A $400K Revenue Boost — How To Ask (and Answer) the Right Questions (With Harneet Bhalla)

Tim: If you’re in business and I’m guessing you are, you’re going to face the fact that there are some common objections that your customers will have to buying your product. A lot of the time, we look at objections as these frustrating things we have to “figure out.” But the good news is there’s a way to actually use these objections to obtain more business than ever before. That’s exactly what today’s guest Harneet Bhalla did for one of his clients and it worked to the tune of over 400 grand. The beautiful thing is all you had to do was ask. I’m Tim Paige the conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast.

Hey Harneet. Welcome to ConversionCast. Thanks for coming on the show.

Harneet: Thank you Tim. It’s an honor to be here on the show and I’m really excited to share a lot of information with your audience.

Tim: Cool. I can’t wait. I know they’ll be pumped to hear that this. So why don’t we start right out? Kick it off with a bang, tell us what the results were that you were able to get with this tactic?

Harneet: So we were able to generate an extra $400,000 for our clients that were basically enrolling a thousand new students to their course.

Tim: I love that. That’s awesome. I love, you know, we about a lot of things but whenever we talk about revenue, I can see like people getting more excited by the minute. So that being said, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do to set the stage for what we’re talking about.

Harneet: Exactly. So to be precise, I’m a marketing consultant, coach and speaker. So my passion is to help people establish and scale their online businesses so that they can live their freedom lifestyle. So I’m pretty much known for helping my clients multiply their revenue by implementing some high performance strategies.

Tim: Awesome, perfect. Alright so that in mind, tell us all about what you did to get that $400,000 boost in revenue.

Harneet: So this strategy I call it as obstacle to conversion funnel. So Tim what happens is every firm or every product and services that we market out to people, they already have a lot of obstacles or I would say problems or some kind of frustrations, some kind of hesitations while signing up for that service.

So that might be that oh it is too expensive, it is too cheap, I don’t think it would be valuable or not and these are different kinds of things. So here we are talking about an education brand that I was working with and if you know a little bit about education is there are like three main issues that every person faces while they’re trying to enroll students on board.

So one of the issues is whether the degrees well you’re able or not that I’m enrolling into. Another one issue is that I can’t pay the full price once so do we have some EMI options and all of these things. The last option is is this degree accredited from a recognized university or not.

So we were working with an education brand that generated a ton of leads in like three years of time. After like three years down the line they were having some 90,000 wasted leads that were not even replying to them on calls. They were not replying to them on the sales people or some any other medium. So what we did, we actually implemented a lead nurturing campaign over here and we sent a survey email to all of this list and the subject line was as simple as Hey Tim, I just wanted to contact you. The email just said as simple as that Hey Tim, I was just trying to contact you out to talk about why didn’t you sign up for our service so that we can improve our service right now. So can you please go ahead and fill this survey.

So out of 90,000 people that we send this list, over like 50,000 people actually filled the survey. Now it was having just three options, the biggest three problems that our clients are facing. As I told you whether the degree is valuable, can’t pay the full price, is the degree actually accredited from a US recognized university or not.

Now once this person basically selected one of these options, they were like targeting them to a different email marketing campaign for all of them. Now, when the person  selected whether this degree is valuable or not, we basically send them the content about the success stories of the previous students, some testimonials of the theme, some video chats we had with our previous successful placement and basically bombarded them with all of these content that ensured that they can trust our degree and it is really valuable in the world.

Now for the people who selected can’t pay the full price, we basically designed an EMI calculator that had all the features of the intros and all of these options that they can choose and pick  from and we helped them navigate the complete pricing in a very easy manner. We even gave them some scholarship like 25% and 50% off depending on how much they are paying. So we basically removed this barrier as well of the full price. Now the last one whether the degree is accredited from a recognized university or not . For that we actually shared the document some proofs, some videos inside of our college and institution that we were working with. We actually had some teachers and industry professors talking about our university.

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So we packed up the complete thing and we send them all the documents and proofs that yes this university is really well known. It would be helpful. So in a nutshell we removed all the barriers that they were having with the lead nurturing and email marketing campaigns and ultimately the results are in front of you.

Tim: You know I love that because what I think is really unique about this is that you took instead of just saying here are the common issues and sending them an FAQ or you know, doing a drip sequence entirely just based on all the objections that you heard, all the barriers for people actually buying you sent out a survey to find out what those objections were. What was it that people were struggling with and then based on that, you just sent them an email or a series of emails that addressed that objection with proof or with I love the tool where you built, you actually built a tool to help them figure it out.

This is all about knowing exactly the right way to talk to the right customer at the right time to get them to buy. Isn’t that right?

Harneet: Exactly. So here we were not thinking as a marketer. We were only thinking as a human. So it was like human to human interaction that we were trying to do. As you can see in the subject line as well it was as I was writing to you Hey Tim I just wanted to contact you.

Tim: Right, yeah. So you’re – as my friend Chris Tucker puts it P2P right, people to people. It’s not –

Harneet: Exactly.

Tim: –you know, we’re marketers and that’s great and we’re trying to grow a business and get our product into people’s hands and that kind of thing but at the end of the day people are going to respond to you better if they feel like they’re talking to another human being and you will be able to serve them better from a marketing perspective as well as just from being a better I guess human being. If you can understand that they are going through real struggles, they have real things that are stopping them and a lot of the time those objections are not that difficult to overcome if you just offer the – if you offer that thing that overcomes that objection that they’re actually facing as opposed to trying to assume and then throwing stuff out there and hoping that oh maybe they fit into this kind of mould.

Harneet: Exactly. Now out of the thousands students we enroll Tim, I would say 200+ people actually emailed us back and they actually thanked us for actually starting all of these things and they were like we are really happy you actually mailed us back and you were looking forward to hear from us. We are excited, really excited to enroll on the course. So the wasted lead actually became the best testimonials we can have for that university.

Tim: Wow and then of course we know the value of a great testimonial. So that’s great I love this. so you know, reach out to your customers, ask them what’s stopping them and you know, overcome those objections. The other thing about this the one other thing I wanted to point out and this has been something that we’ve talked about I think the last three or four episodes of this show is that we tend to as business owners and marketers we tend to assume that we know our customers. We tend to assume that we know what struggles they’re facing, what problems they have and who they are but a lot of times we’re going to get better results if we actually asked them and really get answers from them and in doing so, we can turn them into our most loyal customers. I love that. Harneet, thank you so much for sharing this on the show. I know that people are going to be pumped.

Harneet: You’re welcome Tim and it was an honor to be on the show.