WTF is Customer Lifetime Value? The reason why I keep making moolah without launching

A lot of my clients ask me how exactly I make the money that I do when they don’t see me launching. How is there so much flow and spaciousness in my day and the sales keep coming in? There are so many factors involved with this, but one big strategy that doesn't require a lot of work, and sure does pay off is the concept of secret offers. 

This links directly to your customer lifetime value, which is how much money you can expect to earn from each customer over the course of their business with you. In this episode, I’m sharing exactly how I use secret offers in my business to keep my clients coming back for more, giving them extra delightful ways in which they can better themselves as a coach and mentor. It’s amazing for them and it’s amazing for the business. 

There is so much opportunity to have multiple offers on the table with existing clients, people who have just bought from you and those who are interested to buy from you. This is something that a lot of business owners don’t realise and they’re missing out on a lot of potential with current clients who are wanting to go deeper. 

In this episode, I talk about what customer lifetime value is and how this secret offer strategy will help to increase the bottom line of your business for years and years to come. I talk about upselling, down selling and cross selling and doing it in such a way that doesn’t feel sleazy. For me, sales never feels awkward or inauthentic. It’s relational, not transactional. 

Stay tuned to the end where I share an exact Voxer message I sent to one of my clients to offer them what I call my “lux upgrade”. It’s fun, it’s flowy, and it’s easy. And this is the way I do business!

Think about what offers you have that could further your existing clients’ experience with you. 

What are some ways to upsell to your clients without being pushy? 

Let the universe guide you with the most innovative solutions and the most flow based way to expand your impact to your soul led clients. I know you’re going to love this episode with so much tangible and strategic insight. Let me know how you go!

LINKS:

Send me a DM on INSTAGRAM 📸 here

Subscribe to my YOUTUBE channel here 

Check me out on TikTok here

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to Flow State Business. We are doing a live one tonight. It's like old school style, sitting back, chatting once most people have kind of settled down and go into bed, and here I am with you, whether it's on your favourite platform to listen to your podcast, or whether you're on YouTube, I'm so grateful that you're back and I feel inspired. I want to talk, I want to chat, it's been a pretty easygoing day, where I haven't talked to many people so I need to let the energy out. And as a manifesting generator, we need to kind of ground this out somewhere, otherwise, we literally cannot sleep. So thank you for helping me do so and to wind down for the evening. 

00:53

I want to address a question that I am most certainly always asked, especially with high level clients, who are really inside of my world. And typically, this question comes out maybe after the first couple of calls, when we're getting really comfy with each other. And the question kind of goes like this. So how exactly do you make all of this money? Because we don't see you launching? We definitely don't see you doing the traditional countdown to a course enrollment type of open cart. And we're just sort of wondering, how are you doing the levels of money that you're doing? Whether it be six figures, or almost multiple six figure sales month? How does that happen? Can you walk us through that? And they asked me truly out of not wanting to work more and push more, but more so recognising how much flow and spaciousness is in my day. And why is it that they seem to be working five times as much as me? And whilst it's not about the money, and beating somebody's score, although, with some of you, maybe it is, they're kind of going, is it some sort of magic spell that you're casting? Is it because you have a secret person who is funding all this money to you? I don't know if anyone actually thinks that. Is it because you got a head start with LinkedIn? Is it because you've been in the business for four years now and this is the leverage that you've built? 

02:35

I mean, yeah, all of that. And I will even say this, which is maybe a little controversial, but a lot of it does come down to being lucky, being seen by the right people at the right time, putting myself out there and believing that the universe has got my back, and just doing the work that's required, but not doing the hard work all the time in order to make sure that I'm successful. And knowing that the work I put in is good, and it's effective, and it's needle moving. And one of those big strategies that I do, which doesn't require a lot of work, but it sure does pay off is this idea of secret offers, and how it links essentially to building customer lifetime value. And also why I have made this year at least, this has been really modest, at least an extra $450,000 this year without having to launch or actively sell. Have I gotcha? I got your interest? Have you already clicked away. It's like, oh my god, I'm bored.

