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SHOW NOTES
You should be tracking your delivery metrics every. single. day.
Your “delivery metrics” will be specific to your business. You might track your retention rate, your refund rate, or your student success rate – but whatever your business, you have delivery metrics to track!
And you should be paying attention.
In this episode, I’m highlighting why tracking your delivery matters, plus:
The lesson in “delivery” I’ve learned from 8-figure business owners
Why even good marketing can’t sell a crappy product – sustainably
And why “The Perfect Business” is a myth (plus, how to commit to forever-improvement)
Tune into another short (10 minute!) lesson in marketing/business, screenshot the episode, and share with your takeaways to your Instagram stories (tag @emilyhirsh for a shoutout!).
Key Points:
[2:31] Why your retention rate should be something you track every day
[3:46] What this means for member sites, courses, etc.
[4:54] Here’s a lesson from 8-figure business owners
[6:01] “The Perfect Business” is a myth
[9:00] If you’re not tracking your delivery metrics, you have a hole in your funnel
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Episode Transcripts:
Emily: I’m Emily Hirsh, and this is the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast. Attention, innovators, influencers, creators, and game changing entrepreneurs. Your internet domination begins right here. We are the powerhouse marketers that you’ve been looking for. You’re already making waves in your industry and we’re here to help amplify those waves of change by creating a connection that cuts through the noise. We take everything you’ve built inside your zone of genius and find its audience. With killer strategy and laser eye for impact, we launched multimillion dollar campaigns and skyrocket your reach online and now we are doing the unheard of. We’re unveiling everything we’ve learned, taking you behind the scenes with the Hirsh marketing team and giving away the secrets to our client’s success. Stay tuned for top converting strategy, ROI reports and insider knowledge that you won’t find anywhere else. You’re changing the world and we’re the team to help.
Hello friends. I am excited about this episode, because it is one thing that is a core part of what I believe. Which is, focus on your delivery and constantly put time and attention and energy into the delivery that you have for your customers or your clients or your students. It’s a huge way that I’ve grown my business, my service side of my business with our clients because every single big client that we’ve ever signed has come from a referral. Which means our delivery, our service is really amazing. That’s what happens when you work with really high level people. Like once you get in that circle, as long as you deliver really well, everybody starts knowing about you, which is an incredible experience. That’s come from me literally putting constant effort into our systems, our processes, our delivery to our clients, and improving it and never been like, oh we made it, we’re good, we’re perfect.
We’re constantly surveying our clients, asking for more feedback. Like I actually want the constructive feedback, ’cause I’m like, I know I can always do things better. So tell me what I could do better. Like tell me what we’re not seeing. And I asked my team the same thing constantly. Every quarter we send our clients a survey, every month our management checks in with our clients. Every month I check in with our team and I get those reports back and then we create, basically our company goals and our projects based on those feedback. But that’s not exactly what I’m talking about today. I’m talking about retention rate, and why this should matter to you. Why this should be a metric that you track. Every single day, on our team huddle, we track our retention rate percentage for the month, and last month we had our highest retention rate. We were at 95%. we’ve been in the 90s a lot, but 95% for a full month is really good.
It’s like only losing three clients, and we’ve got a roster of over 60, so that’s pretty amazing. And that’s really because we focus so much on it. But here’s actually one caveat I want to say. We also have to sign the right clients for that to work. So I’ve talked about my podcast journey from one to 3 million. I talked about raising our price. I talked about changing our ideal client avatar and how we started only working with higher level people who were ready for the level of service that we deliver. When I didn’t do that, and we would have lower retention rate because we’d be signing the wrong clients and then it wouldn’t work out, right? And so that actually matters too in your sales process, especially if you’re high ticket and you’re a service business like I am. That you’re really clear on the clients that you want to attract and you’re not signing people who are not those ideal clients.
Really, really important, because that will obviously affect your retention rate down the line. But retention rate is a metric that you should always track. So if you’re a service business, like you can track your retention rate. If you are a membership site, you can obviously track your churn and your attention, right? And if you have a course, you can track the either refund rate or the people who complete the course, like who’s completing the course, who’s getting results. Because I truly believe this. If you don’t focus on your delivery and get people talking about your product and how it’s good and giving that positive feedback out into the industry, you will stop growing. There are people who might have, like people say, oh, with good marketing you can sell everything. Anything, right? That’s true to an extent. If you have good messaging and good marketing, you could sell a crappy product but it won’t last.
It’s not sustainable. Because as soon as you start selling a crappy product or a product that doesn’t deliver on what it’s promising, people are going to start finding out and people are going to start talking about it. And that’s gonna affect your business and make you go downhill ,basically. So I have many friends who have eight figure businesses, successful businesses, and I constantly am studying like what makes them different? What are they doing different? And a constant theme is they care about their students and their clients success constantly. And it’s something that I naturally do, but I’ve realized how important it is because otherwise it’s like you have a hole. Like you know how we look at our funnels and we look at like where’s the hole in our funnel? Is that the landing page? Is it the ad? Is it the emails? Is it the Webinar?
