Effective Marketing and Sales Strategies

One of our portfolio companies went from stuck to $10 million per year in four months. And in this video, I'm going to walk you through the actual marketing and sales tactics we use so that you can apply those things to your business too. So one of the newer companies in our portfolio was doing about $570,000 per month, and they had plateaued there month after month after month for about six months. So let's start with marketing. So we had in this business a webinar-based business, meaning it's running ads to a video. that the founder would get on and basically pitch a call to find out more. All right, so I'm going to give you current state. So our show rate for this webinar was 18%, which is really not good. You want it to be 25 or kind of higher. The schedule rate from the webinar, meaning people who booked to then take a sales call, I actually don't have that number, but we did improve it. So I'll tell you what we ended up doing. And before we made these changes, we were getting 58 calls booked per webinar. All right, so that's where we started. So the problem starting with this was the show rate. So the issue is that we were only doing one time per week for the founder. So they'd only wanted to do kind of like one pitch per week. And the issue is that means that if somebody books on, let's call it Monday, and she does the webinar on Sunday, then it means all of this time in between is where people could forget about it, get busy, fall off, and essentially just not show up, even though we paid to get the opt-in. So we did four things to actually fix this. So number one is that we introduced a long email sequence. We had nine emails that went out. And these were, we just basically improved the email. So we simplified the language. We put it more benefit-driven and basically sold the reason they should attend. And we tried to hit it from different angles. So we tried to hit it from pain. We tried to hit it from speed. We tried to hit it from ease. We tried to hit it from being stuck and plateaued. Because the big thing that you always have to remember is that pain is what drives motivation. All right. That's what gets people to actually take action. The second thing we did is we added an SMS. Because if people aren't showing up, then you want to communicate in more places in more ways. And so some people, like me specifically, I'm way more text responsive than I am email responsive. I rarely check my email, but I do check my texts. The next thing that we did on top of that was within the emails, we actually did some sort of behavior response. So you're like, what the hell does that mean? And so behavior response. means that if someone engages in any piece of content, they click, they open it. We then sent them behind the scenes content. So think about this as exclusive or secret stuff that made it show that we saw what they were doing, which is also something every business wants. It's like, oh, wow, this is pretty cool. I didn't know they could do something like this. Just showing kind of some more sophistication in marketing. And then the fourth thing that we did was, again, with more places, more ways, we had voicemail messages that we sent out to them. And so that means that we cover people who like text, people like email, people like voicemail. And then we also had video essentially for people who took an engagement. So we had all four ways that people consume information that we added in prior to the webinar. And so one of the other things that you can do, obviously, besides pain is that you add in proof. And so you can alternate between proof and pain. But big picture is that you always want to use the value equation, which has got dream, which is what's the big thing that they want to have happen. You've got risk. So you want to decrease the risk. This is where proof comes in and you want to. decrease the time, so that's speed, and you want to decrease the hard, right? Which is you want to make it easy. And so we want to show how easy it is, how fast it is, how risk-free it is with proof, and we want to make sure that we're very accurately describing what they want to have happen. And if you especially have people who have, you know, your avatar doesn't respond to email because sometimes there are industries, you know, if you're in finance, a lot of people respond to emails. If you're in painters and maybe blue collar workers, you might have fewer responses to email, so that's okay. So instead, it's like making sure that we have these multiple ways, like text, for example, has a 95 to 99 percent open rate. So people will get the message. And so obviously you don't want to abuse it. But having just a few strategically placed texts can massively increase the show up rate to things. And I would bet that if I had to put between all of these things, this would be the biggest one that had the increase in show up rates. And so because we had CTAs inside the email to get them to engage, we also long term keep the health of our email account because it shows that we're not just spamming people. Instead people are getting our emails. They're opening them. They're reading them They're taking an action all those increase the overall health of your your email server and your deliverability And so that way you can continue to get your emails delivered rather than getting into the promo tabs is get a little bit Tactical but you get into a second tab with an email which is like oh no one ever checks the spam folder Essentially the big reason that we have to do all this stuff is because no one remembers what they signed up for this morning Let alone five days ago and so we do this because you have to remind them and don't worry about, quote, bothering people. Now, do you want to send five a day? No, that's probably not smart. But if you send one reminder a day between a certain time and an event, there's nothing wrong with that. And so the most important part of the sequence, I'll tell you right now, is 24 hours before. So you're thinking the night before, you have the morning of, which is a.m., and then one hour prior. These are the three most important reminders that you want to send out. These are the ones that you definitely want to have as SMS. So you might be wondering, well, how much did we increase the show up rate percentage? Well, we went from 18% to 24%, which means that this increase was a 33% increase right off the bat. And so one of the things I think is one of the most underutilized ways to make a business more money, like a lot of people obsess about close rates, and we're going to talk about what we did with sales, but you can get a 33% increase in show up rates and have the same result as having a 33% increase in close rates. But getting 33% more people to show up is usually way easier And you're able to automate a lot of that to a great degree. So it's one time work that have permanent increases in revenue and profit rather than having to consistently drill a team on how to close, which you obviously should do. It just takes more work. So the next problem that we had was that people who were actually attending. So now we have our 24 percent of people who are showing up is that they weren't actually choosing to book a call. And so problem number two, no bookings. Right. And so what we did is we solved a few things inside of how we structure the webinar to get way more people to show up. And I'll show you just how many. So the first thing that we did is we actually looked at what was. And so I think people skip this step, but like this is the real work is you look at the webinar. You look at the attendance rates. You look at the drop off points. You look at where there's spikes in engagement, spikes in engagement to be the interest points where you're like, OK, this is something maybe we should expand some of this stuff. And where you have huge drop offs, then you're like, oh, we need to improve this. And so for us, we saw we were losing a ton of people right at the beginning of the webinar. And so we're like, OK, this is where we're going to put most of our attention, which, by the way, if you're doing anything, content, sales, webinars, whatever, the first five minutes and even the first 60 seconds is where you should be obsessing. Even in a different company we have in our portfolio, which does a tremendous amount greater volume than this particular company, we re-scripted the first five minutes of presentation and got a 20% increase in close rates. So that's just. just redoing five minutes and it was on a three hour presentation. So based on the research, we did four things. The first thing we did is we scripted a faster intro, basically getting to the point much faster and being clearer about why they are here and what they're going to get from it. And so if you're like, well, what would that actually look like? Well, it actually follows the exact same format that we use for our content, which is proof, promise, plan. So proof is, hey, I help someone just like you. and you want them to identify with the proof that you are showing so they can approximate, oh, this is just like me. The promise is clearly defining exactly what they're going to get both from the webinar and potentially after the webinar. And then the plan is to set expectations for how the next 60, 90, however many minutes your presentation is, so they know where they're going. And the key point here with all the faster intro stuff is you just want to get to the meat. When I look at a beginner sales call or beginner sales presentation or VSL, video sales letter, Oftentimes people spend a minute, two minutes, just like meandering, like trying to figure out what they're saying. And they don't know that they're losing