How to Use Customer Surveys to Sell More (And Better)

From Entertainment to Marketing: The Unlikely Entrepreneurial Journey

Louis: What happens if you take three struggling freelance marketers, lock them in a 17th century cottage and don’t let them leave until we fix their businesses? In August, I rented an old cottage in rural Ireland and invited copywriter Rob

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: E. Commerce, designer Laura and book coach Vicky.

Louis: Three freelancers desperate to stand the fuck out. And over two days, I ripped everything apart. Their offers, their messaging, their branding, their legion. To find what was really holding them back. This is the concept of a new YouTube channel that I’m launching. You can watch the first episode for free right now. It’s half an hour long. It’s supposed to be entertaining as well as practical. I hope you’ll enjoy watching it. So please set half an hour aside to watch it around your morning coffee, breakfast, lunch break, or on the bus or at the gym, whatever. The link to Access this new YouTube channel is in the episode Show Notes. I really, really appreciate you taking the time to watch it and then, you know, the usual to like it, comment to share, talk about it around you. If you like it. Thank you so much. Bonjour. Bonjour. And welcome to another episode of everyone hates marketers.com, the no fluff actionable marketing podcast for marketers, founders and tech people who are just sick of shady, aggressive marketing. I’m your host, Louis Grenier. In today’s episode, you’ll learn how you can use surveys to sell better. And for the first time ever, you’ll be hearing from two guests. Yes, the first time actually interviewing two guests at once. One is a hypnotist, the other one is a mind reader for the last 17 years. So it’s kind of a crazy couple of guests to get. For the first time, I’m interviewing two people. But anyway, we’ll do our best, right? So both are actually the co founders of the survey software Response Suites. It’s a shame. Actually, it’s an audio podcast because they have terrific haircuts. Anyway, Rob and Kennedy, welcome aboard. Hello.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Bonjour.

Louis: Wow, you’re picking up fast.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: That’s the best I’ve got, my friend.

Louis: You’re co founders of ResponseUite, but as I said in the intro, you also do quite some interesting stuff in the entertainment world, like including mind reading and hypnosis. So the first question I have for you is, is mind reading or hypnosis not being enough? Do you know what it is? It’s a funny old thing. So Rob and I have both been individually doing our entertainment thing and the problem with entertainment and actually, funnily enough, I the reason I got into selling Any kind of information or doing anything that was outside of just being on stage and being mildly humorous was because the thing that you spend the most time doing is traveling and waiting for gigs. So because Rob and I individually both travel to London a lot, away from home or further abroad, stuff in Dubai, stuff throughout Europe, stuff in the States and Canada, we do a lot of international stuff for our clients. It means we spend a lot of time either in departure lounges or on trains or in hotels waiting to go and do our show, or in a hotel having done our show, waiting for the next day to fly home. So it basically means, really, as I teach my students who I help with their entertainment businesses, which is my first foray into doing something other than entertaining as I actually set up a business helping other entertainers, is that we actually waste a lot of time. Our maximum capacity for doing any kind of gig in the corporate entertainment world, which is the world that I’m in, is probably three events a week, because that’s when there are corporate conferences. In Rob’s World Theater, you’re talking about max out five or six nights a week.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Yeah, and in a very condensed space of time for me. So like probably, you know, 40 to 60 shows over the course of two months, but then I’m not performing for the rest of that time. You know, I do all my shows, get them out the way, and then I just do a handful spread throughout the year. So in that case, I’ve got months and months of time. Apart from writing a new show, I’ve got months of time sitting around, really.

Louis: And one of the things I do is, you know, you sit around going, this seems like a lot of wasted time. I can’t take another gig. I can’t be anywhere else. How else can I use this time productively? What could I do? Well, I could. There’s only so far, you know, if you’re single, you can chase women or whatever, but if that’s. If that’s your thing. But then when you’re not single anymore, that sort of puts an end to that, doesn’t it? And then you have to do something else. And so for me, that’s when I started writing stuff for fellow performers, writing material for other people, helping and coaching other performers and doing that kind of thing. Rob did something similar because I know you went into helping people and doing.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Helping people. Yeah, exactly. Self improvement, helping hypnotists who wanted to learn stage hypnosis. The other thing for you, of course, is that what you do now came about through demand, I guess. So People started to see that you were so busy, always posting pictures on cruise ships or corporate events on the other side of the world and saying, wow, how’s Kennedy getting all of this work? I’ve put my ad in the Yellow Pages. Why aren’t the cruise ships calling me? And then. And then saying, how do I get a better business as an entertainer that pays me more money, et cetera. And then that evolved into coaching, but then coaching is very time intensive, so that evolved into a membership site. So I guess as well, it also came from doing a thing, being noticed for people who wanted to do that thing. And then they came back.

Louis: Yeah, I never woke up one day and thought, I know what I’m gonna do in my spare time. I’m gonna teach other entertainers how to build their businesses or how to run more efficient businesses and get the gigs they wanna get. I never had. I wish I was smart enough to have thought, like, I’m just not that smart. What I did instead is I got lots of bloody messages from people and emails and Facebook messages said, hey, how do you get those gigs? And what should I do? Is this advert good? Should I be doing this? And I thought, I’ve got some, at some point, leverage this time.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: What I like is we both fell into the entertainment world because we got hooked on it at a very young age and then led into that. But then everything else we’ve done, like, everything we’ve done online has very much been born from a need. So somebody wanted something and we thought, well, we can fulfill that and we’ve got the time and the knowledge to do it.

Louis: Yeah, because we’re not like business visionaries. Not like, oh, I can see. I have diagnosed the markets and there’s a real strong need for this thing. No, like, I’ve just gone, I’ve got a problem with this. So I’m being offered this opportunity. Let’s do that. So it’s more like a gut instinct.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: We have this thing about being the most unlikely entrepreneurs. Because the truth is, I wasn’t selling sweets to kids at school when I was 12 and, like, I wasn’t on a market stand by the age of 18. And all the sort of typical entrepreneurial stories.

Louis: I kind of was.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: You did have a weird experience.

Louis: Do you want me to tell you my first entrepreneurial story? Gone. All right. So when I was. I remember I was at school, I used to get dinner at school, so my mum used to give me my dinner money every day, every morning, leave it on the kitchen table before I went to school. And then one evening she was doing the laundry, she was doing the washing and she said, kennedy, what’s all of this? And she had a handful of change. And I was like, damn it. And she’s like, have you not been eating your school dinner? Like, is everything okay? She was concerned about me. And then I had to confess what I’d been doing. So from quite a young age, I’ve got quite. I had pretty neat handwriting. My handwriting is pretty good mostly. And so what I was doing as an entrepreneur, we’ll call it entrepreneur, that’s the word we’ll use, is I was offering to write excuse notes for my fellow kids for 50p. So if you like were off school for a day because you’re like skived off school, I could write you a note for 50p if you want to get it out, get out of pen. Didn’t want to do it. I’d write you a note for 50p. So I had this pocket full of 50ps that I would just use to buy sweets and crap like that and swapsea cards or whatever they were wrestling federation cards at the time. Like I would do all of that. So that was my first foray in entrepreneurship.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: But apart from that.

