Category: Core Training
How to Go from Zero to Full Certainty When Launching a New Product
How to Go from Zero to Full Certainty
When Launching a New Product
Transcript
So, yeah, so you wanna create that you know, you wanna start pulling those emotional triggers by connecting with their pain points, letting them know that, hey. You know what? If you are overwhelmed with how disorganized your home is, because of whatever, you know, like or, you know, let’s say you got the the quiz result that shows that you’re currently feeling extremely overwhelmed because your home’s full of clutter, I have something for you. Right?
This is what I have, and this is something that I’ve created based on twelve years of experience as a home organizer dealing with exceptionally cluttered homes. And if I can help x number of families do that, I can help you too. So you’re connecting with their pain points. You’re introducing the offer early on in the conversation, and you’re creating certainty by establishing yourself.
When I say yourself, if you’re working for a client, establishing your client as the expert by helping by doing all of this really early on in the funnel, whether it’s a webinar, a quiz, whatever it is.
So here’s what what you need to know. And I’m sure all of you know this already, but we kind of need sometimes step away from it is people buy when they’re both excited about the outcome and when they’re convinced that it’s the right investment for them. So it’s both a right brain, left brain kind of a thing. We we want both of these things to happen, and that will happen when you are going ahead and building certainty in the product, in the seller, and then, of course, the brand.
So here’s an insight into my process. When I’m working on a launch of least resistance, I lean very heavily on, of course, the offer. And something that I do as part of my process is and I do that for all kinds of launches, not just this one, is I go through the course or the membership or whatever is from a first person, from a student point of view so I can see exactly what they’ll be seeing.
And then I also lean really, really heavily on brand affinity.
So if you’re not collecting information about why your clients’ clients are loyal to them or, you know, are connected with the brand, not just the client. Right? We’re talking about the brand. How do they run their business?
That’s something you wanna start doing, especially if you wanna use launches of least resistance. I firmly believe you should be doing it in any case, but these three factors really come into play because these would help you, a, remove objections, b, create that logical certainty, and, see have that direct conversation with confidence and without it feeling, pushy or salesy because that’s why straight line selling generally gets a bad respond you know, get gets a bad rap is because it’s considered very pushy, very, you know, like, oh, I’ve got but you wanna come at it from a place of confidence, and you can still use the principles to help your prospects make a decision that they’re excited about.
So, yeah, definitely collect start collecting. If you’re not doing it, start collecting data. And next time you’re working with a client on yes. What makes the product great? What makes the client an expert? But what is it about the brand that brings people back to them or even attracts them initially?
Next up, you wanna start building emotional and logical certainty with offer presentation.
So, again, something to remember, you wanna connect features to pain points. You wanna connect features to benefits.
Really, really important. Start using stories and examples that speak directly to the struggles that your audience is experiencing. I’ll give you a great example of this. So, where I was writing copy for, my client who’s an astrologer.
Right? So one of the things that her audience really struggled with was with two things that kept coming up. One was called armchair astrology. Now armchair astrology is where people are reading we call it armchair astrology.
Why? Because or they would call it armchair astrology because they would be sitting in a chair reading a book and then, you know, you would be expected to kind of know about astrology by reading a book. So it just doesn’t work that way, especially for serious astrologers, and I was amazed at how many serious astrologers there are.
So they really struggled with this on chair astrology approach where, you know, you just read and then you are expected to kind of just go ahead and give readings.
That was something that came up. And the second was that it’s very confusing.
It can be extremely confusing. Why? Because there’s so much of free information, and there are all of these bits and pieces that you’re, like, just kind of supposed to put together, but no one really shows you the full picture.
Or the courses that are out there are extremely long and overwhelming and confusing. Like, you’re just kinda watching, like, hours of videos.
We used the fact that her course had a shorter videos. So instead of saying shorter videos, you know, we connected it with the pinpoint of not them not having to sit through and watch hours of videos.
But, also, we told them that it’s an approach that goes again. That’s not armchair astrology because not only will they be learning, but they’ll also be implementing as they learn. So and then we backed it up with social proof. So we had stories of, you know, people who’d gone through the course.
Every single feature from the workbooks to the videos to the teaching assistants to the community, all of those are features, but every feature was linked to a struggle that our audience is experiencing. Feeling lost while practicing astrology? You don’t have to be. We have trained teaching assistants, and we have a community.
Feeling judged by others? Well, this is gonna be your judgment free space. Feeling overwhelmed, it’s literally, every objection, every pain was tackled and addressed while being honest with, with them. So you wanna use especially, again, in this case, every feature has to be linked to a pinpoint. Every feature, I very rarely say has, but if you’re using this launch model, you definitely wanna do this because it would work otherwise.
And you’d say you wanna use data, you wanna use testimonials, you wanna use case studies, but your features should be connected to a pinpoint or a benefit.
And like I said, you could do this with with any product. You’re selling email software, whether you’re selling a membership, whether you’re selling coaching, whether you’re selling your copywriting services.
Right? If you wanna start having a straight line conversation with your prospect, your features need to speak to the pain or a benefit. So you’re selling copywriting services.
If you’re sending them a questionnaire, why should they care? I mean, like, really, who wants to sit through sixty minutes of trying to fill out a questionnaire?
Is there a way you can repack reposition, repackage that to address either an objection or highlight a benefit?
Now this is specific to courses, but, again, or software and things like that. But you wanna demo the course. Like, one of the things that we do is we get we do an open house or we do an ask me anything or we do a behind the scenes, or we do a day in the life of one of our students, kind of an email that goes out, which includes a demo of the course.
Again, you can do it with your with SAS as well. You can even do it with copy, and I’ll tell you how in just a minute with your services because I’ve done this in the past.
Let me describe it.
So but what you wanna do is you wanna do it too as the final stage because by then, you’ve removed all of their objections, and now you wanna help them visualize themselves in the course using the service, using the product.
So things like, like I said, video tours, BDS, modules, or day in the life of a student, actually take them with you inside. So, again, going back to the astrology clients example, what we did was we gave them, we gave them access to, like, a course preview almost. That was that was amazing as a conversion mechanism. We gave them access to, I think, the first module, few lessons in there so they could, you know, actually go and see how all of the lessons flowed, that we weren’t just kidding when we were saying the lessons aren’t long or assert or aren’t longer than x minutes.
The worksheets, they had, like, the complete student experience.
I did the same thing, last year, with my program launch, for a ESL is I did a board I call it sales kitchen. It was a complete experience. We had, like, the we had a pop up group to give them the community feel. We had the a lesson that was taken directly from ready to sell and, you know, even the process and everything worked really, really well.
We had, like, almost a fifty percent conversion. Like, every fifty percent people who signed up for sales kitchen converted, which was great. And it’s a high ticket investment. Right?
It was it’s a three thousand dollar course. So claim being but keep it for keep the demo towards the final stage of the funnel. Copywriting services. One of the ways I do this is when I’m on a call, I walk my prospect through this exact same process by actually showing them the examples of the deliverables they’ll get.
So it helps them see what they’ll be getting. So I’m not just gonna say, oh, yeah. Yeah. I can do your sales page or I’ll do your email file or map out your ecosystem.
I actually show what an ecosystem would look like. I show what my messaging recommendations guide looks like. It’s like for most clients, it’s like almost forty, fifty pages of data and, you know, implementable suggestions and recommendations for content and things like that. It just blows people’s minds.
It might yeah. I rarely get pushback. Rarely.
I don’t even remember. Last time I got pushed back on price. Right? So, why? Because I walk I showed them that’s like the final stage.
I showed them exactly what they’re getting.
Next up, objection handling. This is gonna be one of the most important parts of this kind of a launch. So you wanna be really, really good at this. You wanna start writing your copy, whether for a sales pitch or for emails, with your list of objections in front of you.
I don’t want this. I don’t want this because. I don’t want this because. This will not work because.
This will not work because. You want that whole list of of objections right in front of you, and then you wanna just start going through them one by one by one and making sure that you’ve addressed all of them. So anticipating those concerns, whether it’s to do with themselves, because you’ll always have those inner you know, oh, I’m not ready, or I don’t have the right experience. I don’t have the right credentials.
Whatever. So you’ll always have this inner objections, but then you’ll also have the external ones. Don’t have the money. Don’t have the time.
And we’re you tried this before and it didn’t work. All those things. So you wanna just dismantle all of those through the funnel, through your sales page.
The goal here is for you to just on really digging into the objection beneath the objection.
Is it time? Is it overwhelm? Is it past experience? And instead of just addressing a few, address them all. Right? So you wanna say and before you your prospects even come back to you or, you know, like, oh, I don’t think this is gonna work for me because I don’t have time. Well, it’s only gonna take you ten minutes to watch a video and just another nine to eleven minutes to implement it.
Can you take out ten minutes of your day to make this happen? You could, like, watch it on your way to work.
You would literally address objections like that, whether it’s an email, whether it’s on a sales page.
You wanna start getting them to think and look at those and go, okay. Yeah. Of course, I can do that. I can watch ten a ten minute video.
Tell them you gotta you’ll you’ll have, like, seven modules.
Yep. That’s not gonna work. You tell them yes. I I know you’re thinking this is gonna be time consuming, but do you have ten minutes or nine minutes? Whatever.
Okay. This is, this is a technique taken from straight line selling, the straight line selling school call looping, where you revisit points of certainty, like the creator’s expertise, the course’s effectiveness, the brand’s track record as you address new objection set rise. So for example, someone comes in and says, yeah. I did a similar course or you, you know, in your funnel, you wanna address the you’ve seen this objection come up in the past that people have done this done similar courses, have not seen results.
You wanna remind them that this is not the way it was because this pre this course creator is different, because this brand is invested in ensuring that we, you know, we get you results because we have a guarantee that would work, that would kick in if you don’t see results.
So keep coming back to those points of certainty, which is why I said here. It’s really important for you to, yes, know how the course or the offer works. You wanna know have complete knowledge of your clients or your own expertise, and then, of course, the brand affinity as well because you would be wanting to use that and keep coming back to that to address objections and to increase and strengthen your prospect’s belief in your offer.
Okay. So things to consider when you’re strategizing this launch. Like, put this on a worksheet for the next launch. You wanna know pinpoints.
So okay. What specific challenges will you be talking about? How can you map those to the features? Right?
Consistent mess messaging. How will you keep the narrative unified and in a straight line across all stages of the funnel? You do not want to be going in five different directions here. One message is more important in this kind of a launch than in any other kind of launch.
So you wanna get really clear on that one message, that one theme, that one story line that you’ll be drawing from start to finish. Certainty building. How will you be building certainty and the main messaging angle across the sequence? How will you be creating certainty in your client, in the brand, all of that?
Objection handling, I’ve already kind of, yeah, beat the drum on this one, but preempting and addressing objections, all of them. You wanna know you wanna know all of the m. And you wanna know, okay, which features, which benefits will I be mapping here? Which how will I be using emotional and logical hooks so that I’m balancing the storytelling part but with data and proof?
So you wanna have these five, six elements in place in a document when you’re working on a launch of user assistance.
When you have these in place, it becomes so much easier for you to write the copy that would just go in a straight line in a straight line. Yeah. It’s really, it’s now here’s the thing. It sounds very simple, but it’s not.
It’s I found over the years with the hundreds and hundreds of launches that I’ve written for, it’s way easier to do a traditional launch because you have that you have the runway. You can build that, you know, the know, like, trust factor. But when you’re going in cold and you need to sell and you also need to do it without being pushy or, you know, like a typical salesperson.
You wanna be thoughtful and mindful and demure.
You would wanna keep keep these things in mind because that kind of helps you keep the conversation on track, but it is a little bit harder than a traditional launch because you’ve you’ve gotta keep it really tight across the funnel, your sales pitch and your emails.
That messaging is so, so important.
Okay. Yeah. Your job as a copywriter is to obviously keep the process moving forward by addressing their concerns. That is the one thing I want you to take away from this one is that your objection handling is gonna play a huge role.
The more control you have, the easier your close will be. And, again, this this will work, but, like I gave you example, this will work on a sales call. This will work with a webinar. This would work with a quiz.
A launch of least resistance is great where high ticket offers are involved and where an audience needs that extra persuasion.
Alright.
Cool.
Questions? I can see Katie’s hat is up.
Hi, Berna.
As always, I love your workshops.
They’re so meaty and, give us so much to go on.
So I have a couple of questions about implementing this.
One, you mentioned how this is different from, like, the traditional launch runway where you would do, you know, your your prelaunch runway. I’m curious, like, the objection handling, are you doing most of that? Like, is the difference the fact that here you’ve introduced the offer and then you’re handling objective objections, or are you handling those objections?
But, like, I I guess just what’s the sequence of handling the objections versus introducing the offer and kind of more, like, selling?
Yeah. So, yeah, in this case, you introduce the offer first.
So since you you’re in this pretty much same niche as I am with online course creators and coaches and consultants, with a traditional launch. You know how you do it. Right? You have, like, your prelaunch runway, and then you have, like, your launch mechanism kick in, then you have your cart open. You’ve got, like, a lot of room to kind of play with.
And you wanna address those objections before you like, typically, I’d wanna do that before I introduce the offer. Right?
Yeah. Yeah. Here, what’s happening is you’re going in cold. You’re just going in straight for the sale, and you’re addressing your the objections, preempt preempting them and addressing them or, you know, like, your Okay.
In fact, for one of the launches, what I did was the sale the pitch email, like, generally, my pitch email is more of I call it the path for value pitch email. That’s why I call it, but because it has a lot of value in it, and then we are introducing the offer. But in launches of least resistance, what I do is it’s the offer and then the big objection that I know they would have, whether it’s cost or time or money. I’m just it’s like a whole series of objection demolition emails, and the sales page is structured the same way as well.
So there’s like yeah. Will work for me. You know? Don’t have the money. Don’t have the time.
Or, you know, like, tried this before or not ready.
Just yeah. So that’s how it’s structured.
And then so do you if you because I’m assuming that all of these principles that you were sharing, you’re using those both on the sales page and in the emails. Yes.
Does the sales page in this type of funnel also spend much time on, like, desires, dream state, or is it more like, here’s what we do and then boom boom boom?
So what does how the sales page differs from, say, a regular, maybe even a PS or a pays off or the, you know, the different frameworks that I I, kind of have developed over the years is there’s we talk about the pain.
That’s why the emotional certainty kind of comes in. So we, we tap into their pain and their struggle. Do we show them their desires? Yes.
But we tie it to a, a feature of the course. We tied we that’s where the logical certainty starts to build. It’s like, okay. You know, if you want more time freedom, this is how you’re gonna get it using a b c from the course.
So we are tapping into it, but it’s not the structure of the sales page is different. The structure of the sales page starts with the pain that they’re experiencing and how this particular offer is gonna solve that pain for them, with whatever framework, method, etcetera.
And then we go into their you know, maybe what they want, but also, again, that’s why it’s benefit first. So every feature is linked to a benefit, which is, in other words, a desire or an outcome, and then, of course, objection handling, all through the page.
Okay. Thank you. And if I may, could you just elaborate a bit on the looping technique? I didn’t quite understand.
I, you know, I know you said revisit points of certainty as you introduce new objections.
So could you just give an example of what that might look like?
Sure. So I’ll give you an example from okay. I’ll give you an example from sales calls. Right? So I whenever I’m on a sales call with clients, they’ve already you know?
The thing is, most of them are not cold because they’ve either found us through the our website or they’ve, at the very least, have sent us a contact form from the website. So it’s not that, like, they’re entirely cold, but I like using straight line sign for that because it’s a high ticket service. Like, they’re all five figure services. Right?
So how I use Looping is I they already know, my expertise. They know my experience. But what I always always do is I would have I would bring up case studies of clients who are from similar niches, or I would let them know if, if recently recorded a podcast somewhere or if I’ve spoken on stage somewhere. So I’m just building certainty because the big objection most people would have in hiring a strategist or a copywriter is either they’ve been booked before and which is, you know, usually when they come to us or maybe their launch hasn’t worked before or it’s their first time hiring, which is rare, but maybe. You know? So you wanna kind of loop back to, the fact that you’re the best person for this, and here’s why.
Okay. Does that help, Katie?
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So just kind of, like, as you know or as we’ve seen or, you know, as I mentioned on this like, just reinforcing those points of certainty so that that’s an ongoing theme.
Yeah. Because you need again, like I said, you need to know what objections, like and after you’d you know, when you do a ton of sales calls, you know exactly what objections your prospect has. And similarly, with a program or a product or service, you know, what objections, you know, your clients would have. So you want to loop back to this.
So it’s not just, oh, let me just put my bio here on the sales page and think we’ve established trust and credibility, but you wanna loop back to it maybe, you know, in the social proof section. Maybe you wanna loop back to it in the FAQ section. Maybe you wanna loop back to it in the in the closing section of the sales page. So you wanna kind of keep coming back to so it’s not just a, let’s just put the bio here and call it a day, but how can we come back and establish certainty?
I’m just giving an example from, say, the credibility of the creator, but you could do that with pretty much any of the other elements as well.
Cool.
Any other questions?
Not even if not related to the training or if anyone’s got, like, copy or a review or things like that, we could dig into it.
I guess I have not necessarily, like, a question. So you mentioned that the course preview or some kind of showing them behind the scenes, that should go out in one of the last emails or at the end of the funnel.
And I usually do that in, like, email four or five.
And How how many emails? Like, how long does the emailed. So it’s in the in the middle. Okay.
Yeah. And then I have an FAQ email that’s emailed six out of eight.
Mhmm. Mhmm.
So I’m wondering if you’ve tested different placements in the promo structure to see which one works best.
Yeah. The reason I so, yeah, I actually have, and I have found I have, in fact, even tested not including FAQ emails. Yeah. Okay, Michelle. Bye.
Even not including FAQ emails in in a sequence because if you, a, addressed and answered most of the questions, you don’t really need an FAQ email. You could easily use that email for for something else.
Mhmm. And the reason why I feel and this is again, I’ve, Blanca, I’ve tested it only with audiences, like, in the online course world. And, That’s my niche as well. So Oh, amazing.
Okay. Great. So yeah. So then we’re in Concord. Okay.
So yeah.
The reason I find that it works really well by placing it towards the end is because by then, you’ve handled most of their objections. You’ve established trust. And now what you’re doing as the final step is helping them visualize themselves as a student in the course. It works beautifully. So for me, I’ve I’ve found you know, placing it towards the end of the funnel is that final little push that they need to kind of go, oh, wow. That’s good. That’s what my experience is gonna be like.
And do you just send them to the sales page where you have a section with that kind of behind the scenes video?
So we’ve done this different ways. We’ve done this with, by recording a like, just like an over the shoulder Loom walk through Mhmm. Of what the post dashboard looks like. We’ve also done this, like I shared, with with my course launch, you know, example where it was a complete experience where we invited them to a pop up group.
We had a full lesson that they needed to log in to Teachableforce. They had to be at a login and everything. So it was a complete student experience where, and we also did this with our astrologer client is that, you know, it was a complete student experience. You created an account.
Why? Because these are micro conversions. Right? Yeah. So it helps them get into that whole student mindset.
And then because, so with the astrologer client, in fact, what we did was really cool was because we had the whole course laid out, and they had unlocked access to this. So they could actually see what happens next. Right? And they all they had to do was upgrade.
So they just had to click the upgrade button. So that really helped as well. So we took this, like, in a few different ways. We’ve done this as an open house where literally, like, as a school or a college would do an open house, we would have, like, some students.
It it is a room Zoom room like this. There would be some students joining in, and then, you know, the the course creator would share screen, walk them through the course portal, show them the community, everything, and then they would have a q and a. They would have the chance to ask questions of the students as well. So it kind of depends on the audience you offer and, you know, of course, what your client’s willing to do, that kind of thing.
That’s cool. Thanks. I I now have a bunch of ideas to test for upcoming promotions.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Absolutely. Yeah. Awesome awesome training, by the way. And I liked your previous one too.
How much Thank you. Thank you. Marina, question.
I’m not a Yes. Yeah. Course creator for this purpose, although I have done other stuff.
So this offer is going to cold traffic.
So you could use this as a starting point for, offering copy services to SaaS potential SaaS clients.
So they know they so they’re starting at problem aware already, and then you have to show them that this is the solution for your and you’re starting, like, right there Mhmm. Jumping in Mhmm. Hard selling. Essentially, you’re hard selling.
Like, this is hard selling.
Exactly. Yes.
You’re just hard selling it.
Hard selling.
This is this is what you need. And then going into the and this is why you need me to do that for you.
Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is hard sales. It’s just that I like to just be mindful of the fact that, you know, we wanna respect people’s reasons for not buying, but at the same time, we wanna make a strong argument for why they should buy.
So which is why you wanna handle those objections. You don’t wanna overlook them. You don’t wanna kind of, you know, brush them aside or anything. You wanna handle them and move on.
But then the objection handling is not like you’re like, it’s integrated, not like you’re saying this. I’m saying this. It’s more subtle.
Yes. Yes.
Oh, I had another question related to that. Oh, have you tried this for productized services?
Oh, good question.
No.
But I do have an opportunity to test it out. We’ve recently overhauled one of our product based services. So, yeah, I could test it out, but, no, I haven’t.
Okay. Right. Thank you.
You’re welcome. Cool. I would love it if you would go ahead and test it out. Like, if you would test out I plan to. A launch of least resistance.
I would love to know how it goes or if you get find yourself coming up against, like, a roadblock.
Find me in Slack and, yeah, just chat with me about it.
I love these launches. They’re just yeah. Them, you know, they’re a challenge, but they’re they’re so exciting to to write for. So yeah.
I’ve done emails sorry, Katie. I’ve done emails, like, email promotions where each email was answering a specific objection, but it was usually for brands that had such a bad reputation or such a bad perception with their audience that it just felt like I can’t really afford to sell anything. Like, I have to afford to sell the product. I first need to repair the trust.
So each email was, okay.
We asked you, and we got some, like, really crazy feedback from you. So let’s settle things straight. So over the next few days, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
And, yeah, that did work well. Whereas with other audiences, you just don’t need to do all that much.
You don’t need to exactly.
Exactly. Which is why this works really well, like I said, for skeptical audiences. Right?
Like, where like, in your case, the crust has been you know, it needs repairing, but then you also need to do selling.
So works. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing.
Katie.
So I would love to I’m still building out my, like, post workshop funnel. So I have, you know, my diagnostic workshop online.
I have, you know, I know you haven’t watched the workshop yet, so go watch his sequence that Yes. But I don’t have a lot that goes out after that.
Like, you know, essentially, my post webinar Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. For my, for my standardized offer. So I think that this would work well. Yes.
But I’d love your tips on, like so if the offer is, you know, a productized service around behavior based back end automations Mhmm.
What because to me, I’m like, oh, I don’t see what objections you could have. It’s a great idea. But I know, you know, it’s like okay. So the founder’s time, the team’s time, like, adding something else to their plate, not wanting to annoy or bother their clients, like, not wanting to have feel salesy.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, it’s my first time. Like, I haven’t sold it yet, so I need proof, like, proof that it will work and that I can do it.
The idea that they can’t imagine what it looks like or how it would Yes.
Go. Exactly. Which is where a demo would come in. So you wanna kind of show them what it would look like. I would like actually, if you’ve not done this, then I would actually build that build something out so you can kinda walk them through what it looks like so they can see that it’s not as either as confusing because with something like this and because I sell a lot of these, you know, behavior based sequences, I find the biggest objection is they just can’t visualize what it looks like. So Mhmm. Yeah.
And you would just build that out in whimsical or something?
Like, Yeah. Or whimsical, fun analytics, whatever you wanna kind of use. Whimsical works just fine. Just, you know, kind of visually helping them to see, hey.
This is what’s gonna happen. This is what happens when this happens. And if this happens, and then you kinda see light bulbs go up. Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Mhmm. And is there anything else that comes to mind that I didn’t mention that you think it would be a big one?
Yeah.
Tried it in the past, did not work.
Mhmm. Okay.
Yeah. That come up, you know, with a few established creators.
They have sequences in place, but didn’t work, which is where your credibility comes in as I actually heard from an OBM that I’m friends with.
She she was like, oh, yeah. We already have something like that. I was like, I don’t think you I don’t think you have what I’m talking about.
Like Yeah.
Yeah. Exactly. So it’s which is why the looping technique kicks in. You know? So you wanna kinda remind them. Yeah.
Okay. Okay. I’ll let you know how it goes. Thank you.
Cool. You’re welcome. Rayna?
Okay. So two things, commenting to Katie, about the OBM that said we already have something like that.
Herna, I’m just wondering, is it too cheeky just to ask them, so are you getting the results that you wanted from them?
Yeah. No.
That’s not you know, like, if they say that, hey.
We’ve got this.
Like, even thinking about Yeah.
Yeah.
If we’re saying, okay. So here’s an onboarding flow.
Well, we already have one.
Okay. So are you happy with your conversions?
Exactly. You that is preempting.
Like, I mean, you could say it so it’s not snarky, but, is that where that kind of comes down to your tone.
Right? Yes. Exactly. Yeah.
You know, it kinda comes down to your timeline.
Curiosity.
Like Yeah.
Exactly. More like I would do that. Okay. One hundred percent. One hundred percent. Yeah. Address it.
That’s exactly what straight line is. You wanna address those objections. Like I said, you don’t you wanna be mindful, of course. You wanna be, you know, you don’t wanna be disrespectful.
But at the same time, you don’t wanna tiptoe around it and not address not address it. I yeah. I would definitely do that one hundred percent.
And then secondly, because it’s cold, can you run ads can you run ads directly to your straight line funnel?
Yes. Yes. Cold. Cold traffic.
Right?
Like, it’s meant to convert cold traffic, and it’s just a numbers game.
Right?
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One hundred percent. I would want to, however, ensure that the offer is validated.
So you could run it the because the last thing you wanna do is Yes.
Spend money on an invalidated offer.
Exactly. Yeah. It’s not So It is for cold audiences. It’s not for untested, invalidated offers. That’s an important distinction.
Okay. So then here’s my question because I’m kind of in the same boat as Katie right now. Like, I’ve done the work for other people, yes, and gotten results, but I haven’t done this particular set of activities to accomplish this particular outcome in this in my signature way.
Mhmm.
So is the offer proved by the fact that, yes, I have written onboarding flows that have increased conversions, or is the offer proof that I’ve done it my way in this current system and gotten results with that signature?
I mean, yeah, it’s it’s not either or. It’s both. You’ve written onboarding sequences that have bought gotten conversions.
Right. And, you know, you know, I would do both. Like, I would lean on both of those. I would call this a validated offer. I would so to I would not what would an invalid offer be? Where you’ve never done something, for either your own brand or a client, and you’re, like, absolutely near the market.
Okay. So yeah. So if you’ve done it either for your own brand or for even, like, another brand, and it’s not, like, the full scope of things, but it’s been, like, you know, I’ve done one for one client. I’ve done one for another client.
That’s about it all for me. Like, you’ve you’ve tested those out. People need it. They work. Mhmm. Yeah.
Okay. Okay. Thank you.
Can I add something here?
Yes.
So if you don’t have, like, case studies right now to demonstrate how effective the solution is, like onboarding sequences, you can use industry data to back that up.
So something that I’m doing is my framework is customer centricity applied to sales emails in a way that allows me to sell a course each month without making it aggressive, salesy, or burning the list. That’s because I’m implementing the customer centric concepts. And, obviously, I’m not, like, an authority right now. I haven’t done any research in this specific area, but there are professors. And there are big, economic studies that demonstrate that companies that use customer centric frameworks are actually gaining better results than product based companies. So for me, when I go to a client and say, well, obviously, yes, you can run a flash sale that’s product based. But can you do that every month in a way that actually lets you convey your unique brand messaging whatever?
Although, actually so if you turn to customer centricity and here are all these sources that back it up, then that’s a lot better than me saying, well, I’ve been doing this for a long a long time.
And I do have the results, but if you don’t believe me Exactly.
Data. So that is why you know? And that’s where both the emotional and logical certainty factors kick in with this one. So you wanna lean on the data.
You may have you may have or may not have testimonials and case studies or the the stories to back it up. But if you have data, that will work too. And then your expertise is what would help create and, you know, the the other side of the certainty equation. So, I think that’s what the yeah.
Katie says she uses this data too. So amazing. Great.
So do this, Marina.
Do the quality of your questions to your clients also validate your authority?
One hundred percent. I’m a big fan of sales calls because of that.
It really helps me close way bigger projects and packages, and which is why I yeah. I have, like, I would say, a list of questions, but I don’t have a quote, unquote, a templated sales call flow, because, yeah. It just helps me to kind of, you know, assess what I need to do. And, sales calls are, like, the perfect example of straight line selling, like, you know, but you wanna do it your way.
So yeah. But one hundred fancy your question? Yes. One hundred percent.
Thank you.
You’re welcome.
Awesome. Anything else?
All good. Perfect. Marina, apparently, for some reason, like yes. Sarah’s saying, Zoom is recording, so, hopefully, yes, we record it.
But I’ve told her that yours is recording too. Mine got kicked out. It’s a weird Zoom world. I may need to reach out to you for the recording.
I’ll wait for Sarah to come back to me on that.
Yeah. I can also send you the or the fathom.
Okay. Awesome. That would be that would be great. Yeah. Yeah. That’s fine. Perfect. Perfect. Thanks so much, everybody.
Lovely seeing y’all.
Bye now. Bye. Bye.
Worksheet
Transcript
So, yeah, so you wanna create that you know, you wanna start pulling those emotional triggers by connecting with their pain points, letting them know that, hey. You know what? If you are overwhelmed with how disorganized your home is, because of whatever, you know, like or, you know, let’s say you got the the quiz result that shows that you’re currently feeling extremely overwhelmed because your home’s full of clutter, I have something for you. Right?
This is what I have, and this is something that I’ve created based on twelve years of experience as a home organizer dealing with exceptionally cluttered homes. And if I can help x number of families do that, I can help you too. So you’re connecting with their pain points. You’re introducing the offer early on in the conversation, and you’re creating certainty by establishing yourself.
When I say yourself, if you’re working for a client, establishing your client as the expert by helping by doing all of this really early on in the funnel, whether it’s a webinar, a quiz, whatever it is.
So here’s what what you need to know. And I’m sure all of you know this already, but we kind of need sometimes step away from it is people buy when they’re both excited about the outcome and when they’re convinced that it’s the right investment for them. So it’s both a right brain, left brain kind of a thing. We we want both of these things to happen, and that will happen when you are going ahead and building certainty in the product, in the seller, and then, of course, the brand.
So here’s an insight into my process. When I’m working on a launch of least resistance, I lean very heavily on, of course, the offer. And something that I do as part of my process is and I do that for all kinds of launches, not just this one, is I go through the course or the membership or whatever is from a first person, from a student point of view so I can see exactly what they’ll be seeing.
And then I also lean really, really heavily on brand affinity.
So if you’re not collecting information about why your clients’ clients are loyal to them or, you know, are connected with the brand, not just the client. Right? We’re talking about the brand. How do they run their business?
That’s something you wanna start doing, especially if you wanna use launches of least resistance. I firmly believe you should be doing it in any case, but these three factors really come into play because these would help you, a, remove objections, b, create that logical certainty, and, see have that direct conversation with confidence and without it feeling, pushy or salesy because that’s why straight line selling generally gets a bad respond you know, get gets a bad rap is because it’s considered very pushy, very, you know, like, oh, I’ve got but you wanna come at it from a place of confidence, and you can still use the principles to help your prospects make a decision that they’re excited about.
So, yeah, definitely collect start collecting. If you’re not doing it, start collecting data. And next time you’re working with a client on yes. What makes the product great? What makes the client an expert? But what is it about the brand that brings people back to them or even attracts them initially?
Next up, you wanna start building emotional and logical certainty with offer presentation.
So, again, something to remember, you wanna connect features to pain points. You wanna connect features to benefits.
Really, really important. Start using stories and examples that speak directly to the struggles that your audience is experiencing. I’ll give you a great example of this. So, where I was writing copy for, my client who’s an astrologer.
Right? So one of the things that her audience really struggled with was with two things that kept coming up. One was called armchair astrology. Now armchair astrology is where people are reading we call it armchair astrology.
Why? Because or they would call it armchair astrology because they would be sitting in a chair reading a book and then, you know, you would be expected to kind of know about astrology by reading a book. So it just doesn’t work that way, especially for serious astrologers, and I was amazed at how many serious astrologers there are.
So they really struggled with this on chair astrology approach where, you know, you just read and then you are expected to kind of just go ahead and give readings.
That was something that came up. And the second was that it’s very confusing.
It can be extremely confusing. Why? Because there’s so much of free information, and there are all of these bits and pieces that you’re, like, just kind of supposed to put together, but no one really shows you the full picture.
Or the courses that are out there are extremely long and overwhelming and confusing. Like, you’re just kinda watching, like, hours of videos.
We used the fact that her course had a shorter videos. So instead of saying shorter videos, you know, we connected it with the pinpoint of not them not having to sit through and watch hours of videos.
But, also, we told them that it’s an approach that goes again. That’s not armchair astrology because not only will they be learning, but they’ll also be implementing as they learn. So and then we backed it up with social proof. So we had stories of, you know, people who’d gone through the course.
Every single feature from the workbooks to the videos to the teaching assistants to the community, all of those are features, but every feature was linked to a struggle that our audience is experiencing. Feeling lost while practicing astrology? You don’t have to be. We have trained teaching assistants, and we have a community.
Feeling judged by others? Well, this is gonna be your judgment free space. Feeling overwhelmed, it’s literally, every objection, every pain was tackled and addressed while being honest with, with them. So you wanna use especially, again, in this case, every feature has to be linked to a pinpoint. Every feature, I very rarely say has, but if you’re using this launch model, you definitely wanna do this because it would work otherwise.
And you’d say you wanna use data, you wanna use testimonials, you wanna use case studies, but your features should be connected to a pinpoint or a benefit.
And like I said, you could do this with with any product. You’re selling email software, whether you’re selling a membership, whether you’re selling coaching, whether you’re selling your copywriting services.
Right? If you wanna start having a straight line conversation with your prospect, your features need to speak to the pain or a benefit. So you’re selling copywriting services.
If you’re sending them a questionnaire, why should they care? I mean, like, really, who wants to sit through sixty minutes of trying to fill out a questionnaire?
Is there a way you can repack reposition, repackage that to address either an objection or highlight a benefit?
Now this is specific to courses, but, again, or software and things like that. But you wanna demo the course. Like, one of the things that we do is we get we do an open house or we do an ask me anything or we do a behind the scenes, or we do a day in the life of one of our students, kind of an email that goes out, which includes a demo of the course.
Again, you can do it with your with SAS as well. You can even do it with copy, and I’ll tell you how in just a minute with your services because I’ve done this in the past.
Let me describe it.
So but what you wanna do is you wanna do it too as the final stage because by then, you’ve removed all of their objections, and now you wanna help them visualize themselves in the course using the service, using the product.
So things like, like I said, video tours, BDS, modules, or day in the life of a student, actually take them with you inside. So, again, going back to the astrology clients example, what we did was we gave them, we gave them access to, like, a course preview almost. That was that was amazing as a conversion mechanism. We gave them access to, I think, the first module, few lessons in there so they could, you know, actually go and see how all of the lessons flowed, that we weren’t just kidding when we were saying the lessons aren’t long or assert or aren’t longer than x minutes.
The worksheets, they had, like, the complete student experience.
I did the same thing, last year, with my program launch, for a ESL is I did a board I call it sales kitchen. It was a complete experience. We had, like, the we had a pop up group to give them the community feel. We had the a lesson that was taken directly from ready to sell and, you know, even the process and everything worked really, really well.
We had, like, almost a fifty percent conversion. Like, every fifty percent people who signed up for sales kitchen converted, which was great. And it’s a high ticket investment. Right?
It was it’s a three thousand dollar course. So claim being but keep it for keep the demo towards the final stage of the funnel. Copywriting services. One of the ways I do this is when I’m on a call, I walk my prospect through this exact same process by actually showing them the examples of the deliverables they’ll get.
So it helps them see what they’ll be getting. So I’m not just gonna say, oh, yeah. Yeah. I can do your sales page or I’ll do your email file or map out your ecosystem.
I actually show what an ecosystem would look like. I show what my messaging recommendations guide looks like. It’s like for most clients, it’s like almost forty, fifty pages of data and, you know, implementable suggestions and recommendations for content and things like that. It just blows people’s minds.
It might yeah. I rarely get pushback. Rarely.
I don’t even remember. Last time I got pushed back on price. Right? So, why? Because I walk I showed them that’s like the final stage.
I showed them exactly what they’re getting.
Next up, objection handling. This is gonna be one of the most important parts of this kind of a launch. So you wanna be really, really good at this. You wanna start writing your copy, whether for a sales pitch or for emails, with your list of objections in front of you.
I don’t want this. I don’t want this because. I don’t want this because. This will not work because.
This will not work because. You want that whole list of of objections right in front of you, and then you wanna just start going through them one by one by one and making sure that you’ve addressed all of them. So anticipating those concerns, whether it’s to do with themselves, because you’ll always have those inner you know, oh, I’m not ready, or I don’t have the right experience. I don’t have the right credentials.
Whatever. So you’ll always have this inner objections, but then you’ll also have the external ones. Don’t have the money. Don’t have the time.
And we’re you tried this before and it didn’t work. All those things. So you wanna just dismantle all of those through the funnel, through your sales page.
The goal here is for you to just on really digging into the objection beneath the objection.
Is it time? Is it overwhelm? Is it past experience? And instead of just addressing a few, address them all. Right? So you wanna say and before you your prospects even come back to you or, you know, like, oh, I don’t think this is gonna work for me because I don’t have time. Well, it’s only gonna take you ten minutes to watch a video and just another nine to eleven minutes to implement it.
Can you take out ten minutes of your day to make this happen? You could, like, watch it on your way to work.
You would literally address objections like that, whether it’s an email, whether it’s on a sales page.
You wanna start getting them to think and look at those and go, okay. Yeah. Of course, I can do that. I can watch ten a ten minute video.
Tell them you gotta you’ll you’ll have, like, seven modules.
Yep. That’s not gonna work. You tell them yes. I I know you’re thinking this is gonna be time consuming, but do you have ten minutes or nine minutes? Whatever.
Okay. This is, this is a technique taken from straight line selling, the straight line selling school call looping, where you revisit points of certainty, like the creator’s expertise, the course’s effectiveness, the brand’s track record as you address new objection set rise. So for example, someone comes in and says, yeah. I did a similar course or you, you know, in your funnel, you wanna address the you’ve seen this objection come up in the past that people have done this done similar courses, have not seen results.
You wanna remind them that this is not the way it was because this pre this course creator is different, because this brand is invested in ensuring that we, you know, we get you results because we have a guarantee that would work, that would kick in if you don’t see results.
So keep coming back to those points of certainty, which is why I said here. It’s really important for you to, yes, know how the course or the offer works. You wanna know have complete knowledge of your clients or your own expertise, and then, of course, the brand affinity as well because you would be wanting to use that and keep coming back to that to address objections and to increase and strengthen your prospect’s belief in your offer.
Okay. So things to consider when you’re strategizing this launch. Like, put this on a worksheet for the next launch. You wanna know pinpoints.
So okay. What specific challenges will you be talking about? How can you map those to the features? Right?
Consistent mess messaging. How will you keep the narrative unified and in a straight line across all stages of the funnel? You do not want to be going in five different directions here. One message is more important in this kind of a launch than in any other kind of launch.
So you wanna get really clear on that one message, that one theme, that one story line that you’ll be drawing from start to finish. Certainty building. How will you be building certainty and the main messaging angle across the sequence? How will you be creating certainty in your client, in the brand, all of that?
Objection handling, I’ve already kind of, yeah, beat the drum on this one, but preempting and addressing objections, all of them. You wanna know you wanna know all of them. And you wanna know, okay, which features, which benefits will I be mapping here? Which how will I be using emotional and logical hooks so that I’m balancing the storytelling part but with data and proof?
So you wanna have these five, six elements in place in a document when you’re working on a launch of user assistance.
When you have these in place, it becomes so much easier for you to write the copy that would just go in a straight line in a straight line. Yeah. It’s really, it’s now here’s the thing. It sounds very simple, but it’s not.
It’s I found over the years with the hundreds and hundreds of launches that I’ve written for, it’s way easier to do a traditional launch because you have that you have the runway. You can build that, you know, the know, like, trust factor. But when you’re going in cold and you need to sell and you also need to do it without being pushy or, you know, like a typical salesperson.
You wanna be thoughtful and mindful and demure.
You would wanna keep keep these things in mind because that kind of helps you keep the conversation on track, but it is a little bit harder than a traditional launch because you’ve you’ve gotta keep it really tight across the funnel, your sales pitch and your emails.
That messaging is so, so important.
Okay. Yeah. Your job as a copywriter is to obviously keep the process moving forward by addressing their concerns. That is the one thing I want you to take away from this one is that your objection handling is gonna play a huge role.
The more control you have, the easier your close will be. And, again, this this will work, but, like I gave you example, this will work on a sales call. This will work with a webinar. This would work with a quiz.
A launch of least resistance is great where high ticket offers are involved and where an audience needs that extra persuasion.
Alright.
Cool.
Questions? I can see Katie’s hat is up.
Hi, Berna.
As always, I love your workshops.
They’re so meaty and, give us so much to go on.
So I have a couple of questions about implementing this.
One, you mentioned how this is different from, like, the traditional launch runway where you would do, you know, your your prelaunch runway. I’m curious, like, the objection handling, are you doing most of that? Like, is the difference the fact that here you’ve introduced the offer and then you’re handling objective objections, or are you handling those objections?
But, like, I I guess just what’s the sequence of handling the objections versus introducing the offer and kind of more, like, selling?
Yeah. So, yeah, in this case, you introduce the offer first.
So since you you’re in this pretty much same niche as I am with online course creators and coaches and consultants, with a traditional launch. You know how you do it. Right? You have, like, your prelaunch runway, and then you have, like, your launch mechanism kick in, then you have your cart open. You’ve got, like, a lot of room to kind of play with.
And you wanna address those objections before you like, typically, I’d wanna do that before I introduce the offer. Right?
Yeah. Yeah. Here, what’s happening is you’re going in cold. You’re just going in straight for the sale, and you’re addressing your the objections, preempt preempting them and addressing them or, you know, like, your Okay.
In fact, for one of the launches, what I did was the sale the pitch email, like, generally, my pitch email is more of I call it the path for value pitch email. That’s why I call it, but because it has a lot of value in it, and then we are introducing the offer. But in launches of least resistance, what I do is it’s the offer and then the big objection that I know they would have, whether it’s cost or time or money. I’m just it’s like a whole series of objection demolition emails, and the sales page is structured the same way as well.
So there’s like yeah. Will work for me. You know? Don’t have the money. Don’t have the time.
Or, you know, like, tried this before or not ready.
Just yeah. So that’s how it’s structured.
And then so do you if you because I’m assuming that all of these principles that you were sharing, you’re using those both on the sales page and in the emails. Yes.
Does the sales page in this type of funnel also spend much time on, like, desires, dream state, or is it more like, here’s what we do and then boom boom boom?
So what does how the sales page differs from, say, a regular, maybe even a PS or a pays off or the, you know, the different frameworks that I I, kind of have developed over the years is there’s we talk about the pain.
That’s why the emotional certainty kind of comes in. So we, we tap into their pain and their struggle. Do we show them their desires? Yes.
But we tie it to a, a feature of the course. We tied we that’s where the logical certainty starts to build. It’s like, okay. You know, if you want more time freedom, this is how you’re gonna get it using a b c from the course.
So we are tapping into it, but it’s not the structure of the sales page is different. The structure of the sales page starts with the pain that they’re experiencing and how this particular offer is gonna solve that pain for them, with whatever framework, method, etcetera.
And then we go into their you know, maybe what they want, but also, again, that’s why it’s benefit first. So every feature is linked to a benefit, which is, in other words, a desire or an outcome, and then, of course, objection handling, all through the page.
Okay. Thank you. And if I may, could you just elaborate a bit on the looping technique? I didn’t quite understand.
I, you know, I know you said revisit points of certainty as you introduce new objections.
So could you just give an example of what that might look like?
Sure. So I’ll give you an example from okay. I’ll give you an example from sales calls. Right? So I whenever I’m on a sales call with clients, they’ve already you know?
The thing is, most of them are not cold because they’ve either found us through the our website or they’ve, at the very least, have sent us a contact form from the website. So it’s not that, like, they’re entirely cold, but I like using straight line sign for that because it’s a high ticket service. Like, they’re all five figure services. Right?
So how I use Looping is I they already know, my expertise. They know my experience. But what I always always do is I would have I would bring up case studies of clients who are from similar niches, or I would let them know if, if recently recorded a podcast somewhere or if I’ve spoken on stage somewhere. So I’m just building certainty because the big objection most people would have in hiring a strategist or a copywriter is either they’ve been booked before and which is, you know, usually when they come to us or maybe their launch hasn’t worked before or it’s their first time hiring, which is rare, but maybe. You know? So you wanna kind of loop back to, the fact that you’re the best person for this, and here’s why.
Okay. Does that help, Katie?
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So just kind of, like, as you know or as we’ve seen or, you know, as I mentioned on this like, just reinforcing those points of certainty so that that’s an ongoing theme.
Yeah. Because you need again, like I said, you need to know what objections, like and after you’d you know, when you do a ton of sales calls, you know exactly what objections your prospect has. And similarly, with a program or a product or service, you know, what objections, you know, your clients would have. So you want to loop back to this.
So it’s not just, oh, let me just put my bio here on the sales page and think we’ve established trust and credibility, but you wanna loop back to it maybe, you know, in the social proof section. Maybe you wanna loop back to it in the FAQ section. Maybe you wanna loop back to it in the in the closing section of the sales page. So you wanna kind of keep coming back to so it’s not just a, let’s just put the bio here and call it a day, but how can we come back and establish certainty?
I’m just giving an example from, say, the credibility of the creator, but you could do that with pretty much any of the other elements as well.
Cool.
Any other questions?
Not even if not related to the training or if anyone’s got, like, copy or a review or things like that, we could dig into it.
I guess I have not necessarily, like, a question. So you mentioned that the course preview or some kind of showing them behind the scenes, that should go out in one of the last emails or at the end of the funnel.
And I usually do that in, like, email four or five.
And How how many emails? Like, how long does the emailed. So it’s in the in the middle. Okay.
Yeah. And then I have an FAQ email that’s emailed six out of eight.
Mhmm. Mhmm.
So I’m wondering if you’ve tested different placements in the promo structure to see which one works best.
Yeah. The reason I so, yeah, I actually have, and I have found I have, in fact, even tested not including FAQ emails. Yeah. Okay, Michelle. Bye.
Even not including FAQ emails in in a sequence because if you, a, addressed and answered most of the questions, you don’t really need an FAQ email. You could easily use that email for for something else.
Mhmm. And the reason why I feel and this is again, I’ve, Blanca, I’ve tested it only with audiences, like, in the online course world. And, That’s my niche as well. So Oh, amazing.
Okay. Great. So yeah. So then we’re in Concord. Okay.
So yeah.
The reason I find that it works really well by placing it towards the end is because by then, you’ve handled most of their objections. You’ve established trust. And now what you’re doing as the final step is helping them visualize themselves as a student in the course. It works beautifully. So for me, I’ve I’ve found you know, placing it towards the end of the funnel is that final little push that they need to kind of go, oh, wow. That’s good. That’s what my experience is gonna be like.
And do you just send them to the sales page where you have a section with that kind of behind the scenes video?
So we’ve done this different ways. We’ve done this with, by recording a like, just like an over the shoulder Loom walk through Mhmm. Of what the post dashboard looks like. We’ve also done this, like I shared, with with my course launch, you know, example where it was a complete experience where we invited them to a pop up group.
We had a full lesson that they needed to log in to Teachableforce. They had to be at a login and everything. So it was a complete student experience where, and we also did this with our astrologer client is that, you know, it was a complete student experience. You created an account.
Why? Because these are micro conversions. Right? Yeah. So it helps them get into that whole student mindset.
And then because, so with the astrologer client, in fact, what we did was really cool was because we had the whole course laid out, and they had unlocked access to this. So they could actually see what happens next. Right? And they all they had to do was upgrade.
So they just had to click the upgrade button. So that really helped as well. So we took this, like, in a few different ways. We’ve done this as an open house where literally, like, as a school or a college would do an open house, we would have, like, some students.
It it is a room Zoom room like this. There would be some students joining in, and then, you know, the the course creator would share screen, walk them through the course portal, show them the community, everything, and then they would have a q and a. They would have the chance to ask questions of the students as well. So it kind of depends on the audience you offer and, you know, of course, what your client’s willing to do, that kind of thing.
That’s cool. Thanks. I I now have a bunch of ideas to test for upcoming promotions.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Absolutely. Yeah. Awesome awesome training, by the way. And I liked your previous one too.
How much Thank you. Thank you. Marina, question.
I’m not a Yes. Yeah. Course creator for this purpose, although I have done other stuff.
So this offer is going to cold traffic.
So you could use this as a starting point for, offering copy services to SaaS potential SaaS clients.
So they know they so they’re starting at problem aware already, and then you have to show them that this is the solution for your and you’re starting, like, right there Mhmm. Jumping in Mhmm. Hard selling. Essentially, you’re hard selling.
Like, this is hard selling.
Exactly. Yes.
You’re just hard selling it.
Hard selling.
This is this is what you need. And then going into the and this is why you need me to do that for you.
Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is hard sales. It’s just that I like to just be mindful of the fact that, you know, we wanna respect people’s reasons for not buying, but at the same time, we wanna make a strong argument for why they should buy.
So which is why you wanna handle those objections. You don’t wanna overlook them. You don’t wanna kind of, you know, brush them aside or anything. You wanna handle them and move on.
But then the objection handling is not like you’re like, it’s integrated, not like you’re saying this. I’m saying this. It’s more subtle.
Yes. Yes.
Oh, I had another question related to that. Oh, have you tried this for productized services?
Oh, good question.
No.
But I do have an opportunity to test it out. We’ve recently overhauled one of our product based services. So, yeah, I could test it out, but, no, I haven’t.
Okay. Right. Thank you.
You’re welcome. Cool. I would love it if you would go ahead and test it out. Like, if you would test out I plan to. A launch of least resistance.
I would love to know how it goes or if you get find yourself coming up against, like, a roadblock.
Find me in Slack and, yeah, just chat with me about it.
I love these launches. They’re just yeah. Them, you know, they’re a challenge, but they’re they’re so exciting to to write for. So yeah.
I’ve done emails sorry, Katie. I’ve done emails, like, email promotions where each email was answering a specific objection, but it was usually for brands that had such a bad reputation or such a bad perception with their audience that it just felt like I can’t really afford to sell anything. Like, I have to afford to sell the product. I first need to repair the trust.
So each email was, okay.
We asked you, and we got some, like, really crazy feedback from you. So let’s settle things straight. So over the next few days, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
And, yeah, that did work well. Whereas with other audiences, you just don’t need to do all that much.
You don’t need to exactly.
Exactly. Which is why this works really well, like I said, for skeptical audiences. Right?
Like, where like, in your case, the crust has been you know, it needs repairing, but then you also need to do selling.
So works. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing.
Katie.
So I would love to I’m still building out my, like, post workshop funnel. So I have, you know, my diagnostic workshop online.
I have, you know, I know you haven’t watched the workshop yet, so go watch his sequence that Yes. But I don’t have a lot that goes out after that.
Like, you know, essentially, my post webinar Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. For my, for my standardized offer. So I think that this would work well. Yes.
But I’d love your tips on, like so if the offer is, you know, a productized service around behavior based back end automations Mhmm.
What because to me, I’m like, oh, I don’t see what objections you could have. It’s a great idea. But I know, you know, it’s like okay. So the founder’s time, the team’s time, like, adding something else to their plate, not wanting to annoy or bother their clients, like, not wanting to have feel salesy.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, it’s my first time. Like, I haven’t sold it yet, so I need proof, like, proof that it will work and that I can do it.
The idea that they can’t imagine what it looks like or how it would Yes.
Go. Exactly. Which is where a demo would come in. So you wanna kind of show them what it would look like. I would like actually, if you’ve not done this, then I would actually build that build something out so you can kinda walk them through what it looks like so they can see that it’s not as either as confusing because with something like this and because I sell a lot of these, you know, behavior based sequences, I find the biggest objection is they just can’t visualize what it looks like. So Mhmm. Yeah.
And you would just build that out in whimsical or something?
Like, Yeah. Or whimsical, fun analytics, whatever you wanna kind of use. Whimsical works just fine. Just, you know, kind of visually helping them to see, hey.
This is what’s gonna happen. This is what happens when this happens. And if this happens, and then you kinda see light bulbs go up. Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Mhmm. And is there anything else that comes to mind that I didn’t mention that you think it would be a big one?
Yeah.
Tried it in the past, did not work.
Mhmm. Okay.
Yeah. That come up, you know, with a few established creators.
They have sequences in place, but didn’t work, which is where your credibility comes in as I actually heard from an OBM that I’m friends with.
She she was like, oh, yeah. We already have something like that. I was like, I don’t think you I don’t think you have what I’m talking about.
Like Yeah.
Yeah. Exactly. So it’s which is why the looping technique kicks in. You know? So you wanna kinda remind them. Yeah.
Okay. Okay. I’ll let you know how it goes. Thank you.
Cool. You’re welcome. Rayna?
Okay. So two things, commenting to Katie, about the OBM that said we already have something like that.
Herna, I’m just wondering, is it too cheeky just to ask them, so are you getting the results that you wanted from them?
Yeah. No.
That’s not you know, like, if they say that, hey.
We’ve got this.
Like, even thinking about Yeah.
Yeah.
If we’re saying, okay. So here’s an onboarding flow.
Well, we already have one.
Okay. So are you happy with your conversions?
Exactly. You that is preempting.
Like, I mean, you could say it so it’s not snarky, but, is that where that kind of comes down to your tone.
Right? Yes. Exactly. Yeah.
You know, it kinda comes down to your timeline.
Curiosity.
Like Yeah.
Exactly. More like I would do that. Okay. One hundred percent. One hundred percent. Yeah. Address it.
That’s exactly what straight line is. You wanna address those objections. Like I said, you don’t you wanna be mindful, of course. You wanna be, you know, you don’t wanna be disrespectful.
But at the same time, you don’t wanna tiptoe around it and not address not address it. I yeah. I would definitely do that one hundred percent.
And then secondly, because it’s cold, can you run ads can you run ads directly to your straight line funnel?
Yes. Yes. Cold. Cold traffic.
Right?
Like, it’s meant to convert cold traffic, and it’s just a numbers game.
Right?
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One hundred percent. I would want to, however, ensure that the offer is validated.
So you could run it the because the last thing you wanna do is Yes.
Spend money on an invalidated offer.
Exactly. Yeah. It’s not So It is for cold audiences. It’s not for untested, invalidated offers. That’s an important distinction.
Okay. So then here’s my question because I’m kind of in the same boat as Katie right now. Like, I’ve done the work for other people, yes, and gotten results, but I haven’t done this particular set of activities to accomplish this particular outcome in this in my signature way.
Mhmm.
So is the offer proved by the fact that, yes, I have written onboarding flows that have increased conversions, or is the offer proof that I’ve done it my way in this current system and gotten results with that signature?
I mean, yeah, it’s it’s not either or. It’s both. You’ve written onboarding sequences that have bought gotten conversions.
Right. And, you know, you know, I would do both. Like, I would lean on both of those. I would call this a validated offer. I would so to I would not what would an invalid offer be? Where you’ve never done something, for either your own brand or a client, and you’re, like, absolutely near the market.
Okay. So yeah. So if you’ve done it either for your own brand or for even, like, another brand, and it’s not, like, the full scope of things, but it’s been, like, you know, I’ve done one for one client. I’ve done one for another client.
That’s about it all for me. Like, you’ve you’ve tested those out. People need it. They work. Mhmm. Yeah.
Okay. Okay. Thank you.
Can I add something here?
Yes.
So if you don’t have, like, case studies right now to demonstrate how effective the solution is, like onboarding sequences, you can use industry data to back that up.
So something that I’m doing is my framework is customer centricity applied to sales emails in a way that allows me to sell a course each month without making it aggressive, salesy, or burning the list. That’s because I’m implementing the customer centric concepts. And, obviously, I’m not, like, an authority right now. I haven’t done any research in this specific area, but there are professors. And there are big, economic studies that demonstrate that companies that use customer centric frameworks are actually gaining better results than product based companies. So for me, when I go to a client and say, well, obviously, yes, you can run a flash sale that’s product based. But can you do that every month in a way that actually lets you convey your unique brand messaging whatever?
Although, actually so if you turn to customer centricity and here are all these sources that back it up, then that’s a lot better than me saying, well, I’ve been doing this for a long a long time.
And I do have the results, but if you don’t believe me Exactly.
Data. So that is why you know? And that’s where both the emotional and logical certainty factors kick in with this one. So you wanna lean on the data.
You may have you may have or may not have testimonials and case studies or the the stories to back it up. But if you have data, that will work too. And then your expertise is what would help create and, you know, the the other side of the certainty equation. So, I think that’s what the yeah.
Katie says she uses this data too. So amazing. Great.
So do this, Marina.
Do the quality of your questions to your clients also validate your authority?
One hundred percent. I’m a big fan of sales calls because of that.
It really helps me close way bigger projects and packages, and which is why I yeah. I have, like, I would say, a list of questions, but I don’t have a quote, unquote, a templated sales call flow, because, yeah. It just helps me to kind of, you know, assess what I need to do. And, sales calls are, like, the perfect example of straight line selling, like, you know, but you wanna do it your way.
So yeah. But one hundred fancy your question? Yes. One hundred percent.
Thank you.
You’re welcome.
Awesome. Anything else?
All good. Perfect. Marina, apparently, for some reason, like yes. Sarah’s saying, Zoom is recording, so, hopefully, yes, we record it.
But I’ve told her that yours is recording too. Mine got kicked out. It’s a weird Zoom world. I may need to reach out to you for the recording.
I’ll wait for Sarah to come back to me on that.
Yeah. I can also send you the or the fathom.
Okay. Awesome. That would be that would be great. Yeah. Yeah. That’s fine. Perfect. Perfect. Thanks so much, everybody.
Lovely seeing y’all.
Bye now. Bye. Bye.
The ROI of hiring (or the cost of hiring wrong / not hiring at all)
The ROI of hiring (or the cost of hiring wrong / not hiring at all)
Transcript
Every person you hire at an agency helps you make money. That’s not true in other businesses. You’re gonna you start a software company, most of your team does not help you make money. They’re all expensive developers. They’re not helping you make anything other than usually the product they wanna make.
That’s not true for agencies. Every single person you hire helps you make money and I mean directly helps you make money. So if you’re at all good at selling and getting your team members to do decent work and the more you specialize, the easier that part is, then it’s it’s actually kind of it’s foolish I would say not to hire unless you have of course health problems or these challenges that you know are currently insurmountable.
But if you don’t have currently insurmountable health or other such challenges, dig in. It’s time to hire. Alright. So I’m gonna share my screen. We’re gonna talk about this calculator, then I’ll share this around with y’all afterward.
I’m gonna make it bigger in case you’re on a laptop or something smaller than that even.
Okay.
So this is a general way of looking at how to afford things and can you.
So it starts with a breakeven calculator just to see, like, when am I gonna actually start making money, and we’ll get into all of those across these different tabs. The general tab here is just you setting your goals for good, better, best. Now in the intensive freelancing, which I think everybody here comes from, except Caroline, I don’t know if you did it. In the intensive freelancing, though, I’d say ten thousand dollars for your core project, five thousand dollars for your retainer.
My assumption here is your retainer average is about six months. It could be more, and, of course, your numbers go up if it’s more. We wanna also break down what it costs to run a project and what it costs every month to run a retainer. So if you are and this is why you really wanna get time tracking down.
Every single minute that your team member spends on something they shouldn’t be working on is literally costing you profit. So this all comes from, a variety of things. So we have to figure out what your salary is, what their salary is, how much time, how many hours it takes to do a project, usually about fifty is what we’re trying to budget, and how many hours it takes to to do a retainer every month, usually about twenty. And, again, you can see that if this suddenly takes thirty hours, now the project just got more expensive or the retainer just got more expensive. It takes forty hours, people are just pissing away your time. Now a project that should have cost a little over a grand cost you two, and that’s real money.
Actual money that you could just not do the work and just sit there, and that would be better than you waste energy on low profit projects. So we don’t want to have our numbers go up, our hours go up as soon as they do. It’s really like, the math is right there. It’s a lot.
We don’t want that. Don’t do it. And, of course, the more, expensive people, spend time on things, the less profit you have. So let’s say if you didn’t have a VA or a junior copywriter or a copywriter working with you, that means a hundred percent of the costs are suddenly yours.
So let’s say instead, there’s that. So now with the project without me deleting those, the project is now forty four hundred bucks instead of being thirty two hundred bucks. Right? So it costs you twelve hundred dollars to keep hiring yourself for these projects instead of hiring help to get you there.
So when you think of that, it can be easier to think, oh, it’s gonna be expensive to hire someone. But the reality is it’ll cost you an extra twelve hundred dollars for you to just keep hiring yourself for this with these, like, basic numbers in play. So we don’t want to do that. And, of course, as your salary goes up now these are all in salaries that we have here.
All the taxes and other things that you might be paying. If you were at a hundred and twenty five thousand salary in Canada, you’re probably going to end up spending about a hundred and seventy somewhere in there. The government’s gonna take a whole bunch, and all the other overhead that comes with it. So a hundred and seventy five thousand now if you are even more expensive than that.
The copywriter salary doesn’t keep getting more expensive. If you hire someone for copywriter and biz dev, that doesn’t keep getting more expensive and the VA doesn’t keep getting more expensive but you do. So as soon as this goes up, if you’re at two fifty suddenly because you’re like I work hard then everything gets more and more expensive the more involved you are. So we don’t want to involve you more than we have to in things that you could hire other people to do and train them to do it.
But the question usually is, okay, well, Joe, when do I hire someone? The answer is usually you should have already, but there’s another way to look at it. So what I want you to do is think about and I’m gonna share this with you afterward and I want you just to, like, put your own numbers in here. And you might find that you have to adjust them of the math, etcetera.
That’s fine.
That’s totally cool. This was me doing this all in an assumption of what goes on for people when they follow a general rule of project plus retainer. Every other month you get every month you get one new retainer in the last six months. Okay.
So this is the good year project projection where the year was about five hundred thousand where we have twenty projects and retainers are at sixty. I think that’s what we’re working with here. They take fifty hours a week. This is the breakdown of hours when you go through this.
Profit is showing up here. You as the CEO, if you were the only person doing the work here, you would actually max out at month four. You’ve got two projects a month and three retainers a month. You max out on available hours.
There’s nothing else left. There’s not there’s no time for biz dev in there. Nope. Even here, you have five hours a week for biz dev this month.
So when we think about that, you’re not gonna be able to grow your business very long. This is why a lot of people get stuck. They get stuck when they’re like, wow. I’ve got a lot of great work coming in.
I can’t do the business development work that my business needs me to do. So now here I am. I’ve got nice profit. I’m making good money.
I feel good about that. Anybody who’s made, who’s had a three hundred thousand dollars year and then found themselves dropping down afterward or wanting to drop down afterward is this is what was usually going on for you. And it’s just the numbers, They might budge a little, but they don’t lie. So if you’re going to max out, if you’ve got a hundred and sixty hours that you are technically selling, then what would that’s great.
That’s fine. You get you get nice profit, but you’re burned out. You can’t grow anymore, so we have to go back to this month maybe where it’s, you know, decent profit.
But, again, you’ve only got twenty hours in the month for biz dev, which means you’re working after hours or, again, you’re not developing your business.
No partnerships, no marketing, nothing going on and wondering why you’re only at five thousand profit, why there’s really not much left after you pay yourself and maybe your very part time VA who helps you run things a little bit. So this can be a deceiving little area to be in. I don’t need people. I’m making five thousand a month.
It’s not enough to hire anybody because nobody will come in for sixty thousand dollars a year and really make my life easier, but let’s look down. Once we’ve actually hired someone and we are bringing them on board, revenue has gone up because we’re open and available to actually do business development so we can keep bringing more projects in, keep converting those into more business, get those systems down. Right? Now we’ve got revenue of fifty thousand and salaries of about thirty three thousand.
And that sounds like a lot, but your profit and this is with all overhead built in, your profit is actually much higher month after month after month after month versus this one little month. Right? So you end up with profit of about a hundred and thirty six thousand. If you’re thinking like a business owner, you’re thinking shit.
If every person I hire is worth lots of extra money to me, I don’t wanna end the year with a hundred and thirty six thousand dollars just sitting there. I should have hired two more people along the way because I could afford them, and they would further explode my opportunities to grow. And I could bring in somebody who is going to be my salesperson or somebody who does account based marketing to get bigger themes coming in. I could have done that because I have all this profit.
But I decided to camp out in this little zone that feels safe. I don’t have to hire people. Everything’s fine. I can’t really do much, but it’s okay.
Right? It’s wrong. You’re gonna burn out. This is where you burn out. This is where life goes badly even though it appears to be going great.
So the ROI, the focus of today’s lesson is what is the ROI of hiring? The actual ROI shows right up here, and this is taking time for all of the right work. So we have basically a layout of what your life would look like if you were to start doing this right away. You bring a VA on board if you don’t already have one.
This is the person who in the intensive freelancing when we have week three where we show you your VA is doing this, this, this, this, this, and this, and here are templates for them, that’s what they’re trained on. They’re doing that work here. Week one, this is broken down by weeks. Basically, four weeks at a time, which is great because in the fifth week, your clients don’t need you in that week so you could kinda sorta take that time off according to this schedule.
Now you’ve got forty hours a week as the CEO.
Your VA, you’ve got them in for about five or six hours a week because you don’t need them to do other things. Anybody who hires their VA to be the copywriter, I know a lot of VA’s end up writing copy. I don’t understand who hires a VA to write copy though, especially if you are a copywriter.
What I would say, if you were like, I like the idea of having a good year like this where I’m free to close two projects a month and convert a bunch of those into retainers that last about six months and my profit is really good and I can see myself building a really nice business that grows, okay, then you should hire a copywriter right now. Recruit one right now. It’s expensive.
It seems to be in the short term, but we already have the numbers unless you can’t close a ten thousand dollar project. And we haven’t even talked about what happens if those prices go up. The project doesn’t change. But suddenly, we’re making way more. We can bring our retainer up to seventy five hundred, make way more, and the project and retainer stay the same. So we can see that there’s a lot of leverage ahead, but not if we keep doing everything ourselves.
So we hire a copywriter.
We don’t have a biz dev copywriter person yet, but we have them on the horizon. It’s in our org chart. Very likely, it ended up in your org chart. This is how much time you’re spending a week.
You’re working with clients, and you’re also dealing with this person shadowing you. So we have that under team slash skills. Now client time needed for the month, we’ve copied over from here. These are client time needed for the month.
They’re over here now. So as long as our clients as long as we have a hundred hours spent on client work, we’re good to go, which we do. We’ve got twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, and then our VA is putting in this for admin work. Cool.
That’s covered. We can then allocate fifteen hours a week to training this that’s two full days of training this person who is going to be able to start taking on jobs the next month because you have spent an exhausting amount of time treating them because you planned your week to the hour. You’re not going overtime, forty hours. You’re not even putting in the normal sixty or eighty it takes to build this thing because it’s an agency, and every person you hire is somebody who turns their job into more money for you as long as you’ll spend the time on it and take the leap and hire quickly because we wanna get this person onboarded and taking on a little bit of client work a week.
So like every morning they’re doing client work and every afternoon they’re training, and you’re doing a little bit of the training to help them get there, but you know it’s important and we’re still solving for what our clients need from us. We’re still allowing ourselves to have business development time of twenty hours a month or a week, which is phenomenal when you think about how that would look if you were to manage your calendar that way. Now business dev also can mean administration and other things that help support the business itself, but it shouldn’t mean I’m doing payroll all the time.
You have to run payroll twice a month, and it’s for three people. So, like, it’s fine. You just have to hit yes on payroll, and then it’s done. But we are actually over.
We’ve got more than twenty hours spent on client work in this month. So that’s kinda cool, but we’re willing to do that because even though it means an actual expense to us, we allocated more than we were actually charging for and if needed to, we were training this person. So it’s an acceptable It’s the season of spending in order to get that copywriter trained up. You’re okay with it.
You can handle it. You still walk away with the business getting eighty four hours of your time in there and some VA time as well. Your team has been upscaled to the tune of a hundred and twenty hours and you participated in that which only makes you stronger as the person who’s doing the training. Then by month three, where we’re again going back to all of this and the salaries here match that.
So month two, you’re not making any money. Month three, though, you’re starting to make money because that person is now working more and more. So every one of these tabs all work together. So you can see that by the time you hire, so month four, you’re recruiting the next copywriter, month five.
And when this is happening, you’re gonna be like, this is too fucking slow. We have to go faster than this. There’s so much opportunity if I just keep hiring people. Month five, you’ll be like, I shoulda hired you three months ago.
And you may wanna actually think about that depending on what your pipeline looks like. But you’ve got month four where they’re being recruited. Month five, they’re hired and onboarded. And month six, they’re starting to do client work.
You can see that your client time is going way down in this period. You are now officially working on the business, not in the business, still doing things to help your team, but your copywriter is empowered to work directly with your new copywriter who also does biz dev work for you so that you’re not also entirely the person in charge of biz dev because we don’t want single points of failure. Why? Lots of reasons.
One of them is vacation time. Eventually this copywriter is gonna need a freaking break and you don’t wanna be the one doing that work when the copywriter goes away for a week. Nor should the copywriter come back and go, you didn’t do anything while I was gone. Do I have to do everything around here?
And then they’re burning out and you train them and now they’re ready to leave. We don’t want that. We want them to go on vacation.
Other copywriters this, they do this work. You might do a little more, but we’re even seeing that by this point, you’re not doing more. You’re still only up five hours. This copywriter was able to take over in that time, and now you get to start going on vacations too.
So you decide you’re gonna do this. We still have an excess of hours that we’re dedicating to clients. We’re not we’re not skimming or doing anything less than. We’re doing exactly what our clients need us to do if we’re keeping to the rules around how much time we spend on each project.
And if those change wait. Where are the rules? There. If these change, then none of this works the same way, which is why you have got to time track if you want ROI from your copywriting team in an agency.
And eventually, I want you to look at this and go like, I don’t wanna have these extra hours hanging out. If an hour of my time is worth what’s my hour worth? Ninety bucks And we keep a hun or we keep ten of them at the end of the month that we didn’t use that we like kinda pissed away on client work that we shouldn’t have been putting my time into, that’s nine hundred dollars wasted. That’s the copywriter at this, that’s five hundred dollars wasted.
And it’s time that we could have put towards something else. So you, to be successful in bringing copywriters on staff, anybody on staff, need to be a real stickler for this. We don’t want to be over. We want it to always be at zero.
This is a great month. We did exactly enough for clients and not a smidgen more, and we were able to grow our business and add new team members here. We’re a little over, so that that means we could do something in here or we could say, well, ten extra hours.
If we how much do we need for a project, for a retainer?
By the time we get here, we could take on another retainer if we can maintain this. What can I do up here to maybe squeeze this so we can add another retainer in sooner?
And maybe we budge some of these numbers around and maybe the team and skills part shifts a little bit so that you can take on another retainer. And now it’s the same amount of money that you’re spending, but you’re getting more out of it and making more. Does this all make sense?
It’s a lot of numbers in a spreadsheet, but CEOs love spreadsheets.
And there’s lots of different tabs to go through and we’ve only done this for Goodyear. We haven’t done this for better year or best year, nor are they updated so that we have got if this number changes, everything else here changes. So that’s not happening at this point, but you can imagine and hypothesize that if you charged a little more and if you sold a few more projects and couple more retainers because you know what you’re doing, because you’ve specialized, because you have time available to do biz dev instead of you thinking you have to do all the work yourself, that’s how we make money. That’s where the money comes from in an agency, and that’s why agencies are so profitable.
That’s why we’ve reopened agencies every every time we’re like, alright. Let’s do another agency. We got lots of people in the pipeline. Just gotta hire a bunch of copywriters, and then by the end of that, we printed cash.
So I’m gonna share this out with you. That is the takeaway.
I wonder what would keep you from hiring copywriters if you could see and see as we saw today. Let’s imagine that you’re able to spend more time on biz dev, biz dev being everything to do with partnerships. So you’ve got your workshop, and if you know you have thirty hours a week to do things like pitching, to partners, you could do your workshop in front of, doing all of your Instagram lives and everything that engages your audience, posting to LinkedIn, running your newsletter, all of that stuff that’s actually the most fun as a CEO, what’s really getting in the way of hiring and training copywriters to do the work so that you don’t do that work anymore?
I know not everybody’s hiring. Most people are not hiring at all.
What’s going on?
And it’s like a real talk. It’s not like, shame on you. But, like, what’s getting in the way? Is it finding copywriters?
Is it training them? Is it that you haven’t looked at the numbers and how unprofitable it is for you with your expenses and your skills to be doing this project and retainer work that it’s actually bad for business for you to do that work?
Anybody have any ideas?
Jess?
So I think for me, it’s two things. One is, yeah, finding a copywriter who would agree to get paid that much money because working with contractors, they’re definitely more expensive, but they’re really good. So then the oversight is, like, you you don’t really have to oversee them as much. So that’s the one thing. And then I think the second thing is like not knowing a hundred percent that the clients will come in. And for me, just being in this new industry and targeting a new type of client, I think I’ll get more comfortable with that as time goes on. But, yeah, it feels just kind of like a I hope that’s the way that it works, but I’m I’m not a hundred percent certain at this time.
Yeah. So the second part, hiring someone is an incredible forcing function.
You’re like, alright.
I got payroll.
I have to make payroll. I’m gonna go figure out how to bring more clients in for this. Without payroll, you can take the summer off. And then you’re like, that was a good summer, but I guess I still have to go do this business. Where do I start? Like, you shouldn’t have stopped. You should have been at this the whole time.
So there’s that. The second part is I think that you might be surprised by how many copywriters are out there who are actually talented and who would need your help learning how to do things your way with your unique, this is what we do and this is how we do it. But if you have that baked in, that training time so most businesses that are successful don’t hire the, like, unicorns that we talked about before.
You don’t hire the great copywriter early. You make you are that great copywriter. You’re making copywriter someone who’s really good at this, someone who’s really good at that, and then later hire them. And this this is, like, across the board.
Think of a business.
No business that I that I know of at all hires the best person when they’re first starting unless they’re VC funded, and that’s it. Otherwise, you gotta hire cheap and start training them. Every agency on the planet hires cheap trains, and that’s where you get, like, a bit of a churn. So every two years, you can expect that that person put in a crap ton of time learning under you, not making that much money, but then still going and then they’re like, cool.
It’s been a great two years. I found a cool job at a tech company. I’m gonna go take that. Of course you are.
But that’s why we’re always training new copywriters and bringing new ones on board.
So I think that part one isn’t actually true. You’re probably shopping in the copy hackers world. So what I would say is go outside of the copy hackers world. Those who haven’t discovered that their talents are valuable, go post that to LinkedIn, in LinkedIn jobs.
And then the second half, yeah, as discussed. So I get it.
I can tell you from the other side.
This is this is the reality. Go through to the numbers.
You don’t know what if people are coming. How what are you doing for marketing today? What are you doing to intentionally are you spending for one thirty hours a week on business development to marketing?
Right now, no.
No. How much are you how much are you spending a week on biz dev and marketing?
Not a lot, to be honest.
That’s why I’ve just been trying to work yeah. That’s why I’m trying to work through, like, all the intensive stuff and then get into, like, doing everything else. But yeah. Yeah.
So that’s where I knew you could hire you.
Yeah. Second version of you to do thirty hours of biz dev a week for the price of a hundred thousand dollars a year.
If you found a guest who could do all of the work with your brain for your audience and they cost a hundred thousand dollars, you get thirty hours of their time a week and they’re on, would that be worth it?
Mhmm.
It would be worth it, and that’s all it takes to hire a copywriter who frees you up for that. Right? A hundred thousand dollars all in. Most copywriters that work for CXL get paid fifty thousand dollars a year.
Fifty thousand dollars a year. They’re we’re not expensive out there, just in here. Just in this world we are. But out there, great talented copywriters are available.
Just stop looking within this network. It’s not gonna it’s gonna be expensive.
Okay. Yeah. But yeah. You were otherwise just sitting there doing client work. That is probably best outsourced to somebody that you train.
Yeah. Cool. But thanks for sharing that, Jess. And I think that’s the reality for everybody as well.
Katie says, I don’t feel like I know my offer well enough to hire or train someone in it yet. Also waiting on clients in the pipeline.
Yep. That’s the thing. The waiting.
Right? The waiting because you don’t get to do the marketing and business development at thirty hours a week would be, like, bliss. Like, you could do so much with a hundred and twenty hours a month.
There’s so much there. I wish I had a hundred and twenty hours a month to do that stuff. But yeah. And then I get that. I get that. You wanna make sure that you have everything ready to go to train somebody well on it. That’s fair.
What what’s getting in the way of you having everything ready to go? If it’s actually costing you potentially a hundred and thirty six thousand dollars in profit this year after paying yourself and team members well, if it’s costing you big profits, could you pause, go off to a little hotel room for three days, charge to the business? I know everybody has family and things they need. It’s a work trip. You’re going off and you’re sitting down with your laptop at a not good resort, I’m talking at a Holiday Inn by an airport, you sit there in your shitty room and you type out all of this stuff, you bring a big post it note thing and you’re drawing and writing and figuring things out.
That’s three days of your time, two hundred bucks a night, fifty bucks a day in food. It’s pretty solid excursion, a meeting with yourself in order to have what it takes to then move forward.
That’s my take on it. Marina, what what are you thinking right now?
I’m glad you did that spreadsheet. I have something similar on my whiteboard downstairs, and I was going like, figuring out those hours and going, I’m gonna run out of time. Like, I have not.
Yeah. So then thinking about, like, when to hire it. But my question then is, do you maybe this is really bad business sense.
Do you have a line of credit that you You should have two months for an agency, you should have two months worth of payroll in your account.
That’s it. That’s not true for larger businesses or for, like, other kinds of businesses, but that’s what you need there. So before you hire a person, especially if your pay is usually if it’s a thirty day invoice Yeah. If it’s sixty, obviously, that’s worse. But that’s sometimes the reality. So okay. But if you have two months payroll sitting in your account, you’re more than ready to hire someone unless you have reason to believe that the world is about to explode, which I know we’re all traumatized.
We’re all dealing with PTSD. Thank COVID and everything getting really weird. And then thanks ChatGPT for making it weirder right afterward.
But we’ve survived, so we have to, like, focus and breathe.
The world the the sky is not falling. And if it does, then it’s gonna fall for everybody, and then you’ll have to adjust course or, like, abort mission.
But we can’t build a business thinking the sky is falling. You just you won’t. You’ll go work for the government part time, like and your life will suck, just to be clear.
So I would say if you think you don’t have enough time to do that work, you you don’t.
Now what?
Just do less work? Yeah. But you still need the money. So we have to, like, hire and train people.
Right. Have those two months of salary ready to go. And that’s it. But you have to hire before you’re ready to.
Every agency that I run, I’ve put cash into it upfront, twenty thousand dollars upfront. Mhmm.
And that was what we ran with. Yeah. Okay.
That’s what that’s what I was wondering.
Like, if you put seed capital in just to, like Yeah.
Get you through that Yeah.
Bit and then You’ll take it back out, like, three of her months later.
It’s like a very brief loan from one business to the other.
And it’ll just work like a dog. So to Katie’s point about waiting for clients in the pipeline Mhmm.
And I said I’m in implementation. So I then would it make sense then? I just wanna know if I’m procrastinating or if this is, like, good sense.
So reaching out for workshops.
So then once I start booking workshops and hopefully getting some calls, so concurrent to that, starting to look for potential copywriters and continuing to, like, refine the process so it’s easier to train Yes, sir.
So that when I land a client, then I can bring that copywriter on.
Yeah.
And then just What we can say is if you’re not currently closing two projects a month, which is, like, on that spreadsheet, you’ll see you may be closing two ten thousand dollar projects a month.
If you’re not doing that, like, you don’t have pipeline that shows you can do that, then when we talk about the constraints that we talked about a couple weeks ago, to me, the constraint is you’re not bringing enough leads to close on the project or your sales process needs to be improved.
I want you bringing in at least two projects that you’re closing every month in order to be ready to hire. So once you have two months of those under your belt, I did two projects.
And, I mean, it really quickly though. It really quickly switches to, like once you sell the project, selling the retainer is easier, and that’s why the retainer exists. It’s not to, like, make your life harder. It’s to make it so much easier to sell more ongoing services that give you results to the same clients you just spent all that effort trying to acquire, where a ten thousand dollar project might, at some point, not even feel profitable to you. It should based on what we’ve already seen in the numbers, but it’s like, no. That’s the retainer is what we’re really going for. That’s the easiest money, especially if you do a great job with it and it lasts longer than six months.
But you need to first close those projects. So if you’re working with one core client, your constraint is you need more leads and you need more of those to close into your projects.
And then once you sort that’s like the assembly line. Right? That’s the factory of making your business and a client along it.
You can’t even do anything further. Nobody down the assembly line is getting anything. They’re all just sitting there going like, where’s the rest of where’s the shit? So you have to fix the frontage. You gotta start pushing more into the assembly line So lead generation is a big thing for you, which means if you are dealing with one client right now, or one or two, then and if they’re not the product based thing that we’re talking about here, then you should be spending a lot of your day on biz dev, a lot of your day, a lot of your week to get to a place where you can do all of this other stuff that we’re talking about. Does that make sense, Marina?
Yes. That is helpful.
But But I was like, it’s a little bit cart before the horse, I think.
So Right.
Yeah. But but but this is speed wins here. Like, go faster. Just like Right. Speed will win when it comes to building an agency.
I I can’t think of an example of when that hasn’t worked.
Get out there. Get your message out there. Put some lead gen forms together.
Start calling. Start putting your phone number on your website. Like, do things to get people to say, like, okay. Let’s do this.
Let’s do this. Not like this slow and steady wins the race. Slow and steady gets put out of business in, like, three months. Like, it takes no time for that to fall apart.
So up to. Okay.
Get those leads. Yamar Yamar everywhere. Andrew.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Yeah. All of these are are resonating with me. I have no problem coming up with, list of fears and reasons not to do things.
I think something that I’ve noticed that’s a little bit different from what anyone else has said is, I’m having a little bit of fear of, like, having all of, like, having a lot of clients at once.
So right now, I have three clients, and I’m subcontracting for one of them and have project manager for two of the others, which is helping but still not exactly what we’re talking about here. And, yeah, I don’t know. I I guess I don’t know. I I still feel very attached to the idea that each client is getting a good amount of my attention, and I really know what’s going on with them. And so, I guess I start to worry about the overhead the mental overhead, that comes with, you know, remembering, like, a bunch of different clients and what they care about and, you know, all all these details. So I guess I could use I’m I’m sure there are some practical things here that I have like, skills that I haven’t learned yet that where you still know what the client cares about, but you’re not necessarily all the way down the weeds the way that I am right now.
Yeah. So when you unpack me what care about looks like for you when you say that.
Yeah. I guess okay. So I guess it’s a couple different things. So on so in terms of what they care about, I guess that’s maybe not the right thing to that maybe that’s not exactly what I what I’m worried about.
I guess it’s like, when I think of the level of detail that I have to go into right now in order to, like, write a landing page for someone, you know, and I’m presenting the copy, it’s really detailed. It’s little things. It’s, you know, at the at the level of features and things like that. And, I guess, I worry that if I have more clients, I’m kind of juggling, like, am I gonna forget what this I don’t know.
I guess I’m just I’m just I guess it’s a it’s a fear, and I don’t maybe I don’t know exactly what I’m afraid of with that. But, yeah, I think it probably all just comes back to, like, a fear of responsibility, complexity, all of those kinds of things.
I I do. I get that, and thanks for clarifying.
I think about that transition from being the service provider to being the agency founder.
Do you know Will Reynolds?
No. I do not.
Okay. He started this big SEO agency out of Philadelphia and have the multiple locations.
He by, like, year end of year one, he was only showing up on kickoff calls and, like, important calls with clients. And this and, like, he was the face of his business. And if you think that wasn’t hard for him to say, like, okay. Some other people have to take over and present what what was good about it. What many things. One, it freed him up to work on the business and go out and be an authority.
The less you’re in front of your clients, like, this is just human psychology, the more attractive you are to them. The less access they get to you, the more once you do show up, they’re, like, excited. Like, oh, cool. Andrew’s here.
And I think that it would be valuable for you to start, you know, kind of meditating on that, like what would change for me my happiness and what signals would it give to my clients as well if I wasn’t the one who appeared to be doing everything.
So you think it’s valuable, you think, hey, they’re getting me and they don’t recognize quite that getting you is amazing. But once you start vanishing, now getting you is amazing.
So I didn’t show up for tons of my client calls at all. That’s what Rashi was for. That’s what Carolyn was for. That’s what Aaron was for. Other people did that job. Sometimes they fucked it up.
Delegate with risk of failure. That’s fine. But but way more often, they didn’t they nailed it. And so all you really have to do then if you’re worried about releasing that control, what’s the mechanism you can put in place to make sure that you feel in control? You show up for certain meetings and you do, like, recording reviews.
So you can record your client your team member presenting to your client, and then you have meeting with the team members under your team skills area on your sheet, that’s just like, hey. Let’s look at your recording, and let’s talk about it. And you can point out, here’s how you should behave differently. Here’s what you did great.
Here’s what you didn’t do great. That’s it. It’s a game tape for you. That’s it.
I know that sounds simple, but but the numbers are are like they’re just they’re not going to lie.
So if they’re if if you are too expensive put in front of your clients, which I would argue you are too expensive to be doing this work, then it’s like, tell your business brain you are mismanaging funds right now by putting yourself a high value copywriter on every project.
Isn’t that copywriter likely to burn out too? And aren’t they responsible for business development as well? And if they go, doesn’t our whole business collapse? I feel like these are those feel like bigger concerns than my clients might not get as much access to me, or they might not understand why that cross head was written that that way. Does that make sense, Andrew?
Okay. Good. I know I’m talking about this.
I get very passionate.
Muted myself. No. That especially that last part. Definitely, yeah, the cost cost is not doing it. It’s greater than that.
Okay. Cool.
Cool. Wonderful. Katie?
Hi.
Okay. This is all really good. Delegate with risk of failure. I just wrote on a post it to stay my periphery.
But I’m so I’m operating with, like I only have there’s a fix in my business.
Yeah.
That’s what I’ve got right now. I have oh, okay.
K. Yeah. And, so I’m, like, deep in this debt now. Like, that’s kind of all I’m doing.
I know I’m not moving fast enough. Just gonna say that.
But I’m wondering, like, how right now, yes, I have time to work on, like, training materials and, actually, what you described about having, like, a head down mapping everything out session, like, that’s kind of in my calendar for this week. Okay.
But I’m like, at this point where I have my, like, remaining nest egg, I’m like, does that does it make sense to think about hiring at all this point? I guess you said no if it’s two clients in the pipeline.
But would it be crazy to invest in ads at this point?
I guess, because I’m like, I I see the the hiring roots, and I trust the profitability of that.
Does it make sense with, like, limited funds to invest in ads to bring those clients in?
No. It yes. It makes sense. Have you done ads before for your services?
No. Okay. I bought a course, like, two years ago, and I have yet to watch it. So I’m, like, back also on my list of things.
Is it Claire Peltz course?
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It’s good, though. Okay.
So, yeah, watch the course.
Watch the short workshop I think she has. It’s actually better than the long one.
And it takes, like it’s an hour on a Saturday, and you’ll have an ad set up. And, actually, mine got rejected.
I remember when I did it. But it was I got I it was fun. I I took away enough that I could fix the parts that got rejected. But, yes to doing ads. Yes. Because you don’t have to spend that much money on them, but you really do have to figure out that offer. How are you going to get them to book a call?
Does it make sense to do retargeting ads? Is there a place where you can, like, buy a list that you can then upload? I know that sounds sketchy, but it’s actually not that expensive to buy a list.
And then it’s just a matter of uploading it, creating a look alike from it in Facebook.
And then yeah.
And I just don’t know if there are other places that are better than that other than I I talk about Facebook.
Maybe you meant Google Ads or something else or both.
So So my plan would have been add to the workshop with retargeting ads to my ROI calculator.
K. Yeah.
And then, yeah, and then that’s that’s as far as my plan went currently. And I’m it’s just like, in the background I have I wanted like, for example, Claire Pals is, like, a dream client that I would love to pitch this offer to. So I’m like I just am afraid, I guess, at this point of, like, burning bridges with prospective clients because I’m not like, that my, like, really, like, size are dream clients. I’m afraid to pitch them too early before I’ve, like, worked the kinks out of a new offer.
Then start with the semi driven clients.
Who’s the next tier down from Claire Pels? Who wants to be the next Claire Pels?
Yeah. I start there. And, I mean, we never talk about account based marketing here, but, effectively, you’re doing account based marketing. Right? Like, if you really want Claire Pels, you can really make that happen. It’s just it’s gonna feel like stalking and there’s going to be weird gifts involved.
But it’s all like a doable thing. It’s just, yeah. Think of it as account based marketing when you’re trying to get clients in right now. Like, account based marketing doesn’t scale as well as the rest of the marketing that we’re talking about, but it can actually help you land those key clients right away or the next tier down. So I’d Jess says, what do you mean by account based marketing?
If you even just Google ABM, account based marketing is where you say marketing to sales come together.
Instead of marketing pushing to sales, marketing and sales align, which is you sitting and talking to yourself and saying, like, okay. So here’s an account that we really want. What can we do to get them? It’s really all it comes down to.
There’s more to it than that, but that’s that’s effectively we’re gonna ship them. We’re gonna have a three tier process where we go phase or fear phase process. Phase one, we’re gonna ship an envelope to them that just introduces us to them. We have to make sure it lands on their desk.
So we’re gonna take an hour to look for their mailing address and freaking make sure it’s theirs. Okay. Fine. So we start the mailing process then seven days later, we know the package is supposed to arrive there or we did FedEx tracking on it.
We got a ping that said, hey. It arrived. Now we ping them on LinkedIn at the exact same moment and start a message with them. And if they still don’t reply, phase two begins and that’s another mailer.
And that’s LinkedIn plus maybe we call them. We get their phone number. They have seen our name now. So all in, you invest three, four hundred bucks in an account but if you can see it being worth thirty thousand, forty thousand dollars, that’s money very well spent versus three hundred dollars on a Facebook ad that might generate nothing.
You know, it’s just this takes time but account based marketing is is an opportunity when you’re really trying to just land some business.
Yeah.
And never underestimate the power of, like, hopping on a call, calling someone, especially if you are retargeting them. Have the call me number right in, like, your Facebook retargeting ads. It’s like, call. Like, call me, and then take the call, which sucks. And now you have to take calls. And they’re like, I don’t know who that person is.
But yeah. Does that help at all, Katie?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Actually, I’m rewatching Mad Men, so the account based marketing is, like, giving me good. I’m like, yeah. I can see how this how this can work.
Nice.
Okay. Thank you.
Cool. No worries. And Jess says, do you have a separate number for that? Eventually. I think for now, I just put your number out there. And you can set it up. Like, Zoom will sell you a phone number, and you can get phone numbers all over.
Our sales team uses their own phone.
We just I’ve put my phone number out there, and it’s just like, you’re my number. It’s in my signature.
Yeah.
Just take the call. And then if you’re, like, inundated with calls, that’s a high class problem to have. That means people are seeing it. And then you can address, do I need a new phone number?
Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Okay.
And, oh, their dog walker is here.
Alright. Any any other questions that we want to cover today? Does anybody did anybody arrive with other questions or more of the same questions or panic that it’s time to hire? It’s really actually exciting when you start hiring. I think you’ll find that you will you will rise to the occasion and make money.
Jess. Jess, come on. Andrew, what’s up?
Yeah. I guess so, you know, I I know I’m a little bit of a special case here. As you mentioned earlier, like, health health issues is definitely a thing for me.
I guess there’s I I feel a little bit like I’m sort of straddling two kinds of worlds here. Like, one is to, like, grow, grow, grow, build an agency, hire people as fast as you can, and the other is like, okay. Like, relax. You don’t have an unlimited amount of, like, energy Yeah.
Emotional, physical, like, all all of that stuff. And so I feel like I’m I’m trying to sort of, like, okay. How can I still do this, but also but do it kind of, like, on a smaller scale? And, like, I’m picturing, you know, can I do this with I have a, you know, maybe a business manager, a VA, and a copywriter or something like that?
Like Yeah. Does it is that still a feasible path, or am I screwing myself by trying to, like, be in the middle of two different approaches, and I should be, like, choosing one or the other? Or is there a middle ground that still is, like, credible and worth it?
Yeah. So a couple of things. One, you do need to plan for a future where you have clients and someone wants to go on vacation. And that’s where redundancy goes a long way. That’s why I’m, like, hire a few copywriters. Okay. Okay.
Also, I can’t help but think that this model is better for you because there are times when you can’t work or you don’t have enough energy for it. Right? Cody is saying something similar.
