Tag Archive for: Marketing Agencies

Digital Marketing Strategy: Chris Handy on How He Built a $400K 2-person Agency in 24 months

If you’re a marketing agency owner who’s struggling to get traction, how would you like to hear from an agency owner who was very successful early along? Chris Handy built a $400,000 two-person agency in just 24 months, and he has generously agreed to share what worked with the BrightIdeas audience. (For more agency Bright Ideas, check out our other posts that are especially relevant to marketing agencies.)

Chris has excellent strategies for lead generation, LinkedIn and other social promotion, lead nurturing and more. In addition to the ThinkHandy digital marketing strategy, Chris shares ideas on how to select a profitable niche.

Listen now and you’ll also hear Chris and I talk about:

  • (5:00) Introductions
  • (8:50) His background with eBay
  • (12:30) How his exposure to process has molded his thinking
  • (14:50) Overview of #1 lead generation
  • (15:30) Overview of how he’s using LinkedIn
  • (19:50) Overview of how they are blogging for leads
  • (24:20) Criteria for selecting a profitable niche
  • (26:30) Overview of lead nurturing
  • (31:00) Overview of retained income and how assessments lead to it
  • (40:00) Overview of how they systematize the deliverables
  • (43:30) How they are using client interviews to create blog posts
  • (45:00) Overview of deliverables given for retainer
  • (51:00) Overview of social promotion strategy
  • (56:00) Advice on how to get started at content marketing
  • (58:20) His biggest mistake and lessons learned

Resources Mentioned

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

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Transcript

Trent: Hey there, bright idea hunters. Welcome to the Bright Ideas

Podcast. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast

for marketing agencies, marketing consultants and entrepreneurs

who want to discover how to use content marketing and marketing

automation to massively boost their business without massively

boosting the number of hours that you have to work every week.

As a matter of fact, the goal is to help you reduce the number

of hours you have to work every week. The way that we do that is

we bring proven experts onto the show to share with us what’s

working for them. When I say a proven expert I don’t mean a guru

or a theorist, I mean someone who’s actually using this stuff in

their business and they’re getting significant results by doing

so.My guest on the show today is a guy by the name of Chris Handy,

and he is the Founder of a marketing agency by the name of

ThinkHandy.com. He and his wife are actually the two people that

are behind that agency. He launched that in the beginning of

2011 and here we are just not even two years later he’s at

$20,000 a month in recurring revenue from retainer business.

They’re on track to do $400,000 in revenue this year and as you

can imagine with no overhead and only he and his wife as being

the two key employees that also translates into a very

profitable business venture.In this interview I get Chris to share all sorts of stuff with

us in great detail. For example, I want him to, or get him,

rather, to explain how he’s using LinkedIn to generate leads and

he does something that’s very unique and interesting. It’s

different than what I do and I’ll go so far as to say it’s

smarter and better than what I am doing so of course I need to

adjust my action as a result. You’re going to hear that at

roughly the seven to nine-minute mark and then after that we

start talking about his criteria for selecting which niches that

he pursues and that is a real key part of his business strategy

is choosing those niches correctly because as he points out not

all niches are created equal. Some are going to be a whole lot

more profitable for you than others.Then we walk through his four-step process for taking a lead

that goes through the funnel and requests an assessment then

there’s four steps that he does to convert them to a client and

it was very interesting as he shared the details on that because

the one thing that he doesn’t do is he doesn’t ever go and meet

them face to face. The really wonderful thing about this is no

matter what town you’re in or where you live you can get clients

that are anywhere if you listen to this interview and you

replicate the process that Chris explains.His background involved a lot of work with process improvement

and process automation and that really shines through in the

systems that he’s using to run his agency. We talk about that as

well. When a client says yes, how efficient you are or aren’t in

delivering the work that you’ve promised to them is going to

make all the difference between whether you build an agency with

lots of revenue and no profit or you build an agency with lots

of revenue and lots of profit. You really need to get good at

this whole systematizing and process management and in this

interview Chris shares a whole lot about that.Finally, towards the end of the interview he shares one of the

biggest mistakes that he made early on and the lessons that he

learned as a result of that. Do make sure that you stay tuned to

the very end and check that out.We’re going to welcome Chris to the show in just a second, but

before we get to that I want to very briefly tell you about a

new book that I’m working on and how you can get an advance look

at it, some free chapters and a discount when it comes out if

you go to BrightIdeas.co/book all of the information will be

there and this is going to be a book that covers extensively

everything that I’ve ever learned plus everything I’ve learned

from all the guests that have been on the show about two really

important topics, content marketing and marketing automation.Why are those topics so important? Because in this day and age

that’s the magic sauce that gets you all the business and all

the clients and the growth and the profits. I didn’t really have

a name for the book yet but if you go to BrightIdeas.co/book

you’ll see there a landing page that I created and you’ll be

able to opt in and get all the things that the landing page

says. With that said, please join me in welcoming Chris to the

show. Hey Chris. Welcome to the show.Chris: Thank you, Trent. Great to be here.Trent: It is a thrill to have you on. Just from what we were talking

about before we hit the record button we have a very good

interview coming your way so for the listeners who have not

heard of you please take a moment, introduce yourself, who you

are and what you do.Chris: Sure. My name is Chris Handy. I’m in Fort Worth, Texas, and I

operate a company called Think Handy and we’ve really decided

against putting anything as a definer on the end of that name

because we were kind of in marketing sales and operations and

we’re a consultancy in helping people streamline those and get

more out of their marketing dollars, but also integrating sales

and service into that.Trent: In the last, so you started this firm at the beginning of 2000,

and we’re going to get into your background and everything in a

minute, but I want people to know the results that you’ve

achieved in a pretty short period of time. You started in the

beginning of 2011, correct?Chris: Yes.Trent: Here we are, 2013 now. Middle, I guess fall and in the last, so

you started off from zero. Nothing. Right?Chris: Started off from zero. I took a few freelance web design

projects in 2010 and really proof of concept is, we were just

trying to see if we could get clients and found out that we

could so in 2011 went ahead and took the plunge and got started

and it was a slow ramp up. We’ve grown quite a bit in revenue

and in recurring revenue specifically so this year we are on

track to do about, hopefully about 400,000 by the end of the

year.Trent: In the last six months you said, off air you said you’d done

200.Chris: That’s correct.Trent: That’s pretty good. Your recurring revenue is at how much per

month now?Chris: We’re at about $20,000 in retainer relationships for each

month.Trent: That’s pretty fantastic. It makes, when you run a lean business

like you do with virtually no overhead, then 20,000 a month

coming in on the first day of every month makes for not a whole

lot of stress of, ‘Hey, where’s our next meal coming from.’Chris: It’s definitely improved our quality of life a little bit. Not

having to worry but we’re investing a lot back into the business

and in our marketing. Really we’ve spent a lot of time figuring

out where we go. We can obviously grow now so which way do we

grow? That’s very important to me. I want to make sure that when

we do make that next hire, who’s it going to be? What’s that

role going to be for and how can we make the most of our future?Trent: I have a lot of people who listen to my show based upon the

emails and so forth that I get that are solopreneurs. A lot of

marketing consultants, [freelance] web designers and I think I

speak for the when I say they all want to grow up. They want to

get, they want to make their firms bigger. They want to get more

recurring revenue. They want to be able to hire some more

employees and they want to use some more resources. They want to

grow like every other entrepreneur on the planet.I really want to make this episode for them so let’s, I want, I

really want to walk through kind of how you made that transition

from that first freelance client and I know there’s a lot of

people who listen to my show as well who maybe aren’t even in

business yet and you talked earlier how you kind of did a little

project with some freelance work to see if you could even get

clients. I want to talk about that.Before we get into both of those things I want you to tell a

little bit about your background because you have this rather

unusual background, this eBay consignment thing. You want to

talk a little bit about that so we have context?Chris: Sure. A lot of people bring up the 40 year old virgin when I

bring that up because you’ve seen that movie. The girl that

Steve Carell was going after, she managed an eBay store and what

an eBay store is is where you walk in and you hand the item to

the person at the counter and say, ‘I’d like to see this on

eBay.’ What they do is they take the item back and list it on

eBay or another online sales channel and basically sell it on

consignment so they’re going to take a commission and give you

the rest. Email you a link to the auction so you can see

everything that’s going. I was in that business which was

definitely interesting and that business has kind of, that whole

industry’s changed a lot in the last few years obviously.Started off in a small shop and then was recruited to the big

boys of the eBay consignment world, and I found myself managing

a distribution center that we routed trucks and went out and

picked up items from different people’s homes. We had five

stores in the Dallas Fort Worth area, that’s where we’re located

so all over the Metroplex. It’s a really large area so we had a

lot of ground to cover.I found myself routing all these trucks, managing the creative

team. Working on marketing these items. Actually getting them

listed onto eBay, working with software, working with people.

Managing a lot of people, customer service. Really just

everything that you could possibly think of with that business.

I was the operations director but that just included all these

different things. I learned a lot from the upper management

there. A lot of the people that were in management there were

former executives at Radio Shack and they had some great

processes. That was one of the things I really picked up during

that, what I called boot camp for sales and marketing and

operations.I was taught there that you don’t have to manage people as long

as you can manage the process and that was the most important

thing that I learned. We would create detailed process books for

everything. Now when I say everything I mean this is what you

say when you answer the phone. Scripts are easy to identify but

we encourage people to riff on those, obviously but also this is

what happens when an item comes in. Let’s say we get an item

from a person who wants us to sell something for them. This is

exactly where it goes, this is the process here, here, here.All the steps are detailed on an online document that everyone

can see. What we found was if ever there was a situation where

the, where something went wrong, rather than saying, ‘How, why

did you mess up or how did this happen,’ you simply say, ‘Well

did you follow the process?’ Either yes or no. If they did

follow the process, well, then you change the process. You don’t

have to do anything with the person because it’s not their

problem. That if they follow the, or if they didn’t follow the

process then it becomes a situation where, ‘Hey, here’s our

process book.’ You point to the book and you don’t have to

really do any disciplining of any kind. It’s just letting the

process manage the business for you so manage your team.Trent: Now being a guy that runs a marketing agency, how did all that

exposure to the importance of processes, how has that influenced

how you’re building and running your business, right, the way

from, and we’re going to go into detail on all these things but

just kind of at the high level right the way from lead

generation all the way to delivering your service. How has that

influenced you?Chris: Well it’s kept me, kept my eye on the prize of duplicating

myself and making sure that I don’t have to be the one pushing

all the buttons and following all these processes. If I work to

build these processes as we grow our agency then it won’t be

very difficult at all to manage people and every agency owner

wants to grow. Every agency owner wants to have a team of X

number of people. We have our own growth goals and I want to

make sure that we’re ready when we get there and that we have

detailed processes in place.We use a lot of online tools to get there so you have to kind of

come up with a process before you build the tool. That’s been

really important in our marketing process and then everything

that we do as far as client service.Trent: Where do you store all these processes?Chris: Well we use a project management system called Podio, but many

of them can do similar things. I found that this one works for

us because we can customize certain things with regards to

marketing campaigns specifically we can trigger actions based on

creating an item. We have a very detailed process on how we run

campaigns so if we have a client we know that we need to create

a downloadable offer for that client and we know we need to

create some blog posts to promote those downloadable offers.Every time we come up with a marketing persona to market to we

know we need at least one marketing offer and at least eight

blog posts to promote that marketing offer. As soon as we create

that persona, all these other tasks are created automatically so

it helps manage me. I’m extremely ADD. I don’t know what’s going

on.Trent: Join the club.Chris: If I don’t have it written down or if I don’t have somebody

bugging me to do it then I’m going to forget. There’s no

question. I built the software and built it on top of the

software basically just to keep me in line.Trent: My wife does that for me along with software. Let’s go back to

the thing, I want to talk about lead generation here because I

think a lot of people really struggle with it. Can you tell us

what you’re doing? What’s your number one method of generating

leads?Chris: Number one method of generating leads has got to be creating

content. I’ve had the website for two or three years now and so

I’ve done a lot of, before I really got into inbound marketing I

did a lot of SEO work, so I spent time making sure I was getting

found for some local stuff here in Fort Worth. That really

doesn’t bring me any business to be honest.Now our focus has been to get global and to not worry about

local because our best clients are not anywhere close to us so

we got away from that and really started getting active in

social networks. I think LinkedIn is the best place to promote

our content that we’re creating. [inaudible 15:45]Trent: How do you promote your content on LinkedIn? I want to see if

it’s similar to what I do.Chris: Gotcha. We’re writing blog posts that promote offers. That are

behind a form so that we’re gathering leads that way. I’ll look

for conversations where information we’ve written about is

applicable. I’ll go and I’ll say, ‘Hey we wrote this. Maybe this

can help you out.’ I’m a member of a lot of different groups. We

do have some verticals that we target and we’re always looking

to figure out what the best verticals are going to be for us to

go after. We’re still defining that.We’ve done a lot of construction marketing and home contractor

marketing which is interesting. It just kind of found us. We’re

testing out a new market right now and I’m involved in some of

those groups and I’m starting to kind of get in on those

conversations and help people. I think that’s the number one way

is helping people. Eventually they’re going to either need your

help or need more of your professional help or they’re going to

refer you to someone who does.Trent: How much of your time do you spend going into, how many groups,

first of all how many groups are you a member of?Chris: I think I’m a member of 45 right now. I had to delete myself

from some groups that I just wasn’t all that active in in order

to pursue some other ones in the verticals I want to see.Trent: Define specifically your activity in these groups. When you

produce a blog post on your blog, like when we do, we can put a

check mark in every group and say Add to group and it puts a

link to your post and your little intro. It’s not really like

one on one discussions. How do you do it?Chris: Sure. We use HubSpot for marketing automation. It does the same

thing and I think that’s the number one mistake people make when

they go in and they see this fancy social media tool, and they

can just check all the group boxes and then they end up spamming

everyone in their LinkedIn feed. That’s not good for anyone

because everyone sees that you just posted in 15 different

groups and that really doesn’t add any personal value.I really do spend time watching the groups and figuring out who

the influencers are there. Then when a conversation is heating

up and someone actually has something that I can add to, so

there’s a question about marketing in that particular instance

and I have something that’s of value to them I’ll add it into

the conversation manually. I will go ahead and automate some of

the posts, like when I do a new post on the blog. We’ll put that

out there to everyone on LinkedIn but I’m not spamming it into

groups. I really do consider it spam if you just add it to

everyone’s group. That’s how we do it. Even though it’s

marketing automation I think you really need a very human touch.Trent: I agree. I don’t think the way that we’ve been doing it is

ideal. It was, I had a past guest on the show was a LinkedIn

expert author of a book and that’s what she told us to do and so

we’ve been doing it since.Chris: That’s how you do it. I’m sorry.

Trent: No. I don’t mind. This is how we get better, we see what other

people are doing. How much time per day do you spend on LinkedIn

monitoring these conversations? Because with 45 groups, I mean

dude, you could spend like four hours.

Chris: You have to pick your battles. I’m not active in 45 groups. I’m

a member of 45 groups right now. Some of them are professional

groups. Some of them are places we’re targeting so maybe four or

five different groups really right now I’m active in and

actually helping people, and I spend maybe an hour throughout

the day monitoring LinkedIn. It’s one of the first things I look

at when I get up in the morning just to see because I get the

emails of what was going on yesterday, the hottest

conversations, that kind of thing.

Trent: So you . . .

Chris: I just look for anything that I might be able to help add value

to.

Trent: Do you subscribe to a daily email for every group that you’re a

member of?

Chris: Some of them. Yes.

Trent: Some. You wake up in the morning and you check and see what

people are talking about and say, ‘Can I add value to that

conversation?’

Chris: Correct.

Trent: That’s a good way to do it. I should probably do that too. What

other things are you doing for lead generation?

Chris: Aside from LinkedIn, just creating content around those

personas. We do a lot of keyword research. Now we’re trying to

actively solve problems. I prescribe to the Marcus Sheridan

school of blog topics. Marcus Sheridan made his pool business

grow by answering his customers’ questions online. I know that

you’ve interviewed him before.

Very much inspired by his process. Let’s just figure out what

questions our customers are asking and each one of those is

going to be a blog post. I look for questions that have not been

answered in the industries that I’m targeting and I answer those

questions. Simple as that.

Trent: Is that working well for you yet?

Chris: It is. Absolutely. I’ve got a few blog articles that are just

machines. They’re bringing in more leads than I need. A lot of

them we have to qualify throughout with some nurturing sequences

and stuff like that because it’s bringing in more than I

probably need to but you need to kind of cast a wide net at the

top of the funnel and then figure out who’s going to be a fit.

Trent: Absolutely. What types of lead magnets do you find are working

really, because you’ve got your blog posts and people are

getting there via either LinkedIn or search? They’re reading the

article. Are you using one lead magnet across all your posts or

using ten different lead magnets? How many do you use?

Chris: We rotate them out. I’ve got a few. I’ve got one that’s Inbound

Marketing 101 that is a really nice go to for the top of the

funnel and for some of our more basic blog posts. We categorize

our blog posts by three levels, introductory, intermediate and

advanced. I try to make sure that people that are visiting see

that, ‘Hey, they’re on an intermediate article, or they’re on an

advanced article.’ I’ll have it even suggest introductory

articles to folks who found us on an advanced just in case it’s

above their heads because this is an education game.

People need to understand when we’re talking about marketing

automation or even sales process improvement they need to

understand a little bit more about how we work so we’ll always

suggest a previous post to try to educate them along the way.

To answer your question I’ve got probably 15 different offers

that we’ve got and we use five or six of them more than all the

others. We kind of refined those fringe ones every once in a

while and repost it every once in a while.

Trent: What would you say is your number one lead magnet for top of

the funnel?

Chris: I’ve done this really interesting thing. If you’re familiar

with Facebook marketing you’ll have a cover photo at the top of

your Facebook page. I found myself always going and Googling the

dimensions to create a custom Facebook cover photo for my

clients and for me. We create a new one all the time. I found

there wasn’t any great place to find it, so what I did is I

created a Facebook page that is called Facebook Cover Photo Size

Helper.

In fact, if you Google Facebook Cover Photo Size it’s like

second or third result. What it does, it puts the actual cover

photo shows all the pixels on it so you can see exactly how to

build a perfect cover photo for you. Then I link to, I

constantly post some of our articles, and I link to a landing

page where you can download an even bigger guide on how to build

Facebook cover photos.

Trent: What’s the, I just did that search criteria. What is the URL

for your particular?

Chris: It’s Facebook.com/coverphotosize.

Trent: Yeah, okay, number two.

Chris: Right behind Facebook’s Help article.

Trent: Smart, smart, smart. Look at that, 9,643 likes.

Chris: And growing.

Trent: That’s a smart idea. I might even have to call that one a gold

nugget.

Chris: Sure. It brings us 15, 20 leads every single day.

Trent: How many of those, because not every lead, not all leads are

created equally of course. Do you, how many of those leads are

converting to customers?

Chris: I’d say we’ve gotten two or three referrals off of that.

Trent: You mentioned earlier that you are targeting a few different

niches. Can you talk a little bit about the criteria that you

use to analyze the viability of a niche?

Chris: Sure, Trent. I think that, especially when you’re talking about

a retainer relationship, now we really shy away from projects

but every once in a while we’ll take a project, if it’s a

referral that we think is going to help an existing relationship

we’ll do a project. That is different criteria but if we’re

going to go after someone that we think can be a pretty sizable

monthly retainer with a multi-year agreement or 12-month

agreement, we’re looking for something that is a large decision

purchase so it’s a business that has to do a lot of education

before a sale can be made. Maybe something that has really long

sales cycles.

I would not go, we found ourselves doing some construction

marketing and home contractor marketing. That’s just kind of how

we grew. That’s some of the first projects I took on so I keep

getting them, but I would not, today target those industries

because they are kind of one time and the need for recurring

services is not there. I want something like a big software

purchase or a managed IT company, something like that that

targets maybe huge facilities. Just an example of something that

is really a big decision and they need to have a lot of

expertise in any particular field.

Trent: Interesting that you mention managed IT. That was the industry

that I was in before and I’d never want to deal with those guys.

Once you get your leads into the funnel I’d like you to talk

about how you are segmenting them and if you’re using mid-funnel

lead magnets. Because where I’m going here is, as I said before,

not all leads are created equal. There are, and even if they

have the same need they’re at different phases in the buying

cycle. Some people are early. Some people are ready to buy. How

do you handle all of that using automation?

Chris: Sure. Everyone that signs up for any one of our offers is

automatically subscribed to our blog. I’ve had people give me

different feelings on that, whether or not you should just put

everyone on your blog but I find that it really works because we

get a lot of social shares. That’s something that immediately,

they’ll see everything that comes in every week. [inaudible

27:10]

Trent: I’m sorry to interrupt you. Do they get an email for every post

that you publish?

Chris: I choose to have it go out once a week.

Trent: A weekly summary?

Chris: Sure. Weekly summary. We’ll do three or four or five blog posts

every week. In a perfect world we’d have one for every day or

two but right now we’re producing about three or four every

week.

Trent: They get those on Sunday morning.

Chris: Mm-hmm. I find we get the best open rate then. I’m sure once

this thing goes live if you have enough listers that now

everyone’s going to be coming through on Sunday morning and

we’ll need to change it to another day. There’s no hard and fast

rule I’ve found. People will tell you it’s Tuesday at noon.

Well, it really is just when your audience is getting up. I find

early in the morning is great for me. No matter which day.

Trent: What type of, what are some, how are you segmenting? Just kind

of walk us through that. I opt into your funnel. What happens?

Chris: Now you’re signed up for the blog and if you click on any of

the links in those blogs I can identify that you’re somewhat

interested. That’s the only criteria I have to go into an

automated list. I’ve segmented that list off then I will segment

off the agencies because there are a lot of other agencies that

read our content. Then I narrow it down further and I look and

see where people came from. I’ve got some other smart lists that

tell me where they came from. If someone came from that Facebook

cover photo size helper and they’re not an agency then I send

them more introductory content on basic marketing and I look at

that as a way to get more social shares, more cheerleaders out

there because not everyone that comes through there is going to

be a fit for large scale retainer services.

Once I kind of siphoned off all of those other folks, I look at

everyone by industry and I’ll try and send something very

specific. We’ll create new landing pages all the time with

webinars because I can write a webinar. If I see that I’ve got

five different, for instance, managed IT companies that have

come in and filled out forms I might decide to try out a

webinar. I’ll say, ‘We’re going to do a sales and marketing

alignment webinar specifically for the managed IT companies.’

I’ll send them all an email and if somebody signs up, I do the

webinar. If somebody doesn’t sign up, I don’t.

It’s just something else out there a lot of times that we do, we

do end up getting that. I’ve got a real quick process on

launching new targeted landing pages and so we do that all the

time.

Trent: Define all the time. How often would you say you do it?

Chris: Once every week. Probably creating a new vertical just checking

it out seeing what comes up and then it’s another page out there

on Google to be found. Especially, we do have a field on all of

our forms that’s biggest marketing challenge. I think I saw that

on several different marketing automation software original

forms and so I started doing it. It’s kind of my gauge on what

questions to ask folks.

I’ll go and create content around that and make sure it’s in the

weekly email coming up. Even if it’s not a direct, ‘Hey,’ I’m

targeting this person,’ it is something that I can answer and

I’ll find that, let’s say managed IT, I’ve got ‘How do I build a

workflow for marketing automation with a managed IT company?

I’ll build that blog article. I’ll make sure it’s in the next

week’s weekly RSS email that gets sent out. Oftentimes those

folks click on those and then they go straight to an assessment.

Our bottom of the funnel’s always that request a free

assessment.

Trent: That was going to be my next question. What’s the main call to

action? You mentioned that you’ve been particularly successful

to the tune of $20,000 a month in generating clients that pay

your retainer. How long did it take you to get from zero to

20,000 a month?

Chris: Actually only about four months. We had all the pieces of the

puzzle we just hadn’t put it together really until early this

year. I read a book called the, god. Is it “The Agency

Manifesto”? I think it’s, “The Marketing Agency Manifesto.” I’ll

make sure that you can have a link to this but it’s basically a

quick read but it has 12 proclamations. Unfortunately, I’m

unable to think of the author’s name right name but basically

one of them is, ‘We will specialize.’ One of them is, ‘We will

charge for our services.’ I just really was inspired by that and

a lot of different things that is said in there is how can we

charge more for our expertise?

We really don’t accept projects anymore unless, like I said

earlier it was a referral or it’s something that we think will

further our business. We’re just very steadfast on that. I’m not

sending out proposals. I will flat out tell you I’m not in the

proposal writing business because I don’t want to spend my days

writing proposals. We are right now a two man shop and we can’t

do that. We really want to do business. Make the verbal

agreement that we’re going to go forward at that time a contract

will be signed and we’ve eliminated the proposal process

entirely. I think that’s allowed us to spend most of our sales

time on getting quality clients and then weeding out those that

must present a proposal to a board and all those extraneous

steps that end up getting in the way.

Trent: What is the average size of your retainer right now?

Chris: Right now it’s about $5,000, $6,000.

Trent: You’re talking roughly four clients that you have on retainer.

Do these clients all go through your funnel and do the call to

action for the assessment that’s at the bottom of your funnel?

Chris: They all filled out the assessment. Some of them were referred

straight to the website and one of them just called me actually

but in equality I guess he requested an assessment. But two of

them came all the way through the top of the funnel.

Trent: When you do this assessment, so I want to make sure that we,

the listeners and myself understand what this assessment is. Is

that them filling out a form on the website with lots of

questions or is that you on Skype with them asking them a bunch

of questions? What is the assessment?

Chris: Sure. I’m really just wanting their information with that form

and then it’s a 20 to 30 minute conversation. We run a

consultative sales process. It’s very defined. I’ve got four

steps basically in the process. Starts with the assessment. I’m

going to identify what your goals are, ask questions. That’s

really a question and answer session. Sometimes if we need to do

a little coaxing to actually do the assessment once we get on

the phone after they fill out the form we’ll set an appointment

for this assessment. The way it’s positioned is that we’re going

to give you some tips on things you can do online, things you

can do in your sales process to improve. No obligation.

It’s just an opportunity for me to give them a few things that

they could change right now and either get more visits to the

website or drastically improve things and it’s an opportunity

for me to really interview the client and understand if it’s the

right fit. Start to identify some of the questions I’ll ask in

the next call.

Trent: All of this stuff is done on the call? You don’t get face to

face with your clients to do this?

Chris: I try not to, even here in town because what it does is it

takes another hour out of my day to go and drive across town and

get in front of someone and it’s just a big waste of everyone’s

time especially with that first call. I really refuse to even

have people out to my office for that first call because I just

want to get a feel for what they’re after. If the first question

they ask is how much does it cost, I know that that’s going to

be a big factor in the whole relationship and it might not work.

Trent: Do you do these calls with video like you and I are doing right

now where you can see each other?

Chris: Typically, what we’ll do is we’ll use Go to Meeting, and I’ll

have their website or lack thereof up on the screen and we’ll do

a screen share.

Trent: If that’s step one. What’s step two?

Chris: Step two, after we have an assessment we’ve identified their

goals, we’ve identified that there is a need and they’ve

identified that they would like to continue talking with us. We

go to a goal setting call where I send them homework beforehand.

They’re going to fill out a lot of different questions. Here’s

where they fill out a lot of questions and it’s basically just a

spreadsheet that asks them the frequency of marketing and

different channels. How often are they blogging? How often are

they performing these X marketing activities and it’s designed

to do a few things to give us an end result of an arbitrary

score, sort of holistic score based on their entries.

Also the process of that prospect filling out this form and

saying, ‘No, I’m not doing any of this stuff,’ it’s a

psychological trigger and it’s sort of an “aha” moment. ‘Oh my

gosh, I’m not doing any of this.’ That’s been really effective.

Trent: Is there any chance that you would share that spreadsheet that

we can make as a downloadable from this episode?

Chris: I can give you a PDF copy of it, yes.

Trent: That would be wonderful. Thank you. For my show notes, what am

I going to call that?

Chris: Let’s call that an assessment questionnaire. This will be

homework between my assessment call and my goal setting call.

Trent: Very helpful. Thank you for that. That’s very generous of you.

What’s number three after that goal call?

Chris: After the goal setting call we get on the phone and we’ve

identified, ‘Hey, we want to increase revenue by $1 million next

year and it’s going to take us three big projects to do it.’

We’ve kind of gone through the process of, ‘Well how many visits

do you have to your website right now? How many more are you

going to need to get? How many leads are being generated by your

website?’ We can reverse engineer a number of visitors that we

need to bring to the website so we’ll have to put together a

plan. That plan will vary based on how effective their website

is right now, how many calls to action we need to add. Are they

doing anything or do they have any offers? Do we need to create

some? That will all kind of go into the last call [inaudible

38:03:]

Trent: What do you call this third call?

Chris: Sort of just a deal presentation or a solution presentation. I

won’t write up a 20-page document but what I will do is, I have

a PowerPoint presentation that has some of this stuff in it

already. I will just manipulate that to show what our plan might

look like. It’ll detail out the services that we would perform

on an ongoing basis and it’s really a visual meeting so we’re

screen sharing that and we’re talking about, ‘Hey, this is the

plan that we’ve put together. Based on the things you told me

this is what we think we can do and this is how long it’s going

to take us to get there and here’s the cost.’ Only after they’ve

said, ‘All right, let’s do it’ will I go and actually draw up a

contract.

Trent: That’s the fourth call?

Chris: Yes. That would be the fourth step.

Trent: You just review the contract, get them to sign it and send it

back to you?

Chris: That’s right.

Trent: How do you collect payment for retainer? Credit card or direct

debit?

Chris: I require a credit card, recurring payment. I found that when

we did not do that they’d come in late, they’d come in early,

they weren’t as reliable. I don’t mind taking a hit on the fee

because it’s peace of mind. There’s no question it’s going to

come in.

Trent: Absolutely. That’s been very interesting and so now you’ve got

to the point, and I promised early in this conversation, at

least I think I did, that we were going to talk about process

automation and how it’s fitting into your business because I

know that having run a service business myself in the past and

now launching another one how efficient you are or aren’t in

your service delivery can make the difference between being

wildly profitable and making no profit whatsoever.

I think a lot of people especially the solopreneurs or even

people who haven’t started yet maybe haven’t had that experience

and they just assume that if I get more revenue I’ll naturally

have more profit. Doesn’t always happen. Can you describe to us

and let’s stay on the thread of a retainer client, so you’ve got

this spreadsheet, you’ve got a solution, you’re going to need to

do all these things, how do you then systematize the delivery of

the deliverables so as to maintain your efficiency?

Chris: During the process of the sales process we’ve already detailed

out exactly what we’re going to do. Typically that’s going to be

creating offers, promoting those offers and then working on lead

generation. I’ve got in my project management system, which they

have access to, I’ve got built in templates for all these things

so once I launch the new marketing persona that we’re going to

craft for this client, let’s say they are managed IT and they’re

performing managed IT services to let’s see, theme parks, right?

You have to solve very specific problems for that theme park IT

manager.

We want to create a construct of that person so I said all that

to say once we create that persona we know we need to deliver an

offer for that persona to download on the website. We work

backwards. I don’t start with the blog posts. I start with the

offers; I start with the personas then the offers, the promoting

blog posts.

I’ve built my project management system the same way. When a

persona is created we know an offer needs to be created. When an

offer is created we know a blog post needs to be written, in

fact eight to ten. It’s automatically going to create all those

tasks for me. This helps me keep in line because I’m prone to

forget things and I have to have a system that allows me to go

back and make sure we’re on track.

The number one thing we’ve done is make all this open to our

clients so we have complete visibility. The clients can see what

we’re doing all the time. As we create these offers they can

comment, like. They can add files; they can contribute as we’re

working. This makes our meetings so much more productive because

we’re not having to recap, ‘Hey here’s everything we did this

week.’ They know what we’ve done this week. That’s already been

established. Let’s just talk about our strategy for next week.

Let’s talk about the results so that we don’t have to spend so

much time educating them on what we’re doing.

Trent: You’re using Podio to make all this happen?

Chris: That’s correct.

Trent: Do you speak to your retainer clients? Is there a weekly

meeting with them just as though you’re their director of

marketing?

Chris: Yes. Weekly or bi-weekly. That’s how often we meet and we

structure our meetings based on the week number so we’ll have a

different style of meeting at the beginning of the month than

from the end of the month. Then during the middle of the month

we’ll have what we call interviews so we are talking about

topics that we’ve identified are going to be good keywords for

them to target. We’ll put an outline out there and just have

them talk about it and we’ll record the session on Go to

Meeting, come back and use that interview content to actually

build the blog post so that each blog post will be in the voice

of that particular business owner or marketing director.

Trent: That is an excellent idea. Did you think that one up or did you

learn that from Marcus?

Chris: Marcus definitely talked about that and we had already been

doing it for a while when I heard him say something about that

and it’s been a great thing. Once I heard him giving it I said,

‘We’re on the right track.’ We implemented processes around

that. Now it makes our meetings a lot more fun, we don’t have to

spend as much time digging up, ‘Oh god, what are we going to

talk about this week’ because I know a lot of agency owners that

have to speak to clients on a regular basis.

You might find yourself struggling to come up with, ‘What are we

going to talk about?’ That was genuinely a problem I used to

have. Not much has changed. We’ve gone up a little bit. This is

really where we thought we were going to be as far as visits,

leads and sales but we have this meeting on the books. Now we

have something to talk about for these meetings and it’s way

more productive and way more fun honestly because people love to

talk about what they do. It makes them happy.

Trent: Let me feed this back because I want to make sure that myself

and the audience has understood this. In these meetings you come

into the meeting with an agenda of keywords that could be

targeted, correct?

Chris: Yes. They’re framed in the form of a question.

Trent: Like give me an example.

Chris: I have a client that is an HVA, commercial HVAC contractor.

People have questions about how to better cool a commercial data

center. ‘How do I keep my data center cool?’ We’ll just come in

with that and have that business owner share their expertise.

Trent: Your team knew that that was a keyword that you should target?

You then do this meeting with them and you ask them that

question, you record the answer so now you have it in his voice.

You transcribe it and edit it and turn it into a post.

Chris: That’s correct.

Trent: For these clients that are paying you the $4,000 to $5,000 per

month, how many posts per month, like what is the deliverable

that they’re getting for the $5,000 a month?

Chris: It depends on the level of retainer, but we don’t suggest

having any less than ten blog posts every month. There are some

graphs that I’ve got in my presentations that show when you get

to 30 blog posts a month, which we’re not even at, but when you

get to that point the leads start coming in like crazy. It’s

just all about having more content out there on Google but we’ll

have anywhere from ten to 20, in some cases 25, blog posts per

month.

Trent: That’s a lot of posts.

Chris: It’s a lot of posts. That’s what it’s all about though is

creating content that is going to get found.

Trent: You’re doing these, so in one of these calls then, if you’re

doing this once per week you must have to have four different

blog posts in mind that you’re interviewing them for, and so

four questions and they’re giving you the answer to those four

questions and those four questions become four different blog

posts.

Chris: That’s right.

Trent: Tell me what the process that goes from recorded answers

through to finished blog posts and are subcontractors playing a

role in any of this anywhere?

Chris: In some cases yes, we use a content marketplace to fill out

questions, if we didn’t have a chance to do interviews and we

look for experts. For instance I have a client that is in the

hockey space and we found a contractor who is awesome at writing

about hockey and he just knows hockey better than I do. We’re in

Texas. I don’t know anything about hockey. It may be different

from up north but we’re Cowboys football, Rangers baseball down

here. We have the Starts, but it’s just not as big of a deal so

we really struggle in that area but we’ve been very successful

with the content we’ve been able to create because we found an

expert to help us. We do have a few contractors in different

verticals.

