Tag Archive for: marketing strategy

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.

 

oss

How to Uncover Your Optimum Selling Strategy – Part 2

ossIn How to Uncover Your Optimum Selling Strategy Part 1, I explained how I was looking for a way to get the Bright Ideas Agency generating positive cash flow in the shortest period of time possible by using what Michael Masterson calls an Optimum Selling Strategy (OSS) in his book, Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat.

Today, I’m going to continue where I left off by taking a deeper dive into the second of four questions that you (and I) must answer in order to discover our own OSS.

What Product Do You Sell Them?

Most people who start a business do so because they have an idea for a product or service. Sadly, this is not always the best way to get going – unless you’re just lucky enough to nail it right out of the gate.

Personally, I’m never that lucky! Which is why I recorded the video below a few years ago.

The reason that having only one product in mind when you launch isn’t a very good idea is because you are basically putting all your eggs in one basket, and unless you already know your market/industry extremely well, that is quite a large risk to take.

To avoid this, savvy entrepreneurs remain flexible about the details of their product. If version one doesn’t work, another version can be waiting in the wings.

How to Determine the Ideal Startup Product

Here are five simple steps to creating a product that is virtually guaranteed to succeed:

  1. Find out what products are currently hot in your market
  2. Determine if your product idea fits that trend
  3. If it does, you’re set, if not, go to next step
  4. Come up with me-too versions of several hot products
  5. Improve them in some way by adding features or benefits lacking in the originals

Let’s go into more detail on these steps.

How to Discover the Hot Products in Any Market

Figure out what's hot! Image credit:  123rf.com

Figure out what’s hot!
Image credit: 123rf.com

In Part 1 of this post, I suggested you go study the competition to see where they were advertising? Well, now you want to pay attention to what they are trying to sell with all those ads.

When you do this, you are going to see trends, and the trend you are looking for is the product type that is most commonly advertised. That is the hot product.

When studying the hot products in your market, it’s also very important to pay attention to the trend for these products because there is the chance that they are near the end of their trend. To do this, first, start off with Google Trends and take note of whether the search volume for related keywords is still on the rise. If it is, you’re probably in good shape.

Another method you can use is to talk to some people in the industry, as they are going to be far more in tune with what is going on within their industry that you are ever will…unless of course, you are already an industry insider.

Once you have identified the top three to five products in your space, you should spend some time studying them. Identify their features and benefits. Compare them. Attempt to figure out which features are most desirable. Make a list of any deficiencies that you see. Write all this down and then review it.

Once you’ve done all this, and you have an idea of what your product might look like, it is a good idea to start sharing it with friends and/or colleagues so that you can ask them for input on how you could improve it. If you don’t have a draft description of your product yet, just share the products you are researching and ask the same questions. If you and the people you are showing it to are excited, that is a good indication that you have something to take it to market.

How Much to Charge?

By now, you should know where your customers are and have a pretty good idea for a product that will sell. (Remember, you are NOT reinventing the wheel here…you are just improving on a kind of wheel that is already selling!)

All you need to do now is to figure out how much to sell it for.

Much like my previous advice on generating a product, with pricing, I’d suggest you stick pretty closely to what others are doing. If you can afford to be less expensive, that could be a good thing; however, keep in mind that building a business whose only differentiator is price can be a double edged sword. Good, because it generates business. Bad, because your price-conscious buyers may leave you in a heartbeat if they find a better deal somewhere else.

Optimal Selling Price

In Ready, Fire, Aim; Michael gives a pricing example from his newsletter business. He said that, through testing, he determined that $39/year is the optimal price for his newsletter. Selling for less eroded profits and selling for more killed conversions. Based on this, if I was launching a newsletter, I’d charge $39/year.

The optimum price isn't always the lowest one.Image credit:  123rf.com

The optimum price isn’t always the lowest one.
Image credit: 123rf.com

Earlier, I warned of trying too low a price. However, there is one exception to that, and that’s when you have a back end funnel filled with higher value, higher priced products.

For example, the last information product I launched was a course for marketing consultants on how to generate more leads. Because I wanted to sell a high volume of products, I priced it on a dime sale starting at $7 with the price rising to as high as about $10. Then, in my back end funnel, I offered two upsells. The first was at $49 and the second was at $97. Of those who purchased the initial product, 26% of buyers took the first upsell and 10% of buyers took second upsell.

As a result of taking this approach, we sold 1,450 front end units, 377 of upsell #1 and 148 of upsell #2. Overall, even though I never made a dime on the front end sale, the product’s overall profits were very good and since then, I’ve been able to generate even more revenue from the customers that bought the original product. Obviously, I’m not the first one to try a strategy like this – and, as I said before, sticking to what is already working for your product/market will likely lead to desirable results.

How Will You Convince Them to Buy?

If you’ve done a good job with defining your OSS up to this point, generating sales will not be overly challenging. With that said, they key is to generate as many sales as possible, and to do that, you are going to need to ensure that you do an extremely effective job of getting your sales message across to your buyer. This is done with sales copy.

Sales copy can have a huge impact on sales. Done correctly, sales copy can easily double your overall sales.

If you have never written sales copy before, study the sales pages and emails of other successful sellers in your space. Pay particular attention to the structure of their sales copy, as opposed to just their words.

As you might guess, an overview of how to write sales copy is well outside the scope of this post, so rather than attempt to do that, I’d suggest you grab a copy of Michael’s book and study the chapter devoted to sales copy. In addition, you may also want to spend some time on CopyBlogger.com as there are a plethora of tips and advice to be found.

For the basic nuts and bolts of writing effective sales copy, I’ll offer up four concepts (from Michael’s book) that you must know:

1. You must understand the difference between wants and needs
2. You must understand the difference between features and benefits
3. You must understand how to establish a unique selling proposition (USP) for you product
4. You must understand how to sell the USP

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oss

How to Uncover Your Optimum Selling Strategy – Part 1

oss

When launching a company or a product, my goal is always to get the maximum traction possible in the shortest amount of time. Sometimes, I get better results than others, and because of that, I’m always on the lookout for methods that appear to be more effective than what I’m currently using.

It was with this desire in mind, that I started to read a book called Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat by Michael Masterson, and while I’ve not yet finished this wonderful book, I have already picked up some really fantastic ideas, the first of which is what Michael calls The Optimum Selling Strategy.

Introduction to The Optimum Selling Strategy

Michael believes that for every business at any given time, there is one best way to acquire new customers, and that this best way is the way the meets the company’s greatest current need. For a startup, the greatest need is almost always – or should be – generating positive cash flow.

Put simply, startups need to find the most effective way to generate positive cash flow NOW.

You need to prioritize your cash flow. (image source: www.123rf.com)

You need to prioritize your cash flow.
(image source: www.123rf.com)

The mistake that most entrepreneurs make when they are first starting out is that they are so totally jazzed with their product or service (their baby), that they don’t give adequate considering to feeding their baby – with cash flow. Oddly, this same thing can even happen to more experienced entrepreneurs like me! We often assume that one method of selling can be just as good as another.

According to Michael, we’re dead wrong.

How we sell our lead product – the specific decisions we make about presenting and pricing it – has a huge impact on whether or not we’ll be successful. If you find yourself thinking that your product is so totally awesome that it will sell itself, you’re in for a rude awakening, I can assure you.