Louis: But that was due to demand.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: So yeah, I suppose we’ve created stuff to fulfill a demand.

Louis: And so if I had to summarize what you just said, it sounds like you’re so experienced in the field of like the entertainment side. It seems like you’re well known, you get gigs, you know your stuff, you know how to write new shows and how to prepare for shows. It sounds like you needed something else to do that to really something new, something exciting, something that you probably didn’t. For me, I always had this thing of I’m not really. It’s funny, when you do a gig, people come up to you and they insult you without realizing they’re insulting you because they say to you, so what do you do for a job? And I’m like, you know, this shit I just did on stage, that’s what I do. That stuff I work really hard at. But the truth is, the reason they say that is because you are 100% exchanging time for money. You can never as an entertainer build anything that’s bigger than you. And I’ve got this strong sense and it sounds a bit like out there and a bit like woo bsc. But I have this strong thing that I like to give back. Like I like to contribute. There’s nothing. And I think that’s one of the reasons I’M an entertainer because when I do my funny sort of mind reading stuff, people react like that feeling that I get when they go, wow, that’s amazing. I love that feeling. Or when I give somebody a piece of advice which allows them to book the most expensive, high priced gig they’ve ever got. Or if they use our survey platform response suite and they are able to transform and slicken up the way that they run their coaching program or the way they engage people on webinars or whatever they do. When I hear the response and the reaction they get, like, that’s better than the money for me, yes, I need the money to pay my bills and yes, I want to have success and be able to have freedom. But actually I just like that feeling of people going, that’s great. So that’s what it’s really about for me. So how can I leverage that thing? It’s the same buzz, right? You have the same buzz when you enter people as well as what you mentioned in response to it. So let me switch gears to something much more closely related to marketing, much more closely related to helping people to sell better, as I said in the intro, right? Using surveys. So just briefly, I’m curious from zero, how do you think surveys, how trendy are they right now?

Why Traditional Customer Surveys Are Data Graveyards

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Surveys, like for most people in the business world. So I think the way that most people use it, it’s a zero. Like most people, it’s a thing. We get asked questions all the time, like, does anyone even take surveys anymore?

Louis: Tell the story about the presentation.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: I mean, for example, so we were booked to do a presentation at a business exhibition type event and I was going to do a presentation for about 45 minutes about the power of surveys, et cetera. Now what happened was people would be attending this event. I was speaking, there’s a few other people doing other presentations about other things, you know, like staff and HR and finance and all sorts of other things. And in advance, the event organizers sent me a spreadsheet that had the names and email addresses of all the people who had registered interest in coming to my particular presentation. Doesn’t mean they have to come. Sometimes they might get there and get caught up in other things. And equally, you don’t have to register in advance. You can just turn up on the day and come along. But they had given their email address, they had registered their interest in coming to the presentation and they had given explicit, just to say they had given explicit consent for their details to be given to us so that we could contact them. So what happened was, I Knocked up a quick email, like two days before the event. I sent the email out and that email basically said, hey, I can see you’re coming to our masterclass session on whatever day. It was just so it’s about email marketing, but just so I can tailor it best to, to suit you, can you take this quick three question survey just so I know where you’re at? And then I asked them what we call key questions. So these like key defining questions to find out specifically where they’re at. So there were questions like, again, it’s to do with email marketing and surveys. So I asked questions like, how many subscribers do you have right now? That was question one. Question two, do you mostly do like broadcast emails or do you mostly do automated campaigns or both? And see what email marketing solution do you use, you know, infusionsoft, getresponse, web, etc. So I sent that email out and people took it. That was great. And then I turned up and I did the presentation and at the end when I did the Q and A, somebody said, but does people even take surveys anymore? And I said, okay, well, let’s just find out. And I said, let’s take a gamble. And I said, if you received an email from me that had a link to a survey in it and you took the survey, put your hands up. And 100% of the room put their hands up, including the lady, incidentally, weirdly, who said, does anyone even take surveys anymore? So I think from a marketing perspective, a lot of businesses think that, oh well, people don’t do surveys anymore. It’s a hassle. And if I email them with a survey, I can’t email them with an offer, which is not true. We’ll talk about that in a minute. And therefore they get locked in this

Louis: mindset of the big problem I think a lot of people have is just the mindset of where a survey fits in your flow. And this is the thing we broke. And the reason we actually had to create response suite in the first place, because again, we didn’t come up with this great idea that’s gonna make us rich one day by coming up with a response suite. Actually, we came with a response suite because we needed a solution to do this thing. So what we have, the idea was where a survey fits in most people’s minds is like this. So step one of your process is you do some kind of lead generation, you build your list, and then you do some kind of indoctrination. You warm up those people and then you sell them a thing and Buy them a thing and they buy the thing. And then a few days later, you might sometimes send them a survey to find out what they thought of that thing, just as a courtesy, so you can find out how well your product is doing. And funnily enough, a lot of people who sell online products don’t even do that. But for everybody who’s running surveys, when you think of a survey, that’s where the survey goes. It goes at the very end of the process, and that’s where it sits. What happens with that survey data? Well, every now and again, maybe once a year, a couple of times a year, maybe even once a month, if you’re really keen, you might open that up and just see how well you’re doing. Oh, that’s good. Or they didn’t like that. Well, might improve the fact that they couldn’t have to change their password three times to get into the online membership area. You sort of use it to sort of fix a few things in your business, but basically.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: But you can’t do a lot with that data.

Louis: I mean, you just look at it and sort of react to it. Yeah, that’s all you’re doing. You react. Surveys is where useful data goes to die. That’s what happens. It goes there and it rots until somebody can be asked to go and actually check it out.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Yeah.

The New Survey Model: From Cul-de-sac to Center of Marketing

Louis: We had another idea, which was what if, instead of at the end of the process, what we would call, like the cul de sac of the marketing world. I’m just making sure.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Bonjour. And cul de sac, by the way,

Louis: le petit pois d’ or le chambre. I don’t know why the peas are in the bedroom, but they’re that. So the only two words I know. I did GCSE French, I love you.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: So did I. There you go. I can’t remember anything.

