Membership Multipliers: How To On-Board New Members and Clients So They Stay, Pay, and Refer With Scott Whitaker - I Love Marketing Episode #452

Onboarding is simple. It's assimilation. It's taking somebody from where they are and making them similar to what you provide.

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to www.gienstruitnetwork.com. no matter what your business is or what you sell, or if you have members, you are constantly onboarding people who will be using your products or services. How do you go about that process of onboarding them and creating a great so that they are even more excited about you and what you can do for them? This can be a very complicated process or it can be simplified into a process that Scott Whitaker has been working with for years. Scott is an expert at the assimilation process by which you take a new member or a new client from saying I signed up to saying I'm a member of. You can assimilate new members by answering three simple questions Scott will share with you. Scott's business Membership Multipliers helps coaches create, launch and sell high ticket membership offers. He also provides services to help them increase retention, create new membership levels and keeps people from canceling their memberships. Scott is responsible for growing one of the largest membership organization in its niche, taking it from 72 members to over 3,100 members. He's helped create some of the largest business coaches in niches like service businesses, dance studio owners, childcare businesses, podiatrists, online marketing, dry cleaners, Glaser Kennedy, inner circle, tax resolution. And he's worked with many past or present Genius Network members, all while using the process which he will share with you in this 10 minute talk.

