EP 53 | Why You're LOSING CLIENTS and How to Fix It

execute on these things starting in January. So in the middle of all of that, what I also do as like a side part of my job. But I think that this is going to resonate with most of you because, yes, annual planning is like the main priority to of what I need to get accomplished over the next about week and a half. However, then shit happens. Then I go on to our website and a link is broken. Or I try to subscribe to something and it doesn't work. Or a client had an experience that they needed to

get resolved. This actually came up for me over the weekend because just like you, I invest in myself from a development standpoint. And so I had signed up. I finally like everything fricking worked for this individual's marketing campaign. I saw an ad, I looked on Instagram, I got more information about this event. It was a three day event. I was so excited about it. I dabbled for maybe like five minutes. And then I saw another ad and I was like, okay, I'm just going to buy this event.

It was like a $500, three day virtual conference. I bought this on Saturday morning, and the event started at like 10 a.m. on Saturday. I bought at 6 a.m. event started at 10 a.m. I never received my login for the event here. I had just spent, I had. Finally, I've stocked this company and this person for like two years and never made a purchase. I finally made the

decision think about me as a customer. I finally made the decision to move forward and to go to this event, and I was interested in some of the offerings that they had. Everything finally worked. It's a business owner's dream to make this happen. I sign up at 6:00 and I never receive my login. Never received it. I still, it's four days later, still haven't received the login. I emailed them one hour into the event. A very nice email. Hey, I know I'm sure things are stressful because we run

virtual events. I know things are stressful, I know things are stressful, but I'm, you know, looking forward to being able to get the access link. Can I send it or can you send it over to me? I didn't hear anything back later that night. Then I go back on there, I'm like, hey! And I'm sure day one was great. Wish I could have seen it. Could you send me the login so that I can watch it and get caught up here again? We're four days out and I still haven't received this. I paid $500 for it.

It was the second to the top tier. The top tier would have been me being in person, which I couldn't have done. But I am a qualified buyer. They have been. I am a target audience and their business operations failed me. Now am I going to be, you know, pissed off and upset and write horrible reviews? No, I will never be that person. However, when things happen like this, all of a sudden it makes me think. I wonder what type of experiences our clients are having that are

like that. And I want to start with a mindset thing around this, because this is what I can promise you. I have certainty that even though we try to check every detail, and even though we coordinate things and have meetings about stuff, I am certain that there are things that fall through the cracks in our organization. And that

is okay because we are moving at light speed. But if I'm not willing to ask the question initially of man, I wonder what's going wrong, and then have a framework for how I figure out what's going wrong, what's the first thing I should focus on versus things that maybe aren't as important, but still should be touched at some point?

Then I'm lost as a business owner as to how to fix that, because what I don't want to do is spend all of this money in marketing and think that nobody's interested in my product, and then just give up, because the operations wouldn't actually support what all of the great idea and creativity was that went into it. And so today, I really want to talk to you about why you're losing clients and how to put a framework in place in order to solve this. Because you work

really hard to make your business what it is. And to the extent that you don't have this in place, what I what I know is that if you don't feel confident about the structure, you're not going to be willing to confront the difficult things that are taking place

in your business. If all of it just feels random, and you have this client that has this request and another client over here and your team member, you know that they're not handling certain things, but you don't have a plan in place for when you're going to be handling that. You're not going to ever figure out how to coordinate this effort to make it what you're actually wanting, which is to fulfill your brand promise, whatever that is.

