Trent:                  Everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Bright Ideas Podcast. As always, I am your host Trent Dyrsmid and I’m here to help you discover what is working in the world of eCommerce and online business in general by shining a light on the tools, the tactics, and the strategies in use by today’s most successful entrepreneurs. And I’m going to do exactly that in this episode with my guest Ravi, who is becoming a quick good buddy of mine. But the first, we’ve got a sponsor message today. So today’s episode is brought to you by Cloudways. Is your website’s slow, has your online business outgrown your current hosting provider? Yeah, if it’s a yes to either of these questions, it’s time to move over to Cloudways. A managed cloud hosting provider that is built for online businesses from a hassle free launch to smooth server operations Cloudways is your partner in scaling your eCommerce business to greater success. Go to [inaudible] dot com and use the promo code right ideas to sign up. And that’s all one word, bright ideas, no spaces to sign up for a new Cloudways account. And you’ll get a free $25 hosting credit. All right, Ravi, we’ve paid the bills now time to introduce you. Welcome to the show buddy.

Ravi:                    I appreciate you. Thank you for having me here.

Trent:                  So Ravi and I, we’re were, became acquainted pretty recently and I flew down to San Diego to see who this guy was and do a day of masterminding because we both figured out that we were ultra systems nerds. We like to SOP the hell out of everything, delegate everything and try and make it so that we can be successful while kicking back and not having to be a slave to our businesses. And over the last week or so, I’ve got a chance to spend quite a bit of time with him. I was down there, his mastermind in San Diego and it was a pretty fantastic event. So Ravi, you got, it’s really a pleasure to have you on the show. Let’s start it off in your own words. Who are you and what do you do?

Ravi:                    Thank you for having me. Trent. Yeah, it’s kind of crazy how life works like that right now. You and I talk all the time and now we have to read, try to say focus on the task at hand because we started masterminding all the time. But yeah, thank you for having me on here, everyone that’s listening. Thank you guys for your time. I promise you right now this will be one of the most valuable podcasts you listen to and that’s a money back guarantee. just kidding. I’m not going to give you money, but still I think he probably audio for you.

Trent:                  Oh, you better hope I asked you good questions.

Ravi:                    I know, right? what’s going on everyone? My name is Ravi Abuvala, law school dropout. Now I run multiple seven figure companies. One of my companies is on a run rate, to do eight figures next year. Pretty exciting upon that. my two main companies, I’m in an online advertising agency. we run paid traffic for real estate agents in North America. We have about 183 different clients right now. we bring them qualified buyers and seller leads. And then I also run essentially what’s becoming and developing into like a biz dev or a business accelerator, a company where we work with entrepreneurs that are trying to scale to the six figure a month, AKA seven figure Mark in their business and they’re kind of stuck and flat-towing out. So we use systems, processes, and actually fully trained virtual assistants that we train for our clients, in the Philippines in order to help them achieve that goal.

Trent:                  All right. So for my Amazon sellers in the audience who are using the wholesale model, you want to pay attention to the details of this interview because that is pretty much like running a marketing agency. We’re pretty much in the B to B business space. Our job is to reach out to brands, lots of them send them a compelling message to get them to book a call with us so that we can talk about forming a relationship and ultimately selling their goods. So take good notes because we’re gonna dive into that, under the auspices of how Ravi, sorry, made his agency his success. So when did you start your agency?

Ravi:                    You know, I was the one asking that the other day and I was trying to do the math. So I created my LC in February of 2018. but I didn’t get my first client until March. and then I didn’t make more than a thousand dollars a month, until August of 2018. So I usually tell people that I started my businesses and audience because I really was losing between refunds and chargebacks cause I was doing it so wrong in the beginning. I was really losing money the first six months of my business. and so, but it wasn’t until I kind of crack the code on systems and processes and just consistently generation. Some of the stuff I’m sure we’ll cover today and some of this stuff we’re going to be working together with you try it on. I think that once I figured out the importance of that and then how to have somebody else do it every single day so that when I didn’t want to show up to work, it was still getting done. That was what we started hitting the, you know, for the three figure four figure months, five figure months and now six figure months for for our company.

Trent:                  Wait a minute, did you mean to say you started to use this slight edge?

Ravi:                    The slight edge that then turns out over there right now all the time. And I was talking to my COO rise last night. I was like, you know, I’ve met, reached out to Jeff Olson multiple times, but yeah, this slight edge, they caught on stuff that essentially small daily things. It’s, it’s actually the gentleman who’s mentee was the gentleman who wrote the compound effect, which people don’t realize that he came from Jeff Olson. But the idea is you’re like small daily things that are easy to do but also easy not to do over time. It will compound. And it was was that was exact same thing for us. And so the point, just like Trent was saying a second ago about sponsors is like you build it and just slowly over time that you’ve been building and building it up and then eventually it’s like you’re not doing outreach anymore. People are knocking on door to come to you.

Trent:                  Yup. That’s exactly what’s happened with sponsors for the podcast. And you know, when we were doing all that outreach, it never worked.

Ravi:                    Yeah, exactly. Well it never worked in your head. It never worked. There was number of direct ROI, but there’s no way you can’t like, you know, maybe someone saw they didn’t reach out to you and then all of a sudden they’re going through Apple or.

