:41 — Businesses should be asking themselves: ‘What else could I be offering the customer at this point in their life/phase in their purchase cycle?
13:21 — “From a business point of view, we are in revolutionary times.” – John Logar
13:57 — A case study on an e-commerce business (importance of customer engagement)
19:29 — John’s personal example around the importance of not underpricing your offer
20:47 — Being the cheapest isn’t always the best strategy.
21:08 — Price can also be a signaling factor. A higher price signals higher value.
22:08 — Price anchoring and how it impacts price in the customer’s mind
24:23 — Businesses that do really well plan for it.
24:38 — The purpose of your business vs the goal of your business and why that distinction matters
25:51 — Get clear on your purpose and then get clear on how you can create a profitable path to achieve that purpose.
28:09 — The question businesses should be asking themselves is: Why should people buy from me rather than from a competitor?
28:33 — Apple case study on premium positioning and value-based pricing without significant discounting
29:33 — How Apple executes on a clear purpose to deliver spectacular customer experience
31:57 – Apple has ‘taught’ their customers well which is why they will be more profitable.
34:25 – “Most people give up too early.”
34:42 — If you want to do bigger deals then understand those people and create multiple touch points.
35:32 — Recap on key insights and key obstacles businesses face
36:02 — Action points for business owners to take:
Get clear on your purpose, then create a plan around that purpose.
Focus on value, not price. Big clients are visible and, therefore, easier to find.
37:06 — The key obstacles to obtaining more customers and how to overcome those obstacles
36:45 — The best thing you can do is invest in your marketing, advertising and measure everything.
38:01 — The basic principles (like referrals) have been the same for 6,000 years.
38:30 — Globally, e-commerce only accounts for 12% of purchases online.
39:06 — Get clear, get a plan in place and go and make an offer.
39:16 — John Carlton said, ‘You’re only one email away from your next big paycheque.’.
39:45 — John’s favourite sequence of emails within a campaign with multiple follow-up offers
41:56— Key insight – Rather than trying to go wide, go deep.
42:33 — If you want to maximise your conversions, pick up the phone and talk to a real person.
43:25 — How you can get in contact with John and find out more about him

Transcript

Machine transcript, lightly edited for reading. Speakers aren't marked. The intro, one passage and the sign-off are left out.

Hello, everyone. Our guest today has been a sales professional, a marketing consultant, a trainer, an international speaker and a coach for the last 25 years. He's helped clients generate millions of dollars in businesses all over the world. He's conducted over 5,000 one-to-one strategic sessions with managing directors, CEOs, entrepreneurs in over 140 different industry groups. In the last 18 months, he's helped launch 27 consulting businesses that have generated over $4.2 million in consulting contracts around the world. He cuts through all the fluff and gives you real actionable strategies that actually work.

I'm delighted to welcome the founder of consultingunleashed.com, Mr. John Logar. Welcome, John. Thanks, Ash. Thanks for having me on board. It's great to be here. It's an honor to have you, man. So, John, we've talked a few times before, and you've clearly got a gift when it comes to attracting and converting customers for businesses with very powerful strategies. So could you talk to us a little bit about your most successful customer acquisition and retention strategies and how you help drive profitability to businesses doing that? Well, the biggest thing, I guess, with acquiring customers is to know the customer first.

And I think one of the biggest mistakes a lot of businesses make is that they treat their business like a promotion. So a lot of businesses operate very knee-jerk reactions, so there's no strategy to them growing. I mean, one of the questions that I ask most CEOs that I speak to is, what is your projected growth rate for the year? And most people would say it'd be, well, as long as we're doing 10% better this time than we did this time last year, essentially. And my next question is, do you have a strategic plan to actually generate that extra 10%?

And I can count on my hand in the last 15 years that I've asked that question. The number of CEOs have said to me, yes, we have a strategic plan for that growth. So in terms of talking about the best strategies for acquiring customers, I think the first place to start is to actually know who your customers are. And if you are clear about that, then the next best thing is make an offer. And the number one thing that most businesses don't do is they don't offer enough.

And in today's economy, speed and distribution and access is everything. So from a strategic point of view, probably the best acquisition strategy is to understand the markets that you serve as a business, understand your niches that you serve, understand what the customer is worth to you in terms of the capacity, and also understand how much you're willing to pay to buy that customer as well. So that's a really important point as well. So if you have those basic fundamental understandings and you're really clear about where you're heading as a business, then the number one strategy is to make an offer.

