Customer retention is one of the most expensive problems in an expert business – and a lot of business owners try to tackle it from the wrong end.
I want to tell you about something that happened to me recently, because I think it’s going to sound very familiar.
I’ve been inside a training program with a highly successful business owner – high seven figures, maybe low eight – who teaches her version of signature frameworks. It’s a multi-day training, ongoing, and there is no shortage of valuable content. AI tools, authority-building exercises, frameworks for packaging your expertise. Genuinely good stuff.
But here’s what I noticed: every time I showed up, I felt a little more lost.
Not because the training wasn’t good. It was great. But because I had completely lost sight of where I was going. I didn’t know how this session connected to the last one. I didn’t know where I was on the path. And I didn’t know how any of it was getting me closer to my goal.
I was experiencing what I call “random acts of training”.
What Are “Random Acts of Training”?
Random acts of training happen when valuable content exists – but there is no visible customer journey connecting it.
Each session stands alone. Each training delivers value in isolation. But there is no game board. No map. No way for the customer to look at the full picture and say, “I am here. This is where I am going. This is what I need to do next.”
And here is the thing: this is not a content problem. The content can be outstanding. The problem is structural.
Want a Scalable Business? It Starts with Your Signature Pathway
When there is no visible pathway, your customers are not just confused – they are quietly losing confidence. Not in you, necessarily. In themselves. They start to think, “I must be missing something. I must need more. Maybe the next offer will be the thing that finally connects it all.”
That is not a customer retention strategy. That is a revolving door.
The Real Customer Retention Problem
Here is what I want you to hear, because this is important: customer retention does not start at the renewal conversation. It starts the moment a customer enters your world.
If your customer cannot see the path they are on from day one, you are already working against yourself.
Think about it from their perspective. Adults need to see the big picture. They need to know where they are, what is coming next, and how each step is getting them closer to the result they paid for. This builds trust. It builds transparency. And it builds the kind of confidence that keeps people engaged, committed, and ascending in your world.
When that map is missing, the most common outcomes are:
Turnover. Customers leave not because they are unhappy with you, but because they are not getting closer to their goal – and they cannot see why. They blame themselves, then eventually they blame the program, and then they leave.
Endless questions. As an expert, nothing is more frustrating than answering the same question twelve times. But customers ask the same questions repeatedly when they do not have a clear path forward. It is not laziness. It is a lack of orientation.
Stalled ascension. This is the one that costs you the most. When customers do not feel a sense of progress, they do not upgrade. They do not refer others. They do not stay. Customer retention and ascension are directly tied to how clearly your customers can track their own progress.
A Simple Strategy for Winning Customer Engagement & Long-Term Retention
The Game Board Your Customers Need
I kept using the phrase “game board” in my head as I sat in this training, and I want to explain what I mean by that.
If you hand someone a pair of dice and tell them they are playing a game, they will stand there and stare at you. But if you put a game board in front of them, they immediately understand the rules. They can see where they start, what the spaces mean, and where the finish line is. They can play.
Your Signature Pathway is that game board.
When your customers can see the full journey – the steps, the milestones, the progress markers – they know how to move forward. They know where they are. They know what comes next. And most importantly, they believe they can get there. That belief is what drives customer retention more than any follow-up sequence or check-in call ever could.
Design the Journey Before You Build the Delivery
Here is the shift I want you to make: stop thinking about customer retention as something you manage after a customer joins your program. Start thinking about it as something you design before you build anything.
The question to ask is not, “How do I keep my customers engaged?” The question is, “Can my customers see their journey clearly enough to stay on it?”
That means starting with your ideal customer. One customer. One problem. One result they are searching for. That result becomes the destination. Your expertise becomes the path between where they are and where they want to go. Everything you teach, every training you deliver, every resource you create – it all lives on that path and serves that journey.
This is what I call the Signature Experience Map. It is not just an outline of your program. It is the customer’s journey, mapped and made visible, so that every step they take feels connected, purposeful, and leading somewhere.
When you design it this way, your customers do not lose the plot. Because you have given them the plot.
Whether You Build Top-Down or Bottom-Up – Start with the Customer
I want to address something I see often: the question of where to start when building your framework.
Some people start with the big picture and work down into the detail. Others – like the coach I mentioned – start with all of the detailed expertise they have and use that to reverse-engineer the overarching framework. Neither approach is wrong.
But both approaches fail if they do not stay anchored to the customer.
Your Signature Pathway is not a collection of everything you know. It is the most direct, effective route from your customer’s problem to their result. The genius you bring is in knowing which steps matter, in which order, and why – so your customers can move faster and with more confidence than they ever could alone.
That is why they hire you. Not for the volume of your content. For the clarity of your path.
