How to Keep MORE Customers Without Lowering Prices

Lowering prices won't help you keep more customers because price has nothing to do with why customers are canceling.

I'm Dan Martel, CEO of Martel Ventures, a portfolio of companies that generates over $100 million in revenue.

But we wouldn't be able to drive that amount of revenue if we didn't understand how to keep more customers.

So I'm going to share with you the simple seven-step process we use in all my companies to keep more customers paying us month over month over month and make more money in the process.

Because losing a customer that you spend a ton of money to get is crazy expensive. And as business owners, the number one thing you need to run your business is money.
So let's get into it.

Welcome to the Martel Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million empire and being a Wall Street Journal best-selling author.

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Step number one, we need to understand our growth ceiling. See, every business has a point in the future that no matter how many customers they add, they won't grow.

Let's say you have 10 customers today, but every month that goes by, you add five customers per month, but you're currently losing 10% per month. Well, if you have 10 today, 10% is just one.

It's not a big deal. But if you keep adding five per month, that's another 45 over the next nine months.
10% of that now is five. Think about it.

If you churn 10% of your customers every month, then every 10 months, you've lost 100% of those customers that you had. So you got to keep adding more just to replenish.
That's your growth ceiling.

It's just like a leaky bucket. When you have a lot of water in the bucket and you have a little hole, it's not a big deal.

But if the hole gets bigger because the bucket gets bigger and there's more pressure pushing out of it, that is essentially how much water you can keep in your bucket.

Plugging that hole is way more valuable than pouring more water in the top. So that's why we have to ask the question, how do we keep our customers from leaving?

Step two, we have to capture the cancel. What's crazy is that when somebody leaves, it's super possible to stop them from canceling if we just create a cancellation capture system.

Like I'm not trying to stop people from canceling. I just want to ask them why.
Think about a restaurant. You have a kitchen that's putting out food, 90% of it's coming back to the kitchen uneaten.

And the chef never asks himself, why are all these plates of chicken coming back not eaten?

The whole point is for the chef to get out onto the floor, introduce themselves and just ask, I'm curious, sir, did you not enjoy your chicken?

Or ma'am, I'm curious, did you not enjoy the the dessert? Fix it, then make it right. And then the person might actually come back to that same restaurant knowing that the chef listened.

Here's four things that you don't want to miss when you create your cancellation capture system. The first is we need to figure out the reason.
Is the reason somebody's canceling because of the cost?

Is the service too confusing? Are we missing a feature, a benefit? You're just not using it. You're switching to something else.

If I can at least understand why, then I have an opportunity to do something with it. Again, I'm not stopping them.
I just want to learn.

Next, we want to branch the offer, meaning that based on each one of those options, we can produce a different sub-option to hopefully capture the person from leaving.

The key is never discount your product because then all of a sudden you're downgrading the value.

I'll always take things away to something that I've publicly communicated, but I don't like discounting. It's a bad habit to get into.

If it's cost, we might ask them, are you looking to pause for a few days? So that way you don't have to pay for two or three months because you're moving and you won't have a chance to consume this.

Whatever it is, you can offer them a downgrade to a different plan. If they say it's confusing, well, then I can offer to get on a 15-minute setup call or a guided tour with somebody on my team.

If they're not using it, maybe I can offer different ways that they can consider using it. Maybe they just didn't know the product did something.

If it's missing a feature, maybe I have a workaround that I've documented that they don't know about that I can send it to them.

Maybe I can capture the feature request and say, hey, this is something we're going to build over the next 30 days. And when we launch it, we'll let you know.

And then if they're switching, you can say, you can switch, but I just want you to know that once you leave, your current data will be deleted, right?

Do you want to like keep your account active on a lower plan so that you can at least export your data in the future if you want to?

Which takes me to the next step, which is create some kind of notification that reminds them what they're losing. Maybe they bought when your product was a lot cheaper.

Maybe that in the future, when they reactivate, you now have this new fee.

Whatever it is that you offer, just let them know what they're gonna lose and make them confirm that as a way to get them to think twice before canceling. And the last thing is you got to follow up.

Sometimes people leave not because they don't want to use a product, but maybe they change jobs.

Well, what if you follow up and you find an opportunity to maybe sell your product or service in the new place where they went to work?

Just following up to offer help after they've canceled just sets you on a different level of customer experience than they're probably used to, which will get positive word of mouth marketing on your behalf.