I a hundred percent get that. There’s a reason I’m on Zoloft. It’s like real I they’re not the same as yours. Don’t get me wrong. But I get not wanting to just be at the mercy of, oh my gosh. I have to do all this stuff. That’s what teams actually help with.
If I didn’t have Tina coaching, I’d be coaching. And everyone’s like, no.
And so Tina frees me up so that I can do other things. And sometimes those things are no things. Sometimes it’s just like I need Friday off because I didn’t sleep last night, and I’m kinda dying. And that’s my feeling today. I’m like, but I got a full day because I’m hiring another person, and I need a few interviews today.
So that just means that I’m gonna be low energy tonight.
But the goal is that in interviewing these people in a month’s time, now marketing is not my responsibility like it currently is. Right? So I know it sucks right now, and I’d much rather be napping, but I’m not.
And that’s it. But every team member I hire frees me up to do more. It’s not there’s no luxury. I don’t have a VA or an assistant as much as I watch Veep and want my own Gary. For anybody who knows Veep and Gary, like, I definitely want one, but that’s a luxury. I’m hiring people who free up my time so I can work on the right thing. So I would look, Andrew, at the, worksheet.
Once I send it out, go on team time, that team time tab and look under the CEO column. You can see that as you grow into doing more and more of the business development stuff, that might you might not need all of the time showing there. So you’ll see that there’s, like, by month three with this model knowing it’s not gonna work as perfectly as a model shows, but it’s a starting point. Right? So with this you’ve got twenty five hours a week on business development.
The reality is you don’t need twenty five hours a week on business development. You might need twenty five hours a month on business development if you’re working on the right things. So you then instead do ten hours a week on client work, five hours a week on getting your team in a good place, and another five hours a week on business development. That’s a twenty hour week suddenly instead of a forty or sixty hour week, so this doesn’t have to be as bad as it seems like because that’s what employees are there to do. Does that make sense?
It’s gonna be hard until you do it.
Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. So I think, like, two having two copywriters and business, like, project manager type person, like, that that sounds manageable to me.
So Yeah.
And those copywriters, I mean, there’s a lot of good things to be said about hiring two copywriters together to work under you.
They’ll help you make content as well. Like, they’ll help in so many ways. Like, Carolyn was so useful as a team member, beyond just being a really great conversion copywriter.
Yeah. And she was actually in the copy hacker sphere for those who were like, where do you find one then? They’re there. So all of them are just like, I do good work, and I don’t wanna sell my projects anymore.
I just wanna, like, go work somewhere and do the work. Cool. I got you. But it’s not gonna be the same unlimited salary that you had when you were on your own.
Yeah.
I like to sound a lot.
Thank you.
Awesome. Thanks, Andrew. Marina, did you have something to add?
Well, I was just gonna say, yeah, where do you find these non copy hackers, copywriters?
And they are out there.
So it’s I mean, Carolyn was sitting in ten x FC. She would ask good questions.
So if I have access to freelancing school, look for the people who ask good questions.
And then, like, great. Like, you try to hire that person if you can.
Right. Start start talking with them. Yeah.
Yeah. Cool. Alright, y’all. Okay. I know we already have okay. We’re end of time. Oh, sorry.
Okay. Alright. So thank you, and be sure to sign up for the hot seat this Thursday with Ry to work through whatever thing is your biggest constraint right now or if you’re not sure what your constraint is or if it’s time to hire or whatever you’re working on.
You can talk through it on Thursday. Alright? And if you’re not in the hot seat, please show up for your fellow copywriters, and you can also, like, catch interesting insights by hearing what they’re going through and maybe even sharing your own story with them. Okay?
Worksheet
Break-Even Calculator
Worksheet
Break-Even Calculator
Transcript
Every person you hire at an agency helps you make money. That’s not true in other businesses. You’re gonna you start a software company, most of your team does not help you make money. They’re all expensive developers. They’re not helping you make anything other than usually the product they wanna make.
That’s not true for agencies. Every single person you hire helps you make money and I mean directly helps you make money. So if you’re at all good at selling and getting your team members to do decent work and the more you specialize, the easier that part is, then it’s it’s actually kind of it’s foolish I would say not to hire unless you have of course health problems or these challenges that you know are currently insurmountable.
But if you don’t have currently insurmountable health or other such challenges, dig in. It’s time to hire. Alright. So I’m gonna share my screen. We’re gonna talk about this calculator, then I’ll share this around with y’all afterward.
I’m gonna make it bigger in case you’re on a laptop or something smaller than that even.
Okay.
So this is a general way of looking at how to afford things and can you.
So it starts with a breakeven calculator just to see, like, when am I gonna actually start making money, and we’ll get into all of those across these different tabs. The general tab here is just you setting your goals for good, better, best. Now in the intensive freelancing, which I think everybody here comes from, except Caroline, I don’t know if you did it. In the intensive freelancing, though, I’d say ten thousand dollars for your core project, five thousand dollars for your retainer.
My assumption here is your retainer average is about six months. It could be more, and, of course, your numbers go up if it’s more. We wanna also break down what it costs to run a project and what it costs every month to run a retainer. So if you are and this is why you really wanna get time tracking down.
Every single minute that your team member spends on something they shouldn’t be working on is literally costing you profit. So this all comes from, a variety of things. So we have to figure out what your salary is, what their salary is, how much time, how many hours it takes to do a project, usually about fifty is what we’re trying to budget, and how many hours it takes to to do a retainer every month, usually about twenty. And, again, you can see that if this suddenly takes thirty hours, now the project just got more expensive or the retainer just got more expensive. It takes forty hours, people are just pissing away your time. Now a project that should have cost a little over a grand cost you two, and that’s real money.
Actual money that you could just not do the work and just sit there, and that would be better than you waste energy on low profit projects. So we don’t want to have our numbers go up, our hours go up as soon as they do. It’s really like, the math is right there. It’s a lot.
We don’t want that. Don’t do it. And, of course, the more, expensive people, spend time on things, the less profit you have. So let’s say if you didn’t have a VA or a junior copywriter or a copywriter working with you, that means a hundred percent of the costs are suddenly yours.
So let’s say instead, there’s that. So now with the project without me deleting those, the project is now forty four hundred bucks instead of being thirty two hundred bucks. Right? So it costs you twelve hundred dollars to keep hiring yourself for these projects instead of hiring help to get you there.
So when you think of that, it can be easier to think, oh, it’s gonna be expensive to hire someone. But the reality is it’ll cost you an extra twelve hundred dollars for you to just keep hiring yourself for this with these, like, basic numbers in play. So we don’t want to do that. And, of course, as your salary goes up now these are all in salaries that we have here.
All the taxes and other things that you might be paying. If you were at a hundred and twenty five thousand salary in Canada, you’re probably going to end up spending about a hundred and seventy somewhere in there. The government’s gonna take a whole bunch, and all the other overhead that comes with it. So a hundred and seventy five thousand now if you are even more expensive than that.
The copywriter salary doesn’t keep getting more expensive. If you hire someone for copywriter and biz dev, that doesn’t keep getting more expensive and the VA doesn’t keep getting more expensive but you do. So as soon as this goes up, if you’re at two fifty suddenly because you’re like I work hard then everything gets more and more expensive the more involved you are. So we don’t want to involve you more than we have to in things that you could hire other people to do and train them to do it.
But the question usually is, okay, well, Joe, when do I hire someone? The answer is usually you should have already, but there’s another way to look at it. So what I want you to do is think about and I’m gonna share this with you afterward and I want you just to, like, put your own numbers in here. And you might find that you have to adjust them of the math, etcetera.
That’s fine.
That’s totally cool. This was me doing this all in an assumption of what goes on for people when they follow a general rule of project plus retainer. Every other month you get every month you get one new retainer in the last six months. Okay.
So this is the good year project projection where the year was about five hundred thousand where we have twenty projects and retainers are at sixty. I think that’s what we’re working with here. They take fifty hours a week. This is the breakdown of hours when you go through this.
Profit is showing up here. You as the CEO, if you were the only person doing the work here, you would actually max out at month four. You’ve got two projects a month and three retainers a month. You max out on available hours.
There’s nothing else left. There’s not there’s no time for biz dev in there. Nope. Even here, you have five hours a week for biz dev this month.
So when we think about that, you’re not gonna be able to grow your business very long. This is why a lot of people get stuck. They get stuck when they’re like, wow. I’ve got a lot of great work coming in.
I can’t do the business development work that my business needs me to do. So now here I am. I’ve got nice profit. I’m making good money.
I feel good about that. Anybody who’s made, who’s had a three hundred thousand dollars year and then found themselves dropping down afterward or wanting to drop down afterward is this is what was usually going on for you. And it’s just the numbers, They might budge a little, but they don’t lie. So if you’re going to max out, if you’ve got a hundred and sixty hours that you are technically selling, then what would that’s great.
That’s fine. You get you get nice profit, but you’re burned out. You can’t grow anymore, so we have to go back to this month maybe where it’s, you know, decent profit.
But, again, you’ve only got twenty hours in the month for biz dev, which means you’re working after hours or, again, you’re not developing your business.
No partnerships, no marketing, nothing going on and wondering why you’re only at five thousand profit, why there’s really not much left after you pay yourself and maybe your very part time VA who helps you run things a little bit. So this can be a deceiving little area to be in. I don’t need people. I’m making five thousand a month.
It’s not enough to hire anybody because nobody will come in for sixty thousand dollars a year and really make my life easier, but let’s look down. Once we’ve actually hired someone and we are bringing them on board, revenue has gone up because we’re open and available to actually do business development so we can keep bringing more projects in, keep converting those into more business, get those systems down. Right? Now we’ve got revenue of fifty thousand and salaries of about thirty three thousand.
And that sounds like a lot, but your profit and this is with all overhead built in, your profit is actually much higher month after month after month after month versus this one little month. Right? So you end up with profit of about a hundred and thirty six thousand. If you’re thinking like a business owner, you’re thinking shit.
If every person I hire is worth lots of extra money to me, I don’t wanna end the year with a hundred and thirty six thousand dollars just sitting there. I should have hired two more people along the way because I could afford them, and they would further explode my opportunities to grow. And I could bring in somebody who is going to be my salesperson or somebody who does account based marketing to get bigger themes coming in. I could have done that because I have all this profit.
But I decided to camp out in this little zone that feels safe. I don’t have to hire people. Everything’s fine. I can’t really do much, but it’s okay.
Right? It’s wrong. You’re gonna burn out. This is where you burn out. This is where life goes badly even though it appears to be going great.
So the ROI, the focus of today’s lesson is what is the ROI of hiring? The actual ROI shows right up here, and this is taking time for all of the right work. So we have basically a layout of what your life would look like if you were to start doing this right away. You bring a VA on board if you don’t already have one.
This is the person who in the intensive freelancing when we have week three where we show you your VA is doing this, this, this, this, this, and this, and here are templates for them, that’s what they’re trained on. They’re doing that work here. Week one, this is broken down by weeks. Basically, four weeks at a time, which is great because in the fifth week, your clients don’t need you in that week so you could kinda sorta take that time off according to this schedule.
Now you’ve got forty hours a week as the CEO.
Your VA, you’ve got them in for about five or six hours a week because you don’t need them to do other things. Anybody who hires their VA to be the copywriter, I know a lot of VA’s end up writing copy. I don’t understand who hires a VA to write copy though, especially if you are a copywriter.
What I would say, if you were like, I like the idea of having a good year like this where I’m free to close two projects a month and convert a bunch of those into retainers that last about six months and my profit is really good and I can see myself building a really nice business that grows, okay, then you should hire a copywriter right now. Recruit one right now. It’s expensive.
It seems to be in the short term, but we already have the numbers unless you can’t close a ten thousand dollar project. And we haven’t even talked about what happens if those prices go up. The project doesn’t change. But suddenly, we’re making way more. We can bring our retainer up to seventy five hundred, make way more, and the project and retainer stay the same. So we can see that there’s a lot of leverage ahead, but not if we keep doing everything ourselves.
So we hire a copywriter.
We don’t have a biz dev copywriter person yet, but we have them on the horizon. It’s in our org chart. Very likely, it ended up in your org chart. This is how much time you’re spending a week.
You’re working with clients, and you’re also dealing with this person shadowing you. So we have that under team slash skills. Now client time needed for the month, we’ve copied over from here. These are client time needed for the month.
They’re over here now. So as long as our clients as long as we have a hundred hours spent on client work, we’re good to go, which we do. We’ve got twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, and then our VA is putting in this for admin work. Cool.
That’s covered. We can then allocate fifteen hours a week to training this that’s two full days of training this person who is going to be able to start taking on jobs the next month because you have spent an exhausting amount of time treating them because you planned your week to the hour. You’re not going overtime, forty hours. You’re not even putting in the normal sixty or eighty it takes to build this thing because it’s an agency, and every person you hire is somebody who turns their job into more money for you as long as you’ll spend the time on it and take the leap and hire quickly because we wanna get this person onboarded and taking on a little bit of client work a week.
So like every morning they’re doing client work and every afternoon they’re training, and you’re doing a little bit of the training to help them get there, but you know it’s important and we’re still solving for what our clients need from us. We’re still allowing ourselves to have business development time of twenty hours a month or a week, which is phenomenal when you think about how that would look if you were to manage your calendar that way. Now business dev also can mean administration and other things that help support the business itself, but it shouldn’t mean I’m doing payroll all the time.
You have to run payroll twice a month, and it’s for three people. So, like, it’s fine. You just have to hit yes on payroll, and then it’s done. But we are actually over.
We’ve got more than twenty hours spent on client work in this month. So that’s kinda cool, but we’re willing to do that because even though it means an actual expense to us, we allocated more than we were actually charging for and if needed to, we were training this person. So it’s an acceptable It’s the season of spending in order to get that copywriter trained up. You’re okay with it.
You can handle it. You still walk away with the business getting eighty four hours of your time in there and some VA time as well. Your team has been upscaled to the tune of a hundred and twenty hours and you participated in that which only makes you stronger as the person who’s doing the training. Then by month three, where we’re again going back to all of this and the salaries here match that.
So month two, you’re not making any money. Month three, though, you’re starting to make money because that person is now working more and more. So every one of these tabs all work together. So you can see that by the time you hire, so month four, you’re recruiting the next copywriter, month five.
And when this is happening, you’re gonna be like, this is too fucking slow. We have to go faster than this. There’s so much opportunity if I just keep hiring people. Month five, you’ll be like, I shoulda hired you three months ago.
And you may wanna actually think about that depending on what your pipeline looks like. But you’ve got month four where they’re being recruited. Month five, they’re hired and onboarded. And month six, they’re starting to do client work.
You can see that your client time is going way down in this period. You are now officially working on the business, not in the business, still doing things to help your team, but your copywriter is empowered to work directly with your new copywriter who also does biz dev work for you so that you’re not also entirely the person in charge of biz dev because we don’t want single points of failure. Why? Lots of reasons.
One of them is vacation time. Eventually this copywriter is gonna need a freaking break and you don’t wanna be the one doing that work when the copywriter goes away for a week. Nor should the copywriter come back and go, you didn’t do anything while I was gone. Do I have to do everything around here?
And then they’re burning out and you train them and now they’re ready to leave. We don’t want that. We want them to go on vacation.
Other copywriters this, they do this work. You might do a little more, but we’re even seeing that by this point, you’re not doing more. You’re still only up five hours. This copywriter was able to take over in that time, and now you get to start going on vacations too.
So you decide you’re gonna do this. We still have an excess of hours that we’re dedicating to clients. We’re not we’re not skimming or doing anything less than. We’re doing exactly what our clients need us to do if we’re keeping to the rules around how much time we spend on each project.
And if those change wait. Where are the rules? There. If these change, then none of this works the same way, which is why you have got to time track if you want ROI from your copywriting team in an agency.
And eventually, I want you to look at this and go like, I don’t wanna have these extra hours hanging out. If an hour of my time is worth what’s my hour worth? Ninety bucks And we keep a hun or we keep ten of them at the end of the month that we didn’t use that we like kinda pissed away on client work that we shouldn’t have been putting my time into, that’s nine hundred dollars wasted. That’s the copywriter at this, that’s five hundred dollars wasted.
And it’s time that we could have put towards something else. So you, to be successful in bringing copywriters on staff, anybody on staff, need to be a real stickler for this. We don’t want to be over. We want it to always be at zero.
This is a great month. We did exactly enough for clients and not a smidgen more, and we were able to grow our business and add new team members here. We’re a little over, so that that means we could do something in here or we could say, well, ten extra hours.
If we how much do we need for a project, for a retainer?
By the time we get here, we could take on another retainer if we can maintain this. What can I do up here to maybe squeeze this so we can add another retainer in sooner?
And maybe we budge some of these numbers around and maybe the team and skills part shifts a little bit so that you can take on another retainer. And now it’s the same amount of money that you’re spending, but you’re getting more out of it and making more. Does this all make sense?
It’s a lot of numbers in a spreadsheet, but CEOs love spreadsheets.
And there’s lots of different tabs to go through and we’ve only done this for Goodyear. We haven’t done this for better year or best year, nor are they updated so that we have got if this number changes, everything else here changes. So that’s not happening at this point, but you can imagine and hypothesize that if you charged a little more and if you sold a few more projects and couple more retainers because you know what you’re doing, because you’ve specialized, because you have time available to do biz dev instead of you thinking you have to do all the work yourself, that’s how we make money. That’s where the money comes from in an agency, and that’s why agencies are so profitable.
That’s why we’ve reopened agencies every every time we’re like, alright. Let’s do another agency. We got lots of people in the pipeline. Just gotta hire a bunch of copywriters, and then by the end of that, we printed cash.
So I’m gonna share this out with you. That is the takeaway.
I wonder what would keep you from hiring copywriters if you could see and see as we saw today. Let’s imagine that you’re able to spend more time on biz dev, biz dev being everything to do with partnerships. So you’ve got your workshop, and if you know you have thirty hours a week to do things like pitching, to partners, you could do your workshop in front of, doing all of your Instagram lives and everything that engages your audience, posting to LinkedIn, running your newsletter, all of that stuff that’s actually the most fun as a CEO, what’s really getting in the way of hiring and training copywriters to do the work so that you don’t do that work anymore?
I know not everybody’s hiring. Most people are not hiring at all.
What’s going on?
And it’s like a real talk. It’s not like, shame on you. But, like, what’s getting in the way? Is it finding copywriters?
Is it training them? Is it that you haven’t looked at the numbers and how unprofitable it is for you with your expenses and your skills to be doing this project and retainer work that it’s actually bad for business for you to do that work?
Anybody have any ideas?
Jess?
So I think for me, it’s two things. One is, yeah, finding a copywriter who would agree to get paid that much money because working with contractors, they’re definitely more expensive, but they’re really good. So then the oversight is, like, you you don’t really have to oversee them as much. So that’s the one thing. And then I think the second thing is like not knowing a hundred percent that the clients will come in. And for me, just being in this new industry and targeting a new type of client, I think I’ll get more comfortable with that as time goes on. But, yeah, it feels just kind of like a I hope that’s the way that it works, but I’m I’m not a hundred percent certain at this time.
Yeah. So the second part, hiring someone is an incredible forcing function.
You’re like, alright.
I got payroll.
I have to make payroll. I’m gonna go figure out how to bring more clients in for this. Without payroll, you can take the summer off. And then you’re like, that was a good summer, but I guess I still have to go do this business. Where do I start? Like, you shouldn’t have stopped. You should have been at this the whole time.
So there’s that. The second part is I think that you might be surprised by how many copywriters are out there who are actually talented and who would need your help learning how to do things your way with your unique, this is what we do and this is how we do it. But if you have that baked in, that training time so most businesses that are successful don’t hire the, like, unicorns that we talked about before.
You don’t hire the great copywriter early. You make you are that great copywriter. You’re making copywriter someone who’s really good at this, someone who’s really good at that, and then later hire them. And this this is, like, across the board.
Think of a business.
No business that I that I know of at all hires the best person when they’re first starting unless they’re VC funded, and that’s it. Otherwise, you gotta hire cheap and start training them. Every agency on the planet hires cheap trains, and that’s where you get, like, a bit of a churn. So every two years, you can expect that that person put in a crap ton of time learning under you, not making that much money, but then still going and then they’re like, cool.
It’s been a great two years. I found a cool job at a tech company. I’m gonna go take that. Of course you are.
But that’s why we’re always training new copywriters and bringing new ones on board.
So I think that part one isn’t actually true. You’re probably shopping in the copy hackers world. So what I would say is go outside of the copy hackers world. Those who haven’t discovered that their talents are valuable, go post that to LinkedIn, in LinkedIn jobs.
And then the second half, yeah, as discussed. So I get it.
I can tell you from the other side.
This is this is the reality. Go through to the numbers.
You don’t know what if people are coming. How what are you doing for marketing today? What are you doing to intentionally are you spending for one thirty hours a week on business development to marketing?
Right now, no.
No. How much are you how much are you spending a week on biz dev and marketing?
Not a lot, to be honest.
That’s why I’ve just been trying to work yeah. That’s why I’m trying to work through, like, all the intensive stuff and then get into, like, doing everything else. But yeah. Yeah.
So that’s where I knew you could hire you.
Yeah. Second version of you to do thirty hours of biz dev a week for the price of a hundred thousand dollars a year.
If you found a guest who could do all of the work with your brain for your audience and they cost a hundred thousand dollars, you get thirty hours of their time a week and they’re on, would that be worth it?
Mhmm.
It would be worth it, and that’s all it takes to hire a copywriter who frees you up for that. Right? A hundred thousand dollars all in. Most copywriters that work for CXL get paid fifty thousand dollars a year.
Fifty thousand dollars a year. They’re we’re not expensive out there, just in here. Just in this world we are. But out there, great talented copywriters are available.
Just stop looking within this network. It’s not gonna it’s gonna be expensive.
Okay. Yeah. But yeah. You were otherwise just sitting there doing client work. That is probably best outsourced to somebody that you train.
Yeah. Cool. But thanks for sharing that, Jess. And I think that’s the reality for everybody as well.
Katie says, I don’t feel like I know my offer well enough to hire or train someone in it yet. Also waiting on clients in the pipeline.
Yep. That’s the thing. The waiting.
Right? The waiting because you don’t get to do the marketing and business development at thirty hours a week would be, like, bliss. Like, you could do so much with a hundred and twenty hours a month.
There’s so much there. I wish I had a hundred and twenty hours a month to do that stuff. But yeah. And then I get that. I get that. You wanna make sure that you have everything ready to go to train somebody well on it. That’s fair.
What what’s getting in the way of you having everything ready to go? If it’s actually costing you potentially a hundred and thirty six thousand dollars in profit this year after paying yourself and team members well, if it’s costing you big profits, could you pause, go off to a little hotel room for three days, charge to the business? I know everybody has family and things they need. It’s a work trip. You’re going off and you’re sitting down with your laptop at a not good resort, I’m talking at a Holiday Inn by an airport, you sit there in your shitty room and you type out all of this stuff, you bring a big post it note thing and you’re drawing and writing and figuring things out.
That’s three days of your time, two hundred bucks a night, fifty bucks a day in food. It’s pretty solid excursion, a meeting with yourself in order to have what it takes to then move forward.
That’s my take on it. Marina, what what are you thinking right now?
I’m glad you did that spreadsheet. I have something similar on my whiteboard downstairs, and I was going like, figuring out those hours and going, I’m gonna run out of time. Like, I have not.
Yeah. So then thinking about, like, when to hire it. But my question then is, do you maybe this is really bad business sense.
Do you have a line of credit that you You should have two months for an agency, you should have two months worth of payroll in your account.
That’s it. That’s not true for larger businesses or for, like, other kinds of businesses, but that’s what you need there. So before you hire a person, especially if your pay is usually if it’s a thirty day invoice Yeah. If it’s sixty, obviously, that’s worse. But that’s sometimes the reality. So okay. But if you have two months payroll sitting in your account, you’re more than ready to hire someone unless you have reason to believe that the world is about to explode, which I know we’re all traumatized.
We’re all dealing with PTSD. Thank COVID and everything getting really weird. And then thanks ChatGPT for making it weirder right afterward.
But we’ve survived, so we have to, like, focus and breathe.
The world the the sky is not falling. And if it does, then it’s gonna fall for everybody, and then you’ll have to adjust course or, like, abort mission.
But we can’t build a business thinking the sky is falling. You just you won’t. You’ll go work for the government part time, like and your life will suck, just to be clear.
So I would say if you think you don’t have enough time to do that work, you you don’t.
Now what?
Just do less work? Yeah. But you still need the money. So we have to, like, hire and train people.
Right. Have those two months of salary ready to go. And that’s it. But you have to hire before you’re ready to.
Every agency that I run, I’ve put cash into it upfront, twenty thousand dollars upfront. Mhmm.
And that was what we ran with. Yeah. Okay.
That’s what that’s what I was wondering.
Like, if you put seed capital in just to, like Yeah.
Get you through that Yeah.
Bit and then You’ll take it back out, like, three of her months later.
It’s like a very brief loan from one business to the other.
And it’ll just work like a dog. So to Katie’s point about waiting for clients in the pipeline Mhmm.
And I said I’m in implementation. So I then would it make sense then? I just wanna know if I’m procrastinating or if this is, like, good sense.
So reaching out for workshops.
So then once I start booking workshops and hopefully getting some calls, so concurrent to that, starting to look for potential copywriters and continuing to, like, refine the process so it’s easier to train Yes, sir.
So that when I land a client, then I can bring that copywriter on.
Yeah.
And then just What we can say is if you’re not currently closing two projects a month, which is, like, on that spreadsheet, you’ll see you may be closing two ten thousand dollar projects a month.
If you’re not doing that, like, you don’t have pipeline that shows you can do that, then when we talk about the constraints that we talked about a couple weeks ago, to me, the constraint is you’re not bringing enough leads to close on the project or your sales process needs to be improved.
I want you bringing in at least two projects that you’re closing every month in order to be ready to hire. So once you have two months of those under your belt, I did two projects.
And, I mean, it really quickly though. It really quickly switches to, like once you sell the project, selling the retainer is easier, and that’s why the retainer exists. It’s not to, like, make your life harder. It’s to make it so much easier to sell more ongoing services that give you results to the same clients you just spent all that effort trying to acquire, where a ten thousand dollar project might, at some point, not even feel profitable to you. It should based on what we’ve already seen in the numbers, but it’s like, no. That’s the retainer is what we’re really going for. That’s the easiest money, especially if you do a great job with it and it lasts longer than six months.
But you need to first close those projects. So if you’re working with one core client, your constraint is you need more leads and you need more of those to close into your projects.
And then once you sort that’s like the assembly line. Right? That’s the factory of making your business and a client along it.
You can’t even do anything further. Nobody down the assembly line is getting anything. They’re all just sitting there going like, where’s the rest of where’s the shit? So you have to fix the frontage. You gotta start pushing more into the assembly line So lead generation is a big thing for you, which means if you are dealing with one client right now, or one or two, then and if they’re not the product based thing that we’re talking about here, then you should be spending a lot of your day on biz dev, a lot of your day, a lot of your week to get to a place where you can do all of this other stuff that we’re talking about. Does that make sense, Marina?
Yes. That is helpful.
But But I was like, it’s a little bit cart before the horse, I think.
So Right.
Yeah. But but but this is speed wins here. Like, go faster. Just like Right. Speed will win when it comes to building an agency.
I I can’t think of an example of when that hasn’t worked.
Get out there. Get your message out there. Put some lead gen forms together.
Start calling. Start putting your phone number on your website. Like, do things to get people to say, like, okay. Let’s do this.
Let’s do this. Not like this slow and steady wins the race. Slow and steady gets put out of business in, like, three months. Like, it takes no time for that to fall apart.
So up to. Okay.
Get those leads. Yamar Yamar everywhere. Andrew.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Yeah. All of these are are resonating with me. I have no problem coming up with, list of fears and reasons not to do things.
I think something that I’ve noticed that’s a little bit different from what anyone else has said is, I’m having a little bit of fear of, like, having all of, like, having a lot of clients at once.
So right now, I have three clients, and I’m subcontracting for one of them and have project manager for two of the others, which is helping but still not exactly what we’re talking about here. And, yeah, I don’t know. I I guess I don’t know. I I still feel very attached to the idea that each client is getting a good amount of my attention, and I really know what’s going on with them. And so, I guess I start to worry about the overhead the mental overhead, that comes with, you know, remembering, like, a bunch of different clients and what they care about and, you know, all all these details. So I guess I could use I’m I’m sure there are some practical things here that I have like, skills that I haven’t learned yet that where you still know what the client cares about, but you’re not necessarily all the way down the weeds the way that I am right now.
Yeah. So when you unpack me what care about looks like for you when you say that.
Yeah. I guess okay. So I guess it’s a couple different things. So on so in terms of what they care about, I guess that’s maybe not the right thing to that maybe that’s not exactly what I what I’m worried about.
I guess it’s like, when I think of the level of detail that I have to go into right now in order to, like, write a landing page for someone, you know, and I’m presenting the copy, it’s really detailed. It’s little things. It’s, you know, at the at the level of features and things like that. And, I guess, I worry that if I have more clients, I’m kind of juggling, like, am I gonna forget what this I don’t know.
I guess I’m just I’m just I guess it’s a it’s a fear, and I don’t maybe I don’t know exactly what I’m afraid of with that. But, yeah, I think it probably all just comes back to, like, a fear of responsibility, complexity, all of those kinds of things.
I I do. I get that, and thanks for clarifying.
I think about that transition from being the service provider to being the agency founder.
Do you know Will Reynolds?
No. I do not.
Okay. He started this big SEO agency out of Philadelphia and have the multiple locations.
He by, like, year end of year one, he was only showing up on kickoff calls and, like, important calls with clients. And this and, like, he was the face of his business. And if you think that wasn’t hard for him to say, like, okay. Some other people have to take over and present what what was good about it. What many things. One, it freed him up to work on the business and go out and be an authority.
The less you’re in front of your clients, like, this is just human psychology, the more attractive you are to them. The less access they get to you, the more once you do show up, they’re, like, excited. Like, oh, cool. Andrew’s here.
And I think that it would be valuable for you to start, you know, kind of meditating on that, like what would change for me my happiness and what signals would it give to my clients as well if I wasn’t the one who appeared to be doing everything.
So you think it’s valuable, you think, hey, they’re getting me and they don’t recognize quite that getting you is amazing. But once you start vanishing, now getting you is amazing.
So I didn’t show up for tons of my client calls at all. That’s what Rashi was for. That’s what Carolyn was for. That’s what Aaron was for. Other people did that job. Sometimes they fucked it up.
Delegate with risk of failure. That’s fine. But but way more often, they didn’t they nailed it. And so all you really have to do then if you’re worried about releasing that control, what’s the mechanism you can put in place to make sure that you feel in control? You show up for certain meetings and you do, like, recording reviews.
So you can record your client your team member presenting to your client, and then you have meeting with the team members under your team skills area on your sheet, that’s just like, hey. Let’s look at your recording, and let’s talk about it. And you can point out, here’s how you should behave differently. Here’s what you did great.
Here’s what you didn’t do great. That’s it. It’s a game tape for you. That’s it.
I know that sounds simple, but but the numbers are are like they’re just they’re not going to lie.
So if they’re if if you are too expensive put in front of your clients, which I would argue you are too expensive to be doing this work, then it’s like, tell your business brain you are mismanaging funds right now by putting yourself a high value copywriter on every project.
Isn’t that copywriter likely to burn out too? And aren’t they responsible for business development as well? And if they go, doesn’t our whole business collapse? I feel like these are those feel like bigger concerns than my clients might not get as much access to me, or they might not understand why that cross head was written that that way. Does that make sense, Andrew?
Okay. Good. I know I’m talking about this.
I get very passionate.
Muted myself. No. That especially that last part. Definitely, yeah, the cost cost is not doing it. It’s greater than that.
Okay. Cool.
Cool. Wonderful. Katie?
Hi.
Okay. This is all really good. Delegate with risk of failure. I just wrote on a post it to stay my periphery.
But I’m so I’m operating with, like I only have there’s a fix in my business.
Yeah.
That’s what I’ve got right now. I have oh, okay.
K. Yeah. And, so I’m, like, deep in this debt now. Like, that’s kind of all I’m doing.
I know I’m not moving fast enough. Just gonna say that.
But I’m wondering, like, how right now, yes, I have time to work on, like, training materials and, actually, what you described about having, like, a head down mapping everything out session, like, that’s kind of in my calendar for this week. Okay.
But I’m like, at this point where I have my, like, remaining nest egg, I’m like, does that does it make sense to think about hiring at all this point? I guess you said no if it’s two clients in the pipeline.
But would it be crazy to invest in ads at this point?
I guess, because I’m like, I I see the the hiring roots, and I trust the profitability of that.
Does it make sense with, like, limited funds to invest in ads to bring those clients in?
No. It yes. It makes sense. Have you done ads before for your services?
No. Okay. I bought a course, like, two years ago, and I have yet to watch it. So I’m, like, back also on my list of things.
Is it Claire Peltz course?
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It’s good, though. Okay.
So, yeah, watch the course.
Watch the short workshop I think she has. It’s actually better than the long one.
And it takes, like it’s an hour on a Saturday, and you’ll have an ad set up. And, actually, mine got rejected.
I remember when I did it. But it was I got I it was fun. I I took away enough that I could fix the parts that got rejected. But, yes to doing ads. Yes. Because you don’t have to spend that much money on them, but you really do have to figure out that offer. How are you going to get them to book a call?
Does it make sense to do retargeting ads? Is there a place where you can, like, buy a list that you can then upload? I know that sounds sketchy, but it’s actually not that expensive to buy a list.
And then it’s just a matter of uploading it, creating a look alike from it in Facebook.
And then yeah.
And I just don’t know if there are other places that are better than that other than I I talk about Facebook.
Maybe you meant Google Ads or something else or both.
So So my plan would have been add to the workshop with retargeting ads to my ROI calculator.
K. Yeah.
And then, yeah, and then that’s that’s as far as my plan went currently. And I’m it’s just like, in the background I have I wanted like, for example, Claire Pals is, like, a dream client that I would love to pitch this offer to. So I’m like I just am afraid, I guess, at this point of, like, burning bridges with prospective clients because I’m not like, that my, like, really, like, size are dream clients. I’m afraid to pitch them too early before I’ve, like, worked the kinks out of a new offer.
Then start with the semi driven clients.
Who’s the next tier down from Claire Pels? Who wants to be the next Claire Pels?
Yeah. I start there. And, I mean, we never talk about account based marketing here, but, effectively, you’re doing account based marketing. Right? Like, if you really want Claire Pels, you can really make that happen. It’s just it’s gonna feel like stalking and there’s going to be weird gifts involved.
But it’s all like a doable thing. It’s just, yeah. Think of it as account based marketing when you’re trying to get clients in right now. Like, account based marketing doesn’t scale as well as the rest of the marketing that we’re talking about, but it can actually help you land those key clients right away or the next tier down. So I’d Jess says, what do you mean by account based marketing?
If you even just Google ABM, account based marketing is where you say marketing to sales come together.
Instead of marketing pushing to sales, marketing and sales align, which is you sitting and talking to yourself and saying, like, okay. So here’s an account that we really want. What can we do to get them? It’s really all it comes down to.
There’s more to it than that, but that’s that’s effectively we’re gonna ship them. We’re gonna have a three tier process where we go phase or fear phase process. Phase one, we’re gonna ship an envelope to them that just introduces us to them. We have to make sure it lands on their desk.
So we’re gonna take an hour to look for their mailing address and freaking make sure it’s theirs. Okay. Fine. So we start the mailing process then seven days later, we know the package is supposed to arrive there or we did FedEx tracking on it.
We got a ping that said, hey. It arrived. Now we ping them on LinkedIn at the exact same moment and start a message with them. And if they still don’t reply, phase two begins and that’s another mailer.
And that’s LinkedIn plus maybe we call them. We get their phone number. They have seen our name now. So all in, you invest three, four hundred bucks in an account but if you can see it being worth thirty thousand, forty thousand dollars, that’s money very well spent versus three hundred dollars on a Facebook ad that might generate nothing.
You know, it’s just this takes time but account based marketing is is an opportunity when you’re really trying to just land some business.
Yeah.
And never underestimate the power of, like, hopping on a call, calling someone, especially if you are retargeting them. Have the call me number right in, like, your Facebook retargeting ads. It’s like, call. Like, call me, and then take the call, which sucks. And now you have to take calls. And they’re like, I don’t know who that person is.
But yeah. Does that help at all, Katie?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Actually, I’m rewatching Mad Men, so the account based marketing is, like, giving me good. I’m like, yeah. I can see how this how this can work.
Nice.
Okay. Thank you.
Cool. No worries. And Jess says, do you have a separate number for that? Eventually. I think for now, I just put your number out there. And you can set it up. Like, Zoom will sell you a phone number, and you can get phone numbers all over.
Our sales team uses their own phone.
We just I’ve put my phone number out there, and it’s just like, you’re my number. It’s in my signature.
Yeah.
Just take the call. And then if you’re, like, inundated with calls, that’s a high class problem to have. That means people are seeing it. And then you can address, do I need a new phone number?
Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Okay.
And, oh, their dog walker is here.
Alright. Any any other questions that we want to cover today? Does anybody did anybody arrive with other questions or more of the same questions or panic that it’s time to hire? It’s really actually exciting when you start hiring. I think you’ll find that you will you will rise to the occasion and make money.
Jess. Jess, come on. Andrew, what’s up?
Yeah. I guess so, you know, I I know I’m a little bit of a special case here. As you mentioned earlier, like, health health issues is definitely a thing for me.
I guess there’s I I feel a little bit like I’m sort of straddling two kinds of worlds here. Like, one is to, like, grow, grow, grow, build an agency, hire people as fast as you can, and the other is like, okay. Like, relax. You don’t have an unlimited amount of, like, energy Yeah.
Emotional, physical, like, all all of that stuff. And so I feel like I’m I’m trying to sort of, like, okay. How can I still do this, but also but do it kind of, like, on a smaller scale? And, like, I’m picturing, you know, can I do this with I have a, you know, maybe a business manager, a VA, and a copywriter or something like that?
Like Yeah. Does it is that still a feasible path, or am I screwing myself by trying to, like, be in the middle of two different approaches, and I should be, like, choosing one or the other? Or is there a middle ground that still is, like, credible and worth it?
Yeah. So a couple of things. One, you do need to plan for a future where you have clients and someone wants to go on vacation. And that’s where redundancy goes a long way. That’s why I’m, like, hire a few copywriters. Okay. Okay.
Also, I can’t help but think that this model is better for you because there are times when you can’t work or you don’t have enough energy for it. Right? Cody is saying something similar.
I a hundred percent get that. There’s a reason I’m on Zoloft. It’s like real I they’re not the same as yours. Don’t get me wrong. But I get not wanting to just be at the mercy of, oh my gosh. I have to do all this stuff. That’s what teams actually help with.
If I didn’t have Tina coaching, I’d be coaching. And everyone’s like, no.
And so Tina frees me up so that I can do other things. And sometimes those things are no things. Sometimes it’s just like I need Friday off because I didn’t sleep last night, and I’m kinda dying. And that’s my feeling today. I’m like, but I got a full day because I’m hiring another person, and I need a few interviews today.
So that just means that I’m gonna be low energy tonight.
But the goal is that in interviewing these people in a month’s time, now marketing is not my responsibility like it currently is. Right? So I know it sucks right now, and I’d much rather be napping, but I’m not.
And that’s it. But every team member I hire frees me up to do more. It’s not there’s no luxury. I don’t have a VA or an assistant as much as I watch Veep and want my own Gary. For anybody who knows Veep and Gary, like, I definitely want one, but that’s a luxury. I’m hiring people who free up my time so I can work on the right thing. So I would look, Andrew, at the, worksheet.
Once I send it out, go on team time, that team time tab and look under the CEO column. You can see that as you grow into doing more and more of the business development stuff, that might you might not need all of the time showing there. So you’ll see that there’s, like, by month three with this model knowing it’s not gonna work as perfectly as a model shows, but it’s a starting point. Right? So with this you’ve got twenty five hours a week on business development.
The reality is you don’t need twenty five hours a week on business development. You might need twenty five hours a month on business development if you’re working on the right things. So you then instead do ten hours a week on client work, five hours a week on getting your team in a good place, and another five hours a week on business development. That’s a twenty hour week suddenly instead of a forty or sixty hour week, so this doesn’t have to be as bad as it seems like because that’s what employees are there to do. Does that make sense?
It’s gonna be hard until you do it.
Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. So I think, like, two having two copywriters and business, like, project manager type person, like, that that sounds manageable to me.
So Yeah.
And those copywriters, I mean, there’s a lot of good things to be said about hiring two copywriters together to work under you.
They’ll help you make content as well. Like, they’ll help in so many ways. Like, Carolyn was so useful as a team member, beyond just being a really great conversion copywriter.
Yeah. And she was actually in the copy hacker sphere for those who were like, where do you find one then? They’re there. So all of them are just like, I do good work, and I don’t wanna sell my projects anymore.
I just wanna, like, go work somewhere and do the work. Cool. I got you. But it’s not gonna be the same unlimited salary that you had when you were on your own.
Yeah.
I like to sound a lot.
Thank you.
Awesome. Thanks, Andrew. Marina, did you have something to add?
Well, I was just gonna say, yeah, where do you find these non copy hackers, copywriters?
And they are out there.
So it’s I mean, Carolyn was sitting in ten x FC. She would ask good questions.
So if I have access to freelancing school, look for the people who ask good questions.
And then, like, great. Like, you try to hire that person if you can.
Right. Start start talking with them. Yeah.
Yeah. Cool. Alright, y’all. Okay. I know we already have okay. We’re end of time. Oh, sorry.
Okay. Alright. So thank you, and be sure to sign up for the hot seat this Thursday with Ry to work through whatever thing is your biggest constraint right now or if you’re not sure what your constraint is or if it’s time to hire or whatever you’re working on.
You can talk through it on Thursday. Alright? And if you’re not in the hot seat, please show up for your fellow copywriters, and you can also, like, catch interesting insights by hearing what they’re going through and maybe even sharing your own story with them. Okay?
People Management & The 10% Rule
People Management & The 10% Rule
Transcript
Today, of course, we are continuing on with August theme for Copy School Pro, which is the people powered month, how to get help and get them to be helpful.
So I’m going to share my screen. You got the worksheet delivered over the weekend. Tina sent that out.
So make sure you reference that and print this out.
Now this is today’s lesson is based on something that I only heard after a good six or seven years of managing people. And that was this whole ten percent rule, which is kind of crazy to me, and it might be to you. So what I learned is that every person that reports to you takes up ten percent of your time to manage. So if you’re managing five people, half of your day is half of your day, half of your time is spent, managing those people.
And that might seem like, woah. That’s a lot. But the reality is there’s a lot that goes into managing people if you wanna do it right. Then you look at companies like Google where there’s, like, twenty eight people reporting into one developer, and you wonder how that could possibly work.
But that’s a whole different story. I think that’s a lot of, like, you just make it work for various purposes and reasons and people.
I would argue that they’re probably not very well managed as people. Probably not getting a lot of time to talk about development, to get one on one with you or with the person who makes decisions about their career, who helps them through their career.
I think it’s really important to remember that everybody that you hire is on a career path. They’re trying to do something in their life, whether that is I’m shifting from a high stress job to a lower stress job or I’m looking at my career ladder and where I wanna go, they’re on a path. And so it’s important for us as employers to respect that.
Thus, we need to give them the time that we would want to have with somebody if we were working for them. So ten percent of your time is real, and, thus, if you are going to continue in an execution role, which I know so many people here are still like, I can’t give up control of research, of synthesis, of planning, of writing, of editing, of talking with the client. If you can’t give that stuff up, how are you ever going to really grow if people are at the heart of where you get that leverage that you need to grow? And so even if you only wanna have a small team, if you’re like, I only want three people reporting into me, that’s thirty percent of your time that’s gone.
It’s gone. So you really have to make sure that the seventy percent that is left is time really well spent. So it’s a really simple lesson today. How can we make sure that the more people you hire, even if that’s one or two, every single if you hire one, it is ten percent of your time gone, possibly more because you’ll be so partnered up with that person and because they’ll really depend on you as, like, a social, like, being in their lives, like, you are the only two that work together, you’re gonna get pretty close.
And if it’s not a close feeling, you’ll probably lose them.
So you have to think about that. And every time you lose somebody and have to replace them, every time you hire the wrong person and then have to fire them, this is all stuff that takes up time, and this is the stuff that will burn you out on people. So we wanna be realistic about people. If you want to get to a place where you’re going to make really good money without doing all the work, you’re going to need people. They’re gonna have to be the right people who are well managed and who feel like they’re part of a bigger vision of growing something. So meetings.
Meetings are how we communicate as remote team members. There’s there’s Slack, of course, but meetings are going to be critical. No one likes a meeting. It’s a rule. Nobody likes a meeting. Only middle managers like meetings because their whole job is to meet with people.
That’s not your job. That’s not an individual contributor’s job. You hire a copywriter. They don’t wanna have meetings. They’re also going to complain a lot about meetings. Oh, it’s interrupting my flow.
And and that’s fair, but the reality is you work in an organization, and that organization needs meetings to grow. So what you need to do is make sure you know what meetings you have and what meetings you don’t have because people adding meetings to your calendar is how things get out of control. No one cares about your calendar like you do. So right out of the gate, we need to make sure we’re making really good calls about what meetings you have as a team. And that could be starting with you as one person.
Having meetings with yourself is huge. So if you have a start of day stand up with yourself, that’s you sitting there looking at your to do list and determining what’s the most important thing to get done, when you can do it, blocking out your calendar for the day, whatever that might be. An end of day stand up could be a thing for you as well. And then just think of all the other meetings that you need to have. If you can start with a strategy now, then every single new team member that you hire, you can just hand this sheet over to them and say, this is how we do meetings here. So you choose, are you gonna do start of day stand up or an end of day stand up? Are you gonna do both?
I would recommend you choose one or the other and you make it daily and you keep it short. So we’ve got how long is it gonna be. If you have a ten person team, you’re gonna need at least thirty minutes for the stand up. And then later, you have to, of course, come up with your own agenda for that stand up.
Because the last thing you wanna do is go into a stand up and just have people say, today, I’m working on this. And you’re like, I could I could see that in Asana. I need to really, like, know what my stand up exists to do. Is it a social stand up to get everybody, like, jazzed for the day or to celebrate what we did at the end of the day?
So you need to decide that as CEO of your business.
When do you do a stand up? And that’s a whole team meeting, and how long is it? Do you need weekly team meetings or biweekly team meetings? What happens in a team meeting? What’s its function? What why are people going to attend this meeting and not be, like, upset that it’s interrupting their work? How long is that team meeting going to be?
There will be a need to have team meetings later.
If you figure this stuff out too late, you’ll always find your meetings are changing. And every new person who comes on says, let’s do meetings differently. Let’s do meetings differently.
You are not running a democracy.
You’re running a business, and you’re in charge of it. So you say, this is when we have meetings, and you get everybody on board. And if you have a good why behind that meeting, when it happens, why it’s as long as it is, what you cover, then it’s not a waste of time meeting. And then we’re not just adding in meetings for the sake of meetings.
So what does the stand up exist to do? What do your team meetings exist to do? When is there a time to socialize? What what happens there?
Things that you would normally do in an office where it’s lunchtime and you go get lunch together. It’s coffee break, you go get coffee together. What can you do to unite your team members? Do you need a large format team meeting, which is more of, like, even if you’ve only got, like, one person in sales, two copywriters, a smallish looking team, sales and account management.
They’re the same thing at this point.
It might feel like, well, all hands is, like, every single meeting we have. But an all hands meeting is a really good chance for you to restate your vision to the team, for individual team members to say, here’s how I fit into this world and, like, teach the rest of the team about their job. So there’s a lot that you can do with that that can better help you communicate. And then things like project briefings.
Those are just whole team meetings. Then you have individual meetings. Do you have a weekly one on one or biweekly one on one? How long is it?
Do you have coffee chats where you just sit down together? If your one on one is not meant to be a time to, like, talk about each other and what you’re going through, If it’s more of a get me up to speed on your projects, then when do you have time to just chat and be social with them? You are somebody that very likely they look up to in some ways. They’re usually going to be confused by the decisions that you make.
What you think is clear, they won’t think is clear. So there’s a lot that you have to consider in managing people, and just having a coffee chat is a good way for them to be like, oh, I think I understand you better. And for you to be like, oh, okay. Got it.
I see who you are now as a person. I’m getting to know you better. And that’s really critical for managing them well.
Quarterly performance reviews, annual performance reviews, what happens with those? Do you want it to be quarterly or annual? Gotta have a performance review at some point. People need to know how they’re doing or they’re not gonna feel well managed, and they won’t have a chance to say, I want more. I want less. I want clarity. Whatever those things might be that they’re looking for.
Goal setting.
They’re your team member.
You have targets for them, I’m sure. You probably have goals for where they go with their career in your organization, what they want to do more of. You won’t know unless you set goals with them. And Then, of course, once you set a goal, do you have growth check ins? Do you have, like okay. You said that you wanted to get better at email copywriting.
Great. We put you in ten x emails. Let’s talk about how that’s going for you. And then they can say, I haven’t taken it yet.
Okay. Now you can manage them towards taking it because they said that they wanted to. What’s getting in the way of them taking it? You have to manage them towards that.
So we gotta have our meetings figured out. Shorter is always better. If it can be done in fifteen minutes, do it in fifteen minutes. People expand to the size of a meeting.
And then comes basically this stuff. Just what are the days that you won’t work? So oh, sorry. Won’t won’t work.
Won’t have meetings. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Which ones are they? If you can set that up front, then everybody who joins your team knows.
We have no meeting Tuesdays, no meeting Wednesdays. I don’t know. You decide what those are. When do you refuse to have meetings as a team?
When is energy highest to do a person’s work versus when is it a good time for team members to meet? As you add in more people who are going to dictate what other people on the team are doing with their day, will that change? Should you always start your meetings at nine in the morning and only go until ten, and that’s a daily thing? That’s the only time, but you have to have rules.
You gotta have these standards set up or people don’t know what to do, and they just go populating meetings all over the place. And your clients are already gonna try to do that. Your clients already do not give a crap what your calendar looks like. So the more control you can have as an agency owner, the better.
Whether you think of yourself as an agency owner or not, if you have services that you produce, even if it’s a very small business, it’s still going to need to operate like an agency. And then what rules do you have about non work, non meetings? So Slack, email. When do you communicate?
What are the rules on scheduling a message versus not scheduling a message and just posting it? Are we allowed to send out anything after five PM or before nine AM? You have to have that rule. And if you have that rule, then everybody knows how to operate.
And if you don’t, then somebody ends up pinging the CMO of one of your companies that you work with at seven PM and interrupting how they live their lives, which is not good. It’s not a good look. So you have to figure that stuff out. It’s good to figure it out.
It really is a checklist with a circle around the thing that’s the starting point of your strategy, and then you just have to start to live it and then creating calendar controls. So this is part of no meetings days. Do you have all meetings in the morning? If so, then afternoons never get meetings.
It’s good to have those rules. Everybody can follow those really clearly. Are meetings only in the afternoon, and all morning time is there for you to work, get in flow, go through stuff while you’ve got high energy?
Or do you believe that your team might not actually show up until eleven in the morning because it’s remote and you don’t actually micromanage them. And if that’s a concern, then you might wanna start your meetings at nine in the morning and have an end of day meeting as well. That’s up to you and how you wanna trust people or not. Trust them.
It’s not your fault or their fault that you don’t trust them. It’s the reality of remote work. We wanna just make sure people are actually working during their work day. You decide that.
That is all. Then I want you to go away from this, and we’ve done in the intensive freelancing. I think it was in the intensive freelancing, but it was during a different week. Anyway, I know that at this point, you’ve drawn an org chart with where you’re going to go for your organization.
Now the time is now to go in and start circling those next hires. We’ve been talking over the last few weeks about who you should hire, how to find the constraints.
So if you can go in there and say, okay. My next four hires are this, this, this, and this, which means forty percent of my time is about to be eaten up with the meetings and other work that it takes to manage people. I’ll have sixty percent left. Is it time is my fifth hire going to be someone who can handle more project management, more people management? That does not have to be a full time person either. That could be a part time person that you hire just to make sure everybody is aligned with the business goals, everybody’s getting their stuff done, they’re feeling heard, etcetera, etcetera.
But you need to know who’s next because you need to know who’s about to take up ten percent of your valuable time. That is all for this week. The takeaway is every new team member takes ten percent of your time.
Alright. And it’s good. If they’re doing good work Mhmm. Then that’s great. If they’re taking up ten percent of your time, but they’re freeing up seventy percent of your time, then it’s a good trade off. That’s brilliant. Okay?
Alright. Any questions, thoughts, concerns?
No? Alright.
And if you think, oh, it’s just really not worth of hiring people. It really is. It really is. Even with all those things considered, it really is. Alright.
Question time. We have forty glorious minutes to talk about what you’re going through in your business. So if you have a question, please put up your hand using, I think, the react button so that happens.
Lower your hand if you no longer have a question, and we’ll go in order. Start with your win, please.
And if we have no questions, then we’ll just call it a day.
Are we good? No quest oh, Marina’s up. Marina, what’s your win?
I already shared my win, but that’s okay.
Hiring a brand person?
Hiring a brand person.
Dig it. It was yeah. Just had lots of epiphanies about what’s holding me back and how to get over myself so I can do it.
So Love it.
Huge win. And K. Thinking about meetings, and, yes, I agree with this.
Well, it doesn’t matter whether I agree or not, and it is true that every court takes ten percent of your time.
And I’m wondering about scheduling meetings. I can get really rigid about things.
And thinking about clients, this is not a problem right now ish, but I hope that it will be a problem, so I need to solve for it now.
If you say like, how much time do you leave on your calendar for booking client meetings? Do you say I’m only taking client calls in the morning? Also, I’m thinking about time zones. So I don’t love morning meetings, but all of my meetings end up being in the morning. So I’m like, okay. I just have to have morning meetings because that’s when all of the stuff is.
Yep.
Yeah. And eastern time zone, and they’re not gonna want a meeting at four because it’s after their work time. Yep. So knowing that, then I can still say that okay. What is my succinct question?
How many days do I have to allow for client meetings, and how flexible do you need to be to still have the client meetings, but also manage your calendar, and they’re also paying you?
So how do you That’s why you wanna manage your meetings the best you possibly can.
So you’re in control of when your team meets.
That is controllable.
So if you say, as a team, we never book meetings with each other between this hour and that hour or on this day and that day, etcetera, etcetera, then they know if they have a quick question to ask Marina or they wanna run copy by you that you only book meetings in certain times and always as close to an existing meeting as possible. Like, you have to set those rules up so they know that, because clients will be able to do a lot of dictating around the meetings that you have. Now if you are following having more of a standardized offer with retainer that comes off of that, then you set those meetings up all in advance.
And there’s less reason for a client to want to book an ad hoc meeting with you because there’s nothing ad hoc about what you’re doing. Everything’s planned. Everything’s good to go. Right?
And so if they want to have a meeting with you, it’s probably a meeting that’s critical to keeping them as a client. So they wanna change direction. Okay. Shit.
Okay. Let’s hear about this. Whenever they wanna book that, that’s fine. You can take that call.
And or else it’s, hey. This is going really well. We wanna add more. Or there’s something going on in their business. Like, hey. We just had a new product update, and people hate it. Our email strategy needs to kind of change for a second.
Okay. These are all good things to have, but it’s not gonna be like client has new idea they wanna run by me because that’s not the state of your engagement. Does that make sense, Marina?
Right.
So, basically, anytime a client wants to meet, you have to say yes. Like, if people wish to say no.
Yes. But that’s where you have to control as much of that as you possibly can.
Yeah.
Right. So set up the team meetings, and those are nondemocratic.
You work for me, and this is when we have meetings.
And people like it better when you just tell them things. So, yes. Yes. Democracy here. This is when we meet. Cool.
And then as far as clients go, they rule the calendar at that point.
Okay. And that’s that is in keeping with you charging more and delivering a retainer that is in keeping with what we’ve discussed. So Yes.
As a person paying you ten thousand dollars a month to optimize my emails, I feel like I should be able to talk to you when it’s time to optimize. Like, when I have a question about that, Slack is great for those quick questions, and you should default to Slack wherever possible.
But if I wanna sit down and say, Marina, we’ve got some concerns, then whenever. If I wanna call you at nine at night, that’s your job as an agency owner. You take the call. You give them your phone number so that they can call you anytime.
They’re not going to. They don’t want to call you all the time. Right. But at least they know they can.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Cool?
Yes. Fun.
This is my take on having run a couple agencies, obviously.
So I’m sure others have other takes on it. Not me, though. Okay. Adnan, what’s up? What’s your win?
So this is more of a look good kinda win. So there’s an agency that I, I think they’re based off in South America somewhere, but they have offices in London. But, anyways, through them, I got to write for Uber and Uber Eats.
Nice.
And then they contacted me last week because they have some Google projects Nice. That they want me to write for.
So it looks good. It’s not the most lucrative.
But Never is.
The win.
Big ones never are. Yeah.
Okay.
But I mean They know that.
They’re like, we’re you’re gonna want our logo.
Like, you would do this to create the logo.
The the chance out. Okay. Got it. Yeah. So that’s that’s the win.
The question I had, I I guess this relates to both the email services that I offer and also the pricing pages services that I will be offering Mhmm.
Is that over like, all the everyone that I’ve written emails for, I haven’t been able to get any feedback on how they’re performing or if there’s been a jump or any of that stuff. How do I kinda go out there and be able to quickly get that?
Like Why is it because you’ve been writing for large brands and you can’t get into their email platform to Yeah.
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There’s been a couple of smaller ones. I mean, I’m I don’t know how small they are.
Success dot a I, I wrote for them. They reached out directly, but Okay. They haven’t shared anything either.
So Okay.
It’s definitely gonna be tricky, if you can’t get into their tool, to actually look at that. And that’s fair. Uber’s not gonna let you into their email marketing platform. It might even be because I don’t know. I have I have no idea, obviously, what they’re using.
If they’re using something homegrown Yeah.
They’re not even gonna wanna look in that.
Like, you’re looking for a hard pass.
And then, otherwise, it’s just generally gonna be tricky across the board. So who can you get in with who can feed you that information?
And or what can you do at the start of a project to make it clearer that the point of contact you have is responsible for sharing results with you? And I don’t just mean hide that in the contract because no one reads it anyway, except for legal.
They’re not gonna say, like, oh, hey. Point of contact. Did you know you’re supposed to do this? They’re just gonna, like, whatever.
So you need to talk to your point of contact about that right out of the gate. Like, the only way we can do this together is if I can see how it’s working so that I can help you. Maybe there’s something else you build in there. Like, it’s the beginning of a retainer offer or something like that.
But they have to understand that you wanna see it in the first place. Do you know how many copywriters ask to see how it performed? Like, none. Like, nobody ever asked.
They’re just like, I don’t wanna know. I don’t wanna know, please. Like, I hope it did okay, and then they, like, run off. If you’re like, I need to know how this is performing, and here’s why, make it a why that they care about, not like and here’s why I wanna be able to add it to my portfolio.
I don’t give a shit about your portfolio. What do I care about? So make it about what they care about so I can see that I’m getting you the results we are talking about me getting you. And if I’m not, I wanna be able to fix that.
Okay? So I need you to get me results within x period of time of emails launching.
Also, if emails don’t launch, we need to meet so I I can understand why you didn’t send them, and we can revise so that they’re the right emails for your brand.
But you have to make sure that that date is really clear. If it’s a campaign, if it’s a one off, they should be able to share results with you in a week. So seven days after is the time limit you set. If it’s an automation, give it thirty days to run so you can start seeing what’s going on.
But you have to tell them, I need to see results by this time. If the point of contact is not the right person for that, because they’re like, I’m five people removed from whoever implements the thing, Then because they’re maybe in marketing and this happens over in, like, some weird developer part of the organization. It’s not even marketing anymore even though it was five years ago, but now it’s not etcetera etcetera. Things are weird.
Who do you talk to there? Who is in charge of that? And you just ask Ask upfront. And if they’re like, I don’t know.
I’ll get back to you on that, then follow-up. Make a note of it. Follow-up until you know that person’s name, and then you reach out to that person. Say, hey.
Hi. I’m working on these emails. You’re gonna implement.
We should love each other. Let’s have a coffee talk so I can get you on board with what I’m thinking. You can tell me what the limitations are, what you’ve tried. Does that work?
That’s their job. They’re in a large organization. They’re there to have meetings. They know that. So that’s what I would do and have done. Okay. That makes sense?
Thank you. Yeah. That makes sense. It’s always like a chicken and egg kind of thing.
Right? So I’ve lost out on some clients because even though my portfolio is good, the the the first question they’ll ask is like, oh, are you guys an agency, or are there any results can you that you can share with us? And then right off the bat, like, I’m on the I’m on the back foot, if you know what I mean. Yep.
Yeah. That’s the constraint. Right? So last week, we talked about constraints. And if you can say a big constraint to me closing business is that they always ask for results, then you gotta solve that.
Because if you solve that, then the pipeline opens up again. So we gotta take that problem and fix it. Great. You’ve identified.
A lot of people don’t know what where leads go. They don’t know why it stops. You know that. So it only makes good sense for you to prioritize that, and that’s where Joel’s old case study buddy was a good thousand dollars spent because a thousand dollars spent gets you a case study that you can now use to close twenty thousand dollar jobs across the board, or you do it.
You follow-up with clients and you say this. And, of course, if all it takes, if part of all that it takes is you adding into your process three new bullet points about at this point, I tell the client this. At this point, I get connected with their technology person for email implementation.
At this point, I follow-up with them for results.
Now you’ve got three little things added to an SOP that could unlock new projects for you. So I think that’s great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Alright.
Go add it to those SOPs.
Any other questions?
Are we feeling the quiet people in the room who I’m looking at?
No. I’m looking at them.
Awkward. Should I call on someone?
Nobody has any questions or concerns? Anything that they’re working on?
Caroline, I haven’t heard from you in so long. One, how was your summer?
You were off for a month. Don’t worry. I’m not gonna put you on the spot to ask a business question, but I do wanna know how your summer is going.
It is good. It is good. We traveled to we spent June in Asia. We were in Japan and Korea Oh. Which is very cool. Yeah. We sent a our oldest kiddo off to college over the weekend.
Wow.
Yep.
Banana’s amazing. How’s that feeling?
Good. He made it very easy to say goodbye. I’ll just leave it at that.
That’s amazing. Well, now you’ll have all this time to work on your business.
Yeah. I have three other kiddos, but yep.
Oh, I thought that was your youngest or your oldest, but No.
That’s my oldest. Yeah.
Oh, okay. Funny.
So I feel like I’m playing catch up. Yeah.
After the That’s fair.
Kids go back the kids go back to school tomorrow.
Amazing.
Glorious.
Okay. Well, it’s good to see you. I was glad to see you pop back in after your month break.
I yes. Cool. Awesome. Good to be back.
Anybody do you have anything you’re working on in your business that you wanna discuss? You were shaking your head madly that I shouldn’t call on you, and then I called on you.
Nothing nothing really great to share at the moment.
Okay. Cool. Cool. Yeah. Cody? Hannah? Stacy?
I don’t have any questions, but I’ve been working on Instagram posts.
Okay. How’s this going?
Last week.
It’s okay. I think I was getting a little far in the weeds with the Gary Vee book, and I’m trying to figure everything out. But I think I I think I have a decent plan at least now. But, yeah, it took me about ten hours last week to create, like, five posts.
Oh, wow.
Do you feel good about the posts?
Yeah. I mean, I’m writing them all out. That’s what takes the longest is to make sure they’re strategic. And then you have to since I don’t have, like, a team, I’m the one in Canva designing all the things and editing the videos, and it’s it’s a lot. Yeah.
Yeah. We’ll talk.
I mean, I know that it’s tricky to hire people to do that, but there’s, like, some really good short term.
Did you watch Shane’s training on hiring overseas?
No.
But I need to because you’re the second person who told me to watch that, so I’m going to do that.
Yeah. Definitely do. He’s built cool businesses that where the people that like, he’s getting to employ people, in situations where they need employment, and it’s just cheaper than it is here. Life is just cheaper in the Philippines, and so it’s cheaper to hire someone there, and he’s done really, really good work with it.
So, yeah, watch that. Yeah. It doesn’t have to be someone local and expensive who spends four dollars on a nectarine.
Can you believe the cost of fruit?
No. It’s crazy.
I know. Okay. Well, cool. Cody, I’m glad you’re working on that. I know it’s, social.
I’m ready.
I have, like, so many videos I have to record this week. I’m dreading it. Yeah.
Hannah, you have a question?
Yeah. I’ve got a win first. Okay. Great.
I set up a Instagram account on Friday.
Nice.
And I have, eleven followers now.
Amazing. That’s great.
Yeah. So Yeah. So that is a big win because I was quite resistant because I used to have an Instagram account, for for a lot of years and then lost it all.
So I haven’t had an Instagram for maybe about three years, I think.
Mhmm. But I got one now, and I’m Yeah. I’m happy. I’m just Great.
Sharing the same stuff, that I usually share on LinkedIn anyway.
So it’s easy with Yeah.
Just repurpose it. Did you read day trading attention, which we talked about last week?
No.
Gary needs a new book?
No. It’s I think I what I like about it so far, and I’ve not done it, but is this new take that the algorithms don’t care as much about your followers as so everybody’s always scared to get on social. They’re like, I don’t have any followers. It’s gonna take forever to get them.
But the algorithms are shifting in such a way that as long as you’re making content someone wants to see and will, like, pause and stay on, then you get served up to all these new audiences. So I find that encouraging because that was why I held off on Instagram as well. I’m like, well, why now? I’ve spent all this time over on Twitter, and Elon messed the whole thing up, and now I have to go find a new platform.
And so I didn’t want to, and then I just did. And now I’m, like, relieved to hear that it doesn’t matter how many followers you have. It’s always a good signal, but it’s not critical. So yeah. Cool.
I think, like, in a year’s tie in a year’s time, two years’ time, I’m gonna be really pleased that I did it. So that’s what I’m thinking.
Agreed. Yes.
I I look back now. So I set I I started LinkedIn in two thousand and nineteen, and I’ve got nearly sixteen thousand followers at all, like, all my friends.
That’s why that sounds weird.
But, and so and I’m and I look back, and I think I’m so pleased I did that back then. So pleased. Yeah. So, yeah, my question, you’ve just mentioned I just heard you mention the words, Joel’s case study earned a thousand dollars and spending a thousand dollars.
And I I don’t what what does that mean?
Sorry. So Joel Kletke is a copywriter, and he had a business called Case Study Buddy, but he just sold that. So it’s not his anymore. It’s someone else’s now. So it’s case study buddy by so and so.
And it was a thousand bucks a year or two ago. I don’t know what it is right now, but a thousand and you would, like, give them contact information for a person that you had worked with, and they would do all the work of making the case study. So they did this for a lot of different clients. And, yeah, it’s like, if we can find a thousand dollars to take a big, like, bite out of a big problem that we have, that seems like money really, really well spent.
So but it’s yeah. Joel Pletke, case study buddy, thousand bucks to get a case study made.
Yeah. Nice. And they would do everything too. Like, I used them for one case study. It turned out great.
And I would just have to connect them with this client of mine, and they just took over from there. Made the whole thing easy.
Yeah. Right. Okay. So they reach out to your client and then do everything for you.
Yeah. I think I had to warm intro them, just an email connecting the two. I I had to make sure that the client was okay with giving a case study first, but then I didn’t have to get on a call. I all of the tedium of that.
Man, Joel did a presentation at Content Jam, I think it was, a few years ago on making a case study, and there’s a lot. There’s a lot to her. It’s like, just pay just pay someone to do this for you. So I would look into that if you’re looking for case studies. Yeah.
Interesting. Thank you. Sure.
Thanks, Anna.
Anything else? Anyone? Nothing from Stacy. I saw you came on camera when I said your name.
That was just my courtesy showing my face because you said my name.
That’s all. I thought it might be. I thought it might be. Alright. Cool. Well, let us wrap up today’s session.
We have a whole bunch of people joining Coffee School Pro in September, which is our next official, like, intake.
So we have one more call without a whole bunch of new people in it. So bring any questions that you’ve had that you’ve wanted to tackle, because it’s gonna be a little a little bit noisier, not crazy noisier, little bit noisier.
Cool. Otherwise, hope everybody has a really good rest of your day. Alright, Jill?
Take care. Bye.
Worksheet
Transcript
Today, of course, we are continuing on with August theme for Copy School Pro, which is the people powered month, how to get help and get them to be helpful.
So I’m going to share my screen. You got the worksheet delivered over the weekend. Tina sent that out.
So make sure you reference that and print this out.
Now this is today’s lesson is based on something that I only heard after a good six or seven years of managing people. And that was this whole ten percent rule, which is kind of crazy to me, and it might be to you. So what I learned is that every person that reports to you takes up ten percent of your time to manage. So if you’re managing five people, half of your day is half of your day, half of your time is spent, managing those people.
And that might seem like, woah. That’s a lot. But the reality is there’s a lot that goes into managing people if you wanna do it right. Then you look at companies like Google where there’s, like, twenty eight people reporting into one developer, and you wonder how that could possibly work.
But that’s a whole different story. I think that’s a lot of, like, you just make it work for various purposes and reasons and people.
I would argue that they’re probably not very well managed as people. Probably not getting a lot of time to talk about development, to get one on one with you or with the person who makes decisions about their career, who helps them through their career.
I think it’s really important to remember that everybody that you hire is on a career path. They’re trying to do something in their life, whether that is I’m shifting from a high stress job to a lower stress job or I’m looking at my career ladder and where I wanna go, they’re on a path. And so it’s important for us as employers to respect that.
Thus, we need to give them the time that we would want to have with somebody if we were working for them. So ten percent of your time is real, and, thus, if you are going to continue in an execution role, which I know so many people here are still like, I can’t give up control of research, of synthesis, of planning, of writing, of editing, of talking with the client. If you can’t give that stuff up, how are you ever going to really grow if people are at the heart of where you get that leverage that you need to grow? And so even if you only wanna have a small team, if you’re like, I only want three people reporting into me, that’s thirty percent of your time that’s gone.
It’s gone. So you really have to make sure that the seventy percent that is left is time really well spent. So it’s a really simple lesson today. How can we make sure that the more people you hire, even if that’s one or two, every single if you hire one, it is ten percent of your time gone, possibly more because you’ll be so partnered up with that person and because they’ll really depend on you as, like, a social, like, being in their lives, like, you are the only two that work together, you’re gonna get pretty close.
And if it’s not a close feeling, you’ll probably lose them.
So you have to think about that. And every time you lose somebody and have to replace them, every time you hire the wrong person and then have to fire them, this is all stuff that takes up time, and this is the stuff that will burn you out on people. So we wanna be realistic about people. If you want to get to a place where you’re going to make really good money without doing all the work, you’re going to need people. They’re gonna have to be the right people who are well managed and who feel like they’re part of a bigger vision of growing something. So meetings.
Meetings are how we communicate as remote team members. There’s there’s Slack, of course, but meetings are going to be critical. No one likes a meeting. It’s a rule. Nobody likes a meeting. Only middle managers like meetings because their whole job is to meet with people.
That’s not your job. That’s not an individual contributor’s job. You hire a copywriter. They don’t wanna have meetings. They’re also going to complain a lot about meetings. Oh, it’s interrupting my flow.
And and that’s fair, but the reality is you work in an organization, and that organization needs meetings to grow. So what you need to do is make sure you know what meetings you have and what meetings you don’t have because people adding meetings to your calendar is how things get out of control. No one cares about your calendar like you do. So right out of the gate, we need to make sure we’re making really good calls about what meetings you have as a team. And that could be starting with you as one person.
Having meetings with yourself is huge. So if you have a start of day stand up with yourself, that’s you sitting there looking at your to do list and determining what’s the most important thing to get done, when you can do it, blocking out your calendar for the day, whatever that might be. An end of day stand up could be a thing for you as well. And then just think of all the other meetings that you need to have. If you can start with a strategy now, then every single new team member that you hire, you can just hand this sheet over to them and say, this is how we do meetings here. So you choose, are you gonna do start of day stand up or an end of day stand up? Are you gonna do both?
I would recommend you choose one or the other and you make it daily and you keep it short. So we’ve got how long is it gonna be. If you have a ten person team, you’re gonna need at least thirty minutes for the stand up. And then later, you have to, of course, come up with your own agenda for that stand up.
Because the last thing you wanna do is go into a stand up and just have people say, today, I’m working on this. And you’re like, I could I could see that in Asana. I need to really, like, know what my stand up exists to do. Is it a social stand up to get everybody, like, jazzed for the day or to celebrate what we did at the end of the day?
So you need to decide that as CEO of your business.
When do you do a stand up? And that’s a whole team meeting, and how long is it? Do you need weekly team meetings or biweekly team meetings? What happens in a team meeting? What’s its function? What why are people going to attend this meeting and not be, like, upset that it’s interrupting their work? How long is that team meeting going to be?
There will be a need to have team meetings later.
If you figure this stuff out too late, you’ll always find your meetings are changing. And every new person who comes on says, let’s do meetings differently. Let’s do meetings differently.
You are not running a democracy.
You’re running a business, and you’re in charge of it. So you say, this is when we have meetings, and you get everybody on board. And if you have a good why behind that meeting, when it happens, why it’s as long as it is, what you cover, then it’s not a waste of time meeting. And then we’re not just adding in meetings for the sake of meetings.
So what does the stand up exist to do? What do your team meetings exist to do? When is there a time to socialize? What what happens there?
Things that you would normally do in an office where it’s lunchtime and you go get lunch together. It’s coffee break, you go get coffee together. What can you do to unite your team members? Do you need a large format team meeting, which is more of, like, even if you’ve only got, like, one person in sales, two copywriters, a smallish looking team, sales and account management.
They’re the same thing at this point.
It might feel like, well, all hands is, like, every single meeting we have. But an all hands meeting is a really good chance for you to restate your vision to the team, for individual team members to say, here’s how I fit into this world and, like, teach the rest of the team about their job. So there’s a lot that you can do with that that can better help you communicate. And then things like project briefings.
Those are just whole team meetings. Then you have individual meetings. Do you have a weekly one on one or biweekly one on one? How long is it?
Do you have coffee chats where you just sit down together? If your one on one is not meant to be a time to, like, talk about each other and what you’re going through, If it’s more of a get me up to speed on your projects, then when do you have time to just chat and be social with them? You are somebody that very likely they look up to in some ways. They’re usually going to be confused by the decisions that you make.
What you think is clear, they won’t think is clear. So there’s a lot that you have to consider in managing people, and just having a coffee chat is a good way for them to be like, oh, I think I understand you better. And for you to be like, oh, okay. Got it.
I see who you are now as a person. I’m getting to know you better. And that’s really critical for managing them well.
Quarterly performance reviews, annual performance reviews, what happens with those? Do you want it to be quarterly or annual? Gotta have a performance review at some point. People need to know how they’re doing or they’re not gonna feel well managed, and they won’t have a chance to say, I want more. I want less. I want clarity. Whatever those things might be that they’re looking for.
Goal setting.
They’re your team member.
You have targets for them, I’m sure. You probably have goals for where they go with their career in your organization, what they want to do more of. You won’t know unless you set goals with them. And Then, of course, once you set a goal, do you have growth check ins? Do you have, like okay. You said that you wanted to get better at email copywriting.
Great. We put you in ten x emails. Let’s talk about how that’s going for you. And then they can say, I haven’t taken it yet.
Okay. Now you can manage them towards taking it because they said that they wanted to. What’s getting in the way of them taking it? You have to manage them towards that.
So we gotta have our meetings figured out. Shorter is always better. If it can be done in fifteen minutes, do it in fifteen minutes. People expand to the size of a meeting.
And then comes basically this stuff. Just what are the days that you won’t work? So oh, sorry. Won’t won’t work.
Won’t have meetings. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Which ones are they? If you can set that up front, then everybody who joins your team knows.
We have no meeting Tuesdays, no meeting Wednesdays. I don’t know. You decide what those are. When do you refuse to have meetings as a team?
When is energy highest to do a person’s work versus when is it a good time for team members to meet? As you add in more people who are going to dictate what other people on the team are doing with their day, will that change? Should you always start your meetings at nine in the morning and only go until ten, and that’s a daily thing? That’s the only time, but you have to have rules.
You gotta have these standards set up or people don’t know what to do, and they just go populating meetings all over the place. And your clients are already gonna try to do that. Your clients already do not give a crap what your calendar looks like. So the more control you can have as an agency owner, the better.
Whether you think of yourself as an agency owner or not, if you have services that you produce, even if it’s a very small business, it’s still going to need to operate like an agency. And then what rules do you have about non work, non meetings? So Slack, email. When do you communicate?
What are the rules on scheduling a message versus not scheduling a message and just posting it? Are we allowed to send out anything after five PM or before nine AM? You have to have that rule. And if you have that rule, then everybody knows how to operate.
And if you don’t, then somebody ends up pinging the CMO of one of your companies that you work with at seven PM and interrupting how they live their lives, which is not good. It’s not a good look. So you have to figure that stuff out. It’s good to figure it out.
It really is a checklist with a circle around the thing that’s the starting point of your strategy, and then you just have to start to live it and then creating calendar controls. So this is part of no meetings days. Do you have all meetings in the morning? If so, then afternoons never get meetings.
It’s good to have those rules. Everybody can follow those really clearly. Are meetings only in the afternoon, and all morning time is there for you to work, get in flow, go through stuff while you’ve got high energy?
Or do you believe that your team might not actually show up until eleven in the morning because it’s remote and you don’t actually micromanage them. And if that’s a concern, then you might wanna start your meetings at nine in the morning and have an end of day meeting as well. That’s up to you and how you wanna trust people or not. Trust them.
It’s not your fault or their fault that you don’t trust them. It’s the reality of remote work. We wanna just make sure people are actually working during their work day. You decide that.
That is all. Then I want you to go away from this, and we’ve done in the intensive freelancing. I think it was in the intensive freelancing, but it was during a different week. Anyway, I know that at this point, you’ve drawn an org chart with where you’re going to go for your organization.
Now the time is now to go in and start circling those next hires. We’ve been talking over the last few weeks about who you should hire, how to find the constraints.
So if you can go in there and say, okay. My next four hires are this, this, this, and this, which means forty percent of my time is about to be eaten up with the meetings and other work that it takes to manage people. I’ll have sixty percent left. Is it time is my fifth hire going to be someone who can handle more project management, more people management? That does not have to be a full time person either. That could be a part time person that you hire just to make sure everybody is aligned with the business goals, everybody’s getting their stuff done, they’re feeling heard, etcetera, etcetera.
But you need to know who’s next because you need to know who’s about to take up ten percent of your valuable time. That is all for this week. The takeaway is every new team member takes ten percent of your time.
Alright. And it’s good. If they’re doing good work Mhmm. Then that’s great. If they’re taking up ten percent of your time, but they’re freeing up seventy percent of your time, then it’s a good trade off. That’s brilliant. Okay?
Alright. Any questions, thoughts, concerns?
No? Alright.
And if you think, oh, it’s just really not worth of hiring people. It really is. It really is. Even with all those things considered, it really is. Alright.
Question time. We have forty glorious minutes to talk about what you’re going through in your business. So if you have a question, please put up your hand using, I think, the react button so that happens.
Lower your hand if you no longer have a question, and we’ll go in order. Start with your win, please.
And if we have no questions, then we’ll just call it a day.
Are we good? No quest oh, Marina’s up. Marina, what’s your win?
I already shared my win, but that’s okay.
Hiring a brand person?
Hiring a brand person.
Dig it. It was yeah. Just had lots of epiphanies about what’s holding me back and how to get over myself so I can do it.
So Love it.
Huge win. And K. Thinking about meetings, and, yes, I agree with this.
Well, it doesn’t matter whether I agree or not, and it is true that every court takes ten percent of your time.
And I’m wondering about scheduling meetings. I can get really rigid about things.
And thinking about clients, this is not a problem right now ish, but I hope that it will be a problem, so I need to solve for it now.
If you say like, how much time do you leave on your calendar for booking client meetings? Do you say I’m only taking client calls in the morning? Also, I’m thinking about time zones. So I don’t love morning meetings, but all of my meetings end up being in the morning. So I’m like, okay. I just have to have morning meetings because that’s when all of the stuff is.
Yep.
Yeah. And eastern time zone, and they’re not gonna want a meeting at four because it’s after their work time. Yep. So knowing that, then I can still say that okay. What is my succinct question?
How many days do I have to allow for client meetings, and how flexible do you need to be to still have the client meetings, but also manage your calendar, and they’re also paying you?
So how do you That’s why you wanna manage your meetings the best you possibly can.
So you’re in control of when your team meets.
That is controllable.
So if you say, as a team, we never book meetings with each other between this hour and that hour or on this day and that day, etcetera, etcetera, then they know if they have a quick question to ask Marina or they wanna run copy by you that you only book meetings in certain times and always as close to an existing meeting as possible. Like, you have to set those rules up so they know that, because clients will be able to do a lot of dictating around the meetings that you have. Now if you are following having more of a standardized offer with retainer that comes off of that, then you set those meetings up all in advance.
And there’s less reason for a client to want to book an ad hoc meeting with you because there’s nothing ad hoc about what you’re doing. Everything’s planned. Everything’s good to go. Right?
And so if they want to have a meeting with you, it’s probably a meeting that’s critical to keeping them as a client. So they wanna change direction. Okay. Shit.
Okay. Let’s hear about this. Whenever they wanna book that, that’s fine. You can take that call.
And or else it’s, hey. This is going really well. We wanna add more. Or there’s something going on in their business. Like, hey. We just had a new product update, and people hate it. Our email strategy needs to kind of change for a second.
Okay. These are all good things to have, but it’s not gonna be like client has new idea they wanna run by me because that’s not the state of your engagement. Does that make sense, Marina?
Right.
So, basically, anytime a client wants to meet, you have to say yes. Like, if people wish to say no.
Yes. But that’s where you have to control as much of that as you possibly can.
Yeah.
Right. So set up the team meetings, and those are nondemocratic.
You work for me, and this is when we have meetings.
And people like it better when you just tell them things. So, yes. Yes. Democracy here. This is when we meet. Cool.
And then as far as clients go, they rule the calendar at that point.
Okay. And that’s that is in keeping with you charging more and delivering a retainer that is in keeping with what we’ve discussed. So Yes.
As a person paying you ten thousand dollars a month to optimize my emails, I feel like I should be able to talk to you when it’s time to optimize. Like, when I have a question about that, Slack is great for those quick questions, and you should default to Slack wherever possible.
But if I wanna sit down and say, Marina, we’ve got some concerns, then whenever. If I wanna call you at nine at night, that’s your job as an agency owner. You take the call. You give them your phone number so that they can call you anytime.
They’re not going to. They don’t want to call you all the time. Right. But at least they know they can.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Cool?
Yes. Fun.
This is my take on having run a couple agencies, obviously.
So I’m sure others have other takes on it. Not me, though. Okay. Adnan, what’s up? What’s your win?
So this is more of a look good kinda win. So there’s an agency that I, I think they’re based off in South America somewhere, but they have offices in London. But, anyways, through them, I got to write for Uber and Uber Eats.
Nice.
And then they contacted me last week because they have some Google projects Nice. That they want me to write for.
So it looks good. It’s not the most lucrative.
But Never is.
The win.
Big ones never are. Yeah.
Okay.
But I mean They know that.
They’re like, we’re you’re gonna want our logo.
Like, you would do this to create the logo.
The the chance out. Okay. Got it. Yeah. So that’s that’s the win.
The question I had, I I guess this relates to both the email services that I offer and also the pricing pages services that I will be offering Mhmm.
Is that over like, all the everyone that I’ve written emails for, I haven’t been able to get any feedback on how they’re performing or if there’s been a jump or any of that stuff. How do I kinda go out there and be able to quickly get that?
Like Why is it because you’ve been writing for large brands and you can’t get into their email platform to Yeah.
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There’s been a couple of smaller ones. I mean, I’m I don’t know how small they are.
Success dot a I, I wrote for them. They reached out directly, but Okay. They haven’t shared anything either.
So Okay.
It’s definitely gonna be tricky, if you can’t get into their tool, to actually look at that. And that’s fair. Uber’s not gonna let you into their email marketing platform. It might even be because I don’t know. I have I have no idea, obviously, what they’re using.
If they’re using something homegrown Yeah.
They’re not even gonna wanna look in that.
Like, you’re looking for a hard pass.
And then, otherwise, it’s just generally gonna be tricky across the board. So who can you get in with who can feed you that information?
And or what can you do at the start of a project to make it clearer that the point of contact you have is responsible for sharing results with you? And I don’t just mean hide that in the contract because no one reads it anyway, except for legal.
They’re not gonna say, like, oh, hey. Point of contact. Did you know you’re supposed to do this? They’re just gonna, like, whatever.
So you need to talk to your point of contact about that right out of the gate. Like, the only way we can do this together is if I can see how it’s working so that I can help you. Maybe there’s something else you build in there. Like, it’s the beginning of a retainer offer or something like that.
But they have to understand that you wanna see it in the first place. Do you know how many copywriters ask to see how it performed? Like, none. Like, nobody ever asked.
They’re just like, I don’t wanna know. I don’t wanna know, please. Like, I hope it did okay, and then they, like, run off. If you’re like, I need to know how this is performing, and here’s why, make it a why that they care about, not like and here’s why I wanna be able to add it to my portfolio.
I don’t give a shit about your portfolio. What do I care about? So make it about what they care about so I can see that I’m getting you the results we are talking about me getting you. And if I’m not, I wanna be able to fix that.
Okay? So I need you to get me results within x period of time of emails launching.
Also, if emails don’t launch, we need to meet so I I can understand why you didn’t send them, and we can revise so that they’re the right emails for your brand.
But you have to make sure that that date is really clear. If it’s a campaign, if it’s a one off, they should be able to share results with you in a week. So seven days after is the time limit you set. If it’s an automation, give it thirty days to run so you can start seeing what’s going on.
But you have to tell them, I need to see results by this time. If the point of contact is not the right person for that, because they’re like, I’m five people removed from whoever implements the thing, Then because they’re maybe in marketing and this happens over in, like, some weird developer part of the organization. It’s not even marketing anymore even though it was five years ago, but now it’s not etcetera etcetera. Things are weird.
Who do you talk to there? Who is in charge of that? And you just ask Ask upfront. And if they’re like, I don’t know.
I’ll get back to you on that, then follow-up. Make a note of it. Follow-up until you know that person’s name, and then you reach out to that person. Say, hey.
Hi. I’m working on these emails. You’re gonna implement.
We should love each other. Let’s have a coffee talk so I can get you on board with what I’m thinking. You can tell me what the limitations are, what you’ve tried. Does that work?
That’s their job. They’re in a large organization. They’re there to have meetings. They know that. So that’s what I would do and have done. Okay. That makes sense?
Thank you. Yeah. That makes sense. It’s always like a chicken and egg kind of thing.
Right? So I’ve lost out on some clients because even though my portfolio is good, the the the first question they’ll ask is like, oh, are you guys an agency, or are there any results can you that you can share with us? And then right off the bat, like, I’m on the I’m on the back foot, if you know what I mean. Yep.
Yeah. That’s the constraint. Right? So last week, we talked about constraints. And if you can say a big constraint to me closing business is that they always ask for results, then you gotta solve that.
Because if you solve that, then the pipeline opens up again. So we gotta take that problem and fix it. Great. You’ve identified.
A lot of people don’t know what where leads go. They don’t know why it stops. You know that. So it only makes good sense for you to prioritize that, and that’s where Joel’s old case study buddy was a good thousand dollars spent because a thousand dollars spent gets you a case study that you can now use to close twenty thousand dollar jobs across the board, or you do it.
You follow-up with clients and you say this. And, of course, if all it takes, if part of all that it takes is you adding into your process three new bullet points about at this point, I tell the client this. At this point, I get connected with their technology person for email implementation.
At this point, I follow-up with them for results.
Now you’ve got three little things added to an SOP that could unlock new projects for you. So I think that’s great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Alright.
Go add it to those SOPs.
Any other questions?
Are we feeling the quiet people in the room who I’m looking at?
No. I’m looking at them.
Awkward. Should I call on someone?
Nobody has any questions or concerns? Anything that they’re working on?
Caroline, I haven’t heard from you in so long. One, how was your summer?
You were off for a month. Don’t worry. I’m not gonna put you on the spot to ask a business question, but I do wanna know how your summer is going.
It is good. It is good. We traveled to we spent June in Asia. We were in Japan and Korea Oh. Which is very cool. Yeah. We sent a our oldest kiddo off to college over the weekend.
Wow.
Yep.
Banana’s amazing. How’s that feeling?
Good. He made it very easy to say goodbye. I’ll just leave it at that.
That’s amazing. Well, now you’ll have all this time to work on your business.
Yeah. I have three other kiddos, but yep.
Oh, I thought that was your youngest or your oldest, but No.
That’s my oldest. Yeah.
Oh, okay. Funny.
So I feel like I’m playing catch up. Yeah.
After the That’s fair.
Kids go back the kids go back to school tomorrow.
Amazing.
Glorious.
Okay. Well, it’s good to see you. I was glad to see you pop back in after your month break.
I yes. Cool. Awesome. Good to be back.
Anybody do you have anything you’re working on in your business that you wanna discuss? You were shaking your head madly that I shouldn’t call on you, and then I called on you.
Nothing nothing really great to share at the moment.
Okay. Cool. Cool. Yeah. Cody? Hannah? Stacy?
I don’t have any questions, but I’ve been working on Instagram posts.
Okay. How’s this going?
Last week.
It’s okay. I think I was getting a little far in the weeds with the Gary Vee book, and I’m trying to figure everything out. But I think I I think I have a decent plan at least now. But, yeah, it took me about ten hours last week to create, like, five posts.
Oh, wow.
Do you feel good about the posts?
Yeah. I mean, I’m writing them all out. That’s what takes the longest is to make sure they’re strategic. And then you have to since I don’t have, like, a team, I’m the one in Canva designing all the things and editing the videos, and it’s it’s a lot. Yeah.
Yeah. We’ll talk.
I mean, I know that it’s tricky to hire people to do that, but there’s, like, some really good short term.
Did you watch Shane’s training on hiring overseas?
No.
But I need to because you’re the second person who told me to watch that, so I’m going to do that.
Yeah. Definitely do. He’s built cool businesses that where the people that like, he’s getting to employ people, in situations where they need employment, and it’s just cheaper than it is here. Life is just cheaper in the Philippines, and so it’s cheaper to hire someone there, and he’s done really, really good work with it.
So, yeah, watch that. Yeah. It doesn’t have to be someone local and expensive who spends four dollars on a nectarine.
Can you believe the cost of fruit?
No. It’s crazy.
I know. Okay. Well, cool. Cody, I’m glad you’re working on that. I know it’s, social.
I’m ready.
I have, like, so many videos I have to record this week. I’m dreading it. Yeah.
Hannah, you have a question?
Yeah. I’ve got a win first. Okay. Great.
I set up a Instagram account on Friday.
Nice.
And I have, eleven followers now.
Amazing. That’s great.
Yeah. So Yeah. So that is a big win because I was quite resistant because I used to have an Instagram account, for for a lot of years and then lost it all.
So I haven’t had an Instagram for maybe about three years, I think.
Mhmm. But I got one now, and I’m Yeah. I’m happy. I’m just Great.
Sharing the same stuff, that I usually share on LinkedIn anyway.
So it’s easy with Yeah.
Just repurpose it. Did you read day trading attention, which we talked about last week?
No.
Gary needs a new book?
No. It’s I think I what I like about it so far, and I’ve not done it, but is this new take that the algorithms don’t care as much about your followers as so everybody’s always scared to get on social. They’re like, I don’t have any followers. It’s gonna take forever to get them.
But the algorithms are shifting in such a way that as long as you’re making content someone wants to see and will, like, pause and stay on, then you get served up to all these new audiences. So I find that encouraging because that was why I held off on Instagram as well. I’m like, well, why now? I’ve spent all this time over on Twitter, and Elon messed the whole thing up, and now I have to go find a new platform.
And so I didn’t want to, and then I just did. And now I’m, like, relieved to hear that it doesn’t matter how many followers you have. It’s always a good signal, but it’s not critical. So yeah. Cool.
I think, like, in a year’s tie in a year’s time, two years’ time, I’m gonna be really pleased that I did it. So that’s what I’m thinking.
Agreed. Yes.
I I look back now. So I set I I started LinkedIn in two thousand and nineteen, and I’ve got nearly sixteen thousand followers at all, like, all my friends.
That’s why that sounds weird.
But, and so and I’m and I look back, and I think I’m so pleased I did that back then. So pleased. Yeah. So, yeah, my question, you’ve just mentioned I just heard you mention the words, Joel’s case study earned a thousand dollars and spending a thousand dollars.
And I I don’t what what does that mean?
Sorry. So Joel Kletke is a copywriter, and he had a business called Case Study Buddy, but he just sold that. So it’s not his anymore. It’s someone else’s now. So it’s case study buddy by so and so.
