Building Better Developers, DP710

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well hello and welcome back. We are back into an interview. This will be part two where we're speaking with Drake Nightingaleser and we're going to talk about, we're going to get a little bit more into your customer, your best customer, best buyer. When do you do that? When do you make that move to sort of clean out the people that you shouldn't have as customers? What is it that we need to think about when we're considering that, really that risk, particularly if we have some customers and they're not all great and we're trying to figure out a way to move into that better solution where we're really matched, well matched both ourselves and our customers with each other so that we are really doing the best work that we can. And again, that brings happiness and all that kind of great stuff. I don't want to steal his thunder, though, so let's get back into our conversation with Drake. Now, since you're, this isn't something I don't think necessarily falls normally under some of your conversations, but because you've done a lot of sales, it just occurred to me that I figured I'd ask you about it. In the, particularly when you're thinking about sales and into fulfillment, and I've seen it done a little bit differently, is the idea of upselling and cross-selling as part of that. And I've seen it done in the sales process very early on, but I've also seen it done sort of as part of the fulfillment. It's sort of that like, hey, let's take this great customer now that they've bought from us and do some additional work with, you can say milking the customer, but it usually it's like providing them some more stuff. Where do you see that fitting into the sales and the fulfillment that that onboarding process in particular is whether that's something that's like should be completely outside of it or where it's something that maybe somebody can can also even bring additional value to themselves along with that onboarding process? Yeah, so, you know, with the onboarding process, there's always an opportunity to discover an unmet need when you're asking those questions like, hey, so I just want to make sure that we really nail this for you. So are there any particular concerns that you have around this project that you want us to pay special attention to? Right. So talking about that, you may, you know, whoever you're handing it off to in onboard, whoever's doing the onboarding, which, by the way, I always recommend somebody in fulfillment do onboarding because it creates a start to the relationship. You already have a relationship with the sales guy. Now you need relationship with fulfillment. But when you're asking questions like that, it gives you the opportunity to notice those things that they may or may not need. And they've already bought from you. It's always easier to tell somebody something when they've already bought to you, bought from you. That's why like upsells and down sells are so popular in the online world. I've already decided to give you money. It's a lot easier for me for me to decide to give you more money. But so in that onboarding process, you can leverage that conversation to figure out what may or may not match. But you can also do that during the fulfillment process. You know, when I sold commercial vehicle wraps, there would be a lot of times where I would hand off a project for, say, like a three quarter wrap, which is where we're wrapping like three quarters of the vehicle. Right. In terms of square footage. And I would just really think that based on what these guys told me, they want they would actually do really well with a full wrap based on their goals. But they were just like feeling a little tight on the wallet. Right. So when I would write up my work order, I would say, hey, so you're doing a three quarter wrap, but I want you to go ahead and put together a couple of designs for full wraps for them and see what they say. Because I think they'll I think they'll go for it. So then just when they would see it, they would see the three quarter next to the full and they would go, oh, yeah, you know, there's no question now that we see it, let's go full. And that would be an easy upsell. So having communication between sales and fulfillment about around the customers' needs and doing a sort of a pass off to make sure that the fulfillment knows what this person might be willing to be upsold on is a huge way to create upselling opportunities. Now, is that sort of circling back then with that to the that best buyer? Because you one of the ways that you said we can identify that is somebody that we would actually work with them if we're not going to get paid until the end, because we're just that confident in it. Is that also part of that? Then that sales process is sort of that a little bit. Then again, it's more of that a little bit of that upsell because it's like, hey, they come in at one level, we'll say, and they like us. They're like, OK, we're good. But because we recognize them as a best buyer type, we say, hey, because you're you, we can maybe tack on these extra things or we can provide this service a little differently because we know that this is going to be more beneficial to you and then use that as sort of, I guess, building that best buyer into not only that, that they are a best buyer and we're going to be successful, but also somebody that is actually now a successful customer. Also, somebody that is actually now a buyer that is bringing more revenue into the organization. I'm not quite sure I followed your question. Well, it's really it's is do we do we do that same kind of thing? Because I think you had a great example of going for that three quarter wrap to the full wrap. Is that something that we could that we would maybe want to do even as we're thinking about particularly as we're building from, hey, I'm just I'm going from I just need to get customers to now I'm building a one to find my best my best buyers. But maybe there's that product shift or that service shift a little bit that now I'm like, hey, I was out. I'm going to do general web design for you. But really, my best buyers are doctors, doctors offices. So now is that maybe something that that you would look at is to say, OK, you have a you have a customer comes in that happens to be a doctor. They've come in sort of through your normal current stuff. But take that as an opportunity now to say, OK, now we're going to maybe start building something out a little different or we're going to address this a little differently because we know there are best buyer. And so there are things that we wouldn't normally talk about. Maybe there are services or approaches because they're just it's not going to suit the general part, you know, general public or general customer public, but is a better situation for that best buyer. Yeah, I mean, ideally, you would be building your fulfillment system to, you know, if you're trying to move towards doing web design specifically for doctors, you're. Tailoring your messaging and your fulfillment and all those things to serve this person. And at the same time, you're