like 40% of their audience in the first two minutes before they figure out what they're going to start saying. So get to the point. Number two is we mentioned live that this is live. So this was a live webinar they were doing. And the thing is, is that we weren't actually showing. So we're incurring the cost of being live, but we want to say the date. You want to say the time you want to say the weather you want to say any current events. These are all things that give indications that this is happening right now. And so for whatever reason, and I don't know why this is, but when you do live stuff, it works better. No idea why, I just know that it works. And so we want to lean into the fact that it's actually happening. And so, mind you, if you do an automated webinar or you do a video newsletter that's recorded, there's nothing wrong with that. Obviously, it gives you scale because you can't do a webinar every hour of every day. But in general, if you are struggling to make something automated convert better, I would recommend. going live for a while and doing it more frequently live. So you get the reps in, get it tighter and get the benefit of just the magic of liveness. So the next thing we did is we had a takeaway. All right. So you can always, you know, it's like the only guy the girl wants at the bar is the guy who's not chasing them, whatever. Right. And so there's two main things that we changed tactically to make this a little bit more of a takeaway. So number one is that we were very clear about who our qualifications were. So we said, listen, we only sell people who are this, this, or this. If you are below this or above this or adjacent to this, this is not for you. And so by clearly stating those things, we got to ward off the wrong people and magnetize the right people to be like, oh, this is actually just for me. The next thing we did was we put scarcity in play. All right. And so this is one of my favorite ways of ethically providing scarcity, which is saying we only have this many times to take calls or consults because I only have two guys on my team. I only have four guys on my team. So we only have this many slots. And so typically we will book out of slots within this period of time. And so if you say typically, then that does excuse you as long. has more than half the time that does happen. Or oftentimes, you can say that, you can preface it in that way, not an exact language, that it happens often, right? And then with the scarcity, you just say the actual constraint you have. And so I see this as one of the most underutilized scarcity strategies in existence. If you're an agency and you can only take on five customers because you couldn't take on 100 anyways, then say you can only take on five customers. If you can only take 20 phone calls, then say you can only take 20. And if you know that there's the urgency component, which is it's first come first serve, then say that. And so by doing the and then adding the scarcity and a little bit of urgency around it's first come, first serve, and we can only serve so many. Though that sounds simple, people don't do it. And yes, it does work. So the fourth thing is, I would say this is scarcity on steroids. You're like, wait, I thought you just did scarcity. Well, we just put more scarcity in. So we did a couple of things around this, but we added proof. So one is, this is theoretical, but as soon as people begin to take action, we want to show proof that they've done it. So the first thing that we did is we said, hey, as soon as you do book... Let me know in the chat. And so let me know in the chat then shows this proof that's happening in the chat that people are booking. All right. So that was number one. The next thing we did is that by doing this, it creates an open loop. And so it's like if you were on a sales call, say, hey, I'll wait here and then I'll make sure I can see it on my side. Then what we did is we did call outs. So it says, hey, I see that Rosie booked. Hey, I see that John booked. Hey, I see that Susan booked. Right. So we can say in real time and it creates this this frenzy around booking. And the last thing that we did is that you actually want to call out the sold out times. Now, this is a little bit of language use here, but we say the word sold out because it again, it creates more buying behavior and preframes the sale. And so it's a, hey, Wednesday is sold out. Thursday is sold out. Friday is sold out. And so as the times are booking out, we want to show that even though we said we have 100 slots, we basically chunk it down again and say, oh, this day is sold. The morning is sold out. Like if you're like getting worried about like you're not even just say, hey, the morning on Wednesday sold out. the afternoon on Wednesday sold out. Maybe you only have three slots, whatever. But you can still basically approximate some sort of mini urgency, mini scarcity by just saying what has been taken. And it's completely compliant because you're just stating the facts and telling the truth. And by the way, if you're a business owner and you are doing a million bucks a year and you are looking to scale and either you're not scaling as fast as you want or you just feel like you're stuck, I get it either way. And these tactics are helping you out. If you want specific help on your specific business, we open up dates at our headquarters. sporadically to invite people out. And so if you want to see if we have availability and you want to see if you qualify, you can go to acquisition.com. My team will get on the phone. Worst case, we'll try and set you up with something that could help you in the meantime. And best case, we see out here in Vegas and I would love to meet you and help you grow. So those four tactics that I just outlined for you gave us a 33% increase in our booking rate from the webinar. So we got a 33% lift in people who are showing up. And of the now greater amount of people, we got another 33% lift in increased number of people who then booked calls. And so our total book calls went from 58 to, survey says, 102. So nearly a double. This was 77% increase in total book calls from the same ad spend. And if we had only done that, that could have just absolutely demolished it for the business. We could have done nothing else and we could have rode enough in the sunset. But we wanted to make more. And so... let's talk about sales now. So for the sales process, all we're really looking at here is close rate. Now, technically you could have a drop off between the booking webinar and the show up or on the sales call. That was not a constraint for this business. It had super high show up rates. I didn't even lift it here because it wasn't worth doing. And it didn't change because we didn't really focus there because it wasn't the main thing. But we did have a low close rate once people are actually showing up to the sales call. And so we focused there too. And so the close rate before this was 14%. So to be really clear. This is bad. You don't want a 14% close rate. That's tough, especially after a webinar or some sort of long selling event. So we were just missing the ball here. And so we took some steps to fix it. And we chose to fix it in four ways. And so I'm going to start at the front and move backwards. So number one, the thing that we had was bad framing. All right. So what a lot of people don't know is just like in the beginning of a video, proof, promise, plan, right? What you say at the very beginning has a massive, uh, impact on what people end up doing at the end and so most people do look at the end rather than looking at the beginning and how they got introduced to the sale to begin with and so in the beginning a lot of the team that they had was Kind of wasting time trying to like build rapport like how's your week going great? I know we've got limited time here blah blah blah blah blah like new We wanted to fix the fair him and get right to the point. So let me tell you what the bad intro was before this. So it was like, hey, how's it going? My name's so-and-so. How's your week going? Oh, cool. Great. I know we have limited time here, so you're ready to jump in. You know, do you have a pen and paper to take notes with? Right. Now, that was the old way of doing it. And I think that's a fairly common way of doing it. But I tend to think there's a better way to do it. And so that's what I'm going to share with you. And so what we started with was, hey, my name's John. I'm here from this company and I have a background in ABC, which is specific to whatever problem that you want to solve. I work closely with so-and-so edified person that you saw on the webinar. And I would love to know what resonated most with you. Now, they're going to then answer. Now, now we're. reminding them of the value that they got on the webinar and kind of getting them back in that state where they took action. And we say, great. So the real purpose of this call is to see if you qualify for our guarantee. Not everyone does. And it's really based on these three factors. So if it's B2B, you'd be like business size, industry, and you're being the owner. Now, fundamentally, you're going to be going through BANT, which is Budget Authority Need Timing. And you want to use those as the qualifications for the guarantee. Now, if you have guarantees, obviously this is sexy. Now, instead of a guarantee, you could also say, hey, we want to make sure that you qualify for the bonus. Or, hey, I want to make sure that you qualify for starting by this time. It doesn't really matter what it is. But the thing is, you're immediately taking it away and saying, hey, I'm not here to sell. I'm here to first make sure that I can even give you something. And automatically, they're leaning