Maximizing Referrals & Long-Term Customer Retention

In the world of info marketing, a lot of business owners focus so much on getting customers, they miss the most important part, which is keeping those customers for life. Hey there, everybody. Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. In today's episode, we get to listen to Shawn Buck. Shawn co-authored No BS Guide to Maximum Referrals and Customer Retention with Dan Kennedy. And today we're going to talk about how deadly an unchecked turnover rate can actually be to your business. Now, Sean's going to share with you a 3-step formula that's going to help keep your customers for life, as well as share his own strategies for getting customers to refer their friends and colleagues back to you, not only creating customers for life, but a never-ending supply as well. Let's jump in.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.

The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.

They're not really lessons. Kind of laws that you live by.

Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like.

Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

Why should your members refer you to their friends and contacts? I'm Robert Scrope, President of the Information Marketing Association and author of the official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing. Today's program is all about how you can maximize referrals and long-term customer retention from every single customer that you bring in. My guest today is co-author of the book, No BS Guide to Maximum Referrals and Customer Retention, which has 31 reviews and 4.6 out of 5 stars in just a few weeks that it's been available. Shawn Buck has been a serial entrepreneur for over 15 years and currently owns and operates The Newsletter Pro based out of Boise, Idaho. Although The Newsletter Pro has only been operating for 5 years, Shawn and his 40-member team have grown the company into the nation's largest custom print newsletter company, printing and mailing millions of newsletters annually for diverse industries spread across 4 countries. In 2015, Shawn and the Newsletter Pro landed at the number 120 spot on the Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Companies list with a shocking growth rate of 2,975%. And to share why and how that happened and how you can do it too, We have Shawn Buck on today's program.

Yay!

Welcome.

Hey, thanks for having me, Robert. I really appreciate it. I'm excited to be here.

Well, and I've been a Newsletter Pro customer for well over a year now. And you guys publish our newsletter, and certainly appreciate what your team does and enjoy connecting with you at the events. It's good to catch up.

Yeah, same. I appreciate you being a customer. We've likewise been a customer for many years, getting this publication every month and devouring it. It's one of my favorites. It's an honor to be here.

You do an amazing job with the No BS Info Marketing Letter and Information Marketing Special Reports. I hear over and over again that those are the best things that Dan writes. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. Why is it important for info marketers to focus on retention referrals? Isn't this something for local businesses to worry about? Info marketers are primarily worried about getting new customers and increasing their value. Is referrals really something they should pay attention to?

Yeah, I mean, I think so. Here's the thing. As Dan would say, and you'd probably agree with, the most difficult and expensive part of any business is getting new customers. By focusing on how to teach them, how to get each customer to multiply, as well as how to get customers to stay longer, you can really watch your business grow at a crazy rapid rate. I always ask people, how much larger would you be? How much more money would you be able to spend to get a customer if no one had ever left? If you just never lost one yet? You know, how much easier would business be if that was the case? You know, your info businesses, you know, have— are notorious for high turnover rate. Of course, not all of them. I'm painting with a broad brush here, but many of them, when I get to see my friends, you know, and I get to see their— the backend and the real numbers and stuff, you know, they have a large influx of people, but then a mass exodus of people as well on a monthly basis. And so focusing on— I think focusing on retention is more natural. I think actually info businesses, that is more top of mind. Referrals, on the other hand, you know, referrals come in a lot of different shapes and sizes, right? So it could be referral partners, could be referrals from friends and family. So there's a lot of different ways to get referrals.. It doesn't have to all just be, you know, like a friends and family base referral, which, you know, we can jump into a little bit more here in a little bit. But let me give you an example, I guess. Let me start there. So churn, it's a massive problem for most businesses, and it can be a massive problem for a lot of info businesses. And I was speaking with a friend of mine last week. He owns a million-dollar-plus info business, and he is running at between a 3% to 6% per month in churn. It is literally slowly killing his business. If he stopped all the marketing activities, he'd be out of business in relatively short order. If you look at his numbers, and we dug into his numbers a little bit, he's losing between 40 and 70 customers each month. Based off of the amount of new customers he's adding every month, depending on where he's falling out on that spectrum of lost customers, it's taking him somewhere between 13.5 and 23.5 days of each month is just dedicated to replacing the members who have left. Think about that. That means that somewhere between 6, 7 days— I mean, if it's February, he's only got like 4 days to replace them, to get new members. Somewhere in 6 or 7 days of the month is where he's getting all his new growth. If he could bring that churn down, if he could bring those lost customers down, I mean, can you imagine how much more profitable his business would be? How much faster it would grow?

