Episode 6: How to Nail Your Membership Change Project

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EPISODE DESCRIPTION & RESOURCES:

Episode Description

Have you been thinking about making a change to your membership, but you’re afraid of the potential blowback?

In this episode, Natalie takes you behind the scenes of:

What’s required to successfully navigate a membership change project
The 3 specific phases to focus on (and why most membership owners only focus on one)
The missing ingredient that has nothing to do with strategy… and everything to do with your perspective.

Links and Resources:

🔷 Thinking of making significant changes to your membership and want to make sure you nail it? Explore Consulting: themissingink.co/consulting

🌱 Irresistible Offer - a new mini-VIP Day for Membership Owners: themissingink.co/irresistible

Contact Natalie: themissingink.co/connect

See how else you can work with Natalie: themissingink.co/services

Mentioned in this episode:

Nathan Barry on Convertkit’s name change in 2020 and his 2023 end of year review

Connect on Social Media:

Instagram: instagram.com/natalietaylor.co

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Facebook: facebook.com/natalietaylor.co

PREFER TO READ? HERE’S THE TRANSCRIPT:

Have you been thinking about making a change to your membership, but you’re afraid of the potential blowback?

Maybe you want to change up the way you deliver key parts of the membership, remove things that aren’t working, create new pathways for people to move through, explore new topics that excite you… but you’re worried that people are going to be upset with you.

Or, maybe you want to bring new things into the membership that will make it more timely, more relevant, stand out amongst the competition, more practical for what’s happening in your customer’s lives right now, but you’re worried about making a mess of the whole thing and that’s giving you pause.

You’re concerned that your current members won’t like the change, and they’ll get angry and leave. You’re worried that maybe you’re about to break something that’s been working pretty well for you so far, and then you’ll be stuck with a failed membership that nobody wants anymore.

I know — that sounded quite dramatic, didn’t it? But that’s how our minds talk to us. Our brains don’t like change and they’ll throw up every defense imaginable to get us to stick with the status quo, even when it doesn’t serve us.

If you are on the cusp of making changes to your membership, or even just considering it, you are going to love today’s episode.

It’s inspired by the work I’ve been doing behind the scenes with my clients, both inside my Mini-VIP Day for memberships and with my longer-term consulting clients, people with thousands of active paying customers inside their memberships, who want to evolve their offering so it aligns with the direction of their business and the future of their work.

I’ve been doing a ton of work with them behind the scenes: from how they sell it to how they position it, how they deliver it and how they get their existing members onboard with the change… I’ve been there with them through this process each step of the way and I want to share some insights from this work with you.

We’re going to be talking about how to make the changes in your membership that feel necessary, maybe even overdue — the changes that will make it easier for you to grow your membership, make it more fun for you and your team to deliver, and more straightforward for your members to stay engaged and get great results.

On the surface, that sounds like a really fun thing. Change is amazing! But the reality is often way more murky. With all change comes resistance, particularly when you have a business that is in motion and has established ways of doing things, and that’s where I want to start today.

We’ll explore why change is so hard, and how does that specifically show up when we’re working on improving our membership, because we aren’t just making changes for new potential customers — our decisions are going to impact our current members as well, so how do we do it with respect?

Then, I’ll walk you through the 3 key phases of your membership change project — because it is a project — and what’s most important for you to successfully navigate each stage and roll out your membership updates with as few hitches as possible.

Finally, I’m going to talk to you about the missing ingredients for a successful change project, and this really speaks to who you need to be as a leader, a CEO, a founder to drive this project successfully. We’re going to talk about courage and the mindset you need to adopt to not run yourself ragged with anxiety through this change.

My goal is for you to end this episode with the belief that you can change your membership for the better, you’re not going to break it, and if you approach it with intention, it might just become the one of the best things you do for yourself, for your business, and for your customers too.

Why we crave change (and why it’s so scary)

If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to listen to Episode 3 of the podcast: How to evolve your membership without breaking it.

In that episode I speak about what to do and how to reflect when you’re getting the sense that maybe things need to change in your membership. Today, we’re going into the nitty-gritty of that change, how to make it happen and all the stuff that might get in the way.

