Episode 74: How to Consult Subscription Companies with Anthony Napolitano, Founding Partner at Triple C Consulting
In this week’s episode of Subscriptions Scaled, we speak with Anthony Napolitano, Founding Partner at Triple C Consulting.
In the episode, we learn everything from Anthony’s background to how Triple C Consulting works.
Keep reading to learn more about the episode and how Anthony has transitioned from developing subscription services to consulting businesses on how to grow their own.
Triple C Consulting
Triple C Consulting helps businesses create a compelling value proposition for their customers, company, and channel partners. One of the areas Triple C Consulting specializes in is direct-to-consumer subscriptions.
Anthony and his team spend a lot of time understanding their customers and the pain points they feel in the industry, which is one of the keys to their success.
Triple C offers a framework to help customers find the intersection of value for customers, the company, and the channel. The goal is to find the intersection of all three to launch and scale a subscription business successfully.
To be successful, you have to start with your customer.
Anthony Napolitano
Before founding Triple C Consulting, Anthony worked at HP for over 20 years. However, he had never worked in the core business before, and almost his entire career involved building and scaling new businesses.
One of the businesses Anthony built and scaled was a subscription business. He joined the team early on in the consumer supplies space for HP, which essentially involved selling ink cartridges to consumers.
But in 2015, the team wanted to take a fresh look at serving customers, so they started a subscription service. It involved selling blocks of pages monthly that customers bought as a subscription. There was an algorithm developed to monitor ink levels based on personal usage so customers would receive the paper before they ran out.
Anthony was in this business for six years. After that business, there was another startup that didn’t really make it to market.
Last summer, Anthony decided to leave HP. After taking some time off, he started getting into consulting. It happened organically - somebody called Anthony to see if he could help them out, and the idea for the business grew from there.
Anthony started Triple C Consulting. Anthony’s working full-time at the company and loving it, focusing only on subscriptions.
Learning about subscriptions
At HP, Anthony had the opportunity to develop new skills. When it came to learning about subscriptions, Anthony and his team had to learn organically on the job. They relied on external perspectives quite a bit.
Anthony read books and as much content on the subject as possible. Anthony sought out people who were in similar positions and tried to network and learn from them. This would help Anthony avoid the common mistakes that many people make when entering the industry.
Today, that’s where Anthony spends a lot of time with his clients - guiding them through the common pitfalls of running a subscription business. He also teaches them things he wishes he knew at the beginning of his career in subscriptions.
Collecting data
When it comes to collecting data, Anthony starts with qualitative research with focus groups. The goal is to find out what they really like about your industry, market, and product.
Then it would be best if you focused on what’s missing. What are the challenges that customers face?
You start getting an idea and can begin refining the research in time. Then you can begin introducing quantitative kinds of analysis. You can start talking about pricing and what people would be willing to pay.
Think about how many customers you think you can attract. Are they coming from an existing customer base? Or are they new?
For Anthony, piloting is necessary. A pilot can be as small as an AB test to assess particular dynamics during a funnel to see if you can get more people to sign up.
The beauty of subscription is that it’s heavily software-based and in the cloud, so you have the flexibility and agility to modify and test things out. On the other hand, it can take one to three years to test a product and hope it pays off.
With subscriptions, you can be agile and test in a low-cost way to get a feel for the service. Once you’ve done enough testing, you can consider the investment and whether it’s worth launching the service.
Triple C Consulting’s customers
Triple C Consulting is getting the most engagement from companies which already have a subscription. Most of these subscription services were probably growing during Covid as many businesses turned to eCommerce.
Now that things are normalizing again and people can go into retail and other channels again, many subscription services are seeing stagnation.
This is where Anthony comes in to take people through the Triple C methodology.
They discuss questions like:
Do we have a good handle on our customer value prop?
How should we do piloting?
What is our messaging?
What insights do we have into why people are signing up?
Why are people canceling?
Why aren’t people signing up?
Do we have a pricing problem?
Do we need to change the offering altogether?
Many customers of Triple C can work with these customer-focused acquisition and retention strategies.
Then there are other customers who face some kind of company dynamics. These might be product companies that want to start something new.
Anthony spent 20 years of his career working on this, so he has a point of view on what works best.
He may have to discuss the following types of questions with these companies:
How can you build a financial case for the subscription service?
How should we be thinking about a subscriber versus a transaction customer?
How do we sell the subscription?
Each client is different, of course. But the sweet spot for Anthony would be a company that has other lines of business and requires help taken to the next level. They may have hit a wall and need structure and advice.
With plenty of experience developing successful subscription services in his previous role, it seems that Anthony is the right person to consult for businesses hoping to grow an excellent subscription business.
--
Ready to get started with Rebar?
Head to rebartechnology.com or email info@rebartechnology.com to schedule a call today.
