Marie Forleo explains sales prevention: turning away mismatched customers to boost revenue, cut refunds, and build trust. She shares examples like rejecting unsuitable prospects and using an action-takers refund policy, showing how this approach drove enrollment growth and slashed refund rates.
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Okay. I've known, I think I've known Marie for like a decade, but she's awesome. She has something she does called B school. Mostly women, but now a whole bunch of guys. And this year she'll have over 10,000 graduates that have gone through B school in over 72 different countries. So pretty amazing. She's an author, speaker, web TV host and trainer. Was named thought leader for the next gen generation by Oprah when Oprah interviewed her on the own network Super Soul Sunday. Every for profit training program she leads is tied to a non profit partnering supporting women, the environment and entrepreneurship. So I want to give it up for my dear friend, Marie Forleo.
Thanks, Joe.
Thank you, dear.
Love you. Hi everybody. So I'm so grateful and excited to be here. I love coming to Joe's events. They're amazing. I always have my notebook filled with ideas when I leave. So I'm excited, actually even more to learn than I am to speak. But today and this whole two days, we all know that when you come to a Joe Polish event, you are definitely going to get ideas to get more customers in the door. You're also going to learn some ideas to catapult conversions and can pretty much guarantee you're going to learn how to increase sales. But not for me. Today I'm going to tell you how to prevent sales. That's right. I'm going to talk about sales prevention. Now, before you think that I have lost my damn mind and you want to run out of this room, let me tell you why. Sales prevention can be not only really sexy, but extremely lucrative. So some results for my business over the last three years due to sales prevention, really effective sales prevention, we've increased our revenue 725% thanks to sales prevention. We've watched our B school enrollments, which is the program that Joe is talking about, grow 2,996%. And one of my favorite stats, which I'm most proud of, we took the refund rate from when we started B school, which was hovering around 19%, which is not unusual for our industry and information and education. And we've taken it downtown to 1.5%. That's been consistent over the last three years. So I want to show you how sales prevention works because it's literally produced millions of dollars in my business. And more importantly, it's helped me produce a brand that not only we love internally as the company, but our customers love even more and they can trust. So hopefully there'll be some ideas in here for you that you can Translate into millions of dollars for your brand and your business and help it to grow. Cool. So two examples of sales prevention. First example, when I'm promoting B school, I do what many of us do in this room. You go out and you start talking about it. So whether you do speaking engagements, for me, I do a lot of videos, a lot of webinars, and often teleseminars. So one of the most recent teleseminars I did had a couple of thousand people on it. Super fun. I love talking to people, hearing about their businesses, and of course telling them whether or not B school is right for them. So I'm on this teleseminar good time woman gets on the line and starts telling me about her life, asking all kinds of questions. And of course she got to the place where everybody gets to on these teleseminars. Marie, is B school right for me? It became evident that it wasn't, and I knew it. So after just a moment of awkward silence, I said, no, B school is actually not right for you. You sound amazing, you sound lovely. But based on everything that you just shared, I recommend X books, X resources. They would deliver more value to you than my program. My program would be a waste of money for you right now. The host of that teleseminar was shocked as shit. I could feel the uncomfortability. But it was the right thing to do. Now why was sales prevention in that instance so powerful? Three reasons. Number one, it's a pattern interrupt in our world where there's a lot of marketing, marketing, marketing, sell, sell, sell for customers. To hear the founder of a company volitionally telling someone, no, do not give me money. This is not right for you. They sit up and pay attention because you know people on teleseminars are doing like 15 other things. That's like a record scratch. Yes. Reason number two, for the people that we do encourage to join B school, they feel like the chosen ones because they are. This isn't a manipulation technique. It's the truth. When people know that you actively not sell to people, when you discourage them, the people that you do sell to believe you because it's honest and it's true. Cool. The third reason is that level of brutal honesty is so refreshing. Let me ask you this. Has anyone here ever gone clothes shopping? Have you ever gone clothes shopping on your own? Right. All by yourself, got no friends, you walk into the store, pull a bunch of clothes off the rack, go into the dressing room, you come out, you're nervous. You ask the sales associate, do I look okay, in this, does this look good? And you know you've had that experience or something. Oh my God, you look fabulous. Don't worry. It's a little tight, but that's really in. You should take it, go. You get the clothes home, you try them on, you look in the mirror, you look like a friggin sausage. You should not have bought those clothes. But you were sold to them by someone you trusted. Now counter that with another experience if you've ever had this one. Go into the store, get some clothes, try them on, walk out, does this look good on me? And the sales associate says, you know what? Not so flattering. You should try this. Or come back when we have more inventory. Which store would you go back to? Which store would you talk about? Second example of active sales prevention. This is my favorite one. This is really what helped us take that refund rate down from about 19% down to 1.5. Now we did other things, but this was one of the main changes. So I'm a student and a fan and a lover of marketing. So when I started B school, I used one of the timeless marketing principles, risk reversal. We all know about risk reversal, right? Usually it's an awesome idea. Try my stuff, 30 days. You don't like it, just let us know, we'll give you all your money back. Anyone ever used that one before? Sometimes it works. So we had that guarantee for B school when we first started the program. But that 19% refund rate, I know I'm not supposed to take any of that stuff personally, but I do. I saw that number, I wanted to friggin throw up. That was disgusting to me. I put so much time and energy and heart into everything that I produce, every single thing, that to know that one in five people were walking out of my company, not only taking their money back, which gets the business side of me, but the other side of me thinking they weren't happy I didn't give them a great experience. This sucks, so I gotta change it. So I looked at the curriculum, I didn't think it was that. I had this intuitive hit, it was that damn refund policy. So I said, you know what? I want to change this. I'm going to try something different. I'm going to create an action takers guarantee. Here's what it sounds like. You can come and try B school, do it for 30 days. If you don't feel like we've delivered on our promise. All you need to do to be eligible for a refund is turn in your completed homework. If you do the B school work and you don't get value. We do not deserve your money at all. One change, super powerful. And again, we did some other things, but I really believe that was the big change. Took that refund rate all the way down to 1.5%. So let's dig a little bit deeper and look at why. One of the reasons sales prevention, it helped get all the PETAs and the pains in the asses and the whiners and the non committed people, they are not signing up for my shit. My shit is expensive. So if they know they gotta work in order to be eligible for a refund, you really think they're gonna come in the door? No. Then the second thing it did for the people it is right for. And for me, I'm looking for people that are very action oriented, very committed. That's a challenge to them. They know I take this program seriously. If I'm saying, look, if you do the work and you don't get value, I'll give you everything back. They're like, whoa, she actually cares about our success. The third thing that it did, which was amazing, is it helps bond the community. One of the best things that we have going for us is our amazing community. They sell for us. So when people are in B school together and they know based on how we've structured things that A, we care about their success, but B, even more importantly, everyone else in there is a player. It doesn't matter where they're at in their journey, they are in it to win it. That gives them a reason to bond stronger. It's a stronger community and they spread the word more prolifically. Make sense? So I know I've had fun here framing this discussion around sales prevention, but what it's really about is how can we make our marketing more honest, more transparent, and more courageous. How can we have a little more courage in our marketing? So I want you to ask yourself, in your business, are you doing enough active sales prevention? Are you giving enough attention to articulating and creating obstacles to keep the people out who you really are not meant to serve so that you can devote more energy and more love and more caring to those you do. And I'll leave you with just this one final thought. What if the big secret to exploding your sales was having the courage every so often to prevent them? Thank you so much.