in and they're like, oh, I want something that I'm not immediately having. So you're in the driver's seat. They're the ones. who are on the other side hoping to earn your favor. And so then after that, you can clarify what it is. And to be clear, the bonus is X, Y, and Z. Or hey, to be clear, our guarantee, we have to be strict. It's kind of like college admissions, whatever. And if you don't qualify, this is what we're going to set you up with and help you out. But if you do, then we'll start buying back some time and make you some more money. And we'll start X, Y, and Z-ing benefit that we originally promised on the webinar. And so the big thing, and this is like, it's everywhere through the entire process, from marketing to sales to customer success. All the way through is that you want to have congruence. You want to basically have the customer feel like you have this baton pass between every single step in the business. And so from the ad to what they see as the headline for the webinar. Once they opt in, the first few lines of the webinar should match with the headline that they opted in for. Once they get on the call, it should match what you talked about on the webinar. Once they get sold, the onboarding and success person should be matching what they said on the sales call. And this sounds so simple and yet no one... Does it? And literally, if you have complete alignment all the way through your process, you will make so much more money. And this sounds simple. And it is simple to understand, but hard to do because you have to coordinate multiple parties along the same line. But this is what creates streamlined, lubricated sales. We're talking diddy lube. So the second part of the sale is where you get in discovery. So in the beginning, it's like, what's the frame you're setting? What's the agenda? We had a much more takeaway version that was still congruent with what was promised on the webinar. The next thing is discovery. And so a lot of people waste time in discovery and this is where they get caught. They get caught in traps. And I made a whole video about this. You can probably find it on my channel. But they go into traps. And so traps are basically where you get too far in the weeds, you get too into the details, and both you and the prospect forget why you're there to begin with. And so you want to stay chunked up at the highest level humanly possible because when you stay chunked up, you can focus on the few things that matter that are going to move the needle that are ultimately going to be tied to the biggest ROI around whatever it is that you sell. Stop getting cute in sales calls. And so a lot of salespeople will start doing this as they get a little bit more experience. And this is a mistake. And so this is why sometimes you have somebody come into your sales team. They quickly ramp up. They do well. And all of a sudden, their sales number starts slipping. It's because they get cute. They get fancy. They start to start saying words that they've heard around and trying to play business consultant or start to play expert. But they're not the expert because they're not the ones doing the delivery. And so You want to always get out of these very detail-oriented questions because as soon as they ask those questions, then they're the ones in control of the conversation and not you because the way you answer could turn them off and say, oh, actually, I didn't want that. But now you're the one answering their questions. They're in control. So during discovery, you ask the questions, they give the answers, and you stay high level to make sure that you're staying on the line to get to the end. Once you've gone through discovery and you've hit on the pain, you've clearly defined a reason they should be motivated to take action, then we go into the pitch. All right. Now, I. I'm a big advocate of a three-pillar framework, and I talk about this in the Closer process. And let me tell you some advanced stuff on this. So the more do-it-yourself done with you, the product is, the more you want it to be simple. You want it to be 1, 2, 3, ABC, whatever. The more implementation you have, the more done for you it is, the more you want to show, here's 11 steps, 27 steps that we followed. Because what you want someone to see is, oh my God, this is so much work. And then you say, right. So they believe that it works, but they don't want to do the work. And so you're like, yeah, oh, I believe that if I do 38 steps to improve my YouTube videos, they'll improve. But can you just do it for me? And that's where you want them to go. But if you're selling a solution that they're supposed to do a certain percentage of the work or a greater percentage of the work, then you want it to be as simple as humanly possible. And if you're curious, like why is do it yourself and done with you more or less the same is that I actually see done with you as basically a do it yourself sale plus accountability, help, troubleshooting. getting you unstuck. So it's really just that. And theoretically, if you just follow the steps, you could do it yourself. But just to make sure that you're successful, we'll add this extra help in rather than, oh, we're going to do it all for you, which is a true done for you offer. And so instead of the three pillar pitch, what this company was doing was they had a feature pitch or a feature stack. So they were making it seem really complicated and having way too many steps and overwhelming the prospect. But then after the prospects overwhelmed and confused, it was like, great, you got that. So you're going to do it. And then you're like, right. And so they're like, no, thank you. Now, if you're like, hey, all of that, I'll do it. different pitch. Three pillar pitch, if you're not sure, stick with that, usually crushes. And if you're like, wait, I have six steps in my process, you just chunk up. It means that you just gather two of them together and just make it a larger bucket. And one tiny tweak that we added before the pitch was basically getting them to invite us to sell them. And so we said, hey, given everything that you just said, and you're doing X in revenue, you meet Y qualifications, and the fact that your challenge is this, I think that we'll be able to help you out. and that you'd be a great fit. And our experience is in solving this exact problem for your type of person. And if you want, I can walk you through that. But where do you want to go from here? And so then they have to say, no, please walk me through that. And then basically they're giving you permission to launch into the three pillar pitch. Now, this last step, step four was actually execution. And so there's a lot of things that we did here. And so this is not me selling you a done with you solution. This is me actually just trying to help you out. So we did many things to improve execution. And so we actually had a conversation with the founder. And they said, you know, I watched some of these discovery recordings and they look pretty bad. And we said, yeah, well, when was the last time you roleplayed discovery with your team? And they were like, I don't. We're like, hmm, interesting. And so what we did, and this is going to be mind blowing to you, is number one is we roleplay. We actually had the team practiced it. All right. And this isn't with wigs and handcuffs. We actually. had them role play it with one another, but maybe that increases the stakes so you can do whatever you want on your sales team. The next thing is that there wasn't very good tracking. And so we wanted to track KPIs more closely. And so sometimes if you have two chunked up KPIs, if you just have close rate, for example, it doesn't give you more like double click ability to look more granularly into how a closer is doing. And so we want to see, okay, what percentage of people are you getting to show? What percentage of people when you're on the phone, are you actually making the offer to? What percentage of people are missing because of what specific obstacle or not? And so this gives us a lot more insight into how each individual closer is doing. And then from there, that allows us to personalize the coaching that we have for each of those individual sales guys. Now, if you're still looking at this and you're like, man, what else was there? Well, sometimes it's a who thing, which is, do I believe that you can train anyone to sell? Yes. Do I think it's worth it to train everyone to sell? No. Some people just start further back in the line. It's just not worth the resources for the business. And so we ruthlessly prioritize who gets the best calls, who gets the best times. And we do that by who closes the most. And if you eventually get kind of weeded out, you can almost manage someone out of sales if they consistently show low returns for us giving them and feeding them opportunities. And so what we did is if you were below KPI, we cut your calendar in half. If you're still below KPI, you have basically a week or two to prove yourself or you're out. And so the next thing that we did is that we routed the best leads to the best closers. So best to best. And this is one of my favorite ways to increase sales overall. Like if your best closers get the best leads, you'll sell more stuff. If your worst closers get the worst leads, you'll lose the least. And so this is an optimization for any sales process across any business. And then finally, and this is a big one, we incentivize the paid in full because I think this particular business, if I'm not mistaken, the closers got paid the same if they closed or didn't. But I. prefer to close off cash collected. All right. Which means that the closers have the same incentive as you. And so let's say you have a $10,000 thing that you