And if the offer is relevant to the market, you're going to make sales. If it's not relevant, then the results are going to speak for themselves very, very quickly. So to me, if you want cash, make an offer. And the first place to start is with your existing customer base. And the biggest mistake that most people make in business is that they have their customers will say things like, I didn't know that you did that, or they'll buy some of this. It's amazing. I work in the digital.

A lot of people I work with work in the digital marketing space. And I often hear stories where, you know, they might do SEO or they might do Facebook for people. And they also do websites and they'll do other things for their clients. But the client only knows them for the service that they buy. And so all of a sudden, the client comes back to the customer and says, oh, yeah, yeah, we've gone to a web agency and we're going to do a website. And then the, you know, the Facebook company says, yeah, but we do websites.

Why didn't you talk to us, you know? And the statement comes up, well, we didn't know that you did that, right? And so the reason why that occurs is because you're not nurturing, educating your customers about what they can take advantage of or how you can add value to them. So the biggest, the best strategy that you can have if you are in an existing business, if you want to generate cash flow today, go to existing customers and make an offer with other services you provide and make it relevant, you know, is probably the big thing.

So you know, customer acquisition can be very, very fast. I mean, you know, these days, he who he or she who has the most money will win. You know, it's all about advertising promotion. And one of the biggest things that I see in a lot of businesses, they don't invest enough in marketing, in their marketing. So first point of reference, and the fastest way to get cash is to make an offer to people who you already know. The second thing to do is if you understand who your customers and your market are, it's very, it's actually very easy to find them.

So if you're really clear about who your client is, then, you know, take an understanding. If you understand their buying motivations or their habits, then it's very quickly to actually align your marketing strategy in line with how they actually make purchases. And so this is a lot another thing a lot of businesses don't do is they don't spend enough time understanding the behaviors of their customers. So I have this often quote this list, it's the top 5000 fastest growing companies in the US. There's also a top 5000 fastest growing companies in Europe, Inc magazine actually publishes this list every year.

And the first thing I look at that list is I look at who's not on the list, you know, because everybody who's on the list is on the list, and it's very easy to find them. The thing the thing with that list is it gives you demographics, so it shows you companies in specific industry groups that are growing at a rate of between anywhere from 50% per annum up to 1000% per annum. Now that sort of growth rate is unsustainable, but the key factor here is there are 5000 businesses in hundreds of different niche markets that are actually growing.

So if I was looking for customers, if I was serving business to business, that would be the first list that I'd go after. And then I would go after all the people who aren't on that list, who actually should be on the list. So finding finding clients or acquiring customers is actually quite easy. The reason why people struggle with it is that they're just not out there doing it. Right. You know, and the other part of that is consistency. I talk about one of the things that I talk a lot of people about in business is I sit down and I was talking to a company that had a fairly large sales team.

Now you know when you have a sales team of about 20 people who are out there in the market trying to generate customers all the time, the company's actually spending a lot of money on leads to feed the sales people so they can actually do their job and sell. So they're feeding, they're doing their job, giving customers the sales people leads. But because there's so many leads, right, that the company buys, the sales people never follow up because they're too busy, they're too busy always dealing with these new leads all the time.

Right. So when we sit there and say, you know, out of every 10 deals, how many would the average sales person close? They say, oh, we'd close probably about 20% of all ends we get. So and the average sale for this particular company was about $50,000 per sales and average sale, so for every 10 leads, they close $100,000 worth of deals, which is pretty cool. Right. But on the opposite side of that, they lose $400,000 every time they close $100,000. Right. Right. So I said, what's it like to lose $400,000 every time you make $200,000 worth of sales?

Yes. And then they go, oh my God. So it's an error of omission. Exactly. So it's purely just opportunity cost. So another way that businesses can actually acquire more is to make sure that they value what they generate and that they follow through on that. Because there are companies that are spending, or businesses tend to spend most of their energy and effort in acquiring new customers. What they don't realize is that, you know, most people these days don't get married on the first date. And so a couple of things that businesses need to understand from a customer acquisition point of view is that a customer will make a buy, about five years ago, about 2009, Google did a study based on the massive data that they access through all the advertising campaigns that they run.

And they found this concept, or they came up with this concept called the zero moment of truth. Yes. And the zero moment of truth is that the moment when a customer decides to actually make a purchase. Right. So back in 2009, they found through their data mining that people made a purchasing decision with five frames of reference. So they'd look at a website, look at a review, go on Facebook, talk to a friend, you know, check a few pages and then make a purchasing decision. Now we're in 2015, we're six years later.

