The Secret to Eliminating Rejection in 3 Easy Steps

How do you get first-time buyers to buy a second time?

I’m not talking about an up-sell or cross-sell during the first transaction. I’m talking about getting your current customers who’ve bought from you once to come back and buy a second time and again and again.

How do you do that?

The whole point of studying the customer experience is to learn and understand customer valuation over time. What does that mean?

Being in business is not just about acquiring new customers. As an entrepreneur you have to develop the skill of retaining those customers for life.

It sounds like a tall order. It’s easier to focus on getting new eyeballs, new followers, new blood, new feet in the door. But guess what?

Customer Acquisition costs a lot of money.

In addition to the costs of keeping your business going: the overhead, labor, etc., you have to spend a lot of money and time on getting customers.

It costs more money to get new customers than it does to retain existing ones.

Return and on-going customers cost little to no money while bringing in much of your profit.

So studying the customer experience is imperative to the valuation of your business and your customers.

It is their experience customers return to experience again.

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What is Product Consumption Theory?

Studying the customer experience is the heart and soul of Product Consumption Theory. And it’s this study that has helped me retain a loyal client base for the last 15 years.

PCT is the way the customer views their experience with you from the moment they see your ad or see you on stage or read one of your tweets. It’s their first impression of you.

But it’s more than that. It’s the entire experience from start to finish. But hopefully there is no finish. Hopefully you’re making such good impressions along the way that they become a customer or client for life, the life of your business.

Product Consumption Theory is the study of how a customer views, consumes and comes back for your product or service. It’s the study of how to create multi-buyers out of single buyers.

You don’t have to spend marketing dollars on a repeat buyer. That repeat buyer already knows, likes and trusts you so you’ve collapsed the sales cycle. That is a powerful thing in business, probably the most powerful.

Turn First-Time Offenders Into Lifers

You know how I turn customers into clients? I give them the client experience before they become clients.

I have a lot of products. The most profitable part of my business is my coaching and consulting roster. These are premium clients that sign up for on-going consulting or long-term coaching.

How do I turn the people who buy my products one time, or maybe even a few times, into these consulting and coaching clients?

I give them the client experience.

When, or even before, they decide they are interested in these services they go through an enrollment process. This process pampers them to pieces. There is no hard-selling in my organization.

Pampering vs. Pimping

This is a phrase I came up with to distinguish between hard-selling and giving a prospect the client experience.

Rather than trying really hard to get your customer to buy something and risk turning them off, just give them the experience and the room to decide.

People hate to be sold, but they love to buy.

My friend Jeffrey Gitomer said that to me and I always use it as a compass for the pampering paradigm I use with each of my new clients.

If you’re interested in seeing what this process looks like Click Here to experience it first hand.

We’re not going to breakdown what a premium sales funnel looks like here. I’ve boiled the process down to 3 essential features that every premium sales funnel must have to properly pamper premium candidates.

If you’re in the process of creating a premium sales funnel or need to tweak what you already have make sure to include these indispensable key ingredients.

Why?

Give them an experience they won’t forget. And it will keep them coming back for more.

3 Indispensable Features for Premium Enrollment

These 3 features of my premium sales funnel DEFINE the customer experience.

Without these the funnel collapses.

Without these there’s no there there. There’s no heart and no soul.

1. Pre-Qualification

It’s one thing to walk up to someone cold and say “buy my $20 product.” Right?

It’s pretty easy, it may not be comfortable for some people but that’s the selling process and that’s about 80% of the market.

“Buy this piece of luggage for $200.”

“Looking for a dog bed? I’ve got a great one for $45.”

“Need a stapler? This one’s perfect and it’s only 15 bucks!”

Ok, so that’s selling and that’s an everyday experience.

You don’t walk up to Joe Schmo and say, “Buy my $10,000. coaching program,” or even your $1000 premium service. Joe runs the other direction. He doesn’t know, like or trust you.

How do you eliminate rejection at the premium client level?

You pre-qualify your prospects.

What does that mean?

My premium sales funnel is designed to pre-qualify all of the people who are interested in my services at this level.

And pre-qualification is the essence of the customer experience. It’s a process of discovery that looks a lot like what it’ll be like to work with me as a client.

So we take them through a series of interviews to discover and define their Point A and Point B: where they are now and where they want to go.

And we do one other thing. We find out where they’re stuck. We start working with them right away and give them an expert analysis of where they’re at and why they can’t or haven’t moved forward yet.

