Beta Service Follow-Up
The primary purpose of delivering a beta service is to get real client feedback that you can plow back into your marketing, design, delivery, and pricing.
Depending on the nature of the service, this could be done as the final agenda item of your delivery meeting, or during a dedicated beta service follow-up meeting post-delivery.
Here are the base questions that you should try to get answered:
- Find out if your marketing copy could be improved (e.g., “Was the service what you expected? Were there any surprises?”)
- Find out if the service could be improved (e.g., “What could I do to make the service more valuable?”)
- Find out what the most valuable aspect of the service was (e.g., “If we could have only done one of these things, which would it be?”)
- Find out if your planned price is high/low/perfect (e.g., “I’d like to get your feedback on my planned pricing. Would this service have been worth $1,000 to you?”)
- Find out if they will give you a testimonial. If yes, say “Excellent, thank you! I’ll send over a few questions that should make it super easy.” Send the TBA testimonial questions to them (you might need to tweak the language a bit since the beta service was free).
NOTE: Throughout this meeting, you want to be capturing as many direct quotes as possible for your sales page.
NOTE: When you ask about pricing (question 4), don’t lead with “How much would you have paid for this?” Instead, give the client an actual number to react to. Be sure to skew on the high side of what you think it might have been worth to them.
Up-Sells
It is not appropriate to initiate a sales conversation during this meeting but you should be prepared to respond to a purchase request from the buyer. For example, if the output of your beta service is a series of complex recommendations for the client to implement on their own, the client may say something like, “How much would it be for you to just do all this stuff for us?”
Example Template
Following is a beta service follow-up template that one of my students sent out. It’s not perfect but it’s good enough to help get you started:
Hi [HIS/HER NAME],
Thank you so much for participating in my [SERVICE NAME] beta test. I enjoyed learning about you and your business and appreciated your openness and perspective.
As a follow-up to the beta test, I would like to get your feedback on my marketing page for the service. Please review the page and then answer the questions below. Here’s the link:
[LINK TO SALES PAGE FOR SERVICE]
Questions:
- What parts of the page really resonated with you and made you nod your head and think ‘Yes! [HE/SHE] understands!’
- What parts of the page lost you and didn’t connect?
- What did you like about our work together?
- What would you change about our work together?
- Were you at all hesitant about working with me? If so, why? If not, why not?
- What ultimately made you decide to work with me?
- What has been the biggest benefit (or the results that you have achieved)?
- If [SERVICE NAME] was a paid service, would you have paid $[TARGET PRICE] for it?
- What would you say to a friend or colleague who was thinking of utilizing this service, but wasn’t sure?
- How would you like your name and comments displayed for marketing purposes?
Thank you!
[YOUR NAME]