3 Most Common Q's on Over 100 Consulting Calls

This week has been a big one. For starters, I wrote this a bit earlier in the week because we welcomed this bundle of joy Monday morning.

I might take next week off on the newsie, but will be back soon, don’t you worry.

In the last 3 years, I did over 100 consulting calls around CX and Retention across CPG, SaaS, Tech, and more.

Three common questions and themes came up in over 90% of the calls. This week, I’ll tackle all three of those and give you the sauce I generally charge for. 😏

Let’s dive in. 

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1. Why your customers only ever buy your hero product

This one always comes up, especially when thinking about welcome and post-purchase email and SMS flows. 

Brands love to push upsells in the welcome series but then ask, “Why are 90% of my customers just buying the hero product and never coming back?”

Here’s the honest answer: you’re playing a short-term game and expecting long-term revenue.

Let’s say your hero product is a wallet. You run ads for the wallet. Your homepage is all about the wallet. You upsell wallet accessories in the cart. Then in post-purchase, you hit them with a pen or a ring and wonder why no one’s biting.

They didn’t sign up for a brand that sells pens or rings. They signed up for a wallet.

Bic is a fascinating anomaly. They crush it at pens, lighters, and razors—but you’re probably not them.

So, instead of immediately trying to cross-sell, take a beat. Use email and SMS to reframe what your brand actually stands for.

Maybe it’s:

We built the perfect wallet for the everyday guy—something durable, stylish, and simple.

And once we nailed that, we asked thousands of customers what else they needed for their everyday carry. That led us to design the pen. Then, the backpack. You get the idea.

If you want people to buy from a second category, tell a better story about why that category exists. Otherwise, you're just pitching products they never asked for.

2. You're forcing the second purchase instead of fanning the flame

Far too often, brands decide what they want the customer’s second purchase to be based on what they think is best. Sometimes, it’s tied to an LTV model they built in a spreadsheet. Sometimes, it’s the product they’re most excited about. Sometimes, it’s just what they think looks good together.

And every time, they’re shocked when customers don’t buy it.

Here’s the core idea most people miss: it’s far harder to create new behaviors than it is to encourage existing ones.

When someone’s already on the path—bought product A, came back, and bought product B—you don’t always need to redirect them. Sometimes, it’s more effective to just push a little harder in the direction they’re already going.

You don’t need to sell them on a new category. You need to make it easier for them to stay in the one they’ve already committed to.

This is where cohort analysis from tools like Triple Whale and Peel is incredibly helpful. You can see very clearly what real customer behavior looks like across your cohorts. 

You can dig into basket analysis and see that people who buy a Miracle Balm aren’t moving into skincare—they’re buying more balms. Same product, different shade. 

You might want them to graduate into eye cream or a full skincare system. But your customer didn’t sign up for that journey. They just liked the balm.

That doesn’t mean you can’t expand their view of the brand. That’s where storytelling and intentional merchandising come in. But it’s important to separate long-term brand building from short-term purchase logic.

Sometimes, the easiest way to increase the second purchase rate is to stop trying to be clever and start being useful.

3. You’d rather guess than ask

There’s a weird reluctance across teams—especially once a brand hits some scale—to just talk to customers.

I don’t mean surveys or NPS or a slick Typeform flow. I mean actually talking to customers. Real humans. On the phone or over email. For 15–20 minutes. Ask them things. Listen. That’s it.

Most of the time, when I ask a team if they’ve done this recently, the answer is some version of “not really.” Maybe they read support tickets or scanned a few reviews. But they haven’t actually sat down and had a conversation.

That’s where the good stuff lives. The weird little moment that almost made someone return their order. The expectation that wasn’t met. The thing they loved but never told anyone. The words they use to describe how your product makes them feel. You don’t get that from a dashboard.

At Jones, we thought we knew exactly who our customer was. Middle-aged. Loyal Bobbi Brown fan. Into the minimal, “no-makeup makeup” aesthetic. And that was mostly true.

But once we started actually talking to customers, we realized there were entire segments we were missing. The new mom who just wanted something clean and fast. The young professional with three minutes to get ready in the morning. The 22-year-old who found us on TikTok and didn’t even know who Bobbi was.

None of that would’ve shown up in cohort reports or survey data. But those conversations changed how we wrote copy, how we structured flows, and even how we talked about the brand internally.

You don’t need 100 interviews. Just do ten. Two with a first-time buyer. Two with someone who churned. Two with a customer who’s placed five orders. Two who emailed support. Two who subscribed but never bought.

You’ll start hearing things you didn’t expect. And once you do, everything else starts working a little better.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you'd like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

Cheers, 

Eli 💛

P.S. Looking for inspo on your next email/sms campaign?

I know you will love this.