Louis: But rather than the survey B, that end, that cul de sac, where they. All this useful information goes to die, what if it was the center of your marketing? What if, when you move people from joining your list, nurture them, sell them a thing, and then you survey them? What if that was only. Rather than that being the complete process, what if that was only the first half of your sales process? What if there was another half that nobody was really doing anything with that actually was more profitable? So what if. One example. We’ll give you two. I’ll give you the first one. What if you ask people, okay, you bought my program, which was about. Let’s do a marketing example, which was about traffic generation. Using Facebook ads. Because, yeah, there’s not enough courses about that out right now. Right. So you’ve just bought fabulous new Facebook ads. Course. Mainly because the person selling it was an attractive woman on Facebook and she looked pretty and you thought, you know, if I buy this offer, I might be in with a chance. So you buy that off her and you consume it. That’s great. Then you receive a survey and that survey says, what did you think of the program? Was it awful? Okay, amazing. You click, it was amazing. You were very beautiful. That’s good. Question number two. Now you’re really good at Facebook ads. What do you need help with next to grow your business? Is it a template and training on landing pages that convert for sales? Is it another traffic generation method that is Google Ads? Or is it search engine optimization? Just three things off the top of my head and I click, I could do with help with search engine optimization. That’s going to be my bag. And the next question is something like, what is your budget? Or something like that. Whatever other question you click submit immediately on the thank you page, there’s a video of said attractive woman just in this example, saying, thank you for taking my survey. That was lovely of you. You said you wanted some help with search engine optimization. Good news. I’ve got a really good program which teaches search engine optimization. And as a thank you for taking that survey and I want to give you 50% off and give you this bonus. Would you like it? Now what we’ve got is another sales process happening at a moment of unique engagement. Because what would the alternative to that be? The alternative that most people are doing, most marketers are doing is somebody buys a thing off us, then what do they do? They go email all the buyers and go, hey, what about this other thing? And they don’t. And they either say yes or no. Most of them say no. And you go, hey, what about this other thing? And you keep beating them over the head with different offers until they spend money with you. Because we’re told over and over and over again that the easiest people to sell to are current customers who’ve already spent money with us. And it’s true. But what if you break that pattern? What if you do something that the people are not expecting, which is ask what they thought of your product, ask their opinion, show them that you’re actually valued by saying, hey, what did you think of that thing? Suddenly you look a lot more professional. Suddenly you care about them. And suddenly they go from being passively scrolling through their email inbox while they Open up your email and get shouted out with another offer. Instead of that, you cut through that bullshit and instead you say, what did you think of that thing? And I go, oh, he or she wants my opinion. That’s really nice. They click to take your survey and we can share with you some ideas of how to get people to click to take your survey. Because that’s one of the keys to this process of getting people to fill them in. And then they ask you some questions, fill in the survey. Great. And now they’re actively involved because they’re thinking, oh, what did I think of that product? Oh, what do I need help with next? So now they’re active, they’re in an active state of mind. I’m using my psychology brain here from my mind reading world that I’ve spent the last 16 or so years using. So it really applies right here because we don’t, you know, we all got these skills we can pull in. And now on that thank you page, they’re no longer in a passive mode. They’re now they’ve just told you what they need help with. Not only what they need help with, but what they need help with right now and what they’re most interested in in this moment. That’s amazing because how many of us wish we could read our customers minds? Well, you basically are. They’re telling you what they want and now on that next page you can offer them the thing they want. And because they’re in an active mental state, they’re much more likely to buy it because they’re actively involved in completing the survey. So I mean, it changes everything, doesn’t it? Yeah. Right. And so thanks for giving me this example and for painting this super clear picture. It’s quite easy to talk to you, to be honest, because you’re asking the questions and answering them as well. So I’m just sitting back and relax. Sorry. No, no, no, it’s great. I just get excited. I’m not being sarcastic, it’s actually very good. And so you painted this picture of the world where surveys are basically used at the end of the quote unquote funnel, where like survey goes to die,

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: the data goes to die, no one

Louis: really takes the time to read them, apart from maybe an intern every six to nine months when they have nothing to do on a Friday afternoon. Your new world, the picture you’re painting is a bit different. It’s using survey to truly read people’s minds so you can really sell better more stuff without being salesy, but also without pissing them off. Without giving them offers that they don’t want. Exactly. So I think listeners are super curious to hear about how exactly do I do that? This all sounds really good, but how the fuck do I do it? So now let’s take this example you took and maybe there’s another use case, but maybe let’s start with the example you took about you have already subscribers or customers and you’re going to set a survey. So how do you go about it? Starting from step number one.

The Alpha Sequence: Four Emails to Drive Survey Completion

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: So this is going to fit really after any kind of major piece of action. So that might be that somebody registers for a webinar, it might be that somebody joins your list, it might be that somebody buys a product for whatever reason, somebody is going to take some significant action and some significant engagement with you. Again, could be becoming a new subscriber, it could be becoming a new customer, could be literally anything that involves a member of your program, giving you their details, joining your membership site, anything. Now, the moment that happens, you’re going to put them into some sort of sequence where you’re going to send them some emails and push them in the direction of a survey. We like to do it over the course of four or five emails. Four is preferable. We call it the alpha sequence because everything has to have a trendy name on the Internet, otherwise nobody cares. And basically what happens otherwise it’s not real.

Louis: You haven’t invented it.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Exactly. So we invented it. It’s called the alpha Z. There you go. And what happens is that you’re going to send them the emails. They’re going to be short, sharp and to the point, really short emails, like a couple of sentences that just say thanks for joining my newsletter. I want to make sure that the stuff I’m sending you is most helpful and most relevant and most valuable. So please take 2 minutes to fill out this quick survey and I’ve got something special for you as a little thank you for doing it or thank you for buying the product last week. I hope you’re enjoying going through it. Would you take two minutes to fill out this quick survey? So I know what you thought of it. So something basically whereas or thank you for on the thank you page of a webinar registration, thank you for registering for the webinar. I want to make sure that the content on the webinar is the most appropriate it can be for my entire audience. So please take 2 minutes to fill out this quick survey and then I’ll be able to tailor it best. Now, first of all, notice here the big point of this is the opposite of what most people do with surveys. Most of the time when you think of a survey, you think of someone on Facebook that you know is doing a university dissertation. They want to get some feedback. So can you fill in this 29 question survey about the last time you had breakfast? Like, this isn’t about this at all. This is about you’ve just done a thing and now I want to make sure that this is the best possible experience for you. So it’s all about helping, about being honest about the fact that you want their help to help them. So that’s really great. You’re going to send them into a survey and here’s the key. Keep the survey short, sharp and to the point. Don’t ask for anything that you don’t need. We like it to be like three, maybe four questions, all multiple choice where possible. I mean, responseweet, our survey platform, it does allow you to have any type of question, but all multiple choice is best. So they just like radio buttons, they choose an answer from and then just ask for their name and email address at the bottom. So what happens is you now say, so what you’re going to do is you’re going to define what your key questions are. So a key question is any question where you can take the answer and it defines something about that person. So for example, it might be you’ve got a high ticket application form, for example, for a high ticket coaching program. One of those questions might be, what’s your budget for coaching in your business right now or in your life right now? Because truthfully, if somebody can’t afford your $25,000 coaching program, there’s not much point in getting them on the phone. Whereas your key question might be whereabouts do you live? And if they don’t choose your country, then maybe you can’t serve them. If you’re a local business or a country specific business. So you can ask them questions that are relevant. Which of these do you need most help with right now? Which of these is your biggest obstacle right now? Those are not the same thing. Which of these are you most interested in right now? It’s not the same thing either. So you’re going to ask the questions that are most relevant to you. You’re going to give them some options, they’re going to choose one, which is nice, and then they go ahead and they pop their name and email address in just to sort of verify who they are. Now when they go ahead and hit submit, at that point there’s really two things that you want to look at. You want to look at what’s the immediate thing they see within seconds of filling out that survey. So that’s why we recommend doing a thing we called smart redirect. It’s basically as soon as they fill out the survey, take them to a page where you can make them an offer that’s relevant based on what they just said. For example, if somebody says, well, I really want help with Facebook ads next, then make sure that the next thing they see is a thing where you offer them a course about Facebook ads. That’s the first bit. Second bit is to think about what you’re going to do to follow up with them afterwards. So you want to like tag them in your CRM or put them on different lists in your CRM or email marketing software so that the emails they receive, the text messages they receive, the sequence of, you know, direct mail, if you’re a direct mail business, the letters that get printed out of the printer to be stuffed in envelopes and sent to them. The sequence, the phone calls, the sequence of marketing events that happen after filling out the survey are different based on what they said in answer to that survey question.

