What is your sequence? | Into The Mountain

What’s your sequence?

By Fiona Boyd |

Last week I had the pleasure of sitting down for an hour or so and having a really good, in-depth chat with another entrepreneur. The discussion was incredibly intense, mainly because we seemed to be totally on the same page and there was just so much to share.

If you’ve been to St Kilda in Melbourne, you would most likely have stumbled across the Dogs Bar on Acland Street – a famous institution founded by a food and wine visionary who has sadly passed, and a bit of a hangout for those of a creative ilk. This is where we had our ebullient and refreshing conversation.

My fellow chinwagger was the very fascinating, Steve Sammartino, who two years ago and after feeling compressed and suppressed by the corporate world, took his rather extraordinary marketing skills and went and started up a really neat venture, Rentoid.com. It’s essentially a classifieds business for the rental space and allows those with stuff to rent, and those needing stuff on a non-permanent basis to connect up and do a trade. It’s a great way for you to either earn, or save money, depending on which side of the transaction you’re sitting.

As Steve and I were talking we bemoaned the amount of blogs out there in the blogosphere written by people who had no real experience of what it was they were claiming to be guru’s or experts on, and that the best blogs we’d come across were written by those actually doing the thing they wrote about, or who had done it. Steve is a man ahead of his time in many ways and way back at the start-up of Rentoid he realized that whatever he was to learn with his venture, could be really useful knowledge for others involved in a start-up – hence his blog – startupblog.com.

What's your sequence?

One of the issues Steve has with Rentoid.com is that he’s achieved amazing and wonderful growth in the business but has a gut instinct that there’s much, much more to be had, and whilst Rentoid’s growing in a solid organic way, like all internet entrepreneurs he was waiting for the moment when things went ballistic. My mentor who is a genius in the sphere of economics, working out business models and sequences and is sought after around the world for his thoughts on convergence and innovation, Dr Terry Cutler, had long described the benefits of the right kind of internet business as offering ‘non-linear scaling off the asset base’. In other words, you can justify a hockey stick revenue and even profit projection in your business plan, because if you get your model and your sequence right your costs should not scale in line with your profits. This model is almost, but not quite, fixed cost – with revenue and profits growing exponentially.

The more we talked, the more it struck me that Steve’s issue in achieving those hockey stick projections, just had to do with reordering the sequence of events that happens to the customer when they’re on Rentoid. Which again reminded me of ideas drilled into my head over many lunches around the Cutler & Co. board table, with Dr Cutler marker in hand, detailing the specific steps and the rationale for their order for each sequence of events that was key in whatever internet venture we were working on that day.

Sequences are important in all aspects of our lives, but are really key in an internet business. When we started Arts Hub we thought very specifically about what exactly customers would do when they came to our product, what information we should give them and at what point should we try to convince them to buy, and then what was the shortest but most secure sequence we could use to get them to complete the membership sign-up. Believe me, we spent a lot of time on working out our sequences, and testing and refining them. One of the early faultlines we identified was in the first version of the site and that was when we saw visitors would back out at step three in a four step transaction process. There could have been any number of reasons for this, including that they had never intended to purchase and were just curious, but we decided to go with the theory that there were too many steps involved and each additional step over what the customer thought was necessary, was a turnoff for them. We reduced the number of steps by one and hey presto – we reduced the number of those not completing the transaction by 50%.

I remember we also experimented a bit with the sequence taking the customer to sign up for a membership and our experience was, and this is in direct contrast to those who use long sequences and vast amounts of text to seduce you into buying, that a quick, straight up sequence was best. In terms of Arts Hub, by the time the visitor came to our site they had already heard about us from a trusted offline source, and were ready to join – what we needed to do, was get out of the way of them signing up. So we reduced our marketing guff to virtually zero and let the customer get on with transacting (in 3 steps) and joining.

Another sequence we tested, and this was in the first months of our site when lots of experts and busybodies turned up to tell us, unsolicited, how to run our business. In the face of all this interference, we actually succumbed to one of the suggestions of a kindly ‘expert’ which was to drop our direct transaction process and instead offer a free trial, then seek to convert these trials after 4 weeks. I still can feel my stomach fall through the floor when I remember this time. We followed this guy’s sequence and our revenue dropped to zero for the four weeks, and then during the fifth week, we made some sales via conversions. The only problem is that they were about a fifth of what we had been signing before trying the trial system.

Needless to say, we reverted in week six to our original sequence, which was

1) arrive at our site – full content on front page but you can’t click through for full details unless you’re logged in

2) when you try click thru to full details, you get the explanation and the Join Now button

3) if you don’t try click through, the Join Now button is the most obvious icon on the page – right hand side column

4) click Join Now

5) goes to transaction page – give customer info and payment details

6) transaction approved

7) full site content appears

This sequence was only changed once after this time and that was in response to feedback from our annual Members Survey, that the transaction process was a little cold. So we had a picture of either myself with a caption saying ‘we bring you the latest in arts news’ or our Executive Producer, Rita Dimasi, with the caption ‘Arts Hub helps you get a job’ and of course the Join Now button.

Not all content sites are membership based, as Arts Hub was, so in the case of a classifieds site like Rentoid.com I’d be inclined to ask questions about two sets of sequences a) for the person who is listing and b) for the person who’s interested in buying/renting the listed item. Both should have a sequence that is directly relevant to where their activity sits within the website overall. It is also important to think about the transaction and who pays who – there are all sorts of models available but it’s worth making the point that your site should charge the customer who has the most to gain from your site. I would argue in the classifieds model, that you should charge the lister a fee and that the potential buyers/renters should be able to see the wares for free. If you charge the potential buyers they will feel like they’re being hit twice for the pleasure of transacting firstly by your site and second time by the guy they bought/rented the listed goodies off.

There’s obviously no hard and fast rule here – but in order to get your sequence to transaction absolutely optimized I would encourage you to think about the different ways in which your site is used and work your sequences to get the customer (whichever side of the trade) to where they ideally want to be, as quickly as possible.

I also think it’s important to keep your guff to a minimum. If your sequence is rock solid, and makes sense, you don’t need much by way of explanation. And if someone is not transacting today, they may be a looker, it doesn’t mean their visit is wasted, if your customer experience and sequence to what they want is smoothe, they will remember you when they need to rent/buy or list an item. Every visit that doesn’t end in a transaction should be considered a research visit and an opportunity to show how smoothely business is done on your site.

On another note, David and I have been out and about recently and have enjoyed meeting some of our blog readers, so we know that many of you are internet people and many others run offline businesses. I would therefore like to provoke you to consider this question – what is the most important sequence in your business/site/blog’s operation and are the steps of the sequence in the optimum order to maximize your success and profits? Any stories you’d like to share, we’d love to showcase or case study you. Please get in touch via the comment section if you’re willing to share your story.

Image: Flickr vermininc

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