In this episode, I dive into one of the most overlooked strategies for growing a business – client retention. Joined by Megan Huber, a client success and retention expert, we explore why keeping clients is the most profitable marketing strategy and how companies can better focus on client retention, referrals, and renewals.
Megan shares her journey from teaching to coaching and offers practical tips on retaining clients and increasing their lifetime value in your business.
Megan Links:
- https://meganjohnsonhuber.com/
- https://www.instagram.com/meganjhuber?igsh=OXVvODk2eHp6bWYx
- https://meganjohnsonhuber.com/podcast/
Try our passive income calculator: https://bit.ly/3TzqJoJ
TRANSCRIPTS
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Most companies don’t know that their root problem, once you get to a certain level, they just don’t realize they have a retention problem. Who in your company is thinking that every single day? How do we keep every single client here?
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Hello, my fellow Ripples, this is Chris Miles, your cashflow expert in anti Financianal advisor, this show for you. Those that work so stinking hard for your money and you’re now ready for your money to start working harder for you today. You want that freedom and cashflow now, not 30 or 40 years from now, but you want it today so you can live that life that you love with those that you love. But most importantly guys, it’s not just about getting rich, it’s about living a rich life. Because as you’re blessed financially and you prosper, you now have greater capacity to be a blessing and create a ripple effect through the lives of others. That’s what it means to be a riper. Thank you so much for tuning in today and being part of our show. You guys have been binging and sharing, putting us in the top 1% of podcasts all worldwide.
(01:11)
Thank you so much. I could not do this without you guys. As a reminder, guys, if you haven’t done this already, you can go to social media, whether it’s Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, whatever you use, LinkedIn at Money Ripples. You can follow us right there. We always keep things up to speed, especially because there’s always new content and new things that we’d like to teach and give you as value. So be sure to check that out right now. All right guys, so today I’ve got my special guest. I’ve got Megan Huber here today. So excited to have her here because this is somebody that I’ve gone to for my own advice, someone that I’ve come to trust over the last few years as I’ve gotten to know her. Now, if you don’t know who she is, she is like the client success and retention specialist, right? She’s the strategist, the partner that helps you guys make sure you get the best ROI, because let’s be honest guys, the best marketing ROI you can possibly get is not by, especially if you’re a business owner.
(02:02)
It’s not by getting more customers. It’s not through PPC and paid ads and Facebook and promos or even podcasts for that matter. The best thing you can possibly do is be able to make your clients stick with you and love you, and then of course promote you as well. And that’s exactly what I’m talking about with Megan today because so many dollars are going out to waste money. So you try to get new clients, but what about keeping and new your clients happy right now? That’s what she does today, talking about how to create greater profitability, sustainability, and growth in your business right now. Megan, welcome.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
I’m so excited to be here. It’s one of my most favorite topics to geek out on, so I have a feeling we’re going to geek out on it. So let’s go.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Now, I know you’ve done all kinds of coaching and stuff. Heck, you’ve even done athletic coaching and things of that nature. Give us a little bit more about your background and what led you down this path.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Yeah, good question. So I grew up in a really small town in rural North Carolina. The town I grew up in was we have 2000 people in our town, and I always joke, it’s a little bigger now, but I always joke there was a stoplight, a Piggly Wiggly and a Hardee’s. My mom was an educator, she was a career teacher and principal. I go off to college. I got a business management degree. I came home in the summer and I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was one of those people who I changed my major five times when I was in college. I don’t know how I got out in four years. So when I got home, I just turned 22, I moved back home with my parents in this little small town. I had no clue what I wanted to do. I think I was got a job as a manager in training for Jason’s Deli, and I cried every day on the way there and I cried every day on the way home and I was working like 12 hours a day.