Smart Redirect: Personalized Offers Based on Survey Responses

Louis: For example, if the answer that they give you qualifies them for a phone call because they’re a certain value client, then that gives a notification to that salesperson, for example. Whereas if they qualify for something less than that, maybe something of a lower value, again, you put them into that email sequence if it’s a sort of lower touch point. Yeah.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: So, for example, you know, if somebody, if you’re using this as a, as a high ticket thing to find out whether or not they’re likely to be a good fit for your coaching program, which is, again, let’s say it’s $8,000 when somebody fills that out if they tick, I’ve got, you know, $15,000 to spend or $8,000 to spend, you definitely want to get them on the phone. So as soon as they fill out the survey, make sure you take them to a page where they can book in an appointment. Whereas if somebody says, well, I don’t have any money to invest, okay, that might not strictly be true. Maybe they’re just trying to be a little, keep their cards a little bit more close to their chest. But you probably don’t want to get them on a call immediately because they’ve just, they’ve tried to hide the fact they’ve got any money from you and those people exist or they genuinely don’t have any money, in which case you probably want to put them into an email sequence that’s designed to warm them up first, send them some case studies, display some value along the way before you eventually get them on the phone. Rather than just saying, well, anyone who wants to call. Because I’ve seen so many coaches, consultants who are saying, well, if somebody wants a call, they can get on a free strategy call with me, because, you know, if I speak to enough people,

Louis: some of them will buy.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: And that’s just a horrendous waste of time speaking to people who are never going to be able to join.

Louis: They just want us. Often these people just want to get on the phone with you because they want to speak to you personally, because they admire you and they kind of love you a little bit.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Rent a friend. Yeah. So I mean, basically what you end up doing is you want to make sure that there’s three bits to it, really. You want to put people in a sequence to send them the survey, then they fill out the survey and that has three or four questions in it. And then the sort of offshoot from that is that you either or both take them to a relevant offer immediately based on what they’ve said. And that offer could be schedule your strategy call here, or it could be buy this thing, or it could be join this membership program or. And you put them into an email sequence or a sequence of letters or text messages or phone calls or carrier pigeons or whatever it is that you want to do to do your marketing, right?

Louis: So thanks so much for this very thorough and structured answer. Again, I love what you said for a few reasons. The first one is because it’s using basic stuff, right? We’re not trying to invent the wheel here. We’re using surveys. We are just asking people what they want. Two, it’s leveraging a few psychological levers, that one of them being the foot in the door principle, right?

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: So you ask for someone.

Louis: So this person did a small action, for example, they registered to this webinar. So that’s the first kind of the first small action. Then you’re asking them something a bit bigger, filling in a survey, right? Those people are more likely to fill a survey because they’ve done this action before, right? So you’re leveraging to the put in the door principle. But the third thing you’re doing is based on this information right now, while they are quote, unquote warm, while someone is actually actively engaging with you, actively doing something, you actually give them an offer, something that is highly personalized to them right after they chose the options for Example, as you said, if they say I have 10,000 to spend right now, I have a huge problem, I need help, then the next action is simply just book a call right now. So I like that very much because it’s really in line with my philosophy, the philosophy of this podcast and I know the philosophy of people listening. So let’s break it down a bit more in terms of step one. Let’s say it sounds like this system works best for people. As you said, consultants could be agencies or companies selling services that have already some sort of a presence, some sort of an audience, right? Mm, sort of. It’s.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: I mean it basically works for anyone. So it started out because we both have businesses where we sell info products. So that’s where it started out for us. Neither of us have a high ticket program in that niche where we got where we needed this. So it’s if for us it started out actually just because we had loads of products to sell, or we both have a membership site, but that membership site covers a lot of different things and therefore we want to know, well, what specifically from that program do they need help with so we can sell them it with that as the leading sort of benefit, if you like.

Louis: And if you’re just getting started, I mean, that’s a little bit of a different tangent if one of the ways you’re launching or the way you’re starting and growing your things is through a webinar. As we sort of mentioned before we ran a webinar, we thought let’s try using our own platform, responseweet, to increase the show up rate of webinars. Because what we’ve all done as marketers, as we’ve started to accept the normal statistics of show up rates and opt in rates and open rates, like we for some reason accepted that that number that’s touted around by the so called gurus is acceptable. Well, actually we have a philosophy in here that we don’t accept the norm because why on earth would we? Right, so all we want to do is you want to use responseweet to increase the show up rate for our webinars, where we’re going to pitch responseweet in actual fact, in this case. So what we did is we said, okay, come and join this webinar. We’re going to show you how to use really clever modern email segmentation to get better results in your marketing or something like that. Right. It was a little while ago. As soon as people register, we ask them what is the main thing that you need help with, right? Now or something like that. So are you mainly doing this, doing this or doing that? What that means now is with that information because all of that information gets pushed directly into our email marketing system. It means we sent a custom, very slightly custom, by the way, not much work at all, a custom email sequence to each person depending on what they said they wanted the most help with. So if that struggle right now is growing their list, we can highlight in the show up sequence to get them to come along to the webinar and be there live about all the different ways we’re going to help them increase their list size. Whereas somebody else who said the thing I really need help with is getting engagement from my existing list, then all of our emails on the lead up to the webinar are like, here’s one of the things we’re going to share with you and we’ll tease some of the stuff that we’re going to teach about engagement in your list and getting open rates to increase in click throughs to increase. So what we’re doing is when this is not just about making more sales, this is about creating more engagement with every single person who joins your list or people who are already on your list. So because it’s a bit the way I like to think of it and I talk about it a lot with friends, is it’s about, do you remember those? Choose your own adventure stories where I could be reading through and be like, if you think he turned left, turn to page 42. If you think you turned right, turn to page 86. It’s like that for every subscriber. We have the saying in the office, which is blanket marketing is dead. And the reason is, look at the way we consume information these days. Actually even the way we consume TV shows. Now. My dad called me the other night and he said, kennedy, are you watching that thing on like the BBC right now on BBC1? I’m like, no, Dad, I don’t watch TV like that. Nobody of our age and younger watches TV on the schedule that the TV stations say we’re going to publish that and stream it. Instead we tune into Amazon and Netflix, where we consume the content we want to consume on the timeframe we want to consume it. So why have most email marketers not realized that’s how people consume information? Now the way you want that information and what you need right now is different to the way other people do. So why do we treat them all the same? Why do we bang them all? Why do we send to all? Why don’t we open up our email system and say this is today’s promotion, send to everyone. Truth is, you’re probably alienating at least 60% of your list, at least what’s

