Finding the wall

Whenever you try to take a prospect or a customer or a student or an employee through a process, you run the risk of losing them. Sometimes just a few out of a hundred drop out along the way. You lose a few at every step. Sometimes, though, it's a much bigger number.

Too often, we forget to to measure to discover the wall, the one step in the process that nails a huge portion of the population. Maybe, if we left that step out, we'd get a little bit less, but we'd get it from a whole bunch more people.

I was registering an Apple product while the software was installing. I made it to step five, and they wanted to know not just the kind of product, but the "Marketing part number."

I bailed.

The benefits of being registered (dubious at best) were overwhelmed by the hassle of finding out this number. Bye.

Now the marketing gurus at Apple get no data instead of most of the data. My bet is that this is a wall, a place where a huge percentage of people abandon the process.

The same thing happens when people learn trigonometry or apply to your firm for a job or decide whether or not to read about your new products.