For us, our brand promise is to help our clients achieve their personal, professional and financial goals through the growth of their businesses. So every single touchpoint that I'm about to go through has to be followed through with that lens. Is this thing helping our clients achieve their goals? If it's not helping them achieve their goals, then we're not

going to do it. And so as you think about your own customer journey, what I want you to be thinking with is what is the brand promise that you say? Maybe if you're a dental practice, you deliver the highest quality patient experience and make people feel comfortable in a

situation that they're normally terrified of. Okay. So then as I'm looking at the greeting process or I'm looking at the form intake, or I'm looking at the language on the website, how am I using that brand promise that framework to say, oh, this form looks like every other dental form. Well, it really shouldn't look like every other dental form if I'm different, because I care that the patient is likely scared. So what way can I make

that less scary? Maybe instead of it being white with like those three triplicate I think is what it's called. Maybe instead of having it be like a triplicate, you could put some imagery on there of people who are happy, or you could make it a different color or the phrasing, instead of it saying client intake form. It's like not to be cheesy, but like client happiness form or client

something like whatever fits with your brand. And I don't know what your brand is, but I know what our brand is, and I know how I think about these touchpoints, and hopefully these will give you some ideas as to how you can take this model and mimic it, but make slight deviations based on how you talk to your customers and what you're ultimately looking to do. So first place to start with mapping out your client journey. I like to think of this on like this linear, almost

like a timeline. So you're thinking with the very first interactions that your client has all the way through the timeline of ideally them becoming an advocate of your business, like them going from hearing about what you do to actually making the decision to purchase, to being onboarded with your product and service, to maybe buying a second or a third, hopefully buying a second or a third. And if you don't have a second or third, how do

you get them to. And then on the tail end, how do you get them to become advocates and referrals and get testimonials? So as you think about those as like these major buckets in your organization, I went through this big project. Gosh, when was that? It must have been 20, 2017. I went through this big project for our dental company for all of the touchpoints and the process, the framework that I'm going to introduce you to now is slightly different from that. But I'm marrying the best

of both worlds. Back then, I used to think of the first bucket as being introduced to the business. Like how do you introduce a client through a website? They might hear about you through social media, through and get granular with social media, because the YouTube introduction is very different than TikTok introduction, which is going to be different

than Instagram or Facebook. How else could they hear about you? Maybe, uh, a sign outside your your business is vibrant and that's how clients are knowing, oh, that storage unit is right there. Or this new biotech company just popped up here. So all of these different touch points are literal touch points of your brand promise or who you are. That's how a client hears about you. So what are the processes

around each one of those things? In episode 33, I go deep into how you actually document processes, but this is the overarching framework of where to start with your process documentation. So if I'm thinking of Introduce Me or how a client is introduced, the way that I now talk about this instead of an introduction, I use the word awareness. So like what are every single awareness touchpoint in your business. So your first bucket on like this

linear timeline like awareness would be the starting point. And then underneath it you would have bucketed all of these individual things. There could be as few as I would. I would say you have at least eight ways that somebody could have awareness about you word of mouth referrals, all of the social media platforms, your website, some of you might have 20, some of you might have 30. The more awareness touchpoints you have, the more clarity you need to have as to where you're driving traffic to

and why. Certain people are going into certain places, which will then help you set up the next touchpoint consideration. So awareness first bucket. Second bucket consideration in the consideration phase. What is every client touchpoint when somebody is considering making a purchase with you? So for me, with this event that I just purchased my consideration, those touch points would have been the sequential ads that they continued to send me. If they would have just sent one ad I wouldn't

have purchased. I didn't make the decision at that point. If they would have only been posting for social media to social media on Instagram, I would have not been re-engaged with them when on YouTube when I was on YouTube. But they did do YouTube. So these consideration touchpoints have to be mapped out to say, okay, I first am aware of the brand over here, but then I'm now in this second phase as a client as to to be considering. So when a client is in this consideration,

what things do you want them experiencing? Do you want them to be receiving emails? Do you want them to be ads? Do you want them to see you on stories? Do you? If your sales cycle is more so on a phone, what does the follow up process look like during that consideration time frame? Now, ideally, the customer cycle does not end during consideration, and you have to be good stewards of keeping the consideration alive. If they don't say yes the first time and the reality is, very