Figuring out my OSS for the Bright Ideas Agency is something that I’m working on right now; and was my motivation for writing this post. I always think through things better when I write, so why not share my thoughts, ideas, and insights with you? Hopefully, some of you will add your own ideas down in the comments, and we’ll all benefit as a result.

How to Discover Your Optimum Selling Strategy

When you get this right, you are taking a huge step in the right direction. It will make everything else that much easier. Problems will be less of a hassle, obstacles will be easier to overcome, and objectives will be less difficult to attain. Why? Simple…customer acquisition will no longer be your biggest and most expensive problem. Woot!

There’s another benefit to knowing your OSS that you should be aware of, and that is this: when you truly understand the basics of how to sell to your marketplace, you will never fall victim to anyone else’s half-baked marketing strategies and idiotic sales programs. And, even when you hand over the reigns to your marketing and sales functions to someone else, you will be able to confidently lead them in the right direction as your company grows.

The Four Secrets of the OSS

When you are first starting out, there are plenty of tactics that you could employ to attract customers. Direct mail, PPC advertising, Email marketing, SEO, Blogging, Youtube, and Podcast, Radio, etc…

ossquote1As you are not likely an expert in all of these areas, you are going to very likely end up talking to people who are, and as a result, each of the experts you talk to is going to make a compelling case for why their particular method or medium is the best one for you to use.

To determine the optimum selling strategy for your business, you need to answer four questions that will have a significant impact and how quickly you generate positive cash flow – if at all!

Here are the four questions:

  • Where are you going to find your customers?
  • What product will you sell to them?
  • How much will you charge for it?
  • How will you convince them to buy it?

Answering these four questions is critical to discovering your OSS. To help you (and me) do that, let’s dive a little deeper into each one.

Where Are Your Customers?

Where do your customers spend time? Image credit:  123rf.com

Where do your customers spend time?
Image credit: 123rf.com

As I’m an online marketer, I tend to think about this in terms of where do they hang out online? Which blogs, forums, and communities do they enjoy? I also am starting to ask myself which magazines and trade journals they read because, most often, these companies will also maintain an email list. This is important because using “sponsored emails” is a going to be a part of my outreach strategy (which I will explain in future posts).

The trick here is that the answers may not be as easy as you’d think.

To give you an example of what I mean, I’m going to summarize the example that was used in Ready, Fire, Aim: let’s say you want to sell a new kind of golf ball. Where could you find your customers? The follow places might all work to reach them:

  • In the golf pro shop waiting in line to pay for stuff, so an ad near the cash register might work.
  • Advertising on the back page of a golf magazine might also work
  • A TV commercial that is run during tournaments might also work
  • Renting lists with names and addresses of amateur golfers might also work

As you can see, there are plenty of places where your customers could be reached, so what should you (and I) do?

The Best Strategy for Startups

Here’s my best advice for the lowest risk strategy: do what everyone else is doing. Why? Because if everyone else is doing it, it must work, right? Now, I’m not saying that you should do what everyone else is doing forever. There will be plenty of time to innovate and experiment later on, but for now, you need cash flow and want to avoid risk.

Finding the Best Locations

So, how do you locate the best places to find customers? Simple. Just pay attention to where your competition is advertising. Then, talk to people who are already selling to the same set of customers. Ask for the names of the people who are in charge of marketing and tell them you are a marketing student eager to learn what they do (this is true!) and ask for a 15 minute “informational interview”. Or, even better, ask them to be a guest on your podcast! (Why do you think I interview so many successful people on mine?)

Every industry also has its own trade association and these associations can be data gold mines. Contact them and tell them your plans for marketing your product. They will want to help you – just keep in mind that their advice will be a bit biased.

The goal with all this is to assemble a master list of media placements – a map of where all the marketing activity for your industry is happening. This map will reveal where your competitors advertise, how often they do it, and how much they are spending.

Short on cash? Not to worry! Doing research like this doesn’t cost anything more than your time.

When it comes to marketing, nothing is more important that where you buy your media. This is because it really doesn’t matter how well your sales copy is written if you are pitching the wrong audience. For example, if my ad offered 75% off Luis Vuitton bags, but I sent the offer to lumberjacks, I’m not likely to sell much, am I? Whereas, if my sales copy is just average, but I target my exact customers (and do it well), I’m going to see a LOT more sales come in the door.

What Product Do You Sell Them First?

We’ll discuss this in detail in the next post in this series, so stay tuned…or better yet, become a subscriber and you’ll never miss a thing!

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TrentCaricature

Hi, I’m Trent Dyrsmid, Founder of Dyrand Systems and BrightIdeas.co… Ask Me Anything

dyrand-bio-collage

I’ve spent the last 14 years of my life as an entrepreneur trying to create companies that help other businesses succeed. My first company was Dyrand Systems and it was recognized as a PROFIT 100 fastest growing company in Canada for two years in a row. My second company is BrightIdeas.co which provides software and training products for marketing agencies and consultants. My third company is….you guessed it…a marketing agency that will also run under the Bright Ideas brand.

Although I have failed plenty of times (you can hear some of my mistakes with Dyrand in this Mixergy interview), I’ve been fortunate enough to learn something from every one of my failures. For that reason, I want to do something different today, in which I want to share with you what I’ve learned over the years.

However, instead of listing out what I’ve learned, I want to make it as relevant to your business as possible so that it helps you succeed (thanks to Neil Patel for this idea).

The way I’m going to do this is to use a simple question and answer format. All you have to do is leave a comment with a question and I will answer it. The question can be about anything you like; a problem with your business, a technology question, or whatever you like.

And finally, don’t worry about holding back. You can ask me anything you like, no matter how foolish it may sound, as I plan to respond to each and every question.

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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

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

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 to Maximize Conversions with Content Marketing

Building a successful marketing blog is no easy task because there is a LOT of competition. Building a software company that sells software for a monthly fee is even harder.

Have success with on or both of these endeavors and you are on your way to one heck of an exciting entrepreneurial adventure!

In this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, I’m joined by Dan Norris, founder of Inform.ly. Informly provides actionable data to help content marketers engage their audience and create content that grows their business.

When you listen to this interview, you are going to hear Dan and I talk about the following:

  • Why he started Inform.ly and where traditional analytics apps fall short for content marketers
  • How he hired coders to build his app (5:30)
  • A sidebar plugin he’s building that will display your best converting posts (7:30)
  • How he’s attracting customers (9:00)
  • His top 4 tips for building a highly successful blog (15:00)
  • Why conversions are more important than traffic (17:30)
  • How to maximize conversions from your blog (18:10)
  • His biggest screw up and what you should do to avoid repeating this huge mistake (26:05)
  • Why surveys aren’t a good tool for validating your product (31:05)
..And so much more!

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:

About Dan Norris

current_bio_pic_DanNDan Norris is the founder of Informly and helps bloggers and content marketers create content that engages their target audience and drives leads. You can download his free ebook with his top 12 tips here.

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How to Use a Contest to Generate More Leads

This is a guest post by Travis Ketchum, founder of Contest Domination, a robust contest solution with thousands of customers.

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A lot of people have the desire to run a contest to generate more buzz for their business, but many fall into the trap of giving away the wrong prize (like just an iPad), and end up with a big list of unqualified leads that don’t help their bottom line.

Well executed contests have proven themselves time after time to produce high converting landing pages for fresh leads, with strong viral mechanics that let your audience do the hard work of convincing new prospects to care about you.