Trent:                  Well I know why it didn’t work. And it’s the same reason that you’re about to tell me. When you say, when I asked you this question, what were you doing wrong in those first six months of your agency? I know why our podcast outreach to work, same reason, you’re probably, your agency wasn’t being very successful and that reason was?

Ravi:                    I remember what I wasn’t doing enough outreach wouldn’t.

Trent:                  There’s the one

Ravi:                    New England, it was a sporadic. It was like, you know what? I felt like it and it wasn’t consistent and also there was no data behind it. So I was like, Oh, should I try this messaging today, this messaging tomorrow, whatever it is. Like, it wasn’t, I can never tell which one was working with, wasn’t working just purely through data and just it’s a combination of data and then just shoving enough people into a funnel that eventually they’re going to come out the other side. So where you can provide them value. So, yeah, for us, you know, I had no positioning. I had no authority. Right. So for me it was just like how many people, Billy Jean says all the time, he, I was like, your Mount of money you’re making every single month is directly correlated with how many offers you make on a daily basis work with you.

Ravi:                    And so when I started learning that and I combined it with a slight edge, I was like, we need to be making this. I didn’t know. So now we do, I mean in our advertising agency, not including ads fan, we do, you know, five to 8,000 piece of outreach a day to real estate agents in North America and now in UK and Australia will, we’re trying to get them to work with us. So it’s like, you know, I was doing maybe five to eight a week before, and then now I’m doing five, $8,000 outreach today.

Trent:                  Okay. So there are going to be some people who are listening to this conversation right now and they did, their head just exploded cause they’re thinking five to 8,000 emails a day. How honor. So we’re going to spend the rest of the time in this conversation unpacking that because I want to make sure that we make good on the whole promise of actionable golden nuggets. So how the hell do you send five to 8,000 emails a day to people who are reasonably qualified to be your customer?

Ravi:                    So like when we talk about, it’s not just emails, right? It’s five, 8,000 pieces of outreach a day. So, first of all, when we talk about messaging and outreach, we usually break it down into four things. And the first one is going to be the lead source. So where are you finding these people that you’re messaging to? If we’re talking about email, you know, you can, you have two options, which is like auto scrapers, which is you can just type in, you know, let’s say there’s software called [inaudible] and we were real estate agents. So we could type in real estate agent [inaudible] lead finder and find tens of thousands of real estate agents, emails. And I could just start sending to that. But the issue with that is I’m going to hyper unqualify people, you know, in the U S it’s like 60 something percent of real estate and to make less than $40,000 a year and our product is not cheap, right?

Ravi:                    Cause we offer a lot. So instead of doing that, we look for a quality lead source. So for us, we’d go to like zillow.com or realtor.com or any of these websites where we can find real estate agents that are paying those companies and in my opinion our products and services better than those companies if you work for them or if you’re the CEO. I’m sorry. But I think that we find people that are already believing in advertising spend. They believe in lead generation and they’re proving it with their money. Not by just saying I believe in like lead generation or investing in my company. I find them, we scraped their information and then I get their email. That’s a lot more quality. Another option could be like, you know.

Trent:                  Hang on, hang on. You’re doing that manually with an army of VA’s, is that right?

Ravi:                    Or our VA’s.

Trent:                  Yeah cause five to seven. If you’re scraping five to a thousand emails, how many emails per using this method, how many emails per day are you getting per VA and how many VA’s to employ?

Ravi:                    Don’t know. We have about 10 days. I work with us full time, not what we take like our send to our clients. I honestly don’t know how many a day they’re scraping. I have some that scrape full time. I have some that send full time, I have some that respond full time. and then also, you know, we also use Fiverr for like data scraping. So sometimes if it’s like a big project, we’ll instead of taking up some of our VA’s time, I just want to be as close to the money as possible. So I’ll find a VA on Fiverr, a data scraping specialist and I’ll pay them eight to 10 to 12 cents a verified email using this lead generation source.

Ravi:                    So even though I have access to thousands of VA’s and they’re all highly trained to go through our training program, sometimes it’s easier just to go, which if you’re listening to this right now and you want to talk about a quick action steps going to be like, Oh, I don’t want to reach out to Ravi for VA yet, or I don’t have a Fiverr and just type in lead generation. And then sort by bestselling, and then you’ll find somebody to, and then just negotiate a price. 10 times out of 10, you can negotiate a price down to about eight to 12 cents a verified email. And then if you find quality emails, then the next step is going to be, really your sending source or like sending methods. So Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, like you can use a combination of software and manual sending for those, cold calling.

Ravi:                    Your voicemail drops are also really, really great as well. and then email is obviously what we’re talking about here. And there’s a few different ways you can structure email. One of them is, you can do like business email sending, which is going to be like woodpecker reply if by whatever those is. Those things are. So our company’s name is Prospect Social, the one that’s a real estate advertising agency. So I can do Raviprospectsocial.com and create an account with a software called Woodpecker, which allows me to send 500 emails for a Raviprospectssocial.com email domain. Then I can do Raviprospectsocial.org and do another 500 there. And then I do Raviprospect.net and then Raviprospect.info. And then now I’m at 2000 emails a day that I’m sending across all of this and they’re all that.