(03:48)
And my mom finally looked at me. I think I had been working there for three weeks as a manager in training. And she goes, Megan, she goes, just write a letter. Turn in your letter of resignation. I’ll send you back to school to get your master’s degree. You would be such an amazing teacher. And I was like, parents paying for me. I’m 22. Parents pay for me to go back to school to get a master’s degree in teaching. I don’t know what, I had no clue what I wanted to do. So I started teaching at the high school I graduated from in Pittsburgh, North Carolina. And a cool part of the story is that my mom’s classroom was beside mine. So we taught the same subject in the same department. Our classrooms were beside each other. My mom was a very decorated teacher. She got teacher of the year all the time. She has multiple degrees and certifications. My mother was my mentor the first year I taught and I couldn’t have asked for a better
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Mentor. No pressure of course,
Speaker 1 (04:44):
No pressure. I always say I’m the better teacher than my mom, but she is the one who taught me how to be an incredible teacher. And that’s where I got my start. It was in the classroom and I was the tennis coach for the women’s tennis team. I still play tennis to this day. I was the football athletic trainer. And when Sean and I, my husband had our daughter in 2010, I made the decision not to go back to the classroom, which was kind of a strange decision for me because I was so involved and I was the kind of teacher who the janitors would have to kick me out of the building because they were locking up at seven o’clock. I was a work 70 hours a week, and I did not enjoy being home. I didn’t enjoy being home. I didn’t enjoy not being an innovator and creative and leading people and building.
(05:35)
I like to build things and I like to tell people what to do, and I like to know that I’m contributing to something so much bigger than me. And I just felt like I had lost my identity when I became a mom and I’m home by myself all day with a baby who does nothing. And I really struggled with that. So my husband was a personal trainer. He was already in the coaching space, coaching people, and he finally, I think just was a little fed up with me to be quite honest. And he was like, Megan, I really think you should go work on yourself. You should go do this coaching certification program. So he did it with me. It was one he had already gone through. We were both in this coaching certification program for five months, and at the end I was like, this is what I’m supposed to do for the rest of my life.
(06:19)
This was so similar to what I was doing with high school kids, because with high school kids, you’re more of a mentor facilitator, you’re coaching them. You’re not just standing in front of a classroom teaching them because that age, you can’t get away with being a teacher like that and be good at it. So that is how I got into the coaching space. And I was coaching a lot of brick and mortars in my local network because I grew through networking events and speaking locally, and I was doing very general business coaching. And then I started working for a mentor of mine. I was her director of client success, director of client experience, and I was with her for four years. We built a very large scale coaching company that was close to 10 million a year in revenue. We would have pretty big launches, like 3 million, 3.54 million launches.
(07:09)
And I kind of ran that whole show of the coaching programs. And then I left there at the end of 2016, got back into business for myself, and we all evolve over time. And about two and a half years ago, I realized, I was like, okay, I really wanted to niche myself in a specialty instead of just general business coaching. And I niched myself in client experience, client success, and I tell the story of the teaching because adults aren’t that different from how an 18-year-old is going to function in a learning environment. And when you’re in a learning environment with kids at that age and you’ve got 30 of them all staring at you, you’ve got to figure out within a matter of seconds every single day, the emotional state, the psychological state, the cognitive state that those every single one of those kids is in.
(08:05)
And then you’ve got to adapt and you’ve got to accommodate, and you’ve got to figure out, how do I teach this standardized material to this group of people, but they’re all different. How do I do that? And so much of my perspective and the way I see the coaching and online education space, it is through the customer’s eyes, it’s through the customer’s experience. And I think that’s really special. I think that’s really unique because there’s not that many of us who have that background and now we’re in the business world, but kind of bringing that education piece and perspective to the business world where those two worlds can really collide and support each other.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yeah, I agree. And I don’t know if this was a bold claim for me to make because I was kind of talking to you about this beforehand, but I was kind of saying, really what you do is probably the number one most profitable marketing strategy out there. Would you agree with that or am I off base here?
Speaker 1 (09:03):
I believe so. If you look at the different ways that we can acquire clients, and look, I do want to say this to all the listeners as well when we’re talking about retention, and the greatest thing you could do is take care of your people so they stay with you longer. We’re not saying don’t go get new clients. We’re not saying just squash client acquisition altogether because I’ll get in arguments with people about that because they really do think, so you’re saying don’t do client acquisition. That’s not what we’re saying. But if you look at all the different ways to do client acquisition, all of it is linear. It’s all linear. If you look at the retention, referrals, renewals, reactivations, and you’re really focusing on the center of your circle, which if people who have already bought from you either currently or in the past, that is compounding, especially when you look at the referral side.