There are three components you’ll need to know in order to run your own effective contest that generates what your business benefits from the most: more leads & sales.

#1 Pick a Prize with Intrinsic Value

It’s easy when first thinking about what to give away in your contest, to choose something that will generate a ton of interest because it’s shiny and has mass appeal. However, in practice this generates very unqualified leads.

For example, you’ll see a lot of companies choosing to just give away an iPad or an Amazon gift card as the contest incentive. This is massively flawed for most businesses.

Unless you’re an electronics retailer, this doesn’t make much sense because someone who wants an iPad is not necessarily interested in what you do or sell. The goal of your contest should be to get qualified leads who are excited to share your contest.

In most cases it’s not just a prize that is considered “nice”, but instead it’s “experiences” or “fan paraphernalia” that have true scarcity and get people the most excited to enter your contest and share like raving fans.

Fan Paraphernalia

A brick & mortar shop in Vancouver, BC that sells fan gear like hockey jerseys etc, had never done very much internet marketing. They wanted to generate more leads and Facebook likes for greater visibility in the Vancouver area.

While they could have likely had decent traction by simply giving away some apparel or a gift card to their store, that wouldn’t have been enough to actually inspire their ideal customer to become passionate about the contest and share it like crazy.

So how did they light a fire and get people to go crazy over their contest? They got Dan Hamhuis – a local, well known hockey player for the Vancouver Canucks – to sign a jersey to give away as their grand prize.

The results? More than 60% of their total leads came from referrals, and not their own direct traffic. The viral coefficient was very strong because those who entered would do just about anything to improve their chances of winning something that was flat out cool.

This simple strategy of speaking to their fans generated monster results.

Word of Mouth Leads

(More than 60% of their leads were from word of mouth!)

As a nice side effect (since Facebook “likes” weren’t required for their contest), this company added over 300 new fans to their Facebook page in roughly 30 days. These are all people who are extremely engaged, qualified and care about what the company has to offer.

#2 Reward the Right Metrics

The entire reason the Contest Domination platform even exists is that in late 2011 we wanted to use contests for one thing and one thing only: to get more leads for our business.

We were completely shocked to see that the “other guys” out there seemed to be building contest software for the sake of letting people run a contest that had no clear, measurable goal beyond “generating buzz”.

While buzz is good, it can’t be the basis of whether a campaign is successful or not. No one but the Coca-Colas of the world can spend millions trying to stay top of mind.

For the rest of us, we need to be able to correlate our campaigns to real tangible results that impact our bottom line to justify the money and energy we put into something as intensive as a contest.

To put it simply, if something isn’t delivering it needs to be killed off from the budget.

Since we couldn’t find a contest software that was laser focused on rewarding users for actually driving us more leads (vs just taking social actions), we built a new way of doing contests ourselves.

The basic principle is this, when someone enters your contest they get one “unconfirmed entry” into the contest. That entry becomes “confirmed” once they’ve double opted-in to your marketing list.

In order to earn more than the base entry, they will need to convince their friends to enter the contest as well through a unique referral link they are given after entering. Each person they can successfully get to enter your contest gets 10 extra points (entries).

Pretty simple right? That’s the idea, keep it easy to understand and to the point.

Couple this process with your highly valuable, intrinsic prize and it’s a recipe for success.

#3 Maximize Your Campaign’s ROI

There is a rhythm to running a contest that you need to understand in order to leverage each campaign to provide the largest ROI possible. Every business has its own complexities, but these guidelines will help you define what can work.

The Timeline

One of the more common questions we get from customers is along the lines of “How long should I run my contest for?”. While there are benefits to both short contests (scarcity) and long contests (allows for more people to enter over time), we’ve found that 30 days is just about the sweet spot to run a contest.

Running it for one month allows you to give your contests several “pushes” so you can reach a nice wide audience. It lets you get a decent amount of runway from one set of prizes but doesn’t drag on so long that people lose interest.

The Messaging

When you’re working with prospects, it’s always most effective to tell them exactly what you want them to do so that there is no confusion, and you don’t just hope they do what you want. Make it easy for them!

Make sure that you give your audience a friendly reminder that they can earn additional entries by being more active with their unique link. Drive those who have entered back to the share page of the contest to encourage more sharing to get even more mileage out of each person who entered and effectively raised their hand to say “I’m in!”.

Paid Advertising

This one scares some people off because they don’t want to have to spend any extra money to get their contest rolling. However, once you’ve committed to putting the prizes together and to taking the time to run a contest, even a small ad budget can go a long way.

To make things even more attractive, most companies can find their core demographic on Facebook, and when you use an app like Contest Domination to install right into your Facebook tab you’re able to run ads within Facebook.

Why is that important? Because historically speaking, Facebook has given much lower cost per click rates to people advertising within the Facebook walled garden. This means you can acquire real leads inside Facebook for less than your competitors who might be trying to drive the traffic offsite.

Even a $5-$10/day budget can go a long way towards extending your reach, helping you build that initial audience & tribe that can stick with you through future campaigns and give you the kick start you need.

Conclusion

I hope by now you’ve seen just how easy it is to put together a successful contest campaign in a matter a minutes, and taken away a few of the key elements that dictate your success. If you’d like to get started with your own contest you can do so at Contest Domination, absolutely risk free.

About Travis

TravisK

Travis Ketchum is the Founder & CEO of Contest Domination, a powerful contest platform. Travis is a performance marketing expert and entrepreneur.

Having worked with celebrities, best-selling authors, and starting several companies before (including drop-shipping, affiliate shopping portals & more), he’s focused on creating a performance marketing suite of software that anybody can use.

You’ll find his software and influence across many top blogs as well as by household brands who depend on creative, scalable marketing solutions to meet their growth objectives. (And he has the love letters to prove it.)

Check out Contest Domination today!

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The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations with Nancy Duarte

Did you watch Steve Job’s 2007 iPhone launch presentation? It was the stuff of legend.

Sadly, when it comes to creating presentations, most people totally suck. They mash together a deck of slides full of bullet points and proceed to bore their audience to tears.

This is not the winning approach and if this sounds even remotely close to what you have done in the past, this interview is not to be missed…unless of course, you don’t mind giving lousy presentations.

In this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, I’m joined by one of the leading presentation experts of our time, Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte, a 110-employee firm that creates presentations for some of the world’s leading brands.

When you listen to this episode, you are going to hear Nancy share with me:

  • her most significant insights on how to create effective presentations that sell
  • how to incorporate a story into your presentation (and why you will fail if you don’t)
  • the #1 mistake that most people make when creating and delivering a presentation
  • an analysis of Steve Job’s 2007 iPhone launch presentation and why it worked so well
  • how to lay the groundwork for your next presentation
  • how to brainstorm and organize your ideas
  • how to ensure that you deliver a presentation that your audience will never forget
  • why having a STAR moment is so important

And so much more…Great content marketing is made so much better by great content delivery. Learn from an expert how to make your delivery stellar.

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 Nancy Duarte

nancy-duarte-2Nancy Duarte is a communication expert who has been featured in Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Wired, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Economist, LA Times and on CNN. Her firm, Duarte, Inc., is the global leader behind some of the most influential visual messages in business and culture and has created more than a quarter of a million presentations. As a persuasion specialist, she cracked the code for effectively incorporating story patterns into business communications. Resonate, her second book, spent nearly a year on Amazon’s top 100 business book bestsellers list.

