1861 – Reducing Friction for Success with Mark Stern

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2:08With us right now, Mark Stern. Mark, you are the CEO of Custom Box Agency. Your website is customboxagency.com. Mark, thank you so much for joining us. Thrilled to be here, Josh. It's good seeing you. Yes, and you know, it's so funny. It's just amazing that you and I got connected because one of your clients is a personal friend of mine. I have him scheduled for the podcast in a few weeks, but he sent me a message. He said, I'm going to send you something really cool. It's, and I need your mailing address. I'm like, all right, what is it? And so sure enough, Mark, he sent me one of your custom boxes that was done up for him.

2:49So let's talk about what a custom box is. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So the biggest thing that we try to solve for our clients is, do you really understand what it is you're asking your customers to do? And for us, it's all about the customer journey. So when we work with clients, how do we optimize your customer journey? Because the second that you do that, there's just so much magic that can happen. You can really help your clients get unstuck because you know exactly where they are in the process. You can help them get results faster. You can introduce new means to monetize your business. You can gamify it, but it all lives on do we truly understand the journey we're putting our customers through?

3:24And with the box, it's not a swag box. We joke and say swag means stuff without a goal. Our goal here is to give your customers everything they need to be set up for success out of the gates. So and part of it is the dichotomy that we're such in the digital age. Digital, and when we talk about experience, if experience is seen through the senses, everything digital is only what you see and what you hear. When you're scrolling through social media, listening to a podcast, watching a YouTube video, you're just stimulating sight and sound. The power of sending something physical is we can give them all the tools they need to blend both digital, what they're going through on the screen, and physical, what's right in front of them.

4:05All right. My brain is going already right now. To our friend that's listening to our conversation, you probably want to go to customboxagency.com because, Mark, we're talking about something that is kind of experiential. It's certainly visual. So we're doing our best to describe this from an audio perspective. But could you just be very explicit in the best way you can describe what a box is, what's in it and what does it look like and where this fits in the customer journey? Yeah. So let's start with where it fits into the customer journey. We say there's three core objectives, and this is true for any business.

4:40Is your goal acquisition, meaning I'm trying to get new clients, customers and acquisition leads you all the way up to the point of sale. after they've made the sale. The second one is delivery. So how do I deliver a better onboarding experience and set them up for success if they're navigating my products or services? It doesn't matter if your software is a service, a course creator, a professional service provider, econ products, there's always a journey there. Or is it retention? So when we're looking at the three core strategies, what is your overall objective? Is it acquisition, delivery, or retention?

5:10Once we look at that lens, and we try and keep it really simple with those three objectives for business. Then it becomes what needs to go into a box experience. At the very least, what we like to see, there's a couple of essential pieces. One is a welcome note, pretty basic, but it reinforces the what and the why. We like to have a getting started guide. So think about having a piece that frames your business. It's a really powerful sales collateral, but it also reinforces the journey that they're about to go on. So it's reminding them, hey, here are all the tools and resources you have access to, and here's how to get started with the product or service you just acquired.

5:43And then what we like to have is what we call a dedicated journey map as a piece. So think of a one pager that literally takes people from where they are getting started with your products and services to the desired outcome, the thing you sold. How do we have a visual of that? And once you have those table stakes, then everything else in the boxes, well, what else do they need to be set up for success as they're going through that journey with your business? So it's a hybrid between sales collateral that reinforces the buyer decision as well as setting them up for success by giving them the journey that they need to follow and the tools that they need inside.

6:17So if you need a workbook, put the workbook inside the box. The reason I say that is if you're assuming that your customer is going to print out a workbook, then you just put up an obstacle because you're assuming they have a printer as ink. They have paper. It's hooked up to their computer. They printed it out and they're organized. If one thing goes wrong, you stop them in their tracks in a way that they say, someday I'll get to it. So this is kind of where it's, if there's any chance that this is going to be an obstacle to their success, this is where we say, put it in the box. Yeah. You know, in sales, I talk about friction, right?

6:50So you want to always make it easier to keep moving in the direction you're hoping rather than, you know, it's generally, because it's generally easier to do nothing for a new person. But if you can make it easier for them to keep moving rather than nothing, and you can eliminate any of those friction spots. It's like, you know, for example, like, you know, and some of these might be hard to avoid. Like if you require contracts, you know, and you're going to make each person kind of have to read a 16 page contract and sign their name and blood kind of thing. That's a major friction point. Right.