(09:58)
It’s a compound effect. It’s the only way, because referrals is a way we’re acquiring. You’re acquiring new clients when you’re playing the referral game, renewals and retention, you’re not acquiring new clients, you’re just keeping the ones that you currently have. They’re both really important. But if we’re just looking at client acquisition, they’re all linear except referrals. That’s more of a compound effect. And I think people also kind of struggle with it because we either assume or we hope or we would like people to refer us, and then it doesn’t happen. And you and I have talked about this a little bit, and I’ve seen this behind the scenes of other people’s businesses where they’ve created referral programs and they have lifers as clients. I mean, their clients don’t leave, but it’s almost like the client isn’t trained how to do it, or they aren’t trained how to spark the conversation, or they’re not trained on who’s the best person to bring in, or it is just not top of mind.
(11:01)
So you almost have to treat it like it’s its own campaign or it’s its own program or campaign within the program, within the service. And I think we’re just so quick to always look at, well, I have to get new people coming in, and the only way to do that is over here, what I’ve been taught how to do. And then we almost just sort of slide referrals off to the side and it’s like, oh, we don’t have time for that. We don’t have time, blah, blah, blah. I’ve heard all the things. I think we just forget that that is such a leverage point for us.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Yeah, it’s true. I know with some of our clients, a lot of ’em, they’re like, well, what’s the best way to refer? Not my financial advisor. How do we do it? I was like, honestly, if you want to know if they’re a really good fit, just send ’em to the podcast. If they can’t stand me on the podcast, they won’t stand us in the coaching either. It’s almost like the best way to filter through because most of our people do come through the podcast, and when we have gotten referrals, usually people are like, they’re in, it’s not even a conversation. It’s so easy when we get those kind of clients.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Okay, I love what you just said, Chris, because you just shared a really good idea, I think, without even realizing it. So this is great for the listeners. Plus I just got off of the last two days. I joined virtually, there were some people in person in a two day, basically two day clarity day for one of my clients. They brought some other consultants in as well. So we had the marketing consultants, the team, because we’re all there. And a large part of the conversation was about marketing. If you look at referrals, we are here to have retention and referral conversation. There is a marketing play to that. It is marketing, but within your existing customer base. So you do have to think a marketer and what you just said about you’re telling your clients, just send ’em to the podcast. I want people to really catch that because what you’re saying, Chris, is though, I think where we can strengthen our referral game and really support our clients and being better referral partners is, yeah, we’ve got to think about it like a campaign, but then we’re the ones who all, we have all the assets, we have all the marketing assets, they don’t have all the marketing assets because they’re ours.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Don’t make them do it.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Don’t make them do it. Don’t make them figure it out. Don’t make them think too hard because none of us are going to do anything that we have to think too hard to do, especially if it’s not for ourselves. I’m sorry, but we’re all a little self-centered human being population. So we were having this conversation yesterday in this VIP clarity experience, and that was one of the things that came up. And so I’ll give another tip. So everybody kind of think about what are the assets that we have that are really great marketing assets that are helping people make the decision for themselves that they want to be in. And one of the things we were talking about is almost like collecting, well, you’re already collecting testimonials from your clients, but organizing them by, okay, if I were in your program, I’m a female who’s in my forties, I’m married and I have one child who’s a teenager.