few people say yes the first time. So knowing that this consideration phase is something that you have to build out all of a sudden makes you and your sales team feel more confident because, hey, nobody buys on the first time and that's okay. We're going to continue to follow up because we know that our product is the right product. Once they move out of consideration, they move into the decision. So think about this. I made this decision. I'm going to give two examples. The one that failed

miserably over this last week. And then in Cartoon Ventures, what we do around the decision making process. So once I've made the decision, I have put my credit card information in. I have received an email. In the email that I received, it gave me three blanket options because they didn't think about the client journey. They gave me option. Option number one, if you purchased a workbook, you will find a link in the below section for you to get access to your workbook. I didn't buy a workbook

if you bought an online course. Uh, your course credentials will be sent in a separate email. I didn't buy an online course. If you bought a live event ticket, you will be receiving your notification within the next. I think it said 12 hours. I'm like, okay, I gave it 12 hours. The one smart thing that they did do is in that event piece, they gave me an email address. If you have any issues getting your event ticket, then email hello at whatever the site was called. Well

then I emailed that. So that was a good client touch point because they know in their process as they're engineering this, they know, hey, wait a second, people might not get their tickets. So where do they go? Okay, great. They're going to they're going to put that person or they're going to put that email there. However, if you give people the option to email somebody or to give you a phone call, what then do you have to plan for to have somebody answer the fricking email or

pick up the phone? Like it's not good enough just to have an email that says, oh, send an email because it's still not handled at that point. Now, for this company, they should have just put in the checklist. Hey, when we have an event, we have somebody checking the email for the first five hours of the event in case we get any last minute sales or think about this.

I'm getting really technical on this one, but they shouldn't have continued to run ads for an event if they actually didn't want me to purchase it the morning of. Like if they're like, you know, we cannot take people past, uh, Thursday at 2:00 because our system needs XYZ amount of time in order to get them properly registered. That's fine. But then kill the ad spend because now you have a client who did purchase it based off an ad that was run thinking that I could purchase it when

really the operations were shut off. You're starting to get this clicking when it comes to your client journey. Like how do you actually want the journey and how do how do you want it to unfold? But then how do you want to properly set up your operations in order to fulfill upon the journey that you have very intentionally created? So that's one type of decision making process. Another type of decision making. Maybe you have contracts that

you have people sign. I've been publishing a book, and the book publisher that I moved forward with sent me this contract. But then they were quirky in the way that they put the contract together, and they acknowledged that a lot of publishers do this wrong because they put language in that nobody understands and take the rights of the book owner or the book writer. And so by them calling that out, that actually made me trust them more.

I don't want to be taken advantage of as somebody who's writing a book and they know that that's a problem. So in their contract, they're addressing what those problems are and making me move forward in wanting to refer people, which goes later into the client life cycle. But you have to be thinking about that decision making point as

how do you double down on the trust and the confidence? Well, you look at the things that you have in front of them, the payment processing, the contracts, any sort of materials that you're giving as literal touch points to enhance what they're about to experience in the service touch point. So the next bucket being the services component. Now services

depending on your business model can entirely vary. An e-comm business is going to have a smaller services bucket, potentially because it doesn't need to be broken out into a long client journey. It's the fulfillment of whatever somebody has purchased. Not that it's not important, but it's not going to need to. Like let's say with Cartoon Ventures, we have

a full onboarding process as part of the services. Then we have an ongoing services, part of the services, and then we have an onboarding, because some clients might choose to not continue to move forward through onboarding, uh, ongoing and, you know, continue down. So we have to know what if somebody quits? What is the process for that? Are we pissed off? Are we angry or are we happy that they joined us and want to make sure that

that relationship moves forward? If you don't have these things documented as you're hiring brand new team members and bringing them into the environment, as you scale and grow, you're really going to be challenged with being able to have

the continuity of that brand promise. Because if back to the dental office example, if you want people to feel comfortable, but heaven forbid a hygienist makes somebody feel very uncomfortable and something actually goes wrong, potentially during the cleaning, and they experience a lot of pain, well, you could be upset with the patient that they experience pain and decided

