Last week, I was talking to the COO at a health clinic.
The CEO of that clinic — the doctor who heads the clinic — has written a good book, with lots of top endorsements and lots of 5-star reviews on Amazon.
But the book is hardly a best seller. I’m guessing it maybe makes a few dozen sales a month.
“You know,” I said in the voice of a precocious 9-year-old child, “you can run ads on Amazon to promote the book.” I’m smart like that, and I know lots of stuff, so I like to show it off.
“Oh yeah we tried that,” the COO said. “We hired an agency a while back to run ads on Amazon for us. But it didn’t drive that many more sales, and we were paying the agency $1k a month just to keep it going. So we stopped.”
Now, here are a few random facts, which I hope to snap together for you like nuclei colliding and fusing to release a tremendous amount of energy:
1. The core offer for this health clinic is a program that costs $50k a year
2. Rich, successful people tend to read books
3. People who read a book all the way through are prime prospects for an upsell, even a ridiculously elastic one ($5 => $50k)
You see where I’m going with this?
It’s quite feasible that, for this particular business, one good extra client a year, attracted via the help of this Amazon ads agency, would pay for the entire year’s services of the ads agency, and then some.
That would be great for the health clinic, for the Amazon ads agency, and presumably, for the patient who had decided to invest in that expensive year-long program.
And yet, it wasn’t happening.
I’m bringing this up because over the past few weeks, along with talking to health clinic COOs, I’ve also been talking to people who offer services and run agencies of different stripes.
I’ve heard a few of them complaining:
“We can’t make clients see the unique value of our services”
“The clients are never permanent, and I seem like a Chinese acrobat juggling many plates at once”
“Clients are comparing my work to much cheaper freelancers”
A part of this really can come down to having bum clients. Not much to do there, except find better clients.
But what if you have — or have had — clients like the health clinic I wrote about above? Somebody with a solid business… a good product… decent marketing… and still they couldn’t see the value in continuing to pay for your services, which should be plugging up a real gap in their business?
Well, in that case, write me and tell me about it.
I’m curious to hear your story.
And maybe we can figure out a way to prevent this from happening again… and even to profit from those clients who already got away.