Turning a Ghosted Client Into a $30,000+ Sale

There comes a point in business where working harder stops being the answer. The real breakthrough happens when your systems, communication, and expertise become strong enough to do the heavy lifting for you. In this episode, we discuss a recent client experience that reinforced why trusting your expertise, refining your process, and leading client conversations with conviction creates better outcomes for everyone involved. Are you ready to get out of your own way?

Highlights: 

02:20 - What happened when we outreached out to a client we hadn't heard from in years.

04:28 - Why you need to stop asking and start advising.

07:05 - Why “I’m all set” is often the beginning of the conversation, not the end.

10:00 - How getting out of your own way turns dead ends into major opportunities. 

13:30  - Why refining your process is the key to replacing constant hustle with sustainable growth.

16:13 - How confidence in your expertise is what separates average salespeople from top earners.

20:45 - The powerful combination of time-sensitive needs and a well-built process.

22:30 - Why you should never wait to be asked to give your recommendations.

24:19 - The rewarding moment when great systems make exceptional service feel effortless.

27:00 - If you’re not getting consistent compliments on your process, it’s time to reevaluate. 

Resources + Links
Apply for Luxury Clothier Collective Mastermind  HERE
More resources for custom clothiers HERE
Watch on Youtube

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Appointment Only in IG: @appointmentonlypod