(14:10)
So if you’ve got a prospect or if your client is somebody who looks like me and is in their forties, has a kid is married, kind of teach me to look for more people like myself or give me some. Or if I’ve got access to people who maybe don’t look just like me and aren’t what I just described, give me some tools, give me some testimonials of the woman or your clients who are in their forties who have kids, or even down to, I used to have blonde hair, but now it’s brown hair. But if I’m in your program and I want to bring some friends in and they have brown hair, give me more testimonials of women who look like that with brown hair because attracts, and if we see, oh, they look like me, they have a, because you’ll hear this too, I don’t know that I would join a business coaching program from a man or a woman who isn’t a parent because you can’t, how can you understand me? So if all I’m seeing are testimonials of people who are single or in their twenties and thirties, I’m going to think, well, that’s not for me. So again, we just want to be really smart about how can we equip our current clients with almost this little marketing journey that we can provide them with, and then they can drip that out to people, but we’ve got to be the ones who strategize that on their behalf and then give it to them. And then you’ve got to keep training them on how to do that really effectively.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Yeah, I remember one marketer would always say, he is the three key words you need to realize when you’re getting people to talk to other people is someone just like you, that kind of thing, who’s just like, you don’t even have to find somebody in left field is like, who’s just like you in this situation or needs this, right? That kind thing.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Exactly. Yeah. I remember, this was so many years ago, our daughter is almost 14, and this was 13, 12, 13 years ago. I had a life insurance agent, and he would schedule a meeting with me every quarter. And what he did was so brilliant. Every quarter, every quarter, he would either come to my house or I’d meet him somewhere for lunch, and at the end of our conversation, he would whip out his yellow legal pad and he would ask me for referrals. And at the beginning I would say, I can’t remember his name now. I would say, Joe, I was like, look, I have so many people in my cell phone, Rolodex, and I’m connected to all these people on LinkedIn, but it’s overwhelming for you to ask me, Hey, who do you know that’s overwhelming to the brain? So this is a really good teachable thing.
(16:47)
I was so overwhelming. Well, I have access to people, but I want to be a good referral partner. Who should I send you? Because I also don’t want to look like a dummy and send, that’s the other thing too. Your clients don’t want to send the wrong people. They’re thinking about that in the back of their mind. So I remember I would think that in my head and I would be like, why? I want to send somebody bad, because then that’s a reflection on me, and I liked him, and so I really wanted to do right by him, and I would say, okay. I was like, this is too overwhelming for me. I said, you got to give me some direction, give me some information. I was like, who makes a really good client for you? What should I be thinking that’s going to trigger the names of three people or something? He would immediately say to me, somebody who just bought a house, somebody who just got married, somebody who just got a divorce, somebody who just had a kid. I was like, oh, well, I just had a kid. And I recently, well, I had been married for a year and a half, but I just had a kid. So I know other women who just had babies. Guess what?
(17:43)
That’s a good, and then he would evolve and change. And I remember he would, maybe two years later, he started saying, I’ve kind of shifted who my ideal client is, and it’s somebody who has a net worth of a million dollars. Well, now I’m looking at my LinkedIn contacts and I’m thinking, well, who am I doing business with? I’m not thinking about the mom who just had a baby. Now, who have I done business with that I could send him to? And then I would ask him, because again, you don’t want to look stupid.
(18:10)
I would say, what do I say to them? Give me, I just want one sentence. Give me one or two sentences of exactly what to say. Also, the kind of person who will overthink it and I’ll get really nervous about like, oh my gosh, what do I say to somebody? And so if you can just feed that to your clients, that’s just going to make it so easy for them. And one other little psychological trick I’ll teach you too, when asking for referrals, remember, you’re talking to somebody’s brain, so ask your clients, can you think of one person who, and so you’re telling the brain, you’re giving the brain an instruction. Just think of one person. It’s so much easier for our brain to think of that one, right, perfect person versus if we’re just like, bring your referrals, send people to my podcast, bring people to my next launch. People aren’t going to bring anybody because it’s too overwhelming to the mind. Yeah,
Speaker 2 (19:05):
So true. Now, before I move on to I think one of the key crux questions for people here as well, let me ask you this. What’s the best way, if someone wants to follow you, contact you, what’s the best way they can do that?