03:52

But for those of you that have stuck around, I'm so happy. So let's talk about what it means exactly to make a secret offer. Making a secret offer is a way to absolutely increase your money flow and essentially your bottom line for the year and for years and years to come. And that's because it makes customers really happy when you're giving them extra delightful ways in which they can better themselves as a coach and mentor, how they can lean further into their development. And also from a business perspective, it helps your clients want to come back and buy more and more and more things from you. Offering secret offers or having any kind of extras like an upsell or a down sell or cross sell is basically saying to your client I have more than the one offer that you've opted into and I want to show you other options and other ways in which you can explore my shop. If you had a physical shop, you wouldn't really just think a customer came in for one thing and didn't look around. Can you imagine any sort of customer moving through a hardware store in Australia, it's called Bunnings Warehouse, hashtag not sponsored. And you wouldn't ever just go in and think that Bunnings Warehouse only offered one thing and walk out. You absolutely get lost in the maze of things like I'm not even into hardware stuff but they have a plant section, they have a paint section, they have a lighting section, they have an arts and crafts section. You know, like all these things, I definitely get lost in the indoor plant area. And I walk out of there with four indoor plants that I didn't even know I needed, but I buy the ones that need rescuing, and I rescue them. 

05:40

So Anyway, point being said, there is so much opportunity to have multiple offers on the table with customers that are currently working with you customers that have just bought from you and are interested to buy from you. Customer lifetime value is how much money you can expect to earn from each customer over the course of their business with you. What is the highest amount someone can pay you right now in your coaching business? Have you got that number? And if it's wishy washy, if it's like, oh, could be like two and a half grand, but like, I'm thinking about raising my prices to three and a half, or I could probably go to 25k. Oh, okay, we need a number. And if you've already hesitated on that, that's probably the reason why your customer upselling and being able to clearly map out what that looks like is feeling quite hazy. So get that number, right. Have you got the number now at least just for this episode, what is the highest amount that someone can pay you right now in your business because they want the best possible thing available? 

07:00

Okay. Now, I want you to think about what you could upsell to them after they've said yes to the highest amount service that you can offer. And this is often where we can get tripped up, right. But they've already said yes to the highest level thing. So what do you mean, I've got to offer them something else, because the highest level thing is all I've got. And there's nothing else after that. I learned this lesson so well, when I created my first personal branding course called Personal Brand Boss. After my students had finished the six weeks with me, I had a message from one of my clients, Christine. And she said Ruby, I loved working with you. And she's like, it's like buying a pepperoni pizza and not having any extras. And she goes what can I do to keep working with you? And I just said to her, Christine, I have nothing. Zero. That's it, you got to the end of the line. And we both kind of had a laugh about that. But I will always forever remember that I had nothing else to offer Christine. 

08:24

So Christine, thank you so much for bringing that to my attention. And now look what you've done. You've just created this offer queen who has so many different things that I could possibly offer my clients now when it comes to, if you want to pay a little bit more, this is what it looks like, if you don't want to pay that much, this is what it looks like. If you want to add all these courses, this is what it looks like. We want to have options. I love options. It's good. It's fun, it's exciting. One thing I do want to highlight here is upselling can be a really fun experience. And I want to show you an exact strategy, the way in which I do it inside my programme. So hang around to the very end, I'll actually read you out my exact script. So I want you to hang on to the end. But without this context, it wouldn't make sense. Okay, so you're upselling when you offer a customer an additional product or a service that complements their original purchase. So right now we're kind of at this point of discovering what else could someone say yes to even after they've said yes to your highest level product. Now I want you to think about what is it that you could offer them if they said no to your highest level product? What could you offer them as a down sell? Do you have anything like that in which they could kind of still experience your amazing knowledge and energy, but right now they're just not in the position to pay at the highest level. Okay. 