Ravi:                    And that method right there is all pretty automated. You just have to have your VA load up the front end with the leads and then see, look at the positive response on the backend and you can actually forward all of the responses to one email that your VA monitors. And then they take that positive response like I was telling Trent earlier and gives it to you or your sales guy may pick up the phone and call them. And that’s like, we call it like really the B2B method. And that’s like the way that a lot of people do it. And when I say stuff like this, I know immediately people are like, that seems like a lot of work I got to spend, you know, $10 a domain name, whatever it is. So look, I get that. But like depends on what you’re selling. So Trent was giving me some of the numbers, like the Amazon wholesalers. If you find like a whale, right, or he’s a moderately sized one, it’s gonna pay for itself like a hundred times.

Trent:                  You can make a hundred grand a year off one at that.

Ravi:                    So like in your, and you’re going to sit here and talk to me back and forth. I like, you know, I don’t want to spend $10 plus the software, which I’m just making an assumption here. This is just, we’ve worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs and I was here a little kickback on it. I’m like, you make one client and it pays for itself a hundred times over again. You’re gonna make a lot more from this. So that’s the B2B method. And the other method is like a personal sending method, which is something we teach in our program. Would you really need VA’s for, but that’s going to be more along the lines of like creating personal emails like RaviAbuvala1@gmail.com, RaviAbuvala2@gmail.com, RaviAbuvala3@gmail.com, 30 to 50 of those and then sending 10 to 15 to 30 to 50 or 250 emails an email address for each one of those.

Trent:                  So why do you, hold on, let me interrupt you. Why do you need, if you’re gonna go with the cheaper method, the suppose the cheaper method, why do you need all these accounts again, remind me.

Ravi:                    Well which, which method?

Trent:                  Ravi1@gmail, Ravi2@gmail, Ravi3@gmail.

Ravi:                    Because you can only send like a, so like a business domain email like Raviprospectsocial.com that is expected to be sending mass emails a day.

Trent:                  Cause I’ve never tried to send mass email from my @gmail. So they throttle you is what you’re saying.

Ravi:                    Exactly. They throttle you and you even have the warm up, the personal one. So you can’t start the first day sending 5,000 emails. Like the reason we send 5,000 emails, because I’ve had these emails for a year now started one to three to five a day, but it’s a very laborous and like labor intensive tasks. So that’s what virtual assistants you’re paying. Like we play some for $2.50 cents an hour that you find them around that mouth, then it’s worth it for you. So the cost of like the new emails, the SIM cards and the VA for a day of lead generation where you do, let’s say on the low end, 500 emails, it’d be like $20 for the day. Maybe even less than that.

Trent:                  So if you’re not working on a, on a shoestring budget, that would pick her approach is the better way to go.

Ravi:                    There’s probably the better way to go. just because the, the, the personal Gmail one is so good. It’s so effective. I mean, we build multiple 70 are companies using that? The issue is it’s really tricky. your account, you’re going to get banned. They’re going to have blocks through the create new ones and then you have to have a VA that understands the full process. And if you don’t understand the full process, it’s hard to tell someone else. I don’t understand the full process where almost everyone can just go to Woodpecker or reply or fi and just use something like that and figure it out. But the idea is start and just, I guarantee you if you use [inaudible] with one account, which is 250 emails a day, and that’s probably 249 more than you’re doing a day right now. So yeah.

Trent:                  So what about with the business approach to do with a sense score and send a reputation and divert deliverability and so forth? I mean if you are, if you had your domain name for maybe a year or two years or three years or maybe even longer, and suddenly now you’re going to send these mass amount of emails, should you get a separate domain that is very similar. Like if you’re at, if it’s ABC company.com should you go and get ABC company.org and start sending the emails from the.org because you want to protect the sender reputation of the .com.

Ravi:                    That’s an awesome, awesome boy Trent. And yes, the answer is yes. So I started this. I didn’t have like a course or a program or anything to buy into it. This is all me figuring it out and unfortunately I did Raviprospectsocial.com. So even to this day, like I beat my stuff’s still goes to people’s spam, like onboarding information for our real estate clients, all that stuff. So it goes into spam because I just abused the hell out of, I mean I made a lot of money from it, but I’ve used the hell out of my domains, so we do not use our main one. We just use prospectsocial.org. prospectsocial.net, prospectsocial.info. And then if you typed in prospectsocial.info about it for whatever it is, it would actually redirect you to our main website or our Lander for prospectsocial.com that’s a great point for anyone listening right now. You really don’t want to trash or tarnish shores, but I will tell you this, I had a very long conversation with G suite, which is Google is like emails platform. And they told me that like, cause I framed it in the sense of I had a rogue employee that

Ravi:                    he was sending all these emails out and I was like, if I created a different, if it was under James [inaudible], does that hurt my domain name or is it just Jane that’s her. And he told me it was just the Jamesprospectsocial.com that’s hurt, but the Ravi, so you could create like 10 of the ones if you want to keep the.com there. But I, you know, I don’t know how true that is. So, you know, take that with a grain of salt as well and just to be totally safe with us.