And it was a thousand bucks a year or two ago. I don’t know what it is right now, but a thousand and you would, like, give them contact information for a person that you had worked with, and they would do all the work of making the case study. So they did this for a lot of different clients. And, yeah, it’s like, if we can find a thousand dollars to take a big, like, bite out of a big problem that we have, that seems like money really, really well spent.
So but it’s yeah. Joel Pletke, case study buddy, thousand bucks to get a case study made.
Yeah. Nice. And they would do everything too. Like, I used them for one case study. It turned out great.
And I would just have to connect them with this client of mine, and they just took over from there. Made the whole thing easy.
Yeah. Right. Okay. So they reach out to your client and then do everything for you.
Yeah. I think I had to warm intro them, just an email connecting the two. I I had to make sure that the client was okay with giving a case study first, but then I didn’t have to get on a call. I all of the tedium of that.
Man, Joel did a presentation at Content Jam, I think it was, a few years ago on making a case study, and there’s a lot. There’s a lot to her. It’s like, just pay just pay someone to do this for you. So I would look into that if you’re looking for case studies. Yeah.
Interesting. Thank you. Sure.
Thanks, Anna.
Anything else? Anyone? Nothing from Stacy. I saw you came on camera when I said your name.
That was just my courtesy showing my face because you said my name.
That’s all. I thought it might be. I thought it might be. Alright. Cool. Well, let us wrap up today’s session.
We have a whole bunch of people joining Coffee School Pro in September, which is our next official, like, intake.
So we have one more call without a whole bunch of new people in it. So bring any questions that you’ve had that you’ve wanted to tackle, because it’s gonna be a little a little bit noisier, not crazy noisier, little bit noisier.
Cool. Otherwise, hope everybody has a really good rest of your day. Alright, Jill?
Take care. Bye.
Scaling with Subcontractors
Scaling with Subcontractors
Transcript
Cool. Okay. Good.
Well, it’s, you know, I don’t wanna say the time because it’s a different time for you, but, yeah, we’re, like, I think one minute past starting time according to my clock. I we can let everyone join in.
Folks trickle in. But today, I’m very excited because we talked about one of my favorite things, which is scaling with subcontractors.
It’s something that we’ve had a lot of success with. So I’m gonna get started, and, we can have others join in as they go. Hey. Andrew’s here. Okay. Andrew, we’re just kicking things off.
So welcome. Welcome. I was telling Abby this is, like, one of my favorite things to talk about is working with subcontractors.
So alright. Let’s get out. Make sure.
Alright.
Cool. So very quickly, what are we gonna cover is how to quickly identify when to hire a subcontractor.
And we can what we’ll talk about after the session is a a few of the nitty gritties because subcontracting is something that will you know, it takes time, but it frees up time. And I talk about that in the training as well. So we’ll talk about how to quickly identify when to power a subcontractor, when to fully transition, you know, to a team member, how to narrow down on the needle moving roles to hire for, and what metrics will you measure to gauge ROI and all of that. So it is one of the simplest ways to speed up your growth and reduce over which is what you need when you’re looking to scale, which is what we realized when we were looking to scale is this only that much capacity, especially if you, like us, have a lot going on on the life front.
So and at the same time, you’re very ambitious and which all of you in this room are and, you know, anyone who’s watching the recording, all of you are. So so you you want that balance, but you also know that you want you wanna do more, and subcontracting is a fabulous way to do that.
The reason I’m a huge, huge fan of subcontracting rather than bringing someone on full time as a team member is because subcontracting gives you the flexibility that sometimes you need.
You know?
It helps you to see hang on. Okay.
Got others messages for ambitious and constrained, that’s me. Yeah. Andrew. Yeah. Absolutely. So so subcontracting helps you to see whether or not your business would benefit from bringing someone in full time.
I know there are a lot of people who would say, okay. Yeah. You could, you know, hire someone full time on all of that. It that’s never been the case for us.
The one of the other reasons for that is because we are, I would say, we’ve always worked with and this is more mine’s department, but I’m gonna say and we’ve I think we’ve talked about this on our blog as well. One of the things that we’ve always focused on is keeping our expenses to a certain percentage of our revenue.
I’m gonna go out and say about twenty percent is what we look at depending and, you know, as your revenue grows, which it will because you are, you know, going to be subcontracting, and that’s the whole idea here. Right? You will be able to, you know, hire more, and you will be able to have a better idea of how the year is gonna flow and, you know, whether you need someone to, you know, come in full time or whether you can increase their scope and speak to them about it. Point being, it is a simple way to speed up your growth and reduce overwhelm, which is huge.
So what subcontracting is not? It is not about finding the cheapest option. It’s very tempting to do that. Very.
Trust me. I am I’m a big frugalist at heart. It’s very hard for me to look at, oh, you know, let’s find out. But I like it when people pay me well.
When it comes to spending, I can be really hard and to kind of convince. And Bank has a very tough job trying to help me see that this is the this is the ROI. So it’s yeah. Point is, it’s not find about finding the cheapest option.
That does not mean, however, that someone who may be starting out or is an intern or is willing to work for less would do a shoddy job. Point is you don’t go into the market saying, oh, I wanna hire someone, but I don’t want to pay you know, I wouldn’t say you you don’t wanna say, oh, I wanna look for the cheapest option. That’s what you don’t wanna say. You wanna say, I wanna and this is what’s what mine’s taught me actually over the years is you wanna say, I wanna look for the person who would do the best job possible in the budget I have.
So sometimes it takes you time.
But for us, me, you will always find people because sometimes you are working with a budget. Right? And it’s got nothing to do with you wanting to be a cheapskate. It’s just that your business cannot handle bringing on more help.
It’s not about underpaying contractors. That goes without saying. So we do not, quote unquote, haggle. We don’t like it when clients do it with us or try to lower laws. We don’t wanna do it when we’re the client.
Again, I’m pretty sure none of you would do that. It’s just putting it out there. But these other things are more important.
Subcontracting is not expecting to do it all. You need to be really, really clear about role and responsibilities.
A subcontractor would be your greatest asset and would be responsible for a lot of your success if you’re very clear on what is what is that you’re hiring them for. So even if you’re looking at hiring a VA or a digital business manager or an OBM or a salesperson or a research specialist, whatever it is, you need those roles and responsibilities really well outlined.
It’s not about expecting magic. This is a process that will take time, and sometimes you may have to kiss a few frogs before you find your subcontracting prince or princess.
Be prepared for that. It’s very easy to get discouraged and think that, oh, no one would be able to do this as well as I do or no one will be able to help me with this. You know, I’m guilty of falling into the trap of thinking, oh, you know, I’m I’m I’m faster and better.
I’m I’ve got this. So because I sometimes can get frustrated with the time that it takes to onboard someone. So you just wanna kind of keep an eye out for that. And then, also, subcontracting is not about towing the trend. So when we were looking to scale, it was very everyone everyone that I knew, every single freelancer or small business owner, at least, that I knew of was, like, you gotta hire a VA.
Right? I mean, it seems like the logical decision.
The thing is, for our business, that wasn’t a logical decision. For us, it made more sense to hire an editor because I hated editing.
I’m really good at writing. But if you ask me to go in and then read it out loud and do all the sweeps and spot so that was our first hire.
So you need to, like, look at your business. You need to understand what are what are your goals and not just go for whatever’s trending in the hiring world.
Okay. So here’s easy three step process.
You’ve got worksheets with you. If you printed it up, great. I don’t know if they’re fillable or yeah. Maybe they are because I think they’re in Canvas.
You could, you know, go ahead and pull them out. Point is I would love for you to pull them up because we’re gonna be working through them as we go further into this workshop. I’d love to kind of take some time to do that. So first up, you wanna identify those bottlenecks for, you know, for hiring and subcontracting.
We wanna see where in your business, which is what like, whenever we’ve hired anyone, this is how we look at it. Where in your business are you losing cash flow? You losing out on client experience? You losing out on your, you know, the whole peace of mind thing.
So rules that will prioritize profit, productivity, peace of mind, or project delivery.
Those four areas. You wanna look at where are you losing out or tripping yourself up or taking way more time than is needed because those are the roles you wanna prioritize.
Because it may be you may think and the only way you can do that, and if you’re not doing this already, I would highly recommend all of you do it, is you need to start tracking your time. You need to know exactly where your time is going in your business, because only then would you know for sure whether you really do you need someone to manage your inbox or do you need probably someone to do your outreach?
Those are two very different roles.
And then you wanna set curveballs, outcomes, and metrics so you can measure effectiveness because there is no point hiring someone, and as awesome as they may be at their job if it’s not bringing in what you want it to bring in in terms of time, money, or growth, or peace of mind and, you know, just that mental freedom which is, you know, you can’t really measure it, but you experience it.
Yeah. You need to have those noted down, not in your head.
And that is when you’ll be able to take decisions very clearly, like a business owner, and not go not let emotions rule your decision making.
So subcontracting, like I said, takes time in order to free up time. It will take time.
If you are lucky to find the best person for your business on the first, you know, route, amazing. That’s excellent. Hold on to them. But in all likelihood, sometimes you may be more disappointed than all excited, and you just need to kinda be prepared for that. The way to avoid this would be whenever you’re looking to subcontract, start with a test period or start with a test project.
This is something that has saved us so much grief because I’ll be very honest with you. Sometimes, subcontractors are you know, they’re like freelancers like us. They look great on paper.
But when you start working with them, sometimes you find that there’s a lot that just doesn’t align.
And having a test period or a test project is the perfect way of not feeling like, now I’m, like, stuck.
It gives both of you. And on the other hand, for the subcontract as well, it you know, it’s a win win because we may think they are really great to work with, but they may not like working with us. So it gives them an easy out as well. So always start with this. Like I said, it will take time, but once you get, like, the right people to help you with, you can just keep working with them over and over again like our clients do for us. Right?
So how do I identify what to subcontract and who to hire? Let’s get deeper into this.
First step, you wanna identify the what and the why. Before you look at the who, you wanna start with what is it that you’re wanting to hire out. Like, it we talked about, you know, the the bottlenecks and the areas that impact your profit, peace of mind, productivity, and project delivery.
So get really clear about that, and then think about why do you wanna hire it up.
Because, remember, we are not towing trends here. We are looking at helping you scale with these subcontractors.
So when you know the what and the why, it will help you set a budget for your hire as well, which is super important because you would know what’s the impact it’s gonna have on your business if that team member is gonna do a fabulous job. Right?
It would help you understand the impact that hiring this person would bring to you. It would help you outline responsibilities.
It would help you clarify outcomes and metrics. It would just make it so much clearer for you as to how is this person who’s gonna come in be a part of your growth.
So always, always before you go into, oh, I need a social media manager or I need a sales rep or I need a research specialist or I need a a VA or I need whatever, you wanna know why do I need this person?
What are they going to do for me? So worksheets open up the worksheet, our Google Doc. I want you to think about this should be easy. Think about three areas in your business that are currently holding you back because they aren’t your superpower. You’re spending way much time doing them and they impact client experience.
Example for me, fire framing.
Not my strength at all, takes me way too much time, and was impacting client experience.
Right? Or you could look at areas that are slowing down your growth because while you can do them, right, they take too much time.
Again, another self example, editing. That was editing for me. I can do it.
But because I hate it, it would just take me double the time. It would take someone who’s who would enjoy it like Jillian Hill who was who’s, you know, fabulous at editing. So anyways or it’s impacting cash flow because you don’t have the capacity to do stuff.
So you’re great at it. It’s your superpower. You just don’t have the bandwidth to do it.
For instance, sometimes it’s like blog posts or when it was a really large project, like, I remember the hundred k project. I had so many emails. Like, I I had to bring in someone to help me with the emails.
So because it would make no sense for me to say, oh, no. I’m gonna try doing it all on my own.
Not realistic. Right? So I want you to take, like, five minutes. Think about it.
Put it down. Write it down right now. I’m gonna pause. I’m gonna mute myself, drink some water.
Alright.
Keep this with you because we’re gonna come back to it at the end of the session. This one, I I wanted this to be, like, kind of interactive, and I wanted to for you to walk away with knowing who your next hire is gonna be.
So now that you have these five areas, what you wanna start doing is narrow down on the needle movers. So out of those watts, you know, you wanna narrow down on and this is something that we use internally is we use a three c approach to the client experience, cash flow capacity.
Those are your needle movers.
If your client experience is great, it’s such a huge win because that kind of, you know, improves your cash flow.
Anytime client experience suffers, you can be sure, you know, repeat projects are not gonna happen, referrals are not gonna happen. It has a ripple effect on pretty much everything. Right?
And you wanna enjoy the experience as well. And then, of course, capacity. For us, because of chronic health issues, capacity is something that we value a lot. So yeah.
This is what we use.
So I’d want you to kind of, like, start thinking about it. Because when you know what your needle movers are based on your cash flow capacity client experience, you get really clear on why you’re hiring and what’s the impact you’re looking at. Because you’re hiring to either increase cash flow or revenue, capacity, or client experience, all of which has a direct impact on your growth.
All of which has a direct impact on sustainable growth, most importantly.
Because the last thing you wanna do is just focus on cash flow, ignore capacity, and then end up feeling burned out.
Or create great client experience, but overload cash flow, which means you won’t have a good profit margin.
So when you’re looking to scale, you wanna scale in a way that doesn’t burn you out. And that it’s so much easier to do that when you do that looking at, okay, out of these five areas, which ones have a direct impact on either of these three c’s. Ideally, if you’re looking if you find a task that has an impact on all three, that is exactly where you wanna store. So you wanna narrow down again. In the same workshop, you wanna narrow down on one to three areas that impact your cash flow and or client experience.
So here’s the thing. Capacity is a great first level filter. That is obviously your first level filter. Right?
But when you focus on cash flow and client experience, it can create capacity because you’re giving say, example. Let’s say you don’t have the capacity to take on block content for a client who may need it for their launch. Right? Now you wanna give them a great client experience, so you subcontract blog post writing, which means that you’ve now created capacity for yourself while improving cash flow and client experience too.
So look at go through the areas that you’ve identified and look at which ones have a direct impact on cash flow and or client experience. Remember, capacity is a great first level filter. So if you don’t have capacity for something, see whether hiring it out would give you capacity too.
Cool. Was that quick and easy? Are we done?
Yeah.
Okay. I can see nodding heads.
Alright.
Next up. Now based on these areas, those you know, the things that you don’t like or you wanna hire out or you wanna, you know, free up time for or you wanna hire a subcontractor for you wanna look at what are the roles you’re gonna hire. This is where you get really specific about who your subcontractor is gonna be Because sometimes people who we we may think we’re hiring like I said, like, the example. Sometimes you may think you’re hiring the social media manager, and you may think that they’ll do, you know, your your all reels for you.
That may not be the case. They may need you to do the filming. They’ll give you the guidelines, but they may need you to do that. Or you may be hiring, say, a researcher who may not be coming through surveys or may only be coming through a certain number of survey responses.
So you wanna be very, very clear on exactly who would you be hiring and what will they do.
This is where you wanna write a job description, and you wanna write a really good job description.
So this is not no longer about, oh, I just need a b c. This is about not only what the role will involve, but also things like what tech are they comfortable with, what kind of communication you expect, what’s the cadence of meetings, are you more an asynchronous meeting person, do you prefer, communication only via Slack, or is email okay with you? Do you wanna be reached on WhatsApp, or do you not wanna be reached on WhatsApp? You wanna be really, really clear.
And I learned this through lots and lots of hiring, lots and lots of job description writing. So what kind of support, you know, will you you, your team, you know, anyone else you’ve got on your team be offering them? What kind of support do you expect from them, especially if you are if you’ve got your own products that you’re selling, like Abby, you know, you have a program. If you’re in launch season, will your let’s say you hire you’re hiring a social media manager.
What kind of extra support will your social media manager need to pitch in during that time? Because that would be very different from, say, when you’re not in launch mode or when you’re you know?
So point being, you wanna be very clear on everything and, of course, the pay.
And that is why it’s important to set a budget.
So, you can put up these job descriptions. We’ve had success with different VA groups. We’ve had success with different job builds. But point is, even if you don’t put it anywhere, just share it with your email list. Point you need to give people a clearer guideline of what you are looking for.
Then finally, how do you measure, monitor, and manage? You wanna set a cadence and a workflow for measuring effectiveness. What would that look like for you? Remember, you will find a lot of guidelines or in, you know, in various books and, on what kind of meetings to have, what kind of interviews to do, etcetera, etcetera. At the end of the day, this is your business. You decide how you wanna, you know, measure, monitor, and manage. So I’ll give you an example.
Peers of ours have weekly startup meetings.
They work with a whole bunch of contractors.
They’re they’re also a couple in their business, and they, they do book publishing. So, they they have a stand up meeting because they work with a lot of contractors. So every week, I think they do it on Mondays or whatever, when is they meet on Zoom, but they do, like, quick check ins with everybody to see how’s it going, what would it you know, what’s everybody working on, does anyone need any extra support? Etcetera, etcetera.
Mike and I do asynchronous meetings because that works well for us.
So we check-in with any of our subcontractors on Slack. Let them know what’s coming up.
They fill in lesson, end of the week updates and let us know, you know, what they’ve worked on, what’s coming up for them, if they need any extra support from us, and that works well for us. So you’ve gotta figure out what kind of cadence will work for you for managing, working with your subcontractors.
And what you need to remember while a subcontractor is not an employee, they don’t have those full time benefits, a good subcontractor shows up as a team member. We’ve been very lucky, though. So one of our, subcontractors is is Natasha Blinky. We work with her on our research projects, and she’s also been course coordinator for for a really long time and optimization course optimization as well.
The reason we’ve worked with her for as long as we have, and she’s our first point of contact for any, you know, project that we know she would have the capacity for and the capability for is because she’s always shown up as a team member. She makes suggestions for the business that sometimes both Mike and I haven’t even seen. You know? And we’re like, oh, wow. That’s, like, such a great idea, which is what we try and do for our clients as well and, you know, why our clients love working with us. So we love working with people who show a lot of initiative.
This is something that’s really important for us.
Does every subcontractor do that? No. As long as they’re doing the core job you’ve hired them to do really well, I think that is great. If you find a subcontractor who, like, say, Natasha, goes the extra mile, I would say hold on to them. Really, you know, that’s that’s rare, but it’s really great. And as a business owner, on the other hand, for you, you need to remember that you aren’t gonna show up as quote unquote boss.
You’re gonna show up as a leader. It requires a lot of work and to for, you know, for us to kind of start showing up as not as contractors for clients, but as leaders for our own subcontractors. So this is, like, something that you would wanna start working on, start reading about, start, you know, just kind of observing, okay, where are my gaps?
What can I do better when it comes to communication? Because sometimes and I’ll be honest with you. So early days, really early days, I think this is I would expect someone I would hire, like, say, a social media person to basically just know what I’m thinking when it comes to strategy. Right?
And this is a dangerous position to be in because here’s the thing. Because I’ve been doing social media management before we pivoted into the copyright, I knew how social media works. So I would be like, but this is so obvious. Like, you know but and I would say, okay.
But have you told her this? That this is what you’re looking for? No. But she should know it quicker.
No. So it requires a lot of, you know, reflection and looking at, okay, what can I do better?
So something to keep in mind.
How do you do all of this is you create detailed SOPs. And here’s the deal. So with your subcontractors, if you’re hiring someone for a role for the first time, one of the things you wanna keep in the job description is that they need to document and create the SOPs as they go. This is something that we did when we started working with Natasha initially for our blog content.
Like, so she when she would publish a blog post, she created, like, a detailed SOP, complete with the video tutorial. So when she moved on and she started specializing in research instead, I already had all those SOPs to hand over to whoever replaced her. Right? So you wanna be very, very clear.
You wanna create and if you if you feel that you would need to explain to someone how to do something, then I would say create those SOPs yourself right now and detailed workflows as well. What happens when? Who who sends what? What needs to you know, who needs to talk to each other.
All of those things need to be documented.
Have a communication cadence. Cannot emphasize that in our whether you do weekly check ins, end of week check ins, start of week updates, doesn’t matter. But radio silence from either side is never is never good. Legal compliance, contracts, ideas, you wanna have those in place.
We always buy our contracts from, like, like, lots of great legal template shops, legal pages. One, we bought our contracts from. The particular is another one we bought our contract from. So, would recommend those.
I’m sure there are others as well. You want, again, remember how it works you need and not what a book or a coach or anyone else says. And know that it may not always work out, and that’s okay.
Alright.
That was longer, a little longer than our usual twenty minute trainings, but yeah.
Questions?
No questions? Okay. Then I have a few. I wanna know who’s got some like, a clear idea of who they need to hire in order to scale.
Yeah. Andrew.
Can you hear me okay?
Yep.
Sorry. I’m in a public co working space. I’m trying not to speak to you.
I think my next, hire, I think I really want someone to basically help organize all of the research for me when I have a new client, and basically package it together so that I could just take, like, two days and just go through it without worrying about, like, oh, I have to, like, go through these, like, pick up these sales call recordings and go through these. And then I have to, go through, like, analyze this and, like, that whole lot just have it packaged for me. And I think I would I would need someone who understands the industry a little bit because, you know, with technical concepts, there are certain things where you have to kind of understand like, oh, okay. Like, I would Basically this as, you know, helpful. I don’t know.
But, yeah, just someone would have to have a certain amount of, like, research knowledge for for it to make sense.
But, like, I would love to just have someone basically do the research for me, but I still need to understand all the everything that they have. So I’m thinking of of it largely. It’s basically them doing the organizing parking cycle. I’m terrible at it, and I it takes me way too long.
And I’m always always changing the format. Like, always, like, oh, no. This is the right way to organize it. Or no.
This is a better way. So I think just having someone go just deliver me this, like, here’s everything you need to know to get up to speed up this event and just go through an order. Got it. But, like, just just thinking about that is, like, a huge lift off our shoulders.
Oh, cool.
Right. And, so, basically and what I’m hearing is, like, why you wanna hire this person is because it would free up your capacity.
Right? But would it also improve the client experience? Like, do you think it would improve the eventual results that you create for your clients?
It could. If the first I would say that I would say that the main thing is to get that, like, is to is a capacity thing, because I’m losing a lot of time to sort of just, like, indecision. I do part of the research here, part of the research there.
So I think it’s largely a capacity thing. But I think with the right person, it could potentially help get a better result too because then I’m, like, a little bit more fresh when I start writing.
So, you know, I think that rather than if you do after doing all that research, it could be like, oh, I’m already, like, half burnt out on this.
Right. Right.
Right. Right. It so I think it could it could have a better client experience as well, but it would be a different capacity and easier, like, freeing my mind up. I I actually the more I talk about it, the more I think it would be better for the client experience because I think that the way that I’m approaching it now is probably I’m probably causing some, there are probably some gaps that pop in the cracks.
Yeah. That could be the case. Like, when we don’t enjoy a particular task, then we tend to either rush through it or, you know, like, feel like it’s not. And what, at least, I found was that a hiring researcher really improved client experience because then I can, like, present that research in a much better way to the client, you know, and they would have Yeah. Way more understanding of what went into the project and where am I coming from so I can, like, pick depending my copy code and code is something that I very rarely have to do because they know it’s, like, you know, all of this data has gone into into the research. So I think that’s a really good place to start. What I would love to see from you is a job description.
Okay. So it doesn’t matter okay. Here’s the thing. You may not hire this person this month or even next month or maybe not even this quarter.
Maybe this would be, like, a q four thing that you’re looking to do, which is very important because you wanna look at your budget. Right? So you’re gonna look at, okay, where is this gonna come up for? Where is this higher?
And what kind of a budget am I working with for and, again, remember, something like what Adam was talking about, you can easily do a test project. So that’s, like, you know, a single project to see how it goes with that particular person before you start working with them over and over again. So but I would love to see a job description, mainly because I’m curious to see, the role that you flesh out for this person. So because this is a role that we’ve, like, hired for multiple times.
So, yeah, I’m interested in seeing the the role you flesh out. Cool?
Cool. That was good.
Okay. Good.
So Thank you.
When would I see that? I’m not gonna let you off that.
Gonna do, not like the repurposing one that I saw you Yeah. And just ignoring. Yeah.
Ignoring and feeling guilty about.
So this one, I’m gonna have this done by the end of tomorrow to give myself a good deadline for this week.
Alright. Yeah. We’ll check-in with you then. I will. You know I will. So cool. Okay.
This was great. Who else wants to share what’s the next role they wanna hire for? Yeah, Maria.
I need somebody for social media. I do not like social media. I have tried liking social media. I have tried a lot in not just with this business with other businesses, and it’s just like a recurring theme, but I don’t like it.
Like, I’ve made, like, so much content that never gets posted because then I don’t get it into the right form or the right template or the right this or the right that. It’s not like a lack of ideas.
It’s a lack of, getting it formatted right because I hate all that fiddly formatting stuff. Mhmm. Mhmm. And then, and then remembering to actually post it, and it it’s that whole thing. So I don’t mind, like, recording things. I don’t mind the writing of the thing.
I just don’t wanna do the actual like, I just wanna say here’s, like, the raw stuff.
Mhmm.
Put it into the make the carousel or make the reel or make the whatever. I’ll send you the pictures and the video clips and the they can pick the music for it, whatever. It doesn’t really matter to me. And then I just don’t wanna Mhmm. It. So I just wanna be like, there’s the thing. Go make it happen and post it.
Not totally, like, taking my hands off, but kind of. Because it just I know that because I’ve I’ve tried. Like, I’m in this Instagram class, like, learning how to do the things, and I’m like, okay. You can do this. You can do this. And then I love doing strategy and business y things and whatever and the social media stuff.
Mhmm. Like, is this boulder on my back? And so yeah.
Okay. But why why social media? What do you think the impact’s gonna be on your business? How will it help you scale?
Oh, how will it help me? Because nobody knows who I am. I mean, like, I I need to get visibility. So, I am writing a book.
And so, and so, like, I have this plan.
Like, I would like to, go to three conferences next year. So and have a book, and I need to test the ideas in the book. And I’m gonna do that through social media, which will get my ideas out there, and sort of, like, validate and get known so that when I go to these conferences in real life and I’m connecting with people, then I’m not it’s not like, what rock did you crawl under or out from?
Like, who are you?
Right? Yeah. Yeah. So Yeah. Yeah.
Like, I need to build some authority. And so, it’s not working me just trying to have the willpower to do it because Mhmm. Then it would be done already because I’m pretty Yeah. Disciplined.
But this Yeah. I don’t know. I just Yeah. Think it’s a it’s a barrier.
Okay. That’s, like, a really good yeah. So okay.
What I want you to start thinking about is when you’re thinking about social media because this is, like, such a broad umbrella. You know? Like, oh, I need someone to manage social media, and I’ve heard this often.
I’ve been that person.
What you wanna think about is do you need someone to create strategy, create content, create do all of the uploading, do the networking, or are they parts of social media that you enjoy, like the con creating the content but not the format, like you said? And if someone were to take let’s say, you do a you record a video or you do a podcast interview and someone were to take that and turn that into or you, you know, into a blog post and things like that. Because then you’re looking for for different people. A social media manager would map out your would ideally map out your strategy, help you look at it, help you see what goals are you gonna accomplish, and then go ahead, go through your content, create content based off your content, and then, obviously, send it to you for approval and things like that.
But they would create the graphics. They would give you ideas for what reels to film. That’s what, like, our social media manager used to do, which was really helpful. And then they would they would do the job of finding the music and and all of that.
Some of them also do a bit of networking on your behalf.
So you wanted to or you can work with someone who’s a repurposing specialist who can take one piece of content for you Yeah. And repurpose it. And sometimes, they also all have add ons, like, where they’ll even post it for you.
So you wanna think about you wanna give that some thought. And, like, that’s why I say, you know, it’s really important to get here on what is it that you would want this person to do and not just say, oh, I need a social media person?
Because that could mean so many different things.
So it definitely is like, I’m fine with figuring out strategy.
I can plan things That’s what I call.
Yeah.
All night. Yeah. Yeah.
I have so many strategies that it’s not even it’s the and, content.
Like, I’m building content for the thing that the offer that I’m currently having.
So I don’t have heaps of it yet. But I’m fine with creating content and generating ideas and, like, all of that.
Mhmm. Mhmm. But then it is I need somebody to take that primary piece of content, repurpose it into all the different formats.
I’m gonna start doing, like, a live stream. I’m fine with live stream. I hate video editing. I do not want a video edit, which is why I like livestream. But I also do wanna do some longer form stuff for YouTube, like some pillar content around my, diagnostic stuff. But, yeah, I just need somebody to, like, make it look like it should so people actually watch it.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So that’s, you know, so that’s something that you wanna kinda give some thought to because, because I I know people who do both.
You know? Who I know people who who are great at social media management, and I also know, I would know like I say, I know a a handful of people who do social, you know, content repurposing.
So Mhmm.
So I know that there are two different things. And the thing with copywriters is we’re really good. Like I said, we’re really good with strategy. We’re really good with content.
We want our words to sound a certain way, especially because that’s what we do. Right? So, yeah, so I would want you to give some thought to that and get really clear on what is it that you would want this person to do. You could call them whatever you want.
You call them, you know, a social media repurposing strap, you know, assistant, or you would call them a you know, depending on what you want them to do. But social media manager, social media strategist, social media copywriter, You’ll hear all of these job descriptions all you know, but at the end of the day, you gotta get really clear on what will this person do because you’re really clear on why you need them.
Mhmm.
So that’s great. But I want you know, I think if you have more clarity on exactly what yeah. That would be great. So, yeah, job description.
So I did email put it out or not?
Yeah.
Go ahead. I I did email Shane because I went to a session last weekend. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Talking about outsourcing, and I was like, okay. That is something that that might be a good fit for outsourcing.
But I can’t I don’t have budget to hire somebody full time, which working with somebody from the Philippines, he was like, full time is best. And I said, well, this is my budget.
This is it’s obviously not full time. So did he have any recommendations? So I’m waiting to hear back from him. But I see Andrew was saying, yeah, finding one person. So maybe if there’s more than one person, you know, collectively, we could full time hire somebody.
That would be kinda cool.
I mean, like, if everybody Or you could do some sort of project basis.
You know?
You could say, I’m gonna send you four videos.
I need you to create x number of pieces of content out of it.
Yeah.
So I have worked with people on Fiverr.
Like, before different business did a podcast, I had somebody that did all that podcast editing. I just found them on Fiverr.
So I could do that, but I’m I’m really I like the idea of having somebody on the part of the team, like, so that we’re, like, collectively building the business and everybody benefits.
Yeah. So Yeah. That is true. Yeah.
But I do need to do it sooner rather than later because I’m like, okay.
This needs to happen because I need I want clients, and then clients start looking for, like, well, where are you? What what authority do you have? Blah blah blah.
Yep. Yep. Yep.
Yeah. So That’s true. I like it or not, I need to do it. So this is this is the way that I can do it, and so I just need to own that and move forward with it so I can think about other things.
Cool. Great.
Okay. Good. So spend some time thinking about it. And then yeah. But even with you, Marina, I would love to see, you know, an outline of what you would want this person to do.
It may not be like a formal job description, but a really clear outline of what would this person be doing, how often would they be meeting you, what would they need from you, what would you expect from them? Because, also think about your budget. What kind of a budget are you working with? You know, think about the impact it’ll have on your business when you’re using it.
But, of course, you wanna also look at what you’re bringing in and then kind of work with that. So but, yeah, having a detailed description would be really, really helpful.
And I did do I do have a repurposing plan. I just need to, like, actually execute on it. Yeah.
So I mean, I You should have a repurposing plan.
Yes. Yeah. After our session, I was like, okay. Yeah. So I have the diagram, and I’m like, okay. This all makes sense.
And then Yeah.
It just yep, then I think, oh, I don’t know.
Yeah.
Oh, I just I like to make a note.
About how to I don’t do it.
Yeah. Yeah. No. I understand that. Cool.
Yeah. But I could give it to somebody else and say, here’s the primary piece of content.
Exactly.
Here’s the reporting strategy.
Here’s all the images. Make it happen.
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Oh, alright, Jessica.
K. So I’m kind of in this place where I have some clear jobs for sure that I’ll need to subcontract or something. So for example, cover designer, I’ll need to offload doing, book formatting, like, that kind of stuff.
So that’s easy.
That kind of thing to me is like, no problem.
Got that. That’s very clear. But then I have this kind of some of what Marino was saying, I was like, well, okay. So Joe is letting us put a team member through CSP or the intensive or something like that. Right? Okay. So couldn’t I, hypothetically, hire someone too to kind of, like I so I I think you follow her too, Prana.
Rachel Miller, you know, for the social Yeah. Yep. I have her programs, and I often have thought, you know, I should just pay someone to take this course for me, and then they can I’ll do the same thing, Marina. Like, record videos, you do the rest. I don’t care.
Can figure out the strategy. I don’t even care about that. You just make it so that when someone goes to look up Jessica, Noelle, books, publishing, I’m in all the places. Great.
Okay? That’s all I really care about. So I was, like, thinking about it, but then I have these other tasks that I want taken off my plate. So for example, I had I customized the, templated proposal.
Now, admittedly, it was a little more in the future, it won’t take this long, but it still took me with breaks, I think, about half the day. I was like, this is a waste of my time.
So I it it’s like that kinda task. The invoicing part, the onboarding, the, you know, like, that kind of stuff. I also want someone to just just do this for me. Like, I don’t care. Just do this. So I was kinda sitting there going, okay. So I have someone in mind that would like to be the VA.
Would be you work with great. But how far off of the scope of a typical VA? Like, can I slide in there and say, you know what? Would you be willing to take this social media course and help me repurp like or am I is that too I don’t know. Yeah.
So that’s that gets really muddy really fast. I know. Because then they feel that they’ve been paid to be a VA, but they’re doing the social media manager’s job, and it will lead to a lot. So you either bring this person in as a, you know, as a fractional content marketing officer or a fractional CMO or something like that.
You know? Or bring them in as so then they’re doing a lot, but then they wouldn’t be doing a lot of the admin side of things. So you wanna kind of start thinking about that because that’s two different roles that we’re talking about. Like, oh, take my social media and repurpose it, but then also manage my contracts and my proposals and my invoicing and all of that.
The the proposals and customizing the proposals and yeah. You know? All I would say that would be more a really good VA’s job.
But the social media side of things, what you can do here is either bring in someone who’s early in the game, eager to learn, willing to, you know, work with testing different things out, open to feedback, and all of that. Also appreciate is the fact that you’ll be giving them access to Rachel’s courses, etcetera, to go through it. That’s, like, education.
So that would that would possibly work. But, yeah, I would say off the right off the bat, this would be, like, two different roles. And that is what you and what you wanna decide is which one would have more of an impact on your scaling journey, which one would have more of an impact on your cash flow plan of snooze and capacity.
Use that to decide. You don’t always have to hire for both. Sometimes you may realize that, oh, I could have, like, a tool do this for me, or I could have, you know, AI do this for me. But, because we do have that option too. You know? So, so you may wanna look at that.
Okay. Okay. Thank you.
You’re welcome. Abby, who are you gonna hire next?
I want to hire someone to, like, implement my customer feedback loop and then report back to me on the data, like, every month for the optimization. So that’s like, I need to very clearly define what that’s gonna look like.
And then so, yeah, that will free up capacity, and it will improve the client experience because I haven’t Yeah.
I haven’t done, like, all of it for a client before because it’s just, like, too much.
And then it will should improve cash flow as well because I’ll be able to, like, charge more because I’m offering a more kind of end to end service. And then the other thing I I really need in my business, like, the bottleneck is, like, eyeballs. Like, I just need more people kind of going into my funnel, for my course because that’s I really wanna make my course, work. So for that, I’m thinking about potentially hiring someone to to help me do YouTube or social media. I haven’t quite decided yet, but I definitely need someone to just, like, solve that problem of how do I get, like, five hundred people into my funnel a month.
So the five the lead gen part of things is obviously one one role, and you you could you could do that in so many ways, which is why it would be great for you to kind of do this exercise and say, what what are the different lead generation strategies that you wanna test out?
You know? So YouTube is great, but YouTube will bring you those five hundred eyeballs.
It’s a long game. Right? It would start bring But if you need more adults now, what are the things that you could do? And then see if you need to really hire that out, or can you test out some strategies right now? Maybe it’s ads. You’re you’re running ads. Right?
So I did run ads, and I ran it for two months, and I break even.
And I had, like, some clear kind of optimization steps, but then I’d I think I was just, like, overwhelmed with client work, so I didn’t do it. So I I should really revisit.
Exactly.
Yeah. Maybe revisit and optimize that. Mhmm. But the other the other rule is the client feedback thing that you said. Like, what was that?
Like, so for my evergreen process, like, I have, like, kind of different feedback points, like surveys Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
AB testing, that kind of thing. So, like, so I need someone to kind of set it up and then, organize, like, all of the data at the end of the month so I can, like, review it and see what where to optimize.
This is actually something you do you know Angela Tan?
No.
Okay. Can she help?
That yeah. She could help you with setting up all these automations and then also collating the data into Airtable or something like that so you can then kind of go through it. I think she may be able to help, but you yeah. You should speak to her.
But this would be like a systems and automations thing. You know? It’s this is like a quick one time project. So what I would actually love for you to think more is more long term, Abby.
These are like smaller projects. If you’re looking to scale, who’s gonna help you scale?
So and then or what is gonna help you scale? Actually, I would wanna start with what is gonna help you scale? Where are you kind of where could you create more cash flow for yourself? Where could you create more capacity to take on? So I would want you to just kind of start thinking a little bigger because these are smaller single one off projects, one and done. But what we’re looking at is some to bring someone on, you can either like I said, capacity is a first level filter. We have a capacity so you can take on more projects or help you generate more money, charge more from clients.
So things that you could possibly start adding on to packages and and projects.
Yeah. I mean, it would be for, like, the optimization retainer because it was so I would need them every month to, like, organize the research.
But then, yeah, like, same as what Andrew said, like, I would like someone to just, like, analyze it and put it in, like, a messaging guide for me.
Oh, in that case then, if you’re looking for, like, a retail team, then I think you should speak to Natasha. I don’t know whether she knows how to set things up.
But if you know how to set those up, then you can kind of record it and show it to her, but Natasha would be great for this. Yeah.
Natasha Harisari?
Oh, Natasha is, I can make an introduction. Natasha Blinky. Do you know her?
Mm-mm.
No? Okay. Cool.
I can make an introduction to her, but, she could be really great with distilling feedback data and to tell you exactly what needs to be done.
I mean, she’s brilliant at it. Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah. And I didn’t mention her for you because you need someone with, with SaaS experience. Right? So yeah.
But she knows the online course industry. She’s like, yep. We’ve worked with her on multiple projects. We love her.
So, but, yeah, that could be a good, good way to improve both capacity and client streams. That would be a good hire. Yeah.
But go ahead. Like, create your impact. Do do this what everybody else is doing. Create your job description for this person, and I will make the connection. Yeah.
Thank you. Yeah. I will be able to do it by tomorrow like Andrew, but let’s see next Friday.
Okay. Cool. Alright. Cool. Any other questions?
Nope?
All good. All ready to hire.
Okay.
Cool. Great. I shall see you all in Slack, and we’ll check-in with you tomorrow then.
Okay. Cool.
Thanks, Brenna. It’s really helpful.
Thank you. Bye. Thank you, Brenna. Bye.
Worksheet
Worksheet
Transcript
Cool. Okay. Good.
Well, it’s, you know, I don’t wanna say the time because it’s a different time for you, but, yeah, we’re, like, I think one minute past starting time according to my clock. I we can let everyone join in.
Folks trickle in. But today, I’m very excited because we talked about one of my favorite things, which is scaling with subcontractors.
It’s something that we’ve had a lot of success with. So I’m gonna get started, and, we can have others join in as they go. Hey. Andrew’s here. Okay. Andrew, we’re just kicking things off.
So welcome. Welcome. I was telling Abby this is, like, one of my favorite things to talk about is working with subcontractors.
So alright. Let’s get out. Make sure.
Alright.
Cool. So very quickly, what are we gonna cover is how to quickly identify when to hire a subcontractor.
And we can what we’ll talk about after the session is a a few of the nitty gritties because subcontracting is something that will you know, it takes time, but it frees up time. And I talk about that in the training as well. So we’ll talk about how to quickly identify when to power a subcontractor, when to fully transition, you know, to a team member, how to narrow down on the needle moving roles to hire for, and what metrics will you measure to gauge ROI and all of that. So it is one of the simplest ways to speed up your growth and reduce over which is what you need when you’re looking to scale, which is what we realized when we were looking to scale is this only that much capacity, especially if you, like us, have a lot going on on the life front.
So and at the same time, you’re very ambitious and which all of you in this room are and, you know, anyone who’s watching the recording, all of you are. So so you you want that balance, but you also know that you want you wanna do more, and subcontracting is a fabulous way to do that.
The reason I’m a huge, huge fan of subcontracting rather than bringing someone on full time as a team member is because subcontracting gives you the flexibility that sometimes you need.
You know?
It helps you to see hang on. Okay.
Got others messages for ambitious and constrained, that’s me. Yeah. Andrew. Yeah. Absolutely. So so subcontracting helps you to see whether or not your business would benefit from bringing someone in full time.
I know there are a lot of people who would say, okay. Yeah. You could, you know, hire someone full time on all of that. It that’s never been the case for us.
The one of the other reasons for that is because we are, I would say, we’ve always worked with and this is more mine’s department, but I’m gonna say and we’ve I think we’ve talked about this on our blog as well. One of the things that we’ve always focused on is keeping our expenses to a certain percentage of our revenue.
I’m gonna go out and say about twenty percent is what we look at depending and, you know, as your revenue grows, which it will because you are, you know, going to be subcontracting, and that’s the whole idea here. Right? You will be able to, you know, hire more, and you will be able to have a better idea of how the year is gonna flow and, you know, whether you need someone to, you know, come in full time or whether you can increase their scope and speak to them about it. Point being, it is a simple way to speed up your growth and reduce overwhelm, which is huge.
So what subcontracting is not? It is not about finding the cheapest option. It’s very tempting to do that. Very.
Trust me. I am I’m a big frugalist at heart. It’s very hard for me to look at, oh, you know, let’s find out. But I like it when people pay me well.
When it comes to spending, I can be really hard and to kind of convince. And Bank has a very tough job trying to help me see that this is the this is the ROI. So it’s yeah. Point is, it’s not find about finding the cheapest option.
That does not mean, however, that someone who may be starting out or is an intern or is willing to work for less would do a shoddy job. Point is you don’t go into the market saying, oh, I wanna hire someone, but I don’t want to pay you know, I wouldn’t say you you don’t wanna say, oh, I wanna look for the cheapest option. That’s what you don’t wanna say. You wanna say, I wanna and this is what’s what mine’s taught me actually over the years is you wanna say, I wanna look for the person who would do the best job possible in the budget I have.
So sometimes it takes you time.
But for us, me, you will always find people because sometimes you are working with a budget. Right? And it’s got nothing to do with you wanting to be a cheapskate. It’s just that your business cannot handle bringing on more help.
It’s not about underpaying contractors. That goes without saying. So we do not, quote unquote, haggle. We don’t like it when clients do it with us or try to lower laws. We don’t wanna do it when we’re the client.
Again, I’m pretty sure none of you would do that. It’s just putting it out there. But these other things are more important.
Subcontracting is not expecting to do it all. You need to be really, really clear about role and responsibilities.
A subcontractor would be your greatest asset and would be responsible for a lot of your success if you’re very clear on what is what is that you’re hiring them for. So even if you’re looking at hiring a VA or a digital business manager or an OBM or a salesperson or a research specialist, whatever it is, you need those roles and responsibilities really well outlined.
It’s not about expecting magic. This is a process that will take time, and sometimes you may have to kiss a few frogs before you find your subcontracting prince or princess.
Be prepared for that. It’s very easy to get discouraged and think that, oh, no one would be able to do this as well as I do or no one will be able to help me with this. You know, I’m guilty of falling into the trap of thinking, oh, you know, I’m I’m I’m faster and better.
I’m I’ve got this. So because I sometimes can get frustrated with the time that it takes to onboard someone. So you just wanna kind of keep an eye out for that. And then, also, subcontracting is not about towing the trend. So when we were looking to scale, it was very everyone everyone that I knew, every single freelancer or small business owner, at least, that I knew of was, like, you gotta hire a VA.
Right? I mean, it seems like the logical decision.
The thing is, for our business, that wasn’t a logical decision. For us, it made more sense to hire an editor because I hated editing.
I’m really good at writing. But if you ask me to go in and then read it out loud and do all the sweeps and spot so that was our first hire.
So you need to, like, look at your business. You need to understand what are what are your goals and not just go for whatever’s trending in the hiring world.
Okay. So here’s easy three step process.
You’ve got worksheets with you. If you printed it up, great. I don’t know if they’re fillable or yeah. Maybe they are because I think they’re in Canvas.
You could, you know, go ahead and pull them out. Point is I would love for you to pull them up because we’re gonna be working through them as we go further into this workshop. I’d love to kind of take some time to do that. So first up, you wanna identify those bottlenecks for, you know, for hiring and subcontracting.
We wanna see where in your business, which is what like, whenever we’ve hired anyone, this is how we look at it. Where in your business are you losing cash flow? You losing out on client experience? You losing out on your, you know, the whole peace of mind thing.
So rules that will prioritize profit, productivity, peace of mind, or project delivery.
Those four areas. You wanna look at where are you losing out or tripping yourself up or taking way more time than is needed because those are the roles you wanna prioritize.
Because it may be you may think and the only way you can do that, and if you’re not doing this already, I would highly recommend all of you do it, is you need to start tracking your time. You need to know exactly where your time is going in your business, because only then would you know for sure whether you really do you need someone to manage your inbox or do you need probably someone to do your outreach?
Those are two very different roles.
And then you wanna set curveballs, outcomes, and metrics so you can measure effectiveness because there is no point hiring someone, and as awesome as they may be at their job if it’s not bringing in what you want it to bring in in terms of time, money, or growth, or peace of mind and, you know, just that mental freedom which is, you know, you can’t really measure it, but you experience it.
Yeah. You need to have those noted down, not in your head.
And that is when you’ll be able to take decisions very clearly, like a business owner, and not go not let emotions rule your decision making.
So subcontracting, like I said, takes time in order to free up time. It will take time.
If you are lucky to find the best person for your business on the first, you know, route, amazing. That’s excellent. Hold on to them. But in all likelihood, sometimes you may be more disappointed than all excited, and you just need to kinda be prepared for that. The way to avoid this would be whenever you’re looking to subcontract, start with a test period or start with a test project.
This is something that has saved us so much grief because I’ll be very honest with you. Sometimes, subcontractors are you know, they’re like freelancers like us. They look great on paper.
But when you start working with them, sometimes you find that there’s a lot that just doesn’t align.
And having a test period or a test project is the perfect way of not feeling like, now I’m, like, stuck.
It gives both of you. And on the other hand, for the subcontract as well, it you know, it’s a win win because we may think they are really great to work with, but they may not like working with us. So it gives them an easy out as well. So always start with this. Like I said, it will take time, but once you get, like, the right people to help you with, you can just keep working with them over and over again like our clients do for us. Right?
So how do I identify what to subcontract and who to hire? Let’s get deeper into this.
First step, you wanna identify the what and the why. Before you look at the who, you wanna start with what is it that you’re wanting to hire out. Like, it we talked about, you know, the the bottlenecks and the areas that impact your profit, peace of mind, productivity, and project delivery.
So get really clear about that, and then think about why do you wanna hire it up.
Because, remember, we are not towing trends here. We are looking at helping you scale with these subcontractors.
So when you know the what and the why, it will help you set a budget for your hire as well, which is super important because you would know what’s the impact it’s gonna have on your business if that team member is gonna do a fabulous job. Right?
It would help you understand the impact that hiring this person would bring to you. It would help you outline responsibilities.
It would help you clarify outcomes and metrics. It would just make it so much clearer for you as to how is this person who’s gonna come in be a part of your growth.
So always, always before you go into, oh, I need a social media manager or I need a sales rep or I need a research specialist or I need a a VA or I need whatever, you wanna know why do I need this person?
What are they going to do for me? So worksheets open up the worksheet, our Google Doc. I want you to think about this should be easy. Think about three areas in your business that are currently holding you back because they aren’t your superpower. You’re spending way much time doing them and they impact client experience.
Example for me, fire framing.
Not my strength at all, takes me way too much time, and was impacting client experience.
Right? Or you could look at areas that are slowing down your growth because while you can do them, right, they take too much time.
Again, another self example, editing. That was editing for me. I can do it.
But because I hate it, it would just take me double the time. It would take someone who’s who would enjoy it like Jillian Hill who was who’s, you know, fabulous at editing. So anyways or it’s impacting cash flow because you don’t have the capacity to do stuff.
So you’re great at it. It’s your superpower. You just don’t have the bandwidth to do it.
For instance, sometimes it’s like blog posts or when it was a really large project, like, I remember the hundred k project. I had so many emails. Like, I I had to bring in someone to help me with the emails.
So because it would make no sense for me to say, oh, no. I’m gonna try doing it all on my own.
Not realistic. Right? So I want you to take, like, five minutes. Think about it.
Put it down. Write it down right now. I’m gonna pause. I’m gonna mute myself, drink some water.
Alright.
Keep this with you because we’re gonna come back to it at the end of the session. This one, I I wanted this to be, like, kind of interactive, and I wanted to for you to walk away with knowing who your next hire is gonna be.
So now that you have these five areas, what you wanna start doing is narrow down on the needle movers. So out of those watts, you know, you wanna narrow down on and this is something that we use internally is we use a three c approach to the client experience, cash flow capacity.
Those are your needle movers.
If your client experience is great, it’s such a huge win because that kind of, you know, improves your cash flow.
Anytime client experience suffers, you can be sure, you know, repeat projects are not gonna happen, referrals are not gonna happen. It has a ripple effect on pretty much everything. Right?
And you wanna enjoy the experience as well. And then, of course, capacity. For us, because of chronic health issues, capacity is something that we value a lot. So yeah.
This is what we use.
So I’d want you to kind of, like, start thinking about it. Because when you know what your needle movers are based on your cash flow capacity client experience, you get really clear on why you’re hiring and what’s the impact you’re looking at. Because you’re hiring to either increase cash flow or revenue, capacity, or client experience, all of which has a direct impact on your growth.
All of which has a direct impact on sustainable growth, most importantly.
Because the last thing you wanna do is just focus on cash flow, ignore capacity, and then end up feeling burned out.
Or create great client experience, but overload cash flow, which means you won’t have a good profit margin.
So when you’re looking to scale, you wanna scale in a way that doesn’t burn you out. And that it’s so much easier to do that when you do that looking at, okay, out of these five areas, which ones have a direct impact on either of these three c’s. Ideally, if you’re looking if you find a task that has an impact on all three, that is exactly where you wanna store. So you wanna narrow down again. In the same workshop, you wanna narrow down on one to three areas that impact your cash flow and or client experience.
So here’s the thing. Capacity is a great first level filter. That is obviously your first level filter. Right?
But when you focus on cash flow and client experience, it can create capacity because you’re giving say, example. Let’s say you don’t have the capacity to take on block content for a client who may need it for their launch. Right? Now you wanna give them a great client experience, so you subcontract blog post writing, which means that you’ve now created capacity for yourself while improving cash flow and client experience too.
So look at go through the areas that you’ve identified and look at which ones have a direct impact on cash flow and or client experience. Remember, capacity is a great first level filter. So if you don’t have capacity for something, see whether hiring it out would give you capacity too.
Cool. Was that quick and easy? Are we done?
Yeah.
Okay. I can see nodding heads.
Alright.
Next up. Now based on these areas, those you know, the things that you don’t like or you wanna hire out or you wanna, you know, free up time for or you wanna hire a subcontractor for you wanna look at what are the roles you’re gonna hire. This is where you get really specific about who your subcontractor is gonna be Because sometimes people who we we may think we’re hiring like I said, like, the example. Sometimes you may think you’re hiring the social media manager, and you may think that they’ll do, you know, your your all reels for you.
That may not be the case. They may need you to do the filming. They’ll give you the guidelines, but they may need you to do that. Or you may be hiring, say, a researcher who may not be coming through surveys or may only be coming through a certain number of survey responses.
So you wanna be very, very clear on exactly who would you be hiring and what will they do.
This is where you wanna write a job description, and you wanna write a really good job description.
So this is not no longer about, oh, I just need a b c. This is about not only what the role will involve, but also things like what tech are they comfortable with, what kind of communication you expect, what’s the cadence of meetings, are you more an asynchronous meeting person, do you prefer, communication only via Slack, or is email okay with you? Do you wanna be reached on WhatsApp, or do you not wanna be reached on WhatsApp? You wanna be really, really clear.
And I learned this through lots and lots of hiring, lots and lots of job description writing. So what kind of support, you know, will you you, your team, you know, anyone else you’ve got on your team be offering them? What kind of support do you expect from them, especially if you are if you’ve got your own products that you’re selling, like Abby, you know, you have a program. If you’re in launch season, will your let’s say you hire you’re hiring a social media manager.
What kind of extra support will your social media manager need to pitch in during that time? Because that would be very different from, say, when you’re not in launch mode or when you’re you know?
So point being, you wanna be very clear on everything and, of course, the pay.
And that is why it’s important to set a budget.
So, you can put up these job descriptions. We’ve had success with different VA groups. We’ve had success with different job builds. But point is, even if you don’t put it anywhere, just share it with your email list. Point you need to give people a clearer guideline of what you are looking for.
Then finally, how do you measure, monitor, and manage? You wanna set a cadence and a workflow for measuring effectiveness. What would that look like for you? Remember, you will find a lot of guidelines or in, you know, in various books and, on what kind of meetings to have, what kind of interviews to do, etcetera, etcetera. At the end of the day, this is your business. You decide how you wanna, you know, measure, monitor, and manage. So I’ll give you an example.
Peers of ours have weekly startup meetings.
They work with a whole bunch of contractors.
They’re they’re also a couple in their business, and they, they do book publishing. So, they they have a stand up meeting because they work with a lot of contractors. So every week, I think they do it on Mondays or whatever, when is they meet on Zoom, but they do, like, quick check ins with everybody to see how’s it going, what would it you know, what’s everybody working on, does anyone need any extra support? Etcetera, etcetera.
Mike and I do asynchronous meetings because that works well for us.
So we check-in with any of our subcontractors on Slack. Let them know what’s coming up.
They fill in lesson, end of the week updates and let us know, you know, what they’ve worked on, what’s coming up for them, if they need any extra support from us, and that works well for us. So you’ve gotta figure out what kind of cadence will work for you for managing, working with your subcontractors.
And what you need to remember while a subcontractor is not an employee, they don’t have those full time benefits, a good subcontractor shows up as a team member. We’ve been very lucky, though. So one of our, subcontractors is is Natasha Blinky. We work with her on our research projects, and she’s also been course coordinator for for a really long time and optimization course optimization as well.
The reason we’ve worked with her for as long as we have, and she’s our first point of contact for any, you know, project that we know she would have the capacity for and the capability for is because she’s always shown up as a team member. She makes suggestions for the business that sometimes both Mike and I haven’t even seen. You know? And we’re like, oh, wow. That’s, like, such a great idea, which is what we try and do for our clients as well and, you know, why our clients love working with us. So we love working with people who show a lot of initiative.
This is something that’s really important for us.
Does every subcontractor do that? No. As long as they’re doing the core job you’ve hired them to do really well, I think that is great. If you find a subcontractor who, like, say, Natasha, goes the extra mile, I would say hold on to them. Really, you know, that’s that’s rare, but it’s really great. And as a business owner, on the other hand, for you, you need to remember that you aren’t gonna show up as quote unquote boss.
You’re gonna show up as a leader. It requires a lot of work and to for, you know, for us to kind of start showing up as not as contractors for clients, but as leaders for our own subcontractors. So this is, like, something that you would wanna start working on, start reading about, start, you know, just kind of observing, okay, where are my gaps?
What can I do better when it comes to communication? Because sometimes and I’ll be honest with you. So early days, really early days, I think this is I would expect someone I would hire, like, say, a social media person to basically just know what I’m thinking when it comes to strategy. Right?
And this is a dangerous position to be in because here’s the thing. Because I’ve been doing social media management before we pivoted into the copyright, I knew how social media works. So I would be like, but this is so obvious. Like, you know but and I would say, okay.
But have you told her this? That this is what you’re looking for? No. But she should know it quicker.
No. So it requires a lot of, you know, reflection and looking at, okay, what can I do better?
So something to keep in mind.
How do you do all of this is you create detailed SOPs. And here’s the deal. So with your subcontractors, if you’re hiring someone for a role for the first time, one of the things you wanna keep in the job description is that they need to document and create the SOPs as they go. This is something that we did when we started working with Natasha initially for our blog content.
Like, so she when she would publish a blog post, she created, like, a detailed SOP, complete with the video tutorial. So when she moved on and she started specializing in research instead, I already had all those SOPs to hand over to whoever replaced her. Right? So you wanna be very, very clear.
You wanna create and if you if you feel that you would need to explain to someone how to do something, then I would say create those SOPs yourself right now and detailed workflows as well. What happens when? Who who sends what? What needs to you know, who needs to talk to each other.
All of those things need to be documented.
Have a communication cadence. Cannot emphasize that in our whether you do weekly check ins, end of week check ins, start of week updates, doesn’t matter. But radio silence from either side is never is never good. Legal compliance, contracts, ideas, you wanna have those in place.
We always buy our contracts from, like, like, lots of great legal template shops, legal pages. One, we bought our contracts from. The particular is another one we bought our contract from. So, would recommend those.
I’m sure there are others as well. You want, again, remember how it works you need and not what a book or a coach or anyone else says. And know that it may not always work out, and that’s okay.
Alright.
That was longer, a little longer than our usual twenty minute trainings, but yeah.
Questions?
No questions? Okay. Then I have a few. I wanna know who’s got some like, a clear idea of who they need to hire in order to scale.
Yeah. Andrew.
Can you hear me okay?
Yep.
Sorry. I’m in a public co working space. I’m trying not to speak to you.
I think my next, hire, I think I really want someone to basically help organize all of the research for me when I have a new client, and basically package it together so that I could just take, like, two days and just go through it without worrying about, like, oh, I have to, like, go through these, like, pick up these sales call recordings and go through these. And then I have to, go through, like, analyze this and, like, that whole lot just have it packaged for me. And I think I would I would need someone who understands the industry a little bit because, you know, with technical concepts, there are certain things where you have to kind of understand like, oh, okay. Like, I would Basically this as, you know, helpful. I don’t know.
But, yeah, just someone would have to have a certain amount of, like, research knowledge for for it to make sense.
But, like, I would love to just have someone basically do the research for me, but I still need to understand all the everything that they have. So I’m thinking of of it largely. It’s basically them doing the organizing parking cycle. I’m terrible at it, and I it takes me way too long.
And I’m always always changing the format. Like, always, like, oh, no. This is the right way to organize it. Or no.
This is a better way. So I think just having someone go just deliver me this, like, here’s everything you need to know to get up to speed up this event and just go through an order. Got it. But, like, just just thinking about that is, like, a huge lift off our shoulders.
Oh, cool.
Right. And, so, basically and what I’m hearing is, like, why you wanna hire this person is because it would free up your capacity.
Right? But would it also improve the client experience? Like, do you think it would improve the eventual results that you create for your clients?
It could. If the first I would say that I would say that the main thing is to get that, like, is to is a capacity thing, because I’m losing a lot of time to sort of just, like, indecision. I do part of the research here, part of the research there.
So I think it’s largely a capacity thing. But I think with the right person, it could potentially help get a better result too because then I’m, like, a little bit more fresh when I start writing.
So, you know, I think that rather than if you do after doing all that research, it could be like, oh, I’m already, like, half burnt out on this.
Right. Right.
Right. Right. It so I think it could it could have a better client experience as well, but it would be a different capacity and easier, like, freeing my mind up. I I actually the more I talk about it, the more I think it would be better for the client experience because I think that the way that I’m approaching it now is probably I’m probably causing some, there are probably some gaps that pop in the cracks.
Yeah. That could be the case. Like, when we don’t enjoy a particular task, then we tend to either rush through it or, you know, like, feel like it’s not. And what, at least, I found was that a hiring researcher really improved client experience because then I can, like, present that research in a much better way to the client, you know, and they would have Yeah. Way more understanding of what went into the project and where am I coming from so I can, like, pick depending my copy code and code is something that I very rarely have to do because they know it’s, like, you know, all of this data has gone into into the research. So I think that’s a really good place to start. What I would love to see from you is a job description.
Okay. So it doesn’t matter okay. Here’s the thing. You may not hire this person this month or even next month or maybe not even this quarter.
Maybe this would be, like, a q four thing that you’re looking to do, which is very important because you wanna look at your budget. Right? So you’re gonna look at, okay, where is this gonna come up for? Where is this higher?
And what kind of a budget am I working with for and, again, remember, something like what Adam was talking about, you can easily do a test project. So that’s, like, you know, a single project to see how it goes with that particular person before you start working with them over and over again. So but I would love to see a job description, mainly because I’m curious to see, the role that you flesh out for this person. So because this is a role that we’ve, like, hired for multiple times.
So, yeah, I’m interested in seeing the the role you flesh out. Cool?
Cool. That was good.
Okay. Good.
So Thank you.
When would I see that? I’m not gonna let you off that.
Gonna do, not like the repurposing one that I saw you Yeah. And just ignoring. Yeah.
Ignoring and feeling guilty about.
So this one, I’m gonna have this done by the end of tomorrow to give myself a good deadline for this week.
Alright. Yeah. We’ll check-in with you then. I will. You know I will. So cool. Okay.
This was great. Who else wants to share what’s the next role they wanna hire for? Yeah, Maria.
I need somebody for social media. I do not like social media. I have tried liking social media. I have tried a lot in not just with this business with other businesses, and it’s just like a recurring theme, but I don’t like it.
Like, I’ve made, like, so much content that never gets posted because then I don’t get it into the right form or the right template or the right this or the right that. It’s not like a lack of ideas.
It’s a lack of, getting it formatted right because I hate all that fiddly formatting stuff. Mhmm. Mhmm. And then, and then remembering to actually post it, and it it’s that whole thing. So I don’t mind, like, recording things. I don’t mind the writing of the thing.
I just don’t wanna do the actual like, I just wanna say here’s, like, the raw stuff.
Mhmm.
Put it into the make the carousel or make the reel or make the whatever. I’ll send you the pictures and the video clips and the they can pick the music for it, whatever. It doesn’t really matter to me. And then I just don’t wanna Mhmm. It. So I just wanna be like, there’s the thing. Go make it happen and post it.
Not totally, like, taking my hands off, but kind of. Because it just I know that because I’ve I’ve tried. Like, I’m in this Instagram class, like, learning how to do the things, and I’m like, okay. You can do this. You can do this. And then I love doing strategy and business y things and whatever and the social media stuff.
Mhmm. Like, is this boulder on my back? And so yeah.
Okay. But why why social media? What do you think the impact’s gonna be on your business? How will it help you scale?
Oh, how will it help me? Because nobody knows who I am. I mean, like, I I need to get visibility. So, I am writing a book.
And so, and so, like, I have this plan.
Like, I would like to, go to three conferences next year. So and have a book, and I need to test the ideas in the book. And I’m gonna do that through social media, which will get my ideas out there, and sort of, like, validate and get known so that when I go to these conferences in real life and I’m connecting with people, then I’m not it’s not like, what rock did you crawl under or out from?
Like, who are you?
Right? Yeah. Yeah. So Yeah. Yeah.
Like, I need to build some authority. And so, it’s not working me just trying to have the willpower to do it because Mhmm. Then it would be done already because I’m pretty Yeah. Disciplined.
But this Yeah. I don’t know. I just Yeah. Think it’s a it’s a barrier.
Okay. That’s, like, a really good yeah. So okay.
What I want you to start thinking about is when you’re thinking about social media because this is, like, such a broad umbrella. You know? Like, oh, I need someone to manage social media, and I’ve heard this often.
I’ve been that person.
What you wanna think about is do you need someone to create strategy, create content, create do all of the uploading, do the networking, or are they parts of social media that you enjoy, like the con creating the content but not the format, like you said? And if someone were to take let’s say, you do a you record a video or you do a podcast interview and someone were to take that and turn that into or you, you know, into a blog post and things like that. Because then you’re looking for for different people. A social media manager would map out your would ideally map out your strategy, help you look at it, help you see what goals are you gonna accomplish, and then go ahead, go through your content, create content based off your content, and then, obviously, send it to you for approval and things like that.
But they would create the graphics. They would give you ideas for what reels to film. That’s what, like, our social media manager used to do, which was really helpful. And then they would they would do the job of finding the music and and all of that.
Some of them also do a bit of networking on your behalf.
So you wanted to or you can work with someone who’s a repurposing specialist who can take one piece of content for you Yeah. And repurpose it. And sometimes, they also all have add ons, like, where they’ll even post it for you.
So you wanna think about you wanna give that some thought. And, like, that’s why I say, you know, it’s really important to get here on what is it that you would want this person to do and not just say, oh, I need a social media person?
Because that could mean so many different things.
So it definitely is like, I’m fine with figuring out strategy.
I can plan things That’s what I call.
Yeah.
All night. Yeah. Yeah.
I have so many strategies that it’s not even it’s the and, content.
Like, I’m building content for the thing that the offer that I’m currently having.
So I don’t have heaps of it yet. But I’m fine with creating content and generating ideas and, like, all of that.
Mhmm. Mhmm. But then it is I need somebody to take that primary piece of content, repurpose it into all the different formats.
I’m gonna start doing, like, a live stream. I’m fine with live stream. I hate video editing. I do not want a video edit, which is why I like livestream. But I also do wanna do some longer form stuff for YouTube, like some pillar content around my, diagnostic stuff. But, yeah, I just need somebody to, like, make it look like it should so people actually watch it.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So that’s, you know, so that’s something that you wanna kinda give some thought to because, because I I know people who do both.
You know? Who I know people who who are great at social media management, and I also know, I would know like I say, I know a a handful of people who do social, you know, content repurposing.
So Mhmm.
So I know that there are two different things. And the thing with copywriters is we’re really good. Like I said, we’re really good with strategy. We’re really good with content.
We want our words to sound a certain way, especially because that’s what we do. Right? So, yeah, so I would want you to give some thought to that and get really clear on what is it that you would want this person to do. You could call them whatever you want.
You call them, you know, a social media repurposing strap, you know, assistant, or you would call them a you know, depending on what you want them to do. But social media manager, social media strategist, social media copywriter, You’ll hear all of these job descriptions all you know, but at the end of the day, you gotta get really clear on what will this person do because you’re really clear on why you need them.
Mhmm.
So that’s great. But I want you know, I think if you have more clarity on exactly what yeah. That would be great. So, yeah, job description.
So I did email put it out or not?
Yeah.
Go ahead. I I did email Shane because I went to a session last weekend. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Talking about outsourcing, and I was like, okay. That is something that that might be a good fit for outsourcing.
But I can’t I don’t have budget to hire somebody full time, which working with somebody from the Philippines, he was like, full time is best. And I said, well, this is my budget.
This is it’s obviously not full time. So did he have any recommendations? So I’m waiting to hear back from him. But I see Andrew was saying, yeah, finding one person. So maybe if there’s more than one person, you know, collectively, we could full time hire somebody.
That would be kinda cool.
I mean, like, if everybody Or you could do some sort of project basis.
You know?
You could say, I’m gonna send you four videos.
I need you to create x number of pieces of content out of it.
Yeah.
So I have worked with people on Fiverr.
Like, before different business did a podcast, I had somebody that did all that podcast editing. I just found them on Fiverr.
So I could do that, but I’m I’m really I like the idea of having somebody on the part of the team, like, so that we’re, like, collectively building the business and everybody benefits.
Yeah. So Yeah. That is true. Yeah.
But I do need to do it sooner rather than later because I’m like, okay.
This needs to happen because I need I want clients, and then clients start looking for, like, well, where are you? What what authority do you have? Blah blah blah.
Yep. Yep. Yep.
Yeah. So That’s true. I like it or not, I need to do it. So this is this is the way that I can do it, and so I just need to own that and move forward with it so I can think about other things.
Cool. Great.
Okay. Good. So spend some time thinking about it. And then yeah. But even with you, Marina, I would love to see, you know, an outline of what you would want this person to do.
It may not be like a formal job description, but a really clear outline of what would this person be doing, how often would they be meeting you, what would they need from you, what would you expect from them? Because, also think about your budget. What kind of a budget are you working with? You know, think about the impact it’ll have on your business when you’re using it.
But, of course, you wanna also look at what you’re bringing in and then kind of work with that. So but, yeah, having a detailed description would be really, really helpful.
And I did do I do have a repurposing plan. I just need to, like, actually execute on it. Yeah.
So I mean, I You should have a repurposing plan.
Yes. Yeah. After our session, I was like, okay. Yeah. So I have the diagram, and I’m like, okay. This all makes sense.
And then Yeah.
It just yep, then I think, oh, I don’t know.
Yeah.
Oh, I just I like to make a note.
About how to I don’t do it.
Yeah. Yeah. No. I understand that. Cool.
Yeah. But I could give it to somebody else and say, here’s the primary piece of content.
Exactly.
Here’s the reporting strategy.
Here’s all the images. Make it happen.
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Oh, alright, Jessica.
K. So I’m kind of in this place where I have some clear jobs for sure that I’ll need to subcontract or something. So for example, cover designer, I’ll need to offload doing, book formatting, like, that kind of stuff.
So that’s easy.
That kind of thing to me is like, no problem.
Got that. That’s very clear. But then I have this kind of some of what Marino was saying, I was like, well, okay. So Joe is letting us put a team member through CSP or the intensive or something like that. Right? Okay. So couldn’t I, hypothetically, hire someone too to kind of, like I so I I think you follow her too, Prana.
Rachel Miller, you know, for the social Yeah. Yep. I have her programs, and I often have thought, you know, I should just pay someone to take this course for me, and then they can I’ll do the same thing, Marina. Like, record videos, you do the rest. I don’t care.
Can figure out the strategy. I don’t even care about that. You just make it so that when someone goes to look up Jessica, Noelle, books, publishing, I’m in all the places. Great.
Okay? That’s all I really care about. So I was, like, thinking about it, but then I have these other tasks that I want taken off my plate. So for example, I had I customized the, templated proposal.
Now, admittedly, it was a little more in the future, it won’t take this long, but it still took me with breaks, I think, about half the day. I was like, this is a waste of my time.
So I it it’s like that kinda task. The invoicing part, the onboarding, the, you know, like, that kind of stuff. I also want someone to just just do this for me. Like, I don’t care. Just do this. So I was kinda sitting there going, okay. So I have someone in mind that would like to be the VA.
Would be you work with great. But how far off of the scope of a typical VA? Like, can I slide in there and say, you know what? Would you be willing to take this social media course and help me repurp like or am I is that too I don’t know. Yeah.
So that’s that gets really muddy really fast. I know. Because then they feel that they’ve been paid to be a VA, but they’re doing the social media manager’s job, and it will lead to a lot. So you either bring this person in as a, you know, as a fractional content marketing officer or a fractional CMO or something like that.
You know? Or bring them in as so then they’re doing a lot, but then they wouldn’t be doing a lot of the admin side of things. So you wanna kind of start thinking about that because that’s two different roles that we’re talking about. Like, oh, take my social media and repurpose it, but then also manage my contracts and my proposals and my invoicing and all of that.
The the proposals and customizing the proposals and yeah. You know? All I would say that would be more a really good VA’s job.
But the social media side of things, what you can do here is either bring in someone who’s early in the game, eager to learn, willing to, you know, work with testing different things out, open to feedback, and all of that. Also appreciate is the fact that you’ll be giving them access to Rachel’s courses, etcetera, to go through it. That’s, like, education.
So that would that would possibly work. But, yeah, I would say off the right off the bat, this would be, like, two different roles. And that is what you and what you wanna decide is which one would have more of an impact on your scaling journey, which one would have more of an impact on your cash flow plan of snooze and capacity.
Use that to decide. You don’t always have to hire for both. Sometimes you may realize that, oh, I could have, like, a tool do this for me, or I could have, you know, AI do this for me. But, because we do have that option too. You know? So, so you may wanna look at that.
Okay. Okay. Thank you.
You’re welcome. Abby, who are you gonna hire next?
I want to hire someone to, like, implement my customer feedback loop and then report back to me on the data, like, every month for the optimization. So that’s like, I need to very clearly define what that’s gonna look like.
And then so, yeah, that will free up capacity, and it will improve the client experience because I haven’t Yeah.
I haven’t done, like, all of it for a client before because it’s just, like, too much.
And then it will should improve cash flow as well because I’ll be able to, like, charge more because I’m offering a more kind of end to end service. And then the other thing I I really need in my business, like, the bottleneck is, like, eyeballs. Like, I just need more people kind of going into my funnel, for my course because that’s I really wanna make my course, work. So for that, I’m thinking about potentially hiring someone to to help me do YouTube or social media. I haven’t quite decided yet, but I definitely need someone to just, like, solve that problem of how do I get, like, five hundred people into my funnel a month.
So the five the lead gen part of things is obviously one one role, and you you could you could do that in so many ways, which is why it would be great for you to kind of do this exercise and say, what what are the different lead generation strategies that you wanna test out?
You know? So YouTube is great, but YouTube will bring you those five hundred eyeballs.
It’s a long game. Right? It would start bring But if you need more adults now, what are the things that you could do? And then see if you need to really hire that out, or can you test out some strategies right now? Maybe it’s ads. You’re you’re running ads. Right?
So I did run ads, and I ran it for two months, and I break even.
And I had, like, some clear kind of optimization steps, but then I’d I think I was just, like, overwhelmed with client work, so I didn’t do it. So I I should really revisit.
Exactly.
Yeah. Maybe revisit and optimize that. Mhmm. But the other the other rule is the client feedback thing that you said. Like, what was that?
Like, so for my evergreen process, like, I have, like, kind of different feedback points, like surveys Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
AB testing, that kind of thing. So, like, so I need someone to kind of set it up and then, organize, like, all of the data at the end of the month so I can, like, review it and see what where to optimize.
This is actually something you do you know Angela Tan?
No.
Okay. Can she help?
That yeah. She could help you with setting up all these automations and then also collating the data into Airtable or something like that so you can then kind of go through it. I think she may be able to help, but you yeah. You should speak to her.
But this would be like a systems and automations thing. You know? It’s this is like a quick one time project. So what I would actually love for you to think more is more long term, Abby.
These are like smaller projects. If you’re looking to scale, who’s gonna help you scale?
So and then or what is gonna help you scale? Actually, I would wanna start with what is gonna help you scale? Where are you kind of where could you create more cash flow for yourself? Where could you create more capacity to take on? So I would want you to just kind of start thinking a little bigger because these are smaller single one off projects, one and done. But what we’re looking at is some to bring someone on, you can either like I said, capacity is a first level filter. We have a capacity so you can take on more projects or help you generate more money, charge more from clients.
So things that you could possibly start adding on to packages and and projects.
Yeah. I mean, it would be for, like, the optimization retainer because it was so I would need them every month to, like, organize the research.
But then, yeah, like, same as what Andrew said, like, I would like someone to just, like, analyze it and put it in, like, a messaging guide for me.
Oh, in that case then, if you’re looking for, like, a retail team, then I think you should speak to Natasha. I don’t know whether she knows how to set things up.
But if you know how to set those up, then you can kind of record it and show it to her, but Natasha would be great for this. Yeah.
Natasha Harisari?
Oh, Natasha is, I can make an introduction. Natasha Blinky. Do you know her?
Mm-mm.
No? Okay. Cool.
I can make an introduction to her, but, she could be really great with distilling feedback data and to tell you exactly what needs to be done.
I mean, she’s brilliant at it. Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah. And I didn’t mention her for you because you need someone with, with SaaS experience. Right? So yeah.
But she knows the online course industry. She’s like, yep. We’ve worked with her on multiple projects. We love her.
So, but, yeah, that could be a good, good way to improve both capacity and client streams. That would be a good hire. Yeah.
But go ahead. Like, create your impact. Do do this what everybody else is doing. Create your job description for this person, and I will make the connection. Yeah.
Thank you. Yeah. I will be able to do it by tomorrow like Andrew, but let’s see next Friday.
Okay. Cool. Alright. Cool. Any other questions?
Nope?
All good. All ready to hire.
Okay.
Cool. Great. I shall see you all in Slack, and we’ll check-in with you tomorrow then.
Okay. Cool.
Thanks, Brenna. It’s really helpful.
Thank you. Bye. Thank you, Brenna. Bye.
Pitching Your Workshop Presentations
Pitching Your Workshop: Abi, Marina & Claire Present Their Diagnostics
Transcript
Hey. Hey. Alright. Workshop day. Y’all ready? Yes?
Of course.
Good.
I’m excited. This is gonna be a lot.
We’ve got three p doing this a lot. I don’t know what’s going on with my brain.
My fingers never match what the number is that I say. So three. There. I had to think about it. We have three of you going today, and I know it just hit start time. So we’re just gonna let some people come on in.
Abby, you’re going. Marina, you’re going. And I think Claire is our third, and we’ll, go in that order.
Is that exciting? Yeah. Yes. Okay. Good.
Alright. We’ll let some people file in. How are you all feeling about your present your workshops?
I don’t know why, but I’m, like like, nervous about giving it.
Really? Yeah. I was like, I don’t know why.
They’re just, like, my friends. I can agree. I was saying to my partner, but I’m, like, really nervous.
It’s so much worse when you know the people.
It’s so much worse.
Is that what it is? Maybe.
Yes. Totally.
Three thousand strangers, easy compared to three people you know very well. Like, no. Thanks. I don’t need this. I’m good. I’ll do something else with my life.
Well, also these people, they know what it’s supposed to be. So what if you totally miss the boat?
I guess that’s true. Yeah. That’s fair. That’s fair.
Alright. Thanks everybody who’s attending today and not presenting.
We’re going to be attending as people in that person’s ideal audience. So, Abby, Marina, and when Claire gets here, if the three of you can please just let us know basically who your ICP is and the persona that you believe would be watching this, and we can do our best to sit in those shoes. And, otherwise, we’ll just, like, give other feedback as well.
So that’s our job for everybody who is filing in again.
Yeah. Really simply, we are here to watch and give feedback on three workshops. And if you’re working on your own work workshop, which you should be, it’s a great chance for you to do to see to see. So you can also learn like, oh, wow.
I loved that. Or, oh, okay. That’s gonna be a confusing part. It was confusing for their audience.
It’s probably confusing for mine. I didn’t think of it that way, etcetera, etcetera. So a caught not taught kind of workshop day. It is two hours, because we have three groups, three people going.
Each gets about thirty minutes, then we’ll have about five minutes of discussion time, which could turn into ten, which is why we have two hours blocked out. Thank you for this endurance approach. It’s not a sprint, today. So are we ready?
We’re gonna go Abby, then Marina, and then Claire, if any of you surprised.
And you’re like, wait. What? I’m going today? Yeah. That’s the sign up list I got.
So so, hopefully, that’s right. Going in that order, Abby, then Marina, then Claire. Are we ready? Or does everybody know why we’re here and what we’re doing?
Any confusion?
No? I wouldn’t think so. Alright. We are recording.
Let’s get cracking. If you’re not presenting, please go on mute and do your best to stay on camera if possible so that the presenter can see our faces and not feel like they’re talking to an empty room or people who are busy doing other things. Okay. Thanks.
Abby, take it away.
Cool. Okay. So, my ICP is a course creator, so you’re probably doing about three to four million. You wanna be doing ten million.
But at the moment, you’re just completely stuck with a live lodge roller coaster. You’re getting burned out because every time you live lodge, it just takes out of you, and you just cannot get Evergreen to work, and you don’t know why.
Okay. So can everybody, like, see my screen?
Okay. Cool. Right.
Okay. So this workshop is called how to make five thousand dollars a day with a mid ticket evergreen course.
So I’m Abby. I’m the founder of AT Content and the creator and author of day one evergreen, the only funnel that’s built to convert better every month.
I help course creators add one point eight million a year in revenue, which is five thousand dollars a day, without the nail biting stress of live launches. I’ve worked with hundreds of course creators. I’ve worked on evergreen funnels for Amy Porterfield, Becca Klein, Jel Sid, Coffeehackers, Ingrid Ana, Fast Needs a QBO, and some other names that you might recognize.
So you’re in the right place if you have a mid ticket offer between three hundred and two thousand dollars that you’d love to scale to five thousand dollars a day on Evergreen. The reason I say these amounts is just what I found is when it’s over two thousand, it tends to just take a little bit more nurturing. So the idea of this funnel is that you bring people onto your email list and you sell to them straight away.
So you’re already doing at least a million with your online course, but you really wanna scale with to ten million without relying on the nail biting trust of live launches.
And you’re already using paid advertising to sell your online course. So this isn’t a requirement.
So, generally, to to reach five thousand dollars a day, depending on how much your course is, you wanna be getting at least a hundred, maybe two hundred people into a funnel every day. If you can do this with organic marketing, awesome. Great.
But likely, you’re gonna be using some kind of paid advertising.
So a quick case study.
So one of my clients is Fast and Easy QBI. So back in January, they launched a brand new course with an email list of ten thousand, and we made six hundred thousand dollars. Their sales that month outpaced all of their sales in twenty twenty three. We straightaway took that launch funnel evergreen and made seventy six thousand dollars in month one, keeping in mind that they’d already pretty much exhausted that email list because we literally just live launched.
And then we continue to optimize.
And now in July, they’ve got a six point eight cent conversion rate with a three dollar cost per lead. So for a twelve hundred dollar course, they’re they’ve got a pretty good ROAS there, and they’re making five thousand dollars a day with they on Evergreen.
A few more case studies, which you can get in my book.
So one of my clients, Eric Petrus, he came to me because he he was selling guitar guitar repair course.
I worked on his evergreen sales page, and we tripled his weekly sales. At Harmusch, I wrote his evergreen sales page three years ago. Amazingly, he’s still using the same copy, and it’s converting at thirteen percent. He’s making hundreds of thousands of dollars from that. Becca Klein, I increased her final conversions by a hundred and fifty percent.
Jove said two hundred and forty percent increase in webinar sales.
This was actually for a live launch, but the coffee converted so well. She took Evergreen and actually tripled her course price.
And Fast and Easy QBO, another course I’ve worked on for them is a membership, and we’ve seen a forty percent increase in membership sign ups since setting up day one evergreen.
Okay. So to address the eye roll here, these aren’t friends or colleagues. These are course creators that have come to me to evergreen their funnels. This isn’t another just add a countdown timer, just set up deadline funnel, and it’s gonna convert. This is unique system designed to collect ongoing data via a ten point customer feedback loop so you can legitimately improve your conversions without ripping a funnel apart every month.
So deal with evergreen, the funnel that’s built to convert best every month. So now you can stop relying on unpredictable live launches that burn you and your team out or the unpredictability of them as well. I mean, live launches are fun and exciting when they go well, but, also, if you’re putting you’re counting on one live launch to generate your full year’s revenue. And one link doesn’t work, and then you potentially lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So this is to just build a bit more peace into your business. It’s not to say never live lodge, but just to have that one point eight million as well.
Without lining Zuckerberg’s pockets, while barely breaking even on your ad spend, so maybe we’re already running ads to your evergreen course, and it’s kind of converting. But, actually, after you paid your ad spend, you’re not making enough money. Like, yes, you’re getting those leads, but you’re then having to go back to live launching to sell to sell to them.
And without hiring expert after expert in the hope that someone can fix your evergreen funnel problem. And then again, just linking back to live launches because it just doesn’t work.
Okay. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna do a little slice together. So I’d love you to just grab a notebook and pen.
Okay. So what I want you to do is in the middle of your page is to just draw a circle and write in there five thousand dollars. So that’s that’s what we’re going for here, five thousand dollars a day. And then I will need to draw four leaves.
Make them quite big so you’ve got room to write in them. I guess these are kind of kind of looking like petals here. So you should have what looks like a little flower.
And then in the first, leaf, I want you to write attract.
In the second leaf, I want you to write engage.
And the third, convert.
And then the fourth, optimize.
Okay. So the first thing you’re gonna wanna do, if you if you want to be making sales every day, you need to be bringing people into your funnel, and you need to attract the right leads. So we’re gonna be using Facebook ads to do that.
Then the second thing we need is an attraction device. So you need a way to bring these people into your funnel and instantly engage them. So this is like you’re gonna be an opt in page with a workshop.
And then you need a lead monitor. So you need some way of actually seeing, okay, are these good leads as the reason that my funnel isn’t converting because my sales messaging is awful. Am I just bringing in low quality leads?
Okay. And then we have engaged. So you need an irresistible offer.
We’re gonna be talking in a minute about deeper into what these all mean and how to assess, whether you’ve got it set up or not, and then mindset shift.
So rather than doing a traditional how to workshop, you’re gonna do a workshop that’s built out of mindset shifts the audience needs to, go through in order to be ready to buy your course.
And then, oh, sticky story. Sorry.
Brain brain fart.
So because this is you are bringing people in and selling to them straight away, it’s really important you build know, like, and trust here. So this isn’t just like putting a shit’s creep gif in your emails and being like, hey. I have a personality. Like, you wanna build these really sticky stories that, like, win them over to your world and make them feel ready to to buy from you.
Okay. And then we’ve got combat. So we want an easy yes pitch. So at the end of your webinar, you’re gonna pitch your offer, and it’s gonna make it very easy for them to say yes.
And then you’ve got a million dollar sales page. So this isn’t your typical templated sales page. This is a long form sales page that addresses any objections they have that by the time they get to the ends of it, they’re not gonna have any further questions about your course.
And then conversion emails. So, again, not just your generic sales emails, emails that are written to convert.
And then finally, we have optimize.
So data tracking.
Are you tracking your data across the whole funnel?
And then we have your customer feedback loop. So that’s your ten point customer feedback loop, which includes forms and surveys, AB tests to gain as much information about your customer as possible.
And then finally, we have conversion hotspots, which is where you want to implement your customer feedback to have the biggest impact on your conversions.
Okay. So you should have something that looks a bit like this. Maybe a little bit neater. Mine’s a bit. My handwriting’s still great.
And now we’re gonna go through and we’re gonna write where you are for each of these sections. So if you’re feeling really confident, you’ve got it set up, it’s all converting beautifully, you’re gonna give yourself a ten.
If you have it set up but conversions aren’t quite where they should be or you just feel like it could be better, you can give yourself a five. And if it’s not set up or it’s not converting at all, you’re gonna give yourself a zero.
Okay. So the first thing we’ve got is your Facebook ads.
So in order for to hit five thousand thousand dollars a day, your ads need to be profitable. So if you are your current ad spend is ten to twenty dollars a day and you have a five hundred dollar course, you’re just literally flushing away that money and not and not seeing any return on your ad spend. So we wanna ideally get your lead down to around five dollars, five to ten dollars.
And it’s also it’s not just about the cost per lead, but having someone on your team who’s gonna address seasonal changes, who’s gonna keep updating that so that what works in winter can then be made to work in summer. You’re not you’re refreshing the ads, so they can continue to go back, and you’re not just flushing that money away.
And then you want your attraction device. So your opt in page to your workshop. So, ideally, your opt in page conversion rate should be around forty to sixty percent.
You also want to make sure that people are then watching your webinar. So if people aren’t even clicking to watch your on demand webinar, then the chances are that it’s just not desirable enough. So if you have an issue there with people not watching, it might just be that your opt in page isn’t selling it hard enough. And then lead monitor.
So you’re gonna have a thank you page survey embedded after people sign up for your webinar, and this is gonna determine what drove them to to sign up. It’s gonna tell you whether these are good leads. So you might find that lots of people going in there are like, oh, I just wanna make more money or some other kind of quick win, and then this is a sign that actually those leads aren’t the ones that you want in there. You want ones that are ready to buy, they’re ready to invest, and understand that it’s it’s a long term game.
You also wanna be doing very strategic AB testing on your opt in page. So rather than just testing to see if you can get your conversion rate up a little bit, actually looking at the bottom of your funnel and seeing, okay. Is this one bringing in the leads that actually convert?
So, again, if you don’t have that set up, it’s gonna be a zero. If you have some of it set up at five, and if you’re really confident that you know what’s going on with your leads and who’s converting, then you’re gonna be self a ten.
Okay. And then going on to engage. So your irresistible offer.
Do is this something that people will, like, crawl through broken glass to get? Do you have a great offer that’s converted before? And is it converting with Evergreen? So it might be that it converts pretty well when it’s like you live launch, but on evergreen, maybe you don’t have the right kind of urgency set up. Do you have that authentic scarcity that gives people a reason to act now rather than later.
And then mindset shifts. So your workshop, is it built out of the mindset shifts that people need to go through to go from where they are now to where they need to be to say yes to your course, or are you just doing how to content that isn’t actually converting them?
And then sticky stories. So, again, building in that relatability stories that really stick. And you can the way you can tell this is are people staying to the end of your webinar? Are people sticking around? Are they opening your emails? Are they engaging with your offer? And if they’re not, then the chances are you need to just go back and build in more of that storytelling and more of yourself so that people can buy into that.
Okay. And then we’ve got Converse. We’ve got the easiest pitch.
So this is at the end of your webinar. Are you not just are you are you reading through your modules and your bonuses, or are you constantly making sure that you’re connecting the modules and the bonuses to what’s going on in their life at the moment, explaining to them how how it’s gonna improve their life, how it’s gonna aid the transformation that you’re promising. And, again, the way you can measure this is are people sticking around to the end of your webinar, or are they dropping off?
Your million dollar sales page, is this, is it converting? Is is the the first thing to think about? Are you converting at five to eight percent, which is what you should be getting with an evergreen webinar funnel like this?
Is it templated? Are you pulling out generic pain points, or are you have you got your customer research and you’re reading their mind and you’re empathizing with them deeply? You’re as they’re reading through, they’re thinking, oh my god. Yes. This person gets me. Important on an evergreen sales page because again, these people don’t know you. They haven’t been on your list for months and months and months.
So it’s even more important that you show them you understand where they are and that they can trust you to guide to guide them.
And then finally, conversion emails. Again, emails are rich in voice of customer that are addressing different objections objections that are coming up in your customer feedback loop, which we’ll talk about in a second.
Are people opening them? Are people clicking through? Is your click through rate for each email above two percent?
Okay. And finally, optimize. So data tracking. Are you tracking every point of your funnel, and do you understand how it all ties together? So your cost per lead, your click through rate on your ads, your opt in page conversions, how the amount of people that show up for your webinar, and the amount of time they spend on your webinar, your sales pitch, your versions, your open rates for emails, your click through rates. Are you measuring all that, and are you measuring it month monthly and looking at how things are changing each month?
Your customer feedback loop. Do you have a ten point customer feedback loop built in? Do you have survey set up? Do you have opportunities for your customers to engage?
Are you finding out why people are converting versus not converting? Are you running strategic tests? All of these things will help you understand your audience better. So if anything’s not converting, you can use your data tracking to identify where and you know what to change around your messaging.
And this also applies to seasonal changes as well. For example, let’s say you have an outgoing copywriting course, that converted amazing in twenty twenty two. Then in January twenty twenty three, your conversion rates dropped and you don’t know why. If you had that customer feedback loop set up, you could say, oh, okay.
Because everyone’s freaking out about about AI, but I’m not addressing that in my messaging. So do you have these points set up so you understand what is getting in the way for your audience? And then finally, conversion hotspots. Once you’ve got that feedback, do you know where to put it?
Do you know where to put that the voice of customers so that you are having the biggest impact of your conversions and you’re not just constantly randomly rewriting, ripping pile funnels, start again, wasting all this time just hoping, praying that something’s gonna convert.
Okay. Cool.
Thanks. So you should hopefully have something that looks a little bit like this, maybe a bit less colorful unless you you’ve got your crayons. So now we’re you should be able to identify three to four points, for you to now go away and work on. So if your problem is that, okay, you are making some sales, but it’s just not profitable because all of your money is going to Facebook ads. You wanna go and you wanna look at your Facebook ads, you wanna work on your opt in page, see if you can get that conversion rate up, and maybe have a look at your offer. Is there room to put the price up a bit more so you’re more profitable? And then, of course, getting this customer feedback loop built in so you can see why people, why your leads are expensive, what what you can do to actually improve that.
Is your is it the case that your sales are inconsistent? Sometimes, some months are gray, other months are poor.
Again, you wanna build this customer feedback loop in so you can see what’s changing. You want someone working on your Facebook ads so that they can respond to these seasonal changes and then be going through these conversion hotspots through your funnel from the top to the bottom to optimize based on what it is that’s changing.
And if you’re not getting sales at all, then or you’re you’re just making a couple, like, nowhere near that five k that you want, then the chances are you need someone to come in and set up this day one evergreen funnel for you.
So if you do just have a couple of points here, then that’s awesome. Go away. Give give this to your team. Get my book for the to get the ten conversion, the the customer feedback loop.
If you’re thinking, okay. I just really love someone to just set this up for me, then my team has one space available per month. Not only will we set it up, but we’re also available to optimize. So it’ll be like having someone on your team that’s gonna review the customer feedback loop every month and then improve the funnel so that you your comp until your conversion’s where you want them to be, and then, again, respond if anything dips. So I’m gonna be dropping a link to book a call with me, come to that call with your drawing today ready, and, yeah, we’ll have a chat and see if we’re a good fit. Any questions?
Okay. That’s it.