09:56

So if you need to pause, pause and have a think. Whatever that down sell is, what could you then add to the down sell? Oh, what do you mean either just stop at the down sell? What do you mean this something else you can add to it. And this is often the cross sell. So you can say for example, if you were a spiritual or esoteric business owner, the highest offering that you had might be private sessions with you to do readings and to get full ongoing support based on your reading. The downsell might just be one reading, and or a pre recorded course to go alongside it. Does that make sense? You can upsell in person. So if let's say you're doing events, or you're doing in person retreats, if you're doing a red carpet or a VIP day, you can definitely upsell there in person. You can also upsell with your current clients in Voxer, which is a walkie talkie app. I'm sure most people know Voxer by now, right. But it's a walkie talkie app that a lot of coaches use. And when the time is coming to an end with your clients, make sure that you have something in the calendar that reminds you. You know, it's like Jackie finishes in two weeks, what can you do to offer something else as continuation? I certainly have that all through my calendar reminders of when contracts end. And that's probably why contracts don't end as frequently in my world, because I'm jumping straight into Voxer and I'm offering something else. So once again, stick around to the end, because I'm going give you the exact way in which I offer in Voxer. 

11:39

Or you can send them an email. I'm really not that great a fan of sending an email when you're working with a client one to one, unless you are mostly communicating through emails, that's the only caveat that I'll put on it. But let's say if all of your conversations are happening on Zoom and in Voxer, and you're wanting to offer them some sort of add on or continuation service, and you're taking that off the platform that you're mostly speaking on, and taking it into an email because you think it's more formal, it really feels like a frequency fracture. More than anything else, it doesn't feel like a flow. Okay, so my favourite is absolutely being able to sell upsell and offer continuations through Voxer. 

12:26

I want to just quickly pause there and pivot to something else, which I think will help you see this strategy of customer lifecycle as something more important than selling consistently to a cold audience out there on socials. I did very, very quick research. So these numbers, take it or leave it, there's different numbers on every platform. But I just want to shout out some numbers that really drive social media engagement as of this recording, and just highlighting something very important because sometimes we forget to kind of take this helicopter view. So the current average engagement on Instagram is 2.1%. LinkedIn is current average engagement on the platform is 11.7%. So significantly higher than Insta, but arguably not always the more connected audience or aligned customers that you'd be looking for. The current average engagement of a podcast is around 3%. The current average engagement of something like Tik Tok is really high as you can imagine, 16%. And according to the Get Response website, the average open rate for emails at the moment is around 21.73%. That's still pretty high. I think it's probably to me, more like 15 to 20% depending on how many people you have on your list of course. The current webinar show up rate, so if you're doing a free webby, for example, is currently 5 to 10%. I still think that is really high. You know, it was just the average that I was grabbing from all different websites like Kajabi, etc. I actually think that they have a different motivation to pump up those numbers. But cool, let's roll with it. And the current website hit rate, according to Squarespace is 2%. 

14:30

So there it is, there are the numbers. How do you feel hearing that? And of course there's different ways to interpret engagement. But the way I interpret it based on these websites is people clicking on it, potential clients looking at it, audience members clicking like or commenting or sharing or saving. That kind of thing, right? Generally speaking. It's super low, short of LinkedIn and Tik Tok where arguably both platforms aren't necessarily guaranteeing you a super connected niche audience but definitely a wide audience. It's something to really consider. So this data kind of brings me to the conclusion that we really are more than ever peddling to get clients. We're peddling to get views, engagement, leads, conversions, even getting a client in the DM to reach out to say, hey, I'm really interested to work with you. If you're not in the top 1% of the 1%, I'm guessing that there is struggle town at times, it feels absolutely quiet at times, it feels like tumbleweeds at times. And I remember that so clearly. I was not a fan of that experience at all. And I didn't really have much else to go off except whatever was happening on socials, and sometimes just felt really wildly out of my control. And all I could do was to just keep getting on the Creator machine and keep pedalling as hard as I could. 

