You've got a strong customer base of knowledgeable and motivated people, so how do you turn them into pro-active advocates that could actually help you make more sales?
Mitch Russo, author of Power Tribes, is here to give us top insights into creating a tribe of certified partners from your existing top fans who are ready to support your products and services!
Let's find out more…
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Tell us a bit about more about your certification method?
- The way I do it is actually called ‘building a power tribe’.
- The interesting thing about what you do and how you do it is that you perfected a way of creating a transformation in people or companies, that’s what most people in business do.
- The real question is, are you the only one who can do it?
- If the answer to that question is no, then it means you can teach it to somebody else to get the same results as you.
- This means that you can now create a power tribe, simply taking your best customers and training them. Teaching them how to sell, present, and deliver your transformation and then collecting the money!
- It means these people have now joined a new profession by certifying them.
Let’s imagine that I’ve got a certification in your product, what happens now?
- Let’s use the example that you’re a coach and you’ve perfected some processes, and so you decide to create a training that you can sell and in the end people will be certified. Okay, so that’s the dumb way to do it!
- It’s dumb because one, you only get to collect the money once, and two, you aren’t really providing any value to those people because they now can’t do much with that certification.
- What my clients do instead, is they create a program that trains people who are already their existing customers, so they already know and love what they do.
- Now we can mentor them after they pass the certification, provide them with prospects for the future, they’ll renew which means recurring revenue.
What kind of product does this work really well with? Does this work with coaching?
- Yep. One of my clients is running a fairly sizeable real estate coaching organisation and he is currently building a certification program.
- Any coaches, trainers, consultants, anybody who has a process that they’ve perfected and own the intellectual property can do this.
- The idea is that once people join your program and become certified, you want them to pay every year. That means that you have to deliver 2-10x the investment that they paid for certification.
- In order to do that you need a portal, some custom tech, and a constant stream of leads that will help your certified consultants go out there, close deals and make money.
What do we need to deliver to our certified partners?
- When someone purchases the program the first thing you’ll do is send them their username and password for your learning management system. Inside that system, you can welcome them in and share some videos with them upfront.
- The first video is your code of ethics, I provide my clients with a 38-point code of ethics which goes through exactly what they can and cannot do.
What sort of price point are we looking at? What’s realistic as a minimum and maximum price for the product the certified partners will be selling?
- So, when I was selling software, we sold software for $199 as a one time sale.
- Our certified consultants were interested in helping the people who bought the software get the most out of it. So, they could charge an hourly rate to do that.
- Back then we had no way of tracking anything (no internet back then!) so we just said they could sell their services and collect their own money. But they could also sell software upgrades, updates, add-ons, support packages etc, and this became our sales force.
- They were paying us around $1,000 per year to stay certified, selling our products and software, as well as making their own money.
How do you feel about creating a community for your certified partners?
- The name of my program is Power Tribes, because what you’re doing it creating a tribe, a group of people who work together to make each other successful.
- We don’t think of them as being in competition with each other, because they’re all getting different leads and different territories. They’re all out there working with their own clients.
What’s the first step you can take towards seeing if this certification model is going to work for you?
- I have a website that has the three questions you need to ask your clients. If you can answer those three questions, then you have the potential to create a pretty powerful certification program.
A book that you would recommend…
Flip The Script by Oren Klaff
What is your top success habit?
I meditate for 15 minutes every morning before I start working.
What are your favourite apps right now?
My entire life is governed by Trello and Evernote.
Here’s the big one… who do you like more, Rob or Kennedy?
It's gotta be red-haired Rob.
Finally, where can folks go to find out more about you?
You can go to mypowertribe.com or mitchrusso.com and find out all about who I am and what I do.
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