"At the end of the day, your customers are the people you serve and they have all the information you need to make your product better." In this episode, Alex (@AlexHormozi) explains the importance of a direct line of communication to your customers to improve your sales, marketing, product experience, and more.
Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.
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In this podcast, I want to talk about how every problem in your business can get answered by talking to your customers more. Talk to customers to solve all your problems. So Paul Graham said this and I think it's really good. He said, "You can solve just about every business problem by talking to your customers." So if your advertising isn't converting, talk to your customers. If your pages aren't converting, talk to your customers. If the price seems weird, talk to your customers. If the product isn't delivering, talk to your customers. At the end of the day, your customers are the people you serve and they have all the information you need to make your product better. So especially when you're starting out, even if you have very low prices. So let's say you charge $10 a month for something. All right. And you want this thing to have thousands and thousands of customers. Okay, fine. But if you don't talk to customers, you're not going to know what's going to drive them to convert by and stay. And so I come from an industry where people meet face to face in person to sell $10 a month memberships. And so I don't want to hear it. All right. I spent the first four or five years of my career selling $30, $50, $100 things all day long. I don't know a very successful advertising entrepreneur who's a rainmaker, meaning they know how to get customers who didn't have four or five years of hardcore sales under their belt that no knew who they were. Right. That's the rocky cutscene is where you take hundreds and thousands of calls with customers or you hear the words they use so that when you, you say, does this suck, but they say it differently. And so then you say that in your advertising. And when you take these sales calls for $10 a month, you're not doing it for the $10 a month. You're doing it so that you can learn more about them. And you just so happen to get paid. But you find out the words that get them to move, because you might think these are all the selling points to your thing. But when you're talking to them, nothing really happens. Then you say one thing and then boom, their eyes light up and they're like, yeah, that. And then all of a sudden you reorder your sales scripts, you reorder your headlines, you reorder the road map on the things that you're going to improve in the product, because these are actually the things that are driving purchases for the first purchase and getting them to stay. And so most entrepreneurs are afraid to talk to customers. I have no idea why that is. They're afraid to talk to random people who are giving them money. I don't get it. But one of the easiest ways you can learn more about your business and make more money is pick up the phone and call people who've given you money and ask them why they did. And just as importantly, maybe more importantly, talk to all the people who didn't buy it and ask them why they did it. And if you think you're above this, you're right. You should just keep doing that. But for everybody who wants to beat that guy, just get on the phone with your customers. So inside of school.com, we run a contest every month where the top 10 people who are new to the platform who generate the most revenue in their communities get to fly out to Vegas and spend a day with me and Sam who's the other owner of school. And part of the reason we do this is that, of course, it's a great prize for all the winners and they get to meet each other and it's an awesome event. But for us, we get such valuable user feedback from super users. These are the highest most invested users. And so we're like, Hey, do you like this thing? Hey, this is the product roadmap. Hey, would you prioritize this over this? So recently, we used the feedback from this group. We said, Hey, we have this thing that could be controversial with the rest of the community because we could see people taking it like this. If we made this change in the product, who would you guys think? And unanimously, they're like, Oh, no, that would make us more money. We're totally in for it. And so we're like, wow. And so months of deliberation of like, Oh, do you think they'll like it? I don't know if they like it. What if they don't like it? All of that got soft by just asking them. And then we got our answer. And then we did it and everyone was happy. And so the beauty of this is that you get certainty around your decisions. And so you can make decisions faster. And the entrepreneurs who make faster decisions move faster. And when you do talk to customers, whether it's in person like this school event that I was talking about or just on the phone, what do you think happens to them? You can take someone from a neutral customer to a super fan in one call. You can tell the story of the business. You can tell them why they started. You show that you care. And guess what? That person might bring you 10 or 50 more people when you think two rows down the line of word of mouth referrals. And of course, they're probably going to stay way longer than they would otherwise. Because if they do have an issue, guess what they're going to do? Instead of canceling, they're going to call you and let you know. A great time to do this that a lot of people don't like is that the moment people ask to cancel. So if you have any kind of recurring membership or if they ask for a refund if you have one-time transactions, get on the phone with them. And it's not necessarily to try and like, you know, hard sell them back into it, which by all means you can. But the more valuable thing is to understand what went wrong. And you'd be surprised how many times you just let someone vent. And here's the key. Don't minimize what they said. Get more angry about the reason they're canceling than they are. Because you're like, that's ridiculous. That should never happen to you. I can't believe that was your experience. I completely understand why you'd want to refund. I would want to refund 10 times over. I'm surprised you're not trying to put me in jail. I get it. All right. Is there is there a world that I can make this right? Or what would it take for me? This is the question. What would it take for me to make this right? And so now you get into them solving what it would cost or what it would take for them to stay. And more times than not, it's not as big as you think. You want to talk to all sorts of customers. You want to talk to the super users. You want to talk to the moderate users. And you want to talk to the low users. But you're going to get different things out of it. Like, I don't, I'm not going to prioritize a road map or things that I'm going to reinvest in the business based on people who are not that invested in the business. I'm going to, I want to talk to the super users who are getting the most out of it because they're going to have more context. But in terms of what problem do I want to solve for these people? It's like, why didn't this work for you? So this would be stuff that's like friction. So this is going to be way more about getting new customers. Like, I'm going to solve new customer problems by finding out why people didn't buy or bought and then left. And then, I'm going to figure out how to make my customers more valuable and get them to stay longer by talking to super users and your super fans or the best customers you have about what would