Trent: Going back to the first part of that question, you’ve got the

recorded answer. You’re not going to use a contractor so do you

then pay a transcription service to transcribe it and then you

or your wife edit that into a post?

Chris: We don’t pay any transcription services. I take a lot of notes

during so I’m bulleting things out and I do this in Podio where

the client can see so as I’m typing they can see all this stuff

go down. Then we have the transcription so that by the end of it

we’ve got a nice bulleted list of maybe 15, 20 bullets of things

that they hit on during the conversation and then we also have

the recording to fall back on. We can go in pretty soon after

that meeting, we like to go ahead and just type it all out. Get

it ready; get it into a finished format.

We might go over one or two passes as an editorial pass and just

clean it up. Make sure we’re matching it up with the right offer

but we’ve typically come up with that offer and matched it up

well before the interview even takes place.

Trent: How long are these posts typically?

Chris: Six hundred to 800 words is our normal rule of thumb.

Trent: If you’re doing, you said ten of these a month or 20 a month

per client?

Chris: Depending on the client it would be minimum ten. I don’t think

we’re doing only ten for anyone but 15 to 25.

Trent: Let’s just use a number of 15. You’ve got, say five clients

doing this. That’s 75 posts per month?

Chris: Yes.

Trent: Written by just you and/or, well not written, edited, crafted

because it’s already there in the transcription.

Chris: Correct.

Trent: That just seems like a boatload of work.

Chris: It’s a lot of work. We’re putting together a growth plan right

now. We don’t envision us doing that forever.

Trent: I was going to say because that doesn’t scale very well is my

thinking.

Chris: Not for the business owner or the agency owner, for sure, but

what it does it doubles as service. You spend this time client

facing, they’re talking about something they love to talk about.

They’re seeing their ideas realized. They’re seeing the results

they’re getting based on that content. It’s a very positive

experience so that client time spent is actually helping us

produce the content so we’re overlapping a little bit there.

Client service.

With our software being so open they can see everything we’re

doing. We minimize the time on the other side of constantly

struggling to prove your worth. I know that a lot of agency

owners are constantly trying to prove their worth so I’ve tried

to eliminate that step by making everything as transparent as

possible.

Trent: I think that’s very smart. That was a big challenge that we had

back when we ran the IT company because if the computer network

didn’t break, why am I paying you $10,000 this month? Well,

because it didn’t break but it was challenging at times. Where

do I want to go next? Yes, so what strategies do you do to

promote all of this content that you’re creating for clients? Is

it purely an SEO strategy or are you going to town on social

networks?

Chris: We go to town on social networks. I’ve got very specific

numbers of posts for each client that we’re going to make on

each day. For instance our own, we treat ourselves as a client

so the exact same processes you’ll see for our clients are being

used for us. I’ll interview with my wife. My wife and I co-own

the agency together, we work together so we’ll have interviews

together just to kind of extract this content. We find it’s the

best way but for our business, our Twitter account, we post 20

to 25 times a day. Almost every hour and I found that when we

did that we increased now, month over month, 20 percent every

single month in followers. That same growth in my retweet reach,

so our reach is growing at the same pace. If we drop down to 15,

that growth lessens quite a bit. I found that’s optimal for our

business.

Trent: What tool do you use to schedule Twitter posts and get

analytics?

Chris: We use HubSpot for pretty much all of our marketing automation.

That’ll be different for each client. Sometimes the client

preference is simply, ‘I don’t want to have that many posts go

out on my Twitter account.’ That’s understandable. We can show

them, ‘Hey, this is how you get results,’ but we can’t always

convince 100 percent.

Now Facebook’s a different story. We found three to five

different posts every day is appropriate for some and then in

some cases it’s only one.

Trent: Are you sharing other people’s content like in your own Twitter

account, are you only tweeting out your own stuff or do you

share other people’s stuff as well?

Chris: We do both and there are a lot of different schools of thought

on this. A lot of people will say, ‘Share 80 percent of other

people’s content and only 20 percent of yours.’ I found honestly

that’s not the way to go. We’ll schedule out 18 to 20 posts of

our 24, of our own content. We’ll spend time interacting with

other people as sort of an alternate to that plan of sharing

everyone’s content. We’ll retweet. We’ll reply to people’s

tweets. We will generally share the love online but tweeting out

other agencies content, we’re not doing that. I generally don’t

want, I’d rather get the leads. I don’t believe that’s selfish.

If somebody writes a really good article that I used, I found,

‘Hey, how do we use this marketing automation tool in this way?’

If I found value in that, absolutely I’m going to retweet that

because I found personal value but typically we’re going to

write about things as we discover them and that’s the content we

want to promote.

Trent: You guys are doing a lot of writing.

Chris: You have to. It’s content marketing, right Trent?

Trent: Absolutely. You know what? Writing’s better than cold calling.

Chris: That’s true.

Trent: I gave a talk here in Boise just last week. I was given zero

notice. Guy calls me up the night before. He had broken his

tooth and he was supposed to speak and I had lunch with him that

day, just met him. He said, ‘Can you go talk for me?’ There was

like 80 small business owners that were in the room, mostly I’m

going to say three person companies and fewer. A lot of

solopreneurs in there.

The beginning of my talk I asked, I said, ‘How many people here

know what content marketing is?’ What would you guess, let’s

just say there was about, about 70 people in the room. How many

hands do you think went up?

Chris: I’m going to say not many, right?

Trent: Like six. Then I said, ‘How many people here are cold calling?’

Three quarters of the room put their hands in the air. I said,

‘How many people here receive cold calls?’ About half of the

room’s hands went up. I said, ‘How many people who receive them

like getting them?’ Nobody’s hands went up. Then I said, ‘Of

those of you who are making them, how many are getting results?’

Nobody’s hands went up. I’m like, ‘Stop. You’re just pissing

people off and you’re not getting results.’

Chris: Exactly. You’ve got to make warm calls, right?

Trent: Absolutely. So much more I could talk about that, but I’m going

to make a blog post actually about that, that talk that I gave.

Folks will be able to get that at BrightIdeas.co. Let me look at

my questions here and see where I want to go with this.

For the folks who are listening to this and they’re thinking,

‘This is content marketing and marketing automation thing seems

like it’s a pretty good idea, but man oh man does it ever seem

overwhelming. There’s like so much stuff to do.’ A lot of times

people get overwhelmed, they don’t do anything. What advice

would you give, Chris to someone who wants to get started? Who’s

the cold caller and they want to stop being the cold caller and

become a content marketer.

Chris: Start answering folks’ questions online. I will not shy away

from spreading Marcus Sheridan’s advice there. That’s the big

thing because it solves a few problems, well, it solves your

customer’s problems, right? It also solves the problem of what

do I write about? That’s the biggest challenge that I had at the

beginning. I’d write about what my customers are asking me and

you should do the same. Start writing. Don’t worry about what

domain name you’re going to use. Don’t worry about getting a

logo. Don’t worry about getting business cards. If you’re trying

to start a business don’t let any of that get in your way and

just pick something. Just put something out there. Don’t worry

about the design because Google doesn’t care about the design.

[inaudible 57:16]

Trent: You can host it on yourname.com.

Chris: Sure. Anything. That, ultimately it doesn’t matter because

that’s not what people are going to be typing into Google. If

you’re truly going to attack content marketing you’re going to

be attacking questions people type into Google or phrases people

type into Google. They’re not going to be Googling for your

website address, at least that’s not going to be the effect

content marketing has for you, so start writing. Start answering

questions and pick a vertical. Pick an industry that you want to

target because there are a ton of content marketing agencies, if

we’re talking to agency owners, there are a lot of content

marketing agencies, inbound marketing agencies. It’s becoming a

saturated market. It’s not a differentiator anymore so pick a

vertical.

Trent: Absolutely. Is there anything that you thought we should have

talked about in this interview which I’ve neglected to ask you

about? Anything that has worked exceptionally well for you or a

big mistake that you made that you learned a lot from? Anything

at all that we’ve missed that you think we should talk about

before we close out?

Chris: Sure. I think that the biggest mistake I made at the very

beginning was relying on marketing automation and not

remembering that each piece of automated action and all that

stuff really requires a human touch. That’s why I spend so much

time on LinkedIn personally answering questions. You can’t just

set it and forget it. A lot of material online would lead you to

believe that. Remember that each person that you’re trying to

get as a lead is also a real person and they’ve got their own

challenges, their own problems that need to be solved. Start

identifying with them.

Speak with these folks, even if they’re someone who’s not

qualified pick up the phone every once in a while and ask them,

‘Hey, how’d you find us? What did you find valuable in the

content that you read and that you downloaded?’ I do some of

that. I like to spend time just speaking with people even if I

know it’s not a good fit, just understand what challenges they

have and really work with them to better understand. That helps

me build out better lead nurturing sequences, helps me send

better emails. It helps me identify better prospects and that’s

what you have to do over time to improve your efficiency is to

spend time with the folks who are going to be a better fit for

you.

Trent: Absolutely. Those are your biggest cheerleaders and with the

80, 20 rule they’re also going to be responsible for 80 percent

of your revenue.

Chris: That’s right.

Trent: Chris, thank you so much for making this time to be on the

Bright Ideas Podcast. It has been a good time to interview you,

rather a lot of fun to interview you. Download [sounds like],

the episode number of this but I’m just going to pull it up and

so I can rattle that off. Actually I’ll put it in the, I’ll do a

recording here just after you and I are finished so again,

thanks so much for being on the show.

Chris: Cool. Thanks man. I really appreciate your time.

Trent: All right, so that wraps it up for this episode. To get to the

show notes where you can download all of the things that Chris

and I talked about, go to BrightIdeas.co/80. It’s just the

number 80. Then the other thing that if you could do is go to

BrightIdeas.co/love, there you will find a prepopulated tweet

and you’ll also find a link that will take you to the iTunes

store where you can leave some feedback for the show.

I would really appreciate it if you take a moment and do that

because the more feedback that the show gets, of course the

higher it goes in the iTunes store and the more exposure that it

gets and the more entrepreneurs that we can help to massively

boost their businesses with all the bright ideas that are shared

by my guests here on the show.

That’s it for this episode. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid. Thank

you so much for being a listener. I’ll see you or hear you or

we’ll see you again in another episode very soon. Take care.

About Chris Handy

ChrisHandyChris Handy is the Founder & CEO of Thinkhandy, a sales and marketing alignment consultancy in Fort Worth, TX.

Clients working with Thinkhandy find a helpful partner dedicated to shortening their sales cycle and generating more qualified leads.

We create a much more efficient business development environment with an aligned marketing and sales strategy.

 

 

 

Digital Marketing Strategy: Robert Rose on How the Content Marketing Institute Uses Email Marketing to Land Consulting Clients

This podcast is a real treat. Robert Rose is the second guest I’ve had from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), which is virtually an institution of knowledge on content marketing. Robert is CMI’s Chief Strategist there, and I definitely learned some new strategies taht I’m looking forward to sharing with you!

CMI’s stated goal is to advance the practice of content marketing, and one of the ways they do this is by training their consulting clients.

Robert walks us through the process they use to turn a brand new lead into a paying client, including details of their funnel and what they do if a prospect doesn’t buy.

He also shares some strategies that can significantly inflate the reach of your content as he walks us through how and when to use press releases for posts, and how to cross post influencers’ content.

That’s not all. When you listen to this interview, you’ll hear Robert and I talk about:

  • (2:45) Introductions
  • (4:45) An overview of how they are attracting consulting clients
  • (10:00) An overview of how they track where their leads come from
  • (11:55) What happens if their consulting leads don’t buy
  • (17:45) An overview of how to structure an agency funnel
  • (20:30) The different types of registration forms and how to use them
  • (22:45) An overview of the BrightIdeas funnel, and how it could be improved
  • (29:45) How a secondary call to action mid-funnel can improve the buyer journey
  • (31:45) Traffic or conversion, which is easier to increase?
  • (35:15) How to attract other writers
  • (38:45) How to engage a new contributing writer
  • (40:45) How & why to do a press release for a new post

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

About Robert Rose

Robert-headshot-2011-color-medium-300x240Robert is the Chief Strategist for the Content Marketing Institute, and Senior Contributing Analyst for Digital Clarity Group.

Robert is the author of the book Managing Content Marketing, which spent two weeks as a top ten marketing book on Amazon.com.  As a recognized expert in content marketing strategy, digital media and the social Web, Robert innovates creative and technical strategies for a wide variety of clientele.  He’s helped large companies such as 3M, ADP, AT&T, KPMG, Staples, PTC and Petco tell their story more effectively through the Web. He’s worked to help develop digital marketing efforts for entertainment and media brands such as Dwight Yoakam, Nickelodeon and NBC. And, he’s helped marketers at smaller organizations such as East Harlem Tutorial Program, Coburn Ventures and Hippo to amplify their story through Content Marketing and Social Web Strategies.

He is a featured writer for the online magazines iMedia Connection, Fierce Content Management and CMSWire and also a featured author in the book “Enterprise 2.0 How Technology, E-Commerce and Web 2.0 Are Transforming Business Virtually.

An early Internet pioneer, Robert has more than 15 years of experience, and a track record of helping brands and businesses develop successful Web and content marketing strategies.

Digital Marketing Strategy: Andrew Dymski on How He Launched a Successful Marketing Agency Right out of College (part 2)

If you want proof that you don’t need decades of experience and a huge Rolodex full of clients in order to start a marketing agency, look no further. Andrew and his colleagues at Guavabox launched an agency right out of college, and by all measures are on track to have a tremendously successful business.

Guavabox does an impressive job of generating content marketing. And, more than almost anyone I’ve spoken with, they not only understand the importance of list segmentation, but they provide an overview of how they’ve segmented their list, and how this segmentation has helped them identify their hottest prospects, and appropriately nurture and convert their leads into paying clients.

In addition, Andrew explains the thinking behind, and validation of, their business model, sharing insights helpful to any startup. There was so much goodness in this interview that I had to break it into two parts.

If you missed Part 1, you’ll want to check it out to hear Andrew and I talk about:

  • (3:30) Introductions
  • (5:50) Why the old model of web design doesn’t scale
  • (8:30) An overview of financial results
  • (10:00) His business philosophy and how it played a critical role in their launch
  • (13:30) How they validated their business model
  • (16:30) How taking on a new client went wrong
  • (21:00) How they picked their niche
  • (25:30) How they are generating leads
  • (27:30) How blogging plays a role in lead generation
  • (29:30) How they developed their personas
  • (35:30) An overview of outbound marketing

.. And be sure to check out Part 2 below, where we discuss:

  • (3:00) An overview of various nurturing campaigns
  • (7:00) An overview of how they’re using personas to segment their list
  • (13:00) An overview of when and how they decide to follow up with each lead
  • (16:30) An overview of how they are changing their business model to a retainer fee model
  • (21:00) An overview of their retainer plans
  • (12:40) How they report results (traffic & leads) and what they’re planning for the month ahead
  • (25:00) How they manage client expectations
  • (28:00) How they are producing blog content
  • (31:00) How they are using contractors
  • (33:00) An overview of how they are in track with their goals

Resources Mentioned

Inbound Marketing 101 Ebook
Zerys.com
ClearBloggingSolutions.com
Guavabox.com
Best Buyer Formula

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

Transcript

Trent: Hey there bright idea hunters, welcome to the Bright Ideas

Podcast. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid, and this is the podcast

for marketing agencies, marketing consultants and entrepreneurs

who want to discover how to use content marketing and marketing

automation to massively boost their business without massively

boosting the amount of hours that they have to work every single

week.On the show with me today is Andrew Dymski, and this is part two of a

two part series that Andrew and I did. If you missed the first

part, you can get to it by going to BrightIdeas.co/74, and in

this episode we’re going to continue the discussion that we had,

where he is explaining to us how he is building, very

successfully I might add, his marketing agency GuavaBox.In this second part we’re going to be talking about the very creative

and intelligent ways that he is nurturing and converting his

leads to customers. We’re also going to be talking about how he

know when to follow up with and who to follow up with out of all

the leads that are coming into his funnel.We’re going to talk about an overview into how they’re changing their

business from a fee based business, rather like a fee per

project based business to a retainer fee income based business

and how that’s having a wonderfully positive effect on your cash

flow as you might imagine, and we’re also going to talk about

how he reports to his clients all the good stuff that they’re

doing for them so that those clients have a high level of

motivation to keep on paying that retainer on an ongoing basis,

to produce that long term client relationship of course that we

all want and need to make our businesses grow.So before we get to that just wanted to very quickly talk to you

about a Bright Ideas product, if you are at all struggling when

it comes to business to business lead generation, that’s an area

where I have extensive experience and I’ve created a product

called the Best Buyer Formula.You can get to the sales page at BrightIdeas.co/BBF, and in that

video based course, it’s delivered in a membership site, that

you’re going to see just a treasure trove of content that

explains to you exactly how I built my last business and how I’m

building this one in terms of lead generation. Like with all my

products I stand behind it with a 100% money back guarantee, so

if you get access and you think that it’s not for you no

worries, just send an email to my team and we will give you a

refund, no questions asked.So with all that said, thank you so much for tuning in and please

join me in welcoming Andrew back for part two.All right Andrew welcome back for part two of this interview with

Bright Ideas and yourself, for your firm GuavaBox which is an

inbound marketing agency. If you missed part one folks you can

get at it by going to BrightIdeas.co/74, and in part one we

talked a whole lot about how Andrew and his two cofounders

launched his business, how they picked their niche, how they

launched with what we call the minimum viable product, how

they’re generating their leads, there’s a whole bunch of really

good stuff in there in that half hour interview, and now we’re

going to pick up right where we left off.

So you mentioned that you’re getting leads, a lot of leads from your

blog. You also mentioned from referrals and some other things. I

don’t imagine that everyone is ready to buy right away.

Andrew: Sure.

Trent: So what’re you doing to nurture and convert? And if you like

you can also talk about how you’re doing this for your

customers, because I imagine it’s not terribly different than

how you’re doing it for yourself.

Andrew: No it’s not. Again just following the same line that we

prescribe for our clients is we’re HubSpot partners and we use

their workflow tool to kind of lay out lead nurturing sequences.

And the way that HubSpot is built if anyone isn’t familiar with

their product, but it’s a marketing database first so you, as

leads come in they kind of fill into this marketing database and

then it kind of watches their behavior and tracks the different

content that they’ve looked at the content that they’ve

downloaded, emails that they’ve clicked on and clicked through,

all these different data points to help create a smart marketing

system.

So we can go in and set different life cycle stages within the

software, so if someone downloads a what to expect in a

partnership with GuavaBox eBook, we’re going to respond probably

with an email right away, just introducing ourselves, a more

personal touch. But if someone downloads Inbound Marketing 101,

kind of a higher level offer, based on some of the form fields

they will be entered into, just a lead nurturing sequence, just

an email drip sequence basically, like you could set up through

MailChimp or any other email tool you may use. So we use the

nurturing to kind of follow up with people and keep our finger

on the pulse of what they’re clicking through, what’s

interesting them, so that’s how we nurture right now.

Trent: Okay so let me make sure, I want to feed that back and make

sure that I understand and we’ll go to the website here. So

someone on your sidebar, it says subscribe to the GuavaBox blog,

when an email address goes into there, what happens? Are they

just getting blog updates from that point forward, because

that’s its own follow-up sequence correct?

Andrew: Correct. So there, when someone subscribes from our blog we’re

only going to send them blog articles, so that’s a really top of

the funnel lead in our system, so from a follow-up standpoint

there whenever you get a new blog post from us you’re going to

have an opportunity to download an eBook from us, right now it’s

Inbound Marketing 101, kind of a brief overview of what

Inbound’s all about, and gives them more detail.

So if they’re reading our blog, they’re probably going to be

interested in Inbound 101, and that’s kind of the generic first

offer that we offer people who come to the site. And then if

someone downloads say Inbound 101, now they’re kind of a

marketing qualified lead in our funnel and they’re going to get

a different sequence of responses from us, and again it’s based

on those personas. We’ve got a best describes me field in our

form.

And it’s a CEO is looking to increase sales, a marketing manager

who’s looking for a boost, other marketing agencies so depending

on what that field result is right there, they’re going to get

entered into a different lead nurturing sequence and that’s how

our system’s built right now.

Trent: Okay, so this is the offer that I see at the bottom of . . .

I’m assuming it’s every blog post, that green box with a red

button, get started with the free guide correct?

Andrew: Well the offer’s going to change a little bit depending on what

the blog post topic is, so if we’re writing about personas it’s

going to be kind of a buyer persona guide that we have down

there, we cycle between three and four top of the funnel offers

at the bottom of our blog post.

Trent: Okay, and so when your segment, because segmentation’s

unbelievably important, your segmenting by number of employees

and this field called best describes me, so speak to that again

if you would. So let’s say that I choose marketing manager who

needs a boost versus CEO slash owner who needs sales, how is the

experience in your funnel going to be different for me as a

result of one or the other of those choices?

Andrew: Okay, let’s think back to our personas again, if we’ve got

cutting edge Chris, Chris is the CEO of a company, it’s a

pretty, it’s a young and growing company that’s looking to

expand, they’re looking for a new source of leads that’s going

to help throttle their growth and a company that we can scale

with as well. So what kind of information is he looking for?

He wants to know return on investment, he wants to know what kind of

leads he can expect, far more metric driven, straight to the

point kind of stuff, so our content to Chris is usually shorter

than our content would be to the marketing manager. In the

marketing manager we share more tactical information, because

they could be attempting to do inbound on their own right now,

maybe they’re a HubSpot customer, [Marketo] or they’re just

trying to use WordPress by themselves, whatever it is. So

they’re going to be interested in more like how are you driving

leads to our website, whereas the CEO just wants to know are you

driving leads to my website and what kind of return am I going

to see from the money that I’m giving you. So that’s how we use

personas to kind of break up the type of message that we

communicate to our leads.

Trent: Now that’s pretty smart by the way, so bravo to you for that.

Andrew: Thank you.

Trent: Now the content that you’re delivering, is it, are you

basically just writing short emails that then direct them back

to specific posts which would be relevant to the persona that

they selected, or is all of the content delivered in an email so

they don’t have to click through?

Andrew: No we’re typically, we have some emails that are just within

the email, but we’re primarily linking people back to landing

pages, providing them another opportunity to convert on our

website. Another powerful that HubSpot gives you is progressive

profiling in their forms, essentially what that is, is if

somebody has downloaded an offer from your website and they’ve

entered their first name, last name, email address, their

company name and their company URL. We don’t need to ask what

their company name and company URL are again.

If we want to keep the number of fields shorter, we’re going to ask

them a different set of questions. So it’s, their database looks

at we can build out ten questions and if three of them are

already answered they just kind of bump the next three up so

then we might get employee number, or the biggest marketing

struggle, questions like that that help us to get more

information and identify their pain point more clearly through

the automation process.

So we want to take them from the email to a landing page and

sometimes we’ll send them back to a website but the primary goal

is to get them to a landing page to offer them another piece of

content that can help them solve whatever problem they’re

facing.

Trent: Can you give me an example of one of those landing pages? Let’s

say have you got one that you could rattle off for the CEO-owner

persona.

Andrew: Yeah. Well we don’t structure the landing pages. They’re going

to be structured pretty much the same, in the way that we lay it

out. But the email copy is what we vary based on the persona.

Trent: Okay.

Andrew: So an email, we want to get say a CEO to click through, we

might only have three or four sentences, break it up into like

three paragraph breaks with only a couple sentences on there,

and then that is going to get them to click through and then,

I’ll pull up one of our pages, one of our landing pages right

now and kind of walk you through how we use personas to

construct that.

So if someone just goes to GuavaBox.com, and you can go down to the

bottom, in free marketing resources section and click on all

online marketing sources, here’s just a collection of all the

eBooks. Everyone’s just welcome to download as many as they

want, I hope they can help you out.

Trent: Right. I’ll make sure if you’re driving in your car right now

don’t worry about writing any of this down, all you’ve got to do

is come to the post which for this part two episode will be at

BrightIdeas.co/75, and I’ll put links to all this stuff.

Andrew: So when we build a landing page, we understand the personas are

going to read things differently, so in our like H1 tag we want

a straight to the points text that a CEO is going to relate

with. So he’s just breezing through, so in our Inbound Marketing

101 landing page, which is like I said our top of the funnel

offer, the H1 tag is reach new customers with inbound marketing.

That’s going to relate to a marketer but it’s also going to

relate to a CEO because at the end of the day that’s what they

want their marketing to deliver, is new customers.

And then when you drill down into the H2 copy it says learn how an

inbound marketing game plan can bring all marketing efforts into

focus and grow your business. So that helps more of the

analytical thinker, helps them understand more precisely what

this eBook’s going to help them deliver, and then you go down.

And we’ve got bullet points that break down specific tactics

that the marketer’s going to want to understand on how this

value’s going to be delivered.

Trent: This is a lot of content to produce, all these eBooks. Were you

able to take generic eBooks that HubSpot produced and then just

put your branding on them?

Andrew: We have, some of them, their partner program is Out of Sight,

and I recommend every marketing agency at least look into it

because the support that they provide to you is outstanding

beyond just learning their software, they give you offers that

you can convert and co-brand with them. So I’d say about half of

our offers are cobranded offers, and then we have original

offers that we have just created out of problems that have seen

arise.

Trent: Interesting. What does it cost you a month to have HubSpot?

Andrew: We are on the professional package so it’s $600 a month, for

  1. Obviously that’s a number that’s going to scare away or just

chase away smaller agencies, but we were able to pace up towards

  1. And then once you begin to get clients who are using

HubSpot, they have basically an affiliate referral program where

you get 20 percent back from any package that you’re able to

sell. So if you’re able to sell, you’re able to basically get

your portal for free after not too long.

Trent: Yeah, okay. All right so when people are downloading these

various . . . you’ve got all these offers that are in your

funnel, and then I would imagine that you’re doing some type of

like, where I’m going with this is how do you know when to

follow up with who?

Andrew: Great question. When you’re getting started and leads are just

flowing into your system, you don’t really have time for the

lead nurturing sequence to go all the way through. You know if a

company downloads Inbound 101 and we click over to their website

and every day we’re going through the leads that have converted,

and so we see their website we see their in our niche or they’re

a company that we wouldn’t mind working with then we’re just

going to give them a call. You know reach out or send them an

email, say, “Hey, this is Andrew from GuavaBox. I notice that

you were on our website yesterday and downloaded Inbound

Marketing 101. Just wanted to follow up and see if you had any

other questions or if there’s anything I can help you out with.”

And you know that gets a conversation started.

Sometimes people deny that they’ve ever been there. They say, oh I

don’t know what you’re talking about or . . . it’s crazy. But

other times you’ve got people who are really open to having a

conversation with you and that can kind of move the sales

process along just by reaching out. And that’s why we’re in the

inbound marketing is because there is that connection, you can

understand what pages they’ve looked at, you can look at the

type of offer that they’ve downloaded and that from a sales side

that gives you an insight into the kind of problem that they’re

facing. So then as a salesperson you can really offer some

legitimate value to their business, you’re not just interrupting

them with a cold call.

Trent: Absolutely. So I noticed that you do ask for, especially for

your lead magnets that are further in the funnel, you do ask for

phone number and URL.

Andrew: Yeah.

Trent: Have you split tested at all to see the effect on your

conversion rate by asking for those two extra pieces, because I

see that you make it mandatory?

Andrew: Yeah we do, because at the end of the day if someone’s not

willing to give me their company name or their phone number,

it’s not really a lead that I’m ready to follow up with at that

point. So we have like a 30 percent conversion rate, average on

our landing pages, and that’s bringing a good amount of leads

right now that we’re comfortable with. And so if someone’s at

the point where they’re ready to put in their phone number,

that’s great you know and if they’re not at that point yet,

that’s not a lead that we want in our funnel right now.

Trent: But let’s be clear for the people that are listening, people

can get into the top of your funnel with just first name last

name and email.

Andrew: Exactly.

Trent: So they’re only seeing these deeper offers if they are either

reading the emails that you’re already sending to them, or by

their own effort are coming back to your blog and then clicking

the calls to action at the beginning of a blog post, and then

“opting in” again to get this lead magnet that is deeper into

your funnel. So it’s not as though you’re not getting the lead

at all, you just want, and it’s very smart. You’re basically

saying I don’t want to actually talk to this person until

they’ve provided me with more than their name and email but

you’ve already got their name and email.

Andrew: Correct. And I’m going to communicate with them with the

information that they give me, so essentially they give us

permission to market to them through email but not phone, and

we’re just going to market to them through email, until they’re

ready.

Trent: Smart, smart, smart. All right. So very, very early, I think it

was in part one of the interview or it might have even been

before we hit the record button, you talked about how you’re

transitioning the services that you’re offering from you know

just web design to, I want you to describe what it’s going to.

Andrew: Sure. So we started out, again it was a yes-man business where,

“Can you guys do website design?” Yeah. Can you understand

twitter? Yeah. Can you do YouTube videos? Yeah. We did viewer

production, kind of the whole gamut of isolated online marketing

activities. And then as we continued to learn and grow we found

out that none of these activities really drive ROI until they

can be connected together into a system that makes sense, and

that’s going to drive new business in a smart way.

So we wanted to shift to a retainer model business, and that’s kind

of where we started exploring different partnerships and we

ended up going with HubSpot because they provided the best

support, the best technology to help us facilitate that

transition.

So essentially what it is, is we were just a website design agency,

we would do basic WordPress web design, we would do Twitter

strategies, Facebook strategies where we would just write up

basically smart stuff like, just, not smart just whatever you’d

find, like best practices that sort of thing, and apply them to

the client and deliver those sources to them in a way that would

help them kind of do their own marketing.

We would tweet for some clients, we would post on Facebook for some

clients, we would do Facebook design, Twitter design, YouTube

background design, all that kind of stuff, but now the shift

into inbound marketing is really . . . it starts with the

philosophy and it’s no longer a project based system but now

you’re trying to sign up with customers for six month to twelve

month retainer relationships.

So now you’re really aligning yourself as a partner instead of just a

repairman or you know a painter basically who’s coming in and

painting one room and leaving. We want to work alongside with a

company to help on kind of the 50,000 foot level, establish the

growth goals, the revenue goals, get on the same page and figure

out where they’re trying to grow their company, where

opportunities are, and then create a marketing strategy that

helps them get there, and then deliver that strategy over the

twelve month relationship. So that’s kind of what the model

looks like, and then…

Trent: Go ahead.

Andrew: So that’s the model and tactically, where sometimes it is a

website redesign, sometimes it’s just putting a HubSpot portal

on a sub-domain of a client’s website and just starting to blog

and create landing pages and create emails and stuff like that,

it can kind of, we haven’t completely lost our website design

roots yet and that’s been a good skill to have when you

augmented into a retainer relationship.

Trent: Okay so I’m on your retainer pricing page and I see fast,

faster and fastest which I love so much better than bronze,

silver and gold. One is 3000 a month, one is 5000 a month and

one is 10,000 a month. When did you start offering retainer?

Andrew: We started offering retainer just over a year ago. And it took

. . . it’s a learning curve for us and it’s a selling curve as

well because it’s a lot easier for someone to sign up for a one

time $2000 website than it is for someone to sign up for 10,000

a month to work with a company that they don’t really know yet.

And so when you’re just getting started in a new line of business,

it’s basically restarting the business for us because we had to

prove a different line of value to clients, and we really

started just by doing it to ourselves and being like we can show

people our blog at least and show them what it looks like.

And so essentially the pricing model is built off of, we want to

direct it more and more towards value delivered, right now it’s

very activity driven, we don’t think that’s, that’s kind of the

next stage of where we want to go is more value driven, to focus

again on the growth that that CEO really cares about at the end

of the day. So again get it up and get it out but our pricing

model is something that we’re continuing to modify and push

forward as we grow.

Trent: I remember when I had my technology services company I went

through the same transition that you did, at the time in the

industry the common way to bill was per hour to go and do

technology projects, and I realized that that wasn’t ever going

to build me a company that I could sell for any meaningful

amount of money, because there’s no ongoing, recurring revenue

and so we switched and it was painful in the beginning.

We didn’t know exactly how to price things and selling it was a lot

harder but years down the road when we had $80,000 a month

coming in the front door on the first day of every month that

made life a whole lot easier and ultimately why I was able to

sell it for the amount that I did, which was a good amount for

sure. So I applaud you for doing this, because it’s going to

absolutely make your life so much better down the road. How’s it

going so far, have you sold any retainer stuff yet?

Andrew: We have. We have three clients up and running on our retainer

model, which is awesome.

Trent: Is that on which level? Fast, faster or fastest?

Andrew: That is fast and faster.

Trent: So you got eleven grand a month coming in the beginning of

every month.

Andrew: Yeah. It’s transformed our business.

Trent: I bet.

Andrew: And it’s exhilarating too because the clients that we have

we’re delivering results for and so they’re happy. And when you

deal with a bigger ticket client, one who can afford that kind

of price tag per month, they’re going to be less nit picky about

the little things, they’re going to trust you more because I

don’t know when you charge more for something people seem to

think you’ve got your act together more than when you charge

less.

Trent: Absolutely.

Andrew: So they’re going to trust you more, and everything’s seems to

flow smoother once the prices start to go up.

Trent: So how do you, because people get excited in the beginning and

sure, yeah they sign up, but then you’ve got to keep them,

you’ve got to retain those clients. How are you reporting to

your client the value that you’re delivering for fast, the fast

level or any of the levels for that matter? What specifically

are you sending to them?

Andrew: Touch points is huge, having a point of contact that you can

get in touch with on a regular basis that makes time for you,

and setting that expectation up front is something that we’re

going to continue to do a better job of. But at the end of each

month we get together and we look at traffic and we look at

leads, we outline what we’re going to do in the next month,

based on the strategy that we put together at the beginning.

We’ve got to start everything with an inbound marketing game plan

that outlines based on the terms that they want to be known for

and the keywords that they want to rank for and stuff like that.

We put together a blog strategy, and then as we go and we see

what works and what doesn’t work very well we kind of tweak that

along the way.

And obviously we haven’t run someone, we haven’t had a twelve month

client yet so we’re still tweaking those game plans as we go and

they’re getting smarter with every month. But essentially we

review traffic and we review leads, because we’re not a sales

augmenter, we’re a lead augmenter and so at the end of the day

it’s our client’s responsibility to close those sales, so we can

deliver higher quality leads than they used to get, and those

leads just get more and more qualified as time goes, and we

understand their business better and understand the way that

visitors act on their website.

But visitor traffic and traffic to lead ratios are big for us,

looking at individual landing pages to get visitor to lead

conversion ratio, and optimizing calls to action and stuff like

that to try to improve click through rates, we kind of hit on

all of those different areas, all of those key metrics and key

performance indicators.

Trent: Now I would imagine that each of the three people that you have

on retainer now probably weren’t doing much in terms of digital

before they engaged with you. Is that correct?

Andrew: Wide, wide gamut. One client didn’t even have a website up, the

other one was spending like 5K a month in PPC, and just not

seeing any quality results from that spend.

Trent: I’m guessing that’s the guy that signed up for the faster

level?

Andrew: Yeah, I mean they already, they understand the value, and

they’re online and they just know that they need help, and

that’s a good place for us to start.

Trent: Okay, so for the folks that didn’t even have a website and here

you are showing them traffic and you’re showing them leads and

you’re showing them all this stuff. What’s their reaction when

they see that relative to the three grand they’re paying you?