Trent:                  Yeah. Yup. I agree. Okay. All right. So we’ve gone to Fiverr, we’ve scraped a bunch of emails. We went to woodpecker and set up an account so that we can do bulk email Replyify. How does that fit into this equation? What does, what does this buy or would backyards but just different softwares. So pick, pick your bulk sending software. I’m assuming in either one of these you can set up campaigns that are multiple emails long that will stop when they reply. Is that, is that the idea?

Ravi:                    That’s 100% driven. Like the LinkedIn software that we give in our program as well does the exact same thing. and so, and you always want to use the software before and you try and obviously knows that it’s always automated before delegate. So yeah, like we would like to have our, our software take care of it for us. That being said, like I always battled the ball in this conversation. Like, you know, and I had a conversation with one of my clients yesterday on our call. Like you know, he wanted to nurture them a little longer before he went straight to the Hey just let us like, let’s talk if you give me your phone number, whoever it is. And I people have much more successful companies than me that do it that way. So like you had to choose what works best for you. I’m into what’s called direct response marketing where I want to know in that first email, are you interested in working with us or not? I don’t like the whole back and forth or like let me mails. And then finally I tell you what I do or whatever it is. So we go straight to the throat on the first email because for us those are the people that are ready to buy right now. Like it increases our conversion and are on the phone with these people.

Trent:                  Plus, if you’re sending 5,000 emails, I mean the quality is in the quantity cause at the end of the day, what you’re after is I want two or three or four really interested people to book in my calendar every single day. And if you do, you’ll drown in business and make buckets of money. Whether you have to send 2000 emails or 4,000 emails to get it. If you’re automating the bulk of it and you’re delegating the bulk of it, who cares?

Ravi:                    It doesn’t matter. And the other thing is that we’ll bring you back to the wood. The first thing I said, which I can’t highlight enough, is the lead quality that you’re getting these from, right? So it’s like 5,000 emails a day. Like you’re going to get a lot of appointments, but I’m sending it to just every Joe Schmo that has a post. Then I’m going to be on the phone with a lot of every single person there. But if you can like find really hyper qualified people based on like traffic of their website or whatever it is, then you can be getting a lot more quality people even get on even to send the email to you, have them respond back to you to get on the phone with it. Then hopefully we close. So we send a word started starting to send a lot less a day now, but have just super higher quality leads that we’re starting out with and we don’t do necessarily the whole like drip thing.

Ravi:                    But I know people that do the drip of multiple emails that have great success with it. What we do is if they don’t respond back negatively and if they don’t respond back positively, we keep a list of everything and anybody that doesn’t find back negative negatively, positively over 90 days, we’ll take out the negative and positive responses and then we’ll just redo that whole list again and just send that first message again. So we’re just kind of sending them the same message 30, 60, 90 days later. and you just catch them at a better time. Right. I had someone said that they got it, they sent an email to somebody and that person had just fired their marketing agency like the day before. And it was a third time. They sent the same email to them over a about essentially six months. And it was only that time that I got said, I just fired my marketing used to let’s get on the phone. So, for me, the, hold on when I get drips, I get so pissed off. I hate like I get an email especially they don’t have an opt out button and subscribe button, which is technically spam laws. It really pisses me off when I’m getting an email every single day and I’m just like, this is annoying. So I always try to think of I’m that person, am I, what do I am I, what am I trying to do? Right? I try to put myself in my prospects.

Trent:                  And the thing you have to understand folks is that, and Ravi alluded to it, when you’re going after a brand, there’s so much change happening in that company for month to month to month. You don’t, I mean, it could change ownership, new VP, new director of marketing, new person in charge of e-commerce, maybe one of their third party sellers that they were loving, screwed up or that company got sold. I mean, there’s so stuff it could be changing. That’s why you need to keep in tip and keep in touch every 30 days or 60 days or 90 days, whatever it is you feel comfortable with. There’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be keeping in touch with these leads because at some point in time something’s going to be changing on their end.

Ravi:                    And that’s even why Trent at my mastermind, he knows as well. We dropped some little gold nuggets and what I teach my students is I, you know, there’s a lot of other ways to get in, stay in front of these people after you make the first touch point, right? You can re-target them on Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, display network, all that stuff. You can add them to your friends list on Facebook or you can follow them on Instagram, whatever it is. And so even though they didn’t respond back right away, and even though they didn’t say anything to you, you can follow them around 98% of the internet, both organically and paid. And then eventually, like I said, maybe you don’t reach the email out, but maybe you send an email to someone, they respond back, no, now’s not the right time. We already have an agency, but maybe you have your VA, add them as a friend for you on Facebook, right, because this is worth your time if you did the right quality leads to begin with, because these people are making a lot of money, so it’s worth your time.

Speaker 2:          So you have them add to them as a friend on Facebook, they accept the friend request because 99% of people just want to be loved. And then over time you’re just slowly tripping out really high quality content about how you help, you know, let’s just say Amazon wholesalers, whatever it is, and then boom, one day you get an Amazon wholesaler testimonial, Vader, this guy goes, I work with Trent, he made me an extra million dollars this year. Whatever it is I highly recommend working with and I get that’s just every single day about working with wholesalers. I never responded. I just decided to give Trent a shot. I’ll never go back. He posts out on his Facebook that is going to correspond with a timing where this guy is like, man, I hate the wholesaler that I have right now. Let me just message, Trent on Facebook. Yeah. So like it’s all the funnel is just feeding down into you or you’re a sales guy at the other end of it. And if you do it correctly, you can really systemize it where you’re pretty much from the whole prop.

