Point A to point B.

When you move from one-off products to a subscription, the recurring charge stops being the objection once each buyer can see the offer is about their own goal. SPI Media’s membership launch asked its 124,000-person list what was in their way, wrote separate launch emails to the people who answered and to event registrants, and beat its sales target by about 40%, with 85% of six-day sales in the first 24 hours and 56% of new members choosing the yearly plan.

At the end of 2022, SPI Media was changing its business model from the ground up. Courses they'd always sold one at a time were coming off the shelf and moving inside a membership, where you'd get them as part of a quarterly or yearly subscription. Very few creators were doing that yet.

They had an engaged audience and an engaged list. The worry was that people who were used to buying a single course wouldn't want to be locked into a subscription, and the new flagship had to work from day one.

We have been changing our underlying business model really from the ground up and moving into a community first community product model. So we hired Jason to make sure that we didn't fumble that.

That's how Matt Gartland, SPI's co-founder and CEO, put it afterward.

The objection under the objection.

A list that size isn't one audience. It spans people at different stages, who need different things and learn in different ways. A charge on your card every few months feels like an objection when the offer doesn't seem to be about where you're trying to go.

So my suggestion was to speak to each of those groups differently, about the place each one wanted to get to. If every person could see the subscription as the way from their point A to their point B, the payment would stop being the thing they argued with.

Asking first.

To do that, we had to know who was who. Before the launch, one email went to the whole list of about 124,000 people, asking them to help settle an argument about the biggest thing getting in the way of their business goals. More than 3,000 people answered.

From then on, the people who'd answered got their own versions of the launch emails, written to the obstacle they'd named, and so did the people who registered for the launch event. Everyone else got the general version.

The launch.

The work didn't stop at the sale. Afterward I went back through who didn't buy, from the survey takers and event registrants to the people who clicked through to the sales page and the ones who did all three. Those lessons went straight into rebuilding SPI's nurture and sales sequences, which hadn't been touched in more than three years.

If you're asking people for a recurring payment, ask yourself one question.

Does your offer sound like it's about where your buyer is trying to go?

Jason “Point B” Resnick

P.S. The survey email was only the tactic. The real work was making sure each person heard about the subscription in terms of the thing they'd told us was in their way.