Now the average frame of reference that a customer will make a purchasing decision is 18. Yes, that's right. So customers looking at 18 frames of reference before they make a purchasing decision. So what I'm sharing for those of you listening to this podcast, the more engagement you have with your target market audience, the more sales you're going to make, the more value, the more touch points you create, the faster you'll make more sales. What people do is they actually trawl through their leads too quickly. So if you understand if your client base and you understand the things that are relevant to them, if you touch those clients more than at least seven or eight times, you're going to increase your ability to convert sales by up to 80%.

Wow. Okay. Yeah. So the majority of people in business only ever follow up their customers or engage their customers once, once. So they're losing 80% of the opportunities. You've given us some amazing bits of value here. So I would love to try and bring them out a little bit if that's okay, John. Something you mentioned was it's important for a business to understand what it's costing them to acquire a customer and that to decide on how much I want to spend on a customer, they need to understand the lifetime value of a customer, which brings us to the other point, which is businesses aren't cultivating their customers, their existing customers enough.

So they're just trying to cycle through acquiring new customers and trying to push more into their sales funnel rather than saying, what else can be offered to this customer? Businesses are also not understanding their customers as well as they probably should be and making enough relevant offers to their customers. So if you're a bricks and mortar business, if you say in the travel industry, for example, you need to be asking yourself, well, what else does this customer want to buy when they're going on a trip?

Maybe they want to buy travel bags. So the question a business should be asking themselves is what else could I offer the customer? How much points can I have with this customer rather than just try to sell them a ticket and shove it in the hand and send them along their way? How many times can I interact with them through that travel experience and add more value to that journey? Absolutely. Absolutely. And that only comes from talking, actually talking to the customer, listening to customers. So what you're talking about is most businesses, most people, most businesses, and if we talk about the brick and mortar, the small businesses in the world, you know, 80 to 90% of those people won't last more than three to five years, they're gone, right?

So we are in a society right now, from a business point of view, we are in revolutionary times. It's never been easier and cheaper to start a business than ever before. It's never been easier to access markets and open new markets and opportunities like there is before. There is so much innovation and products and new companies starting up every single day, but the majority of these end up on the rocks of decimation purely because they don't have a plan, they don't understand their markets, they don't even talk to their customers.

I was talking to a guy the other day who has been very successful in the e-commerce market, has built quite a substantial business in e-commerce. And one of the reasons why he loves e-commerce is I physically don't have to talk to the customer. Right? That was his thing, right? So he's built this really big business. Now, I said to him, it's really funny, I see your e-commerce business and it's doing really well and you don't have a lot of interaction with the customer. But he knew his major competitor, right?

Here's your competitor. They started roughly around the same time you did, right? Now the person I'm speaking to is turning over about $3 million in their e-commerce business, which is pretty good for an independent operator, that's not bad, and that's taken about three years for them to build to that point. Their direct competitor started a year before them. They're turning over $120 million a year. This sounds like an error of omission, John. Well, the reason why they're turning over $120 million is because they have a lot of direct contact with their customers.

They do a lot of connection, they do a lot of calling, they talk to them, they call them to see if the products and services they provided are okay and they've arrived safely and is there anything else that they could do? Are they looking for other specific products that they can offer? All the things that you just said, what are the other things that we could do for our customer? This other e-commerce business is actually doing. So whilst this person is saying, "Hey, I don't want to get physically engaged,"

this is where they're limiting their opportunity. And their error of omission is costing them $100 million. Tens of millions. Tens of millions. So that's what I meant by error of omission, they're only making $3 million when they could be making $120 million. Well, even if they did triple what they did, the more engagement, the more connection they have with their customer, the more revenue they have the opportunity with. And I see this with direct sales companies as well. We see these companies on TV that sell the Bowflexes and the ab blasters and the buy this diet or powders or buy these products office and they end up as being the most expensive coat hangers in our lounge rooms.

These direct marketing companies spend millions of dollars on TV advertising, they're very successful at selling their products, they have all the elements of a powerful marketing strategy and system, they speak to the pain point, they demonstrate, they have case studies and testimonials, so there's this remarkable transformations, they demonstrate, they hit the product on the ground and it still works. All those sorts of things, so the actual pitch and the process is perfect. But none of these companies, and this still amazes me today, these companies are making tens of millions of dollars, in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars, never actually follow up their customers and offer them another product ever.