Trent:                  So we’ll go back to that personal, we’ll go back to that brand building thing in a minute. Don’t let me forget that. what I wanna dig, what I want to unpack a little bit more is, so we’re sending all these emails, there’s a call to action in the emails you’re sending them to a landing page. You talked about retargeting and so forth. For the folks who aren’t necessarily familiar with will, how does all that work? Let’s, let’s get into the weeds a bit. So you’re sending them to a landing page on that landing page is what and what are you doing with the pixel on that landing page?

Ravi:                    So on the landing page, whenever we send them, so I don’t like to send, and I was just literally having this conversation with Trent and I before we started this. The way we like to do lead generation is this every step with the lead, I’m trying to get a piece of information or something from them that brings them closer to the sale and it’s the bare minimum requirement. So the first email we send out, or the first question we send out, the only thing we’re asking back is if they’re interested, give us their phone number. That’s it. Not the reason they’re interested. I don’t ask them to watch a 20 minute video sales letter doing a webinar. I don’t ask them to tell me what their favorite color is or if they’ve never done lead generation for, I’m just like, give me your phone number of used more to talk about how we can help.

Ravi:                    They give me their phone number that goes straight to our sales guy. Our VA sends that straight for our sales guys. They monitor the inbox and then we, and by we, I mean my virtual assistant will respond back to that lead. Hey Trent, thanks so much for your response. You should be receiving a call from one of our guys in a minute just so that we don’t play the back and forth game. And just so we can see if there’s even a good fit or not, if you don’t mind, click the link below and book a time to speak with us in our online calendar. And then we put a link to a website. We use something called click funnels where we can put our online calendar called Calendly embedded on that click funnel site. And so the cool part of that is that also on that click funnel site is all of our tracking software for every single online advertising platform that’s out there, 98% of the internet.

Ravi:                    So as soon as that person clicks on that link to maybe they didn’t even book a time, they’re now mine forever. And I can now retarget them with testimonials and value and content all across the internet. And then if they booked the time then we can have them redirect it to a page where they thought an application. And we also use something called JotForm for that. and this is all stuff that we give our students for our program cause I know this might be overwhelming, but they fill out the job form application and then once they thought the DOP articulation that redirection to a thank you page and other thank you page. Just really my opportunity to sell them into our program even more. So a video of me underneath it is a video of me on Fox news under that Bill’s authority and read that as a Q and a and underneath that is like 120 testimonial videos of everybody that’s had success with us. And by the time they get on the phone with us, they had gotten probably 15 or 20 emails and all the testimonials in it. They’ve seen the thank you page, warming them up, they’ve got a bunch of other content and they’d been retargeted by some of my content online as well. So, you know, a lot of you guys might get on the phone with a potential lead and they go, why the hell should I work with you? Or who the hell even are you? I don’t even remember responding back to this.

Ravi:                    We never get that because most of the time they’re like, I’ve never gotten more reminders and more emails from somebody when I booked a call with him than with you. And I’m like, I just want to make sure you show up and that you’re educated. And our conversion rates so much higher than the industry standard for that reason. Right.

Trent:                  How many different pixels are you using on the Lander? You’ve got Facebook, probably LinkedIn. What other pixels do you use?

Ravi:                    Google Tag Manager and, [inaudible]. So four is what we use and that puts us on 98% of the internet.

Trent:                  Typing in notes here. All right, so we’ve got them to the land owner. We’ve got ’em pixel. We’ve got ’em pre-sold and they’re going to do the call with you and on the call. Walk me through kind of the structure that you follow.

Ravi:                    Yeah, so we, it depends on who’s doing the call. If you’re scaling. So you have multiple sales guys. So for us, and I’m going to speak to you guys, like I speak to some of my agency clients because like Trent said, I think it’s really similar business model, but we like the two golf clothes in this because time, as Trent knows him, like him and I realized something, that’s why we get along time is such a valuable asset. It’s finite, right? I’d rather pay money than lose time. And so for me, I didn’t want to get, when you started getting it, you do this and if all everything I’m saying right now, you will get five to eight appointments a day like you will, I promise you. But the issue at that point becomes quality over that quantity, right? If I have eight appointments a day and let’s say your pitch is an hour long of why they should work with you, you’re doing five, eight hours a day pitching and maybe one person converts or worst case scenario, nobody converts.

Ravi:                    Well. What we learned to do, especially with real estate agents where a lot of them don’t make a lot of money, is we do what’s called a qualifying call first, so we get on the phone with them and this is really what happens. Like when they respond by the PO with their phone number, we pick up the phone and call them. Our only goal there is to just see, do we continue this relationship further? Is this worth both of our time? And so usually we say, Hey Trent, you responded back to my email like so much you have just about three and a half minutes. I want to ask you five questions Steve and see if it makes sense for us to move forward or not. Eight times out of 10 they’ll say yes or they said no. You can decide what you want to do.