I mean, it would be crazy.

Preaching, brother.

You're on top of my soapbox, that's for sure. I'm doing a presentation at the this month at the SIPA. It's the Specialized Information Publishers Association. And these are the trade publishers that produce, you know, really mostly business-type corporate newsletters. And then there's plenty of financial-type stuff, you know, Agora, Boardroom, and, you know, those types of folks are members of SIPA and are there. Most of these members are annual subscriptions, annual renewals versus monthly continuity, but the numbers are pretty similar either way. And I showed them what the— because there's kind of a natural subscription level based on the amount of churn and the number of new members that you're getting. So if you have, 1,000 new customers coming in every year, but you're only getting 70% of them to renew, well then your membership level after a couple of years is going to be 3,333. 1,000 a year will roll through and you'll have about 3,333 natural members. 80% is at 5,000. If you get 90% renew, that doubles up to 10,000 members. It's amazing, talking with folks, which is easier, trying to get your renewals from 80% to 90% so that you could double from 5,000 to 10,000, or trying to double the number of new members and subscribers that you are generating? It's so much easier to hold onto the ones that you are getting. It's interesting that what you talk about in terms of your example, because with info marketers, most of the numbers that I look at, they're losing 70% of their members a year, not keeping them. So certainly on churn, it's an epidemic portion for this industry, and yet It's pretty well accepted.

Yeah, and think about, I mean, even if we just, even if we take that out just one step further, it's the most expensive thing you do is go get a new customer. Couldn't you take a little bit of that money that you saved by taking your churn from 70% to 35%, how much money do you save where you don't have to spend to get those customers, right? To just even make that up. How much more revenue are you generating by doing that? Because now you've got 35% more customers. I mean, the numbers are— the fact that people don't pay more attention to it is actually shocking to me. When people say, "Hey Shawn, how did you grow 2,975%?" Well, that's because we were averaging less than most months, but on a bad month we were averaging 1% churn a month over the course of a number of years. That's how we grew so fast. People just didn't leave. They came on and they stayed. I would love to say it was because I was a genius and just amazing. Of course, there's some of that.

That's obvious, right? Well, I mean, that goes without saying.

Yeah, it goes without saying.

At least in polite company.

That's right. That's right. When I talk to some of my friends running bigger businesses, I've got another friend who I was talking to a few months ago that runs a $100 million plus subscription-based business, basically. He found that in his $100 million company— to go back to the top of your question here, why referrals— referrals were their number one source of new business. That wasn't just referrals like, I'm a customer, and I am a customer of his business, just me referring you type of a deal. That was that type of referral, but it was also I've got my own herd of people and I do a promotion. You could call that affiliate marketing. They call it partnership marketing. That's what I call it. I do promotion for you on a more regular basis. We kind of have a more long-term relationship worked out, not a one-and-done kind of affiliate promotion. So that was their largest source of new customers, but also in his— he tracks his kind of his top 3 metrics that he's looking at personally where he reports on them and the board's tracking him on and stuff. And churn is in those top 3 metrics every single month, month in, month out, quarter in, quarter out. But for most info businesses that aren't running at those, the boardroom reports level, that's not something they pay a lot of attention to. It's, you know, and they should.

Well, and I'm going to meet with Agora Financial this month for that reason. You know, they are really focused on renewals and want to improve that., and you know, there's a $70 million revenue business, and you know, getting this fixed, it could, you know, it really, it's amazing looking at the numbers and the rates. It won't really take very much for them to double if they just hold on to, you know, a few more of the members and get them to renew, you know, what, you know, in their program. So it's a terrific opportunity. One of the things I was curious about was this topic of referrals and getting your customers and members to refer other customers and members. Have you seen much of that with— I know you have been in the info marketing world for years. You've got a lot of folks that are clients. Do you see much of that, people creating those types of systems to help generate referrals?