sell. Well, if you have a payment plan, let's say that's five payments of 2K, then the closer is going to get, call it $200 for that because they get just 10% of the $2,000 that they close. And if they get the paid in full, then they get $1,000 for that sale. So they get paid five times more. And so this incentivizes closers to... actually close, instead of these kind of like limp-wristed closes, they're rock-hard erect closes, no flaccid closes in this house. And that way, you know that the prospect actually has been sold on it and is more likely to stick with it in the long term, which for real is actually an important thing. And oftentimes these types of issues come up, like these lacks of execution, when a founder gets a little too far away. And so I like to say, you want to know where their bodies are buried. Like you want to know in every department what is going wrong. as a founder. And if you get too far away from it, then you don't know, which means you don't really add value because you have no context. And I think a lot of people get too far away from sales or especially revenue generation too quickly because they like want to scale and they want to give, you know, handoff responsibility to people underneath them. But... If when you hand stuff off, stats go down, you have abdicated, not delegated. When you delegate, stats stay the same or go up. Because theoretically, if you give someone who has equal skill more time to do it because they have more time than you, then stats should improve. And so when you give it to somebody who has less skill than you and you didn't prepare them and you didn't give them a checklist, then it's more likely that stuff's going to go down. And that's where you have to stay there. And they stay side by side with you until they get it all right. And so with all of this stuff and you're like, holy cow, that actually when you think about it, bad framing for, you know, we had to make it congruent. We, we. chunked up discovery to make sure they avoided traps and stayed high level. We simplified it to a three pillar pitch with a little bit of a pre-pitch. And we did all these things on execution to make sure that the team actually was reading the script and actually saying the words the right way. The result of all of this work was we got to a 35% close rate. So that was more than a double, whatever that is, 2.4, I think. 2.4x increase in close rate. Monster. All right, so we're going to talk about the results of this and at the end I'm going to give you the takeaways that I had for this business that you can use. So the result of all that work is we took our CAC from $5,763 to $2,868. So more than or about cut in half what it costs us to get a customer. On top of that, we went from a 1.62, which is very bad ROAS, to a 3.96 ROAS. Much better. And we took our revenue from $569,000 to $860K per month. So we passed our $10 million run rate and we have sustained that since these improvements have occurred. And then profit, we got to a 30.7% profit margin off of that. And so now this business is making $250,000, $300,000 a month in profit, whereas before it was kind of plateaued and just kind of teetering at that edge. So let's talk about the big takeaways. So what you can do from this. for your business, no matter what size you're at. So number one is that you have to keep the main thing the main thing. Obviously, this business was still generating a decent amount of monthly revenue. But the thing is, is that people discount how much an increase in revenue can disproportionately drop to the bottom line. And so let's say you've got a business that has 10% margins. If you can increase revenue by 50%, you can, in a very real way, disproportionately increase profit. So you could increase profit by... 5x when you increase revenue by 10 or 20%. And so understanding the relationship between revenue and profit is something that a lot of business owners don't do. And so sometimes it's cool to trim from the bottom line, but it's so much better to trace the top line and have that extra revenue fall through. And so big picture here, all the way chunked up, the constraint was acquisition. We weren't getting enough customers. Now underneath of getting enough customers, you'll notice that there's just a pipeline of things that all could be improved. It's like, can we improve our CTR? Can we improve our opt-in? Can we prove our schedule? Can we prove our show? Can we improve the close rate? And so what we did is we just looked at all of them. And the key point here is that we actually looked. And so when we tried to improve the webinar, we weren't just like shooting from the hip. We're like, where are people dropping off? Let's fix it. When we looked at the sales, we're like, where are people suffering? Well, if you're watching the calls, you can see that, wow, the discovery sucks. All right, well, then we need to focus more there at the front. And I will also put this point. is that the front is where a lot of times where the cash is. So in the beginning of the webinar, we preloaded it. In the beginning of the call, we preloaded it. Right before we did the pitch, we preframe it. And so a lot of times people don't understand how powerful the frame is for setting the expectation about what's about to happen next. The next one is execution over plan. All right, so let me explain what I mean by this. If you have, call it a mediocre script, and you have exceptional execution, you will still outperform. somebody who has an amazing script and no one reads it, right? Or you have an amazing webinar deck, but you still sound terrible when you do it. You're not going to do as well as somebody who doesn't have as much of a deck, but sounds really smooth and great. And so a lot of times, this is the boring work that people aren't willing to do. They're not willing to watch game tape. They're not willing to role play with the team. They're not willing to practice themselves when they do repictures or when they do presentations. They're not willing to take a content piece, get to the end of it and be like, you know what? We can do that better. We can do it again. And so even for this video, we redid the intro five times before you actually saw that. And so You have to be willing to repeat successful actions and just get 5% better over and over and over again because that betterness across this whole thing compounds. And so one of the big things that I've learned around improving anything is that you can actually have measurement as intervention. And it's like, okay, that's a big fancy word. Is that a drug rehab thing? No, that's not what I mean. If you want someone to lose weight, the first step is to get them to measure their weight. And you can actually. just have someone measure their weight and they will lose weight. If you just have someone report on their profit, they will make more profit. If you just have them report their show rate, schedule rate, close rates, and reinforce that on a regular daily basis where it affects their behavior in a cadence where they can change it, then they will. And so one of the easiest things that you can do to improve any business is start measuring the stuff that matters. And if you hate looking at the stat, you should look at it twice because it means I want you to feel the pain so that it causes you to change. One of the biggest things is that Better is oftentimes one of the lower risk ways versus new. All right. So if you want to expand or improve a business, let's say you're struggling for whatever reason. Part of you wants to do new because new is sexy, new is fun, new shiny object. But the thing is, is that what you're currently doing is already proven to a certain degree. And so simply doing more or doing the same thing better is a better risk adjusted move because you already know this works. And so fundamentally, if we get more people to show, we will close at least as many as we did before. If we pre-frame with more urgency and we get more people to book, we will close more sales on the next call. Right. Is that fundamentally thinking through this is that more or getting an improvement to augment or get better will always fundamentally in the same system improve it. And so just focusing on those things, which usually just takes work, will give you disproportionate return. And oftentimes that drops to the bottom line. And one of the first rules of entrepreneurship that I have is use what you've. Got it. Now, if we look at the team that they had and the process they had, we didn't change them from a webinar. We didn't change them from a phone sale. We didn't even change their calendar availability. But we just stated the facts and told the truth. We said, hey, we only have this many slots. We only have this many sales guys. This is actually live. And so we wanted to reinforce the things that we were already doing, but simply telling them that we were doing it. And you get zero benefits from doing something that you do not communicate. Everything in business is about perceived benefits. perceived scarcity, perceived urgency. So if you have a deadline but don't let people know, there is no deadline. If you have scarcity, there's only so many slots you can take but you don't let people know, you have no scarcity. If you are live but you don't tell people you're live, you're gonna have the same effect as a recorded webinar or as a recorded event, which eliminates the competitive advantage that you did this to begin with. So we got greedy in this business because YOLO, why not? So what we did was we implemented an upsell. And so rather than covering this video, because this is front end, I want to talk about what we did in the upsell in this video, and if it's not out yet, check this one out.

