They already told you.

If prospects fill out an application, intake form or interview before they buy, use what they told you in your follow-up. One $9,000 program sent every applicant the same five emails while their video interviews sat unused; adding each transcript to the follow-up made every email speak to that person.

I was looking at a client's sales process for a high-ticket program. $9,000 per person, cohort-based, and they convert about 20-25% of applicants.

Not bad, right?

But then I read their follow-up emails.

Every applicant gets the same five emails. Same copy. Same testimonials. Same "Have you made a decision yet?" close. Doesn't matter if the applicant is a career changer, a recent grad, or someone ten years into their field... they all get the identical sequence.

Meanwhile, every single applicant had done a video interview as part of the application. Fifteen to twenty minutes of them talking about why they want in, what they're struggling with, what they hope to get out of it.

All of that was sitting in a recording and nobody was using it in the follow up emails.

So I built a small addition into their existing workflow. One additional column in their spreadsheet stores the transcript of each applicant's video. From there, the system pulls out the applicant's motivations, their objections, their own language... and tailors every follow-up email to that specific person.

The testimonials change too. Instead of the same three success stories for everyone, each applicant sees testimonials from people who had similar goals and similar concerns.

When I lined up the generic emails next to the personalized ones, it wasn't even close. The personalized version reads like someone on the team actually watched the interview and wrote back to the prospect. The generic one reads like a form letter with a price tag.

Nothing about the team's day-to-day process changed. The only difference is that now, those emails actually speak to the person receiving them.

We're early in the results... but I'll say this. The program already converts 20-25% with emails that ignore everything the applicant told them. That floor exists because the program is genuinely good. The ceiling is what happens when the follow-up matches the quality of what's being sold.

If you have an application process, an intake form, a survey, or any kind of conversation with your prospects before the sale... ask yourself one question.

Are you actually using what they tell you?

Jason “They Already Told You” Resnick

P.S. The best part about this approach is that it doesn't require a copywriter for every applicant. The data does the heavy lifting... you just have to stop ignoring it.

P.P.S. This is close to what I did with SPI Media, where we asked the list what was getting in their way and wrote the launch emails to each answer. That launch beat its sales target by about 40%. Here’s how it worked.