From their existing members? [Speaker:JAMES] No. I don't see enough of it, I should say. I mean, we do see it, but I find that the focus just tends to be simply on new. So the interest is in the next Facebook strategy to go out and get new customers, not the interest in how can I have, as Dan would say, every customer bring a friend. That isn't the interest. It's the next shiny object maybe, and they overlook it. You know, one of our best promotions we ran in the way of generating new customers was a promotion where we were giving away an experience-based trip to Vegas to drive a race car or a sports car like a Ferrari or Porsche, you know, pick your car type of a thing.. And you know, we may not be— we wouldn't be considered your maybe traditional like info business, but Dan, when we talk to him, he's like, no, you're an info business, just a different product, you know. And we think of ourselves that way too. You know, yeah, we just sell a service and a slightly different product, but we use information marketing to to sell our service and sell our product. Again, it's one of our better— actually, without referrals, we'd be a fraction of the company that we are today.

I definitely want to talk about referrals, because I think that's a really missed opportunity and really one of the things that I want to make sure that we cover. In your book you mention a 3-step customer retention formula. Will you share what you teach to improve retention?

Yeah, so it's shared interest plus shared space plus shared concern equals customer retention. So here's what I mean by this. So one of our largest clients, He's definitely a top 5 client of ours. He's been with us for years. It started with him reading, getting on our list in some way, shape, or form. He read the newsletter. People who know me and who get our newsletter will see that we have a section in there that I debated on putting in for a very long time. It was called "Have You Heard the Good News?" because I'm a Christian guy. I decided that I was going to put this section in there. So it's not really in your face, but I was like, I'm going to be me. I think this is appropriate for me and for my newsletter, so I'm going to put that in there. Now, of course, that's not appropriate for everybody, right? But it is for me. And he stops me at actually a GKIC event. He stops me at a GKIC event and starts talking with me and says, hey, I enjoy your newsletter. You know, I got a question for you. And, you know, I see that you live in Idaho and you have that good news. Are you a Christian or are you a Mormon? I said, well, you know, I'm— yeah, yeah, I said, well, I'm a Christian. And, and I get that a lot. Like, I mean, you know, I live in Idaho, I have 5 kids, like, you know, so a lot of people think I'm Mormon. And so, and so, you know, okay. And we, you know, we just chat about it. He's a Christian too, so we just chat about our Shared interest, right? Then we also had some shared space because he was getting my newsletter. My newsletter was in his world, right? So we went through this and he didn't do business with me right then and there. But a few months later, he calls me up and that is where we started to do business. This relationship. And it started small and it's grown and it's grown. And now this gentleman and his companies spend a very significant amount of money with us and send out tens of thousands of newsletters a month with us. And it all starts in that shared interest section. Now, your shared— you know, there's a lot of people who have a shared interest. Dan would be another. You know, Dan, we all have some shared interest with him and he talks about this, right? Shared interest could be almost anything. He talks about when he gets up on stage and he's like, "Yeah, you know, I went bankrupt at one point in time and I was an alcoholic at one point in time and I love Disney over here." Then he gets people who come and talk to him about those shared interests and tell them their stories of going bankrupt or how they've struggled and they've struggled with maybe some kind of addiction. Seeing him being so successful is helpful to them or whatever. So he's starting to build those bonds and he's starting to build those relationships. And so you can do it in a lot of different ways. What about somebody who feels like, "Oh man, I don't have anything interesting." Yeah, that's funny. We all feel that way, right? So we all feel like everyone else is more interesting, their life is more exciting. The funny thing is, is you feel that way, you're like, "Oh man, Shawn, look, he has 5 kids, that's an exciting life." Maybe they're not thinking that.

They might not be thinking that.

No, I don't think so.

"He lives in Idaho and has 5 kids, that's so exciting." I'm going to stay away from there. I don't know if I could do go, I'm going to bring my own water.

There you go, yes, yes. But whatever the situation is, The thing is, they might think it's so fun, but everyone thinks their life is kind of mundane. So the easiest way to overcome this, and we have to overcome this for our clients all the time, is just start making a list of stories you're willing to share and stuff you're willing to talk about. So for me, what I've found is that there are certain things that people connect with me on. So some of the things on, on my list, to give you an example, right? They— it is the Idaho thing, right, is on my list. The 5 kids is on my list, but I usually add in the fact that it's all boys. I have 5 boys. And the fact that I was— I had a kid in high school at 16 years old. In fact, crazy, crazy life event tomorrow, he is getting married. Oh my goodness, congratulations! Very weird. Yeah, thanks. So it will be, you know, we're going to go do that tomorrow, so that will be fun. And, you know, so I'll tell that story and I'll tell the story about how I got into business at a really young age, right? And so I tell these stories and these are the stories that I've said are okay to tell, you know, that are okay, that are interesting, that maybe I told at a cocktail party that someone thought was interesting or whatever at some point in my life. So you can just create your own little, this is what I'm going to tell them. This is what I'm going to share. This is the interesting stuff. Although you've told it a million times, that doesn't mean that they've heard it a million times. Most of the time they've never heard it before.