Ravi:                    They say yes. We usually ask literally five questions. Number one, what made you on the first base? Even respond back to our email or our message or LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, whatever. Right? So figure out the pain point in the area that they’re in right now. If you run a wholesaler business where you’re trying to help Amazon sellers, whatever it is, then they could be like I hate the person I work with right now or we don’t even have anybody right now or whatever it is. Or I don’t even remember responding. Second thing we ask them is how much money they’re doing in their company right now. Some reason people are like so afraid to ask these questions, but I want to know and you can frame it differently. So for real estate agents, I don’t say how much money are you making? I say, how many closings did you do last month?

Ravi:                    And then I ask them what’s their average price for home sold? And I could just do it even though I’m awful at math, I can use math in my head if you’re how much money they’re making. And then so that lets us know, are they even qualified, right? If you have an upfront cost or whatever it is, then, and it’s, let’s say our upfront costs is $2,500 and they said that they haven’t sold a home in six months. Well it’s probably not worth us. Continue this conversation. I’ll end the conversation right there. Hey, honestly, Trent, thanks for your time. I just don’t think it was right video. And then we figure out how much money they want to make. so once again, a conversation yesterday with my, one of my clients and he, this, it’s played out perfectly. The guy said he didn’t want to do, he was making $15,000 a month, but he didn’t want to make, he was, yeah, I’m fine to put $10,000 a month.

Ravi:                    And my clients still took him into the pitch and the guy was like, I’m, no, I don’t, I don’t need this because the pain is not great enough. Right. You have to identify a gap of where they are and where they want to be. and then we try to find out how they ever done lead generation or paid advertising before or you could be a heavier, we’ll work with a seller before, how many products are you moving or even if there’s a need, we just want to see how they invested in, they believe in paid advertising and working with an agency. and then the final fifth question is super simple. It’s like, Hey, honestly try and based on everything that you told me here, you’d actually be a perfect fit for our company. And I have few examples of people that started just where you are right now and they’re at where you want to be.

Ravi:                    If I show you a process that has guaranteed and proven results, would you be interested in possibly working with us? And you say, yeah, I mean if it works for me, they say yes. And then I transitioned them into a pitch which we give pitch stacks or templates of a pitch deck and our program as well where I do a video presentation of like us going through Google slides. It depends on however you want to do it. But then I actually show them what it looks like to work with us and it’s like pretty much here’s 90% testimonials and then 10% is actually how we execute it. And that’s how we close ratios.

Trent:                  Okay. Brilliant. let me see if I’m, I’m just looking at my questions here to see if there’s anything else that we talked about in the pre-interview that we have not talked about how long we been, we have been 30 minutes. Wow. Time. What time went by fast. Yeah. So we talked a lot about making use of VA’s and initially we both agree that and we’ve told many people that that’s where you should start because the cost of labor is very low. The commitment’s very low. It’s very, very light weight. At what point in time did you make the decision to start hiring US-based full time employees and why?

Ravi:                    So all of our sales guys have always been US-based when I’m assuming that’s probably not what you talk about, what you’re meeting here. So are us, our sales guys have always been us Canadian based B for obvious reasons. Right. You’ve been working with people in the US and they needed to have that kind of strict,

Trent:                  Well actually no, that’s, that’s an important one because in our space, as we scale our businesses, we, we ideally, and I’ve done this before, I hired the very, when I fired myself, I hired the US-based sales people. it’s very difficult to do as I think you and I talked about that we’ve never ever had a whole lot of success hiring salespeople and then you kind of crack the code. So talk about, cause your, your guys are pure commission so you’re not taking on a salary. they, they eat what they kill. How are you finding folks like that who can get the job done, don’t have substance dependencies and you know, like they’re good quality professional salespeople. Hard to find.

Ravi:                    Yeah, that’s too funny. Basically, which I won’t say on here, but yeah, so, and that’s a great point. So for us on almost every one of our companies, the lead generation and the backend Fillmont we have or VA’s do. So it’s like we’ve systemized our business to the point that like everything is pretty much in the business is being taken care of by VA’s. At that point. There’s more appointments on my calendar, then I can literally physically take him a day. That’s when we’re like, all right, let’s find a salesperson. You’ve really two options. You have a few obviously, but the two big options, there’s three big options. Number one,

Ravi:                    and this is what I recommend going in order honestly, number one is leveraging your personal network. So like if you guys are listening to this right now, I always tell my students you can go and click funnels. You type in my name Ravi Abuvala and type in hiring and you’ll see a higher grade close that I made, I don’t know, five, six months ago for our company that we coach entrepreneurs in called scaling systems and you can literally copy and paste that and put it in Click Funnels and try it. Were you there in the mastermind? When I broke down our hiring, how we did the whole like jot form and like,

Trent:                  no, I had to go to catch a plane.