Andrew: It depends, and it leans back on that expectation that you set

up front and this is another part that we keep rolling with and

saying we’ve got to do a better job of that next time is just

outlining what they should expect. Because sometimes it’s like

well I’m not getting any calls just yet like what’s going on,

well we’ve only been working for two and a half months, we

started from zero, we need time because we do everything

organically, right now we don’t have any paid elements of our

offerings, not against PPC or Facebook ads or anything like

that, just it’s not part of our offerings right now.

So just setting, well having honest conversations because again if

we’re going to be marketing partners and work with you over the

next 12 months we need to be able to be transparent and honest

with each other and just be able to communicate authentically

essentially.

Trent: Setting expectations is such a valid point because if somebody

were to hire you as an employee to be their marketing person, no

one would expect that within a month of hiring you that you had

radically transformed their website and traffic and leads and

blah, blah, blah. And yet, obviously enough, some people that

hire a marketing agency expect that within 30 days, they’re

going to be just cranking.

Andrew: Exactly.

Trent: Why do you suppose that is and how do you manage that? What

conversation do you have at the beginning to make sure that you

don’t end up in that hole?

Andrew: We like to set the vision that it’s going to be four to six

months before you start seeing any real results from this. So I

mean from the beginning of our sales process, we’re linking back

to the growth goals, where the company wants to be in 12 months,

what dreams are associated with those goals, why do you want to

get to that point, what happens if you don’t get to that point.

And so then when we start delivering with a client we can lean

back on those numbers, and really it begins to point more and

more towards an organizational change and setting mutual back

and forth expectations at the beginning.

That’s part of our contract to is here is here’s what we’re going to

be delivering to you as a marketing partner and here’s what you

need to deliver to us, because it’s a two-way relationship. If

you want to make real change and grow as a business, that’s not

going to happen over night and you’re going to need to change

the status quo, that’s going to need to be altered and we need

to know do you have enough skin in the game here to make a

strategy like this work.

Trent: Yeah, if they’re not going to change what they’re doing and

they’re just going to sit back arms crossed and say okay magic

boy do your stuff, that’s probably not going to work.

Andrew: No, it’s not and that’s the type of client you get when you

just do one off projects. But if you want to shift to a retainer

model, that’s the kind of client that you need to be comfortable

enough in yourself and in your business model to say you know

what, I can refer you to a couple people who might be able to

help you out but I don’t think we’re the best fit right now.

Trent: Yes indeed. And when you’re doing your inbound marketing

yourself and these people are coming to you and they’re raising

their hand by downloading various reports that’s going to

obviously make converting that sale a whole lot easier.

Andrew: Exactly because the expectation there, I mean it’s a small

expectation set but still they’re the one coming to you for the

information and so inbound marketing at the end of the day

positions companies and agencies as thought leaders and the way

you structure your sales process following that can even lean in

more on that fact and position you instead of a sales person as

more of an adviser into their growth model.

Trent: How are you doing in terms of blogging for your clients?

Andrew: So we batch all of the titles based on keywords, and then we

work with our clients to get kind of the guts to most of those

blog posts, whether that’s bullet points or we’re going to start

experimenting with just audio recordings, so having them like

record a quick clip on their iPhone or something like that,

talking about a subject that we want to write a blog post about,

and then we send those out to different contract writers that we

work with.

And then they take the content, they do some research, and then they

tweak it into like a 400, 500 word blog post, and then we send

that to the client, get the review, and when they give the okay

it gets scheduled to get posted on their blog.

Trent: Okay. So how many clients, so right now I guess you’re

producing blog content on an ongoing basis for your three

retainer clients, yes?

Andrew: Correct.

Trent: Okay. The system that you’re using to manage the producing, the

blog content and the editorial calendar and getting it approved

and pushing it out to the clients blog, I mean is that kind of

spreadsheets and email right now?

Andrew: Right now that is we use [Podeo] internally, it’s an awesome

free platform where you can kind of spin up your own custom work

spaces, and structure your workflow the way you want to. That’s

gone pretty well for us, from the client side it’s just email.

We’ve experimented with Basecamp, but haven’t stuck wit that as

a long term solution. We’re actually working on our own custom

software solution right now that would facilitate client

communication and contractor communication.

Trent: Well at the risk of plugging my own products, I am a cofounder

in a software company and we have an app that is going to solve

that exact problem so I’m happy to show that to you after we

record if you like.

Andrew: I would love to see that Trent.

Trent: Are you using any curation for your clients?

Andrew: Not at the moment, we’ve looked at a couple options, but

haven’t really integrated it well into our strategy yet. That’s

a topic I need to circle back with [Gray and Brennan] and figure

out if that is going to add some value. I think it adds a lot

even for ourselves. We’re kind of the guinea pig for our

marketing strategies and so we tried it out on GuavaBox first

and if we see results then we send it out towards the clients.

Trent: Yeah. Okay, well we’ll cover that when we go off air here. All

right, services offered, service, oh contractors. Can you just

give an overview of the type of contractors that you’re using?

Andrew: Yeah, we’ve done a couple different models and you know there’s

websites out there where you can kind of submit to a pool of

authors and then they can bid on your work or submit trials,

that takes a lot of time to manage that but sometimes it’s a

good way to start. At the end of the day, you need to pick a way

that you can establish a relationship with a writer that you can

trust and so sometimes Elance is a good way to do that.

We’ve done some writing, more like design work through Elance than we

have actual contract writers but that’s been a good source for

  1. Relationships, networking, one of our best content writers

is just someone who went to college with us and who freelances

on the side, so don’t throw that model out. But Zerys is a good

platform.

Trent: Zerys? How do you spell that?

Andrew: Z-E-R-Y-S I believe. You can just Google them and they’ve got a

good pool of writers on there. Content Launch is another one

that we have tried out and has had some good results, and

ClearBloggingSolutions.com is another one that we’ve used with

success.

Trent: Okay. Well my pen just ran out in the middle a name.

Andrew: Perfect timing.

Trent: Luckily, luckily I have another one in the drawer.

Andrew: That’s good.

Trent: Hang on I’ve got to, there we go. Don’t you love this audience

from the hosts, holds up the show because his pen runs out of

ink? Okay, so you got a couple of resources which I will include

in the show notes, clearbloggingsolutions.com, Zerys.com.

All right, I think it’s time. What have we missed? What do you think

for the intended listener here is someone who is you six months

ago, who got a start at an agency and then you know want to make

a success of themselves, what have we missed? What would you

talk about for that person?

Andrew: You’ve got to set goals. You’ve got to know where you want to

  1. Because if you’re just running on a treadmill, I mean

starting a business is hard work, that’s why so many people

quit. But if you want to start an agency and you want to go

somewhere and you want to add value, set some goals for your

self, set goals each day, each week.

We set like 12 week goals at GuavaBox on how we want to perform

across finance, marketing, sales, operations, and we strategize

those metrics and we try to hold each other accountable for that

and we’re a small agency so it’s easy to let each other off the

hook. But again if you want to grow and you want to scale a

business to the point where you want to sell it, you’ve got to

kind of pick a spot on the horizon and start running towards it

in a way that you can measure against yourself.

Trent: I’ve got a resource that I want to throw up as well, it’s one

that I was reading this morning, it’s one of Jim Collins’ early

books, it’s called Beyond Entrepreneurship or Beyond

Entrepreneur or something like that, chapter two. So folks if

you want to grab yourself that book, it talks a lot about a

specific strategy for laying out, and you’ve heard this before

this is not new but it’s incredibly important, your mission

vision, your core values and your beliefs.

And I’m not going to hijack this interview with why talking about

that is important but if you read chapter two you will figure it

out and it’s something that I’m doing in my businesses, because

especially when it comes to attracting the kind of customer that

you want to deal with and attracting the kind of employee that

you want to work with, if you don’t have this stuff defined,

you’re going to end up with culture problems down the road.

Andrew: So true.

Trent: And so I’ll leave it at that. All right, I think this has been

a really terrific interview and we divided it into two parts so

a half hour each. I hope everyone enjoys it. Again, if you guys

who listen to my podcasts regularly think dividing it into two

sucked, definitely let me know, as I cannot exist without your

feedback. But like I say in my effort to attract new listeners I

thought smaller, more bite sized chunked pieces of content would

be less intimidating for them to download.

know that when I look at a video and I see that it’s an hour long I

go, “Ugh, I don’t know if I want to watch that whole thing.” But

if I see something that’s shorter than an hour I’m more inclined

to give it a go and that was the thinking in dividing this

episode into two parts.

So Andrew, thank you very much. For those folks who want to get a

hold of you the best just rattle off one if you would please,

what is the best way to do that?

Andrew: Best way to get a hold of me is on my email that is

Andrew@guavabox.com.

Trent: All right, terrific. Andrew thank you so much for being on the

show. It has been an absolute pleasure this has been I think a

terrific interview that I look forward to publishing.

Andrew: Thank you so much Trent for the opportunity and for all the

work you’re doing, doing great stuff, inspiring entrepreneurs

and hats off to you.

Trent: Well thank you very much, I appreciate that. All right to get

to the show notes for today’s episode go to Brightideas.co/75.

If you really enjoyed this episode, I want to ask you a little

favor please go to Brightideas.co/love and there you’ll find a

pre-populated tweet which you can send on out to your followers,

as well and even more importantly there’s a link that can take

you to the iTunes store so that you can leave a five star rating

for this particular episode. It really means a lot to me when

you guys do that because it really helps this show to gain a lot

more exposure and the more people that hear it the more people

that we can help.

So that’s it for this episode, I am your host Trent Dyrsmid and we’ll

see you in another episode soon.

About Andrew Dymski

AndrewDymskiAndrew is the a co-founder of GuavaBox, a web design and inbound marketing agency. Guavabox helps clients in the industrial space reach new customers through inbound marketing.

You can email Andrew at andrew@guavabox.com or connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Digital Marketing Strategy: Andrew Dymski on How He Launched a Successful Marketing Agency Right out of College (part 1)

If you want proof that you don’t need decades of experience and a huge Rolodex full of clients in order to start a marketing agency, look no further. Andrew and his colleagues at Guavabox launched an agency right out of college, and by all measures are on track to have a tremendously successful business.

Guavabox does an impressive job of generating content marketing. And, more than almost anyone I’ve spoken with, they not only understand the importance of list segmentation, but they provide an overview of how they’ve segmented their list, and how this segmentation has helped them identify their hottest prospects, and appropriately nurture and convert their leads into paying clients.

In addition, Andrew explains the thinking behind, and validation of, their business model, sharing insights helpful to any startup. There was so much goodness in this interview that I had to break it into two parts.

When you listen to Part 1, you’ll hear Andrew and I talk about:

  • (3:30) Introductions
  • (5:50) Why the old model of web design doesn’t scale
  • (8:30) An overview of financial results
  • (10:00) His business philosophy and how it played a critical role in their launch
  • (13:30) How they validated their business model
  • (16:30) How taking on a new client went wrong
  • (21:00) How they picked their niche
  • (25:30) How they are generating leads
  • (27:30) How blogging plays a role in lead generation
  • (29:30) How they developed their personas
  • (35:30) An overview of outbound marketing

.. And be sure to check out Part 2 to hear:

  • (3:00) An overview of various nurturing campaigns
  • (7:00) An overview of how they’re using personas to segment their list
  • (13:00) An overview of when and how they decide to follow up with each lead
  • (16:30) An overview of how they are changing their business model to a retainer fee model
  • (21:00) An overview of their retainer plans
  • (12:40) How they report results (traffic & leads) and what they’re planning for the month ahead
  • (25:00) How they manage client expectations
  • (28:00) How they are producing blog content
  • (31:00) How they are using contractors
  • (33:00) An overview of how they are in track with their goals

Resources Mentioned

Inbound Marketing 101 Ebook
Zerys.com
ClearBloggingSolutions.com
Guavabox.com
Best Buyer Formula

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

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Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

Transcript

Trent: Hey there, Bright Ideas hunters. Welcome to the Bright Ideas

podcast.

I’m your host, Trent Dyrsmid, and this is the podcast

for marketing agencies, marketing consultants, and entrepreneurs

who want to discover how to use content marketing and marketing

automation to massively boost their business without massively

boosting the number of hours that they have to work every single

week.

And the way that we do that is we bring on whip-smart

entrepreneurs to share with you the tactics and the strategies

that are working so very well for them, and that is exactly what

we’re going to do in this episode today.

On the show with me today is a fellow by the name of Andrew

Dymski. He is one of three co-founders of a new marketing agency

called GuavaBox, and they are doing some really impressive

things which we’re going to get into in this two-part podcast.

So in Part Number One, which you are now listening to, we are

going to be talking about how they launched the company, how

they picked their niche, and there’s some real key takeaways in

how and why they picked this specific niche that they did. We’re

going to talk about how developing a minimum viable product fit

into their business model and how it made figuring out what they

should sell and who they should sell it to so much easier than

it would have been if they had gone the traditional route of

building their portfolio of services and then trying to figure

out how to sell it.

We’re also going to talk about how they validated that business

model very, very early on so that they didn’t waste a whole

bunch of time going down with the wrong product for the wrong

customer in the wrong direction, and losing all that time and

losing all of that money.And we’re also going to talk about how they are generating

leads, and specifically, how they’re using, very successfully, I

might add, content marketing to drive more leads to their site.And then in Part Two, we are going to talk about what they’re going to do with those leads to convert them into customers. But

tune into Podcast Episode Two, and we’ll talk more about that.So before we welcome Andrew to the show, I just want to tell you

very quickly about a Bright Ideas product.

It’s called the Best Buyer Formula, and you can get it at brightideas.co/bbf, and it

is the lead generation formula that I used and use. I built my

last company with it, which was a company that got up to just

shy of $2 million a year in sales, which I ultimately sold for

over $1 million, and it’s also the very same formula that I am

using to build the Bright Ideas Agency, which we focus on

dentists with that agency. So if you are struggling with lead

generation and are looking for solutions, go check out the Best

Buyer Formula. And of course, like all my products, there is a

100%, no questions asked, money back guarantee. So if you don’t

like it, you can easily get all your money back.So with that said, please join me in welcoming Andrew to the

show. Andrew, welcome to the show.Andrew: Hey Trent, glad to be here.

Trent: It’s a treat to have you on. I’m super excited to get you to

tell the story of how you’re building your company, because just

based upon what we talked about before I hit the record button,

yours is a story that’s really going to resonate with the new

entrepreneurs who are just in the very early stages of building

their agency and are maybe under $100,000 or just over $100,000

in revenue, somewhere in that range, and maybe even the folks

that are doing larger ones, because I think that you’re going to

have some pretty interesting ideas and stories to share.

So before we get to all of that, please just take a moment, a

minute or so, and tell us who you are, and just a little bit

about your company.

Andrew: Sure. I am Andrew Dymski. I am a co-founder of GuavaBox. We are

an inbound marketing agency. We help companies, particularly in

the B2B space, industrial manufacturers, create a high-quality

lead generation machine through their website that helps them

scale their business in a way that they hadn’t been able to

before. We started out as a traditional web design shop. It

didn’t take us long inside that model to notice that it wasn’t a

model that could scale very well. So, over about the past year,

we’ve been putting the pieces in place to transition ourselves

from a one-off project work based company into more of a

specialist marketing services delivering firm that we feel like

can scale beyond just myself and my two partners.

Trent: So, I want to get you to talk about your financial results in

just a second, but before we go there, you hit on something that

a lot of new entrepreneurs don’t foresee – and I experience this

in my own business – and that issue of scale. You said that the

web design business isn’t going to scale very well. Can you

expand a little bit on what you meant by that, because that’s

causing a major shift in how you’re running your business,

correct?

Andrew: It definitely is, and if you just look at the way the sales

process has to work, when you want to close someone as a web

design client, there’s an extended sales process there and

you’re going up against a ton of competition where it’s really a

race to the bottom. Unless you have a relationship established

upfront with the prospective client or partner, at the end of

the day, it’s going to be a price war.

And we looked around and we said, you know, we’re spending all

of this time selling. We spend four weeks, eight weeks putting

the website together, and then it’s have a nice day, and walk

down the road. We do website hosting and we manage all of that

stuff, so that’s kind of a source of recurring revenue. But when

we started this business in college, we looked at it and said,

okay, we want to start families and kind of grow this business.

We can’t predict our income beyond two months out max. And so we

kind of walked back to the drawing board and said what do our

customers need and what services would we like to be able to

supply to them but we can’t because we’re constrained by this,

you know, put up a website?

We wanted to be able to showcase return on investment to these

clients, but if all you can do is just build a website and put

it out there, but then not control the content that gets pushed

through that system that you spent all this time selling and

building, then at the end of the day, you can’t show a return on

investment because the system is not in place. So we saw that,

and we knew that there has to be a model that we can build off

around this pain point.

Trent: And did you think about, in your shift from a non-scalable

business to a more scalable one, did enterprise value or an exit

strategy factor into that thinking?

Andrew: Definitely. No clear picture at the end of the day on where we

want as an exit philosophy, but from the start point, the three

of us are friends, and an idea that we had is we want to be able

to build a business that hinges off of the lifestyle that we

want. And so we looked at the lifestyle we wanted, and we said

we don’t want to be building WordPress websites and scheduling

tweets for the rest of our life, so how can we structure this

thing in a way that will facilitate a more hands-off approach

down the line so we’re free to spend time with our family, to

travel, to volunteer on sports teams, those sorts of things. So

it definitely played in.

Trent: So would you classify your business as a lifestyle

business?

Andrew: No, I would not right now, not in the sense that you can travel

the world and do this thing at the same time. But I see the

processes that we’re starting to put in place to get the agency

to the point where we could sell it if we wanted to if we wanted

to pursue the more hands-off lifestyle. It’s definitely a

location-neutral business, and for the first two years of our

existence, we operated location-neutral, three different states,

using a lot of GoToMeeting and Google apps. But no, I wouldn’t

say it’s kind of a lifestyle based business.

Trent: Okay. Alright, for the folks that don’t yet know how much

revenue you’re doing, how big you are, because I want to make

sure that the right people are listening to this interview

because we’re already a couple of minutes in, how much revenue

are you doing per year right now, and how many people are on the

payroll?

Andrew: Sure. On our team right now is just the three co-founders, so

it’s myself, Gray MacKensie, and Brandon Jones, and we are on

track to do about $150,000 – $160,000 this year.

Trent: And how many years have you been in business?

Andrew: This will be the end of year three.

Trent: Now, was this a full-time venture in years one and two, or were

you guys juggling college and doing this at the same time?

Andrew: So, when we started, we had two seniors and one sophomore, and

right after Gray and I graduated, Gray jumped in full time. I

went and worked at a PR firm for about nine months, and Brandon

was still in school obviously. So it wasn’t until this past May

when Brandon graduated from college and then I jumped on board

probably a year-and-a-half ago. So we’re only running full power

since May, with all three of us going full time.

Trent: Since May of 2013?

Andrew: Correct.

Trent: Okay. In my research on you, you talked about having a specific

business philosophy, and I want you to expand a little bit on

that because I think it played a role in how you started your

company.

Andrew: Yeah, it definitely did, and it started in college. Gray and

myself, we were on the same freshman hall, and so we were good

friends kind of from our freshman year all the way through. We

were on the lacrosse team together, we joined the same

fraternity, and that’s how we met Brandon as well. He was two

years behind us, but same fraternity and on the lacrosse team

together.

So Gray and I had decided from our freshman year that we have to

find a way to do business together. He was a business management

major and I was a marketing management major at Grove City

College, and we had a good friendship and we just wanted to find

a way to work together. So senior year rolls around, Brandon,

Gray, and I were all on the Officer board for our lacrosse team.

It was a club sport at Grove City, and we were all very

passionate about it. We had built up a machine really that we

launched the team’s first website. We put together the first

successful social media campaigns, email campaigns to reach out

to folks, and got connected with media and everything. It was

really successful, and we said, well, we enjoyed doing this on

the team, we’re graduating now, can we find a way to turn this

into a business?

We kind of put our heads together and we started the business in

the spring of our senior year in the dorm room after classes,

after homework, after lacrosse practice. We’d huddle around a

card table and kind of sketch out the idea.

But it started with the relationships first. You know, you hear

all the time don’t do business with friends, but really, the

friendship is what has saved this business through the dark

times and the ups and downs. We’re not really sure what the

model is going to look like. We’re not really sure where the

revenue is going to come from. We’ve leaned on that friendship

first and we kind of put a line in the sand and said this

friendship is going to get our business through and it’s not

going to tear it apart. And we’ve been blessed to come through

that with our relationship even stronger than it was when we

started.

Trent: An MVP is also a part of your launch philosophy or your

business philosophy, is it not?

Andrew: Can you break that down a little bit more?

Trent: Minimum Viable Product.

Andrew: Yes. So, we could build websites. I understood Twitter and

Facebook and what it took to build a following there. So we

said, great, we can kind of take this out and see if anyone

wants to hire us with this. And so we worked our connections and

found a website project first, and then a Twitter strategy

project after that, and so little by little, we build it up. We

figured out how you build a website, how do you charge for it

when you’re still learning how to build stuff on WordPress and

you’re still learning how to get your hosting account set up and

stuff like that.

But we didn’t build a business plan. We just got together. We

knew we wanted to be in business together, and we found the

minimal viable product that we could offer to people that would

still have value. And those were friends at the beginning, so

they knew where we were in our development stage. We were honest

with them and said, hey, we’re just getting this business going.

Can we build a website for you for $500? Is that something that

you would be interested in? And one or two of those, you pick

them up and they have friends, and that’s how we got started.

Trent: And so when you first launched, I’m assuming you didn’t have

the beautiful website that you have now. You didn’t have all of

the fancy stuff. You just decided, hey, we’re just going to go

and talk to people and say we’re looking for work, this is what

we know how to do. Are you interested?

Andrew: Exactly, yeah. Leaning on the friends and family, and the

fools, I guess, is the third piece. But yeah, that’s how we got

started.

Trent: I dwell on it because it’s an important point. I get a lot of

emails from people, and I’m thinking of one person in particular

right now, and I won’t mention this person’s name to protect the

innocent, but they’re overly caught up in getting ready to be

ready. There’s an expression that I did not originate, it’s

called ‘Version One is better than Version None’. And it’s so

incredibly important, because you don’t – and I want you to

speak to this, but you didn’t really know what it was that you

were going to do or who you were going to do it for until you

started to do it, right?

Andrew: Exactly. You know, they say that success sits just on the other

side of failure. You’ve got to go through failure a lot until

you get to that success point. And so we just decided to plunge

in and say let’s see how this goes. And it’s hard at times

because you’re still trying to figure it out as the clients are

demanding things, and as a young company, inevitably you want to

make everybody happy. So that’s caused some setbacks for us

along the way, but also some really valuable learning

experiences.

So you can’t sit around and wait to build what you think is a

perfect business model because you might get out in the market

and realize that nobody wants what you think is perfect. And so

at the end of the day, the best way to value your time is say,

hey, here’s an idea. Let’s go see if someone will buy it, and

that’s how we kind of build up.

Trent: And I want to reference another entrepreneur that I interviewed

here for the folks that are listening, because Sam Ovens was a

really, really good example of also starting a business, and his

business is crazy successful now. You can get to his interview

at brightideas.co/69. And he really didn’t have a clue what he

was going to do in the beginning, but he went out and instead of

building something and then trying to sell it, he went out and

talked to customers and said, what problem are you having? He

talked to enough of them to identify a commonality in that

problem, and then created a very basic solution and showed it to

them, and his business literally took off.

So, I bring this up when I ask these questions because if you’re

one of those folks out there who are spending time getting ready

to be ready, I would encourage you to start shooting, see who

falls down, and go over and look at what’s available for you as

far as feedback and information.

Andrew: That’s great advice.

Trent: All right. So, let’s talk about – you mentioned you made some

mistakes. I think that’s another thing where people, they are

unnecessarily paralyzed by their fear of making mistakes. But if

you talk to any experienced entrepreneur, they’re all going to

tell you that mistakes are a natural part of the going forward

process. So I’m sure you made some. I think we talked about

something, it was an old-school newspaper company – and I want

to pre-frame this by saying that the lesson I’m hoping people

get from this is that saying yes to everybody all the time isn’t

necessarily the best strategy. Can you tell us, Andrew, a little

bit about what happened?

Andrew: Sure. This was shortly after graduation, we had a really good

friend who worked at an old-school newspaper company, it was

like a weekly mailer, and they were looking for a way to get

this mailer online. I was like, well, this is going to be a

really good opportunity. I think it’s something that we can add

value in. So I was kind of the point of contact here. I mean, I

can build a WordPress website, but when it comes to kind of the

technical back-end of setting stuff up and integrations and all

of that, I have to check to my buddy Gray. He’s the genius

behind the machine.

So, the problem started – I was kind of the project manager and

the salesman, promising things to the client because we’re a

young business, and this is a big company, and I would love to

sign this contract. I think it would be good for us. So I’m out

there promising things and setting their expectations really

high, and it was kind of doomed to fail from the beginning

because their level of technical understanding wasn’t very high

at that point, and they were kind of asking for features and

wanted things to happen with little disruption on their end on

how they produce this paper and wanted to get it online, and I

was saying, oh, yeah, yeah, we can get that, that’s no problem

at all.

Trent: So you were selling flying toasters?

Andrew: Exactly, because I just wanted to make them happy. I wanted to

get the deal signed. Even after the deal was signed, for some

reason I wanted to just keep them happy. I think that’s great to

want happy clients, but sometimes a happy client is a client

that you need to say no to or a client that you need to reset

the focus, because I was promising yes, and then I turned around

to Gray and said, hey, can we do this? And we were living on the

opposite sides of the state at this point, and so there was

conflict within our company because of the way I was handling

this as a project manager.

We grew through that in a tremendous way, thanks to just honesty

and transparency, and again, that friendship we were able to

lean back on, and get us through this tough project. And it was

a great stepping stone because it kind of elevated the level of

client that we worked with but also helped us learn how to

manage a bigger team on the client side. So it’s not really a

small business owner anymore, you’re dealing with a whole crew

inside a company and you have to manage expectations across kind

of a whole organization. The biggest lesson we learned was don’t

overpromise and make sure that you’re lined up with your team

before you go out and start promising what they can do.

Trent: Absolutely. And do you think that you – you mentioned before we

started to record that you’re going through a shift in your

business model. We might talk about that now, but we’ll probably

cover it more later, but do you think that that shift to more of

a retainer model is going to help you avoid selling flying

toasters in the future?

Andrew: I do, because we’re an inbound marketing agency, and there’s a

specific methodology that we want clients to follow. And

obviously, it’s going to be a little bit custom for everybody,

but when you break it down to activity, it’s creating blog

posts, and it’s writing emails, and it’s creating awesome

content offers, and so there’s a more defined process to what

we’re trying to tackle now.

I think in the beginning, people had a problem or they had low

budgets and high ideas or big dreams, and they wanted to be able

to have all these shiny features on their website, and now we’re

able to sit back and say, you know what, that’s really not a

priority right now. You want to be able to structure your post

like this, or you need to include these kinds of conversion

points in your website. We kind of lean back on that methodology

a little bit harder than we did at the beginning when it was

just like, what do you want? We can go make it happen.

Trent: And we’re going to talk more about that, but I think what you

just communicated as well that I want to emphasize is you would

not have been able to figure out that you needed to deliver your

services in this way if you were getting ready to be ready.

Like, interacting with customers and falling down and getting

skid marks on you is what enabled you to define, hey, here’s a

better way that we need to deliver our services so we don’t sell

flying toasters.

Andrew: Exactly. It’s like sports. You can game plan all day long, but

until you get out on the field and you run a play, you can’t

look at the tape and diagnose something that hasn’t happened

yet. You’ve got to get out there and break the huddle and go

make a play and then make your adjustments on the fly. Keep it

lean.

Trent: So, in the beginning, you talked about you have targeted a

specific niche, B2B industrial manufacturers. Now, picking a

niche is something that in my course, the Best Buyer Formula, I

spend quite a bit of time really trying to drive that point

home. At Bright Ideas, we actually have our own agency and it

focuses on dentists because there’s very specific reasons for

that. What are the reasons that you decided, and how did you get

there to focus on industrial manufacturers in the B2B space?

Andrew: The journey, it was kind of happenstance, again, just by going

out, relationships started there from a website design

perspective, from video production. We had some really good

relationships with some industrial manufacturers, and so we just

kind of stumbled into it. We’re in western Pennsylvania right

now, so this is old steel country, and Marcellus Shale is really

making a big impact on the economy out here. There’s a lot of

folks inside the manufacturing industry, fabrication shops,

machining organizations, those sorts of things, who are trying

to get their toe into that pool.

We really recognized an opportunity where we looked at, okay,

we’ve had some success with these kinds of folks, and it’s

really low-hanging fruit in a way because not a lot of

industrial manufacturing companies have an awesome online

presence. There are some that are doing a good job, but most of

them, even who are present, let’s say they have a blog or

they’re on Twitter or they’re doing some YouTube tutorials,

consistency is really a problem. And so that’s part of our value

proposition is we are a marketing partner, so we’ll come

alongside even if you’ve got a couple of marketing people within

your organization, we augment that. We don’t compete with them.

So we can help provide that consistency in there.

We identified the market and said, we need to find a focused

approach, because there’s only three of us, and so as we craft

content, as we work on our positioning statements and refine our

sales process, it’s going to be more valuable for us to be able

to showcase success stories to companies who are similar to the

people we’re talking to on the phone so they can relate to them.

We’re still young guys, and so when we get on the phone with

people or we’re talking to them on a GoToMeeting or something

like that, there’s still a large amount of credibility that

needs to be built based on our age. And so that’s something that

we learned early on too is how can we find ways to position

ourselves as experts, and focusing on a niche is a way that we

see to really help that out along the way.

Trent: Now, was this niche, do you think that it is – like, one of the

things that I talk about in my blog posts and in my products is

pick a profitable niche, because when you do, if you pick a

niche that has – like Sam, for example, in his interview with

me, when he launched his agency, he focused on B2B as well, high-

ticket items, and the reason was is because he could charge so

much more to do the same amount of work because an individual

customer to his client was worth $50,000 to $100,000. Did that

factor into your decision process as well?

Andrew: Absolutely. I think it’s really surfaced after looking back and

saying, wow, if we can work with companies who, if they make a

sale, it’s a $50,000 sale, and they’re signing a $50,000

contract with us for the year, we can deliver ROI way faster

than if they’re selling a $40 widget. So let’s go after the

companies that make manly stuff at a big ticket price, because

that’s a niche that we think we can thrive in. So that

definitely guided the decision.

Trent: All right. So, audience, here’s what’s coming up. We are going

to talk next about how Andrew and his team are generating leads,

and then when we come back in Part Two of this particular

podcast, I’m trying something new here. I’m going to break my

podcast up into half-hour podcasts instead of hour long or hour-

and-fifteen long podcasts to see if it is more popular with the

audience. So if you have an opinion on that, please make sure

that you leave it in the comments that will be down on the

bottom of this post.

But in Part Two, we’re going to talk about how they’re nurturing

and converting their leads into customers. We’re going to talk

about services that they’re offering and how they’re delivering

those services, and how scale fits into that, and how they’re

billing, and how they’re shifting from one-time projects to

retainer fees, and how they’re delivering their services. So

there’s a lot of really good stuff coming in the second half.

But before we get to that, a lot of people really struggle with

lead generation, so I would love it, Andrew, if you would go

into as much detail as you would like on how you guys are

generating leads.

Andrew: Sure. You’ve got to walk the walk. We are a marketing company

that encourages people to create awesome content on their

website and offer that value to their prospective buyers, and so

we’re trying to walk that walk and create regular blog posts on

our site that are targeted to our geography, that are targeted

more and more towards our niche industries. So we do get a good

number of leads through our website right now. I mean, you can’t

ignore referrals, so if you have a customer right now, if you

have a group of customers that you’re able to showcase success

for, don’t be afraid to ask them, do you know anyone else who

could use this? Some of our greatest clients have come from

other clients, and so it’s kind of an old-school, offline way,

but, I mean, it’s tried-and-true, and it works. So, go to

referrals…

Trent: Let’s talk a little bit about the blogging that you’re doing,

because referrals are going to become part of – I mean, there’s

things that you can do to stimulate getting more referrals, and

if you have specific strategies to share, please make a little

note to yourself and we’ll come back to that in a minute. But in

the beginning, when you don’t have any clients, it’s tough to

get referrals, so I am really interested on the strategies

and/or tactics that you decided to do with your blogging. And

you could even talk about what you’re getting your customers to

do, because like you said, you have to walk your talk. So how

are you making blogging work for you?

Andrew: Again, the industry, it kind of starts with that persona first.

We have four buyer personas right now that we try to base all of

our content off of and to speak to them, and then from our

marketing strategy, lean into our sales process as well to

figure out what kind of questions are these people are asking,

because a second-generation owner of a manufacturing company is

going to have a very different set of questions than say an

inside sales manager or a director of a sales team.

So we try to outline what kind of questions each of these people

are asking, because content, if you want it to be guided and if

you want it to be closed loop in a way to unite with the rest of

your strategy, it needs to start with the customer in mind at

the end of the day. You want to put yourself in their shoes. And

so we’ve invested a ton of time in looking at our current

customers and what has gone well, and what kind of personalities

and positions we want to stay away from, and we’ve constructed

those buyer personas. So that kind of guides our blogging

strategy.

So then we take a look at the persona and then we do keyword

research off of that and figure out what kind of keywords we

want to target, what kind of keywords we want to rank for.

Obviously, we want to be found when someone Google’s ‘inbound

marketing agency’. That’s really big for us, and so we spend a

lot of time optimizing and creating valuable content around that

keyword.

As an example, in a pretty competitive market, when you’re a

marketer trying to create an online blog, some people even

advise you don’t even worry about marketing for yourself online

because it’s so competitive, but I would shy away from that.

Again, lean into the industry. This is definitely an area where

we’re trying to grow into, but be the source for marketing

information for whatever niche you’re targeting. For us, it’s

industrial manufacturers, and even that is a wide swath. There’s

a ton of different companies that can fall into that. So

continue to break down your niche, and the more focused you can

become, the more personalized the content, the higher the

conversion rate is going to be and the greater the value that

you’re going to deliver is going to be.

Trent: So, how did you develop these four personas? I think that is an

area where people will get stuck as well.

Andrew: Yeah, as a buyer persona, you just want to just develop an

idealistic picture of a potential client. And so we looked at

the clients that we had, and there’s obviously clients that, you

know, we want to work with more people like this. This is how we

want to scale our business. These people are responsive, they

don’t sweat the small stuff, they give us the freedom to make

decisions. They’re also there when we need to ask them

questions. So those are the kinds of people we want to work

with.

Then there’s – we call them Bob the Builder. He is an owner of

his own company. He’s kind of grown it up from absolutely

nothing. He knows that he needs to be online and have a

presence, but he doesn’t really want to invest anything into it.

He just wants to pay someone to get the website up, and that’s

  1. So that Bob the Builder persona is someone we worked with a

lot when the company got started, but not the kind of person we

want to continue with. So if we get a referral or if someone

contacts us and says, okay, we’ve got a Bob on the phone right

now, that’s the kind of lead we want to pass up. We still

explore it, but have that persona in your mind to say this is

not the type of client that we can scale with, and have the

courage to say no in that situation.

Trent: And are there tools or resources that you use that help you to

develop your personas, or did you simply get the whiteboard out

and look back at the people that you had spoken with or had done

business with and sort of describe as best you could the persona

that you thought represented that person?

Andrew: Both, really. We’re HubSpot certified partners, so they create

amazing content, and one of the pieces they have is a buyer

persona template. It has a great starting point to go out there

and help you. It asks the right questions to get you thinking

about that person on a more personal level. They’ve got a

PowerPoint download that you can get on their website. We also

have an e-book on GuavaBox.com that you can go and get that has

a similar template in mind to help you build up personas like

this.