So let's start with marketing. So we had in this business a webinar-based business, meaning it's running ads to a video. that the founder would get on and basically pitch a call to find out more.

All right, so I'm going to give you current state. So our show rate for this webinar was 18%, which is really not good. You want it to be 25 or kind of higher.

The schedule rate from the webinar, meaning people who booked to then take a sales call, I actually don't have that number, but we did improve it. So I'll tell you what we ended up doing. And before we made these changes, we were getting 58 calls booked per webinar. All right, so that's where we started. So the problem starting with this was the show rate.

So the issue is that we were only doing one time per week for the founder. So they'd only wanted to do kind of like one pitch per week. And the issue is that means that if somebody books on, let's call it Monday, and she does the webinar on Sunday, then it means all of this time in between is where people could forget about it, get busy, fall off, and essentially just not show up, even though we paid to get the opt-in.

So we did four things to actually fix this. So number one is that we introduced a long email sequence. We had nine emails that went out. And these were, we just basically improved the email. So we simplified the language.

We put it more benefit-driven and basically sold the reason they should attend. And we tried to hit it from different angles. So we tried to hit it from pain. We tried to hit it from speed. We tried to hit it from ease.

We tried to hit it from being stuck and plateaued. Because the big thing that you always have to remember is that pain is what drives motivation. All right. That's what gets people to actually take action. The second thing we did is we added an SMS.

Because if people aren't showing up, then you want to communicate in more places in more ways. And so some people, like me specifically, I'm way more text responsive than I am email responsive. I rarely check my email, but I do check my texts.

The next thing that we did on top of that was within the emails, we actually did some sort of behavior response. So you're like, what the hell does that mean? And so behavior response. means that if someone engages in any piece of content, they click, they open it. We then sent them behind the scenes content.

So think about this as exclusive or secret stuff that made it show that we saw what they were doing, which is also something every business wants. It's like, oh, wow, this is pretty cool. I didn't know they could do something like this. Just showing kind of some more sophistication in marketing. And then the fourth thing that we did was, again, with more places, more ways, we had voicemail messages that we sent out to them.

And so that means that we cover people who like text, people like email, people like voicemail. And then we also had video essentially for people who took an engagement. So we had all four ways that people consume information that we added in prior to the webinar.

And so one of the other things that you can do, obviously, besides pain is that you add in proof. And so you can alternate between proof and pain. But big picture is that you always want to use the value equation, which has got dream, which is what's the big thing that they want to have happen. You've got risk.

So you want to decrease the risk. This is where proof comes in and you want to. decrease the time, so that's speed, and you want to decrease the hard, right?

Which is you want to make it easy. And so we want to show how easy it is, how fast it is, how risk-free it is with proof, and we want to make sure that we're very accurately describing what they want to have happen. And if you especially have people who have, you know, your avatar doesn't respond to email because sometimes there are industries, you know, if you're in finance, a lot of people respond to emails.

If you're in painters and maybe blue collar workers, you might have fewer responses to email, so that's okay. So instead, it's like making sure that we have these multiple ways, like text, for example, has a 95 to 99 percent open rate. So people will get the message.

And so obviously you don't want to abuse it. But having just a few strategically placed texts can massively increase the show up rate to things. And I would bet that if I had to put between all of these things, this would be the biggest one that had the increase in show up rates.

And so because we had CTAs inside the email to get them to engage, we also long term keep the health of our email account because it shows that we're not just spamming people. Instead people are getting our emails. They're opening them.

They're reading them They're taking an action all those increase the overall health of your your email server and your deliverability And so that way you can continue to get your emails delivered rather than getting into the promo tabs is get a little bit Tactical but you get into a second tab with an email which is like oh no one ever checks the spam folder Essentially the big reason that we have to do all this stuff is because no one remembers what they signed up for this morning Let alone five days ago and so we do this because you have to remind them and don't worry about, quote, bothering people. Now, do you want to send five a day? No, that's probably not smart. But if you send one reminder a day between a certain time and an event, there's nothing wrong with that.

And so the most important part of the sequence, I'll tell you right now, is 24 hours before. So you're thinking the night before, you have the morning of, which is a.m., and then one hour prior. These are the three most important reminders that you want to send out.

These are the ones that you definitely want to have as SMS. So you might be wondering, well, how much did we increase the show up rate percentage? Well, we went from 18% to 24%, which means that this increase was a 33% increase right off the bat. And so one of the things I think is one of the most underutilized ways to make a business more money, like a lot of people obsess about close rates, and we're going to talk about what we did with sales, but you can get a 33% increase in show up rates and have the same result as having a 33% increase in close rates.

But getting 33% more people to show up is usually way easier And you're able to automate a lot of that to a great degree. So it's one time work that have permanent increases in revenue and profit rather than having to consistently drill a team on how to close, which you obviously should do. It just takes more work.

So the next problem that we had was that people who were actually attending. So now we have our 24 percent of people who are showing up is that they weren't actually choosing to book a call. And so problem number two, no bookings. Right.

And so what we did is we solved a few things inside of how we structure the webinar to get way more people to show up. And I'll show you just how many. So the first thing that we did is we actually looked at what was. And so I think people skip this step, but like this is the real work is you look at the webinar. You look at the attendance rates.

You look at the drop off points. You look at where there's spikes in engagement, spikes in engagement to be the interest points where you're like, OK, this is something maybe we should expand some of this stuff. And where you have huge drop offs, then you're like, oh, we need to improve this. And so for us, we saw we were losing a ton of people right at the beginning of the webinar. And so we're like, OK, this is where we're going to put most of our attention, which, by the way, if you're doing anything, content, sales, webinars, whatever, the first five minutes and even the first 60 seconds is where you should be obsessing.

Even in a different company we have in our portfolio, which does a tremendous amount greater volume than this particular company, we re-scripted the first five minutes of presentation and got a 20% increase in close rates. So that's just. just redoing five minutes and it was on a three hour presentation.

So based on the research, we did four things. The first thing we did is we scripted a faster intro, basically getting to the point much faster and being clearer about why they are here and what they're going to get from it. And so if you're like, well, what would that actually look like? Well, it actually follows the exact same format that we use for our content, which is proof, promise, plan. So proof is, hey, I help someone just like you.

and you want them to identify with the proof that you are showing so they can approximate, oh, this is just like me. The promise is clearly defining exactly what they're going to get both from the webinar and potentially after the webinar. And then the plan is to set expectations for how the next 60, 90, however many minutes your presentation is, so they know where they're going. And the key point here with all the faster intro stuff is you just want to get to the meat.

When I look at a beginner sales call or beginner sales presentation or VSL, video sales letter, Oftentimes people spend a minute, two minutes, just like meandering, like trying to figure out what they're saying. And they don't know that they're losing like 40% of their audience in the first two minutes before they figure out what they're going to start saying. So get to the point.

Number two is we mentioned live that this is live. So this was a live webinar they were doing. And the thing is, is that we weren't actually showing.

So we're incurring the cost of being live, but we want to say the date. You want to say the time you want to say the weather you want to say any current events. These are all things that give indications that this is happening right now. And so for whatever reason, and I don't know why this is, but when you do live stuff, it works better.