But having a kid at 16 could be really embarrassing. Does somebody, one of my business contacts or prospects really care about that?

Yeah, so really good question. It could be embarrassing. One, I have found personally that claiming that I'm not— claiming I'm the smartest guy in the world and I never make any mistakes and I've never done anything wrong in my life doesn't work as well for me as being like, hey, yeah, you know what? Look at this marketing campaign over here. I've got to be honest. We didn't kill it with this one. That actually tends to work better. As far as the kid thing goes, You know, I guess it depends on the story. So my short version of my story on that is that I had a kid at 16 and his mom and I made a very short go of it and then she decided to bow out and I decided to raise him. And so instead of doing what most teenage dads do and walking away, you know, I stepped up and I raised him. Now, I could stop there, but I,— but I actually go on to say, but it's one of the reasons I'm 37 years old and I've had— I've been self-employed since 2001.

I've been—

you know, I've had a lot of success because I had to figure out how to be an adult at 16 years old. I had to figure out how to— you know, I walked into a bookstore and picked up a book written by Dan Kennedy at 16 years old and started reading it. And so it's one of the reasons that I've been successful. So now let me give you— not— Not just to give you the story, but what have I said in that story? I've said a lot in that story. I said, look, I'm a stand-up guy. Even when something goes wrong, because at 16 having a kid, even though it worked out really well for me, that was not, that in society is considered wrong. Even when it goes wrong, I make it right. I'm there.

I don't run away from my responsibilities. —something that could have been embarrassing to you into something that really is an illustration of your character.

That's right. And I didn't have to walk in and say all those things to illustrate it. I told a story to illustrate it.

Yeah, you didn't say, "Oh, you can trust me." Instead, you told a potentially embarrassing story, which creates, as you say, connection. And because you've been vulnerable, they feel like they can trust you because you've told something that could be embarrassing to you. And yet that embarrassing story actually gives them insight into your character that you couldn't ever say, "Hey, you can trust me." Because as soon as— I learned a long time ago, if somebody ever tells me to trust them, that I need to get out of that room.

Yeah, I need to run. Yeah, I mean, you know, I've You know, that story is, you know, like everyone probably on this call, you know, that's listening to this, I lead with my background story. Like, let me tell you my origin story, right? Excuse me. And I lead with that story. And so with that being said, I was at a women's event. I was speaking to a room of 300 or 400 women. I'm 5, 8 minutes into the presentation and I get to that story and I literally get a standing ovation. Oh my goodness. 8 minutes into the story, right? Or 8 minutes into the presentation. It's a 90-minute presentation. I actually was shocked at first. I didn't know what to do. I just said thank you and then I was like, now I'm all flustered and blushing and I don't know what to do. So it threw me off my presentation a little bit. I'll tell you what, I sold really well at that event. That's connection. Yeah, so there you go. So there's your shared interest, right? And shared space, so your shared space is you need to get stuff in their physical world. You want them to see your name, your logo. So this can be your newsletter. I've got a Dan Kennedy bobblehead sitting on the top of my bookshelf over here in my office. It could be your CDs. It could be a lot of different stuff. Like if I was to give you— I'll tell you what we use. This is in the book Dan and I wrote. It's the No BS Guide to Maximum Referrals and Customer Retention. They don't have to memorize all this. It's 31 reviews on Amazon. There you go, 31 reviews. They can find it on page 46. It's 12 times a year they get monthly newsletter. They get a non-sales email from us at least 52 times a year. We have a plaque that hangs on their wall that we send them once. We have a framed first edition of their newsletter we send them with some of our branding on it once. 12 audio CDs a year, typically at least 4 gifts, logoed water bottles, mugs, that kind of stuff that comes a couple times a year. Marketing examples a couple times a year. Birthdays and Christmas cards with gifts a couple times a year. Special reports 2 to 6 times a year. I mean, you know, it goes on and on and on, but those are the things that we're getting in people's physical space, right?