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Oh, follow me.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
I would say that you’re listening to a podcast right now. So if you’re a podcast listener, I have a podcast, it’s called Built to Last, and the large majority, I’d say 85 to 90% of my episodes are about this type of stuff we’re talking about. Now. It’s in the category of everything that happens after the sale of a new customer. So go listen to the podcast. And I’m also on social media. I’m pretty accessible on social media, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Megan J. Huber. Those are going to be the fastest. That’ll be the fastest way to get in touch with me.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Perfect. Awesome. Yeah, we’ll be sure to have that in the show notes as well so people can follow you and follow your podcasts too. So I know we keep bringing up retention, and we were talking about this before we got on the air, and it made me recall, my wife and I buy this really high quality oil, olive oil, and we’ll even drive 45 minutes each way to go to this one store. And our last experience when we went there is there’s a woman there, we’d never seen her there before. And again, we’ve been going there for years. We knew how to cook with it and everything, and we noticed that some of the oils we usually buy weren’t there. And the woman’s like, oh, well, you don’t want to cook with those oils. We’re like, well, we’ve talked to the owner of this company.
(20:37)
And she said, yeah, you cook with these oils. She’s like, oh, no, no, no, you don’t want to do that. So she starts telling us not to do that. Pretty much unsell us on the oils that we buy. And she’s like, no, you buy these other ones. And my wife said, I don’t want those ones. She’s like, well, those are the ones you cook with. You don’t cook with the ones that you want. And so my wife’s like, all right, thanks. And walks out of the store, she goes and gives them a two star review. And here’s even worse, the owner of the store then replies back and said something to the point of, well, I don’t even know if you’re really a true customer or not. And my wife’s saying, I’m the only one with my name. I’m sure you could look it up. I am the only one in your system that has this name. And the fact that you even just didn’t assume that I’m now changing it to one star. So I mean, oh my
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Goodness,
Speaker 2 (21:22):
She could have retained. She has been retaining the customer for really five, six years we’ve been buying these oils and we’ve been buying ’em by the truckloads it seems like. Right? We use ’em daily. And now at this point, my wife’s like, Nope. They’re gone. They’ve lost the customer. And I know we were talking about this before this recording. I know you and I like to really take care of our clients. I have some clients keeping us on retainer for over a decade now. And you were telling me in the coaching industry, retention is a big issue. Let’s talk about that.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Yeah, so I’ve been in the coaching space for 13 years now, and my whole entire entrepreneurial career has been in the coaching space. And when I say coaching, I mean I got started in 2011, so it was very traditional online coaching space, and it’s changed so much over the years, but I still see a lot of the same problems. They’re just exacerbated because we have so many more people who have started coaching businesses. And it’s interesting, I think some of this is just human nature, but I do believe that so much of the outward conversation from a marketing perspective, and now we’re also privy to it a bajillion times a day because of social media. So much of the marketing, at least that I have seen in the very traditional space. And when I say traditional coaching space, I’m talking about like I’m helping people grow a business.
(22:50)
I’m helping people grow a business so they can make more money. And in large part, most of that marketing messages look at how much money I made, look at how much money my company is making, look at the size of our launches. And I even remember when I came back into business for myself in 2017, I was also told to do that by my coaches. You have to share how much money you’re making, you have to share how much you made in your launch. And I would always feel so strange in my heart or in my stomach when I would share that, but I am going to be really honest, I thought I had to to share those things because if I didn’t share those things, why would anybody want to work with me unless they knew I was making all this money? But one of the problems with that is, well, is that top line revenue?
(23:47)
Did they collect all of that? Or is it coming up in payment plans for the next 12 months? Are there business expenses, 65%? Is there a lawsuit behind the scenes? I mean, I’ll be honest, one of the biggest problems I see behind the scenes of coaching companies is there’s lawsuits. One of the biggest problems is legal problems. And I worked somewhere full time. I mean, it happened to us as well. It’s not uncommon that you’re going to get sued when you’re making millions of dollars and you have hundreds and thousands of clients. It kind of comes with the territory. I saw that with principals too. You don’t hear about that. But principals of schools, they get sued all the time. It’s nuts. But there’s a lot of legal problems and there’s a lot of messiness behind the scenes. And that’s not a knock on anybody. It just is what it is. I am no longer shocked. I’m no longer surprised, but again, I’m sharing all of this because so much of what we’ve been bombarded with is the only thing you should be focusing on is client acquisition and marketing and sales at all costs. And it’s sort of like marketing and sales will even come up with the programs that should be offered.