to go somewhere else. No. But in that moment, you might be frustrated that that's what took place, and they might have a bad experience when the client is trying to or the patient is trying to go to another dental practice. So as you're thinking about okay services, it's yes, how somebody starts to engage with the service once they've made the decision, like what are those first initial touch points. But then also if something goes wrong, how are we

handling it? How are we addressing it? What are we doing to confront it? In an ideal scene, after the services bucket takes place, what you might find about your client journey is you only have 1 or 2 products for people to be able to engage with, and then the client cycle drops off. Well, your business should have a continuous stream of things that you're offering your clients

to be able to solve their problems. Because if you've been able to solve 1 or 2 problems, why can't you solve 3 or 4 or 5 or 20 if you're not quite there yet and you're like, man, I'm just starting to get my first couple of clients and I'm not quite ready to start adding additional pieces. You should be focusing on this final bucket, which the final bucket is advocacy. So how do you get those clients who have bought one thing, or maybe two things, to

turn into advocates of your brand? What are you asking for? Are you saying you want a video testimonial and when they send it to you, do you send them chocolates that are branded to you? Or if they're if you ask them to refer a friend, do they get $10 off their next service, whatever that looks like for your business? You have to be thinking with each individual point under advocacy. It shouldn't just be 1 or 2 ways. There should be 15 or 20 different ways that a client could

advocate for you. Maybe they send their kid to intern with your organization. That is a form of advocacy. I really think of it almost visually, like an org chart where these top line, like the timeline is at the is at the very top, and all of these touchpoints

just cascade down. And as you're going through and trying to navigate which things to start with and which things, maybe somebody else could start doing process documentation around or which pieces you need to add in order to grow this org chart, like Client Journey, will take you to where there are issues and where there might not be

issues today. But in order to scale and grow, you're going to need to bolt on an additional product or service that ties into how somebody is aware of you, but that ultimately will help get you to the growth goals that you have. This is all tying back around to annual planning, because if we think about the client journey as it is today and today's state, and let's say your business is doing 2 million in revenue, okay. With this client journey, our ability to hit financial targets

is 2 million. Well, if I'm at maximum capacity at 2 million with this client journey, but my goals are to have a $5 million business. What additional services do I need to add? How much more spend do I need to create on the awareness side, all of a sudden you get to visually see this almost like levers. You get to pull levers into the business to be able to add things on and see if this works. And if it doesn't work, remove it. But you still have the core of the business of how the client

is moving from point to point. And ultimately when you have issues like the issue that I ran into over this weekend, I don't want the person to be upset at their team for missing an email like that. The intention is not, oh, clients are pissed off and I would never want any business owner to feel completely overwhelmed because I had a bad experience with a tiny little

touch point, because that's all it is. But the tiniest touch points can lead to, hey, I'm likely going to ask for a refund because I wasn't able to see the event and I didn't get access to any of it. So $500 is removed from the revenue that they generated, and it's something that's so small as answering the email

on the day of an event. So as those things happen, my greatest hope is that instead of being irritated or frustrated, sure, it's $500 lost, but ideally that gains this individual thousands, if not tens of thousands, hopefully hundreds of thousands in the future as they're able to scale and grow because they have that piece handled, and then they can go on to adding bigger and better things and more courses and and feel really confident in the way that the

client cycle and the client life cycle is progressing and adding value to their clients. With that, I am very passionate about all of this and mapping and really helping people understand, okay, what leverage points are in the business that maybe could be turned on or heightened or slowed down a little bit in order to be able to really hit their goals and to scale with their businesses. So at the ten x 360, this is something that I just go crazy over, like I am at lunch

helping people map out their client journeys. I would love to see you at a ten x 360 and be able to help you map these things out so you don't miss out on lost revenue. With that, go to Cardone ventures.com/events to attend our next Ten-x 360. And I cannot wait to see you on the next Work Woman podcast.