going through this little dance, the revenue dance of figuring out what you're going to stop doing. So like when I came into the rap company, we were doing a lot of things and. There was I remember this one time, there was this moment where I heard our project manager just like really exasperated, you know, her her office was just outside my door. She's really exasperated and I can't come out. I'm like, hey, what's up? She's like, can we not do projects like this anymore? And that was the first time I realized the power of what you sell and the ripple effect it has going through the company. But. You know. Things that weren't commercial vehicle wraps at that time represented probably 30 to 40% of our revenue, so you can't just lop them off and. You know, ah, so what we did is we started by saying, OK, so what are the lowest value projects that bring in difficult customers that don't return and spend more money? And we chopped off that little bit and things got better. And then we went through that process again a few months later and chopped another thing off. All the while, we're replacing that revenue with more commercial vehicle wraps. As you go through that process, you end up in a in a place where slowly but surely you're only serving who you want to be serving as you continue to develop your messaging and your fulfillment processes around that person. You're slowly but surely going to attract more of those people while repelling the other ones, because as I start to build things to specifically serve doctors, right, if I'm doing web design for doctors, there's going to maybe going to be an appointment scheduler in there. But then if. Yeah, I don't know, somebody comes to me for an e-commerce website, they're going to look at all the stuff that I'm putting forward, facing about all the amazing things we do and be like, well, this doesn't meet any of my needs. So now have you seen enough difference, enough examples where you have a growing out of that? So we're we're in a we've got a stream of customers and we've got a fulfillment process and we've got a handoff and all of this. And we're looking at it saying, OK, now we're going to step up to the next level. Have you seen a better approach or is it is it again, one of those it depends as far as slowly like you like you talked about where you're certainly like taking the we'll say the worst customers and slowly like chipping away at those and shifting versus. Really just saying, hey, this is what we've got in repositioning your your branding or your messaging to say, OK, we've had this message, this branding, this approach that has brought us this general set of clients. But now instead, we're going to change everything to really talk just to those best buyers. So sort of that that sliding scale or that incremental approach versus the let's let's very much change course. Yeah. So when we did that incremental change, we were already a seven figure business. So it was, you know, there are a lot of people whose livelihood depended on the business and things like that. So we needed to be careful. If you're in that phase in that state, I would be careful and incremental about chopping off the things that you don't sell and who you don't sell them to while fully committing to the shifting of the messaging and the creation of a fulfillment process that really serves that person. If you're on a side hustle and you've got a nine to five paying your bills. Just make the shift. It's gonna because it's gonna hurt to make the shift. You can do it like. Long and slow and draw it out, or you can just rip it off like a bandaid and do away with the difficult clients that are always arguing with you about price or that just have weird needs or that, you know, always find something wrong with what you're doing. You're you're immediately going to get rid of those and you're going to buy your when you do that, what you're doing is you're buying yourself the bandwidth to actually focus on improving, on the fulfillment, on improving the process, on spending more time making it a great experience for the clients that you have on figuring out, you know. How to improve, you know, there's two big questions I like to have people answer when they're trying to figure out how to improve, you know, the fulfillment process and that's what problems are they running into while trying to use your product or service and what problems are they running into as a result of successfully using your product or service. So like. When we when we really dig into those two questions. We get a lot of ways to improve fulfillment and making that shift, if you have the financial stability from a full time job to just flip the light switch and make that switch. Go for it, because it's going to hurt revenue in the short run, but it's also going to buy you the bandwidth that you need to really start improving things. To serve that. Best buyer in a powerful way, and. That's going to slingshot your business a lot more than the slow incremental. Shift, because, you know, I always tell people that we attract what we allow into our business, so the work that you're allowing into your business is the work that you're going to continue to attract more of. So if we can make that shift as fast as possible and you have. The ability to do that without hurting yourself. No, financially, because you got a nine to five paying your bills like go for it. So sort of talking about that and that the pain of switching, do you find that it's what's sort of like a if there is sort of a general time frame that somebody should expect that if I make this change, that they're going to start seeing the benefits or the positives of making that change. So that is a wonderful question. I'm pretty outspoken about my frustration with a lot of consultants and how they market like that, they're going to completely radically change your business forever in like three months or 30 days. Lasting change does not come quick and quick change goes away fast. So. There are a lot of quick wins to be had with processes like this, especially when you're looking at best payday and best buyer. Best payday is a lot like best buyer, except it's with what product or service, you know, is actually going to serve your business to focus the most on. When you come in and do those, those are going to be really quick wins because they're going to do they're going to come with a lot of perspective shifts, a lot of paradigm shifts. And just the act of starting to understanding who to start saying no to. Is going to create a lot of good change in your business, going to be very quick when. The other stuff that's around changing your messaging around being more transparent, your marketing around, you know, reimagining your policies, improving client experience and really improving fulfillment. Those are going to take a longer time. There's going to be trial and error in there. You know, it's probably going to be you can get really great results from best buyer and best payday inside of a couple of weeks. The rest of it is going to be. Kind of a parabolic climb, you know, it's going to start pretty low. It's not going to it's not going to