John Warrillow > Quotes

“Once you’ve isolated what is teachable, what your customers value, and what they need most often, document your process for delivering this type of product or service.”
― John Warrillow, Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You

“Don’t be afraid to say no to projects. Prove that you’re serious about specialization by turning down work that falls outside your area of expertise. The more people you say no to, the more referrals you’ll get to people who need your product or service.”
― John Warrillow, Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You

“We have a system we follow every time we get asked to create a product logo. Clients like the work we produce and we’re able to charge a good dollar because clients know a product logo is something they will use for a long time. Once we create one product logo, we have our foot in the door and clients often come back as they launch new products.” Ted considered Alex’s conclusion. “Tell me about the system you follow for creating logos.” “It’s nothing too formal, but we always start off by asking the client to describe their vision for their product and how they differentiate themselves from their competitors.” Ted began to make notes. “That sounds like a good first step. Let’s call it Visioning.” Step 1: Visioning “What’s the next step?” asked Ted. “After we establish the client’s goals, we go through an exercise where we ask the client to personify their product. For example, we’ll ask questions like, ‘If your product was a famous actor, who would it be?’ and ‘If your product was a rock star, who would it be?’ One of our favorite questions is a little goofy: ‘If your product was a cookie, what kind of cookie would it be?’ These questions force the client to think about the personality they want to come through in their logo.” “That sounds unique, Alex. Let’s call that step two and give it a name like Personification.” Step 2: Personification “What’s your next step in designing a logo?” “We then go back to the office and use a pencil and paper to freehand sketch”
― John Warrillow, Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You

“Agency could not afford to lose MNY Bank as a client. Last month, the bank amounted to $48,000 of the Stapleton Agency’s $120,000 in total billings. Alex, Sarah, and the other six employees of the Stapleton Agency needed MNY Bank. Traffic was heavy on the way across town and Alex was late for his second meeting of the day. Sandy Garmalo sat at the table sipping San Pellegrino. She ran the marketing department for a law firm and had been Alex’s client for five years. The”
― John Warrillow, Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You

“Next, name your scalable product or service. Naming your offering gives you ownership of it and helps you differentiate it from those of potential competitors.”
― John Warrillow, Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You

“there are two main things you need to focus on. First, as we saw in chapter 12, you need to find a way to consistently acquire customers for no more than a third of their lifetime value. Second, you need to reduce the number of customers who cancel (churn).”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“Therefore, your biggest competitor for your subscription business is not the rival service; it is your customer’s inertia in not using your service.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“The simplifier model promises two things: not only will you take to-do items off your customer’s list, you will also be the one reminding the customer that the task needs doing.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“WhichTestWon.com subscribers pay $25 per quarter or $75 per year for a subscription. When I interviewed Holland, I asked her why the cost of the subscription was so low. “That’s intentional,” Holland said. “We keep the price low to get as many paying customers as we can. It’s a gazillion times easier to convert a paying customer into an event attendee than it is to convince a nonpaying customer to come to an event.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“Holland employed a full-time telemarketer who called people who had ordered a $7 case study. First, the telemarketer would ensure that the customer had received the case study and then would follow up with an invitation to a live event on the same topic. “We ended up selling 900 tickets to a $1,500 conference just because we called someone who bought a $7 article.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“These four factors—the access generation, light-switch reliability, delicious data, and the long tail—have led some of the world’s most successful companies and promising start-ups to shift their business models to a focus on subscriptions.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“video attracted so much attention that it crashed Dollar Shave Club’s servers. Within 48 hours of the video’s release, the company received 12,000 orders.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“Like many subscription models, Amazon Prime is a Trojan horse that is expanding the list of products consumers are willing to buy from Amazon and giving the eggheads in Seattle a mountain of customer data to sift through.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“Data has become an asset, and nobody has more customer information than a subscription business. Traditional companies are launching entire subscription offerings just for the data they provide.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“Research firm Gartner estimates that “by 2015, 35% of Global 2000 companies with non-media digital products will generate incremental revenue of 5% to 10% through subscription-based services and revenue models.”12”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“At the time it was acquired, WhatsApp did not employ a single marketing executive.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“An amazing thing will happen when you start turning down other projects in favor of promoting your specialized logo design process—you’ll instantly become more referable”
― John Warrillow, Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You

“there was a time when you bought books in a bookstore. The bookstore paid rent and therefore had to stock only the best-selling books to ensure that sales revenue per square foot was high enough to cover its rent and staff.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“By early 2014, WhatsApp users were sharing more pictures than were posted on Facebook and the service had twice as many users as Twitter. WhatsApp was adding a million users a day when Facebook decided it had to buy them for $19 billion. WhatsApp is a classic network model subscription, in which the value of being a subscriber increases as more people subscribe.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry