Episode 73:Best Buyers

How do you identify and work with your best customers?

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Summary

Nick and Kai work through Chet Holmes’ best-buyer concept from The Ultimate Sales Machine: within any large market, a much smaller subset of buyers are worth focusing on, and tuning your marketing to that group makes it far easier for the right people to self-identify. The episode covers how product ladders create a natural path to spotting those buyers, how to segment them in email software, and why a handful of repeat, high-value customers can account for most of a business’s revenue.

Highlights

  • Kai cites Holmes’ Dream 20 idea: don’t aim for NASA-level clients, identify dream clients at the caliber you currently serve, then market to those 20 persistently and politely.
  • Nick’s working threshold for a best buyer is two purchases, at least one outside a book, meaning someone who has crossed from two-figure into three-figure spending. He says roughly two dozen people fit that profile and they pay most of his bills.
  • Nick distinguishes two types of repeat buyers: people who will buy every book he writes (great, get told about the next book) versus people climbing into higher-value products (candidates for consulting, Revise Express, or a bespoke engagement).
  • Kai set up an automation in Drip that fires a personal 15-minute call invitation when a subscriber’s engagement crosses a threshold. People who book have already self-selected as more serious; many calls stay advisory, some convert to paid work.
  • Nick mentions Ben Thompson’s daily newsletter as a clean ladder: one free article per week sets the tone, paid tier delivers the remaining four days. He frames his Revise Weekly the same way, why vs. how rather than just more of the same.
  • Kai runs a segment he calls the Platinum Reserve, about 150 people out of 3,500 on his list, specifically for testing new positioning or product ideas. If they say yes and then actually pay, the product is validated before it’s built.
  • Both agree the feedback loop matters: identifying who your best buyers are internally should directly inform who you go after externally, because the archetype of your best existing client is the profile you want to find more of.
Read the transcript
Kai

So there’s a quote that I am enamored with by Chet Holmes in The Ultimate Sales Machine, one of my favorite books of all time that I highly, highly recommend to everyone. In it, he talks about the concept of the best buyers for a service, where best buyers are your ideal targets. And there’s always fewer best buyers than all buyers in a market. This connects largely to the idea of positioning. You might be niching down and saying, I’m going to target e-commerce stores and I’m going to help them get more revenue through conversion rate optimization. But even within that, there’s a spectrum of customers, of people who might want to work with you where Some people are, you know, we’re just starting out. We just launched our store. We’re wondering what to do next. Some people are very specific on, hey, we are running on Shopify Plus. We are investing in a testing and a research strategy. And we have these specific goals. And by Orienting your marketing to just target the best buyers in your market, first defining who those best buyers are, you’re able to have more success. As we imagine two sort of different versions of this, one where you target all 10,000 potential customers. And the other where you niche down and you say, like, okay, out of those 10,000, these 500, they’re the people I want to reach. And I might reach them through channels like podcast marketing or outreach marketing or guest articles or direct outreach or speaking at conferences. But By being specific and understanding who your best buyers are, you’re then able to more effectively market to them. And because you’re able to tune your marketing message essentially to Just those 500 best buyers, when you present them with your marketing message, they’re able to more easily raise their hand and say, You’re describing me and my business. You’re describing the outcome I’m looking for. How do we get started?