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: come out of conversations recently. Because so basically this was originally kind of devised for us as info product marketers. And by the way, for years we were doing this manually. So we were running surveys, we were exporting CSV files, we were segmenting CSV files based on the response, loading them back back into email marketing software. This was done for. We were just doing this in our own business for ages before we actually decided, actually, let’s make this a piece of software, let’s start teaching these methods. And it was working really nicely. So that’s what we were doing it, although. And we were doing it to serve our info product businesses. And in doing that, we sold cheap things with it, we sold expensive programs with it, we sold memberships, we used

Louis: it on webinars, we used it on existing businesses, we launched new brands with it.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: So it works with all that stuff. But at the same time, over time we’ve realized actually, in fact just in a few weeks, a few weeks ago, we were talking to somebody who helps freelancers to build better freelancing businesses as WordPress developers, or as PHP developers, or as copywriters. And actually he was like, well, I need to tell everyone about this because they should be using it as part of their client acquisition process. So we realized actually it works for those people as well, which is a crazy thing we had never thought of until he came up with it. So I guess it works for everyone. However, what I would say is if somebody is starting out and somebody’s just getting their business going and they’ve just built their first list building funnel or their first webinar funnel or their first product launch thing, like the time to start using this concept and this mindset really of not treating all your customers the same is immediately because otherwise your marketing is going to be out of date before you start.

Louis: So let’s say we have a list, an established business and we run a few things, we run some webinars, we have an email list, people can join. We said product briefly, can you give me which action will you start gathering? Setting up a survey after like, based on like what I said, webinar registration, email registration, buying a product, which one would you pick first?

Where to Start: Email List Registration vs Other Touchpoints

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: So I guess the simplest one to do it with would be when somebody subscribes to your list. So let’s imagine that you’ve got a free report or a free white Paper or a free recipe or whatever that you give away. At this point, the only thing that you know about the person who’s opting in is that they are interested in that one thing. So, for example, we’ve got a client in the fitness space and he gives away a free report. And so people are opting in for

Louis: that from all over the world.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Opting in, put their email address in. And he’s excited because he’s seeing his list get bigger and bigger and bigger. And that’s cool. And then when we were chatting to him, we said, but you realize that free report is going to help loads of different people. And he’s like, yeah, that’s why it’s great. And I said, no, that’s why you’ve got a problem. Because what he was doing was giving away this free report that would attract people who want help to lose weight, but it would also be beneficial to people who want to build muscle, which is a very different thing, but it would also be beneficial to people who want to train for a marathon. So suddenly he’s got all these different people who need different help, different advice, different solutions. And actually, truthfully, it would be medically damaging if he was to try and treat them all the same. If somebody wants to shed pounds as opposed to wants to put on muscle and become a bodybuilder, it’s a very different thing. Not that I’m a fitness expert, but I know that. So as we were talking to him, we realized, well, actually, you’ve got a bunch of people opting in for your thing. Another example, somebody we interviewed on our podcast, three Marketers Walk podcast a little while ago, is one of our clients, Teresa. Teresa is a social media coach. So she teaches businesses, small businesses, how to use social media. Now, what she realized was what she’s trying to do is help freelance social media experts to do social media on behalf of clients. That’s why she started, because that’s what she does. She wanted to help people who are like one man bands or one woman bands or one person bands in 2019 to start helping other businesses with their social media. But very quickly she realized her list was growing full of people who have a job doing social media within an actual company or have an agency, or are just entrepreneurs who want help with social media. And suddenly she realized they need help with very different things. Because if you’re a freelancer, you need help getting clients. If you are a. If you’ve got a job, then you need help creating content. So they’re very different things. So Again, suddenly she realized just because she’s giving away that one free thing, it doesn’t mean that all those people now immediately want help with the next thing. So here’s the problem that gives us Most people have been taught the standard process of give away a free report, sell a thing for like $27, sell another thing for a bit more money, that works and it’s fine. And we do it. And we suggest that you do it, you might as well have an offer there. But actually very quickly after opting in. So within a day or two, within a few hours, in our case within four hours, it sends them an email that then says, okay, great, do you want to take this quick survey so I can find out how best to serve you? Because I think what more and more businesses are finding, especially people who are new and starting out, is that turning new subscribers into paying customers is the hardest challenge. Acquiring subscribers actually is not that difficult. It’s fairly easy to do, especially if you willing to throw some money at Facebook ads or Google Ads, whatever. But actually getting a return on that investment is getting harder and harder. There are people now more and more marketing coaches who only three or four years ago were saying, oh, when you just run some ads and the funnel will self liquidate, are now saying actually that funnel might half self liquidate, but then the real money is in the next thing you sell them. So the faster somebody can get that initial sale, the better. So we think the easiest starting place is as soon as somebody joins your list, run them through a survey. Which means that within a few hours you can be selling them the exact thing they want right there. And they’re not guessing what they might want.

Louis: Right. So you start at the very top. There are a few solutions out there. I’m. I’d like to be very practical right here to give some information listeners on how to do that. So you mentioned your software that does that response with. I was thinking, as you were describing, there is also very easy way to do that using for example Zapier where you use one tool for your email such as mailchimp. You set up a trigger via zapier and then you send them to a surveys like Typeform and depending on the action you can set up different tags or different sequences. I was also thinking when you were talking about making them send a survey that a lot of people now are using links or questions directly within the email. Instead of you sending a survey, you have a question with three choices in the email, straight away in the welcoming mail that says click on the Link on the sentence that matches closest to who you are. Like, I’m a marketer, I’m a designer, I’m a developer. And clicking on this will actually fire a tag in your CRM or email sequence that will allow you to do what you said as well. I wanted to give you to provide a few more options as well. But the process is the same. Right? It’s just all about. But I mean. Okay, here’s a couple of tips. If you’re going to do any of those things or if you’re going to run a survey, whether it’s with responseweet or with any other platform, really important thing is that you want to increase the response rate. So when you do this, you need to really focus on how many people actually complete those surveys. So we’ve got a couple of different techniques. Is it okay to share them? I think might be valuable, maybe?

Maximizing Response Rates: Technical Integration and Retargeting

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Of course.

Louis: Okay, so one of the things you want to do is make sure you do link your survey system to your email marketing system. If they don’t talk to each other, you’re not going to be able to get the most responses possible. And the reason we know that is because we tried, because this is what we did. We used a really famous survey platform long before response week to do this manually. And what we had to do is we would send out the first email saying, hey, please take this survey. And some people would, great. But then the majority of your list don’t take that survey on that first sort of email. Of course they don’t because they don’t all open that email and they don’t all react to it. So what happens now is you can’t really email everybody again saying, hiya, if you didn’t take the survey I mentioned yesterday, would you please go and take it now with a different angle?