yield a lot, but as you go further and further, the result it's going to yield are going to become exponentially more. I would say probably like a year. To really like be able to like. Stand on the mountaintop and look down and be like, look how far we've come. This is amazing. We've talked a lot about the. Well, the external part of this about your brand and your messaging and how much how much of you you've seen this be also a an internal change, particularly, you know, like if you're a solopreneur or side hustle or you know, it's you and a one or two people or something. It's it's a lot easier. But once you start getting to, you know, 10, 20, 100 employees or something, you've got an actual organization. Is this. Are there additional things that somebody needs to really think about when they start focusing on that best buyer, you know, based on what the organization that they have today? Like what kind of things do you have in mind? What kind of maybe what are some of the struggles maybe that somebody should expect to have or maybe even some ways that they can go into this this change and not have, I guess, one, not have people freak out, but also deal with situations where maybe you've got it because it sort of goes in and like you said, you're going to get the customers that you service, but also you're probably going to have the organization that services those customers that you have. So there may be. Yeah, so when we did all this at the wrap company, there was definitely. There were definitely some issues with implementation. It was not smooth. It was not seamless. You know, we had a lot of people that struggled with the change that we were making. Some more so than the other. What we had to do was we had to do a lot of things that we had to do to make sure that we had the right one and the other. What we found was that as we implemented these changes. There were some people within the organization that. Simply struggled with change, but as the changes were implement and they could see things improving. They were like, oh, cool. I was worried about nothing. Let's go. Then you have the people who. We found out. Really liked things the way they were, because it created an environment. For negativity. So a lot of the people that had continually had problems ended up leaving optionally and saying, Well, this environment doesn't allow me to sustain my negativity anymore. So I'm going to go find another environment that does. And when that happened, things just got better again. And we were able to replace those people with people with new team members that. Aligned with the changes that we were making in the direction that we were headed. Which again is kind of sort of like the best buyer process, right? That's like a similar process, but with your team. But overall. Things got way better for the team over the three years that we did this. Three years later, everybody's far happier. Everybody's better paid. We have. We were able to afford better equipment. You know, client happiness was through the roof. Team morale was through the roof. It was just. To be honest, I run, I still to this day, remember the day that I left that company, which was I think September 19th of 2019 and looking back and thinking about when I started and just being absolutely astounded at how much things had changed for the better. I think that is a good ending point for, you know, for anybody that's considering doing this, I want to thank you so much for your time and for coming on and a lot of great information there. What is if somebody is saying, Hey, I need to, I need to spend some time with Drake. I think he's got some great ideas. I need to work with him and he can help me out. What are the best ways for them to get ahold of you? Yeah, absolutely. So if they want to get ahold of me, they can always email me. I try and be very available. My email is just drake at profit collective.vip. If maybe they're not ready to talk to me personally, or they just want to check out some stuff, I do have a training that's available to your audience. It's called the three simple steps. I go over in and out of the company, I go to the company's website. I go over in it. I go over the one one one equation, which is simplifying the business into one offer that serves one buyer with one fulfillment process. And then it also goes over the best payday and best buyer and teaches them how to find it and how to implement it into their business. And if they want, that's completely free, no email address or anything. If they want to give me their email address, there is a tracker sheet that they can they can download that helps them track their sales by client quality and whether they match up with the payday and the best payday and the best buyer rather than just the traditional metric sales sales metrics of, you know, close rate and things like that. Excellent. Well, we'll make sure we've got make sure we've got links in the show notes to get to those places and kudos. This goes back to the sales and fulfillment. I'm always a fan of something where it's just like, hey, we're putting it out there. We're not going to we're not going to get to the end and make sure that you throw us a credit card or an email address or stuff like that. And then, you know, but if you want more, if you find this useful, then, hey, give us an email address and we'll give you some more stuff. So I love that approach and, you know, getting in front of people. So thank you so much for your time and hope you go out there and have yourself a good day. Thank you so much. And of course, that will wrap this one up. I want to thank Drake for some time. Great conversation was one of these that we just sort of got going. It didn't have quite as much focus initially as some of the others have. There weren't really any specific questions as much as a, hey, let's sit down and talk about what you've done and where you're going and your thoughts on these things. And he more than delivered. I think it was a great conversation. I hope you were able to get a couple of things in there that maybe maybe motivated you a little bit and maybe even got some, you know, a little bit of optimism in there or, you know, sort of bucked you up a little bit, gave you a little bit of a rah rah like, hey, you know, I can go do this. And yeah, it's it's not always easy. It's not overnight, but it can be done. And the better you the sooner you start, the sooner you'll get done and get to that successful point. That being said, it's time for you to go out in your day and get it started to make sure you can get to that successful part of having a great day, a great week. And we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers to develop a newer podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Hi, this is Rob from building better developers, the developer podcast. We're excited to be on Alexa. Now you can enable us by simply saying Alexa enable building better developers and we will be there ready for you every time you want to listen to your now favorite podcast. Whether we are your favorite podcast or not, we would love to hear from you. So please leave a review on Amazon.