So they could literally double or quadruple their sales. These companies have several products, one of the companies in the US is a company called QVC. Now they're turning over about $350 million a year in selling stuff on TV, basically doing all the infomercials, right? So massive company, big company, that company has got one of the largest consumer databases on the planet. It has never emailed that database in the last 15 years of its business. So understand that as a company, for me a lot of people talk to me about how do I generate new, how do I get more, offer more people, offer more things to the people that you do business with, find out what they want, get it to them faster, look for ways of adding value.

You don't have to be the cheapest on the planet. For me, I love being the most expensive person on the planet because if I'm the most expensive, then I'm making more profit and at the same time, I'm also creating a much higher perception of value. And so another tactic that people forget is that most people never increase their prices. They tend to hold on to their prices as long as possible, so they actually minimize their margins. So if you want to dramatically improve your net profit in your business faster than you'll ever generate any form of sale, all you need to do is increase your prices marginally.

So for example, if you discount your prices by 10% to keep the same amount of profit that you lose on that 10% discount, you actually need to sell twice as many items to maintain the level of profit. That means, now I've asked people, if we look at 10%, we don't look at 10% as a great discount anymore. We know that people are offering 20%, 70%, 50%. So imagine how much more revenue they have to generate to actually maintain or to actually keep the profit that they're giving away in the business.

Alternatively, if we increased our prices by 10%, we could afford to lose one third of our customers before we actually lost any money. And you can focus better on the customers that you've got left behind. Yeah, exactly. But also, you've got this thing that that 10%, that 10% is not an increase in cost. That 10% is a pure increase in net profit. So if you had a 10% increase in net profit, sometimes that may add 2% to 300% on your bottom line net profit, just by increasing prices.

So what I try and help people understand that if you value your products and services at a higher price, your customers will value them as well. Perfect example is I was trying to get rid of a sub convertible. When I first put the car on the market, I priced it at about $1,000 less than any other car on the market. So I went to one of these car sales site, put the car up, put the photos on, and I looked at all the other cars that were selling the same similar car, and I thought, I'll just make mine $1,000 less.

And it didn't sell. And it sat there for about two weeks, and I said, I thought, this is crazy. So all I did was I tinted the windows of the car. So I spent like, I think I spent about $180 on the tinting. And then I got somebody to detail the tires. Like it had these mags on it, but I've got them to actually really make them stand out in black, right? So I retook the photos, put the photos up on the thing, and then I raised the price of the car by $6,000.

So I was actually the most expensive one on the actual car sales. It sold within two days. So all I did was change what was perceived and added value. I made the car look a little bit sportier, and it made it look different, and it sold very quickly. And that's not to say that the other cars were better or worse on the market, but being the cheapest is not always the best strategy. There's always somebody that's going to be $1 cheaper than you. So a lot of people tend to think that their customers are looking to push their prices down.

Customers are very discerning. They're looking for value. They are looking for value in the market. That's not to say that price isn't important, but it is actually not the most important consideration when somebody makes a purchasing decision. Price is also a signaling factor, isn't it? A higher price can, in some cases, give a signal of higher value as well, which is something people should consider. Yeah. I mean, I always cite this example, and I've used this often, and it's even used in pricing models all over the world, where you have the pricing table.

So you've got the cheap price, the entry point price, then you have a middle price, which has more value, and then you have the higher enterprise price, where you have the greatest value, right? Yeah. Well, the one in the middle is the one that sells the most. Yes. McDonald's uses that as well. Yeah. The reason why it sells the most is because it tells people that most people buy this one and also positions the value at much greater levels than at the lowest possible price. So 80% of the market will actually increase their purchasing price point based on the perception of value.

So if you could change a word or a sentence or add something to a product, it immediately changes the frame of reference to that product. Yes. I remember writing a blog post about price anchoring, and I think that pricing is a very interesting topic in itself, but if you start off by creating a very low price and you try and be totally price competitive, you're actually anchoring your value along with the price at a very low level in the customer's mind, which isn't necessarily doing a service to your business.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah. So I think margins is an area that a lot of people miss out on because even I ask people, I've worked with a lot of businesses and I've seen businesses that have turned over hundreds of millions of dollars and they're losing 20, 30 million a year. And I've sat down with a CEO and said, "You've built this company. You've worked an entire year. You've got a thousand people working for you. The company turns over 250 million this year and you made, you lost $20 million."