That’s huge. You could walk away with some life-changing info if you stop there. But we continue. We walk them through a strategic process designed to instill two emotions, hope and confidence.

You, of course, want to instill them with hope that there is a Point B. There is a goal and we will reach it.

Then you instill them with confidence that they can reach Point B. Not only does Point B exist but it exists for them. Together you will create a road map to get to Point B and you will get there together.

That is the Pre-qualification process: finding out where they’re stuck and instilling them with hope and confidence through a series of interviews and strategic questioning.

The 80/20 Rule.

I follow the Pareto Principle during the qualification process.

I qualify 80% of the time and I sell 20% of the time. I only ‘sell’ to a premium prospect at the very end. The whole rest of the time is spent making sure that we’re right for them and they’re right for our programs. Capeesh?

Following this rule takes the ‘selling’ out of the selling. I don’t have to worry about selling if I’m focused on my prospect as if they’re my client.

And that way they get an understanding of what it’s like to be pampered and coached by me and my team.

2. Dis-Qualification

I would love to bring in everyone that goes through this process but that’s not realistic. Some people aren’t ready.

They may not be financially ready, or emotionally ready; they may be too scared to take a risk. They may be too afraid of success right now, they may be overwhelmed with how big their company could really become, etc.

There are some fundamental and powerful reasons why someone is not ready to work with me at this level. When you work with me at this level I guarantee you will go through a lot. And you and your company will change dramatically.

You hire me to discover the mechanisms of success in your market.

And you find out what they are.

Some people aren’t ready to find out. And that’s totally ok. The door is always open.

But instead of wasting 6 months of my life discovering that slowly and getting entangled in someone’s issues I discover that during the pre-qualification process.

The pre-qualification process entails certain benchmarks. If you don’t pass these benchmarks you do not pass go and you do not collect $200.

You get dis-qualified.

You do that by letting them convince you that they’re a right fit for your program. Make sure in your premium sales funnel or your intake process that you have disqualification markers in place. This is extremely important because you don’t want to end up with a “problem child” client down the line.

And you don’t want to lead people on. You want to set people up for success and you want to manage their expectations. These same two principles are vitally important for any customer experience, no matter the dollar amount.

This is the essence of ethical influence in marketing

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3. Indoctrination

So we’re almost finished with the process. Each prospect has gone through a series of smaller and smaller hoops.

They’ve been pre-qualified and they’ve been disqualified from the programs that aren’t right for them or from the process altogether. 

Pre-qualifying is about setting someone up for success and managing their expectations of the product.

Indoctrination is formally introducing them to what is expected of them.

This is so important because I’m not the one who is going to create their success. They are.

They’re going to create their own success. I’m going to provide the blueprint, the road map. But they’ve got to do the work.

You don’t give someone $10,000 and then walk away and check back in 6 months. You don’t even do that with a financial planner unless you’re Nicholas Cage.

Anyhoo…

People need to understand what they’re getting into with you. But that may be very overwhelming and scary even if they qualify, even if they pass all the tests.

So how do you allay their fears, prep them for success and let them know what is expected of them?

You indoctrinate them. And you do it with three tools:

• a new vocabulary
• a new community
• a new role model

Make a note here that you don’t do this after they’ve started your program. You indoctrinate them before their first pre-training or training. This is the first step.

Introduce them to your community, the way you talk to each other in your community and the role models they’re expected to follow and study.

You also introduce them to the details of what their days will look like; how they’re expected to spend their time; what those time requirements are and who to talk to if they run into trouble.

And the reason you give them this picture of what life will be like under your tutelage is because if they don’t want to buy into it they need to get off the train now.

I go one step further. I tell them what their life will be like and then I ask them to tell it back to me and how they will make this work. They have to figure out which habits and time-wasters they’re going to give up to work with me.

Indoctrination is essential to success. Don’t skip it and don’t lump it into a welcome packet.

The Wrap Up

The Customer Experience needs to be studied at every level of product consumption including the premium client funnel.

And these 3 ingredients are the cornerstones of a successful premium client experience. But they’re also the secret ingredients for eliminating rejection and getting to ‘yes’ faster.

I have 13 specific questions I ask during pre-qualification. Want to know what they are? Click Here to get these 13 questions. They are the very questions I use to discover why and where a premium client prospect is stuck; why they can’t get to Point B.

Do you pre-qualify your premium client prospects?

Do you have a premium client sales funnel?

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