Duarte, Inc. is the largest design firm in Silicon Valley, the 5th largest woman-owned employer, and made the 2012 Silicon Valley’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies list. Nancy has won several prestigious awards for communications and entrepreneurship and was recently honored in Watermark’s “Women Who Have Made Their Mark 2011” ceremony. She has been a speaker at a number of Fortune 500 companies and counts many more among her firm’s clientele. She also speaks at business schools and teaches classes at Stanford University several times a year.

Nancy has 20 years of experience working with global companies and thought leaders, and she has influenced how the world perceives some of the most important brands and entities, including Apple, Cisco, Facebook, GE, Google, HP, TED, Twitter, and the World Bank. She is the author of two award-winning books. Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences identifies the hidden story structures inherent in great communication, and it spent more than 300 days on Amazon’s top 100 business book bestsellers list. Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations teaches readers to think visually and has been translated into eight languages. Her third book, released in the fall of 2012, is titled HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations, which gives readers the tools and confidence they need to master public speaking.

Nancy has three grown children who walk in their destiny and a husband who has loved her for over 30 years. She has two grand-dogs, Bear and Necessity, and a grand-frog named Hubert.

Digital Marketing Strategy: Fueling Ad Agency New Business with Michael Gass

Do you run a marketing agency and want more new business?

Are you getting frustrated with outbound prospecting strategies that just aren’t working like they used to?

mike-gass-caricatureWould you like to create an inbound marketing system that provided you with a steady flow of new qualified leads?

If you answered yes to these questions, you are going to love the step by step new business development strategy that my guest and I talk about in interview.

In this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, I’m joined by Michael Gass, the man behind Fuel Lines, a blog that has been ranked among the top 100 marketing blogs in the world by Ad Age’s Power 150.

When you listen to this interview, you are going to hear Michael and I talk about:

  • the #1 mistake that 99% of agencies make when it comes to new business
  • why they make this mistake and a risk free way to avoid it
  • several examples of how Michael’s clients used his advice to land new accounts they otherwise never would have
  • how Michael has used his own advice to build his own firm (and he’s never made a single cold call to do it)
  • how social media plays a role in Michael’s strategy
  • the 5 steps that you need to take to get started
  • Michael’s favorite tool for building a large, targeted Twitter following in just 60 days
  • Michael’s favorite tool for scheduling his social media activities
  • how much time per day you should spending on social media
  • the specific activities you should be using social media for
  • how to effectively network online, so you can run your business from anywhere in the world you like

And so much more…

Be sure to check out many more of Michael’s Twitter strategies in his generous guest 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:

Transcript

Trent

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

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

business owners and marketers who want to better learn how to learn online

marketing and sales automation tactics to massively boost their business

and the way that we do that is we bring expert guests onto the show to

share with us precisely what is working for them in their businesses.And my guest today is a fellow by the name of Michael Gass. He is an

international new business consultant to advertising, digital media, and PR

agencies and since 2007, he has led in the use of social media and content

marketing strategies to make agency new business easier. He’s the founder

of Fuel Lines, which has been rated among the top 100 marketing blogs in

the world according to Ad Agencies Power 150.Michael, thank you so much for making some time to come here and be a

guest on the Bright Ideas Podcast.Michael

Gass: I’m glad to, Trent.Trent: So, for the folks have not yet heard of you, I’m sure you’ve

probably got a little bit better of an introduction than what I just

rattled off, so maybe you could just tell us a little bit about who you are

and what it is that you do.Michael: I’ve been in business development my entire advertising career

and I had the bright idea of starting my own consultancy, but little did I

know that I was doing it on the verge of a great recession. Most agencies

that I worked with, there was a commonality of problems. They had a very

difficult time with positioning. Positioning, in my opinion is the

foundation of your business and they never used the tools that they

recommended their clients to use. It was almost as if promoting their

agency, they lost their marketing line [sounds like 02:10] and I had

always preached that they needed to have an identifiable target in a narrow

niche so that they could stand out among the competition.

So when I started my consultancy, I put into practice what I’d been

preaching and so if you look at my website, Fuel Lines, it’s very specific

for ‘ad agency and business development.’

Trent: Mm hmm.

Michael: And so when I started my consultancy, I had three kids in

college, my wife works for a large law firm as a comptroller, so she’s a

bean counter and my entrepreneurial spirit just didn’t mesh well with my

wife’s, so I was under a bit of pressure to generate new business quickly

but I had a few problems. My entire advertising career had only been spent

in two markets: Nashville, Tennessee and Birmingham, Alabama and outside

of that two-state area, those two markets, I really didn’t have much

awareness and so I was going to have to be able to build that quickly.

Then, I also live in a suburb of Birmingham, which, it’s called

Alabaster, Alabama, and I could only imagine that being on my business card

and how difficult it would be to build new business for myself with clients

like in New York and San Francisco and other more creative markets, but I

jumped into social media. I went back as if I were in grad school and put

in the nights and the weekends and there was really no mentor for me, but I

had a clear objective, a very clear target.

And I think it was my fourth client was on the west coast, in Costa

Mesa, California and I really saw the potential of social media, so I just

dedicated myself to it. Most agencies didn’t get into social media until

2010 and then when they jumped in, they literally jumped in, there was no

strategy, there was no plan, there was no target audience. The same

problems that they had offline, they continued to bring that with them

online and instead of really seeing the potential of social media, being

able to take their networking and referral for new business to a whole new

arena, most continue to be plagued with problems of generating any kind of

new business success.

Trent: So would it be fair to say that the success of your consultancy

is the byproduct of employing the strategies that you’re attempting to

teach your clients to implement?

Michael: It is, because I always put into practice and I refine it. I’ve

been able to do this one-on-one with about 135-plus agencies, not only in

the United States but also in the UK. I’ve been to London to work with

client groups there. I’m going to Hong Kong in September, just did

workshops across Canada back in the fall, but I’ve put into practice and

refined this system that agencies then can implement and get up to speed

pretty quickly.

Trent: So when did you start Fuel Lines?

Michael: Right at the end of 2007.

Trent: Okay.

Michael: And I think I’d written 50 blog posts and never gotten a

comment back and was wondering if anybody was even reading it. When I got

my first comment, I wanted to frame the thing, almost like your first

dollar bill.

Trent: Yeah.

Michael: And I continued to write and then I started using a number of

the other social media platforms to help propagate the material and also to

build a community. I have now probably on two Twitter accounts, Michael

Gass and Fuel Lines, over 104,000 Twitter followers, which generates more

traffic to my site than probably any other tool.

My site’s highly-optimized for search engine optimization. I was very

pragmatic with my SEO strategy that I felt like no matter what Google did

to the algorithms, they remain true to one purpose and that’s to help

people find what they’re looking for. So almost in every blog post that I

write, I had ad agency new business incorporated in the post title. That

identified the content with the audience and so the traffic that I generate

is just highly-targeted traffic and then the overall theme for my blog, you

know, is just naturally optimized for search, so I rank in that first

position with ‘ad agency new business’ in Google Search and I tend to

dominate the first three to four pages in Google Search.