How does that work? How is that possible? That means $220 million worth of revenue has gone through your accounts and you've actually paid out more than what you've actually made. And a lot of that stem from poor purchasing decisions, very bad management margins, and nine times out of 10, it's because they never exploited their customers. They never looked at the opportunities within their customer base to generate that revenue. So I'm amazed at even big companies that are losing significant amounts of money. You can't do that for too long, by the way.

The banks are not going to let you stick around if you're going to be losing $20 million a year, but I've even seen small companies where they've worked all year, they've made a few, like $2 or $3 million going through the business, and they end up with a loss of like $30,000, $40,000. And I can't fathom what it's like to work for nothing for an entire year because they might as well have gotten a job. They would have made more money working for somebody else and being in a business that's turning over $3 million and losing $50,000 to $60,000.

It's crazy. So I think a lot of people-- business is tough. There's a lot of considerations that people need to make when they're in business. But if you look at businesses that do really well, they plan for it. They fundamentally know exactly what they're doing, where they're heading, what their objective is, why they want to do it. They've got their reasoning. They've got a purpose in their business as well. There's two sides of the business. The purpose of the business is to actually deliver extraordinary value and be great to the customers you have.

That's the purpose of your business. But it's the goal of your business to profit as much as possible from that purpose. What people do is they confuse the two and actually have it switch it around. They try to make as much money as possible out of the business. And then it's like, well, we'll serve our customers secondary, so profit first, customer second. Got it. That's such a good point. If you flip it and say, hey, if we're awesome to the people that we do business with, they're going to buy more of our stuff.

They're going to talk about us more often. They're going to bring more customers to us in our business because a lot of businesses rely on word of mouth, on recommendations. That's why all these review sites are popping up everywhere. You've got Yelp and all these directories, yellow pages where all these five star ratings are popping up. People are paying attention. People are looking for companies that are serving better. So if your purpose as a company is to be great to your clients and at the same time that you maximize your profitability from being great, that's awesome.

Most businesses have it the other way around. That's why they fail. Such an excellent insight. So purpose first, get clear on your purpose, which is how you're going to provide awesome value to your customers and then figure out the how, which is getting profit while delivering on your purpose. Oh, absolutely. And you want to do it as much. The other thing is there's a broad spectrum of how you uniquely position yourself in a market as well. There's dozens of ways to see yourself apart from your competitors.

Sometimes I know we've been talking about pricing, but sometimes pricing is a competitive advantage. There are businesses that are solely built around the discount model and they do very well, but they manage their margins very successfully so they can afford or they can operate in that volume market of credit volume sales at low margins. And they're usually all over their cost base. They understand their costs very well. They're very strong across their numbers. Exactly. They know their numbers. So they can afford, they can use pricing as a competitive advantage and still make a profit.

Whereas other companies don't use the pricing model as their advantage. They're using maybe the fact that they've got a broad range or the fact that they actually have a unique range that other companies don't actually sell. If you look at some of the luxury brands in the market, well, let's look at handbags for a second. So if we look at Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Hermes, Prada, Gucci, they're all premium brands in the market. Most of these companies are multi-billion dollar brands globally worldwide. They don't sell cheap bags.

They're selling handbags at $3,000 to $5,000 to $20,000. And whereas if you look at their competitors, the smaller companies, they're selling bags at $300 or $500 or $800. If you look at a company like Louis Vuitton, it doesn't discount ever. You'll never see the word "sale" in an LV store ever. And people go in and they know what the price is. You can't negotiate the price. They'll say, "You want this bag? This is what the price is." You're buying a brand. You're buying an experience. You're buying a sense of status, achievement.

There's all this emotional attachment to those significant brands. Your classic premium positioning. Yeah. So how you set yourself apart is a key part of your marketing strategy. And the question that businesses should be asking themselves is, "Why should somebody buy from me as opposed to getting a competitor?" And the more reasons you find that are in line with the customer's desire, the faster you're going to make more sales. Because once you connect with that message, once you connect with that idea, that becomes the cornerstone of all your branding and marketing.

If you can uniquely position yourself in that market, Apple is a perfect example of this, right? They've built an enormous and amazing brand. The why is to create that experience, to build amazing products, to do it differently. They only own 15% to 17% of the market share, yet they're the most profitable company in the world. Yes. Right? And they're the best presellers in the world. They'll tell you a product's coming a year before it comes. You can buy the product before it's actually launched. And then on launch day, there's miles of people standing out in front of their stores saying, "Hey, I've got to get the new thing."

