EP #32
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Trey Sheneman: [00:00:00] A few years ago, I walked into the restaurant, one of my favorite restaurants here locally in town where I live in Franklin. And the menu had changed, not, not the food on the menu, thank God, because I love the food that they had. The, the menu itself was like printed on a thicker piece of paper. It had a different font to it, very refreshed look, and I had a relationship with the owner, and I later learned.
That they spent about $300 on redesigning the menu. Obviously they had printing costs going forward, but on the actual redesign of the menu, and they looked up over the next 90 days, and that incremental change of a new, nicer menu had driven the best quarter that they had ever had in the history of the brand because people felt like it was worth more.
It just helped me remember, man, there are some strategic small changes you can make in your business that will go a long way. So today we're gonna talk about how big doors swing on small hinges, and I'm gonna talk to you about five ways you can improve your customer experience and see your revenue go up.[00:01:00]
Welcome to 10 Minute Masterclass. I'm your host, Trey Sheneman. It's my goal each week on this show to just get down in the trenches with you. Teach you something very practical that you can apply to your business. Right now, my, the way I think about it is, is most of the time the principles are timeless, but they should work to solve today's business problems.
Now, we do that by talking through one of the core four drivers of growth each week. Sometimes that's marketing, sometimes it's sales, sometimes it's ops, like today, and sometimes it's leadership. In today's lesson, I wanna talk to you about the fact that. People think it always takes big changes to get big results, but that's not really been my experience.
My experience is, yeah, if, if there are, sure there could be big changes that produce big results. [00:02:00] I'm not trying to say that, but I've also had the experience where I've realized it's really small changes that actually produce incrementally large results and having a keen eye. At identifying what those small operational procedural changes can be to move the needle is such a gift.
And so today I'm just gonna share with you five what I consider high impact, but low cost and low lift improvements to customer experience that I've done. On past funnels operationally that I've been a part of, that I think can translate to your business pretty irrespective of what industry you might be in.
What I love about all these changes, if you haven't picked up from the title of this episode, is like, they don't cost a lot, but they have a really strong shot of producing a lot. So I'm gonna work through these five changes and uh, I think you're gonna get a lot of, especially a lot out of this, especially if you can figure out how to do.
All of them. So let's jump in. Number one is speed of response. So nothing kills [00:03:00] sales like a slow follow up. If a lead fills out a form, every minute you delay is a drop in conversion rate. Let me give you an example. Inside sales.com found that if you respond to a lead within five minutes, your 21 times more likely to qualify them down the funnel and into a sil.
Five minutes. Okay. So the low cost fix here of how you can apply this logic to your funnel is how do you simply set up an automated text message or email confirmation if you're not already doing this? That just confirms their inquiry, thanks them for it and lets them know who's gonna be calling them.
So building a simple CRM trigger that both does that step and then alerts your team that they got a new lead and that that lead's been assigned to them, especially if you're like a multi-person. Salesforce kind of a team. Those steps going a long way towards increasing the close rate of your business, killing a slow response time.
I think back to last year with a service company that we worked with. We worked with them. Now we used an AI tool to do [00:04:00] this, but we worked with them to shave their average response time from three hours down to sub 15 minutes Now. I want you to imagine what that did to sales. Now, don't get me wrong, they were busy.
Like the reason why they had slow response times is because they were busy. But just the ability to use AI automation to, uh, give off the perception of engagement, help their sales go up over 20% in the next quarter. Okay? So small change, big fix. The second thing other than, uh, slow response times would be to remove a friction point.
So every step in your process either makes buying easier or harder. Uh, a dental chain that we work with kind of have like this four step appointment request process on their website. I'm not trying to think of the best way to describe it. And once we saw it, we were like, Hey, we really should cut this down to two steps or less.
Maybe we should add in a call button over here instead of just the form button. So there's gonna be some people that wanna call instead of just filling out a form. And the cost to do all this, I think was like three hours of dev work, [00:05:00] which means it was 450 or 500 bucks for us to do that with them. But over the course of the next 38 days, those forms had a 38% lift in their book rate by just simplifying the four steps down to two and adding in the call button.