7:23Or, you know, you expect them, you know, for us, like this is perfect. You know, in terms of like for us, you know, one of our biggest things is like when we start with a client, we want that client to be successful. So the more I can empower them so that success is an inevitability, the better. And I would imagine you have a lot of your clients that work with their customers in that way. So it's like an activation and a retention tool. 100%. And so the thing about it is, stop thinking about, you joined my program, here's a box. What I may do is, you joined my program, and here's box one of four.

7:58If you want to get the other boxes, you have to stay engaged and continue to play the game. but I can show you the journey for the next year ahead or to get through this major milestone, depending on what you're doing with your clients. But I may just give you what you need for the first month or two. And then say like, I want you to take an action. If you take this action, it'll trigger the next box. Or if it's timing, when it gets to month three, we'll trigger the second box of the sequence. But the thing I love about that element, we're playing with this concept called collection. If you create an open loop, people wanna close open loops.

8:28Like that's a big thing. It's a big part of my story. If you've ever heard of a Spartan race, I don't know if you are familiar with like a mud run like a Spartan race. Oh, yeah. What they did so brilliantly, and this is it's such a big influence for my business is when I did my first Spartan, this is a mud run. If you've ever like you get muddy, you do obstacles. I did a 5k, so like a three to five miler. I got my medal, which is what I wanted. But then they gave me a third of a medal and said, you need to go after your trifecta, which meant I needed to do an eight to 10 miler and a half marathon mud run, which had you told me at the beginning of the year I was going to be doing a half marathon mud run, I would have said you lost your mind.

9:04But they set up the constraints in a way that I wanted to collect all the pieces to complete what they call their trifecta. And it's incredible to see how just that incentive, there's just so many little strategies like that you can do to incentivize and celebrate people when they hit milestones. I see that you're working with Joey Coleman. My team and I are reading Never Lose a Customer Again. And then, of course, his new book Never Lose an Employee Again, that's on our reading list as well. Who have you worked with in the past? And maybe just share a few stories of kind of what you put together and how that may have impacted their work.

9:41Yeah, I think the biggest impact that we've had on clients is we're forcing clarity on the journey, like getting very clear. It's amazing how frequent clients don't realize what they're asking their customers to do. What I mean by that is it's easy to sell a desired outcome, you're selling the thing that people want. But when they buy your product or service, do you have that clear pathway that's forcing clarity? And so when we get into your business, one of the things we do is we'll go through any products and services you have and break it down to the minute, because we truly want to understand the composition of it.

10:11I hate to get into two specific clients, but we've had clients. So we had a client in the print on demand space that we gamified his front end onboarding in terms of his, he had a 14 day challenge. challenge and what we ended up doing was when we transformed this experience into a 14-day rip and reveal a series of envelopes that they open each day over 14 days, we gamified it like you were becoming an undercover detective trying to find the perfect print-on-demand business solution for you, which then upsold you into his higher ticket product or service. He doubled sales on the front end and then he doubled his conversions on the back end, which 4x the value of the campaign.

10:50We had another one that recently did a big launch, sold about 3 ,500 units of a product at 2K a pop. The one thing that we did when we sent out the boxes, it was a shift from the year before, was we said, you are welcome to ask for a refund in the first 30 days. All you need to do is send back your box. The simple strategy of just asking to send back the box, what ended up happening is of about 3 ,500 buyers, 19 sent back the box. So when you're talking about - Way too much friction to send back a box. It's incredible to see, like, if you can tell me my refund rates in the first 30 days is 19 people, not 19%.

11:27We're talking like less than a percent. Those are the things that, you know, there's a perceived value that when you blend the physical with digital, it's so much more powerful than just a digital entity. Yeah. Okay. So I'm holding a box right now. This is from, yep, this is my friend, Daniel Den. You got the same box, right? So this is Ideas to Influence Interactive Book Box Experience. Okay, so I open it and, you know, and they sent like a coffee mug and stuff. My brain, Mark, is going to like, dang, Daniel, you spent a lot of money to put this together. Can you maybe share just a bit about the economics?

12:05Sure, happy to. My happy zone with the hard cost of goods. So one of the things that's very unique about our boxes is one of the things that really harp on with a lot of people are like, what are the things we naturally save in our lives? because when we create these experiences, what I don't want you to do is get it, rip it apart, throw it out. So one of the things I know you save is a book. You don't typically read a book and just trash it after you read it. You typically put a book on a bookshelf. It could sit on that bookshelf for years, if not decades. So most of our boxes are the size of a book.