Good job, Abby.
Alright.
Let’s share any notes. Who would like to go first to share feedback for Abby?
Otherwise, I’ll choose you. So put up Andrew’s first and then Claire.
Right.
Yeah. That was really good, Abby. Definitely lit some fire under my butt to to get my workshop going and hopefully get it as good as yours is.
I would say my number one point of feedback, would be to really slow down, a good bit. There were parts where you were going through it really fast, and it’s like, I could keep up with you because I kinda know a lot of this stuff. And what you’re talking about, you know, getting customer feedback or, like, conversion rates and sales pages that add address objections, I’m right there with you. But I feel like if I’m someone who is that’s not marketing is not my main thing, I would need you to go a lot slower so that I can understand what you’re talking about.
I wrote that down when you were going through the diagnostic at the mindset mindset shift. Like, I know what you’re talking about about we need to, like, shift people’s mindsets, but you kinda blew through it a little bit. So I think if you went, like, maybe, like, half the speed, that would probably help, a little bit.
And then in terms of, like, stuff that I really liked was when you’re going through the diagnostic, when you had things like the exit like, when you were doing the customer feedback loop, you had like, you used the example of, like, AI. You know? Oh, is my messaging not resonating anymore? Because everyone’s freaking out about AI, and we haven’t addressed that.
That specificity was helpful.
Same thing with the last one, the conversion hotspots of, like, asking questions. Like, okay. You’ve collected this feedback. Do you know where to put it, where to implement it?
I feel like that was helpful.
And I just wanted to check on in the beginning, would you could you say it was supposed to be three hundred to two thousand dollars, or was it higher than the other typo?
No. Yeah.
You might have a typo.
So Okay.
Okay. Yeah. Three hundred to two thousand.
Yeah. It goes to twenty thousand. I was like, oh, damn. That is a high ticket offer.
Nice. Okay. Yeah. No mid ticket. Thank you.
I didn’t notice that.
But, yeah, big biggest piece of advice would be just, yeah, slow down. Like, the content taught the content is really good, I thought.
So Thank you, Andre.
Her goal was so nice.
Claire.
My feedback is is really simple.
First, like, there were a few points where I really loved. You got, like, super specific. You just gave me an example, and I went like, oh, okay. I get what that is now. But you didn’t do it for all of them. So I some of them, I was like, okay. Following along.
But those super specific points were, like, really convincing, I suppose. And then same feedback on slowing down. I’ve gotten that feedback, like, a million times as well. Slow it down. Say less.
Say say things simpler as well. I think, my biggest piece of advice that I got from Cody was, sometimes they don’t understand what you’re saying because you’re overexplaining, which is, like, kind of the opposite of what you’re trying to do when you’re overexplaining.
So just by keeping it to, like, one, I suppose, big idea, per section, it makes it a lot easier to slow down and not catch yourself over explaining.
And then lastly, I really loved your presentation. I haven’t done a presentation at all. I hope that I’m instantly jealous.
But I really loved your presentation. I thought it was super cool to be able to follow along.
I think as you go, you’ll probably find you don’t say as much as you did just as you get, like, more comfortable with the content. But, the end was also really, really great. I love the Calendly visual. I just felt so like, okay. Today.
Yeah. I hate that.
Thank you. Helpful.
Anyone else wanna share some notes for Abby?
No?
Okay. I’ll share mine. Abby, I loved it. I thought you did a great job overall. The opening numbers and the promise right out of the gate, it’s like a super solid hook.
The case studies, well done. I do have a note that you’re talking a blue streak. That’s not what I wrote.
So can you ask questions earlier on? Like, have you experienced this too?
Something like that just to bring people in. I know when it’s recorded in advance, then that’s really, like, tricky, but even maybe slowing down could solve it there.
Okay. So early on, I have at ten o seven my time, which is probably about four minutes into the presentation.
I I would love you to say, hey. Yes. You can work with me and my team directly, and, like, just get ahead of that because I am definitely in your target market. And as somebody who would rather outsource this work, then try to get my team to do it ourselves.
Yeah. I was like, my question was immediately. Can we just hire you for this? So you could say, yeah.
You know, you can work with me directly. I’m gonna walk you through this because we only accept three clients a month. Also, I think you should say three clients a month, not one. So it sounds bigger, like a larger group.
You can only take on one. Then if you want, you can take out as many as you want to at that time, but I would open it up to three.
So then say, yes. You can work with me directly. I would also love, at that point, for you to say what your prices start at.
There’s no reason to not do that. Yeah. So give it a shot, and make it a nice high number.
You’re presenting really well, and you clearly know your stuff, and you have good case studies.
The only thing that would make a person think you should be less than fifty thousand dollars at minimum is you not saying fifty thousand dollars to start. So, like, if you don’t have a fifty thousand dollar budget, you’re not a good fit to work with you. You’re just not. So no. So fifty, sixty, whatever that number goes to, but say it. Even though it’s scary, this is what the whole point of this thing is, not just to get the leads you could otherwise close, but, like, new leads, more money. So I want you to do that.
You need more build up to the fact that you’re gonna be drawing today. So I would say earlier on, hey. By the way, just as we’re kicking off and while people are still filing in, you’ll need a piece of paper and a pen today. It’s not that’s not an art class. Don’t worry. But you’re gonna wanna draw something. I’m gonna show it to you.
I don’t understand the leaf the need for the leaf shape.
Because it’s evergreen.
So yeah.
Yeah.
I know. It’s really corny, but I just like No.
Because I I I had a design when it’s not in the green belt.
Leaves are seasonal.
Yeah. I don’t I just gave it to a sign designer. I was like, can you make this, like, not look like Joe’s?
From your from my side of things, I was drawing it, and I didn’t know what the lines off the leaves are meant to be.
So, like, when you have a triangle and you put those lines in there, the triangle is meaningless. As soon as you make something a shape, then everything on it needs to be part of that, like, metaphor.
And so if I’m thinking, okay, these are leaves, what are the three pokey things coming off the side then? So for me, like, I’m just it didn’t connect, and so I didn’t know why I was drawing three leaves. I didn’t know what was expected.
I know Andrew’s really trying to make it evergreen there.
Yeah. So just know that as your audience drawing it, I didn’t give myself enough room possibly because I wasn’t set up to know to draw this thing. The leaves felt like a artsy exercise that I couldn’t do, and it’s one more point of friction. Right? Like, did I draw a good leaf?
That’s just like come on. But I love starting with the circle in the middle. I love the four parts.
What I a couple notes.
When you’re going through, you’ve got, like, metrics and yes, no. I’m gonna look through and see if I can find a blank version of the scorecard that they gave us at their workshop, because you might wanna also follow this workshop up with shipping out that or bring the work and I’ll show it to you, and I’ll send you separate loom so you know what I’m talking about. Simply because what you’re talking about like, you’ve got numbers and how to tell if this is a yes or no. I didn’t love zero five ten either. I I think simplify it down to red, yellow, green.
It’s just like five zero ten.
I was copying it.
I know. I hate it. And I only do it because the sun doesn’t have, like, the sunshine growth model and zero like, the red, yellow, green doesn’t work on a sun. So that’s where it’s bad, like, where it falls apart from me.
But I don’t I know I know that’s what I do. I don’t like it, and so I wanna coach you to do it the easier way, which to me is red, yellow, green, or something really simple like that where there’s a three part thing. Okay.
Bum bum bum. Let me see. I took some good notes on, like, the actual content. Like, that was good. I have notes here for self.
Oh, when we get to oh, yeah. Million dollar sales page, I would love you to rename that for the purposes of this workshop simply because that’s the only thing that has million dollar or a price or, like, a, like, a outcome attached to it. So for me, I was like I mean, easy yes is another thing. Also, it sounded like you were saying easy ass to me. Just so you know, it came off as easy ass. And I was like, let me see what she writes down here.
So there’s that. But million dollar sales page, I would give it something else that sounds different just because I wrote, makes it sound like success is all on this.
Suddenly million dollar sales page had much heavier weighting than anything else, and I was thinking, do we just need a better sales page?
And that’s not the takeaway that you want.
Ta da. Couple more notes, then I’m done.
Oh, yeah. When we get to optimize, I felt like so you opened with data tracking. I needed a story there. Like because you say you can find places where there’s where money is basically hidden is effectively what you were saying there.
Like, you won’t know unless you’re tracking that. And you walked us through a bunch of great metrics, which was great. But then I was like, wouldn’t it be cool if at this point you were to say, for example, or whatever that QBO one was, we noticed x here, we optimized it, and we brought in another twenty thousand dollars in that in the next quarter or something like that. Right?
So I’m like, oh, damn. But then I was like, well, if you could do that.
It closely tied to the data tracking ties to conversion hots hotspots. Once you track data, then you know where to put it in these hotspots. Right? So I was confused about why the ten point thing was between the two.
So I wrote, what if for optimize, you first open with the ten point feedback loop, then you do data tracking, and then conversion hot hot spots, which would allow you to finish with a case study example. Like, oh, and when we did this and now we’re ending on a really high note. Money outcome. I remember why I want you to do this because although I can see that I’m red here, green there, yellow there, I know that I want you to do it if I remember that you you make money for people, which leads me to final notes.
We dropped the model pretty quickly.
What I would love is you spent a lot of time, I think, saying, like, if this is true for you, if that is true for you, etcetera, I had just finished with you should have have an idea of where your weaknesses are and what you should work on next. Don’t say give it to their team. You can imply that. You can say that earlier on.
Like, I’ll give you enough that you can go forward and do this yourself. But at this point, like, close them, and that’s really it. Like, now is the point where I’m like, I’ve seen that I’m really right in a lot of places. Those all seem expensive, and, like, I’m really gonna need to train my team on how to do those things.
So don’t say go give it to your team. Instead, you could say, I mean, the red parts, is your team ready to do those parts? Are they qualified to optimize all of those parts?
Don’t minimize what you do. You started talking using verbs like set up. I’ll set this up for you.
No. Like, you’re not setting it up. That’s even when you do, it’s just not a good verb. Like, we’re we’re we’re this for you as we’re watching.
Like, wow. She, like, knows her shit. She can do this. And then I was brought down to maybe your team can maybe you can buy the book.
Maybe I can set it up for you. You know? So, no. And then book a triage call with team. Don’t put yourself in your Calendly even if you have to make somebody up. Someone else is your setter.
So make sure it’s like you can book a call with so and so from my team, and then go from there. It just elevates your price again and again. Like, oh, damn. Just sales team.
Yep.
The workshop’s selling. It’s doing a great job. I think if you simplify the model, slow down a bit, you’re good.
Tell people. Yes. You can charge me. You you can hire me. It’s fifty thousand to start or whatever the price is. What is the price to start?
Thirty five. To start. That prices start at thirty five.
Right. And then you build on the retainer after that?
Well, I’m gonna I think I’m gonna say like, I’m gonna build in an obligate not not a retainer, but just like, I’m here if you like if things don’t work. Like, I’m on I’m here for forty days just to work with your team if anything’s not working, and then recommend, like, you should really do the three the retainer as well.
Well, you should because your model Andrew knows what’s coming. You know your model.
Your this optimized you’ve sold us on it. It’s in the freaking model. It’s right here. How am I gonna go forward and data track and update those conversion hotspots?
You sold us on a thing here.
Like, you have done the work.
Okay.
That’s all. You know what my take is here.
So, yeah, any other notes or thoughts from anybody else for Abby?
I I just wanna tack on to what you just said, Joe, about, like, making this goes back to that that post that I made a while back about not making your monthly retainer separate from the offer to just make it part of the whole thing from the beginning so that it’s just the natural next stage of your product. It’s not a separate thing.
I so agree with that.
Yeah. Totally. It’s it’s it’s built in. I I attended this both as me here for you, but also as a person who would hire you for this. And if I heard, oh, you don’t necessarily need me for that part. I’d be like like, what are you talking about? But who’s gonna handle my conversion hotspots?
Like, what?
What’s happening? Who’s gonna look over my survey data? What?
So, yeah, Andrew made a really great point. I don’t know if you’re being tentative about selling yourself because you’re in a room with us and maybe with strangers. You’d be, like, more on the nose about how awesome you are, but wherever you do this next, lay it on.
Yeah. Reason to. Okay? Please?
One other tiny thing too. You just said a couple a couple minutes ago, Abby, about I’ll be there in case something’s not working. Like, you don’t even wanna say in case something’s not working because don’t even put that in their mind. Just if you wanna reframe that even as to make sure everything goes smoothly. Mhmm.
Mhmm.
You know?
But don’t even put in the possibility that something might not be working.
Yeah.
Okay. Love it. Good? Thank you. Bye. That’s Abby, nice work.
That’s lots of noise. Very helpful. Thanks.
Awesome. Marina, you’re up. You ready?
Of course.
K. After just a heads up for everybody who’s like, I need a bio break.
After Marina’s talk and our feedback session, we’ll take, like, a five minute break and then come back for Claire’s. Okay?
Cool. Awesome. Thanks, Marina.
Alright.
Take it away.
Tell us who your ICP is and everybody upfront first, please.
Yes. So ICP, CMO, VP marketing, twenty to a hundred million, b two b SaaS, with a reverse trial. So they start with a trial and then go to a freemium kind of model.
So that is who you are.
Alright. Thank you for Sorry, Maureen.
I hate to interrupt you. What remind me just really quickly.
Persona.
Sorry. Just just again. How much the persona who are you talking to at that ICP, and how much do they bring in a year? ICP years?
So we are b to b SaaS brands that are twenty to a hundred million.
Twenty to a hundred million.
And I’m talking to CMO, VP marketing, head of Okay.
Perfect. Sorry. Thank you. I had a restaurant instead of pen. Okay. Thanks.
Okay. All good.
Alright. Today, we’re gonna talk about how you can get more of your free users to convert to paid plans. So for our session today, grab a piece of paper and a pen. Don’t worry.
Not an art class. As long as you can read the notes on your diagram when we’re done, you will be good to go. So we’re specifically going to be talking about using, action triggered emails, message met sales pages to get your free users to to upgrade to a paid plan. Now these are users that have gone through your trial.
They have not converted yet, and there they are. We want them to feel good about the upgrade so they leave you a good review.
Now the next twenty five minutes, they’re gonna be valuable to you if you are a CMO, head of growth, VP of marketing, if you’re a b to b SaaS brand that generates twenty to a hundred million in annual revenue, these types of brands are the ones I work best with. Companies like Bitly, QR code generator, where we’re continuing to increase conversions strategically, by rewriting and optimizing emails and so on. Now I’m not the first person to share big brand names with you. So let me clarify.
These brands are not filled with people I knew before I started working with them. I got this work because this is exactly the type of work I’m building my reputation around. Further, I don’t pretend to have the perfect solution for you right here and now. Your company is not built on templates or you wouldn’t be here right now.
I may have the solution for you, but I’m not gonna hand you like it’s not like a trick where I say, oh, let’s all of a sudden stop letting those nine hundred and ninety five out of every one thousand free users sit in that free plan, sucking support resources indefinitely while taking space in your CRM, space you pay for every month.
Instead, I’m gonna help you see where your challenges are, and you’re going to discover them today for yourself in today’s workshop. So if by the end of our twenty five minutes together, you believe that my team is the only one that can stop the bleeding, fix what’s broken, reshape your conversion program into a superhuman sales generator, then you’ll be invited to book a conversion consultation with my team.
If that call proves that we should work together, you’ll be invited to invest twenty thousand dollars for my team of trained experts to establish your free to paid post convert, post trial free to paid strategy, roll out that strategy, including getting all of the automation set up. You won’t have to do a thing with that. And then five thousand dollars a month thereafter to optimize it. Because as you know, if you set and forget, it’s just going to go downhill.
Now my team has room for two clients. We take on very few clients, so we can serve them extremely well, and we always serve them on an ongoing basis.
Because while what I do seems magical, it’s not a magic trick.
So now let’s see what’s happening with your post trial free to paid program.
We’re gonna use my diagnostic tool to see what’s holding you back from driving more of those free users into paid plans.
So get that piece of paper out, and I’m gonna get you to go ahead and draw a triangle right in the middle of your paper.
So draw a triangle right in the middle of your paper, and here we go.
So we’re going to have, something on this side. We’re gonna say activate.
Don’t worry if your penmanship is awful. It’s alright. As long as you can read it, you’re good to go.
And we’re gonna have a few things on that activate side.
Alright. As we go along, I’m gonna get you to write the things in as we go, and then we’re gonna see where are you at, red, yellow, or green. Red being like, never even thought about this. We don’t have this, or it’s just not performing well.
Yellow is things are just like status quo. They’re not going up or down. We can’t seem to budget. And green, is we are doing great.
Now as we go through, you might think, my goodness. I don’t know the numbers for this.
Or you might be like, oh, I had some of the numbers for the last board meeting. I don’t know where we’re at right this second. No worries. We’re looking for sort of rolling averages. What is the general trend? Because we can always go back and get specific numbers later.
So let’s start over here, and let’s talk about open rates.
So you’re sending your free users emails.
Are they opening them?
Red, yellow, or green, generally?
Are you like, yeah. I’m happy with my open rate. I think people are opening them. We have some pretty cool subject lines. It’s getting them to open them. You might think you’re green.
Great.
Moving along then, we move to click rates.
So once they’re open and they’re in that email, are they actually clicking on the button or clicking on the link? And I don’t mean clicking unsubscribe. I mean, are they clicking on the call to action that you have in that email so they can go and do the thing that you want them to do?
So if your click rates are, like, great. Give yourself a green. If they’re, like, sometimes people are clicking, but it’s not going up at all. Or maybe it’s, not looking good at all, and you’re like, we can get them to open, but they don’t do anything.
So I’m gonna put us a yellow here.
And just on your diagram, put whatever it is that you think for your company.
Now the next thing we’re gonna think about as we are activating because these users, they might have gone through that free trial already. They may have opened things. They may not have opened things, but we know that they didn’t actually understand the value. Otherwise, they would be using or they would have converted to paid. They would have done something.
So now we have this time to value. Do you have your post trial, user journey map mapped out so that those users that went through that trial didn’t really get to value? How are you getting them to value post trial? Because they are there sitting in your free plan. Are they getting to value?
Now if that if you’re like, I don’t even have a map, we send out a few post, trial emails, and that’s it. Probably sitting at red there.
If you have thought about it, have a few things, you might be yellow. And if you’re like, oh, we’ve mapped out the whole process. We know how we can get them to, that value. Great. You’re green.
Now I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you might be red on that because if we would have had people already experiencing that value, we might not be talking.
Alright. So now this next side of the triangle of our conversion triangle, we’re gonna call it sticky.
How can we get these free users to actually use the product? So we might have them. Maybe we can get them opening, those emails.
K? We’re gonna it’s this progression. Maybe we can get them opening the email. Maybe we can get them clicking. Maybe we can get them to value, but can we get them to stay? Let’s see.
Because if they’re not gonna stay for the freed, they’re definitely not gonna a free plan, they’re definitely not gonna stay for the paid. So over here, we want them to commit to something.
So, they’re committed to something, and this could be maybe, you have as part of your, features that they can invite a team member, and maybe they can do still do that on a free plan. So if they’ve invited a team member, great. Perhaps they are uploading data In order to use your software, appropriately, they need to input data. And if they’re doing that, it shows that they’re somewhat committed. They’re invested in that. Or if they’re including it as part of their tech stack, maybe there’s some integration. They’re starting to integrate that.
So we wanna know, are they committed? And maybe you’re like, you know, some of people are doing this, but it’s not really it’s not really increasing.
Give yourself a yellow. If nobody’s really, taking advantage of it, give yourself a red. And if you’ve got lots of people integrating already, give yourself a green.
Alright.
Next up.
If they are doing that, then we need to look at daily active users or weekly active users. So this is dependent on, what your software is. Do people need to be in there every day? Do they set something up, look at it once a week? What is the process? So for your, software situation, think about how people are, how often people are in, the app doing something.
If they are increasingly doing things in app, give yourself a green. If it’s staying the same, yellow. And if it’s kinda tanking, give it a red. So you might be yellow here.
Alright.
Again, I don’t know your current situation. If we have a chat later on, if you decide to book a call with the team, we can dig into this more at that point.
Now the next thing on this sticky side is we have increased feature usage.
So if they have invited a team, great. If they’re in the app more often, great. They came to your app to solve a problem.
They’ve got your software. They because they think, hey. Your software is the answer to this problem.
If over here, we finally got them some value, they’re like, okay. Yes. I can do this thing.
Now in order for them to stick, we want them to expand that expand the number of your, features that they are using. So they’re using the thing they came for, and they have confidence in that. And now they’re like, I wonder what else we can do. Because as we expand this feature usage, that’s where we can start selling things in the plan. Like, oh, you want the plan because you can also do this other thing.
So, in general, are users using more features? Give yourself a green, staying the same yellow, and kinda decreasing, give it a red.
So you might think, okay. Well, I’m kinda yellow on that on that sticky side. Alright.
And, again, it’s kind of this progression.
Now we come to convert.
So here we are at the bottom, and we have looked at all these things. Now we can finally talk about conversion and what are some other things that are going to be influencing conversion. So now we’ve got them in the product. They have some value, and we’re like, great. They’re ready to convert.
And then we look, and we’re like, oh, but are they?
Let’s look at support tickets. Now you might think, oh, I don’t know. I’m not in there talking about support tickets all the time. I don’t know.
Do we have lots? Do we? K. If you have not heard about the number of support tickets your team is, processing, you’re probably good.
But if you’ve heard a lot of stuff and people are complaining and going like, can you do something about this? Like, our, we can’t handle the volume of support tickets. Like, it’s too much. If that’s the case, we’re looking at red.
If you’ve heard sort of murmurings, maybe it’s yellow. Yellow with the mind of, oh, we need to do something about this. Because if we have lots of support tickets and I don’t mean the support tickets that are asking simple questions. I mean, they’re angry about things because they don’t understand the product.
And so you think, why are they asking us about these things? It’s because look back to this first side, this activate side, we’re obviously not getting them the information they need so that they can see the value. Because once people start seeing the value, we’re gonna have a whole different kind of support ticket coming in. It might just be a simple question rather than a rage against the product.
Alright. The next thing, product reviews, and the review rating.
Now this is something that a quick search of Trustpilot, Capterra, g two, that’s gonna get you your star rating.
And what is it? Maybe think about the last time you looked. What was it? If it was under three, give yourself a red. If it was a three, give yourself a yellow. And four and five, give yourself a green.
We live in a society that people don’t buy stuff without looking for reviews. Think about it. When was the last time you bought something without googling to see a review?
Even simple things. Now think about this. They’re buying this for their business to help them increase their business. Of course, they’re gonna be looking at reviews.
Now, unfortunately, people leave for reviews if they don’t understand the product and don’t think they got value from it. So if we solve the things earlier on, we can get this up. So perhaps right now, you’re thinking, my reviews are not that great.
Don’t worry. It’s something we can do something about.
It is a solvable problem.
And this last thing on the conversion is this time to sale.
Is the time to sale so they finish the trial. They didn’t convert the during the trial. So now you’ve got them on this post trial, road map. You want to get them to that sale.
Perhaps they just needed more time. They didn’t have time to read the emails earlier. Whatever the case, they didn’t get there. Now you’re going to take them on that journey to get to the sale.
Is that time to sale decreasing? So as you look at the number of of users converting in a in a specific time frame, is that number going up, down, or staying the same?
And you might say, you know, it’s just staying the same. We can’t seem to increase the number of conversions in that time frame, meaning you’re having trouble decreasing that, time to sale.
So now at this point, you probably got a pretty good idea of what is happening. There should be no question into your in your mind of what’s getting in the way of you or your team increasing those post trial free to paid conversions.
We talked about perhaps time to value was too long. Users didn’t get there.
Maybe you didn’t have that customer journey mapped out. Maybe there was no plan. Whatever the case, perhaps they finally get to value, but they’re only doing the one thing. They’re not increasing the number of features that they’re using. They’re not exploring those, which means they’re going to sit in that free plan comfortably, sucking your resources forever because they don’t feel the need to, move on to a paid plan.
Perhaps your support tickets through the roof. Angry users feel misinformed, and, research shows that angry users tell nine to fifteen people about their bad experience.
Good experiences, people tell maybe six people.
So what is your customer experience, and can we change that, so that more people are telling about their good experience?
Alright. Here, we’ve gone through this whole conversion triangle in order you know what needs to be happening next.
Some of you, you might think, oh, great. I know what I need to work on.
Maybe share it with your team and they think, oh, yeah. We have capacity to do this. But I’m guessing since you’re here, that might not be the case.
It’s a lot of legwork.
So if you take this away, you think, yes. I don’t wanna leave money on the table. There are huge, possibilities and, for wins on the horizon, you can decide to book a call with my team.
Others are wondering, hey. How can I be one of these two brands that you work with next?
And we say I’m honored to consider, to be considered and say I’m sorry, though, that if we find we cannot work together, I can’t help all the brands that reach out to me. But I can give you a private link to book a call with my team, step one of three. So after you book, after you book, you will have the opportunity to answer three questions.
If you don’t complete the form, I’ll have to cancel the conversion consultation. If, however, you complete the form and my team assesses that we’re unlikely to be a good fit, we’ll have to cancel. But in all other cases, we will proceed with that call. Now bring your drawing from this session to our call because we’re going to use it to create a plan to work towards your goals, using our strategic solutions. So go ahead and start with scheduling your conversion consultation, complete the form, and then be ready to have a candid conversation with me.
Thank you.
Awesome. Thanks, Marina. Notes. Who would like to start? Abby. Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. First of all, like, well done for doing it without a slide deck. I feel like it’s a lot to remember, and you just did it really calmly. You didn’t even stumble at all.
So that’s really cool. I have, like, some very specific notes. No. I’m not trying to be, like, nitpicky.
I just found it really helpful when I got specific notes. So Oh, please do. Yeah. I really like the superhuman sales generator.
I thought that was very cool. When you were talking about the optimization, you said about setting and forgetting it, like, and this is a note I’m gonna I’ve made for me as well. I’d love to hear, like, more, like, what because you just said it will go downhill. I could love to hear a bit of drama there, like, the worst case scenario if you don’t optimize.
When you were going through the diagnostic, it was quite high up. So where everybody is, I couldn’t actually see the top. So, like, it’s nice.
Like, we just the very, very top. So I just like to, yeah, make sure it’s lower down.
When you’re going through the activate, like, the open rates, click rates, I would have quite liked benchmarks. Like, I know it’s it’s always difficult with benchmarks because, like, everybody’s a different. But when you’re just saying, like, oh, if you’re getting, like, some some opens, it’s kinda I think a bit of specificity there would have been helpful.
And then yeah. Like, I guess, like, a bigger note with the I didn’t feel like there was, like, a very big clear promise. Like, it was kind of increasing the activations, but I’d love, like, something just a bit, like, sexier.
Like, a bit more like, really kind of selling that promise.
And then, like, this might just be a a meeting, but the with the three sections, you’ve got activate, sticky, and convert. Like, for my brain, I just love, like, three verbs. Like, the sticky just kind of like, even if it was just sticky, it just felt a little out of place for me.
And then when you were talking about support tickets, I loved that research point you gave that just really, like, build my confidence in you. I think just sharing those things really makes you seem like an expert.
But then you connected it to activate, instead of convert. And, like, I guess I can I can understand why it’s in the convert a bit, but I would like like you to kind of lay that out a bit? Like, this is why it has to do with conversions.
And then, yeah, just a really stupid thing, like, the traffic lights because you your your red was pink.
Like, I just because you said red, yellow, green. Like, I wanted to see red, yellow, green. But yeah. No. I thought it was really awesome. And like I said, it’s just, like, very impressive to me that you managed to remember all that without any slides or anything.
Thanks, Abby. Andrew?
Yeah. Cool. Just, great job, Marina.
Just a couple quick fire rapid fire thoughts. I thought that maybe, there might have been, like, compared to Abby with talking about, like, this kind of sales pitch part of it, there might have been a little bit of, like, an overcorrection that might have just been for me. But, like, there’s something you said in the beginning about, like, talking about, like, who you work best best with. And it for whatever reason, it felt to me, like, maybe a little bit too early, to to bring that piece in about telling, like, telling us who you work best with because we’re about to, like, get ready to learn from you. That might just be my opinion. Curious to hear what others say.
And I think there also might be some some work to do around, like, smoothing out the part where, like, I can tell that there’s, a part in the beginning where you were talking about, like, who you’ve worked with and that it wasn’t, like, exactly, like, who you’ve worked with isn’t exactly who you want to work with or something like that. And I I don’t necessarily have a good solution, but there was something Yeah. About that that sounded a bit tentative and sent sent a little bit of a signal that, like, you don’t do this all the time kind of thing. Again, might have just been my my opinion.
And I just felt like maybe it raised a little bit of an objection that I didn’t necessarily have. Like, I kind of assumed that you’re the expert, and then it was like, oh, wait. Like, now she’s telling me that she hasn’t worked with with those, with companies like mine or something like that that I don’t have an elegant solution for you yet.
And, two more quick things. One was along with what Abby said, I think that you could dive a little bit deeper into, like, what the problems are. You said something about, like, this you know, paying for space in my CRM. I could be wrong because I don’t know this audience or I don’t know this problem all that well, but, like, I feel like maybe that’s not the biggest manifestation of the problem is, like, they’re not really worried about space in their CRM. They’re worried about, like, getting more money.
And I agree with Abby that having some specific percentages around open rates and click rates, like, rather than just letting it feel like being left to their sub subjective opinion of how they’re doing. I think it can be really helpful to give me some percentages. Like, I think people love benchmarks and knowing, like, where they stand in comparison to other people.
On the reviews part of convert, I felt like that would be a good opportunity to bring in some data because there definitely is data to support the point that you’re making that people look at reviews. So if you had something where you could be, like, you know, x percent of people, say that the of b to b buyers, you know, say that they consult reviews before, making purchase decisions. Something like that could back that claim up.
And I think you could also get a little bit more granular there. Like you said, like, three, you’re kind of, like, yellow.
I feel like there’s a big difference between, like, someone who’s, like, three point nine, rated and someone who’s, like, four point six, or even, like, four point two and four point six. So I feel like you might be able to get a little bit more granular there, and I think that would make me feel like you’re more of an expert if you do, like like, to the to the tenth.
Like, what what signals, good versus bad. But, yeah, I think that’s about it for me. Hope that’s helpful.
Awesome. Thanks, Andrew. Todd, you had your hand up and then you put it down. So down?
Yep. I’m here.
Sure I’m here. Can everyone hear me? Because I had to restart. Cool. Yeah. Just didn’t wanna clutter it too much.
Mine are basically what everyone else just said. Pretty much the triangle was cut off. I’m really happy that the red, buzzed pink because I am colorblind.
So I was like, oh, okay.
The only thing for me really, there’s a lot of information.
So, again, everyone’s on on point. The only thing I would say, and it’s just because I come from a PR thing, is, to spell out certain words like daily active users, I think, weekly active users, maybe, time to sale. Just because they’re looking at so much information, if they can see it spelled out, it’s a quick reference for them.
And I think as well, I would say, I think you mentioned I don’t know your current situation at one point for clients, and I you you do, though. You’re the expert. So you do know their situation. You have been in that spot.
I would just maybe, if you want, you know, use a use I always call it pays off. Just maybe agitate it. You know? If you’re like some of my clients and give them a quick solution and agitate it, that’s the only thing.
I would say it was it was great. And I’ll be honest, everyone everyone says slow down here, but we are trying to bolt through this workshop. So I think that’s a given. But, yeah, if you can keep it in your mind just to keep your speech just kinda level throughout.
Also, I wanted to say though, great energy. That was really, really good energy. You had you came in with a smile. You came in with a pen and note, and you just kept great energy throughout.
So that was that’s basically it for me. So good job. Well done, Rena.
Thanks, Todd. Claire?
Yeah. I have two notes. The first one was on the product reviews.
I am not I’ve never worked with a company that has had less than four stars.
So I but I have worked with plenty of companies. We’ve had very few reviews and trouble getting reviews.
So I wonder if that’s also not a good signal of, like, review help, to maybe talk about is something that’s more universal. But, again, I don’t know your specific ICP or personas, so that might be useful. They’re showing me the support tickets.
I have haven’t seen people write into support angry. That’s not an emotion I’ve, like, heard of, but they do write in very confused and overwhelmed.
Also, I worry that your CMO doesn’t care that much about support and their outcomes, but is more, like, I guess, self centered. Like, if they can be the hero, great. But it’s not like a priority for them to remove all of support’s messages.
But if you tie supports like, if you tie that overwhelm and confusion of support, through to the time to sale, or time to value as you as you well did, like, in a more I wanna say in a stronger way, that could be really powerful.
Because support reviews are kind of emotional things for for people to fail at.
Awesome. Perfect. Thanks, Katie.
Hey, Marina. I thought you did a really great job.
Like Todd said, really appreciated your energy and, yeah, just like the comfort that you brought to talking about all of this. Like, props for doing it, some slides. The only thing so I agree with a lot of the feedback you’ve already gotten. The only thing that I found that nobody’s mentioned so far was just at the end. You said if your team doesn’t have capacity, and I feel like that can’t be the only thing that their team doesn’t have. Like, it’s, you know, strategy, vision, you know, and capacity, like, on top of that. So just, like, sure capacity is part of the equation, but not obviously not the only thing that they’re lacking.
Yeah. Thanks, Katie.
Agreed. I think one of the I think we’re out of everybody giving feedback, so I’ll jump in with mine. In addition to what everybody has said, yeah, definitely do check when you share your screen. Just make sure, because nobody will tell you. Like, none of us told you. Right? Because we’re all trying to not interrupt you.
So, yeah, double check. Never hurts.
Okay. You’re selling email, but where but but there was, like, very little push on how awesome email is for businesses.
So, for me, I feel like you you really quickly glossed over anything you had done with Bitly.
Spend some time there. Like, you’ve rewritten countless emails in their life cycle, series.
You’ve mapped a customer journey. You have seen that people get lost. Lots of leads get lost, and there’s real expense there. And yet all I really heard was, like like, twelve seconds max about Bitly and QR code generator.
What? Like, that’s anybody in that audience finds this a sexy topic. So you’re allowed to nerd out and spend some time here. So, like, spend time on that. Bring it back to money. Bring it back to how they’re spending money on bringing people into their flow, trying to attract trial users, and then they’re just sitting there. So have an opinion, and make it all about money because the right people will be sitting in the audience going like, shit.
Yeah. And that’s what you want instead of, oh, yeah. She seems nice.
Like, that’s not the point.
Yeah.
Right? Exactly. Abby’s message there. So you are minimizing the stuff that you need to really emphasize, And when you don’t emphasize it, the other parts land wrong because we haven’t heard that you’re an authority yet, and we haven’t got on side with you yet.
So when you say it’s twenty thousand dollars to start and then five thousand a month, we drop off. Right? Like, what are you talking about? What do you even do?
And because you don’t have slides, it’s very hard to go along with that. Right? Like, it’s hard to keep up, so you need if you’re not sharing a visual, you have to really talk through everything.
Like, make it clear, still have energy. And then there’s times when you just do want to share, I mean, you’re not slides. So I was looking up this thing, and this is I’ve talked a bit about how I’m gonna reward myself with this training at some point.
It’s not open right now. Let me just share this with you in chat.
You know, use the Stream Deck and a few other things. And, so you don’t have to show slides on the screen, but you can pop up things on your screen, and I want you to play with that.
Not necessarily take this, but just, like, follow inside the show and start looking at some of the things that they do. Because with a Stream Deck and a little plugin for Zoom, you can, like, hit a button and the Bitly logo pops up next to you. Right? So there are cool things you can do just like that.
You can pull in a testimonial and flash it on the screen from somebody. So it doesn’t have to be a slide deck, but unless you’re going to take a lot of time really driving things home, you need something on the screen. I also think you need, to show me some emails. Like, here are some examples of emails that I’ve written.
Just really ground me in as a member of your audience and, like, oh, okay. Okay. When she talks about this kind of email, here’s what she means.
So okay. Couple more things. Take a few breaks for breath.
Set more things up upfront too. Just like, if you have your water here with you, that’s great. We’re gonna settle in for twenty five minutes. We’re gonna do some drawing. I’m not gonna share a lot of slides.
Make sure you stop for water. I’m gonna stop every so often. Just, like, set that up up front, and then you can stop.
And you can pretend you’re drinking water and just take a fucking breath. Like, just take a breath, but I know what it’s like. I know what it’s like.
Definitely need a promise up front. Dig into the pain. Set up the desire.
I have a few more notes that I can’t read here. I don’t understand on the triangle, what product review rating and support tickets will have to do with you doing the work later. So you’re gonna go through and make sure that support doesn’t get tickets.
You’re gonna do work to increase their product reviews, but you’re really just saying, no. No. Once you have active activated users, these things will all go up. But if if you’re not working on it and it’s on the model, that’s like a flag.
And if you ignore it, it’s gonna be it’s gonna continue to be like but it’s never gonna feel right for you and maybe even for them. So rethink the convert part. There’s no money showing anywhere on your model. Where at what point?
Like, I’m like, where’s the when do I get the money from them? Like, I want the money from them.
So I would think through that as well. But overall, I mean, I think it’s good. You just need to spend more time on things so we really, really get what you can do. And that also means you have to get what you can do. So go over the stuff that you’ve done in Bitly and QR code generator and, like, come up with your cheat sheet of awesome that you, like, need to remember, and it’ll help you.
Cool?
Everything else everybody else said agreed as well.
Oh, yeah. No. I won’t worry about that. But, yeah, I drew a dollar sign with, like, circles around it galore.
Like, where’s the money? Where’s the money? This is the path we’re able to make money. Help them see that.
Okay. That is all.
Thanks, Marina. Any notes or thoughts, Marina or Abby so far? Or, Abby, go ahead.
Can I just ask a quick question? So because I noticed when I did the diagnostic, I, like, wrote it out and then went and did the review, and then read and I just went straight into the view.
I was just wondering, like No.
Agreed. It was actually one of my bigger notes too. I’m not ready to diagnose as I’m going through. Agreed. First, draw the model, tell them about it, and then walk them through. Now we’re gonna diagnose where you’re at.
Yeah. Not as you go. I was I was actually I lost interest a little bit, because I didn’t know, like it doesn’t feel right. So and that could be just for me because I know how it’s supposed to be presented.
But, yeah, just so you know, just do it the way it’s taught. First, you die first, you document everything. Show them the thing so I can zoom out, see that there’s, like, a map of my life cycle right here. And then you can zoom into the parts and say, are you red, yellow, green here, and give your examples in there.
For example, you might be yellow if your numbers are this. Yeah. Totally agree. Thanks for bringing that up, Abby.
Okay.
Abby, Marina, how are you feeling?
Well, I’m glad I have not pitched anybody yet, and I’m thankful for all the feedback because it’s actually helpful Good.
Because I know what to do now. And I think it it is a confidence thing.
Mhmm. Like, as far as, like, pulling out and saying, oh, I’ve done this and that.
So I just need to You just need to write it down and look at it.
Put it on sticky notes all over the place then. Like, I know that might seem like gel.
Why not? If you need to build your confidence, build your confidence, like, actively. It doesn’t build itself.
No.
But I wanted to do this today so that I could get Oh, and you did great. Let me be very clear.
Feedback. Totally.
Because I was just trying to follow that form formula that you add, and I was like, okay. Are these actually my words? I’m like, I’m just gonna do the thing, and then I can review. So thank you everybody for all the feedback. Super helpful.
And just to be clear, these notes are, like sometimes the the formula just needs to be adjusted for you. There are things that I mentioned to Abby for Abby to change, and I’m sure she’s like, but, Joe, I took that from what you taught me. Then she’s like, I’m just not gonna say anything, but this is annoying.
But so just know, like, that’s why we’re doing it live. Not to say, did you follow it exactly, but cool. Was cool. Here’s how you can make it cooler.
Yeah. Cool. Abby, how are you doing?
Yeah. I’m glad I did it because I was like, okay. If I if I, like, book it Monday, then that means I’ll actually make the damn thing. So, yeah, I think, like, tomorrow, I’m gonna start doing pitching five people every day and just see what happens and work on my closing because I know that’s my my week there anyway.
Love it. Amazing.
Okay. So we’ll take three minutes. We’ll be back at twenty two after the hour when Claire will be our final presenter.
Alright? Three minutes. Thanks, everyone.
Oh, a little bit overtime there.
Okay. We are back. We’re here. Good stuff. Ready? Where’s Claire? Claire’s not here. Karen. Oh, there you are.
I just like to lost it in calculation.
Awesome. Okay. Claire, are you ready to go?
I am ready.
I’m gonna stop this all by saying I’m very nuts for some bizarre reason. I was so confident up until, like, well, seven o’clock, which is when this started.
Okay. Wicked. Well, I’m excited. So, tell us who your ICP is, who you’re targeting this toward, and then we’ll dive in.
Sure. My ICP is pretty similar to Marina’s. So it is b to b SaaS companies within the twenty five to fifty million range, so a little bit tighter.
They are either doing a freemium or a free trial, sort of setup at the moment. And I’m talking specifically to the CMO or director of growth, head of growth, that kind of person.
Cool.
Awesome.
Then okay.
Okay.
Today, I’m gonna talk about onboarding your free trial and premium users so that more of them stick around, log back in tomorrow and the next day and the next because the reality is that eighty percent of the users that you’ve worked really hard to get through the front door and to click start trial or sign up now, eighty percent of those users don’t come back tomorrow. They try your product once, give you twenty minutes, and that’s it. They’re out the door, and they are never coming back, unless you can win them back. And using email is a great way to do that.
So specifically using triggered emails, I’ll explain more about that later, but it’s stepping away from the concept of timed emails and dripping things out slowly but surely and more than focusing on sending more relevant, messages at the right time and right context.
So this is gonna be a great use of your time if you are a CMO or head of growth at a b two b SaaS company doing around twenty to fifty million dollars a year.
Companies have worked with me to get results like a thirty seven percent lift in product adoption that was with Invoice Simple.
And then Synthesia has also worked with me to sorry.
For messaging optimization.
And I’ve also partnered with Forget the Funnel and worked on over twenty start ups, onboarding flows to optimize for their growth and retention.
So if this I’m guessing this isn’t the first time you’ve caught email or that the email channel might be useful to you.
But there are some things that you need to remember. First, people do read. Else, LinkedIn wouldn’t exist, and it wouldn’t send you those annoying yet effective notifications to check your feed.
Secondly, you do not have to guess at what to put in your email, and you don’t have to worry that you’re going too long or too short, you’re including too many pictures, no pictures at all. All that is something that you can definitively answer through optimization and testing.
And then just so you know, email is also a seven billion dollar industry at the moment. So it is, again, really clear that people do still check their email inboxes.
Inboxes. So this is gonna be great if you are looking to improve your user activation, free to pay conversion rate, and ultimately conversion, what I’m not gonna do is give you another template or the two minute secret to a sixty eight percent reduction in churn.
This is going to be a bit of a hands on workshop, so get a pen and paper ready while I continue talking.
What we’re gonna walk through today is something called the overpowered onboarding framework. Now if you haven’t heard about what overpowered means, it is a term used for superheroes, and it basically means a character or an object that is so powerful it makes the game easy.
So Superman would be a great example of an overpowered character, and this is going to be something that really makes the email channel easy. It’s gonna answer all the questions and make it simple for you to prioritize what to do next.
So it’s not gonna be a game changer for your acquisition, but rather a game changer for your activation.
Okay. Let me go ahead and share my screen, and we can get into it.
There we go.
Alrighty.
Can everyone see my screen?
Yes. Okay.
Alright. So first step is to draw a big old circle.
Don’t worry if your circle is not perfect. That would prove to you’re insane.
And then another circle on the inside.
Here, I’m gonna write down and say our goal for today is a thirty percent lift in free to paid paid. You’re wondering how much that’s worth if you have, say, ten thousand users who are, signing up and actually paying every month, and they’re on on average paying seventy nine or sixty nine dollars each, then a thirty percent lift is equivalent monthly lift is equivalent to just over two hundred thousand dollars worth of revenue. So it’s a pretty big difference that you could be getting very, very quickly.
One of the best things about onboarding people effectively is that that revenue actually stacks up because your retention naturally increases now that your users fully understand and realize the value that you’re giving them.
Next is to draw a nice Mercedes symbol because we are winners.
And I’m just gonna go ahead and label, so please label with me as we go. Up at the top, we have foundation.
This is what sets the tone for your entire onboarding flow and what is a great foundation.
Next up, we have conversation, which is where you start talking to your oh, talking and writing is difficult. Conversation, let’s just pretend I wrote that correctly.
Where you are, actually talking to your customers and convincing them that creating this great idea. And then finally, on the left, we have personalization.
Sorry, optimization.
Alright. We’re gonna go ahead and divide this diagram in hop again, just each section, a nice little line.
Up at the top, we have insight.
And down below, we have journey.
Next up, we have triggers, and then we have personalization.
Then we have tracking.
And finally, we have testing.
K. I’ll give you all a second to finish writing down.
If you have some colored pens nearby, please feel free to grab those. You can do red, for poor or not so great, orange for it’s kind of okay, and then green for everything is absolutely rosy. I’ll also give you some examples so you’ll know which one you want. If you don’t have colored pens nearby, feel free to do a star system. Just one, two, three stars, three for excellent, one for so good, and two for okay.
Alright. We’re changing over.
Okay. Scientists.
When you are struggling to understand your customers, that means that ultimately what you’re struggling to do is connect your what with your why.
So insight predominantly consists of customer interviews, customer surveys. You could even do some social listening.
You could even do some analysis of your heat maps, basically understanding what people are doing.
You could keep recording and analyzing your demo calls or your sales calls. All of that stuff gives you insight into who you’re talking to, what they value, and what they care about most. So if you’re currently doing one or more of those and you are, actually analyzing it with a regular occurrence, then you can go ahead and give yourself a green. If you are recording things, but maybe not finding the time to analyze them because you’ve got a million other things on your plate, which is totally understandable, think of yourself in orange. And if you haven’t conducted any kind of customer research in the last six to twelve months, that would be a red.
Alright. Next up is journey.
So the customer journey is a very well known phenomenon at this point. It is, however you’re currently tracking it, what you need to hit on for your onboarding is to understand at what points your customer is seeing value. So if you have a customer journey map that walks someone that walks you through exactly where your users are seeing value when they sign up, fantastic.
Give yourself a green. If you’re not so sure and you’re kind of implementing a bit of guesswork, chances are that guesswork is gonna bleed over into the rest of the circle. Right? You’re gonna stop making more and more educated guesses, and they’re gonna start getting less and less educated and more and more guessy.
So give yourself an orange there, that’s something to look at. And if you are not sure about your customer journey at all, you’ve maybe undergone a lot of changes recently, a lot of product updates, If you saw a red, that’s something to prioritize.
Onto triggers.
So historically, we’ve all we’re all very familiar with sending out timed emails. Right? Those are the direct emails sent to you. Maybe you get eight, when you sign up to a new product.
The thing with timed emails is that their quality degrades exceptionally quickly. So sorry. Not quality, but their their metrics. So the open rate, the click through rate, how many people even look at them in their inbox. So if you’re sending more than three emails in a in a row to someone without any kind of interaction from them, so you’re not triggering any, chain reaction in your in your email marketing system, then that would be a red.
If you are sending, emails that are email chains or sequences that are for emails or less, so maybe you’ve only got one welcome sequence and it’s for emails. That’s great. That’s an orange.
If you are sending triggered emails, so you’re tracking your product, you’re tracking your product.
Usage. Sorry about that. You’re tracking your product usage, seeing what features they’re using, what what they’re actually onboarding onto. Maybe if you have multiple products within your within your software suite, then you could trigger emails based on how they sign up to things and and play around. You could also be triggering Winmax, when someone doesn’t hit a certain, beat of of your customer journey, that would be a green.
Next up, personalization.
So it’s very easy to generalize an email and very easy to say something very generic. Right? And the problem of saying things that are generic is that they’re specific to absolutely nobody.
For example, let’s say you are and this is a situation that I ran into with a client the other day. Right? They are serving lots of different types of businesses with lots of different types of use cases. Now the triggers are all the same, but the context is slightly different because these businesses are different types of businesses. We have a food truck or a nail salon.
So instead of saying businesses for every email here, how is how are things going in your business? We say, how are things going in your food truck? How are things going at your nail salon? It’s much more specific, much more personalized.
And that kind of attention to detail is what gets your open rates higher, your click through rates higher.
So if you are personalizing the if you’re personalizing your emails, then you can go ahead and, give yourself a green for segmenting by use case. Right? So if you’re separating people out into use cases like I just described, it could be yourself agree.
If you are not doing anything beyond maybe the name that’s getting personalized in every email and perhaps you’re also doing a trial date in every email, then you can go ahead and give yourself an orange. You’re on the way.
If you’re not doing anything at all, give yourself a red.
Alright. Onto tracking. Now most people are tracking the free to pay conversion rate.
That’s pretty common and pretty easy to do. Some people are also tracking the product adoption rate. Now if you haven’t bumped into that term yet, it’s another fun acronym. You know, marketers love them.
But the product adoption rate or PAI is what we use to tell if someone has truly adopted the software. Doesn’t mean that they’re paying for it yet, but they’ve adopted it. So, for example, Slack only considers someone debated, if they hit the product adoption indicator of getting sort of sending two thousand messages. Right? Anything less, they are not considered activated.
So are you tracking your free to page? Are you tracking your, product adoption indicator? If so, great. You are currently in orange. To take you to green, you will need to be tracking a few more details, something like the engagement rate, how often people are logging back into your software, how long they’re taking to get to various stages of their customer journey, and then as well as their time to value. Right? How long does it take for them to create ultimately?
K. So hopefully that was clear to you all.
Next up is testing.
Testing is really where the magic happens. Right?
So if you are not currently testing, then you’re probably really struggling with the guesswork that’s started over at Journey.
If you if you haven’t really looked at your welcome email in six to twelve months, Your new newest user who signed up, like, three seconds ago has just read it. Right?
Testing means that you can continuously maintain and optimize your results. And if you don’t test, the thing that will happen is that your, your metrics will just slowly decline. It’s like a slow gradual hill of sadness. And at the end of that sadness hill is, unfortunately, the sandbox, which is exceptionally difficult to get out of.
So in testing, you are doing a great job if you are currently checking on your open rate and click through rates every and deliverability every month.
You are also possibly, making some hypotheses about your customers, testing those up, disproving them, or approving them.
If you’re not doing that, but you are checking on things monthly just to see how things are going, or maybe, you have pretty regular product updates, which means that you’re going to be checking.
It means you’re gonna be updating your emails fairly regularly with new screenshots or new messaging, then that’s great. Give yourself a orange. If you’re not doing any testing at all, then you’d be a red.
So this is the onboarding to, the show about onboarding framework.
And it’s great. It’s a circle because you are going to start way back at inside once you’ve gone all the way around and keep going around, keep optimizing, and keep improving with time. And that ultimately is what makes that thirty percent lift a recurring lift rather than just a one sole win.
Alright.
So I haven’t practiced the closing very much.
In true honesty so let me just get my notes. Alright. By this point, you shall know, should know what’s getting in your way the most. Right? It’s very easy to get overwhelmed with a hundred different things, grabbing your focus. And the last thing you wanna do is walk into your next boardroom meeting and give your presentation and watch your CEO kinda glaze over in confusion as you go over the numbers in immaculate detail.
So now you know where to put your focus. You know how to explain what’s going wrong, what’s going right, and how you’re gonna improve it. If that’s something that you need help with or that you’d like to outsource, then you are welcome to book a call with me. I will pop it kindly into a spreadsheet slideshow later on for you to go ahead and click on.
And I’ve lost my track completely. I’m very sorry, but thank you.
Thanks, Claire.
Alright. Okay. Notes for Claire. Who’s up first?
Yeah.
I’ll I’ll I’ll go.
Yeah. Claire, I thought that was that was really good. Like, you’re so funny. I really wanna get coffee with you.
And we can work on our, like, shy girl energy together.
But yeah. No. It was really engaging. That was really fun. I took quite a few, like, notes or just bits I really like. Like, I love the overpowered onboarding framework. And if you do use that tool that Joe said when you, like, describe Superman, if you have a Superman come up, I just love that so much.
There was a bit when you’re talking about insights and you’re talking insights. Sorry. You’re talking about the customer research that you could do. You say you could do this. I kinda wanna be told, like, what I should do, not what I could do.
And then when you’re talking about personalization, like, that just felt like a really good place for a case study to just when you’re saying about specificity, if you could just say I did this for so and so.
And I thought the fact that it’s a circle is brilliant, like, the ongoing going round and round. Like, really, really like that. So, yeah, it it was good. And if you do wanna, like, work on the clothes together, because I just I just get so shy when, like, I’d be happy to do that.
Oh, and just another thing as well, like, because you seem to get a lot more confident as you went on. Like, that’s why I always use a slide deck at the beginning because it just I don’t know. It just makes me feel which, you know, maybe I need to go over that this well. But, yeah, just a tip if if you, like, need something at the beginning to yeah.
But, anyway, I thought it was really good.
That’s so helpful. Thank you. I have a quick question. I don’t just okay.
I went back and forth between personalizing personalization and segmentation for emails and ultimately decided that personalization is very different to segmentation, obviously, and that if different segments are identified in the insights area or the customer journey area, that those should have their own circle. So it’s like other circles for other for other, segments.
Does that track with everyone, or is that sounding fairly confusing and counterintuitive?
So you’re saying so you’re saying this is the core model, and then you’d have a separate one for the personalization part of the model. Like, let’s dig into that, and here’s what that looks like? No.
Like like a big circle is, like, the main say that’s their main identified job to be done. They know very clearly who they’re targeting, But they have all these little satellite ones to the side, which on that important.
Our first engagement would be focusing on the main one. But in future, if they realize that one of their satellites is actually a bit bigger than they thought, we could do the same thing for that one, but it would be a whole new process.
Yeah.
So I don’t know if I’ll I can’t answer that, but what I can say is each one of these sections you have is likely to have its own thing that you would draw. So insights, As you dig in and you’re working with the client more and more, then you’ll do you’ll help their team get up to speed on what you mean by how to tell if we’re doing insight right. So you’ll have a new model that’s, like, breaking down insight, and that might be speaking to, like, the satellite thing that you’re talking to.
But I wouldn’t I wouldn’t draw a satellite in here. I wouldn’t say anything more about these other parts. I might just call it personalization and segmentation just for the sake of, like, simplicity here with your audience.
But don’t I wouldn’t have more stuff going off the side.
You’ve also, like, the circle is in segments, so you could even say, like, the sec you know, segmentation is part of it.
That’s That’s cute.
Little orange segments. Cute. Awesome. Okay. Any other notes for Claire? Katie?
Hey, Claire. Just like kudos for putting yourself out there and doing it. I thought you did really well.
Okay. So things I thought were great. I love when you said, like, how much that’s worth and have that concrete number of, like like, we’re talking about a thirty percent lift, but here’s the what that would be worth to you. I thought that was a great way of bringing the money in.
And I’m sure, like yeah. I don’t know, not much about your client history, but I’m sure that there is room to bring in other case studies. But I did like how you had the food truck versus hair salon example just to give me something concrete, to work with when you’re talking about the personalization.
I also like the example with Slack. Like, Slack doesn’t consider, was it product adoption metric reached until two thousand messages?
So one thing I thought you could work on was, and I’m just looking at myself. Like, I don’t think I have actually had any other, like, changes. But I wrote the drama that moment that you talked about, like, your you have looked in your onboarding emails for six months, but the person who just signed up looked at them a few minutes ago.
I just felt like that’s such a good moment, and I felt like it needed a little bit more build up to really hammer home, like, what kind of, you know, how we, like, build up that moment of high attention. Like, why does that matter?
What is that worst case scenario? Like, what are the implications of that, versus just, like, locating me in that moment, but not really, like, having me realize why it has been important for me to inhabit from that moment. Does that make sense? So, like okay.
So I’m thinking about that. I’m like, oh, shit. Yeah. Who knows if I have, like, COVID references in my in my onboarding emails or something?
But if that new user looks at it, what is what is that irrelevant is going to cost me, basically.
Yeah. And then so I just wonder I have a question mark if that if where you at it was the best place for that or if building that moment up more towards the end could be a great segue into your pitch of, like, this is your worst case scenario.
Don’t have that. Hire me. So maybe moving that from where you had it, I believe you had that within testing.
I wasn’t really clear on its relevance to testing. I saw it as more of, like, keeping your onboarding fresh and, you know, optimized.
So for me, it just felt like it should have been pulled out of testing and then use more as that pivot into your closed.
Does that make sense?
That makes total sense. Yeah. So I pull it out of the pull it out of the circle and use it for the close?
Use it to the pivot. Yeah.
That’s so helpful. Thank you. Because I have no idea how to transition. That’s kinda where I went like, oh, crap. It’s done. What?
Do you know?
That’s really helpful. Thank you.
Perfect. Thanks, Katie. Marina.
Hey, Claire.
You’ve got so many gems in there, and I was like, oh, that’s how you could say that. Oh, that’s how you could say that. But I had to listen so carefully because they were sort of hidden in just, like, I think a little bit of, like, vocal variety or, change in speed of saying things or, like, varying the energy so that, like, you’ve got a ton of good things in there. And I was like, oh, that’s really cool.
That if they just, like I know you’re nervous. I get it. You’re probably probably throwing up too.
Maybe I’m projecting. But, anyway I don’t know.
But but it would totally then it would be like these little zingers, And then you’ve got, like, this wicked under, like, quiet sense of humor that then it would bring that out too. And so then I I don’t know. I just think you’ve got a lot of good things going in there. And it’s kind of like, maybe just think about it as taking a highlighter mentally and go going, okay. I need to highlight these bits and, like, really, like, come out a bit more instead of ending, like, with your kind of, like, a question.
Right? And just Yeah. Yeah. This is me telling you. So this like, I’m try I I’m not one to talk.
But seeing it in yours, I was like, oh, okay. She could totally if you’re just, like, pushing this one little bit and pushing this one little bit. And I can’t remember all the things because I was, like, listening and going, oh, that’s how you can include something without it coming across seeming like, you were bragging on yourself, but it didn’t come across as like, oh, I’m so great, and I did this in a bad way. It came across as like, oh, she knows what she’s she’s talking about.
But then just, like, zing it out a little bit more so I don’t have to, like, listen for it quite so deeply, if that makes sense.
That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I I I’m really grateful for that feedback. It’s so specifically helpful.
Sun Sinic actually has a new course I’m presenting, which I’m desperate to do.
Yeah. He’s so convincing.
Yes.
Anyway, nice nice work. Obviously, lots of work has gone into it.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thanks, Marina. Todd.
Yeah. Mine is pretty quick, Claire. And I could be wrong. It might not be relevant, but I believe you spoke to email as a seven billion dollar industry.
And, you know, I will kinda just look at Joe for this one. In ten x emails, you speak to for every, know, every dollar you spend on email marketing, and the average return is, like, forty four dollars and twenty five cents or something. So maybe it could be a setup for ADA as you move them through. Like, did you know if you do this, you get this back?
And let them know, like, there’s not just we’re not just selling your service, but you should expect a return on what you’re getting kind of idea and just set them up. Like, you’re the expert again in it and just like, yeah. Come with me, and this is not a cost. This is an investment kind of idea and just really set it up because you’ve talked to such a big number.
But if you can bring that back and just put that in their in their court and let them know, like, we’re expensive for a reason kind of idea, but I’m not sure if that’s relevant or not.
Love that. Agreed. I think there were a few number of points in there that needed more, like, push on. That’s one of them. Your line eighty percent don’t come back. I wrote down and circled like, damn, that’s terrifying.
Eighty percent don’t come back.
So there are a lot of moments there. I was like, if you need calculators, you need, like, to show what that adds up to, how much you spent only to have them vanish. Like, no wonder marketing looks flat.
You early on, you picked a fight sort of with blast emails, but then it wasn’t until you were getting to the trigger part of the model that you really dug into why, like, a broadcast or blast email isn’t as good as a triggered one. I would have liked you to pick a fight with it earlier and then just continue the fight when you get to triggers.
So, like, bring me into the problem with blast or broadcast emails, which the vast majority of these people are doing.
So why they should stop doing that.
What else have we got?
You said it’s a game changer for activation, but not for acquisition. And I didn’t know why you bring up acquisition at all, just, like, focus on activation when you were talking about the overpowered onboarding framework. You’re like, this is a game changer for activation.
It is not for act for acquisition. It’s like, shush. Shush. Don’t talk about acquisition. No. No. That’s not actually activating.
I’ve got a great diagram if we have, like, a few minutes afterwards that I wanted to quickly If it shows up on the slide, then that’s one thing.
But I’m like, I don’t know if you’ve read straight line selling. I’m talking about it a lot these days, the Jordan Belfort book. But, it’s it’s what he would call Pluto.
So it’s too far out. Don’t bring come back. Come back. Let’s not talk about that part.
I also thought that you could okay. Two things and we’ll wrap up.
You did get more confident as you went. I totally noticed that. The more you practice, the more the parts are, like, second nature to you, the better and more engaging the whole thing is. And I know you hadn’t practiced the clothes or things like that, so that’s fair.
But just know that if it ever feels like, is it even worth it? The more you practice it, the you’ll it’ll be a natural thing. You are funny, and you’re friendly and likable. There’s a lot of good stuff there, but now we just gotta nail your delivery.
Like, that’s it. Just practice a bunch of times.
The thirty percent lift in the middle, I’d love to see you pause, and I think you’ll do that more as you get more chill with, like, presenting like this.
What’s nice about, like, Abby’s five k in the middle is it’s a number that I want. I want that number. Thirty seven thirty percent lift is not yet a number. It’s just like this wonder like, this great idea.
I would love you to be able to before you even draw your model, to put them through a very simple calculation, and just say, like, look. Don’t worry. We’re not using this for, like, the wrong purposes. Just set up just put context around it, but what you want is them to have a number to put in the middle of the circle.
So if you can help them do the calculation of what a thirty percent lift would look like and then extrapolate that, like, maybe say, okay. Now annual. Like, just figure it out how you can get that number in the middle to look really compelling. Like, oh, I could make eight thousand dollars a day, and I’m currently making four dollars a day.
That sounds awesome. Thanks.
But if you can do the calculation now, I’m, like, very keen on this instead of thirty percent lift.
My final note here is I’m not in love with some of the word choices across the model.
Foundation threw me because it was up high, and I want a foundation to be down low.
So I’m like, no. That’s a sky up there. I’m very literal.
But I thought that you could do a, like, a SaaS sweep.
Now that you’ve got these six parts in place with their three labels, go back through and make it feel what words can you use? Because right now, what we have for foundation conversation optimization, insights, journey, triggers, personalization, tracking, and testing, that’s all like, a course creator could follow the same thing, and an ecommerce business could follow the same thing. Right?
Lower journey might be replaced with funnel if you were really getting into it for, like, a specific course creator group. So to me, it felt too generic still. It feels like, good. You’ve got this, like, poor model in place. Now let’s SaaSify it. Now that twenty five to fifty million dollar group, what words will feel better?
Foundation doesn’t feel right.
Conversation might.
Optimization does, I think. But then inside of that, insight, I want you to work on that word.
Journey is good. Triggers are good. You already know you’re gonna work on personalization and segmentation and figure that out. Tracking and testing, can you do something that feels more if you know these people are using intercom, for example, intercom e language.
So, like and that’s your job. Just sweep through it and see if you can make it sound more sassy so I can see myself. Sassy this sassy, not Stacy’s sassy. But so I can see myself as a SaaS founder or marketer or whatever when I look at this model.
Does that make sense?
Just a little more pointed on your word choice.
Okay. That’s super helpful because I I like I’ve taken it way back. Do you know how how long it took to get like three shuns?
Sorry.
What did you say?
Three shuns. Three, like, activation. What is it? Conversation, foundation.
Oh, the shuns. Foundation. Oh, I see.
Yeah. But I can find a new shuns. I’ve done it now.
Find a new shuns. There are more shuns.
Yeah. K. Cool.
I’m a new shin.
Awesome. Good. How are you feeling, Claire?
Great. Great. Yeah. I’m really really excited to actually do this well.
Yeah. Yeah. You’ve got a really good starting point here. And, oh, Todd.
Nice job. Nice way to finish the meeting.
You’ve got great case studies too. Oh, one other note, the over twenty startups with, on the or onboarding flows with Forget the Funnel. I don’t know that you have to say it with Forget the Funnel because I’m just gonna go look up Forget the Funnel. So just say, like, twenty more onboarding flows. Like, wow. It’s a lot of onboarding flows.
Yeah. Nobody’s listening anymore because there’s a puppy in the room. So, we’re just gonna go look at the puppy now. But good job, Claire and Marina and Abby. Thank you. Well done, everybody. And thanks for giving your notes as well and tuning in to help your fellow to help your peers out here.
Good. Alright.
So next month kicks off a whole new month for, Coffee School Pro. We’ll be posting about that very soon.
Cool. Awesome. And, Todd, you have to tell us about this puppy. What’s going on here?
Sorry. We she’s a week and two days old, and we’re renovating the house. We’re actually getting a podcast studio ready for me in the basement, and, she sleeps at my feet. She’s on her little bed.
And, yeah, she’s she’s a great little dog. She’s learning quickly. And she’s just been at my feet all things, so I you might see me looking down. I’ve been trying to avoid it, but she just woke up.
So yeah. And she’s licking me like crazy.
So She is. But she’s got those little shark teeth too.
Yeah. She’s got little pearls as Tina said.
Oh my gosh. What’s her name?
Patty. Patty. Patty. Patty. The patty.
Yeah. Patty? Yeah. It’s a yeah. It’s a new dog for us. So, yeah, she’s she’s a great dog.
So Oh. Try and sorry if I interrupted everyone.
It’s just It’s end of meeting.
I’m amazed you were able to hold off this whole time.
Oh, it’s tough. You have no idea when she’s at my feet and she’s, like, nudging me with a bone, and then she’s nudging me with a toy, then another toy, and then she’s out cold and looking at her. So, yeah.
Oh, so cute.
So cute. Well, I saw your two as well.
So Oh, yes.
They just came in from Yeah.
Playing out at the lake.
Yeah. We’ll do it. Tina was the first one to meet her, I believe, as well. Uh-huh. So yeah.
Patty. Yeah. Super cute.
Patty is welcome to the crew.
Absolutely.
Awesome.
Okay. Thanks, y’all. Thanks so much. Well done, everybody. If you haven’t worked on your workshop, go do it.
And if you have, keep practicing. Thanks, everybody. Bye.
Thank you.
Transcript
Hey. Hey. Alright. Workshop day. Y’all ready? Yes?
Of course.
Good.
I’m excited. This is gonna be a lot.
We’ve got three p doing this a lot. I don’t know what’s going on with my brain.
My fingers never match what the number is that I say. So three. There. I had to think about it. We have three of you going today, and I know it just hit start time. So we’re just gonna let some people come on in.
Abby, you’re going. Marina, you’re going. And I think Claire is our third, and we’ll, go in that order.
Is that exciting? Yeah. Yes. Okay. Good.
Alright. We’ll let some people file in. How are you all feeling about your present your workshops?
I don’t know why, but I’m, like like, nervous about giving it.
Really? Yeah. I was like, I don’t know why.
They’re just, like, my friends. I can agree. I was saying to my partner, but I’m, like, really nervous.
It’s so much worse when you know the people.
It’s so much worse.
Is that what it is? Maybe.
Yes. Totally.
Three thousand strangers, easy compared to three people you know very well. Like, no. Thanks. I don’t need this. I’m good. I’ll do something else with my life.
Well, also these people, they know what it’s supposed to be. So what if you totally miss the boat?
I guess that’s true. Yeah. That’s fair. That’s fair.
Alright. Thanks everybody who’s attending today and not presenting.
We’re going to be attending as people in that person’s ideal audience. So, Abby, Marina, and when Claire gets here, if the three of you can please just let us know basically who your ICP is and the persona that you believe would be watching this, and we can do our best to sit in those shoes. And, otherwise, we’ll just, like, give other feedback as well.
So that’s our job for everybody who is filing in again.
Yeah. Really simply, we are here to watch and give feedback on three workshops. And if you’re working on your own work workshop, which you should be, it’s a great chance for you to do to see to see. So you can also learn like, oh, wow.
I loved that. Or, oh, okay. That’s gonna be a confusing part. It was confusing for their audience.
It’s probably confusing for mine. I didn’t think of it that way, etcetera, etcetera. So a caught not taught kind of workshop day. It is two hours, because we have three groups, three people going.
Each gets about thirty minutes, then we’ll have about five minutes of discussion time, which could turn into ten, which is why we have two hours blocked out. Thank you for this endurance approach. It’s not a sprint, today. So are we ready?
We’re gonna go Abby, then Marina, and then Claire, if any of you surprised.
And you’re like, wait. What? I’m going today? Yeah. That’s the sign up list I got.
So so, hopefully, that’s right. Going in that order, Abby, then Marina, then Claire. Are we ready? Or does everybody know why we’re here and what we’re doing?
Any confusion?
No? I wouldn’t think so. Alright. We are recording.
Let’s get cracking. If you’re not presenting, please go on mute and do your best to stay on camera if possible so that the presenter can see our faces and not feel like they’re talking to an empty room or people who are busy doing other things. Okay. Thanks.
Abby, take it away.
Cool. Okay. So, my ICP is a course creator, so you’re probably doing about three to four million. You wanna be doing ten million.
But at the moment, you’re just completely stuck with a live lodge roller coaster. You’re getting burned out because every time you live lodge, it just takes out of you, and you just cannot get Evergreen to work, and you don’t know why.
Okay. So can everybody, like, see my screen?
Okay. Cool. Right.
Okay. So this workshop is called how to make five thousand dollars a day with a mid ticket evergreen course.
So I’m Abby. I’m the founder of AT Content and the creator and author of day one evergreen, the only funnel that’s built to convert better every month.
I help course creators add one point eight million a year in revenue, which is five thousand dollars a day, without the nail biting stress of live launches. I’ve worked with hundreds of course creators. I’ve worked on evergreen funnels for Amy Porterfield, Becca Klein, Jel Sid, Coffeehackers, Ingrid Ana, Fast Needs a QBO, and some other names that you might recognize.
So you’re in the right place if you have a mid ticket offer between three hundred and two thousand dollars that you’d love to scale to five thousand dollars a day on Evergreen. The reason I say these amounts is just what I found is when it’s over two thousand, it tends to just take a little bit more nurturing. So the idea of this funnel is that you bring people onto your email list and you sell to them straight away.
So you’re already doing at least a million with your online course, but you really wanna scale with to ten million without relying on the nail biting trust of live launches.
And you’re already using paid advertising to sell your online course. So this isn’t a requirement.
So, generally, to to reach five thousand dollars a day, depending on how much your course is, you wanna be getting at least a hundred, maybe two hundred people into a funnel every day. If you can do this with organic marketing, awesome. Great.
But likely, you’re gonna be using some kind of paid advertising.
So a quick case study.
So one of my clients is Fast and Easy QBI. So back in January, they launched a brand new course with an email list of ten thousand, and we made six hundred thousand dollars. Their sales that month outpaced all of their sales in twenty twenty three. We straightaway took that launch funnel evergreen and made seventy six thousand dollars in month one, keeping in mind that they’d already pretty much exhausted that email list because we literally just live launched.
And then we continue to optimize.
And now in July, they’ve got a six point eight cent conversion rate with a three dollar cost per lead. So for a twelve hundred dollar course, they’re they’ve got a pretty good ROAS there, and they’re making five thousand dollars a day with they on Evergreen.
A few more case studies, which you can get in my book.
So one of my clients, Eric Petrus, he came to me because he he was selling guitar guitar repair course.
I worked on his evergreen sales page, and we tripled his weekly sales. At Harmusch, I wrote his evergreen sales page three years ago. Amazingly, he’s still using the same copy, and it’s converting at thirteen percent. He’s making hundreds of thousands of dollars from that. Becca Klein, I increased her final conversions by a hundred and fifty percent.
Jove said two hundred and forty percent increase in webinar sales.
This was actually for a live launch, but the coffee converted so well. She took Evergreen and actually tripled her course price.
And Fast and Easy QBO, another course I’ve worked on for them is a membership, and we’ve seen a forty percent increase in membership sign ups since setting up day one evergreen.
Okay. So to address the eye roll here, these aren’t friends or colleagues. These are course creators that have come to me to evergreen their funnels. This isn’t another just add a countdown timer, just set up deadline funnel, and it’s gonna convert. This is unique system designed to collect ongoing data via a ten point customer feedback loop so you can legitimately improve your conversions without ripping a funnel apart every month.
So deal with evergreen, the funnel that’s built to convert best every month. So now you can stop relying on unpredictable live launches that burn you and your team out or the unpredictability of them as well. I mean, live launches are fun and exciting when they go well, but, also, if you’re putting you’re counting on one live launch to generate your full year’s revenue. And one link doesn’t work, and then you potentially lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So this is to just build a bit more peace into your business. It’s not to say never live lodge, but just to have that one point eight million as well.
Without lining Zuckerberg’s pockets, while barely breaking even on your ad spend, so maybe we’re already running ads to your evergreen course, and it’s kind of converting. But, actually, after you paid your ad spend, you’re not making enough money. Like, yes, you’re getting those leads, but you’re then having to go back to live launching to sell to sell to them.
And without hiring expert after expert in the hope that someone can fix your evergreen funnel problem. And then again, just linking back to live launches because it just doesn’t work.
Okay. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna do a little slice together. So I’d love you to just grab a notebook and pen.
Okay. So what I want you to do is in the middle of your page is to just draw a circle and write in there five thousand dollars. So that’s that’s what we’re going for here, five thousand dollars a day. And then I will need to draw four leaves.
Make them quite big so you’ve got room to write in them. I guess these are kind of kind of looking like petals here. So you should have what looks like a little flower.
And then in the first, leaf, I want you to write attract.
In the second leaf, I want you to write engage.
And the third, convert.
And then the fourth, optimize.
Okay. So the first thing you’re gonna wanna do, if you if you want to be making sales every day, you need to be bringing people into your funnel, and you need to attract the right leads. So we’re gonna be using Facebook ads to do that.
Then the second thing we need is an attraction device. So you need a way to bring these people into your funnel and instantly engage them. So this is like you’re gonna be an opt in page with a workshop.
And then you need a lead monitor. So you need some way of actually seeing, okay, are these good leads as the reason that my funnel isn’t converting because my sales messaging is awful. Am I just bringing in low quality leads?
Okay. And then we have engaged. So you need an irresistible offer.
We’re gonna be talking in a minute about deeper into what these all mean and how to assess, whether you’ve got it set up or not, and then mindset shift.
So rather than doing a traditional how to workshop, you’re gonna do a workshop that’s built out of mindset shifts the audience needs to, go through in order to be ready to buy your course.
And then, oh, sticky story. Sorry.
Brain brain fart.
So because this is you are bringing people in and selling to them straight away, it’s really important you build know, like, and trust here. So this isn’t just like putting a shit’s creep gif in your emails and being like, hey. I have a personality. Like, you wanna build these really sticky stories that, like, win them over to your world and make them feel ready to to buy from you.
Okay. And then we’ve got combat. So we want an easy yes pitch. So at the end of your webinar, you’re gonna pitch your offer, and it’s gonna make it very easy for them to say yes.
And then you’ve got a million dollar sales page. So this isn’t your typical templated sales page. This is a long form sales page that addresses any objections they have that by the time they get to the ends of it, they’re not gonna have any further questions about your course.
And then conversion emails. So, again, not just your generic sales emails, emails that are written to convert.
And then finally, we have optimize.
So data tracking.
Are you tracking your data across the whole funnel?
And then we have your customer feedback loop. So that’s your ten point customer feedback loop, which includes forms and surveys, AB tests to gain as much information about your customer as possible.
And then finally, we have conversion hotspots, which is where you want to implement your customer feedback to have the biggest impact on your conversions.
Okay. So you should have something that looks a bit like this. Maybe a little bit neater. Mine’s a bit. My handwriting’s still great.
And now we’re gonna go through and we’re gonna write where you are for each of these sections. So if you’re feeling really confident, you’ve got it set up, it’s all converting beautifully, you’re gonna give yourself a ten.
If you have it set up but conversions aren’t quite where they should be or you just feel like it could be better, you can give yourself a five. And if it’s not set up or it’s not converting at all, you’re gonna give yourself a zero.
Okay. So the first thing we’ve got is your Facebook ads.
So in order for to hit five thousand thousand dollars a day, your ads need to be profitable. So if you are your current ad spend is ten to twenty dollars a day and you have a five hundred dollar course, you’re just literally flushing away that money and not and not seeing any return on your ad spend. So we wanna ideally get your lead down to around five dollars, five to ten dollars.
And it’s also it’s not just about the cost per lead, but having someone on your team who’s gonna address seasonal changes, who’s gonna keep updating that so that what works in winter can then be made to work in summer. You’re not you’re refreshing the ads, so they can continue to go back, and you’re not just flushing that money away.
And then you want your attraction device. So your opt in page to your workshop. So, ideally, your opt in page conversion rate should be around forty to sixty percent.
You also want to make sure that people are then watching your webinar. So if people aren’t even clicking to watch your on demand webinar, then the chances are that it’s just not desirable enough. So if you have an issue there with people not watching, it might just be that your opt in page isn’t selling it hard enough. And then lead monitor.
So you’re gonna have a thank you page survey embedded after people sign up for your webinar, and this is gonna determine what drove them to to sign up. It’s gonna tell you whether these are good leads. So you might find that lots of people going in there are like, oh, I just wanna make more money or some other kind of quick win, and then this is a sign that actually those leads aren’t the ones that you want in there. You want ones that are ready to buy, they’re ready to invest, and understand that it’s it’s a long term game.
You also wanna be doing very strategic AB testing on your opt in page. So rather than just testing to see if you can get your conversion rate up a little bit, actually looking at the bottom of your funnel and seeing, okay. Is this one bringing in the leads that actually convert?
So, again, if you don’t have that set up, it’s gonna be a zero. If you have some of it set up at five, and if you’re really confident that you know what’s going on with your leads and who’s converting, then you’re gonna be self a ten.
Okay. And then going on to engage. So your irresistible offer.
Do is this something that people will, like, crawl through broken glass to get? Do you have a great offer that’s converted before? And is it converting with Evergreen? So it might be that it converts pretty well when it’s like you live launch, but on evergreen, maybe you don’t have the right kind of urgency set up. Do you have that authentic scarcity that gives people a reason to act now rather than later.
And then mindset shifts. So your workshop, is it built out of the mindset shifts that people need to go through to go from where they are now to where they need to be to say yes to your course, or are you just doing how to content that isn’t actually converting them?
And then sticky stories. So, again, building in that relatability stories that really stick. And you can the way you can tell this is are people staying to the end of your webinar? Are people sticking around? Are they opening your emails? Are they engaging with your offer? And if they’re not, then the chances are you need to just go back and build in more of that storytelling and more of yourself so that people can buy into that.
Okay. And then we’ve got Converse. We’ve got the easiest pitch.
So this is at the end of your webinar. Are you not just are you are you reading through your modules and your bonuses, or are you constantly making sure that you’re connecting the modules and the bonuses to what’s going on in their life at the moment, explaining to them how how it’s gonna improve their life, how it’s gonna aid the transformation that you’re promising. And, again, the way you can measure this is are people sticking around to the end of your webinar, or are they dropping off?
Your million dollar sales page, is this, is it converting? Is is the the first thing to think about? Are you converting at five to eight percent, which is what you should be getting with an evergreen webinar funnel like this?
Is it templated? Are you pulling out generic pain points, or are you have you got your customer research and you’re reading their mind and you’re empathizing with them deeply? You’re as they’re reading through, they’re thinking, oh my god. Yes. This person gets me. Important on an evergreen sales page because again, these people don’t know you. They haven’t been on your list for months and months and months.
So it’s even more important that you show them you understand where they are and that they can trust you to guide to guide them.
And then finally, conversion emails. Again, emails are rich in voice of customer that are addressing different objections objections that are coming up in your customer feedback loop, which we’ll talk about in a second.
Are people opening them? Are people clicking through? Is your click through rate for each email above two percent?
Okay. And finally, optimize. So data tracking. Are you tracking every point of your funnel, and do you understand how it all ties together? So your cost per lead, your click through rate on your ads, your opt in page conversions, how the amount of people that show up for your webinar, and the amount of time they spend on your webinar, your sales pitch, your versions, your open rates for emails, your click through rates. Are you measuring all that, and are you measuring it month monthly and looking at how things are changing each month?
Your customer feedback loop. Do you have a ten point customer feedback loop built in? Do you have survey set up? Do you have opportunities for your customers to engage?
Are you finding out why people are converting versus not converting? Are you running strategic tests? All of these things will help you understand your audience better. So if anything’s not converting, you can use your data tracking to identify where and you know what to change around your messaging.
And this also applies to seasonal changes as well. For example, let’s say you have an outgoing copywriting course, that converted amazing in twenty twenty two. Then in January twenty twenty three, your conversion rates dropped and you don’t know why. If you had that customer feedback loop set up, you could say, oh, okay.
Because everyone’s freaking out about about AI, but I’m not addressing that in my messaging. So do you have these points set up so you understand what is getting in the way for your audience? And then finally, conversion hotspots. Once you’ve got that feedback, do you know where to put it?
Do you know where to put that the voice of customers so that you are having the biggest impact of your conversions and you’re not just constantly randomly rewriting, ripping pile funnels, start again, wasting all this time just hoping, praying that something’s gonna convert.
Okay. Cool.
Thanks. So you should hopefully have something that looks a little bit like this, maybe a bit less colorful unless you you’ve got your crayons. So now we’re you should be able to identify three to four points, for you to now go away and work on. So if your problem is that, okay, you are making some sales, but it’s just not profitable because all of your money is going to Facebook ads. You wanna go and you wanna look at your Facebook ads, you wanna work on your opt in page, see if you can get that conversion rate up, and maybe have a look at your offer. Is there room to put the price up a bit more so you’re more profitable? And then, of course, getting this customer feedback loop built in so you can see why people, why your leads are expensive, what what you can do to actually improve that.
Is your is it the case that your sales are inconsistent? Sometimes, some months are gray, other months are poor.
Again, you wanna build this customer feedback loop in so you can see what’s changing. You want someone working on your Facebook ads so that they can respond to these seasonal changes and then be going through these conversion hotspots through your funnel from the top to the bottom to optimize based on what it is that’s changing.
And if you’re not getting sales at all, then or you’re you’re just making a couple, like, nowhere near that five k that you want, then the chances are you need someone to come in and set up this day one evergreen funnel for you.
So if you do just have a couple of points here, then that’s awesome. Go away. Give give this to your team. Get my book for the to get the ten conversion, the the customer feedback loop.
If you’re thinking, okay. I just really love someone to just set this up for me, then my team has one space available per month. Not only will we set it up, but we’re also available to optimize. So it’ll be like having someone on your team that’s gonna review the customer feedback loop every month and then improve the funnel so that you your comp until your conversion’s where you want them to be, and then, again, respond if anything dips. So I’m gonna be dropping a link to book a call with me, come to that call with your drawing today ready, and, yeah, we’ll have a chat and see if we’re a good fit. Any questions?
Okay. That’s it.
Good job, Abby.
Alright.
Let’s share any notes. Who would like to go first to share feedback for Abby?
Otherwise, I’ll choose you. So put up Andrew’s first and then Claire.
Right.
Yeah. That was really good, Abby. Definitely lit some fire under my butt to to get my workshop going and hopefully get it as good as yours is.
I would say my number one point of feedback, would be to really slow down, a good bit. There were parts where you were going through it really fast, and it’s like, I could keep up with you because I kinda know a lot of this stuff. And what you’re talking about, you know, getting customer feedback or, like, conversion rates and sales pages that add address objections, I’m right there with you. But I feel like if I’m someone who is that’s not marketing is not my main thing, I would need you to go a lot slower so that I can understand what you’re talking about.
I wrote that down when you were going through the diagnostic at the mindset mindset shift. Like, I know what you’re talking about about we need to, like, shift people’s mindsets, but you kinda blew through it a little bit. So I think if you went, like, maybe, like, half the speed, that would probably help, a little bit.
And then in terms of, like, stuff that I really liked was when you’re going through the diagnostic, when you had things like the exit like, when you were doing the customer feedback loop, you had like, you used the example of, like, AI. You know? Oh, is my messaging not resonating anymore? Because everyone’s freaking out about AI, and we haven’t addressed that.
That specificity was helpful.
Same thing with the last one, the conversion hotspots of, like, asking questions. Like, okay. You’ve collected this feedback. Do you know where to put it, where to implement it?
I feel like that was helpful.
And I just wanted to check on in the beginning, would you could you say it was supposed to be three hundred to two thousand dollars, or was it higher than the other typo?
No. Yeah.
You might have a typo.
So Okay.
Okay. Yeah. Three hundred to two thousand.
Yeah. It goes to twenty thousand. I was like, oh, damn. That is a high ticket offer.
Nice. Okay. Yeah. No mid ticket. Thank you.
I didn’t notice that.
But, yeah, big biggest piece of advice would be just, yeah, slow down. Like, the content taught the content is really good, I thought.
So Thank you, Andre.
Her goal was so nice.
Claire.
My feedback is is really simple.
First, like, there were a few points where I really loved. You got, like, super specific. You just gave me an example, and I went like, oh, okay. I get what that is now. But you didn’t do it for all of them. So I some of them, I was like, okay. Following along.
But those super specific points were, like, really convincing, I suppose. And then same feedback on slowing down. I’ve gotten that feedback, like, a million times as well. Slow it down. Say less.
Say say things simpler as well. I think, my biggest piece of advice that I got from Cody was, sometimes they don’t understand what you’re saying because you’re overexplaining, which is, like, kind of the opposite of what you’re trying to do when you’re overexplaining.
So just by keeping it to, like, one, I suppose, big idea, per section, it makes it a lot easier to slow down and not catch yourself over explaining.
And then lastly, I really loved your presentation. I haven’t done a presentation at all. I hope that I’m instantly jealous.
But I really loved your presentation. I thought it was super cool to be able to follow along.
I think as you go, you’ll probably find you don’t say as much as you did just as you get, like, more comfortable with the content. But, the end was also really, really great. I love the Calendly visual. I just felt so like, okay. Today.
Yeah. I hate that.
Thank you. Helpful.
Anyone else wanna share some notes for Abby?
No?
Okay. I’ll share mine. Abby, I loved it. I thought you did a great job overall. The opening numbers and the promise right out of the gate, it’s like a super solid hook.
The case studies, well done. I do have a note that you’re talking a blue streak. That’s not what I wrote.
So can you ask questions earlier on? Like, have you experienced this too?
Something like that just to bring people in. I know when it’s recorded in advance, then that’s really, like, tricky, but even maybe slowing down could solve it there.
Okay. So early on, I have at ten o seven my time, which is probably about four minutes into the presentation.
I I would love you to say, hey. Yes. You can work with me and my team directly, and, like, just get ahead of that because I am definitely in your target market. And as somebody who would rather outsource this work, then try to get my team to do it ourselves.
Yeah. I was like, my question was immediately. Can we just hire you for this? So you could say, yeah.
You know, you can work with me directly. I’m gonna walk you through this because we only accept three clients a month. Also, I think you should say three clients a month, not one. So it sounds bigger, like a larger group.
You can only take on one. Then if you want, you can take out as many as you want to at that time, but I would open it up to three.
So then say, yes. You can work with me directly. I would also love, at that point, for you to say what your prices start at.
There’s no reason to not do that. Yeah. So give it a shot, and make it a nice high number.
You’re presenting really well, and you clearly know your stuff, and you have good case studies.
The only thing that would make a person think you should be less than fifty thousand dollars at minimum is you not saying fifty thousand dollars to start. So, like, if you don’t have a fifty thousand dollar budget, you’re not a good fit to work with you. You’re just not. So no. So fifty, sixty, whatever that number goes to, but say it. Even though it’s scary, this is what the whole point of this thing is, not just to get the leads you could otherwise close, but, like, new leads, more money. So I want you to do that.
You need more build up to the fact that you’re gonna be drawing today. So I would say earlier on, hey. By the way, just as we’re kicking off and while people are still filing in, you’ll need a piece of paper and a pen today. It’s not that’s not an art class. Don’t worry. But you’re gonna wanna draw something. I’m gonna show it to you.
I don’t understand the leaf the need for the leaf shape.
Because it’s evergreen.
So yeah.
Yeah.
I know. It’s really corny, but I just like No.
Because I I I had a design when it’s not in the green belt.
Leaves are seasonal.
Yeah. I don’t I just gave it to a sign designer. I was like, can you make this, like, not look like Joe’s?
From your from my side of things, I was drawing it, and I didn’t know what the lines off the leaves are meant to be.
So, like, when you have a triangle and you put those lines in there, the triangle is meaningless. As soon as you make something a shape, then everything on it needs to be part of that, like, metaphor.
And so if I’m thinking, okay, these are leaves, what are the three pokey things coming off the side then? So for me, like, I’m just it didn’t connect, and so I didn’t know why I was drawing three leaves. I didn’t know what was expected.
I know Andrew’s really trying to make it evergreen there.
Yeah. So just know that as your audience drawing it, I didn’t give myself enough room possibly because I wasn’t set up to know to draw this thing. The leaves felt like a artsy exercise that I couldn’t do, and it’s one more point of friction. Right? Like, did I draw a good leaf?
That’s just like come on. But I love starting with the circle in the middle. I love the four parts.
What I a couple notes.
When you’re going through, you’ve got, like, metrics and yes, no. I’m gonna look through and see if I can find a blank version of the scorecard that they gave us at their workshop, because you might wanna also follow this workshop up with shipping out that or bring the work and I’ll show it to you, and I’ll send you separate loom so you know what I’m talking about. Simply because what you’re talking about like, you’ve got numbers and how to tell if this is a yes or no. I didn’t love zero five ten either. I I think simplify it down to red, yellow, green.
It’s just like five zero ten.
I was copying it.
I know. I hate it. And I only do it because the sun doesn’t have, like, the sunshine growth model and zero like, the red, yellow, green doesn’t work on a sun. So that’s where it’s bad, like, where it falls apart from me.
But I don’t I know I know that’s what I do. I don’t like it, and so I wanna coach you to do it the easier way, which to me is red, yellow, green, or something really simple like that where there’s a three part thing. Okay.
Bum bum bum. Let me see. I took some good notes on, like, the actual content. Like, that was good. I have notes here for self.
Oh, when we get to oh, yeah. Million dollar sales page, I would love you to rename that for the purposes of this workshop simply because that’s the only thing that has million dollar or a price or, like, a, like, a outcome attached to it. So for me, I was like I mean, easy yes is another thing. Also, it sounded like you were saying easy ass to me. Just so you know, it came off as easy ass. And I was like, let me see what she writes down here.
So there’s that. But million dollar sales page, I would give it something else that sounds different just because I wrote, makes it sound like success is all on this.
Suddenly million dollar sales page had much heavier weighting than anything else, and I was thinking, do we just need a better sales page?
And that’s not the takeaway that you want.
Ta da. Couple more notes, then I’m done.
Oh, yeah. When we get to optimize, I felt like so you opened with data tracking. I needed a story there. Like because you say you can find places where there’s where money is basically hidden is effectively what you were saying there.
Like, you won’t know unless you’re tracking that. And you walked us through a bunch of great metrics, which was great. But then I was like, wouldn’t it be cool if at this point you were to say, for example, or whatever that QBO one was, we noticed x here, we optimized it, and we brought in another twenty thousand dollars in that in the next quarter or something like that. Right?
So I’m like, oh, damn. But then I was like, well, if you could do that.
It closely tied to the data tracking ties to conversion hots hotspots. Once you track data, then you know where to put it in these hotspots. Right? So I was confused about why the ten point thing was between the two.
So I wrote, what if for optimize, you first open with the ten point feedback loop, then you do data tracking, and then conversion hot hot spots, which would allow you to finish with a case study example. Like, oh, and when we did this and now we’re ending on a really high note. Money outcome. I remember why I want you to do this because although I can see that I’m red here, green there, yellow there, I know that I want you to do it if I remember that you you make money for people, which leads me to final notes.
We dropped the model pretty quickly.
What I would love is you spent a lot of time, I think, saying, like, if this is true for you, if that is true for you, etcetera, I had just finished with you should have have an idea of where your weaknesses are and what you should work on next. Don’t say give it to their team. You can imply that. You can say that earlier on.
Like, I’ll give you enough that you can go forward and do this yourself. But at this point, like, close them, and that’s really it. Like, now is the point where I’m like, I’ve seen that I’m really right in a lot of places. Those all seem expensive, and, like, I’m really gonna need to train my team on how to do those things.
So don’t say go give it to your team. Instead, you could say, I mean, the red parts, is your team ready to do those parts? Are they qualified to optimize all of those parts?
Don’t minimize what you do. You started talking using verbs like set up. I’ll set this up for you.
No. Like, you’re not setting it up. That’s even when you do, it’s just not a good verb. Like, we’re we’re we’re this for you as we’re watching.
Like, wow. She, like, knows her shit. She can do this. And then I was brought down to maybe your team can maybe you can buy the book.
Maybe I can set it up for you. You know? So, no. And then book a triage call with team. Don’t put yourself in your Calendly even if you have to make somebody up. Someone else is your setter.