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Now your messaging is like wishy washy and everything that we hate.

Louis: Yeah, it’s not direct, it’s not giving them a really clear thing.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: So things do.

Louis: But also worse than that is you’re actually punishing the people who are your hyper responders by sending them an email to which they’ve already taken action on. So you’re basically saying, you know that thing you did yesterday, sorry, but I’m emailing you again about it and now you’re sort of punishing your hyper responders, which is not good. So what you want to do is just make sure that your email marketing system is talking to your survey platform. And that means when somebody completes the survey, you take them and you exclude them from the follow up email which are saying, hey, you didn’t complete the survey, please go and complete the survey. That’s the first thing. So send them. We send four or five emails in that sequence to encourage them to take the survey with different angles and making it friendly and all that sort of good stuff. That’s the first thing. The second thing to do is there are some people who will click to take the survey. They’ll get to your survey page and they’ll go, right, that looks good, I’ll do it later. Or for some reason they click, which you can track in your email marketing system. Great, you can track that. But if they don’t complete the survey after clicking it, what are you going to do? Now? The other thing we’re going to do is put some kind of way of retargeting those people, which is the reason obviously I’m going to tell you about responseweet because we saw all these problems so we fixed them in responseweet for us. So what we do there is we allow ourselves to put Facebook tracking pixels and to put Google, what’s the Google one called? Google Pixels, right?

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Analytics.

Louis: Google Analytics, that’s the word. I’m not being technical. Google Analytics code onto your actual surveys themselves. So you can now retarget people using Google, using Facebook into the survey. So you now know if the complete of the survey. So that’s just two really quick tips on how you can maximize the number of completions you get. I’m aware of, I know that most email marketing software like yours have this capacity now and with Zapier or any connection, I also like a lot of tools as well. Talk to each other and you can perform all of that. But at the end of the day it’s not about the tool, right? No, absolutely not. It’s about using the technique. And that’s the big thing. Because if you continue. Let’s imagine, let’s look. Imagine the situation, which is the way we all normally do it. I’ll give you an example we’ve used a few times actually in presentations that we’ve given. Imagine you’re in the DIY sort of home improvement niche, right? And you do a few different things. So people join your list and the first bunch of emails you send them through are all about how to improve your garden. Okay? So it’s in the DIY niche, they’ve opted in for something diyish and you Send the Next 5 Emails are all about, here’s a good product about improving your garden. But I don’t want a Thing that’s about improving my garden. Exactly. I don’t have a garden, I don’t have a backyard. I just live in a place without one. That’s okay. Five emails later I now get put to the next sequence of offers and that sequence of offers all about how to convert my attic and I get five emails about this product they’ve got about converting my attic. Problem is I don’t want to convert my attic but it’s okay because after that, after those 10 emails now I’ve gone through five emails about my improving my garden and five emails converting my attic and now get an email which is about how to remodel my kitchen. My kitchen’s fine, my kitchen’s absolutely fine. So I get another five emails promoting a product about convert, about remodeling my kitchen and finally 15 emails later. So now the 16th email I get an email about a course which is to do with how to lay out my garage. So now it’s really, so everything is really nicely laid out, my tools are really nicely laid out and I can actually fit my car in my garage. How many people are really going to stick around for 15 emails about stuff they’ve got no interest today, no interest in at all. Not many people, if they don’t unsubscribe, they’re certainly going to disengage. Which means your engagement, your open rates, your click through rates drop through the floor. The solution to that, the knock on

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: effect of which is your delivery gets worse.

Louis: Yeah, absolutely. If you look at email marketing science, the actual tech behind it, soon people stop opening your emails, then the email providers start thinking this is probably not that relevant so they stop delivering as many of emails, which is awful as well. But we could go into that another time perhaps. So now that’s the way that most people are doing it is they’re putting people through a chain of offers. Whether you’re doing it in real time with broadcasting, you’re doing it through automations. The simple solution of getting me straight there to that offer of how to lay out my garage is as soon as I’ve opted in for that free thing, ask me what I really want help with. And then when I say I really want help with my garage, offer me stuff that helps with my garage. Not only have you kept me more engaged, increased your deliverability for everybody in your list, but you’ve got your return on ad spend investment back quicker and they like you more because you’re only sending them offers for stuff they actually want.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Now here’s why we like to do a survey as opposed to. Because it’s a great technique if you put links in your emails and get people, people to click the links. So click here if you are this. Click here if you are. This. Click here if you are. This is realistically, and we have tested it, you can only. It only is really effective if you’re asking one question with a handful of answers as opposed to a bunch of questions. And the big technology here, the big secret, I guess, is to not only put people through the right sequence, as Kennedy just described, in other words, what do you need help with right now? And then sell them that thing, but actually to gather as much data as possible about that person in the swiftest time possible. Here’s what I mean by that. Pretty much all email service providers now allow you. Email marketing provider, sorry, Allow you to tag people based on stuff. So it used to be back in the day, no, no, everyone’s on a list and then that list tells you what it tells you. Now it’s more so tag oriented. So you tag them based on different things. And now it’s. And some of them are a combination of both. So somebody might be on this list, but they have these tags. So the big thing for us is if you ask a question where you’ve got four questions, each of the four questions has four possible answers. So now you’ve got 16 possible answers across that thing. Each one of those is associated with a tag in your system. So for example, one of the questions might be. This question is getting harder to ask, but are you male or female? Again, that might make a difference if you’re in, say, the fitness world. Well, if somebody tag or prefer not to say, if somebody says they’re male, you tag them as male. If somebody says they’re female, you tag them as female. If somebody says say not to prefer, you can tag them as that. And the way you follow up with that would be done to you. The next one might be, okay, great. Which of these are you most interested in? What’s your big goal here? Are you trying to lose weight and that would apply that tag. Are you trying to build muscle? That would apply that tag. Are you trying to regenerate after an illness? Regenerate? I’m not doctor Who. What’s the word anyway, whatever that is, get better.

Building Data Matrix: Tags, Segments, and Targeted Broadcasting

Louis: Recover.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Recover. Or are you trying to train for a big event? And each one of those would have a relevant tag. Next one. How old are you? Are you 18 to 25? Are you 26 to 40? 40 to 60? 60 plus. And that would tag them differently as well. And the big thing here is that you now have this matrix of data where you can look in your system and you can quickly say, great, give me a report of everyone who is male, 25 to 60, which would be a couple of tags put together. Male, those age ranges and interested in building muscle, because they’re the only people who it’s going to be worth inviting to my Bodybuilding for Men webinar class. So the key here really, I guess, is to over time build this matrix of data. But the faster you can get that, the better your instantly, the better your ongoing broadcast marketing is going to be. So I guess our philosophy is automate that really cool process to sell them the perfect thing at the right time. But then over a period of the months, years, decades, that somebody remains on your list. Make sure that you don’t just email everyone on the list with an offer, which is what most people are doing right now. The most that most people do at the moment, and some people don’t even do this, is they exclude the people who’ve already bought a product when they mail it. So buy my how to Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous product and we’ll exclude everyone who’s already bought that product. Great, that’s a good, that’s a great starting point. But now the next step to that, to really step up your game and start getting better results, is to only make those offers to people who it fits.