12:35We'll brand the spine. That's really important because I want you to stick it on your bookshelf. I want you to have it as a referenceable piece that you can come back to. So the economics of it, my happy zone with boxes is for hard cost of goods, 15 to$30. That's usually where I like it. A lot of times you see these swag boxes get up to 80 to 120. I'm like, stop with the stuff, like really focus on what they need. And the cool thing about that is you can do what we call incentivize with jewels. A jewel is if you hit a certain milestone, I may trigger another thing that we sent to you, whether it's a box, whether it's a widget, but it's a way to really celebrate you for taking action.

13:11If I can reinforce that behavior, it's a really powerful thing. And you're gamifying it. You're bringing it from the digital to the physical. You got it. Yeah, that's it. But that there's so much you can do there. I'd rather you spend less because when you look at print collateral, it comes down significantly in cost as opposed to putting a lot of swag in there. But I can introduce the swag as a celebration piece, which then makes it a retention play to keep people engaged and going after the next thing. This is the part of gamification. the more I gamify the cool thing about gamification that's turning like your business into almost a gamified experience like you're playing a video or board game the powerful thing about this is you've given people a direction and something to achieve I can't tell you how many businesses we get into and they have given no direction or no pathway to achieve and that was for me in Spartan they gave me something to achieve the trifecta for people in the clickfunnels community it's the two comma club award having that element those are what we call jewels for you to strive for is just a really powerful tactic to get people to truly take action yeah all right so your website custom boxagency.com what is the process like we break it down into three phases phase one is what we call activate um what that's focused on is we'll delve deep into your business and your business strategy because we produce so much sales collateral throughout our process we want to know what the where you are today and what the big vision is so we have these 10 pillars we break down your business.

14:36The second part of that is a workshop. People typically come to Austin, Texas. We can do it virtual. We have clients all over the world. But this is kind of where you can come into the CBA lab, come into our office, get your hands on things. And people just don't know what's possible. That's the fun thing about the workshop is we're trying to build out the blueprint that aligns to your business. So that's phase one. Phase two is once we've defined what is that campaign going to look like, phase two is all about bringing it to life. We have a huge design team. So we can take that concept and truly bring it to life.

15:05We can design and build anything. Phase three is once it's designed, we'll send it off into production. We'll get it at our warehouse. We'll assemble it and get it ready for market. So that's all the end market deliverability. So we truly want to be that end to end solution where we can not only help you strategize and that's like where we excel. We've seen so many different blueprints in businesses and then to be able to deliver it. So you don't have to figure out like now that I have this awesome blueprint, how do I do it? We can do it for you. And we have the means to plug into your business and truly help you have this whole physical leg that you may not have had those capabilities before.

15:37So that's a lot of how we look at it in those three phases. Yeah. What is the initial step? Or let's share it this way to our friend that's listening right now. Go to customboxagency.com. And what I would tell you is go look at the work so you can see examples of exactly what this looks like. And you start ideating about what's possible here. Again, you do great for virtual events, certainly coaching boxes. You know, if you have a digital course and everything is just digital, the perceived value of getting something physical, not only in just, is it a better experience for the user and probably will improve conversion rate, but, you know, just visually, I'm thinking about, you know, how you can market this differently.

16:21Now it's like, we're sending, you're getting stuff in the mail, like you're getting physical things in the mail when you engage. It's not just, you're not just buying pixels, you know, like you're, you're getting something physical. That's it. And again, if you look at just even the data, like email open rates are so low. Oh yeah. Direct mail open rates are like 80 to 90%. If someone gives you a package, you're going to open the package when it arrives at your door. That's a really powerful thing. I think your question was, and if it's as simple as go to our website and sign up for a free discovery call, even if you're just toying with the idea, we can help guide you.

16:53We'll tell you if you're ready or not, because our biggest thing is we're in the business of transformation in many ways of what we do. We want to make sure that you are set up for success. That's something that's really important to us because we look at our clients as our partners and we want to be a good strategic partner to you. And part of it is just realizing, are you ready for a journey like this? So, yeah. Love it. Awesome. Customboxagency.com. Mark Stern, you're the CEO. I appreciate this great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Of course. Thank you. I appreciate the time.

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