To make this even easier, I link the exact cancellation flow, the wireframes, the copy, the button clicks, everything that I use in all of my companies that you can steal from me.

I've paid tens of thousands of dollars to develop this with a UX designer, and I'm giving it to you free. Just click the link below in the descriptions and download your copy.

Now that you set that up, it's time to make sure customers don't cancel in the first place. Step number three, speed up first value.
Click, click, value.

My whole motto in life is: as soon as somebody pays, how fast can I get them a win?

If you shorten the time that somebody becomes a customer in from days to minutes that they get value, they will stay. Like when you get a new phone, the setup time takes like three minutes or less.

That's by design. One of my portfolio companies at Martel Ventures is called Precision.

And essentially, they take an onboarding process that's done with voice and they use AI to automatically create all their business scorecards in minutes. That way nobody has to wait.

The process is done and the client's getting results immediately. So how do you do this? You go through what I call a time time-to-first value sprint.
It's a four-step process.

The first thing is we have to define the value event. Essentially, what's the event that the customers, if they experience it, would brag about?

You know, so one of my portfolio companies, youratlas.com, they have this rule: your first 10 calls performed.

If they can get their product to do 10 calls on your behalf as fast as possible, then you're going to be like, wow, that's amazing, and tell everybody about it.

The second step is we have to remove all friction from that process.

I'm talking defer integrations, give them auto defaults, like offer sample data or templates, like whatever you can do to make that first experience, that time to first value just frictionless and don't make them think.

Like I was saying, youratlas.com, they give the call scripts and best practices and it's built into the software. So you don't have to think.
The third is you have to design that path.

Click, click, value. The two to three clicks has to end in the customer experiencing the value.

When you installed, let's say like Instagram, when it launched, it was the easiest way to take a picture, add a filter, and post it on your social media profile. That's all it did.

It did a bunch of other stuff, but it didn't even talk about that because it wanted to get you to take a picture, add a filter, post it on Twitter, post it on Facebook, post it on text message, share with a friend.

That's it. They knew if they could get every new signup to do that, then the person would then go, hey, how does this feed work? How does the messaging work?

Don't confuse the experience by adding other stuff. The fourth and and last is alerting.
I think of it as like nudging the person along.

So if somebody signs up for your product or service and they don't get to step one or two or three, you need to create trigger notifications via email and SMS to get them back into your world, maybe back on a call or back in your app and just nudge them to get started to get to that core value.

See, the key is, is don't add more features or content because sometimes your customers just need to consume more. The more they use, the more they'll stay.

So now that they got to fast value, it's time to map the path so nobody gets lost.

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Step four, map the golden path.

If you have a bunch of customers and you don't know what the best customers are doing that cause them to want to stay, then what we have to do is analyze the click stream.

So it's a software term, but it applies to every business.

If somebody came into your retail store and they spent $1,500, but they've been there before, and you could identify the 25 customers that spent $1,500 or more and then work back from the first time they ever walked into your store to figure out what that interaction looked like that would cause them to trust you to want to spend $1,500 in your retail store, you might discover that 90% of them talk to Jane.

Oh, interesting. What did Jane say to them? Because if I can figure out what experience they all had in common, then I can replicate and front load that experience.

That's why it's called a click stream analysis. So to implement a click stream analysis, to design your golden path, these are the four things you need.
First, we have to design some event maps.

They're essentially like these milestones, right? Things like signed up, started the setup, first value.

See, if you can create these milestones in a process or what I call a customer journey, then you can figure out what parts people are getting stuck at.

If I sit down with you and I say, okay, all your new customers, what's the flow from the moment they give you a dollar to them becoming valuable or retained?

And if you haven't designed that map, then you don't know it. The next step is to create a funnel dashboard.

Essentially, take that flow and put it into a funnel so that you know, okay, everybody that walked into our store, that was 100%.

How many people went and tried something on? Oh, that was only 50%.

How many of those people then went and bought anything? Oh, that's only 10%.

What caused the drop-off? Well, maybe while they were in the change room, somebody working there could have came with different color options or size options and recommended that.

Because when I go to Lululemon, let me tell you, they do that. They have blackboards in the changing rooms that when I give feedback to the staff, they write it down.

And at the end of the day, they take a picture and send that back to the product managers so they know what the customer is saying.

So in software, we use the data, the analytics to understand that because the customer doesn't have to tell us. We can just look at it.