When you stay focused on that, customer retention stops being a challenge you manage and starts being a natural outcome of the experience you have designed.
Ready to Map Your Customer Journey?
If this episode hit close to home – if you recognized yourself either as a customer who has lost the plot or as a business owner whose customers might be losing it – I would love to help you find it.
Take the free Scalable Expert Audit and find out exactly where your customer journey stands and what one shift could do for your customer retention and growth.
→https://thescalable.expert/scalable-expert-audit
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Our Host
Tara Bryan is on Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin
Website is: www.Taralbryan.com
Hey, it’s your host, Tara Bryan. And I am on a mission to help more business owners learn to infinitely scale their businesses by leveraging the power of online without sacrificing the customer experience or results.
I like to geek out on all things business strategy, marketing, interactive digital and user experience. This podcast is all about what is working, lessons learned and actionable tips to create and grow a thriving online business.
Join us each week as we dive into different strategies, tactics and tips you can apply immediately to your business.
Key Topics:
Customer Retention | Signature Pathway | Customer Journey Design
Highlights
- Random acts of training happen when valuable content exists but there is no visible customer journey connecting it.
- Customer retention does not start at the renewal conversation – it starts the moment a customer enters your world.
- When customers cannot see their progress, they do not ascend – and stalled ascension is the most expensive retention problem in an expert business.
[00:00:00]
Tara Bryan: Welcome to today’s episode of the podcast, I am thrilled that you’re here. Hey, I had this happen today and I had to jump on and record this right away because it was such a good reminder, and so it may be something that’s helpful for you as well.
So I was attending a training with one of the coaches that I have and she’s a very successful business owner — I would say she’s high seven figures, maybe low eight figures at this point — teaching her version of Signature Frameworks. And hers was slightly different but it was fascinating to me because I was listening to her and it’s a multi-day training that she’s doing. She started talking about signature frameworks and how to put them together and what to look at.
[00:01:00]
And I’ll tell you that one of the things that I struggle the most in her program is that I feel like I’m not exactly sure where I am on the path. You’ve heard me talk about the customer journey and how important it is to be really transparent about that signature pathway for your customers, so they know exactly where they are. They know how they’re getting from point A to point B. You’re showing them the steps for them to get there. It’s like when you’re driving across country, you don’t just jump in the car and go, even if somebody in your ear is saying, turn here, do this. You still wanna have the map. Adults like to see the big picture. They like to know what is happening. It builds trust, it builds transparency, and it builds confidence.
[00:02:00]
I’ve been in her experience for a while, and one of the biggest things is like, where am I? And she’s doing this training and she’s doing that training and she’s introducing this and she’s introducing that. The challenge is, I call it random acts of training. Because I show up and I’m like, this is super interesting and super helpful and I could apply this. But what happens is I have lost the big picture.
And so anyway, she’s teaching about how to think about your signature framework, how to create it, how to take your genius and really build the foundation that helps your customers go from where they are today to where they wanna go. All of that’s great. All of that is exactly on point for how I would describe what somebody needs in order to really have a strong foundation for their business.
[00:03:00]
What was interesting, however, is that she was teaching people how to reverse engineer the whole process. So she was starting with the detail and then helping people use AI to have AI create the bigger picture based on all the detail that they have. And I thought it was fascinating — not because it’s the wrong approach — but I thought it was fascinating because when she finally revealed that this is the way that she was doing it, I thought, huh, that is fascinating.
So she took her expertise and what she focused on — she calls them her authority codes — taking her intellectual property that she’s created around these different topics that she is an expert in, what she was saying was take all of those and then see what happens. See how the big picture starts to formulate. And then create a big picture around all of these things. So it’s really reverse engineering the process. If you’re a detailed person and you are in the weeds, this may help you get out of the weeds and see what you’re doing from a 10,000 foot view.
[00:04:00]
So it’s not necessarily the wrong activity. The challenge is that very easily you lose sight of the customer, right? Because really the whole thing is about the customer’s journey from point A to point B, and you’ve defined that you are the expert to help that customer go from point A to point B. So it’s really about the person that you’re helping and the journey that they’re taking to get to that result, regardless if you’re doing it for them or they’re doing it themselves.
And so I would argue that you start with a customer. You identify your ideal customer. You identify that ideal customer’s biggest problem and the result that they are searching for — what’s that transformation that they want? That becomes your signature pathway. You’re the bridge from that problem to that solution, and then everything inside of that is the progression or the pathway or the steps that you take them to go from that problem to that solution. That’s where your expertise comes into play.
[00:05:00]
So it’s really not about packaging all of the random things that you’ve done and hoping there’s an overarching theme to it. It’s really looking at it from that customer’s point of view and then connecting how you can best deliver that step to them so that they can keep moving forward.
