Sales Flat? The "Law of Big Changes" Gets You Unstuck
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- In this monthly Strat on a Sat, I discuss the Law of Big Changes and how shaking up your way of doing things could boost sales.
- I support this with several case studies, including one from Mailchimp.
Hey, what's up? It's Matt from Growbo.com, and today we're talking about the Law of Big Changes.
This is the second-ever episode of "Strat on a Sat," where we sit and we talk about strategy at a high level, since during the week we're normally talking about specific tactics at a specific level of your sales funnel.
So, what is the Law of Big Changes? Why should you even care? Well, let me kind of give you an example personally.
Understanding the Law of Big Changes
I think as an entrepreneur that being lazy can be an asset sometimes. The way I see it is that you're always looking for the most efficient way to get something done.
You can use your laziness and your desire to get results fast as motivation to get them in the most efficient way possible, right?
However, the problem with this—and maybe you can relate to this, too—is that you end up looking for quick wins and you look to grab the low-hanging fruit perhaps a little too often.
You can jump around in your funnel and always be looking for that next tactic, tip, or shiny new tool that's going to get you results. But that only works to an extent.
I'm as guilty of this as you might be, where you're looking for quick wins and we are susceptible. I think just as human beings, we want a silver bullet solution to our problems. We want to just flip a switch or run an A/B test, like the much-hyped A/B test case studies we see published on every blog, where they change a color of a button or a word in a copy, and instantly they're seeing 200% growth in sales. Like, "Oh my God, how can I copy this example and get similar or better results?"
Well, the truth is that grabbing and going for the low-hanging fruit only works for so long.
So, what's the solution when you really hit a roadblock and you find that sales really just aren't growing and you've made some incremental progress, but it's really stalled and you need a big boost?
That's kind of where we're at, and I have the instinct for it because I've been through this process many times for clients and in our own business. I learn as I'm sharing the journey with you guys, since we're coming out with a growth report from January to February. It might already be out by the time this video is up.
From January to February you'll see how we tripled our revenue. However, my concern for the next month is that that growth rate is not going to be maintained, because I think that a lot of the growth, it was going for quick wins and incremental progress, where we changed where people were being redirected to a page, made an offer more visible, or we changed some copy here and there.
My instinct says we are going to hit a wall. Maybe you feel you've hit a wall too with your business.
So, here's what it is. The Law of Big Changes in sales funnel physics is the theory that you can cause sales in a predictable way, much like in physics.
In physics, if you know the variables, like, for example, if you're throwing a ball and you know the wind speed, and you know the weight of the ball, and you know the force behind the ball, you can predict where that ball is going to land.
Sales funnel physics is much the same, except that it applies obviously to digital marketing and sales funnels.
There are seven laws I've discovered in total. The Law of Big Changes is one of them and one of my favorites, and one of the most important, because it says that big, meaningful, and significant structural changes are more likely to cause bigger bottom-line results for you than other incremental types of changes you might be chasing after instead.
So, for example, there was a car company that rented out limos and other types of cars to corporations.They would drive people to a landing page to try to generate leads. This was based on a case study that was written up in Crazy Egg. I'll actually link to it below this video.
They practiced the Law of Big Changes without even really knowing it, since they made a big structural change to the way that they were trying to generate leads.
Their original call to action was to get people to opt in for a demo. They A/B tested it against another offer, which was for a 10-minute free demo video. They can watch it right online, and there is no obligation to get on the phone.
What was the result of that?
Well, the result was a 15-times increase in the overall conversion rate in terms of the number of leads that they were generating. This worked because it was a big structural change, meaning that for the prospective customer, the experience was completely different. It was a different offer and it spoke to their needs, which was that a lot of people don't want to waste their time getting on the phone just to get the information they need. They don't want to get on the phone with someone if, ideally, they can get the information from the website.