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

His sale ended up being in the 30s. He did tell us afterwards, like I was kind of hoping to keep this in the 20s, but whatever. That's target demographic behavior where they've got that flexibility. Yeah. They're making comma decisions like that. Or in this case, if we can appropriately communicate the value, it's worth an additional $10,000. Like that. This is appointment only, the podcast for custom clothiers and entrepreneurs building profitable high-end businesses. If you want control, profitability, and freedom from what feels like an endless hustle, this is for you. We're Kenny and Danny, twin brothers from day one and business partners for more than 15 years. We're sharing insights from our own experiences as luxury custom clothiers who built our own business from nothing. The highs, the lows, and what we've learned along the way that will help you build a high-end business you actually enjoy running and isn't running you. Clothier Coaching's official podcast. Appointment only starts now. So I guess you'd call this a between appointments. Yeah. You know, just kicking back. A kickback. Consider this your first official kickback with appointment only. Uh that's we know you love to we know you love to kick back. We know you love to let loose. We had a roommate in uh college once. Yeah, what was it that he thought was curious to do? Cut loose. To cut loose. He said we didn't really know the guy, but his his family owned the house we lived in, and so he also lived there. And we were kind of getting to know him. And one of the first things he says was, Do you like to cut loose? I would say I liked to cut loose. I liked to cut loose. I still like to cut loose. I think it looks a little different though than when we used to cut loose when we were in college. Yeah, but you know what? I am cutting loose. It's still coming out of a glass bottle. I'll tell you that much. I'm cutting loose right now. An episode or so back, we were chatting through what does it look like when you work with somebody and you haven't worked with that person in the lead up to where your business currently exists. Like, how do you go about that? How do you get them prepared for the price points that exist today versus however many years ago? We literally just wrapped one of those meetings. We just did. And uh it's not it's it's not an I told you so, but we did tell you so a couple episodes ago or whenever that was. But just a little backstory on this guy. We worked with this guy for the first and only time, uh, very much a customer at that point, was uh we I just looked it up. It was 2019, was it 19 or 18? Um, it was pre-pandemic, we know that either 2019 or 2018. And at the time, it felt like I mean, our business was two or three business iterations ago when we worked with him. It was in like two of our locations ago. Everything's changed since then. But at the time, I remember it felt like a good order simply because he bought a couple things. He bought a couple suits. It wasn't just a one-suit, wedding suit, and see later. I think he bought three suits and none of them were our intro suits. Okay. Well, so that would have at the time felt like a really good client. Yeah, we like where we could have told you it wasn't a whale, but we thought it was a pretty damn big fish. Felt really good at the time. And in the years that have gone by, there have been many attempts from our side. Uh, most recently uh in 2020, and the most number of which happened in 2020. We were all over that in 2020, reaching out to anyone we'd ever worked with. Hey, you know, now's a good time to get stuff ordered because we don't have anything. We're turning things out pretty quickly. Our manufacturers doing really fast work, you know, just trying to drum anything up. Well, you know, spoil alert, he never bit, he didn't come back, we never saw him. And a couple a couple weeks ago, we get an email. Didn't no, no, no, no. A couple of weeks ago, we were on a walk and we were just talking shop. And we said, you know, we've probably have not really reached out to this guy in quite a lot. That's right. We did send him an email. And it was it was more, it was actually kind of just to be a little not funny, but it was just to be, it was to entertain ourselves. Yeah. Where what if he responds to this email? And listen, that maybe that's a good lesson for you. What do you have to lose? The worst he could say is no. Well, uh, the worst he could say is is ghost, yeah, which is what had been happening for years, and not just from him, from so many people we've reached out to over the years. But we we we've changed our as we have grown more uh confident and unapologetic over the years. We've changed our reach reach outs from asking if they need more to telling them you have needs because it's been fill in the blank years. And sometimes, depending on how we're doing it, we can we'll go in, we'll look at their order history, and we can say, I mean, we can, it's pretty easy to look through. There's only usually a few things. We say it looks like they have a blue suit and they did a sport coat. But when it but when it's seven or eight years later, it doesn't matter what they did. We are not factoring that in moving forward. Like, you know what's a good analogy that I thought of the other day? It's kind of like an interior designer that gets hired to redo someone's home. And in their first meeting, the per the client is saying, Well, I picked up this couch that I really like when I was in college and it's really comfortable. And I also have this lamp that's really special to me. You know, the interior designer is gonna say, Okay, we're not gonna build your whole strategy for the interior of your home around these your college futons. Old random things that you like but are old, don't fit in the design aesthetic, are not current, and that I have had nothing to do with. It's kind of like meaningless information. Okay, good to know. You know, maybe we can throw it in the corner in the basement, but we're not gonna make these decisions today with that information. The same is true of when we're selling somebody suits. I don't care that you have a blue suit at home that you bought for a wedding. I don't even know from who, I don't even know how many years ago. What we're doing today doesn't have any bearing from that. That's not gonna drive the decisions we're making today. Yeah, that's a good analogy. Thank you. What were we even saying? You well, we were saying we change when we reach out to someone, we when we cold reach out and and we're saying, hey, it's you know, it's been a few years. Instead of saying, do you have any needs? We say, we know you have some needs that have come up, probably this, this, and that. Here are some of our upcoming availabilities. Let us know if something works. Thanks so much. It's a little bit more of a presumption that they have need. Well, I mean, we're not it's not even it, it's an it's a it's a recog recognition that we know that needs exist. We got so fed up with people saying, I'm all set for now. No, you're not. You know what? You know how I know? Because I'm not even all set. Yeah, me neither. There are there are a number of things that I know I need that I just haven't bought yet. And I have 50 suits hanging up in that closet over there that I reach for every single day. And I I have needs. So I know you're not all set because I can look at your order and tell you what you have, and I can think of 15 things that you need that you don't have. So nobody's all set. Even our very best client isn't all set. Even the guy who just left, having done what he did after however many years it had been, which we'll tell you in a minute, he's not all set either yet. He's a hell of a lot closer than he was an hour ago. It's it's the same like fed up. I've had it with this response from people that got us to take the way that we upsell or the way that we make recommendations seriously enough to change how we operated that we then put into practice for a year and then did the six-figure upsells. It's the same. I'm so, I'm so tired of the upsells thing specifically was I'm so tired of people coming in who wear clothes for work and have this go-to everything suit sensibility.