So make sure that you. Aren't just setting your forms up inside of your business one time and never touching them again. Make sure that you're auditing that process of what it goes through to book. I would look at it at least quarterly. I would keep metrics on it quarterly to know what my completion rates are on forms.
'cause if we're not spending time asking where our customers are either getting stuck in our funnel or bored with our marketing, we're missing out on opportunities to make small changes that are gonna swing big doors. The third place is. Focusing on upgrading your first impression. See the challenge with the first impression is this is where perception of the brand actually gets set.
And we all know that perception is reality for the one perceiving it. So whether a first impression is your packaging, if you're selling CPG and your project is on the [00:06:00] shelf, or if it's your lobby. If you're a, you know, a professional services business and somebody has to come in to see you, if it's your website, if you're an e-commerce business or you sell something online, if it's, uh, your onboarding email, if you're an offline sales business and somehow they were able to buy you, buy from you from a referral and they've not met you yet, whatever it is, your first touch point is where trust is either.
Built or it's lost. We advised a SaaS provider last year and they had a pretty simple kind of plain text, welcome email, and a short personalized video. And so when we saw it, we took the step one further and said We would keep the plain text email, we would add in the personalized video, but the personalized actually needs to be shot personally on the iPhone.
Like somebody was sending somebody a voice memo or something super friendly. All in all, it took the founder of this company about 30 minutes to make it all, and their response rate to that onboarding email, which we measure under something called customer activation, jumped up double [00:07:00] digit points pretty immediately from just adding in that step.
It really didn't cost them anything other than their time, right? They were all already on staff. It was just a different wrinkle into the onboarding experience. The fourth way that you can, uh, you know, maybe find a small change that will have a big outcome is train for one thing, not 10 Now. What I mean by this is when employees are coming onto your team, and even no matter what their specialty area is that they work in, I would say in the onboarding phase of an employee and you see them in a sales role or a marketing role, is focus on one skill that you know that they were to improve in this new role that they just joined on their team.
All of their output would go up. Okay. All of the times they interacted with the customer, they would get better. Sometimes that skill is their ability to communicate more clearly. Sometimes it's in how they write. It doesn't matter if it's a retail team. As an example, we worked with a retail team one time before, and we focus solely on the old adage of making sure that they greet to their customers within 10 seconds of seeing them.
You sounds like, Hey, Trey, is that a skill? Well, [00:08:00] some people have nervous energy or they, they, they, they get distracted or whatever it is, so. Just pushing on that group. Last year, they tracked it, they tracked, uh, the, uh, third party kind of observation. The ones, the sales agents that were on the floor that did that, and the ones that didn't.
And, you know, eventually they found out the ones that stayed and slayed, so to say, were the ones that focused on greeting the customer within 10 seconds. So that's another thing you can do. And the fifth thing is, is you can repurpose what already works. Sometimes the fastest improvement is to take your best performing asset and just put it in more places.
One of our agency clients that we coach. They have this one killer testimonial video, but it was only on their website. And I was like, guys, you should have this on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. Like this is a great asset for you. And when they tracked it after they did that, they found out that a lot of their sales were coming from that lead.
So I think it's, I. You could try and do all five of these if you once if you wanted to, but that might end up spreading you too thin. My recommendation after you listen to this episode is to pick one or two and try 'em out, and maybe you do one a [00:09:00] month for each of the next five months. And what you're gonna find is there is a compounding effect that happens when you make these small changes over time.
It helps you build momentum in the business. Um, it helps people, uh, realize that they are valued and that they matter, especially when you're doing the upskilling. And I think this is a gr a good way for you to think about operational efficiency in the business. So like always, hopefully you got something super practical outta this episode.
If you haven't subscribed to our newsletter yet, please do. We always make an artifact that goes along with the episode that will help you put the episode into action. So I wanna make sure that you get that. Um, if you haven't follow me yet on LinkedIn, shoot me a follow or a connection request. I'd love to meet you, especially if you're getting value outta the podcast.
As always, it's my goal to make this super practical for you, which I hope I did. And until next time, I'll see you on the flip side.
