Recently, I chatted with my old friend, AJ Roberts, an exceptional growth consultant. He is an accomplished marketer in his own right. He is a serial entrepreneur, a podcaster, a speaker, and actually a two-time world-record weightlifter.
AJ first discussed the company he runs called Barbell Business, which is one of the top fitness podcasts on iTunes at the time. They saw how the barbell business would be a great spinoff to work with the listeners of the podcast who owned gyms.
He noted that gym owners like to be coaches. And so, the last thing they ever want to do is sales and marketing. What they taught was: if the owners could pay a fee, they could essentially set them up with a website with the lead magnets, follow-up emails, and conversion mechanisms.
But AJ said that there was another company in the marketplace that’s already built that out on in logic; so, they connected with them. He told his partners at the time that they’re going to say that they want 60%, and they would give them the 40%; and that they own the rights to everything. They agreed and AJ’s team ended up with 150 gyms paying them roughly 100,000 bucks a month!
Some people don’t have the cashflow to do heavy-paid advertising. Word of mouth was okay. But AJ said that with gym owners, it’s a little different when it’s business to business referrals. So what AJ’s team had is this captive audience. It’s a match made in heaven that they had the product and AJ’s team had the audience.
It’s such a valuable service to offer: if you can be the deal maker or the person that puts that together, there’s always going to be a great relationship.
AJ pointed out another factor: you can set those initial deals, but the due diligence needs to be done at a lot deeper level.
I also asked AJ if there are any patterns that he is seeing in their day-to-day workings through their webinars. He noted that most people think that ‘sales and marketing’ when they thought of ‘revenue generation.’ Can we sell more to the same person? Can we upgrade the people we have? Can we increase the value of the customers?
It is a constant process and a pain, because nobody likes customer support. Very rarely would write and be like, “Hey, I just wanted to let you guys know you’re awesome.”
Everybody’s writing would be like, “This doesn’t work well,” “I don’t know how to do this.” And so, he said that being able to bring customer experience into the metrics would matter. Like, how long does a customer stay and what’s the difference between a customer who stays for a year or longer, versus a customer who’s only there for a couple of months?
What’s the difference between a customer who takes the trial and someone who activates their account and pays? How do we get more of them? And for those that don’t, what is it that would’ve made the difference?
AJ also discussed how most businesses nowadays enter into the subscription business. He noted that one doesn’t have to be in the subscription business to have a relationship with the customers beyond the purchase.
You just need to look at the systems that you’ve got in place for retention, and how is it that you can create an experience where people simply don’t want to leave.
With the episode today, we got some powerful take-aways from AJ Roberts. For anyone looking to grow your business, it’s important to have this quality: due diligence about retention and about customer experience.
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