Trigger warning

Find the trigger, find a path to $$$$

Merry Christmas!

Summary:

• Triggers are events that cause people pain

• View your “foot in door” product as a pain medicine

• When people have pain medicine, you can then sell the broader product that prevents the trigger from happening again

Why don’t you spend money on retention?

My company sells recruiting software to fast food franchisees. They’re always hiring and often short-staffed.

When they’re short-staffed, every other aspect of their business suffers – customer satisfaction drops, revenue sinks, employee morale plummets, and they’re unable to focus on anything other than hiring.

Yet when we talk to franchisees, we find something interesting:

They admit that their biggest problem is not hiring but retention – too many people quit too fast. Fast food jobs are difficult and don’t pay much. Staff often aren’t trained well or treated right.

We hear this and then we ask the killer question: “So how much do you spend on retention? It must be much more than you spend on hiring, right?”

The answer is always the same: Franchisees spend very little – if anything – on retention.

We scratched our heads. It didn’t make a ton of sense. Why weren’t they spending money to solve the real problem?

Someone on my team figured it out.

When an employee quits, franchisees experience a “trigger” to act.

They need to hire someone new. They have to do something. Now.

And they know they need to improve retention – they’re not stupid. But retention doesn’t matter right now.

Retention will prevent this trigger from occurring as much in the future, but it’s not the painkiller they need today.

And that’s why we start by selling a recruiting solution. We start with the immediate painkiller, then expand to a product that prevents the trigger from occurring in the future.

Triggers = our go-to-market strategy.

When a franchisee is understaffed - when someone quits - I want them to embark on a series of events that ends up with them as our customer.

If we own this series of events through our marketing and sales sequences, we’ve built a causal chain from an employee quitting to the customer buying our product.

Why do this?

In short, I hate waste. And there’s so much waste in marketing and sales.

I hate wasting time selling to people who don’t care.

I hate selling a solution to a problem people aren’t trying to solve right now

I hate “selling” instead of helping people who want to buy.

Focusing on triggers changes the equation - you don’t sell; customers buy.

Rob

PS - highly recommend Demand-Side Sales 101 by Bob Moesta on this topic!