And I think that's very important that there is absolutely something about giving them a physical document that lays on their desk or comes in their mailbox that is really very different emotionally to experience than just another one, just another email in their inbox. So I like that. So you've got shared interest, shared space, and the third?

Yeah, so shared concern. So this is kind of the final piece of the puzzle. You have to actually want your customers to be successful and be concerned with their success, right? And you can show that in a lot of different ways. But I mean, they are obviously concerned with their success. So if you come across like you just really could care less whether they this works for them or it doesn't work for them, you have no concern for them, then that's not a relationship. You don't have a relationship there, and relationship is the key to longer-term retention, or a key to longer-term retention. So you need to help them as much as you can achieve the promised outcome. I hear numbers thrown around like, well, 95% of people don't even open the package, and so on and so forth. And I'm like, well, that's just asking for more returns and for them to never buy from you again. I would want to consider how can I get them to at least consume the information so at least they get the knowledge out of it. So not just being concerned with making the sale, but being concerned that you give them value and get additional value and concern for their success. I know a lot of people say that they are concerned for that, and I know tons of people are, but I see some where their actions tend to speak louder than their words. So I want to see that shared concern there.

I think that's brilliant. And also, today a lot of the product is digital, so it's online, and you can tell if you want to know whether or not members are logging in. And for somebody who's not logging in, a follow-up sequence say, hey, I noticed you hadn't been around in a while. We'd love to have you back. Or I noticed you started a training module and got to Module 3 and haven't yet started 4, and it's been a couple of weeks. Do you have any questions? Do you have anything that I can help you with? And all that can be set up and automated with just a little bit of forethought. And it goes a long way to cutting that, you know, 70% of your members are gone within the first year or really even in a lot of businesses that I see even in the first 6 months. Totally. And it starts with the concern. And it really doesn't take a lot to— you know, a lot of folks I remember, you know, folks are like, oh, well, but if I— If I ask them, if I send them an email, then maybe they'd want to quit their membership because now they'll be reminded that they're paying membership and they'll just want to quit early. You know what? You don't want members who are not paying attention. Those are not the ones that are going to refer. Those are not the ones that are going to be success stories. You're not going to grow— if you're thinking you're going to grow a business based on people who are not paying attention to the charges, that's the wrong business model. Instead, like you're saying, show concern, build a relationship and a connection with them that allows you to build a business on a foundation of relationships, because that's what's going to be valuable for you on a long-term basis. Yeah, couldn't agree more. Like you were saying before, in the info marketing world, referrals are rare. Campaigns that go to new customers or existing members in order to invite them to come into the info marketing business is pretty rare. The dentist usually isn't out there referring other dentists to his coach or even really even mentioning that he has one. And so we suffer a little bit from, you know, like the restaurant owner isn't going to go around and say, "Hey, I've got this coach to help me get more customers into my business." You know, in general they kind of feel like they should be able to do that without the coach. So how do you get folks to not only admit that they have a coach or they have resources or they're, they're open to getting this help, but then also refer other people to you?

