289: When Someone Says You're Selling Too Much
A customer bought a VIP pass for one of our HobbyScool summits and then emailed me to say she was heartbroken by how much selling happens at our checkout. Upsell, upsell, upsell before completing an order, is how she put it, and she didn't expect it from a craft site.
This episode is what I actually do with a message like that. I walk through what a free event costs to produce, why the order bump and the upsell at checkout are the thing paying for the free part, where I think the line is between selling and being obnoxious, and the three signals that tell me a complaint is worth acting on.
In this episode
- The email I got from a paying customer and what she said
- What it actually costs to put on a free event, line by line
- What Amazon and your local craft store do between the buy button and the receipt
- The three questions I use to decide if selling has crossed a line
- What happens to your revenue when you cut your marketing over one complaint
- The three signals that mean a complaint is real feedback and not just noise
Resources mentioned.
- Where we run our live events every month: The Creator's MBA Boardroom
We run a live event every single month inside the Creator's MBA Boardroom, and it's free to join.
Join the Boardroom →Episode transcript.
00:00Hi there, Destini here, and welcome back to the Creator's MBA Show. I'm super excited that you're here, and I think you are going to enjoy today's episode. It's a little bit of a hot take, so bear with me. But I first want to start with a story, and here's what happened to me. Yesterday I got an email from a customer.
Now, this is an actual customer, not a free attendee. She had purchased one of our VIP passes for the Art of Handmade Summit that we are running in September at HobbyScool. I'm just going to read it to you because I think it's better in her words than in mine. I'm going to leave her name out, but here's what she said.
01:00She said, "Wow, Destini, I see what you did there. Upsell, upsell, upsell before completing an order. I wouldn't have thought that a craft HOBBY site would be so aggressively marketed. No hard feelings, just a broken heart and a disillusioned and regretful soul."
So that was the checkout. She signed up for the free event, and then on the next page we have our VIP pass offer, and she bought it. And between the buy button and the confirmation page she got offered a couple of other things, and that is what set her off. I want to spend this episode on it because I know I'm not the only one getting these, and I watch people get one message like this and lose their mind over it.
02:00They pull the order bump off their checkout, or they take the upsell down, or they cut their promo emails in half. And then they wonder why the next launch didn't do anything. So I want to walk through how I think about it, what I actually do with a message like this, and where I think the line is between selling and being obnoxious, because there is a line, and it's just not where she is suggesting it should be.
So let's start with the part that I think gets lost here. HobbyScool is a business. It's not a hobby about hobbies. It's a company. There is a federal identification number. It pays contractors, and it exists to make money.
03:00I want to make that very clear because I think there's an assumption floating around that when a brand is about something fun, like crafting or quilting or baking, it's somehow not supposed to be a real business. Nobody says this about a plumbing company. Nobody emails a plumber to say, "You seem awfully focused on getting paid."
So let's talk about what it takes to put on a free event like this, because if you've never run one, it just looks like you're getting some people up on Zoom and pressing go, or you have recorded workshops and everybody's sending their information in and it's all hunky dory. That's not the case. There are instructors, and there's a real cost to bringing them in and supporting them. Then there's the software, and what I mean by that is the email platform, the webinar platform,
04:00the cart, the course platform, the scheduling, the landing pages, all of it every single month, whether we are running an event or not. Then there's my team, and those are real people who get paid every single week. Then there's the ad spend, because I do run ads, and that money goes out the door before a single person registers. Then there's the editing, the graphics, the tech checks, the rehearsals, the replay pages. There's so much that goes into it.
And all of that gets paid for one way, and that's people buying things. The VIP pass, the classes, the club. That's the whole model. The event is free for the person attending, and it's not free to produce.
05:00And the gap between those two things is covered by the people who buy. So when somebody tells me there's too much selling, what they are describing is the mechanism that pays for the free part. The order bump and the upsell at checkout are a piece of that. And if I took all of that out, there wouldn't be a free event to attend because there would be nothing paying for it.
The other piece of this is that we didn't invent any of this. Every single brand out there that a person buys from does the exact same thing, and quite frankly most of them are doing it a lot harder than what we're doing. Go to Amazon, put one thing in your cart, and then I want you to count how many
06:00times they try to sell you something else before you can even finish the order. There's the frequently bought together, there's customers also bought, there's the warranty, there's the subscribe and save, then there's the Prime upsell, then there's the credit card offer that shows up right at payment. That is the exact thing she's describing. Upsell, upsell, upsell before completing an order, and it's sitting between you and the confirmation page on the biggest store in the world.
And then you buy the thing, and then they email you about more of it for weeks, and then they put it in your recommendations, and then they follow you around with it on every other
07:00website you visit. Nobody's sitting down to write Amazon about a broken heart.
I want you to also walk into a craft store. The entire path from the door to the register is designed to sell you things you didn't come in for, and then when you get to the register there's a wall of stuff stacked up right there, and then they ask you about the rewards program, and then they hand you a coupon to bring you back next week. Go to any quilt show or craft fair out there. Admission costs money. The classes cost money. Every booth in the building is there to sell you something, and the vendors paid to be there, and the whole event exists because of that.