So make sure it’s like you can book a call with so and so from my team, and then go from there. It just elevates your price again and again. Like, oh, damn. Just sales team.
Yep.
The workshop’s selling. It’s doing a great job. I think if you simplify the model, slow down a bit, you’re good.
Tell people. Yes. You can charge me. You you can hire me. It’s fifty thousand to start or whatever the price is. What is the price to start?
Thirty five. To start. That prices start at thirty five.
Right. And then you build on the retainer after that?
Well, I’m gonna I think I’m gonna say like, I’m gonna build in an obligate not not a retainer, but just like, I’m here if you like if things don’t work. Like, I’m on I’m here for forty days just to work with your team if anything’s not working, and then recommend, like, you should really do the three the retainer as well.
Well, you should because your model Andrew knows what’s coming. You know your model.
Your this optimized you’ve sold us on it. It’s in the freaking model. It’s right here. How am I gonna go forward and data track and update those conversion hotspots?
You sold us on a thing here.
Like, you have done the work.
Okay.
That’s all. You know what my take is here.
So, yeah, any other notes or thoughts from anybody else for Abby?
I I just wanna tack on to what you just said, Joe, about, like, making this goes back to that that post that I made a while back about not making your monthly retainer separate from the offer to just make it part of the whole thing from the beginning so that it’s just the natural next stage of your product. It’s not a separate thing.
I so agree with that.
Yeah. Totally. It’s it’s it’s built in. I I attended this both as me here for you, but also as a person who would hire you for this. And if I heard, oh, you don’t necessarily need me for that part. I’d be like like, what are you talking about? But who’s gonna handle my conversion hotspots?
Like, what?
What’s happening? Who’s gonna look over my survey data? What?
So, yeah, Andrew made a really great point. I don’t know if you’re being tentative about selling yourself because you’re in a room with us and maybe with strangers. You’d be, like, more on the nose about how awesome you are, but wherever you do this next, lay it on.
Yeah. Reason to. Okay? Please?
One other tiny thing too. You just said a couple a couple minutes ago, Abby, about I’ll be there in case something’s not working. Like, you don’t even wanna say in case something’s not working because don’t even put that in their mind. Just if you wanna reframe that even as to make sure everything goes smoothly. Mhmm.
Mhmm.
You know?
But don’t even put in the possibility that something might not be working.
Yeah.
Okay. Love it. Good? Thank you. Bye. That’s Abby, nice work.
That’s lots of noise. Very helpful. Thanks.
Awesome. Marina, you’re up. You ready?
Of course.
K. After just a heads up for everybody who’s like, I need a bio break.
After Marina’s talk and our feedback session, we’ll take, like, a five minute break and then come back for Claire’s. Okay?
Cool. Awesome. Thanks, Marina.
Alright.
Take it away.
Tell us who your ICP is and everybody upfront first, please.
Yes. So ICP, CMO, VP marketing, twenty to a hundred million, b two b SaaS, with a reverse trial. So they start with a trial and then go to a freemium kind of model.
So that is who you are.
Alright. Thank you for Sorry, Maureen.
I hate to interrupt you. What remind me just really quickly.
Persona.
Sorry. Just just again. How much the persona who are you talking to at that ICP, and how much do they bring in a year? ICP years?
So we are b to b SaaS brands that are twenty to a hundred million.
Twenty to a hundred million.
And I’m talking to CMO, VP marketing, head of Okay.
Perfect. Sorry. Thank you. I had a restaurant instead of pen. Okay. Thanks.
Okay. All good.
Alright. Today, we’re gonna talk about how you can get more of your free users to convert to paid plans. So for our session today, grab a piece of paper and a pen. Don’t worry.
Not an art class. As long as you can read the notes on your diagram when we’re done, you will be good to go. So we’re specifically going to be talking about using, action triggered emails, message met sales pages to get your free users to to upgrade to a paid plan. Now these are users that have gone through your trial.
They have not converted yet, and there they are. We want them to feel good about the upgrade so they leave you a good review.
Now the next twenty five minutes, they’re gonna be valuable to you if you are a CMO, head of growth, VP of marketing, if you’re a b to b SaaS brand that generates twenty to a hundred million in annual revenue, these types of brands are the ones I work best with. Companies like Bitly, QR code generator, where we’re continuing to increase conversions strategically, by rewriting and optimizing emails and so on. Now I’m not the first person to share big brand names with you. So let me clarify.
These brands are not filled with people I knew before I started working with them. I got this work because this is exactly the type of work I’m building my reputation around. Further, I don’t pretend to have the perfect solution for you right here and now. Your company is not built on templates or you wouldn’t be here right now.
I may have the solution for you, but I’m not gonna hand you like it’s not like a trick where I say, oh, let’s all of a sudden stop letting those nine hundred and ninety five out of every one thousand free users sit in that free plan, sucking support resources indefinitely while taking space in your CRM, space you pay for every month.
Instead, I’m gonna help you see where your challenges are, and you’re going to discover them today for yourself in today’s workshop. So if by the end of our twenty five minutes together, you believe that my team is the only one that can stop the bleeding, fix what’s broken, reshape your conversion program into a superhuman sales generator, then you’ll be invited to book a conversion consultation with my team.
If that call proves that we should work together, you’ll be invited to invest twenty thousand dollars for my team of trained experts to establish your free to paid post convert, post trial free to paid strategy, roll out that strategy, including getting all of the automation set up. You won’t have to do a thing with that. And then five thousand dollars a month thereafter to optimize it. Because as you know, if you set and forget, it’s just going to go downhill.
Now my team has room for two clients. We take on very few clients, so we can serve them extremely well, and we always serve them on an ongoing basis.
Because while what I do seems magical, it’s not a magic trick.
So now let’s see what’s happening with your post trial free to paid program.
We’re gonna use my diagnostic tool to see what’s holding you back from driving more of those free users into paid plans.
So get that piece of paper out, and I’m gonna get you to go ahead and draw a triangle right in the middle of your paper.
So draw a triangle right in the middle of your paper, and here we go.
So we’re going to have, something on this side. We’re gonna say activate.
Don’t worry if your penmanship is awful. It’s alright. As long as you can read it, you’re good to go.
And we’re gonna have a few things on that activate side.
Alright. As we go along, I’m gonna get you to write the things in as we go, and then we’re gonna see where are you at, red, yellow, or green. Red being like, never even thought about this. We don’t have this, or it’s just not performing well.
Yellow is things are just like status quo. They’re not going up or down. We can’t seem to budget. And green, is we are doing great.
Now as we go through, you might think, my goodness. I don’t know the numbers for this.
Or you might be like, oh, I had some of the numbers for the last board meeting. I don’t know where we’re at right this second. No worries. We’re looking for sort of rolling averages. What is the general trend? Because we can always go back and get specific numbers later.
So let’s start over here, and let’s talk about open rates.
So you’re sending your free users emails.
Are they opening them?
Red, yellow, or green, generally?
Are you like, yeah. I’m happy with my open rate. I think people are opening them. We have some pretty cool subject lines. It’s getting them to open them. You might think you’re green.
Great.
Moving along then, we move to click rates.
So once they’re open and they’re in that email, are they actually clicking on the button or clicking on the link? And I don’t mean clicking unsubscribe. I mean, are they clicking on the call to action that you have in that email so they can go and do the thing that you want them to do?
So if your click rates are, like, great. Give yourself a green. If they’re, like, sometimes people are clicking, but it’s not going up at all. Or maybe it’s, not looking good at all, and you’re like, we can get them to open, but they don’t do anything.
So I’m gonna put us a yellow here.
And just on your diagram, put whatever it is that you think for your company.
Now the next thing we’re gonna think about as we are activating because these users, they might have gone through that free trial already. They may have opened things. They may not have opened things, but we know that they didn’t actually understand the value. Otherwise, they would be using or they would have converted to paid. They would have done something.
So now we have this time to value. Do you have your post trial, user journey map mapped out so that those users that went through that trial didn’t really get to value? How are you getting them to value post trial? Because they are there sitting in your free plan. Are they getting to value?
Now if that if you’re like, I don’t even have a map, we send out a few post, trial emails, and that’s it. Probably sitting at red there.
If you have thought about it, have a few things, you might be yellow. And if you’re like, oh, we’ve mapped out the whole process. We know how we can get them to, that value. Great. You’re green.
Now I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you might be red on that because if we would have had people already experiencing that value, we might not be talking.
Alright. So now this next side of the triangle of our conversion triangle, we’re gonna call it sticky.
How can we get these free users to actually use the product? So we might have them. Maybe we can get them opening, those emails.
K? We’re gonna it’s this progression. Maybe we can get them opening the email. Maybe we can get them clicking. Maybe we can get them to value, but can we get them to stay? Let’s see.
Because if they’re not gonna stay for the freed, they’re definitely not gonna a free plan, they’re definitely not gonna stay for the paid. So over here, we want them to commit to something.
So, they’re committed to something, and this could be maybe, you have as part of your, features that they can invite a team member, and maybe they can do still do that on a free plan. So if they’ve invited a team member, great. Perhaps they are uploading data In order to use your software, appropriately, they need to input data. And if they’re doing that, it shows that they’re somewhat committed. They’re invested in that. Or if they’re including it as part of their tech stack, maybe there’s some integration. They’re starting to integrate that.
So we wanna know, are they committed? And maybe you’re like, you know, some of people are doing this, but it’s not really it’s not really increasing.
Give yourself a yellow. If nobody’s really, taking advantage of it, give yourself a red. And if you’ve got lots of people integrating already, give yourself a green.
Alright.
Next up.
If they are doing that, then we need to look at daily active users or weekly active users. So this is dependent on, what your software is. Do people need to be in there every day? Do they set something up, look at it once a week? What is the process? So for your, software situation, think about how people are, how often people are in, the app doing something.
If they are increasingly doing things in app, give yourself a green. If it’s staying the same, yellow. And if it’s kinda tanking, give it a red. So you might be yellow here.
Alright.
Again, I don’t know your current situation. If we have a chat later on, if you decide to book a call with the team, we can dig into this more at that point.
Now the next thing on this sticky side is we have increased feature usage.
So if they have invited a team, great. If they’re in the app more often, great. They came to your app to solve a problem.
They’ve got your software. They because they think, hey. Your software is the answer to this problem.
If over here, we finally got them some value, they’re like, okay. Yes. I can do this thing.
Now in order for them to stick, we want them to expand that expand the number of your, features that they are using. So they’re using the thing they came for, and they have confidence in that. And now they’re like, I wonder what else we can do. Because as we expand this feature usage, that’s where we can start selling things in the plan. Like, oh, you want the plan because you can also do this other thing.
So, in general, are users using more features? Give yourself a green, staying the same yellow, and kinda decreasing, give it a red.
So you might think, okay. Well, I’m kinda yellow on that on that sticky side. Alright.
And, again, it’s kind of this progression.
Now we come to convert.
So here we are at the bottom, and we have looked at all these things. Now we can finally talk about conversion and what are some other things that are going to be influencing conversion. So now we’ve got them in the product. They have some value, and we’re like, great. They’re ready to convert.
And then we look, and we’re like, oh, but are they?
Let’s look at support tickets. Now you might think, oh, I don’t know. I’m not in there talking about support tickets all the time. I don’t know.
Do we have lots? Do we? K. If you have not heard about the number of support tickets your team is, processing, you’re probably good.
But if you’ve heard a lot of stuff and people are complaining and going like, can you do something about this? Like, our, we can’t handle the volume of support tickets. Like, it’s too much. If that’s the case, we’re looking at red.
If you’ve heard sort of murmurings, maybe it’s yellow. Yellow with the mind of, oh, we need to do something about this. Because if we have lots of support tickets and I don’t mean the support tickets that are asking simple questions. I mean, they’re angry about things because they don’t understand the product.
And so you think, why are they asking us about these things? It’s because look back to this first side, this activate side, we’re obviously not getting them the information they need so that they can see the value. Because once people start seeing the value, we’re gonna have a whole different kind of support ticket coming in. It might just be a simple question rather than a rage against the product.
Alright. The next thing, product reviews, and the review rating.
Now this is something that a quick search of Trustpilot, Capterra, g two, that’s gonna get you your star rating.
And what is it? Maybe think about the last time you looked. What was it? If it was under three, give yourself a red. If it was a three, give yourself a yellow. And four and five, give yourself a green.
We live in a society that people don’t buy stuff without looking for reviews. Think about it. When was the last time you bought something without googling to see a review?
Even simple things. Now think about this. They’re buying this for their business to help them increase their business. Of course, they’re gonna be looking at reviews.
Now, unfortunately, people leave for reviews if they don’t understand the product and don’t think they got value from it. So if we solve the things earlier on, we can get this up. So perhaps right now, you’re thinking, my reviews are not that great.
Don’t worry. It’s something we can do something about.
It is a solvable problem.
And this last thing on the conversion is this time to sale.
Is the time to sale so they finish the trial. They didn’t convert the during the trial. So now you’ve got them on this post trial, road map. You want to get them to that sale.
Perhaps they just needed more time. They didn’t have time to read the emails earlier. Whatever the case, they didn’t get there. Now you’re going to take them on that journey to get to the sale.
Is that time to sale decreasing? So as you look at the number of of users converting in a in a specific time frame, is that number going up, down, or staying the same?
And you might say, you know, it’s just staying the same. We can’t seem to increase the number of conversions in that time frame, meaning you’re having trouble decreasing that, time to sale.
So now at this point, you probably got a pretty good idea of what is happening. There should be no question into your in your mind of what’s getting in the way of you or your team increasing those post trial free to paid conversions.
We talked about perhaps time to value was too long. Users didn’t get there.
Maybe you didn’t have that customer journey mapped out. Maybe there was no plan. Whatever the case, perhaps they finally get to value, but they’re only doing the one thing. They’re not increasing the number of features that they’re using. They’re not exploring those, which means they’re going to sit in that free plan comfortably, sucking your resources forever because they don’t feel the need to, move on to a paid plan.
Perhaps your support tickets through the roof. Angry users feel misinformed, and, research shows that angry users tell nine to fifteen people about their bad experience.
Good experiences, people tell maybe six people.
So what is your customer experience, and can we change that, so that more people are telling about their good experience?
Alright. Here, we’ve gone through this whole conversion triangle in order you know what needs to be happening next.
Some of you, you might think, oh, great. I know what I need to work on.
Maybe share it with your team and they think, oh, yeah. We have capacity to do this. But I’m guessing since you’re here, that might not be the case.
It’s a lot of legwork.
So if you take this away, you think, yes. I don’t wanna leave money on the table. There are huge, possibilities and, for wins on the horizon, you can decide to book a call with my team.
Others are wondering, hey. How can I be one of these two brands that you work with next?
And we say I’m honored to consider, to be considered and say I’m sorry, though, that if we find we cannot work together, I can’t help all the brands that reach out to me. But I can give you a private link to book a call with my team, step one of three. So after you book, after you book, you will have the opportunity to answer three questions.
If you don’t complete the form, I’ll have to cancel the conversion consultation. If, however, you complete the form and my team assesses that we’re unlikely to be a good fit, we’ll have to cancel. But in all other cases, we will proceed with that call. Now bring your drawing from this session to our call because we’re going to use it to create a plan to work towards your goals, using our strategic solutions. So go ahead and start with scheduling your conversion consultation, complete the form, and then be ready to have a candid conversation with me.
Thank you.
Awesome. Thanks, Marina. Notes. Who would like to start? Abby. Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. First of all, like, well done for doing it without a slide deck. I feel like it’s a lot to remember, and you just did it really calmly. You didn’t even stumble at all.
So that’s really cool. I have, like, some very specific notes. No. I’m not trying to be, like, nitpicky.
I just found it really helpful when I got specific notes. So Oh, please do. Yeah. I really like the superhuman sales generator.
I thought that was very cool. When you were talking about the optimization, you said about setting and forgetting it, like, and this is a note I’m gonna I’ve made for me as well. I’d love to hear, like, more, like, what because you just said it will go downhill. I could love to hear a bit of drama there, like, the worst case scenario if you don’t optimize.
When you were going through the diagnostic, it was quite high up. So where everybody is, I couldn’t actually see the top. So, like, it’s nice.
Like, we just the very, very top. So I just like to, yeah, make sure it’s lower down.
When you’re going through the activate, like, the open rates, click rates, I would have quite liked benchmarks. Like, I know it’s it’s always difficult with benchmarks because, like, everybody’s a different. But when you’re just saying, like, oh, if you’re getting, like, some some opens, it’s kinda I think a bit of specificity there would have been helpful.
And then yeah. Like, I guess, like, a bigger note with the I didn’t feel like there was, like, a very big clear promise. Like, it was kind of increasing the activations, but I’d love, like, something just a bit, like, sexier.
Like, a bit more like, really kind of selling that promise.
And then, like, this might just be a a meeting, but the with the three sections, you’ve got activate, sticky, and convert. Like, for my brain, I just love, like, three verbs. Like, the sticky just kind of like, even if it was just sticky, it just felt a little out of place for me.
And then when you were talking about support tickets, I loved that research point you gave that just really, like, build my confidence in you. I think just sharing those things really makes you seem like an expert.
But then you connected it to activate, instead of convert. And, like, I guess I can I can understand why it’s in the convert a bit, but I would like like you to kind of lay that out a bit? Like, this is why it has to do with conversions.
And then, yeah, just a really stupid thing, like, the traffic lights because you your your red was pink.
Like, I just because you said red, yellow, green. Like, I wanted to see red, yellow, green. But yeah. No. I thought it was really awesome. And like I said, it’s just, like, very impressive to me that you managed to remember all that without any slides or anything.
Thanks, Abby. Andrew?
Yeah. Cool. Just, great job, Marina.
Just a couple quick fire rapid fire thoughts. I thought that maybe, there might have been, like, compared to Abby with talking about, like, this kind of sales pitch part of it, there might have been a little bit of, like, an overcorrection that might have just been for me. But, like, there’s something you said in the beginning about, like, talking about, like, who you work best best with. And it for whatever reason, it felt to me, like, maybe a little bit too early, to to bring that piece in about telling, like, telling us who you work best with because we’re about to, like, get ready to learn from you. That might just be my opinion. Curious to hear what others say.
And I think there also might be some some work to do around, like, smoothing out the part where, like, I can tell that there’s, a part in the beginning where you were talking about, like, who you’ve worked with and that it wasn’t, like, exactly, like, who you’ve worked with isn’t exactly who you want to work with or something like that. And I I don’t necessarily have a good solution, but there was something Yeah. About that that sounded a bit tentative and sent sent a little bit of a signal that, like, you don’t do this all the time kind of thing. Again, might have just been my my opinion.
And I just felt like maybe it raised a little bit of an objection that I didn’t necessarily have. Like, I kind of assumed that you’re the expert, and then it was like, oh, wait. Like, now she’s telling me that she hasn’t worked with with those, with companies like mine or something like that that I don’t have an elegant solution for you yet.
And, two more quick things. One was along with what Abby said, I think that you could dive a little bit deeper into, like, what the problems are. You said something about, like, this you know, paying for space in my CRM. I could be wrong because I don’t know this audience or I don’t know this problem all that well, but, like, I feel like maybe that’s not the biggest manifestation of the problem is, like, they’re not really worried about space in their CRM. They’re worried about, like, getting more money.
And I agree with Abby that having some specific percentages around open rates and click rates, like, rather than just letting it feel like being left to their sub subjective opinion of how they’re doing. I think it can be really helpful to give me some percentages. Like, I think people love benchmarks and knowing, like, where they stand in comparison to other people.
On the reviews part of convert, I felt like that would be a good opportunity to bring in some data because there definitely is data to support the point that you’re making that people look at reviews. So if you had something where you could be, like, you know, x percent of people, say that the of b to b buyers, you know, say that they consult reviews before, making purchase decisions. Something like that could back that claim up.
And I think you could also get a little bit more granular there. Like you said, like, three, you’re kind of, like, yellow.
I feel like there’s a big difference between, like, someone who’s, like, three point nine, rated and someone who’s, like, four point six, or even, like, four point two and four point six. So I feel like you might be able to get a little bit more granular there, and I think that would make me feel like you’re more of an expert if you do, like like, to the to the tenth.
Like, what what signals, good versus bad. But, yeah, I think that’s about it for me. Hope that’s helpful.
Awesome. Thanks, Andrew. Todd, you had your hand up and then you put it down. So down?
Yep. I’m here.
Sure I’m here. Can everyone hear me? Because I had to restart. Cool. Yeah. Just didn’t wanna clutter it too much.
Mine are basically what everyone else just said. Pretty much the triangle was cut off. I’m really happy that the red, buzzed pink because I am colorblind.
So I was like, oh, okay.
The only thing for me really, there’s a lot of information.
So, again, everyone’s on on point. The only thing I would say, and it’s just because I come from a PR thing, is, to spell out certain words like daily active users, I think, weekly active users, maybe, time to sale. Just because they’re looking at so much information, if they can see it spelled out, it’s a quick reference for them.
And I think as well, I would say, I think you mentioned I don’t know your current situation at one point for clients, and I you you do, though. You’re the expert. So you do know their situation. You have been in that spot.
I would just maybe, if you want, you know, use a use I always call it pays off. Just maybe agitate it. You know? If you’re like some of my clients and give them a quick solution and agitate it, that’s the only thing.
I would say it was it was great. And I’ll be honest, everyone everyone says slow down here, but we are trying to bolt through this workshop. So I think that’s a given. But, yeah, if you can keep it in your mind just to keep your speech just kinda level throughout.
Also, I wanted to say though, great energy. That was really, really good energy. You had you came in with a smile. You came in with a pen and note, and you just kept great energy throughout.
So that was that’s basically it for me. So good job. Well done, Rena.
Thanks, Todd. Claire?
Yeah. I have two notes. The first one was on the product reviews.
I am not I’ve never worked with a company that has had less than four stars.
So I but I have worked with plenty of companies. We’ve had very few reviews and trouble getting reviews.
So I wonder if that’s also not a good signal of, like, review help, to maybe talk about is something that’s more universal. But, again, I don’t know your specific ICP or personas, so that might be useful. They’re showing me the support tickets.
I have haven’t seen people write into support angry. That’s not an emotion I’ve, like, heard of, but they do write in very confused and overwhelmed.
Also, I worry that your CMO doesn’t care that much about support and their outcomes, but is more, like, I guess, self centered. Like, if they can be the hero, great. But it’s not like a priority for them to remove all of support’s messages.
But if you tie supports like, if you tie that overwhelm and confusion of support, through to the time to sale, or time to value as you as you well did, like, in a more I wanna say in a stronger way, that could be really powerful.
Because support reviews are kind of emotional things for for people to fail at.
Awesome. Perfect. Thanks, Katie.
Hey, Marina. I thought you did a really great job.
Like Todd said, really appreciated your energy and, yeah, just like the comfort that you brought to talking about all of this. Like, props for doing it, some slides. The only thing so I agree with a lot of the feedback you’ve already gotten. The only thing that I found that nobody’s mentioned so far was just at the end. You said if your team doesn’t have capacity, and I feel like that can’t be the only thing that their team doesn’t have. Like, it’s, you know, strategy, vision, you know, and capacity, like, on top of that. So just, like, sure capacity is part of the equation, but not obviously not the only thing that they’re lacking.
Yeah. Thanks, Katie.
Agreed. I think one of the I think we’re out of everybody giving feedback, so I’ll jump in with mine. In addition to what everybody has said, yeah, definitely do check when you share your screen. Just make sure, because nobody will tell you. Like, none of us told you. Right? Because we’re all trying to not interrupt you.
So, yeah, double check. Never hurts.
Okay. You’re selling email, but where but but there was, like, very little push on how awesome email is for businesses.
So, for me, I feel like you you really quickly glossed over anything you had done with Bitly.
Spend some time there. Like, you’ve rewritten countless emails in their life cycle, series.
You’ve mapped a customer journey. You have seen that people get lost. Lots of leads get lost, and there’s real expense there. And yet all I really heard was, like like, twelve seconds max about Bitly and QR code generator.
What? Like, that’s anybody in that audience finds this a sexy topic. So you’re allowed to nerd out and spend some time here. So, like, spend time on that. Bring it back to money. Bring it back to how they’re spending money on bringing people into their flow, trying to attract trial users, and then they’re just sitting there. So have an opinion, and make it all about money because the right people will be sitting in the audience going like, shit.
Yeah. And that’s what you want instead of, oh, yeah. She seems nice.
Like, that’s not the point.
Yeah.
Right? Exactly. Abby’s message there. So you are minimizing the stuff that you need to really emphasize, And when you don’t emphasize it, the other parts land wrong because we haven’t heard that you’re an authority yet, and we haven’t got on side with you yet.
So when you say it’s twenty thousand dollars to start and then five thousand a month, we drop off. Right? Like, what are you talking about? What do you even do?
And because you don’t have slides, it’s very hard to go along with that. Right? Like, it’s hard to keep up, so you need if you’re not sharing a visual, you have to really talk through everything.
Like, make it clear, still have energy. And then there’s times when you just do want to share, I mean, you’re not slides. So I was looking up this thing, and this is I’ve talked a bit about how I’m gonna reward myself with this training at some point.
It’s not open right now. Let me just share this with you in chat.
You know, use the Stream Deck and a few other things. And, so you don’t have to show slides on the screen, but you can pop up things on your screen, and I want you to play with that.
Not necessarily take this, but just, like, follow inside the show and start looking at some of the things that they do. Because with a Stream Deck and a little plugin for Zoom, you can, like, hit a button and the Bitly logo pops up next to you. Right? So there are cool things you can do just like that.
You can pull in a testimonial and flash it on the screen from somebody. So it doesn’t have to be a slide deck, but unless you’re going to take a lot of time really driving things home, you need something on the screen. I also think you need, to show me some emails. Like, here are some examples of emails that I’ve written.
Just really ground me in as a member of your audience and, like, oh, okay. Okay. When she talks about this kind of email, here’s what she means.
So okay. Couple more things. Take a few breaks for breath.
Set more things up upfront too. Just like, if you have your water here with you, that’s great. We’re gonna settle in for twenty five minutes. We’re gonna do some drawing. I’m not gonna share a lot of slides.
Make sure you stop for water. I’m gonna stop every so often. Just, like, set that up up front, and then you can stop.
And you can pretend you’re drinking water and just take a fucking breath. Like, just take a breath, but I know what it’s like. I know what it’s like.
Definitely need a promise up front. Dig into the pain. Set up the desire.
I have a few more notes that I can’t read here. I don’t understand on the triangle, what product review rating and support tickets will have to do with you doing the work later. So you’re gonna go through and make sure that support doesn’t get tickets.
You’re gonna do work to increase their product reviews, but you’re really just saying, no. No. Once you have active activated users, these things will all go up. But if if you’re not working on it and it’s on the model, that’s like a flag.
And if you ignore it, it’s gonna be it’s gonna continue to be like but it’s never gonna feel right for you and maybe even for them. So rethink the convert part. There’s no money showing anywhere on your model. Where at what point?
Like, I’m like, where’s the when do I get the money from them? Like, I want the money from them.
So I would think through that as well. But overall, I mean, I think it’s good. You just need to spend more time on things so we really, really get what you can do. And that also means you have to get what you can do. So go over the stuff that you’ve done in Bitly and QR code generator and, like, come up with your cheat sheet of awesome that you, like, need to remember, and it’ll help you.
Cool?
Everything else everybody else said agreed as well.
Oh, yeah. No. I won’t worry about that. But, yeah, I drew a dollar sign with, like, circles around it galore.
Like, where’s the money? Where’s the money? This is the path we’re able to make money. Help them see that.
Okay. That is all.
Thanks, Marina. Any notes or thoughts, Marina or Abby so far? Or, Abby, go ahead.
Can I just ask a quick question? So because I noticed when I did the diagnostic, I, like, wrote it out and then went and did the review, and then read and I just went straight into the view.
I was just wondering, like No.
Agreed. It was actually one of my bigger notes too. I’m not ready to diagnose as I’m going through. Agreed. First, draw the model, tell them about it, and then walk them through. Now we’re gonna diagnose where you’re at.
Yeah. Not as you go. I was I was actually I lost interest a little bit, because I didn’t know, like it doesn’t feel right. So and that could be just for me because I know how it’s supposed to be presented.
But, yeah, just so you know, just do it the way it’s taught. First, you die first, you document everything. Show them the thing so I can zoom out, see that there’s, like, a map of my life cycle right here. And then you can zoom into the parts and say, are you red, yellow, green here, and give your examples in there.
For example, you might be yellow if your numbers are this. Yeah. Totally agree. Thanks for bringing that up, Abby.
Okay.
Abby, Marina, how are you feeling?
Well, I’m glad I have not pitched anybody yet, and I’m thankful for all the feedback because it’s actually helpful Good.
Because I know what to do now. And I think it it is a confidence thing.
Mhmm. Like, as far as, like, pulling out and saying, oh, I’ve done this and that.
So I just need to You just need to write it down and look at it.
Put it on sticky notes all over the place then. Like, I know that might seem like gel.
Why not? If you need to build your confidence, build your confidence, like, actively. It doesn’t build itself.
No.
But I wanted to do this today so that I could get Oh, and you did great. Let me be very clear.
Feedback. Totally.
Because I was just trying to follow that form formula that you add, and I was like, okay. Are these actually my words? I’m like, I’m just gonna do the thing, and then I can review. So thank you everybody for all the feedback. Super helpful.
And just to be clear, these notes are, like sometimes the the formula just needs to be adjusted for you. There are things that I mentioned to Abby for Abby to change, and I’m sure she’s like, but, Joe, I took that from what you taught me. Then she’s like, I’m just not gonna say anything, but this is annoying.
But so just know, like, that’s why we’re doing it live. Not to say, did you follow it exactly, but cool. Was cool. Here’s how you can make it cooler.
Yeah. Cool. Abby, how are you doing?
Yeah. I’m glad I did it because I was like, okay. If I if I, like, book it Monday, then that means I’ll actually make the damn thing. So, yeah, I think, like, tomorrow, I’m gonna start doing pitching five people every day and just see what happens and work on my closing because I know that’s my my week there anyway.
Love it. Amazing.
Okay. So we’ll take three minutes. We’ll be back at twenty two after the hour when Claire will be our final presenter.
Alright? Three minutes. Thanks, everyone.
Oh, a little bit overtime there.
Okay. We are back. We’re here. Good stuff. Ready? Where’s Claire? Claire’s not here. Karen. Oh, there you are.
I just like to lost it in calculation.
Awesome. Okay. Claire, are you ready to go?
I am ready.
I’m gonna stop this all by saying I’m very nuts for some bizarre reason. I was so confident up until, like, well, seven o’clock, which is when this started.
Okay. Wicked. Well, I’m excited. So, tell us who your ICP is, who you’re targeting this toward, and then we’ll dive in.
Sure. My ICP is pretty similar to Marina’s. So it is b to b SaaS companies within the twenty five to fifty million range, so a little bit tighter.
They are either doing a freemium or a free trial, sort of setup at the moment. And I’m talking specifically to the CMO or director of growth, head of growth, that kind of person.
Cool.
Awesome.
Then okay.
Okay.
Today, I’m gonna talk about onboarding your free trial and premium users so that more of them stick around, log back in tomorrow and the next day and the next because the reality is that eighty percent of the users that you’ve worked really hard to get through the front door and to click start trial or sign up now, eighty percent of those users don’t come back tomorrow. They try your product once, give you twenty minutes, and that’s it. They’re out the door, and they are never coming back, unless you can win them back. And using email is a great way to do that.
So specifically using triggered emails, I’ll explain more about that later, but it’s stepping away from the concept of timed emails and dripping things out slowly but surely and more than focusing on sending more relevant, messages at the right time and right context.
So this is gonna be a great use of your time if you are a CMO or head of growth at a b two b SaaS company doing around twenty to fifty million dollars a year.
Companies have worked with me to get results like a thirty seven percent lift in product adoption that was with Invoice Simple.
And then Synthesia has also worked with me to sorry.
For messaging optimization.
And I’ve also partnered with Forget the Funnel and worked on over twenty start ups, onboarding flows to optimize for their growth and retention.
So if this I’m guessing this isn’t the first time you’ve caught email or that the email channel might be useful to you.
But there are some things that you need to remember. First, people do read. Else, LinkedIn wouldn’t exist, and it wouldn’t send you those annoying yet effective notifications to check your feed.
Secondly, you do not have to guess at what to put in your email, and you don’t have to worry that you’re going too long or too short, you’re including too many pictures, no pictures at all. All that is something that you can definitively answer through optimization and testing.
And then just so you know, email is also a seven billion dollar industry at the moment. So it is, again, really clear that people do still check their email inboxes.
Inboxes. So this is gonna be great if you are looking to improve your user activation, free to pay conversion rate, and ultimately conversion, what I’m not gonna do is give you another template or the two minute secret to a sixty eight percent reduction in churn.
This is going to be a bit of a hands on workshop, so get a pen and paper ready while I continue talking.
What we’re gonna walk through today is something called the overpowered onboarding framework. Now if you haven’t heard about what overpowered means, it is a term used for superheroes, and it basically means a character or an object that is so powerful it makes the game easy.
So Superman would be a great example of an overpowered character, and this is going to be something that really makes the email channel easy. It’s gonna answer all the questions and make it simple for you to prioritize what to do next.
So it’s not gonna be a game changer for your acquisition, but rather a game changer for your activation.
Okay. Let me go ahead and share my screen, and we can get into it.
There we go.
Alrighty.
Can everyone see my screen?
Yes. Okay.
Alright. So first step is to draw a big old circle.
Don’t worry if your circle is not perfect. That would prove to you’re insane.
And then another circle on the inside.
Here, I’m gonna write down and say our goal for today is a thirty percent lift in free to paid paid. You’re wondering how much that’s worth if you have, say, ten thousand users who are, signing up and actually paying every month, and they’re on on average paying seventy nine or sixty nine dollars each, then a thirty percent lift is equivalent monthly lift is equivalent to just over two hundred thousand dollars worth of revenue. So it’s a pretty big difference that you could be getting very, very quickly.
One of the best things about onboarding people effectively is that that revenue actually stacks up because your retention naturally increases now that your users fully understand and realize the value that you’re giving them.
Next is to draw a nice Mercedes symbol because we are winners.
And I’m just gonna go ahead and label, so please label with me as we go. Up at the top, we have foundation.
This is what sets the tone for your entire onboarding flow and what is a great foundation.
Next up, we have conversation, which is where you start talking to your oh, talking and writing is difficult. Conversation, let’s just pretend I wrote that correctly.
Where you are, actually talking to your customers and convincing them that creating this great idea. And then finally, on the left, we have personalization.
Sorry, optimization.
Alright. We’re gonna go ahead and divide this diagram in hop again, just each section, a nice little line.
Up at the top, we have insight.
And down below, we have journey.
Next up, we have triggers, and then we have personalization.
Then we have tracking.
And finally, we have testing.
K. I’ll give you all a second to finish writing down.
If you have some colored pens nearby, please feel free to grab those. You can do red, for poor or not so great, orange for it’s kind of okay, and then green for everything is absolutely rosy. I’ll also give you some examples so you’ll know which one you want. If you don’t have colored pens nearby, feel free to do a star system. Just one, two, three stars, three for excellent, one for so good, and two for okay.
Alright. We’re changing over.
Okay. Scientists.
When you are struggling to understand your customers, that means that ultimately what you’re struggling to do is connect your what with your why.
So insight predominantly consists of customer interviews, customer surveys. You could even do some social listening.
You could even do some analysis of your heat maps, basically understanding what people are doing.
You could keep recording and analyzing your demo calls or your sales calls. All of that stuff gives you insight into who you’re talking to, what they value, and what they care about most. So if you’re currently doing one or more of those and you are, actually analyzing it with a regular occurrence, then you can go ahead and give yourself a green. If you are recording things, but maybe not finding the time to analyze them because you’ve got a million other things on your plate, which is totally understandable, think of yourself in orange. And if you haven’t conducted any kind of customer research in the last six to twelve months, that would be a red.
Alright. Next up is journey.
So the customer journey is a very well known phenomenon at this point. It is, however you’re currently tracking it, what you need to hit on for your onboarding is to understand at what points your customer is seeing value. So if you have a customer journey map that walks someone that walks you through exactly where your users are seeing value when they sign up, fantastic.
Give yourself a green. If you’re not so sure and you’re kind of implementing a bit of guesswork, chances are that guesswork is gonna bleed over into the rest of the circle. Right? You’re gonna stop making more and more educated guesses, and they’re gonna start getting less and less educated and more and more guessy.
So give yourself an orange there, that’s something to look at. And if you are not sure about your customer journey at all, you’ve maybe undergone a lot of changes recently, a lot of product updates, If you saw a red, that’s something to prioritize.
Onto triggers.
So historically, we’ve all we’re all very familiar with sending out timed emails. Right? Those are the direct emails sent to you. Maybe you get eight, when you sign up to a new product.
The thing with timed emails is that their quality degrades exceptionally quickly. So sorry. Not quality, but their their metrics. So the open rate, the click through rate, how many people even look at them in their inbox. So if you’re sending more than three emails in a in a row to someone without any kind of interaction from them, so you’re not triggering any, chain reaction in your in your email marketing system, then that would be a red.
If you are sending, emails that are email chains or sequences that are for emails or less, so maybe you’ve only got one welcome sequence and it’s for emails. That’s great. That’s an orange.
If you are sending triggered emails, so you’re tracking your product, you’re tracking your product.
Usage. Sorry about that. You’re tracking your product usage, seeing what features they’re using, what what they’re actually onboarding onto. Maybe if you have multiple products within your within your software suite, then you could trigger emails based on how they sign up to things and and play around. You could also be triggering Winmax, when someone doesn’t hit a certain, beat of of your customer journey, that would be a green.
Next up, personalization.
So it’s very easy to generalize an email and very easy to say something very generic. Right? And the problem of saying things that are generic is that they’re specific to absolutely nobody.
For example, let’s say you are and this is a situation that I ran into with a client the other day. Right? They are serving lots of different types of businesses with lots of different types of use cases. Now the triggers are all the same, but the context is slightly different because these businesses are different types of businesses. We have a food truck or a nail salon.
So instead of saying businesses for every email here, how is how are things going in your business? We say, how are things going in your food truck? How are things going at your nail salon? It’s much more specific, much more personalized.
And that kind of attention to detail is what gets your open rates higher, your click through rates higher.
So if you are personalizing the if you’re personalizing your emails, then you can go ahead and, give yourself a green for segmenting by use case. Right? So if you’re separating people out into use cases like I just described, it could be yourself agree.
If you are not doing anything beyond maybe the name that’s getting personalized in every email and perhaps you’re also doing a trial date in every email, then you can go ahead and give yourself an orange. You’re on the way.
If you’re not doing anything at all, give yourself a red.
Alright. Onto tracking. Now most people are tracking the free to pay conversion rate.
That’s pretty common and pretty easy to do. Some people are also tracking the product adoption rate. Now if you haven’t bumped into that term yet, it’s another fun acronym. You know, marketers love them.
But the product adoption rate or PAI is what we use to tell if someone has truly adopted the software. Doesn’t mean that they’re paying for it yet, but they’ve adopted it. So, for example, Slack only considers someone debated, if they hit the product adoption indicator of getting sort of sending two thousand messages. Right? Anything less, they are not considered activated.
So are you tracking your free to page? Are you tracking your, product adoption indicator? If so, great. You are currently in orange. To take you to green, you will need to be tracking a few more details, something like the engagement rate, how often people are logging back into your software, how long they’re taking to get to various stages of their customer journey, and then as well as their time to value. Right? How long does it take for them to create ultimately?
K. So hopefully that was clear to you all.
Next up is testing.
Testing is really where the magic happens. Right?
So if you are not currently testing, then you’re probably really struggling with the guesswork that’s started over at Journey.
If you if you haven’t really looked at your welcome email in six to twelve months, Your new newest user who signed up, like, three seconds ago has just read it. Right?
Testing means that you can continuously maintain and optimize your results. And if you don’t test, the thing that will happen is that your, your metrics will just slowly decline. It’s like a slow gradual hill of sadness. And at the end of that sadness hill is, unfortunately, the sandbox, which is exceptionally difficult to get out of.
So in testing, you are doing a great job if you are currently checking on your open rate and click through rates every and deliverability every month.
You are also possibly, making some hypotheses about your customers, testing those up, disproving them, or approving them.
If you’re not doing that, but you are checking on things monthly just to see how things are going, or maybe, you have pretty regular product updates, which means that you’re going to be checking.
It means you’re gonna be updating your emails fairly regularly with new screenshots or new messaging, then that’s great. Give yourself a orange. If you’re not doing any testing at all, then you’d be a red.
So this is the onboarding to, the show about onboarding framework.
And it’s great. It’s a circle because you are going to start way back at inside once you’ve gone all the way around and keep going around, keep optimizing, and keep improving with time. And that ultimately is what makes that thirty percent lift a recurring lift rather than just a one sole win.
Alright.
So I haven’t practiced the closing very much.
In true honesty so let me just get my notes. Alright. By this point, you shall know, should know what’s getting in your way the most. Right? It’s very easy to get overwhelmed with a hundred different things, grabbing your focus. And the last thing you wanna do is walk into your next boardroom meeting and give your presentation and watch your CEO kinda glaze over in confusion as you go over the numbers in immaculate detail.
So now you know where to put your focus. You know how to explain what’s going wrong, what’s going right, and how you’re gonna improve it. If that’s something that you need help with or that you’d like to outsource, then you are welcome to book a call with me. I will pop it kindly into a spreadsheet slideshow later on for you to go ahead and click on.
And I’ve lost my track completely. I’m very sorry, but thank you.
Thanks, Claire.
Alright. Okay. Notes for Claire. Who’s up first?
Yeah.
I’ll I’ll I’ll go.
Yeah. Claire, I thought that was that was really good. Like, you’re so funny. I really wanna get coffee with you.
And we can work on our, like, shy girl energy together.
But yeah. No. It was really engaging. That was really fun. I took quite a few, like, notes or just bits I really like. Like, I love the overpowered onboarding framework. And if you do use that tool that Joe said when you, like, describe Superman, if you have a Superman come up, I just love that so much.
There was a bit when you’re talking about insights and you’re talking insights. Sorry. You’re talking about the customer research that you could do. You say you could do this. I kinda wanna be told, like, what I should do, not what I could do.
And then when you’re talking about personalization, like, that just felt like a really good place for a case study to just when you’re saying about specificity, if you could just say I did this for so and so.
And I thought the fact that it’s a circle is brilliant, like, the ongoing going round and round. Like, really, really like that. So, yeah, it it was good. And if you do wanna, like, work on the clothes together, because I just I just get so shy when, like, I’d be happy to do that.
Oh, and just another thing as well, like, because you seem to get a lot more confident as you went on. Like, that’s why I always use a slide deck at the beginning because it just I don’t know. It just makes me feel which, you know, maybe I need to go over that this well. But, yeah, just a tip if if you, like, need something at the beginning to yeah.
But, anyway, I thought it was really good.
That’s so helpful. Thank you. I have a quick question. I don’t just okay.
I went back and forth between personalizing personalization and segmentation for emails and ultimately decided that personalization is very different to segmentation, obviously, and that if different segments are identified in the insights area or the customer journey area, that those should have their own circle. So it’s like other circles for other for other, segments.
Does that track with everyone, or is that sounding fairly confusing and counterintuitive?
So you’re saying so you’re saying this is the core model, and then you’d have a separate one for the personalization part of the model. Like, let’s dig into that, and here’s what that looks like? No.
Like like a big circle is, like, the main say that’s their main identified job to be done. They know very clearly who they’re targeting, But they have all these little satellite ones to the side, which on that important.
Our first engagement would be focusing on the main one. But in future, if they realize that one of their satellites is actually a bit bigger than they thought, we could do the same thing for that one, but it would be a whole new process.
Yeah.
So I don’t know if I’ll I can’t answer that, but what I can say is each one of these sections you have is likely to have its own thing that you would draw. So insights, As you dig in and you’re working with the client more and more, then you’ll do you’ll help their team get up to speed on what you mean by how to tell if we’re doing insight right. So you’ll have a new model that’s, like, breaking down insight, and that might be speaking to, like, the satellite thing that you’re talking to.
But I wouldn’t I wouldn’t draw a satellite in here. I wouldn’t say anything more about these other parts. I might just call it personalization and segmentation just for the sake of, like, simplicity here with your audience.
But don’t I wouldn’t have more stuff going off the side.
You’ve also, like, the circle is in segments, so you could even say, like, the sec you know, segmentation is part of it.
That’s That’s cute.
Little orange segments. Cute. Awesome. Okay. Any other notes for Claire? Katie?
Hey, Claire. Just like kudos for putting yourself out there and doing it. I thought you did really well.
Okay. So things I thought were great. I love when you said, like, how much that’s worth and have that concrete number of, like like, we’re talking about a thirty percent lift, but here’s the what that would be worth to you. I thought that was a great way of bringing the money in.
And I’m sure, like yeah. I don’t know, not much about your client history, but I’m sure that there is room to bring in other case studies. But I did like how you had the food truck versus hair salon example just to give me something concrete, to work with when you’re talking about the personalization.
I also like the example with Slack. Like, Slack doesn’t consider, was it product adoption metric reached until two thousand messages?
So one thing I thought you could work on was, and I’m just looking at myself. Like, I don’t think I have actually had any other, like, changes. But I wrote the drama that moment that you talked about, like, your you have looked in your onboarding emails for six months, but the person who just signed up looked at them a few minutes ago.
I just felt like that’s such a good moment, and I felt like it needed a little bit more build up to really hammer home, like, what kind of, you know, how we, like, build up that moment of high attention. Like, why does that matter?
What is that worst case scenario? Like, what are the implications of that, versus just, like, locating me in that moment, but not really, like, having me realize why it has been important for me to inhabit from that moment. Does that make sense? So, like okay.
So I’m thinking about that. I’m like, oh, shit. Yeah. Who knows if I have, like, COVID references in my in my onboarding emails or something?
But if that new user looks at it, what is what is that irrelevant is going to cost me, basically.
Yeah. And then so I just wonder I have a question mark if that if where you at it was the best place for that or if building that moment up more towards the end could be a great segue into your pitch of, like, this is your worst case scenario.
Don’t have that. Hire me. So maybe moving that from where you had it, I believe you had that within testing.
I wasn’t really clear on its relevance to testing. I saw it as more of, like, keeping your onboarding fresh and, you know, optimized.
So for me, it just felt like it should have been pulled out of testing and then use more as that pivot into your closed.
Does that make sense?
That makes total sense. Yeah. So I pull it out of the pull it out of the circle and use it for the close?
Use it to the pivot. Yeah.
That’s so helpful. Thank you. Because I have no idea how to transition. That’s kinda where I went like, oh, crap. It’s done. What?
Do you know?
That’s really helpful. Thank you.
Perfect. Thanks, Katie. Marina.
Hey, Claire.
You’ve got so many gems in there, and I was like, oh, that’s how you could say that. Oh, that’s how you could say that. But I had to listen so carefully because they were sort of hidden in just, like, I think a little bit of, like, vocal variety or, change in speed of saying things or, like, varying the energy so that, like, you’ve got a ton of good things in there. And I was like, oh, that’s really cool.
That if they just, like I know you’re nervous. I get it. You’re probably probably throwing up too.
Maybe I’m projecting. But, anyway I don’t know.
But but it would totally then it would be like these little zingers, And then you’ve got, like, this wicked under, like, quiet sense of humor that then it would bring that out too. And so then I I don’t know. I just think you’ve got a lot of good things going in there. And it’s kind of like, maybe just think about it as taking a highlighter mentally and go going, okay. I need to highlight these bits and, like, really, like, come out a bit more instead of ending, like, with your kind of, like, a question.
Right? And just Yeah. Yeah. This is me telling you. So this like, I’m try I I’m not one to talk.
But seeing it in yours, I was like, oh, okay. She could totally if you’re just, like, pushing this one little bit and pushing this one little bit. And I can’t remember all the things because I was, like, listening and going, oh, that’s how you can include something without it coming across seeming like, you were bragging on yourself, but it didn’t come across as like, oh, I’m so great, and I did this in a bad way. It came across as like, oh, she knows what she’s she’s talking about.
But then just, like, zing it out a little bit more so I don’t have to, like, listen for it quite so deeply, if that makes sense.
That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I I I’m really grateful for that feedback. It’s so specifically helpful.
Sun Sinic actually has a new course I’m presenting, which I’m desperate to do.
Yeah. He’s so convincing.
Yes.
Anyway, nice nice work. Obviously, lots of work has gone into it.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thanks, Marina. Todd.
Yeah. Mine is pretty quick, Claire. And I could be wrong. It might not be relevant, but I believe you spoke to email as a seven billion dollar industry.
And, you know, I will kinda just look at Joe for this one. In ten x emails, you speak to for every, know, every dollar you spend on email marketing, and the average return is, like, forty four dollars and twenty five cents or something. So maybe it could be a setup for ADA as you move them through. Like, did you know if you do this, you get this back?
And let them know, like, there’s not just we’re not just selling your service, but you should expect a return on what you’re getting kind of idea and just set them up. Like, you’re the expert again in it and just like, yeah. Come with me, and this is not a cost. This is an investment kind of idea and just really set it up because you’ve talked to such a big number.
But if you can bring that back and just put that in their in their court and let them know, like, we’re expensive for a reason kind of idea, but I’m not sure if that’s relevant or not.
Love that. Agreed. I think there were a few number of points in there that needed more, like, push on. That’s one of them. Your line eighty percent don’t come back. I wrote down and circled like, damn, that’s terrifying.
Eighty percent don’t come back.
So there are a lot of moments there. I was like, if you need calculators, you need, like, to show what that adds up to, how much you spent only to have them vanish. Like, no wonder marketing looks flat.
You early on, you picked a fight sort of with blast emails, but then it wasn’t until you were getting to the trigger part of the model that you really dug into why, like, a broadcast or blast email isn’t as good as a triggered one. I would have liked you to pick a fight with it earlier and then just continue the fight when you get to triggers.
So, like, bring me into the problem with blast or broadcast emails, which the vast majority of these people are doing.
So why they should stop doing that.
What else have we got?
You said it’s a game changer for activation, but not for acquisition. And I didn’t know why you bring up acquisition at all, just, like, focus on activation when you were talking about the overpowered onboarding framework. You’re like, this is a game changer for activation.
It is not for act for acquisition. It’s like, shush. Shush. Don’t talk about acquisition. No. No. That’s not actually activating.
I’ve got a great diagram if we have, like, a few minutes afterwards that I wanted to quickly If it shows up on the slide, then that’s one thing.
But I’m like, I don’t know if you’ve read straight line selling. I’m talking about it a lot these days, the Jordan Belfort book. But, it’s it’s what he would call Pluto.
So it’s too far out. Don’t bring come back. Come back. Let’s not talk about that part.
I also thought that you could okay. Two things and we’ll wrap up.
You did get more confident as you went. I totally noticed that. The more you practice, the more the parts are, like, second nature to you, the better and more engaging the whole thing is. And I know you hadn’t practiced the clothes or things like that, so that’s fair.
But just know that if it ever feels like, is it even worth it? The more you practice it, the you’ll it’ll be a natural thing. You are funny, and you’re friendly and likable. There’s a lot of good stuff there, but now we just gotta nail your delivery.
Like, that’s it. Just practice a bunch of times.
The thirty percent lift in the middle, I’d love to see you pause, and I think you’ll do that more as you get more chill with, like, presenting like this.
What’s nice about, like, Abby’s five k in the middle is it’s a number that I want. I want that number. Thirty seven thirty percent lift is not yet a number. It’s just like this wonder like, this great idea.
I would love you to be able to before you even draw your model, to put them through a very simple calculation, and just say, like, look. Don’t worry. We’re not using this for, like, the wrong purposes. Just set up just put context around it, but what you want is them to have a number to put in the middle of the circle.
So if you can help them do the calculation of what a thirty percent lift would look like and then extrapolate that, like, maybe say, okay. Now annual. Like, just figure it out how you can get that number in the middle to look really compelling. Like, oh, I could make eight thousand dollars a day, and I’m currently making four dollars a day.
That sounds awesome. Thanks.
But if you can do the calculation now, I’m, like, very keen on this instead of thirty percent lift.
My final note here is I’m not in love with some of the word choices across the model.
Foundation threw me because it was up high, and I want a foundation to be down low.
So I’m like, no. That’s a sky up there. I’m very literal.
But I thought that you could do a, like, a SaaS sweep.
Now that you’ve got these six parts in place with their three labels, go back through and make it feel what words can you use? Because right now, what we have for foundation conversation optimization, insights, journey, triggers, personalization, tracking, and testing, that’s all like, a course creator could follow the same thing, and an ecommerce business could follow the same thing. Right?
Lower journey might be replaced with funnel if you were really getting into it for, like, a specific course creator group. So to me, it felt too generic still. It feels like, good. You’ve got this, like, poor model in place. Now let’s SaaSify it. Now that twenty five to fifty million dollar group, what words will feel better?
Foundation doesn’t feel right.
Conversation might.
Optimization does, I think. But then inside of that, insight, I want you to work on that word.
Journey is good. Triggers are good. You already know you’re gonna work on personalization and segmentation and figure that out. Tracking and testing, can you do something that feels more if you know these people are using intercom, for example, intercom e language.
So, like and that’s your job. Just sweep through it and see if you can make it sound more sassy so I can see myself. Sassy this sassy, not Stacy’s sassy. But so I can see myself as a SaaS founder or marketer or whatever when I look at this model.
Does that make sense?
Just a little more pointed on your word choice.
Okay. That’s super helpful because I I like I’ve taken it way back. Do you know how how long it took to get like three shuns?
Sorry.
What did you say?
Three shuns. Three, like, activation. What is it? Conversation, foundation.
Oh, the shuns. Foundation. Oh, I see.
Yeah. But I can find a new shuns. I’ve done it now.
Find a new shuns. There are more shuns.
Yeah. K. Cool.
I’m a new shin.
Awesome. Good. How are you feeling, Claire?
Great. Great. Yeah. I’m really really excited to actually do this well.
Yeah. Yeah. You’ve got a really good starting point here. And, oh, Todd.
Nice job. Nice way to finish the meeting.
You’ve got great case studies too. Oh, one other note, the over twenty startups with, on the or onboarding flows with Forget the Funnel. I don’t know that you have to say it with Forget the Funnel because I’m just gonna go look up Forget the Funnel. So just say, like, twenty more onboarding flows. Like, wow. It’s a lot of onboarding flows.
Yeah. Nobody’s listening anymore because there’s a puppy in the room. So, we’re just gonna go look at the puppy now. But good job, Claire and Marina and Abby. Thank you. Well done, everybody. And thanks for giving your notes as well and tuning in to help your fellow to help your peers out here.
Good. Alright.
So next month kicks off a whole new month for, Coffee School Pro. We’ll be posting about that very soon.
Cool. Awesome. And, Todd, you have to tell us about this puppy. What’s going on here?
Sorry. We she’s a week and two days old, and we’re renovating the house. We’re actually getting a podcast studio ready for me in the basement, and, she sleeps at my feet. She’s on her little bed.
And, yeah, she’s she’s a great little dog. She’s learning quickly. And she’s just been at my feet all things, so I you might see me looking down. I’ve been trying to avoid it, but she just woke up.
So yeah. And she’s licking me like crazy.
So She is. But she’s got those little shark teeth too.
Yeah. She’s got little pearls as Tina said.
Oh my gosh. What’s her name?
Patty. Patty. Patty. Patty. The patty.
Yeah. Patty? Yeah. It’s a yeah. It’s a new dog for us. So, yeah, she’s she’s a great dog.
So Oh. Try and sorry if I interrupted everyone.
It’s just It’s end of meeting.
I’m amazed you were able to hold off this whole time.
Oh, it’s tough. You have no idea when she’s at my feet and she’s, like, nudging me with a bone, and then she’s nudging me with a toy, then another toy, and then she’s out cold and looking at her. So, yeah.
Oh, so cute.
So cute. Well, I saw your two as well.
So Oh, yes.
They just came in from Yeah.
Playing out at the lake.
Yeah. We’ll do it. Tina was the first one to meet her, I believe, as well. Uh-huh. So yeah.
Patty. Yeah. Super cute.
Patty is welcome to the crew.
Absolutely.
Awesome.
Okay. Thanks, y’all. Thanks so much. Well done, everybody. If you haven’t worked on your workshop, go do it.
And if you have, keep practicing. Thanks, everybody. Bye.
Thank you.
Fired Up & Focused Followers: Pitching Your Webinar to High-Value Brands
Fired Up & Focused Followers: Pitching Your Webinar to High-Value Brands
Transcript
Guys, well, let’s jump in and get started with, the workshop. If anyone else turns up that’s okay, they can just slot in and sort themselves out as they’re going along. But as you hopefully know today’s session is building on, the process that Jo has started stepping you through this week, in terms of building out that Waking Up to the Problem webinar. Today’s workshop is all about, when it comes time to pitch that, how to actually do that to high value intimidating brands, keeping in mind all the mindset muck that is likely to appear as you go and put that, ask out into the world.
So before we jump into the worksheet today, I just want to do a bit of a quick, temperature check with you guys.
How are you feeling after the session with Joe earlier this week, in terms of, I guess, maybe having started ideally, putting together that that webinar, and having I guess, doing that process with something that’s clearly such a a direct sales tool. How are you guys feeling about that? And there’s no right or wrong answer here. Just wanted to sort sort of get the gauge. Feel free to pop something in the chat or unmute yourself and and share a few words, whatever suits best.
I was like I’ve just tried to start recording stuff today and saying, like, my minimum is or, like, your offer will start at twenty thousand dollars, and then we’ll do ten thousand dollars recurring because that’s just how our agency works, and that’s, like, the best way blah blah blah. That was really tough to actually say the first couple of times. I’m still struggling with it.
But, I’m stopping slowly stopping the stumbling.
Amazing. Yeah. Yeah.
I haven’t even thought about pitching people, though. That that idea is more scary than the actual work of putting it together.
Okay. Can you tell me more about that? Why is that part more scary?
I guess, like, my language is always like, hey there. How are you? Hope you’re having a great day. This is, like, me and my thing. And I know you’re busy, but if this is something that you think would be cool and, like, would align, we should totally connect kinda thing. Anyway, hope you have a great day. Bye.
That’s what I was I feel like I sound like on emails to people I don’t know.
Once I know them, no problem. But it’s that first touch.
Brand voice I’m still getting their time. I need to have a meeting with you. Maybe next.
Yeah. Awesome.
Yes. And I feel like I can definitely resonate with some of that too. I am someone who is far less direct in my language usually.
So I can imagine that seeing, you know, some of the examples of what Jo shared there for the opening and the closing of that webinar could have been quite, and feel quite uncomfortable to sort of try that language on. Just a reminder while you’re here that, you know, there it’s I think it’s actually important to make sure that you do appear in the way that you’re making those pictures. So it’s not about a true copy paste. You know, you must say those exact same words.
It is finding a way to be clear and direct, and calm, ideally, and in control. But you can also, you know, bring your own language into how to make that ask and how to make that pitch at the end of the workshop. So, I always feel that it is very easy to tell when someone is trying to wear someone else’s clothes in a sense and, you know, just, you know, stumble through a script that they’ve been given. So I would definitely encourage you, Claire, to take time to sit with, those things.
And I know that some of those messages, you know, need to be direct and they need to be as they are, but are there any ways that you can bring yourself more into those so that you feel a bit more comfortable when it comes comes time to actually say them out loud, inside? But it’s probably quite intimidating rooms, intimidating situations.
And maybe something for you to take away.
Esai and Todd, how are you guys feeling or going with that workshop?
So I found the entire structure that Joe laid out so brilliant because there’s very little to guess, but all the room that I need to improvise and just bring my process and my framework into it. But one of the things that I struggle with is, I don’t get called on tech in webinars and meetings. People My name is very difficult to pronounce, and I’m clearly not from the US. My I am not a native speaker.
Even though I worked in this field and I’ve built a reputation, by virtue of the results I get from my clients, it is still a challenge for me when I’m in a room where people don’t know me. So it the biases do work against me that she like, I am not needed, and I don’t know how to pronounce the name. So I am a little worried about, how my pitches are going to land of course. Because I know that hosts want to bring in the best experts on the whether it’s to their communities or their podcast.
And sometimes it does happen if you can’t pronounce a name, you would just sort of don’t call on that person. It’s just because you are in a lot a lot of pressure your your client facing. You don’t wanna offend me sometimes.
So that’s a challenge that I have, like, I have struggled with. One on one people are great, but when you are they are they are in a position where they don’t wanna stumble or make mistakes. So, one, so I am wondering how that’s gonna work and how’s that how to work around that when I’m sending out pitches to speak on podcast, like social media marketing. Like, I would I I I’m gonna be offering a mini chat, automation, but for lead gen and sort of to mirror customer journey and act as a sales concierge.
Right? Nice.
And nobody’s talking about it this way. Everybody’s using it as a link delivery system instead of, like, an actual powerful tool that it is.
And I know that even on social media marketing, social the social media examiner or the social media marketing podcast, which is the biggest podcast and, and websites. Nobody’s talking about this yet. So there is clearly a gap, but I don’t know. Part of it is real challenges are faced, and part of it is, like, am I the person who can fill that gap fill that gap, really? There are bigger, better experts.
Mhmm. So maybe like that.
Well, possibly, and that’s probably true for all of us. But, if you’re the first person to pitch the idea to that platform and you can do it in a way that makes them say, oh, god. Yes. I need to hear this.
My audience needs to hear this. And I love the phrase you use, sales concierge, and just talking about that then. I was like, well, that’s, like, that’s a brilliant concept. And the fact that you spoke about it and lit up, like, you’re clearly passionate about it.
So Mhmm. I think your idea is super solid. It needs to get out there. And I just say, I mean, I I mean, obviously, I come from a place of privilege as a, you know, a white lady with a relatively easy to pronounce name.
But your explanation that you gave me when I asked, like, an esai, like, could you put that even, like, as your first line in your email? Because all you need to do is just remove the guesswork for someone, take the awkwardness out of it. Right? You could even be like it’s like, you know, mail, email, sigh, e sigh, like, just so they’re like, oh, cool. I know how to say that name. Right.
Because I think it’s it’s not the name itself.
Right?
It’s the worry for someone about mispronouncing it and then perhaps having you either be silent from podcast and not correct them about it out and then have all these followers who call you the wrong thing or you having to pull them up sort of mid recording.
So just be upfront with it. That would be my best suggestion. And, I mean, even, like, to be honest, for me, a lot of Americans say my name Kirsty, So I’ve had to say, oh, it’s like thirsty with a k, like, you know, which is not as cool as your explanation. But, so just saying that, you know, I think that can just relieve depression, relieve that anxiety.
So Mhmm.
That feels like a really simple practical fix, but I love those other mindset gremlins that are lurking there because we’re definitely gonna talk more about those today.
Perfect. Thank you.
Pleasure.
And, Todd, you’re up. How are you feeling, thinking? What’s happening for your workshop and in your in your noggin?
Well, you know, this might blow Tina’s mind, when we’ve been talking lately. But for me, the the webinar itself what was it called here? Let me just get my notes up real quick. The wake them up to the problem webinar.
It made me think about that, but I had a good talk with Cody this week as well. And, I’m actually thinking about pivoting on my standard off my standard standardization offer, because it does take more time. There is more work that goes into it, and it’s great, but, like, it takes longer. So I’ve just been thinking about how I’m gonna pivot and what that’s going to look like, and I think it’s just gonna be a, like, a good game changer.
I can also bring people in easier. I can get things done faster. So that’s really what made me think about. The workshop, how I was going to do it, no change, but it’s the actual deliverable and how it will work that’s actually I’m thinking differently about.
Awesome. That’s huge. And I love that you’re thinking about that now and thinking about that first because, obviously, it’s really important to know where you’re wanting people to go, what you’re wanting them to do before you create the sales tools for that. So awesome.
Great. Okay. Well, let’s dive into, I guess, the meat of today’s, workshop.
I will be referring to the worksheet too. So if you I’ll share it on my screen, but if you guys have it at your end as well, feel free to open it.
Here we go.
Sorry. I’m always quite clunky with this soon stuff.
Okay. So I think the first thing that I wanna really make clear, is that because you are all and told you will soon be, in the space of creating this workshop, You’re very much in the mental space of thinking about how you could make this a really effective sales tool for you, right, which is where you need to be to create this thing for it to be successful. Right? So you’re in that right frame of mind definitely for the creation process.
But the problem is if you bring that frame of mind into the pitching process, it can really exacerbate all those mindset gremlins. Because if you approach, you know, pitching a really big deal, a partner or a business in your space with the mindset of like, oh, I’m thinking about how this could benefit me. Like, I’ll get to get in front of all that audience. And, you know, there’s so many of my ICPs there.
You know, I can borrow so much authority from them, then it can often feel like you’re asking that really big deal business or person for help, which, I mean, is quite an uncomfortable spot to be in.
I personally am terrible at asking people for help. I feel like, if you approach something from that sort of frame of mind, it can make you feel very small and very insignificant, which, of course, are not the kind of things you wanna be thinking about yourself or feeling about yourself as you’re trying to position yourself as an expert. Right? The right person to present this idea, the right person to present this workshop, and ultimately, the person who can actually help brands affect this idea, right, to help them solve all of those, really painful points that they’re facing.
So when you’re able to actually flip that frame around and approach your pitch thinking about how the workshop could benefit them it feels much more like you’re offering a service. So offering some sort of missing puzzle piece, something that can help round out their offer and get their audience better results, or something that could help optimize their process. Whatever makes sense for the context of your workshop and then of your offer.
So this is, I guess, the mindset shift that I wanna help you make today.
And I wanna help you get some, notes down on paper for this even though, as I said, I know that you’re sort of in the process still creating that workshop. Jo has more for you next week, I believe.
So you probably will have to go back to that mindset of, like, thinking about how this benefits you, right, how it can be a really good sales tool, how well does it lead into the actual pitch at the end, etcetera, etcetera. But I would love for you here and now to just take, five minutes. I don’t think it will take too long just to have a look at the first three questions in this worksheet. So how will your webinar benefit the person, business, brand you’re pitching?
And don’t be afraid to play the ego here. So a quick reminder that, you know, most well, I guess, all all brands and businesses have competitors, and therefore, all brands and brands and businesses love to have an edge, right? Something that their competitors don’t. They also love anything that enables them to, further their status as the best x in the space or the most efficient blah blah blah, whatever that might be.
So is there a way here that your webinar could, really play to their ego in that way in terms of the outcomes that it offers them? That might be a good way to think about it.
And these next two questions here for you too, how will it benefit their audience?
And finally, how, if at all, can you tailor it slightly? I’m not talking about reinventing the wheel here, but how can you make it feel bespoke? Right? Like a unique opportunity for, that business or brand.
Because if they’re a big player, they don’t want what everyone else is having. Right? They probably don’t want exactly the same thing that is on your website for your own audience.
So I’d love you to take five minutes just to jot some thoughts down there. Feel free to turn your camera off while you do that if you would like. I’ll turn mine off just so you’re not watching me looking at at at you.
But I will, come back in five minutes, and we can talk about what you’ve got down on paper, and, yeah, help you through any stumbling blocks. Okay.
Okay. That’s been five minutes.
When you’re ready, feel free to turn your camera back on.
Right. It’s fine. I just need another minute or so.
There we go.
Okay. How did everyone go? Anyone get stuck anywhere?
Anything come up for anyone as they were going through those prompts?
I I’m a little stuck.
Mhmm. Kinda. Still got some stuff down, but in terms of tailoring it to so it feels like a unique opportunity.
Okay.
I got like, I can tailor it to their audience. I can, you know, talk their language. So, like, let’s say I was doing it on Joe’s thing. I could use conversion copywriting, for example. I could use their framework. Right? Mhmm.
But that’s kinda where I got like, where I sort of stopped. I couldn’t figure out another tailoring opportunity.
Mhmm.
Can you give me some more context about who your workshop is for and and what it’s teaching, what it’s showing?
Sure. It’s for heads of growth, or marketing, and it is teaching people. It’s it’s one of the frameworks. Right? Listen. It’s like the drill with me kind of thing.
Mhmm. Yep.
And it’s teaching them how to think about their onboarding in a way that gets people to actually activate or gets more of their audience more of their sorry. More of their free users to activate into paid customers.
Amazing. Got it. Sorry.
It’s late. No.
No. It’s all good.
Okay. Perfect. So, yes, I think, you tailoring it to use their language is an excellent idea because that is a way of you not only entering into their world more specifically, but also indicating that you know their world well enough, right, that you give enough shits, that you’ve done enough research, that, you know, you’re really well qualified to lead this workshop for that group or for that business. So I think that’s an excellent idea.
I may know other examples or ideas are coming from the top of my head.
Are there any examples that you may share within the workshop? I don’t know if you’re down to that level of content yet. I know it’s taking through the diagnostic.
Is there anything in there that you do use sort of any real world examples for, or is it Yeah.
They’re not mine, but I borrowed them.
So the one is I’ll talk people through product adoption indicators, and those are that a product adoption indicator is the moment that you know that a user is activated. Right? And for Slack, it’s two thousand messages. If you haven’t sent two thousand messages, then you’re you’re not sticky yet. You’re not considered an activated, like, fully onboarded user.
Mhmm. That’s the one example. The other example is HubSpot. HubSpot reworked their entire onboarding flow and saw a fifteen percent lift in retention, which is kinda like a wait. Retention?
Not activation?
That’s weird, moment. But retention is actually the the whole big point to onboarding because it’s the thing that makes the graph go like that rather than like that.
Yes.
Awesome. Okay.
Well, I mean, I feel like there are examples that, you know, your people that you’re pitching would absolutely know.
Right? Who doesn’t know Slack? Who doesn’t know HubSpot?
So that’s awesome.
I think in that case, obviously, being able to tell tailor the language so that it sits within their ecosystem and their frame of reference, I think that would be perfect, because I think anything else beyond that is probably gonna take you forever and ever to do, which is not the point. Right? You wanna have this workshop mainly nailed down, and it’s about making any tiny little tweaks that you can just to make it hyper specific, hyper relevant, and to demonstrate that you know about their business, you know about their brand. So I think by bringing their frame of reference in, I think that’s actually pretty peachy.
Oh, thank you.
My pleasure. Toto, Isai, anything sticky or tricky or challenging come up for you two?
So I took a lot of notes from what Claire wrote because I did not have customized the audience, and I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. So thank you, Claire. So I definitely have that written down now. But, a couple of things that I have is, number one, the way the framework that I’m teaching, even people who are teaching ManyChat, nobody else is teaching.
Nobody else is talking about it this way. Right? Like, I’m essentially talking about a two way sync between your social and email. People usually have no idea whether the people on the email list are also following them on social or not.
It’s such a like, to me, it’s, like, mind boggling when you think about it. Like, why would you not want complete information about your people? Right? Nobody’s talking about so you you and your community will be the first people to wake up your audience to talk about like, essentially, wake wake them up to this problem, and they’re seen as somebody who’s bringing cutting edge trends to that, number one.
And number two, we will help you market us market it internally as well as example. Even if it’s a closed community, there’s value in talking about it, marketing it. So people will wanna join. Even if it’s not open now, people will take notice and then, like, hey.
That’s something I’ve never heard anywhere else. So when do you open next? I would like to I would like to be a part of that community. Right?
So we would help you market it as By that, I mean, create assets, promote it myself, and create assets so you can promote it as well. So it gives you brings you more visibility.
And we’ll project manage the whole thing. Because I have a team, I can do that.
And the third thing, and this is actually very unique to me, my business essentially runs on referrals, and I have a policy of giving a ten percent referral fee to anybody who sends, who makes a connection or send, like, sends me somebody.
And I usually give ten percent for the first six months. Any project they sign for the first six months, I give like, it’s like it’s like how cookies work.
And I say it’ll it’s gonna take me at least six months to build my own good bill until then I’m trading on yours. So you deserve to be compensated. So I but I am wondering, is this something good to offer to people that I’m willing to teach? Hey. If any of them do end up working with me, I’m happy to give maybe ten percent or five percent that. But is that is that gonna be a turn off for the kind of people that are gonna be pitching? Are they gonna think I’m gonna come in and sell hard?
I actually don’t think you need that. Your the answer to the first prompt that you shared is so compelling, like, to be the first people ever to be able to see how you’re conceptualizing this and the opportunities there. Like, yeah, sign me up for that. I I don’t think you need the the referral, to be in there Okay.
As part of the pitch. Okay. And I would also question too because I think what is hopefully or potentially gonna happen for you is that this workshop will actually become a tool a sales tool for you that doesn’t rely on that referral bonus system, which, I mean, I’ve all four referral bonuses, obviously, it’s worked well for you so far, but this will be a way where you can get in front of people and sell them on your brain and your skills and what you can do for them without actually having to rely on that referral bonus. And you’ll have the workshop itself as a method by which to build know, like, and trust with those people.
So, you know, you said that, you know, you’re borrowing, you know, the person who refers them. You’re borrowing their goodwill for for the first six months. This being able to be in a room with you, see you, hear you, understand what it is you can do for them, that really accelerates that know, like, and trust process. So I actually don’t think you need to include that referral bonus.
And, you know, if you if you if you find out that, actually, that would be really helpful, then you can always add it in, you know, for the next the next workshop that you deliver for the next business. But I strongly encourage you to not not include that for the first the first time because I think the fact that this is such a unique opportunity is amazing, and I think that’s such a compelling reason for someone to say yes to your pitch.
Okay. Yeah. Thank you. I’ll try that for a little bit. Amazing.
Hi, Marina, by the way. Hello.
Hello.
Todd, how did you go with the prompts?
So we’re just talking about the three answers. Correct? The three questions with three answers. Correct? Okay. Cool.
That’s right. Yes.
Yeah. So in terms of how we will benefit them, what I’m looking at is it’s a Philippine ICP workshop. So it’s gonna help put a face to the market and increase conversion rates from the industry standard of five percent.
It’s also gonna create a buyer for them versus selling a product or service.
It’ll benefit their audience because it’s gonna provide clarity in a cluttered landscape. I don’t know if anyone’s ever heard of the surplus economic theory. You’re either first, your second, or your last. So people are searching for your type of brand, and they’ll find you. Then they’re gonna find something that’s kinda close to what you do.
And if they don’t find that, they’ll choose what’s last, and then they’re really not never gonna be happy. So the idea is provide that clarity, be their first choice, and go from there. And then the third one is how would I tailor it? It would be with, one to one interviews and switching up their mindset about how they look at their clients. Most people have come into ICP processes.
They have really no idea of their client. They just think of product, product, product, service, service, service. And then it’s like, well, who is it for? And they’re like, shit.
I, and then you ask questions like, are they male, female? What’s your age? All these things. And some people just get really kind of annoyed because you’re forcing them to get out of the business itself.
So just the one to one when I’m done.
People are just like, wow. Like, you know, it we were talking about this person last night or after a process. I’ve had someone by the name sign up for their product or service. It’s really kinda weird. So that’s what I would do is put those three answers.
Amazing. And you’re I mean, you sound like you’re so clear and compelling and sharp with those responses. So I feel like you’re definitely on a track, Todd. It’s awesome to see.
Hope so.
I hope so. You get you get thrown wrenches in these programs all the time, but but sometimes when when Joe does things, you’re like, shit. Shit. So yeah.
Yes. I think we can all relate.
Amazing. And and then I guess my bigger question for, all of you is how did it feel to sort of switch that frame and to spend some time thinking about all the goodness that exists in your workshop for the people you’re pitching?
Did that have any impact on how you feel about the workshop and how you feel about pitching on how you feel sort of in your body when you’re working through those responses, and it may not have. There’s I’m not I’m not fishing for confirmation. I’m curious.
No. This reframe was really helpful because I was thinking, like, who am I to pitch these big podcasts and websites that I’ve been following?
But now I feel like like nobody else is talking about it. So clearly, it’s it’s of benefit to them to have me on and talk about these things, and it’s like, my podcast with at the the copywriters club was the third most downloaded that year. And I had I was so nervous when I was talking to Rob during the during the recording that I was, like, shaking and all that. But the episode obviously resonated with a lot of, with a lot of people, and it’s happened to be over and over again from other episodes that I’ve recorded.
So, clearly, it’s gonna be of benefit to them. And just thinking about it like that, I think it’s gonna it it does remove a little bit of the desperate energy. I think I was already bringing into the pitch because it’s not something you’re going to do for me now. It’s something that I’m going to do for you and your audience.
So I think that is going to translate so much better into the pitch.
Amazing.
So good to hear. I’m so excited for you. I’m so excited to see your your pictures and and your workshop live in the world.
Me too. Thank you.
And I also just wanted to make a note there too before I forget.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, how, as you mentioned, for the Copywriter Club podcast, you were so nervous, but, obviously, that didn’t translate to how you were perceived in the terms of the episode. So just a good thing to keep in mind too that you can feel so nervous in the moment when you’re doing something, and you can be so sure that it’s translating. But then if you do listen back or you get feedback from it, that’s not always obvious to the people listening. And I think that can be helpful too, something to keep in mind that no one can see what’s going on inside of you.
Yeah. So yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, just a good thing to think of when you are nervous.
Yeah. It’s so weird. That’s the only podcast where I didn’t say a single or a because I was too nervous too, so I was speaking very slowly. And I was like, how is this part where I look through the transcript? I didn’t say or a, like, even once. But I’m like, okay. So it paid off to be that nervous that I was speaking slowly and deliberately that it came off as confident and not, like, you know, shaking.
That’s amazing. You found you found a hack.
Any other thoughts on this stuff before we move on, Claire or Todd? And Marina, sorry. I just should have upped the energy. We’re just going through the, the first three, questions in the worksheet for this session, just in terms of helping shift the frame from, what your workshop can do for you in terms of being a really killer sales tool into what it can actually do for the people that you’re pitching it to.
Thank you.
I still feel kind of scared and salesy.
So Mhmm.
Yeah.
Yeah. I feel like to what to this stuff, I think my my my block or wall to climb is huge. Like yeah. It’s it’s gonna take time.
I do a lot of sailing, and I remember when I started, I was like, how do I improve? How do I get better? I’m learning all this stuff. And everyone said, you can learn as much as you want on books, but it’s time on the water.
Yes.
And it kinda feels like it’s just gonna be time on the water.
One hundred percent. That’s the perfect analogy. Because it is, you know, you can only psych yourself so much up, you know, and learn so much and do all the theory. But at the end of the day, you do need to take the leap and make it a real world thing. And every time it gets better, every time it gets easier, every time it gets more comfortable.
And I think what was last month or the month before that I mentioned that, you know, we often misinterpret discomfort as a sign that we’re doing something we shouldn’t be, but really it’s more often than not a sign that we’re pushing for more or different or better.
So I just encourage you not to see that discomfort as a sign that you’re doing the wrong thing and going in the wrong direction. It’s just that you’re literally growing your comfort zone, getting your sea legs on. That might not be the best addition to your metaphor, but, there you have it. And I also think something I thought of for you too.
Was it you who was saying that you had one of your mindset thoughts was who am I to teach this? Or maybe that was Esai.
No. But that guy totally resonates.
Like, who am I in this grand scheme of everything? Like, there are so many experts out there. I’ve just gone and, like, plucked this from my imagination and, like Mhmm. Study and gone. I have this brand new idea, and I think it works. Let’s see.
Mhmm.
It catches like I’ve been following other people’s frameworks for so long.
It feels bizarre to sort of just try be the master instead of the student. I’m awful. I’m all the geese tonight. Sorry.
I love it.
Yes. And very like, it’s such an exciting place to be, I think, when you’re finally generating your own ideas and concepts, right, and models. Right? You’re no longer just a carbon copy of someone else’s path, but you’ve been able to gather enough experience.
And who you are in a life that you’ve lived has enabled you to see things in a different light, and you’re now putting that out there, you know, as something that is uniquely yours. Obviously, very terrifying because if it’s all yours, then it’s all yours to fail. Right? You know?
I think we all feel that on some level.
So just normalizing that for you. And also wanted to say that I think often, particularly when we are pitching ourselves to, people or brands who are really big deal in our space, we often confuse the size of their success with the size of their knowledge about what we have to share. So we’re if you can imagine circles, like, we’re like, okay. They’re this big deal.
Like, this is their knowledge. They’re huge. And I’m like, I’m in here. I’m this little tiny circle in here.
Like, what do I have to offer? But the reality is that we both have big circles of knowledge, and the overlap is quite small. So so much of your circle is absolutely brand new to them even though they’re a huge established business.
I don’t know if that helps, and I don’t know if I’ve explained that very well.
Would be a good time. It’s a Venn diagram.
It’s a circle, and then it’s a circle inside the circle, and then another slightly overlapping circle.
Yes. The big circle is their success.
You know, it’s so interesting you said that, Christy. I Christy, I was actually doing my structural research on my ICP, and one of them is head of content. And doctoral, they give you it gives you keywords. Right?
What are the keywords they’re searching? Like, the top ten keywords are, like, basic SEO tips, like how to do SEO, like a simple beginner’s guide to SEO. It’s like the top ten search, and these are heads of head of content in, like, SaaS companies. And I was like, what?
Thank you.
Isn’t that amazing?
So hopeful.
Yes. That’s so reassuring, isn’t it? It’s like, cool. That’s where their head’s at. It’s like, I’m way above that for that yet.
That’s amazing.
Had anything come up for you, and no pressure.
If if not, feel free to just shake your head, and I won’t force you to to talk to me.
No. No one’s ever forced here. So, yeah. Yeah. I think everything that comes down to what we’re doing in pitch, mindset, everything for me is just the the acceleration nature.
I think these are things that you might, like, be a little dilettante shit and kinda dabble and try and figure it out, but this forces you. There’s like you know, Ryan Schwartz always talked about that, authentic scarcity. It’s not FOMO, but it’s, like, just forcing you to, like there’s an urgent timer behind you and, like, you just feel it and you’re kinda like, stop. Leave me alone.
And it’s just kinda there and it’s but it’s it’s effective. Right? You you’re you’re coming into programs and, and meetings where other people are doing it and you’re seeing it and, like, Claire’s talking about it and what she’s going through, but she’s doing it. She’s showing up.
She’s in the you know, you’re in the boat, Claire. You know what I mean? And it’s it’s tough, but that’s what it is for me. It’s the acceleration.
I I’ve been working ICPs for a while. We did as a a studio, we did ICPs, but it’s always on the website and, you know, it’s more inbound. And what we’re doing now is more outbound. And it’s just accelerating that that approach.
And you’re literally going, like, we sign up for webinars. Now we’re running webinars in a workshop. So it’s just, again, that mindset. Right?
And that’s to me, it’s just the acceleration nature. I love it myself. It makes for long days, but I love it. And when you when we all when you get it together, you can see it’s laid out.
So that’s what it is for me. It’s just taking what I’ve already had and just refining it more. Right? So and this group is kinda like iron sharpening iron for me.
It helps you with everything that we do.
So Amazing.
I love the way you conceptualize things, Todd. It’s very cool to hear because you’re right. There is a big acceleration happening, and I think particularly in CSP. Right? There’s a new theme every month that Joe’s dropping knowledge nuggets everywhere.
And Every month.
Every day, I go I go into coffee school like CSP. I’m like, oh, man.
Do you know what this is?
What you wanna do? And you’re like, oh, just getting it done and trying to document it and do it. And, like, everyone here is it’s funny. Again, everyone here is questioning it, but we’re, you know, it’s like, because we’re learning from a different way and it’s, like, just being patient with it as we accelerate.
Right? But again, yeah. I I mean, I it’s when you say conceptualize, it’s actually for me, the concept that was always there. What I’m learning is that, again, we’re just framing a concept that we already had.
And just making because if it makes sense to us, it will definitely make sense to anybody else because what we do is persuade people.
So That’s right.
So I did also have, just going back to the worksheet, I did also have a section in there to help you actually craft the pitch, but I think just given, that Joe’s workshop is two part. Hang on. Let me put this in present mode.
Sorry. I love that in music. Not sure why that was there.
So I think I will actually leave this, second half of the worksheet for you guys to dive into as you need because I suspect if the workshops themselves aren’t yet finalized, Jo has obviously more to step you through next week. We might be jumping the gun a little bit here.
But please come back and use this if you do need some help and some structure to guide you on getting that first pitch on paper, because often that first one can be the hardest. Right?
And please ping me in Slack as you go if you’re like, hey, Kirsty. I’m getting stuck on this. I need some help with this. Or can you review this for me? I would absolutely love to do that. And the one other thing I note, and I see your hand tied, I’ll, get to you in a sec before I forget.
I suspect after seeing Jo’s worksheet, it may be that, that she will be encouraging you to pitch, leading with pains rather than benefits.
But anyway, that will be TBC. So just highlighting that there may be a difference there.
This is the structure that I usually use for my pictures. My pictures are usually very successful, so this does work. It might just be a different, I guess, focus than what Joe may be may be teaching you. Alright.
Cool. If it’s okay, we have a couple of minutes just sitting where where we are. For anyone who has ever seen me in these these groups, I never really asked for critique. So it’s not something I normally share.
So if possible, if if it’s okay, when you’re saying crafting your pitch, I wrote one. Can I just check it out here and I’ll put it in Slack and then just say it out loud? And I wouldn’t mind some critique on it if possible. Anybody I want a game for that.
Cool. So here’s the in chat, there’s the actual relevance because you you said, like, why am I pitching?
Mhmm. Great. Yep.
And then the actual promise is this.
And the again, if for anyone just reading, the the pitch itself was the targeting is on point. Because we know if you’ve got a great brand, as soon as you start researching them, you’re gonna get retargeting no matter where you’re and what’s going on. And then, yeah, the the promise is what I’m I’m curious about as well.
And the promise is nineteen words, so it’s very on brand voice, Claire. We’ll talk about that after.
So the promise part is, the the way it’s phrased is confusing me a little bit, but maybe I’m just missing a piece of context.
So the promise is that you start with shared language, or is that Yes.
So it’s the it start with shared language. So that’s all all one sentence, but it just broken up with the call. So it start with shared language. K. And shared language is understanding your ICPs.
And when you understand the ICPs that it was one to one interviews, brand voice naturally comes out of that through osmosis. And then, really, what happens, you’re able to stay on brand throughout all channels by knowing your vocabulary, by not only knowing the client, but knowing your vocabulary, your cadence, and your tone.
Awesome. So I’m just curious. Do you think the people you are pitching would know what start with shared language means, that phrase?
No. That’s why the ICP will be bringing them into that. The actual story of the workshop would be ICP. And then as I promote, it will be based on you know, we’ll break down what a shared language is and all of those things, like, through promotion, through authority building.
Okay. Cool. Because I feel like the way you explained it the second time. I was like, ah, cool.
I understand why that’s valuable. So I think for the pitch itself, you know, you need to sort of meet them where they’re at and not use any of your terms too early on in the pitch. Yeah. Because it’s it’s less meaningful.
Right? If they’re like, I don’t know what this means. But if you can explain to them in terms that it’s a mate. Right?
Like, they’re your ICP, so you’re gonna be pulling the words from their head in terms of what they’re thinking about and what they would love to achieve.
I would suggest leading with that and using that language in the promise rather than the language of what you’re going to step them through during the workshop because they’re not there yet.
Hundred percent.
That make sense?
Hundred percent.
Any other thoughts?
If I might add something, I would reconsider putting the part where you say put a face to your ideal flying profile because that sort of gives away a little bit of your process. And I’ve found that sometimes people have resistance towards certain things, so they feel like either they assume they already know what you’re going to talk what you’re going to talk about, but they will decide whether it’s for them or not even before understanding what it is. So I would rather I would actually suggest removing your process from it entirely and only speak about the benefits like you like you did when you act when you’re actually talking about it, you didn’t talk about putting a face. You only talked about the benefits that they will get, which Claire so beautifully summarized. So I think that’s a lot more powerful.
Yep. Hundred percent. Thank you.
Awesome. Any other thoughts from anyone or any other questions from you, Todd? No? Amazing. Thanks for sharing that. Claire?
Yeah. I just wanna say, Todd, I find you so eloquent. Like, when you’re I honestly feel like you should just talk and, like, get it down on paper and then use that. Just talk and tell chat g p t to, like, neaten it up a bit because you’re so eloquent in speech, honestly.
Like, every time you talk, I’m like, oh my gosh. You sound so intelligent. Everything’s, like, all packaged together in these nice ideas. Why can’t I do that?
Can do that on writing.
Like, when I talk, I start going in tangents.
So yeah.
That’s actually what I just summarized was what you, like, said verbatim.
So that yeah.
Okay. My question.
I would love to see an example of one of your, successful or even unsuccessful pitches and what that actually looks like because I have no idea what I would even start typing.
Like Yeah.
Of course.
I’m so happy to share one of those with you. It will be a dive through my Google Drive, though. So is it okay if I pop plunk it in Slack later today? Is that alright?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Of course. Whatever works. That would just be so helpful to, like, yeah, move move past the, like, I don’t know what to write kind of plot.
Yeah. Of course. No problems whatsoever.
And I know. Seeing real life thing is actually quite helpful. I might even have two.
I’ve kept any of these. I may even have some too. I have, like, the back and forth then from the person I was pitching, which might also be helpful to see because often it’s not just that you send the pitch and then it’s like booked in done. There can often be some back and forth in terms of them, you know, working things out and locking it in. So I can see if I have any of those two email chains that I’ve shared and sorry. Kept. And I can share those and just block out names and email addresses so that no one’s vulnerable.
Thank you so much. That’d be very helpful.
My pleasure. Esai.
So my first part of my question was gonna be that, you know, what does that conversation look like? Because, obviously, the first pitch is not gonna be the one that immediately converts. So how do we I have I have a process that I follow for myself and for my clients that sort of works. We do a multichannel approach, like email, social, sort of keep one channel.
We follow-up on follow-up via email, but just sort of chat and just have a friendly conversation via social. So it’s never awkward, even though it’s a door or whatever. The relationship is still alive. But I would love to know your process of what that conversation looks like, One, so thank you for sharing that.
But two, I was also wondering and I know you have a part with call to action here, but what that looks like because it might not be an immediate yes or an immediate let’s get on a call. Right? So would it be better to have a a different call to action at the first pitch, or what is it that you would recommend?
Yeah. So I think this is where context is really important. Right?
So even the platform of which you’re pitching, so you’re thinking about some podcast, right, for example, or if you’re thinking about, speaking inside of someone else’s paid program or mastermind, that’s gonna be different to pitching, say, ActiveCampaign to be, you know, to present a workshop customers. So Mhmm. I think thinking about the context of that, like, what is the call to action that actually makes sense? Like, how are you gonna be most likely to book this workshop in?
So and I think also the context too of, like, what is your relationship with the person you’re pitching? Because in some cases you may have like a connection with them. Maybe you met them at an event, you know, maybe you both have worked with the same person. There could be something there that you could leverage as well.
Or is it just a pure cold pitch, right, where you you just know that this is gonna be a really high value brand for you to actually get in tunnel.
So, thinking through all of those things, I think, can help you determine the call to action.
So for example, with if when I’m pitching podcasts, it’s never jump on a call because I think I’ve actually never had to jump on a call to land a podcast spot. Yeah. Yeah. I find that with podcasts, it’s all done via email.
Yeah. That’s been my experience. So Yeah. My call to action has been usually something along the lines of, you know, how do you think this would land for your audience?
Hit reply and let me know. So something as simple as that that just stimulates a conversation. And then if I don’t hear back from them within, say, three working days, I’ll then just follow-up and say, hey. Just wanted to to see how you you know, how this is sitting for you.
So, you know, a much softer CTA in that case because of the context of the fact that, you know, the podcast track isn’t gonna wanna jump on a call with me before they get me on the podcast. Like, the call was gonna be the interview.
Yeah. Yeah.
But that’s helpful. I just ran with you.
I can No. No. No. That’s helpful because I did. I I am thinking about pitching whole pitching podcast that don’t know me and I don’t have a preexisting relationship with.
So the softer CD, I think, is what I was thinking. Like, how does this idea did did you have the follow-up was thinking, did you have any suggestion? Would you suggest tweaks or what else came up along with Yes. Thing of, like, referencing some of the more recent podcasts.
I think that could be a good way to follow-up as well.
Yes. Definitely. Anything that’s current or relevant, I think, is always a good a good way to follow-up.
And I do think I think, actually, I shared one of my podcast pictures, in Slack a few months ago.
So I can see if it I’ll I’ll go back and tag you in it, Esai, because Yeah.
And maybe Claire as well if you’d like to see that one. I don’t know if podcasts are relevant for yep.
Cool. I’ll I’ll tag you both, and and if anyone else wants me to tag them, let me know.
But that was for Rick Mulready’s, Art of Online Business podcast, which at the time was a really, huge win for me.
So yeah. Was that a yes tag me please too from Todd or okay. Awesome.
Okay.
Easy.
Any final thoughts, questions, conundrums, cries for help?
No.
Well, as always, it’s been an absolute pleasure to spend this hour with you all.
Please ping me in Slack. I’ll go find that post with the podcast pitch now, and I’ll go through my Google Drive and find some more that I can share, Claire, and hopefully some email exchanges too, just so you can see sort of what the back and forth can look like and and how the the pitch can, I guess, not evolve, but how it can sort of have some flex in it to to really meet what the ideal you know, the person you’re pitching might want?
Any questions as you go along and do any of this stuff, if you need any pep talks or anything, please reach out in Slack. Just tag me, and I’ll see it.
I would love to really, like, help you as you go, so please don’t be shy.
Alright. I’ll see you in Slack.
Thank you so much. I’m definitely gonna ask for a pet dog. Great. Yes. Do. Please do.
Alright. Thanks, everyone.
Thank you.
Transcript
Guys, well, let’s jump in and get started with, the workshop. If anyone else turns up that’s okay, they can just slot in and sort themselves out as they’re going along. But as you hopefully know today’s session is building on, the process that Jo has started stepping you through this week, in terms of building out that Waking Up to the Problem webinar. Today’s workshop is all about, when it comes time to pitch that, how to actually do that to high value intimidating brands, keeping in mind all the mindset muck that is likely to appear as you go and put that, ask out into the world.
So before we jump into the worksheet today, I just want to do a bit of a quick, temperature check with you guys.
How are you feeling after the session with Joe earlier this week, in terms of, I guess, maybe having started ideally, putting together that that webinar, and having I guess, doing that process with something that’s clearly such a a direct sales tool. How are you guys feeling about that? And there’s no right or wrong answer here. Just wanted to sort sort of get the gauge. Feel free to pop something in the chat or unmute yourself and and share a few words, whatever suits best.
I was like I’ve just tried to start recording stuff today and saying, like, my minimum is or, like, your offer will start at twenty thousand dollars, and then we’ll do ten thousand dollars recurring because that’s just how our agency works, and that’s, like, the best way blah blah blah. That was really tough to actually say the first couple of times. I’m still struggling with it.
But, I’m stopping slowly stopping the stumbling.
Amazing. Yeah. Yeah.
I haven’t even thought about pitching people, though. That that idea is more scary than the actual work of putting it together.
Okay. Can you tell me more about that? Why is that part more scary?
I guess, like, my language is always like, hey there. How are you? Hope you’re having a great day. This is, like, me and my thing. And I know you’re busy, but if this is something that you think would be cool and, like, would align, we should totally connect kinda thing. Anyway, hope you have a great day. Bye.
That’s what I was I feel like I sound like on emails to people I don’t know.
Once I know them, no problem. But it’s that first touch.
Brand voice I’m still getting their time. I need to have a meeting with you. Maybe next.
Yeah. Awesome.
Yes. And I feel like I can definitely resonate with some of that too. I am someone who is far less direct in my language usually.
So I can imagine that seeing, you know, some of the examples of what Jo shared there for the opening and the closing of that webinar could have been quite, and feel quite uncomfortable to sort of try that language on. Just a reminder while you’re here that, you know, there it’s I think it’s actually important to make sure that you do appear in the way that you’re making those pictures. So it’s not about a true copy paste. You know, you must say those exact same words.
It is finding a way to be clear and direct, and calm, ideally, and in control. But you can also, you know, bring your own language into how to make that ask and how to make that pitch at the end of the workshop. So, I always feel that it is very easy to tell when someone is trying to wear someone else’s clothes in a sense and, you know, just, you know, stumble through a script that they’ve been given. So I would definitely encourage you, Claire, to take time to sit with, those things.
And I know that some of those messages, you know, need to be direct and they need to be as they are, but are there any ways that you can bring yourself more into those so that you feel a bit more comfortable when it comes comes time to actually say them out loud, inside? But it’s probably quite intimidating rooms, intimidating situations.
And maybe something for you to take away.
Esai and Todd, how are you guys feeling or going with that workshop?
So I found the entire structure that Joe laid out so brilliant because there’s very little to guess, but all the room that I need to improvise and just bring my process and my framework into it. But one of the things that I struggle with is, I don’t get called on tech in webinars and meetings. People My name is very difficult to pronounce, and I’m clearly not from the US. My I am not a native speaker.
Even though I worked in this field and I’ve built a reputation, by virtue of the results I get from my clients, it is still a challenge for me when I’m in a room where people don’t know me. So it the biases do work against me that she like, I am not needed, and I don’t know how to pronounce the name. So I am a little worried about, how my pitches are going to land of course. Because I know that hosts want to bring in the best experts on the whether it’s to their communities or their podcast.
And sometimes it does happen if you can’t pronounce a name, you would just sort of don’t call on that person. It’s just because you are in a lot a lot of pressure your your client facing. You don’t wanna offend me sometimes.
So that’s a challenge that I have, like, I have struggled with. One on one people are great, but when you are they are they are in a position where they don’t wanna stumble or make mistakes. So, one, so I am wondering how that’s gonna work and how’s that how to work around that when I’m sending out pitches to speak on podcast, like social media marketing. Like, I would I I I’m gonna be offering a mini chat, automation, but for lead gen and sort of to mirror customer journey and act as a sales concierge.
Right? Nice.
And nobody’s talking about it this way. Everybody’s using it as a link delivery system instead of, like, an actual powerful tool that it is.
And I know that even on social media marketing, social the social media examiner or the social media marketing podcast, which is the biggest podcast and, and websites. Nobody’s talking about this yet. So there is clearly a gap, but I don’t know. Part of it is real challenges are faced, and part of it is, like, am I the person who can fill that gap fill that gap, really? There are bigger, better experts.
Mhmm. So maybe like that.
Well, possibly, and that’s probably true for all of us. But, if you’re the first person to pitch the idea to that platform and you can do it in a way that makes them say, oh, god. Yes. I need to hear this.
My audience needs to hear this. And I love the phrase you use, sales concierge, and just talking about that then. I was like, well, that’s, like, that’s a brilliant concept. And the fact that you spoke about it and lit up, like, you’re clearly passionate about it.
So Mhmm. I think your idea is super solid. It needs to get out there. And I just say, I mean, I I mean, obviously, I come from a place of privilege as a, you know, a white lady with a relatively easy to pronounce name.
But your explanation that you gave me when I asked, like, an esai, like, could you put that even, like, as your first line in your email? Because all you need to do is just remove the guesswork for someone, take the awkwardness out of it. Right? You could even be like it’s like, you know, mail, email, sigh, e sigh, like, just so they’re like, oh, cool. I know how to say that name. Right.
Because I think it’s it’s not the name itself.
Right?
It’s the worry for someone about mispronouncing it and then perhaps having you either be silent from podcast and not correct them about it out and then have all these followers who call you the wrong thing or you having to pull them up sort of mid recording.
So just be upfront with it. That would be my best suggestion. And, I mean, even, like, to be honest, for me, a lot of Americans say my name Kirsty, So I’ve had to say, oh, it’s like thirsty with a k, like, you know, which is not as cool as your explanation. But, so just saying that, you know, I think that can just relieve depression, relieve that anxiety.
So Mhmm.
That feels like a really simple practical fix, but I love those other mindset gremlins that are lurking there because we’re definitely gonna talk more about those today.
Perfect. Thank you.
Pleasure.
And, Todd, you’re up. How are you feeling, thinking? What’s happening for your workshop and in your in your noggin?
Well, you know, this might blow Tina’s mind, when we’ve been talking lately. But for me, the the webinar itself what was it called here? Let me just get my notes up real quick. The wake them up to the problem webinar.
It made me think about that, but I had a good talk with Cody this week as well. And, I’m actually thinking about pivoting on my standard off my standard standardization offer, because it does take more time. There is more work that goes into it, and it’s great, but, like, it takes longer. So I’ve just been thinking about how I’m gonna pivot and what that’s going to look like, and I think it’s just gonna be a, like, a good game changer.
I can also bring people in easier. I can get things done faster. So that’s really what made me think about. The workshop, how I was going to do it, no change, but it’s the actual deliverable and how it will work that’s actually I’m thinking differently about.
Awesome. That’s huge. And I love that you’re thinking about that now and thinking about that first because, obviously, it’s really important to know where you’re wanting people to go, what you’re wanting them to do before you create the sales tools for that. So awesome.
Great. Okay. Well, let’s dive into, I guess, the meat of today’s, workshop.
I will be referring to the worksheet too. So if you I’ll share it on my screen, but if you guys have it at your end as well, feel free to open it.
Here we go.
Sorry. I’m always quite clunky with this soon stuff.
Okay. So I think the first thing that I wanna really make clear, is that because you are all and told you will soon be, in the space of creating this workshop, You’re very much in the mental space of thinking about how you could make this a really effective sales tool for you, right, which is where you need to be to create this thing for it to be successful. Right? So you’re in that right frame of mind definitely for the creation process.
But the problem is if you bring that frame of mind into the pitching process, it can really exacerbate all those mindset gremlins. Because if you approach, you know, pitching a really big deal, a partner or a business in your space with the mindset of like, oh, I’m thinking about how this could benefit me. Like, I’ll get to get in front of all that audience. And, you know, there’s so many of my ICPs there.
You know, I can borrow so much authority from them, then it can often feel like you’re asking that really big deal business or person for help, which, I mean, is quite an uncomfortable spot to be in.
I personally am terrible at asking people for help. I feel like, if you approach something from that sort of frame of mind, it can make you feel very small and very insignificant, which, of course, are not the kind of things you wanna be thinking about yourself or feeling about yourself as you’re trying to position yourself as an expert. Right? The right person to present this idea, the right person to present this workshop, and ultimately, the person who can actually help brands affect this idea, right, to help them solve all of those, really painful points that they’re facing.
So when you’re able to actually flip that frame around and approach your pitch thinking about how the workshop could benefit them it feels much more like you’re offering a service. So offering some sort of missing puzzle piece, something that can help round out their offer and get their audience better results, or something that could help optimize their process. Whatever makes sense for the context of your workshop and then of your offer.
So this is, I guess, the mindset shift that I wanna help you make today.
And I wanna help you get some, notes down on paper for this even though, as I said, I know that you’re sort of in the process still creating that workshop. Jo has more for you next week, I believe.
So you probably will have to go back to that mindset of, like, thinking about how this benefits you, right, how it can be a really good sales tool, how well does it lead into the actual pitch at the end, etcetera, etcetera. But I would love for you here and now to just take, five minutes. I don’t think it will take too long just to have a look at the first three questions in this worksheet. So how will your webinar benefit the person, business, brand you’re pitching?
And don’t be afraid to play the ego here. So a quick reminder that, you know, most well, I guess, all all brands and businesses have competitors, and therefore, all brands and brands and businesses love to have an edge, right? Something that their competitors don’t. They also love anything that enables them to, further their status as the best x in the space or the most efficient blah blah blah, whatever that might be.
So is there a way here that your webinar could, really play to their ego in that way in terms of the outcomes that it offers them? That might be a good way to think about it.
And these next two questions here for you too, how will it benefit their audience?
And finally, how, if at all, can you tailor it slightly? I’m not talking about reinventing the wheel here, but how can you make it feel bespoke? Right? Like a unique opportunity for, that business or brand.
Because if they’re a big player, they don’t want what everyone else is having. Right? They probably don’t want exactly the same thing that is on your website for your own audience.
So I’d love you to take five minutes just to jot some thoughts down there. Feel free to turn your camera off while you do that if you would like. I’ll turn mine off just so you’re not watching me looking at at at you.
But I will, come back in five minutes, and we can talk about what you’ve got down on paper, and, yeah, help you through any stumbling blocks. Okay.
Okay. That’s been five minutes.
When you’re ready, feel free to turn your camera back on.
Right. It’s fine. I just need another minute or so.
There we go.
Okay. How did everyone go? Anyone get stuck anywhere?
Anything come up for anyone as they were going through those prompts?
I I’m a little stuck.
Mhmm. Kinda. Still got some stuff down, but in terms of tailoring it to so it feels like a unique opportunity.
Okay.
I got like, I can tailor it to their audience. I can, you know, talk their language. So, like, let’s say I was doing it on Joe’s thing. I could use conversion copywriting, for example. I could use their framework. Right? Mhmm.
But that’s kinda where I got like, where I sort of stopped. I couldn’t figure out another tailoring opportunity.
Mhmm.
Can you give me some more context about who your workshop is for and and what it’s teaching, what it’s showing?
Sure. It’s for heads of growth, or marketing, and it is teaching people. It’s it’s one of the frameworks. Right? Listen. It’s like the drill with me kind of thing.
Mhmm. Yep.
And it’s teaching them how to think about their onboarding in a way that gets people to actually activate or gets more of their audience more of their sorry. More of their free users to activate into paid customers.
Amazing. Got it. Sorry.
It’s late. No.
No. It’s all good.
Okay. Perfect. So, yes, I think, you tailoring it to use their language is an excellent idea because that is a way of you not only entering into their world more specifically, but also indicating that you know their world well enough, right, that you give enough shits, that you’ve done enough research, that, you know, you’re really well qualified to lead this workshop for that group or for that business. So I think that’s an excellent idea.
I may know other examples or ideas are coming from the top of my head.
Are there any examples that you may share within the workshop? I don’t know if you’re down to that level of content yet. I know it’s taking through the diagnostic.
Is there anything in there that you do use sort of any real world examples for, or is it Yeah.
They’re not mine, but I borrowed them.
So the one is I’ll talk people through product adoption indicators, and those are that a product adoption indicator is the moment that you know that a user is activated. Right? And for Slack, it’s two thousand messages. If you haven’t sent two thousand messages, then you’re you’re not sticky yet. You’re not considered an activated, like, fully onboarded user.
Mhmm. That’s the one example. The other example is HubSpot. HubSpot reworked their entire onboarding flow and saw a fifteen percent lift in retention, which is kinda like a wait. Retention?
Not activation?
That’s weird, moment. But retention is actually the the whole big point to onboarding because it’s the thing that makes the graph go like that rather than like that.
Yes.
Awesome. Okay.
Well, I mean, I feel like there are examples that, you know, your people that you’re pitching would absolutely know.
Right? Who doesn’t know Slack? Who doesn’t know HubSpot?
So that’s awesome.
I think in that case, obviously, being able to tell tailor the language so that it sits within their ecosystem and their frame of reference, I think that would be perfect, because I think anything else beyond that is probably gonna take you forever and ever to do, which is not the point. Right? You wanna have this workshop mainly nailed down, and it’s about making any tiny little tweaks that you can just to make it hyper specific, hyper relevant, and to demonstrate that you know about their business, you know about their brand. So I think by bringing their frame of reference in, I think that’s actually pretty peachy.
Oh, thank you.
My pleasure. Toto, Isai, anything sticky or tricky or challenging come up for you two?
So I took a lot of notes from what Claire wrote because I did not have customized the audience, and I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. So thank you, Claire. So I definitely have that written down now. But, a couple of things that I have is, number one, the way the framework that I’m teaching, even people who are teaching ManyChat, nobody else is teaching.
Nobody else is talking about it this way. Right? Like, I’m essentially talking about a two way sync between your social and email. People usually have no idea whether the people on the email list are also following them on social or not.
It’s such a like, to me, it’s, like, mind boggling when you think about it. Like, why would you not want complete information about your people? Right? Nobody’s talking about so you you and your community will be the first people to wake up your audience to talk about like, essentially, wake wake them up to this problem, and they’re seen as somebody who’s bringing cutting edge trends to that, number one.
And number two, we will help you market us market it internally as well as example. Even if it’s a closed community, there’s value in talking about it, marketing it. So people will wanna join. Even if it’s not open now, people will take notice and then, like, hey.
That’s something I’ve never heard anywhere else. So when do you open next? I would like to I would like to be a part of that community. Right?
So we would help you market it as By that, I mean, create assets, promote it myself, and create assets so you can promote it as well. So it gives you brings you more visibility.
And we’ll project manage the whole thing. Because I have a team, I can do that.
And the third thing, and this is actually very unique to me, my business essentially runs on referrals, and I have a policy of giving a ten percent referral fee to anybody who sends, who makes a connection or send, like, sends me somebody.
And I usually give ten percent for the first six months. Any project they sign for the first six months, I give like, it’s like it’s like how cookies work.
And I say it’ll it’s gonna take me at least six months to build my own good bill until then I’m trading on yours. So you deserve to be compensated. So I but I am wondering, is this something good to offer to people that I’m willing to teach? Hey. If any of them do end up working with me, I’m happy to give maybe ten percent or five percent that. But is that is that gonna be a turn off for the kind of people that are gonna be pitching? Are they gonna think I’m gonna come in and sell hard?
I actually don’t think you need that. Your the answer to the first prompt that you shared is so compelling, like, to be the first people ever to be able to see how you’re conceptualizing this and the opportunities there. Like, yeah, sign me up for that. I I don’t think you need the the referral, to be in there Okay.
As part of the pitch. Okay. And I would also question too because I think what is hopefully or potentially gonna happen for you is that this workshop will actually become a tool a sales tool for you that doesn’t rely on that referral bonus system, which, I mean, I’ve all four referral bonuses, obviously, it’s worked well for you so far, but this will be a way where you can get in front of people and sell them on your brain and your skills and what you can do for them without actually having to rely on that referral bonus. And you’ll have the workshop itself as a method by which to build know, like, and trust with those people.
So, you know, you said that, you know, you’re borrowing, you know, the person who refers them. You’re borrowing their goodwill for for the first six months. This being able to be in a room with you, see you, hear you, understand what it is you can do for them, that really accelerates that know, like, and trust process. So I actually don’t think you need to include that referral bonus.
And, you know, if you if you if you find out that, actually, that would be really helpful, then you can always add it in, you know, for the next the next workshop that you deliver for the next business. But I strongly encourage you to not not include that for the first the first time because I think the fact that this is such a unique opportunity is amazing, and I think that’s such a compelling reason for someone to say yes to your pitch.
Okay. Yeah. Thank you. I’ll try that for a little bit. Amazing.
Hi, Marina, by the way. Hello.
Hello.
Todd, how did you go with the prompts?
So we’re just talking about the three answers. Correct? The three questions with three answers. Correct? Okay. Cool.
That’s right. Yes.
Yeah. So in terms of how we will benefit them, what I’m looking at is it’s a Philippine ICP workshop. So it’s gonna help put a face to the market and increase conversion rates from the industry standard of five percent.
It’s also gonna create a buyer for them versus selling a product or service.
It’ll benefit their audience because it’s gonna provide clarity in a cluttered landscape. I don’t know if anyone’s ever heard of the surplus economic theory. You’re either first, your second, or your last. So people are searching for your type of brand, and they’ll find you. Then they’re gonna find something that’s kinda close to what you do.
And if they don’t find that, they’ll choose what’s last, and then they’re really not never gonna be happy. So the idea is provide that clarity, be their first choice, and go from there. And then the third one is how would I tailor it? It would be with, one to one interviews and switching up their mindset about how they look at their clients. Most people have come into ICP processes.
They have really no idea of their client. They just think of product, product, product, service, service, service. And then it’s like, well, who is it for? And they’re like, shit.
I, and then you ask questions like, are they male, female? What’s your age? All these things. And some people just get really kind of annoyed because you’re forcing them to get out of the business itself.
So just the one to one when I’m done.
People are just like, wow. Like, you know, it we were talking about this person last night or after a process. I’ve had someone by the name sign up for their product or service. It’s really kinda weird. So that’s what I would do is put those three answers.
Amazing. And you’re I mean, you sound like you’re so clear and compelling and sharp with those responses. So I feel like you’re definitely on a track, Todd. It’s awesome to see.
Hope so.
I hope so. You get you get thrown wrenches in these programs all the time, but but sometimes when when Joe does things, you’re like, shit. Shit. So yeah.
Yes. I think we can all relate.
Amazing. And and then I guess my bigger question for, all of you is how did it feel to sort of switch that frame and to spend some time thinking about all the goodness that exists in your workshop for the people you’re pitching?
Did that have any impact on how you feel about the workshop and how you feel about pitching on how you feel sort of in your body when you’re working through those responses, and it may not have. There’s I’m not I’m not fishing for confirmation. I’m curious.
No. This reframe was really helpful because I was thinking, like, who am I to pitch these big podcasts and websites that I’ve been following?
But now I feel like like nobody else is talking about it. So clearly, it’s it’s of benefit to them to have me on and talk about these things, and it’s like, my podcast with at the the copywriters club was the third most downloaded that year. And I had I was so nervous when I was talking to Rob during the during the recording that I was, like, shaking and all that. But the episode obviously resonated with a lot of, with a lot of people, and it’s happened to be over and over again from other episodes that I’ve recorded.
So, clearly, it’s gonna be of benefit to them. And just thinking about it like that, I think it’s gonna it it does remove a little bit of the desperate energy. I think I was already bringing into the pitch because it’s not something you’re going to do for me now. It’s something that I’m going to do for you and your audience.
So I think that is going to translate so much better into the pitch.
Amazing.
So good to hear. I’m so excited for you. I’m so excited to see your your pictures and and your workshop live in the world.
Me too. Thank you.
And I also just wanted to make a note there too before I forget.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, how, as you mentioned, for the Copywriter Club podcast, you were so nervous, but, obviously, that didn’t translate to how you were perceived in the terms of the episode. So just a good thing to keep in mind too that you can feel so nervous in the moment when you’re doing something, and you can be so sure that it’s translating. But then if you do listen back or you get feedback from it, that’s not always obvious to the people listening. And I think that can be helpful too, something to keep in mind that no one can see what’s going on inside of you.
Yeah. So yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, just a good thing to think of when you are nervous.
Yeah. It’s so weird. That’s the only podcast where I didn’t say a single or a because I was too nervous too, so I was speaking very slowly. And I was like, how is this part where I look through the transcript? I didn’t say or a, like, even once. But I’m like, okay. So it paid off to be that nervous that I was speaking slowly and deliberately that it came off as confident and not, like, you know, shaking.
That’s amazing. You found you found a hack.
Any other thoughts on this stuff before we move on, Claire or Todd? And Marina, sorry. I just should have upped the energy. We’re just going through the, the first three, questions in the worksheet for this session, just in terms of helping shift the frame from, what your workshop can do for you in terms of being a really killer sales tool into what it can actually do for the people that you’re pitching it to.
Thank you.
I still feel kind of scared and salesy.
So Mhmm.
Yeah.
Yeah. I feel like to what to this stuff, I think my my my block or wall to climb is huge. Like yeah. It’s it’s gonna take time.
I do a lot of sailing, and I remember when I started, I was like, how do I improve? How do I get better? I’m learning all this stuff. And everyone said, you can learn as much as you want on books, but it’s time on the water.
Yes.
And it kinda feels like it’s just gonna be time on the water.
One hundred percent. That’s the perfect analogy. Because it is, you know, you can only psych yourself so much up, you know, and learn so much and do all the theory. But at the end of the day, you do need to take the leap and make it a real world thing. And every time it gets better, every time it gets easier, every time it gets more comfortable.
And I think what was last month or the month before that I mentioned that, you know, we often misinterpret discomfort as a sign that we’re doing something we shouldn’t be, but really it’s more often than not a sign that we’re pushing for more or different or better.
So I just encourage you not to see that discomfort as a sign that you’re doing the wrong thing and going in the wrong direction. It’s just that you’re literally growing your comfort zone, getting your sea legs on. That might not be the best addition to your metaphor, but, there you have it. And I also think something I thought of for you too.
Was it you who was saying that you had one of your mindset thoughts was who am I to teach this? Or maybe that was Esai.
No. But that guy totally resonates.
Like, who am I in this grand scheme of everything? Like, there are so many experts out there. I’ve just gone and, like, plucked this from my imagination and, like Mhmm. Study and gone. I have this brand new idea, and I think it works. Let’s see.
Mhmm.
It catches like I’ve been following other people’s frameworks for so long.
It feels bizarre to sort of just try be the master instead of the student. I’m awful. I’m all the geese tonight. Sorry.
I love it.
Yes. And very like, it’s such an exciting place to be, I think, when you’re finally generating your own ideas and concepts, right, and models. Right? You’re no longer just a carbon copy of someone else’s path, but you’ve been able to gather enough experience.
And who you are in a life that you’ve lived has enabled you to see things in a different light, and you’re now putting that out there, you know, as something that is uniquely yours. Obviously, very terrifying because if it’s all yours, then it’s all yours to fail. Right? You know?
I think we all feel that on some level.
So just normalizing that for you. And also wanted to say that I think often, particularly when we are pitching ourselves to, people or brands who are really big deal in our space, we often confuse the size of their success with the size of their knowledge about what we have to share. So we’re if you can imagine circles, like, we’re like, okay. They’re this big deal.
Like, this is their knowledge. They’re huge. And I’m like, I’m in here. I’m this little tiny circle in here.
Like, what do I have to offer? But the reality is that we both have big circles of knowledge, and the overlap is quite small. So so much of your circle is absolutely brand new to them even though they’re a huge established business.
I don’t know if that helps, and I don’t know if I’ve explained that very well.
Would be a good time. It’s a Venn diagram.
It’s a circle, and then it’s a circle inside the circle, and then another slightly overlapping circle.
Yes. The big circle is their success.
You know, it’s so interesting you said that, Christy. I Christy, I was actually doing my structural research on my ICP, and one of them is head of content. And doctoral, they give you it gives you keywords. Right?
What are the keywords they’re searching? Like, the top ten keywords are, like, basic SEO tips, like how to do SEO, like a simple beginner’s guide to SEO. It’s like the top ten search, and these are heads of head of content in, like, SaaS companies. And I was like, what?
Thank you.
Isn’t that amazing?
So hopeful.
Yes. That’s so reassuring, isn’t it? It’s like, cool. That’s where their head’s at. It’s like, I’m way above that for that yet.
That’s amazing.
Had anything come up for you, and no pressure.
If if not, feel free to just shake your head, and I won’t force you to to talk to me.
No. No one’s ever forced here. So, yeah. Yeah. I think everything that comes down to what we’re doing in pitch, mindset, everything for me is just the the acceleration nature.
I think these are things that you might, like, be a little dilettante shit and kinda dabble and try and figure it out, but this forces you. There’s like you know, Ryan Schwartz always talked about that, authentic scarcity. It’s not FOMO, but it’s, like, just forcing you to, like there’s an urgent timer behind you and, like, you just feel it and you’re kinda like, stop. Leave me alone.
And it’s just kinda there and it’s but it’s it’s effective. Right? You you’re you’re coming into programs and, and meetings where other people are doing it and you’re seeing it and, like, Claire’s talking about it and what she’s going through, but she’s doing it. She’s showing up.
She’s in the you know, you’re in the boat, Claire. You know what I mean? And it’s it’s tough, but that’s what it is for me. It’s the acceleration.
I I’ve been working ICPs for a while. We did as a a studio, we did ICPs, but it’s always on the website and, you know, it’s more inbound. And what we’re doing now is more outbound. And it’s just accelerating that that approach.
And you’re literally going, like, we sign up for webinars. Now we’re running webinars in a workshop. So it’s just, again, that mindset. Right?
And that’s to me, it’s just the acceleration nature. I love it myself. It makes for long days, but I love it. And when you when we all when you get it together, you can see it’s laid out.
So that’s what it is for me. It’s just taking what I’ve already had and just refining it more. Right? So and this group is kinda like iron sharpening iron for me.
It helps you with everything that we do.
So Amazing.
I love the way you conceptualize things, Todd. It’s very cool to hear because you’re right. There is a big acceleration happening, and I think particularly in CSP. Right? There’s a new theme every month that Joe’s dropping knowledge nuggets everywhere.
And Every month.
Every day, I go I go into coffee school like CSP. I’m like, oh, man.
Do you know what this is?
What you wanna do? And you’re like, oh, just getting it done and trying to document it and do it. And, like, everyone here is it’s funny. Again, everyone here is questioning it, but we’re, you know, it’s like, because we’re learning from a different way and it’s, like, just being patient with it as we accelerate.
Right? But again, yeah. I I mean, I it’s when you say conceptualize, it’s actually for me, the concept that was always there. What I’m learning is that, again, we’re just framing a concept that we already had.
And just making because if it makes sense to us, it will definitely make sense to anybody else because what we do is persuade people.
So That’s right.
So I did also have, just going back to the worksheet, I did also have a section in there to help you actually craft the pitch, but I think just given, that Joe’s workshop is two part. Hang on. Let me put this in present mode.
Sorry. I love that in music. Not sure why that was there.
So I think I will actually leave this, second half of the worksheet for you guys to dive into as you need because I suspect if the workshops themselves aren’t yet finalized, Jo has obviously more to step you through next week. We might be jumping the gun a little bit here.
But please come back and use this if you do need some help and some structure to guide you on getting that first pitch on paper, because often that first one can be the hardest. Right?
And please ping me in Slack as you go if you’re like, hey, Kirsty. I’m getting stuck on this. I need some help with this. Or can you review this for me? I would absolutely love to do that. And the one other thing I note, and I see your hand tied, I’ll, get to you in a sec before I forget.
I suspect after seeing Jo’s worksheet, it may be that, that she will be encouraging you to pitch, leading with pains rather than benefits.
But anyway, that will be TBC. So just highlighting that there may be a difference there.
This is the structure that I usually use for my pictures. My pictures are usually very successful, so this does work. It might just be a different, I guess, focus than what Joe may be may be teaching you. Alright.
Cool. If it’s okay, we have a couple of minutes just sitting where where we are. For anyone who has ever seen me in these these groups, I never really asked for critique. So it’s not something I normally share.
So if possible, if if it’s okay, when you’re saying crafting your pitch, I wrote one. Can I just check it out here and I’ll put it in Slack and then just say it out loud? And I wouldn’t mind some critique on it if possible. Anybody I want a game for that.
Cool. So here’s the in chat, there’s the actual relevance because you you said, like, why am I pitching?
Mhmm. Great. Yep.
And then the actual promise is this.
And the again, if for anyone just reading, the the pitch itself was the targeting is on point. Because we know if you’ve got a great brand, as soon as you start researching them, you’re gonna get retargeting no matter where you’re and what’s going on. And then, yeah, the the promise is what I’m I’m curious about as well.
And the promise is nineteen words, so it’s very on brand voice, Claire. We’ll talk about that after.
So the promise part is, the the way it’s phrased is confusing me a little bit, but maybe I’m just missing a piece of context.
So the promise is that you start with shared language, or is that Yes.
So it’s the it start with shared language. So that’s all all one sentence, but it just broken up with the call. So it start with shared language. K. And shared language is understanding your ICPs.
And when you understand the ICPs that it was one to one interviews, brand voice naturally comes out of that through osmosis. And then, really, what happens, you’re able to stay on brand throughout all channels by knowing your vocabulary, by not only knowing the client, but knowing your vocabulary, your cadence, and your tone.
Awesome. So I’m just curious. Do you think the people you are pitching would know what start with shared language means, that phrase?
No. That’s why the ICP will be bringing them into that. The actual story of the workshop would be ICP. And then as I promote, it will be based on you know, we’ll break down what a shared language is and all of those things, like, through promotion, through authority building.
Okay. Cool. Because I feel like the way you explained it the second time. I was like, ah, cool.
I understand why that’s valuable. So I think for the pitch itself, you know, you need to sort of meet them where they’re at and not use any of your terms too early on in the pitch. Yeah. Because it’s it’s less meaningful.
Right? If they’re like, I don’t know what this means. But if you can explain to them in terms that it’s a mate. Right?
Like, they’re your ICP, so you’re gonna be pulling the words from their head in terms of what they’re thinking about and what they would love to achieve.
I would suggest leading with that and using that language in the promise rather than the language of what you’re going to step them through during the workshop because they’re not there yet.
Hundred percent.
That make sense?
Hundred percent.
Any other thoughts?
If I might add something, I would reconsider putting the part where you say put a face to your ideal flying profile because that sort of gives away a little bit of your process. And I’ve found that sometimes people have resistance towards certain things, so they feel like either they assume they already know what you’re going to talk what you’re going to talk about, but they will decide whether it’s for them or not even before understanding what it is. So I would rather I would actually suggest removing your process from it entirely and only speak about the benefits like you like you did when you act when you’re actually talking about it, you didn’t talk about putting a face. You only talked about the benefits that they will get, which Claire so beautifully summarized. So I think that’s a lot more powerful.
Yep. Hundred percent. Thank you.
Awesome. Any other thoughts from anyone or any other questions from you, Todd? No? Amazing. Thanks for sharing that. Claire?
Yeah. I just wanna say, Todd, I find you so eloquent. Like, when you’re I honestly feel like you should just talk and, like, get it down on paper and then use that. Just talk and tell chat g p t to, like, neaten it up a bit because you’re so eloquent in speech, honestly.
Like, every time you talk, I’m like, oh my gosh. You sound so intelligent. Everything’s, like, all packaged together in these nice ideas. Why can’t I do that?
Can do that on writing.
Like, when I talk, I start going in tangents.
So yeah.
That’s actually what I just summarized was what you, like, said verbatim.
So that yeah.
Okay. My question.
I would love to see an example of one of your, successful or even unsuccessful pitches and what that actually looks like because I have no idea what I would even start typing.
Like Yeah.
Of course.
I’m so happy to share one of those with you. It will be a dive through my Google Drive, though. So is it okay if I pop plunk it in Slack later today? Is that alright?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Of course. Whatever works. That would just be so helpful to, like, yeah, move move past the, like, I don’t know what to write kind of plot.
Yeah. Of course. No problems whatsoever.
And I know. Seeing real life thing is actually quite helpful. I might even have two.
I’ve kept any of these. I may even have some too. I have, like, the back and forth then from the person I was pitching, which might also be helpful to see because often it’s not just that you send the pitch and then it’s like booked in done. There can often be some back and forth in terms of them, you know, working things out and locking it in. So I can see if I have any of those two email chains that I’ve shared and sorry. Kept. And I can share those and just block out names and email addresses so that no one’s vulnerable.
Thank you so much. That’d be very helpful.
My pleasure. Esai.
So my first part of my question was gonna be that, you know, what does that conversation look like? Because, obviously, the first pitch is not gonna be the one that immediately converts. So how do we I have I have a process that I follow for myself and for my clients that sort of works. We do a multichannel approach, like email, social, sort of keep one channel.
We follow-up on follow-up via email, but just sort of chat and just have a friendly conversation via social. So it’s never awkward, even though it’s a door or whatever. The relationship is still alive. But I would love to know your process of what that conversation looks like, One, so thank you for sharing that.
But two, I was also wondering and I know you have a part with call to action here, but what that looks like because it might not be an immediate yes or an immediate let’s get on a call. Right? So would it be better to have a a different call to action at the first pitch, or what is it that you would recommend?
Yeah. So I think this is where context is really important. Right?
So even the platform of which you’re pitching, so you’re thinking about some podcast, right, for example, or if you’re thinking about, speaking inside of someone else’s paid program or mastermind, that’s gonna be different to pitching, say, ActiveCampaign to be, you know, to present a workshop customers. So Mhmm. I think thinking about the context of that, like, what is the call to action that actually makes sense? Like, how are you gonna be most likely to book this workshop in?
So and I think also the context too of, like, what is your relationship with the person you’re pitching? Because in some cases you may have like a connection with them. Maybe you met them at an event, you know, maybe you both have worked with the same person. There could be something there that you could leverage as well.
Or is it just a pure cold pitch, right, where you you just know that this is gonna be a really high value brand for you to actually get in tunnel.
So, thinking through all of those things, I think, can help you determine the call to action.
So for example, with if when I’m pitching podcasts, it’s never jump on a call because I think I’ve actually never had to jump on a call to land a podcast spot. Yeah. Yeah. I find that with podcasts, it’s all done via email.
Yeah. That’s been my experience. So Yeah. My call to action has been usually something along the lines of, you know, how do you think this would land for your audience?
Hit reply and let me know. So something as simple as that that just stimulates a conversation. And then if I don’t hear back from them within, say, three working days, I’ll then just follow-up and say, hey. Just wanted to to see how you you know, how this is sitting for you.
So, you know, a much softer CTA in that case because of the context of the fact that, you know, the podcast track isn’t gonna wanna jump on a call with me before they get me on the podcast. Like, the call was gonna be the interview.
Yeah. Yeah.
But that’s helpful. I just ran with you.
I can No. No. No. That’s helpful because I did. I I am thinking about pitching whole pitching podcast that don’t know me and I don’t have a preexisting relationship with.
So the softer CD, I think, is what I was thinking. Like, how does this idea did did you have the follow-up was thinking, did you have any suggestion? Would you suggest tweaks or what else came up along with Yes. Thing of, like, referencing some of the more recent podcasts.
I think that could be a good way to follow-up as well.
Yes. Definitely. Anything that’s current or relevant, I think, is always a good a good way to follow-up.
And I do think I think, actually, I shared one of my podcast pictures, in Slack a few months ago.
So I can see if it I’ll I’ll go back and tag you in it, Esai, because Yeah.
And maybe Claire as well if you’d like to see that one. I don’t know if podcasts are relevant for yep.
Cool. I’ll I’ll tag you both, and and if anyone else wants me to tag them, let me know.
But that was for Rick Mulready’s, Art of Online Business podcast, which at the time was a really, huge win for me.
So yeah. Was that a yes tag me please too from Todd or okay. Awesome.
Okay.
Easy.
Any final thoughts, questions, conundrums, cries for help?
No.
Well, as always, it’s been an absolute pleasure to spend this hour with you all.
Please ping me in Slack. I’ll go find that post with the podcast pitch now, and I’ll go through my Google Drive and find some more that I can share, Claire, and hopefully some email exchanges too, just so you can see sort of what the back and forth can look like and and how the the pitch can, I guess, not evolve, but how it can sort of have some flex in it to to really meet what the ideal you know, the person you’re pitching might want?
Any questions as you go along and do any of this stuff, if you need any pep talks or anything, please reach out in Slack. Just tag me, and I’ll see it.
I would love to really, like, help you as you go, so please don’t be shy.
Alright. I’ll see you in Slack.
Thank you so much. I’m definitely gonna ask for a pet dog. Great. Yes. Do. Please do.
Alright. Thanks, everyone.
Thank you.
The Buyer Handbook: Find and Attract Your Ideal Buyers
The Buyer Handbook: Find and Attract Your Ideal Buyers
Transcript
Excellent. Okay. So we have a few more people joining. Of course, this is recording, but this is our Copy School Pro call of the week. This week, we are talking continuing on with our final week, actually, of the buyer handbook.
Next week, as you’ll see in the Coffee School Pro training area very soon, next week, we will have a whole new theme starting, and that one for the month of July is under the sunshine growth model.
When you look at the skills part of the sunshine growth model and the skills that you use, those are used to grow your business, like administrative stuff or things like list building and social followers. That’s what we’re doing next month is all about list building, and getting more social followers where social can be the best path toward building your list today. But we’ll talk more about that all next starting next week. We’re gonna get started on Instagram.
We’re gonna get into gamifying list building, with Shane. We’ll do a webinar, like, how to create a waking up to the problem webinar that you can present to other people’s audiences. I’ll be running that. So if you are wondering how to get in front of other audiences, like what we’re gonna talk about today, then this will be useful for you.
So there’s a lot coming up in July. Watch for all of that. Two lessons a week as usual.
And then this week this week oh, yeah. This week, we have Shane wrapping up, our, buyer handbook month with using AI to create your business’ actual buyer handbook. So that should be fun and exciting.
Alright.
It’s a bit of a working session today. We’ll be doing some actual work, which I hope is good for everybody in the room. And, yeah, there will, of course, be a replay, and there is the worksheet. So if you can open up the worksheet that we that Sarah sent out over the weekend that has the buyer handbook, find and attract your ideal buyers. I’m about to share my screen.
This is, of course, a really this is a fundamental topic, finding people who will buy the stuff that you’ve got, pretty important.
We we we need to do that. That’s just how life works. Now, hopefully, they’ll find you right back, but you still need to show up conveniently where they are. So that’s what we’re gonna talk about here today. Let me just go into presentation mode.
If you haven’t watched other sessions from the month of June on the buyer handbook, go back through the Coffee School Pro training area and pick up some more stuff there where we’re talking about ICPs, personas, personas underneath your ICP, all of that kind of stuff that, is critical to understanding who you’re talking to and if they’re the right person to talk to right now. And, of course, they will talk about where they are. So this is going to be very useful for you. If you wanna find out where your ICPs are, you will need to have your laptop open in front of you to do this work.
If not, your phone might be okay, but we’re gonna go into a tool, today. And maybe you already have access to that tool. And if you do, awesome. And if you don’t, that’s okay. They have a free thing that you can use today.
And then after this, you’re going to be ready to start pitching brands, not people.
Brands on partnering to share your content. Now there are people at the brands, but what people often talk about for freelancers with cold pitching is go cold pitch a potential client. And there’s nothing technically wrong with that, except it doesn’t scale very well. It takes a lot of work to do it, and we would all rather people just come to us.
So we’re gonna borrow the authority of other brands, which I talk about all the time, because that’s how I got here. So if not for me, absolutely latching on to the authority of other brands, way back in the beginning, I would not have the business that I have today. Not at all. And I’m very happy with the business I have today.
And so I can say, and I think a lot of people who look back at their growth or their lack of growth will be able to look at the network that they tapped into or did not tap into early on. So for me, Hacker News was a big part of it. So that’s community. What community can and should you participate in right now? We’re gonna work on finding those communities today.
It would be better if you’d started working in that community five years ago. Of course, it would everything better if we’d started doing any of this stuff five years ago, but we didn’t. So we’re going to do it today and not let any of the crap in because this crap always comes in. Oh, there’s no way in. It’s saturated, etcetera, etcetera. Shush.
We’re just gonna do the work. Just do the work and don’t think about it.
I also partnered with brands.
Unbounce was just starting out. HubSpot was still small enough that people weren’t necessarily that familiar with everything HubSpot could do. It wasn’t ubiquitous like it is today when I was starting out. Leadpages was like a whole different thing at the time, and Wistia was two dudes.
That was it. So but we partnered with them early on, and now their brands have grown. Our brands have grown and been able to, like, carry on. Our brand has grown and been able to carry on with it.
So I borrowed their authority. You need to do the same because there is an a early version of Wistia out there right now. There’s an early version of Unbounce out there right now.
Partner with them. They have as much hustle as anybody else had twelve, fifteen years ago, they are people to, partner with. So we’re gonna talk about who those, like, hidden gems are, and that’s really the goal today. When you find where your people are at, then we want you to put a webinar, which you’ll probably call a workshop, in front of them as soon as humanly possible.
And you’re going to force it to snowball. You’re not going to sit there and go, okay, I wonder if this is gonna work. You are going to make it work because that is how we get shit done. That’s what separates us here. We will force the snowball effect. Okay. So how do we even get started?
We’re gonna find people online using SparkToro. Has anybody used SparkToro before?
Yes. Cool. Are you using it now?
Good. It’s very easy to start and cancel, start and cancel. That’s actually you know, anybody who’s worked with them knows that’s a an actual challenge for them. As you use it, get everything you need out of it, and then you cancel, but you might come back four months later and use it all over again. So it’s a bit of a a different subscription model. But will you use SparkToro, in order to find out where people are, obviously, that’s what SparkToro does. It helps you find out what they’re talking about, etcetera.
But oftentimes when you’re using SparkToro and I’m just gonna open this up, over to the side as I move Zoom around. When you’re using SparkToro, it’s often defined, like, keywords and things like that.
Not keywords for social necessarily, what brand should I be looking up?
Just mine. And so I’m what brand should I be looking up? Just mine. And so I’m going to recommend that you look up a complementor. So instead of a competitor, this is someone who is like a competitor, but they’re more complimentary. So for us, ConvertKit or Kit might be a complimenter for us because we share a similar audience of digital creators, but we want to find a group that has more traffic, ideally, significantly more traffic than we get.
So for me, I might look up convertkit dot com, or I might look at other complementors. April Dunford and I have similar audiences in some ways. It depends on what I’m trying to sell. In other ways, we have very different audiences.
So that might be somebody that I look up to see, what because we can’t look up ourselves. Right? If you’re if you have a brand new website or you’ve got, like, five people coming a day to your website, you can’t really use SparkToro or yourself to get a sense of it. So we need to go and basically get a sense of the audience that our complementors or even full on competitors have.
So if you’re like, okay. I’m serving this market, but I know that this other brand is huge and they’re serving the same market I am. We’re just gonna use this over here in SparkToro. So you should now be seeing the SparkToro interface where you wanna go to the tab audience research.
What I recommend is right now, while I’m chattering, if you’re not using SparkToro, start an account right now. It’s free. You just, like, go to SparkToro dot com, use your Gmail or whatever to create an account quickly, get in there because we’re going to go to the audience research tab and this there’s all sorts of things.
Claire, did you work with Jia and Claire on SparkToro stuff?
Sorry. Muted. I have someone on the tab. Yes. I did. Okay.
Wait back to before two point o.
You would know, of course, more than I I’ve used for Arturo on and off, but I’m not, like, a power user of it. So, Claire, if you have anything to add, please do feel free to at any point or anybody who uses this and and has something to add here, please please do.
What we wanna do today is start by listing out three brands, ideally, the dot com version, like, the actual website that gets the audience you wish you could get. Now that could a really obvious one is some sort of software Software made for different audiences. So if you’re like, I want to work primarily with nonprofits, then you’d go look you should know what software people who are at nonprofits use. If you were like, I only work with real estate developers, then you’ll know or or realtors. And you might say, like, okay. Realtors use follow-up boss. So I’m going to look up follow-up boss and see what comes up.
And that’s what I’ll use to get started here on filling this in.
We have to wait for it to load, so we’re gonna do that. While that’s happening, make sure you’ve started your SparkToro account and start thinking of these people. So you have to first first know who your ideal audience is and then what they trust. So I don’t have a part on here for your ideal audience because you already know that That’s, like, very introductory basic stuff.
Tell Rand what did you say? Oh, got it. Fine. To pedal faster?
Is he in a race right now? Is he, like, biking somewhere, Andrew?
Or Andrew?
Are you chatting to us? Oh, he’s powering the sparktor.
I got it. I didn’t get that. Okay.
Now I got it.
I was slow. It’s my damn slow. Yeah. It’s taking a while to load up. Is it slow is it slow for everybody?
No? For some? Okay.
So we’ll just set that aside, and I will walk through what our objective is, like, what we’re going to do along the way. So if you can list out those three to five groups, you’re going to enter and repeat this process for those three to five different groups in here. For follow-up, boss, really?
Okay. So we’ll go through a creative free SparkToro account, go to audience research, search the website or domain of a complementor, then we’re going to fill this in for for, like, three to five of those groups. Knowing that as just happened here, sometimes, Barktoro won’t have enough data for it. So just keep that in mind, and then just repeat. Then afterward, we’re going to save this and downloaded data because you can export data on, SparkToro from SparkToro to wherever. This is the kind of thing that you’ll want to share with your VA as you move forward or just have for yourself as you, like, get deeper and deeper into building your business.
Knowing more about who and where they are is everything. It’s the thing that keeps people from growing is I don’t know how to get in front of my audience because I don’t know where they are. What are they paying attention to? And then everybody gravitates to the exact same people.
Well, all Chorus creators want to get or or follow Amy Porterfield. Okay. Great. But what software are they using?
What plug ins for that software are available? What Chrome extensions are they using? Can you partner with those smaller groups in order to get some traction? Because everybody can’t go around pitching Amy Porterfield, and her audience gets fatigued too versus the smaller companies that are out there that are gaining traction and would love to help an x to have an expert like you come in and teach their audience.
This is a big thing. Unbounce wanted me to come in and teach their audience to be better at making landing pages because it’s good for Unbounce. Same was true for Leadpages. Same was true for ConvertKit.
All of these different groups early on want you to come train their audience, and the good thing is you want to do that too. You wanna be an authority in front of them, so we need to find out where they are. So we’re gonna use SparkToro to find out where your buyers are. It might not be your audience.
Now if your audience if your website gets a lot of traffic, then this is gonna be really directly applicable for you. Like, oh, this is where my audience is coming from. That’s cool to know. What you’ll really wanna focus on, though, are not, like, the top accounts, but the hidden gems.
So you’ll see when you do oh, now they do have stuff. You’ll see when you go through here that, they have these bigger accounts, like, how are you going to pitch Realtor magazine?
Instead, you’ll probably wanna look at some hidden gems. Now they don’t have any hidden gems here, so that would be a thing where I’d have to then go do another search. But what I want to do is not just focus on all of these giant places to pitch, but where are my buyers going? What websites are they visiting is step one.
So we wanna write in the websites that they visit based on what you’re seeing here. Focus only on the ones that where you can actually answer. I can guest here, or I can advertise here. If it’s not an option, although this is a column that I have on the worksheet, if you can’t do anything with this, like, if you’re like, well, I can’t do anything with Keller Williams.
Like, it’s a giant broker brand. What what might I do? That’s too hard for me to conceive of putting a web webinar together. I mean, maybe maybe it’s a ten x that’s worth it more than, like, something else that could feel like a two x.
But try to be, like, realistic because you could list out all the websites they visit that are huge names. And then you think, okay. I can guess here. And if you get no’s across the board, you’re going to not feel good about it. So we wanna be able to get you wins in here. So maybe put some big websites in alongside some smaller websites in.
Don’t underestimate the power of directly advertising in some of these spaces. That doesn’t mean you go to their advertised page, but there are ways to get in. We’re not gonna talk about those today.
But you can, in some cases, advertise where they’re at, and that’s gonna get more real as we get into newsletters and podcasts that look more like sponsorships.
Then you’ll go through and look at their, YouTube channels. This is really straightforward stuff. Right? Like, you just go through and use SparkToro, but document what you’re learning so that you’re not just like, oh, yeah.
Cool. I’m gonna, like, probably hit home lights. We’ll write it down. Write it down and then say, okay.
I can guess here. Because at the end of this, we’re gonna go through and make an actual plan for what you will do over the next ninety days. This will feel like, big work, but it’s useful work to do. It’s where your buyers are at right now.
Like they’re sitting there right now.
So we want to go get them. So we’ll go through and look at YouTube channels that they watch. There are a lot of columns here. Websites are a little trickier, so I didn’t put that many or a lot of rows.
Sorry. I didn’t put that many rows in here because a website could feel like, what do I even do with the website? What we’re really saying is the brand behind the website. A YouTube channel is far more specific.
If you know that they’re all going to let’s see where they’re going. HomeLight. Okay. So HomeLight is really popular as a YouTube channel, I guess, for people in the realtor space.
So you could write in home light, and then you could figure out what am I going to do with this. Go look. Go look into what HomeLight is doing on YouTube. Is there anything you could do there?
It might just be as simple as I can try to advertise. I can put a video together for these people. I can try to figure something out. Can you guest there?
You’d have to watch and see. Like, do they have podcasts that are also video that they post there? Can you try to pitch them on getting on that? If you can and if it’s a big enough swing, it’s going to be worth your time.
If it’s a small swing, then you have to make sure it’s a really scalable thing. And that’s, like, put one workshop together, which we’ll be talking about next month, that you can then pitch and you keep repeating that workshop in all of these smaller places. It’s a twenty minute workshop. The leads come directly to you, not to them, etcetera. We’ll get into that next month.
But first of all, you need to know where you’re gonna pitch it. Otherwise, when you put the webinar together next month, you’ll be like, well, what the hell do I do with this thing now? So this is that work.
Every second page in this workbook is for you to make notes to self. So if you haven’t printed this off and started going through it, I recommend you do. If you don’t print it off, if you just, like, go through and mark up the PDF, absolutely cool too. But some people will look at this table and do nothing with it.
Go like, oh, yeah. Cool. Good lesson. And move on. I don’t want you to be that person.
You’re here right now. Do the thing.
Add notes to self. Add notes for a VA if you’ve got one.
What are you thinking right now about the Homelight YouTube channel? What are you thinking? Write down your notes as they come up. If I’m chattering, turn the volume down on me. You can come back and watch the replay later if you’re actually doing work and I’m talking through your work. I’m good with you muting me. I just can’t mute myself because other people have to still do the work.
Continuing on. Oh, Claire. Yes.
Sorry to interrupt.
I I can build a list on Airtable. So I’ve got I’ve got a list of, like, fifty websites.
Sorry. Eight hundred websites, actually. Fifty YouTube channels and a bunch of subreddits that I kind of narrowed down. The subreddits were actually easiest to narrow down to my OCD.
Yes. Yes. They’re also obviously the easiest to, like, research and post on. But when it comes to YouTube and websites and I’m looking at, like, big brands, like, let’s say Crazy Egg, for example.
They do SaaS. They do analytics. People who are interested in that are probably interested in what I do. Mhmm.
But, wow, how do I begin to, like, even start narrowing down all of the different sites and also, like, figure out if they allow advertising. Because a lot of places have stopped having, like, a guest posts available page because they get crazy. Right. So yeah.
So, yeah, any advice on that?
That’s where I I firmly believe that if you can run a workshop that gets recorded and played and that brand then puts it on their YouTube. It comes up as a search result when your name is searched.
That’s what we wanna do. I would focus entirely on what is an audience.
It could be Crazy Egg if you’re subscribed. So step one, make sure you’re actually subscribed to that brand’s newsletter or email list, however that comes in. If that means you have to get a free, a free user account, free trial account, then do it. Do it and start, like, looking through.
Does Crazy Egg ever invite people to workshops?
Like and if they do, have a look at it because you might be like, Kajabi invites a lot of people to workshops, but then they’re also affiliates for all of those workshops. So you have to sell something in the workshop. So that’s not gonna be a good fit because Kajabi would be like, no. Because you’re not selling anything at the end, and so we’re not gonna make any affiliate revenue off of this.
Okay, fine. So the more you know about what they’re doing to create content and share content for their audience, the better. So that would be step one. And then then the challenge is not a guest blog post because a lot of people are not publishing guest blog posts right now.
Written content is not what it was.
So what can you do? Can you get in front of their Instagram audience somehow?
Can you I would really, really put all my eggs honestly in the basket of workshop, workshop, workshop.
They’re going to do live events of some kind. I mean, live online events.
Any brand that is scrappy enough to try to break in right now that has a little bit of money to spend is teaching their users to be better users. It’s just like a really classic playbook for getting your SaaS brand out there.
So if you if you can say, okay. I’m really clear on who my ICP is on the persona under that that this group does watch workshops.
Workshops get a bad rap. No one watches a webinar. No people people don’t watch low value stuff. But if it’s coming from a brand that they trust, then they’re more likely to watch it.
So I will watch all the webinars that Gong dot IO puts out, because they teach good stuff about sales calls and all of the stuff that matters to me. They’re not putting crap out there. I don’t get three tips for running a sales call. I get, like, here’s how to do multithreading four zero one, which is really valuable.
Right? So you do need a workshop.
It needs to be the right value level for the audience you’re trying to attract that will wake them up to their problem. So not thirteen copywriting tips, obviously, but something more strategic, something that where five people who attend reach out to you immediately, not some other thing, which, again, we’ll talk about next month when we talk about the workshop that you should be getting out there. But, Claire, as a long answer to your question, focus on getting that workshop together and then finding the right group based on what you know about how they’re creating content and promoting it to pitch because Crazy Egg might not be the way to go.
Does that make sense?
Got it. Super helpful. Yes.
I love that you have that giant air table.
That’s great. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Like, pay for it. It’s so expensive as software.
So I might as well use this.
Yeah. Totally.
Yeah. The tricky thing about, like, lists of eight hundred is, like, where do you start? Right? So that’s very tricky. And that’s why I frankly like limiting it to, like, only the size of this worksheet.
If you can take that table you already have all filled in and start, like, limiting your options, putting those constraints around it. You’re only allowed twelve podcasts that they listen to only right in twelve then. Every this is ninety days. This isn’t the rest of your life. This is the next ninety days. What are you going to do? Where are you gonna pitch?
So same as these for podcasts. They listen to make notes to self subreddits that they frequent.
And that might not be where you create content, but you can get involved in conversations, obviously.
Any notes to self there, social accounts that they follow, these are gonna be hidden gems, not the big ones necessarily, but not tiny ones either. So you wanna look through and make sure and next month, we’ll talk more about Instagram followers and stuff like that.
But keep in mind, when I say buyers throughout this, I don’t just mean ICP. So not just that ideal client profile, but the persona under it. So you might say, people who are in a marketing capacity are your persona, and a lot of them are women. So they may be on x social space versus other groups.
So what I want you to do is not discount. I’ve had people discount. Oh, nobody’s on social. None of my the people that I’m trying to reach are on social.
And I’m like, that’s Europe to lunch. Of course, they’re on social. We’re all on some form of social unless you’ve actively chosen not to be, and then chances are good you’re not in digital marketing because you you gotta be on social if you’re in digital marketing. And if you’re hearing this and going, but I’m not on social and I’m in digital marketing, get on social.
It’s time. You have to. You have to. If I have to, you have to. Because I have to, and I’m not always happy about it.
Then we wanna get into keywords and topics. This is just not so that you’re creating content that is keyword rich or keyword targeted necessarily.
But when it comes time as we get deeper and deeper into the work, this isn’t just it’s not none of the work we do is siloed. Right? It feels like it because it’s a rectangular document, and it effectively looks like a silo. But it’s not.
This is all gonna work together. So you might not use trending keywords you can post about right now. But since you’re in SparkToro and it will share with you what some of those trending keywords are, you can see all the keywords. Obviously, it’s Rand.
Document them because that could be stuff that you can pitch content about. If it’s trending in particular, you can then adjust your workshop or webinars that the title is more about that trending keyword, but it’s still actually about the same thing. And this would just be a trending keyword that’s related to what you do. So if you’re like, oh, none of these keywords are related to what I do, that’s okay.
Just put a strike through it so that you know you did the work and nothing was there or do an NA or whatever, but I just don’t want it to look blank. I find that frustrating when things are blank. Maybe you don’t. Okay.
Now this is gonna wrapping up this conversation here. I know that we can’t do all the work because SparkToro is being a slow little bunny.
But go off and do it afterward, please. It’s on your business. Your business wants you to. That’s why you’re part of Coffee School Pro. So make sure that you do it.
Hacker News was where I started. I swear by finding a community and being of value to it before you try to take anything out of it. So add to the bank. Keep adding to the bank, and then later, you can start withdrawing.
Start now. If you don’t have a community that you’re part of, start now. It’s time to. Got it. And it could pay off a lot faster than, like, I wasn’t using Hacker News for a thing. I was just interested in what people were doing on Hacker News, like, cool, fun startup ideas and stuff like that. It’s, like, scrappy atmosphere.
So I want you to know what your Hacker News is.
I found that if you go on Reddit, you can find a lot of good communities talked about on Reddit. So go on there immediately.
Most of us are on Reddit for some things anyway, just for fun even. If you can go on Reddit and search something as simple like where are marketers hanging out? And you’ll see all sorts of responses. You can just Google Reddit and then that search phrase or whatever you want to look or, you’ll find them.
They’re listed there. Slack group. You need a couple Slack groups that you could request to join. So, ideally, they won’t just be open to everybody.
If there are a hundred and twenty thousand people in there, don’t do it. Don’t you go into that Slack group. That is going to be a waste of your time.
So Slack groups that are limited or private membership or even that are, like, you have to pay the cost of the monthly Slack charge, like, eight bucks a month plus two dollars for the administrative person who has to take care of all of this, that’s going to narrow the number of people who are in that Slack group, and that’s good for you. You don’t want a hundred and twenty thousand people in a Slack group, in a Discord, in in bigger communities maybe.
You you really do wanna focus on a concentrated group of professionals.
So if that means joining the paid product led growth Slack group, if there’s a way to do that without taking the course, I don’t recommend the course. But if you can do that, cool. Because now you’re in a product led growth Slack community, and everybody in there is concerned about product led growth. And most of them are just actively in start ups or tech companies that are using product led growth.
If that’s your ideal audience, it only makes good sense for you to participate in that group. Adding value, not taking it out, not saying, hey. I’ll do that for you. Wait until people are like, woah.
Wait. You’re a SaaS copywriter, and you do the research?
I had no idea that’s true for you. Can we talk? That’s exciting. That’s better. That’s good. So find a Slack group.
Discord, particularly if you work with tech in any way. There’s going to be a bunch of nerds who said no to Slack and yes to Discord.
So go check out Discords as well, which, of course, Reddit is also very good for nerds. So you can find all the Discord groups on Reddit too.
Clearly, I am more targeted at tech and SaaS companies than I am health and wellness and other groups like that. However, you can apply the same rules to finding same stuff for health and wellness. And if you’re like, Reddit doesn’t work for that, well, then something else, the health and wellness equivalent of Reddit.
Be resourceful. Figure that part out. The point is you need to walk away with at least one really solid Slack group for that your ideal audience is in so that you can start participating and adding value, answering questions, posting useful resources, all of those sorts of things that make you a useful part of that community. And then when it’s time for you to, like, withdraw a little from the bank, you got lots of credit there.
You got lots that you can do there. So go ahead and make sure you’re brainstorming based on everything you’re seeing on SparkToro, based on the idea of participating in a Slack group. What are you going to do? Can you come up with a brand that you could partner with?
Can you come up with three brands that you could partner with? And I mean, Unbounce thirteen years ago, Wistia twelve years ago, those sorts of groups.
Who are they today?
Can you find a way to partner with them? Where are they showing up? Where are their heads of growth showing up? Or where are the CEOs slash CMO slash cheap garbage take routers? Like, they’re doing everything.
Where are they right now? Where are they consuming content? Where are they hoping to find that next great idea?
Get in front of them. But you need to brainstorm this stuff, move through it, and then start to figure out, okay.
If it’s x brand, whoever it is, if it’s boards, let’s say words is up and coming. They’re doing lots of cool stuff. They’ve got lots and lots of users, but they really wanna scale. Boards could be my audience.
What webinar could I pitch to boards? What would make the users of boards better users of boards? Maybe it’s around x. And if it doesn’t make sense to it, you’re like, oh, no.
They need me to, like, help them write social posts and stuff. Forget it. Not boards. Next.
Cool. Eliminate things. That’s a big part of, like, finding the gold is washing away everything else until you get to the gold. Right?
So put a whole bunch of stuff in there and then start figuring out what to do. That’s the point of brainstorming. One page should not be enough. If you can do it all in one page, that was like a brain drizzle.
We wanna go on full storm, really stormy stuff, lots of stuff. And then that’ll help you get down to a ninety day attraction plan, which is free. It’s free and loose because all of this is there to tighten up your ideas where you can be. Now once you’ve got a brainstorm in place, what are you going to do over the next ninety days?
That’s July, August, September. Or if you’re watching the replay, whatever month you’re in, plus two more after that. What are you going to do for that, for the next ninety days? Are you going to pitch?
First, you have to put that webinar idea together pretty loosely because you wanna get it approved before you start actually going out and putting a full workshop together only to find out that nobody wants the damn thing. So what are you going to do to try to get out there? Keep in mind that next month we have full training on more stuff around using social media and getting your workshop in front of other audiences.
Any questions on this really quick run through of finding your buyer?
Thoughts or concerns?
No?
Andrew’s thinking.
Okay.
That is the training for today.
Do you have any questions about it, or are we ready to move on? Oh, I just saw your thing about the joke. Are we ready to move on, to the AMA part of today’s call? Good. Yes.
Alright.
Cool.
Let’s do that then. So as usual, if you have any questions, please start by, sharing your win, win of the week. Jessica has put up her hand. So what win do you have to share with us first? And if you could I know, Jess, you’re on your treadmill, I think, so you probably don’t want to come on camera.
But feel free to. It’s also encouraging.
Yeah. Share your win. Ask your question. And if you want everybody in the room to weigh in, please be sure to open it up to everyone. Otherwise, I’ll just jump in. Jessica?
Thank you. Sorry. I’m in the dark right now, actually, so that’s why I’m not on camera.
You can hear me alright? Yes. Okay. Perfect. So my win is leads into my question.
So I thought on Friday, my win was, I don’t know if people saw, but I’ve been doing the big pivot back to books. And that’s great. I feel really, really solid about that.
And I was in the middle when I made the shift. I was in the middle of a VIP client potentially hiring me for a optimization retainer for their ecommerce emails. So I was in the middle of that conversation when this shift kind of happened, but it was kinda looking that good, I guess.
Also a client who’s not ideal, so it was a very stupid choice anyway.
The win was on Friday, I kind of thought that I made it clear that this was not going to move forward via an email. I tried in a meeting. It didn’t work out. I made it clear in the email. I’ve since gotten a so I felt really good.
The winners, I felt really good because I was like, yes.
All in on books. Let’s go.
But since then, I’ve gotten a reply, and it’s kind of become clear that this it’s a fractional CMO. She would really like to work with me, but she’s really it’s, like, it’s becoming the classic thing you always coach Joe about when they can’t afford you and the things they want. And it’s like, a guarantee and promises and when can we see results or whatever. And so, of course, I stupidly used in my email response finally to just really cut this off. I I said that I I kind of attributed it to her need for guarantees and promise of results in the first like, by month two even though month one was spent on strategy. We need to analyze your data. We need to look at all the things, whatever.
So, anyway, my point is is basically, I need to now cut this off completely, and I’ve really just made a freaking mess of it. And, I don’t know. She she wrote me this long email trying to justify I misunderstood, and we can continue working. I just want clarity around the promises and the potential results and all that, and it’s just a mess. I’ve made a mess of this, and I need to get out of it.
Okay. So you’re trying to get out of it while preserving the relationship?
Yeah. I mean I mean, at least at least in a I know we’re not gonna work together in the future, but I don’t wanna be an asshole.
Oh, you came to the wrong place. Just kidding. Sorry.
It might be a bit of just kidding.
Okay. So what do we so this person had enough time to write you a long email instead of just saying, hey. Can we hop on a call? You’d already hopped on a call before, Jessica?
Yes.
Last week, I tried to hop I did hop on a call with her to say, look.
I this isn’t, you know, whatever. And I’m I know it’s a growth area. I I need to work on this, but I did I was like, oh, okay. Yeah. We can work out a and stupid. It was my fault.
So you were saying we can work something out?
It was more like I defaulted to okay.
I wouldn’t say we work yes. Sure. Let’s go with that. Yeah.
It’s okay.
I’m gonna need No.
No. No. No. No. No. No. It’s hard to say no, especially if you haven’t practiced saying no.
So I think that’s completely fair.
But now you have to practice saying no. So, it’s awkward. It is. Even when you practice at it, it’s still awkward because you have to let them down.
But one way that I would recommend going about it is saying, like, hey. Something’s changed for me. I’ve actually been running two different service businesses, and the other one is taking off big time. So I need to now reprioritize my efforts on that one because it’s a service, and I am the service provider. So I can’t move forward with you on the ecommerce side of things. And that’s absolutely true. And how could she argue with that?
No. She really can’t. I think it’s I think it was just my yeah. I I should have led with that. I’m kicking myself. I should have led with that.
That’s okay. I mean, I think you’re do so, like, so what? You’re not honestly, she’ll be over it within a minute.
I’m moving on, so I wouldn’t I wouldn’t overthink it. I think it’s nice that you’re worrying about it. Just tell her the fact in a nice way, and then she’s released to go look for someone else instead of waiting around hoping that it might work out with you.
Yeah. Okay. Good? Thank you. That’s cool. It still feels like garbage. But Yeah.
It does. Lots of the things will feel like garbage as you grow.
That’s why you have to make a lot of money to make up for when you feel shitty. Yeah.
Yeah. You’re right. Okay. I’ll add that to the list, become millionaire faster than I wanted to be Exactly.
So because of this. I like that. I like that. Except it needs a deadline. Okay.
Alright. Cool. Awesome, Jessica. Good luck. Thanks. Thanks.
Johnson, what’s your win?
Hey.
So a win, for this weekend is related to the question is that, I developed, three to four more outlines for various products within narrative selling to follow the sort of land and expand model that you, were talking about. And, it actually came fairly easily once I was kinda looking at it from that perspective, and it’s quite exciting.
So my question is that I’ve, I have this this this new idea for a for a product wise, a service based product, that I’m calling the founder’s narrative, as a sort of standardized offer with the authority building offer that you’ve seen in in that document as the, sort of upsell and then ongoing retainer.
So the the founders product is basically to help founders, find their story and and message, like, a kind of a well, a few elements of it, but but but a key story that is sort of their why, their, their meaning, behind their sort of their mission, and then, signifier stories that can be reframed in in multiple ways to convey various, aspects of, their their product.
And then there’s some other stuff about how to tell stories and how to adjust them for various audiences.
So my question is, does that sound like a good pairing and a good choice for the land and expand?
And, also, do you have any thoughts about the the document that you placed on?
Yes. The document. Thanks.
Yes. So so the idea with the founder’s narrative for land and expand is you’re brought in to work on the founders narrative, and then you work through other departments?
Yeah. Sort of to to look for founders who are keen to be out there, get in front of people, talk about, their stuff, which I I feel like won’t be hard to find, and, and to give them a framework to do that that that they, that that helps, helps them resonate with their target audience, basically.
Okay. Cool.
Let me open the doc then. Okay. So if you feel good about that as your land and expand, that’s cool. The only question I have around expand is if it’s a founder’s narrative, how big is the ICP that you’re going after?
How many employees does it have?
Well, I guess somewhere between sort of ten and fifty is a very sort of rough number. I’m imagining around, twenty to thirty, probably on on average, in this sort of, in that sort of range.
Do you think there’s a do you think it’s it might be too small?
Well, there’s just not much room to expand there. Where land and expand when you’re, like, talking about going up market is I mean, you still can.
You would just land in c suite and then expand to marketing might want the product narrative, I guess.
Yeah. I’ve got something for for marketing and sales as well.
So it was sort of like get the founders on board, make them love us, and then it felt like it would be an easier sell to the rest of the the teams.
Yeah.
And maybe that’s so in looking over your pricing, the thing about the founder’s narrative and, like, it’s cool and, like, I don’t know.
It feels like there’s it’s got legs because it’s a lot like positioning, but for the founder, which is cool.
So you could definitely, like, piggyback off of a lot of what April Dunford’s done. Like, if April did it, you should do it.
So that’s worth considering.
I guess I just wonder about the retainer side of it.
April also doesn’t have a retainer model for hers. However, there is this, like, there is more of a land and expand, which might be more of the retainer for you, where you would instead start with the founder’s narrative as the thing that you’re standing up, impress the crap out of the founder with that, and then say, okay. You know, we can do the same thing for your products, or we can do the same thing for your different groups, like the sales team or whatever. You’d have to figure that out. When I look through your document, the part that’s tricky is, like, the the execution y stuff, like monthly lead magnet development, it feels like forcing the issue, in order to get that easier performance based retainer in there or performance driven retainer in there.
So I would for you, I would say, okay. This week, I’m going to pause thinking about my business as stand up offer followed by retainer and instead think of my business as fully land and expand. Okay. That’s all I’m going to do. If I were to do that, what would expand look like? So land is the templated thing that then gets applied to different departments.
For that to work, what did my what would my ICP need to look like? What would they need to believe?
What would need to be their struggles right now? Because you have to solve those by repeating this thing across everywhere, which is doable. But I would put aside anything that has to do with, execution.
I’d keep it at the strategic level, and you can always recommend other people to execute. Yeah. I know. Right?
Johnson, you just graduated from executing. Well done.
That’s awesome.
My word. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. There’s a win for me. I was having a conversation with my, teammate where we were discussing, like, just how much I want to move away from delivery, of execution of products, and onto consulting.
Yeah. Cool. So And if you’re down for traveling too, the only side note is that if you’re going to go in and impress founders, they often need to see you in real life.
So you have to travel.
Fair.
And if I was willing to, sorry to hold the mic. But if I was willing to, switch up because, again, like, I feel like there’s a lot of ways I could apply these ideas, and there’s a lot of ways I could go with it.
If I wanted to look at a more sort of enterprise y level of the really upmarket, sort of land and expand.
Do you have any thoughts about, just the maybe the land product?
The problem is I really like the idea of the founder’s narrative.
I feel like it reminds me of this is so stupid.
It reminds me of on Friends when Jennifer Aniston says something about apartment pants to her, boss, who’s like, now I want apartment pants. They’re not even a thing, but it’s such a good, like, idea. Like, you could sell it.
So she’s like, let’s invent apartment pants.
And that’s the same kind of thing here. Like, the founder’s narrative just sounds really good. You know, you can see that founders would be like, I want a narrative. I need a narrative.
Get me a narrative. I want this, just like apartment pants. So now you just have to figure out what the founder’s narrative is. Stacy just said leaders narrative, potentially.
Yeah. Right?
I think that there’s if it’s blank narrative, you’ve got a big idea there that although people have been saying narrative, it’s kind of like story brand. It’s blank brand. But your blank narrative But then you just you gotta be ready to go all in and, like, own narrative. And I think that’s cool. I think that’s great and strategic and potentially expensive.
But, yeah, you do have to rethink that. Maybe it is leaders’ enter leaders’ narrative.
Maybe. Yeah. I love that. Yeah.
I I love that, Stacy.
Thank you.
And, okay, just one other tiny, tiny, tiny thing, because I feel like you will know the answer to this. I have this, as far as, like, coming out with this idea and talking about it and being this, thought leader, and creating all of the content, I have this fear that someone is going to take the the developed idea as far as it’s developed right now and then run with it faster than I can, and rename it, rebrand it into something else.
Is that, not stupid, but, like, is that something worth worrying about?
Yeah. Except you’re gonna do it better. You’re going to stay with it. People will steal your ideas all day.
So many. But they’re also lazy and quickly bored because they don’t have their own ideas. So I would say, like, don’t worry about it. They’ll come in.
They’ll swoop in. They’ll try to steal it.
The more you can’t. So that’s the worrying side of it. You can protect it as well. You can’t protect it from some parts of the world.
But once you’ve trademarked the thing, you’re good. You’re pretty good from there. People will still try to knock you off, but there was actually a story that Bob from Rewired Group was telling me a couple of weeks. I think it was Bob was saying, that one of his friends has, like, this big IP.
And someone from, like, McKinsey came to his friend and said, like, oh, we love your, we love or no. It was Blair Ends, maybe. I mean, we love your, blah blah blah product, the program, the framework. We use it across we’ve been using it across our x y z clients.
He sent them an invoice for his consulting fees on that because it’s his protected IP, and you cannot teach it. And so he got paid, like, three million dollars or something because this guy from McKinsey didn’t know better than to keep it to himself.
There was legal shit involved. Not that it wasn’t just like, oh, we’ll pay this invoice. Like, there was stuff. But that said, write a book about it.
Knock that thing out. You can do a better edition once it gets traction. Like, second edition is actually good. Like, well written.
First one is just great ideas. Document your framework. Own the title, trademark what you can, and then no people will steal it. And you just have to push through and be better at it.
Don’t switch to something else. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it will happen.
Alright.
It’s just the way it is.
Okay. Okay. Alright. That’s helpful. Thank you, Joe.
Sure. I look forward to reading the book in a couple months.
Yes.
Yes. Good. Awesome.
Deadline’s next ninety days.
Got it.
Oh, good. I hope so. Andrew, what is your win?
Hey. Can you hear me okay? Yeah.
Cool.
My win is that, I gay I did a, redid a client’s, land paid search landing page, maybe that they started testing about six weeks ago. And as of today, they they’ve a little bit lower traffic, so we’re using eighty percent as, significance. And as of today, I have a winner, at about twenty eight percent increase Nice. At eighty percent significance.
So, you know, not Getting there.
You know? Yeah. Amazon is not, you know, not gonna count that as a win, but it’s been consistently leading, and the copy from before was really bad. So I’m pretty confident that it’s that it’s true, but there’s some some reality behind the those numbers. So that’s exciting. That definitely lights me up. I like that stuff.
I love that. Cool. Nice work.
Yeah. That’s a big that that that’s the stuff that really lights me up is checking, like, to go into the, into Optimizely and be like, winning.
Anyway, so my my main question is that what I’ve noticed is that the companies that I tend to have the most success with, are companies that are, like, doing fairly well. Like, let’s say, they’re already at, you know, maybe fifty million, a hundred million, but have obviously bad copy on their website. Like, you can go in, and it’s usually, like, a problem, and it’s just, like, way too technical. Like, you know, clients that like, I have a client who’s running a headline. It’s, like, accelerate analytic productivity, and it’s, like, okay. What?
So what I’m so I’m kind of wondering, like, is that, like, a reasonable strategy to sort of look for companies that are, like, succeeding despite bad copy? Because I just I just feel, like, a lot more confident going into those situations where it’s, like, I can just look at their website and just know that I’m gonna be able to make it better.
Guess the question is I would look at their team. Why is the copy bad?
It’s because it’s use often because they’re having their product marketers write it, and their product marketers are really smart, but they’re very technical and write in a sort of academic tone, and nobody really knows. Like, when I come in and start talking, like, copy hacker stuff, their minds are exploding.
Yeah. Cool.
I love hearing that.
No. I’m sorry. I’m just kidding. Thank you.
Thank you for Okay.
Can you are you willing to pick a fight with product marketers writing copy? Would you write a headline ever that says product marketers can’t write copy?
Yeah. I’ll take some whack with that as a former product marketer.
But yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I’m sure a lot of them would be like, yeah.
No. That shouldn’t be my job in the first fucking place, by the way.
Yeah. Doing a very respectful way.
Well, that’s the thing. In a if the real challenge is, can you put a banner up that says product marketers can’t or shouldn’t write copy?
But you have like, if you can stand behind that, if you could put it on a T shirt, then you might be on to something.
Right? Because then then you can go out to these groups and or they’ll come to you and they’ll see, like, oh, this person understands that product marketers, maybe the word is shouldn’t. But what you need to know when figuring out if this is what’s keeping them from writing good copy, if it’s not just bureaucracy, if it’s not just dilution of things as more features are added, If it’s really product marketers are writing this stuff and they shouldn’t, that may need to be the fight that you pick. And if that’s the fight that you pick, you have to be willing to fight that fight.
And that really does mean you have to pick a fight. You have to say product marketers shouldn’t write copy, and it’s everywhere. And that doesn’t mean that’s going to be your tagline, but you have to be willing to do that. Like, your head has to get right with that, with the big statement, whatever that big statement is.
So I think, yes, if you’re willing to stand behind it and really say something.
Yeah. Otherwise, there’s no point.
Yeah. I mean, I think I would as maybe a question of when I back in when I need to start doing internal interviews with the people I just called out.
Hey. You guys are so smart. Love what you do. But, I mean, honestly, that’s part of the problem.
Right? Is that they they know the product too well. They don’t have any objectivity. They’ve learned it in a kind of academic way.
And so they’re just disconnected from how people are going to buy, you know, I mean, you you send them to copy school, then sure, they can do it.
But if they haven’t done that yet, then they’re just not the people who should be writing your conversion focus Exactly.
Conversion copy. Yeah.
So as long as you have the support for that, then I think but you just have to be willing to say it. You have to go on LinkedIn and say it, and then support it with everything that you just said. If not just LinkedIn, I actually whatever. But I know everybody else likes, like, LinkedIn.
Go wherever you’re going online and and say the thing, and then support it like you just did. And they will buy in. They’ll agree with you. That’s just the way it is. Yeah. And some won’t, and that’s good. Some shouldn’t.
Yeah.
Okay? Then we can pipe it. Cool. Thank you. Sure. Awesome.
Thank you. Claire, what’s your win?
Hey. Well, I just completed my win, which was narrowing my Reddit parse my Reddit, like where is the subreddit? So where is the subreddits?
Sorry. It’s late for me.
My YouTube and my website’s down. Also under forty. So each of them is under forty, which is a good start. And I’ve got some, like, moonshots in there and some, like, realistic ones.
Interestingly, I don’t know if anyone else is targeting b to b SaaS, but here’s quick fun insight.
Everyone’s YouTube channel, like, if you are targeting people who, like, follow April Dunford, for example, are interested in product led growth, those brands’ YouTube channels, crap.
Like, as far as the scale of YouTube goes, like, their view count is pretty low, and their cadence is pretty low as well Okay.
Which is really interesting. What’s the opportunity there when you know that? What do you think the opportunity is then?
Well, Crazy Egg hasn’t posted a video in three years. But three weeks ago, they posted a video, and I’m like, oh, does that mean Coming back. That they’re trying to do something? Does that mean that some marketer in there has gone like, crap, guys.
We really need to work on our, you know, stuff.
And some executive has gone, yeah. Find people.
Yes. Totally. And you, like, miraculously show up at the right time.
Right time, right place.
Love it. So nice.
That’s the one thing.
Cool.
Okay. So I you told me a while ago to name, what I’ve been working on, which is onboarding flows. So I’m gonna say, like, broadly this this is for everyone, by the way. Broadly, this flow, will include include emails at its most basic.
It’s more complicated. It will take someone from free to paid. So that means the in app prompts the sign up page for when you, like, click the, sign up button or stop for free, that page, and even the pricing page in future. That’s like the expanded version.
It’s, like, comprehensive.
So I’ve got a few options that I’ve narrowed it down to. Two of them were like, oh my god. Like, that might work moments.
And two of them were chat GPT moments. So the premise being that onboarding flows, typically, most people understand them as like a linear path. Right? And my fight that I’m picking is that, no. It’s not a linear path.
It is very much, and this is my latest one, like a pinball machine. Right? So the user, like, drops it, and then they get, like, knocked all over. Maybe get close to converting, visiting a pricing page, and then nope back to product experience.
Yeah.
So, the pinball onboarding machine, TM was one idea.
The pinball what? Onboarding machine. Onboarding machine. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Interesting.
And then my brand name is Coby Ireland. I had, like, a little wobble about whether or not I need to change that and ultimately decided that the effort of changing it probably wouldn’t be worth the payoff.
But bucket list onboarding was another kind of concept where the user has to go through, like, a bucket list of things that they need to check. Basically, points k.
In order to actually activate.
K.
That was the one.
And then the other two are Japanese. I love Japan. Obsessed.
Also, my audience is fairly, like, interested being nerds and all.
So the one is pretty classic. Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy of continuous small improvements Yep. Which has three kind of main principles of involvement of everyone. So that would be like sales, customer success, etcetera. Standardization of the practice that would be more about the optimizing side and the process. That would be the process of confiding someone.
K.
There were two other Japanese words that I thought could be could work with onboarding flow or activation flow. The one was, which means to wake up something dormant, and kumiki, which is the Japanese woodwork. I don’t know if you guys know about it, but they very carefully cut, their wood so it slots together. Like, their houses are built with no nails they used to be.
The workmanship is extremely precise so that everything, the whole big picture just slots together.
Yeah.
Those old ideas. Anyone any of them feels sticky? I was driving myself.
Anybody wanna chime in?
I have thoughts.
I would just on the on the Japanese words, I would caution against that right now because of the whole issues with cultural appropriation and things like that. So I don’t know that I would want to latch onto another culture’s term for, you know, for commercial gain.
That’s something that I would be beware of. I I love the pinball concept, and I think you have a lot of potential with that.
You know, pinball pinball onboarding, don’t tilt, you know, get the high score or all the kinds of things. I mean, there’s a lot you could do with that. It’s kinda it’s fun and and memorable.
Just my my take.
Cool feedback.
Anybody else have a note for Claire on this?
So I like the I like that pinball is a known thing. For me, pinball means chaos, though. Like, it flies everywhere.
So I wonder if there’s, like if you could dig into pinball the way you dug into these Japanese terms.
What are the little toggle guys called? What are the what are the parts called?
And I would, like, try or what’s, like, the outcome or the sound when you when you land it? Like, what’s the like, when the the ball goes in the hole? Whatever hole that is. What are the I would dig more into that famous pinball players even, in the past and stuff like that simply because I like the analogy.
I like metaphor. I like I like that it’s pinball.
I don’t love the visual chaos of things going everywhere, Right.
Because you’re not going to bring chaos. It might be that things are popping all over the place.
But, yeah, what’s the oak? What’s the I dig into it because I think there’s something there. And maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks chaos with that word.
So there’s that to consider, but I like it. It’s it’s a thing. It’s a known thing. I know what it is.
I could talk about it. It’s pinball.
When it comes to the Japanese stuff, I didn’t see it the same way that Stacy does, but I think it’s valid and worth considering, of course.
The Kanuki one seemed most interesting simply because Kaizen, I feel like a lot of tech companies were talking Kaizen, like, seven years ago or somewhere in there. Yeah.
Although I really like that the model has, like, those three parts that you could, like, model out, no share, use as your diagnostic, and things like that.
But the visual of the Kanuki is nice. I think it was Kanuki is what you said. Kanuki? Kanuki?
It’s with an m, but pretty close. Okay.
I don’t know it.
But that could be interesting and also, like, ownable and still in the the area of Kaizen and everything that we learned from Toyota and all of these other great brands that are extremely efficient.
So, yeah, those are my thoughts. I like where you’re going, and I love that you’re giving it a name. Oh my gosh. Yes to naming things. Yes.
But naming is extremely difficult while we’re on the subject. So yeah. Yeah. And pinball dot I o is twenty five thousand US dollars to buy.
Mhmm. Interested in really going in on that and only getting an I o out of it while we’re on the subject. So, yeah. Johnson, do you have to add do you want me to add anything here for Claire?
Oh, mine’s, that’s, well, it’s, like, related to knitting, but, I don’t you I I don’t wanna cut off the phone. Claire.
K. Claire, is that helping at all? Like yeah. Yeah. Load it also over in the Slack group for those who weren’t here today.
Yeah. Cool. Awesome. In the CSP part, not just in the intensive because it’s a CSP.
Okay. Perfect. Cool. Cool. Awesome. Thanks, Claire.
Johnson, you’re back.
I’m just getting in all the questions I should have gotten in Do it.
Over the last excellent. Yes. On naming things, right, which you just mentioned.
So you might remember, I my sort of and, Stacy, I would love your feedback on this too if you’re willing.
The the name I came up for my idea was narrative selling. And that was gonna be sort of the overarching concept. And now we’ve got, like, founders narrative and company narrative and product narrative and narrative selling itself as, like, its own sort of subdivision, of it. But I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts on how narrative selling as a as the overarching, sort of as the forget the final, as the jobs to be done, like, does that make sense as a, as a name, or is there maybe a different direction I should think about?
Stacy, do you wanna share your thoughts since you were invited?
I mean, I’ve as a name for you mean, like, a brandable name for your Yep. It’s too generic to be a brandable name, I think, because, I mean, there’s already there’s so many people talking about narrative selling already. It’s just a thing. You know? I mean, I Sassy writes sales narratives.
It it’s just, you know, lots of people are doing narrative selling and talking about narrative selling. So I would find another brandable name that you can own and figure out, you know I mean, and make that narrative selling could be what it is, but I would I wouldn’t necessarily call it that unless you’re and with you’re talking about that as a product. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah. Yeah. Sure.
I mean, I I maybe I’m not I’m probably not in the same circles as you, but, do they call it narrative selling as, like, the the that combination of words, or is there just talk about narrative and selling as, like, a sort of Well, like, I mean, like, StoryBrand has a whole thing on, you know, selling with story, and there’s a whole they have a whole course in that.
And I’m I’m very, very involved in story because I’ve, you know, ingested, like, pretty much everything having to do with story. I have all the, you know, all the books and all the things because I’ve been a StoryBrand I’ve been a StoryBrand certified guide for six years, and, about thirty percent of the StoryBrand certified guides use my software.
So I’m very, very steeply involved in story.
So, I would just you you know, if you want something brandable, I would just say that narrative selling is a generic term. That’s that’s all I’m saying.
Cool.
That’s a thing. It’s a valid thing. And if you can talk about narrative selling, that’s fine to talk about it. But if it’s if you’re looking for a brandable term, I don’t think that you’re gonna have success with that as a brandable term.
Got it. That’s really helpful, Stacy. Thank you. I didn’t know that you, you’ve worked so much with story branding.
That’s cool. I will we have to do a coffee meet soon, actually. I meant to message you. Sorry.
Okay. Jo, do you have any thoughts?
Yeah. I mean, I feel like, okay. Cool. So totally fair on maybe narrative selling, but I still think there’s room there.
I honestly do. I think, it doesn’t have to be that. I like I really like the founder’s narrative. People have been talking about storytelling and narrative for all time, and no one’s ever nailed it.
Like, there’s still you walk away even with StoryBrand. We get all people that copy hackers coming over from StoryBrand because they’re like, well but I can’t actually, like, write the stuff. Like, I can put it mapped very well, and that’s great. But, like, now my clients need the next step, and I can’t do that.
And that’s fair. It’s fine to stay higher level. That’s fine. It just means I think that it leaves what it’s speaking to is that there’s room in the market for more gap filling.
I I every time you say you talk about this, Johnson, I think of The Message and the Messenger, which is a book that I would write if it made sense for me too.
What what I keep seeing from brands is right now, they don’t know there’s a mismatch between what they’re saying and who they are, and they’re publicly demonstrating that on social media, trying to be something that the brand isn’t, But that’s because a brand has a hard time being authentic, but a person can be authentic. Like, a person can be real. And so a founder wants to be the right messenger for his brands or her brands or their brands message. So so to me, it feels like there’s an opportunity opening up, thanks to social media largely, where the messenger needs to have the right message, and it has to come together. It has to work.
And that’s where the founder’s narrative is interesting.
To me, I would try to break it, though. I think that we should always try to break the things before we invest. So how could that be broken? Maybe it does get confused with StoryBrand.
Maybe it gets confused somehow with Rem’s book Lost and Founder somehow.
You don’t you don’t know. Right? But you just, like, start trying to break it. And then, okay, if we can break it, now let’s rebuild it stronger and better so it can’t be, which could be trying to break it for me would be like, okay.
If the founder’s narrative is my land, my expand has to be getting into other parts of the organization.
So what are those called? Is it like, we were talking about, is it product narrative? Uh-uh. Not great.
Is it the sales narrative also not really meaty?
So play around with that. You’re I think there’s something there. I would also, like, try to work through how Simon Sinek got to start with why. Because we are talking about something strategic here. We are talking about something that would attract a lot of c levels if they heard it, if they saw you on stage or heard you on a podcast.
It would feed their ego, honestly, to have their own narrative created by some great person from England with an accent. Like, there’s a lot there, honestly, as this I know that sounds stupid, but I think it would sell extremely well.
Interesting.
So what is the name?
If it’s not the founder’s narrative, stay in that vicinity, though, and see Well, I I do like that.
Yeah. I mean, I, like, I do like the founder’s narrative as a, as a name for this particular product.
And I I’m just I I feel like I I keep kind of asking this thing. It’s like, is this the right umbrella to put my these ideas under? Because I know that once this is done and I invest it and I buy the websites and, like, that’s it. It’s locked in. And I just kind of wanna I know names are maybe the least important part in many ways of Okay. You know? Oh.
They’re both not important and entirely everything.
So, yeah, if you get it right, it doesn’t matter. If you get it wrong, you’re screwed.
Right. I mean, I think founders narrative is is great. I really like that one. I think that’s strong and that the the the thing that I don’t like about that is that it doesn’t bring you into the enterprise market, which is why you can have founders narrative for the smaller companies and leaders narrative for the enterprise companies. And for the for the enterprise companies, leaders narrative is great because every enterprise wants to harness their workforce to help them establish thought leadership.
So if you’re if you’re going into an enterprise and helping them establish thought leadership across the enterprise by teaching them a process of the leader’s narrative and then empowering everybody to share the same story, you can make a fortune doing this.
So I did have an idea that I’ve called the organizational narrative, which was a sort of internal look at the narratives that are at play sort of strategically within the organization where there’s conflicting, perceptions essentially about, well, the stories, the the narratives that exist within the company, of what teams are doing, of what C suite wants and does.
And that was a that was a sort of next the next sort of one I wanted to start fleshing out a little bit.
Yeah. So cool. Okay.
I mean, it sounds like You’re separating it from the human element then, though.
You’re breaking up the organizational narrative. That’s like the people are what matter when you’re telling stories. Right? So the if you you you make the leaders narrative align with the organizational priorities, and then you have happy people who have their own story that they get to share that’s aligned with the organization.
Does that make sense? What do you think, Joanna? Yeah.
I fully agree. Yeah. Organizational narrative bored me immediately, and it’s, it’s it’s probably because it’s missing people. Yeah. Yeah. Cool.
Alright. Okay.
And think about the job that they’re actually hiring this to do. It might feel like they’re hiring it. They’re hiring this service to do, so a a job inter I would say they’re hiring it for they’re likely going to wanna come out of this, feeling better about themselves. It’ll be a personal job they’re really hiring it for, feeling valuable, feeling, of course, like they can can perform better and go out into the world and really understand their message.
But but so if you know it’s about you’re gonna have people making people based decisions, name it in a way where it’s, like, gotta have it.
This thing, the leadership story deck, there’s a guy, David Hutchins. His book is, The Circle of the Nine Muses. He has this great deck of cards, and it’s all about stories. And it’s the stories that individual people can tell, and it breaks it down into this whole framework of, like, when to use what story for what. It’s really fantastic. I think if you checked it out, it would be a a good, thing for sparking ideas for creating your own thing. But he goes in and does workshops, and it it becomes, actually a personal transformation for the attendees.
It’s it’s about them transforming themselves by learning to tell these stories and to to do it through work. So that’s a that’s another thing to think about. Think about the people, the people.
Alright.
Okay. That’s really helpful. Thank you.
And so narrative selling maybe as an umbrella term is not, possibly not the the best way to go, but something narrative was narrative something, maybe still to keep these all under a similar sort of, format.
Yeah. I think so. Yeah.
Alright. Thank you so much, guys. This was incredibly helpful. That was, like, a little bit of a electricity for me there. Thank you.
Good. I, I love it.
Okay. Excellent. Good stuff. Alright. Thanks, y’all. Thanks for hanging on, and see you later. Have a good one.
Thanks, Stacy. Thanks, Jared.
Bye.