And then my newsletter goes out to about 33,000 ad agency

professionals. I use Google+ I incorporate Facebook. It’s a blend of both

personal and professional, but it’s the place that people really get to

know me well. And usually, I’m a new business hunter from way back, so I

wasn’t afraid of cold calling. It didn’t really tie my stomach in knots or

anything like that, but social media’s so efficient that I don’t have to

chase new business nor does a client that’s properly positioned.

You’re positioned in a way to be strategically found with such an

appeal and certain calls to action that it creates that engagement with a

prospective client audience and the fuel for it, the beauty of it, the fuel

for all of it is ‘what enriches me professionally?’ And it’s my own

customized continuing education program.

Trent: So, help me to understand, there’s some things here that I want

to get straight so that the listeners really understand why this is going

to be such an important interview for them to listen to. You mentioned to

me in our pre-show discussion that there is a really big mistake that

virtually every agency you’ve ever run across makes. Then there’s a cascade

of errors that happen after that mistake. Can you talk about that first big

mistake that they’re making?

Michael: I think one of the biggest mistakes is that they’re trying to

lead with brick-and-mortar and they’re also trying to use social media for

promoting their credentials, capabilities, and case studies. All of those

things should reside on the website and the website is their on line

brochure. Most agencies that I work with, they’re in a perpetual state of

redesigning their website. It’s like they can’t quite ever get there. If

they’d just let it be that online brochure, what I prefer to do in social

media is lead with, like the agency principals, the owners of the agency

and create a presence to a very narrow niche audience, much narrower than

they’ve ever dreamed possible, and that we fish away from the boat. In

other words, we don’t incorporate the blog site into the branding of the

website.

It allows us to have room to breathe and grow and to keep a much more

narrowed focus and it doesn’t create any complications. Most agencies, they

show their diversity as a form of strength but, to prospective clients,

it’s a weakness.

Trent: Yeah.

Michael: Because that’s the way all of them look, but when you create

this blog, you can create something very specific and very targeted. I’ve

got an agency in Louisville, Kentucky, as an example, they’ve had a long-

standing client Kroger they wanted to leverage their expertise in working

with them for such a long period of time, but they had to do it in a

similar category without, you know, hurting the relationship that they had

with Kroger and they also wanted to grow their creative because they placed

a lot of media on behalf of Kroger but a lot of the creative work had

fallen to other agencies.

So we created a blog around the two agency principals, Scott Kuhn,

who was the CEO, and Dave Carter, who’s a partner and also a creative

director, and we call it ‘TheStorestarters.com’ and it’s all about creating

great grand openings, so it leveraged a good portion of their expertise to

multi-unit retailers.

Trent: Mm hmm.

Michael: The blog lives off-site and then it features the both of them

and sets them apart as these new store-starting gurus. That allows them to

work with clients even that have an agency of record but they want this

particular expertise.

Trent: Mm hmm.

Michael: And then, you know, we do connect back to the agency, but the

agency is more in the background. We want them to connect with Scott and

Dave first and they can actually go in even as consultants as a part of

their service line.

And, again, they can do that even if a client has an agency of

record. Many of those clients are really accustomed to hiring a consultant

to come in, and then it gets them out there, we can build awareness around

that blog very quickly. People want to work with other people that they

know, trust and like, so the media is all about people and Scott and Dave

won’t to appeal to everybody, but those that they have created an appeal

for, it’s a very strong appeal.

Trent: So, the big mistake, if I’m understanding this correctly, is

that agencies do not pick a specific, they don’t pick a narrow-enough niche

and the reason that they don’t do that is they’re scared that they’re going

to lose out, if they focus too much on, say, being the expert store-

starter, they’re going to lose out on the people that would want other

things that didn’t have to do with being a store-starter.

So you’re saying you can leave your agency or one approach is you can

leave your agency website, your ‘online brochure,’ to be the place where

you display all your case studies and it’s not so much focused on what

niche and then you go and start a separate property for the niche that you

really, really, really want to gain a lot of traction in. Am I

understanding that correctly?

Michael: Yes, that’s exactly it.

Trent: Is it–

Michael: And to give you an example, the very first client that I worked

with, an agency here in Birmingham called Holland + Holland, this is a very

typical agency. We’re sitting around the room and I’m asking how they’re

different from all the other agencies in town and they tell me, you know,

they have great creative. I tell them ‘Great creative is not a point of

differentiation; it’s an expectation.’ Then it’s like ‘Well, we’re

strategic,’ as if nobody else in Birmingham, no other agency is strategic.

And then it’s like ‘Well, we’re fun to work with, we’ve got great

chemistry.’ And I said, ‘So, I’m a company in the Midwest, I’m going to fly

over hundreds of other agencies that look and sound just like you? That

just doesn’t make sense.’ So we narrowed it down to the point that

Stephanie Holland, who was the president, also served as creative director

and I asked the question ‘How many other female creative directors are

there in Birmingham?’ And, at that time, there weren’t any.

So we started looking at that and doing a little bit of research and

we were amazed to discover that 97% of all creative directors in the

country are male and only 3% female. That was our ‘Ah-ha’ moment.

Trent: Mm hmm.

Michael: But we also learned that 85% of all brand purchases are made

primarily by women. We learned that they brought more product from Home

Depot and Lowe’s than did men. They bought more consumer electronics from

places like Radio Shack than men. Women bought more NBA and NFL apparel

than men did. Women bought more hamburgers than men.

And our education was that the women is the purchasing agent

primarily for the family. No, the problem we had, we were going to use this

in a positioning and Stephanie was very nervous about it because, through

her 25 years, she worked mostly with male advertisers and she did not like

working with women. And so we had a problem with how we were going to do

this without hurting our particular target group that she had success with

in the past, and utilize this positioning in a way that would be beneficial

and remain true to who she was.

So we came up with a blog and it’s called She-conomy, and you’ll

notice when you go to the URL that the target group is very specific:

it’s ‘A guy’s guide to marketing to women,’ so those male advertisers, and

Stephanie was in very early on. This agency had never been in a national

pitch in their 25-year history. We couldn’t even get the Birmingham News to

do a write-up on their anniversary.

Trent: Mm hmm.

Michael: It was like, ‘That’s really like no news’, but Stephanie’s been

written up by ‘Forbes’ twice, she’s been mentioned in the ‘Wall Street

Journal’, she’s been interviewed by NPR radio. She called me not too long

ago with some success after she’d been in three national pitches and the

positioning really put them on the map. You’d go to the website, there

wasn’t any hint on this narrowed positioning, but the blog site lived off-

site.

When they wanted to look under the hood and see if their perception

matched up with Stephanie’s expertise, they’d then go to the website. But

when she called me back in January of last year, she said ‘You’ll never

guess where I am.’ And then she said ‘I’m in California. I’ve just been

hired as a consultant to work with Porsche.’

These are things that had never happened to that agency before. That

narrowed positioning helped put them on the map. Now, if she were to do the

same thing today, she’d be kind of late to the game, so it would be her

expertise in marketing to women maybe for high-end real estate or some

other niche. But she was in very early and now she’s willing to incorporate

a lot of what she learned and much more confident to be able to incorporate

that into the branding of the agency as a whole, even to the point of

renaming the agency ‘The She-conomy Agency.’

Trent: So why bother putting the blog off-site? I mean, it seems to me

like almost semantics whether it’s at She-conomy.com or whether it’s at,

what is their URL, HBadvertising.com/blog? What’s the difference?