Nick

Right, right. So one thing that I like talking about with this whole topic is the notion of a product ladder. And if you haven’t listened to our episode about product ladders, I believe it’s 12 or 13 or something like that. We call it our incremental steaming abomination, something like that. And in it, it’s basically you have a low-value product or free product or something like that that gets people in like a free course or a how-to guide or handbook or something like that that you give away and get on their mailing list and then you start to teach them. You don’t start selling to them yet. And then you sell something like a cheap book, right? For me, it’s Keynes and Slang. So the goal is to get you to buy one of my books. Because I’ve written a few, and I think that they’re useful and valuable and reasonably priced, and have a pretty good upside for you if you actually take their advice. So once that happens, then I know you are a person who has bought something from me, right? You get to join the 3,500 other people who have bought something from me, right? So that’s That’s cool. That’s definitely something. But that does not necessarily make you my best buyer yet. My best buyer, I’ll give you a few examples. One of them is the person who bought the A-B testing manual. And they they bought like the book bundle that has like all the worksheets and stuff, and that’s $150. And when you get that In the receipt, you get a link to upgrade at a $150 discount for life to the full course. The full course is five and a half hours of actionable video. With fully annotated transcripts and all that, all the nine yards, right? So deluxe wash. And four days later, I get a receipt for $850 that you have bought the deluxe wash. And that you have subscribed to Revise Weekly. And then six weeks later, I find out that you bought something else from me. So, like, they’re obviously like your regular, right? You’re coming in and buying a lot of stuff, and you’re working your way up the ladder fairly quickly, right? That does two things. Number one, you get to learn about anything new that I’m bringing out pretty quickly. And I also make myself available for like a half hour call, something like that. And if I haven’t done that and you think you’re one of these people, ping me, please, seriously, I, you know, try and make myself available in some capacity, try and help out your business. And I also think the second thing is that you’re liable for consulting engagement, right? You probably work at an organization which could benefit from my work because I write basically what I do for my job every day, right? Now that makes you one of two potential customers. You are either perfect for consulting engagement because you’re very curious about what it is I’m doing Or you’re dismal for consulting engagement because you believe you can do it all yourself and there’s nothing I can do to convince you otherwise. And I get both. I get both all the time. A lot of people who are just kind of plugging away and ask me a lot of questions. And again, neither are bad. It just means I shouldn’t be pitching draft revise to you because it will be annoying and inappropriate. But I absolutely should pitch the like other big courses that I have, or maybe like a one-off teardown or something like that. Slightly higher touch consulting things like Revise Express, right? You’re terrible for draft revise, but you’re very good for Revise Express because You’re happy to be taught in a more bespoke way, right? So that’s A little bit on the contours of the best buyers bit and how I envision at least fitting into my own personal product ladder, but you can fit this into any product ladder, right? There’s a seam between passively sold things like info products or courses and actively sold things like consulting engagements or one-off teardowns. At some point, somebody crosses that seam or nudges very close to it. That’s when I start to open up a conversation in a more bespoke way. I have maybe two dozen people. That I can think of that fit this profile. It’s not many, but they pay most of my bills.

Kai

Now, in connecting with that, also in Ultimate Sales Machine, literally one of my favorite books ever, Jed Holmes talks about the concept of a Dream 20 list. And who are like the 20 ideal clients who match your buyer profile that you’d love to work with? Who are the people that you’re actively going after? And When I’ve talked about this idea with people, oftentimes they immediately jump to like, I want like NASA. NASA’s the dream client. And I’m like, okay, literally cool the Jets here. Let’s talk about the Dream 20 for the current scope of your business. What caliber of client are you working with right now? Oh, you know, they are doing X to Y revenue. Okay, so Who are your ideal dream clients within that segment? Let’s not go after NASA, let’s not go after Entrepreneur on Fire yet. Let’s identify those dream clients who we want to persistently and politely market to. Within the scope of who you’re currently working with, because we don’t want to be punching up too many levels, so to speak. We don’t want to be going too large in terms of the clients, but we want to be Identifying the people who should be our clients and finding a way to reach them, finding a way to present them with this information, see if they’re experiencing the trigger for our service. and should therefore become a client to help resolve the problem they’re either experiencing or about to experience in their business.

Nick

So with all that in mind, I think it’s pretty easy to identify a best buyer, right? What do I do when they get in the door?

Kai

I think the first thing is what do you do? I think the first thing is identifying how they want to get it, how you want to get them into the door. And Michael Porn and Book Yourself Solid Advocates, and I fully agree with this advice. Always having some free offering available, be it an email course, a webcast, a group phone call, something, something for you when you identify when you meet somebody at a networking event or a conference, you’re connected with them over email. You could be like, hey, I do this free thing. You should join it. It’ll be very, very valuable for you. And it provides an opportunity for them to engage with you and your worldview, to start learning from you, and to start moving along that spectrum from a person who’s never heard of you to person who is a true rating fan. And I think as you identify these best buyers, either Within your own business, people who bought from you before, or people outside of your business, what’s important is to identify: well, what is the outcome they’re looking for? What is the value they’re looking for? And how could you best provide that value to them? Through education? Or how could you get in front of them to provide that value through education? That could often take the forms of outreach marketing directly to them to build a relationship, not even focusing on sales yet, but saying, I love that thing you do. Thank you for doing that thing. Let’s have a conversation. Or it might take the forms of running a webinar or running a weekly series or having an email newsletter where you’re able to invite people in. And have them start to engage and then start to self-segment as, like, oh, I really enjoy this content. They’re replying back, they’re asking questions, and they move forward along that spectrum.