(24:58)
They’ll even come up with what the ascension model should be, and then they’re turning around and they’re looking at your client success division or your product developer, whatever, and they’re like, you just figure it out and you fulfill it.
(25:10)
And then you’ve got these people running around crazy. And so I just think that the conversation, and sometimes I feel like a very lone ranger. Sometimes I feel like I’m just knocking on doors of houses where nobody lives. It’s just not been a conversation. Retention has not been a conversation in the marketplace to the degree that it needs to be. I mean, if you’re in a mastermind and you have to be making millions of dollars to get in it, and the price tag is 50 to a hundred grand, they might be having a retention conversation behind closed doors. It’s probably happening, but it’s not happening anywhere else beyond that. And a lot of people, people even tell me, Megan, I heard you speak somewhere or whatever, and I wanted to reach out to you, but I was so embarrassed to reach out to you because I’m making millions of dollars and I’m talking about making millions of dollars, but my clients don’t stay.
(26:10)
Or I have chargebacks, or I have refund requests, or my clients are only buying one time and then they’re leaving. But the picture, the story they’re telling to the world is everything is amazing and we’re making 7 million a year, but then nobody’s staying. And if your retention is really low, I mean, the worst I’ve ever seen was a company, it was coaching company and their retention was 5% or lower. And I was like, oh my gosh, this company, I give them 12 more months. If they keep doing what they’re doing and their retention is that abysmal, they’re probably going to have to shut their doors in 12 months because at that point before then you are in the red. You are not making money at that point. All you’re doing is you’re just moving your money around and you’re just putting more onto the paid ads.
(27:02)
And a lot of people who have companies that are very large, it’s a paid ad game, and so you’re spending all this money, but then if your clients don’t stay for a certain amount of time, you don’t ever reach the point of profit. You don’t ever profit off that client. It just depends. There’s factors. But yeah, I just think that we haven’t had the conversation about retention. And I believe that because so much of the marketing message we see out there, it is about marketing and client acquisition. And so the business owner has problems in their business, but they’re solving it with more client acquisition, and they’re solving it with more marketing on the front end because they don’t actually realize they have a retention problem. That’s been my biggest learning, Chris, super honest over the last two and a half years of really going all in on consulting in this topic.
(27:56)
That’s been my biggest learning lesson is that most companies don’t know that their root problem, once you get to a certain level, once you get to a certain level, you really have to pay attention to this. They just don’t realize they have a retention problem. They don’t realize they have a client experience problem. They don’t realize it’s a customer journey problem. They still are trying to solve the problem with, let’s just get more clients. Let’s just spend more money. Let’s just go hire a marketing agency and pay them 70 grand to just get more people in. Yeah, I see it all the time.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Oh, yeah, it’s bad. It really is. And that brings up a great point. If you’re that kind of business owner, I mean, you’re always hustling, right? You never stop. You can’t stop because you always have to keep acquiring new customers, burning through them. It’s like a turn and burn system. It’s kind of sick actually when you think about it.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Yeah, it is. And what people don’t like to hear all the rage is scaling. I’ll talk to people who are making six figures a month. So they have figured out how to acquire enough clients, make enough sales, they have setters and closes, they have their marketing, the engine is working. If you’re making 200 grand, 300 grand a month, your engine is working to supply your business with clients. It is working.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
You
Speaker 1 (29:11):
May not always be getting the right people, but you’re getting the people in. But what people get afraid of when they talk to me is they think that when you have this retention conversation and client experience conversation, they think it’s not scalable. And so they think they’re going to make less money, and that’s where they get really scared. And then the other thing that this is just true. You know this because you take really great care of your clients. It’s not cheap. There’s a cost involved with taking care of your clients. There’s a cost involved to client experience. And I don’t mean just buying people gifts, but you have to have, everybody asks yourself this question, especially if you’re making seven figures in your business, can, I mean under seven figures? You don’t need somebody full-time to do this. But if you’re over seven figures, you should have somebody on your team whose sole job is to wake up every single day to think about how do we keep all of our clients here?