So often I get one or two ways that people think of this. One is, oh, it’s so easy. I already know what my thing is. Most of the time you have an idea of kind of that through line, that pathway that you create for people. I mostly work with people who have established businesses, and so they have some sort of method to the madness of how they do things, so it’s a little bit easier for them to identify what that looks like.
[00:06:00]
But if you are in that place where you’re just like, I do all these things and some of them are connected, some of them aren’t, I don’t really know how I do what I do most of the time. You just pick a topic and go with it, or create an offer and run with it. And then you end up with lots of offers, lots of ideas, lots of ways you’re helping people, but not one cohesive pathway.
If this is something that you’re struggling with — if you are the weeds-first-then-big-picture kind of person — that may help you identify what it is that you’re doing and all the parts and pieces. Or if you’re like, I feel like I have the big picture, I have all the parts and pieces, I’m not sure the order — go back and look at your ideal avatar and put them on the path.
[00:07:00]
What’s the best way that they need to go through that so they can get through it easier and faster and better? That’s why they hire you — for your experience. So you’re kind of putting your little character on the path and looking at it from that perspective. That will help you simplify and get yourself out of the random acts of training, random acts of unconnected offers. And if none of that works, give me a shout because this is my superpower — this is what I do every single day for people, helping them take it out of their head and put it into a structure that really is simplified for themselves, for their business, for their team, and most importantly, for their customers.
[00:08:00]
Because here’s what happens — and I’m seeing it in her program — when I go to the training, I’m like, this training is great. This is super valuable. All the AI stuff she’s giving us is super valuable. There’s all sorts of value that’s happening. But at the end of the day it’s not connected. And so I keep saying, okay, this is great. And then I do that, and then I do this activity, and then I do this other activity and I’m like, all this is really great, but I don’t know how they’re all connecting. I’ve lost the plot.
[00:09:00]
So what happens with that traditionally is that then people don’t ascend. People don’t continue in your world because they’re like, this is all great and I’m taking up a lot of time doing all of these things, but I’m not getting closer to my goal. And while that’s great for initial ascension, what happens is it leaves that bad taste in people’s mouths, right? Because the piece that’s missing is the game board, the map, the pathway. These are the things that I’ve been talking about on the podcast for a while now.
[00:10:00]
And so if I can see myself in the journey and I can see how this training relates to where I am on the journey, and I stay focused on my personalized journey, then I’m going to get to my finish line, and then I’m gonna ascend. Then I am going to keep working with this woman and she is gonna help me go to the moon. But if she doesn’t capture where I am at the time that I am there, and help scooch me forward on my path, then I am not gonna continue working with her because she’s lost the plot for me.
That is the difference between somebody who comes into a program and someone who stays.
[00:11:00]
So it’s a really fine line, but from your perspective as a business owner, from your perspective as an architect of how you create this experience for your customers — the more you can dial in the customer journey, the better off you’re gonna be. Because that’s when you can really become scalable. When everybody can drop in wherever they are at the right place and go on their path to get to the result.
But if it’s just noise, noise, noise, noise, noise — it’s like marketing. If you’re just marketing by showing up and making noise, people will see you, people will attend, but they’re not actually gonna take the action that you want them to take. They’re not gonna get those results. They’re not gonna get to the goal or the transformation that you’ve promised.
[00:12:00]
And you’ll see it in a couple different ways. One, you’ll have turnover. People will leave because they’re like, this is great, but it’s a lot of time and I’m still not doing anything. You’re gonna have another group of people who want your time and attention and they’re gonna continuously be asking you the same questions and they’re not gonna continue forward on their path.
As an expert, this is very maddening when you’ve answered the same questions 12 times and people aren’t taking action. They’re not taking action, not because they don’t want to, but because they don’t see the clear path forward. If you give them the game board and the pair of dice, they know how to play the game. But if you’re not giving them those things, then they’re either waiting for it or they’re gonna say, I don’t get it.
[00:13:00]
So when you do this, it’s so important to get that 10,000 foot view correct. So whether you come from the bottom up or you go from the top down, it’s really recognizing that it’s probably actually somewhere in the middle. But it’s really looking and starting with who your ideal customer is and then building their journey. That is where it starts, and that’s where, if you can stay focused on the journey that person has, that is when you really start to transform your business.
[00:14:00]
If you love this episode, give me a shout. I would love to hear what your thoughts are on this, and whether or not you’ve been in any of these experiences — either the random acts of training where you feel like you’re getting lots and lots of stuff but nothing that’s leading you directly down a path, or a really great experience where you feel completely supported and you’re able to go from point A to point B very quickly and with purpose and with all of the support that you needed. Either one, I would love to hear about it. All right, until next time.