But really, it starts with trying to put yourself at their desk.

What kind of pictures do they have sitting on the table? What do

they do on the weekends? What kind of music do they listen to?

So it’s not really like what’s their job title or how much they

make a year. Those things are important, but you really want to

ask questions that can put you inside their shoes as best as

possible.

Trent: And the reason for that is because you want to make sure that

you use words and phrases and content that they will relate and

respond to?

Andrew: Exactly. So some of our clients in the manufacturing space,

they’re selling to maintenance managers who are on the floor all

day in the shop and they might have just a high school diploma,

but they’re also selling to engineers who are drawing blueprints

for a new power plant. So those two personas are buying the same

product, but they’re asking incredibly different questions.

So from a client delivery standpoint, it helps us out a ton as

we’re trying to learn a new industry and learn a new set of

terms and stuff like that. Get those buyer personas cranked out

right away. Ask your clients, what does a typical buyer look

like for you, or if you could describe three typical buyers that

you sell to or that you’d like to scale your business towards,

what do they look like? What kinds of questions are they asking?

What do they do on the weekends? What kind of pains or questions

are they asking, those sorts of things. That really helps us

create content geared towards the people they’re trying to sell

to.

Trent: And when you talked earlier on about creating content that

answers questions, obviously, you know Marcus Sheridan. He’s

been on my show, it’s brightideas.co/27, and he kind of became

quasi-famous as a result of river pools and spas because he

decided to create a lot of blog content that answered the pre-

sales questions of people who are considering getting a pool. Is

that an approach that you took?

Andrew: Definitely. Marcus did an awesome job with that business of not

being afraid to address with confidence questions people have.

You know, what’s fiberglass versus concrete, those kinds of

questions for pools. The same sort of thing approaching your

marketing, approaching your client’s marketing, what are

questions that everybody is asking that no one is answering.

And that can be – maybe you take at the beginning of a campaign,

just take a half day and call, or have your clients get in touch

with 25 or 50 of their customers and figure out what kind of

questions were you looking for, what kind of questions you

continue to have. Do a little bit of market research on the fly

almost, but just reach out and figure out, maybe it’s surveys or

something like that. Just get a finger on the pulse of the

customers that have already converted with you and figure out

what kind of questions or pains that they have. If you client

has a sales team, always talk to them and figure out what kind

of questions are people coming to you with? What question do you

answer ten times a day that you wish you could just hit copy,

paste, and send a reply back to, because that’s an instant blog

post right there. There’s no shortage of content out there, you

just need to be able to ask the right questions to the right

people.

Trent: Now, I’m going to finish up Part One here with two more

questions. The second one is going to be are you doing any

outbound marketing, but the first one, I noticed you mentioned –

you said you were a HubSpot partner. Your blog is on WordPress,

and I know that HubSpot encourages people to use their blogging

platform as opposed to an independently hosted WordPress site.

Can you briefly speak to why you’re using WordPress?

Andrew: We redesigned our website probably six months ago, and HubSpot

had not spun out their new COS, which, if anyone is unfamiliar

with that, it’s a Content Optimization System that they have,

and historically, their CMS wasn’t very user-friendly. WordPress

is obviously incredibly user-friendly, and it’s open source, and

there’s an awesome source of plug-ins and stuff like that. So we

went with the WordPress theme because we had more flexibility on

the design side. We could spin out the design much faster than

we could with HubSpot, and we also knew that the COS was coming

down the line, and so to redesign on their CMS and then have to

redo it six or eight months later, it wasn’t something that we

were really excited about.

Our next design is probably going to be on that COS on HubSpot

because it is pretty powerful. They encourage it, but at the end

of the day, as long as you’re creating content, it doesn’t

matter.

Trent: Okay. Last question then for the first part of the interview,

outbound marketing. Are you guys making cold calls, are you

doing direct mail, are you doing any paid advertising? What

other things are you doing to generate inquiries?

Andrew: I think cold calls would be the closest to outbound that we

get. We don’t do a ton of cold calling. We like to do it just to

continue to hone our positioning statements and stuff like that,

and if an opportunity comes through, that’s great. But we really

haven’t had a lot of success with it, so it’s not something that

we’re going to lean into if we haven’t had a lot of success.

We like to think kind of creatively around the marketing,

obviously, and how can we add value with content through maybe

traditional off-line methods. So even if we do a press release

or – we’ve got some partners, like, we’re in a technology

incubator right now, we moved into this office space at the end

of May, and they’ve got a press release that goes out in a print

newsletter to the community here, and so we created a content

piece that was kind of about what GuavaBox is, but wrote it like

inbound marketers in a way that could help a potential business

owner who might read it, understand the value of inbound

marketing and the potential that’s out there and the lead

machine that they could create, those sorts of things. So, just

applying inbound methodology through outbound channels is as

close as we get. We try to remain pure.

Trent: And it’s not just trying to remain pure, like there’s something

uncool about outbound marketing, but with respect to cold calls,

they just don’t work as well. People don’t like making them, and

people don’t really like receiving them, so I think why would

you do that?

All right. So that wraps up the Part One of this interview. I

tried to keep it to about a half-hour. I went over by just a

couple of minutes. So as I mentioned, in Part Two, we’re going

to dive deeper into how we’re nurturing and converting leads,

what services are being offered, how they’re being delivered,

how leads generate in retainer’s fees, and probably a whole

bunch of extra things that I’ll ask as a result of the answers

that Andrew gives us. So we will see you in Part Two.

So that wraps up Part One of this interview with Andrew. You can

get the show notes at brightideas.co/74. Now, if you really

enjoyed this podcast, I would absolutely love it if you would

take a moment to go to brightideas.co/love, and when you get

there, you’ll find a pre-populated tweet that you can send out,

as well you’ll find a link to go to take you to the iTunes store

so that you can leave some feedback for the show. And if you

would be kind enough to go give a five-star rating, I can’t tell

you how much I would appreciate your taking a moment or two to

do that, because it really does make a huge difference to the

show.

So that’s it for this episode. I’m your host, Trent Dyrsmid, and

I look forward to seeing you in another episode, and for sure in

Part Two.

About Andrew Dymski

AndrewDymskiAndrew is the a co-founder of GuavaBox, a web design and inbound marketing agency. Guavabox helps clients in the industrial space reach new customers through inbound marketing.

You can email Andrew at andrew@guavabox.com or connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Digital Marketing Strategy: Meny Hoffman on How He Built a Highly Profitable Marketing & Business Service Agency

If you want to learn marketing from someone who knows his stuff, you could do worse than to talk with Meny Hoffman, CEO of Ptex Group, a growing marketing agency with 27 employees.

Unlike many marketing agencies that haven’t reached the size of Ptex Group, Meny’s company has multiple divisions. Ptex supports their clients with everything from strategic planning and branding; to specific design, print and web development work. They even have an in-house call center that can answer phones on behalf of their clients.

Another unique offering from Ptex Group is their “Let’s Talk Buisness” conference, a one day live event that sold out of seats at 650 attendees.

There are a lot more goodies in this interview. When you listen, you’ll hear Meny and I talk about:

  • An overview of his lead generation strategy
  • How to generate leads beyond referrals
  • The details of the compensation plan for his sales reps
  • An overview of a marketing funnel, and why it’s so important to focus on the human touch
  • An overview of a ‘Project Awarded’ campaign
  • Why he has a call center division
  • An overview of their business conference, including how they generated sponsorship revenue

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

About Meny Hoffman

11774510-meny-hoffmanMeny Hoffman is the CEO of Ptex Group, an Inc. 500/5000-ranked marketing and business services firm headquartered in Brooklyn, NY. A longtime entrepreneur, he specializes in creating strategic marketing solutions and business-boosting tactics to help small businesses achieve higher levels of success.

To learn more, follow Meny Hoffman on Twitter or email him at meny.hoffman@ptexgroup.com.

 

Digital Marketing Strategy: How Graig Presti Grew His Local Marketing Agency to 7 Figures In His First Year

Do you think you could start with nothing and build a 7 figure local marketing agency in your first year? If you follow Graig Presti’s advice, you sure can.

Do you think you could start with nothing and build a 7 figure local marketing agency in your first year? If you follow Graig Presti’s advice, you sure can.

Graig Presti started his local marketing consulting business and did something different than most: he chose to offer his services only to dentists…and by doing so, he grew top line revenue to 7 figures in year one…and has increased it to $3.5 Million in year 3. When you consider that most local marketing consultants really struggle to attract clients, Graig’s accomplishments are nothing short of amazing.

In this interview, you’ll hear Graig and I talk about:

  • (2:17) Introductions
  • (3:47) The results he’s getting (automating all sales)
  • (7:47) Why he picked dentists
  • (12:17) How he generates leads, and his sales funnel
  • (14:47) How he builds a list; using sponsored email, direct mail, LinkedIn, and JV partners
  • (17:47) The lead magnet he uses: Google Review Cheat Sheets
  • (19:27) How leads are nurtured
  • (22:17) How he’s using webinars
  • (30:57) How he converts webinar attendees to customers
  • (32:37) An overview of his product offerings
  • (41:17) The downside of continuity
  • (43:37) Where his customers are located
  • (45:17) How he leverages the telephone
  • (52:17) How to get others to send email sponsoring you
  • (57:17) How he’s using direct mail
  • (58:17) How he uses postcards with personalized landing pages
  • (1:04:17) How he’s running ads on LinkedIn
  • (1:08:17) How long it took him to get his ad spend back
  • (1:11:57) How long it took him to get his first client
  • (1:18:27) The benefits of a Mastermind

Links

Additional Resources

Graig gets great results using simple text like this.

Graig gets great results using simple text like this.

There's nothing complex about this formula.

There’s nothing complex about this formula.

 

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

Transcript

Trent: Hey there, bright idea hunters. Welcome to the Bright Ideas podcast.

I’m your host, Trent Dyrsmid, and this is the podcast for marketing

agencies and entrepreneurs who want to discover how to use content

marketing and marketing automation to massively boost their business.On the show with me today is an entrepreneur by the name of Graig Presti.

He’s the founder of localsearchfordentists.com and you are in for a real

treat in this interview because I ask Greg a truckload of questions and I

drilled down for detail on all of them. He’s going to explain to you how he

built his local marketing company that serves dentists.He did a million dollars in his first year. Three years in, he’s doing

almost $4 million a year. His profit margins are off the charts. He’s got

hundreds of customers, and he has automated virtually the entire sales

process. I shouldn’t say “virtually the entire” — he’s automated the

entire sales process and so attracting new clients for him is not a

challenge. When you listen to this interview, you’re going to hear exactly

what he does. There are gold nuggets galore in this interview.Before we get to that, I very quickly want to tell you about the Conversion

Tactics Toolkit at brightideas.co. I do a much better job than the average

website at converting my site visitors into subscribers and then those

subscribers get converted within my marketing funnel into customers. In the

Conversion Tactics Toolkit, which is a four-part video series, I’m going to

open up the kimono. I’m going to show you exactly how I do it all. It’s all

free. All you’ve got to do is go to brightideas.co, enter your e-mail

address, and you’ll get your first video right away.So with all of that said, please join me in welcoming Graig to the show.

Hey, Graig, welcome to the show. Thanks for making the time.Graig Presti: Hey, Trent, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Trent: No problem. So for the folks who don’t know who you are yet, please,

real quickly, who are you and what do you do?

Graig: Well, my name’s Graig Presti and I’m the CEO and founder of a

company called “Local Search For Dentists”. Basically what we do is we help

dental practices all over the world, really, we have clients all the way

from the United Kingdom to here in the United States leverage the Internet

and start to get more patients, more phone calls, and more bottom-line net

profits. The way that we do that is through a lot of Internet tactics and

so on and so forth, but we’ve really had some good success with being able

to do that and I’ve grown the business quite quickly in the last two to

three years.

Trent: Terrific. So, for the folks — I know that I’m like this whenever

I’m listening to a podcast, I always do this and I hope you don’t mind —

let’s talk about the results that you’re getting now and then I want to go

backwards and have you explain to everyone all the strategies and tactics

you’re using to get those results. So can you talk a little bit — if

you’re willing to, of course — about number of customers and maybe top-

line revenue that your firm is generating?

Graig: Sure, and if you hear someone blowing in the background, they’re

doing the landscaping right now at the office, so I apologize for that in

advance. I didn’t know that they would be coming today.

Really, the key way that I built my business so fast was the fact that I

was able to automate all of my marketing and all of my sales to occur all

the time, seamlessly without me, so we were able to therefore have a

minimal staff because everything we were doing was completely automated. We

use InfusionSoft to automate our marketing. I’ve tried a bunch of different

other things but, for me, the InfusionSoft, like I was telling you earlier,

basically I’ve used it since its inception and there really is no other

software out there that you can sync up direct mail, sales funnels, e-mail

marketing, SMS marketing, and then syncing up automated webinars.

There’s really no other system out there that allows you to do that. You’d

have to have 1,000 microworkers doing what you need them to do, so without

out it, we wouldn’t have had half the growth that we’ve had.

Trent: So how big’s the company now?

Graig: In terms of employees or . . .?

Trent: Revenue. Give a range.

Graig: Revenue? Well, we went in our first year, we went from $0 to $1

million in revenue in 12 months and this year we’re going to do over $3.5

million dollars in just under three years.

Trent: That’s not a bad business, my friend.

Graig: No, and it’s a very good business and the reality is we’ve become

very profitable because of what I’ve said, where, we’ve automated

everything. We don’t have huge overhead. We don’t need 50 employees. We

only need a small team and as long as the little engine is running in the

background, we’re good to go.

Trent: So let’s talk a little bit about that. I don’t normally ask this but

you alluded to it: you’re very profitable. Do you mind sharing what the

profit percent is?

Graig: Yeah, I don’t mind. It obviously ranges from product to product but,

in general, our company’s going to run around a 40% profit margin.

Trent: Wow, that is phenomenal. All right, and how many employees —

because I know when I ran my old service business, and I didn’t know

anything about automation back then — I needed about one employee for

every $100,000 of annual revenue. So how many full-time employees do you

have?

Graig: Well, to your question — let me back you up. Your little formula

that you used applies to your business a little bit, but you can really

scale ours a little bit more because we’re Internet-based, so it really

comes down to utilizing a system and then putting clients into that system

so then you don’t get out of that system. So we can basically crank out

more work with less people.

Right now we have, I’d say — I like to break it up between operations,

which is fulfillment, and sales and marketing. So on the operations side,

we have about 12 people. Some of them are outsourcers, some of them are

internal employees doing the fulfillment inside of things.

Trent: Okay.

Graig: Then on the sales and marketing side of things, you have really four

people, including myself, because I do handle the marketing. I don’t write

the copy, but I handle sort of the campaign-building and things like that,

so about four. The reason we only really needed three to four people on the

sales and marketing side is because we’re so systematic with our marketing

that I’ve figured out how much I need to spend to acquire a client, what’s

my most profitable activity, and all I do is I just put leads into that

system. I don’t try to get fancy and that’s really all we’ve done.

Trent: All right, and we’re going to talk about that. Before we get into

that — because I know that a lot of people that are in my tribe that are

going to listen to this interview, they are either looking to start a

business, and I do everything I can to encourage them to start what I call

a “real business”, which is one like yours that has customers, as opposed

to some goofy fly-by-night, get-rich-quick thing that you see all over the

Internet, which I don’t believe in those.

Then the other portion of my tribe is marketing consultants–or the next

biggest portion, I should say, is marketing consultants who, by and large,

are one-person shops and I don’t think too many of them are getting rich

and they’re all looking for ways to get more customers. In one of my

courses called the “Best Buyer Formula”, one of the very first things I

talk about is pick a profitable niche, so do you want to talk a little bit

about why you picked dentists versus all the other niches you could’ve

picked?

Graig: Right, right. It’s a good question. I get asked that at every dinner

party I go to because that just sounds so crazy to people, like, “Why

wouldn’t you just try to conquer the world?”

Trent: Why not just be everything for everyone?

Graig: Why wouldn’t you just do everyone? It’s hard to explain that to

someone who might not think the way that I think and the way that you think

and so on and so forth. It’s a very logical thing why I chose dentists.

Well, I use this in any time I look at going after it for any niche, is

there’s like three to four criteria.

Let’s just take dentists for example. One, their customer transaction size

is high, so their average customer value is going to be anywhere between

$1,000 and $3,000. That allows them to spend more money on consultative

services, i.e., Internet marketing, right? So now a service that costs $500

a month or $2,000 a month, if it gets him patients, is pretty palatable

because they know they only need a few to make money.

Trent: Yeah.

Graig: So it lowers price resistance naturally. Now, on the flipside of

that, if I was to go after, say, the chiropractic niche or plumbers or

roofers, well, the transaction size is a lot less and a lot less frequent,

so they’re not going to be able to essentially afford expensive services,

okay?

Then the second step with dentists is they have a lot of problems with

marketing and a lot of problems with technology, so they essentially need

outsourcers to do the work. They’re not going to do it internally mostly.

They need someone who’s an expert to do it. Then, on the flipside of that

is you need someone who has, essentially, the need for marketing. They’re

not a referral-based business. Dentists have to market externally. They’re

not like an M.D. who gets patients from insurance. I think it’s only like

20% of people get dental insurance. They need to go out and get new

customers and new patients so they need marketing, so it was very, very

specific as to why I chose dentistry — because they have the transaction

size to support the cost, they have the problems and need the marketing to

sustain their business, therefore they need a company like mine.

Trent: Absolutely, couldn’t agree more. Okay, so now let’s roll up our

sleeves here and talk. Let’s start at the very beginning of the funnel

because nothing happens until you have a lead. It’s hard to make a sale if

you don’t have a lead.

Graig: Right on.

Trent: Please talk about InfusionSoft and automation as much as you like

because that’s the big thing that I’m trying to get people to understand,

is you shouldn’t be doing this stuff manually and obviously you’re not, so

please give as much detail as you’d like.

Graig: Sure. Yeah, I mean, just as a disclaimer, anyone who is trying to

half-ass it and not 100% automate their marketing and using something cheap

like iContact or AWeber, you really need to change that mindset because if

you really want to increase your income, you need to just bite the bullet,

go over and do something that automates everything. That’s just a

disclaimer. That’s not a sales pitch, that’s just the truth because I’ve

messed around with all of those things before.

But back to your original question, okay? For me, it’s a very simple Dan

Kennedy-style lead generation: put them through a simple sequence that

makes them more able to purchase and buy, right? Then there’s pre-

qualification steps in between there. We’ll do the typical lead source,

drive them to a landing page or squeeze page offering them a free report or

some sort of free content for an opt-in and then the opt-in takes them to a

low-end product office for $97. Then after they buy the $97 thing, we’re

trying to up-sell them into the big, multiple-of-thousand-dollar thing.

So that’s the lifecycle of our client. Now, not everybody’s going to take

that cycle, but anyone who doesn’t essentially take the $97 low-end offer,

they get put into a drip sequence that’s automated and then they get

marketed to constantly after that, both offline and online.

Trent: Okay.

Graig: Until they buy or die.

Trent: Pretty much just like my funnel.

Graig: So someone listening is probably going like, “That’s it?” Honestly,

I coach other people on how to become local marketers like myself and we

spend a day together and I map out this funnel for them — and obviously I

go into greater detail — they’re just blown away at how simple it is, yet

how effective it is.

All that, by the way, Trent, operates on its own. I don’t sit here pushing

a button 270 times a day. It just happens because of InfusionSoft and that

allows me to do that. Then one of the other cool things that I do is in

between those sequences and so on and so forth, is I can automate webinars

with Stealth Seminar to work with InfusionSoft, so I can literally use live

events to sell my services automatically, which is pretty cool.

Trent: Absolutely. Okay, so let’s go right back to the leads. How are you,

first of all, getting your list? Are you buying a list? Are you having a VA

going around and do Google searches and make a spreadsheet for you? Because

you’ve got to identify your targets and you’ve got to build a finite list.

Graig: Right, right. I have a very specific criteria and pet peeve of mine

that where all I do is I find the lead sources and then I let my marketing

copy drive the opt-ins and drive the leads because I don’t want to deal

with folks who are not really interested in the topic that I’m talking

about, okay? I don’t want to just buy a list of dentists and then just

bombard them with push marketing. I want people who are actually going to

be interested in my services, who that copy speaks to them, right? So

they’re like, “Well, I need to have that.”

The way that I do it is I have, just like a lot of my things is I don’t

like using just one lead source, so I use some sponsored e-mail blasts that

are through other dental companies. I do direct mail, where I’ll use

postcards and so on and so forth to drive them to a landing page. I’ll use

online traffic via LinkedIn and paid ads and I drive all those people to

one single lead source, so I’m getting a myriad.

I also have JV partners and so on and so forth but I’m not one to go out

and just buy a list or have a VA scrape anything or use any software

because I don’t want crap leads, right? I want people who are actually

raising their hand like, “Oh, you know what? I have that problem, I need to

get that free report.”

Trent: Now, are you using tracking links, Google Analytics tracking links

so that when you look at the traffic that’s going to this one squeeze —

because, I mean, you said you’re using one squeeze page regardless of where

you’re getting the lead from.

Graig: Well, when I say “one squeeze page,” I mean one templated copy

squeeze page. I have that copy myriad of times over tracking each lead

source, so what I’m doing is I’m not only tracking the lead source using

Infusion — which you know you can do, you can set it that way — and then

each lead source has their individual landing page. It looks the same but

it’s a different tracking mechanism, so I don’t really use Google for that;

I use InfusionSoft for that because they have their own dynamic page, so I

know for certain what’s going on there.

Trent: Okay, so these folks are coming from these variety of ways —

sponsored mail, direct mail, LinkedIn and so forth — they’re coming to the

squeeze page. What’s the offer on the squeeze page? And these are

prospective dental clients for you, I just want to be clear. I want to make

sure people know we’re not talking about your dentists and getting them

patients; we’re talking about how you’re getting clients.

Graig: Correct, correct, but the thing is that I need to focus on that. In

order for me to offer solutions to their problems, I need to understand

that they need phone calls, they need patients in order for my services to

speak to that problem, right? So, for me, one of my biggest lead source

magnets, if you will — because I’ve done a few, more than one — but my

best one has been my Google Review cheat sheets, which essentially is a

templated way for dental practices to get more Google patient reviews, five-

star Google patient reviews.

Essentially that’s what I’m giving them that template for free so they can

go out and start to get good patient reviews instantly on Google, and that

seems to be quite the little hot button for folks right now. Then that gets

them going into my sequence.

Trent: Okay. I’m just jotting notes here. Sorry, audience, I wish I could

write faster but I’ve got to have good show notes for you guys. Okay, so

that’s your number one lead magnet? Do you use anything else for a lead

magnet or is that pretty much . . .?

Graig: I have three to four free reports and so on and so forth. I have a

couple videos, stuff where I just put content out and then I have my

copywriter write it up and I’ll use that just to sort of shake it up. But

my bread and butter is what I just told you.

Trent: Okay. Let’s talk about the sequence that happens because when you

use InfusionSoft, they fill out this form and you’re applying some tags,

which is just a means of categorizing people and causing things to happen.

Walk us through the sequence so that we understand what is happening to

those leads, so we understand how they’re being nurtured.

Graig: Okay, so after someone opts-in, right, they give their name and e-

mail to get, we’ll say, the Google Review thing, okay, they are then sent a

follow-up e-mail automatically, providing the content that I said I would

give them. That’s important for people to understand that. You can’t just

give away crap. You do have to provide them with some really good stuff in

that follow-up e-mail because that, essentially, is your first introduction

to them, right? They need to trust you at that point and not think you’re

full of it.

So while that’s being sent, they’re also being flipped to an up-sell page

which sells them a $97 product.

Trent: Which is what?

Graig: Which is what?

Trent: Yeah, what is that?

Graig: It’s basically the ability to essentially look at what they’re doing

right now with their marketing and kind of give them a diagnostic on where

they’re failing and where they’re not failing.

Trent: Is this a loss leader for you? I mean, do you actually have some

manual delivery in fulfilling what they’re buying for $97?

Graig: Yeah, it is a manual thing but that’s on purpose.

Trent: Okay, and is it a VA that’s doing it or are you interacting with

them?

Graig: Nope, that’s actually my sales consultants will fulfill on that.

Trent: Okay.

Graig: Because it’s part of the sales mechanism, so it’s important that

they communicate the results to them in a proper way.

Trent: So what do you call that product or that report?

Graig: We call that like a “Dental Marketing Game Plan” is what we’ll call

it.

Trent: Okay.

Graig: And it’s okay that’s manual, by the way, because 50% of the people

that buy that $97 product buy the big one.

Trent: Yeah, which we’ll get to.

Graig: Sure.

Trent: Okay, so nurture sequence: deliver the content, deliver the up-sell

of $97 — or rather offer the up-sell — and what percentage of the people

who come at the top of the funnel buy the $97 product?

Graig: Well, it really depends on the lead source, right? Because sometimes

the house list is going to convert better than a cold list, so about 25% of

the people take the up-sell. But even though they don’t take the up-sell

doesn’t mean we just stop and give up, right? Because the majority aren’t

going to buy anything, right?

Trent: Right.

Graig: So then they go into, really, just a four-step sequence of

delivering over five days more content — give them an invite to a webinar

in there, give them a video that they can watch, all sort of breeding

content, breeding trust with me, right?

Trent: And is it you on the video and your voice on the webinar?

Graig: Oh, yeah.

Trent: Because you’re trying to get them familiar with you.

Graig: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, it’s me. It’s me all the way around, yeah. It’s

more so they can identify with me because here’s the thing: in this day and

age, man, e-mail marketing is just going to get tougher and tougher and

it’s really getting hard now. So without being recognized in the inbox and

being recognized as the go-to person and the authority, man, it’s hard to

sell.

Trent: Yeah.

Graig: It’s hard to sell.

Trent: It’s why I do podcasts and probably the same reason you do them.

Graig: Right, right, right, and so what we do, one of the other things too

is once people are on my list, right — so those are people that opt-in,

they’re on my list, right? So I’ve dripped content to them, they know me,

they hopefully trust me — not everybody’s going to trust me, some people

are just going to ignore it but that’s okay; you actually want that in some

folks — is every month we’re doing a promotional webinar driven to promote

sales. All we’re doing is re-inventing the copy around very similar topics

so that they seem new and then we go out and we sell more stuff every

month, doing it that way, so we’re actually holding virtual events one time

a month.

Trent: And are those one-time-per-month virtual events actually live or are

they recorded?

Graig: Of course not. Sometimes they are, sometimes they’re not. I would

say most of the time, most of the time they are evergreened most of the

time.

Trent: Yeah, and some people are like, “Oh, you’re fooling people.” But

you’re not because I think most people know, but it doesn’t matter. I read

a study and it was like 86% of people that attended webinars actually

preferred the recording because that way they can watch it on their on

time.

Graig: You want to know the real answer to that question?

Trent: Sure. Yeah, please.

Graig: The real answer to that question is that most people surveyed in

this country actually think infomercials are live television.

Trent: No way.

Graig: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That’s a hard, proven thing, stat. I’m not

making that up and the reality of that situation is that you should never

feel bad for automating and evergreening everything because some people are

just always going to believe it’s live even if you tell them it’s recorded.

Trent: Yeah.

Graig: So there’s a reason infomercials convert like crazy is because of

that.

Trent: Is that a dog?

Graig: It is my dogs.

Trent: No worries. I like live action on my podcasts. Okay, so, again, I

want to make sure that everyone understands this: they opt-in, they get the

content, they’re all going to see the $97 up-sell, if they don’t buy the up-

sell, they’re going to go into a five-day nurturing sequence of more

content, and then they’re going to get dripped on and then probably going

to see an offer once a month to attend your live event, correct?

Graig: That is correct. They will get sort of driven to opt-in for a live

event once a month, yeah.

Trent: Okay, and the content on the webinar, can you talk about that?

Graig: I can’t. Now, I’m going to disclaimer this: I don’t just have one

webinar. I don’t just sell one thing, right? The webinar content’s going to

depend on what I’m promoting that month and maybe it’s a launch, maybe it’s

not a launch. It just depends on what I feel is going to work that month

from a CEO perspective I want to know what do I think is going to make us

the most amount of revenue this month, so sometimes it’s a long-term

strategy, sometimes it’s just what we do every month.

So what was your question again? I’m sorry.

Trent: Just the content of the webinar, so I’m assuming . . .

Graig: Oh, yeah. The content of the webinar — and this may fly in the face

of what a lot of people say, but it works — yes, I focus on content of the

situation, so whether it’s dental marketing or some sort of dental

marketing, Internet dental marketing, whatever it is, yes, I focus on

content, but I’ve shifted the paradigm where the old way of doing it used

to be, “Oh, just give them amazing, amazing stuff that they can do for like

80% of the webinar and then 20% can be the pitch.”

I did that for a while and it did do well, but then I decided, since

everybody’s doing it, why don’t I just do the opposite of that? I’m just

going to try to sell from the get-go. Sure, I talked about content and what

you should be doing and I did put them through sort of a problem and

agitation and then solving that problem, but I just flat-out made it a

video sales letter, which I don’t know if your audience will know what a

video sales letter is. Do you want me to explain what that is?

Trent: Yeah, go ahead, please.

Graig: Okay, a video sales letter — and I’m sure everyone has probably

seen one before, they just maybe don’t know what that name is — a video

sales letter is basically a PowerPoint slideshow on video of just written

word and someone speaking to that written word in black-and-white. It’s not

a fancy Keynote presentation, it’s not a fancy PowerPoint presentation with

these crazy images. It’s just spoken word to written word is what it is and

they’re just essentially reading it.

The idea behind that is to keep the person engaged and they actually read

along with you as you’re speaking so they’re soaking up that information

more. I decided just apply that to all my webinars and everything’s going

to be a video sales letter now. Even if it’s a webinar, I’m just going to

make it that type of style and, man, I tell you, my conversions went up 20%

by just doing that and that’s how I launch everything now. Everything.

So my webinars really are a video a sales letter. I kind of scrapped the

content and I know that sounds crazy, but . . .

Trent: Just so that me and everyone else understands this, everyone of your

webinars is black text on a white background and your voice is reading

exactly what’s on the screen.

Graig: You got it.

Trent: I love it. All right.

Graig: All my friends, by the way, all my buddies who are entrepreneurs and

Internet marketers and all this stuff, they think I’m crazy.

Trent: Yeah.

Graig: They’re like, “You’re the only one I know that does all that crazy

stuff and that’s how you launch everything?” I’m like, “That’s why it

works.”

Trent: Yeah, sometimes simple is best, man.

Graig: Because think about it this way: if you’re in consulting — so like

you said a lot of your people are consultants and maybe coaches and

marketers and so on and so forth — everybody does a free demo, a free

webinar, a free evaluation. Everyone does that in some fashion or form. I

mean, I even see e-mails these days — that’s how I know it’s getting bad

out there for people — is they’re bribing people to get on their webinars

and do taped demos, like giving them Starbucks gift cards and $25 Visa

check cards. I’m like, that tells me that they don’t know what to do, other

than bribe their prospects to absorb their crap content.

So doing it my way, that’s why it works so well, because everyone’s doing

these demos and webinars and real soft stuff.

Trent: It’s a way of definitely separating the folks that are seriously

interested and likely to take action from the folks that are kicking tires.

Graig: Sure, sure.

Trent: Okay, so I’m at the point now in your funnel where I’ve seen one of

your webinars. What’s an offer look like? What’s the call to action on the

webinar?

Graig: Well, the call to action is buy because here’s this great package

with these great bonuses that I’m offering to the first 10 people, and if

you’re not one of the 10, then that’s okay but you’re just going to miss

out on this great opportunity, so go hit the button below this video, go to

the order page and we’ll talk to you.

Trent: So give me an example of something that you’ve sold via this method

recently, like was it a $1,000, was it a $5,000 deal?

Graig: Well, I’ve always done more expensive products. In my world, I would

deem them expensive, medium to expensive. I’ve never been the cheap person.

I’ve never been the low-end $100 guy, but just recently we did come up with

a low-end offer, which was a press release product where we offered a very

inexpensive, it was $200 to set it up and it’s a $97 a month subscription

and we’re offering some press release marketing for that and that’s the

least expensive thing I’ve ever offered.

But it did quite well. We sold 30 in a night.

Trent: Well, that’s good. That’s three grand a month in continuity for you

right there from one webinar.

Graig: By the way, the goal of having that lower-end sort of nugget is not

to really make any money off of it. It’s okay, the money part of it is

okay, it absorbs some of the cost, but I really want to get those folks

into my other programs, so now I have someone who’s actually paying us, we

can prove results, and now we can really show them how we can even really

ramp it up for them.

Trent: Let’s talk about your products for a minute. Let’s get out of the

marketing funnel for a second. Don’t worry, audience, we’ll come back to

this. But I want to talk about what are you offering to do for people?

Graig: We have “the big three” is what I call them, so we have our big

three products. Now, we don’t do any sort of a la carte stuff. We don’t do,

“Oh, you can pick a Twitter account and we’ll create a Twitter account,”

“Oh, pick a Google account and we’ll create a Google account.” We don’t

really operate like that. It’s really just a one-thing-or-not. You can’t

pick-and-choose what you want type of deal.

Our first product is really our local SEO product, which is basically

helping dental practices get ranked in the cities that they serve via

Google, via Bing, via Yahoo!, utilizing a bunch of things within that.

Trent: And what do you charge for that?

Graig: That one is $2,500 to set it up and $500 a month continuity after 30

days and it is a 12-month contract.

Trent: Okay.

Graig: The second one that we have is Google AdWords management. If people

don’t know what Google AdWords is, it’s basically managing, creating, and

monitoring dental marketing ads for our clients on Google and their various

ad networks, so that way they can get more phone calls, more traffic, and

that’s $699 a month and that includes your budget on Google and your

administration fees. There’s no hidden costs or anything. It’s $699 a month

and that’s a four-month agreement.

Trent: Now I want to clarify something. Does that include the cost of the

ads or that’s just . . .?

Graig: Oh, yeah, that’s everything.

Trent: So they spend $700 a month and you’re going to spend some portion of

that $700 on the actual ads and the rest is kind of your profit margin.

Graig: Correct, and the reason that I structure it that was is because it’s

advantageous for us as the company to run their campaign at 100% premium

efficiency because we don’t want to waste any of the ad budget because we

want to keep them at the top and we want to make money, so they look at us

like the good guy, not the bad guy.

Now, the way most companies price their pay-per-click campaign is they’ll

say, “Okay, well, it’s $1,000 budget minimum and we take 30% of that.” So

if you want to do $2,000, they take 30%. Whatever it is, they take 30%.

Problem is the customer always looks at you like the bad guy, so now

they’ve got to pay Google one thing and then they’ve got to pay your pain-

in-the-butt another thing and if it doesn’t work, they get mad at you no

matter — they don’t get mad at Google, they get mad at you.

So I looked at it as let’s just get a bunch of ads going and we’re just

going to crank down on this, make sure we know our keywords, and that way

our client’s going to get the most out of their campaigns. Because some

months and some days we don’t get any money on our PPC, but that’s okay

because we know our clients are doing better and we know we’ll make that up

at some point.

Trent: So out of $700, how much is left for you, typically, for profit?

Graig: It depends on the city and the area and the client, but that product

really does quite well. That’ll run at a 40% margin.

Trent: Okay.

Graig: Sometimes more.

Trent: And how about the next product?