No idea why, I just know that it works. And so we want to lean into the fact that it's actually happening. And so, mind you, if you do an automated webinar or you do a video newsletter that's recorded, there's nothing wrong with that. Obviously, it gives you scale because you can't do a webinar every hour of every day. But in general, if you are struggling to make something automated convert better, I would recommend.

going live for a while and doing it more frequently live. So you get the reps in, get it tighter and get the benefit of just the magic of liveness. So the next thing we did is we had a takeaway. All right.

So you can always, you know, it's like the only guy the girl wants at the bar is the guy who's not chasing them, whatever. Right. And so there's two main things that we changed tactically to make this a little bit more of a takeaway. So number one is that we were very clear about who our qualifications were. So we said, listen, we only sell people who are this, this, or this.

If you are below this or above this or adjacent to this, this is not for you. And so by clearly stating those things, we got to ward off the wrong people and magnetize the right people to be like, oh, this is actually just for me. The next thing we did was we put scarcity in play. All right. And so this is one of my favorite ways of ethically providing scarcity, which is saying we only have this many times to take calls or consults because I only have two guys on my team.

I only have four guys on my team. So we only have this many slots. And so typically we will book out of slots within this period of time.

And so if you say typically, then that does excuse you as long. has more than half the time that does happen. Or oftentimes, you can say that, you can preface it in that way, not an exact language, that it happens often, right? And then with the scarcity, you just say the actual constraint you have. And so I see this as one of the most underutilized scarcity strategies in existence.

If you're an agency and you can only take on five customers because you couldn't take on 100 anyways, then say you can only take on five customers. If you can only take 20 phone calls, then say you can only take 20. And if you know that there's the urgency component, which is it's first come first serve, then say that. And so by doing the and then adding the scarcity and a little bit of urgency around it's first come, first serve, and we can only serve so many.

Though that sounds simple, people don't do it. And yes, it does work. So the fourth thing is, I would say this is scarcity on steroids.

You're like, wait, I thought you just did scarcity. Well, we just put more scarcity in. So we did a couple of things around this, but we added proof.

So one is, this is theoretical, but as soon as people begin to take action, we want to show proof that they've done it. So the first thing that we did is we said, hey, as soon as you do book... Let me know in the chat.

And so let me know in the chat then shows this proof that's happening in the chat that people are booking. All right. So that was number one. The next thing we did is that by doing this, it creates an open loop. And so it's like if you were on a sales call, say, hey, I'll wait here and then I'll make sure I can see it on my side.

Then what we did is we did call outs. So it says, hey, I see that Rosie booked. Hey, I see that John booked.

Hey, I see that Susan booked. Right. So we can say in real time and it creates this this frenzy around booking.

And the last thing that we did is that you actually want to call out the sold out times. Now, this is a little bit of language use here, but we say the word sold out because it again, it creates more buying behavior and preframes the sale. And so it's a, hey, Wednesday is sold out.

Thursday is sold out. Friday is sold out. And so as the times are booking out, we want to show that even though we said we have 100 slots, we basically chunk it down again and say, oh, this day is sold.

The morning is sold out. Like if you're like getting worried about like you're not even just say, hey, the morning on Wednesday sold out. the afternoon on Wednesday sold out. Maybe you only have three slots, whatever.

But you can still basically approximate some sort of mini urgency, mini scarcity by just saying what has been taken. And it's completely compliant because you're just stating the facts and telling the truth. And by the way, if you're a business owner and you are doing a million bucks a year and you are looking to scale and either you're not scaling as fast as you want or you just feel like you're stuck, I get it either way. And these tactics are helping you out.

If you want specific help on your specific business, we open up dates at our headquarters. sporadically to invite people out. And so if you want to see if we have availability and you want to see if you qualify, you can go to acquisition.com.

My team will get on the phone. Worst case, we'll try and set you up with something that could help you in the meantime. And best case, we see out here in Vegas and I would love to meet you and help you grow.

So those four tactics that I just outlined for you gave us a 33% increase in our booking rate from the webinar. So we got a 33% lift in people who are showing up. And of the now greater amount of people, we got another 33% lift in increased number of people who then booked calls. And so our total book calls went from 58 to, survey says, 102. So nearly a double.

This was 77% increase in total book calls from the same ad spend. And if we had only done that, that could have just absolutely demolished it for the business. We could have done nothing else and we could have rode enough in the sunset.

But we wanted to make more. And so... let's talk about sales now.

So for the sales process, all we're really looking at here is close rate. Now, technically you could have a drop off between the booking webinar and the show up or on the sales call. That was not a constraint for this business. It had super high show up rates.

I didn't even lift it here because it wasn't worth doing. And it didn't change because we didn't really focus there because it wasn't the main thing. But we did have a low close rate once people are actually showing up to the sales call.

And so we focused there too. And so the close rate before this was 14%. So to be really clear.

This is bad. You don't want a 14% close rate. That's tough, especially after a webinar or some sort of long selling event. So we were just missing the ball here. And so we took some steps to fix it.

And we chose to fix it in four ways. And so I'm going to start at the front and move backwards. So number one, the thing that we had was bad framing. All right.

So what a lot of people don't know is just like in the beginning of a video, proof, promise, plan, right? What you say at the very beginning has a massive, uh, impact on what people end up doing at the end and so most people do look at the end rather than looking at the beginning and how they got introduced to the sale to begin with and so in the beginning a lot of the team that they had was Kind of wasting time trying to like build rapport like how's your week going great? I know we've got limited time here blah blah blah blah blah like new We wanted to fix the fair him and get right to the point.

So let me tell you what the bad intro was before this. So it was like, hey, how's it going? My name's so-and-so. How's your week going? Oh, cool.

Great. I know we have limited time here, so you're ready to jump in. You know, do you have a pen and paper to take notes with? Right.

Now, that was the old way of doing it. And I think that's a fairly common way of doing it. But I tend to think there's a better way to do it. And so that's what I'm going to share with you. And so what we started with was, hey, my name's John.

I'm here from this company and I have a background in ABC, which is specific to whatever problem that you want to solve. I work closely with so-and-so edified person that you saw on the webinar. And I would love to know what resonated most with you. Now, they're going to then answer. Now, now we're.

reminding them of the value that they got on the webinar and kind of getting them back in that state where they took action. And we say, great. So the real purpose of this call is to see if you qualify for our guarantee. Not everyone does. And it's really based on these three factors.

So if it's B2B, you'd be like business size, industry, and you're being the owner. Now, fundamentally, you're going to be going through BANT, which is Budget Authority Need Timing. And you want to use those as the qualifications for the guarantee. Now, if you have guarantees, obviously this is sexy.

Now, instead of a guarantee, you could also say, hey, we want to make sure that you qualify for the bonus. Or, hey, I want to make sure that you qualify for starting by this time. It doesn't really matter what it is. But the thing is, you're immediately taking it away and saying, hey, I'm not here to sell.

I'm here to first make sure that I can even give you something. And automatically, they're leaning in and they're like, oh, I want something that I'm not immediately having. So you're in the driver's seat.

They're the ones. who are on the other side hoping to earn your favor. And so then after that, you can clarify what it is. And to be clear, the bonus is X, Y, and Z.

Or hey, to be clear, our guarantee, we have to be strict. It's kind of like college admissions, whatever. And if you don't qualify, this is what we're going to set you up with and help you out.