16:07

So that's when it was like, ding! I already had one or two clients at the time, why don't I speak to them, about what else we could do together to either extend out their contract, or continue working in some way in the future. So, you know, maybe they might want to take a pause, but they would commit to coming back in three months. And so this was a really cool new beginning around my journey of selling and extending out the value of a client. And I'm so proud that that was something that I decided to do, because if I didn't learn how to perfect this strategy from within my business, it definitely would have felt a lot harder to have received that on average, 250k extra a year, because I would have been more heavily reliant on external launches for that to happen, right. So for now, I want to talk about exactly the strategy around it, the operations behind it. I'm just going to try and get into your mind, like what you'd be asking the nitty gritty of exactly how to approach a topic like this with a current client, or maybe even a client that's recently wrapped up, and you want to re invite them back into the space, for example, I've done that so many times as well with great success. 

17:33

And once again, it's kind of like, you know, we use the example of the hardware store. But let's talk about McDonald's. Imagine going into McDonald's once and never getting up sold to it would be really bizarre. And the reason why it would feel bizarre is because we as consumers of fast food, have been groomed to expect it. Correct? If you go into a Maccas drive thru, and they don't upsell you, it's kind of strange. It's like, Oh, all right, that's, that's weird, and maybe more so in the United States than Australia. But I know when I go through drive thru in the US, you always get upsell to without a doubt, it's just standard. And this brings me back to this idea of it might feel weird, but the sooner you get started by almost crafting this culture, within your business and working with you, the more and more your clients will start to shape to that and love hearing about what else you've got going on. I know that's absolutely 100,000% happened in my world, where whenever I have different offers come out, my current clients will say, Oh, my gosh, I'm so excited for your new offer. How do I get in there? Or, you know, a current course, client who's just purely doing a self study might see me launching a mastermind and they'll say, Hey, I'm doing a self study. I love it so much. But I do want to be in your life energy, what can I do to get myself in there? And so there's all these really cool nuances that you can create behaviorally, if only you allow yourself to open up to that world. And for that to become your reality. 

19:15

It doesn't have to be weird. Do you think Maccas feels weird about upselling? Like, uhh, so I'm just wondering, would you like to upgrade that to a large drink? It's actually only like 50 cents. But you know, if you don't, don't worry about I mean, this is so weird. Don't worry, I'll just put the small one through. That would be even more awkward, right? So come to a point where you are centred and grounded and linking back to why you would love to offer this client and extension of services in some way. How is it going to enhance their development and how is it going to further their experience with fitness coaching, health coaching, business coaching, finance coaching. What is it that you can provide them, which will kind of just be a beautiful, delightful way to add to their already great experience with you? If you're a Facebook Ads Manager, and you're purely just running their ads, what if you said, hey, I'd love to add some mindset modules to what we're doing. Because there is a lot in there about staying strong and staying connected to your brand and knowing that you are meant to be seen and worthy of it. If you'd love to do a couple of sessions with me, it is an add on. But I really feel it's going to enhance the energy around your Facebook ads. If you are someone who is coaching on money and wealth mindset, and you're really helping them see things from a perspective of worthiness and energetics, you could upsell or cross sell to someone that you're collaborating with who puts together a bloody good budget, and helps them get really on track with their money. And someone who offers CFO services. And that would be a really great way to collab with someone in the industry. 

21:01

There's so many awesome things. In my business, I've done a lot of cross sells, where I offer business coaching services, and then I cross sell into human design readings where I have past clients of mine who have now become amazing readers, I cross sell into their business, I might upsell or add an additional service into my package where I add, like a legal package. And I would speak to my attorney to say, can I also add a trademark and some terms and conditions to my private clients contract? What would that look like? And it would beef up the value of the overall service. And that would be a cross sell also into my attorneys business. So there's so many fun ways that you can look at it and like 100 ideas that we could come up together. 