And they're not the cheapest product in the market. They're a brand premium price. And they barely own a discount. They very rarely discount, or there are discounters in that market for their accessories and their products. But as a company, they don't discount at all on their websites. So yes. So if you look at those types of companies, and I know that's an iconic example, the question would be, how does a small business do that? But that's a great example, John, of your point earlier, which is they are very clear on their purpose, which has delivered spectacular value to their customers.

And by the way, deliver a great customer experience, not just with one product, but with multiple products. They come with the iPhone, the iPad. It started off with an iPhone, but now they're doing Macs, everything. So they're very clear on their purpose, and then they figured out how to make profit while delivering on that purpose, which was your point earlier on. It's really funny, and I've just noticed this, and I do a lot of traveling around the world. And what I've seen, Macs, I'm forever seeing people cleaning their Mac screens.

I never see people cleaning a PC screen. I always see people cleaning their Mac screen, keeping their product because it's as shiny or as clean as possible. It's quite interesting that that brand has created such a reverence around the quality of the product. It's a culture. I mean, Apple sets the tone with their packaging. If you look at their packaging, it's immaculate. They set the tone right from the beginning, right? I mean, they've been known to be quite obsessive about how they do their packaging for their products.

But when you do receive an Apple product, you do feel like you're doing something that is quite sacred almost. Your product is beautiful. It's just an absolutely beautiful experience if you're unwrapping it. You've hit the word on the nail on the head, it is an experience. They create a user experience. You come into our stores and use all our products, come and use our internet, come and send messages from our stores. Come and charge your phone in our stores. Come and play with our products. From a retail experience, they're probably one of the best retailers in the world.

I really like how they started off with the iPod, but they've taken that, as you pointed out earlier, they've taken the iPod. They started off creating an amazing experience with the iPod when they reinvented themselves. And then they've extended it into the iPad, into the Mac, into the MacBook Air. Now they're looking at the iPad Mini. Now they're looking at an iPad Pro, which is due to be announced tomorrow, I believe. So there's all sorts of things they're coming up with and adding additional products to an existing customer experience rather than trying to shovel more customers in the top end of their funnel.

They're penetrating more deeply into the existing customer experience. They're selling more products to less customers rather than getting more customers and selling the same product to them. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's why they'll still maintain their profitability as a company because they've taught their customers very well. They've taught their customers to expect a new product. I think I've had four iterations of the iPhone. I've got the iPhone 6, the new one. Will I upgrade? Probably maybe not on the next iteration, but the iteration after that, I'd probably upgrade to that iteration.

Again, the idea is that they've thought about who their clients are and they've been very clear about the message, and they've built that engagement. And so if a small business were to take some of those aspects away, how can you create an experience? I'll give you a classic example, one of the strategies that I teach in terms of customer acquisition. If you want big clients, then you need to understand big clients. I'm a big fan of acquiring big customers. So when I say big customers, customers that will spend $1 million with you or spend half a million or multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars with you, where generally you would think that they would spend that kind of money with bigger agencies.

And so my thing is, is that the people that you're dealing with that level are human beings. What they're interested in as a result, they're looking for somebody who'll come in, provide a fresh perspective and look at ways of adding value and looking at ways of enhancing their business basically. So if you can focus on those sorts of things, to get into the big playing market, it doesn't take actually a lot of effort. It's actually quite-- it's actually probably easier to get in the bigger markets than it is to get into smaller markets.

Because they're more accessible. They're easy to find. There are multiple touch points that you can have with people who are in larger companies. And also, they're very easy to map out. So you can actually see the buying behavior of those companies and how they engage and interact. So you can basically model your approach to the way that they behave. So the average sales cycle for a large company or large contract is anywhere between six to eight weeks is about for a large contract. It could extend out to 12 weeks, depending on the dollar value of the deal that you're creating.

But the larger the deal, the longer the sales cycle. But the average purchasing decision for a major deal of that multi-six figure up to the million dollar bracket is anywhere between that two-month to six-month period. So what most people do is they give up too early. Again, we go back to that story, not enough touch points, not enough building relationships, not enough building likeability and trust. They're too quick to walk away. If you want to get into people, acknowledge them. If you want to engage people at significant levels and do bigger deals, look at the people that you're engaging, spend some time understanding them, get to know them, talk to them, create multiple touch points.

It's no different to nurturing a customer, right? What you're doing is you're building a relationship so that they sit there. They see that you're a person that looks to add value. If you're adding value, they're going to be asking you questions like, how do we engage you? How do we get you involved with us? So rather than you going to them, you're getting them to come to you. Right, which is a pull selling approach. Exactly. Yep. So there's plenty of ways to grow and engage businesses.