That's win-win for both parties too, because if a person is not a fit and you give them the information up-front, you're disqualifying them faster. So, the quality of the leads they were getting would be higher from this, I suspect. Overall, though, they're getting 15 times more leads as a result. That's the bottom line.
Here's a second example. In 2013, I started to build a SaaS business on the side. I ultimately abandoned it after two years because I realized the importance of focus and building on top of what is really working.
Anyway, it was a software-as-a-service, and I built it from scratch. I was really proud of it, I learned a lot about it, but it didn't work out.
Relating that to the Law of Big Changes, we originally had a free trial, where we saw three to four free trial signups per week.
When we removed that free trial, we said, "Maybe people are willing to pay right away up front." We went from three to four free trial signups per week to zero.
Now, if we'd been starting at zero and then we introduced the free trial, obviously this would have had a positive result, and in this case, obviously we reverted back to the free trial because it was leading to more sales in the end. So, this is another example of that.
A final example comes from MailChimp. They were offering a free trial, much like many of the other competitors like Constant Contact or Mad Mimi, iContact, they all had, you know, 30- and 60-day trials.
MailChimp decided to take it one step further and practice the Law of Big Changes, and they changed the offer completely. They introduced a free forever plan, which made them a freemium service. If customers wanted more of the premium features and like, autoresponders, or if they wanted more contacts once they hit the limit, they would have to upgrade, hence why it's a freemium.
The result of this change was a 150% increase year over year in revenue, 150% in revenue.
So now, for the month of March going into April, my instinct is telling me that we, at Growbo, have to apply the Law of Big Changes, because otherwise, we're going to hit a major plateau or roadblock if we haven't already.
I went and looked at our survey funnel, because I saw that email has been the biggest bottleneck. I said, "Let's apply the Law of Big Changes here." So what we're doing is revamping our entire survey funnel or email funnel experience to make it more connected.
Right now, part of the problem is, I've learned a lot about copywriting since the last time I originally wrote our sales funnel. I noticed that quality copy can be better and the tips can be more interrelated. The way we present our offer at the end can be much better as well, and just the way we convey the information in a way that really just builds trust with our email subscribers could be so, so much better. to the point where I believe that making this big change could potentially double our revenue by itself in the next couple of months.
We'll see how that works out, but just sharing the journey with you guys, that's what we're working on right now. Of course, we're going to be publishing a growth report to kind of break it all down for you in terms of how it actually works.
I'll be sharing whatever other lessons I learn from it as well.
To conclude this video, let me ask you a question: do you like these kind of, more broad-based strategy videos, "Strat on a Sat" as we're calling it?
Do you like it?
Should I keep doing it?
Leave a comment below, let me know.
Also, leave a comment and let me know an answer to one of these questions. First, does the Law of Big Changes make sense to you?
How will you apply it to your funnel today in a meaningful way?
It's not just about, "Change your color on a button and run an A/B test, and maybe you'll get double the number of sales" or "Change your word in the headline." Those are flukes in most cases.
Unless you're running a test on a site wide pop-up and you have at least 5,000 to 10,000 visitors to your website every single month, running an A/B test often doesn't make sense.
The Law of Big Changes makes a lot more sense because you just don't have the traffic to run a meaningful A/B test in that way. It is still testing in a way, because it's just a sequence test, you know. If what you roll out, you can always revert back to the old version of it, right?
So anyway, how would you apply the Law of Big Changes to your funnel today?
If you've applied it in the past, perhaps without even knowing, what sort of results did you see?
Share your comment below, and if you never want to miss another video like this "Strat on a Sat", or any of the daily Matt Hack videos, hit the red subscribe button directly below on YouTube. If you're watching this on our blog, there's a link directly below in the description in the yellow box, where you can opt in via e-mail to never miss another Matt Hack video. So, until next time, my name is Matt Ack in the Matt hat, delivering you daily and a weekend dose of Matt Hacks. I'll see you in the next video. Take care.
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