unknown 8:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:29

So I got one thing once. I've never, I'm all good. Yeah. And now I don't have to think about it again, and now I'm good. Yes, until you have an issue, until something happens that then becomes my problem because you're not all set and it's my fault. Or you're not even really prepared enough and it's my fault. So it's the same kind of, you know, when when when reaching out to people after it's been a period of time, like we we just got so sick of hearing, I'm all set for now. Because objectively speaking, no, you're not. You're not all set. I know what you do for work, I know how frequently you wear clothes, I know what you've purchased, you're not all set. Well, and even if you are not, even if you're not wearing this stuff to work, you have stuff that comes up. You have you have needs, you have opportunities to wear things. And if you have one thing and you're wearing it on repeat, you're not all set. It's that simple. So we just we change the language. So we're not asking, yeah. In which we reach out to people. And it's it's not us asking and us feeling, you know, less than in our approach and in our and in our emails. But anyway, it's it's a different phrasing of the e of the reach out. It we're not asking. If you already know that we already know the answer. What's the thing? We're telling you, we're we're telling you that you do need things. Isn't is are any of these times gonna work for you to actually come in and meet these needs? So it's a different type of email. And we reached out to this guy who we haven't reached out to for six years, probably. Yeah, we we were regularly reaching out to him up until 2020, and we did continue to reach out to him through 2020. And then after that, we just said, okay, message received. Yeah, got it, got it. Yeah, I can read between the lines and uh read between the lines, I can read between the uh unanswered uh emails, I can read between the ghostings, got it, understood. But anyway, he re he emails us back almost immediately and is like, I was just thinking about you guys. I need I need new clothes. So how about this this time and this day? So this morning we come up uh to the office here and we were just discussing amongst ourselves what are your hopes for today? What do you hope he does? And we both said the same number. Um and it is a it's it was a loft based on what he spent last time, it would have been a lofty number to hit. But it's the number that when somebody comes in Is there any reason we can't just say the number? No, it's fine. Okay. We both wanted to make $20,000 from the sale today, which based on what he said he needs. I mean, somebody comes in and they need work stuff and they're relatively open and they're gonna do a couple suits, a few jacket pant combos, it's very, very easy to hit that that number. And so that was our goal for today. We both wanted to hit that number because we know that's at least where his needs are. Yeah, and when and when you're doing just sort of a generic refresh and you're, you know, and we're doing, we're doing it, it's gonna, it's gonna be there. It's gonna be over 20. So uh that was what we wanted. It's a far cry from the last time he bought anything being close to that number. I mean, not even close. So we knew that you know, there was obviously gonna be a bit of a disparity between then and now. And again, we have those doubts in our minds of how much focus should we spend and should we place on the differences between then and now and the fact that it's just a completely different experience compared to when we would have seen him on the third floor of that warehouse building that we were located in back the last time we saw him.

