Refining the Process: Tripling Leads, Quadrupling Repeat Clients

Business Strategist

Operations Manager

Sales-Driven Marketing

Microsoft Excel

Mural

Zapier

Challenge:

Nationally recognized stylist Rachel Vallozzi has worked with commercial clients like Mattel, GlaxoSmithKline, Gatorade, Keurig, Chewy, and Nationwide, so she's well-versed in high-pressure work for exacting clients. Her other client base -- high profile and high net-worth private clients -- was growing more slowly than she hoped, despite their wild enthusiasm for her work. The referrals and conversions that came so easily for Vallozzi on the commercial side just weren't happening on the private side, despite their wild enthusiasm for her work. When they did come, the high-touch nurturing and education pulled down the return on billable rates.

Approach:

We took a full panoramic view of her services and what went on in the background to deliver them. We looked at the deltas between client-speak and professional styling terminology. I learned that Rachel was roughly modeling her 1:1 services on her commercial services: high-touch and lots of heavy lifting behind the scenes.

This had a few implications:

Clients started out unsure what to ask for, making more skittish clients u-turn out of the funnel even if they were a great fit for services

Rachel and her team spent substantial time educating prospective clients about styling in general and directing them to appropriate services

Poor-fit clients made it too far down the sales funnel before self-selecting out, taking up team resources and time

Rachel and her team spent significant effort controlling scope and expectations throughout the service delivery process

All nurturing work was done by hand

After analyzing the various components of her services, we bundled service sets into discreet offers and attached clear price tags to them. We also took a look at what was essential to and special about Rachel's ethos: body positivity, 21st-century gender literacy, queer culture advocacy, tremendous versatility, personal warmth, and vast experience. We identified a sweet spot in her positioning, and designed messaging and offerings to fit. Very slight tweaks to the website's SEO translated into a lot more sales.