Ravi:                    Okay, I won’t go did you much of it here. It’s kind of a Ninja way where we literally do like a kindergarten test to see if they can follow directions. So essentially like we make a post on Facebook, my personal Facebook page on Instagram, on LinkedIn. we can do some lead generation using email and LinkedIn. Just same stuff we use to get agencies or, or wholesale or I mean Amazon sellers, whatever it is and say, Hey, we’re looking for sales guys. So instead of scraping know Amazon sellers are scrapings salespeople. And we use our email lists and we blast out once, our personal network and we blast out a post that since it says, Hey, it’s our company [inaudible] systems. We help entrepreneurs scale to seven to eight figures while removing the social in the process. we get on average eight to 15 appointments a day for a salesperson. we give a 15% commission only based position. we’re really flexible. You can work from anywhere. We believe in having a family relationship.

Ravi:                    So you have to be a team player and you have to be, and we’d have bonuses, whatever you want to do on top of it. I didn’t say, if you’re interested in applying, click the link below. Now it’s really important for you to start with your personal network because like my best employees, which ironically I’m saying because we’re sitting right next to me at this table, but my best employees are people that know, like, and trust me already, they’re already clients in my program or they’re already close friends of mine, so they just buy into me and my vision. So that’s the first step. It will just like you to find quality leads to even talk to for your prospecting. You have to find quality leads to talk to you for your hiring. So like I could have easily found a COO outside of my company.

Ravi:                    I have plenty of people asking to work with me, but I wanted somebody that already told me that they buy into my vision by not telling me they buy in my vision, but by paying me and showing me that they buy into division. And that’s exactly where I found my COO who I know Trent met as well. and you do the whole mastermind and he’s an awesome guy. And so we always look for our personal network first because they already know, like, and trust you. They find your vision and dream and there’s a lot less training involved. I don’t know. I send them that post out there. And then if you’re interested, apply here. They click there and in the top of the things I say excited for you to work with us. underneath it it says for the age question put in the number 42.

Ravi:                    So then we go name, age, you know, past experience. Have you sold high ticket offers before? Have you ever worked in real estate? Whatever it is and they click submit. I honestly could care less about those questions. The only thing that I have Zapier my software looking out for is did that person put in 42 as their age or do they actually put their age in that? And if they put in 42 is her age, they get a zap, which is an that’s another email that goes to them and says, Hey Trent, thanks for submitting your for them. Congratulations, you passed the first test. Now send a two minute video of why you should work for our company. So the email ravi@scalingsystems.com and put the subject line, I want to work with rugby. And then I have another zap that looks for a subject line I want to work with Ravi and then sends them another email that says, congratulations, you’ve made it to the final interview.

Ravi:                    Click the link here to book at a time in our calendar. And if they put I want to work for Ravi or Ravi, please hire me. Whatever it is, we don’t send them that last email. And so the idea is how welcoming all instructions from A to Z and by the time they get to our calendar, like the example I use in the mastermind, we had about 150 applicants on JotForm when I posted all across all of my channels for a sales guy, I had four interviews, when they came all the way down to the bottom of it. And then all I did was I, before the interview, I pulled up the JotForm and I pulled up their video and I was like, let me just see what their answers were before they got on the call with us. and I love that it’s so good and it works for every position and we do it for VA’s as well. And it’s like, it’s just how, cause if they, if they can’t follow instructions, I’ve been in there, they’re not gonna follow instructions like.

Trent:                  I posted a job on indeed. I never ended up hiring $100,000 salary and nobody followed the fricking instructions. And I’m thinking, are you kidding me? I love it.

Ravi:                    I know. Scared. So we use our personal network first, to do it cause it’s free and they already know, like, and trust you. Second option we’d go through was like a placement company. So like we place virtual assistants are fully trained, are good to go, and they come work in your company the first day they’re setting three to 5,000 messages a day. They already are trained in all of this stuff. and, and then same thing with sales people. So we work with a guy, he works with some of the largest high ticket offers in the nation.

Ravi:                    I found him, I paid him upfront for our sales guys. And now I think you met Matt while you were at the event too. I have my sales guys, I love, they crushed it for us. and I got him through his sales space and company. That was, again, it goes back to if you have money you want the cheap layer for us. And like I talked to Trent, you know, just like people pay us for a VA cause I’ve known how to go through the bullshit of training one. I was like, I don’t want to have to go through this whole thing where the salesperson would give me a fully trained one that’s good, that proven rep track record, whatever it is. And that’s the second way we look for sales people or hiring or the third way is to just say indeed monster.com whatever it is.

Ravi:                    But that’s always like literally last resort because they have no idea who you are, you know, if they’re unemployed right now and probably not like doing a great job, whatever the last job is. and also you have to pay for it. And like for me it’s just not, I actually have never hired a new item for sales and in my opinion there’s more sales people that are, are companies that need salespeople. But the truth of this is my friends is that the reason why we hire top reason sales people that are okay, I’m commission-based is because we have the lead generation side. If I look for a sales guy that is a top producer and he goes to my company and I’ve given you a one appointment a month, he’s going to leave very quickly, but all my sales guy want to marry me because I have my business so systemized that all they do is wake up and get on the call with people that have already gotten like 15 touch points, they’re already super warmed up and watch the VSL and they’re pretty much ready to buy as long as the handling of your objections.

Ravi:                    So we’re able to take in top producers because they have eight to 16 appointments a day on their calendar and they’re just like, I just got to sell every single day. I mean sometimes I tell them, I’m like, you know, I wish I was using them times. I say I’m like, easy job, right? You’re just going to close a deal and then you’re onto the next call.