Michael: Well, agencies have a number of common problems. The narrowed

niche is one, so they’re afraid to be as narrow as they need to be by

incorporating it on the website, that they’re always in this perpetual

state of redesign. You can’t get anything done.

It’s like one of my early clients, it took them three months to

design the blog header. That’s typical. Agencies tend to over-create and

so, two, when a prospective client comes to the website, they’re so

accustomed to all the BS that comes from agencies.

I was talking to a client, someone on the client-side just last week

and they were telling me how many calls they get from agencies in a week

and almost all of the conversation in those calls are focused on the agency

rather than on them the client.

Trent: Really? Wow.

Michael: And so agencies have to learn you lead with benefits and the

conversation is totally changed. It’s not about you anymore, it’s all about

the prospective client. So when we create that blog, I mean, it is all

about the prospect and it’s creating valued content that helps them with

their challenges, that provides information that they need. The blog

becomes a repository of information and, you know, they keep coming back.

The website, you know, I try to keep the IT department and the

creatives out of this project when we first launch it, because they are

usually the ones that will slow the whole process down.

Trent: Now I get it, yeah.

Michael: And so we’ll create a freebie site, a WordPress.com site

initially and what I do is get them to write 30 posts in 30 days.

Trent: Mm hmm.

Michael: And we’re over here concentrating on the content, they’re

learning to write for web in an inverted pyramid style where the most

important information’s at the top, where they’re not talking about being,

you know, having won best of show at this year’s ADDYs. They’re really

creating valuable content and, in the meantime, the blog becomes then that

continuing education program to kind of keep them focused and get them to

where they need to be.

I assimilate information so much quicker when I’m writing and I can

articulate it much better. So my blog then becomes kind of my own

personalized university and I even get graded. I can go to the analytics

and review posts that I’ve written to see if it really was appealing or not

and my audience tells me what they’re interested in.

So this does so many things for agencies to make new business easier,

but if you’re trying to incorporate the website, I mean, from the get-go,

you’re going to get slowed down and agencies are so much, you know, they

tend to procrastinate. That’s why I do these 30 posts in 30 days and, to

give them that challenge, when we finish with the 30th post, they then have

their own personalized system for creating content.

Trent: Mm hmm. All right, let me cover off what we’ve gone through

here so far. So, your strategy starts with, first of all, picking a

narrowly-defined niche as opposed to being a generalist. So that you have

some way of truly differentiating yourself and then you’re saying ‘Okay, go

create an off-site blog so that your IT department and your creative

department don’t slow down the process,’ Put the personality and the

knowledge and the expertise of your founders of your agency on the blog,

and talk specifically about the issues that affect the client. Do not

promote, promote, promote; instead, educate, educate, educate. Have I

summarized what we’ve talked about so far?

Michael: Yes, exactly.

Trent: All right. What next? So now I’ve got this blog, I’ve got 30

blog posts on it. I don’t imagine I’m drowning in traffic at this point in

time and I don’t imagine–

Michael: No, and, actually, we’re not wanting traffic to come to the

site while the writing is going on and developing that base of content.

I’ve found that if we get these 30 posts up, then we have enough posts

there, the new audience isn’t going to know there’s only 30 posts there or

300, so the blog has an appearance of age to it.

Trent: Right.

Michael: We’ve got this statement so that once we get that 30th post, we

get a more realistic writing schedule up of one to two posts per week. In

the meantime, we’ve built up their Twitter following using an tool like

Tweet Adder which I can use to find, say, other agencies that are in this

same niche who have the same audience.

If they’ve got a Twitter account and they’re targeted, I could follow

everybody my competition follows and everybody that follows them. We can

usually build up a following of anywhere from 500 to 1,000 new followers

per month by creating this database and initiating those followings and 20%

to 30% of those we initiate a following to will follow back.

Trent: Mm hmm.

Michael: And that then is going to be one of the ways that we’re going

to jump-start traffic to the site. We also create an e-mail newsletter

that’s made up from the blog post and usually three or four posts per

newsletter, sending it out every other week, and we’ve created this

database of e-mail addresses that will also help jump-start the traffic to

the site, and then it’s highly-optimized as we repurpose content.

I’ve had posts in circulation that I write in such an evergreen way

that are still relevant, that I’ve got a media schedule for Twitter almost

like you’d have a media schedule for print and I can look at the analytics

and pull certain posts out that aren’t trending very well any longer or

revise those.

But I tend to post, repurposed content from my site around the clock,

seven days a week, almost 24 hours a day, but in addition to that, the

other sources that I’m finding, conversations that I have, and the personal

status in my Twitter account that makes it, you know, very robust.

Trent: Mm hmm.

Michael: Because it will jump-start traffic to the site, it will also

enhances search engine optimization and it will help to propel that blog

and its content in Google Search much, much faster. I actually have some

agencies that are SEO agencies that I work with and have carried them

through the same process.

We try to get everything done in that first 30 days. The next 30

days, we start jump-starting the traffic and then helping with the

engagement. As they learn many of these principles, they haven’t really

been using their social media platforms for new business and have a network

and a lot of the ones that I’m training, they’re Baby Boomers and feel like

they’ve kind of been left on the bench, but I tell them it’s real easy. All

you have to do is bring the way you network off-line online. That same

capability that you’ve developed in networking at events, at chamber

meetings is exactly how you would network online.

Trent: So in this next 60 days, then, it sounds like you’ve got people

really heavily focused on using Twitter, because you haven’t talked about

anything else yet, to continually tweet or link back to the content that is

on their site and then would be responsive to the interactions they get

from other humans on Twitter. Am I understanding that correctly?

Michael: Yes, but not just Twitter, also LinkedIn and Facebook and, you

know, but these are their personal accounts. These are not their agency

accounts that are using the agency logo that you don’t know who in the

world you’re talking to. This is that agency principal, their Facebook

account.

When your mother wants to friend you on Facebook, you can’t turn mom

down. My mom’s 73 and I thought, you know, ‘This is going to mess up

everything’ because I thought in the beginning I would just keep everything

focused strictly for business. What I’ve found over time is to show the

personal side really makes that emotional connection and, over these six

years, I have yet to make a single cold call for any piece of new business,

for any speaking engagement, for any workshop that I’ve been enlisted to

  1. And prospective clients, when they call me, they talk to me like they

know me because they do.

Trent: Absolutely they do.

Michael: And so I’m not going through the dating process. Usually when

they call, they want to know how much is the initial engagement and then

when we get started, so it’s like in business development you’ve died and

gone to heaven. The prospect actually engages when they’re ready and you’re

not wasting time chasing business and because you’re pricing that initial

meeting, it eliminates those that just want to meet with you to glean from

your thinking without ever paying you a dime.

Trent: Mm hmm. It’s so profound and something that I really want, and

that’s one of the reasons that I’m interviewing you and people like you. I

want new agencies, small agencies, independent consultants to understand is

all those questions that people ask before they hire you, you don’t need

to answer those one-on-one. By blogging and creating videos or doing

podcasts or putting your knowledge online so that people, your target

market, can come to consume it on their time, their dime, their schedule.

When they reach out to you, you’re right, they’re already sold, they

already know you’re an expert and the beauty is that you can automate the

vast majority of that, if you’re good with sales funnels and you use things

like Infusionsoft and so forth, you can really do a good job with

nurturing.