But if you have a retail store, collecting that feedback at the point of the activity is where you're going to find the opportunities to create innovation.

The third step is we have to fix the interface. We have to fix the experience, right? So it might be that they got confused, add some copy so that it's not confusing.

I don't know what to do next, put some signs up. My son the other day bought a course.
Okay. He's 13 years old, bought his first course.
He spent 50 bucks.

As soon as he spent the 50 bucks, he was like, okay, now what do I do? Nowhere on the thank you page after taking his money did it say, go check your inbox.

One simple fix would have saved him a support email because that's what my son did instead. It sounds so simple, but those little tweaks will change the whole flow of your customer experience.

And the last one is we want to create targets for each one of those milestones. We want to sit down with the team and say, how do we increase the throughput of that funnel?

One time I was working with a client and I noticed that all their top customers invited other team members to join the software to review and be involved in the tool. It was a reporting tool.

So part of the onboarding for that software was asking, who are three or four other people on your team that you would want to have access to that report?

Then all of a sudden you have three or four other people that get an email notification. They come back into the tool.

When they're doing stuff on the report in your tool, you can email the original person who signed up for the software to let them know that Bobby just did something, brings them back in the tool, which means they're using the tool, and that creates retention.

Like I said, the more consumption, the more retention.

So you want to create targets for your team to hit and then come up with creative ideas like that based on the data that might improve the golden path.

Now, data is great, but real words from real customers is a lot better if you want your customers to stick around. Step number five, talk to customers weekly.

This is my biggest pet peeve, especially for you software nerds out there. Stop hiding behind your computer.

Like I said, if you owned a retail store, if you were hiding in the back office looking at cameras and you watch 100 people come in, not buy anything, and then leave your store.

And you're like, why are they doing that?

So you think I need to collect their cell number when they come in the store, and then you send them a text message filling out a survey to ask them why they didn't buy anything.

Or you get out of the back office, you walk onto the floor and you talk to people in person. This is the biggest opportunity in business is to talk to the people, talk and find out why.

So how do we do this in a way that's systematized? I call this the feedback flywheel. The first thing is we have to build a cadence.
How often are we going to talk to customers?

You just figure out for yourself. Maybe it's one happy customer, one angry customer every week.
That's a good system.

For me, I like to do smile and dial on Thursdays, pick up the phone, randomly call a customer, maybe five or six, depending on how many can get done in an hour, and just ask them about their experience and what they've learned and how they heard about us and what we could do to improve.

Those conversations allow me to stay connected to the front line, to the people that are actually spending money. The second thing is we have to figure out the beats.

Like when we're talking to a customer, ask them what their goal was, find out if anybody's had a successful outcome around that. If they didn't achieve it, what's the friction?

And then sit down with the team and just like propose a solution.

Sometimes solving the customer's problem is as simple as like updating a process that the support team could do and then creating a feature request that they can fix in the future.

The third step is to tag and score. See, I'm all about fixing problems, but not if it only happens to one out of a thousand of your customers.

First, you want to tag how frequent it's happening because it's happening a lot. That's one thing.
Then you want to tag it, like how hard is it to solve? Is it simple, medium, or hard?

Because if something's happening a lot and it's really easy to solve, I might want to front load and fix that so it impacts the most customers.

The last step, the fourth step is to close the loop, where once you fix something, emailing the customer and letting them know, hey, we just shipped this for you.

Now, it could have been something you had on your roadmap to build or add anyway, but keeping a list of customers that have asked for it.

And then when you launch it, just emailing them, letting them know goes so far. All right.

So now that you fixed their words, them being upset, if you really want to keep more of your customers, it's time to fix your words.

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Step number six, make the product dummy proof. A confused mind never buys.
Oftentimes you might have to rename, rewrite, reorder something about your document, your contract, your software.

And I know you might have a preference and you're an artist and you're like, this is the way I like it. My customers decide, not me.

If every one of my customers is confused that they got to go from here to here in my store or they got to click this button to download this information to upload it over there, I need to make it simple.

Here's an example. If the dropdown menu for ordering in your online software for food delivery says bovine patty unit and it really should say cheeseburger, you might want to update it.

I mean, it's so funny because like one time I launched this product called Creator and people were like, What is it? And I go, Well, it's kind of like a SaaS Academy.

Like, it's this program for software founders, and it's like a university. So, it's like software as a service academy.
And they're like, Why don't you just call it that?

So, let's go through three tips that you can use to make your product or service extremely easy for anyone to understand.