Nick

Yeah. One thing that I’ve always thought about doing is bringing together like some of my best customers and just kind of having like a private cabal. where I talk a lot about optimization stuff, new things in design. And it’s almost like a mastermind group. Like there’s no selling other than like, here’s the thing I’m doing in my business. End of selling, you know, just place the thing there. Because they don’t need much selling. They’ve been buying from you for, I mean, in some cases, with draft over three years. Like. And I’m sure with many more established businesses, it’s even longer. So you have a you already have a relationship with them, but They’re also the people that are most likely to resonate with your values and they take you really seriously. So, when you go in that room and paste a link and are like, What do y’all think? You’re going to get really interesting feedback. That’s the theory, right? I haven’t actually done this yet. But like getting a Slack room together would be trivially easy. Getting a mailing list together for VIPs would be really easy. doing a five-minute video series where you just kvetch uh would be easy. Um one of my um one of my colleagues I look up to quite a bit. He’s uh His name is Ben Thompson. He has a paid mailing list that’s a daily mailing list, but one of those five days is free, and it’s more of the feature article that dictates the tone for the rest of the week. And I love that. So you get the day you get the weekly stuff for free. Do you want more of it? It neatly ladders into the paid thing. And then you get on the paid thing. It’s kind of what Revised Weekly is, but it’s like the difference between why and how more than the difference between this and more of this. Identify them and nurture them. You need to at least reach out because, like, then they’re going to be like, oh, wow, Nick D emailed me. This is really great. I can’t tell you how many people have. I’ve emailed directly thanking them profusely for their support, and they’re shocked because it didn’t arrive on a Monday and hence didn’t come from my mailing list.

Kai

Oh, I get that all the time. I’ve personally responded to people, and they’re like. This is an automated email. How did you personalize this? And I’m like, nope, it’s me on the other side of the keyboard. Hi, how are you? And they’re like, I’m a nerd. Hi. But one of the most valuable things I did recently for my business was, and this was just setting it up simple and drip. When a person’s engagement reaches a certain level, send them a quick email being like, hey, you’re awesome. You read my stuff. Thank you. Would you like to have a 15-minute call? Here’s a link, book a time. I’d love to chat with you. And it was fascinating just to start to engage with people because The people who trigger that are the people who are reading most of my content, who are reading more pages on my site, which means they’re self-selecting as being better buyers or better customers or more engaged. Presenting them with the offer to get on the call. Not everybody takes advantage of that. So, again, we have some segmentation there. And the people who I do get on a call with, I’m able to better understand the pains and problems they’re experiencing. Outcomes they’re looking for, and if I can help them. Oftentimes, it’s a 15 to a 20-minute call where I give them some advice, we talk about their business, we talk about where they want to go, and it ends there. Sometimes it transitions into a larger engagement or an opportunity for them to say, Hey, I really need help with X, Y, or Z. Can you help with that? But either way, just by having that as an opportunity to engage with people who are already high on the engagement spectrum. Has been a wonderful way to learn more about the people on my email list, learn more about what they’re trying to experience, and then start delivering that as content, as articles, as podcast episodes. A lot of our recent episodes have come out of questions people have specifically asked on those calls, and I’ve just Just written down, like, oh, we should do an episode talking about that. Because if one or two people are asking that question, there’s a dozen, two, three dozen people out there who are also asking it, but haven’t verbally asked it yet.

Nick

Yeah, there are a lot it’s so funny. I see every time I come into the Trello board that we use to plan content for this podcast, there’s always like three or four new things, and I know it’s because somebody emailed you, right? Like it’s And I if nobody else is posting to that, I don’t think our editor is posting random things for us to be posting to be talking about on the podcast, in which case, slyly done, Craig. Because each one of us can blame the other for it. But yeah, it’s so my criteria for this, and y’all may have other criteria that fit your business better, but this one works for mine. You have to have bought things from me at least twice, and one of them has to be not a book. Because there are just some people, more than some, there’s like a couple hundred people out there that will just buy every book I write, which is amazing. It is. Wonderful. But then you’re slotted into a special group that is the person that will buy every book I write, right? And then I’m going to Just tell you about my next book. Great, great, wonderful. Thank you so much for your support. This is fantastic. It is very different from the type of relationship that we’ve been talking about on this episode, right? And that’s not good or bad. It’s just you’re working your way up the ladder. You’re not working your way to the side of the ladder or inventing a new ladder. You have to be going up on the ladder and paying increasingly more money. And again, that’s only like a couple dozen people. It’s not very many. So if you have bought, say, draft analysis in addition to cadence and slang, or draft evidence, or something like that, or you have bought I don’t know, like the A-B testing manuals full thing, the bundle or the full course, then you are further up the product ladder. Basically, if you move from two to three figures, I know you are serious. Right. I know you are potentially a client potentially using a petty cash card. And that matters for the business, right? That’s how I eat. So, it very much behooves me to cultivate a one-on-one relationship with you. And that’s very different from being somebody who is avidly reading all of my books. Again, amazing. Email me any time. I’ll reply back and talk to you. But I don’t think anybody’s going to disagree that when you move into three-figure territory, the a professional relationship begins, not a um consumption-based or even aesthetic, in my case, relationship. Or yeah, it’s a very, very different type of thing. It’s like the difference between buying a copy of responsive web design and going to an event apart, right? And in both of those situations, you are probably ingesting the words of Ethan Marcott in some capacity. They’re very different, right? I’ve been to both. So, yeah, yeah. Does that am I am I detailing that well enough?