Graig: Then the next one is our reputation management product that I don’t

actually call it “reputation management” — most people would know

“reputation management” on this podcast — I call it “revenue protection

program” because reputation management implies that you have a reputation

problem and, at that point, now you’re being reactive. I like people to

protect their revenue sources

That means even if you don’t have a reputation problem — say you have no

bad reviews. Let’s just say you’re squeaky clean. Well, the problem is that

you’re not putting your best foot forward because 9 out of 10 patients are

Googling you before they call your practice. So if you’re disorganized and

have nothing done professionally and no review sites on page one and your

Google reviews are slim to none, they’re not going to trust you.

But if you have press releases from FOX News, CNN, third-party media sites,

video on YouTube of your best patients talking about how you’re the best

dentist they ever went to, you’re going to close more cases and you’re

going to have more revenue in your practice. In the event, somewhere down

the line when you get a bad review — not if, but when you get a bad

review, which is bound to happen — you’re protected because you just spent

this amount of time letting us market your practice so that way you’re

almost indestructible on the web.

So if they go to Ripoff Report or Pissed Consumer, you don’t really have to

worry about it because, number one, we’re on it, but on the second part,

you’re protected because you have all this great PR as opposed to none.

Trent: So I want to ask a question about this then. Essentially what this

boils down to is you’re building up so much positive PR that when someone

leaves a negative review, it’s not going to rise to the top because, as a

percentage of the overall reviews, their negative review is negligible. Is

that correct?

Graig: Right, that’s correct and they may never see it.

Trent: Okay.

Graig: For example, I did have a dentist in Louisville who had a patient go

onto — and he was a client of my other services, actually — but he had a

patient go onto Pissed Consumer and say that Dr. Larry gave him a metal

mouth. Talk about a bad review, right? “Gave me a metal mouth.” Well, every

time you Googled his name or his practice, it was like the third spot on

Google in big, bold letters saying this poor dentist gave this guy a metal

mouth.

He was like, “I’ll hear about this all the time! Patients are saying, ‘Do

you know this guy said this? Do you know this?'” He didn’t know what to do,

so we essentially plugged him into our revenue protection program and that

Pissed Consumer site is on like page 15 of Google, never to be seen again.

Trent: So you just produce so much good stuff that ended up being newer

and, because of press releases and so forth, ranked better than the bad

stuff and literally just it pushed down, made it go away.

Graig: Yeah. Yeah, we nuked it. Yeah, it got nuked.

Trent: What are your customers paying you for this service?

Graig: That one is $1,000 to set up everything and $497 a month not only to

maintain the rankings of that content — which, by the way, you can’t just

do it one time and think it’s going to stay up forever. You do have to do

some Internet stuff to do it and make it stick. So we do that for the

months after that and then we monitor the reputation and so on and so forth

after that for $497 a month.

Trent: And what are you doing to monitor it? Are you just using Google

Alerts or is there a special tool that you use?

Graig: We have some proprietary software we use. I mean, obviously, we do

have Google Alerts because they’re quick and nice, but we do have some

reporting tools that we use.

Trent: Okay. So is there anything else in your product portfolio or is that

it?

Graig: That’s pretty much it. I have one program that is basically specific

to implant dentistry. Are you familiar with dental implants? Do you know

what they are?

Trent: Help me out.

Graig: Okay, basically dental implants are a way for people with dentures

and missing teeth to get permanent teeth.

Trent: Okay.

Graig: So this is going to sound awful, but what they do is they drill a

metal post into your jaw and then they put a crown on it and you basically

have stronger than real teeth, so you can go out and eat a steak and smile

and you’re going to have these until you die. Here’s the good news: you’re

going to be happier and your wife’s going to love your new smile, but

they’re $1,000 to $1,500 per tooth.

Trent: Per tooth, yeah. Isn’t this what people call . . .?

Graig: The benefit to that is that every new patient to a dental implant

dentist is worth more, so I decided to come up with an Internet marketing

program that gets more implant patients coming to practices.

Trent: Okay. What do you call that?

Graig: I just call that “Local Search Dental Implant Marketing Program”.

Trent: Okay, and what do you charge for that?

Graig: That one is, we’re charging, I believe, $3,000 to set it up and $697

a month.

Trent: Okay. What percentage of your top-line revenue is recurring?

Graig: What percentage of my top-line revenue is recurring?

Trent: Yeah, because every product you’ve described to me has some kind of

monthly fee, which is what we want.

Graig: Yeah, no, you may have duped me. I have to pull up Infusion — I

actually don’t know that number. You want to know why I don’t know that

number — and this is actually a very good lesson for everyone listening —

because I was part of a business that declined because of its gluttony with

continuity. Continuity is phenomenal. I don’t sell anything without it. I

never will ever.

It’s the best thing in the world, don’t get me wrong, but here’s the

problem: continuity in subscription fees can make you gluttonous. They can

make you forget about the fact that you still need to retain and sell

stuff. So what happens is once a business sort of starts to lean and only

lean on its subscription income, it will die.

Trent: Because you get lazy and stop looking for new customers.

Graig: Correct. For example, this is actually a good lesson for your folks

because just recently we had a bit of a bad stretch. We had some retention

issues with our clients, not because of performance on our part. I think it

just happened to be we weren’t doing the right things to maintain some

customers. We plugged some holes, but here’s what started happening was we

started not retaining and adding new customers and all we did was live off

our continuity.

Well, you have a few customers leaving every single month, before you know

it, you just lost 20% of your revenue, so I don’t know that number but the

reason I don’t is because I know that I have the continuity. I focus only

on new sales and retention and the rest will take care of itself.

Trent: Because if you’re not growing, you’re dying.

Graig: Right, so if I know we need to hit 10 new customers a month and we

hit that above, I know that we’re where we need to be. If we do three to

four, I know we’re screwed because we’re basically going to be living off

of continuity and that just drives me nuts.

The last business I was a part of, that’s how the business died. I had a

company that was doing $15 million a year that went down to barely doing a

million because it lived off its continuity.

Trent: Wow. How many of your customers live or work within driving distance

of you?

Graig: Four.

Trent: Out of how many.

Graig: Out of 400.

Trent: That’s what I wanted you to say. I want people to understand that

this is a business that doesn’t matter what town you live in.

Graig: No. No, no. That’s a minimalistic type of attitude because even the

people that I coach and consult on how to be local marketers have been

conditioned and predetermined to think that they can only sell local

businesses in their particular city and geography and the reality is that

is going to be your death.

Trent: So your sales process begins with online marketing, you make

extensive use of automated webinars, and the sales are, I’m going to guess,

either closed by someone clicking the “buy” button or are they ever closed

by one of your sales reps being on the phone and making the final sale?

Graig: Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Trent: But they’re not doing it in-person, they’re not getting in their car

and going . . .

Graig: No, no dog-and-pony shows.

Trent: They’re just calling, they’re following-up with someone who is a

lead that has opted-in to your system, correct?

Graig: Correct.

Trent: So there ain’t no cold-calling happening in your shop.

Graig: Oh, no. We have never — and I’m proud to say this — ever, ever

cold-called anyone.

Trent: But yet the phone, very, very powerful tool.

Graig: Yeah. I mean, honestly, I think people who don’t master the art of

selling on the phone and using language and scripting that works is really

doing themselves a disservice because the old-school way of doing it is

somewhat how like the pharmaceutical sales rep does it, and I’m not saying

selling pharmaceuticals is comparative to what we’re doing but think about

it: they have a territory, that’s their territory, they go and they get in

their car and they drive to their offices and they do a dog-and-pony show

and they’re giving away stuff and they’re doing this and they’re doing

that.

Phone sales is a great leverage, a leveraging point to very good marketing.

It should not be the other way around. Your sales should not be your

marketing because companies that are sales-driven and have a little bit of

marketing, they’re always going to be limited and may never be around

forever, but a company that is focused on marketing that has a sales team,

you always do well. Always, always.

Trent: It’s so much easier to hire people, it’s so much easier to train

people, it’s so much easier to retain people when they don’t have to make

cold calls.

Graig: It is. You know what’s funny? I have to tell this story real quick

because this is one, this is a funny story. My aunt is in sales, right? And

she just started doing this job where she works for a very prominent and

well-respected reputation management company in the auto dealer space.

They’re a very large, big, dumb company and they’ve got a lot of money to

burn, clearly.

So I was at her house the other day — we actually took her kids out to go

to Lasertron or whatever, laser tag — and she needed to work from the

house and she needed quiet so she could cold call. I asked her after we

came back, I’m like, “So tell me about how you’re selling these things.”

Which is basically it’s a reputation management sort of portal product for

auto dealers, not a very complicated sale. She’s like, “Well, I have to

make 40 to 50 dials a day.”

Trent: Ugh.

Graig: I’m like, “So where are you getting your leads from?” I’m like, “Are

they giving you opt-ins and you’re calling opt-ins? Where are they coming

from?” She’s like, “We just have directory sites that we just dial.” I’m

like, “So you’re cold-calling?” She’s like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “Ugh, what?”

She goes, “What I don’t understand is, I’m having trouble getting to four

sales a month for a $300 product for an auto dealer.”

Trent: Yeah.

Graig: She tells me — this is the kicker, Trent — she tells me that, in

the Chicago area, they just hired three more sales reps to do what she’s

doing, just dial. I’m like, “Okay, here’s a very philosophical difference

between businesses. There’s a difference between a sales-driven culture and

a marketing-driven culture. Very distinct things, very distinct things.”

A sales-driven culture like that company, they’re using their sales force

like lead gen. They’re saying, “We’re paying this person $15 an hour. We

want them to dial so they can get working leads and that’s just how it is.”

That’s the sales-driven culture. “And hopefully we get lucky and they pop a

sale.”

As opposed to a marketing-driven culture like what we have in my business,

where we wouldn’t even pick up the phone unless the prospect raised their

hands because what they want is what we are giving away, so therefore,

we’re not wasting man-hours, marketing material, energy, money on people

and things. They’re wasting it.

Trent: Plus, no one likes making those calls and nobody likes getting those

calls.

Graig: No. No, and you want to know the funny part about you saying that is

she told me, “I called on a guy who I got him on the phone, I actually got

through the gatekeeper and I got him on the phone” — because, remember,

these are big businesses, they’ve got a gatekeeper, meaning they’ve got

multiple receptionists — so she got the guy on the phone and she says, “I

want to get you on one of our webinars,” and he goes, “Ugh, seriously?

Another webinar? I’ve had five phone calls today of people asking me to get

on webinars, demos, more demos.”

I’m like, “Well, you’d better hope you’ve got a hearty appetite because

you’re going to get 100 more of those every, single time you call because

that’s exactly what’s going to happen.” You just look at that compared to

what we talked about today where people are only getting on my webinars

when they either pay my company, like fork over $100 or $300 or whatever,

or they’ve raised their hand and said, “Hey, I love what you’re saying. I

would like to learn more.” No problem, but you have to get on this webinar

first. They’re going to sign up for the webinar and not complain.

Trent: Can you give the URL of one of your landing pages? I’d love to look

at it.

Graig: Let me check and give you a good one here. Let me pull one up. Ask

me another question and I’ll pull one up.

Trent: All right. Well, now I’ve got to think of another question to ask.

Oh, yeah, while you’re pulling up, let’s talk about your podcast because I

know that you’ve got one.

Graig: Yeah.

Trent: How’s that working out for you?

Graig: It’s good, it’s good. Okay, here, I found one for you.

Trent: Okay.

Graig: Go to localsearchfordentists.com/googlereviews.

Trent: All one word, no hyphens or anything like that?

Graig: Yeah, all one word.

Trent: Okay. Folks, if you’re listening to this . . .

Graig: There’s going to be audio on that, by the way, if you want to shut

that off.

Trent: Yeah. For the folks that are listening to this while you’re driving,

don’t worry, I’ll put this in the show notes, this link, so you’ll be able

to get to it and at the end of this episodes I’ll give you the link to the

Bright Ideas, where on the blog you’ve got to go to get to this interview,

so fear not. Don’t be trying to take notes while you’re driving.

Graig: Yeah, that landing page I just gave you is really good for cold

traffic, meaning a lot of paid media and such. It’s pretty good.

Trent: Now, is this any particular plug-in that you used to make this

landing page or is this just somebody did HTML?

Graig: No, we made that one, we made that one. We made that one in-house.

Trent: Okay.

Graig: But I know this is a template of something. One of my buddies told

me, “Oh, yeah, that’s a whatever page,” and I went, “Well, I saw it, I

liked it, we just made it.”

Trent: Yeah. What’s the conversion rate on this page?

Graig: This one has a 50% opt-in on cold traffic.

Trent: Very nice. Okay.

Graig: I only use this one on — and when I say cold traffic, meaning not a

house list. I only use this one on paid media.

Trent: Okay, so you’re spending money on, say, LinkedIn ads, for example,

and you’re driving them to this page.

Graig: Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, that’s right.

Trent: All right, I want to go back, actually, to the top of the funnel

because I don’t know that I got enough detail. So, sponsored e-mail — we

didn’t dive into that all, so if it’s okay, I’d like to go back and just

talk a little bit more about that particular one and some of the others. So

if someone wants to market to dentists — like you’re doing — how do they

go about finding — first of all, explain what sponsored e-mail is. I’m

sure everyone gets it, but in case a few people don’t, explain what it is

and then explain how you find people to buy it from.

Graig: Right. Okay, so I’m going to be a little private on this answer,

okay, for an obvious reason because lead sources are like gold. That’s my

money, so I will tell you how to find them, essentially, but I will not

tell you where and who, okay?

Trent: Sure, all right.

Graig: So how about that?

Trent: That’s fine.

Graig: Sponsored e-mail blasts — and this is something no one does in any

sort of business, and not necessarily dentistry, and this is what I teach a

lot of the people that I coach on how to be local marketers is there are

people out there who have herds or subscription or magazine companies or

whatever it is, educational companies, that have e-mail lists of people

that open their crap and read it. They have maybe never thought that they

can monetize the e-mails that they send out.

Essentially what a sponsored e-mail blast is, let’s take eye doctors, for

example. Say you want to target LASIK surgeons with marketing consulting or

something like that. Let’s just take them for example. You can go and find

publications, whether it’s continuing education, Eye Doctor Magazine, any

sort of print, maybe there’s blogs, forums, where these guys and gals hang

out and get their information from. You can use this cool little thing

called Google to figure it out, where those things.

Some may have media kits where they do offer sponsored email blasts, you

just didn’t know about it. It’s, say, $1,000. Now, in exchange for that

$1,000, they will send pre-approved e-mail content out to their list from

you with basically an offer: “Here’s my free report, here’s my Google cheat

sheet.” Then you get to keep the leads, you pay them the $1,000. Done deal.

Now, here’s a cool way to do it, is sometimes these media companies never,

ever think to monetize their e-mail list like that. They sell print space,

they sell banner ads, but they never think that by clicking a button they

can make $1,000. And you’ll keep coming back for more if it works, so what

I tell my people is find a community of people in the niche that you want

to go after, find the key-holder to the e-mail list. If they don’t offer a

media kit or something like that, tell them you’ll pay them $1,000 to send

one e-mail out and if it goes well, you’ll give them $1,500 an e-mail and

buy four more of them. That is a way to get someone to mail for you

essentially, sponsor you in a way and I’ve done it a myriad of times

myself.

Sometimes they’ll say no. Sometimes they’ll say, “Oh, we don’t want to do

that.” Sometimes they’re just not into it but, honestly, I know some of the

biggest names in the business in certain niches who, from a publication

standpoint, from a media standpoint, love the e-mail sponsored blasts and

they’re open to doing it.

Trent: Okay, and where does that rank in-between, let’s say, direct mail —

which we’ll talk about next — LinkedIn — which we’ll talk a little bit

after that — and sponsored e-mail? Are they roughly equal? Is sponsored e-

mail the best one?

Graig: Sponsored e-mail is the fastest way to cash.

Trent: Okay.

Graig: That’s the fastest way to build your list. It’s the fastest way to

make money but the problem is it saturates quickly, so it comes down to

really knowing your numbers when it comes to that. In the beginning, you’re

going to be like, “Oh, this is amazing! I got 100 leads from one e-mail.”

Well, in three months, six months, that might be 30 people, that might be

  1. Who knows? So you need to have back-up. So that leads my lead source is

the e-mail blast but I also do a lot of direct mail. I do a lot of cheap

postcards and then I’d say just after that LinkedIn and other paid traffic,

not just LinkedIn but other outside traffic.

Trent: Yeah. Let’s talk about direct mail.

Graig: Sure.

Trent: So are you doing only postcards or do you do three-dimensional?

Graig: No. For lead gen, yes, and the only reason I have is because I’ve

been able to make money doing it, so I just know if I send these postcards

out, I’m going to get traffic, I’m going to get opt-ins and then we’re just

going to push them through. So right now, I do do other direct mail but

mostly I’m using postcards to drive traffic.

The other thing that I’m doing that nobody does is I use postcards to drive

webinar sign-ups.

Trent: So the postcards are either sending to a landing page like the one

you shared with me, this Google Reviews one, yeah?

Graig: Yeah.

Trent: Or a webinar opt-in page.

Graig: Correct. I also use what’s called a PURL postcard. Do you know what

a PURL postcard is?

Trent: No, I don’t, I don’t.

Graig: You don’t? Okay.

Trent: No.

Graig: They’ve been around for a while and they’re pretty cool. So PURL

stands for “personalized URL”.

Trent: Oh, okay.

Graig: So what that basically does is you print a postcard and it’ll say,

“Hey, Trent, look at this cool new thing on how to get 10 to 15 more

clients a month without lifting a finger. I made this brand-new website

just for you. Check it out: abc.com/trent.”

You’re like, “Wow, this person like made their own individual website for

  1. Cool.” So you go to the computer and you type in “abc.com/trent.” You

go the landing page, and it says at the top, “Hey, Trent, thanks for coming

to this webpage” and then inside the web form is pre-populated with your

name and e-mail already and you’re like, “Wow, this is super-customized.”

Conversions go up exponentially because of it because people actually think

you made a real, live individual website for them — but you didn’t. All

you did is all it is is a list uploaded to your server that talks to some

code and the code, when they type in their name, pops it into the fields

and you’re done, so it’s really one webpage with a list. That’s all it is.

Trent: Now, is there a service that you subscribe to get these PURL

postcards?

Graig: No, but there are and they all suck. So I’ve tried to do that before

where I thought I could crank them out quicker, and they’ve all been very,

very terrible, so what I decided to do is I just have a mailing company

that prints the postcards and then the developer uploads the list and then

I just go.

But here’s the good news: once the list is uploaded to your server, you can

just keep adding to it. It’s not like it has to be replaced. So once that

mailing list is uploaded, you could have 100,000 names on there and still

only mail to a 1,000 and it’ll still work.

Trent: So the URL on the postcard is abc.com/trent and it doesn’t matter if

you had 47 Trents on your list because they all come to the page that says,

“Hey, Trent,” because . . .

Graig: We usually do first name, last name.

Trent: Oh, you do? Okay, so everyone’s getting an individual page, so

you’ve got one landing page, your developer wrote a little bit of script,

queries the database, pulls the first name and populates it.

Graig: Yup.

Trent: And makes the URL the same thing.

Graig: Yup, and I would imagine if anyone listening is an InfusionSoft

user, if you go under the Community page, there will be people on there

that can build PURL pages for you.

Trent: Absolutely. What are you spending per-piece for one of these

postcards?

Graig: Oh, geez, I think it’s — what is postage? $0.45 right now or

something like that?

Trent: I have no idea, something like that.

Graig: I think postcards probably run me around $0.65 in total, so the

postage is more than the stuff on the card.

Trent: So it’s about a buck by the time you’re all done.

Graig: No, it’s less than a dollar. No, it’s $0.65 cents.

Trent: Oh, including the postage.

Graig: Like I just mailed a letter — I call it the “granny letter”, one

piece of paper, handwritten, everything for $0.85 cents apiece.

Trent: And is it actually handwritten? I used to hire people off

Craigslist.

Graig: Uh-huh, not fun. Handwritten.

Trent: I’d just hire people off Craigslist and they’d come over to my house

and pick all the things up and they’d go home and watch TV and write them

all.

Graig: Are you being serious?

Trent: Yeah.

Graig: Oh, dude, there are mailing houses that could do that for you for

$0.85 cents.

Trent: This was years ago before I knew about any of this stuff.

Graig: Oh, okay. No, you’d be surprised, you’d be surprised with that

stuff. It’s pretty reasonable. The reason I like the PURL postcard is

because it’s personalized so people really get engaged with it and it’s

really inexpensive.

Trent: Any chance you’d send me a screenshot of one of these postcards that

I could include in the post?

Graig: Yeah, I can do it but I’m going to blur stuff out.

Trent: That’s fine.

Graig: Okay.

Trent: Is the message on the postcard pretty much the same message as on

the landing page that it’s driving them to?

Graig: Pretty close because, obviously, from being of Direct Response 101,

you do need congruency.

Trent: Yeah.

Graig: But you still never want to get away from the fact that you need to

get the click. You need to get the click and you need to get the traffic,

so don’t be too revealing in your message upfront. Give them enough to not

satisfy their appetite so that when they get to the landing page, they’re

like, “Ah, makes sense but it didn’t say it all on the copy.” Because

that’s what a lot of people do, they forget that they need to get that

click, so they give away way too much on the front end when just give away

your stuff later because you don’t want to satisfy their appetite by just

writing a bunch of great copy and them being like, “Oh, that was pretty

good, thanks. Well, see you later.”

Trent: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Okay, and then let’s finish this off on

LinkedIn. Just talk very briefly about how you’re using LinkedIn.

Graig: Okay. Like no one else. Because everybody goes on there to solicit

and profile and go into groups and network and all that. Isn’t that what

most people use it for?

Trent: Probably, yeah.

Graig: Yeah, yeah, right. I don’t even go on there and do anything other

than run my ads. That’s it.

Trent: Okay.

Graig: Because one thing people need to understand about LinkedIn versus

Facebook — which I’m not saying don’t do Facebook, I’m saying do a lot of

things that make you money but let’s just talk about LinkedIn for a minute

— is it lets you specifically with, by the way, 100% accuracy, sort by

profession. So if you want to go after Fortune 500 CEOs, you can do that.

If you want to go after eye doctors, you can do that. Pinpoint that,

exactly that, so it really enables you to go by profession and that’s

really good for us sort of marketers and consultants because we really can

segment out the people that we want to go after.

I don’t use it for any of the social networking. I don’t network at all,

actually, and that’s not because I’m antisocial; that’s because I don’t

make money when I network and that’s actually good. We don’t use it for

that, we just use it for traffic, that’s it. Ads and traffic.

Trent: And ads are driving to like the Google Reviews landing page?

Graig: Yeah, sure, or various landing pages, yeah. Yeah.

Trent: In the ads, is it like Facebook, you can include a little image?

I’ve actually never advertised on LinkedIn yet.

Graig: Yeah, it’s actually the set-up for LinkedIn ads is simpler than

Facebook but it is an image and copy. They restrict you a little bit more

with the number of characters, but they also let you get away with a little

bit more than Facebook, so it’s kind of a give-and-take.

Trent: And what kind of images are you doing? Pretty girls with smiles?

Graig: Pretty girls, pretty girls.

Trent: Really? Seriously?

Graig: Oh, yeah, of course. That’s pretty much it. Pretty girls most of the

time.

Trent: And these pretty girls are dressed in business attire, I’m assuming?

Graig: No, sometimes bikinis.

Trent: You’re pulling my leg, right?

Graig: Nope.

Trent: And LinkedIn lets you do that?

Graig: Yup.

Trent: Because Facebook is ridiculously anal about that.

Graig: Yeah, they’re a little tougher. They’re loosening up a little bit

but, yeah, LinkedIn, they’ll let me — I’d probably embarrass you if you

saw some of the pictures I got away with on LinkedIn but they work, man.

But I’m going to say this, though, with a disclaimer, is the business that

I’m in happens to be very male-dominated. I think about 80% or higher are

males in dentistry. So, if you’re going after the holistic niche or, yeah,

females in it, still use pretty girls but don’t put them in bikinis. But I

still need to get people’s attention. I use pretty girls on all of my — I

even put them on my postcards.

Trent: Yeah, I still think you’re pulling my leg about the bikinis.

Graig: No, no, I’m not, I’m serious.

Trent: That’s awesome.

Graig: I’m not ashamed. I try to push it, because I know that if you’re

online and you’re looking at ads, you’re looking at thousands a day, so I

know that I’ve got to make that thing jump out at you.

Trent: Yup. I went to a workshop where the guy did a lot of paid ads.

Graig: Sure.

Trent: He even went so far — pretty girls were his images — that he would

split test how big their eyes were.

Graig: Oh, that’s funny.

Trent: He would split test which direction they were looking, whether it

was looking at the camera or away from the camera. It was insane, but this

guy’s running an eight- or nine-figure-a -year business. I can’t remember.

Graig: Yeah, no, I have friends like that, too, and they’ve tested cleavage

versus no cleavage, stuff like that, and cleavage got more clicks. That’s

very true but, to his defense, it probably depends on his market. Like I

said, mine happens to be a male-dominated industry where bikinis and

lingerie probably get clicks, but in other businesses it may not

essentially work.

Trent: So when you first started, you had to spend some money on LinkedIn

ads, sponsored e-mail, direct mail. How long did it take you to get that

money back?

Graig: Well, I ROI’ed out pretty quickly. I’d say it depends on the lead

source, though, but I didn’t do them all at one time. I had my lead sources

and I was like, “Okay, we’ll do this one, see how it goes.” This is

actually a good lesson. I don’t know the exact number of days, but I know

that I made money on it. Because here’s what a lot of people do when it

comes to marketing: they do a lead source campaign. In the lead source

campaign, they get a bunch of leads and they say, “Okay, well, we’ve got

100 leads, so I’m not going to do any more marketing until we make money

off that one campaign.”

Trent: They’re wrong.

Graig: They’re like, “Okay, so waiting, still waiting.” Whereas what if

that lead source just sucked? Or what if that lead source needed six months

to be nurtured before it converted? Maybe that’s just the way those people

are. So now you’ve done no marketing for six months because you’re still

“testing” this lead source, right? You’ve sat on your ass and made no

money, whereas when I did it — and I’m not saying this is the only way to

do it but it’s definitely a smarter way to do it — is I ran the campaign,

I got, say, 100 leads.

I knew I had the leads. I knew that they were going to be in Infusionsoft.

I knew that I could market to them forever. I knew I was going to give them

good content. So what I did was I waited until some more cash came in, just

a little bit of cash, and then I did another lead source campaign and then

I stacked them like that. Now I have 300 leads that I’m able to monetize

versus a six-month gap of just marketing to one particular customer and I

was able to build my list, my herd, right, because I just need more people.

Sometimes it’s just pure numbers. Sometimes 100 people in your niche just

isn’t going to cut it to get a customer. Maybe you need 300 people to get a

customer. So a lot of people do that one-and-done marketing, that one-shot,

“Oh, I’m going to do one direct mail campaign,” “Oh, I’m going to do one

thing” — and then they sit and they wait. Sometimes you waiting may cost

you your business.

Trent: Yep, because cash flow is king.

Graig: Right, right. The thing is that, especially when you start a

business, you don’t really know the life cycle of your customer. You don’t

know it might take seven months to close someone, so you’ve kind of got to

get your marketing in order and just stagger it and go out six months and

then look at it and say, “Okay, on average it took us four months to get a

client. Now we know that,” as before you may not have known that.

Trent: How long did it take you to get your first client?

Graig: A week.

Trent: Yeah.

Graig: A week, but you know why was because I knew the basics of what it

was going to take to get a client. What I mean by that is in the first week

of being in business, I hosted a live teleseminar where I got 50 dentists

on and I sold my first product.

Trent: How’d you get those 50?

Graig: Various lead sources opting-in to a landing page. The life lesson

there is I didn’t focus on anything but just selling them on the one thing.

I needed eyeballs and I needed ears and I had a product. I just needed them

to listen to it and I put them on a telecall and I think I sold five in

that one night.

Trent: So the machine began.

Graig: Then the matrix started, that’s right.

Trent: Yeah.

Graig: But how many people do you know spend the first two weeks of

business making up a website and business cards and a logo?

Trent: Yeah.

Graig: I had an e-mail address. I didn’t even have a website and I made

thousands in a day.

Trent: I interviewed a guy by the name of Sam Ovens yesterday and he has a

marketing consulting business and he put up a one-page website. He didn’t

have a business card, he didn’t have a business plan, he didn’t know what

he was going to sell and he didn’t know who he was going to sell it to. He

just started to reach out to everyone he knew and he said, “Hey, I’m pretty

knowledgeable about online marketing and I’m looking for clients to help.”

Graig: Yep.

Trent: And one, two, three, four, five, six, seven clients later, he

started figuring out what they really wanted, who he should really be

selling to, and what he should really be selling and he figured out that

his sweet spot was selling to high-ticket B2B companies for the same

reasons that you explained at the very beginning of this interview, was

because their customer value was between $50,000 and $100,000.

Check this out — he would go to one of these companies and say, “I can

make your website produce more qualified leads for you.” “Okay.” And he

would tweak — so these people wouldn’t even have an opt-in form.

Graig: Right.

Trent: So he’d fix the headline, fix the sales copy, put on in opt-in form,

basic autoresponder, and charge $10,000.

Graig: Yup.

Trent: But these customers are like, “Well, if I could get one more

customer per year, that’s $50,000 and I only have to pay this guy $10,000.

Yeah, sign me up.”

Graig: I have a lot of friends that do exactly what he does and it’s very

true. It’s very true and that’s just the basics of it. I mean, Trent, I

still to this day, we’re talking three-and-a-half years later, I still

don’t have a business card.

Trent: If you’re not going networking, then what in the hell do you need

one for?

Graig: Oh, yeah, that’s a whole other hour podcast right there but, yeah,

no, and that’s exactly it and that’s the thing is a lot of people don’t

understand is I still do deals. So a lot of people associate networking

with deals, getting deals done. I still do deals all the time. It’s made me

a lot of money, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t do them where I go and I

peddle around my business card at stupid conferences.

What I did is I elevated myself to a certain stature that allowed people to

be attracted to me, not the other way around, so now all I have to do is

ask. So if I want one of my friends to send an e-mail out for me, they’re

my friends now because of the respect that they have for me, not because I

handed them and peddled them business cards at conferences and they just

say, “Yeah, I’ll send it out for you.” Because I’ve elevated that stature,

as opposed to saying, “Hey, call me, let’s get something together.”

Trent: And, folks in the audience, if you’re listening to this and going,

“Yeah, I’d like to elevate my stature,” I have three words for you: start a

podcast.

Graig: Start a podcast. That’s true. It’s very true. Write a book. Get

featured in press releases.

Trent: Blog.

Graig: Actually, you know what? Can I do a shameless plug and it’s not for

me, it’s for one of my friends who does a really good job with this, a

really good job?

Trent: Yeah. Please do.

Graig: If you want to be the authority in your particular arena or you just

want to be able to hang your hat on more notoriety — because nobody argues

with an expert, no one argues with Dr. Oz or Suze Orman about financial

stuff, even though they’re average in their profession. You would think

they’re phenomenal.

If you utilize my friend Brian Horn, he’s got a website, I think it’s

horndogsearch.com or something like that or beonpageone.com. You just

Google “Brian Horn SEO” and he will help you. He has done a phenomenal job

with helping his clients in all sorts of businesses from dentists to

Fortune 500 CEOs on how to get featured in local media, Wall Street

Journal, and syndicate you all over the dang place so, that way, you can

put all of those labels on your authority badge. You’re “as seen on CBS,

FOX News, CBS Sports,” whatever you’re in. He does a phenomenal job with it

and that’s an easy way to become an authority where you can garner more

respect from not only your peers, but your clients and customers and

prospects. So that’s a shameless plug for Brian but he’s good at it.

Trent: I was going to ask you about that because I noticed you had “ABC,

NBC, CBS, FOX, blah blah blah,” Brian Horn, did you work with him to be

able to do that?

Graig: I did and Brian’s a really good friend of mine. He’s in my

MasterMind group with me, and he’s phenomenal at it. He’s phenomenal at it.

Yeah, I was even in Newsweek Magazine as a featured person and, by the way,

guys, you can pay to be in all that stuff. It’s not special. I mean, it’s

special to the outside world, but it’s not that hard.

Trent: So you mentioned a word near and dear to my heart: MasterMind group.

For folks, if you’re listening, Bright Ideas is about to launch a

MasterMind group for people that want to learn how to build a local

marketing agency to serve dentists. Why, Graig, do you think MasterMind

groups are so valuable?

Graig: Well, I mean, it’s the whole adage of the power of the MasterMind. I

mean, the simplest way to explain it is many brains is better than one. So

you’re automatically multiplying what can be done in a room. For example,

if Trent and I sat down in a room together and I told him my biggest

problems and biggest ideas, he may just look at me and say, “Well, here’s

what I would do and what I’ve done.” But what if you had seven Trents in

that room? It’s the ultimate multiplier.

Anyone who’s not part of a MasterMind, you should just be in one. I don’t

care, be in at least just one. Most successful people are in more than one,

but be in just at least one and that’s really it because when I go to

MasterMind and I’m like, “Okay, here’s what I’m seeing,” not only can they

help me, but when I say, “I’m doing this that’s working,” I have 8 to 10

other eyeballs in the room helping me out with that, versus just one.

Versus just a coach. It’s not just a coach, it’s a room of experts.

Trent: What do you pay to be in yours?

Graig: The one that I’m in is actually sort of, it’s like Fight Club.

Trent: Yeah?

Graig: So we don’t even tell people where we meet. We call each other,

we’re the “SEO Mafia” is what we say, so I can’t tell you that or they’ll

kill me. They won’t kill me literally but we don’t talk about it. But in

all honesty, I think paying around anywhere from $20,000 to $25,000 a year

for a MasterMind is not a bad investment.

Trent: Yeah, because you’re around other people who can afford to pay

$20,000 to $25,000 a year.

Graig: Yeah, and the other thing is don’t just join a MasterMind group of

average people, right? You want to be in a room with seven- or eight-figure-

earners. So if you were to be in Joe Posh’s $25,000 group or something like

that, you know you’re going into that room and there’s going to be other

millionaires in that room. That’s a good place to be.

Trent: Yeah, absolutely.

Graig: It’s a real good place to be.

Trent: I guess I’d better raise the price of my MasterMind.

Graig: Double it, double it.

Trent: Actually, as of this recording, I have not decided yet how much I’m

going to charge. I’m off to Washington D.C. the tail-end of this week,

actually, to do a meeting which will be instrumental to my figuring out

what the pricing will be and what will be included.

Graig: Nice.

Trent: So details to come, folks.

Graig: Nice.

Trent: All right, Graig, let’s wrap this up. We’ve done a long one here,

but, man, this has been super-awesome and thank you for that.

Graig: Yeah, I know we went over but I think everybody’s going to get a

good idea of things. If people are looking to get more information like on

me and so on and so forth, not necessarily me itself but sort of how I look

at marketing, is if you go to 7figurelocalmarketer.com — that’s where

you’re going to be able to get my free report on how I’ve really built my

business. The dentist stuff is good to talk about but that’s where all your

people are going to want to go.

Trent: Okay, I’ll make sure that I link to that from the show notes, as

well.

Graig: Yeah, yeah. That’s where they’ll want to be.

Trent: And do you have an affiliate link for whatever that is?

Graig: I can set one up for you, Trent. That’s not a problem.

Trent: Okay, cool. All right, so unless there’s anything else, Graig, that

you want to add to this.

Graig: No, this was good, this was fun.

Trent: Yeah, thank you very much for making the time. I hope that people

who are listening to this were both educated and inspired by your story as

I was and thanks for being on the show.

Graig: No problem.

