Congruence: The Secret Weapon to Maximizing Conversion | Ep 769
8 Nov 2024 · 10 min
In this solo podcast episode, the host argues that the single most powerful lever for increasing revenue is "congruence" – the practice of keeping the prospect’s experience perfectly aligned from the first ad impression through landing pages, thank‑you pages, sales calls, and onboarding. He explains how most businesses suffer leaks at handoff points between ads, copy, sales reps, and platforms, often because the messaging or promised benefit changes, causing prospects to lose the thread of why they engaged. The host outlines a concrete click‑journey map (ad → landing page → opt‑in → thank‑you → scheduling → sales call → onboarding) and demonstrates how to make each step echo the same core benefit. Practical tactics include split‑testing headlines to find the most resonant benefit phrase, mirroring that phrase in ad copy, landing headlines, thank‑you copy, and call scripts, and repeatedly restating the prospect’s original reason for engagement. He ties this to the psychological principle of commitment and consistency bias, noting that reminding prospects of their prior actions reinforces their self‑image as consistent decision‑makers. The episode provides a step‑by‑step audit checklist for listeners to walk through their own click journey, promising typical revenue lifts of around 28% (with potential for 15‑30% or more) and illustrating how such lifts can double profit margins without extra cost. The host closes with a call‑to‑action for listeners to try the audit, share feedback on the audio‑first format, and engage on social platforms.
Chapters
Hey guys, welcome back to the game. We talk about making that sweet cheddar and taking it home with the bacon and making that bread, taking home the lettuce, which, by the way, now sounds like a delicious sandwich. But today I want to talk about something that is very serious, unlike sandwiches, that will make you money, which is a throughline. So when we buy businesses, one of the easiest uplifts that we can create is following the click journey, which is following the path from prospect to customer. And as crazy as this sounds, you probably haven't done yours. In 6 months or more. And the crazy thing is, is that you've changed like 3 or 4 things in that process during that time period, but you haven't looked at how different it is for the prospect. And although you may have improved some things, you're still leaving money on the table. The big word for this is congruence. And so you can almost always— I don't even say almost always. I'm going to say always. I'm going to say I'm going to— I'm going to be bold. I'm going to be bold. You can always increase how much money you make by making everything from the beginning to the end congruent. One of the issues with businesses is that you have handoffs between departments, handoffs between employees, handoffs between platforms and technology. And so there's many transition points for a prospect to become a customer and even a customer to become a repeat purchaser. With these handoff points, the worst version of this is that there is no handoff and the person just falls through the cracks. This is, you know, level zero or below zero. And this is where honestly, I would say the vast majority of people are. How many times you called a business or you email them and they just never email you back? You're like, well, that sucked. And that business owner is like, man, I think, I think my market's too small. It's like, do you even— you don't respond to leads. All right. Anyways, so I want to walk you through what this kind of journey might look like hypothetically. All right. So let's say that someone sees an ad and you say, hey, I'm going to decrease your page load times, okay? And that's going to increase how many leads you get. Now they click the ad and then on the landing page you say, I'm going to help you get more leads. But if the ad said, I'm going to help you decrease your page load times, and then you have the benefit of that thing as the next page, a certain percentage of people are not going to make the tie. They're not going to see how those things are the same. And so you will lose a certain percentage of people who hit the first thing that don't convert on the second. Now, the surefire way to improve the conversion of that landing page is to simply match it to what the ad says. Now, I'll give you a little hack on this. So it's easier, in my opinion, to test headline split tests with larger amounts of data for your audience than sometimes it is for ads, 'cause ads become more varied. What I have found to be an effective way of doing this is that I split test my headlines for the main benefits, and then the hooks in my ads will change plenty, but the meat of my ad will more or less remain the same because that's the benefit that people see from whatever it is that I sell. And so hook is changing, meat is the same, and that meat now matches The headline, because I tested that that specific word or phrase or combination of words is the thing that the most people like. Once I have the person who's opted in, what is the thank you page gonna be? Guess what? It's gonna be the same benefit that we just said in the headline. To get that headline, here's the next step. To get that benefit, here's what you have to do. And then, and here's where people get lost again, they schedule or they book or they take the next step. And then guess what happens on the setting call or the closing call? The first person they talk to after that. In the beginning of the call, relate back what they have done to that point to say that they are in the right place. This is congruence. So what they saw as a benefit of the ad, why they opted in. And now on the beginning of the call, we're going to re-mention, we're going to recap their journey so that they're like, oh, that is why I did it. And so think about this as a hypothetical, 100%. So let's say at the beginning, 100% of people click for this reason. Every time you move them along this process and you don't remind them of that reason, Some of that 100% you will leak or you will lose. And so I think of this visually as a pipeline. This is just like an analogy for this. And so you've got water flowing in, which is the traffic, which is the demand, which is the prospects, right? And that each connection point of the piping is where you have a handoff or transition between systems, between people, and you have to remind them what they just did or what they just came through. Now it doesn't just stop at the sale. Once you have the sale completed, guess what happens next? They're gonna get onboarded. And so when your customer success person gets on the phone with them, What are they gonna say? They're gonna say, hey, I know that you clicked on this thing and you got this stuff and you talked to John and he said this