But that’ll probably be a topic for another discussion because I

don’t want to hijack this interview with my thoughts on marketing

automation funnels.

So when you did this for yourself, how long did it take you before

you got your first client?

Michael: It was just a matter of months because I was that disciplined

and focused and I had a narrow focus in the very beginning. I saw a listing

from the AAAA of the business development personnel that were out there and

it was like ‘How do I break into this group and how do I propel myself to

the top of this group and really build awareness?’ When I was in that, I

think, fourth client meeting in Costa Mesa, California, I was thinking

‘What would it have taken me to do this using the traditional methods?’

And so from the get-go, I’ve never sent out any direct mail, nothing

like that. I don’t use those interruptive-type tactics. I’ve learned to

create helpful information and, you know, it’s like when I speak to groups,

agencies know that I understand their culture. They educate me, and then I

know kind of where to zero in because they educate me. I mean, it’s the

best focus group you could possibly have and when you really think you

understand what’s appealing, a lot of times I found that I had no clue

until I really got into this and then this is just kind of a, you know, we

use ‘integrated’ a lot, but this is really a complete integrated program

that feeds me as well as feeds my clients.

And I guess it’s my curiosity. If I don’t understand something, to

me, that’s a blog post and I’m going to do the research and it’s going to

help me stay focused and I’m looking at like how to use Google+, say, for

ad agency new business and I’m thinking like that constantly and then as I

have success and I’m able to share in more detail the specific tactics to

use and because every platform’s different, you would not post with the

same frequency, say, on Facebook that you would with Twitter, you’d turn

your audience completely off. But if you’ve got a fairly large Twitter

following, and some hate this but it’s true. It’s like a broadcast channel

and it’s about reaching frequency and if I maintain a consistency like with

my post titles and somebody’s seen a post that I’ve published before that

they’ve read, they just skip over it, it’s no big deal, but a lot of times

they’re going to see content out there that they’ve never seen before.

And in the early days, you know, if you posted–I was told that if

you posted something once, you couldn’t post it twice, like in Twitter, and

I thought ‘How stupid is that? If I post this at 11 o’clock on Thursday,

how many in my audience has actually seen that post or would see that

post?’

Trent: Very few, and that’s why it’s okay to post again.

Michael: And, you know, but I have to continue to create new content, as

well, and things change and the model changes, but this provides me a

system that I change with it so I’m not caught flat-footed or behind and I

think I’m fully engaged with most of the tools that are out there. And if

it’s something that I see that’s trending higher like Pinterest, you know,

I started a Pinterest board very early on because agencies, they were very

inquisitive of me about what other agencies looked like. They’d love to do

what I do and visit all these other agency offices.

So I thought ‘Well, I’ll create a Pinterest board’ and so when I

would do these workshops and things, I would take pictures and then others

started sharing and it’s become a global thing to where I’ve had agencies

as far away as Spain that have had a photographer to take pictures just to

post things on that board. But I saw like in my reading, and I use an RSS

Reader, which is probably the best time management tip that I could leave

the audience, it focuses in my reading all in one location, but I can also

see as I’m looking through literally thousands of articles, studies and

post the things that tend to be trending.

So when I saw Pinterest being mentioned more often, that became a

post and then I started looking ‘Well, how then can we utilize Pinterest

for new business?’ I’ve got one agency now, they’ve actually created their

website using Pinterest, which I thought was a very cool idea because it

provides them a way to showcase their work and do that almost in real-time.

Trent: Yeah.

Michael: When most agencies, you know, it’s hard to get them to get

their work up and to keep their website fresh with new things that they’ve

created.

Trent: So, with social media, you can speak to your audience and you

can speak with your audience and what I mean by that, ‘speaking to’ is when

you’re putting a link to some of your content that is maybe on your blog or

in some other place; ‘speaking with’ is when you’re actually having a chat,

conversation back-and-forth with a specific individual who may be in your

following or may have just come to your social media presence for the first

time.

Do you have any rules of thumb for how much time, first of all, an

agency principal or anyone who’s in charge of new business at an agency

should spend on social media per day and then, of that time, how much time

should they focus on speaking to versus speaking with their audience?

Michael: The way I developed this program was to whittle it down to an

hour or an hour-and-a-half per day.

Trent: Okay.

Michael: because most agency principals were telling me that ‘I have

people lined up to my door when I come into the office. I cannot put

anything else on my plate.’ And I fully understood, but they have to be

convinced of the benefits of social media to rearrange their schedule. But

even in that rearrangement, there’s the real world of agency life. And so I

would tell them ‘this is the hour or hour-and-a-half that you need to spend

every day to keep you, professionally, where you need to be.’

Trent: Mm hmm.

Michael: And so the engagement part is really pretty easy. Because we

have so many tools that we can talk to a number of people almost

simultaneously and it looks like I live online, but I preach and teach that

we ought to develop our new business program that allows us to have a life

outside of advertising, and be able to spend quality time with friends and

family. I’m a big believer in that, so there are times that I unplug and

I’m not as engaged. But it’s very easy for me to come in and pick up where

I left off without any problems without spending an undue amount of time.

Trent: Mm hmm.

Michael: And then there are other ways that I can connect with larger

groups and be more efficient with my time, such as in the webinars or these

podcasts, and continue to provide real value. I reserve time. There’s a

number of people that I help that have called on me that I knew they

weren’t a prospect but, you know, you almost have to have a pastoral spirit

of being willing to help everybody in such a way. I mean, it’s kind of

paying it forward and then it pays you back.

Trent: Mm hmm. Are you familiar with Infusionsoft? Do you use it?

Michael: I don’t.

Trent: You don’t? Okay, what you’re talking about, I just really need

to address this point because this value or this idea of time is so

precious to all of us. I really just want to take a little tangent here

because I’m such a massive advocate of making sure that you use tools, in

this case, I’m going to speak about Infusionsoft, which I use, to really

save some time and maybe, Michael, this’ll be something you’re interested

in trying for yourself.

At Bright Ideas, you know, like most everyone with a website, I want

to collect an e-mail address. And so I offer a variety of different things

as an incentive for someone to give me an e-mail address, but the real

beauty of some of the tools like Infusionsoft, and I think this one does it

better than the others, which is why I use it, is you’re really able to

nurture your prospective customers and you can do it all on auto-pilot and

you can do it in such a way because you don’t want to talk to everybody the

same way. Not everyone who gives you an e-mail address is going to be

interested in the same things, has the same buying criteria, has the same

timeframe for buying.

And when you set up a really well-designed nurturing funnel in, like

I say, some marketing automation software, be it Infusionsoft or something

else, you can really let those people raise their hand all on their own,

and when I say ‘raise their hand,’ I mean metaphorically speaking, so that

your software, so that the experience they have going through your

nurturing funnel is almost completely unique to them based upon the forms

that they fill out and the links that they click and the pieces of content

that they consume and so forth.

So, again, I don’t want to go on for too long, but if you feel as

though you’d love to be able to put a level of automation into that pre-

sales, into that nurturing, I really encourage that you start to go and

take a study of marketing automation tools and, in particular, go and have

a look at Infusionsoft. Because I just came back from a conference over the

weekend and their success stories were just amazing, absolutely amazing.

Michael: And, you know, a thing with most agencies, like with my

practice, I can only handle so many clients, so it’s not like I need a mass

group and of course I’m not selling software, so it’s totally different as

to how that engagement operates and I’m giving attention to those

prospective clients.