So I'm a membership guy. Let me just say up front, when I talk with somebody and they're a business owner, I see memberships. Now I know in that process that not everybody here deals with memberships. Some of you have customers, some of you have clients. And that's fine because what I'm going to teach with you today and share with you is is going to be transferable regardless of who you serve or your niche. So having said that, let's dive in. Have you ever considered what the oldest still in existence membership is? Yes, it is the local church. And I'll just challenge you up front. If you ever thought about membership and you wanted to take a dive into membership, you might look at what is the local church actually doing. Part of my background there. Onboarding is simple. It's assimilation. It's taking somebody from where they are and making them similar to what you provide. So inside Genius Network. Joe's got a process for this. I'm going to unpack it in front of you and show you a little bit of his magic behind the scenes here. But every membership organization has this process of being able to take somebody from who literally just signs up for the membership to saying I'm a member of. So if you think about that, somebody says I signed up for this membership versus somebody who says I'm a member of. If you just literally signed up for Genius Network last month or the month before or the month before that, and this is maybe even your first meeting, you're thinking, well, I just signed up for this. I'm here today to just kind of check this out. I'm not really feeling like I'm a member. So how do you take that process? And again, to make this transferable to everybody in the room, Think about your employees. They do the same thing. Language matters. You hire a brand new employee, what do they say? They say your company, they say your products, they say your services. But then you put them next to somebody who's been with you a year, three years, five years, they're saying, our products, our services. And so what can you do to change that? Now you're not going to be able to change it up on the front end, but there are simple steps that you can take that assimilates them and gets them saying, our membership, our products, our services, our team, our company as just employees, or even your members. So think about this. I'm going to give you three simple questions you can follow along on your handout. Here it is. What do you want your members to receive? Believe and achieve. What do you want your members to receive? Believe and achieve. These are the questions that you can ask. What do you want your customers to receive? Believe achievements. As we break it down, these three questions. What do you want your members to receive in the first hour? In the first hour, somebody literally comes into your membership. What do you want them to receive in that very first hour of membership? Well, one is I want them to get something in the way of the transaction that they just agreed to. So if they're going to be on recurring revenue like that needs to be laid out and handle the business side on one side of it. But I want them to also begin to see and gain access to the actual membership. To begin to see what is the very first thing that they should be doing. Now when we sign up as Genius members, I mean, there's all these 10 minute talks loaded inside the membership site, but that's not what they Point out for us to do. It's very simple step of what do they want us to do in the first hour? Then what do you want them to do in the first day? First day. So now they wake up 24 hours later. Do they feel like a member yet? No. So we've got to work toward that. Maybe there's an onboarding call, maybe there is some sort of ramp up that happens within the first seven days of their membership. And they begin day one to begin that assimilation process. So first hour, first day, first week, first week, what do you want them to receive? And then ultimately you build it out first month. Now you could build out this process for as long as you want. It could be first quarter, first six months, or whichever. But then ultimately they're now saying I'm a member because of everything that they're beginning to receive as part of the benefits of their membership or part of the benefits from buying from you as your customer. But then what do you want them to receive in the sense of creating a wow factor? This is really what I want you to do in focusing in on this question here. If you just go in and say, hey, how can we create a wow factor for our members? Well, by wow factor, I mean something that they actually say wow to. This just happens to be one of my members, Gloria St. Germain. She actually sent me this photo. I gave her a gift. She signed up for my membership. She actually sent me a photo and an email thanking me for the gift. When's the last time a member sent you something because you created such a big wow factor for them or your customers creating such a big wow factor? So focus in on creating that wow factor for your people. What do you want your members to believe? Now, my background honestly is I used to be a pastor. The largest membership organization in its niche was actually for pastors who were taking money out of their own pocket. The average pastor makes $36,000 a year. It's not as big as what you think it would be. Taking money out of his own pocket to invest in coaching so that he could learn how to reach more people and have a greater impact in his community. And this process here of what you want them to believe, belong, become is what happens inside the church, but also inside your membership. Ultimately, you got to get them thinking like you. You got to get them believing that your membership, that your product, your service is actually going to benefit them in some way or another. Because they're signing up with some sort of hesitation, they're signing up with some sort of wondering about is this going to really work? So one of the ways that I thought I would illustrate this is part of what Joe does with Genius Network. If I was to say elf, what does that stand for? Easy. Okay, but if I say half, what? Yeah, See, by the way, did you see the difference there? I mean, there was confidence on easy, lucrative fun. But Joe just sent out an email, what just last week, about half and having your half business. And so he's constantly continuing to put these messages in front of you because he wants you to believe not only in elf, he wants you to believe in half as well, so that you can believe, belong, become a part of the Genius Network. What do you want your members to achieve? What do you want them to achieve? When your members come into your membership, there's something that they desire, there's something that they want out of your membership. After all, that's why they signed up. They have some sort of desire that they're wanting you to meet. And so you've got to meet that desire. Now sometimes that desire doesn't always line up with what you want to deliver. So there is the promise outcome of your membership or your product or service and it has to then begin to align with what they desire to achieve in their own personal well being or whatever the membership niche is. So you deliver a quick win. What is just a quick win? What can we do for our members or our customers that gets them just the immediate win in their business or in their life? Well, again, using Genius Network as a next step that you can learn from, what you can do is that you can do like Joe does and say, we want to create a 10x return on genius. We just want to create a 10x return on genius. That's one of the things that we want to create as a quick win for members who come in. There's also the meaningful connections. And you heard Joe say about it just earlier today, about creating the connections and the opportunity and the, the experience that he created this morning and building that connection with one another and just kicking off the day so you can do the same, create some sort of quick win that people can get you. When I joined Genius Network, Gina made an introduction to me, I believe it was with Paul and said, hey, you and Paul ought to connect. Paul's got a membership. You guys ought to connect and see what there may be. It was one of the quick wins that immediately I was able to begin building that I don't have to be here not knowing anyone. I said earlier was the oldest still existing membership in its niche. It is the local church. And you know, as a former pastor, I think there's a lot the church can learn from the business world. That's one of the things that we taught pastors. But there's also a lot that the business world can learn from the local church. Regardless of what your religious beliefs are, if you just went in there and said, how is it that they got these people believing what they believe? What happened there to create that? What happened there to create the community that's there in that local organization? You would be surprised and be able to take back and apply to your business. So just start with the question, what do you want your members or your customers or clients to receive? You'll be able to increase referrals. You'll be able to get your members to stay longer and ultimately increase retention in your business.

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