21:50

But for now, I want to show you and teach you how you're missing out on a lot of potential current clients wanting to go deeper with you, but you're not allowing them to. So a couple of months ago, maybe a year ago now actually, now that I think about it, I had a reading done by a natal chart expert. And she was recommended to me from a good friend of mine and I actually really loved the reading, I thought it was really useful, very practical, I felt really connected to the way that she was talking about my chart and my houses. So much so, I said to her, I love this so much. I love this experience so much. And I want to keep doing this. And what I would love is to have a reading from you once every quarter. And perhaps every quarter, you can show me what energies are around what I can be more aware of, especially when it comes to business and money and you know, all these things. And her eyeballs just about popped from her head because I don't think anybody had really asked her that before. And she told me absolutely. Give me a couple of days, I'm going to price it up. And let's put together a custom package for you. And I said no worries, I'll pay up front. And I kind of calculated in my head that it would be something like a four figure, almost a mid four figure offer. And I was more than willing just to do that pay in full, how fun, right? 

23:21

So a couple of days later, it came and went and I reached out and I said Hey babe, like, don't forget about me, I really want to do this. My energy's so excited. And she wrote back saying yeah, yep, I just have to get a couple of final touches done on the website and it'll be ready. And I'm thinking to myself website, what? Can I just get this payment link and pay you? Can I just transfer through PayPal, if you just give me the the investment amount, I'll just PayPal you, I've already got your PayPal. And you know what happened? She never followed through with it. I don't know what happened. I'm not sure if she chickened out, or maybe I wasn't her ideal client. That could very much be the case. Perhaps it just wasn't a calling anymore. She's actually still doing astrology readings and natal chart readings. And I'm sure she's got this offer now, this four part all year offer. But she just never came back to me personally on it. So I wasn't sure if she wanted me to find the link and then activate it. Just don't be that coach. Okay. Don't be that coach or that entrepreneur that expects people to find the upsell. Be proactive with it, especially when you feel the energy. I mean, in this case, I was literally begging her to pay her. But there will be others who maybe aren't as forward as this example that I'm giving you but you can just feel that they're leaning right in and they really want to have more time with you and more depth with you. 

24:54

You know what did cross my mind there was the upsell for her might have felt sleazy and she didn't really know how to re approach me on that. And it doesn't have to be sleazy, especially, you know, when you're upselling, knowing that it's going to better their whole transformation. And you want to offer them something that's really going to help them in their business or in their life. Because, you know, there's nothing worse than having like an upsell or something that is so irrelevant. And that does nothing for your customer lifetime value. In fact, that doesn't make sense, I don't want to do this course, have you not been listening to me about what I really truly wanted? I want this instead. So if you don't actually have an upsell, or a down sell, or cross sell your business is more than likely going to fall more transactional than it is having all these other ways to sell to your customers and clients because it's more relationship based. I really hope that landed with you. Because most times the perception is the opposite. That when you have all of these upsells and down sells, what if it feels really transactional? Well, no, it's relationship based, because you're listening to what they want. And you're giving them what they want. 

26:05

That is really what I want to say before we jump into this example of how to do it and how I've done it. And once again, likely why I've made an extra almost half a million dollars without launching, because I'm approaching each and every one of my clients that I love working with, to say, hey, let's keep going. Exceptions for me not to do that is when someone is struggling to make their payments, I just don't offer them anything extra for obvious reasons. And that's so rare. Honestly, this whole calendar year, I've only had two people in my whole business, say that they are struggling to make payments. Two people. I think that is incredible. I'm very proud of my energy in the business because I know I attract incredible payers and those that show up, mostly willing to just go all the way through their contract and pay in full. 