Trent: Okay, to get the show notes for today’s episode, go to

brightideas.co/70. And while you’re in front of your computer, I’d love it

if you would take a minute and go to brightideas.co/love. If you’ve enjoyed

this episode, there will be a pre-populated tweet that you can click and,

as well, there’s a link to the iTunes store where you can go and leave

feedback for the show and for this episode. If you would take a moment and

do that, it would make a huge difference because it helps the show to get

more awareness and more people can listen to it and we can help more

entrepreneurs to massively boost their business.

Thanks very much for tuning in. I’m your host, Trent Dyrsmid, and I look

forward to seeing you in the next episode. Take care, have a wonderful day.

Announcer: Thanks very much for listening to the Bright Ideas podcast.

Check us out on the web at brightideas.co.

About Graig Presti

graigGraig Presti, founder and CEO of LocalSearchForDentists.com, is a foremost advertising authority who operates with dental practices all around the planet, assisting them to leverage the internet so they can generate more telephone calls, reach more new patients, and bring in more revenue. His strategies begin to work immediately and continue to work month after month.

Presti specializes in helping dental practices dominate their nearby location by using confirmed regional Internet dental advertising strategies to help them dominate the top rated regional research engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Presti uses easy to understand stories to help his clients comprehend how they can improve their internet presence. He is a repeated featured speaker at dental conferences and other venues.

Presti has mastered the art of bringing a flood of new patients into dental offices, and has undoubtedly established himself as a top specialist in his field. His considerable accomplishments, and his industry contributions, led him to be showcased as a Newsweek Magazine Champion of Health, Wealth and Success.

How to Start a Marketing Consulting Business and Go From Zero to $35,000 a Month in Only 12 Months – with Sam Ovens

Do you think you need a fancy website, and business card, and plenty of startup capital to start a business? If you do, you’re dead wrong.

Do you think you need a fancy website, and business card, and plenty of startup capital to start a business? If you do, you’re dead wrong.

Sam Ovens started his marketing consulting business with no clue of what he was going to sell, no idea who would buy it, no idea how he’d actually deliver the work, and with no savings to speak of.

In this interview, you’ll hear Sam and I talk about:

  • (4:37) His number of customers and revenue
  • (8:00) His background, and how he got started
  • (10:30) His start as a marketing consultant
  • (13:00) How he used email to get his first clients
  • (16:00) How success led to more success
  • (19:00) How he made $10,000 sales, and closed $20,000 deals with $3k/mo in retainer fees
  • (23:00) How he used lumpy mail to find his leads
  • (25:30) How he delivered services using elance
  • (30:30) How he transitioned to a trusted advisor
  • (34:30) The difference between a service business and a product business
  • (38:30) The cons of a product business
  • (40:00) The cost of version 1
  • (42:00) His Big Business mindset
  • (48:00) How he used Idea Extraction to get his rich niche to tell him their pain
  • (51:00) How he researched Property Management
  • (58:00) Mistakes he made along the way

Links

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

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Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

Transcript

Trent: Hey there, bright idea hunters. Welcome to the Bright Ideas podcast.

I’m your host, Trent Dyrsmid, and this is the podcast for marketing

consultants, marketing agencies, and entrepreneurs who want to discover how

to use content marketing and marketing automation to massively boost their

business.On the show with me today is an entrepreneur by the name of Sam Ovens. Sam

is the founder of a very rapidly-growing company by the name of

SnapInspect. Just over a year ago, Sam barely even knew what an

entrepreneur was. He literally had to actually Google the term when he

first discovered it and that was a little bit longer ago. With that said,

this interview, if you are a new entrepreneur looking for a business to

start or you are already a marketing consultant looking to grow your

business, this interview is going to be absolutely a mind-blower for you.I don’t want to sound too hype-y, but I took so many notes for myself when

I was doing this interview with Sam that I absolutely promise that if you

invest the time to listen to it, you are going to come away from this

interview with some of the most valuable insights possible that will

literally be for you, as they were for Sam, massive game-changers.His app, his company, SnapInspect — so a year ago, nothing, didn’t exist.

He had to figure out how to find the idea, how to get it built, how to pay

for it, and then how to turn it into a very healthy six-figure business and

he did all of that in just over a year. And keep in mind, beforehand, this

guy barely even knew what an entrepreneur was. So get some pen and paper,

sit down. You are absolutely going to love this interview.Before I get to it, I want to really quickly tell you about something if

you’re listening, if you’re not yet a Bright Ideas subscriber, I’ve got a

new four-part video series called the Conversion Tactics Toolbox. It

teaches you — shows you, actually; it’s free–exactly how I get bright

ideas to add so many subscribers every day to my newsletter list and

therefore my marketing funnel and, of course, that causes products to sell.

Go sign up at brightideas.co.So, with that said, get ready, here we go. This is going to be a really

good one. Please join me in welcoming Sam to the show. Hey, Sam, welcome to

the show. Thanks for making the time.Sam Ovens: Glad to be here.Trent: So for the folks who don’t yet have a clear understanding of who you

are, take a minute and just please briefly introduce yourself. Tell us who

you are and what you do.Sam: Okay, so I started a software as a service company called SnapInspect,

which is basically a property inspection app for property management

companies. They use it to inspect rental properties and create reports.

Yeah, so that’s basically what I did.Trent: Is this your first entrepreneurial venture?

Sam: First successful one, yes, but including the failed ones, it’s

probably my third or fourth.

Trent: Okay.

Sam: Yeah.

Trent: All right, so you’re at a point now where you’re having quite a bit

of success. So let’s talk a little bit about where you are today and then I

want to back this up to the process that you went through and how you

started off as a marketing consultant and used that money to fund this and

where there’s a whole lot of really good stuff I want to get into. But so

that people know where you’re at, because you’ve accomplished quite a bit

here in the last year since you launched the product, I really kind of want

them to know the conclusion first, so maybe we can talk about number of

customers and revenue, how’s that sound?

Sam: Sure.

Trent: All right, so how many customers and how much revenue?

Sam: So, last time I checked, we’re around 1,400 paid customers and revenue

is around about $400,000 annually.

Trent: Very nice. And on a software business, how much of that is making it

to the bottom-line? Quite a bit, I would think.

Sam: I mean, our expenses run roughly right now about $16,000 a month, so

you could do the maths on that.

Trent: The point of it is — and this is what I wanted people to get —

because here you are, this guy who fell on his face a couple of times

beforehand and then finally, when you got it figured out, within a year

you’ve made a massive transformation to your life as a result of this

business. Would that be an overstatement, do you think, or do you think

that that’s pretty accurate?

Sam: No, I think it’s pretty accurate. I’ve tried to be an entrepreneur for

probably, I think, three years now, maybe not quite three but close to. Two

of those years, I was practically just spinning my tires and then when

things sort of clicked for me, which was about a year ago, it just all

moved so rapidly. SnapInspect is one year old in August. SnapInspect is

only one year old and all of my business stuff has really snowballed in the

last 12 months and it’s been a pretty crazy 12 months.

Trent: And a lot of fun, too, I’ll bet.

Sam: Oh, yeah. It’s fun finally making money.

Trent: Yeah.

Sam: Instead of just finding ways to get more to spend.

Trent: Yeah, funny how that is. Being an entrepreneur is so much more fun

when you’re making a profit. All right, so let’s talk a little bit about

your background and then how you got into this and how you were a marketing

consultant, because a lot of my audience — and I really think this is

going to be a great interview for them — they’re either a new entrepreneur

like you were before this success came your way or they are a marketing

consultant looking to grow their business to the point where it’s providing

a very nice level of income for them and maybe some of them are at a point

where they’re already there and they’re thinking, “Well, how do I take my

business to the next level?” The pieces of your story, I think, will speak

to all of those people, so let’s kind of dive into that.

What did you take in college? What did you do before this? Were you born in

this entrepreneur whiz-bang family with a big silver spoon or is it

something other than that?

Sam: Sure. No one in my family is an entrepreneur or even in business. My

mum’s a teacher and my dad’s a builder and none of my friends are even

entrepreneurial. I think back home in New Zealand, I don’t even think I

know another entrepreneur and I never really was entrepreneurial. I mean, I

was obsessive with things, like if it was a hobby or a sport or whatever it

was, I’d always have something I was quite obsessed with and spend all day

and all night thinking about it and something like that.

Those are the only early traces I could think of what’s led to today

because I remember my parents and teachers always said to me, “If only you

could just get obsessed with school or college or doing something

productive instead of,” because my obsessions used to be race cars or go-

karting or something like that and that was me spending money and taking

time away from studying, so my grades were always below average and

everything.

Then I don’t know when the click was. I think it was, I went to a friend’s,

her dad was a very successful businessman and I went away to their island —

the guy owned an island — and I was sitting there and I was like, “Oh my

God, this is so awesome,” and then when I got back, I was like, “I want to

do that.” I think the first thing, my first move was Googling, “What is

entrepreneurship?”

Trent: No kidding, wow.

Sam: Not even kidding, just trying to get a definition on it because I’d

asked this girl, “What does your dad do?” And she’s like, “Oh, he’s an

entrepreneur,” and I was like, “I want to be one of those.” So I went back

and I Googled it and I bought a bunch of books and I guess that’s where the

journey began and that was roughly three years ago.

Trent: Wow, that’s cool. All right, so you fell on your face a few times

and we’re going to skip past those just because there’s so much good stuff

that I want to talk about what’s worked for you.

Sam: Sure.

Trent: Then you, at some point, started working for yourself as a marketing

consultant, is that correct?

Sam: Correct.

Trent: Okay, so when was that?

Sam: I joined The Foundation in October of 2011 and I learned a lot there

about how to start a software company from scratch. I got the idea for

SnapInspect and we started developing it, but I quickly realized I’m going

to run out of money. Development builds were coming in because we had

milestones with the original developers and I never even knew how I was

going to pay the next milestone, so I was constantly trying to figure out

ways, see which banks were offering student credit cards, trying to just

come up with money any way just to pay the development bills.

Then I was looking, I was talking to my developer like, “What do you think

server costs are going to be?” He gave me some numbers and I was adding up

the numbers and I was like, “Oh my God, I’ve got an awesome idea for a

company. This company’s going to work, but I don’t know if I’m going to be

able to keep it alive long enough for it to actually gain traction.”

So I quickly realized that I’m going to need a source of income to support

starting SnapInspect. At that point, I knew a bit about marketing and I

figured, “Well, these skills are probably helpful to other business,” so I

decided that I’d help consult other businesses on marketing and basically

sell my own services and use that cash to help get SnapInspect started and

survive through the early stages.

Trent: So let’s talk about how you did that. You’ve got no customers,

you’ve got some marketing skills which you’ve acquired as the product of,

presumably, your failures along the way. You’re out there trying to figure

out how to do stuff, it’s all on the line and you can’t help but learn

things. Then you made a decision, “Well, I’m going to go get some clients

because I need some cash flow or my business is not going to succeed,” so I

want to know what did you do — and I’m sure my audience would like to

know, especially the new entrepreneurs who are thinking, “Man, this guy’s

story sounds like mine,” — what did you do to get those clients?

Sam: Sure. My first attempt, like any of my first attempts, was pretty

weak. I just reached out to people I knew because I didn’t even know what I

was selling. I was like, “I know all of this stuff,” but I couldn’t put

into a sentence what I was selling. So it sort of started out with getting

a few cheap $2,000 or $3,000 website deals where I’d essentially just be an

order taker and help a business rejig their website and that’s how it

started.

Trent: These were all people initially that you knew? But you didn’t have

any credibility with them as a marketing or a website developer, did you?

Sam: No, not at all. I just reached out via e-mail. They knew I was in this

whole online space, which most people don’t understand that most business

owners, outside of the tech and San Francisco space, they actually don’t

know anything about websites and so you don’t need to know much to be an

expert. In fact, most of the people that probably had the ability to find

your content and listen to it probably know more than enough to actually be

valuable to 95% of the businesses in the world. You don’t actually need to

be that much of an engineer to help other people out. Now I’ve side-tracked

myself, what was the question?

Trent: It’s okay, it’s okay. I couldn’t agree more. I think that is

something people overestimate or maybe underestimate, I don’t know what the

right word is, but they think they need to be this guru before they could

ever go to a small business owner that runs any kind of small business

that’s in your town and say to them, “I can help you with your marketing.”

So limiting belief number one that hope Sam has just smashed for you guys

is that you already know enough. If you found my site and you’re listening

to this interview and you know what WordPress is and you know what hosting

is, you already know enough.

Okay, so you sent some e-mails, you got some clients, $2,000 gigs, $3,000

gigs here and there. Is that about right?

Sam: Yup.

Trent: What happened next?

Sam: So that was enough money. From what I was making, that was a big

change. I mean, $2,000, $3,000 compared to zero? Pretty sweet, so I was

pretty happy with myself and I did quite a few of those and then I guess

the more I thought about it and the more of these little deals that I won,

the more confidence I got and I sort of found my foothold and my market in

exactly what it was that I did. So instead of being a consultant that

literally would do anything for money, I now had a very specific thing that

I did for a specific market.

Trent: Which was what?

Sam: So I would help B2B companies, so B2B companies that had high-ticket

priced items generate more leads with their websites.

Trent: Okay, so did you do that by helping them to do better conversions or

more traffic?

Sam: The beauty of this was that it was so much easier than doing even the

$2,000 deals because essentially what I would do is I’d put just such basic

stuff, like their websites would have headlines and basic copy which,

instead of saying, “We are the best. We, we, we,” it would talk a little

bit about the other person, the customer and what pains they’re

experiencing. So I’d rejig the copy, put a headline in and I’d create some

sort of lead capture system, which would just be usually a like a MailChimp

opt-in form for a free consultation or a pricing booklet or some sort of

information thing that they had. Most of the time, they had these in their

business; they just weren’t putting them to work.

Trent: So this is really basic stuff for us but, again, for these small

business owners, they had no idea how to do this stuff. So how much were

you able to charge to do this?

Sam: Well, so, my average–to do something simple as that, I would charge

$10,000.

Trent: $10,000?

Sam: Yup.

Trent: To tweak a headline, fix sales copy, put a lead capture form on,

presumably write some kind of autoresponder sequence on behind-the-scenes,

and get them to take some content they already had and turn it into a free

report/lead magnet, $10,000 for that?

Sam: Yup.

Trent: I hope, my beloved audience, this is sinking in for you guys.

Sam: Well, you’ve go tot understand that they didn’t know that they needed

that. If they knew that they needed that, they could do it themselves or

they could hire someone on Elance to whack it together for a couple hundred

dollars, but . . .

Trent: But they don’t know that.

Sam: It’s the advantage of not being an order taker but an advisor or an

expert and knowing exactly what you’d do because the beauty of B2B high-

ticket item companies is one sale to them is usually worth $50,000 to

$100,000.

Trent: Yup.

Sam: They’re already making plenty of sales and they’re making them through

their website with people going to the “Contact Us” form and filling out,

like, 15 fields, which was hard to find and I was thinking, “My God, if we

could remove some of this friction, rejig the copy, even if I just got them

one more in a whole year, it’s still worth it for them to pay me $10,000.”

Trent: Absolutely.

Sam: And I did. They got way more than one a year so as far as they were

concerned, they were away laughing. They only had to pay me $10,000 but

that’s the thing about pricing on value instead of cost.

Trent: Mm-hmm.

Sam: The whole time, I anchor my deals on what’s a new client worth to you.

They know it’s $50,000, $100,000 and if we can get at least one or two more

of those a month, they’re sorted. That’s the advantage, that’s why I picked

that as my niche and as my specialty because once I had one of those under

my belt and I could get a testimonial, I just started reaching out to more

of them that were in the same situation and it was easy. I’d put retainers,

I started to build retainers in and I started to charge more.

I did contracts where I’d implement a CRM system too. For example, a

company, it would need the website rejigged, it would need testimonials —

which I’d have to find — it might include lead capture, basic

autoresponder, and then it would have to feed into a CRM system, which you

wouldn’t even believe that a $10 million a year company didn’t even have a

CRM.

Trent: They probably didn’t even know what it was.

Sam: I put a CRM in place, showed the team how to use it, we talked about

all of this new stuff. It was fun. I learned a ton doing it. The owner

loved it, the company profited wildly from it and that was a $25,000 deal

with a $3,000 a month retainer and still not even touching on any of the

stuff that the guys in your audience know, like split-testing and what

button colors convert. Forget that! This is simple stuff, right?

Trent: I’m loving that you’re sharing this because this is a perfect

example in this video that I mentioned to you before that’s on YouTube that

I get all these views on and we talked about before — I talk about my

green dot theory and it’s more or less the best way to succeed in business

is to be in business. Because once you start — and this is what I hope

that my new entrepreneurs who are listening to this will understand — you

don’t need a great idea to start, you just need to start. Then along the

way, like what happened to you, Sam, is the byproduct of the journey is

that you start discovering these rich niches that I talk about, the

importance of selling to businesses that have a high customer value, and

you discovered all the stuff. You didn’t think this up on a whiteboard and

say, “That’s what I’m going to do,” right?

Sam: Oh, so far from it, it’s ridiculous.

Trent: Yeah, fantastic stuff. Okay, and how, by the way — because I know

some people are probably thinking this — how did you find these companies

to go and you contacted them via e-mail always to begin with, was that

correct?

Sam: I tried lots of things and over time, again, I adapted my process. In

the end, my secret weapon was lump e-mail.

Trent: I love so much you just mentioned that because that’s one thing that

we’re starting to do, as well.

Sam: Yeah, that was my secret weapon in the end. I could send out pieces

and I knew that I was going to get a new client. I knew what my conversions

were off that and it worked, it really worked and I never paid for any . .

. I never used AdWords, never had Facebook, never had a blog. I mean, I

didn’t have anything. I didn’t even have a business card.

Trent: Did you have a website? You had a website?

Sam: Well, I mean, if you looked at samovens.com, it’s one static page that

just says “Direct Marketing Consultant.” The website took me five minutes

to build.

Trent: Mm-hmm.

Sam: It pays to note I don’t even know how to use WordPress. I built my

website using Unbounce.

Trent: I love it.

Sam: I still don’t know how to set up a WordPress website.

Trent: I love it. So how when you were actually working with these clients

and you wanted to fix a headline and improve copy and put the webform on,

did you just give them the code for the webform and have their team make

the tweaks on their own sites?

Sam: That’s a really good question. That’s the other part of it: I never

did any of the actual work. So I would win the deal — that part is

important — I put a lot of my effort into winning the deal and that was

where I spent the bulk of my time. Then I would sit down with the business

owner and I’d ask him questions to learn about how we’re going to rejig the

site and how we’re going to generate leads.

Generally, he would give me all the information I needed and then I would

set aside a day or two to write the copy and I’d design all of the pages,

I’d just write them up in either Keynote or later on I used Unbound, but I

started out using Keynote, and I had a guy that I hired from Elance who

would do all of my implementation.

So I’d essentially win the deal, create a list of what needed to be done,

jump on Skype with my guy from Elance, brief him. He’d go and do it all —

like build the website, put the code on, do the style, all of that stuff

that I didn’t know how to do — and we had an awesome arrangement where he

charged a flat fee regardless of how long it took: $200 to do the

implementation.

Trent: $200. So you’re selling a deal for $10,000 and it’s costing you $200

to deliver it, right?

Sam: Yup, yup.

Trent: I hope there are people listening to this podcast right now with

their jaw hanging open and then kicking themselves in the butt because

they’re doing too much analysis and too much paralysis before they get

going.

Sam: It sounds illegal, right? But what people aren’t understanding is that

I’m not selling the doing. If these people knew what they wanted, they

could go directly to the Elance guy.

Trent: But they don’t.

Sam: I’m the one that’s telling them what they need, like I’m creating the

real value. The real value isn’t in doing. The real value isn’t in typing

the code or putting the MailChimp form on the page. There’s no value in

that. That’s a commodity. You can hire people all over the world on Elance

that’ll do that for next-to-nothing. The real value is in knowing how to

get the client more customers.

Trent: Mm-hmm, and knowing what the client needs when they don’t know

themselves.

Sam: Yeah, and the best part about it is you get treated with so much more

respect when you’re not an order taker.

Trent: Mm-hmm.

Sam: Back in the day when I did $2k and $3k website deals, I mean, I’d show

them the site and they’d send me back a list of, like, 50 things to change,

like “move the logo a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right,

color of the font doesn’t look right,” just stuff like that and it killed

me because you’re essentially an order taker — you’re not an adviser or an

expert — and they don’t listen to anything you say because you’re

essentially just that Elance guy except a more glorified version that gets

paid $2,000 instead of $200.

That’s essentially what I was but when you’re the adviser and the expert,

they don’t fight you on anything. You never hear about a logo placement or

a color because what they’re hiring you for is the added revenue they’re

going to get, the customers. They don’t care about anything else and that’s

the way it should be. So, honestly, it really changed how I did the whole

marketing consulting thing because I went from busting my ass doing $2,000,

$3,000 deals to doing $10,000 to $20,000 deals where I was treated like

someone that was valuable and also not having a fight with the customer

over the color of a logo.

Trent: Just so that I make sure myself and the audience is crystal-clear on

the difference, the differences between starving consultant Sam and getting-

rich consultant Sam — and we haven’t even talked about your SaaS yet,

which we’re still going to get to — is you decided, number one, to focus

on a different niche, the rich niche, these high-ticket B2B companies. Then

you used your lump e-mail to get in touch with them and you positioned

yourself deliberately through the questions, I’m assuming, that you asked

them as a trusted adviser. Is that pretty much the difference between

“starving” and “getting-rich”?

Sam: Yeah, so, first of all, I mean, I would target companies that had

money to spend and I’d target companies where I honestly believed that if I

was to do what I wanted to do to their website, that they would value from

it more than what they would pay me. Because a lot of the deals I did early

on when I was what you’re calling a “poor consultant,” I honestly thought —

and there was no real added value to the company. I mean, sure their

website looked nicer, but I didn’t feel, I felt like this is a waste of

their $2,000, $3,000; it just looks prettier.

But with these other companies, I was happy to charge $10,000 or more

because they got the value from it. It sounds criminal and I used to feel a

little bit shady doing it but then when I really thought about it, because

a lot of the time after I had these big customers with $10,000, $15,000,

$20,000, $25,000, I felt guilty. I was like, “Oh my God, they’re going to e-

mail me two months later and they’re going to be like, ‘We want our money

back.'” But it was the exact opposite.

They told other people about me and I started getting referrals and they

loved it. They were like, “There’s a big difference,” and the people I did

$2,000 or $3,000 websites for, they still call me today because they say

something like their website isn’t loading fast enough. I mean, the

difference is I can’t even define.

Trent: Well, you’re doing a pretty good job of it so far and I hope that

the incredibly valuable message that you are sharing right now is sinking

in with the people that are listening to this. Folks, if you have

questions, there’s going to be a comment form on the blog post where this

interview is published. Make sure you use it and either Sam or myself will

answer them.

All right, so I kind of want to transition the interview now to the

SnapInspect story. So, obviously what you’ve shared with us so far has

communicated how you got some cash flow so that you could build this other

business, which has a bunch of pros and cons. Before we get too much into

SnapInspect — and this is something that when I was a new entrepreneur, I

didn’t know anything about — there are some pros and cons to a consulting

business and there are some pros and cons to a software business. I don’t

think many people, especially in the beginning, even have the belief system

that they could ever possibly even create a software business.

So, very quickly, just tell us the pros and cons of the consulting model

and the pros and cons, mostly what you just told me before the interview,

the pros and cons of the software model.

Sam: Consulting is one specific example but it’s really the pros and cons

of any service business and the pros and cons of any product-based

business.

Trent: Sure.

Sam: But in my specific example, I’m going to use consulting and SaaS. The

pros and cons of a consulting business or a service business is, the pros:

you can get into business immediately. All you really need is a laptop and

a cell phone, plus the barriers to entry, there’s none. You don’t need to

build a product, you don’t need to invest in development and it doesn’t

cost anything or really anything. You can get into business straight away.

The other pros of the consulting business is you start to make decent money

pretty quickly so I started to make $3,000 where I had to pay my developer

$200. That was still $2,800 and while that’s not much money, that was a lot

to me back then, more than what my product business could do at the time,

so it can generate cash pretty quickly. Within a year, the consulting

business got pretty big. I grew it up to $35,000 a month.

Trent: Within a year.

Sam: Yep.

Trent: Fantastic.

Sam: It’s still at that today and, yeah, that was quick. It grew to $10,000

a month so much faster than SnapInspect did and the profitability of it was

much higher. It was very profitable. It was pretty much a cash business.

Now, the cons of a service business or a consulting business: firstly,

there’s no asset value. If you’ve got a consulting business, someone’s not

going to come along and acquire it because you are the business. It doesn’t

have an asset value, it doesn’t have a multiplier. You can’t say, “Well, I

earned $100,000 this year and using a ten times multiplier, the market cap

for my consulting practice is a $1,000,000.” That doesn’t work.

Trent: I do want to interject, though, from my own experience, I did have a

service business but it wasn’t just me — I had a dozen employees and we

had a lot of recurring revenue, MRR, monthly recurring revenue — and I

sold it for $1.2 million because the asset value was the recurring revenue

with the people behind it to do it all, so I just want to make sure that

the audience understands that service businesses can have an asset value if

you build them correctly. Not as good, necessarily, as software, but–

Sam: You want to make sure you are not the business.

Trent: Correct.

Sam: But I was the business, so if you can make your consulting or service

business run without you and it’s got some sort of reliable income that’s

predictable . . .

Trent: That doesn’t depend upon you.

Sam: Yes, then, absolutely, that’s a real business, that’s an asset. But

most consulting, it’s essentially the person, it’s just them and people buy

because it’s them and you can’t leave. So, yeah, you’re right, thanks for

correcting me, but my one was I definitely had no multiplier.

Trent: Mm-hmm.

Sam: And so–where was I, that was my con . . .

Trent: Yeah, now you’re going to talk about, I believe . . .

Sam: And also scaling.

Trent: Okay.

Sam: To scale a consulting business, there really is only two ways: one is

to charge more; the other is to work more hours; or the other one, which is

actually hiring more people, and there’s a limit on how high you can scale.

Now, on a product business, the cons: there’s barriers to entry. You have

to have a product. To do that, you need to develop it, you need to work

with developers, you need to pay money to build the product, test it, all

that stuff. That takes time, so speed-to-market, cost-to-enter is high, and

then also when you launch, you’re not making much money.

I mean, I had about 10 customers when I launched, paying around $150 a

month, that $1,500 a month. That’s still pretty good but my costs were

higher than that, so I was losing money and I was losing money for quite a

long time. Eventually it starts to pick up and scale but by the time it

gets out of that trough, it’s sucked up a fair bit of time and money.

Trent: How much do you think you burned through before you achieved

breakeven?

Sam: I don’t want to scare people — to get the product to market, version

one to market with 10 paying customers, cost me about $10,000.

Trent: Okay.

Sam: To build it up to where it is today, it’s not that same $10,000

product. There’s been a developer full-time on it for over a year now,

developing every single day. We’ve really built it out and invested in it.

I mean, it’s more than six figures — I don’t mean more than six figures,

but in the six figures range.

Trent: Mm-hmm.

Sam: So it’s under $300k but above $100k.

Trent: Yeah, it cost me probably close to $300,000 and several years before

my service business — which was not just me, it had a staff, so it had an

asset play achieved to break even. It’s expensive.

Sam: Yeah. Now, and also I don’t want to scare people off of the product

business costing that much. To get in there and to start selling, $10,000,

but I grew it without investing much money to a pretty decent income where

it was profitable pretty quickly, within six months. But I had this

realization that I just didn’t want a six-figure product business. I really

wanted a big business, like multi-millions, and so I figured, all right,

it’s time to turn the company into a loss and start making a loss with a

plan to scale.

Trent: But you had your consulting revenue to cover the loss for you.

Sam: Precisely, so I’ve always been a massive fan of big business. A lot of

people like lifestyle and all that sort of stuff but me, I’ve always been a

massive fan of just big business and so I’ve always followed people like

Warren Buffett and J.P. Morgan and Rockefeller and all of those guys and

been fascinated with how they think. I was reading the letters of Warren

Buffett–have you ever read those?

Trent: No, I have not.

Sam: Letters he writes to his Berkshire Hathaway . . .

Trent: Oh, yeah, the shareholders’ letters. I have.

Sam: Yeah, yeah, the shareholders’ letters and I was reading them, I still

read them. In it Buffett and Munger, Charlie Munger, were talking about

this concept of cash float, which is they use insurance companies such as

GEICO and I think they’re the largest insurance company holder in the

world, and they use insurance companies to generate cash float. So GEICO

and other companies, they charge the premium up-front, so you pay the 12-

month premium up-front and generally there’s 12 years before a client will

make a claim. So let’s say someone pays $1,000 a year over 12 years,

Buffett and Munger essentially have $12,000 of cash which they can invest,

and so they call that cash float. The reason they love insurance so much is

it produces huge amounts of cash that Buffett and Munger can take away and

invest in companies that need start-up money and money to get to scale and

get into profitability.

I was reading this and all of this clicked that my consulting business was

generating quite a bit of cash and I sort of thought of that as my GEICO,

my cash float business. So I started shifting the revenues from my

consulting business into SnapInspect to help it scale more rapidly. I could

get very detailed here, even into the tax things — but if you have a group

structure, you can shift revenue from one company to another company and

expense it in another company and it’s expensed against the revenue in the

other and it’s amazing how powerful it is.

You can essentially take money out of your service business, invest it in

your product business, and get a 10 times ROI on it. So let’s say you make

$10,000 in your service business. Shift it into your product business,

invest it wisely, get a 10 times ROI: that’s $100,000. That’s essentially

what Warren Buffett and Munger did and that’s why they’re so successful. I

use that same strategy today to scale SnapInspect, so shifting revenues

from my marketing consulting business into SnapInspect to help it scale.

Trent: Thank you for sharing that because I think that that type of

thinking is not commonly talked about, especially in the “Internet

marketing communities”. People there are all talking about getting rich

quick and a fast buck and all that stuff that is more or less a load of

crap.

Sam: Well, I found the perfect mix is to mix Internet marketing, like all

of this IM stuff, in with the big thinking that the big guys have and sort

of see ways that you could do what they’ve done in the traditional old days

and into today’s thing because Internet marketing, it’s very tactical. It

really lacks any form of where are we going with this. You know what I

mean? Like what’s the 10-year strategy? That doesn’t exist in the IM world;

it’s about making a buck today.

Trent: I couldn’t agree more. I have a course called the “Best Buyer

Formula” and right at the very top of the sales page, it says, “What would

you rather build: a business that’s going to make you a couple of quick

bucks or something that’s going to be around for years that you can one day

sell to somebody else for a big pile of cash?”

Sam: Yeah, well, I mean, yeah. I was broke for a long time and I lived at

home with my parents up until 12 months ago and my office was in my garage

and all I’d dreamed about was making that quick buck, because it would be

very nice to go to a restaurant and actually have a car that maybe had

leather seats, after being poor for so long. I mean, I can definitely see —

but as soon as you make that quick buck, like as soon as I was able to buy

a nice car and stuff, it gets old so fast that you immediately realize that

this is a long-term thing and you’re looking to build something. The quick

buck isn’t attractive any more.

Trent: That’s so true. I used a subject line once — and this got one of

the highest open rates that I’ve ever had — is “How to Build a Business

You Can Be Proud Of.” That’s the problem, I think, with a lot of the quick-

buck businesses, is that it’s not something you necessarily would want to

hang your reputation on and tell your family all about even though it’s

putting some money in the short-term in your bank account.

Sam: Yeah, I honestly think if you can’t tell your friends and family about

your business without cringing, then you’re never going to do well in it

ever.

Trent: I agree. All right, so let’s talk a little bit then about — I want

to talk about how you found — because I think this is a huge hang-up for

people, as well, and this applies to both people who are listening to this

who are thinking about starting any type of service business, as well as it

does to people who would be interested in potentially starting any kind of

product business and that’s how do you get the idea?

I want to give a shout-out to Dane Maxwell because I’m pretty sure that you

learned from him, he calls it “idea extraction.” Do you want to talk about

that?

Sam: Yeah, this is big. This is actually how I took Dane’s thinking and

applied it to, basically, consulting to even find the market and what to

sell. This is a really powerful thing which Dane, I’d never heard anybody

else mention it before Dane. It’s called “idea extraction” and it’s

essentially picking a market, a decent market — so, I mean, most

entrepreneurs go out and they just target everyone. That’s failure number

one. You have to pick something specific and you have to make sure those

people have money to spend and it’s a decent market where money can be

made.

So step one is pick a market, step two is talk to the market and find out

what their most painful problems are. Instead of coming up with an idea of

what you believe might help them or what you believe might be “cool,” I

mean, you don’t assume anything; you talk to them and you talk to them

about what the most painful part of working in that particular market is

and once you’ve found an extremely painful problem, you essentially build,

you come up with an idea to solve that problem.

I picked the market property managers and I started e-mailing and calling

property managers and asking them what the most painful part about their

job was and they said “property inspections.”

Trent: Sorry to interrupt you, but why did you pick property managers?

Sam: A lot of people ask me that and I wish I had a cool answer but it

literally was just in my mind. I mean, I had been at a dinner two nights

before, a family dinner, where there was a guy that owned a property

management business there and I was asking him questions about it and it

was doing really well. I mean, he had an Aston Martin so I figured this

dude was the man.

When I thought about, “What’s a profitable business to target?”, well, I

thought, ‘”This guy has an Aston Martin, he’s in property management, it’s

going good. This must be a good market.”

Trent: Okay.

Sam: I wish I could give you some sort of science to it but that was how I

came up with it.

Trent: But the thing I want people to understand is you didn’t get lucky

because some dude showed up in an Aston Martin. Because property

management, if you don’t go and do what you’re about to explain in a

second, you still didn’t or would not have come up with the idea for

SnapInspect, so what happened next after you saw an Aston Martin and

thought, “Okay, property management must be at least profitable?”

Sam: Sure. I did some other things to figure out whether it was a good

market to target because my old mindset was very doubtful, like I didn’t

just start looking into property — I mean, this thought was lingering for

two weeks and so I was looking at job websites and seeing what industries

were posting the most jobs available because I figured if people are

hiring, then industry must be good and I was Googling things like “what

industries are going well” and all sorts of things.

But property management still seemed to be good, I hadn’t ruled it out, so

I decided, “Oh, I’m going to look into this. This is my market to start

with,” and I basically jumped into Google and started searching for

property management businesses and started building a list of them in

Microsoft Excel, just going to their “About Us” page, copy-pasting the

company name, copy-pasting a couple of contacts from the business into

Excel and I built a list of 100 people and then I sent out one e-mail,

blasted it to all 100, subject line was “Strange Question” and I go, “Hi,

my name’s Sam Ovens. I’m currently doing some research on the property

management industry and the most painful problems in it.” Then my question

was, “On a day-to-day basis, what is the most painful task-related problem

you face as a property manager? I’d love to hear your answer, even if it’s

just one sentence. Thanks, Sam.”

I blasted that out to 100 people, got maybe 20 responses with people giving

me a couple of different answers. Then I e-mailed back those 20 people and

I said, “You sound like you know your stuff in this industry. Would you

mind jumping on the phone with me for just 5, 10 minutes so I can ask you a

couple more questions?” I think about 10 people said yes, and so I called

them up and we had deeper conversations. I think it was my third phone call

where someone told me property inspections were their most painful problem

and that’s where it all started.

Trent: I hope that the audience is understanding the gravity of what you’re

explaining and I’m going to repeat it because I think it’s so incredibly

important. You sent 100 e-mails to people who did not know you from Adam —

anybody can do that. You didn’t try to sell them anything in the e-mail;

you just asked them a question. Then you got 10 conversations out of that

and then you got an idea out of that.