So why do we crave change? Here are some examples shared with me by my clients, people who have memberships that serve anywhere from fifty members to well over five thousand members.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of all the reasons why you might be considering a change:

You want to make it easier to deliver
You’ve been doing certain things last-minute and you’re not enjoying it
You’re showing up because you promised you’d do something, not because you want to do it
Your team is spending too much time on one specific part of the membership
There’s so much inside the membership that people feel overwhelmed
You want to incorporate new ways of thinking, new processes, new ideas into the membership — whether that’s new curriculum, new pathways, or both
You feel locked into a certain way of selling and delivering the membership, and it doesn’t match how you want to run your business anymore
You’re talking about topics that don’t excite you
You want members to get better results and take more action
You want to change the type of customer you’re attracting

These are all valid reasons for change.

Interestingly, the reasons aren’t all that different when your membership gets bigger. It’s just that as you grow, the friction gets stronger, because now there are all these opposing forces coming from our systems, team, software, processes and the sheer volume of customers that push back on any change we might want to make.

I say this because if you’re thinking about making some changes in your membership but then you say well, things are pretty small and manageable right now, but I’m sure I’ll be able to change things when the membership gets bigger and we have more momentum, the opposite is true. Putting guardrails in place for yourself now so that delivery works for you and building that muscle of leading change now is going to make it hurt much less when you’re bigger.

And if you are listening to this and have a big membership, don’t worry — I work with clients like you all the time and it’s never too late to change, no matter what stories your mind might be telling you.

If you’ve listened to the previous episodes of the podcast, then you know I feel strongly that memberships are supposed to evolve, and this should be our expectation and something we prepare for as a membership-driven business owner.

The problem is that the reality of change is complicated and this is why it’s scary. You don’t want to break something that’s working well. You don’t want to alienate your existing members in favor of new ones, and you don’t want to reduce the perceived value of your membership by taking things away.

I know you have these fears because everyone I’ve spoken to with a membership has these fears too. It’s not just you. And it’s a really good thing that you feel this way because it means you’re taking this change seriously, and it means you want to treat your customers with respect and care.

This is one of the unique things about having a membership, because every change you make doesn’t just affect how you get new members — it impacts your current members as well. This is the nature of having a continuity offer, or as I often say, with recurring revenue comes recurring responsibility. And the bigger your membership is, the bigger the impact these changes will have, and the bigger the potential is for pushback.

I was talking with a client the other day who said the hardest thing about change isn’t talking to potential members and getting them excited, it’s getting her existing members on board with the change because they’re used to the old version, and I couldn’t agree more. It can feel like the stakes are really high when you’re in this position.

Our brains start doing this really interesting thing where they tell us that any kind of change we make is going to upset people and let them down, therefore we can’t make any changes if we want people to be happy with us. It’s really interesting how people-pleasing can show up for us when we start considering these kinds of changes.

So we stay frozen, stuck in idea-mode, and we entertain the fantasy of change but never actually do it, because we’re afraid to get it wrong or god forbid, make somebody mad at us. Worse yet, we can wait too long to make the change, and then one day something snaps, we’re fed up, so we make all the changes in a hurry, give ourselves, our team and our customers whiplash, and make a mess of the whole thing or just shut it down entirely. I’ve seen that happen as well.

I have an alternative to present to you which is that you can carry that same level of respect and care forward with you to make your membership incredible, to elevate it above what anybody else in your market is doing and to blow your customers’ minds with what is available to them.

So how do we do it?

All the changes you make to your membership must be connected by ONE common thread — and that is your vision for the space and the experience you want to create for your members.

This is how you get everything working in sync, and make sure your changes are of service to your customers. It’s how to make changes you’re proud of, knowing that you’re about to create an exceptional experience for members, new and old. This is what will give you the courage to see these changes through.

And, this is also how you’re going to get your current members on board with the change.

Making changes to your membership without alienating your existing members

In the previous episode of the podcast I spoke about the tendency we have to focus on the deliverables of our membership, versus the outcomes and results people get.

It’s easy for us to sell a new video each month, some coaching calls, a Facebook group. That’s tangible. But the real reason people buy and the reason why they stay is because of their experience and the results they’re able to create.

It’s your role as the founder of the company, the leader of this membership, to keep your focus on the results of your membership. What are you here to do? What are your members here to do? What is a win for them? What’s getting in the way?

Your answers to these questions should be the compass for the future changes you make to your membership. And this is what I’m talking about when I say that you need a common thread that unifies all of your decisions. The common thread is the result you want your members to achieve.