27:08

The only other exception that I don't offer an upsell to is if there's an energetic disconnect if the person that I have worked with for some time is very clearly on a different pathway. And that's cool, too. But this is really for the majority of those that you know that there is a clear ascension, and you want to offer them something really fun. Okay, so this particular Voxer that I sent, I actually have it scripted out just for the purposes of this podcast, I actually had to go back and re listen to the Voxers, and type it all out. And that was really helpful. Okay, so this offer I called the Lux upgrade, the Lux upgrade. And I'm going to try and say it like I would do if you were in Voxer with me as a current client. And yeah, offering it to you one to one. So I'd say something like yeah, like, Hey, babe, I am loving our time together, I really hope you are too that's definitely always been the vibe off our calls, and certainly in here in Voxer. And I can't believe it but we're already three weeks into working together. And usually around this time, you know, 21 days creates a habit 21 days of really being in each other's energy, you get to really know where someone needs more support, and also where I realise I could probably give you more advice and deepen in a certain area. So what I'm thinking is we go Lux. So what you've really seen and connected with investment wise and package wise is this and I list out whatever that was. There is actually a secret door. It's a lux offer. And it's only found within really working with me in a private container. And I'm excited because this is I know something that is really special. And I know that you've been searching for something to feel more first class. That's definitely the energy that I've been getting from you. It's kind of this elevated sense of you're ready to take your development into a whole new level. So this is what I'm thinking for the next week. If you need that week to make that decision, you can upgrade to more private coaching with me. But also I'd love to offer it to you at 75% off the normal investment because I love being able to reward my current clients in this way and it also makes more sense energetically for me to do this. 

29:33

So in addition to continuing with your current contract, you can unlock another five private coaching sessions and extend out our Voxer until the end of this year for the remainder of your container and like I mentioned earlier, it's usually this amount of money but if you want to activate the Lux offer, it's now this amount of money. Because it is such an incredible deal, I am going to only offer it to you as a pay in full, not as a payment plan, but you've paid in full anyway so I'm guessing if you're matched to this, then you're all cool. So just let me know if this is the upgrade that you've been looking for. We can do some really cool things with it, we can add some tarot, we can add some EFT tappings, I can customise your scripts for you, we can also maybe do some Astro readings. I can personalise some journal entries for you. And also in that time, really even I think what would be great is if we actually bounced off each other, and did some actual sales calls and did some launch languaging together and you know, really get into the depths of it. Because this will give you a lot more practice ground so that as you're ready to launch and put something out there, then this is how we would do it. Okay, so I'm not going to talk your ear off any more. I'm thrilled to be working with you, regardless of what you decide to do. But if this feels like a hell yes, then let me know I can send you through the extra payment link. And we can even just book all those other calls in advance, you can get my calendar link first before everyone else grabs my times. And yeah, I love this. I love you. And I'll hope to hear from you soon.

31:09

That's it? How did that sound? So that was probably two minutes, two and a half minutes of me just offering a really classic upsell, something that is easy. It's flowy. It doesn't feel pushy, or at least I hope it didn't. I hope you didn't kind of lean into that and go eww oh my god, I hate that I would hate it if my coach did that. I hope instead it felt like, oh my god secret door. This is really cool. Of course, I'd love more time. Great. Let's do it. I'm hoping it came across that way. I could jam on this for so long, you guys, I definitely could keep going with a whole bunch of other strategies. But this is why you'd more than likely want to work with me privately so that we can customise something like this for you and your game plan. Or I also talk about this inside of my mastermind. So if you're trying to work out a way to best get into my energy in my world, to help you really accelerate your income, your flow and your connection to being a wealthy coach, then come on over and join me on Instagram, send me through a DM however you want to reach out, please do that. 

32:16

And I'm going to leave you with this question. So that you can really reflect on it and do a bit of homework and then if you do decide to work with me, then we can jam off what you've come up with as a part of this question. So what are some ways to upsell to my clients without being pushy? What are some ways to upsell to my clients without being pushy? And let the universe guide you with the best answers and the most innovative solutions and the most flow based way to expand out your impact and transformation to your soul led clients. I love you so much you guys. Thank you for joining me I appreciate you. I love you. If you really found this episode so useful, I would so love it if you could share it on wherever it is Instagram, LinkedIn wherever you're listening, or simply just leave a review and five stars. Everything that you do just makes a massive difference. And I just want to express my greatest appreciation to all of you out there, and I'll catch you for the next episode. Bye my love's