Worksheet
Worksheet
Transcript
Excellent. Okay. So we have a few more people joining. Of course, this is recording, but this is our Copy School Pro call of the week. This week, we are talking continuing on with our final week, actually, of the buyer handbook.
Next week, as you’ll see in the Coffee School Pro training area very soon, next week, we will have a whole new theme starting, and that one for the month of July is under the sunshine growth model.
When you look at the skills part of the sunshine growth model and the skills that you use, those are used to grow your business, like administrative stuff or things like list building and social followers. That’s what we’re doing next month is all about list building, and getting more social followers where social can be the best path toward building your list today. But we’ll talk more about that all next starting next week. We’re gonna get started on Instagram.
We’re gonna get into gamifying list building, with Shane. We’ll do a webinar, like, how to create a waking up to the problem webinar that you can present to other people’s audiences. I’ll be running that. So if you are wondering how to get in front of other audiences, like what we’re gonna talk about today, then this will be useful for you.
So there’s a lot coming up in July. Watch for all of that. Two lessons a week as usual.
And then this week this week oh, yeah. This week, we have Shane wrapping up, our, buyer handbook month with using AI to create your business’ actual buyer handbook. So that should be fun and exciting.
Alright.
It’s a bit of a working session today. We’ll be doing some actual work, which I hope is good for everybody in the room. And, yeah, there will, of course, be a replay, and there is the worksheet. So if you can open up the worksheet that we that Sarah sent out over the weekend that has the buyer handbook, find and attract your ideal buyers. I’m about to share my screen.
This is, of course, a really this is a fundamental topic, finding people who will buy the stuff that you’ve got, pretty important.
We we we need to do that. That’s just how life works. Now, hopefully, they’ll find you right back, but you still need to show up conveniently where they are. So that’s what we’re gonna talk about here today. Let me just go into presentation mode.
If you haven’t watched other sessions from the month of June on the buyer handbook, go back through the Coffee School Pro training area and pick up some more stuff there where we’re talking about ICPs, personas, personas underneath your ICP, all of that kind of stuff that, is critical to understanding who you’re talking to and if they’re the right person to talk to right now. And, of course, they will talk about where they are. So this is going to be very useful for you. If you wanna find out where your ICPs are, you will need to have your laptop open in front of you to do this work.
If not, your phone might be okay, but we’re gonna go into a tool, today. And maybe you already have access to that tool. And if you do, awesome. And if you don’t, that’s okay. They have a free thing that you can use today.
And then after this, you’re going to be ready to start pitching brands, not people.
Brands on partnering to share your content. Now there are people at the brands, but what people often talk about for freelancers with cold pitching is go cold pitch a potential client. And there’s nothing technically wrong with that, except it doesn’t scale very well. It takes a lot of work to do it, and we would all rather people just come to us.
So we’re gonna borrow the authority of other brands, which I talk about all the time, because that’s how I got here. So if not for me, absolutely latching on to the authority of other brands, way back in the beginning, I would not have the business that I have today. Not at all. And I’m very happy with the business I have today.
And so I can say, and I think a lot of people who look back at their growth or their lack of growth will be able to look at the network that they tapped into or did not tap into early on. So for me, Hacker News was a big part of it. So that’s community. What community can and should you participate in right now? We’re gonna work on finding those communities today.
It would be better if you’d started working in that community five years ago. Of course, it would everything better if we’d started doing any of this stuff five years ago, but we didn’t. So we’re going to do it today and not let any of the crap in because this crap always comes in. Oh, there’s no way in. It’s saturated, etcetera, etcetera. Shush.
We’re just gonna do the work. Just do the work and don’t think about it.
I also partnered with brands.
Unbounce was just starting out. HubSpot was still small enough that people weren’t necessarily that familiar with everything HubSpot could do. It wasn’t ubiquitous like it is today when I was starting out. Leadpages was like a whole different thing at the time, and Wistia was two dudes.
That was it. So but we partnered with them early on, and now their brands have grown. Our brands have grown and been able to, like, carry on. Our brand has grown and been able to carry on with it.
So I borrowed their authority. You need to do the same because there is an a early version of Wistia out there right now. There’s an early version of Unbounce out there right now.
Partner with them. They have as much hustle as anybody else had twelve, fifteen years ago, they are people to, partner with. So we’re gonna talk about who those, like, hidden gems are, and that’s really the goal today. When you find where your people are at, then we want you to put a webinar, which you’ll probably call a workshop, in front of them as soon as humanly possible.
And you’re going to force it to snowball. You’re not going to sit there and go, okay, I wonder if this is gonna work. You are going to make it work because that is how we get shit done. That’s what separates us here. We will force the snowball effect. Okay. So how do we even get started?
We’re gonna find people online using SparkToro. Has anybody used SparkToro before?
Yes. Cool. Are you using it now?
Good. It’s very easy to start and cancel, start and cancel. That’s actually you know, anybody who’s worked with them knows that’s a an actual challenge for them. As you use it, get everything you need out of it, and then you cancel, but you might come back four months later and use it all over again. So it’s a bit of a a different subscription model. But will you use SparkToro, in order to find out where people are, obviously, that’s what SparkToro does. It helps you find out what they’re talking about, etcetera.
But oftentimes when you’re using SparkToro and I’m just gonna open this up, over to the side as I move Zoom around. When you’re using SparkToro, it’s often defined, like, keywords and things like that.
Not keywords for social necessarily, what brand should I be looking up?
Just mine. And so I’m what brand should I be looking up? Just mine. And so I’m going to recommend that you look up a complementor. So instead of a competitor, this is someone who is like a competitor, but they’re more complimentary. So for us, ConvertKit or Kit might be a complimenter for us because we share a similar audience of digital creators, but we want to find a group that has more traffic, ideally, significantly more traffic than we get.
So for me, I might look up convertkit dot com, or I might look at other complementors. April Dunford and I have similar audiences in some ways. It depends on what I’m trying to sell. In other ways, we have very different audiences.
So that might be somebody that I look up to see, what because we can’t look up ourselves. Right? If you’re if you have a brand new website or you’ve got, like, five people coming a day to your website, you can’t really use SparkToro or yourself to get a sense of it. So we need to go and basically get a sense of the audience that our complementors or even full on competitors have.
So if you’re like, okay. I’m serving this market, but I know that this other brand is huge and they’re serving the same market I am. We’re just gonna use this over here in SparkToro. So you should now be seeing the SparkToro interface where you wanna go to the tab audience research.
What I recommend is right now, while I’m chattering, if you’re not using SparkToro, start an account right now. It’s free. You just, like, go to SparkToro dot com, use your Gmail or whatever to create an account quickly, get in there because we’re going to go to the audience research tab and this there’s all sorts of things.
Claire, did you work with Jia and Claire on SparkToro stuff?
Sorry. Muted. I have someone on the tab. Yes. I did. Okay.
Wait back to before two point o.
You would know, of course, more than I I’ve used for Arturo on and off, but I’m not, like, a power user of it. So, Claire, if you have anything to add, please do feel free to at any point or anybody who uses this and and has something to add here, please please do.
What we wanna do today is start by listing out three brands, ideally, the dot com version, like, the actual website that gets the audience you wish you could get. Now that could a really obvious one is some sort of software Software made for different audiences. So if you’re like, I want to work primarily with nonprofits, then you’d go look you should know what software people who are at nonprofits use. If you were like, I only work with real estate developers, then you’ll know or or realtors. And you might say, like, okay. Realtors use follow-up boss. So I’m going to look up follow-up boss and see what comes up.
And that’s what I’ll use to get started here on filling this in.
We have to wait for it to load, so we’re gonna do that. While that’s happening, make sure you’ve started your SparkToro account and start thinking of these people. So you have to first first know who your ideal audience is and then what they trust. So I don’t have a part on here for your ideal audience because you already know that That’s, like, very introductory basic stuff.
Tell Rand what did you say? Oh, got it. Fine. To pedal faster?
Is he in a race right now? Is he, like, biking somewhere, Andrew?
Or Andrew?
Are you chatting to us? Oh, he’s powering the sparktor.
I got it. I didn’t get that. Okay.
Now I got it.
I was slow. It’s my damn slow. Yeah. It’s taking a while to load up. Is it slow is it slow for everybody?
No? For some? Okay.
So we’ll just set that aside, and I will walk through what our objective is, like, what we’re going to do along the way. So if you can list out those three to five groups, you’re going to enter and repeat this process for those three to five different groups in here. For follow-up, boss, really?
Okay. So we’ll go through a creative free SparkToro account, go to audience research, search the website or domain of a complementor, then we’re going to fill this in for for, like, three to five of those groups. Knowing that as just happened here, sometimes, Barktoro won’t have enough data for it. So just keep that in mind, and then just repeat. Then afterward, we’re going to save this and downloaded data because you can export data on, SparkToro from SparkToro to wherever. This is the kind of thing that you’ll want to share with your VA as you move forward or just have for yourself as you, like, get deeper and deeper into building your business.
Knowing more about who and where they are is everything. It’s the thing that keeps people from growing is I don’t know how to get in front of my audience because I don’t know where they are. What are they paying attention to? And then everybody gravitates to the exact same people.
Well, all Chorus creators want to get or or follow Amy Porterfield. Okay. Great. But what software are they using?
What plug ins for that software are available? What Chrome extensions are they using? Can you partner with those smaller groups in order to get some traction? Because everybody can’t go around pitching Amy Porterfield, and her audience gets fatigued too versus the smaller companies that are out there that are gaining traction and would love to help an x to have an expert like you come in and teach their audience.
This is a big thing. Unbounce wanted me to come in and teach their audience to be better at making landing pages because it’s good for Unbounce. Same was true for Leadpages. Same was true for ConvertKit.
All of these different groups early on want you to come train their audience, and the good thing is you want to do that too. You wanna be an authority in front of them, so we need to find out where they are. So we’re gonna use SparkToro to find out where your buyers are. It might not be your audience.
Now if your audience if your website gets a lot of traffic, then this is gonna be really directly applicable for you. Like, oh, this is where my audience is coming from. That’s cool to know. What you’ll really wanna focus on, though, are not, like, the top accounts, but the hidden gems.
So you’ll see when you do oh, now they do have stuff. You’ll see when you go through here that, they have these bigger accounts, like, how are you going to pitch Realtor magazine?
Instead, you’ll probably wanna look at some hidden gems. Now they don’t have any hidden gems here, so that would be a thing where I’d have to then go do another search. But what I want to do is not just focus on all of these giant places to pitch, but where are my buyers going? What websites are they visiting is step one.
So we wanna write in the websites that they visit based on what you’re seeing here. Focus only on the ones that where you can actually answer. I can guest here, or I can advertise here. If it’s not an option, although this is a column that I have on the worksheet, if you can’t do anything with this, like, if you’re like, well, I can’t do anything with Keller Williams.
Like, it’s a giant broker brand. What what might I do? That’s too hard for me to conceive of putting a web webinar together. I mean, maybe maybe it’s a ten x that’s worth it more than, like, something else that could feel like a two x.
But try to be, like, realistic because you could list out all the websites they visit that are huge names. And then you think, okay. I can guess here. And if you get no’s across the board, you’re going to not feel good about it. So we wanna be able to get you wins in here. So maybe put some big websites in alongside some smaller websites in.
Don’t underestimate the power of directly advertising in some of these spaces. That doesn’t mean you go to their advertised page, but there are ways to get in. We’re not gonna talk about those today.
But you can, in some cases, advertise where they’re at, and that’s gonna get more real as we get into newsletters and podcasts that look more like sponsorships.
Then you’ll go through and look at their, YouTube channels. This is really straightforward stuff. Right? Like, you just go through and use SparkToro, but document what you’re learning so that you’re not just like, oh, yeah.
Cool. I’m gonna, like, probably hit home lights. We’ll write it down. Write it down and then say, okay.
I can guess here. Because at the end of this, we’re gonna go through and make an actual plan for what you will do over the next ninety days. This will feel like, big work, but it’s useful work to do. It’s where your buyers are at right now.
Like they’re sitting there right now.
So we want to go get them. So we’ll go through and look at YouTube channels that they watch. There are a lot of columns here. Websites are a little trickier, so I didn’t put that many or a lot of rows.
Sorry. I didn’t put that many rows in here because a website could feel like, what do I even do with the website? What we’re really saying is the brand behind the website. A YouTube channel is far more specific.
If you know that they’re all going to let’s see where they’re going. HomeLight. Okay. So HomeLight is really popular as a YouTube channel, I guess, for people in the realtor space.
So you could write in home light, and then you could figure out what am I going to do with this. Go look. Go look into what HomeLight is doing on YouTube. Is there anything you could do there?
It might just be as simple as I can try to advertise. I can put a video together for these people. I can try to figure something out. Can you guest there?
You’d have to watch and see. Like, do they have podcasts that are also video that they post there? Can you try to pitch them on getting on that? If you can and if it’s a big enough swing, it’s going to be worth your time.
If it’s a small swing, then you have to make sure it’s a really scalable thing. And that’s, like, put one workshop together, which we’ll be talking about next month, that you can then pitch and you keep repeating that workshop in all of these smaller places. It’s a twenty minute workshop. The leads come directly to you, not to them, etcetera. We’ll get into that next month.
But first of all, you need to know where you’re gonna pitch it. Otherwise, when you put the webinar together next month, you’ll be like, well, what the hell do I do with this thing now? So this is that work.
Every second page in this workbook is for you to make notes to self. So if you haven’t printed this off and started going through it, I recommend you do. If you don’t print it off, if you just, like, go through and mark up the PDF, absolutely cool too. But some people will look at this table and do nothing with it.
Go like, oh, yeah. Cool. Good lesson. And move on. I don’t want you to be that person.
You’re here right now. Do the thing.
Add notes to self. Add notes for a VA if you’ve got one.
What are you thinking right now about the Homelight YouTube channel? What are you thinking? Write down your notes as they come up. If I’m chattering, turn the volume down on me. You can come back and watch the replay later if you’re actually doing work and I’m talking through your work. I’m good with you muting me. I just can’t mute myself because other people have to still do the work.
Continuing on. Oh, Claire. Yes.
Sorry to interrupt.
I I can build a list on Airtable. So I’ve got I’ve got a list of, like, fifty websites.
Sorry. Eight hundred websites, actually. Fifty YouTube channels and a bunch of subreddits that I kind of narrowed down. The subreddits were actually easiest to narrow down to my OCD.
Yes. Yes. They’re also obviously the easiest to, like, research and post on. But when it comes to YouTube and websites and I’m looking at, like, big brands, like, let’s say Crazy Egg, for example.
They do SaaS. They do analytics. People who are interested in that are probably interested in what I do. Mhmm.
But, wow, how do I begin to, like, even start narrowing down all of the different sites and also, like, figure out if they allow advertising. Because a lot of places have stopped having, like, a guest posts available page because they get crazy. Right. So yeah.
So, yeah, any advice on that?
That’s where I I firmly believe that if you can run a workshop that gets recorded and played and that brand then puts it on their YouTube. It comes up as a search result when your name is searched.
That’s what we wanna do. I would focus entirely on what is an audience.
It could be Crazy Egg if you’re subscribed. So step one, make sure you’re actually subscribed to that brand’s newsletter or email list, however that comes in. If that means you have to get a free, a free user account, free trial account, then do it. Do it and start, like, looking through.
Does Crazy Egg ever invite people to workshops?
Like and if they do, have a look at it because you might be like, Kajabi invites a lot of people to workshops, but then they’re also affiliates for all of those workshops. So you have to sell something in the workshop. So that’s not gonna be a good fit because Kajabi would be like, no. Because you’re not selling anything at the end, and so we’re not gonna make any affiliate revenue off of this.
Okay, fine. So the more you know about what they’re doing to create content and share content for their audience, the better. So that would be step one. And then then the challenge is not a guest blog post because a lot of people are not publishing guest blog posts right now.
Written content is not what it was.
So what can you do? Can you get in front of their Instagram audience somehow?
Can you I would really, really put all my eggs honestly in the basket of workshop, workshop, workshop.
They’re going to do live events of some kind. I mean, live online events.
Any brand that is scrappy enough to try to break in right now that has a little bit of money to spend is teaching their users to be better users. It’s just like a really classic playbook for getting your SaaS brand out there.
So if you if you can say, okay. I’m really clear on who my ICP is on the persona under that that this group does watch workshops.
Workshops get a bad rap. No one watches a webinar. No people people don’t watch low value stuff. But if it’s coming from a brand that they trust, then they’re more likely to watch it.
So I will watch all the webinars that Gong dot IO puts out, because they teach good stuff about sales calls and all of the stuff that matters to me. They’re not putting crap out there. I don’t get three tips for running a sales call. I get, like, here’s how to do multithreading four zero one, which is really valuable.
Right? So you do need a workshop.
It needs to be the right value level for the audience you’re trying to attract that will wake them up to their problem. So not thirteen copywriting tips, obviously, but something more strategic, something that where five people who attend reach out to you immediately, not some other thing, which, again, we’ll talk about next month when we talk about the workshop that you should be getting out there. But, Claire, as a long answer to your question, focus on getting that workshop together and then finding the right group based on what you know about how they’re creating content and promoting it to pitch because Crazy Egg might not be the way to go.
Does that make sense?
Got it. Super helpful. Yes.
I love that you have that giant air table.
That’s great. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Like, pay for it. It’s so expensive as software.
So I might as well use this.
Yeah. Totally.
Yeah. The tricky thing about, like, lists of eight hundred is, like, where do you start? Right? So that’s very tricky. And that’s why I frankly like limiting it to, like, only the size of this worksheet.
If you can take that table you already have all filled in and start, like, limiting your options, putting those constraints around it. You’re only allowed twelve podcasts that they listen to only right in twelve then. Every this is ninety days. This isn’t the rest of your life. This is the next ninety days. What are you going to do? Where are you gonna pitch?
So same as these for podcasts. They listen to make notes to self subreddits that they frequent.
And that might not be where you create content, but you can get involved in conversations, obviously.
Any notes to self there, social accounts that they follow, these are gonna be hidden gems, not the big ones necessarily, but not tiny ones either. So you wanna look through and make sure and next month, we’ll talk more about Instagram followers and stuff like that.
But keep in mind, when I say buyers throughout this, I don’t just mean ICP. So not just that ideal client profile, but the persona under it. So you might say, people who are in a marketing capacity are your persona, and a lot of them are women. So they may be on x social space versus other groups.
So what I want you to do is not discount. I’ve had people discount. Oh, nobody’s on social. None of my the people that I’m trying to reach are on social.
And I’m like, that’s Europe to lunch. Of course, they’re on social. We’re all on some form of social unless you’ve actively chosen not to be, and then chances are good you’re not in digital marketing because you you gotta be on social if you’re in digital marketing. And if you’re hearing this and going, but I’m not on social and I’m in digital marketing, get on social.
It’s time. You have to. You have to. If I have to, you have to. Because I have to, and I’m not always happy about it.
Then we wanna get into keywords and topics. This is just not so that you’re creating content that is keyword rich or keyword targeted necessarily.
But when it comes time as we get deeper and deeper into the work, this isn’t just it’s not none of the work we do is siloed. Right? It feels like it because it’s a rectangular document, and it effectively looks like a silo. But it’s not.
This is all gonna work together. So you might not use trending keywords you can post about right now. But since you’re in SparkToro and it will share with you what some of those trending keywords are, you can see all the keywords. Obviously, it’s Rand.
Document them because that could be stuff that you can pitch content about. If it’s trending in particular, you can then adjust your workshop or webinars that the title is more about that trending keyword, but it’s still actually about the same thing. And this would just be a trending keyword that’s related to what you do. So if you’re like, oh, none of these keywords are related to what I do, that’s okay.
Just put a strike through it so that you know you did the work and nothing was there or do an NA or whatever, but I just don’t want it to look blank. I find that frustrating when things are blank. Maybe you don’t. Okay.
Now this is gonna wrapping up this conversation here. I know that we can’t do all the work because SparkToro is being a slow little bunny.
But go off and do it afterward, please. It’s on your business. Your business wants you to. That’s why you’re part of Coffee School Pro. So make sure that you do it.
Hacker News was where I started. I swear by finding a community and being of value to it before you try to take anything out of it. So add to the bank. Keep adding to the bank, and then later, you can start withdrawing.
Start now. If you don’t have a community that you’re part of, start now. It’s time to. Got it. And it could pay off a lot faster than, like, I wasn’t using Hacker News for a thing. I was just interested in what people were doing on Hacker News, like, cool, fun startup ideas and stuff like that. It’s, like, scrappy atmosphere.
So I want you to know what your Hacker News is.
I found that if you go on Reddit, you can find a lot of good communities talked about on Reddit. So go on there immediately.
Most of us are on Reddit for some things anyway, just for fun even. If you can go on Reddit and search something as simple like where are marketers hanging out? And you’ll see all sorts of responses. You can just Google Reddit and then that search phrase or whatever you want to look or, you’ll find them.
They’re listed there. Slack group. You need a couple Slack groups that you could request to join. So, ideally, they won’t just be open to everybody.
If there are a hundred and twenty thousand people in there, don’t do it. Don’t you go into that Slack group. That is going to be a waste of your time.
So Slack groups that are limited or private membership or even that are, like, you have to pay the cost of the monthly Slack charge, like, eight bucks a month plus two dollars for the administrative person who has to take care of all of this, that’s going to narrow the number of people who are in that Slack group, and that’s good for you. You don’t want a hundred and twenty thousand people in a Slack group, in a Discord, in in bigger communities maybe.
You you really do wanna focus on a concentrated group of professionals.
So if that means joining the paid product led growth Slack group, if there’s a way to do that without taking the course, I don’t recommend the course. But if you can do that, cool. Because now you’re in a product led growth Slack community, and everybody in there is concerned about product led growth. And most of them are just actively in start ups or tech companies that are using product led growth.
If that’s your ideal audience, it only makes good sense for you to participate in that group. Adding value, not taking it out, not saying, hey. I’ll do that for you. Wait until people are like, woah.
Wait. You’re a SaaS copywriter, and you do the research?
I had no idea that’s true for you. Can we talk? That’s exciting. That’s better. That’s good. So find a Slack group.
Discord, particularly if you work with tech in any way. There’s going to be a bunch of nerds who said no to Slack and yes to Discord.
So go check out Discords as well, which, of course, Reddit is also very good for nerds. So you can find all the Discord groups on Reddit too.
Clearly, I am more targeted at tech and SaaS companies than I am health and wellness and other groups like that. However, you can apply the same rules to finding same stuff for health and wellness. And if you’re like, Reddit doesn’t work for that, well, then something else, the health and wellness equivalent of Reddit.
Be resourceful. Figure that part out. The point is you need to walk away with at least one really solid Slack group for that your ideal audience is in so that you can start participating and adding value, answering questions, posting useful resources, all of those sorts of things that make you a useful part of that community. And then when it’s time for you to, like, withdraw a little from the bank, you got lots of credit there.
You got lots that you can do there. So go ahead and make sure you’re brainstorming based on everything you’re seeing on SparkToro, based on the idea of participating in a Slack group. What are you going to do? Can you come up with a brand that you could partner with?
Can you come up with three brands that you could partner with? And I mean, Unbounce thirteen years ago, Wistia twelve years ago, those sorts of groups.
Who are they today?
Can you find a way to partner with them? Where are they showing up? Where are their heads of growth showing up? Or where are the CEOs slash CMO slash cheap garbage take routers? Like, they’re doing everything.
Where are they right now? Where are they consuming content? Where are they hoping to find that next great idea?
Get in front of them. But you need to brainstorm this stuff, move through it, and then start to figure out, okay.
If it’s x brand, whoever it is, if it’s boards, let’s say words is up and coming. They’re doing lots of cool stuff. They’ve got lots and lots of users, but they really wanna scale. Boards could be my audience.
What webinar could I pitch to boards? What would make the users of boards better users of boards? Maybe it’s around x. And if it doesn’t make sense to it, you’re like, oh, no.
They need me to, like, help them write social posts and stuff. Forget it. Not boards. Next.
Cool. Eliminate things. That’s a big part of, like, finding the gold is washing away everything else until you get to the gold. Right?
So put a whole bunch of stuff in there and then start figuring out what to do. That’s the point of brainstorming. One page should not be enough. If you can do it all in one page, that was like a brain drizzle.
We wanna go on full storm, really stormy stuff, lots of stuff. And then that’ll help you get down to a ninety day attraction plan, which is free. It’s free and loose because all of this is there to tighten up your ideas where you can be. Now once you’ve got a brainstorm in place, what are you going to do over the next ninety days?
That’s July, August, September. Or if you’re watching the replay, whatever month you’re in, plus two more after that. What are you going to do for that, for the next ninety days? Are you going to pitch?
First, you have to put that webinar idea together pretty loosely because you wanna get it approved before you start actually going out and putting a full workshop together only to find out that nobody wants the damn thing. So what are you going to do to try to get out there? Keep in mind that next month we have full training on more stuff around using social media and getting your workshop in front of other audiences.
Any questions on this really quick run through of finding your buyer?
Thoughts or concerns?
No?
Andrew’s thinking.
Okay.
That is the training for today.
Do you have any questions about it, or are we ready to move on? Oh, I just saw your thing about the joke. Are we ready to move on, to the AMA part of today’s call? Good. Yes.
Alright.
Cool.
Let’s do that then. So as usual, if you have any questions, please start by, sharing your win, win of the week. Jessica has put up her hand. So what win do you have to share with us first? And if you could I know, Jess, you’re on your treadmill, I think, so you probably don’t want to come on camera.
But feel free to. It’s also encouraging.
Yeah. Share your win. Ask your question. And if you want everybody in the room to weigh in, please be sure to open it up to everyone. Otherwise, I’ll just jump in. Jessica?
Thank you. Sorry. I’m in the dark right now, actually, so that’s why I’m not on camera.
You can hear me alright? Yes. Okay. Perfect. So my win is leads into my question.
So I thought on Friday, my win was, I don’t know if people saw, but I’ve been doing the big pivot back to books. And that’s great. I feel really, really solid about that.
And I was in the middle when I made the shift. I was in the middle of a VIP client potentially hiring me for a optimization retainer for their ecommerce emails. So I was in the middle of that conversation when this shift kind of happened, but it was kinda looking that good, I guess.
Also a client who’s not ideal, so it was a very stupid choice anyway.
The win was on Friday, I kind of thought that I made it clear that this was not going to move forward via an email. I tried in a meeting. It didn’t work out. I made it clear in the email. I’ve since gotten a so I felt really good.
The winners, I felt really good because I was like, yes.
All in on books. Let’s go.
But since then, I’ve gotten a reply, and it’s kind of become clear that this it’s a fractional CMO. She would really like to work with me, but she’s really it’s, like, it’s becoming the classic thing you always coach Joe about when they can’t afford you and the things they want. And it’s like, a guarantee and promises and when can we see results or whatever. And so, of course, I stupidly used in my email response finally to just really cut this off. I I said that I I kind of attributed it to her need for guarantees and promise of results in the first like, by month two even though month one was spent on strategy. We need to analyze your data. We need to look at all the things, whatever.
So, anyway, my point is is basically, I need to now cut this off completely, and I’ve really just made a freaking mess of it. And, I don’t know. She she wrote me this long email trying to justify I misunderstood, and we can continue working. I just want clarity around the promises and the potential results and all that, and it’s just a mess. I’ve made a mess of this, and I need to get out of it.
Okay. So you’re trying to get out of it while preserving the relationship?
Yeah. I mean I mean, at least at least in a I know we’re not gonna work together in the future, but I don’t wanna be an asshole.
Oh, you came to the wrong place. Just kidding. Sorry.
It might be a bit of just kidding.
Okay. So what do we so this person had enough time to write you a long email instead of just saying, hey. Can we hop on a call? You’d already hopped on a call before, Jessica?
Yes.
Last week, I tried to hop I did hop on a call with her to say, look.
I this isn’t, you know, whatever. And I’m I know it’s a growth area. I I need to work on this, but I did I was like, oh, okay. Yeah. We can work out a and stupid. It was my fault.
So you were saying we can work something out?
It was more like I defaulted to okay.
I wouldn’t say we work yes. Sure. Let’s go with that. Yeah.
It’s okay.
I’m gonna need No.
No. No. No. No. No. No. It’s hard to say no, especially if you haven’t practiced saying no.
So I think that’s completely fair.
But now you have to practice saying no. So, it’s awkward. It is. Even when you practice at it, it’s still awkward because you have to let them down.
But one way that I would recommend going about it is saying, like, hey. Something’s changed for me. I’ve actually been running two different service businesses, and the other one is taking off big time. So I need to now reprioritize my efforts on that one because it’s a service, and I am the service provider. So I can’t move forward with you on the ecommerce side of things. And that’s absolutely true. And how could she argue with that?
No. She really can’t. I think it’s I think it was just my yeah. I I should have led with that. I’m kicking myself. I should have led with that.
That’s okay. I mean, I think you’re do so, like, so what? You’re not honestly, she’ll be over it within a minute.
I’m moving on, so I wouldn’t I wouldn’t overthink it. I think it’s nice that you’re worrying about it. Just tell her the fact in a nice way, and then she’s released to go look for someone else instead of waiting around hoping that it might work out with you.
Yeah. Okay. Good? Thank you. That’s cool. It still feels like garbage. But Yeah.
It does. Lots of the things will feel like garbage as you grow.
That’s why you have to make a lot of money to make up for when you feel shitty. Yeah.
Yeah. You’re right. Okay. I’ll add that to the list, become millionaire faster than I wanted to be Exactly.
So because of this. I like that. I like that. Except it needs a deadline. Okay.
Alright. Cool. Awesome, Jessica. Good luck. Thanks. Thanks.
Johnson, what’s your win?
Hey.
So a win, for this weekend is related to the question is that, I developed, three to four more outlines for various products within narrative selling to follow the sort of land and expand model that you, were talking about. And, it actually came fairly easily once I was kinda looking at it from that perspective, and it’s quite exciting.
So my question is that I’ve, I have this this this new idea for a for a product wise, a service based product, that I’m calling the founder’s narrative, as a sort of standardized offer with the authority building offer that you’ve seen in in that document as the, sort of upsell and then ongoing retainer.
So the the founders product is basically to help founders, find their story and and message, like, a kind of a well, a few elements of it, but but but a key story that is sort of their why, their, their meaning, behind their sort of their mission, and then, signifier stories that can be reframed in in multiple ways to convey various, aspects of, their their product.
And then there’s some other stuff about how to tell stories and how to adjust them for various audiences.
So my question is, does that sound like a good pairing and a good choice for the land and expand?
And, also, do you have any thoughts about the the document that you placed on?
Yes. The document. Thanks.
Yes. So so the idea with the founder’s narrative for land and expand is you’re brought in to work on the founders narrative, and then you work through other departments?
Yeah. Sort of to to look for founders who are keen to be out there, get in front of people, talk about, their stuff, which I I feel like won’t be hard to find, and, and to give them a framework to do that that that they, that that helps, helps them resonate with their target audience, basically.
Okay. Cool.
Let me open the doc then. Okay. So if you feel good about that as your land and expand, that’s cool. The only question I have around expand is if it’s a founder’s narrative, how big is the ICP that you’re going after?
How many employees does it have?
Well, I guess somewhere between sort of ten and fifty is a very sort of rough number. I’m imagining around, twenty to thirty, probably on on average, in this sort of, in that sort of range.
Do you think there’s a do you think it’s it might be too small?
Well, there’s just not much room to expand there. Where land and expand when you’re, like, talking about going up market is I mean, you still can.
You would just land in c suite and then expand to marketing might want the product narrative, I guess.
Yeah. I’ve got something for for marketing and sales as well.
So it was sort of like get the founders on board, make them love us, and then it felt like it would be an easier sell to the rest of the the teams.
Yeah.
And maybe that’s so in looking over your pricing, the thing about the founder’s narrative and, like, it’s cool and, like, I don’t know.
It feels like there’s it’s got legs because it’s a lot like positioning, but for the founder, which is cool.
So you could definitely, like, piggyback off of a lot of what April Dunford’s done. Like, if April did it, you should do it.
So that’s worth considering.
I guess I just wonder about the retainer side of it.
April also doesn’t have a retainer model for hers. However, there is this, like, there is more of a land and expand, which might be more of the retainer for you, where you would instead start with the founder’s narrative as the thing that you’re standing up, impress the crap out of the founder with that, and then say, okay. You know, we can do the same thing for your products, or we can do the same thing for your different groups, like the sales team or whatever. You’d have to figure that out. When I look through your document, the part that’s tricky is, like, the the execution y stuff, like monthly lead magnet development, it feels like forcing the issue, in order to get that easier performance based retainer in there or performance driven retainer in there.
So I would for you, I would say, okay. This week, I’m going to pause thinking about my business as stand up offer followed by retainer and instead think of my business as fully land and expand. Okay. That’s all I’m going to do. If I were to do that, what would expand look like? So land is the templated thing that then gets applied to different departments.
For that to work, what did my what would my ICP need to look like? What would they need to believe?
What would need to be their struggles right now? Because you have to solve those by repeating this thing across everywhere, which is doable. But I would put aside anything that has to do with, execution.
I’d keep it at the strategic level, and you can always recommend other people to execute. Yeah. I know. Right?
Johnson, you just graduated from executing. Well done.
That’s awesome.
My word. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. There’s a win for me. I was having a conversation with my, teammate where we were discussing, like, just how much I want to move away from delivery, of execution of products, and onto consulting.
Yeah. Cool. So And if you’re down for traveling too, the only side note is that if you’re going to go in and impress founders, they often need to see you in real life.
So you have to travel.
Fair.
And if I was willing to, sorry to hold the mic. But if I was willing to, switch up because, again, like, I feel like there’s a lot of ways I could apply these ideas, and there’s a lot of ways I could go with it.
If I wanted to look at a more sort of enterprise y level of the really upmarket, sort of land and expand.
Do you have any thoughts about, just the maybe the land product?
The problem is I really like the idea of the founder’s narrative.
I feel like it reminds me of this is so stupid.
It reminds me of on Friends when Jennifer Aniston says something about apartment pants to her, boss, who’s like, now I want apartment pants. They’re not even a thing, but it’s such a good, like, idea. Like, you could sell it.
So she’s like, let’s invent apartment pants.
And that’s the same kind of thing here. Like, the founder’s narrative just sounds really good. You know, you can see that founders would be like, I want a narrative. I need a narrative.
Get me a narrative. I want this, just like apartment pants. So now you just have to figure out what the founder’s narrative is. Stacy just said leaders narrative, potentially.
Yeah. Right?
I think that there’s if it’s blank narrative, you’ve got a big idea there that although people have been saying narrative, it’s kind of like story brand. It’s blank brand. But your blank narrative But then you just you gotta be ready to go all in and, like, own narrative. And I think that’s cool. I think that’s great and strategic and potentially expensive.
But, yeah, you do have to rethink that. Maybe it is leaders’ enter leaders’ narrative.
Maybe. Yeah. I love that. Yeah.
I I love that, Stacy.
Thank you.
And, okay, just one other tiny, tiny, tiny thing, because I feel like you will know the answer to this. I have this, as far as, like, coming out with this idea and talking about it and being this, thought leader, and creating all of the content, I have this fear that someone is going to take the the developed idea as far as it’s developed right now and then run with it faster than I can, and rename it, rebrand it into something else.
Is that, not stupid, but, like, is that something worth worrying about?
Yeah. Except you’re gonna do it better. You’re going to stay with it. People will steal your ideas all day.
So many. But they’re also lazy and quickly bored because they don’t have their own ideas. So I would say, like, don’t worry about it. They’ll come in.
They’ll swoop in. They’ll try to steal it.
The more you can’t. So that’s the worrying side of it. You can protect it as well. You can’t protect it from some parts of the world.
But once you’ve trademarked the thing, you’re good. You’re pretty good from there. People will still try to knock you off, but there was actually a story that Bob from Rewired Group was telling me a couple of weeks. I think it was Bob was saying, that one of his friends has, like, this big IP.
And someone from, like, McKinsey came to his friend and said, like, oh, we love your, we love or no. It was Blair Ends, maybe. I mean, we love your, blah blah blah product, the program, the framework. We use it across we’ve been using it across our x y z clients.
He sent them an invoice for his consulting fees on that because it’s his protected IP, and you cannot teach it. And so he got paid, like, three million dollars or something because this guy from McKinsey didn’t know better than to keep it to himself.
There was legal shit involved. Not that it wasn’t just like, oh, we’ll pay this invoice. Like, there was stuff. But that said, write a book about it.
Knock that thing out. You can do a better edition once it gets traction. Like, second edition is actually good. Like, well written.
First one is just great ideas. Document your framework. Own the title, trademark what you can, and then no people will steal it. And you just have to push through and be better at it.
Don’t switch to something else. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it will happen.
Alright.
It’s just the way it is.
Okay. Okay. Alright. That’s helpful. Thank you, Joe.
Sure. I look forward to reading the book in a couple months.
Yes.
Yes. Good. Awesome.
Deadline’s next ninety days.
Got it.
Oh, good. I hope so. Andrew, what is your win?
Hey. Can you hear me okay? Yeah.
Cool.
My win is that, I gay I did a, redid a client’s, land paid search landing page, maybe that they started testing about six weeks ago. And as of today, they they’ve a little bit lower traffic, so we’re using eighty percent as, significance. And as of today, I have a winner, at about twenty eight percent increase Nice. At eighty percent significance.
So, you know, not Getting there.
You know? Yeah. Amazon is not, you know, not gonna count that as a win, but it’s been consistently leading, and the copy from before was really bad. So I’m pretty confident that it’s that it’s true, but there’s some some reality behind the those numbers. So that’s exciting. That definitely lights me up. I like that stuff.
I love that. Cool. Nice work.
Yeah. That’s a big that that that’s the stuff that really lights me up is checking, like, to go into the, into Optimizely and be like, winning.
Anyway, so my my main question is that what I’ve noticed is that the companies that I tend to have the most success with, are companies that are, like, doing fairly well. Like, let’s say, they’re already at, you know, maybe fifty million, a hundred million, but have obviously bad copy on their website. Like, you can go in, and it’s usually, like, a problem, and it’s just, like, way too technical. Like, you know, clients that like, I have a client who’s running a headline. It’s, like, accelerate analytic productivity, and it’s, like, okay. What?
So what I’m so I’m kind of wondering, like, is that, like, a reasonable strategy to sort of look for companies that are, like, succeeding despite bad copy? Because I just I just feel, like, a lot more confident going into those situations where it’s, like, I can just look at their website and just know that I’m gonna be able to make it better.
Guess the question is I would look at their team. Why is the copy bad?
It’s because it’s use often because they’re having their product marketers write it, and their product marketers are really smart, but they’re very technical and write in a sort of academic tone, and nobody really knows. Like, when I come in and start talking, like, copy hacker stuff, their minds are exploding.
Yeah. Cool.
I love hearing that.
No. I’m sorry. I’m just kidding. Thank you.
Thank you for Okay.
Can you are you willing to pick a fight with product marketers writing copy? Would you write a headline ever that says product marketers can’t write copy?
Yeah. I’ll take some whack with that as a former product marketer.
But yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I’m sure a lot of them would be like, yeah.
No. That shouldn’t be my job in the first fucking place, by the way.
Yeah. Doing a very respectful way.
Well, that’s the thing. In a if the real challenge is, can you put a banner up that says product marketers can’t or shouldn’t write copy?
But you have like, if you can stand behind that, if you could put it on a T shirt, then you might be on to something.
Right? Because then then you can go out to these groups and or they’ll come to you and they’ll see, like, oh, this person understands that product marketers, maybe the word is shouldn’t. But what you need to know when figuring out if this is what’s keeping them from writing good copy, if it’s not just bureaucracy, if it’s not just dilution of things as more features are added, If it’s really product marketers are writing this stuff and they shouldn’t, that may need to be the fight that you pick. And if that’s the fight that you pick, you have to be willing to fight that fight.
And that really does mean you have to pick a fight. You have to say product marketers shouldn’t write copy, and it’s everywhere. And that doesn’t mean that’s going to be your tagline, but you have to be willing to do that. Like, your head has to get right with that, with the big statement, whatever that big statement is.
So I think, yes, if you’re willing to stand behind it and really say something.
Yeah. Otherwise, there’s no point.
Yeah. I mean, I think I would as maybe a question of when I back in when I need to start doing internal interviews with the people I just called out.
Hey. You guys are so smart. Love what you do. But, I mean, honestly, that’s part of the problem.
Right? Is that they they know the product too well. They don’t have any objectivity. They’ve learned it in a kind of academic way.
And so they’re just disconnected from how people are going to buy, you know, I mean, you you send them to copy school, then sure, they can do it.
But if they haven’t done that yet, then they’re just not the people who should be writing your conversion focus Exactly.
Conversion copy. Yeah.
So as long as you have the support for that, then I think but you just have to be willing to say it. You have to go on LinkedIn and say it, and then support it with everything that you just said. If not just LinkedIn, I actually whatever. But I know everybody else likes, like, LinkedIn.
Go wherever you’re going online and and say the thing, and then support it like you just did. And they will buy in. They’ll agree with you. That’s just the way it is. Yeah. And some won’t, and that’s good. Some shouldn’t.
Yeah.
Okay? Then we can pipe it. Cool. Thank you. Sure. Awesome.
Thank you. Claire, what’s your win?
Hey. Well, I just completed my win, which was narrowing my Reddit parse my Reddit, like where is the subreddit? So where is the subreddits?
Sorry. It’s late for me.
My YouTube and my website’s down. Also under forty. So each of them is under forty, which is a good start. And I’ve got some, like, moonshots in there and some, like, realistic ones.
Interestingly, I don’t know if anyone else is targeting b to b SaaS, but here’s quick fun insight.
Everyone’s YouTube channel, like, if you are targeting people who, like, follow April Dunford, for example, are interested in product led growth, those brands’ YouTube channels, crap.
Like, as far as the scale of YouTube goes, like, their view count is pretty low, and their cadence is pretty low as well Okay.
Which is really interesting. What’s the opportunity there when you know that? What do you think the opportunity is then?
Well, Crazy Egg hasn’t posted a video in three years. But three weeks ago, they posted a video, and I’m like, oh, does that mean Coming back. That they’re trying to do something? Does that mean that some marketer in there has gone like, crap, guys.
We really need to work on our, you know, stuff.
And some executive has gone, yeah. Find people.
Yes. Totally. And you, like, miraculously show up at the right time.
Right time, right place.
Love it. So nice.
That’s the one thing.
Cool.
Okay. So I you told me a while ago to name, what I’ve been working on, which is onboarding flows. So I’m gonna say, like, broadly this this is for everyone, by the way. Broadly, this flow, will include include emails at its most basic.
It’s more complicated. It will take someone from free to paid. So that means the in app prompts the sign up page for when you, like, click the, sign up button or stop for free, that page, and even the pricing page in future. That’s like the expanded version.
It’s, like, comprehensive.
So I’ve got a few options that I’ve narrowed it down to. Two of them were like, oh my god. Like, that might work moments.
And two of them were chat GPT moments. So the premise being that onboarding flows, typically, most people understand them as like a linear path. Right? And my fight that I’m picking is that, no. It’s not a linear path.
It is very much, and this is my latest one, like a pinball machine. Right? So the user, like, drops it, and then they get, like, knocked all over. Maybe get close to converting, visiting a pricing page, and then nope back to product experience.
Yeah.
So, the pinball onboarding machine, TM was one idea.
The pinball what? Onboarding machine. Onboarding machine. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Interesting.
And then my brand name is Coby Ireland. I had, like, a little wobble about whether or not I need to change that and ultimately decided that the effort of changing it probably wouldn’t be worth the payoff.
But bucket list onboarding was another kind of concept where the user has to go through, like, a bucket list of things that they need to check. Basically, points k.
In order to actually activate.
K.
That was the one.
And then the other two are Japanese. I love Japan. Obsessed.
Also, my audience is fairly, like, interested being nerds and all.
So the one is pretty classic. Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy of continuous small improvements Yep. Which has three kind of main principles of involvement of everyone. So that would be like sales, customer success, etcetera. Standardization of the practice that would be more about the optimizing side and the process. That would be the process of confiding someone.
K.
There were two other Japanese words that I thought could be could work with onboarding flow or activation flow. The one was, which means to wake up something dormant, and kumiki, which is the Japanese woodwork. I don’t know if you guys know about it, but they very carefully cut, their wood so it slots together. Like, their houses are built with no nails they used to be.
The workmanship is extremely precise so that everything, the whole big picture just slots together.
Yeah.
Those old ideas. Anyone any of them feels sticky? I was driving myself.
Anybody wanna chime in?
I have thoughts.
I would just on the on the Japanese words, I would caution against that right now because of the whole issues with cultural appropriation and things like that. So I don’t know that I would want to latch onto another culture’s term for, you know, for commercial gain.
That’s something that I would be beware of. I I love the pinball concept, and I think you have a lot of potential with that.
You know, pinball pinball onboarding, don’t tilt, you know, get the high score or all the kinds of things. I mean, there’s a lot you could do with that. It’s kinda it’s fun and and memorable.
Just my my take.
Cool feedback.
Anybody else have a note for Claire on this?
So I like the I like that pinball is a known thing. For me, pinball means chaos, though. Like, it flies everywhere.
So I wonder if there’s, like if you could dig into pinball the way you dug into these Japanese terms.
What are the little toggle guys called? What are the what are the parts called?
And I would, like, try or what’s, like, the outcome or the sound when you when you land it? Like, what’s the like, when the the ball goes in the hole? Whatever hole that is. What are the I would dig more into that famous pinball players even, in the past and stuff like that simply because I like the analogy.
I like metaphor. I like I like that it’s pinball.
I don’t love the visual chaos of things going everywhere, Right.
Because you’re not going to bring chaos. It might be that things are popping all over the place.
But, yeah, what’s the oak? What’s the I dig into it because I think there’s something there. And maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks chaos with that word.
So there’s that to consider, but I like it. It’s it’s a thing. It’s a known thing. I know what it is.
I could talk about it. It’s pinball.
When it comes to the Japanese stuff, I didn’t see it the same way that Stacy does, but I think it’s valid and worth considering, of course.
The Kanuki one seemed most interesting simply because Kaizen, I feel like a lot of tech companies were talking Kaizen, like, seven years ago or somewhere in there. Yeah.
Although I really like that the model has, like, those three parts that you could, like, model out, no share, use as your diagnostic, and things like that.
But the visual of the Kanuki is nice. I think it was Kanuki is what you said. Kanuki? Kanuki?
It’s with an m, but pretty close. Okay.
I don’t know it.
But that could be interesting and also, like, ownable and still in the the area of Kaizen and everything that we learned from Toyota and all of these other great brands that are extremely efficient.
So, yeah, those are my thoughts. I like where you’re going, and I love that you’re giving it a name. Oh my gosh. Yes to naming things. Yes.
But naming is extremely difficult while we’re on the subject. So yeah. Yeah. And pinball dot I o is twenty five thousand US dollars to buy.
Mhmm. Interested in really going in on that and only getting an I o out of it while we’re on the subject. So, yeah. Johnson, do you have to add do you want me to add anything here for Claire?
Oh, mine’s, that’s, well, it’s, like, related to knitting, but, I don’t you I I don’t wanna cut off the phone. Claire.
K. Claire, is that helping at all? Like yeah. Yeah. Load it also over in the Slack group for those who weren’t here today.
Yeah. Cool. Awesome. In the CSP part, not just in the intensive because it’s a CSP.
Okay. Perfect. Cool. Cool. Awesome. Thanks, Claire.
Johnson, you’re back.
I’m just getting in all the questions I should have gotten in Do it.
Over the last excellent. Yes. On naming things, right, which you just mentioned.
So you might remember, I my sort of and, Stacy, I would love your feedback on this too if you’re willing.
The the name I came up for my idea was narrative selling. And that was gonna be sort of the overarching concept. And now we’ve got, like, founders narrative and company narrative and product narrative and narrative selling itself as, like, its own sort of subdivision, of it. But I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts on how narrative selling as a as the overarching, sort of as the forget the final, as the jobs to be done, like, does that make sense as a, as a name, or is there maybe a different direction I should think about?
Stacy, do you wanna share your thoughts since you were invited?
I mean, I’ve as a name for you mean, like, a brandable name for your Yep. It’s too generic to be a brandable name, I think, because, I mean, there’s already there’s so many people talking about narrative selling already. It’s just a thing. You know? I mean, I Sassy writes sales narratives.
It it’s just, you know, lots of people are doing narrative selling and talking about narrative selling. So I would find another brandable name that you can own and figure out, you know I mean, and make that narrative selling could be what it is, but I would I wouldn’t necessarily call it that unless you’re and with you’re talking about that as a product. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah. Yeah. Sure.
I mean, I I maybe I’m not I’m probably not in the same circles as you, but, do they call it narrative selling as, like, the the that combination of words, or is there just talk about narrative and selling as, like, a sort of Well, like, I mean, like, StoryBrand has a whole thing on, you know, selling with story, and there’s a whole they have a whole course in that.
And I’m I’m very, very involved in story because I’ve, you know, ingested, like, pretty much everything having to do with story. I have all the, you know, all the books and all the things because I’ve been a StoryBrand I’ve been a StoryBrand certified guide for six years, and, about thirty percent of the StoryBrand certified guides use my software.
So I’m very, very steeply involved in story.
So, I would just you you know, if you want something brandable, I would just say that narrative selling is a generic term. That’s that’s all I’m saying.
Cool.
That’s a thing. It’s a valid thing. And if you can talk about narrative selling, that’s fine to talk about it. But if it’s if you’re looking for a brandable term, I don’t think that you’re gonna have success with that as a brandable term.
Got it. That’s really helpful, Stacy. Thank you. I didn’t know that you, you’ve worked so much with story branding.
That’s cool. I will we have to do a coffee meet soon, actually. I meant to message you. Sorry.
Okay. Jo, do you have any thoughts?
Yeah. I mean, I feel like, okay. Cool. So totally fair on maybe narrative selling, but I still think there’s room there.
I honestly do. I think, it doesn’t have to be that. I like I really like the founder’s narrative. People have been talking about storytelling and narrative for all time, and no one’s ever nailed it.
Like, there’s still you walk away even with StoryBrand. We get all people that copy hackers coming over from StoryBrand because they’re like, well but I can’t actually, like, write the stuff. Like, I can put it mapped very well, and that’s great. But, like, now my clients need the next step, and I can’t do that.
And that’s fair. It’s fine to stay higher level. That’s fine. It just means I think that it leaves what it’s speaking to is that there’s room in the market for more gap filling.
I I every time you say you talk about this, Johnson, I think of The Message and the Messenger, which is a book that I would write if it made sense for me too.
What what I keep seeing from brands is right now, they don’t know there’s a mismatch between what they’re saying and who they are, and they’re publicly demonstrating that on social media, trying to be something that the brand isn’t, But that’s because a brand has a hard time being authentic, but a person can be authentic. Like, a person can be real. And so a founder wants to be the right messenger for his brands or her brands or their brands message. So so to me, it feels like there’s an opportunity opening up, thanks to social media largely, where the messenger needs to have the right message, and it has to come together. It has to work.
And that’s where the founder’s narrative is interesting.
To me, I would try to break it, though. I think that we should always try to break the things before we invest. So how could that be broken? Maybe it does get confused with StoryBrand.
Maybe it gets confused somehow with Rem’s book Lost and Founder somehow.
You don’t you don’t know. Right? But you just, like, start trying to break it. And then, okay, if we can break it, now let’s rebuild it stronger and better so it can’t be, which could be trying to break it for me would be like, okay.
If the founder’s narrative is my land, my expand has to be getting into other parts of the organization.
So what are those called? Is it like, we were talking about, is it product narrative? Uh-uh. Not great.
Is it the sales narrative also not really meaty?
So play around with that. You’re I think there’s something there. I would also, like, try to work through how Simon Sinek got to start with why. Because we are talking about something strategic here. We are talking about something that would attract a lot of c levels if they heard it, if they saw you on stage or heard you on a podcast.
It would feed their ego, honestly, to have their own narrative created by some great person from England with an accent. Like, there’s a lot there, honestly, as this I know that sounds stupid, but I think it would sell extremely well.
Interesting.
So what is the name?
If it’s not the founder’s narrative, stay in that vicinity, though, and see Well, I I do like that.
Yeah. I mean, I, like, I do like the founder’s narrative as a, as a name for this particular product.
And I I’m just I I feel like I I keep kind of asking this thing. It’s like, is this the right umbrella to put my these ideas under? Because I know that once this is done and I invest it and I buy the websites and, like, that’s it. It’s locked in. And I just kind of wanna I know names are maybe the least important part in many ways of Okay. You know? Oh.
They’re both not important and entirely everything.
So, yeah, if you get it right, it doesn’t matter. If you get it wrong, you’re screwed.
Right. I mean, I think founders narrative is is great. I really like that one. I think that’s strong and that the the the thing that I don’t like about that is that it doesn’t bring you into the enterprise market, which is why you can have founders narrative for the smaller companies and leaders narrative for the enterprise companies. And for the for the enterprise companies, leaders narrative is great because every enterprise wants to harness their workforce to help them establish thought leadership.
So if you’re if you’re going into an enterprise and helping them establish thought leadership across the enterprise by teaching them a process of the leader’s narrative and then empowering everybody to share the same story, you can make a fortune doing this.
So I did have an idea that I’ve called the organizational narrative, which was a sort of internal look at the narratives that are at play sort of strategically within the organization where there’s conflicting, perceptions essentially about, well, the stories, the the narratives that exist within the company, of what teams are doing, of what C suite wants and does.
And that was a that was a sort of next the next sort of one I wanted to start fleshing out a little bit.
Yeah. So cool. Okay.
I mean, it sounds like You’re separating it from the human element then, though.
You’re breaking up the organizational narrative. That’s like the people are what matter when you’re telling stories. Right? So the if you you you make the leaders narrative align with the organizational priorities, and then you have happy people who have their own story that they get to share that’s aligned with the organization.
Does that make sense? What do you think, Joanna? Yeah.
I fully agree. Yeah. Organizational narrative bored me immediately, and it’s, it’s it’s probably because it’s missing people. Yeah. Yeah. Cool.
Alright. Okay.
And think about the job that they’re actually hiring this to do. It might feel like they’re hiring it. They’re hiring this service to do, so a a job inter I would say they’re hiring it for they’re likely going to wanna come out of this, feeling better about themselves. It’ll be a personal job they’re really hiring it for, feeling valuable, feeling, of course, like they can can perform better and go out into the world and really understand their message.
But but so if you know it’s about you’re gonna have people making people based decisions, name it in a way where it’s, like, gotta have it.
This thing, the leadership story deck, there’s a guy, David Hutchins. His book is, The Circle of the Nine Muses. He has this great deck of cards, and it’s all about stories. And it’s the stories that individual people can tell, and it breaks it down into this whole framework of, like, when to use what story for what. It’s really fantastic. I think if you checked it out, it would be a a good, thing for sparking ideas for creating your own thing. But he goes in and does workshops, and it it becomes, actually a personal transformation for the attendees.
It’s it’s about them transforming themselves by learning to tell these stories and to to do it through work. So that’s a that’s another thing to think about. Think about the people, the people.
Alright.
Okay. That’s really helpful. Thank you.
And so narrative selling maybe as an umbrella term is not, possibly not the the best way to go, but something narrative was narrative something, maybe still to keep these all under a similar sort of, format.
Yeah. I think so. Yeah.
Alright. Thank you so much, guys. This was incredibly helpful. That was, like, a little bit of a electricity for me there. Thank you.
Good. I, I love it.
Okay. Excellent. Good stuff. Alright. Thanks, y’all. Thanks for hanging on, and see you later. Have a good one.
Thanks, Stacy. Thanks, Jared.
Bye.
Changing Audiences Without Second-Guessing Every Challenge
Changing Audiences Without Second-Guessing Every Challenge
Transcript
So let’s jump straight into things, so that we don’t waste any more time.
As you probably know, today’s training is essentially the mindset piece to everything that Jo and the other coaches are stepping you through this month, when it comes to your buyer handbook, and looking at potentially changing, shifting, going up market with your ICP.
So, I actually spend a lot of the training portion of today which will just be the first fifteen minutes talking about anxiety.
And by anxiety I don’t necessarily mean clinical anxiety, but feelings of discomfort, of uncertainty, of not knowing.
Because of course when you are in the process of shifting or changing anything about your business, including who you serve and who you work with, there is a level of discomfort when you go about making changes.
Especially, and I think this is really an important point and worth noting, especially when you already have a business that is on some level successful, successful. It’s working for you on some level and I think that that is obviously true of everybody in this room and everybody in this program. You know, you’ve got something to lose. So I just wanted to acknowledge that as a starting point, and just remind you that, you know, as humans, we’re very motivated by loss aversion.
So that’s how we get into that mentality of better the devil you know. So even though you can be in a situation where you can see quite clearly that shifting to a new audience type or serving a new type of prospect will have really amazing potential benefits and wins for your business and where you wanna take things, it’s also unknown. Right? You don’t really know what challenges you’re gonna face until you’re doing it.
So there is a tendency to lean in towards what’s known and what’s comfortable even if it’s not ideal. So let me just start there.
Alright.
Let me share my screen.
Here we go.
And I’m just gonna pull up the worksheet which you all, should have, access to. If you don’t let me know, and I can get Sarah to, follow it follow-up with you.
Sorry. I’m at the bottom preparing last night. So I’m gonna start by, talking about something called the anxiety avoidance cycle. If you’ve been in therapy at all, any sort of anxiety related thing, this will probably look familiar.
But the basic concept is that when we are faced with some sort of situation or scenario that makes us feel anxious, if we then find a way to avoid facing that scenario or going through with that activity, whatever that might be, we get a really immediate wink and that we get immediate short term relief. Right? We can relax and say, I don’t need to deal with that today. You know, that might be future Kirsty’s problem.
I can just, you know, close that tab in my brain. Hooray.
The problem with that is that it actually then leads to long term anxiety growth. So if you do avoid something that makes you uncomfortable, the next time you’re faced with a similar or the same sort of challenge or anxiety, it’s actually going to be a bigger hill for you to climb because you haven’t had the experience of riding that wave of anxiety and getting through to the other side.
So a couple of important things to note about this cycle before I go ahead and contextualise it in business terms.
So, importantly, the experience of being anxious and doing the thing anyway and riding that wave is actually really beneficial even if you don’t get the desired outcome.
So as a really basic life example, when I was a little kid I was terrified of getting dumped by waves at the beach. We lived right near the beach so I was obviously exposed to this anxiety whenever there was a big swell in town. But I remember very clearly, second grade, I got invited to the cool girl’s birthday party. Her name was Tamara Prestwich.
It was at the beach. All the other girls were going into the sea. It was quite a big swell. Peer pressure.
I didn’t want to be the only one staying on the sand doing my usual avoidance tactic. So I went in and I got dumped pretty much straight away. It sucked but it also wasn’t as bad as I’ve been imagining all those years. Right?
So I broke that anxiety curve. I did the thing. The good outcome, which would have been to actually not get dumped by a wave, didn’t happen. But what happened was I got dumped, and I was like, oh, actually not as bad as I thought it would be.
So that obviously is a good example of, how to break this curve and how then you don’t actually have that long term anxiety growth because you’ve had that experience even if the good or planned outcome hasn’t happened. Right?
The other really important thing to note about this cycle too is that the avoidance portion of the program rarely looks as simple as, I I’m just not gonna do that. I feel too scared to do that. Right? Our mindsets are far more nuanced than that and will often present us with things that may on first glance actually look like a good reason to postpone doing the thing.
So to bring this into the realm of business and the realm of updating or going upmarket with your ICP, let’s say, you know, you’re thinking about connecting with a big fish prospect on LinkedIn, but maybe you decide, oh, no. I’m not gonna connect today because I wanna spend some time growing my followers first.
Now this could be a good thing. If you know for absolute certain that the person you’re working out to would not even consider having a conversation with you if you didn’t have above x number of followers, then maybe that is a reason to actually go, you know, spend sixty days building content, building engagement, building those sorts of things. But if that is something that you are assuming and if it is a hoop that you are setting for yourself to jump through, that’s actually avoidance. Right?
That’s you saying, oh, no. No. Let me go. You know, plan sixty days of content, And that is that immediate short term relief because sitting at your laptop or your computer in your office planning out content is probably a really comfortable, safe thing for you to be doing.
So that’s an example of how this cycle can come into play into business and specifically, come into play when you’re looking at, changing something about the people that you serve.
This page here is just a reminder, if it really resonates with you, feel free to print it out and stick it on your desk like a post it. But too often we interpret anxiety, discomfort, or challenge as a sign that we’re deficient or doing something wrong. But more often than not, these things are simply a sign that we’re in the process of pushing for more, different, or better. Right?
It’s a sign that we are in, the process of growing or stretching our comfort zone, which means that we are going to feel uncomfortable for a while while we’re doing that. So just a reminder because I think as I’ve said here, too often, our first thought is, oh, you know, I feel a bit nervous about this. It probably means I’m not ready or I shouldn’t be doing it. If you wait until you’re a hundred percent ready for anything in your business, you’ll be waiting a very long time.
Right? There’s always that little gap that you have to jump over when you do something for the first time and it’s always going to be a little bit uncomfortable, which is such a cruel cruel irony, but there it is.
So bringing this back to the topic at hand, whenever you’re faced with an anxiety or a challenge in your business, and of course this is relevant for all sorts of things not just for audience and ICP stuff but let’s focus on that today. There are two possible paths. Right? You can decide, I’m going to avoid that.
You know, I’m not going to do that thing today. I’m going to wait. You know, your clever brain will likely come up with some very good looking excuse to postpone. And I think one of the challenges, and I imagine something that we may talk about in the discussion period of this, will be how to discern whether something is actually an avoidance tactic or whether it is actually a good strategy.
What’s gonna happen then immediately after is you’re gonna feel relief, but then ultimately, you’re gonna stagnate. Right? Because if you’re not pushing for more, if you’re not trying different things, you’re gonna be getting the same results that you’re currently getting.
On the flip side of the coin, in the second path here, and obviously the one that I wanna encourage you down, you can actually accept the challenge, which will lead in the short term to discomfort. Right? It’s gonna be a bit of a bumpy ride, but then in the longer term, it’s going to lead to growth because you’ve tried new things, you’ve got new skills, you’ve reached out to new people, etcetera, etcetera. So I think it’s really important here when we’re looking at these two paths to just acknowledge that, you know, in the short term, the path of avoidance is way more appealing. Right? Because we’re gonna be happily plugging away in our comfort zones. We’re gonna feel relief that we haven’t had to do any big scary things.
Whereas if we do rise to the challenge, you know, and accept it, you know, we’re gonna be feeling probably quite nervous, you know, probably quite anxious, all of those things. But again, if you look one step further down both of these paths, it’s obvious that the path on the is the one that is going to get you much closer to the goals that you have for your business.
So I know that I’ve put these little examples here on the page, but just to, I guess, contextualize them further. So let’s say that you are thinking about pitching, an upmarket client, right, an upmarket version of your current ICP.
You’re ready to go, but then you start thinking, oh, what if they find out that I’ve never worked with the business as big as theirs before?
Avoidance in that case may look like, okay. Well, you know what? I’m actually just gonna wait until I’ve done x training or I’ve got x certification first. And, again, if you know beyond a threat of doubt that the person that you want to pitch or the business you wanna work with would not even consider a contractor unless they had a certain certification, then yes, this is what you need to do.
You need to go ahead and get that thing first. But if this is you putting up your own hurdles and your own roadblocks and just thinking, no. I’m gonna wait, and I’m gonna go do this thing first. You know, that is avoidance.
Again, there’s always gonna be that little uncomfortable leap that you have to make at some point. So if you do do that, then the feeling of relief might be, okay. Cool. Well, instead of spending the next two hours putting this awesome pitch together, I’m gonna Google courses for x thing.
Right? That’s quite a safe activity that you can indulge in for the rest of the afternoon.
On the other side of the coin, if you have that same anxiety, you know, what if they find out I’ve never worked with someone this big before, but you decide well you know what if they do find that out yeah I’m going to be upfront and own it but I’m also going to own the expertise and the USP that I bring to the table. I’m really clear on how I’m uniquely qualified to help serve this business and help them hit their own goals and I’m going to paint a really clear picture of that for them. And you know, and sure they might be the first client of this size that I’ve worked with but there’s always going to be a first client of that size no matter what I do whether it’s them or someone else.
That’s probably going to feel quite uncomfortable obviously for all sorts of different reasons.
But then even if you do make the pitch, it doesn’t go through, you know it doesn’t get accepted, you don’t land the project, you’re still going to experience some sort of growth from that process because you would have gone through the motions of doing the thing.
You would have built some confidence in that sort of interaction. You might have learned some things about, hey, well, that actually didn’t land so well with that type of client. So next time, I’m gonna you know, change or adjust that.
You might even learn in that process that, hey. I actually did need to get this sort of certification. So, you know, I’m gonna go and do that, then I’m gonna come back to them. So again, the growth may not look like winning the project and hitting the ideal goal. It might look a bit different to that.
Which brings me to my final point, which is all about adopting a growth mindset. So a growth mindset is something I spoke about, I think it might have been in our second or third mindset workshop, so quite a few months ago now.
I don’t actually know if it is on the Copies School Professional website. I’ll check that for you. But, basically, a growth mindset is, all about being open to the fact that, you know, going to do things and you’re going to learn things by failing essentially.
So a failure is not the end of the road, a failure or a falling short or not doing things perfectly is actually an opportunity, for you to grow a skill set, to grow a knowledge base, to grow confidence in yourself, all sorts of things.
So these prompts here are for you guys to use, whenever you’d like.
Actually, Sket, if you would like five or ten minutes to go through these now so that you have something concrete that you might wanna talk about with, just pop a one in the chat box.
Whereas if you would like to just go through these on your own at a later date and spend the rest of the session diving straight into the the coaching portion of things, Pop a two in the chat box so that I can just work out which path is better. I’m sorry. I’ve stopped sharing my screen because I don’t know how to look at my chat while I share it. Okay. Andrew two, Abby two.
Right.
Claire two.
Katie two.
K. Looks like it’s a two, I think.
Claire’s. I don’t know that we’ve met before.
No. No. Sorry. I was in such a fluster when I came in a minute late that I didn’t even realize.
I was also a minute late.
Perfect. Okay. Simple. You didn’t miss anything.
Welcome to the cruise. I love you to meet, and I’m excited to get to know you more and more.
Thank you so much.
No. My pleasure. So two as it is. So we will not go into that process there, but, for future reference, those reflective prompts are there for you so that you can really clearly identify what the challenge is that you’re currently facing or what the anxiety is that you’re currently up against, what the worst case scenario actually is if you go ahead and do the thing anyway, but you mess up or you don’t hit the mark.
And I think that’s a really important one too because often we can get so in our own heads and we can start because sorry. I always mispronounce this word.
Oh my god. Six AM before coffee.
Kitadas oh my god.
Kitadas castrifies.
Thank you, Claire.
Yes. Thank you. You are my savior. Yes.
So we can get our own head, and we can make things snowball and allow them to become bigger than they actually are. So being able to write something down there that’s really concrete can actually help narrow us in and keep us focused, and make the boogeyman, I guess, feel less scary.
The next question there is if that does actually come to pass, then what would I have gained? Right? And this is about flipping you into that growth mindset so that if the worst case scenario does actually happen, you don’t just curl up in a ball on your couch with a big bag of chips and watch some crappy TV. Right? You’re actually able to say, well, actually, things that have come out of this are x and y. And the last prompt there is how does that feed back into your big picture goals. Because I think if you can always see how every action you’re taking is actually bringing you closer to the business that you want to have, you’re going to be able to stay more motivated even when things do not go as planned.
Alright.
So those are there for you, whenever you are ready or needing them.
And let’s, on that note, jump straight into the coaching portion of the call today, and we can talk about anything that I’ve just gone over or anything else that is happening or not happening in your businesses. So, feel free. Who has something they would like to ask or share?
Andrew. It was a steady hand.
I was ready. Can you hear me okay?
Yeah. Perfect.
Okay. Cool.
Yeah. This is very timely for me.
I’m definitely dealing with a lot of indecision around next steps because as you said, like, I have kind of, you know, like, the current state of my business is is going, and and that’s all well and good. And so it doesn’t feel like I can just sort of, like, oh, you know, just try like, just trying something else without making it a full committed effort. It doesn’t seem like a good use of my time. And so the way that this the way that this kind of avoidance cycle manifests for me is that there’s just a lot of, paralysis and indecision. And so, you know, just to to give you an example of of what how that’s showing up in my life right now is, like, right now, I should be working on lead gen.
Just, like, very clear that that’s something that I should be working on right now.
But then my mind goes, okay. Well, in order to do that, I need to, like, figure out exactly what it is that I wanna offer people. And in order to know exactly what it is that I wanna offer people, have to figure out exactly what my business strategy is. And if I wanted to figure out what my business strategy is, then I need to figure out, like, exactly what I want my life to look like.
And then that’s where I kind of get stuck. And something as you were talking that I kind of realized is that I think I’m equally afraid. I’m I’m it’s not just the failure side that freaks me out. It’s also the success side.
Because if I succeed, then there’s also gonna be, like, more responsibility, more risk, more, you know, clients to keep track of? Is that what I want in, you know, in my life? And and so it it feels it’s kinda the term perfectionism doesn’t never really resonated with me, but I do think I deal with it. It’s I think the word perfect is not right, but it’s like there’s some sort of standard in my mind or ideal in my mind that I feel like things need to I need to have like, I I I need to feel a certain level of confidence in my business model and business strategy and my offer before I could do any of that stuff.
And Mhmm. I’ve just been spending a lot of time the past few months of just constantly thinking about, well, I could do things like this or I could do it like that, but I don’t know if I wanna do it that way. I don’t know if I wanna and so, you know, I I I move on some stuff, but then I I don’t move forward with anything meaningful because like, reaching out to people, doing actual lead gen. Sorry about the extra noise.
And so, yeah, I I find myself with just a lot of not moving forward because I have not made a decision.
Mhmm.
Yes. It sounds like you are drowning under the weight of a multitude of decisions. When you were talking about the path that your brain jacks you down, I was like, wow. You’re trying to define Yeah.
And I’m whole life. And I’m high high anxiety, like, long ago, diagnosed medicated therapy, whole deal. So, like, yeah, this is all driven by anxiety for me for sure.
Yep. Oh, you have such good insight into what’s going on for you, which is a really awesome place to start.
I so I I definitely understand that your business and where you wanna take it from what I’ve seen in the Slack group and in some of the other recordings. Like, you know, it is a big movement. Obviously, it does involve growing a team and all those sorts of things, more so than you currently have, although you’re on the past already doing that. So I definitely understand and appreciate that it feels like you can’t just test this thing. Right? You know you’ve sort of got to jump into the deep end in some way.
And at the same time, I wonder if it is possible to jump into the deep end in one way with, like, a test project in that area. So like as an example, I did that with an upmarket version of my client years ago, because I wasn’t sure, like the same reasons as you, I think, about how much I would actually enjoy that process and what it would mean to the responsibility and all those things about my life. I actually didn’t love it. Love working with that kind of client, and it did take a significant portion and chunk of time out of my business to actually do that test project with it.
But I was able to move on that I think because I just brought in the resources I needed for that project on a contract base, if that makes sense. Would something like that be a possibility for you just to get me moving and just to get you testing with real world data?
Yeah. Definitely. I mean, I I and and in a way, a current client that I have right now kind of is that test project, because they are kind of I’m not necessarily changing my ICP as much as I’m changing the way that I structure my end of things going from, like, freelance conversion copywriter to, like, landing page optimization agency or, or CRO agency.
And I think another part of this that I didn’t quite mention on the on the first part is that there’s also like, around the perfectionism thing is that there’s this constant, like like, in terms of trying to figure out my process, what I’m what kind of research am I gonna do versus what am I not gonna do? There’s constantly this battle of, like, oh, you know, like, that’s not really gonna be enough. I need to also add this thing and this thing in order to have enough research. Oh, but then if I add that, then, like, then I’m overcomplicating it.
So, yeah, it’s it’s also indecision about exactly what that process is gonna look like. And and this need to kind of always be looking over my not focusing on what I have in front of me and and committing to the decision, but also, like, always like, oh, is there some other better way? Is someone else doing this better? You know, what do I need to add to this?
What do I need to change?
So it’s a lot of that. A lot of the this endless tweaking or endless, endlessly considering all the possibilities instead of just making a decision, knowing that it’s not gonna be perfect, and committing to it.
Mhmm.
Yep. And does the idea of the the latter, like, I’ll make the decision and knowing it’s not gonna be perfect and knowing you’re gonna find out, you know, answers to those questions as you go, does that just make you incredibly uncomfortable?
I guess. Because I just keep I just kinda keep doing it, and I keep so when it’s time alright. Here’s this way that Joe showed us that we can, like, reach out to people, and it’s, like, straightforward. She’s done all the work for us.
There’s always my mind is always going, oh, no. Wait. But there’s this other thing I haven’t figured out yet. No.
I haven’t figured out the perfect process. I haven’t so I guess so. I guess that there’s I’m I’m not sure what it is that I’m afraid of is gonna happen.
Mhmm.
I don’t think that there’s a negative consequence. I think that there’s just this internal need to to feel like I have something so good that I can’t wait to share it with the world instead of right now where it’s like, oh, I have this thing, but I’m gonna hide it because I’m not sure about it yet.
Yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha.
It’s interesting, and I wonder if this perspective shift may help you.
I do genuinely think that the people that we work with actually have such an important role in us shaping our offers and our services so that they are something that is so exciting and so compelling and so compelling and so wonderful. And I think to deny them that opportunity to help us shape something into being is actually a bit selfish because there’s no way that I could create something in isolation in my mind even with all of my experience and all of my knowledge that would be as good as it could be without testing it on real humans, with real businesses, and being able to identify the gaps. So I wonder if here the reframe might be partly that, but also you’re really bloody good at being able to identify things that, you know, could help a process or things that are, you know, surplus as you’re doing the thing. So I wonder how much can you trust yourself to do that on the run versus doing that in isolation before you unleash a thing into the world. Does that make sense?
Yeah. I think so. It sounds like you’re kind of saying to on one, treat it kind of as an experiment, and two, to invite the clients kind of into the process of, of optimizing it into something better.
Yeah. That’s right. And that invitation doesn’t need to be formal. Right? It’s just that, you know, they’re like a a lab rat in in some ways. Right? And, you know, you won’t know how things are gonna play out until you actually have the chance to play them out in real time in the real world.
Yeah. Because I think you you’re definitely like, you’re right.
You’re stuck in that cycle, and I think you’re actually stuck in that cycle.
Yeah.
Yeah. You’re almost like washing machine. It feels like you’re kind of spinning spinning. And I and I feel like you’re at the point now where that anxiety curve has gotten bigger.
It’s like the, you know, the crest to get over to actually do the thing now almost feels insurmountable because your head’s so busy with all of these things. And the reality is, you know, there’s so many questions that you have that you will not be able to answer until you actually do the thing. So Yeah. You’ve just gotta you’ve just gotta get uncomfortable.
Yeah.
No Yeah.
No. That that definitely helps. I think and also the first part about starting smaller in terms of how I think about this, like, not thinking the whole business and the whole future, but thinking about just the next client. What does this business look like for the next client and and nothing else? That that’s helpful because that makes it less overwhelming and less it feels less permanent.
Awesome. What’s the next client?
What is this gonna look like for the next client? Yeah.
Yes. And what could that look like for you then? Because I’d love for you to have in your mind, okay, if you’re just thinking about it in that, like, just that piece, what’s this gonna look like for the next client? Like, just what what is that gonna look like for you in your process? Like, what’s gonna happen for you next? What things you actually gonna action and do?
Yeah. I think that what I need to do is I think I need to focus on, a lead gen activity and letting myself figure out the rest after I have someone on the hook because that’s that’s what worked in the very beginning of my business where where, you know, oh, yeah. Hey. I can help with your email, you know, project.
And then they’re like, okay. Great. And they sign on, and then I’m like, alright. Let me go open ten x emails for the first time.
Let’s do this. So yeah. So, I think that that that could work for me if I just shrink the whole thing down and just think of it as what is who who’s the next client and then figure out what’s what does it look like from there.
I love that. And I love that young if she’s still young, but younger Andrew energy of just like, oh, cool. I’ll book an email project, and then I’ll learn how to do it. I think that’s awesome.
No. He was he was young.
He was in his twenties.
He was young. He was a wise man. And carefree. Yeah. That’s that’s the The last the last thing I just wanna say to you, sorry, and then I’ll stop.
Please, please. Yeah. That’s remember that just because you do something one way once, you’re not locked into doing that again and again forever and ever. Like, you may try this thing and realize that for some reason, something about it or everything about it doesn’t work.
That’s okay. That’s great data to have because now you can build with that in mind. So, you know, I think as well as being overwhelmed by, like, all the things because the decision is feeling so big. Sorry.
I’ll just mute Katie. I think that’s oh, no. She’s on it. Thank you, Katie.
As well as being overwhelmed by that, I do wonder if you’re also like, that’s kinda where that perfectionism is coming in. Like, this idea that, like, you need to get it right first time and, like, you’re gonna be locked into doing it a certain way. Whereas it’s all just a data gathering process. Right? And you can only optimize what you already know.
So I don’t know if that helps, but take that with you if it does.
Yeah. No. It it it does. Thank you. I appreciate it, Christie. Thanks.
My pleasure. Alright. I think, Katie, did you have your hand up earlier, or did I imagine that?
I did, but I have to leave for my daycare run now. So I’m not gonna relinquish my spot. But I just wanted to say, like, everything Andrew asked was very similar to what I was gonna ask. I really struggle with that all or nothing thinking as well as, like, secret like, I always wanna get things in the right order. So it’s like, okay. Well, this would be the next step, but if I do it now, like, I can’t do that until I get all these other things in place. So, Chrissy, your resource that of win slash acceptance really made me feel personally attacked by the in a really helpful way.
And I think what you were just saying to Andrew about, like, thinking of it as doing a service to your clients to act before you’re ready is also really helpful. And if you have anything else to say around fear of success, I’m here for it because I definitely think that that holds fear of success of, like, getting into the room, but then messing it up and being exposed as a fraud is, like, a way bigger fear for me than failing, like, just not having the thing.
Yes. And thank you for bringing it up. Cassandra, sorry. I forgot to touch on your fear of success as well.
It’s, yeah, it’s a big one, isn’t it? Because I feel like the bigger you get and bigger being in a matter you’re working with for your clients, you’re earning more money, you’re more visible, right, you’re more out there, the more vulnerable you feel, right, because you’re more exposed, obviously. So if people disagree with what you’re doing, if someone, you know, God forbid, has had a bad experience with you, like, that can be out there and that is really confronting. But I think one of the threads that runs not just through this fear of success but also, sort of like the all or nothing mentality and having to have all the steps in exactly the right order is that I feel like both of you might be forgetting that you are very intelligent, adaptable, responsive human beings.
Right? You it’s not like you’re gonna have to make all these decisions in isolation and then you’re just gonna play them out no matter what happens. Right? You’ve got your businesses to the point that they’re both currently at by reading the room, by responding to things, by taking really strategic sound actions most of the time.
So I think it’s really important to keep those things in mind. And I always wonder if there might be space for a workshop on self trust, at some point because I feel like ultimately, you know, there’s so much that we can’t control about the world, you know, our clients and projects and all those things. But if we’re able to trust ourselves to make decisions in the moment when those challenges arise, then so much of that becomes so much easier.
I don’t know if any of that resonated with anyone.
That it’s funny because when Andrew was talking, I was thinking it was I just self trust was on my mind for both of us.
Mhmm. Yes.
Awesome.
Okay. And it’s sorry. What Andrew has written here. Trying to figure out the right order is eating a ton of time and mental bandwidth for me. Yep. Yep. So this ordering of things, and I think, again, that’s probably linked to perfectionism, the idea that we must have all our ducks in a row, and they must be perfectly in the right row in the right place at the right time, for us to even take the first step and to get off the ground.
You know, it’s a mindset block one hundred percent because it’s not how learning works. Right? Think about the most basic skills. Like, think about talking.
Like, you don’t all of a sudden one day just open your mouth. Start having full sentences with, like, multisyllabic words. Right? It’s it’s such a process, and you trip and you stumble, but you learn from all of those things.
So I think with that metaphor too, like, the other good thing to note is that you start talking because you’re ready to start. You’re motivated. You wanna do the thing. So maybe that applies here too for reaching and stretching and growing your businesses in all these exciting ways.
That may have just been a very random metaphor, but it’s what came to mind.
Yeah. Awesome. Is there anything else I can quickly talk to you about, Katie, before you go do the, day care drop off? Or, otherwise, we could always continue this in Slack as well.
I’m good. I’m gonna keep listening, but I won’t be able to wave anymore. But thank you, Kirsten. That was helpful.
All good. And, Claire, I think your hand was up next. Hello. Hi.
So, obviously, mostly, my question’s, like, so so much in the same zone, but it’s probably a little bit more linked to the, maybe not fear of success, but, like, the whole imposter syndrome side of things.
Mhmm.
So whenever I try to post something or write something, if I’m, like, writing just for an internal thing, working out a process, I can sit down and write. No problem. The moment I’m like, okay. Let’s come up with a LinkedIn post, my brain starts going, you know nothing.
Everyone else already knows this. It’s very obvious. It’s out there. You learned this by listening to someone else.
Why wouldn’t they listen to someone else? Why listen to you?
And I get myself into this, like, whirlwind. Even when I answer, like, things on calls, I’m like, they’re gonna know. They’re gonna know mid talk, and then I start stumbling.
If it doesn’t happen, I know I could be really great. But if, like, that anxiety kicks up, it just makes me ramble.
Yeah.
So I don’t know how to deal with that.
Do you have any tips?
Yeah. Sure. And, also, I don’t know if you noticed, but Andrew was definitely nodding there. So I just wanted to highlight that I feel like everything everyone shared so far is an experience that most people in the room have also had. So just know, one, it’s very normal.
Two, you’re in good company. And three, it’s not a sign that you’re not doing the right work and doing the right thing. Right? We all have those moments where we worry that what we have to share or what to say is not good enough, not new enough, not interesting enough, not valuable enough.
But I think we also all have those moments where we manage to wow a a client just by saying something that we think is quite middle of the road. And they’re like, I never knew this. And they’re like, look at me with my expertise.
So, I mean, obviously, that’s, something that can really help with that, but that’s not something that’s in your control. Right? So let’s not focus on that. We can’t control other people’s reactions. We can only control our actions and to some extent our feelings about those.
So I’m just wondering when you feel this imposter syndrome hit, is it always when you are sharing your own knowledge or your own skill set? Is it is it confined to that, or is it more broad?
Yeah. I think so.
Because it’s in my mind, it’s not my own knowledge. It’s, like, knowledge learned. Do you know what I mean? Like, I’ve acquired this knowledge from lots of other experts, lots of other people. It’s technically theirs. I’ve just learned it.
Mhmm.
Yeah. Sure. Which is the case, I think, for all of us in this room. Right? We haven’t all just spoken up one day and discovered the craft of copywriting on our own.
I think it’s important to remember that, yes, you know, everyone learns their expertise and their craft from somewhere. Right? It’s how education systems work. For example, you get a degree to be a doctor, like, you know, that’s a maybe an example that’s quite helpful to think about.
I think what’s important to remember is that you are going to always bring your own USP and your own uniqueness to the table. Right? There’s gonna be something about the way that you share that information that’s gonna resonate with the right people. There’s gonna be something about, you know, your experience of utilizing that information or using that skill that’s gonna be really appealing to the right people.
So I think it’s again of thinking about your niche, right, and who it is you’re actually speaking to, and how what you have to share is actually hyper relevant for them. Because I think if any of us broaden out, you know, the kind of content that we would share to a white audience, it’s going to be compelling for a whole group of people, right? We have to go narrow, think narrow, and think about how to actually, you know, resonate with that person. I think another thing that can help too in those moments of imposter syndrome, especially when you’re in the middle of a a call or a conversation with a prospect or a client, is just to remember that what you’re having is actually a conversation. Right? It’s a back and forth. So it’s not a show and tell necessarily.
You know, if you can just bring it back down to that human level, that can often relieve some of that anxiety of you feeling like you’re on show, of you feeling like you’re up on a stage of some sort. Because if you just think, hey, I’m just having a chat with Claire. Like, we’re just talking about this. They’ve asked a great question.
I know the answer. Here it is. That flow can actually help bring those levels of anxiety down so that you feel less watched and just more present in the moment. Because I think something that you also, shared when you were talking about that is that it’s almost like there’s this version of Claire that hovers above you and, like, watches and is aware of what you’re doing and is possibly judging or worrying for you.
Is that is that sort of the case?
Yeah. It’s like, oh, look. Now you’re rambling. Of course you are.
Yes. Yeah. Okay. So I think it would be very helpful if if we could find ways to stop that sort of dissociation happening and and having so much of your brain up there watching, judging what you’re doing because of course that’s taking you out of the present moment.
And of course would be impacting your ability to actually you know, show up confidently. You know, it would be imagine if there was an actual person behind you saying those things. Like, that would be so distracting. So it’s the same kind of concept.
So I think it might actually be good to work with anything that brings you into the present moment. So really focusing, on the person you’re speaking to, maybe even grounding yourself with some really subtle exercises. So, do you normally meet in person or on Zoom with your clients or prospects? On Zoom.
Awesome. So a really good grounding exercise because, obviously, on Zoom, no one can see your feet unless you have a very strange camera setup that I’ve not seen before.
Even just scrunching your toes into whatever floor you have underneath your desk and just noticing the sensation, noticing what it feels like, that’s a really good way just to bring you back into your body, so that you have less of those sort of out of body floating above or behind the shoulder kind of, moments. So even something as simple as that, I would love for you to try that and then report back in Slack and just let me know if something that simple can actually help bring you back into the present, into the conversation, and out of that nasty imposter syndrome.
Oh, well, that’s super helpful. Thank you.
My pleasure. Todd, I think I might have seen your hand before unless I also imagine that.
Well, first off, this is great. Great workshop.
I’ll be honest. The last couple of days for me, I’ve had, anxiety, and it’s actually coming to a group and talking about it about it. For me, it’s like, Andrew and I actually have a call scheduled for tomorrow. And for me, it’s the CRO side of it.
Like, am I making the right decision if I’m gonna go with the CRO side of it? I talked a little bit to Tina about it. I’ll be quite honest. I don’t have an issue with process.
I’ve got a nail down, dialed in process. I know that when it runs, it runs extremely well.
I’m closing out a project right now, and the process is so dialed. I’m like, I don’t even wanna go and do it because it’s gonna be easy. And it’s one of those things. I don’t have that, but I have the anxiety side of it, and it’s great to have the conversation about, like, okay. Is this gonna be the right thing?
Mhmm.
And, you know, I’ve got other client work in the background. But you made me think of something that’s kind of important, and I will impart this if I can.
Had a client in the past, and they are Canadian special forces. So they’ve shared conversations where they’ve if not to get too deep into it, where they’ve actually had their superiors over somebody they just killed in a war, or they’ve been on a spot in the world where their only contact the rest of the world is when a satellite passes over their head. And it goes back to the stoics. And one of the things that when you’re talking about self trust and everything, you just made me think of something, and I’m like, excuse my language, but I’m like, shit.
I forgot all about that. And it’s called the only thing you can control is your controllables. That’s it. That’s the only thing you can control is what you can control.
And for me, what I’m thinking a little bit more of is doing anything I can control in the day, you know, not tomorrow or what happened yesterday, but today, is just showing up and showing up and doing what you can in that day. And it might not be the win you want or the huge success you want, but just showing up in that day and just doing what you can in that day, that’s a controllable that you can control. That I don’t know. For me, I think those stack up, And I think the more they stack up, the less the other days can kinda stack, and you actually are standing over it more than it standing over you.
So that was just my comment. It just made me remember, like, control your controllables. And that’s that’s a tough thing to do for me, especially in the last couple of days. Because it’s like, oh, okay.
Where is this going? What am I gonna do? What is this going to look like? You know?
And and all these things. So that’s all. Just wanted to impart that. That’s just it’s a very important thing to do.
It’s just control your controllables. That’s it. It’s all you can do. Right?
So Hundred percent.
Thanks so much for sharing that, Todd. That’s so timely. And, yes, And like you say, just showing up every day and doing the thing, I think, can also help when things feel overwhelming. Right?
It’s like we’re not trying to plan and execute every single thing for the business that you wanna have two years from now. It’s about what little things can actually do today that day after day can add up. So I think if, yeah, looking if looking and thinking too broad is something that causes anxiety, then bringing it back into that. And, again, yeah, what you can control, so helpful.
So thanks for sharing. That’s awesome.
Anyone else have any questions, concerns?
Hello?
All good? Okay.
So I’m never sure how long to wait in case someone’s just been shy, but I feel like we might be all questioned out for this morning.
We’re all just anxious.
I know. You’re like, oh god. This workshop was, like, my avoidant part of my day. Now I have to actually go and do some work.
What is this? Well but thank you so much for showing up this morning. Thank you so much for sharing so openly and honestly. I think the more honest that we can all be about these feelings and doubts that we have, you know, the more we just feel like, oh, we’re in the right room and we’re doing the right things.
Right? Everyone here is in the right place doing the right things. And because you have those doubts, you know, it it doesn’t mean anything about your qualifications, or where you’re headed with your business whatsoever. It’s all part of being human, unfortunately.
So please feel free to reach out and continue any of these conversations in Slack. I would love that, or have a chat with Zoe about Zoe with Joe, sorry, about, doing a workshop on self doubt, and see where that might be able to fit in because it sounds like that might be a helpful one. Sorry. Self trust. Sorry. Sorry. My baby was awake every hour last night, so she’s functioning on bare minimum.
But, yes, I will see you all in Slack, and I’ll see you again on Zoom next month.
Bye, everyone.
Transcript
So let’s jump straight into things, so that we don’t waste any more time.
As you probably know, today’s training is essentially the mindset piece to everything that Jo and the other coaches are stepping you through this month, when it comes to your buyer handbook, and looking at potentially changing, shifting, going up market with your ICP.
So, I actually spend a lot of the training portion of today which will just be the first fifteen minutes talking about anxiety.
And by anxiety I don’t necessarily mean clinical anxiety, but feelings of discomfort, of uncertainty, of not knowing.
Because of course when you are in the process of shifting or changing anything about your business, including who you serve and who you work with, there is a level of discomfort when you go about making changes.
Especially, and I think this is really an important point and worth noting, especially when you already have a business that is on some level successful, successful. It’s working for you on some level and I think that that is obviously true of everybody in this room and everybody in this program. You know, you’ve got something to lose. So I just wanted to acknowledge that as a starting point, and just remind you that, you know, as humans, we’re very motivated by loss aversion.
So that’s how we get into that mentality of better the devil you know. So even though you can be in a situation where you can see quite clearly that shifting to a new audience type or serving a new type of prospect will have really amazing potential benefits and wins for your business and where you wanna take things, it’s also unknown. Right? You don’t really know what challenges you’re gonna face until you’re doing it.
So there is a tendency to lean in towards what’s known and what’s comfortable even if it’s not ideal. So let me just start there.
Alright.
Let me share my screen.
Here we go.
And I’m just gonna pull up the worksheet which you all, should have, access to. If you don’t let me know, and I can get Sarah to, follow it follow-up with you.
Sorry. I’m at the bottom preparing last night. So I’m gonna start by, talking about something called the anxiety avoidance cycle. If you’ve been in therapy at all, any sort of anxiety related thing, this will probably look familiar.
But the basic concept is that when we are faced with some sort of situation or scenario that makes us feel anxious, if we then find a way to avoid facing that scenario or going through with that activity, whatever that might be, we get a really immediate wink and that we get immediate short term relief. Right? We can relax and say, I don’t need to deal with that today. You know, that might be future Kirsty’s problem.
I can just, you know, close that tab in my brain. Hooray.
The problem with that is that it actually then leads to long term anxiety growth. So if you do avoid something that makes you uncomfortable, the next time you’re faced with a similar or the same sort of challenge or anxiety, it’s actually going to be a bigger hill for you to climb because you haven’t had the experience of riding that wave of anxiety and getting through to the other side.
So a couple of important things to note about this cycle before I go ahead and contextualise it in business terms.
So, importantly, the experience of being anxious and doing the thing anyway and riding that wave is actually really beneficial even if you don’t get the desired outcome.
So as a really basic life example, when I was a little kid I was terrified of getting dumped by waves at the beach. We lived right near the beach so I was obviously exposed to this anxiety whenever there was a big swell in town. But I remember very clearly, second grade, I got invited to the cool girl’s birthday party. Her name was Tamara Prestwich.
It was at the beach. All the other girls were going into the sea. It was quite a big swell. Peer pressure.
I didn’t want to be the only one staying on the sand doing my usual avoidance tactic. So I went in and I got dumped pretty much straight away. It sucked but it also wasn’t as bad as I’ve been imagining all those years. Right?
So I broke that anxiety curve. I did the thing. The good outcome, which would have been to actually not get dumped by a wave, didn’t happen. But what happened was I got dumped, and I was like, oh, actually not as bad as I thought it would be.
So that obviously is a good example of, how to break this curve and how then you don’t actually have that long term anxiety growth because you’ve had that experience even if the good or planned outcome hasn’t happened. Right?