Yeah, so I think it starts out with, you know, why aren't they gonna do that? I mean, that's not the case for everybody, and I think the why that people aren't out, you know, screaming your names from the rooftops may come into partially that shared concern we just talked about, but it could come into just that you don't have a system set up to help them do it. If I think about Dan, so many of his top students talk about him. If you go to a Ben Glass conference, he talks about Dan Kennedy. If you go to many of the micros, these gurus, these niche gurus, right? If you go to their conferences, they talk about Dan. The reason I know they talk about Dan is because I meet a lot of these people at GKIC events who, when you ask them where their origin story was, they're like, "Well, I was sitting in Ben's conference and it was great. Then he mentioned this guy Dan, and so now I'm here as well." They do talk about him. Talking about dentists who have coached, for example, Jay Geier is the largest kind of coach consultant in the dental niche. For people who don't know who he is, he has an information marketing business. Does like, I don't know, I want to say it was, last time I heard, I want to say it was $50 million, $50 million. So he'd be worth like checking out what the guy's doing, right? And he consults with Dan a couple times a year. And so I was at one of his conferences about 18 months ago and he brought many dentists dozens of people. So, you know, 50, 60, 70 people up on stage. It was, it was a lot of people at the conference to thank them for referring other doctors to him. And what happened was, is yeah, they didn't refer the guy down the street, but they referred the guy the next state over, the next city over, two counties over, whatever the case may be. In fact, the doctor I was with at this conference did refer two people, both in different cities, but in our area. And that's how those two people ended up at this conference. So he brought dozens of people up. At the end, he brought one guy back up, and over roughly a 4-year period— I can't remember, maybe it was 5 years even— this doctor had referred over 25 other doctors who became clients to Jay. Now, becoming a client's like a 6-figure investment, so this doctor had helped Jay make a lot of money. But anyone can get referrals, but it has to be a priority basically. You have to set up the system. It's not just going to happen because you have the most awesome membership site in the world. You have to set your customers up with an ability to refer. How are they going to get the word out? We've all done this where we're like, "Hey, you should go see my accountant. He's awesome." Then that's it, right? Because there's no lead capture mechanism. There's no follow-up system. Maybe the guy totally wants to go see my accountant, maybe the business owner I'm referring, but I said it at a cocktail party and that was the end of it. It never went anything more because the next step was call the guy and make an appointment. Well, that's scary. I don't want to go do that. Right? So I think it's just more that there's not a system is why they don't see more referrals. There's not recognition. I've been trying to get a couple of companies that I've talked to about setting up, you know, I mean, maybe give VIP status to the people if they give a certain number of referrals. Yeah, I know you can sell VIP status, but wouldn't it be better to get, you know, 10 referrals and someone earns VIP status, you know, or something along those lines at some of their events? Yeah, so I mean, I guess it really just, I don't think that they can't get them, I just think they don't have a system and they don't make it a priority to go get them.

Well, what sort of system, what sort of systems would you, if you were consulting with somebody like a Jay Guyer and they brought you in to create a referral system, what are the types of things that you would recommend to create in order for an info marketer to generate a steady stream of referrals from their customers?

Yeah, so here's the best part. It's basically the same systems you have now, just with minor tweaks. I would use information. That's where I would start. The step of my accountant, wouldn't it be a lot simpler if my accountant had the 18 18 overlooked tax deductions that million-dollar-plus businesses are missing out on and costing them a small fortune, free report that I could tell my buddy to go download instead of him having to make an appointment. Then making sure I'm communicating that message out enough to my existing customers that, hey, this is available, giving them means and opportunity to make that referral. See, here's the thing. That is the exact same model that they're using to get new people in from Facebook or whatever media they're using. It's just setting it up with referrals and understanding where you're going to target the message for referrals is to your existing members and your existing customers. You're just not necessarily out targeting it, this particular funnel and this particular message isn't going out to the masses. It may even be the same lead magnet, possibly.

[Speaker:ADRIAN_WILSON] Well, it was pretty interesting. One of the things that I grew IMA with, and we actually, I think this promotion added something like 280 members or something back in '07 and '08, which was the 4 for Free campaign. It was promotion out to existing members. Saying, "Hey, with your affiliate commission of $25 a month, if you get 4 new members, your membership is paid for." And so it was just as simple as giving members this encouragement. And I can tell you, probably only 4 or 5% did anything. A few of them actually got a steady stream of checks for a few years. Many got their membership for free because they had affiliates paying their dues, or people they had referred, and those commissions were making their dues free. Just the process of asking, like you're saying, and being creative around this, it's really not that hard.

It's not. Let me give you one example. In the info business. This is trying to drive butts into a room to take coaching. Some people on the call might be familiar with Dan Sullivan and his organization. He's a coach to business owners. I was at an event of Dan's a few months back and they passed out a new book that was written by Dan. They gave it to everyone in attendance as a free gift. There were about 60 people. Roughly in the room. And these were all primaries. There were no guests in this event. So everyone who was sitting in that room was paid to be there. And of course everyone clapped, yay, free gift. Everyone is excited, new book, great. Okay, the next thing they did right after passing out the books, they passed out a referral form. And they asked if we knew anyone that would be a good fit for the class, if we would jot down their info and check a box offering them either the same free book we just got in the room Or they could pick from like 3 other books that were maybe Dan was more well-known for. I'm not as up to date on his world and what he's well-known for or not as I maybe am in GKIC. But it appeared to be his more popular titles. And they were going to send that book as a gift from us to the person we referred. Now they put parameters around who would make a good referral for them. They would send it to them as a gift and then as well some information on this particular class. Now there was space for 2 names. They were asking for 1. There was space for 2. And the guy who was doing the presentation made this comment that he had never gotten more than 53 referrals out of a single class before. And that the actual record for anybody in the dance hall of an organization was 65 referrals. Since there were 60 of us, he wanted to know if not only all of us could at least give one, but if some of us could give two so that he could beat the record of 65 referrals.