But if you do, then we'll start buying back some time and make you some more money. And we'll start X, Y, and Z-ing benefit that we originally promised on the webinar. And so the big thing, and this is like, it's everywhere through the entire process, from marketing to sales to customer success. All the way through is that you want to have congruence. You want to basically have the customer feel like you have this baton pass between every single step in the business.

And so from the ad to what they see as the headline for the webinar. Once they opt in, the first few lines of the webinar should match with the headline that they opted in for. Once they get on the call, it should match what you talked about on the webinar. Once they get sold, the onboarding and success person should be matching what they said on the sales call. And this sounds so simple and yet no one...

Does it? And literally, if you have complete alignment all the way through your process, you will make so much more money. And this sounds simple. And it is simple to understand, but hard to do because you have to coordinate multiple parties along the same line. But this is what creates streamlined, lubricated sales.

We're talking diddy lube. So the second part of the sale is where you get in discovery. So in the beginning, it's like, what's the frame you're setting? What's the agenda? We had a much more takeaway version that was still congruent with what was promised on the webinar.

The next thing is discovery. And so a lot of people waste time in discovery and this is where they get caught. They get caught in traps.

And I made a whole video about this. You can probably find it on my channel. But they go into traps. And so traps are basically where you get too far in the weeds, you get too into the details, and both you and the prospect forget why you're there to begin with.

And so you want to stay chunked up at the highest level humanly possible because when you stay chunked up, you can focus on the few things that matter that are going to move the needle that are ultimately going to be tied to the biggest ROI around whatever it is that you sell. Stop getting cute in sales calls. And so a lot of salespeople will start doing this as they get a little bit more experience. And this is a mistake. And so this is why sometimes you have somebody come into your sales team.

They quickly ramp up. They do well. And all of a sudden, their sales number starts slipping. It's because they get cute.

They get fancy. They start to start saying words that they've heard around and trying to play business consultant or start to play expert. But they're not the expert because they're not the ones doing the delivery. And so You want to always get out of these very detail-oriented questions because as soon as they ask those questions, then they're the ones in control of the conversation and not you because the way you answer could turn them off and say, oh, actually, I didn't want that.

But now you're the one answering their questions. They're in control. So during discovery, you ask the questions, they give the answers, and you stay high level to make sure that you're staying on the line to get to the end. Once you've gone through discovery and you've hit on the pain, you've clearly defined a reason they should be motivated to take action, then we go into the pitch. All right.

Now, I. I'm a big advocate of a three-pillar framework, and I talk about this in the Closer process. And let me tell you some advanced stuff on this. So the more do-it-yourself done with you, the product is, the more you want it to be simple.

You want it to be 1, 2, 3, ABC, whatever. The more implementation you have, the more done for you it is, the more you want to show, here's 11 steps, 27 steps that we followed. Because what you want someone to see is, oh my God, this is so much work.

And then you say, right. So they believe that it works, but they don't want to do the work. And so you're like, yeah, oh, I believe that if I do 38 steps to improve my YouTube videos, they'll improve. But can you just do it for me?

And that's where you want them to go. But if you're selling a solution that they're supposed to do a certain percentage of the work or a greater percentage of the work, then you want it to be as simple as humanly possible. And if you're curious, like why is do it yourself and done with you more or less the same is that I actually see done with you as basically a do it yourself sale plus accountability, help, troubleshooting.

getting you unstuck. So it's really just that. And theoretically, if you just follow the steps, you could do it yourself.

But just to make sure that you're successful, we'll add this extra help in rather than, oh, we're going to do it all for you, which is a true done for you offer. And so instead of the three pillar pitch, what this company was doing was they had a feature pitch or a feature stack. So they were making it seem really complicated and having way too many steps and overwhelming the prospect. But then after the prospects overwhelmed and confused, it was like, great, you got that. So you're going to do it.

And then you're like, right. And so they're like, no, thank you. Now, if you're like, hey, all of that, I'll do it.

different pitch. Three pillar pitch, if you're not sure, stick with that, usually crushes. And if you're like, wait, I have six steps in my process, you just chunk up. It means that you just gather two of them together and just make it a larger bucket. And one tiny tweak that we added before the pitch was basically getting them to invite us to sell them.

And so we said, hey, given everything that you just said, and you're doing X in revenue, you meet Y qualifications, and the fact that your challenge is this, I think that we'll be able to help you out. and that you'd be a great fit. And our experience is in solving this exact problem for your type of person. And if you want, I can walk you through that.

But where do you want to go from here? And so then they have to say, no, please walk me through that. And then basically they're giving you permission to launch into the three pillar pitch.

Now, this last step, step four was actually execution. And so there's a lot of things that we did here. And so this is not me selling you a done with you solution. This is me actually just trying to help you out. So we did many things to improve execution.

And so we actually had a conversation with the founder. And they said, you know, I watched some of these discovery recordings and they look pretty bad. And we said, yeah, well, when was the last time you roleplayed discovery with your team?

And they were like, I don't. We're like, hmm, interesting. And so what we did, and this is going to be mind blowing to you, is number one is we roleplay. We actually had the team practiced it.

All right. And this isn't with wigs and handcuffs. We actually.

had them role play it with one another, but maybe that increases the stakes so you can do whatever you want on your sales team. The next thing is that there wasn't very good tracking. And so we wanted to track KPIs more closely. And so sometimes if you have two chunked up KPIs, if you just have close rate, for example, it doesn't give you more like double click ability to look more granularly into how a closer is doing.

And so we want to see, okay, what percentage of people are you getting to show? What percentage of people when you're on the phone, are you actually making the offer to? What percentage of people are missing because of what specific obstacle or not? And so this gives us a lot more insight into how each individual closer is doing.

And then from there, that allows us to personalize the coaching that we have for each of those individual sales guys. Now, if you're still looking at this and you're like, man, what else was there? Well, sometimes it's a who thing, which is, do I believe that you can train anyone to sell? Yes.

Do I think it's worth it to train everyone to sell? No. Some people just start further back in the line. It's just not worth the resources for the business.

And so we ruthlessly prioritize who gets the best calls, who gets the best times. And we do that by who closes the most. And if you eventually get kind of weeded out, you can almost manage someone out of sales if they consistently show low returns for us giving them and feeding them opportunities.

And so what we did is if you were below KPI, we cut your calendar in half. If you're still below KPI, you have basically a week or two to prove yourself or you're out. And so the next thing that we did is that we routed the best leads to the best closers. So best to best.

And this is one of my favorite ways to increase sales overall. Like if your best closers get the best leads, you'll sell more stuff. If your worst closers get the worst leads, you'll lose the least.

And so this is an optimization for any sales process across any business. And then finally, and this is a big one, we incentivize the paid in full because I think this particular business, if I'm not mistaken, the closers got paid the same if they closed or didn't. But I.

prefer to close off cash collected. All right. Which means that the closers have the same incentive as you. And so let's say you have a $10,000 thing that you sell.

Well, if you have a payment plan, let's say that's five payments of 2K, then the closer is going to get, call it $200 for that because they get just 10% of the $2,000 that they close. And if they get the paid in full, then they get $1,000 for that sale. So they get paid five times more.

