Once upon a time, there was a company that was doing everything right. They had understood that the customer value journey now follows a different course than a few years ago, and so they produced content for prospects in each and every stage of the journey. They inspired, educated, offered experiences and delivered a well-defined product or service in the end.
Not only did they ace the content production part, they also nailed the scaling. Every time a client presented them with a new and unprecedented problem, they would produce a tailored solution, along with a how-to model they shared with the rest of the world. Clearly, creating value was right at the core of what they did and how they did it. They shared their content with the right audience, gathering thousands of prospect emails. Everything they did was centred around creating as much value as they could.
Yet, something was missing. Something crucial. Something that would help this company to connect the dots. Something that would tell them what to do with the tens of thousands of email addresses they’d amassed. And something to answer the questions that were arising as they became a victim of their own success. Because there were many such questions:
How to know which phase of the Value Ladder a prospect is at when encountering your content?
How to create trust with just one piece of content? (Spoiler: you can’t)
If a prospect downloads or reads a piece of the content, what to send him next?
How to separate good leads from useless ones before handing them over to sales?
While the value journey makes it clear what types of content you need to create, the journey alone won’t suffice to build on and turn all this content of yours into useful leads. What you need to complement the value journey is something fundamental. Something that tells you what your next step is and allows you to automate your course of action, no matter where in the journey your prospect is. That, we call a Value Ladder.
The Value Ladder is a piece of genius I first gleaned from reading Russel Brunson’s Dotcom Secrets. Straight off the bat, Brunson argues that every company, product or service should have its own Value Ladder.
Brunson’s Value Ladder has two axes. There’s value on the one and price on the other. The higher the value you offer, the more you go up. The more your product or service becomes expensive, the more you move to the right. As a sales strategy advisor, I saw in this graph a golden tool to build new types of products and finetune their pricing. But the true power of this simple sketch only hit me later, when I went into marketing. Suddenly, everything fell into place: this graph, if adapted to the thought leadership context, serves as a map. It will tell you exactly where your prospect is in his journey, and what your next step is. And once you’ve figured that out, you can scale your machine even faster by automating a few of the steps in the ladder.
If we adapt Russel’s Value Ladder to your plans for world domination, it looks like this.
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We take the three main concepts from our Value Journey: inspire, educate, deliver. We put these on the vertical axis in their order of appearance. Inspiration at the bottom, then education in the middle and delivery on top. The higher you go on the ladder, the more value is on offer. On the horizontal axis, we put a prospect’s willingness to buy. The more she moves to the right, the more she accepts your expertise as a thought leader. The more to the right, the more willing your prospect will be to buy your service or product.
Building Bait: the Value Ladder
Together, these two axes create agclear map you can use to pinpoint exactly where your prospect is on the Value Ladder. It doesn’t matter in what order she’s consuming your content. Let her come at any angle she pleases–you will always know what your next step is. Plus, this map gives you the opportunity to move your prospects around. If a prospect comes knocking but she’s the wrong kind, you have options. You can filter her out. You can stall her until your organisation is ready to deal with her. Or you can push her down your ladder.
Half a century of over-consumption has reprogrammed our children’s brains to prefer fries, chocolate and ice cream over vegetables–especially if they’re green. If your offspring is the kind to frown upon anything plant-like on their plate, your understandable reaction would be to exert your authority. ‘You will eat what’s on your plate. No discussion.’ If that doesn’t work, you tell those rascals to go stand in a corner until they are ready to return to the table and chew that leaf of spinach.
In time, you might want to opt for a tactic that comes with less drama. ‘Dear bambini’, you could say, ‘what’s your favourite menu for tonight? Chicken with broccoli or chicken with carrots?’ All of a sudden, the little rascals have a choice. They can influence what will happen. And it makes all the difference.
Always, always offer choice. Wherever your prospect is on the Value Ladder, don’t push your broccoli down his throat. Offer him a choice–but make it a smart one. One that gives the impression that he’s making his choice, whereas in fact, you’re the one leading.
Choice works. Actually, a lack of choice is the reason many calls to action on websites don’t work. ‘Get a demo’, ‘book a meeting’, ‘plan a call’… These only work on the rare occasion that your prospects know your company (or you) and need a quick fix to their problem. For companies trying to get appointments and meetings, though, having these CTAs on their website rarely gets them a lead.