So John, no surprises here. Like when we talk every time, you're just blown me away with really great insights. So I'd like to just recap on some of them as we've been talking. One of the questions I was going to ask is, how does a business go about increasing average customer spend? And we already touched on it, and that is by making more offers, more relevant offers to your clients, understand your clients. Some of the key obstacles businesses face is they're not making enough offers. They're not getting to understand their customers.

They're not spending enough time talking to their customers. They're just trying to throw offers at their customers without having any detailed insight about their customers. So some action points for a business to take and for listeners to take is get very clear about your purpose. What is the purpose of your business? Apple's example of their purpose is to create an amazing customer experience and then create a plan around that purpose, which includes creating profit through delivering on that purpose, which is creating very relevant, high quality products.

Don't get obsessed with low pricing. Pricing can be a signal and it can be a signal of good value. Focus on the value you're delivering rather than try to be price competitive all the time. It's quite easy to find big clients because they're more visible. The sales cycle takes anything between two and six months, depending on the size of the deal. But you can map the purchasing decision and the purchasing part of a big client more easily. So don't be intimidated by the idea of big clients.

Don't give up too quickly on the big clients and recognize that the cycle takes between two to six months. How am I going? Have I missed anything? I think we've covered a lot there. I think one of the questions that you're also asking is what are the key obstacles of obtaining more customers and how do they overcome those sorts of obstacles? I don't see attaining customers. If a business is having difficulty attaining customers, then they should not be in business. If you're having trouble getting clients, then figure it out very, very quickly because if you don't figure it out, you're not going to be in business for long.

So in terms of acquiring customers, there are so many ways that you can do that, inexpensively, freely or cheaply. But for me, the best thing you can do is invest. Invest in your marketing, invest in your advertising, invest in your promotion, and measure everything. Test, test, test. Nothing I'm sharing with you today is new. We've been doing business like this for 6,000 years. People still used to refer people back in ancient Egyptian times. People would refer a good vendor to other people. There's nothing different, how we distribute, how we engage.

The only thing that's changed is the mechanism of our delivery, the ability to go faster, the ability to reach more. The global economy is really coming together with a significant force now. But understand that even from a global economy, only 12% of all purchases are made online. Only 12% account for-- if you look at globally, e-commerce only accounts for 12% of the purchasing that's done online. That means 88% of all purchases are still done offline. Now, it is growing. That 12% is going to grow to about 24%, 27%, probably the next 5 to 10 years.

And so that's going to have a significant impact on how we buy. But if 88% of people are still going direct, the opportunities are phenomenal for business. So get clear, get a plan in place, and go and make an offer as quickly as possible. You want to make money today, actually, a mutual friend of ours reminded me of something John Carlton said. John Carlton said, you're only one email away from your next big paycheck. And I thought, what an interesting statement. Because often when I've gone and made an offer, I've made money.

I only did it the other day. I put a campaign together. It was very relevant for a very small list. And I had a significant amount of revenue come from that very, very simple offer. And the other thing is, if you're going to offer, don't offer once. Offer multiple times. So if you've got an offer out there, back it up. My favorite sequence that I often talk to people about, which is really easy and it works every single time that I've done it, is create a relevant offer, send it out, then send out a follow-up campaign.

The follow-up campaign is, I just want to make sure you got the offer so you didn't miss out. Then the next follow-up campaign is, hey, I'd love to know what you thought about the offer if it was something that was relevant to you and of interest to you. And then the last piece of that campaign is, are you interested? Would you like to go ahead? So instead of just creating a promotion and just putting it out there, a one-shot deal, which is what most businesses do when they advertise, have a process that you want to maximize your conversions.

Remember the zero moment of truth. Multiple touch points creates a dramatic improvement in conversions. So instead of running one campaign, just set your campaign up to remind people that, hey, we've got a campaign. You can use scarcity, you can use time allocations or constraints. You can use quantity. The biggest insight I'm getting from this conversation is rather than trying to go wide, go deep. So rather than trying to acquire a broad range of customers, try and go deeper into the experience with one individual customer or with a smaller number of customers, try and sell them more products, sell them more offers.

When you do make an offer, don't just make one offer and then assume that they've read it. Reiterate your offer three or four times to make sure that they received it because in today's information overload age, chances are they've missed it or they read it and they forgot about it. Yeah. And the other thing also is you want to monitor your offer as well. So if you want to maximize your conversions, pick up the phone and talk to your customers. The number of people who email back and forth or text back and forth, just pick up the phone, have it ask the question.