And so this incentivizes closers to... actually close, instead of these kind of like limp-wristed closes, they're rock-hard erect closes, no flaccid closes in this house. And that way, you know that the prospect actually has been sold on it and is more likely to stick with it in the long term, which for real is actually an important thing. And oftentimes these types of issues come up, like these lacks of execution, when a founder gets a little too far away.

And so I like to say, you want to know where their bodies are buried. Like you want to know in every department what is going wrong. as a founder. And if you get too far away from it, then you don't know, which means you don't really add value because you have no context.

And I think a lot of people get too far away from sales or especially revenue generation too quickly because they like want to scale and they want to give, you know, handoff responsibility to people underneath them. But... If when you hand stuff off, stats go down, you have abdicated, not delegated.

When you delegate, stats stay the same or go up. Because theoretically, if you give someone who has equal skill more time to do it because they have more time than you, then stats should improve. And so when you give it to somebody who has less skill than you and you didn't prepare them and you didn't give them a checklist, then it's more likely that stuff's going to go down.

And that's where you have to stay there. And they stay side by side with you until they get it all right. And so with all of this stuff and you're like, holy cow, that actually when you think about it, bad framing for, you know, we had to make it congruent. We, we. chunked up discovery to make sure they avoided traps and stayed high level.

We simplified it to a three pillar pitch with a little bit of a pre-pitch. And we did all these things on execution to make sure that the team actually was reading the script and actually saying the words the right way. The result of all of this work was we got to a 35% close rate. So that was more than a double, whatever that is, 2.4, I think. 2.4x increase in close rate.

Monster. All right, so we're going to talk about the results of this and at the end I'm going to give you the takeaways that I had for this business that you can use. So the result of all that work is we took our CAC from $5,763 to $2,868. So more than or about cut in half what it costs us to get a customer.

On top of that, we went from a 1.62, which is very bad ROAS, to a 3.96 ROAS. Much better. And we took our revenue from $569,000 to $860K per month.

So we passed our $10 million run rate and we have sustained that since these improvements have occurred. And then profit, we got to a 30.7% profit margin off of that. And so now this business is making $250,000, $300,000 a month in profit, whereas before it was kind of plateaued and just kind of teetering at that edge. So let's talk about the big takeaways.

So what you can do from this. for your business, no matter what size you're at. So number one is that you have to keep the main thing the main thing.

Obviously, this business was still generating a decent amount of monthly revenue. But the thing is, is that people discount how much an increase in revenue can disproportionately drop to the bottom line. And so let's say you've got a business that has 10% margins.

If you can increase revenue by 50%, you can, in a very real way, disproportionately increase profit. So you could increase profit by... 5x when you increase revenue by 10 or 20%. And so understanding the relationship between revenue and profit is something that a lot of business owners don't do.

And so sometimes it's cool to trim from the bottom line, but it's so much better to trace the top line and have that extra revenue fall through. And so big picture here, all the way chunked up, the constraint was acquisition. We weren't getting enough customers. Now underneath of getting enough customers, you'll notice that there's just a pipeline of things that all could be improved. It's like, can we improve our CTR?

Can we improve our opt-in? Can we prove our schedule? Can we prove our show?

Can we improve the close rate? And so what we did is we just looked at all of them. And the key point here is that we actually looked.

And so when we tried to improve the webinar, we weren't just like shooting from the hip. We're like, where are people dropping off? Let's fix it. When we looked at the sales, we're like, where are people suffering? Well, if you're watching the calls, you can see that, wow, the discovery sucks.

All right, well, then we need to focus more there at the front. And I will also put this point. is that the front is where a lot of times where the cash is. So in the beginning of the webinar, we preloaded it.

In the beginning of the call, we preloaded it. Right before we did the pitch, we preframe it. And so a lot of times people don't understand how powerful the frame is for setting the expectation about what's about to happen next.

The next one is execution over plan. All right, so let me explain what I mean by this. If you have, call it a mediocre script, and you have exceptional execution, you will still outperform.

somebody who has an amazing script and no one reads it, right? Or you have an amazing webinar deck, but you still sound terrible when you do it. You're not going to do as well as somebody who doesn't have as much of a deck, but sounds really smooth and great. And so a lot of times, this is the boring work that people aren't willing to do. They're not willing to watch game tape.

They're not willing to role play with the team. They're not willing to practice themselves when they do repictures or when they do presentations. They're not willing to take a content piece, get to the end of it and be like, you know what? We can do that better. We can do it again.

And so even for this video, we redid the intro five times before you actually saw that. And so You have to be willing to repeat successful actions and just get 5% better over and over and over again because that betterness across this whole thing compounds. And so one of the big things that I've learned around improving anything is that you can actually have measurement as intervention.

And it's like, okay, that's a big fancy word. Is that a drug rehab thing? No, that's not what I mean. If you want someone to lose weight, the first step is to get them to measure their weight.

And you can actually. just have someone measure their weight and they will lose weight. If you just have someone report on their profit, they will make more profit. If you just have them report their show rate, schedule rate, close rates, and reinforce that on a regular daily basis where it affects their behavior in a cadence where they can change it, then they will. And so one of the easiest things that you can do to improve any business is start measuring the stuff that matters.

And if you hate looking at the stat, you should look at it twice because it means I want you to feel the pain so that it causes you to change. One of the biggest things is that Better is oftentimes one of the lower risk ways versus new. All right. So if you want to expand or improve a business, let's say you're struggling for whatever reason. Part of you wants to do new because new is sexy, new is fun, new shiny object.

But the thing is, is that what you're currently doing is already proven to a certain degree. And so simply doing more or doing the same thing better is a better risk adjusted move because you already know this works. And so fundamentally, if we get more people to show, we will close at least as many as we did before. If we pre-frame with more urgency and we get more people to book, we will close more sales on the next call. Right.

Is that fundamentally thinking through this is that more or getting an improvement to augment or get better will always fundamentally in the same system improve it. And so just focusing on those things, which usually just takes work, will give you disproportionate return. And oftentimes that drops to the bottom line.

And one of the first rules of entrepreneurship that I have is use what you've. Got it. Now, if we look at the team that they had and the process they had, we didn't change them from a webinar.

We didn't change them from a phone sale. We didn't even change their calendar availability. But we just stated the facts and told the truth. We said, hey, we only have this many slots. We only have this many sales guys.

This is actually live. And so we wanted to reinforce the things that we were already doing, but simply telling them that we were doing it. And you get zero benefits from doing something that you do not communicate.

Everything in business is about perceived benefits. perceived scarcity, perceived urgency. So if you have a deadline but don't let people know, there is no deadline.

If you have scarcity, there's only so many slots you can take but you don't let people know, you have no scarcity. If you are live but you don't tell people you're live, you're gonna have the same effect as a recorded webinar or as a recorded event, which eliminates the competitive advantage that you did this to begin with. So we got greedy in this business because YOLO, why not? So what we did was we implemented an upsell.

And so rather than covering this video, because this is front end, I want to talk about what we did in the upsell in this video, and if it's not out yet, check this one out.

Transcript for:Effective Marketing and Sales Strategies

Transcript for:
Effective Marketing and Sales Strategies