Kai

No, I think you’re right on the money there. Yeah. And I mean, in a sense, it takes the form of segmentation between your customers. I mean, there’s people who are true fans, there’s people who are not true fans. There’s a spectrum in between there and identifying who those people are who love and support your work. I mean, I’m starting to think of, oh, who is it? Kevin Kelly’s essay, 1000 True Fans. Do I have that reference right?

Nick

Well, I know a thousand true fans. Yeah, the yeah, it is Kevin Kelly. He’s the guy who founded Wired. Yeah.

Kai

Wonderful, wonderful gentleman. Oh, my gosh. His Facebook is amazing. But this also connects to, I think, that idea of a thousand true fans as you identify those best buyers for your business, as you identify the people who. Historically, have spent the most on your services or been the best clients, that needs to feed into your understanding of: well, who out there could be a best buyer? Who out there Could be a great customer for me. How do I get in touch with them? How do I connect with them? Because there’s this feedback loop between, oh, this type of person or this, you know, this, this archetype. Engages with me the most, buys the most, replies the most. That’s wonderful. How do I attract more of those people?

Nick

Yeah. And so there are. I’ll just say they’re kind of tiers and this is not necessarily a um some of them are kind of orthogonal and unrelated, but they’re different like It’s a tag cloud, I should say, not tears. There are people who just buy all my books. There are best buyers, like what I’m talking about here, people who are buying higher-value products. There are people who have said they will buy products. Like when I launched draft analysis, I opted a bunch of people into a list that was like, I’m launching it here. If you’re interested, go here. And now that may include tire kickers or other consultants who are curious about my game plan, but you’ve at least flagged as somebody who might be interested in something I’m selling, which sifts you out from all the people who are reading me for like sandwich advice. You know, they’re never going to buy anything that I’m selling unless they come over to my house and pay me for deli meat. So, you know, you want at least some sort of like economic Tagging of these people where you can say, okay, well, they might have an implication for the business. Then, once they start buying stuff, now they do have an implication for the business because they have begun buying things, right? This is why so many stores want you to join their mailing list. Because the instant you join their mailing list, what do you think they’re going to do? Start selling to you. If you join the mailing list, you’ve automatically pegged yourself as somebody who’s interested in buying their things. I can’t imagine a scenario where you would not be, you know, joining, say, I don’t know, Warby Parker’s mailing list for like not a coupon code, right? The latest trends in eyewear. Well, great. You’re going to be putting on their glasses eventually. So that’s That’s kind of how I end up tagging people and like the broader strategies around it. Right.

Kai

Yeah, I agree with that. I’m just getting to the point within my own like marketing automation and business setup where I’m starting to segment out these people. And Create segments within Drip of like, okay, this is the Platinum Reserve. These are the people who respond to the most of my emails, who have bought my product. These are the people that I want to reach out to if I’m like, hey, Head Scratch, I’m thinking about this kind of thing. Is this the type of thing that you would buy? Because more often than not, People who have bought my products or bought my services in the past, they’re a great filter to test new things against or see if they’re interested in. They alone don’t determine if it’s a service or a product I launch, but. If they’re like, oh, yeah, we want that. And I’m like, would you pay this much money for it? And they’re like, oh, yeah, we’d pay that much money. And I’m like, here’s a link. And then people actually pay money for it. I’ Delke Corp We have validated in every possible way that this is a thing people want to buy. Now I’m going to go make that thing. And I feel being able to segment your audience either through an email marketing software or. A simple dumb spreadsheet where it’s like, these are the 20 people who are really big fans and buy my services. Having that as a list where you could reach out to them and be like, hey, I’m testing new positioning, or I’m seeking referrals, or I’m testing a new product. Is this something you’d be interested in? Having that idea of your internal best buyers for your company, those dream clients, those repeat clients, can be incredibly valuable.

Nick

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, they could turn into clients. That’s great. Or they could just buy your info products for the rest of your life. That’s also great. You know, there’s no bad outcome out of this because people are interested in what you’re doing and they’re willing to pay you for it. Like, my God, that’s the whole point of this podcast. Right.

Kai

Right. But I think the crux of it is you need to talk to your customers, and it’s more efficient to identify who those best people either within your existing customer database or Outside of your business who match that profile, identify those best buyers. So instead of talking to everyone, I got 3,500 people on my email list. That’s a lot of conversations. I probably have 150 on the Kai Davis Platinum Reserve segment. Those are the people I’m going to reach out to first. Those are the people I’m going to be like, is this a crazy idea? Is this actually solving the pain that I think it is? And get their feedback first and see if they’re interested in buying it to further validate it. So, I think internally and externally, understanding what that profile of the best buyer is can be a force multiplier for your business. Because it lets you know what to do next. It lets you know how to market. It lets you know how to communicate.

Notes