When you can stay focused on this, you can sleep at night knowing that the changes you make to your membership are in service of your members, their experience, and the value they get from being a customer. It’s not about how much stuff you give them each month. It might even be that the volume of “stuff” available to them is contributing to their overwhelm.

So, you have to decide that you are a person who creates exceptional experiences for your customers, and you’re not willing to compromise that.

Use that as your motivator to make your membership better. And, use this as your guide when you communicate upcoming changes to members. This is all in service of supporting them. When you’re considering a change, simply ask yourself: does this respect my members? If not, what would?

This is also a great way to shift your mind away from the negativity and fear that comes with change.

Instead of worrying about what could go wrong, have you given yourself time to consider:

How will this create new possibilities for your members?
In what ways does this change make your membership more valuable to members?
What kinds of incredible things will this change free you up to focus on, create, build?

Ask your team these questions too. If you’re going to be making changes, your team doesn’t just need to be bought-in on the changes: they need to be involved in the decision making and feel heard as well.

That brings me to a related point, which is to understand that it takes time for people to accept change. You’ve likely been pondering these changes for months, maybe even years. You’ve had time to warm up to the idea, mull things over. But then we need to get our team involved, get them onboard, and help them become active contributors to the change.

Then, once we have internal buy-in, we need to share these changes with our existing members, too. They’re going to need time to understand the changes, and that’s why I recommend rolling out your changes to your existing members at least a few weeks before you do a live launch and bring in new customers.

You don’t want new customers walking into an avalanche of posts in your community from your existing members, asking about the changes. Let your existing members see the changes first, get their feedback, give them time to adjust, and love up on them a little. Then, we can focus on presenting our upgraded membership to the world and welcome in some new people.

The final point I’ll add here, if you’re still worried about how these changes will impact your die-hard, long-term customers, is that these are the people who have a lot of appreciation for you. They’ve stuck around with you for the long-term. They want you to succeed. They’re excited to be on the journey with you!

I know that you want to give them an incredible experience in return, but just try that reframe on for a moment. They want you to succeed and they’re excited for the journey. If you follow the other principles I just laid out, which is to make changes with their results in mind, communicate this, and to give people time and space to adjust, then you’ll be in good shape.

This doesn’t have to be a disaster. People don’t have to be frustrated. They might be excited and delighted instead.

Changing the way you run your membership is a project — treat it as such!

So we’ve spent some time exploring the fear you might have around change and how to treat your existing members well, through that change. If it wasn’t becoming clear already: this really is a project.

Making significant changes to your membership takes time to conceptualize, to set up, and then to roll out — internally to your current members, and then externally, to new potential members.

So, give yourself the time. Depending on the scope of the changes we’re talking about, this could be a project that you and your team work on for anywhere from 90 days to 6 months, if you want to do it right.

When I support my clients through changes like this, I work with them for at least 90 days. If you’re interested in working with me to create the next version of your membership, I’ll put information in the show notes below - I would love to talk to you and hear about what you’re working on.

Whether we work together or not, I want you think of your membership change project as having 3 main phases:

How you sell it
How you deliver it
What you say about it

Most of my clients, before they come to me, are only thinking about the delivery phase — what are we going to offer to people and what’s changing? Again, we get stuck on deliverables!

But on the other side of that is how you sell your membership (that is: what does your sales model look like, how do you promote, when do you promote, and how do your other offers fit in) and what you say about your membership (which relates to the message, the copy, the positioning and the promise of your membership).

It’s really important for you to think in terms of these phases because any change you make to your membership has to be financially feasible. The pricing needs to make sense, it needs to align with how you want to launch and sell this offer, and how often you want to do it.

Earlier this year I was working with a client who wanted to introduce a micro-certification into her membership. The way that certification rolled out, how people got certified, and when it became available was something we looked at closely to make sure it didn’t conflict with how she wanted to sell the membership.

We looked closely at her curriculum and how she would deliver it so that she could promote her membership on a quarterly schedule, which is what she wanted to move towards, and then we modified the topics of her certification curriculum so that it could easily tie into a promotion topic that her audience would be interested in. It’s so important to think about this because sometimes we can get really excited about a change, and while we know it’s great, it might not be as exciting to our members and what’s front of mind for them.

Every change you make to your membership should be marketable.