And the same is true of many agencies. A lot of agencies I work with,

they need four or five good, qualified pieces of new business per year and

if it’s much beyond that, they wouldn’t really be able to handle it, but

this gives you a way to really work with those qualified candidates on a

more personal basis, to get them where they need to be and develop that

relationship, which I think is just very [inaudible 43:50] and there’s ways

to do that.

I know that Copyblogger and others, they got a good system of, like

with your additional landing pages and specific offers that carry those

prospective clients deeper into the engagement, with them, they have a lot

of that automated and I think all of that is excellent and great. I use

automated tools such as HootSuite Pro that allows me to maintain a good

engagement not only for me, but I can also help with my new clients to kind

of get their accounts where they need to be and to help them to grow but,

again, I can have so many conversations going on simultaneously that it

helps and [inaudible 44:47] social hub [sounds like 44:48] which helps

repurpose content back, through the TweetAdder program that I mentioned and

a number of tools that are out there that, you know, make the time

management in particular…

Trent: A lot easier.

Michael: …so much less than you’d think you’d need to spend. In the

beginning, I think they have to be educated and they have to have a sense

of how these various platforms operate and it’s hard to do that just with

theory alone, you’ve got to do it by engaging. Once they really understand

them, then they can utilize other tools that would simplify that engagement

process.

Trent: All right, so let me summarize where I think we’ve come from

and where we’re at and then you can ask and let me know if I’m missing

anything. So, step number one is you really need to pick a very specific

niche, something that is narrow enough that you can really and truly have

some differentiating factors so that people are going to have a compelling

reason to want to choose you.

The next thing to do to gain traction is create an off-site blog and

then write 30 posts in 30 days and then start to use the social media

platforms that are out there to draw attention to the content that you’ve

created, as well as to engage the people that are coming to consume that

content.

Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about yet that you feel

we should before we wrap up?

Michael: Well, to simplify it further, the outline that I use in the

positioning discussion with most agencies is just kind of looking backwards

and seeing how it works so well to facilitate a discussion to get that blog

where it needed to be. I would say start at WordPress.com. They can always

export that information to a design site. You know, once creative have done

what they needed to do, but it’s a five-minute process, but let it live on

WordPress.com, follow this outline to facilitate your own discussions, and

the first is identifying kind of that target audience.

You have to have it as clearly defined as if you went to a list

broker and you’ve given them the parameters to come up with a list. And if

you have a hard time articulating it to a list broker, you’re not clear

enough yet. So identify the target audience. The second is that descriptor

statement, it’s the subtitle of the blog. Which you only have so many

seconds to let somebody know that this is something for them and it needs

to be not very creative but very plain. Like ‘A Guy’s Guide to Marketing to

Women,’ ‘Fueling Ad Agency New Business’, something that’s specific which

states the purpose that connects the blog to the particular target group

and then something creative and clever for the title, that hopefully you

can also purchase the URL that would tie-in.

Then, the key words, these aren’t necessarily the most popular terms

but the ones that you can realistically put into every post title that

would identify, you know, the content and the audience. It could be even a

made-up word. We’re working with an agency in Toronto that came up with

‘Mosh-pit marketing,’ which is how to grow brands through music, so not

something that people might necessarily be searching for, but a term that

they could own like Cause branding [sounds like 48:44] was, maybe five or

six years ago that now they have conferences and there’s a lot of material

around cause branding that wasn’t even a definable term five or six years

ago.

But the key words in every post title. Then, come up with 12 to 14

categories and these are navigation categories for the reader to be able to

navigate the content, but it also guides the writing and it needs to be as

plain as like ‘Advertising marketing,’ ‘Social media marketing,’ ‘Public

relations’ ‘Media,’ ‘Point-of-purchase’. whatever is then specific to your

target group. But if you kind of do that with that outline and facilitate

that discussion, not get hung-up anywhere, it’s like, you can’t move an 18-

wheeler sitting still, but if you can get it to move just a mile or two an

hour, you can move the thing and that’s what I tell them in this. You can

always go back and make revisions, but you want to keep progressing.

Most of the time in that outline, I’ve been very surprised that

almost everybody nails it because they kind of know where they need to be,

They’ve just been afraid to step out and do it. Once they create this, say

if it didn’t work at all, they’ve not risked anything and they don’t

necessarily have to link from the website to the blog, as they’ve done from

the blog to the website.

Trent: Mm hmm.

Michael: So it really does eliminate a lot of risk and allows you to go

in and to have some success. I think agency principals, when they’ve had

success with a positioning, then they’re more adapted and ready to drive

that stake into the ground and declare this is who we are, and this is who

our best prospects are.

Trent: Terrific. Well, Michael, I want to thank you very much, oh, I’m

sorry wait a minute. I’ve got my lightning round questions to do, three

real quick questions and then we will wrap-up. What are you most excited

about for 2013?

Michael: The opportunities internationally. You know, from Alabaster,

Alabama to Hong Kong this year, it just amazes me at how far our reach can

be and I’m just now, I think, seeing more and more of that. And it’s so

exciting when you go to these other groups in completely other cultures and

you work with agencies and they’ve got the same problems and so that’s

really exciting for me, is the international community and I’m able to

converse with people as if they were next door to me here in Alabaster.

Trent: Mm hmm. Yeah, that’s pretty cool. What about your favorite

business book?

Michael: The one that was most helpful to me very early on was Tim

Williams’ book ‘Take a Stand for Your Brand’ and it got me thinking in a

completely different light and I just conducted a webinar for Tim just last

week and he’s been my mentor and it’s been very cool to be able to now work

with him. But on agency branding, that’s kind of like the Bible and if an

agency principal has not read the book, I would encourage them to do so.

Trent: Okay, and the easiest way for people to get in touch with you?

Just give one way, if you could, what is that one way?

Michael: If they can just remember MichaelGass.com, that’ll get them to

my blog site and then that has all the content, information, and ways to

connect with me on the various social media platforms and whatever is their

preferred platform of engagement and I’d be glad to follow-up with them.

Trent: All right, Michael, thank you so much for making time to come

here on the Bright Ideas Podcast and share your ideas on how ad agencies

should be building new business.

Michael: Trent, you just do such a great job with the interviews and I

think I’m always nervous when I’m on your end, but you’re always just so

cool and collected and you do such a great job and I appreciate you and the

resources that you provide.

Trent: Well, thank you very much for the kind words. It’s a lot of fun

to do and when I get feedback like what you’ve just given me, it just

motivates me to keep on doing more of it.

All right, to get the show notes from this episode, go to

brightideas.co/50 and when you do, I’ll include all the links we’ve talked

about plus some other valuable resources to help you grow your business.

And if you’re listening to this on the fly, please text ‘TRENT’ to

585858 and I will give you some very special information, as well, so that

you don’t have to wait till you get back to your computer to access

everything that you need.

All right, thanks very much and I’ll see you in the next episode.

About Michael Gass

mike-gass-caricatureMichael Gass is an international new business consultant to advertising, digital, media and PR agencies. Since 2007 he has led in the use of social media and content marketing strategies to make agency new business EASIER.

He is the founder of Fuel Lines, which has been rated among the top 100 marketing blogs in the world, according to Ad Age’s Power 150.  You can reach Michael at michael@michaelgass.com