Louis: Yeah, that’s a perfect way to kind of end this step by step. Although they have a question I wanted to ask you, but I’m not sure we touched on it exactly. So if you had to pick the four questions that you would recommend people to ask in this survey, you ask a few, you gave a few examples. But if you really have to pick those four questions that would tend to give you the best type of answers, the one that are the most business critical, what would they be? So what we call the key question, which is you have to decide your key question, which is what is the question you have to ask to figure out which of your products. And they don’t even have to be your products. Remember, the products that you recommend could be things that you’re an affiliate of where you just make a commission on. You don’t have to create all these products if that fits your bag. I mean, for some businesses, that doesn’t fit your bag.

The Four Critical Survey Questions That Generate Sales

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: So I mean, imagine you could only ask one question. If it was illegal to ask more than one question, what would that question be?

Louis: Yeah, and that question has to Be which. So if you, from your pool of things that your products are, look at what are the. What are the. What are they? What are the problems that your four products solve? And then you basically say, which of these things do you need the most help with right now? And the important parts of that question are, which of these you need the most help with? So what do you need help with? And the last bit is, right now, the timeliness is really important because that’s like the closest thing to mind reading, like we said earlier, right? So because now we know it’s a tiny thing, they really want help with it right now. The next most important question, that’s the most important question you must ask. The second thing is to come up with a question which allows. Because what you want to do is you want, and this is getting pretty advanced now, but you want to ask questions which are actually loaded to get the person to start selling themselves on the thing you’re going to offer them. And the way you do that is by getting them to think about the value of the thing that they said they’re having a problem with. So if I said to you, which one of these things do you need a problem do you need help with right now? And I give you four options, you check that one. Well, the first little secret there is as well, by the way, to make these radio buttons, like Rob said earlier, so that it’s easy to complete and fast to complete, like five minutes or less. They choose that thing and then you ask them what would it mean to you? Or what would the value of that thing be to you right now? So now you can start saying either monetary values, which are a little bit crude and quite transparent, or more importantly, emotional values, what would it allow you to do? And you can talk about it will allow me to spend more time with my spouse. It would create more freedom. It would allow me to. It depends what your niche is, but whatever the benefits are, and basically give four benefits of all of those products which apply all the benefits and allow them to choose one.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: What you can do right there, by the way, is make sure that if you’ve got four options to the first question, you can have those benefits for each of those options. So, for example, if somebody said, I want help to build, so your options are, do you want help to build your list? Do you want help to drive traffic? Do you want help to create products? Or do you want help to convert people into sales? You would have four benefit options for each of those, but only display the relevant ones. So if somebody Says I want help with list building and then you say, great, well how would that benefit you in your life right now? How would that help you? Your 4 options that appear in the survey now are based on list building. It would say, well, I want help to build a tribe, so I’ve got ready instant traffic and I can work less and blah blah, blah. So the second set of options will be different for the second option. Does that make sense?

Louis: Yeah.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: So you want to branch down your answers to make sure that the four things they’re saying all they’ve got is four benefits that they can choose from from the thing they just selected.

Louis: So what do you think? What do you need the help with right now? What are the benefits of, of this particular solution and what else? Yeah, so what is that? So it’s not the benefits, it’s. You position it as the value. The value. Right. The way to write the options for you as the writer of the survey is to actually write the big benefits and do that in an emotional way. The next thing you want to do is you want to make sure for sure, for absolute sure, that you’ve got the person’s email address. Because if you don’t do that, then really talking back to your email marketing system and excluding them from anything or then following up in the most relevant way, not really going to happen. So that’s the third one. The fourth one can be a variable thing and we always leave that one up to being something that’s maybe specific for your industry. So that might be to do with goals, if that works for your business. It might be to do with demographic. Yeah, exactly. So it might be demographic. So it might be location if it’s a physical thing or it might be your time zone if it’s like online coaching. So it’s something usually to do with the way that it’s delivered specifically to those people. So it’s a bit of information. The idea of that one there is really to help you overcome an objection, to make sure there’s not going to be an objection. It might be an objection the customer might have or it might be an objection you might have to working with them. So for example, it might be that they self identify as something that they might have an objection to actually buying your product. Like I can’t get to Louisiana every week because it’s a Louisiana based mastermind. So you would discount them from the Louisiana mastermind at that one. Or it might be for you. Like they have no money to invest in ads. And if you’re running an ads program. Well, you don’t want to have them invest in your program and then not get any results. They’ve got no money to actually invest in ads. Then again, that would be excluding themselves, but from your perspective rather than from their perspective. So it’s some kind of inclusion or exclusion question. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific because I don’t want to say it depends, but hopefully I’ve given you the framework to figure out what your question.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: We hate those. It depends answers, but it’s one of those things where if you’re in the fitness niche, you probably need to know some stuff about their age and their sort of makeup, if you like.

Louis: And if you’re doing a physical in person, personal training, you need to know where they’re based.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: So yeah, it is going to vary a bit, but those are the basics.