(30:08)
Who in your company is thinking that every single day? How do we keep every single client here? And then how do we get every single client to bring another person in? Who in your company is thinking of that every day? You’ve got to have somebody so passionate about that side of your business that they’re literally eating, breathing, sleeping. I mean, that’s what I did when I worked for the company I worked for. That was my metric. How do I keep people here? How do I make people so happy, so satisfied, getting results that they want to stay here and they don’t want to go anywhere else?
Speaker 2 (30:43):
That’s right.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Because a business owner doesn’t have time to think of just that every single day. I get it. You can’t just think that if you’re the ceo, but somebody in your company does.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Somebody has to. Absolutely. That could be for somebody listening to this right now that could be their next new hire that they need or somebody that’s already there that just need to get focused on that one objective, right?
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Yeah, for sure. It can be a game changer for absolute game changer for a company. And that being said, the CEO and the rest of the company has to be on board with that. And that’s the thing that I will also see the bigger the company. I’ll be interviewed by three people before they finally bring me in to consult. It’s like, I’ve got to talk to the CFO, the COO, the CEO, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Everybody’s got to make sure it’s the right move. And oftentimes what I’ll see is that it just depends on the person, but lots of times CEOs come from a marketing and sales background,
(31:45)
So you don’t really have that many CEOs who came from client care or customer service or client experience. You just don’t. And I get it. It makes sense because that person is going to be so focused on marketing and sales because that’s their background and that’s what they know in order for this to really work. I mean, yeah, your next move can be assign somebody to that particular outcome retention, and they’re also going to have a harder time if your whole company isn’t what I call client-centric, meaning your marketing team has to be in communication with your client success team. Your sales team needs to be in communication with your client success team. And oftentimes those three departments are very siloed and there’s no cross communication. And so your marketing and sales team, they don’t even know. Look, I promise you, the person who knows who your ideal client really is, it’s whoever’s working with the clients. They know who your ideal client is better than your marketing team does.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
That’s right.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
They just do because the people working with your clients, they know what kind of person do we need to bring in here, who actually does what we need them to do? Takes responsibility, takes action, and gets results, and they’re successful. Who is that? And then you should be feeding information to your marketing and to your sales team as a client success team. And even sales. It’s like, how many companies is the sales? Let’s just say I’m your salesperson and I’m closing sales. I close the sale, and I usually never talk to that person ever again. So another, we could take this a step further to become client-centric, and you can even compensate your salespeople less on closing the sale and then give them compensation and a bonus based on how long the client they sold actually stays in the fold. That’s another, if we want to be really client centric, how can we make our sales team almost partially responsible for making sure the right people are coming in such that those people are making improvement from making progress, hitting their success milestones, staying in longer, and it’s just also disconnected and disjointed in most companies.
(34:06)
And that would actually solve a lot of problems. And you would just, you’d keep people longer. You’d reactivate old people, alumni, whatever. You’d have more referrals if marketing, sales and client services are all communicating and working together as more of a unit than three separate silos.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
So true. Yeah. Great stuff. Well, Megan, I appreciate you being on here today. I know we would go longer than I usually do on this show, but you have so much good information to give so much good stuff. So I’m definitely going to encourage everybody, check out her built the last podcast for sure, and definitely follow her, Megan J. Huber on social media, whatever social media you use, definitely keep in contact with her and get those good nuggets. So again, thank you so much, Megan.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Yeah, thanks for having me
Speaker 2 (34:55):
And everybody, remember, we talk about money all the time. It’s not just about getting that top line number. It’s about that bottom line too, right? It’s about how do you really show up with integrity, prosper, because you’re helping people and create a ripple effect in their lives, just like I know Megan’s doing as well. So guys, go and make it a wonderful and prosperous week. We’ll see you later.