Sam: Yep.

Trent: So that is the big golden nugget, folks. I mean, there’s been many

golden nuggets in this interview, but that has got to be one of the top two

or three.

Sam: Oh, if there’s a way to start, I mean, I might have got a bit too

advanced with the whole “cash float” concept and stuff, but this was the

major breakthrough, I think, for me, in the beginning, was you didn’t have

to come up with ideas in the shower or be a creative genius. You could just

find problems and build solutions to them. I think even Mark Cuban said

recently, “Innovation is dead. You just solve problems.” I’m pretty sure he

said something exactly along the lines of that, like you don’t need to be a

creative genius; if there’s a painful problem that someone has, you have a

solution to it, they’re going to buy it.

In business, people don’t buy things that are “cool,” people buy things

that solve problems and the more pain associated to a problem, the easier

it is to sell a solution to it and that’s true. I applied that same

thinking of idea extraction into my consulting business, so step one, which

is a pick a market, pick a profitable market, I picked a profitable market,

which was high-ticket B2B companies.

Then the next step was, “Well, find out what their most painful problem

is.” I started talking to a lot of these people and they just wanted more

customers, more leads. They wanted more in the pipeline and I figured,

“Well, instead of building a software product to solve that, I could just

provide this service.” So it’s not just for SaaS, and it’s most certainly

not just for SaaS and it’s most certain not just for products. That line of

thinking can be used to sell anything in the world.

Trent: By the way, folks, if you don’t know what SaaS is, it’s “software as

a service,” software that’s hosted on the web that people pay a monthly fee

to use.

Sam: Mm-hmm.

Trent: Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off. I just wanted to make sure that

people didn’t get confused by that terminology.

Sam: Yeah, no, that’s no problem. So, I mean, yeah, I used that same line

of thinking to come up with my service business and I still use that same

line of thinking today. I’ve got some other businesses and investments that

I’ve got going on on the side now, too, because of that cash float. Once I

understood that concept, I wanted to put it in more places and I’ve still

used that same line of thinking to pick good markets, find painful

problems, and provide solutions to them.

Trent: Let’s talk about mistakes, because I want people to understand that

you’re not like this thousand-IQ rocket scientist and, “Hey, I can’t do

what Sam did. He’s way smarter than me, blah, blah, blah,” because that’s

just a limiting belief that inexperienced entrepreneurs let get in the way

or some of them do, let get in their way. I’m willing to bet that, just

like me, you made a truckload of mistakes along your way.

Sam: Oh, man, there’s a lot. See, that’s the danger of people listening to

me now. They might think, “I can’t do that. I can’t do this. He sounds like

he knows so much.” Well, geez, you should have heard me a year ago.

Honestly, a year ago, I didn’t even know what a lead was. I didn’t know

what SaaS meant. I actually Googled SaaS. I didn’t know about headlines, I

didn’t know about copy writing. I honestly knew nothing. I didn’t know

anything about software, I still know nothing about software. I mean, I

didn’t know anything, literally.

My other businesses were like a daily deal website that failed and a job

board website that failed. I mean, they were just the sort of businesses

that people start because they see a couple of other ones that are doing

well. There was no good thinking or logic behind starting those businesses.

Trent: No idea extraction.

Sam: Yeah, and so all of this, big mistakes I made, biggest mistake in the

world I made was starting a business before talking to the customers. For

example, I started my first business, which was a job board website, I

started it, I didn’t talk to a single person because I thought they’d steal

my idea. Even when I talked to people about it, like talked to my developer

at the time, I’d close the windows. I thought I was sitting on some sort of

Facebook version two thing, and that was bad because it never got any

oxygen and I never talked to a customer about it. I mean, it took me a year

to build. I spent $10,000 of my own money on it, which I had to sell my car

to get that, plus all of my income at the time and then we launched it and

there was just crickets. No one joined, so I thought, “Oh, hell, I’m going

to have to do the unthinkable and talk to some customers.”

So I started talking to some customers and they’re like, “What is this? I

don’t need this,’ and I thought there was something wrong with them but,

no, everyone just said that. So the business just died because no one

needed it. It didn’t solve any problem, it was just some cool thing and

cool things don’t sell. Well, that’s not true. I mean, I guess you could

say an iPhone’s cool but I guess an iPhone solves a lot of painful problems

that people used to have. But if something’s just got some little “cool”

factor to it and you’ve invented it just out of your own head without

solving any problem or talking to a customer, it’s going to fail.

Trent: Unless it’s a game or something like that.

Sam: Yeah, I mean, there’s always exceptions to the rule but talking about

the bulk, I mean, yeah.

Trent: Mm-hmm.

Sam: What’s another big mistake? I guess building something without first

trying to sell it. So, my second business solved a problem and people

thought it was good. I talked to the market, they said this was a problem,

they thought this was a good solution. They said they’d use it but I never

tested whether they’d actually pay for it and you’d be amazed at how many

people, even the customers in a market, will tell you that they’ll use

something and that something’s awesome and, yeah, they’ll pay money for it,

they’ll even say they’ll pay money for it, but when you actually get them

to pay money for it, it’s a very different story.

It’s like playing poker with no real money. I mean, I’m sure everyone’s

done that and watch the dynamics of the game; no one is sensible. They’re

all-in every hand and they don’t care sometimes. Pretty much, the game

never finishes because everyone just leaves because it’s so boring. But put

real money in, even just $10 a person, and everyone is dead serious and no

one is going to do any moves that aren’t sensible.

It’s the same in business. As soon as you bring money up and try to sell

it, people start squirming in their seats and you get the real

conversation. So talking about money and trying to sell something before

building it is huge because what I always thought is think about what’s

going to happen once I’ve built this product. So with SnapInspect, I

thought, “Once I build the product, I’m going to have to sell it to people

and then when I talk about money, they might not want to buy it,” so I

figured, “Why don’t I have that conversation now before building the

product?”

That was huge. I got to see the real responses and the real squirms and

objections and things of the market before building it and that would be my

second major thing, I’d say.

Trent: And those are two pretty common mistakes, absolutely.

Sam: Yup, for sure.

Trent: All right, we are coming up on an hour here and I generally like to

keep my episodes to about that length of time. So unless there’s something

else that you think that we should talk about, I think we produced a really

fantastic interview here, Sam. I want to thank you for that. So before we

sign off, again, is there anything else that you wanted to talk about?

Sam: No, I think I’ve covered pretty much my whole story from when I got

started in business.

Trent: Okay, so if anyone wants to get in touch with you, I’m assuming they

can just go to samovens.com because I can see your e-mail address right on

it, so I will link to that website from the podcast or rather the post on

brightideas.co and at the end of the interview — I don’t know what the

shortcode is — but I’ll give the exact path to get to this interview.

Sam: Yeah, samovens.com is my website and sam@samovens.com is my e-mail and

if the e-mails are short and they actually have a specific question in

them, I typically reply to them.

Trent: Okay, terrific. Well, Sam, it has been absolutely wonderful to speak

with you, to have you on the show. I just want to give you a huge round of

applause for going out and Googling “entrepreneurship” and then becoming a

very successful one. I think that your family is undoubtedly exceedingly

proud and you should be, too, and I think it’s just fantastic what you’ve

accomplished and thanks for sharing your story.

Sam: No problem.

Trent: All right, and you can come back on the show any time you like. As a

matter of fact, I may reach out to you as I may want to do another

interview more devoted to your SaaS app because I’m sure there’s another

whole other hour or so of conversation that we could have around that, but

for now I think we’ve got it covered.

All right, to get to the show notes from today’s episode including the

transcript, head over to brightideas.co/69. Now, if you’ve really enjoyed

this episode, I need to ask you for the smallest favor ever: just head over

to brightideas.co/love where you will find a link to leave us a rating in

the iTunes Store. I can’t stress how important it is and how much I

appreciate it every time a listener takes that moment to fire up iTunes and

go and leave us a five-star feedback and some comment because it helps the

show to get more exposure and the more exposure we get, the more folks like

you that we can help to massively boost your business.

So thank you very much. That’s it for this episode. I’m your host, Trent

Dyrsmid, and I look forward to producing the next one for you. Take care

and have a wonderful day.

Announcer: Thanks very much for listening to the Bright Ideas podcast.

Check us out on the web at brightideas.co.

About Sam Ovens

sam-ovens-interviewSam Ovens is an Entrepreneur, Marketing Consultant and the founder of SnapInspect – a property inspection app for property management companies.

Sam started as a marketing consultant and used the money from his consulting business as “Cash Float” to start and scale his main business SnapInspect.

Digital Marketing Strategy: How Blue Cow Creative Doubled Revenue in 12 months with Marketing Automation

Do you run a small marketing agency and struggle to attract enough new clients to meet your growth goals?

Would you like to discover a way to put client attraction on autopilot?

In this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, my guest on the show is Shaun Whynacht, founder of Blue Cow Creative, a small marketing agency based in Nova Scotia, Canada. I learned of Shaun at the last Infusioncon and when I heard that he’d doubled his revenue in just a year, I asked him to come on the show to share his story.

When you listen to this fascinating and informative interview, you are going to hear Shaun and I talk about:

  • (02:13) Who he is and what his company is all about
  • (04:13) The results they’ve achieved (doubling their revenue!)
  • (04:58) What they did prior to what they’re doing now
  • (06:13) A big investment they made, and the cost of signing up
  • (08:13) How they capture leads
  • (10:53) Specific tactics they use for lead magnets
  • (11:53) Their focus on educating prospects
  • (13:13) How they segment their list
  • (15:49) The type of lead magnets they use
  • (18:43) Which social networks are working for them
  • (19:58) How they drive traffic
  • (21:13) A description of their lead nurture process
  • (22:58) How they are using the phone to follow up
  • (25:03) How they are converting prospects
  • (26:43) How they qualify leads
  • (31:13) How they are using testimonials
  • (33:53) How Infusionsoft has exponentially improved their nurturing
  • (38:13) How they are using Infusionsoft for operations
  • (39:46) Lightning round

Links

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

Transcript

Trent

Dyrsmid: Hey there, bright idea hunters. Welcome to the ‘Bright Ideas’

podcast. I’m your host, Trent Dyrsmid, and this is the podcast for

marketing agencies and entrepreneurs who want to discover how to use

content marketing and marketing automation to massively boost their

business.On the show with me today is a fellow by the name of Shaun Whynacht,

who is the founder of a company called Blue Cow Creative, a small marketing

agency. I learned of Shaun by way of attending InfusionCon this past year.

Shaun started to use InfusionSoft, and in the year following his using it,

he was able to double the revenue of his firm. Being as he’s got a

relatively small firm, just two people, I wanted to get him on to tell his

story because that’ll be a great story of significant results with someone

who maybe doesn’t have a huge pile of resources to work with Shaun’s story

is exactly that.Before we get to the interview, I want to give you my tool tip for

this episode, and that is something called JobChangeAlerts.com. If you want

to know when someone who you are connected to on LinkedIn changes their job

description or profile, which might be an opportune time for you to get in

touch with them to sell them your services, JobChangeAlerts.com will do

that for you. Will actually send you an email, so it’s a super-cool little

tool and it’s totally free.The other announcement is, my next life cycle marketing webinar,

which you can register for at BrightIdeas.co/webinar. If you are not yet

getting as many leads as you would like, or you’re not doing a good enough

job converting those leads to customers, or you’re not getting enough

referrals from your existing customers, this webinar will definitely help

you to improve your results. So, BrightIdeas.co/webinar, to register.So, with that said, please join me in welcoming Shaun to the show.

Hey, Shaun, welcome to the show.Shaun

Whynacht: Thanks for having me.Trent: It’s a pleasure to have you on. I think you’re the first

Canadian that I’ve actually had on my show, which is significant for those

in the audience who don’t know, because I’m Canadian.Shaun: Excellent. It’s a pleasure to be on, and be the first.Trent: Go, Canada, go. [laughs] All right. For the folks who do not

know who you are or what you do, please take a moment and introduce

yourself and your company.Shaun: I consider myself an entrepreneur of life. I’ve had a business

since the age of 17, and a couple since; but most recently, what I’ve been

doing is a company called Blue Cow Creative Design and Productions, Ltd. We

do a lot of content creation for clients, including social media marketing

and lead capture, drip marketing, those kind of things.Trent: Okay. So, very much a marketing expert in the marketing agency

space, which is ideal because a lot of the people who are listening to this

show either run a firm like yours, aspire to run a firm like yours, or

could use the services of a firm like yours.You came to my attention because InfusionSoft profiled you for some

of the success that you’d been having since starting to use their

application. I want to talk a bit about that because obviously I’m a big

InfusionSoft fan. I use it myself and I think that there are people who are

considering using it, or could be using it, and I’d really love them to

hear from people who are having success with it.

With that said, you run a two-person agency?

Shaun: Yes.

Trent: Okay. Let’s jump to the conclusion first, So the people who are

wondering, ‘Why do I want to listen to this interview?’ Since starting to

use InfusionSoft, can you tell us a little bit about the results that

you’ve been able to achieve?

Shaun: We’ve been using it almost two years now. After the first year

of using it, we’ve noticed that our revenue has doubled from the previous

years. It wasn’t just a banner year just because of the economy, it was

actually what we have proven to be attributed to the benefit of using

InfusionSoft through educating our prospects before they actually decide to

work with us. And then the service after the sale, that it’s allowed us to

  1. That’s really what it has done for us and it’s almost like having two

other people working 24/7 for us when people are inquiring online.

Trent: Yeah. That’s pretty significant. Doubling your revenue and the

work of two other people.

Before InfusionSoft, how did you used to do what it is that you’re

doing now? Or did you even do it?

Shaun: If anybody listening is familiar with the old show MacGyver, I

say that we’ve MacGyvered a system together, where we had multiple

different systems out there running, one for invoicing, one for emailing,

one for contacts, and none of them really worked together. It wasn’t that

we looked at them as systems that didn’t work together. We just didn’t know

that there was a solution out there that would do it all in one.

When we heard about InfusionSoft and did the online demo, we were

hesitant that there was a claim that there was a service out there, that we

could subscribe to and use their software, and do all that. It took

probably six months for me to convince myself to take that leap and

actually try it, but it was the best decision we’ve done since then.

Trent: What you just said there is not uncommon. It’s a reasonably

good-sized investment up-front, a couple thousand dollars, and then it’s a

couple hundred dollars per month. I’ve had people email me who’ve listened

to the show, to ask about the pricing, and then right away, ‘Oh no, that’s

too much money.’ Did you think the same thing when you were looking at it

to begin with? Was that one of the things that was causing you to not pull

the trigger right away?

Shaun: Definitely. It wasn’t because I saw it as I didn’t have the

money to invest in it, it was just a big investment, especially for a small

business, a young entrepreneur who was just trying to make ends meet month-

to-month. Then, actually doing it, and looking at the other systems we used

where commonly they were considerably less per month, but you get what you

pay for. The time it saved us to not have to go between all those, it

actually works out cheaper if you figure out the time you’ve wasted with

the other services, by using their all-in-one solution.

Trent: Was there subcontractors that you used to use for various

manual processes, that now you’ve been able to automate and so you don’t

require those subcontractors, or even just your own time?

Shaun: It was my own time. It was replying to people’s inquiries about

common questions and those kind of things. For us, for what we do, because

a lot of the work is in creating a project and training our clients to use

it and be able to pedal on after the sale and use those solutions. To

educate them after, and have that resource there that they can come back

to, and currently drip information out to them after the fact to enhance

that service, was something that I would have had to spend a lot of time,

for one with a calendar and figure out, when do I send all this stuff, and

then actually physically have to do it. InfusionSoft just makes it all

simple for us.

Trent: Indeed it does. There’s three main pieces to InfusionSoft.

There’s the CRM component, there is the online shopping cart so you can

receive payments for whatever you would like, and then there’s the whole

marketing automation/email/autoresponder, however you would like to

describe that. I just call it the marketing automation piece. Are you using

all three pieces?

Shaun: I use all three. I use, more so, the campaign manager and the

campaign builder for a lot of the stuff. Probably about 80 percent of the

function we use it for, is for that. We have a lot of free resources on our

website where people can come in and request to download a free eBook or

free report, and then they get into a campaign where they’re getting drip

information about that, to convert them down the road, about when they want

to make that decision to move with a company like us, that they’re already

educated about what we do. We do that before the sale.

Then, after the sale, we use a lot of follow up through that, getting

people into education sequences, going out. We use the CRM, obviously, to

keep track of all the contact information, but also keep track of a lot of

the pertinent information regarding that client’s account, whether that’s

passwords, and things of that nature.

When it comes to the online payment and the eCommerce side, we don’t

use it as much. We don’t have an online store, but we do have certain

products. We do workshops where we get people to register and it processes

through that and puts them in the sequence for those workshops.

We wrote a book last year on marketing for small business and we sell

that through there, as well. There’s definitely a lot of power there on the

shopping side that we don’t use, but a lot of clients in different

industries could use it a lot more to their advantage than we do.

Trent: Yeah. Good segue into my next bit of questions. You started to

talk about free reports and capturing leads and so forth. I want to shift

to that because I think lead generation is a big problem for a lot of

people, especially when they are first starting out, or even when they’re

thinking about starting out. That’s probably the biggest fear I find in

people: How am I going to get my customers? In the next bit of the

interview, we’re going to talk specifically about what’s working for you

for lead generation, what you’re doing to nurture and educate those leads,

and then how you’re converting them to customers. Then, if we have time,

because I want to keep this under an hour, for sure, We’ll talk maybe a bit

about some of what you’re doing for up-sells and cross-sells and referrals.

Shaun: What we do for lead generation: when we started doing this kind

of thing, it was looking at people that were similar in our field and

seeing those mass numbers of contacts. Whether it was social media and

looking at their Facebook pages, to hearing about their email lists and

hearing about the thousands of people that they have, and being overwhelmed

by that and wondering how you can do it.

We’re looking to build quality connections as opposed to quantity. We

do it a lot through offering free webinars. We do a lot of them live, and

then we’re getting into more writing little white papers, two or three

pages, on things like permission marketing and Facebook advertising and

those kind of things.

In our industry here, most of the business community are owners over

45 years of age and up. So a lot of them haven’t grown up with the social

media side. They haven’t grown up with the technology. A big part of it

based around education. We don’t base it around, if you do this, you’re

going to make X amount of dollars, you’re going to bring X amount of

clients through your door. It’s education first. Then, they try it for a

bit, and then they want to take it to the next step. That’s usually the

point where they get in contact with us.

We do a really good job. We give them maximum information with

minimum commitment to begin, and that’s the key to lead generation. If you

want somebody to download something, if you want to email them something,

all you really need to give them, or for them to give you, is their email

address. You don’t need their address, you don’t need their phone number,

all that stuff. The more you ask for, the less you’re going to get. As you

get them through that whole sequence, and educating them, and building that

trust that you know what you’re talking about, then they’re going to be

more willing to give you that information down the road. That’s what we’ve

seen. It’s what we heard about first, and we tried it, and we see that it

works, so that’s what we’re doing.

Trent: Let me ask a follow-on question for that. You, like me and

probably everybody else, when you get that email address from an

individual, we really don’t know anything about them. In the case of Bright

Ideas, they could be a small business owner, they could be a marketing

consultant, they could be the CEO of a marketing agency, they could be

somebody thinking of starting a marketing agency. The way that I would want

to nurture and educate, because I have products across a couple of

different spectrums. Some products would be applicable to more than one of

those four categories, and other products wouldn’t. I don’t want to just

start sending out all my stuff to everybody, so I start to segment.

What is it that you do? You must segment somehow, because it’s not so

difficult to do. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re doing to make

sure that you get your list segmented in the right way?

Shaun: The information they’ve put out there for those lead generation

tools are very specific to that certain area. For example, we have one

where it’s a ten-video series on how to use Facebook, how to set it up, how

to do the very basics of it. We know that the people that are signing up

for that are very basic users. You’ll have the odd person that’ll sign up

because there’s something for free, but the majority of them are that way.

They’ll go through those ten videos, and then at the end we’ll make them an

offer to go to a more advanced phase, or they just sit there for a bit and

they just get periodic emails.

If they make the step up, then we know that they’re looking to go a

little further. The key is not, get an email and send them everything but

the dog’s lunch, it’s very segmented and making sure that you make them the

ones that control when they want the next bit of information. We find that

it works really well. Every webinar that we do, we do them for free, we get

a couple of really good leads that turn into clients, so it does pay back

itself multiple times after the fact. A lot of our clients that we try to

teach this to haven’t really grasped the concept of giving away something

for free. It’s like, ‘Why should I spend my time doing that if I’m not

getting paid for it?’ Well, you nurture them now, they’re going to pay you

back later if you do a good job at it.

Trent: Absolutely. It’s not as though you’re restricted to giving away

this information to one person at a time. The beauty, obviously, of a

webinar is that you can leverage your time by giving one bit of information

to many people at one time.

Shaun: The key that I’ve found with using InfusionSoft specifically

for this is that you’re not set to a start and end time. You spend the time

to create these products, create these sequences, and depending on when

people come into the funnel, whether it’s today or three weeks down the

road, they’re in the program. They’re getting the information based on the

time that they went in. It’s not like somebody’s going to miss some

information, and I think that’s what’s key to that. It allows us to

leverage the power of InfusionSoft above and beyond doing it manually, like

we had before.

Trent: Going back to what you were talking about with the lead

magnets. A lead magnet, by the way, in case people are unfamiliar with that

term, is what you are giving away to get the email address. It sounds like,

Shaun, that you have more than one lead magnet. How many different ones do

you have?

Shaun: We’ve done the webinars. We’ve recorded them, so those are now

available. People can go on there, sign up, then they get the link to the

videos. There’s probably two or three of those right now. We’ve got our

Facebook video series, we’ve got our book that we wrote, that’s now

available in eBook format and audiobook format for free as well. We’re

working on one right now, that’ll come out in probably the next couple of

weeks, on permission marketing.

Trent: Cool. Of those three, which one works the best for you?

Shaun: The videos. People like to be able to watch a video. The way

that we do them is solely with screencast for the trainings. People

actually get to see what we’re talking about, as opposed to giving them a

printed report. The printed report does all right, but not as well as

video, especially if you have some information to give out, just turning

the camera on and talking to the person will have a higher engagement, we

found.

Trent: I also think it goes a long way to build more trust, as well,

because they’re hearing your voice, and I think that we form a lot of our

opinions about how we feel about another person when we can either hear or

see them on our screen, versus just reading some text that they’ve written.

Shaun. Yes. You get to hear their voice, you get to see them. It’s all

those things that you would have if you were in front of that person. My

background is in video, so I’m a big fan of it. I think people are using

video more and I think they can use it even more as we move forward.

Trent: Speaking of video, I’m actually right in the process of

creating a new lead magnet myself, called The Conversion Tactics Toolkit.

If you’re listening to this on iTunes and you have not yet been to Bright

Ideas, go to BrightIdeas.co and you’ll be able to have an opportunity to

opt in to The Conversion Tactics Toolkit. It is an entirely video series.

All right. Is there anything that, in terms of capturing email

addresses, that’s working particularly well for you that I’ve not yet asked

you about, that you would tell somebody if you were sitting in a coffee

shop having this conversation?

Shaun: What I tell people is that if you’re doing this kind of thing,

and you’re on different platforms like social media, Twitter and Facebook,

is you need to have all your lead capturing/lead generation tools available

in all those different platforms. That’s worked really well for us. When we

create something new, we send it out to our existing email newsletter list

that we’ve gained over the years. We also put it on Facebook and do some

promotion there. We put it on Twitter and LinkedIn. The more relevant that

the information is to the networks that we’re doing, then we find we’re

getting some really good engagement that way.

Trent: Do you find that there is one social network that tends to work

better with the business audience than the others?

Shaun: Not really better, it depends on what we’re doing. Depending on

whether it’s a video series, or if it’s-, specifically let’s talk about the

Facebook one, because we had a higher engagement promoted out on Facebook

because they were in that medium when we were doing it. Whether it’s doing

that there, or sending it out by email, I think it’s relevant to what

you’re offering.

Trent: That makes a lot of sense. People hanging on Facebook would

obviously want to know how to use Facebook for marketing.

Shaun: Time of day, too, when you’re posting things. If you’re

targeting a business owner, which in most of the cases we are, we find a

higher engagement when it’s near the end of the day, as opposed to the

middle of the day because most people are engaged in their business. Even

on the weekends, surprisingly enough. At least here, we have a high

engagement of business owners that will subscribe to stuff on the weekends

because it’s low cost, in most cases free, for them to opt into it. That’s

when they’ve got some time to be online.

Trent: What are some things you’re doing to drive traffic to all these

offers? Are you getting traffic to your blog because you’re blogging, or

are you doing paid Facebook ads?

Shaun: We’ve done a little bit of paid Facebook ads, and they do

convert quite well for us. The majority of the stuff that we’re getting for

new leads is through our existing emails and through referrals. Most of our

new business, probably about 85% to 90% of it, is all referral-based. We

don’t do too much advertising. A lot of it comes through other people

sharing the content, being on our Facebook page, and those kinds of things.

Trent: Do you think there’s anything that you’re doing specifically

that’s stimulating those referrals, or is it just people who are genuinely

happy with the services you’re providing them?

Shaun: I think it’s the fact that we’re very real in the way we

present ourselves. We’re not making any false claims. We’re not giving them

the ‘This is the be-all solution to all your financial freedom.’ We make it

known that these are steps that you need to take to learn and know this

technology and we’re here if you want to take it to the next level. People

really appreciate that we’re not leading them in and making them sink or

swim.

Trent: Yeah. All right, let’s transition to nurturing now. You’ve

talked a bit about it. You’ve talked about the importance of educating

people, but I want to get a little bit more specific now, if we can. Let’s

use your video series, ‘Lead Capture,’ as the example of the guinea pig for

this part of the conversation.

Someone, they see your lead magnet, they give you their email

address, they hit the submit button, or the sign-me-up button, whatever

you’ve called it. What happens in that campaign builder? What have you

built, and what’s going to happen to that new subscriber? Walk us through

that.

Shaun: Once they sign up, they’ll initially get an email welcoming

them to the series, explaining what each of the videos are going to be

doing, and giving them the realistic expectation that they come out every

three days on a weekday and they spend whatever the length is there. In the

videos at the end, they’re then given a link to them. So that if for some

reason they can’t watch one, they’re going to get that in the end for that.

Throughout the process, then about a quarter of the way through,

we’re prompted to mail them out a letter just to introduce the company. No

sales or anything is in that letter. Just excited to have them going

through the series. Just introduce our website and those kind of things a

little bit more. Then, near the end, once they’ve finished, we’re prompted

to give them a call and see what they thought about it. See if they had any

further questions. They can talk to me personally about their journey

through Facebook.

We’re promoting it also as education, to use it on a personal level,

so we’re getting both sides of the fence there. Because I truly believe

that even though somebody might not be in a business and might not use it

for a business purpose, they know somebody that could. We’re not

eliminating educating those people that want to know how to use it for a

personal reason, too.

Trent: I’m very happy you mentioned that there was a call in your

sequence. I think that some people are needlessly scared of the telephone.

When you say call, they think cold call, and they think, ‘Ugh, I don’t ever

want to do that. That would be horrible.’ But, you’re not making a cold

call.

Shaun: No. That’s the key with putting the call near the end of the

sequence, as opposed to initially, at the beginning. If we put it right

when they signed up, we would technically be cold-calling them. Whereas at

the end, we’ve provided them ten videos, ten contact points of information

where we’re helping them every time. We’re never asking for the sale. Even

the call is not sales-oriented. It’s not, ‘Here we have a paid program’, or

anything like that. It’s ‘Just wanted to thank you for going through that.

Do you have any questions? If you ever want to take it to the next level,

this is who we are.’ We thank them for doing that. In most cases, we get

thank-yous back. Other times, we even get people saying that they’ve never

actually had a call that wasn’t pushy sales.

Trent: When you’re making these calls, do you find that people…

‘Hey, this is Shaun from Blue Cow,’ they’re like, ‘Oh hey, Shaun’. What’s

the response that you get, the vast majority of the time when they answer

the phone?

Shaun: They know who I am, even if I’ve never met them, because

they’ve heard me. Each of the videos are probably 15-20 minutes in length.

Some are shorter. They hear my voice throughout those videos. They know my

name. I introduce myself at the beginning, so it’s kind of like they

already know me when I call. It’s a familiar voice on the phone, as opposed

to getting somebody else to call.

Trent: Definitely it’s an easy phone call for you to make and it’s an

easy phone call for them to receive.

Shaun: That’s right.

Trent: How many times, even though you say it’s not a call to ‘be

pushy’ or ask for business, how, in your experience, are you finding that

some people are volunteering, ‘Hey, actually I would like to work with you

to do blah, blah,blah.’ or if that never happens, how are we starting to

convert some of these prospects to clients?

Shaun: Probably I have just over 50% of those people openly, as soon

as I thank them for that and I ask them if there’s anything else they might

need education on, they’ll openly tell me what it is. The rest of them, you

have to dig a little bit about that. I’ll ask, ‘How are you using

Facebook?’ first, if you have a business, and then I’ll ask, ‘How are you

using Facebook in your business?’ and they’re hoping to do some advertising

and that kind of stuff, so I lead them to one of our webinars on Facebook

advertising. Or, we have a report that goes with that and I tell them about

that. But probably more times than not, they want to schedule a time to

talk on the phone, and then, if we do a good job and convert them, then we

end up working with them.

We’re not scared to admit that the relationship is not a fit, if

that’s the case. A lot of people will not do that. They’ll just push and

push for the sale, whereas we want to work with a certain demographic of

business owners. If it doesn’t fit for us, and it doesn’t fit for them,

then we thank them and we both go our separate ways.

Trent: That’s a really, really important point, that you’ve brought

  1. Because a lot of small business owners, they get a few years in, and

then they realize they have this hodge-podge of customers, 20% of which are

generating 80% of the revenue. The other 80% are, kind of, a pain in their

butt because they took them maybe out of desperation in the early years. Or

they just took them for reasons that weren’t really solid reasons. Does

that sound familiar to you? Did you go through that experience, or were you

very choosy from the beginning?

Shaun: No, I was not very choosy. Starting out, any hook that came

into the water, I was biting at it. Using the InfusionSoft system, it’s has

allowed us to qualify those people and see, when they receive emails, what

are they clicking on? What are they doing? To see how interested they are,

so that when we talk to them, we can tell now if they’re really going to be

a key client. If we can’t help them, there’s no point in even going through

that process.

Even if the money’s there, we’d still do this work if we didn’t have

to get paid. We just enjoy doing it, especially if it’s helping people. But

also, that need to help people led us, in the early years, to jump at those

early leads because we feel that people were needing our help. We would

just do stuff. We’d discount some services just so they could use what

we’re doing. But in the end, like you said, that’s probably that 80 % that

just takes up more valuable time than you have, when really, they’re just a

one-off project whereas we’re trying to build long-term relationships.

Trent: You mentioned qualifying. I want to dig a little deeper into

that, if we can. In InfusionSoft, there’s something called lead scoring?

Shaun: Yes.

Trent: I apologize to the audience for all the frogs in my throat

today. I don’t really know why I’m having such a problem here, but I’m

doing my best. Are you using lead scoring, and if so, how are you using it

to help qualify the prospects that are in your funnel so that the people

who deserve the attention, be it the phone call and so forth, are getting

it?

Shaun: We currently don’t use lead scoring. I know the power of it. I

just don’t think that where I’m currently at with the business, that it

works for us the way we’d want it to. We do a lot of our qualifications by

the initial phone call and talking with people. We make it known that this

is what we hope to get out of this call and this initial consultation and

get them to commit to that first. Then we sit down. Just talking to people,

we find, is the best way to do it.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t go in and look at the back history to

see how many times they’ve been checking out our website, what they’ve been

looking at, before we sit down, so I can see how interested they are; or,

if they just decided to come to our website and call right away.

The lead scoring is a powerful tool, especially if you’re in a

business where you might even have a sales force or a sales team where it

can figure out if they’re a hot lead based on their interaction and those

kind of things.

Trent: When you are interviewing a prospective client, do you always

meet with them face-to-face before they become a client? Or, are you

sometimes getting clients who aren’t in your town?

Shaun: It depends on the situation. I prefer to meet face-to-face

whenever possible, but I realize sometimes that time restraints, distance,

and weather don’t allow that. We do a few phone calls for this kind of

thing, but in most cases we try to sit down. I think one of the key things

is to not come across as selling them something. But them identifying what

their needs are, what their goals are, and realizing that what we could

offer will be a solution to that. We find that’s really good.

One of the first things I ask somebody is, ‘What do you hope to get

out of working with us?’ They tell you right away. ‘This is what my problem

is and this is where I’d like to go with it.’ Now it gives us a target to

work towards. In some cases, that goal is something we can’t attain for

them, so it’s either try to get them to a realistic level, or just say,

‘Maybe there’s somebody else better suited for that.’

Trent: That’s a very powerful thing to be able to do. I know that when

I was running my last technology company, and this was in the early 2000s,

before any of this fancy-schmancy marketing automation stuff, that I was

aware of it maybe it existed. One of the first questions we would ask when

we would get a meeting with a new prospect is, ‘Why’d you take the

meeting?’ That was a really terrific way for someone to tell you their

agenda right at the beginning, so that you knew the points that you needed

to speak to so you’d have a chance of converting them into a good client.

Shaun: Yeah, for sure.

Trent: We’ve talked about how you’re capturing leads. We’ve talked

about how you’re nurturing leads. I think we’ve covered how you’re

converting your leads to customers as well, unless there’s anything else

there. Is there anything that’s major in your process on the conversion

part of it that we haven’t talked about?

Shaun: Because a lot of our new business and new leads comes from

referrals, it’s using the power of asking for testimonials. I’m a big fan

of testimonials and people telling their story of why they chose to work

with us. What they liked working with us, so we can use that on our

website, on our blog, on our social media, to promote that experience.

Because I think working with a company should be a positive experience as

opposed to just hiring somebody, and then not really understanding what it

is that we do. That talks back to what we do in the early stages with the

education. It’s not really a lot about educating them about what’s out

there. But educating them about the process we take with them, in the early

stages. So that they know they’re involved in that process and they don’t

feel left out.

One of the things we’ve heard a lot is that they’ve worked with other

companies and they don’t hear from them for a few days and they don’t

really know what it is that they’re doing. Then, they get a bill in the end

and hopefully the project is good, or not. That’s key to what we do.

Trent: How do you ask for testimonials? Do you just call them up and

ask them? Or do you have a process, campaign, something?

Shaun: Yeah, we just have a little note campaign that we add to that

contact at the end. Just thanking them that the project has completed and

we’ve successfully launched, depending on what it is. And just ask them to

go to our Facebook page and write their testimonial, as opposed to just

emailing it to us.

Trent: Wow, that’s cool.

Shaun: In most cases, but if they’re not on Facebook, then obviously

we take it by email, but we want it to come authentic from them and not

seem like we’ve reformatted it and pushed it out after the fact.

Trent: Then, you can take a screen shot of it on Facebook and reuse

that particular image wherever you like.

Shaun: That’s right. Plus, immediately, all their friends see that

they’ve posted something on our wall, and it helps that way.

Trent: Golden nugget, there it is. I’ve got to write that down –

testimonials on Facebook.

Shaun: You can always copy and paste it and use it in other things

after, but at least the original source is authentic.

Trent: Yeah. Okay. This nurturing process that we’ve been talking

about obviously is working very, very well for you. And you’d mentioned,

before InfusionSoft that this was not so easy. Did you nurture, in any way,

shape, or form, like you do now, only you did it manually and it took a lot

of work? Or, were you like maybe a lot of people out there who would get a

prospect, call them three or four times, ‘Nah, they don’t want to take the

meeting’, and then just give up?

