The narrative in the media is that OneTaste had “predatory” sales practices. Ellen Huet wrote in her June 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek article, “Many who’ve become involved in the upper echelons describe an organization that they found ran on predatory sales and pushed members to ignore their financial, emotional, and physical boundaries in ways that left them feeling traumatized.”
We are not trying to shy away from anything regarding sales. OneTaste sales were direct: we asked for a clear yes or no. If somebody wanted to buy a course, we were happy to enroll them. If they didn’t, we moved on. OneTaste did not have “predatory” sales practices. One indication of how the company dealt with money can be seen in its refund policies and practices. We had a generous refund policy, which resulted in over $6 million worth of refunds to customers, most of which were before they even took the course they signed up for. If you decided you no longer wanted to take a OneTaste course, you got your money back, often even outside the terms of our generous policy.
(For more information on refunds, see “Part 4: Onetaste: The Truth About Refunds”).
OneTaste regularly conducted customer satisfaction surveys. Below shows an internal company presentation showing customer survey results over a 3-year period. Customer satisfaction scored above 70%, and more tellingly, customer willingness to share OM with others averaged 73%. This was based on the “Net Promoter Score” or NPS, a best-practice metric used by America’s most admired companies like Apple. Ask any marketer; an NPS score above 70 is astounding. Amazon’s score is 73, and Zoom’s score is 72. (Click the link to see other company scores.)
Screenshot from internal company report on customer satisfaction from 2016
We took professionalization and ethics seriously enough that we updated and re-published the code of ethics at least seven times from 2010 to 2018, and these ethics were a module taught to over 1,300 graduates from its six to ten-month long coaching program.
These standards of ethics were upheld by a company-funded Ethics Committee, and a third-party Reconciliation Council was available to help resolve any disputes between customers and OneTaste staff.
OneTaste’s sales practices were guided by what was standard and accepted for the sales industry. OneTaste regularly hired industry sales consultants to train its sales staff and in some cases manage operations of the sales team. Their names and bios are below. This represented the company's emphasis and investment in training a sales team that could grow the company in a powerful and sustainable way.
David Hutchison, a sales trainer and consultant for OneTaste, who is also an award-winning sales trainer, compares OneTaste's sales practices to those of the major Fortune 100 companies he trains. In response to a question about how he rated OneTaste’s sales:
“Same. I would say across the board, OneTaste sales were like Cisco Systems, Oracle, Apple, and Google”
David Hutchison Video Interview
Over the years, OneTaste used the following sales trainers:
MAI VU— 2010
Mai Vu is a successful personal and group coach who trained our sales team on two occasions circa 2010.
MARJEAN HOLDEN — 2014
Marjean Holden is a leadership, corporate trainer and actress. She held 2 sales trainings for us circa 2014.
DAVID HUTCHINSON, CYNTHIA FREEMAN, TOM MCCARTHY — 2016
The Fire Up Team — are master trainers and coaches especially in the art of making presentations and sales. They worked with our students and sales team at 4 different courses between 2016–2018.
DR ROBERT DEE MCDONALD — 2016
Dr Robert is the founder of The Telos Healing Center and author of Tools of the Spirit and The New Technology of Achievement. He taught at three intensive courses and trained our sales team on two or three occasions in the year 2015–2018.
MAXIM KIZBAZ — 2017
Maxim Kizbaz is a global sales director/trainer and motivational speaker. He was OneTaste Sales Director in 2017 for much of the year. He conducted numerous trainings for our team during that time. He has done sales trainings for companies like European Wax Center and Massage Envy.
JASON DREES — 2018
Jason Drees is the founder and CEO of Jason Drees Coaching and author of Do The Impossible. He is a successful business and achievement coach and trained our sales team in 2018.
OneTaste was like any other sales organization that hired people to train the sales staff. There were daily sales meetings, and Help Desk software was used to track customer inquiries. Eventually, OneTaste grew from a company that could remember all its customers to one that was in multiple cities in the US and abroad and needed to adopt common technologies like Eventbrite for workshop registration and Salesforce for tracking customer communication.
The media portrays OneTaste as a company that sold extravagantly priced courses. Internal OneTaste sales analysis, surveying all customer accounts across its Salesforce customer management system in 2016, shows that on average 50% of customers who take the “Intro to OM” course for $199 do not take another course. Of the 50% who do sign up for another course, over half of them spend less than $1,000. Put another way, 84% of OneTaste customers spent less than $1,000 with OneTaste.
Table showing the breakdown of the 50% of Intro customers who go on to spend more money at OneTaste (2012–2016)