Louis: The best advice I can give on this is like when you speak to people face to face, you meet them at events or whatever and you’re curious about who they are because they could be potential customer or they actually are customers, is to think what questions you tend to ask straight away. Get to know them better. Right. And sometimes as you say in fitness, it’s like, well, you know, have you done it before? Have you done any weightlifting before? Yes or no? Or if your marketing is about, you know, are you, are you a no bullshit marketer, yes or no. Or do you, do you believe in the same thing I believe, like the belief system. I mean, that’s a great question there about, about where are they in like if it was, are you a beginner, are you an intermediate, are you an advanced person? And you can apply that. Basically you want to be more specific in your niche. But for example, in list building, that would be. I don’t have a list yet. I have a list but I want it to be bigger. Or I’ve got a massive list but I want to be more effective. That’s one question. Or if it’s in the fitness niche, it’s. I’ve never done any fitness before. I’ve done fitness fairly regularly or I’m an athlete, I want more support. So it’s about where they are in their journey. Yeah. And it goes back to what the system you’re talking about right now, and thanks by the way for going through all of those use cases is that you need to do some sort of research before. At the end of the day, you can’t just jump in and make an assumption about everyone. Please resist the temptation to make it any longer than four or five questions, you get to a sixth question. You are asking too many questions. Because the real key with this is to get the answers. And you can’t get the answers to those questions if people aren’t completing them. People don’t complete when there are open ended paragraph type questions, you’re going to massively reduce that uptake. And if there are lots of questions, more than five, more than four questions, when you get that number five, that’s when it drops off. So I would say the fact that you’re advocating for radio buttons, I agree. For the speed of selection and all of that. It’s something to trade carefully. If you don’t know your demographic, your Persona, your customers very well. And this is why it’s better. I mean that’s my point of view. It’s better to start with one or two open ended question. If you have no clue about who the customers are or what the structure. I think that’s an interesting idea. So they can use their own words. Sure. I mean I think it’s an interesting idea to do that. But actually I think the big mistake we all make in marketing is that we go ahead and we run ads or we put a sales page up or we create product before we even know what the customers are. Actually we shouldn’t be running this, we shouldn’t be creating the opt in unless we know that data. Yeah, that’s the point, right? Maybe run a survey beforehand, but that’s not to actually do or better than surveys at that point. And I realize we have a survey platform so I should be like surveys for everything but actually run the survey at that point. Yes, it works really effectively. But better than surveys for doing your customer research and understanding your customers are customer interviews. Actually pick the phone up, go face to face. People love doing you a favor. Go ask them the question. Don’t be afraid to do that. Have conversations. So make sure you have a deep understanding of the customers first. Sorry to sort of cut you off there, but I got excited. But that’s my point as well. Exactly. Like don’t do your research before running such surveys because else you might actually shoot yourself in the foot by giving them options that they don’t care about.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: I’ll just jump in here. There is an interesting thing here which is our customers have two things. First of all, they don’t always know what’s best for them. And secondly, they can’t always put into words exactly what their problem is because sometimes they don’t know and sometimes they just don’t word it very well, that’s another problem with taking that route. One thing you can do, however, one phenomenon that we’ve noticed a lot over the last six or seven years of doing this is that if you have. By this, I mean survey marketing, specifically, if you have somebody who comes into your business and they go through this survey, a lot of the time, if you just give them radio buttons to choose from, you will actually tell them what their problem is, because they’ll read your radio buttons and they’ll suddenly think, actually, that’s where I’m really falling apart. I’ve got a product I made, but I’m really struggling to build a sales page for a funnel for it. Or I’ve got everything built. Like, I paid somebody to do that for me, but now, like, I built it and nobody’s coming. Like, how do I market this now? How do I drive traffic through the thing? So a lot of the time, if you just said, what’s your problem right now? They’ll say, oh, well, you know, I’m very busy and I wake up in the morning, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next. And then my wife nags me. And then. And then, well, I suppose I check the emails and I get lost in a slurry of people trying to sell me.

Louis: There’s also the other guy, which is, I’ve built a funnel, but it’s just not working.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Yeah, yeah. Or the Facebook, I’m working.

Louis: What does that mean?

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: So what you’ll find is a lot of the time if I just said to somebody, what do you need help with right now? And give them literally face to face, they say, what do you need help with right now? They can’t actually just say, because most people only have one problem in their life, in their business, at any one time. We think we’ve got loads, but actually there’s only one big problem we have to solve. Once we’ve solved that, we’ll have a new big problem to solve. And once we solve that, we’ll have a new big problem solve. I’m not saying they’ve only got one problem. Once that’s solved, they’ll be the next Richard Branson. But they’ve only got one problem that’s really important to them right now and that’s all we should be trying to help them solve. So from my perspective, you should give them some options for things you can genuinely help them to solve. And if, truthfully, if their answer isn’t in one of those radio buttons, then you can’t help them Anyway, because you don’t have a solution for that. We shouldn’t just be inventing solutions for the sake of customers giving us money. If they’re going to choose one of those four things, they’re basically raising their hand and saying in their own mind, well, I’m interested in that thing. Which means that now when you start promoting that to them, they think it was their idea because they told you about it. But they only told you about it because it was the one that was most applicable from your options, if that makes sense. So effectively this whole thing about if you tell a customer something, they might believe it. If someone else tells a customer something, they’re more likely to believe it, but if they think they’ve come up with the idea themselves, well, they’re definitely going to believe. Kind of inspires that mentality in them selecting which one. We’re basically saying, do you want help with list building, product creation, building funnels or driving traffic? Well, their actual open ended answer might be none of those things. But when presented with those four options, the one that’s most relevant to them might be product creation that inspires them to want it.

Louis: It’s a bit like the presumptive clothes like the old sales guys used to do. They say, you know, you’re gonna buy this new car that you’re thinking about getting. Do you want the, that you’re buying? Do you want the red one or the blue one? The option there is not do you want the car or not? Yeah, because that’s a terrible way to close in the old school way, which we all hate. So it’s, it’s that broad but like made, not terrible. So remind me very briefly about the questions you advise to use. So the questions are, oh, which of

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: these you need most help with right now and how’s that going to change your life? Is effectively what you want to get across.

Louis: And then any demographic or qualify you need to have. And then of course their email address. We also like to ask for their name so we can address them properly. All right, thanks so much for going through this step by step with me and giving me so many examples and giving people listening so many examples and use cases. I have one last question for you before I let you go. What are the top three resources you’d recommend our listeners today? Could be anything. Software, books, conferences, anything resources. I really like a book called how to Sell the Way Customers Want to Buy. I think it’s called. It’s a really good book.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Catchy.

Louis: Yeah, yeah, It’s a long title but it’s really about doing those customer interviews and understanding your customers. So I just thought what we talked about that was really, really relevant. So that will really help us out in terms of apps. We run our entire business pretty much on Asana and Slack.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Slack and Asana, yeah. I mean, our team are all here in the office. We don’t. Nothing’s outsourced or farmed off to other countries or anything. Everything happens here in our office. So we could actually shout across the room at each other and do sometimes. But Slack and Asana have made a massive difference. And obviously, I mean, it’s funny, with email marketing platforms, we’ve moved across quite a few. We currently use Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit and recommend them all. Like they’re all good. We just use them for different things. Right, well, thanks so much for naming

Louis: all of those tools. I do use ConvertKit as well, but I’m not married to any tools. I’ve learned through my experience that, yeah, it’s not about the tools, never. It’s always about the systems, the first principle behind them. Well, Rob and Kennedy, thanks so much once again. Where can listeners connect with you, learn more from you? Well, there’s a few places if you want to hear us interviewing a different expert marketer every single week. You can tune into our podcast over at 3 marketers, walk into a podcast, catchy name for you there. Or if you want to take a look at what responseweet does and what it might be able to do for you, we’ve actually got a 14 day free trial, so you can actually go and test it out and make sure it’s a really good fit for you because we want only delighted customers. You can do that [email protected] and also

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: we would absolutely love to hear from listeners. So if you want to get in touch and say you’re lovely and your hair looks great, or you want to get in touch and say that was a load of shit and you don’t know what you’re talking about. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can just send us a message on social. So Twitter, I guess, is probably the easiest. It’s just ResponseSuite or Facebook.

Louis: I’ve got a little challenge for the listeners, actually. I would like to know how you felt about this episode and I’d love you to take a photo of your face which expresses how you feel about this episode. And please tweet that to us.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Yeah. So just one photograph, One photograph of

Louis: yourself expressing how you felt about this

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Episode with only your face.

Louis: With only your face sponsuite. Make sure to tag me as well. People listening, they’ll know. They’ll know which Twitter account to tag me. I want to see those stupid faces so make them ugly as possible so that Rob and Kennedy gets get heart attack every minute. That’d be great fun. All right, thanks again. Absolutely. Our pleasure.

Rob Woodgate and Kennedy: Pleasure.

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