Shaun: Yeah, the last one there, that was pretty much me. A lot of the

process of using InfusionSoft was learning the keys to nurturing and that

that was actually a key point to doing business. The benefit with

InfusionSoft is not just that they’re a software, but there’s a whole team

of people there that are invested in your growth and the well-being of your

company.

So if you have any questions about, ‘How could I use this element?’

It’s not just the p’s and q’s, and click here and do this. It’s ‘Here’s how

you take it offline, here’s how you use it.’ So I think that they’re really

great that way.

I’ve also been down to both InfusionCons in the last two years.

That’s a huge event that really helped me focus my business, learn what I

needed to do, and realize that I didn’t have all the answers, but I could

learn them down the road.

Trent: That is such an incredibly good point. I’m wondering if you do

this: back when I was running my technology company, I participated in a

couple of mastermind groups where, in one case, one of them was called True

Profit, and another one was called Vistage. We would meet, I think one of

them was four times a year, and the other one, I can’t remember. I think

also four times a year. You’d sit down in a room with other people who are

running companies exactly like what you’re running, just in a different

marketplace. And we would openly share a huge amount of detail in every

area, from marketing to operations, so that we could all learn from each

other.

I can’t emphasize how valuable that was, because you’re learning from

people who are doing exactly what you’re doing, and they’re running their

own businesses. Do you participate in anything like that?

Shaun: I currently don’t. I’m currently looking for something like

that. I do see the extreme value in a mastermind group, but just in the

area that we’re in, we haven’t found that kind of thing. We do a lot of

networking and talking to businesses in other areas that cover a lot of the

key basics of bookkeeping and all that other kind of things that we need to

talk about. But when it comes to specifics, we currently haven’t done

anything like that.

Trent: Okay. Well, I’m going to introduce you to something like that.

Bright Ideas does have a mastermind group. If you go to

BrightIdeas.co/mastermind, you can learn more about it. It is specifically

targeted to people who are marketing consultants and marketing agencies.

However, with that said, because that’s what, when you read the page,

actually by the time this is published, there will be a full page

explaining everything, Shaun. If you go there right now, it’s just what I

call the pre-launch page, where you can register for updates and so forth.

Even though, on the full page, which, people when they’re listening

to this will see it, I want them to understand that the principles and the

things that we talk about, and it starts off with a two day workshop, two

day online workshop. The principles that we talk about are going to be

highly applicable to whatever industry you’re in, but most of the people in

the group probably will be running marketing agencies. With that said, one

of my facilitators, and you probably know him, his name is Dustin Burleson.

That name ring a bell with you?

Shaun: No, it doesn’t.

Trent: Oh, okay. He was one of the Ultimate Marketer finalists at

InfusionCon this year. He’s the guy that has the orthodontics clinic

that…

Shaun: Okay, yes, now I know.

Trent: Four clinics now, because he’s using, it just blew up once he

started using InfusionSoft. He’s going to be inviting a number of the

people who attend, other orthodontists who attend his seminars. This first

one that we’re going to do, I’m not exactly sure of the mix of the people.

Regardless, if you’re looking for a mastermind group, just head over to

BrightIdeas.co/mastermind and there will be information there for you to

check out.

All right. Sorry, again, for all the frogs in my throat. I don’t know

why. What do I want to ask you about next? We were going to make a

transition, how are we doing for time? We’ve still got a bit of time.

Are you still – got a few minutes left?

Shaun: Yes, certainly.

Trent: I know. I know what it was. This wasn’t on my list of

questions, but you talked about this early on. We’ve talked a lot about how

InfusionSoft and the campaign builder is helping you with marketing, but I

want to talk about how it’s helping you with operations, and stuff that

happens after people become a client.

Can you speak to, because the campaign builder, I mean, campaigns

don’t have to be marketing-oriented. Because all a campaign is, is a

sequence of communication and activity, which is more or less any, and

almost every, business process. Can you talk about anything that you’re

doing in that regard?

Shaun: Well use a lot of the CRM side of InfusionSoft, with the custom

fields and and the custom tabs, to tailor it towards the information that

we need to keep about each client’s project. When we’re dealing with people

that we’re building websites for, or setting up online accounts, we keep a

lot of their account details in there; attach their records, so that if I

need to go in, or somebody else needs to go in later to send them that

information, it is there for them.

The other side is, also, using a lot of the tracking of the emails

that we send out. We can send them out through that so we can see when

they’ve opened them and any links that they clicked on. As for using any of

the sequences internally for the actual project building, usually once we

take on the project, when we finish it, a lot of that communication is just

done one-on-one with the client by our team, or any subcontractors that we

use. Then, after the sale, we go back and give them some resources about

using that service or that product that we’ve created for them.

Trent: Okay. All right, Shaun. Well, I want to thank you very much.

Oh, before I go, my lightning round. Can’t forget the lightning round.

Three questions.

Shaun: Okay.

Trent: Question number one: what are you most excited about for 2013?

Shaun: For 2013, what we’re more excited about it we’re launching a

new area to our business called the Seniors Learning Academy. Because here

in Nova Scotia, we have a large contingency of seniors who are using iPads

and a lot of them don’t know how to use them. This whole project is, first,

teaching them how to use these new pieces of technology for their

lifestyle. We’ll be rolling that out in a DVD learning series for them.

That’s what we’re really excited about, coming up.

Trent: Now is that a product you’re going to sell?

Shaun: Yes.

Trent: Okay. I was going to say, because how does that fit in with

lead gen? But now I get it. That’s just a revenue producer in its own

right.

All right. What is your favorite business book?

Shaun: Ooh, well, I’m currently reading, and I’m really liking, Seth

Godin’s ‘Permission Marketing.’ I really like the mindset of that. Anything

that he writes has been stellar, right from ‘The Purple Cow,’ to ‘Meatball

Sundae,’ I think is the latest one that I read before this. Anything Seth

Godin puts out, I think, is golden.

Trent: Finally, for the folks who have been listening to you now and

think, ‘Hey, I might like to do business with Shaun’, what’s the number one

easiest way for them to get in touch with you?

Shaun: The best way is to go to www.BlueCowCreative.ca.

Trent: Terrific. Shaun, thank you so much for making some time to be

on the show. It’s been a pleasure to have you on.

Shaun: It’s been a pleasure being here.

Trent: All right. To get to this show notes from today’s episode, go

to BrightIdeas.co/66. When you’re there, you’ll see all the links that

we’ve talked about today, plus some other valuable information that you can

use to ignite more growth in your business.

If you’re listening to this on your mobile phone, just text TRENT to

585858 and I’ll give you access to the ‘Massive Traffic Toolbox,’ which is

a compilation of all of the very best traffic generation strategies shared

with me by the many proven experts that have been guests here on the show.

As well, you’ll also be able to get a list of, what I feel, are the very

best interviews, thus far, that I have recorded. I can promise you will

discover many bright ideas as a result of those interviews.

Finally, if you really enjoyed this episode, please head over to

BrightIdeas.co/love, where you will find a link to leave us a rating in the

iTunes store.

That’s it for this episode. I am your host, Trent Dyrsmid, and I look

forward to seeing you in the next episode. Take care and have a wonderful

day.

Recording: Thanks very much for listening to the Bright Ideas podcast.

Check us out on the web at BrightIdeas.co.

About Shaun Whynacht

ShaunWhynacht-PromoShot-SmallAs a leader in social media consulting, Blue Cow is on the leading edge of technology application, combining an up-to-the minute understanding of current tools and trends with proven skills in creative design and video production to offer clients the latest, hippest approach to their business needs. But Blue Cow’s approach dictates that superior customer service and a personalized approach is the hallmark of their operation; here high tech meets down home.

It’s a business acumen that has made converts of business operators who have experienced the philosophy; developed by company President Shaun Whynacht; of educate, engage and accelerate in which clients learn about the options available, buy-in to those concepts, and then, through applying those tools and trends, meet their goals. But it’s a process that is preambled by Blue Cow’s astute understanding of the technologies and deep interest in the needs of the client. There’s no love-‘em and leave-‘em in these relationships – Blue Cow and their clients stay committed to each other for the long haul!

And with that track record, it’s no wonder that the youthful Mr. Whynacht (he’s, amazingly, just 32) has earned the attention of regional business leaders who have featured him and his firm in High Flyers, a showcase of the region’s most promising up-and-coming entrepreneurs.

Digital Marketing Strategy: The Story of How Digital Relevance Grew by 3,596% in 3 Years

If you heard about a marketing agency that had increased revenue by 3,596.8% over a 3 year period, do you think that would be a firm you’d want to learn from?

Are you looking for ways to get more attention for your firm (or your clients) from the media?

If you answered yes to either of these questions, you are in luck!

In this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, my guest is Aaron Aders, co-founder and Market Research Director of Digital Relevance (formerly Slingshot SEO) which was named the fastest growing private company in Central Indiana with a 3 year growth rate of 3596.8%!

When you listen to this fascinating and informative interview, you are going to hear Aaron and I talk about:

  • (00:00) the service that his firm offers that is in such huge demand
  • (3:00) how they launched their company without any outside funding
  • (4:00) a very ingenious referral strategy that played a pivotal role in their very early days
  • (5:50) how they produced an industry report that literally catapulted them into the spotlight and brought them to the attention of their target market
  • (11:00) how they got their next report, a blog optimization guide, covered by Inc magazine
  • (16:00) an overview of their Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 content production plans that is used to underpin all the media attention they receive
  • (20:00) how they produce their own blog content, how Google authorship plays a role, and how to get credit (from Google) to their writing team
  • (24:00) how they nurture their leads to become qualified prospects that the sales team should talk to
  • (28:00) an explanation of the specific process that a lead goes through in their funnels to become qualified

I learned a great deal in this interview, and strongly encourage that you go check it out now.

Links

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

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Transcript

Trent: Hey there bright idea hunters. Welcome to the Bright Ideas

Broadcast. I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the

broadcast for marketing agencies and entrepreneurs who want to

discover how to use content marketing and marketing automation

to massively boost their business.On the show with me today is Aaron Aders, co-founder and Market

Research Director of Digital Relevance formerly known as

Slingshot SEO, which was named one of the fastest growing

private companies in central Indiana with a three year growth

rate of, check this, 3596.8%. You are absolutely going to love

this interview with Aaron. Before we get to that I want to go

over my tool tip and I’ve got a special announcement webinar

coming up.So the tool tip for this episode is something called the Fancier

Author Box by ThematoSoup and it’s a free WordPress plug in that

you can download and in this interview you are going to learn

why this is so important. But to basically to boil it down to a

nutshell this allows you to make sure that the author of each

blog post is properly credited in the eyes of Google for the

purposes of Google Authorship, which is an increasingly

important component to SEO, so it allows you to insure that each

writer is properly credited and that will help your SEO efforts.

So you can just Google it Fancier Author Box of course it there

will be a link in and show notes as well.And so the webinar coming up is the webinar on lifecycle marketing

and if this topic you’re not going familiar with I strongly

encourage you to become a subscriber to Bright Ideas just go to

brightideas.co and you will receive notifications of the next

webinar coming up as this has been proven to be a very popular

webinar for folks who to want better learn how to use this

concept called lifecycle marketing to make customer traction oh,

so much easier.So with all of that said, please join me in welcoming Aaron to the

show. Aaron, welcome to the show.Aaron: Hey, thanks for having me here, I really appreciate the

opportunity.Trent: No problem at all. I appreciate you making the time to come and

share with the Bright Ideas audience what’s working for your

firm. So for the folks who don’t yet know who you are or much

really about your business can you just briefly introduce

yourself and your company in your own words?

Aaron: Yeah, no problem, Trent. My name is Aaron Aders and I’m co-

founder of Digital Relevance Inc. and what we do is mostly earn

media online so usually what that means is we work with

companies to create valuable content that target marketing will

find value in and do a visual PR effort to get that out to the

industry influential websites and things of that nature. So the

result from that is a mix of leads and search engines traffic

and the results of those links and the content and a email list

growth, a lot of digital marketing return that really have the

biggest ROI and SEO and such a media and such, so that is

Digital Relevance and I’m one of the co-founders.

Trent: Cool. So we might dive into that a little bit more in a few

minutes, but before we do I just want to kind of give our

readers our listeners as of why I invited you on the show. I was

traveling around the Internet as I always do and I don’t even

remember where off the top of my head now that we discovered you

but what stood out was your growth rate over the past three

years. You grew at 3596.8% over three years. That is a

whopping amount of growth.

You want to know kind of…where were you three years ago in terms of

how big the company was and where are you now and what in the

heck did you do to cause so much growth to happen?

Aaron: Well it was an interesting ride for sure along our growth

there. We took an interesting position beginning that we wanted

to bootstrap this thing and grow organically because I think

that is just a real natural way to grow through. I guess client

referrals and on the back of your work rather some fundraising

effort that just goes out and hires a lot of sales people; not

that that’s bad. It can get a lot of traction from new ideas but

it just wasn’t the idea that we wanted to go by because I

believe being in services is a little bit different then if you

had a product or something like that, it makes sense to a

fundraising for.

So as a service writer . . . well first of all, when we started this

company, I was 26 years old and we didn’t really have a whole

lot of funding between us or anything else, but we did have a

list of people that were interested in our services. So kind of

as when we were starting off a bit of our strategy was, “Okay,

let’s get these clients on board, let’s do great by them,” and

we took some of the first contracts to kind of, not quite a loss

but just about. I mean we were eating beans at the time to give

you an idea there.

When we took this contract we said we’re going to do this for you at

somewhat of a discounted rate and basically all we ask is that

when we make you successful, not if, but when, you tell three

other people about us and we’ll make that pitch at the contract

of signing and hold it back. We never really had anyone turn

that down but it was very effective in growing us. Because we

did hold people to telling other business owners about our

company so that kind of word of mouth marketing was really how

we grew our business in the beginning. The 3,000% growth rate,

that was past. I think you were referring to the Inc. 500

number.

Trent: Probably.

Aaron: I think you have to . . . you can’t say anything to them until

they make over a $100,000 but still, at that point we really had

a pretty small market, inbound marketing team but it was mostly

by word of mouth. We didn’t stop taking projects at losses was

obviously, and grew that way but it was really through clients’

success and really being adamant that when we make you

successful we expect that. When you do right by people and do a

good job for them and especially in marketing, I think that’s

something people like to brag about.

We got our start in SEO and having rankings being number one or

number two or whatever for a certain keywords that people like

to brag about that as well, so I think that also helped us.

Trent: Yeah. No question. So let’s go back then to, because it seems

to me that the growth has really been the byproduct of this,

what you said at the very beginning of the interview, you create

valuable content, combine it with PR campaigns and that ends up

helping the SEO or helping the ranking of your clients for a

given keyword set of keywords.

So if I’m to understand what you’ve explained so far it’s the result

of your work, combined with that referral strategy that caused

all the growth as opposed to doing a lot of webinars or doing a

lot of lead magnets or doing other things, am I correct or is

growth coming from two places?

Aaron: Well, as we scaled when we got larger we had beef up our

marketing department and our marketing efforts just to keep up

that growth rate because doubling every year gets twice as hard

every year as we scale. So we did have to pick up, but again

all of the marketing that we do–I should say the marketing that

we do for our clients–which is webinars, white papers and

research guides.

In fact, probably the most successful marketing campaign that we ever

did was a click through rate study that we released in 2011 and

so that was really significant because unless you are a search

engine or a digital marketing company doing the SEO campaign for

a ton of clients, you really don’t have the data to show real in-

depth and informative click through rates on certain keywords.

So that’s essentially was what it was. The PR study was looking

at top ten results, how much percentage of clicks the number one

position get versus the number two through ten.

So since we had such a large client base of SEO customers, we had the

data to have a very significant sample set and now there was

something in that we put together pretty quickly. We were

already tracking the data, we already had it in there, but we

created this what we call a contribution. A contribution is

something that . . . our target market finds valuable and our

target market is essentially marketing directors, VPs of

marketing. This was something that was very important to them–

understanding click through rates so they can plan their

campaigns.

So when we developed that and we went to market with it, that was

talking to, in our case, Search Engine Land and Search Engine

Journal. Websites like that, these industry, influential, what

Google refers to at hilltops, so these authority basis

essentially. So we went there, they loved it, and they were

in fact fighting over the first rights to release it and we

ended up releasing it on Search Engine Land and then released on

guest articles on a lot of other places that were still willing

to take that even though they didn’t get the first release.

But if you have a contribution that valuable, then you’re going to

see those links and the placements come very naturally but you

have to combine the contribution which is obviously putting

upfront effort to create something quality, very targeted, and

then combine that with an earned media strategy and that is the

effective, again, also targeted outreach. So all of that has to

be in sync and speaking to the same audience.

And if you can put all those pieces together then that’s essentially

what we do at Digital Relevance and that’s what I do. I’m kind

of the digital relevance at Digital Relevance here on a day to

day basis so it’s a really fun job and a great way to grow your

business.

Trent: So this report that you’re speaking of is this called the Tale

of Two Studies: Establishing Google and Bing Click Through

rates?

Aaron: Yeah, you were able to find that pretty quickly. I mean that

study was so effective and driving leads to us, driving links.

We instantly started ranking for everything around click through

rates, but it kind of raised the ship on all fronts because we

suddenly became the center of authority and kind of helped out

on our own right because of so many links from other hilltops in

our industry. That was so powerful and it really kicked off the

discovery of . . . well, earned media and contribution that is

just a way that you have to of SEO and optimizing for search

going forward.

Trent: It’s interesting that you mentioned so much success with this

and I want to make a shout out to a past guest of mine in a past

episode because what you’re describing is what Mike Stelzner of

Social Media Examiner calls Nuclear Fuel in his book, “Launch”.

And I did an interview with Mike. It’s brightideas.co/7. If any

of the audience would like to go and check it out and we go into

a lot of detail on producing what is called or what Mike calls

Nuclear Fuel and your report absolutely falls into that

category.

It’s something that attracts a ton of attention to your firm or your

brand and gets a lot of coverage and ends up on a whole bunch of

links that’s coming into you and that’s exactly what you’ve been

describing.

So now, I see on your site you’ve done a couple of other reports.

There’s an enterprise blog post optimization guide and a

Facebook graph search cheat sheet. Did either of those reports

have the impact for you that the click through rate report did?

Aaron: Yeah. Like I said, the click through rate report was definitely

the biggest but those were also very impactful. For example the

blog optimization guide; that was huge. I released in on

Inc.com’s website and that just trickled down to so many

different . . . but that’s what you get out of a big media

placement.

So if you create something of value for a target audience and you

market it effectively to these outlets and you get these

placements, then you just get this trickle down effect of all

these links coming across from people that just syndicate that

content just straight up. That happens from public libraries,

public institutions, private companies all in your industry and

you get requests get a placement in even magazines and print

publication. This guy has been in both and we’ve gotten

requests for both.

And you can just look . . . one of the easiest way to check that is

select maybe a paragraph of text there and throw in a Google

search and you can see how many people straight syndicate that

and you’re looking at hundreds if not thousands of links

everything time you do that. So yeah, the impact of these things

is really big and that’s what we’re seeing in most of the

releases that we’ve done.

Trent: So a couple questions come to mind, first you said you released

it to Inc. Magazine. Can you describe specifically what you mean

by that?

Aaron: Yes, a digital PR effort, the earned media part is probably the

biggest piece in terms of guarantying that you that you get a

lot of links out of that. It’s pitching to an outlet that is an

authoritative industry hilltop that has a lot of your target

audience members reading that publication so whenever this is

placed there, not only get the search engine rankings, you also

get a ton of leads coming in that download that piece; that

value added piece.

That PR digital effort is pitching to them and trying to first get

that first release to somebody and also marketing articles to

the other ones that might not have gotten first release. But if

the piece is valuable enough, then you’re not going to get . . .

it makes the outreach effort a lot easier, let’s say that. Again

those two strategies, the contribution and the earned media, you

really got to be firing on both sides and they’re going to make

each other most successful.

Trent: Okay, so when you reached out to Inc., it’s not like you paid

them. This wasn’t a media buy. You just said, hey, we’ve

produced what we think is a phenomenally valuable piece of

content and we’re going to give you first dips on putting it in

your magazine, mentioning it, linking it, whatever if you deem

it as valuable as we believe it to be. Do I understand this

correctly?

Aaron: Exactly and in doing so we call that climbing the hilltop. And

when climbing hilltops, it’s kind of a future proof way to build

links because it’s done natural. Now we also tell people that

you can’t buy a ticket to the hilltop. If purchasing the links,

first of all, Inc. and any serious publishing wouldn’t even

consider it but some websites do and that’s a practice some,

well, quite a few, people take in trying to get a guest article

posted. They’ll say, hey, I’ll give you $50 to post this on your

blog. It might be middle of the pack domain, authority website

and Google’s attacking that.

[Mad cats] came out last week and said they’re looking specifically

at in shutting down these networks and so as a result whenever

these companies get penalized using that are using tactic they

have to go in an disavow that link. Being from Indiana, I always

have basketball references so pardon me here. It’s kind of like

using a strategy as like taking the ball down the court and

every shot clock ends in a violation. It’s not worth doing at

all. You’ve got to take the other route. Just create something

of value and then you don’t have to pay for it.

I mean consider the effort of those hundreds and sometimes thousands

of links an Inc. article will place out. How long would it take

you to make that manually, to pitch that many companies and what

would you have to pay them? I mean you can’t pitch. It’s really

the best way to scale, link building. It’s a good contribution

and their immediate combination.

Trent: No kidding. So how often are you producing, and Mike Stelzner

is calling this primary fuel, blog posts versus these bigger

reports because obviously it’s a lot more work to produce the

report, the click through rate report, or the blog post

optimization report. So in addition to those reports, actually,

before I move off, how many per year of six months, or how often

are you trying to produce a new report?

Aaron: So we have tier one, two, and three levels of content, so tier

one would be like an e-book, something of that nature, that blog

put out an optimization guide, would probably be considered tier

one. Maybe tier two [good] as a guide. Tier two would be like

cheat sheets, guides, things of that nature, and then tier three

would be just really great guest articles that say you have an

awesome idea to pitch to an industry public publication in just

a really nice well thought, well researched article.

And so we try and do one tier per quarter and then multiple tier two

and tier threes depending on our cycle of editing schedule and

things like that so that’s kind of a good thing to shoot for.

But it’s really not, especially for enterprise clients, it’s not

like it takes a ton of work to create these in some cases

because even in tier one content pieces.

Because there are so many enterprises in the back of their desk

somewhere or maybe sometimes behind a payroll or maybe somewhere

buried on my website they’ve got these false leading pieces and

guides already and sometimes you can just take that and put it

through a more consumable downloadable format, in an e-book or

something like that and then we dress it a little bit.

But a lot of times these companies have tier one content but they

just don’t know it or don’t know how to promote it so that’s a

really great situation coming into. We get a client takes

thought leadership seriously and is creating this somewhere and

we get our PM on it and fast track it. Like I did with the

[CPR] study, I think we spent maybe two guys and less than two

weeks. I know that because we already had the data and we just

crunched the data and wrote maybe a couple thousand words around

it and that was it.

Trent: For the folks that are listening to his if you’re wondering,

I’m browsing Aaron’s site as I’m going the interview and you can

get free reports from him on all this stuff. How to be the

Topic of Your Industry with Earned Media and there’s a download

for that. How to Write Insanely Popular Blog Posts, there’s a

download for that. So I would really encourage you to go to . .

. it looks like it’s Relevance.com. Is that correct, Aaron?

Aaron: Yeah, our website is Relevance.com. You can check the Resources

section and we’ve got . . . it’s all over the map. How to Pass

the Google Analytics IQ Test. That’ll teach you there,

Beginner’s Guide of Google Analytics. Yes, so many ways that we

try to help our target market. Again it’s VP marketing,

directors of marketing do their jobs better and then whenever it

comes around to making decision around digital PR and SEO and

things like that we’re top of mind.

Trent: You know what’s really doing horrible interviews like this for

me is I realize how much more homework I have to do as a result

of talking to you.

Aaron: Well, it’s all there for free.

Trent: All right, so my question that I never got to was, how often do

you blog? And I didn’t mean like you described tier one, two,

three which looks like it’s all content that’s going on other

people’s properties, and then you have your own blog and it

looks like it’s pretty darn active. Two posts in the 20th, one

in the 17th, one in the 16th, two in the 16th. How many people .

. . I mean are you taking guest posts from other people or do

you just have enough people on your team that you guys are able

to crank out this much content?

Aaron: Yes, we have staff of about 80 people here in Indianapolis and

so a lot of these blog contributors, they are all staff. I know

that we have maybe one or two guest posts here and there from

people outside of our company and we do accept guest posts of

their own topic and valuable, just like any other publisher.

But we try to foster blogging for our company within our organization

and I think that’s an important point I’d like to make,

especially with Google Authorship coming. Or it is here and

it’s coming, it’s probably going to be a big part of ranking out

algorithm here soon, but it’s kind of going to . . . [employees

able to] promote themselves, right. So these employees that are

blogging on our website that’s more coverage for their name and

gives them more credit under their Google Authorship profiles.

We want to promote that because it will help us in the end, and even

if they do move on in some point to another organization and

keep doing the same thing, then their [confidence] our website

just only becomes more valuable, so really it’s in the best

interest of the employee and the employer to encourage this

thought leadership and again it helps them and probably even

more than it helps us.

Trent: And how are you ensuring that for example in the case of Rachel

Brown, I see she has two posts. How are you ensuring that the

content that she has authored that is published on your blog is

in Google’s eyes through the authorship of whatever word you’d

like to use is “credited” to Rachel? Is there a plug in or how

does that happen?

Aaron: Yeah, great question, so if you click on that post and you

scroll down to the bottom there is a plug in and it links to

their biography on the site that links to their Twitter account,

Google+. You can see their latest posts so that plug in, I

don’t remember the name of it. I know we run WordPress. I think

it was called Fanciest Author Box. So it will connect your

Google+. Anything that connects your Google+ [inaudible 24:47]

there’s ways of doing it by hand but pay the $5 or $10, maybe

it’s even free. It’s just one click if you’re using WordPress

and you’ve got a connection.

Trent: Okay, Fanciest, and if you’re listening to this I will be at

the end of this interview I’ll describe a link on how you can

get to the show notes for this episode and anything we’ve talked

about like this will be in the show notes. And you’ll be able

to follow those links to get to it.

Fancy, yeah, something called Fancier Author Box by ThematoSoup. So

we’ll check that out and make sure that’s the right one and if

not, I’ll trade some emails with you here and we’ll make sure we

get the right one.

All right, so I now you have to keep this just a half hour so I think

we have about seven minutes left. So obviously you guys are

doing a killer job in terms of getting attention which is a

first phase of lifecycle marketing of course attracting

interest. Phrase two is capturing leads so lots of people are

coming to your site because of all the exposure and these links

and this is helping your ranking and they’re entering their

contact info to get whatever free report which you have many

that they are interested in.

But the next phase is nurturing because just because they download

from a report doesn’t mean that they are ready to become a

customer. So what are some of the things that you do with

you’re a HubSpot partner, yes?

Aaron: Yeah, we use HubSpot. We are a HubSpot [founder].

Trent: So it doesn’t matter for what we’re going to talk about next,

whether you use HubSpot or Infusionsoft or whatever marketing

optimization tool. It wouldn’t matter because you can accomplish

this in all of them. But what are some of the things that you

do to segment and nurture your list of prospects so that your

sales team focuses on the people they should be focusing on?

Aaron: Well, I think, like you said, a lot of marketing automation

software out there could handle quite a bit. I do think HubSpot

does offer definitely some functionalities that others don’t.

But essentially what you want to do is from the very first

gathering their information on a questionnaire form, you want to

understand what questions, and you can get this data from your

service sales people is get prospect questions basically that

can give them an idea if this is someone we want to target and

as a prospect. So it might be a company size, it might be

revenue levels, or numbers of employees, or things of that

nature. Maybe it’s a more in-depth question, but working these

questions into your form that people have to download, fill out

the download your content can help.

Now lengthening that form too long is going to have diminishing

returns with people getting annoyed filling out giant survey but

if you can keep it to a few questions that’s pretty good

practice, and then probably even better information comes

through the software as you start to funnel users through your

marketing automation workflows. So that’ll gives you an idea,

when you send them more resources and more messaging: are they

opening, are they downloading, are they coming back to your

site, what are they looking at when they come back to your site?

Are they filling out the content form?

A good marketing automation software will have all this information

within the portal and ad leads scores as different interactions

happens so you don’t really have to . . . you can set up these

workflows and say they come in through, in our case a blog

optimization guide. We have a specific workflow just for that

because these people are interested in the writing and

authorship and things like that. So people who work through that

funnel and say you have a prospect and say we’re interested in

and they’ve opened up every analysis and downloaded everything

we sent them and they’ve kind of upped their lead score so now

they know more about our company.

At that point, depending on the content that they read, it might be a

time for outreach someone from business development. Now it’s

not that you can send them ten things about your company and

okay once they’ve read ten, then their qualified. You have to be

very tactical with the content that you send them. You’re

starting off at the very top of the funnel when they first find

you and then you work your way down the funnel. So top of the

funnel stuff might be educating them, then about some market or

industry techniques things like that. And the middle of the

funnel might be educating them about those specifics techniques

that your company provides, and maybe it talks about some

comparisons and things like that.

At the bottom of the funnel directly here’s what we do, here’s some

more data, and if you have somebody, a prospect that works

through all that content and downloads it all, then they’re

clearly interested in you, they have been educated on your

company and then outreaching them at that point is not only a

waste of your sale’s guys time but it’s going to be high

prospect, high percentage they are going to close in the end.

Trent: Absolutely, which makes the sales person job easier, lowers

your cost to your customer acquisition, eliminates the need to

waste tons of cold calling and there’s all sorts of benefits. I

think that it’s reasonably likely that lots of people listening

to this don’t necessarily know what auto marketing automation

  1. So I want to feedback on what you just described so I can

make sure folks who aren’t terribly familiar with it really get

a handle on what it is because it’s extremely powerful concept

to embrace and then implement in your business.

So what’s of folks have websites and you can go put in your email

address and you get whatever it is they are offering. But it

sounds to me, Aaron, like what you’re doing of course is you

have not just one lead magnet, but you have many lead magnets

and the follow-up campaigns, which are these sequence of emails

that path down the funnel as it were is going to tailored

obviously to each one of those lead magnets. Am I understanding

this correctly?

Aaron: Exactly.

Trent: Okay. And then at some point down each . . . let’s say if you

have ten lead magnets. Ten different reports, for example, you

would have ten different early stage educational and nurturing

funnels, and then at some point you’re probably have what I call

a catch all product and company specific thick funnel that these

people would eventually make their way into that says “this is

what we do and you can kind of buy our stuff.” Is that correct?

Because I’m thinking of a scale of about how many, of how

manageable that you can make this.

Aaron: Yeah, we have a workflows for every piece that we send out and

all of them in and learning a lot more about our company and

that specific offering that they might have been interested in

more than maybe a different offering we have or different

offering, or different perspective on our offering. Our goal is

to get them to, as what we call, go through the bottom of the

funnel so really what that means is someone again has gone from

leaning about your expertise in the market, to learning about

your company and your offering.

So it doesn’t matter. Like when you sent it to a salesperson and if

you’re like a giant company and you have all these products that

you sell, you obviously want to send people from certain

workflows to the sales guys that handle those. We essentially

sell one thing and that’s the contributions in earned media, so

it’s pretty easy for us because we can export our [inaudible

32:54] through leads and see which workload they are in and get

an idea of what interest drove them to our company and in just

use those as conversation starters and to see if there’s any

interest there. So they all lead to the same thing which is a

high lead score on the bottom of the funnel [website].

Trent: Okay. There’s so much more I could ask you and that I want to

ask you. Excuse me, let make that stop ringing, but you told me

a half hour is all you have, so sadly I’m going to have to cut

this episode off here. I do really want to thank you, Aaron,

for coming and being on the show. Like I say, I’m kind of mad at

your now because I need to read a lot of lead magnets and see

how much better I can do at some of this stuff. For the folks

that are listening who want to get a hold of you, what would be

the easiest way for them to do that?

Aaron: Well, pretty easy: Aaron@revelance.com. That’s my email address

and you can go to relevance.com and see a lot of the guides and

research reports and things of that nature. I think it’s very

helpful for anyone that’s interested in learning more and even

implementing some of these strategies on their team, or their

marketing tam in their company, trying to earn more natural

search engine traffic and leads and social media mentions and

all the great things that earn media contribution provided.

Trent: Absolutely and that’s by the way that’s Aaron with two A’s,

aaron@relevance.com.

Aaron: Yeah. A-A-R-O-N at relevance.com.

Trent: Okay, Aaron, again, thanks you so very much for making the time

to be on the show. It’s been a pleasure to have you on and look

forward to having you back.

Aaron: Yeah, thanks a lot, Trent. It was great fun and I’ll be back

any time.

Trent: Okay, take care.

Aaron: Take care, bye-bye.

Trent: All right, to get to the show notes for today’s episode go to

brightideas.co/64. When you’re there you’ll see all the links

that we’ve talked about today, plus some other valuable

information that you can use to ignite more growth in your

business. If you’re listening to this on your mobile while

you’re driving or doing whatever, just sent a text to, rather

just text Trent to 585858 and I’m going to give you access to

Massive Traffic Toolbox, which is compilation of all the very

best traffic generation strategies that have been shared with me

by my many proven experts and guests here on the show. As well

you’ll be able to get a list of all my favorite episodes that

I’ve published thus far on the blog.

And finally, if you really enjoyed this episode please head over to

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appreciate it if you’d take a moment to do that because it helps

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we have, of course, the more people that we can help to

massively boost their business.

So that’s it for this episode. I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid and I look

forward to seeing you in the next episode. Take care and have a

wonderful day.

Announcer: Thanks very much for listening to the Bright Ideas Broadcast.

Check us out on the Web at brightideas.co.

About Aaron Aders

AaronAdersAaron is co-founder of digitalrelevance™, a national leader in inbound marketing, planning and execution. Building on more than a decade of Internet marketing experience, Aaron steers the strategic vision behind digitalrelevance™ marketing strategy, research and collateral. Aaron also maintains a weekly tech column at Inc.com and has contributed content to various national publications including Time.com, Businessweek, Money Magazine, and SmartData Collective – where he also serves on the board of advisors.

Digital Marketing Strategy: How to Build a Retainer Fee Only Marketing Agency with Joel Widmer

If you want to build a highly profitable (and valuable) marketing agency, you must avoid hourly charges and instead bill your clients via retainer fee. While this may not seem like rocket science, the reality is that most agencies aren’t very successful at putting this idea into practice.

In this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, I’m joined by Joel Widmer, founder of Fluxe Digital Marketing, a firm that he’s built as a retainer fee only agency.

In our discussion, you will hear he and I talk about:

  • how he launched his company
  • a decision that he made early on that totally changed his way of thinking on how to bill his clients
  • how he altered his client attraction strategies to ensure that he ends up working with the right clients
  • the one idea that he implemented with his retainer agreements that made it easy for clients to say yes
  • why documented systems and processes are so important and how he’s using them to free up his time
  • the 5 steps that must precede any lead generation activity
  • several of the tools and resources that he uses to run his firm

..And so much more!

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

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About Joel Widmer

joel-profile275Joel Widmer is a digital marketing strategist who helps businesses make good marketing outcomes more predictable.

He’s the founder of Fluxe Digital Marketing, a marketing shop that specializes in content marketing and strategic consulting for businesses and authors.

You can find Joel on his blog.