The first is just rename with the customer's words, what's called self-identifying language. My favorite way to do this is to harvest from calls, either support calls or sales calls.

And then I want you to ban internal jargon. See, oftentimes the way your team explains things ends up in support documents or sales calls or whatever, and it makes no sense to a buyer.

Let them change the words. The best in the world at this is Apple.
Look at the way they name their features. Things like Airdrop, AirPlay, Touch ID.
Retina display. You can go through the list.

Go on ChatGPT and ask it and you will see this is language that they use that the customer remembers and continues to build what makes their product different.

The second thing is we want to rewrite the documents, any kind of specific outcome language. So it's better to say create invoice versus get paid.

Get paid doesn't make sense, but if I want to create an invoice, that's where I click to do that. The third is reduce the amount of choices.
A confused mind never buys. A confused mind never clicks.

They don't decide. Why? Because you have too many things on the screen, too many options.
Hide anything that's more advanced behind the simple, right?

Keep the golden path visible to accomplish an outcome without adding any extra distractions.

So, when we look at the click stream analysis and the time-to-first value and really tweak the language, that's how we ensure that the customers stick around.

That's how we can keep more customers without reducing our prices.

Bonus tip is to go look at your marketing website, your homepage, take that first line in the description below it, and make that the heading.

And you'd be surprised how almost every website becomes clearer and more valuable. Every company I work with, I ask them to swap that and they increase conversions by 30% because it becomes clear.

So now, even with the language fix, if you want to keep customers without lowering your prices, you need to create a strong future for your existing customers. Step number seven, expand consumption.

The best way to get people to buy more is to become evangelists of your product or service by making them part of it. How do I enroll my existing customers to participate in things within my business?

Think about it like this. If I own a gym, the key is to like get the person to come back first time visit.
Think how do I get them twice a week? Then maybe I can get them to hire a personal trainer.

But the whole point is to increase consumption by getting them involved in the thing, which is just going to the gym, feeling comfortable with that. It's like my buddy Matt, who runs Precision.co.

First, he became a coaching client by buying SAS Academy. Then within that company, I asked asked him to work on a key project.
Then I asked him to speak at an event.

Then I asked him if I could highlight him as a client and did like a micro doc on him. Then he exited and I asked him to partner with me at high-speed venture.

So like essentially, I think of it this way. How do you create a relationship with a customer that isn't even just your current business, but could be future businesses?

To do this and really get people bought in, I call this the adoption ladder process. The first thing is we got to create milestones.
So think about like CrossFit.

The first 10 classes, that's a milestone. Maybe they become an affiliate member.
That's another milestone. Your first class that you coach now that you're a coach, that's a milestone.

Think about like what are the progression ladders of adoption you want your current customers to go through? Because when you give people a ladder, they want to climb the ladder.

The next thing, the second step is to create the prompts. Essentially, after each milestone, you want to ask them to do something that is integrated and related to the prompt.

Maybe if they get to the 100th class, you could say, hey, we've got a podcast and I'd love to interview you for our podcast. Would you be open to it? You want to map the milestone to the request.

The last and final step is you want to spotlight your customers. They're called bright spots.

If somebody accomplishes something meaningful, have them share it with everybody else or acknowledge them for it so that other people can aspire to be like them. It's like my buddy Taki Moore.

When he does his events, he gives out belts, just like in martial arts.

That way, at different revenue levels, he gives you a different color belt, but there's a belt ceremony at the end of his two-day event, which is like a celebration to the members to say, oh, someday I'm going to be a black belt.

So that's how we get more people to adopt and build the ladder for them to contribute and feel committed to the company.

Ultimately, that leaves them to staying around longer and you not having to discount your prices to keep them around. And it also gets them to buy more.

And the more they buy, the more money you make, which is how we increase what's called the share of wallet.

And remember, through all of this, you should be using a cancellation capture flow, like a documented process.

If you want to get the exact PDF version of how I design it with the copy, just click the link in the description below and I'll send it right over. Keeping customers isn't really magic.

It's just caring about them that makes the moments that matter to them magical. You build the system.
You document it. You make it a checklist.

And it's not about lowering your prices or giving discounts. That's the easy way to do it that just churns through goodwill you build your customers.
You want to be the premium provider.

It It means you want to elevate the experience, get people results, and make sure you show up caring about them and their needs and their reality, not making it just about the dollar and you.

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