A short monologue arguing that the most profitable businesses resemble a spider web: they offer multiple entry points, upsells, downsells, and cross-sells so customers move through different products/services over their lifetime. Using Verizon and an accounting firm as examples, the speaker warns that selling only one product limits lifetime customer value and therefore reduces profits and marketing allowance.
Chapters
The best businesses in the world are like a spider web. Okay, now this might sound crazy, but just like, hang with me here, I'm going to explain. If you look at one of the huge businesses that are like doing these TV commercials, they've all got different offers that they're selling. For example, Verizon, they might be advertising like their family phone plan and how affordable it is for a family of four. Or maybe they're advertising their $30 phone plan for just, you know, single individual people. But then you go to the Verizon store to actually like sign up and get a new phone and whatever, and you end up walking out the door with the $90 phone plan and the new iPhone 3 Pro Max Ultra Super Duper. They're getting you in the door here, but then they're selling you on this thing over here. And then later on down the line, once you have, you know, a couple of kids and they have to get phones, then you're buying this thing over here. And then when your kids grow up and they're, they're buying their own phone plans, then they're back over here. And you know, maybe for some people, they're going straight into the family phone plan over here. But they get old and retire and now it's just them and they don't need the whole family phone plan. And then you've got the special phone plans for nurses and firefighters and maybe then they retire from their job and they don't qualify for that anymore and it starts becoming like this spider web, right? There's different entry points for different people. And then there's upsells and downsells and cross sells. And they're making kind of this journey all within your business, just with different types of services and products you offer. So for example, if you're an accounting firm, you might get people in with like a tax strategy service, but then you're going to upsell some people into a monthly bookkeeping service. But then a lot of those people are going to have you prepare their tax returns and some of those people are going to upsell into a monthly bookkeeping service. Some of those people are going to need a more in depth financial reporting system. And so they go on your CFO package. If you only have one thing to sell them, then you're not going to make that much money over the course of the customer's lifetime with you. But if you have multiple different things, you can sell them all kind of arranged in the spiderweb fashion where they can move to where they need to go. That's where you make a lot of profit. Dollars on every individual customer, which means you can afford to spend more on marketing than your competitors.