is the main thing. And you recap that journey and you recap the benefit, which is the original benefit that they opted in for. The thing is, is that each of these opportunities, or each of these touchpoints, is an opportunity to either dilute the customer's interest or reaffirm or reinforce the reason they did this to begin with. It's almost like you wanna recap their entire pain journey every time because it reminds them why they're here. Because most businesses have this crazy assumption, myself included, that everyone is thinking about their business all the time, that their prospects are like, man, I can't wait for that appointment I have on Monday with that sales guy from so-and-so. No, they're busy. They forget. They have, you know, 10,000 marketing messages going to them a day. Their boyfriend breaks up with them. Their employees are yelling at them. Their customers hate them. Whatever it is, right? They've got 100 things going on. And so simply reminding them of why they're here creates a through line from beginning to end. And I can't tell you the amount of times that I've done this. And it's one of those no duh things. But the thing is, at least that I found, and I've said this before, but being advanced is never not doing the basics. And so at scale, it's just being able to say that you do the basics every time, everywhere. And so it's like, of course we need to follow up with our leads, but guess what the follow-up is about? The thing they opted in for. And we restate that benefit over and over again because they told us that's what they wanted. And so it's like we have this answer, we have this cheat code. They've already said, hey, by the way, this is what I want. But most businesses are like, hey, here's this thing that you didn't say you wanted. And they think it's surprise and delight or they think it's translating it. But all they're doing is saying, yeah, but that's— and all of a sudden you find yourself on these sales calls. The person's like, nah, I think I'm good. And you're like, no, no, no, but like, this thing's amazing. And they're like, yeah, I'm sure it is, but I think, I think I'm good. But it's because that's not what they signed up for. The cool thing is, is that we have this inherent advantage. And this is like, I feel like every business owner, especially salespeople, forget this. You have a forever one-sided advantage when it comes to talking to a prospect, which is that they moved first because fundamentally them picking up the call and then say, like, the first thing they do when they said they have time or they said they have the problem, they have now indicated interest. At that point, you have a forever advantage. Now, that is in the coldest of situations. But if someone opens up your email from your cold outreach, they have taken a step to engage. If someone likes or comments on your post, they have taken a step to engage. If they click on your link, if they opt into your site, if they schedule a call, all of those are indications of interest. And so because they have done that, we can always relate back. So it's those one-sided things like, oh no, no, I'm not, I'm not saying you need anything. I'm just telling you what you already did. And so what happens is you have commitment and consistency bias, which means that the person— people like to be perceived as consistent. It's how we slam politicians, which by the way, I think it's silly. It's like, oh yeah, I learned this thing when I was 7, which means I can never change my mind again. I'm not even going to get into the bias. But the point is, is it exists. And people do prefer to be seen as consistent people who stick with their commitments. And so when you remind them— and this is why congruence is so effective— is that when you remind them of what they already did, it's, it's you not saying, hey, I think you'll like this. It's saying, you already said you'd like this. This is me just trying to deliver on what you asked for. You called me. You responded to my message. You took action on my post. You made a comment. You DM'd me back. So I'm not the one pursuing you here. And so forever keeping that one thing front and center keeps you in the driver's seat in the conversation with the prospect and keeps the message clean from click to close to ascension. My ask for you is to number one, actually walk through the click journey for your customers. Actually look at the emails that you've been sending. Actually, Click on the link on your profile. Actually opt in on your site. Actually click an ad. And then look at the follow-up emails that you get. Look at the text that you get. Think about them within the context of the thing that you just saw. And what you will find so many times is the crazy areas of opportunity for improvement because all you have to do is just keep it consistent. And so I promise you, if you do this little audit, you can, in a very real way, if you, like, imagine you have 6 steps. In your process from they clicked, they opted in, they schedule, they show, they close. There's 5 steps. So the result of that is a 28% improvement. And you're like, oh, 28% improvement. Well, that improvement is going to increase revenue with no added cost. And if you run a, call it, 25% margin business, or let's keep it simple. Let's say you run a 28% margin business, then you could veritably double your profit, even with that 28% increase in revenue. And so even though it is just 28— just 28%, by the way, Adam Hernandez told me this. He said, never put just in front of money. So it's never say it's just $10, it's just whatever. He's like, money's money. Most of you will find oftentimes significantly more than a 5% improvement. You'll find 15, 25s. And when you pick up those quarters in 4 or 5 places, you don't have a 25% improvement. Sometimes you get a double or a triple. And these are some of the things that we do to organically grow a business that just take the attention span to walk through the process and make sure that everyone is aligned. And specifically the first part of every script, whether it's email, whether it's a phone call, whether it's onboarding, all mirror what just happened. So with that being said, I appreciate you guys taking the time and hopefully this podcast gave you a higher return on your time than what you could have done otherwise. I promise you, if you do that audit, you will make more money. And if this audio-first style podcast is something that you enjoy over the more structured notated versions that we have, kind of YouTube, YouTube versions, let me know in the comments if you're on Spotify. And if you're on an iPhone, just screenshot it, tag me on Ziggram, and I will know that you don't hate this. And if you do hate this, you know, just stay silent like a lurker in the darkness, smoking your cigarettes. That's right, you cigarette smokers. Have a good one. See you in the next one. Bye.