It's amazing how many sales you would make by just engaging physically because the customer's ready to buy. With this ticky tacky back and forth, all you're doing is delaying the inevitable result. So the key here is that, yes, you want to watch your numbers, yes, you want to see what's going on. But at the same time, if you want to increase your conversions and get better results, go and talk to the people who are going to spend the money with you because they'll tell you. They'll tell you everything.

They'll tell you exactly what they want, how they want it, why they want it. If you can find that information out and craft your offers around those sorts of things, that's a license to print money. Cool. And John, how can listeners find out more about you and get in contact with you? There's probably two places, the easiest places. One they can go to businessunleashed.com or they can go to consultingunleashed.com. One is a podcast that's got heaps of free advice information and live case studies are some of the things that I talked about on this episode.

The other is for people who are looking to scale and grow a consulting business with their skills, I look to help those people to value themselves and value those skills and then how they can go and actually target high-end clients to actually invest in their services. Okay. Is there anything else you would like to mention that I didn't ask you that I should have asked? I think one of the questions you asked me is what book has had the greatest impact on me and why? I thought about that question and there are so many great books.

It's really funny. I'm traveling at the moment. I'm in San Diego and traveling over throughout the US and I have my Kindle with me. Before I left, I purchased three books, but I actually repurchased a book that is very tired and doggy that I absolutely love. In fact, it was probably the first book of its kind that I ever read. I read it when I was 17 years old. I've probably read this book dozens of times throughout my business life and career. Every time I pick it up, there's always something new in this book and it was written by Dale Carnegie.

It was a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People. One of my favorite, my sayings, and I don't know where this came from, but I often find myself saying this and I try to teach people this as well, is to have a friend, you want to be one first. If you're a friend to your clients and if you're a friend to the people that you do business with and you're a friend to the people who are around you and your peers, you'll do extraordinary things and I think Jay Abraham coined the phrase of preeminence.

If you come to your customers with a level of preeminence where they understand that you hold them and you revere them at the highest value, they'll do anything for you. If I was to pick a book, it would be How to Win Friends and Influence People. I love that book. Probably one of the best books I think ever written. I think it was written in the 1920s, about 1929, I think it was first published. It's millions of copies and I've had several copies and given away several copies but it's the one book that keeps coming back to me because the fundamental principles and the ideas of that book are extraordinary.

I love that book too. John, I must say you've been a pretty good friend to me, so thank you. You're welcome, Ash. Good to talk to you. Likewise. That was an information-packed episode and I hope you got a lot of value out of it. Just to recap on a few of the key points in the episode, John talked about how he uses strong acquisition and retention strategies to increase profitability. One of the biggest mistakes that businesses make is to treat their business like a promotion rather than an ongoing relationship with their customers that they cultivate.

The solution is start by knowing who your customers are, get to really understand them and make an offer, and spend a significant amount of money on advertising, a big mistake that businesses make is they don't spend enough on advertising. If you understand your customers' buying habits and their motivations, you're likely to find out how to create a profitable business pretty quickly. We talked about Google's study in 2009 about the zero moment of truth and how customers now need 18 frames of reference as opposed to something like three or four frames of reference six years ago before they make a purchase decision.

It's very important to have multiple touch points with your customer. If you have seven or eight touch points with your customer, you're 80% more likely to make sales. Price can be a signaling factor and a higher price often does signal higher value, so don't be shy to price your product or service at premium positioning if your product does offer premium value. We talked about price anchoring and how that impacts the customer's perception of pricing. We talked about how Apple, for example, executes on the clear purpose that they have and that is to deliver a spectacular customer experience, but they do so with a lot of clarity.

I hope you found this podcast useful. I certainly did. If you did find it useful, please share it with your friends and please leave a positive review in iTunes. That would be greatly appreciated. Some related podcasts that you might find useful are episode number one with Neil Patel, where we talked about branding and how to make better business decisions, episode number two with James Schramko, where we talked about recurring income. You'll probably enjoy the episodes with Dan Norris, which is episode number 11 and number 12 on startups and content marketing and how he uses content marketing and how he uses content marketing to grow his startup.

I think you'd really enjoy the podcast that I did with Ed O'Keefe. That's episode number 22 called $50 million and counting and podcast number 23, which is on the membership economy with Robbie Baxter and that's on recurring income models.