If it isn’t then we either need to go back to the drawing board to figure out what our customers need and what will move them to action, or if we need to do some tweaking to how we position the change so it’s appealing to members, both new and old.

This is probably a separate podcast episode, so let me know if this topic is something you want to hear more on, but for now, think about your membership change project as having 3 phases.

Again, to recap, there’s how you deliver it, how you sell it, and what you say about it. How you deliver it relates to what you’re going to offer to members and how you want them to move through and engage with your membership. This is a question of curriculum, of member journey, of how you onboard, and then all the tech and automations and processes required to make that work.

Then there’s how you sell it. This is where you make sure that the changes you make actually align with how you want to sell the membership. How do you want to promote, how often, and how do your other offers relate?

Finally, there’s what you say about it. This is how you position your membership, the promises that you make, and how you connect the thread for your potential buyers between what they want and what your membership will give them.

Don’t just get stuck on delivery. Your membership change project will require you to think about your sales model and your positioning. If you don’t give these phases the time they need, things will feel messy, it’s likely that your changes won’t land the way you want them to, and you might just start thinking about rolling those changes back and wishing you hadn’t done it in the first place.

The forgotten ingredients: courage, conviction and the willingness to listen

Above all, and I think this is a good place to wrap things up, beyond all the strategy, there’s one thing you really need to embark on this process and that is courage.

Courage to stand behind your vision for this membership, and how you want it to grow and evolve. The courage to stop doing things you don’t want to do anymore. The courage to change, to be different, to do something that hasn’t been done before. You’re going need it on this project, and it will be worth it.

I know this is a big project. It might feel so big that you’re questioning whether you can pull it off. I know you’re worried about everything that could go wrong, and you’re trying to anticipate all of those issues and hurdles now so that things go smoothly.

Well, allow me to be the bearer of bad news, which is really good news in disguise: things will go wrong.

Really. Even with the best plan and the best support and the smartest strategy, there’s always something. Let’s just accept that now and decide that you’re going to be OK, especially if you put the ideas I shared in today’s episode into practice.

Change is never a smooth process. You will have to resolve some issues as part of the changes you’re making. And you’re going to be OK. Are you really telling me that you aren’t a smart person who can figure things out? If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be where you are today. You’ve solved more problems than you can count, more than you can remember. And you’ve survived.

Whenever I think about the bumpy process of change, I always think of Nathan Barry, who is the founder of ConvertKit, which I believe is now just becoming Kit. A few years ago, I think it was in 2020, ConvertKit was in the middle of a bit of a controversy regarding another name change. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the decision and the rollout of changing their name to Seva, which in Sanskrit, means to be of service. Nathan wrote a whole series of blogs about this, and I’ll link them in the show notes below, but the short version of a long story is that they had to rollback this change. People felt that the term was not culturally appropriate. I can’t imagine how difficult it must have felt to receive the volume of feedback, of critical feedback, that he and his company received. And yet — he listened. He was transparent. He made his decision to rollback the change based on wanting to do the right thing. And he survived.

Earlier this year he shared in a blog that in 2023, ConvertKit’s revenue had grown by over $7.5 Million dollars. He didn’t have to shut down his company and go live in a hut on the fringes of society, which is what most of us think will happen when we make a mistake. I’m not sharing this story with you because I think your change project will go badly, but because I think Nathan and ConvertKit are such a great example of things going about as bad as we could expect, but when you listen and respond from a place of respect — which is really everything we’re talking about today — then you will be OK. You can navigate hard things, you can make mistakes, you can course correct and get back on track.

I’m not saying this because I think your change project is going to go badly.

More than likely, 98% of your project will go smoothly. But you’re still going to need courage for the 2% that doesn’t.

I’m completely confident that your change project will be one of the best things you do for your business, especially if you look at it closely through the lens of customer experience, your sales model, and your positioning — everything we touched on today.

This is the work I do with my clients and if you would like my support, information is in the show notes about how we can work together.

Even if you’re not ready to make big changes, I hope today’s episode has given you the courage to make just one. It’s OK to start small. For example, maybe it’s time for you to stop answering any and all questions on your coaching calls, and instead, focus on specific topics that you’re excited about and feel like an expert in. Maybe you start by building some processes around that, and practice communicating that with your members. Small wins like this can stack up to something big.

And if you’re ready to go big, you know how to find me. All the information is in the show notes below.

Thank you for being here with me and I’ll see you in the next episode.