Whether it’s sales or cold emails, the vegetable dilemma is a parable to explain you have to offer your prospects a choice, or at least the illusion of a choice. Ideally, you’ll define these choices depending on the stage your prospect is in. And because offering three choices is a bit much (people like choice, but not too much of it), I recommend giving them the option to either be educated further or be served right now.
Here is an example from MoneyOak and Tilroy.
And a newsletter from Hubspot.
Hubspot masters the choice technique in every email they send. They will first provide you value, offering that you learn something. But if you want the shortcut in the form of a solution to your problem today, there’s still the classic ‘book now’, ‘talk to an expert’, etcetera.
One day, a young company that helps start-ups and scale-ups with their financing (we’ll call it X), asks me for help. I set up a workshop for them and they explain their model to me. What they sell is a service, on the one part, and a training covering four topics (financial model, financing methods… the works) on the other. The training serves as bait for the consultancy bit. But calling it bait doesn’t do it much justice: this training is top-notch.
X sells this training to companies for 750 euro apiece. To get the word out, they set up an online campaign on Facebook and LinkedIn and make some noise using their personal brands. The result is an average of thirty paying-subscribers per training. That may not sound like much, but consider that this is a highly niche business. At the end of the training, there’s a slide that tells trainees something along the lines of ‘We can do this for you. Become a customer’. Guess how many of the trainees, on average, signed up to become a customer? Six.
Out of thirty people, that’s not much. Don’t forget that those who signed up did so because they have a real issue. They had paid for the training. They had sat through an entire day of high-end training, meaning they couldn’t be more trusting that X had legit expertise on the topic. Yet only a handful would go on to purchase anything.
The problem X wanted me to solve was twofold: how do we convert to more sales? And is there a way to get more people into that training?
Value Ladder
To answer this first question, the first thing we did was change the presentation’s last slide so it would offer trainees a choice after their one-day training. Instead of saying ‘become a customer’, the slide now gives trainees two options:
Learn more (aka ‘educate’)
and
Our experts can do this for you (aka ‘deliver’)
Spinning out the ‘learn more’ part, we took a new look at the training this company offered. As their one-day course consisted of four topics, we decided to chop their single course into four separate ones. The offer now consists of four half-day training sessions at 250 euro per session, with a package discount if you book all four, amounting to 750 euro, just like the original training.
What happened? The end slide worked. Out of thirty, six customers immediately hired their services. Twelve others booked extra trainings–in other words, they were not ready to buy just yet. Selling extra trainings meant extra income for the company. But the real magic hadn’t yet happened. After this extra round of trainings attended by twelve trainees, eight decided to become a customer and hired the company’s services. Why? Because it was starting to sink in that reality is more complex than these trainees thought. They acknowledged that they wouldn’t be able to do it all by themselves. Moreover, the participants now really trusted X, as it had shared all this knowledge with them. So who better to buy advice from than X?
In essence, we doubled the conversion and boosted revenue. Lucky shot? No: we tested this conversion rate another time and the numbers were exactly the same.
The next challenge was to get more people to sign up for each training. Back to the Value Ladder we went, looking at the lower-left corner and asking ourselves a) what could be of value to prospects and inspire them and b) how to reach a broader audience.
We went digging in psychology. Knowing that humans like to compare, we took our cues from a few companies who use this knowledge to their advantage and added a little gamification to the mix. Here are three examples that served as a guiding light.
Intuo builds HR applications and software. They also have a page that lets you find out how strong your company culture is, and how you score compared to others. Another example is Knowingo, a learning platform. They have a website hosted on a different URL that lets you find out how well your company deals with learning, and how this influences employees’ performance. Plus, they compare your results to that of your peers. And if you’ve ever wondered how strong your website is, Hubspot has got you covered. They have a page where you can evaluate your SEO, which immediately gives you advice on how to do better.
All these pages or websites have three things in common:
•They rate your current performance and compare it to others
•They offer these tests as a separate page with its own URL, so that it becomes a concept in its own right, disconnected from the company behind it
•They offer advice on how to fix this specific problem for your business (aka inspiration and education)
We used this psychological principle to help out our client company, X. Their target audience are founders, freelancers, and small business owners who need more money to scale their business, so we made a quiz called ‘How ready is your business to attract investors?’. We posted and emailed the link to the page in the evening, when we knew our audience to be quietly at home and not amid the hubbub of work. Within a few days, over a thousand entrepreneurs took the test. At the end of it, we gave them two choices.