Now, I'm guessing that that was completely scripted and that they do that on every class, right? That's Zig Ziglar's shoeshine guy with the $100 tip story. Yes. How the shoeshine guy tells about the time he got the $100 tip and now everybody is sitting in that chair getting their shoes shined. If they were thinking about giving $5, now they're thinking about giving $10. And if they thought about giving $10, now they're thinking about giving $20. And every now and then someone might match that $100 tip. Who knows? That's right. That's right.

Dan Sullivan is applying that principle. Yeah, absolutely. They did hit their 65 referrals. Nice. Yep. He beat the record, which again, I'm guessing was completely pulled out of thin air, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. I enjoyed it no less knowing that it was probably made up. In fact, I was like, "Hey, can I put my name on here and get one of these referral gifts so I can just see what your system is?" Here's the funny thing. I did actually ask one of the friends whose name I put down to scan or take pictures. I wanted to see everything when it comes in. But here's the funny thing. They give you this little who's who in the class before you start. And under it, So they start this ahead of time, right? Under the who's who in the class is who they were referred by into the class. Now, there were 60 of us in there, like I said, give or take. There was only one person who did not have a referral source under his name on this directory. So I'm guessing this tactic's working out well for them. Now, there was a couple, more than a couple of people, there was maybe, 8, 9 people who had Joe Polish's name under them. So Joe is a big, obviously, referral partner for them. But nonetheless, there was almost everyone there had been referred by somebody, including me.

Joe talked about them on the podcast and everything else. So he's— yes. I mean, that's very interesting. And it's something that could be done by anybody. If you're having a conference, and you have people in a room, or you're on a teleseminar or a webinar and you've got people in the room, and you offer something of value and then invite the folks that are on there in order to invite other people that they know that may be able to benefit from to have that thing of value. And it could be a terrific opportunity. Absolutely. So the other thing you get into, which is near and dear to my heart, is partnering with associations in order to generate referrals.

Tell folks about that. So, I mean, I think associations are one of the most probably overlooked opportunities out there, just in general. Associations, and these associations can be like a dental association, right? Or it could be just someone who, it could be one of these info marketers, right? It could be someone listening to this call who has a herd of people similar to GKIC or IMA or Ben Glass or whomever it may be, right? But when you're working with these associations, these Forming these long-term strategic partnerships with them, if I'm looking to— well, let me ask you which strategy you want. Do you want the strategy where I'm looking to form relationships with them or how they should go out, how an association should go out and get more referrals?

Which strategy are you looking for? How an info marketer can use an association in order to get customers for them.

More customers. Okay. I am talking to the expert on this right now, so I'll do my best.

I've done at least 2 full-day seminars on this for folks' coaching groups where they bring me in to teach their coaching groups this stuff, just in the last 6 months, so yes.

But please go ahead. All right, no pressure, no pressure. What I like to do with them is I like to form— it's just a relationship-based partnership. So we start with typically some kind of small buy with them to start the relationship. Now, I make sure that whatever I'm doing with them goes amazingly well. Even if it doesn't go amazingly well on my end, in the sense that I didn't get as many leads or it didn't work as well as I wanted to, as far as they're concerned, it was the most amazing thing we've done in a long time. And I start the conversation. I keep the conversation going. I will many times send them out of the blue, send them something that might be of interest to them based off of what they do. Hey, I saw this book. I thought of you guys. And then I kind of build into trying to develop a year-long strategy with them where they're promoting us as a preferred vendor, preferred partner. Possibly even speaking opportunities at their events, certain number of emails or direct mail blasts out or both, space on their website, articles in their newsletter, articles on their blog, all with soft call to actions back to my lead magnets. That is the 30,000-foot view of what we do to build those partnerships. We make them strategic, long-term. They can be very expensive depending on who you're talking to. They don't always have to be, but they, you know, sometimes some of these big guys want big bucks for this stuff, but there are also guys who are, you know, the Idaho Dental Association is going to want way less money than the California Dental Association is going to want for a similar partnership, and so there are ways to kind of stair-step up in these partnerships as your business grows. Partners are our number one, and associations even are some of our best new leads and new customers come from those.