I mean if you have really terrible retention rate or like a terrible refund rate on your product, you have a hole in your funnel, because your marketing isn’t working and you’re getting people in, and you’re making money, and then you’re losing it through either people leaving your roster or leaving your membership site, or requesting refunds, or charge backs or whatever. And that’s like a massive hole that’s going to ruin your marketing budget, right? Because you’re getting all these people in and then you’re going to lose it on the backend and your delivery. And so it’s a balance. And that’s where I’m, Alex Charfen teaches the five core functions. Which is where you look at … Actually I have them written in my office. You look at your lead generation, your nurture, your conversion, and your delivery. And then you look at your retention resell and your upsell, and you rate it on a one to five scale and you see what needs the most work. You’ll never have a perfect score.
That’s not the goal because of the perfect business as a myth. So you’ll often have a twos, and like have you try to say 2.5, it’s a two. So you go down. So, for example, what’s going to happen is it’s a constant shuffle, right? So your marketing is bad right now, right? Let’s say your marketing is a two, then you fix your marketing and you’re getting all these people into your product and then they overflow the system, they break some processes, they break stuff. It’s not working totally. So then your delivery goes down. And you have to pause working on your marketing or pause, pushing heavily on your marketing, fix your delivery. And then so which we’re ready for more, right? So it’s like, it’s kind of this constant thing. And whenever we have … Let’s say we’re at capacity, right?
When we’ve hit very close to cross state, we only have room for a couple of clients. That’s currently where we’re kind of at right now. We have room for like three. And so it’s like whenever that happens, we’re like, we’re not going to heavily push dream 100 or whatever. We’re gonna focus on all the gaps in our delivery. Because, this gives us a chance to prepare for the next surge that’s coming in. Right? As a CEO you have to be able to call those shots and see that, right? Because they all … everything in business plays together, and I believe retention rate, or refund rate, like whatever’s relevant to your product and your business matters so much. Because, it’s such a huge hole that you could be losing so much money. And I think it’s really fun and sexy to focus on that front end marketing a lot, but you also need to put some focus into this or have the team do it, and have systems for that so that you can do it. Constantly look at it. Every day we’re looking on our huddle, what is our client retention rate?
We also have an off boarding log for every client that’s ever left. We have a report from the ads manager and the senior strategist why they leave and we have like reasons that they can classify. Was it a funnel problem? What was the problem? So that I know at the end of the month when I get the report from the ads team, I can see our retention rate, how many clients left and what percentage were ones that left that we could have prevented. If that’s a high percentage, we’ve got a problem, we’ve got to stop taking on clients, we got to fix that hole and then we can come back. Luckily, that’s never happened that we’ve had to stop taking on clients to go fix that hole. But we have learned things through that off boarding log, like, Oh wow, we signed, you know, a handful of clients three months ago who weren’t the right fit, and then they left after three months. Like that, maybe, has happened before.
Or, hey, we have this one consistent problem in our onboarding that we’re getting this feedback and everybody saying the same thing, let’s fix it. Right? And it’s going to affect our retention rate. And so if you’re not tracking your retention rate or your refund rate, if you’re in a course or whatever, or like your student completion rate, like whatever matters in terms of like your delivery, and are you getting testimonials and are you going to get referrals, go back and figure that out. Like, because that’s actually more important than the front end and marketing sometimes. Because if you have a massive hole, you don’t want to keep driving people into that hole. And I don’t think a lot of people talk about this, because it’s not like a sexy thing. You know, it’s not how to make a lot of money in seven days or whatever, but actually it will make you a lot of money. Because I see it firsthand in our business, and you should always have both.
You should have marketing and the front end marketing that’s bringing new people in constantly and consistently. And you should also have referrals and organic traffic, because your delivery is so awesome. If you can nail both of those, you will absolutely create a company that blows up and is so successful. Because not many people have both, right? Like not many people are able to do that. And everybody’s successful. I see. It’s like everybody with really successful businesses has the organic, the referral, the brand awareness of that, they can put something out there and they could sell it without ads. But then ads and marketing is amplifying and getting even more people in. And so the power of two create something that’s amazing and really successful. So think about that. Think about those numbers, go back and track them in your business if you’re not, and look at if it’s somewhere that you need to put some more time and energy into your delivery so you can fix that hole so that your marketing can actually work even better.
All right, you guys. If you want to work with team Hirsh, and fill those two spots we have for clients, you can go to helpmystrategy.com and apply to work with us. Thanks so much for listening today, guys.
Thanks for listening to the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast. Go behind the scenes of multimillion dollar ad campaigns and strategies. Dive deep into the Hirsh process and listen to our most popular episodes over@hirshmarketingunderground.com. If you love this episode of the podcast, do me a favor and head over to iTunes to subscribe and leave a review, so we can reach more people and change more lives with this content. That’s all for now, and I’ll catch you next time.