Trent:                  Yeah, and the thing that I think people misunderstand about sales is there’s really two parts to sales. There’s lead generation and then there’s presentation and close your hiring presentation and close cause people suck at lead generation. Whenever I tried to hire sales people in the past, cause I, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing even though I was a good lead generator. Very, very, very, very few people are. And so if you’re hiring a salesperson expecting them to generate their own leads, good luck to you.

Ravi:                    No, we incentivize them. So it’s like, Hey if 15% commission, if you close the deal, but if you bring your own deal in a to Z, they didn’t come through us. You can get 25% of permissions. So if they wanted one, so we’ll incentivize them. But yeah, no, it’s asinine in my opinion to expect a sale because it’s actually two parts of the brain as well. Lead generation is one heart and if they’re really good at closing, like a closure is literally should be on the phone to close. They should not be generating prospecting, especially when it’s super mundane tasks like emailing and like [inaudible] why not hire a VA for that and save your sales person’s energy for literally getting on that cause they’re getting told no all day long. You don’t need to give them another channel to get told no to. So for us I’m like I just want them to be, be on the call and have it be, it would be with appointments and I can easily for $2.50 an hour, I have a VA do the rest.

Trent:                  Yeah. In my very first career as a financial advisor. And in in the latter part of that career, I joined this large team run by this really, really smart dude who had marketing and lead generation dialed. And I was literally that guy. I was the pure commissioned closer and I would sit down and this was a serious sale. I mean these are people who are coming in with their life savings, talking about retirement planning and I would, it got so systematized where people would sit at my desk cause so the, the, the appointment team, thanks to all the lead generation, the appointment team would fill my calendar. I would have typically three to five presentations a day, my presentations because I’d done them so many times. We’re so perfect that it within 45 minutes I knew I would get up and say does this, I would say the end, my close was, does this approach make sense to you? Yes. Wonderful. Sit right there. I will be right back. I believe the room, I’d go get the people on the team that filled out account applications. They would leave my office. Next one would come in. It was a fricking machine.

Ravi:                    And how happy were you?

Trent:                  Oh dude. In today’s dough. So I was 25 I was your age. I was 25 years old and in today’s dollars I was making [inaudible] 400 grand a year. Okay. Yeah. At 25 not bad. It’s all before the internet made it. You know where guys could make way more than that. You, you wanted to make big money 20 years ago, you needed to be in sales.

Ravi:                    And the cool thing about that is like [inaudible] and people think, Oh I have shitty experience with sales people. But in reality, you know, if you’d know anything about like personal development, you need to take full responsibility and reality. You’re probably attracting shitty sales people cause you have a shitty business, right? Like cause you’re trying to have your sales people do everything. But we get high quality sales people because just like try and like you, the dream person of a salesperson is just to get on every call and just pitch every single person. All right. Like that’s it. And if you have them do all this other stuff, you get them, they’re in funks, they get unmotivated, they get upset and that affects the calls. And so yeah, we look for like every single person in our company as a single task or job, just like Henry Ford’s assembly line. And they do that. And if everyone actually gets a really well and then you have like the next level that would be like a CEO who can monitor all that. And then above the COO is like you. So you are pretty much the CEO is you on a day to day task, which allows me to do podcasts, you to invest my time in ads, learning stuff, the hosting masterminds, whatever it is. All right.

Trent:                  So before we wrap up, Ravi, do you have a, I think you have a special offer, a freebie or something.

Ravi:                    So we’ve used a few different like softwares for for SOPs and like they’ve worked, they’ve been good, like we’ve had okay experiences with them, but I’m trying to, I met him and I hit it off like two girls and he actually ended up flying down to see me in San Diego and and then he came to my mastermind and then I started learning about Flowster, his program. And now we’re working on kind of combining both of our stuff together, which I’m super excited about. and then I was playing around with the actual flow stir app is software company where you can create SOPs and put them on the marketplace. And so we are now putting all of our SOPs inside of Fowster, which I’m super excited about to give my students as well. And then I was like, why not give you guys whoever’s listening to this right now, wherever you’re listening to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, podcast, whatever it is, a little gift for listening all the way to the end.

Ravi:                    So we’re going to take probably three to five of our highest lead generating SOPs. so the ones that have literally made us millions of dollars, including the messaging, everything inside of it, and we’re going to put it on the Flowster marketplace and I’m super excited to give it to you guys and all you guys have to do in order to get it, cause you have to have a discount code, cause it’s going to be a probably $2,000 on the marketplace. But if you want to get it for totally free, which we’re gonna offer you, because Trent was kind enough to have us on your, you go to work with Ravi all one word.com/bright ideas, all one word as well. So W, O, R,K , W, I, T, H, R, A, V, I.com slash bright ideas, which is the, obviously what you’re listening to as well. And I’m sure Trent will drop that link in here as well. And then we’ll go in there and you will get, I’m telling he’s literally made it really, I showed Trent what they were as well as little made us millions of dollars and you guys can take that and either do it yourself or maybe hire a virtual assistant to X because that’s a piece for you.

Trent:                  Awesome. Ravi, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been pleasure always.

Ravi:                    Trent, thank you so much for having me here. I appreciate it.