08:00Go to any business conference in our world. You pay to get in, and then there's a pitch from the stage, and then there are sponsors in your welcome bag, and then there's an upgrade to the mastermind at the end. None of this that I'm describing here is a scandal. This is just how businesses work. The only difference with a virtual event is that the selling shows up in your inbox where you can see it all stacked up in one place, and that's maybe what makes it feel like a little bit more than it is. Although I would argue that Amazon is much more aggressive here.
Now, I want to be fair here because I don't think anything goes. I do think there's a line. I just think it's in a different place than where most people put it. And the line for me isn't how
09:00often you sell or how many emails you send. I think the line is whether you are honest about it. So, is the offer clearly an offer? When I'm selling, it says what it is, it says what you get, what it costs, and when it ends. That's not dressing up a pitch as a lesson or springing the price on you at the end.
And on the checkout specifically, since this is what all of this was about, every one of those offers says what it costs. And every single one of them has the click to say no to this right there on the page. Nobody gets charged for anything they didn't click yes on, and nobody has to take any of it to get the thing they came for, which was initially the free event.
10:00If somebody clicks no on any of them, they get exactly what they paid for, delivered the same way.
So is the free thing actually good on its own? If somebody comes to our event and never spends a dollar, did they get something real for free? I would say yes. The event is free. They can come and watch the day one workshops all for free, and they're free for a full twenty-four hours. Then they can come to day two and watch the day two workshops for free for a full twenty-four hours. Same thing for day three.
Can people get out of this very easily? The unsubscribe link works in the emails. The preference options are there. And if somebody wants to get off the promo list, they can just click on it and be done
11:00with it. So if all of this is true, then the volume of selling isn't a character flaw and it isn't unethical. It's just a business running and getting paid for the service they are delivering. And I can look at a complaint like this and know that the answer is we're okay, we're fine. We're going to keep going, because we're a business here that basically exists to make money.
And here's the part for you that I want you to think about as you are going out there into the world and as you start selling things. You're going to get these types of messages. Not might, you will. And it might not be a long, angry complaint. It's just a little one-liner with a little bite on it, like what I
12:00got yesterday. Or it's going to be a comment on your post saying, "I feel like I'm always being sold to."
And here's what happens. You run an event, you have hundreds or thousands of people show up, you have a great time, you have a certain amount of people buy, and then you have two people send you something rude, and those two messages are what you are fixated on. The math is completely lopsided. It doesn't matter, that's just how our brains work, and I was the same way. When I got that email yesterday I got really angry, and I had to take a step back and say, okay, this is one person out of 100,000 that we have served in our events, and I really shouldn't worry about her opinion here.
13:00So having a filter for this doesn't mean that you don't notice. It just means that you have a process for thinking about it instead of being fixated on it. I would say that for me it was pretty simple. I read it once. I took a step back. I didn't like her tone. I didn't like what she was saying to me. It also didn't mean that I had to respond back to her, which I didn't do on this one.
I know that what we're doing is right. I know that what we're doing is ethical, and I also know that if we weren't doing what we're doing in those funnels, this business wouldn't be worth it to me to actually run. So I don't think that one email from somebody like that is something I need to really pay much attention to.
14:00I do think the mistake a lot of people make is when they get one complaint like this about too many emails, or I'm getting sold to too much, and then they make adjustments in their marketing. They cut their launch sequence in half, or they stop sending the emails, or they take those offers out of their funnel, and then they wonder why their revenue's going down. So one person's opinion is just one person's opinion. It's not the data about your business.
Which brings me to something else, because I'm not telling you to ignore everything. There are three things that actually make me stop and look and think, okay, do I actually need to make a change here? The first is volume. If I'm hearing the same thing from 10 people in the same week, that's not just one grumpy person.
15:00That's a pattern, and I should go look into it. The second is who's saying it. Is it my speakers that are giving me consistent feedback? If that's the case, then absolutely, I need to look at it and figure out whether I need to make a change here. Is it somebody who's never bought anything ever and has been on our list for three years and probably is never going to buy anything? Should I really care what they're saying?
The third is the number. Did the unsubscribes jump on a particular event or a promo that we were doing? Some unsubscribes are okay. You're going to get those when you do a launch. But is it unusual? Did the complaints go up? Did the open rates fall off a cliff for no reason at all? Those numbers are telling me something real,
16:00and they tell me without anybody having to send me an email about it.
So if you're not getting a lot of feedback about something, and you're checking into it, and you're like, okay, this is just one person's opinion, one person is upset, then that's okay. That's allowed. They're allowed to have their opinions, and you're allowed to run your business the way you need to run it to actually make a profit.
So that's my take on this. We're a business. We sell things. The free events are paid for by the people who buy, and that's not a dirty secret out there. It's the entire model, and every brand that person shops with is selling to her and upselling her too. So if you are building something and you got one of these messages this week, I want you to read it once and ask yourself if there's really any
17:00truth there. If there is, fix it and then go back to selling. Don't let people like that stop you. The people who are actually in it with you are the ones buying, showing up, replying, and asking when your next thing is coming. That's where I want you to spend your attention.
All right, I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you are not in our Creator's MBA Boardroom, I want you to jump in there. That is where we are running all of our events. We're doing them every single month in the Creator's MBA Boardroom, and we have a lot coming up that's going to help you get more of that consistent revenue in your digital product business. All right, there you go. Bye for now, and enjoy the rest of your day.
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