unknown 12:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

So it's one of those things where we have to just get out of our own way. We just have to let the meeting unfold. We just have to let the conversations happen. And he came in. It's obviously a different scenario, it's obviously a different location. He was obviously curious about it. So we were talking, we talked, we, you know, we talked about what's new since pre-pandemic, literally everything. And but his life had changed too. I mean, he had he had lost weight, he had gotten in shape, he had he had moved up in his career. Like I said, he's not making the same amount of money as he was seven or eight years ago. Duh. He's making more. And he wants, he wants to upgrade his closet. We talked about, you know, what what's different from our business? We talked about we're catering, you know, we've been catering our business more towards people like you and away from being solely focused on on wedding sales. And that's changed a lot for the better. It made COVID tough. It made it a challenge when we were in the wedding boom shortly after COVID, where it's like, we know where we want our focus to be, but we can't really focus on it yet. But here we are in our new spot and it with our new sensibility, and it's a great experience. We then sat down. We took him through the sales process that we take our target demo, the new and improvable people through. And we've mentioned this in previous episodes. We have that sales process that's spelled out from start to finish. That is a just the MVP of our business in Million Dollar Manual. We walk through it from from beginning to end. The sales process that we're taking this guy through today and that we're taking people through now, it does look a little bit different. It's not a lot different, but there are some very specific tweaks that we've made since we provided you in Million Dollar Manual with the sales process that we've been using, our formula to get our business from a low six figures to over a million dollar mark. That sales process that we have in Million Dollar Manual is the baseline for our new sales process, but there are some tweaks to it. And that's what we're talking about, what we go through in the luxury clothier collective, which is our mastermind group for custom clothiers who are looking to run their businesses more similarly to how we are, where we're working with fewer people every year, but our average sales are going up. And it's really more of a sustainable lifestyle business rather than a hustle. And when the LCC members or when we are working with people who we know are at a certain caliber of consumer, where they're not coming in to buy their wedding outfit from us. They're coming in to meet other needs. They're coming in to do work clothes, they're coming in because they know it's been X number of years and they haven't bought anything in that time. That's when we know there's this different sort of tweaked sales process that this person is going to go through because it's gonna work better for them. Also, that's the other thing is when we're not taking them through the exact thing that we used to do, it is working out better for them and it's working out better for us. Well, that's what I found is so cool about running the business and running a business is the things that we teach you in Million Dollar Manual specifically, but also mastering the wedding suit game, six-figure upsells, and all of those individual trainings that we have provided for you in The Clothier Kingdom. Those are the building blocks and the foundation for the business we run now. And we still use so many of those things, so many of those scripts, so many of those processes, but they've been adapted as our business has changed. As we've been working with different caliber of raw materials, we're still using those foundational building blocks, but it's just been tweaked slightly over the years. So, anywho, everyone's like, What was the sale? So we took him through the thing. He he wanted to do it. He was he was excited about, you know, him, like many other people, are wearing a lot more jacket pant combos than full suits. He still needed a couple suits, landed on those, uh, did a few jackets. And well, before we get that, he this is where it's important to plant seeds and to be straightforward. He sat down and he was already talking about how he doesn't wear suits anymore. And he dresses like, I mean, we just had this meeting. He's pointing to what we're wearing. I dress like this now, where it's pant jacket. I like that. It's more fits my vibe. Everything's more casual. I don't wear a tie, blah, blah, blah. So, what a lot of clothiers would have said would have said been, okay, got it. Let's look at sport coats. That's not what we did. What we did was, okay, got it understood. Sport coat stuff is actually more fun for you and for us. So let's start with the suits you need. For people in your shoes, generally, you know, if we were to do, you know, another couple suits that are more current that you're feeling excited about wearing, I think that would be a good way to check suits off your list and then we can transition and talk about sport codes. He said, Okay. But a lot of clothiers I know would have just skipped right past it because he said he didn't need it, even though I know he does, and he knows he does, they would have just skipped past it and allowed him to make the decision of where they were going to start the appointment. And that's where your clothing expertise sets you apart from anyone else in your market who's gonna see a person like this. Your clothing expertise and your ability to confidently communicate, I understand your needs better than you do, in not those words, but your ability to communicate that you, hey, I've got your back, I've got you, I hear what you're saying, but here are some things to think about. That's where you become so valuable to them. Because, like we just said, any other, any other custom clothing you're getting this guy in in the doors would have said, Oh, sweet, and gone straight