The second call

Carl Richards is a financial planner, bestselling author, and former New York Times columnist.

I recently worked with him to help him do three things:

• Nail the overall positioning for his membership-based product, The Society of Advice
• Identify ways to improve the experience for THE people the membership is designed for
• Launch a premium offer that a segment of his audience genuinely want

I want to share a little on the process of how we achieved all of the above, but first I need to credit my friend, Michael Burcham. Michael is a world-class entrepreneur, and many aspects of this process are inspired by him.

The Process

Identify a collection of clients who represent ideal fit. The type of people who you’d work with again and again if you could.

Carl reached out to approximately 25-30 of them, asking them for help to improve the Society of Advice. “Would you consider having a conversation with Liam, who is helping me figure out what you truly value?”

Could Carl have done this himself without me? Yes, he had in the past, but it wasn’t effective.

“Even my very presence in the room would make it impossible for me to get clear signal.” - Carl Richards

As an authority, it’s impossible to conduct interviews without getting confirmation bias. Clients admire and look up to Carl. They’ve been fans for years. He is not going to get the truth in any conversation with a fan.

So, when a client confirms they’d be happy to have the conversation, Carl loops me in.

I book the call, send them the list of five questions I’ll ask them, and assure them that this is a 25-minute conversation and I won’t go a minute over. That piece is crucial. Part of my process is, I want to have a second conversation with them. If I’m disrespectful of their time, they won’t agree to that second call (and as I’ll share later, that second call is where the magic happens).

To give you a sense of the questions I ask, they look like this:

1. I gather what exactly were they trying to achieve when they joined. [When you first joined the Society of Advice, what were you hoping it would do for you?]
2. I gather what they love about the product. [If a friend asked you why they should join the Society, and you only shared the upsides — what would you say?]
3. I gather what they dislike about the product. [What do you wish was different or better about the Society?]
4. I gather the underlying desire. [From a business perspective, what does ‘enough’ look like for you? Where you’re not chasing anything new, just maintaining what matters in the most effortless way possible?]
5. I get a picture of the perfect experience. [If you had a magic wand and could reshape the Society into something that was absolutely perfect for your next 12 months of growth (financial or personal), what would it look and feel like?]

The questions might be different for your context, but directionally, I think you’d be looking for something similar.

And notice, I’m not suggesting anything in this call.

Even though we’re thinking to launch a new offer, I’ve not shared anything with them yet. I’m coming to them with a completely open mind so that we can design the solution that fits what they want, not me entering the conversation with the bias towards funnelling them towards an offer we’ve already devised.

16 of Carl’s clients participate.

From that first call, we get some really interesting insights: what they value, what they don’t value, all in their words.

Carl and I then hypothesise what a new premium offer might look like for these membership clients. It’s 10 times the price of the current offer, with significantly more value related to what these people really want.

I put together a three-page white paper synthesising the following:

• This is who I think you are.
• This is what I think you value in the Society of Advice.
• This is what I think you’d like to change in The Society of Advice.
• This is what we’re planning to build next that delivers even more of the things that you really want.

Here’s where the magic happens

Few people actually speak to their clients to understand what they truly value.

But even fewer actually have a follow-up conversation with clients.

At the end of the first conversation with each client, I inform the participant that we’re preparing a short white paper to collect findings on what we think the group as a whole wants from the product. I ask them whether they’d be open to a second, 15-minute conversation where I share the white paper and they can tell me what I got right and what I got wrong.

This second conversation delivers disproportionate value, even compared to the first.

Here’s why:

In the first conversation, you will notice patterns across clients that are true and resonate with most of your ideal-fit customer base.

But you will also hear things that you extrapolate into patterns that resonate with ideal-fit clients, but they actually don’t. They were individual preferences. And you only discover that they don’t in the second conversation when you present back a white paper of your findings, and a significant number of people say, “Actually, I don’t think that’s true,” and here’s why.

The “here’s why” part reveals even more

So we ensure that any changes we make to the product and message we build around it are true according to the people we want to serve.

Secondly, at the end of this second conversation, I present the idea of the new product we’re thinking to build. “Here’s what I heard from you, here’s what we’re building to give you what you want.”

Now, if Carl and I are correct in our synthesis, our overall pattern recognition, and the corresponding solution that we design, many of these people are going to become the first customers for this product.

And please don’t get me wrong, this is legitimate customer research. I’m not trying to manipulate people into becoming customers through interviews. But the reality is, we’re designing a product specifically to solve their needs, so they’re naturally going to be interested.

We subsequently add them to a priority list for launch.

We build our sales messages and emails to Carl’s community using all of the language we gathered from the interviews.

And we ultimately sell 19 seats to this first iteration of a new annual premium membership that’s 10 times the price of the standard membership. We’re happy because we’ve created a new revenue stream. Clients are happy because we’re creating additional value that wasn’t previously accessible to them.

None of this happens without the first interview.

But I also don’t believe the success happens without the second.

P.S. I’ve created a full case study documenting the entire process of this work with Carl and the Society of Advice here.