Most Leads Say "Not Yet." You Hear "Not Interested."

Most business owners believe that every person who has the problem that their product can solve should buy it today, period. They over-index on the number of people who are committed to solving that problem in their life today, and they invest 95, 98, sometimes 100% of their budget into what we call the now buyer, which studies will show from organizations and research firms far bigger than ours that only 3 to 4%, maybe 5% of anyone who even enters your world as a business is ready to buy today. Set aside those businesses that are emergency service businesses, which is not the vast majority of companies. They over-index on putting an ad or an email in front of their person who they can just get to buy today. And they pay no attention to the study that says that of the 95% that are not gonna buy today, 35% of those people are gonna buy in the next 3 months to 18 months. And so they don't play the long game. They only want to try to squeeze as much fruit out of the 3 to 4 or 5%. And here's the problem. Every one of their competitors is chasing that same buyer. Therefore, supply and demand curve gets all jacked up because everyone wants the same small supply. And yet there's an entire field of opportunity that is just ripe for the taking. I learned this in the '90s and 6 businesses since. It has never been proven to be wrong. And so I think that's one of the biggest— I laugh because it's easy to say, but boy, it's It's one of the most frustrating things to try to get businesses to understand that the money's in the long game. Everything we're talking about seems to fall in the same channel, which is we're over-indexing in the short game. When I think about lifetime customer though, it really sits in one of our key, the way we think about things, and that is it costs, and I, again, studies, I've been very fortunate to read a lot of studies and not make these things up as I go from just my lens or purview. I believe it says that when you maintain a relationship with a current customer in exchange for going to brand new customers all the time, it costs 5 to 25 5 times more to acquire a new customer than to nurture the relationship with your existing customer. And a lot of people over-index. Granted, I understand we want to grow, and if you're really trying to scale, you've got to continually bring in new customers. But sometimes we do so at the fault or with neglect to our existing customers. Here's a real example. It's very common for us to work with companies that have been around 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and you ask them how many customers they've served in that window of time, and it could be 1,000, 2,000, depending on what type of business, or more. We'll ask them how often they email their past customer database. In some cases, they, they could sell— they could have sold 2,000 customers, in some cases they don't even have 200 emails because they just didn't prioritize the ability to keep in touch with people. We'll ask them about their CRM, some of them don't even have one. So how do you get your past customers to buy? And I remember this guy literally saying, well, they'll just— we did such a good job, they'll remember us. Oh my gosh, you give far too many— too much credit to the human brain to remember of all the interactions they're going to have between now and the next time. And so there's a number of things about lifetime value planning and orchestrating is not just about return revenue, because when we think about the idea that we're going to get new customers when our existing customers are happy. In theory, we're touching them on a regular basis. And I learned this again probably in the late '90s, early 2000s. It takes dollars to reach a customer once or twice a year through email or 1 or 2 phone calls a year. And it takes sometimes thousands of dollars in an ad account to get your first customer. And so that's not even a 5 or 25 to 1 ratio. And so a lot of people just underestimate it. They don't plan for it. They don't have a strategy for it. They're not using the technology that'll make the effort easy. And, you know, we won't even get into what AI can help them do these days, but it's just unplanned, unprepared strategy that is costing them a lot of money. It's also, you know, wasting a lot of money. So it's not just a cost, but it's a waste. When we hear from businesses that they're not happy with their marketing ROI, they're only talking about that 5 to 25 times more to acquire a customer for the first time. But yet when we come into a company, we are initially saying, let's go after that existing customer database. Let's find out who they are, what they do, where they've been, do they need you again? And then use that past customer database to help amplify how we're going to get in front of new people because all of the ad platforms can benefit from knowing what your existing customer database looks like. And so that's one of the big things is it's severely, it's just more costly to go after a new customer than to take care of your existing customers. It doesn't mean we can't go get new customers. We do need new customers.