to sport coats. They would not have bothered with suits because he said he didn't wear them. What he really meant is, I don't wear the suits that I have, but I'm rebuilding my closet, so I should get a couple. And so we took him through that. We took him through the sport coats he wanted. He ended up doing doing a like six pants, all from the same book. And he's like, I gotta go at this time. So we're kind of kicking things into high gear. He's letting us take the lead on all pretty much all of the styling and and you just target demographic behavior. I'm here to do this thing. I trust you to do it more than I trust myself. I'm I'm interested in it, but I'm not as good as it at it as you are. So I'll just spend the money. And his sale ended up being in the 30s. He did tell us afterwards, like I was kind of hoping to keep this in the 20s, but whatever. But that's target demographic behavior where they've got that flexibility. Yeah. They're making comma decisions like that. Or in this case, if we can appropriately communicate the value, it's worth an additional $10,000 like that. Because he understands it, he can see it, he knows he'll he'll use it. We've been able to communicate how efficient, how effortless, how intentional the things that we're doing are going to be. And he he said at the end of the meeting, too, before he had to go, he said, I'm really excited about this stuff. But what I think I'm the most excited about is knowing that I can wear things and knowing that I will feel confident in them. If that doesn't speak volumes to the impact that we can have in our business, some people look at us and they and they think, oh, you know, you sell luxury items, it's not meaningful in any way. It's superficial. It's superficial. Yeah. But we have heard that from people so many different times where there is an element of confidence that he will feel now in his life, in his work. He will perform better at work and he knows it because of what we did here. And it wasn't cheap, but it's valuable. And that's what he came in and bought. He bought confidence, he bought effortlessness, he bought the confidence in knowing that he doesn't have to think about these things ever again because he knows it's all gonna work. And he's gonna have clothes to show for it eventually. Did we mention the entire meeting was less than an hour? That's the other thing. Yeah. That's the other thing that we that we walk through in the new iteration of the sales process is how do we do this with someone who's got to go to the airport and has an hour and then ends up spending, you know, $30 some thousand dollars getting an entirely new wardrobe in that time. Like that's what we've figured out is is also valuable to these people is their time. Their time is more valuable than their money. In my perfect world, I would have loved an additional 10 or 15. That would have been great. We were definitely when he's like, Oh, by the way, we didn't know this ahead of time. By the way, I have a flight to catch and I need to be the be to the airport in 25 minutes. Real looking at each other thinking, oh, but that's when when you're operating off of scripts and things are feeling uh things feel like they flow and you have systems and you have processes and you have rhythms, you do have the ability to check in and be like, okay, here's here's what we're gonna do. Here's how we're gonna do it. Well, and if and if I didn't know my flight path throughout the meeting, if I didn't know what all my different processes were that we go through in every single meeting in the same order, every single Time, which we teach you all about in million dollar manual. If I didn't have that just completely locked and loaded in my brain, I would have not been able to have executed that. We would have had to have had a lot fewer conversations. By the time we heard about his timeline, we hadn't chosen spore coats, we hadn't chosen pants. So a lot of you probably would have let him leave having bought two suits. Yeah. And even that would have been a solid, a solid morning for you. But what we what we did is we didn't just start rushing through everything. We started then, because we had already done our sales process, he's who's already aware of cost implications. We just entered into now we are even more explicit about recommendations. And when we're talking about sport coats, we're not giving you entire books to look at. We're saying, what do you think about this? Boom, boom, boom. Oh, I really like these. Not a crazy about this. What about this? What about this? What about this? Boom. Hey, looks like we have four jackets. Do you want to do three or you want to do four? Very quick, very streamlined, very efficient. And he wanted that because he's working with us for a reason. He wants our feedback. And he was saying throughout the meeting, if if you're you're ever feeling like I should look at something, let me know. And we told him, you know, kind of laughed about it, but we said, that's all we're showing you. Right. That's what we're doing. We're not giving you stuff that we don't think you want to see. Like there's a reason why you we don't have a hundred fabrics on the table. Like we are only showing you what we think you should see. And he's like, Oh, okay, good. So he can make these confident decisions. It was quite an hourly rate that we made. Feels good. What I'll say about the sale is it wasn't a record breaker for us, uh, which is great. I mean, we're that's like we said, we were uns we are unsurprised by the the dollar amount. And we know generally if someone comes in and they're they're open-minded, like they're gonna be within a range, and we're, you know, definitely we're pleasantly surprised by it. But it was making the transition from that person as a as a client and a customer from back then to bringing that person into where we're operating operating now. That's what really feels the most valuable to us as business owners. That's what feels good. And it was one of those days, and we have them, we have them from time to time, where this was an awesome sale. And that just