There was an info marketer who has a group of attorneys in his coaching program and had me in to teach the attorneys how to partner and work with associations in order to generate clients.. Most of them were able to work with this. It's been now a few months, and most of them were able to create deals with associations that didn't cost them any money. It's not necessarily going after the big national guys, because these were— in this case it was attorneys, and they were only looking for folks certainly within their state. Probably really within more of a regional. So they were working with smaller organizations that to have somebody come and provide content was excellent. And here in this case, the Specialized Information Publishers Association, I decided I wanted to do some of the membership retention topics and things in that industry. I joined— I went ahead and joined the association back in November. I was featured in an article to all their members in January. I've participated on their member forum and answered a couple of questions and had some $25 million, some $40 million companies where I'm having conversations doing work for them based on a reply to a message board post.

Last thing before I let you go, Shawn, is I know that your onboarding process is really unique. I know in the info marketing world, a lot of times we're gearing all of our fulfillment for efficiency, and we love digital products where all we've got to ship to them is an email with their user ID and password access to the site. What does your onboarding process look like? You've got less than 1% churn every month with customers leaving. That's pretty darn good. What do you do to onboard your members in a way that they stay?

Yeah, so I'll walk you through that process. And I will tell you, when we started to get bigger and we didn't have— our onboarding process got a little fuzzy, our churn kicked up for about 6 months. Before I kind of realized what it was. And I couldn't figure it out until I realized that basically the onboarding had gone bad. So a very simple, quick way to decrease churn is to improve the onboarding process. And so what happened, what we do, the first thing we do is we send them a welcome box or a wow package. And they get it. It comes with all sorts of, fun goodies and treats in it, as well as a little bit of information about making a great decision, thanking them, that kind of a thing. We set up a welcome call which is basically an onboarding call where we are going to get general information from them, contacts, logos, company info, that kind of stuff. We will also, if they are going for the full onboarding call at the same time as the welcome call, They'll get introduced to our systems, identify their campaign goals. We educate them on psychology behind the newsletter, the structure, why our way works. We identify demographics. I mean, communicate with them about preference and design. So the welcome call may be only 10 minutes, but if it's a welcome and an onboarding call, it can easily be an hour-long call. We then set them up through the process of of getting their actual product created, so making sure they are having success, we found that if we don't get them going right away, like literally even waiting days to get them started and scheduled for their onboarding call and their first interview with us to start writing their content and stuff, can be the difference between someone canceling, wanting to cancel in the first month or wanting to continue on. Sometimes like when we sign them up, onboarding starts before they actually return the agreement to us. So onboarding starts— if we were to sign you up right now, I'd be like, "Hey Robert, you know what? I know you want to get that newsletter out really quickly, so here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to send you all the paperwork, but let me go ahead and put you on hold really quick, and I'm going to transfer you over to Kevin." Kevin is our onboarder, and he's going to schedule that first onboarding call with you so that we can get you started and get you in right away. And so of course Kevin schedules the call for tomorrow or Monday or whatever, and that does one of two things. One, when you schedule the onboarding call, you're a lot more committed to the whole process. And two, if for some reason you haven't sent back the agreement, when Kevin gets on the onboarding call, the first thing he does is ask you, hey, can you jump on your email really quick and send back the agreement? And so it helps actually close some deals that way. So we take them through the whole process to getting it created, getting their newsletter created through approval. We then send them that framed first edition that I mentioned earlier with a thank you letter and some other little treats.

[Speaker:GREGG] And even right there, having that onboarding call, anybody that's got a coaching program with— they're either paying you $400 or $500 a month or $1,000 a month or $1,500 a month. Having an onboarding call that educates, talking about the values of the organization, having them set some goals. So now they're thinking about the future, and they are so much more committed once— It's one thing when they buy, they're kind of relieving some pain. But now when you've gotten them to set some goals, now they're thinking about this as a 3-month or a 6-month a 6-month or a 12-month commitment because they've set a 12-month goal of what they want this to accomplish. And then in setting that call up as part of the sale are all 3 really, really brilliant little subtle takeaways that I think are excellent. So Shawn, this has been awesome. I appreciate you joining me as my guest today. Great information about how to build connection through shared interests, shared space, shared concern, how to create a referral campaign, as you said with the strategic coach example, and also a lot of onboarding tips. So a lot of great information here.

So thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Robert.

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