Learn how others solved this problem (linking to a use case)
and
Learn how to do it yourself (education)
The use case worked wonders, as it showed prospects how others in this industry had solved the same problem they were facing. It might seem like just a use case, but it’s more: it’s proof that others had trusted X (social proof!), combined with educational content.
Here’s what the end results were after a few months:
•X pushed their average of participants up to 80 per training session
•X still has a similar conversion rate but makes way more revenue due to those extra training sessions
•End conversion has dramatically increased
•Whenever a prospect comes into contact with their content, X knows exactly what to send them next
•Thanks to a few smart automations, their speed of operation went up three times
•In their niche, X has become the de facto market leader, courtesy of the innovating content they keep on releasing
The above principles don’t only work for companies selling cutting-edge consultancy. They work just as well in a bricks-and-mortar business. A few years back, I had to sell my house. Since I knew so much about sales and marketing, I told my wife I’d do it myself. Four weeks later, she asked me how I was doing with the sale. Clearly, I hadn’t gotten anywhere. I didn’t have the time. So in the end, I called the first real estate agency that popped up on Google and made an appointment.
The next day, a sales guy shows up. I take him through the house and he tells me, ‘Well, to sell this house, I would take x%.’ This is where I start showing off all my marketing mumbo jumbo about online advertising and ask him lots of questions on how he’s planning on making the sale. He gives me a blank stare and in the end says ‘Alright, I’ll give you a discount.’ Hahahaha.
Anyhow. If I were his sales manager, I wouldn’t be too happy. A prospect gives this sales guy something to chew on and he immediately bends over backwards and offers a discount. That can’t be right, and it certainly can’t be any good for their margins.
But it gets me thinking. I call up another real estate agency. This time, I show a woman around the house. The same story repeats itself. She names her price, I do the jargon thing, she gives me a discount. I’m on a roll here, so I call up a third agency. The sales person shows up, I do my annoying arrogant speech and the sales goes ‘That’s a great idea, Michael. You should sell it yourself.’
Eh? What? Shouldn’t this guy be selling to me?
‘Clearly, you know a lot about sales,’ he says. ‘So you should really try it yourself. To help you, though, we’ve bundled all of our know-how in a simple tutorial. This way you can be sure that the things you might overlook will be covered and you’ll get the price you want.’ He had me cornered. I bought the package.
Three weeks later, the same sales representative called me to ask how I was doing. He said he hadn’t seen my house appear in any of the online real estate listings. The reason he hadn’t seen my ad up there was simple. My original problem hadn’t changed: I still lacked the time to put up the ad. And so I caved. ‘Ok’, I said, ‘you have a deal. Please sell my house.’
He never gave me a discount. He didn’t have to. In fact, he took his percentage on the house and he sold me a DIY package to boot. I was intrigued by this sales technique, so I went to talk to the company CEO. He told me that his company makes more revenue than their competitors, all thanks to their approach. And what’s more is that they pry this revenue out of customers who would never have bought from them in the first place. In the end, over 60% of customers who purchase their DIY package go on to sell their house through this company. As a rule, they never give a discount.
Customers, prospects, you and me–we all go through the value journey when we want to build, create, improve something in our lives or in our business. But we don’t think consciously about the way we approach these problems, or how and when we pick up on information. One day we’re inspired, the next we forget all about it and six months later we end up buying a book to solve our problem just because we happened to see an ad float by online while sipping our morning ristretto.
However, our buying that morning isn’t due only to that one ad. As you know by now, this type of traditional, sales-like content won’t cut it. In fact, that content should only make up for 25% of what you’re publishing. The rest? Inspire, educate, deliver.
The Value Journey will allow you to start building your content around its specific pillars, and add experience to the mix. This way, you’ll always have flash answers for your audience. Bring in the Value Ladder and you’ll not only know what to answer, but how to use which content to manœuvre your prospects to the next step. This, in turn, will allow you to automate your responses (hello, distribution software!) and link all the steps on the ladder.
The beauty of the Value Journey and its corresponding Ladder is how they work together to create value for your prospect and–in the end–for you. Combine both and you’ll create a very powerful framework to base your entire thought leadership plan on. One that’s made for scaling. And one that’s made to reach everyone who doesn’t know you (yet).