feels good. But I remember having a day uh a couple of weeks ago where it was about a third of that. And it was just one of those meetings that was straightforward and went well, and the guy was easy and it was 45 minutes later, and he left. And it was just, we looked at each other and said, Yeah, that just that just feels good. That's just how it goes. When you're running this caliber of a business and you're able to just meet somebody's needs in an effortless way, and it's it's one of those things where when you really feel like you're good at what you do, sometimes it just feels good to have a morning like that. We always say to anybody with a set of ears who happens to be in this business a lot of custom clothiers do have a set of ears. So we end up saying it a lot. In fact, I I would most. Uh yeah. Most custom clothiers have got a set of ears on them. And we all we often will say, This business will keep you humble, but it will also reward you for a job well done. And we experience both every single week. We experience the humbling moments, the client frustrations, the person trying to get out of something that they committed to, the somebody who breaks a button and thinks it's the end of the world because they don't have enough, by the way. Yeah, they don't have enough stuff. We deal with all of that, and then we also it get to experience sometimes what it looks like when we're getting rewarded for having good processes and having good systems and being able to and what it looks like to be rewarded for effectively getting somebody who we haven't seen in forever into the current day and age of our business. And that feels really good. It's a mixed bag, just like every business. A lot of times it's a mixed bag daily time. I mean, we've also got one of those right now. Yeah. Where we're dealing with someone who spent a tenth of what the guy we were just talking about. They're there, they spent a tenth. And I was on the phone with his wife. I do mean I do mean they, because we worked with him, but now his wife's involved. She's calling, they're needing order breakdowns. They're wondering if if they can put a hold on stuff. We've all we've already explained that isn't really how it works when you do custom orders. I mean, I remember once buying a couch that was like, I think it was four, four or five thousand dollars on West Elm. It was a custom couch that I ordered. And then we moved into our house, and uh I was like, this is that's I don't want that couch anymore. Well, you can't cancel it. Yeah, it's custom. You or you also shouldn't build your entire interior design plan around that couch that you spent $4,000 at once. No, exactly. Exactly. But this job will keep you humble and it will also reward you for a job well done. And if you're dealing with either or both simultaneously, that's pretty normal. And we've said before, when we first started getting really into our process, we used to tell people if you haven't been, if you haven't been complimented on your process specifically before, or if you don't get compliments on your specific process specifically frequently, you probably don't have a great process. If you're listening to this and you're like, man, I can't wait to feel rewarded for a job well done, there are probably some things that you're actually in control of to get you to the point where you do have that experience sometimes. And you have that experience with relative frequency. I'm not promising that you're gonna feel rewarded more often than you're feeling like you're kept humble, but it should be something that when you're running a caliber of business and you're and you're you're operating off of processes and systems and scripts and things seem to feel rhythmic, you should feel like you're getting rewarded from time to time. And if all you ever feel is that humility, that humble pie, and you're you're like I've had enough. I'm done with the humble pie. I'm done eating. Uh, if if you feel like all you've been doing is just force feeding humble pie, just gobbling it up for years, and you're thinking, I wonder if I'm doing anything wrong, you are. I don't know specifically what it is yet, but you know, there's a few things it could be off the top of my head. But if that's been your experience and there's been no, there's there's felt like there's been no reward for a job well done, and all it is is humility and and uh humble pie. There is at least one thing wrong with the way that you're doing things because it should be both. Well, I wish it wasn't ever the humility thing. Yeah, I wish it was a one-way street. It's just the job we're in. It's the job we're in. And that's the case with anybody who runs a job where it's focused on working with people. That's what you're gonna get. It doesn't have anything to do with our business specifically. When you work with people, you're gonna be rewarded for a job well done, and you're also gonna be kept humble along the way as well. Thanks for listening. Thanks for coming uh and hanging out with us in between our appointments. We gotta get our kickback. We gotta get back to work. We got we're done kicking back. Consider yourself kicked out of this appointment. Your appointment's over. We'll see you for your next one. If you're a custom clothier and you want to be more profitable, less stressed, and work with more of your target demographic client who spends more and buys more often, we share our exact strategies on how to do that in our resources available now on clothiercoaching.com, including Million Dollar Manual, our playbook for turning your sixth-figure business into a custom clothing business that makes more than a million dollars every year. For higher touch, more direct access to us, we have a small mentorship group called Luxury Clothier Collective, where we're actively helping clothiers around the country become their markets leader. If you're serious about finally building that profitable luxury custom clothing business you've always wanted, this is your next move. Join the wait list and we'll let you know when enrollment opens again. Thanks for listening.