The other really important thing to note about this cycle too is that the avoidance portion of the program rarely looks as simple as, I I’m just not gonna do that. I feel too scared to do that. Right? Our mindsets are far more nuanced than that and will often present us with things that may on first glance actually look like a good reason to postpone doing the thing.
So to bring this into the realm of business and the realm of updating or going upmarket with your ICP, let’s say, you know, you’re thinking about connecting with a big fish prospect on LinkedIn, but maybe you decide, oh, no. I’m not gonna connect today because I wanna spend some time growing my followers first.
Now this could be a good thing. If you know for absolute certain that the person you’re working out to would not even consider having a conversation with you if you didn’t have above x number of followers, then maybe that is a reason to actually go, you know, spend sixty days building content, building engagement, building those sorts of things. But if that is something that you are assuming and if it is a hoop that you are setting for yourself to jump through, that’s actually avoidance. Right?
That’s you saying, oh, no. No. Let me go. You know, plan sixty days of content, And that is that immediate short term relief because sitting at your laptop or your computer in your office planning out content is probably a really comfortable, safe thing for you to be doing.
So that’s an example of how this cycle can come into play into business and specifically, come into play when you’re looking at, changing something about the people that you serve.
This page here is just a reminder, if it really resonates with you, feel free to print it out and stick it on your desk like a post it. But too often we interpret anxiety, discomfort, or challenge as a sign that we’re deficient or doing something wrong. But more often than not, these things are simply a sign that we’re in the process of pushing for more, different, or better. Right?
It’s a sign that we are in, the process of growing or stretching our comfort zone, which means that we are going to feel uncomfortable for a while while we’re doing that. So just a reminder because I think as I’ve said here, too often, our first thought is, oh, you know, I feel a bit nervous about this. It probably means I’m not ready or I shouldn’t be doing it. If you wait until you’re a hundred percent ready for anything in your business, you’ll be waiting a very long time.
Right? There’s always that little gap that you have to jump over when you do something for the first time and it’s always going to be a little bit uncomfortable, which is such a cruel cruel irony, but there it is.
So bringing this back to the topic at hand, whenever you’re faced with an anxiety or a challenge in your business, and of course this is relevant for all sorts of things not just for audience and ICP stuff but let’s focus on that today. There are two possible paths. Right? You can decide, I’m going to avoid that.
You know, I’m not going to do that thing today. I’m going to wait. You know, your clever brain will likely come up with some very good looking excuse to postpone. And I think one of the challenges, and I imagine something that we may talk about in the discussion period of this, will be how to discern whether something is actually an avoidance tactic or whether it is actually a good strategy.
What’s gonna happen then immediately after is you’re gonna feel relief, but then ultimately, you’re gonna stagnate. Right? Because if you’re not pushing for more, if you’re not trying different things, you’re gonna be getting the same results that you’re currently getting.
On the flip side of the coin, in the second path here, and obviously the one that I wanna encourage you down, you can actually accept the challenge, which will lead in the short term to discomfort. Right? It’s gonna be a bit of a bumpy ride, but then in the longer term, it’s going to lead to growth because you’ve tried new things, you’ve got new skills, you’ve reached out to new people, etcetera, etcetera. So I think it’s really important here when we’re looking at these two paths to just acknowledge that, you know, in the short term, the path of avoidance is way more appealing. Right? Because we’re gonna be happily plugging away in our comfort zones. We’re gonna feel relief that we haven’t had to do any big scary things.
Whereas if we do rise to the challenge, you know, and accept it, you know, we’re gonna be feeling probably quite nervous, you know, probably quite anxious, all of those things. But again, if you look one step further down both of these paths, it’s obvious that the path on the is the one that is going to get you much closer to the goals that you have for your business.
So I know that I’ve put these little examples here on the page, but just to, I guess, contextualize them further. So let’s say that you are thinking about pitching, an upmarket client, right, an upmarket version of your current ICP.
You’re ready to go, but then you start thinking, oh, what if they find out that I’ve never worked with the business as big as theirs before?
Avoidance in that case may look like, okay. Well, you know what? I’m actually just gonna wait until I’ve done x training or I’ve got x certification first. And, again, if you know beyond a threat of doubt that the person that you want to pitch or the business you wanna work with would not even consider a contractor unless they had a certain certification, then yes, this is what you need to do.
You need to go ahead and get that thing first. But if this is you putting up your own hurdles and your own roadblocks and just thinking, no. I’m gonna wait, and I’m gonna go do this thing first. You know, that is avoidance.
Again, there’s always gonna be that little uncomfortable leap that you have to make at some point. So if you do do that, then the feeling of relief might be, okay. Cool. Well, instead of spending the next two hours putting this awesome pitch together, I’m gonna Google courses for x thing.
Right? That’s quite a safe activity that you can indulge in for the rest of the afternoon.
On the other side of the coin, if you have that same anxiety, you know, what if they find out I’ve never worked with someone this big before, but you decide well you know what if they do find that out yeah I’m going to be upfront and own it but I’m also going to own the expertise and the USP that I bring to the table. I’m really clear on how I’m uniquely qualified to help serve this business and help them hit their own goals and I’m going to paint a really clear picture of that for them. And you know, and sure they might be the first client of this size that I’ve worked with but there’s always going to be a first client of that size no matter what I do whether it’s them or someone else.
That’s probably going to feel quite uncomfortable obviously for all sorts of different reasons.
But then even if you do make the pitch, it doesn’t go through, you know it doesn’t get accepted, you don’t land the project, you’re still going to experience some sort of growth from that process because you would have gone through the motions of doing the thing.
You would have built some confidence in that sort of interaction. You might have learned some things about, hey, well, that actually didn’t land so well with that type of client. So next time, I’m gonna you know, change or adjust that.
You might even learn in that process that, hey. I actually did need to get this sort of certification. So, you know, I’m gonna go and do that, then I’m gonna come back to them. So again, the growth may not look like winning the project and hitting the ideal goal. It might look a bit different to that.
Which brings me to my final point, which is all about adopting a growth mindset. So a growth mindset is something I spoke about, I think it might have been in our second or third mindset workshop, so quite a few months ago now.
I don’t actually know if it is on the Copies School Professional website. I’ll check that for you. But, basically, a growth mindset is, all about being open to the fact that, you know, going to do things and you’re going to learn things by failing essentially.
So a failure is not the end of the road, a failure or a falling short or not doing things perfectly is actually an opportunity, for you to grow a skill set, to grow a knowledge base, to grow confidence in yourself, all sorts of things.
So these prompts here are for you guys to use, whenever you’d like.
Actually, Sket, if you would like five or ten minutes to go through these now so that you have something concrete that you might wanna talk about with, just pop a one in the chat box.
Whereas if you would like to just go through these on your own at a later date and spend the rest of the session diving straight into the the coaching portion of things, Pop a two in the chat box so that I can just work out which path is better. I’m sorry. I’ve stopped sharing my screen because I don’t know how to look at my chat while I share it. Okay. Andrew two, Abby two.
Right.
Claire two.
Katie two.
K. Looks like it’s a two, I think.
Claire’s. I don’t know that we’ve met before.
No. No. Sorry. I was in such a fluster when I came in a minute late that I didn’t even realize.
I was also a minute late.
Perfect. Okay. Simple. You didn’t miss anything.
Welcome to the cruise. I love you to meet, and I’m excited to get to know you more and more.
Thank you so much.
No. My pleasure. So two as it is. So we will not go into that process there, but, for future reference, those reflective prompts are there for you so that you can really clearly identify what the challenge is that you’re currently facing or what the anxiety is that you’re currently up against, what the worst case scenario actually is if you go ahead and do the thing anyway, but you mess up or you don’t hit the mark.
And I think that’s a really important one too because often we can get so in our own heads and we can start because sorry. I always mispronounce this word.
Oh my god. Six AM before coffee.
Kitadas oh my god.
Kitadas castrifies.
Thank you, Claire.
Yes. Thank you. You are my savior. Yes.
So we can get our own head, and we can make things snowball and allow them to become bigger than they actually are. So being able to write something down there that’s really concrete can actually help narrow us in and keep us focused, and make the boogeyman, I guess, feel less scary.
The next question there is if that does actually come to pass, then what would I have gained? Right? And this is about flipping you into that growth mindset so that if the worst case scenario does actually happen, you don’t just curl up in a ball on your couch with a big bag of chips and watch some crappy TV. Right? You’re actually able to say, well, actually, things that have come out of this are x and y. And the last prompt there is how does that feed back into your big picture goals. Because I think if you can always see how every action you’re taking is actually bringing you closer to the business that you want to have, you’re going to be able to stay more motivated even when things do not go as planned.
Alright.
So those are there for you, whenever you are ready or needing them.
And let’s, on that note, jump straight into the coaching portion of the call today, and we can talk about anything that I’ve just gone over or anything else that is happening or not happening in your businesses. So, feel free. Who has something they would like to ask or share?
Andrew. It was a steady hand.
I was ready. Can you hear me okay?
Yeah. Perfect.
Okay. Cool.
Yeah. This is very timely for me.
I’m definitely dealing with a lot of indecision around next steps because as you said, like, I have kind of, you know, like, the current state of my business is is going, and and that’s all well and good. And so it doesn’t feel like I can just sort of, like, oh, you know, just try like, just trying something else without making it a full committed effort. It doesn’t seem like a good use of my time. And so the way that this the way that this kind of avoidance cycle manifests for me is that there’s just a lot of, paralysis and indecision. And so, you know, just to to give you an example of of what how that’s showing up in my life right now is, like, right now, I should be working on lead gen.
Just, like, very clear that that’s something that I should be working on right now.
But then my mind goes, okay. Well, in order to do that, I need to, like, figure out exactly what it is that I wanna offer people. And in order to know exactly what it is that I wanna offer people, have to figure out exactly what my business strategy is. And if I wanted to figure out what my business strategy is, then I need to figure out, like, exactly what I want my life to look like.
And then that’s where I kind of get stuck. And something as you were talking that I kind of realized is that I think I’m equally afraid. I’m I’m it’s not just the failure side that freaks me out. It’s also the success side.
Because if I succeed, then there’s also gonna be, like, more responsibility, more risk, more, you know, clients to keep track of? Is that what I want in, you know, in my life? And and so it it feels it’s kinda the term perfectionism doesn’t never really resonated with me, but I do think I deal with it. It’s I think the word perfect is not right, but it’s like there’s some sort of standard in my mind or ideal in my mind that I feel like things need to I need to have like, I I I need to feel a certain level of confidence in my business model and business strategy and my offer before I could do any of that stuff.
And Mhmm. I’ve just been spending a lot of time the past few months of just constantly thinking about, well, I could do things like this or I could do it like that, but I don’t know if I wanna do it that way. I don’t know if I wanna and so, you know, I I I move on some stuff, but then I I don’t move forward with anything meaningful because like, reaching out to people, doing actual lead gen. Sorry about the extra noise.
And so, yeah, I I find myself with just a lot of not moving forward because I have not made a decision.
Mhmm.
Yes. It sounds like you are drowning under the weight of a multitude of decisions. When you were talking about the path that your brain jacks you down, I was like, wow. You’re trying to define Yeah.
And I’m whole life. And I’m high high anxiety, like, long ago, diagnosed medicated therapy, whole deal. So, like, yeah, this is all driven by anxiety for me for sure.
Yep. Oh, you have such good insight into what’s going on for you, which is a really awesome place to start.
I so I I definitely understand that your business and where you wanna take it from what I’ve seen in the Slack group and in some of the other recordings. Like, you know, it is a big movement. Obviously, it does involve growing a team and all those sorts of things, more so than you currently have, although you’re on the past already doing that. So I definitely understand and appreciate that it feels like you can’t just test this thing. Right? You know you’ve sort of got to jump into the deep end in some way.
And at the same time, I wonder if it is possible to jump into the deep end in one way with, like, a test project in that area. So like as an example, I did that with an upmarket version of my client years ago, because I wasn’t sure, like the same reasons as you, I think, about how much I would actually enjoy that process and what it would mean to the responsibility and all those things about my life. I actually didn’t love it. Love working with that kind of client, and it did take a significant portion and chunk of time out of my business to actually do that test project with it.
But I was able to move on that I think because I just brought in the resources I needed for that project on a contract base, if that makes sense. Would something like that be a possibility for you just to get me moving and just to get you testing with real world data?
Yeah. Definitely. I mean, I I and and in a way, a current client that I have right now kind of is that test project, because they are kind of I’m not necessarily changing my ICP as much as I’m changing the way that I structure my end of things going from, like, freelance conversion copywriter to, like, landing page optimization agency or, or CRO agency.
And I think another part of this that I didn’t quite mention on the on the first part is that there’s also like, around the perfectionism thing is that there’s this constant, like like, in terms of trying to figure out my process, what I’m what kind of research am I gonna do versus what am I not gonna do? There’s constantly this battle of, like, oh, you know, like, that’s not really gonna be enough. I need to also add this thing and this thing in order to have enough research. Oh, but then if I add that, then, like, then I’m overcomplicating it.
So, yeah, it’s it’s also indecision about exactly what that process is gonna look like. And and this need to kind of always be looking over my not focusing on what I have in front of me and and committing to the decision, but also, like, always like, oh, is there some other better way? Is someone else doing this better? You know, what do I need to add to this?
What do I need to change?
So it’s a lot of that. A lot of the this endless tweaking or endless, endlessly considering all the possibilities instead of just making a decision, knowing that it’s not gonna be perfect, and committing to it.
Mhmm.
Yep. And does the idea of the the latter, like, I’ll make the decision and knowing it’s not gonna be perfect and knowing you’re gonna find out, you know, answers to those questions as you go, does that just make you incredibly uncomfortable?
I guess. Because I just keep I just kinda keep doing it, and I keep so when it’s time alright. Here’s this way that Joe showed us that we can, like, reach out to people, and it’s, like, straightforward. She’s done all the work for us.
There’s always my mind is always going, oh, no. Wait. But there’s this other thing I haven’t figured out yet. No.
I haven’t figured out the perfect process. I haven’t so I guess so. I guess that there’s I’m I’m not sure what it is that I’m afraid of is gonna happen.
Mhmm.
I don’t think that there’s a negative consequence. I think that there’s just this internal need to to feel like I have something so good that I can’t wait to share it with the world instead of right now where it’s like, oh, I have this thing, but I’m gonna hide it because I’m not sure about it yet.
Yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha.
It’s interesting, and I wonder if this perspective shift may help you.
I do genuinely think that the people that we work with actually have such an important role in us shaping our offers and our services so that they are something that is so exciting and so compelling and so compelling and so wonderful. And I think to deny them that opportunity to help us shape something into being is actually a bit selfish because there’s no way that I could create something in isolation in my mind even with all of my experience and all of my knowledge that would be as good as it could be without testing it on real humans, with real businesses, and being able to identify the gaps. So I wonder if here the reframe might be partly that, but also you’re really bloody good at being able to identify things that, you know, could help a process or things that are, you know, surplus as you’re doing the thing. So I wonder how much can you trust yourself to do that on the run versus doing that in isolation before you unleash a thing into the world. Does that make sense?
Yeah. I think so. It sounds like you’re kind of saying to on one, treat it kind of as an experiment, and two, to invite the clients kind of into the process of, of optimizing it into something better.
Yeah. That’s right. And that invitation doesn’t need to be formal. Right? It’s just that, you know, they’re like a a lab rat in in some ways. Right? And, you know, you won’t know how things are gonna play out until you actually have the chance to play them out in real time in the real world.
Yeah. Because I think you you’re definitely like, you’re right.
You’re stuck in that cycle, and I think you’re actually stuck in that cycle.
Yeah.
Yeah. You’re almost like washing machine. It feels like you’re kind of spinning spinning. And I and I feel like you’re at the point now where that anxiety curve has gotten bigger.
It’s like the, you know, the crest to get over to actually do the thing now almost feels insurmountable because your head’s so busy with all of these things. And the reality is, you know, there’s so many questions that you have that you will not be able to answer until you actually do the thing. So Yeah. You’ve just gotta you’ve just gotta get uncomfortable.
Yeah.
No Yeah.
No. That that definitely helps. I think and also the first part about starting smaller in terms of how I think about this, like, not thinking the whole business and the whole future, but thinking about just the next client. What does this business look like for the next client and and nothing else? That that’s helpful because that makes it less overwhelming and less it feels less permanent.
Awesome. What’s the next client?
What is this gonna look like for the next client? Yeah.
Yes. And what could that look like for you then? Because I’d love for you to have in your mind, okay, if you’re just thinking about it in that, like, just that piece, what’s this gonna look like for the next client? Like, just what what is that gonna look like for you in your process? Like, what’s gonna happen for you next? What things you actually gonna action and do?
Yeah. I think that what I need to do is I think I need to focus on, a lead gen activity and letting myself figure out the rest after I have someone on the hook because that’s that’s what worked in the very beginning of my business where where, you know, oh, yeah. Hey. I can help with your email, you know, project.
And then they’re like, okay. Great. And they sign on, and then I’m like, alright. Let me go open ten x emails for the first time.
Let’s do this. So yeah. So, I think that that that could work for me if I just shrink the whole thing down and just think of it as what is who who’s the next client and then figure out what’s what does it look like from there.
I love that. And I love that young if she’s still young, but younger Andrew energy of just like, oh, cool. I’ll book an email project, and then I’ll learn how to do it. I think that’s awesome.
No. He was he was young.
He was in his twenties.
He was young. He was a wise man. And carefree. Yeah. That’s that’s the The last the last thing I just wanna say to you, sorry, and then I’ll stop.
Please, please. Yeah. That’s remember that just because you do something one way once, you’re not locked into doing that again and again forever and ever. Like, you may try this thing and realize that for some reason, something about it or everything about it doesn’t work.
That’s okay. That’s great data to have because now you can build with that in mind. So, you know, I think as well as being overwhelmed by, like, all the things because the decision is feeling so big. Sorry.
I’ll just mute Katie. I think that’s oh, no. She’s on it. Thank you, Katie.
As well as being overwhelmed by that, I do wonder if you’re also like, that’s kinda where that perfectionism is coming in. Like, this idea that, like, you need to get it right first time and, like, you’re gonna be locked into doing it a certain way. Whereas it’s all just a data gathering process. Right? And you can only optimize what you already know.
So I don’t know if that helps, but take that with you if it does.
Yeah. No. It it it does. Thank you. I appreciate it, Christie. Thanks.
My pleasure. Alright. I think, Katie, did you have your hand up earlier, or did I imagine that?
I did, but I have to leave for my daycare run now. So I’m not gonna relinquish my spot. But I just wanted to say, like, everything Andrew asked was very similar to what I was gonna ask. I really struggle with that all or nothing thinking as well as, like, secret like, I always wanna get things in the right order. So it’s like, okay. Well, this would be the next step, but if I do it now, like, I can’t do that until I get all these other things in place. So, Chrissy, your resource that of win slash acceptance really made me feel personally attacked by the in a really helpful way.
And I think what you were just saying to Andrew about, like, thinking of it as doing a service to your clients to act before you’re ready is also really helpful. And if you have anything else to say around fear of success, I’m here for it because I definitely think that that holds fear of success of, like, getting into the room, but then messing it up and being exposed as a fraud is, like, a way bigger fear for me than failing, like, just not having the thing.
Yes. And thank you for bringing it up. Cassandra, sorry. I forgot to touch on your fear of success as well.
It’s, yeah, it’s a big one, isn’t it? Because I feel like the bigger you get and bigger being in a matter you’re working with for your clients, you’re earning more money, you’re more visible, right, you’re more out there, the more vulnerable you feel, right, because you’re more exposed, obviously. So if people disagree with what you’re doing, if someone, you know, God forbid, has had a bad experience with you, like, that can be out there and that is really confronting. But I think one of the threads that runs not just through this fear of success but also, sort of like the all or nothing mentality and having to have all the steps in exactly the right order is that I feel like both of you might be forgetting that you are very intelligent, adaptable, responsive human beings.
Right? You it’s not like you’re gonna have to make all these decisions in isolation and then you’re just gonna play them out no matter what happens. Right? You’ve got your businesses to the point that they’re both currently at by reading the room, by responding to things, by taking really strategic sound actions most of the time.
So I think it’s really important to keep those things in mind. And I always wonder if there might be space for a workshop on self trust, at some point because I feel like ultimately, you know, there’s so much that we can’t control about the world, you know, our clients and projects and all those things. But if we’re able to trust ourselves to make decisions in the moment when those challenges arise, then so much of that becomes so much easier.
I don’t know if any of that resonated with anyone.
That it’s funny because when Andrew was talking, I was thinking it was I just self trust was on my mind for both of us.
Mhmm. Yes.
Awesome.
Okay. And it’s sorry. What Andrew has written here. Trying to figure out the right order is eating a ton of time and mental bandwidth for me. Yep. Yep. So this ordering of things, and I think, again, that’s probably linked to perfectionism, the idea that we must have all our ducks in a row, and they must be perfectly in the right row in the right place at the right time, for us to even take the first step and to get off the ground.
You know, it’s a mindset block one hundred percent because it’s not how learning works. Right? Think about the most basic skills. Like, think about talking.
Like, you don’t all of a sudden one day just open your mouth. Start having full sentences with, like, multisyllabic words. Right? It’s it’s such a process, and you trip and you stumble, but you learn from all of those things.
So I think with that metaphor too, like, the other good thing to note is that you start talking because you’re ready to start. You’re motivated. You wanna do the thing. So maybe that applies here too for reaching and stretching and growing your businesses in all these exciting ways.
That may have just been a very random metaphor, but it’s what came to mind.
Yeah. Awesome. Is there anything else I can quickly talk to you about, Katie, before you go do the, day care drop off? Or, otherwise, we could always continue this in Slack as well.
I’m good. I’m gonna keep listening, but I won’t be able to wave anymore. But thank you, Kirsten. That was helpful.
All good. And, Claire, I think your hand was up next. Hello. Hi.
So, obviously, mostly, my question’s, like, so so much in the same zone, but it’s probably a little bit more linked to the, maybe not fear of success, but, like, the whole imposter syndrome side of things.
Mhmm.
So whenever I try to post something or write something, if I’m, like, writing just for an internal thing, working out a process, I can sit down and write. No problem. The moment I’m like, okay. Let’s come up with a LinkedIn post, my brain starts going, you know nothing.
Everyone else already knows this. It’s very obvious. It’s out there. You learned this by listening to someone else.
Why wouldn’t they listen to someone else? Why listen to you?
And I get myself into this, like, whirlwind. Even when I answer, like, things on calls, I’m like, they’re gonna know. They’re gonna know mid talk, and then I start stumbling.
If it doesn’t happen, I know I could be really great. But if, like, that anxiety kicks up, it just makes me ramble.
Yeah.
So I don’t know how to deal with that.
Do you have any tips?
Yeah. Sure. And, also, I don’t know if you noticed, but Andrew was definitely nodding there. So I just wanted to highlight that I feel like everything everyone shared so far is an experience that most people in the room have also had. So just know, one, it’s very normal.
Two, you’re in good company. And three, it’s not a sign that you’re not doing the right work and doing the right thing. Right? We all have those moments where we worry that what we have to share or what to say is not good enough, not new enough, not interesting enough, not valuable enough.
But I think we also all have those moments where we manage to wow a a client just by saying something that we think is quite middle of the road. And they’re like, I never knew this. And they’re like, look at me with my expertise.
So, I mean, obviously, that’s, something that can really help with that, but that’s not something that’s in your control. Right? So let’s not focus on that. We can’t control other people’s reactions. We can only control our actions and to some extent our feelings about those.
So I’m just wondering when you feel this imposter syndrome hit, is it always when you are sharing your own knowledge or your own skill set? Is it is it confined to that, or is it more broad?
Yeah. I think so.
Because it’s in my mind, it’s not my own knowledge. It’s, like, knowledge learned. Do you know what I mean? Like, I’ve acquired this knowledge from lots of other experts, lots of other people. It’s technically theirs. I’ve just learned it.
Mhmm.
Yeah. Sure. Which is the case, I think, for all of us in this room. Right? We haven’t all just spoken up one day and discovered the craft of copywriting on our own.
I think it’s important to remember that, yes, you know, everyone learns their expertise and their craft from somewhere. Right? It’s how education systems work. For example, you get a degree to be a doctor, like, you know, that’s a maybe an example that’s quite helpful to think about.
I think what’s important to remember is that you are going to always bring your own USP and your own uniqueness to the table. Right? There’s gonna be something about the way that you share that information that’s gonna resonate with the right people. There’s gonna be something about, you know, your experience of utilizing that information or using that skill that’s gonna be really appealing to the right people.
So I think it’s again of thinking about your niche, right, and who it is you’re actually speaking to, and how what you have to share is actually hyper relevant for them. Because I think if any of us broaden out, you know, the kind of content that we would share to a white audience, it’s going to be compelling for a whole group of people, right? We have to go narrow, think narrow, and think about how to actually, you know, resonate with that person. I think another thing that can help too in those moments of imposter syndrome, especially when you’re in the middle of a a call or a conversation with a prospect or a client, is just to remember that what you’re having is actually a conversation. Right? It’s a back and forth. So it’s not a show and tell necessarily.
You know, if you can just bring it back down to that human level, that can often relieve some of that anxiety of you feeling like you’re on show, of you feeling like you’re up on a stage of some sort. Because if you just think, hey, I’m just having a chat with Claire. Like, we’re just talking about this. They’ve asked a great question.
I know the answer. Here it is. That flow can actually help bring those levels of anxiety down so that you feel less watched and just more present in the moment. Because I think something that you also, shared when you were talking about that is that it’s almost like there’s this version of Claire that hovers above you and, like, watches and is aware of what you’re doing and is possibly judging or worrying for you.
Is that is that sort of the case?
Yeah. It’s like, oh, look. Now you’re rambling. Of course you are.
Yes. Yeah. Okay. So I think it would be very helpful if if we could find ways to stop that sort of dissociation happening and and having so much of your brain up there watching, judging what you’re doing because of course that’s taking you out of the present moment.
And of course would be impacting your ability to actually you know, show up confidently. You know, it would be imagine if there was an actual person behind you saying those things. Like, that would be so distracting. So it’s the same kind of concept.
So I think it might actually be good to work with anything that brings you into the present moment. So really focusing, on the person you’re speaking to, maybe even grounding yourself with some really subtle exercises. So, do you normally meet in person or on Zoom with your clients or prospects? On Zoom.
Awesome. So a really good grounding exercise because, obviously, on Zoom, no one can see your feet unless you have a very strange camera setup that I’ve not seen before.
Even just scrunching your toes into whatever floor you have underneath your desk and just noticing the sensation, noticing what it feels like, that’s a really good way just to bring you back into your body, so that you have less of those sort of out of body floating above or behind the shoulder kind of, moments. So even something as simple as that, I would love for you to try that and then report back in Slack and just let me know if something that simple can actually help bring you back into the present, into the conversation, and out of that nasty imposter syndrome.
Oh, well, that’s super helpful. Thank you.
My pleasure. Todd, I think I might have seen your hand before unless I also imagine that.
Well, first off, this is great. Great workshop.
I’ll be honest. The last couple of days for me, I’ve had, anxiety, and it’s actually coming to a group and talking about it about it. For me, it’s like, Andrew and I actually have a call scheduled for tomorrow. And for me, it’s the CRO side of it.
Like, am I making the right decision if I’m gonna go with the CRO side of it? I talked a little bit to Tina about it. I’ll be quite honest. I don’t have an issue with process.
I’ve got a nail down, dialed in process. I know that when it runs, it runs extremely well.
I’m closing out a project right now, and the process is so dialed. I’m like, I don’t even wanna go and do it because it’s gonna be easy. And it’s one of those things. I don’t have that, but I have the anxiety side of it, and it’s great to have the conversation about, like, okay. Is this gonna be the right thing?
Mhmm.
And, you know, I’ve got other client work in the background. But you made me think of something that’s kind of important, and I will impart this if I can.
Had a client in the past, and they are Canadian special forces. So they’ve shared conversations where they’ve if not to get too deep into it, where they’ve actually had their superiors over somebody they just killed in a war, or they’ve been on a spot in the world where their only contact the rest of the world is when a satellite passes over their head. And it goes back to the stoics. And one of the things that when you’re talking about self trust and everything, you just made me think of something, and I’m like, excuse my language, but I’m like, shit.
I forgot all about that. And it’s called the only thing you can control is your controllables. That’s it. That’s the only thing you can control is what you can control.
And for me, what I’m thinking a little bit more of is doing anything I can control in the day, you know, not tomorrow or what happened yesterday, but today, is just showing up and showing up and doing what you can in that day. And it might not be the win you want or the huge success you want, but just showing up in that day and just doing what you can in that day, that’s a controllable that you can control. That I don’t know. For me, I think those stack up, And I think the more they stack up, the less the other days can kinda stack, and you actually are standing over it more than it standing over you.
So that was just my comment. It just made me remember, like, control your controllables. And that’s that’s a tough thing to do for me, especially in the last couple of days. Because it’s like, oh, okay.
Where is this going? What am I gonna do? What is this going to look like? You know?
And and all these things. So that’s all. Just wanted to impart that. That’s just it’s a very important thing to do.
It’s just control your controllables. That’s it. It’s all you can do. Right?
So Hundred percent.
Thanks so much for sharing that, Todd. That’s so timely. And, yes, And like you say, just showing up every day and doing the thing, I think, can also help when things feel overwhelming. Right?
It’s like we’re not trying to plan and execute every single thing for the business that you wanna have two years from now. It’s about what little things can actually do today that day after day can add up. So I think if, yeah, looking if looking and thinking too broad is something that causes anxiety, then bringing it back into that. And, again, yeah, what you can control, so helpful.
So thanks for sharing. That’s awesome.
Anyone else have any questions, concerns?
Hello?
All good? Okay.
So I’m never sure how long to wait in case someone’s just been shy, but I feel like we might be all questioned out for this morning.
We’re all just anxious.
I know. You’re like, oh god. This workshop was, like, my avoidant part of my day. Now I have to actually go and do some work.
What is this? Well but thank you so much for showing up this morning. Thank you so much for sharing so openly and honestly. I think the more honest that we can all be about these feelings and doubts that we have, you know, the more we just feel like, oh, we’re in the right room and we’re doing the right things.
Right? Everyone here is in the right place doing the right things. And because you have those doubts, you know, it it doesn’t mean anything about your qualifications, or where you’re headed with your business whatsoever. It’s all part of being human, unfortunately.
So please feel free to reach out and continue any of these conversations in Slack. I would love that, or have a chat with Zoe about Zoe with Joe, sorry, about, doing a workshop on self doubt, and see where that might be able to fit in because it sounds like that might be a helpful one. Sorry. Self trust. Sorry. Sorry. My baby was awake every hour last night, so she’s functioning on bare minimum.
But, yes, I will see you all in Slack, and I’ll see you again on Zoom next month.
Bye, everyone.
The Buyer Handbook: Researching ICPs
The Buyer Handbook: Researching ICPs
Transcript
Alright.
Y’all, I know you’re still filing in, but we have Ali here, Ali Bloom. I’ve have I ever said your full name? I’ve always said Ali Bloom. Is it Blum?
It’s Blum. Yeah.
It’s Blum.
I think we’re the only ones to pronounce it that way. The German pronunciation is Blum. I don’t know how my family did it this way, but here we are.
Got it. Okay. Cool. Well, so we’ve known each other forever.
Mhmm. It’s been a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Like, ten years maybe?
I was counting it earlier. Yeah.
Yikes. Spoke at, MicroConf at least one time together. Got to speak to them by each other at the speakers dinner. That was fun.
And Ali’s been working a lot on, gosh, all sorts of things. Do you wanna give a quick background on what you’ve been doing the last few years? Sure.
Yeah. So I took technical I met Joe and took Joe’s copy technical training too long ago. Like, really, truly close to a decade ago. Doesn’t the pandemic makes it seem like it was just a year or two ago.
And since then, I have worked in almost every department in a software company. So before copy, I did PR and content and marketing. And I said, I wanna get closer to the sale. Like, I gotta get closer.
So I kinda did copy, and I was like, write all these copy, did a lot of onboarding emails, and then started to feel like, well, I the product needs some help. Like, I gotta go fix the UX. So then I started going to UX, and then I started going to research. And I worked with Sofia Cantero, the founder of EnjoyHQ to because I was like, okay.
Actually, no. It’s not just me who needs to know it. Like, everyone needs to know the research and VOC. So how about I go mobilize VOC for all these people?
And so I got to help a lot of people get their repos set up and get into research and then research ops. And then, had a chance to go zero to one on a like, as a fractional, had a product last couple of years, which has been so cool.
And now I’m going back my I was pretty fractional pretty close to in house, and now I’m going back to, consultant helping people get buy in on VOC, jobs to be done, and research. Like, how do we actually do this CLG thing that that we talk about?
Yeah.
Dig it. Love it. So yes. It’s amazing. And I really love the progression of going from, like, focusing on copy to working so much in product to see where you can go with this career when you focus on, like, strategy, research, listening to customers.
Right? Like, there’s so much room out there. I think it’s really inspiring.
And so this month, we’re working on the buyer handbook, of course, in Coffee School Professional.
Part of that is really understanding your ICP.
And so we’ve been talking about ICPs a bit so far.
And now, yeah, I wanted to bring you in, Ali, just to, like, share how to do research for ourselves potentially for our own businesses as well as when clients when you’re working with a client, maybe they don’t know who they’re talking to. Yep.
Happens a lot.
They may not know they don’t know who they’re talking to.
Yeah.
Yes. Right? Perfect. So, I know we’ve only got an hour. We’ve got fifty five minutes left, so I would like to stop talking.
I’ll let you take over. Everybody, please get your notebooks ready. And, Ali, please take it away with helping us understand ICP research.
Woo hoo. Okay. Cool. Alright. Let’s see how good I can be at sharing my screen.
Let’s see. I have the browser open.
Okay.
I should have done this while you were talking. Would have been a much more dramatic event.
Oh, no. It’s good. Everyone’s having time to, like, get settled in too.
So it’s Yeah.
Okay.
There we go. Okay. Here we go. We go to present, and then we say presenter view, and then we say sent, and then we say share, and then audience window.
Perfect. Thank you. Okay. So you guys can see my screen?
We can see audience window. Yes.
Okay. Excellent. So I close this. You can see a nice Canva color palette here. Okay. Cool.
Wonderful.
Alrighty. So we’re gonna talk about how to research and mobilize an ICP that actually gets used. So I see so, so often that we do all this work, all this work to get our ICP, and then it just sits on a shelf or somebody’s, like, you know, worst case scenario, fighting us, questioning the fact that we would even do this. I’ve seen all kinds of ignoring of ICP or jobs to be on or any kind of customer development work ignored. So we’re gonna talk about how to bake that part in from the beginning and how to actually do some of the research.
So today, we’re gonna talk about how we can make an ICP useful, unignorable, mobilizable.
Didn’t tell me spell spell check didn’t say that was a fake word, so we’re going with it. How do you build a coalition around your ICP?
And then the five steps of which building a coalition is one of them to research and mobilize your ICP, and then what it kinda looks like when you’re done, what you kinda get out of that.
So before we get into that, I’m gonna ask you guys, why bother researching ICP? Why are we doing this?
Anybody? Go for it.
Internal buy in right from the beginning?
Yeah. On what?
On who the client is and helping them see their client in a different light.
Yeah. Why do we need that?
Because they don’t understand the client and what they’re building it for. And then by the time they build it, it’s not what the client actually wants.
And then what happens?
They don’t use the information that they have, and it just stops right there. So, their copy changes, that’s not what they wanted to say. They don’t know who they’re talking to, and products just die on the vine. Yeah.
The products die on the vine. Yes. So often, if we do not get this right, and it it goes through all these different departments, we don’t get right, things die on the vine. That is that is a really good way to put it. Cool. So that’s what we’re doing this for. That’s why that’s our urgent reason to care here.
So before we get into some of the ways to make it succeed, there’s two main ways that I wanna talk about the how we can avoid failing and how you just nix these. Like, just crush them off your you’re not worried about them anymore. The first one is building something that I call a static ICP. So you’ve probably seen these.
If you’ve been working in marketing any amount of time, it’s like a list of attributes, and it’s fixed. I call it static because it’s fixed in a moment in time. It’s just a a description of of what we’re doing of who the person looks like. And what I call a dynamic ICP is something that’s constantly evolving and also speaks to how your ICP progresses through time.
So to give you an example, we might say, okay. Here’s a regional small business. They’ve got annual volume, hundred million dollars, ten locations, two to three hundred employees. They sell office supplies.
We could maybe sell them, like, CRM. Like, they’ve got some sales. We could maybe sell them HR software. Like, we can, like, there’s hints about things they might need, their business.
They need business things. But if we know, like, actually who their ICP like, who we’re talking to and what their moment in time is, then we might know. So I don’t know how many of you guys have seen the American Office, but we know that there are many different characters with many different roles, many different sets of circumstances. They go through mergers.
They go through getting spun back off. They go through potential downsizing. They have cost cutting. They have all of these different scenarios, some of which, result in buying decisions.
And they don’t the important thing about this is that we’re also looking at the individual, like, not the the company as as a whole necessarily. We’re selling to the company, but we wanna also make sure we we we talk about the individual because people buy things, not companies.
So pothole number two. So pothole number one, making sure that we have, like, a it’s a more, dynamic. We know the storyline in time. Particle number two is thinking you only need to research your customers.
So do you have any idea who the other person the other people we need to research as they’re doing this project?
The client.
Okay. Client, customer, pretty, like, a good product.
Any other guesses? So it’s your coworkers. It’s your colleagues.
So you’re going through this process. You’re gonna be researching your customer, but you’re going to be researching them the you’re going to be building a a tool that’s going to be used by your colleagues. So you wanna make sure you don’t exclude them from the process.
So this is especially, it’s especially important no matter if you’re in house or if you’re a consultant.
But it’s especially important to keep in mind because so often we and I used to do this all the time, and it it often got me tripped up. We’re often hired for expertise. We say we’re gonna go do this thing. We go off, we do the thing, and then we come back and we say, I did the thing.
Here’s the ICP. And then that can kind of sit on a shelf. So we wanna make our ICP stick. So part of what we’re gonna be doing here is making sure that we get that, get that understand who we’re going to be getting that buy in from before we start.
So that brings us to our five steps here.
Yep. So the five steps that we’re going to research and, to learn to research and mobilize your ICP. First is building your ICP coalition.
So we’ll talk about how to do that. So making sure you know who the people are that are going to be in part of this. Then there is quant research, two types of qualitative research, leading indicator and lagging indicator, and then, share as you go steps. So this is kind of a step you do every step of the process, but it’s a really important thing to keep in mind.
So the first step, building your coalition.
So your colleagues are your ICP for your ICP project. If you’re doing jobs to be done, you wanna do your the jobs to be done on your clients, on your colleagues. You wanna know what circumstances they’re in. You wanna know their stage of awareness.
Right? Because if we come in and we say, let’s do an ICP to someone who doesn’t even know they need an ICP, they’re totally unaware, you’re we wanna avoid going from that unaware or that problem or stage to just like, hey. Be most aware. Have high intent.
Let’s just do this thing now. It’s a very, very hard jump to make in a single conversation. I haven’t been able to do it. Maybe your maybe your skills are better, but it’s really, really challenging.
So we wanna nurture people along those stages of awareness by understanding where they are.
So and why this matters? Okay. So miss Congeniality, Ocean’s eight. We wanna be less of this think of yourself less of this, like, lone wolf who’s like a like a genius and has it right, but is alienating everyone around them.
Miss Congeniality, Sandra Bullock plays a, FBI agent who goes undercover in a beauty pageant, and, she’s not taken seriously. She’s also really mean to all of her coworkers. She’s right. She saves the day, but barely with the help of her teammates.
Versus Ocean’s eight, she’s leading this coalition of people to do a heist. So she knows that she’s really good at planning the heist, but she’s gonna be bring in people who are really good at at safe cracking or, like, rebuilding jewelry. Fencing is a thing you need to know how to do if you’re in a heist. So we’re going to be working with other people. So we wanna make sure that we’re in a scenario where we’re setting ourselves up to have that pro social kind of collaborative, heist that we’re making we’re doing together.
I should think of a fun way to work in heist heist, jokes here. Okay. Cool. So this brings us to our first activity.
So, Sarah, I will take you up on that offer. If you could send that, doc out to everyone. So I have a coalition building workbook.
You guys are the ones getting to see it for, like you’re gonna be the first people to ever see it. I am so excited to hear what you think of it. There’s a lot more that I wanna add to it. But the way that I want you to think about it is these are the different things. These are the blanks to fill in as you’re going through to build your ice to research and mobilize your ICP.
So you should see in the first section, build your coalition, there should be a couple of different blocks, and it should say name, title. Some of the titles will be filled out, stage of awareness with respect to ICP, and a problem that they complain about.
So, for example, if you are working with a CEO and the CEO is just like, god. Our churn sucks. Our churn sucks.
Marketing can’t get it together. Product can’t get it together. Like, our churn sucks. That’s what they’re complaining about. They’re not complaining about not having ICP. They’re complaining churn sucks.
So I want you to, I have a couple there. You’re gonna wanna do this for, like, three to five people ideally, but for right now, I’m gonna put five minutes on a timer. I’m gonna invite you to think of like, to fill in the blanks that you can for one person.
So other people, you’re you’re gonna have three different people that you can invite in types of people to invite into your coalition.
Your champion, this is prompt someone who’s not terribly involved in the nitty gritty of the work. That’s the CEO most likely.
Your allies, these are people in other departments. You’re like, you’re you’re doing some of the work together and then your coconspirators.
This is your work bestie. This is who you’re gonna come in and be like, okay. I can’t can you believe this? Ding dong.
Like, that kind of person where you can have that kind of relationship where you can talk through how to actually do this. So five minutes on, I’m gonna ask you guys to, fill in one just the profile for just one coalition number. I’m gonna put five minutes on the clock, and then I’m gonna ask one of you to share and tell me about this person. And if it’s not if you’re, if you’re a consultant, you can do it for, like, your client point of contact.
Okay. That’s just about five minutes. Does anybody want how’s it going? And does anybody want to share a member of your coalition?
Anyone dare to?
I’ll dare. Okay. I was gonna call on you, Claire. You look like you might want to. That’s awesome.
Well, it’s like I’m so curious. I wanted a feedback.
Cool.
I have, for example, the director of marketing, who’s stage of awareness for ICP is probably about a five out of five because it’s their job.
Okay.
And they’re probably complaining about low conversions. Put all this effort to get leads in, and they’re not converting, and they’re complaining about it because it’s messing with their interests.
Okay. Is this a real director of marketing or a hypothetical director of marketing?
A hypothetical director of marketing.
Okay. If you were to, turn this to a real director of marketing you may have worked in in the past, what would you do to take that one level of one level more specific?
I don’t think I have worked with the real director of marketing, to be honest.
Okay.
Yeah. I’ve worked with the head of sales.
Okay.
She was kind of like a three out of five.
Okay.
And sort of at a loss, one between departments. Like, everyone’s going like, this is the thing that you should be focusing on. No. This is it. No. This is it.
So she was really struggling to know, like, what do I what am I telling my reps? What is the message that we’re putting through to people?
Yeah. And what were the specific go ahead.
I’m sorry. I’m just asking if that was the more specific Yeah.
A lot.
What were some of the consequences of not knowing what she could tell her reps about what kind of pitch to make?
I think it was more emotional than actual, like, real life consequences. So I think it was more just like, I need to prove results, prove myself, and I’m not sure that I’m going to.
So many things are changing. I’m confused. They’re confused. Like, we need a ground base.
Okay.
I’m not sure.
Yeah. I’m not sure what her internal conversations look like.
Okay. What kind of was she hitting her her quotas? Was her team hitting her quotas? Their quotas?
I actually don’t know. We mostly had a conversation about, like, what she’s seeing in customers at the moment.
It was more of like a discovery call for me to understand Okay.
What they’re hearing from their current customers. Cool. But yeah.
Cool. Okay.
Excellent. Anyone else wanna share theirs?
It’s a small group. There’s not much room for you guys to hide.
I’m I’m saying this to, like, try to give you an out if you don’t want to.
But Jessica, I know you’re on your, treadmill right now, but, is there anything that you this is a good chance to get some notes as you work through what you’re working on.
Any thoughts? Anything you wanna share? If you’re talking, you’re on mute. Just trying not to be called on.
You came off mute, Jessica.
No? Alright. Everyone’s shy today, Ally. Oh, Katie’s down. Katie, are you down?
I’m mute. Sorry. Okay. Yeah. But I got on problem agreement evidence. Could you clarify what you were looking for there?
Yeah. So this is where we’re going to find, this is something we’re coming to later. So this is great feedback for me of how to work out with this. So that’s research that you’ll get to find that you can say, okay.
I see you head of sales. I see you head of marketing. This problem’s real. I know I I found some evidence.
Like, I’m not I take your word for it, and I want to go track down some evidence. So what I do with these this is sort of the starting point, but what I ultimately like to do over time is keep a problem library. Anytime somebody complains about something, I write it down. And at first, I’m not trying to prove it.
I’m not trying to solve it. I’m just like, okay. Someone’s not meeting their quotas. Sales is about product and marketing.
Like, some there’s problems. I’m just gonna keep track of them, and I’ll add all that data as I go.
Any other questions?
So but the problem agreement is around you finding evidence that that problem exists and that the product that you’re selling, in this case, like, an ideal client profile, could solve that problem Exactly.
Yeah.
To support the need for what you want to sell. Okay.
Yeah. The key to getting your project to to be really, really popular is to position it as a solution to other people’s problems. So we wanna be the experts. I don’t know too much about Margaret Thatcher, except I know that she was a politician who was famous for knowing more than anyone else in the room. So you wanna show up to these rooms knowing more about that problems that other people are having than they do, and that’s looking for some of that evidence as you go. We’ll talk about the ways you can do that in a second.
But there’s also a second kind. So you’ll also see that there’s this quant research step as one of the next, channels. So this is the or one of the next blanks to fill in. So this is one of the other areas where we wanna be collecting a lot of data.
So this is the second step of looking for our ICP, and this is where we’re going to figure out how we can make sure that this is an ICP grounded in reality and an ICP grounded in what people actually do versus an ICP that’s maybe a flight of fancy as many many of them are. Now anybody here do we have you can say in the chat or not in the chat. Anybody here, like, Okay. Okay.
Four out of three people are bad at math, and I’m the fourth.
So Great.
Okay. Cool.
So I’m not either. I love having numbers. I want them. I need them. I crave them.
I don’t wanna make a decision without them. I am, like, very data driven, when I make decisions at work. Not at home. But at work, I’m very, very data driven.
However, I’m not a numbers person. A day when I have to go fight a dashboard tool is a bad, bad day. I know SQL. I would prefer not to have to write my own query.
So how do you what do you do with this? So you can say, like, alright. This is actually a good opportunity to really break down what we mean by quant and what we want our quant to do. So we’re really asking a question with our quant data.
How do you measure ideal? Like, when we say our ideal customer, what does that even mean? Like, how do we know that they’re ideal? What’s the type of, thing that they’re doing in our product?
So that might be activation metrics. It could be churn. It could be volume.
Some indicator that they are picking up what we’re putting down.
Are there any other, are there any other metrics that you guys use when you’re talking about ideal customer profile that, I might be missing here? I’m sure there’s many.
I mean, I feel I’m, like, less in the software space and more in coaching, but I think, like, success, like, they achieve the outcome that was promised in the in the original pitch.
Yeah. Did they actually get a benefit out of the product or the service? Yeah.
That’s a big one. What else?
Everyone’s being so quiet today. Everyone is shy. No.
We’re talking about key metrics. Correct? Really, what we’re looking at are key metrics. So you can really look at that for driving could be primary goals.
Could be driving revenue growth. It could be reducing costs. Would that be correct? So you could say, like, maybe one person wants to have cost savings, one person wants to increase conversion rates, one person wants more ARR, one person wants to have more MRR.
Would that be correct in what we’re looking at for metrics?
All of it. Yep. Yes.
Depending on the person and the ICP you’re interviewing. Correct?
Yeah. That’s a that’s exactly it. So we’re we’re going to want to see customers that are not going to cost us money to serve. So those higher margin, that’s a customer, that’s a one way to look at it. All the other ones that you outlined as well.
And sort of like what what you were saying, Claire, around that that person that’s head of sales had a really emotional component, they all there are some numbers they care about. So it’s we can figure out, okay, what are the numbers that they care about? And we can say, alright. Let’s point our lens. So like I said, I’m not a numbers person, but here’s how I use that as an opportunity to pull other people into my coalition.
So what I do is get really good at framing the questions that I wanna ask. Depending on how much time you guys have get to spend with data, the the opportunities are really endless for the queries and the questions you can come up with. And that is really a huge, huge part of the data work that that happens on data teams. So you can get really good at saying, this is the number I need to understand, and here’s how I need to understand it changing over time.
And then you can find a quant person either at your client, like, hey. Do you have a date person chartered data? Maybe it’s it’s gonna be somebody different at every at every type of company and say, hey. Can we pair on this?
Because I have some things that are really important to some of these these execs that I wanna figure out how it works. And then you can also use that as an opportunity to ask the data person, hey. You guys you you seen any numbers that we gotta pay attention to? Because those data people are probably getting ignored because they’re probably coming up with number after number after number presented in a very numerical kind of way with without the story, without connecting it to a problem.
So you can also help them and bring them into your.
Okay. So that’s it. Step two, quant data. You wanna know you wanna be looking at who has done things that indicate they are the the kind of customer you want to do that with again.
So the next question or the next step is, first of two qualitative research steps. And This is leading indicator qualitative research. So this is happening a little early on, in our relationship with the customer, and I call it the magic question email. I actually call it the magic question email automation. I don’t I left that word off here.
Okay. So I this is another thing that I learned from Joe ten years ago that still works.
So this magic question is, what’s going on in your world that led you to do the thing? And with every client that I work with, I set up a welcome email that has this question at the bottom. Then I pipe the replies to a folder and a qualitative research repository. I use EnjoyHQ.
And then over time, you have a single location with, I’m not exaggerating, I have one client. I think there’s, like, twenty five hundred responses in there right now. And one of the engineers on the team came to me and said, she reads every hour. Every day, she’ll go in and just read replies from an hour.
So when she goes into her product engineering meetings, she’s the Margaret Thatcher in that room because she knows whether or not something’s gonna fail or succeed before they even build it. Whether or not they listen to her, that’s we’ll come we’ll have a master class on that another time, but this is a really, the most powerful thing for building, again, that dynamic ICP. Right? So this is going to give you the answers to questions that pea or the data that people have.
Let me start that over.
Sending this out right after somebody has signed up to start using a product, that’s the moment of that high tension. That’s in that exact switch moment. That’s when they’re really heightened to say, I wanna make sure that I I’m doing something. Like, something has just changed that makes me actually wanna do this.
That energy is gonna be really high. You’re gonna wanna make sure that you capture as much of that as you can. So this is an email that I wrote for a company called Mural many, many moons ago. This is an example of the the type of formula that I use.
There’s a an introduction. I wrote it from CEO.
We had some VOC at the time from people saying Mural was a missing piece they were looking for, so we included it. We added some credibility around the different types of companies that we worked with. We said what’s gonna be coming next because Mural, like many whiteboard tools, blank slate. And at the time when we wrote this, this was not an established category. People did not know how to use these things. And then the one question.
So our activity now is to write your magic question emails. So you’ll scroll down, and you’ll see that’s one of we’re gonna skip quant because that’s not my, that’s gonna be different depending on where you are and because I hate it. And I love this. So we’re gonna go to a magic question email. I can just be so much more useful for you here than I can with the quant stuff. Make a good friend in quant is my quant advice. So, put another five minutes on, and I’ll invite you to write a first draft.
And then I’m gonna ask somebody to read their email if they want. If they’re too shy, then I’ll just go on to the next part. But anyway. Okay.
Sorry. Quick question. Who are we writing this email for? Like, to our ideal client? Good question.
Pick it to a new customer if you work at a for a pro a company where you work or for a client that you might have or maybe one that would that you had, in the past.
Okay. That’s just about five minutes. Does anybody have a first draft that they want to share?
Sure. I’ll go.
Alright.
Doing it. Jumping straight in. Full disclosure, it’s the end of my work day. My brain is fried.
It’s a first round.
No worries.
I’ve written it from, like, a really old client of mine that was super interesting to work with called Pave. So it’s, welcome to Pave name. I’m John, the CEO, and I just wanted to take this time to say we’re really excited to help you grow your newsletter’s revenue.
Pave is the new kid on the block, but thousands of independent newsletter creators have already used it to sell recurring sponsorship slots to big brands like Monday dot com, Masterwork Masterworks, and company Abe. You will find all the tools you need to monetize without spamming your readers with relevant ads. But before you get started, I have one quick question for you. What was going on in your world today that led you to sign up to Pave?
Just hit reply to this email and let me know.
Awesome.
Yeah. Cool. So it sounds like you had this new product in an established space that had already gotten a lot of success. I’m sorry.
You’re celebrating that, making it really exciting. Look at us. You’re or look at you. You’re joining this cool cool new kids club.
And and that’s a great question. Awesome.
I have a question about the question, though. Yeah.
I’ve used it before, and I found, like, people don’t respond to email as much as I’d hope if if there’s, like, a large user base.
So would you ever use, like, a segmenting link, you know, where you just have, like, two options?
So I would probably want to know a little bit more about the situation where you weren’t getting the responses, because I have I worked in one category where I I basically could not get anyone to reply to my emails, but I’ve not experienced that elsewhere.
I have experienced times where, somebody comes in and changes my magic question email and the responses go down for a little bit. So there’s a lot of different factors. But what I would say definitively is that I would leave this question open ended for as long as you can because we don’t know the finite number of reasons why people signed up yet. And the goal that or the the biggest, benefit of having this run continuously, build that repo, is that you get a repo a repository of voice of customer data, and that is part of your dynamic ICP.
So your your ICP is an artifact, but it’s also where your customers are talking, and they’re people. They’re humans. They say things. They complain.
They’re disgruntled. They’re happy. They’re sad. The way they talk about things also changes. Like, I’m sure you guys are seeing with with a lot of the AI things that are coming on, the way that somebody may have responded to this email two years ago, they may be talking about the same things, but in a very different language now compared to them.
So we wanna know that keeps us keeps us sharp with what folks are knowing. So I I don’t really use the segmenting, links unless I know definitively, unless I’ve already built, tested, and had my ICP working for a long period of time, and I I know it’s good, then I wanna start with open ended.
Got it. Okay. So you just send these all to, like, an inbox, where you can access them.
I’m guessing if they go straight to, say, the CEO’s inbox, he might not be active in pulling them to your Yeah.
So you’re gonna want there is some coordination that you’re gonna wanna do with the from name.
So you’ll see on that workbook, there’s a lot of different moving parts to this email. So the the copy is, like, that’s your first thing to get it going, but you’re gonna need to make sure that you have sign off from the person who’s going to be using their from name. Maybe you use a fake email address that’s from the real person and you send the CEO the best emails.
And your I use a qualitative research repository as my receptacle. So there’s a tool called EnjoyHQ, Dovetail, notably, Aurelius. There’s several of them several of them now. I send it all to a folder inside one of those tools.
Great. Okay.
Thank you.
There’s probably other ways to do it.
The only thing I like less than quant is figuring out how to use software. So there are ways to do it that or not this, but this is the one that works I have found that works the best and the easiest for me.
Cool.
Okay. I’m gonna keep going because we’re at step three, and I wanna make sure we get to get through everything. So thank you for sharing. This is awesome.
And like I said, you’re gonna generate tons and tons of responses. In almost every case, there are few limited ones where even tweaks won’t won’t help you too much. We can probably, we can still get other data points here. So step four.
So that leading indicator, you’re gonna say, like, they’re coming in. They they’re right in this switch moment. Then we’re gonna look at our lagging indicator. So this is where we’re going to talk to people who are already successful with us and kind of look back at how they made their decision.
So this is where we’ll do some jobs to be done documentary style interviews. So I chatted with Joe a little bit beforehand. I think you guys have some familiarity with it. Jobs to be Done is its entire own, master class series, so I’ll just hit some of the high notes here.
What I I use the jobs to be done, the job story artifact as the main artifact in an ICP. And the top of that artifact, you’re going to have a sentence that describes your customers, what we call their job story.
So their job story is when I am in a set of circumstances, give me a way to make some kind of progress so I can achieve some kind of outcome. And they’re all going to have this sort of story flow. Once upon a time, I was ahead of sales, and everyone was telling me all of these different things that I needed to do. And I couldn’t figure out who was on first, and I wasn’t meeting my quota. So I need a way to figure out how I can tell my team the single sales pitch to make or the couple of sales pitches to make So I can hit my quotas. I can hit my numbers. My team can all get their commissions.
Right? So we may have a job story come out something like that, and that’s what we’re we’re going to be driving towards here.
Lots of great resources on jobs to be done interviews if you haven’t done them before. I don’t have a a desi dedicated script I use for everyone. I mapped them out based on the category.
But I do have five questions here that I wanna share as an example of how to how to get good data.
First, I always wanna ask somebody about themselves and the role of the company. So much gold in there. I wanna know when they first signed up. I wanna know when they first started looking.
I wanna know what else they considered and what they liked about those other solutions. And I wanna know who else was involved in the decision. This will vary drastically. Like, I have one client.
There’s fifteen people involved in the decision. I’ve worked with others where it’s you’re selling to the buyer. Like, the buyer is the user.
So keep so there’s lots of ways to do it. The the important things to remember are how to, ask good questions to make make sure you get really good data and some just some do’s and don’ts.
I don’t know why I said just some do’s and don’ts, like diminutive as if it’s not, like, the the main takeaway for research. That was a weird thing I just did. So what you want to do is imagine you’re a detective or a documentarian. You are studying a thing that has already happened.
You want to know the moment when somebody switched, when they said, I can’t take it anymore. I gotta get something else, And that already happened. You wanna do that instead of imagining that you’re that they’re a fortune teller. Imagining you can say, like you you don’t wanna say, what would you do in the future?
Or do you think you would do this? Or blah blah blah blah blah. You wanna know what happened.
Another thing that you wanna do is focus on having questions that start with what, when, who, and how.
And there’s a lot of reasons for this, but there’s two main reasons to avoid why. Whether you are a student of linguistics linguistics, psychology, hostage negotiation, patriarchy, all of these systems as you study them, they will tell you to avoid the question why because it is very often accusatory, and it has this kind of accusatory note baked into it. So we wanna avoid it. The second reason is that it can be kind of hard to answer.
I like to give the example and I may have learned this one from Joe too. If we say, you know, why do you love your spouse? Oh, well, why do I love my spouse? Versus what do you love about your spouse?
Hopefully, there is a long, long list and you don’t stop talking until we shut you up. So we wanna make sure we’re asking these kinds of questions that are going to elicit good responses.
Do record the call. One thousand percent get consent and record the call. Do not trust your notes. This is one of the biggest beginner mistakes. I know you guys are learning all about VOC.
I also say if you’re talking to other people who have not done this, those low awareness colleagues of yours, make sure if they’re having calls, get them to record it. Expect it to take two to three months before the message really sinks in. Just keep just kinda keep reminding them. Hey. Thanks for the notes. Did you do you have a call? Whatever.
And then two other techniques I like to probe on general words. If someone says, well, it was just better, what does better mean? What about it was better, versus letting a throwaway word lie. You can’t use better in a in a headline.
That’s not gonna get you anywhere. And then recap and restate. So this is a great way to find, where you may have gotten it wrong and to elicit a response. So you may say, oh, okay.
I heard you say that you were, you had three different meetings in one day, and everybody gave you a different, thing they wanted you to sell.
Do I but you weren’t sure which of the people you should listen to. Do I have that right? And then your head of sales might say, well, actually, it was really the CEO told me to go talk to these people because the CEO didn’t know, and he wanted their opinions or whatever it is. So that gives you an opportunity to get someone to correct you while agreeing with you.
Do I do I have that right? Like, am I picking up what you’re putting down? You can say, oh, no. Not really.
It’s still, like, a kind of agreement type mechanism. Okay.
Step five.
Share as you go. So remember at the beginning, we talked about building our coalition. We talked about wanting to get that trust early on, bringing people in. And, someone I don’t remember who asked a question about this problem agreement evidence.
So you’re going to go through and do this research. You’re going to get evidence of other people’s problems, and you’re going to hear it. You’re gonna be able to share it with people. And And you know what you’re gonna get to say? You’re gonna get to say the three best words in the English language. It’s not I love you. It’s you were right.
Very, very few of us get to hear that in at home, at work, and you’re gonna get to hear that. Like, you’re gonna get to or people you’re working with will get to hear that from you, further endearing them to your cause. So I like to say you’re we’re doing less, like, launching the new iPhone. We’re not going off doing our engineering.
We would’ve built them. We would’ve given them a faster horse if we asked them what we wanted. We’re not doing that. We’re not up on stage.
We’re not separate. We’re a lot more Julia Child. Like, this is how I crack the eggs. Do you wanna taste some of this soup before I add add a little bit more salt in?
We are cooking together. We are involved in this. You’re the expert. You don’t wanna diminish your expertise, but you’re involving people, as you go.
And so there’s a lot of different ways that I like to do that.
My favorite, favorite, favorite thing is to take an interview that you’ve done, get a sixty to ninety second clip where somebody where the customer is talking about a pain point someone else cares about. So if I was working with this head of sales and I’m talking with a customer and that customer is like, you know, I thought you guys were, like, I thought you guys were a CRM, but then I started using you, and I couldn’t, like, I couldn’t do this one thing that is essential for CRMs.
Snip it, put it into the script audiogram, send it to the head of sales in a very casual, informal way. Hey. I heard remember that thing you were telling me the other day? Like, I just got off the phone with this customer. I think you’re gonna wanna hear this. And the reason for this, nobody wants to listen to an hour long interview. Nobody.
You we will do them only when we have an external or internal push to do so. I actually have this story of when I had there were some jobs to be done interviews sitting in the repo for a year that I knew I needed to listen to, but I didn’t listen to them until I found something in the data that said, oh, I gotta fix that. Where’s the data? Okay.
So and so did the research. I’m gonna go get it. So we need to give somebody a push. Ten hours of research, one hour of research, half hour call, this is a big ask.
But there is nobody who is going to hit say no to a sixty second clip that breaks up their day, gives them something really easy to listen to that says you were right.
So highly recommend it. Descript, there’s other tools. Descript is the I haven’t it’s the one to beat. So okay.
So you do all of this, and then what happens when you’re done? So you have all these steps. You’re building your coalition. You’re doing your quant research.
You’ve got your leading lagging indicators for qualitative research, and you’ve been sharing as you’re going.
So at the end, we’re not just getting a document, not just getting an artifact. So at the end, we’re getting a team of people who are bought in and want to see ICT succeed. Their awareness is higher. Their engagement with the work is higher. The how like, what’s in it for me? That’s a question that’s been answered answered months ago. They’re really they’re really with you there.
You’re getting a metrics informed ICP. So because you’ve been incorporating so much data in how you’re pursuing the people that you’re going to research, you’re going to get something that has a lot more data, like, grounding in data reality by the time you ship, and that’s gonna make so much of the work that comes later easier to ship.
So ICP, it’s not just an artifact. It’s something that can seem like, it’s an understanding. Like, it’s it’s not just a piece of paper that says this is who we sell to. It’s I know this is who we sell to, and I know what that’s like, and I know what it feels like. I have a qualia of it. So that that magic question email automation, that’s gonna keep building up your, database.
And then you’ll get that dynamic artifact ICP from your jobs research. And then most importantly, you’re gonna have a team of people who trust your ICP because they were a part of making it. It’s not just Thelma’s project. It’s Thelma and Louise’s ICP.
Everyone’s part of it now. It’s not just my thing. It’s our thing. So thus concludes your introductory crash course lesson, researching and mobilizing ICP.
Thank you so much. This was so fun.
What questions do you have?
I’ll start with you.
So good, Ali. Okay. Amazing.
I’m just so glad that I know that some people couldn’t make it today. I’m so glad that they’ll be able to watch this replay, and the documents you put together too. There’s just a lot of really good stuff here. Even things that are just like, are you saying lagging and leading indicator when you’re talking to a client?
Like, are you using the sorts of jargon? And I know it’s not just jargon. There’s so much more to it than what that. Yeah.
But when a CEO or CMO or anybody hears you use the right words, Your invoice gets paid. Right? You’re the person that knows what they’re doing. So Yeah.
I just love this for, like, introducing people more and more or, like, expanding on, the way that they already talk in organizations.
Yeah. So lots of good stuff here. Thank you, Ali. Yes. Does anybody have any questions for Ali today on ICP research? Or I want you to anything in particular to what we just saw?
No? How are we gonna go forward and use this? What do you think your clients would want to know from Ali if they were here?
That’s a different story. Yeah.
No? Are we good?
Yeah. I think there’s a lot to think about. Oh, Jessica is here. Okay. Jessica has, a question.
Feel free to play. Oh, Clara already asked her. That’s right. So, Jessica, come off mute.
Let’s hear your question. Normally, I would like a win first, but I feel like, I think, honestly, everybody is kind of, like, a little bit scared right now. Yeah. A lot.
Yeah. In a good way, though. Right? Like, there’s a lot of information downloaded on a very specific thing, that is so high value, and now they can go out and talk about this, but it’s, like, processing time.
That’s what I’m thinking of at least. Okay. So, yeah, that’s, Jessica, please.
Can you hear me okay?
Yes.
Okay. Sorry. I’m on the iPad again. Okay. So hi. Thank you so much. I I so I announced in our group last week that, I’ve shifted my business a lot.
So I’m moving away from freelance copywriting to building a book publishing agency. And so this has really shifted all the things because what normally I would go you know, all this focus on companies and, you know, teams and things like that, I’m starting to feel like it might focus a lot more on the thought leader themselves, and there may be a limited number of team involved if at all.
And so I guess I’m just kind of wondering what your thoughts are on how to really identify even the people I’m focused on even for step one. Because the one person that comes to mind for me is the person who wants to either write their book or get their book written and published and marketed and all that.
But I’m not sure, especially in the book writing stage, how much of their team will be involved. So I guess I’m again, all new. This is a very recent shift. So any insights you would have would just I’d really appreciate.
So you are you are starting a book publishing agency. Have you published any books yet, or you’re very, very early?
I’ve published books before, but since this shift in the agency in doing this, no. Not since then. K. We just closed the first.
You just closed your first Yes.
Project since shifting this bus to back to this. Yeah.
And if you had to describe the people who are the authors here, their thought leaders, and their team may or may not be involved in the authorship of the work that you publish?
Yes. I’m not I I haven’t encountered a situation where I would be working with the team, especially in the writing part of it.
Okay.
So your your an ICP can be an an individual.
Is there a reason why you’re feeling like you need to in include the your customer’s team or your client’s team?
No. I just in step one, when you had it broken down, I was like, okay. Well, obviously, the person we would be writing the book for, which is typically, like, the CEO, the founder, the person who wants to build up their authority, you know, that part.
But in terms of any other roles that might be involved, I’m not sure at this point, but if I were working on their marketing, then I could see team more involved. But I was just curious, you know, if yeah.
I was just trying to get any I know it’s a very niched, market I’m talking about.
But Okay.
Good. This is good good point of clarification.
So the people in that first section, like the CEO, your work desk, whoever it is, those are going to be people who are going to be part of the develop development of your ICP.
So when you are working, when you’re working on this agency, the people for you might be your editor in chief, whoever edits the books that come in, or maybe it’s the person who’s responsible for getting the manuscript from digital to paper form or working with the Amazon, some kind of coordination liaison. So you would be working internally with those folks. And then Yeah. If you need to be looking at your your client’s ICP, so the the ICP that they may have would more likely be for their readers if the product that they’re going to sell is a book.
So that would probably be how I would shift that. I it sounds like their team is probably not super significant here.
Yeah. That’s what I was thinking at first. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. Sure.
Awesome. Yeah. It’s quite tricky when you’re figuring out something almost brand new. Like, in Jessica’s case, she has, of course, done lots of this work for other people before just over time, and now she’s, like, turning it into an agency.
But the people differ. You know? And it’s been years of doing this work, so, really tough to to figure out your I mean, this is a huge challenge. Right, Ally? Like, nobody easily lands on their ICP. Or do you know anybody who has?
No. No.
No. Just fully no. Yeah. Exactly.
I mean, maybe maybe maybe maybe people who had a very clear idea in mind before they started, like, the founder of American Girl Doll, I think, had the vision for that entire company, but those are so, so rare.
That’s true.
But I can tell you. Okay. So I’m actually doing jobs to be done research now on people who hire jobs to be done providers because I’m so curious about this. Yeah.
So, what I would say to you, Jessica, is I don’t I would go, like, do some interviews with people who’ve hired a publisher. Like, there’s the one that, what’s it called? I don’t know. Nine or two.
It’s I don’t know what it’s called. I think April Dunford used them.
Page two.
Page two. Okay. There’s a number. So I would go say, like, did you, you know, did you hire an publishing agency and do some interviews?
Find people who are making that switch to go from all just make an ebook or I’ll or, or, actually, I don’t even know what the switch they’re making it from. I shouldn’t make the assumption. I love this game. I’d love to guess what the research is gonna tell.
I am wrong. I’m right fifty percent of the time and way wrong fifty percent. So that that’s what I would probably do to to investigate that.
That’s so smart. I love it. Cool. Excellent. Ali, that was amazing. Thank you so much.
Where can people do you are you on Instagram people can, like, reach out if they have further questions or wanna learn more? Yeah.
Okay. So I’m on LinkedIn now. The other socials, not so much.
And I’m working now on getting a more detailed, like, building your coalition around buy in for jobs to be done, DOC, etcetera.
Yeah. Email, course and a more detailed workbook with a little bit more. So I don’t tell Joanna, but my email my business’s email is not really that great. So, so, anyway, I’m getting that all done. It’s alie blum dot com, and it should be done hopefully, hopefully, middle of August.
Okay. Alie bloom dot com. Well, pop that in there. Amazing. Cool. Thanks again so much.
Thank you.
Thanks from everybody, and we look for I look forward to seeing you again, hopefully, at some event we both planned at somehow. Yeah. Hopefully.
Me too. Yeah.
Cool. Alright. Thanks, everybody.
Have a good day.
Take care.
Thank you.
Bye. Bye.
Worksheet
Worksheet
Transcript
Alright.
Y’all, I know you’re still filing in, but we have Ali here, Ali Bloom. I’ve have I ever said your full name? I’ve always said Ali Bloom. Is it Blum?
It’s Blum. Yeah.
It’s Blum.
I think we’re the only ones to pronounce it that way. The German pronunciation is Blum. I don’t know how my family did it this way, but here we are.
Got it. Okay. Cool. Well, so we’ve known each other forever.
Mhmm. It’s been a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Like, ten years maybe?
I was counting it earlier. Yeah.
Yikes. Spoke at, MicroConf at least one time together. Got to speak to them by each other at the speakers dinner. That was fun.
And Ali’s been working a lot on, gosh, all sorts of things. Do you wanna give a quick background on what you’ve been doing the last few years? Sure.
Yeah. So I took technical I met Joe and took Joe’s copy technical training too long ago. Like, really, truly close to a decade ago. Doesn’t the pandemic makes it seem like it was just a year or two ago.
And since then, I have worked in almost every department in a software company. So before copy, I did PR and content and marketing. And I said, I wanna get closer to the sale. Like, I gotta get closer.
So I kinda did copy, and I was like, write all these copy, did a lot of onboarding emails, and then started to feel like, well, I the product needs some help. Like, I gotta go fix the UX. So then I started going to UX, and then I started going to research. And I worked with Sofia Cantero, the founder of EnjoyHQ to because I was like, okay.
Actually, no. It’s not just me who needs to know it. Like, everyone needs to know the research and VOC. So how about I go mobilize VOC for all these people?
And so I got to help a lot of people get their repos set up and get into research and then research ops. And then, had a chance to go zero to one on a like, as a fractional, had a product last couple of years, which has been so cool.
And now I’m going back my I was pretty fractional pretty close to in house, and now I’m going back to, consultant helping people get buy in on VOC, jobs to be done, and research. Like, how do we actually do this CLG thing that that we talk about?
Yeah.
Dig it. Love it. So yes. It’s amazing. And I really love the progression of going from, like, focusing on copy to working so much in product to see where you can go with this career when you focus on, like, strategy, research, listening to customers.
Right? Like, there’s so much room out there. I think it’s really inspiring.
And so this month, we’re working on the buyer handbook, of course, in Coffee School Professional.
Part of that is really understanding your ICP.
And so we’ve been talking about ICPs a bit so far.
And now, yeah, I wanted to bring you in, Ali, just to, like, share how to do research for ourselves potentially for our own businesses as well as when clients when you’re working with a client, maybe they don’t know who they’re talking to. Yep.
Happens a lot.
They may not know they don’t know who they’re talking to.
Yeah.
Yes. Right? Perfect. So, I know we’ve only got an hour. We’ve got fifty five minutes left, so I would like to stop talking.
I’ll let you take over. Everybody, please get your notebooks ready. And, Ali, please take it away with helping us understand ICP research.
Woo hoo. Okay. Cool. Alright. Let’s see how good I can be at sharing my screen.
Let’s see. I have the browser open.
Okay.
I should have done this while you were talking. Would have been a much more dramatic event.
Oh, no. It’s good. Everyone’s having time to, like, get settled in too.
So it’s Yeah.
Okay.
There we go. Okay. Here we go. We go to present, and then we say presenter view, and then we say sent, and then we say share, and then audience window.
Perfect. Thank you. Okay. So you guys can see my screen?
We can see audience window. Yes.
Okay. Excellent. So I close this. You can see a nice Canva color palette here. Okay. Cool.
Wonderful.
Alrighty. So we’re gonna talk about how to research and mobilize an ICP that actually gets used. So I see so, so often that we do all this work, all this work to get our ICP, and then it just sits on a shelf or somebody’s, like, you know, worst case scenario, fighting us, questioning the fact that we would even do this. I’ve seen all kinds of ignoring of ICP or jobs to be on or any kind of customer development work ignored. So we’re gonna talk about how to bake that part in from the beginning and how to actually do some of the research.
So today, we’re gonna talk about how we can make an ICP useful, unignorable, mobilizable.
Didn’t tell me spell spell check didn’t say that was a fake word, so we’re going with it. How do you build a coalition around your ICP?
And then the five steps of which building a coalition is one of them to research and mobilize your ICP, and then what it kinda looks like when you’re done, what you kinda get out of that.
So before we get into that, I’m gonna ask you guys, why bother researching ICP? Why are we doing this?
Anybody? Go for it.
Internal buy in right from the beginning?
Yeah. On what?
On who the client is and helping them see their client in a different light.
Yeah. Why do we need that?
Because they don’t understand the client and what they’re building it for. And then by the time they build it, it’s not what the client actually wants.
And then what happens?
They don’t use the information that they have, and it just stops right there. So, their copy changes, that’s not what they wanted to say. They don’t know who they’re talking to, and products just die on the vine. Yeah.
The products die on the vine. Yes. So often, if we do not get this right, and it it goes through all these different departments, we don’t get right, things die on the vine. That is that is a really good way to put it. Cool. So that’s what we’re doing this for. That’s why that’s our urgent reason to care here.
So before we get into some of the ways to make it succeed, there’s two main ways that I wanna talk about the how we can avoid failing and how you just nix these. Like, just crush them off your you’re not worried about them anymore. The first one is building something that I call a static ICP. So you’ve probably seen these.
If you’ve been working in marketing any amount of time, it’s like a list of attributes, and it’s fixed. I call it static because it’s fixed in a moment in time. It’s just a a description of of what we’re doing of who the person looks like. And what I call a dynamic ICP is something that’s constantly evolving and also speaks to how your ICP progresses through time.
So to give you an example, we might say, okay. Here’s a regional small business. They’ve got annual volume, hundred million dollars, ten locations, two to three hundred employees. They sell office supplies.
We could maybe sell them, like, CRM. Like, they’ve got some sales. We could maybe sell them HR software. Like, we can, like, there’s hints about things they might need, their business.
They need business things. But if we know, like, actually who their ICP like, who we’re talking to and what their moment in time is, then we might know. So I don’t know how many of you guys have seen the American Office, but we know that there are many different characters with many different roles, many different sets of circumstances. They go through mergers.
They go through getting spun back off. They go through potential downsizing. They have cost cutting. They have all of these different scenarios, some of which, result in buying decisions.
And they don’t the important thing about this is that we’re also looking at the individual, like, not the the company as as a whole necessarily. We’re selling to the company, but we wanna also make sure we we we talk about the individual because people buy things, not companies.
So pothole number two. So pothole number one, making sure that we have, like, a it’s a more, dynamic. We know the storyline in time. Particle number two is thinking you only need to research your customers.
So do you have any idea who the other person the other people we need to research as they’re doing this project?
The client.
Okay. Client, customer, pretty, like, a good product.
Any other guesses? So it’s your coworkers. It’s your colleagues.
So you’re going through this process. You’re gonna be researching your customer, but you’re going to be researching them the you’re going to be building a a tool that’s going to be used by your colleagues. So you wanna make sure you don’t exclude them from the process.
So this is especially, it’s especially important no matter if you’re in house or if you’re a consultant.
But it’s especially important to keep in mind because so often we and I used to do this all the time, and it it often got me tripped up. We’re often hired for expertise. We say we’re gonna go do this thing. We go off, we do the thing, and then we come back and we say, I did the thing.
Here’s the ICP. And then that can kind of sit on a shelf. So we wanna make our ICP stick. So part of what we’re gonna be doing here is making sure that we get that, get that understand who we’re going to be getting that buy in from before we start.
So that brings us to our five steps here.
Yep. So the five steps that we’re going to research and, to learn to research and mobilize your ICP. First is building your ICP coalition.
So we’ll talk about how to do that. So making sure you know who the people are that are going to be in part of this. Then there is quant research, two types of qualitative research, leading indicator and lagging indicator, and then, share as you go steps. So this is kind of a step you do every step of the process, but it’s a really important thing to keep in mind.
So the first step, building your coalition.
So your colleagues are your ICP for your ICP project. If you’re doing jobs to be done, you wanna do your the jobs to be done on your clients, on your colleagues. You wanna know what circumstances they’re in. You wanna know their stage of awareness.
Right? Because if we come in and we say, let’s do an ICP to someone who doesn’t even know they need an ICP, they’re totally unaware, you’re we wanna avoid going from that unaware or that problem or stage to just like, hey. Be most aware. Have high intent.
Let’s just do this thing now. It’s a very, very hard jump to make in a single conversation. I haven’t been able to do it. Maybe your maybe your skills are better, but it’s really, really challenging.
So we wanna nurture people along those stages of awareness by understanding where they are.
So and why this matters? Okay. So miss Congeniality, Ocean’s eight. We wanna be less of this think of yourself less of this, like, lone wolf who’s like a like a genius and has it right, but is alienating everyone around them.
Miss Congeniality, Sandra Bullock plays a, FBI agent who goes undercover in a beauty pageant, and, she’s not taken seriously. She’s also really mean to all of her coworkers. She’s right. She saves the day, but barely with the help of her teammates.
Versus Ocean’s eight, she’s leading this coalition of people to do a heist. So she knows that she’s really good at planning the heist, but she’s gonna be bring in people who are really good at at safe cracking or, like, rebuilding jewelry. Fencing is a thing you need to know how to do if you’re in a heist. So we’re going to be working with other people. So we wanna make sure that we’re in a scenario where we’re setting ourselves up to have that pro social kind of collaborative, heist that we’re making we’re doing together.
I should think of a fun way to work in heist heist, jokes here. Okay. Cool. So this brings us to our first activity.
So, Sarah, I will take you up on that offer. If you could send that, doc out to everyone. So I have a coalition building workbook.
You guys are the ones getting to see it for, like you’re gonna be the first people to ever see it. I am so excited to hear what you think of it. There’s a lot more that I wanna add to it. But the way that I want you to think about it is these are the different things. These are the blanks to fill in as you’re going through to build your ice to research and mobilize your ICP.
So you should see in the first section, build your coalition, there should be a couple of different blocks, and it should say name, title. Some of the titles will be filled out, stage of awareness with respect to ICP, and a problem that they complain about.
So, for example, if you are working with a CEO and the CEO is just like, god. Our churn sucks. Our churn sucks.
Marketing can’t get it together. Product can’t get it together. Like, our churn sucks. That’s what they’re complaining about. They’re not complaining about not having ICP. They’re complaining churn sucks.
So I want you to, I have a couple there. You’re gonna wanna do this for, like, three to five people ideally, but for right now, I’m gonna put five minutes on a timer. I’m gonna invite you to think of like, to fill in the blanks that you can for one person.
So other people, you’re you’re gonna have three different people that you can invite in types of people to invite into your coalition.
Your champion, this is prompt someone who’s not terribly involved in the nitty gritty of the work. That’s the CEO most likely.
Your allies, these are people in other departments. You’re like, you’re you’re doing some of the work together and then your coconspirators.
This is your work bestie. This is who you’re gonna come in and be like, okay. I can’t can you believe this? Ding dong.
Like, that kind of person where you can have that kind of relationship where you can talk through how to actually do this. So five minutes on, I’m gonna ask you guys to, fill in one just the profile for just one coalition number. I’m gonna put five minutes on the clock, and then I’m gonna ask one of you to share and tell me about this person. And if it’s not if you’re, if you’re a consultant, you can do it for, like, your client point of contact.
Okay. That’s just about five minutes. Does anybody want how’s it going? And does anybody want to share a member of your coalition?
Anyone dare to?
I’ll dare. Okay. I was gonna call on you, Claire. You look like you might want to. That’s awesome.
Well, it’s like I’m so curious. I wanted a feedback.
Cool.
I have, for example, the director of marketing, who’s stage of awareness for ICP is probably about a five out of five because it’s their job.
Okay.
And they’re probably complaining about low conversions. Put all this effort to get leads in, and they’re not converting, and they’re complaining about it because it’s messing with their interests.
Okay. Is this a real director of marketing or a hypothetical director of marketing?
A hypothetical director of marketing.
Okay. If you were to, turn this to a real director of marketing you may have worked in in the past, what would you do to take that one level of one level more specific?
I don’t think I have worked with the real director of marketing, to be honest.
Okay.
Yeah. I’ve worked with the head of sales.
Okay.
She was kind of like a three out of five.
Okay.
And sort of at a loss, one between departments. Like, everyone’s going like, this is the thing that you should be focusing on. No. This is it. No. This is it.
So she was really struggling to know, like, what do I what am I telling my reps? What is the message that we’re putting through to people?
Yeah. And what were the specific go ahead.
I’m sorry. I’m just asking if that was the more specific Yeah.
A lot.
What were some of the consequences of not knowing what she could tell her reps about what kind of pitch to make?
I think it was more emotional than actual, like, real life consequences. So I think it was more just like, I need to prove results, prove myself, and I’m not sure that I’m going to.
So many things are changing. I’m confused. They’re confused. Like, we need a ground base.
Okay.
I’m not sure.
Yeah. I’m not sure what her internal conversations look like.
Okay. What kind of was she hitting her her quotas? Was her team hitting her quotas? Their quotas?
I actually don’t know. We mostly had a conversation about, like, what she’s seeing in customers at the moment.
It was more of like a discovery call for me to understand Okay.
What they’re hearing from their current customers. Cool. But yeah.
Cool. Okay.
Excellent. Anyone else wanna share theirs?
It’s a small group. There’s not much room for you guys to hide.
I’m I’m saying this to, like, try to give you an out if you don’t want to.
But Jessica, I know you’re on your, treadmill right now, but, is there anything that you this is a good chance to get some notes as you work through what you’re working on.
Any thoughts? Anything you wanna share? If you’re talking, you’re on mute. Just trying not to be called on.
You came off mute, Jessica.
No? Alright. Everyone’s shy today, Ally. Oh, Katie’s down. Katie, are you down?
I’m mute. Sorry. Okay. Yeah. But I got on problem agreement evidence. Could you clarify what you were looking for there?
Yeah. So this is where we’re going to find, this is something we’re coming to later. So this is great feedback for me of how to work out with this. So that’s research that you’ll get to find that you can say, okay.
I see you head of sales. I see you head of marketing. This problem’s real. I know I I found some evidence.
Like, I’m not I take your word for it, and I want to go track down some evidence. So what I do with these this is sort of the starting point, but what I ultimately like to do over time is keep a problem library. Anytime somebody complains about something, I write it down. And at first, I’m not trying to prove it.
I’m not trying to solve it. I’m just like, okay. Someone’s not meeting their quotas. Sales is about product and marketing.
Like, some there’s problems. I’m just gonna keep track of them, and I’ll add all that data as I go.
Any other questions?
So but the problem agreement is around you finding evidence that that problem exists and that the product that you’re selling, in this case, like, an ideal client profile, could solve that problem Exactly.
Yeah.
To support the need for what you want to sell. Okay.
Yeah. The key to getting your project to to be really, really popular is to position it as a solution to other people’s problems. So we wanna be the experts. I don’t know too much about Margaret Thatcher, except I know that she was a politician who was famous for knowing more than anyone else in the room. So you wanna show up to these rooms knowing more about that problems that other people are having than they do, and that’s looking for some of that evidence as you go. We’ll talk about the ways you can do that in a second.
But there’s also a second kind. So you’ll also see that there’s this quant research step as one of the next, channels. So this is the or one of the next blanks to fill in. So this is one of the other areas where we wanna be collecting a lot of data.
So this is the second step of looking for our ICP, and this is where we’re going to figure out how we can make sure that this is an ICP grounded in reality and an ICP grounded in what people actually do versus an ICP that’s maybe a flight of fancy as many many of them are. Now anybody here do we have you can say in the chat or not in the chat. Anybody here, like, Okay. Okay.
Four out of three people are bad at math, and I’m the fourth.
So Great.
Okay. Cool.
So I’m not either. I love having numbers. I want them. I need them. I crave them.
I don’t wanna make a decision without them. I am, like, very data driven, when I make decisions at work. Not at home. But at work, I’m very, very data driven.
However, I’m not a numbers person. A day when I have to go fight a dashboard tool is a bad, bad day. I know SQL. I would prefer not to have to write my own query.
So how do you what do you do with this? So you can say, like, alright. This is actually a good opportunity to really break down what we mean by quant and what we want our quant to do. So we’re really asking a question with our quant data.
How do you measure ideal? Like, when we say our ideal customer, what does that even mean? Like, how do we know that they’re ideal? What’s the type of, thing that they’re doing in our product?
So that might be activation metrics. It could be churn. It could be volume.
Some indicator that they are picking up what we’re putting down.
Are there any other, are there any other metrics that you guys use when you’re talking about ideal customer profile that, I might be missing here? I’m sure there’s many.
I mean, I feel I’m, like, less in the software space and more in coaching, but I think, like, success, like, they achieve the outcome that was promised in the in the original pitch.
Yeah. Did they actually get a benefit out of the product or the service? Yeah.
That’s a big one. What else?
Everyone’s being so quiet today. Everyone is shy. No.
We’re talking about key metrics. Correct? Really, what we’re looking at are key metrics. So you can really look at that for driving could be primary goals.
Could be driving revenue growth. It could be reducing costs. Would that be correct? So you could say, like, maybe one person wants to have cost savings, one person wants to increase conversion rates, one person wants more ARR, one person wants to have more MRR.
Would that be correct in what we’re looking at for metrics?
All of it. Yep. Yes.
Depending on the person and the ICP you’re interviewing. Correct?
Yeah. That’s a that’s exactly it. So we’re we’re going to want to see customers that are not going to cost us money to serve. So those higher margin, that’s a customer, that’s a one way to look at it. All the other ones that you outlined as well.
And sort of like what what you were saying, Claire, around that that person that’s head of sales had a really emotional component, they all there are some numbers they care about. So it’s we can figure out, okay, what are the numbers that they care about? And we can say, alright. Let’s point our lens. So like I said, I’m not a numbers person, but here’s how I use that as an opportunity to pull other people into my coalition.
So what I do is get really good at framing the questions that I wanna ask. Depending on how much time you guys have get to spend with data, the the opportunities are really endless for the queries and the questions you can come up with. And that is really a huge, huge part of the data work that that happens on data teams. So you can get really good at saying, this is the number I need to understand, and here’s how I need to understand it changing over time.
And then you can find a quant person either at your client, like, hey. Do you have a date person chartered data? Maybe it’s it’s gonna be somebody different at every at every type of company and say, hey. Can we pair on this?
Because I have some things that are really important to some of these these execs that I wanna figure out how it works. And then you can also use that as an opportunity to ask the data person, hey. You guys you you seen any numbers that we gotta pay attention to? Because those data people are probably getting ignored because they’re probably coming up with number after number after number presented in a very numerical kind of way with without the story, without connecting it to a problem.
So you can also help them and bring them into your.
Okay. So that’s it. Step two, quant data. You wanna know you wanna be looking at who has done things that indicate they are the the kind of customer you want to do that with again.
So the next question or the next step is, first of two qualitative research steps. And This is leading indicator qualitative research. So this is happening a little early on, in our relationship with the customer, and I call it the magic question email. I actually call it the magic question email automation. I don’t I left that word off here.
Okay. So I this is another thing that I learned from Joe ten years ago that still works.
So this magic question is, what’s going on in your world that led you to do the thing? And with every client that I work with, I set up a welcome email that has this question at the bottom. Then I pipe the replies to a folder and a qualitative research repository. I use EnjoyHQ.
And then over time, you have a single location with, I’m not exaggerating, I have one client. I think there’s, like, twenty five hundred responses in there right now. And one of the engineers on the team came to me and said, she reads every hour. Every day, she’ll go in and just read replies from an hour.
So when she goes into her product engineering meetings, she’s the Margaret Thatcher in that room because she knows whether or not something’s gonna fail or succeed before they even build it. Whether or not they listen to her, that’s we’ll come we’ll have a master class on that another time, but this is a really, the most powerful thing for building, again, that dynamic ICP. Right? So this is going to give you the answers to questions that pea or the data that people have.
Let me start that over.
Sending this out right after somebody has signed up to start using a product, that’s the moment of that high tension. That’s in that exact switch moment. That’s when they’re really heightened to say, I wanna make sure that I I’m doing something. Like, something has just changed that makes me actually wanna do this.
That energy is gonna be really high. You’re gonna wanna make sure that you capture as much of that as you can. So this is an email that I wrote for a company called Mural many, many moons ago. This is an example of the the type of formula that I use.
There’s a an introduction. I wrote it from CEO.
We had some VOC at the time from people saying Mural was a missing piece they were looking for, so we included it. We added some credibility around the different types of companies that we worked with. We said what’s gonna be coming next because Mural, like many whiteboard tools, blank slate. And at the time when we wrote this, this was not an established category. People did not know how to use these things. And then the one question.
So our activity now is to write your magic question emails. So you’ll scroll down, and you’ll see that’s one of we’re gonna skip quant because that’s not my, that’s gonna be different depending on where you are and because I hate it. And I love this. So we’re gonna go to a magic question email. I can just be so much more useful for you here than I can with the quant stuff. Make a good friend in quant is my quant advice. So, put another five minutes on, and I’ll invite you to write a first draft.
And then I’m gonna ask somebody to read their email if they want. If they’re too shy, then I’ll just go on to the next part. But anyway. Okay.
Sorry. Quick question. Who are we writing this email for? Like, to our ideal client? Good question.
Pick it to a new customer if you work at a for a pro a company where you work or for a client that you might have or maybe one that would that you had, in the past.
Okay. That’s just about five minutes. Does anybody have a first draft that they want to share?
Sure. I’ll go.
Alright.
Doing it. Jumping straight in. Full disclosure, it’s the end of my work day. My brain is fried.
It’s a first round.
No worries.
I’ve written it from, like, a really old client of mine that was super interesting to work with called Pave. So it’s, welcome to Pave name. I’m John, the CEO, and I just wanted to take this time to say we’re really excited to help you grow your newsletter’s revenue.
Pave is the new kid on the block, but thousands of independent newsletter creators have already used it to sell recurring sponsorship slots to big brands like Monday dot com, Masterwork Masterworks, and company Abe. You will find all the tools you need to monetize without spamming your readers with relevant ads. But before you get started, I have one quick question for you. What was going on in your world today that led you to sign up to Pave?
Just hit reply to this email and let me know.
Awesome.
Yeah. Cool. So it sounds like you had this new product in an established space that had already gotten a lot of success. I’m sorry.
You’re celebrating that, making it really exciting. Look at us. You’re or look at you. You’re joining this cool cool new kids club.
And and that’s a great question. Awesome.
I have a question about the question, though. Yeah.
I’ve used it before, and I found, like, people don’t respond to email as much as I’d hope if if there’s, like, a large user base.
So would you ever use, like, a segmenting link, you know, where you just have, like, two options?
So I would probably want to know a little bit more about the situation where you weren’t getting the responses, because I have I worked in one category where I I basically could not get anyone to reply to my emails, but I’ve not experienced that elsewhere.
I have experienced times where, somebody comes in and changes my magic question email and the responses go down for a little bit. So there’s a lot of different factors. But what I would say definitively is that I would leave this question open ended for as long as you can because we don’t know the finite number of reasons why people signed up yet. And the goal that or the the biggest, benefit of having this run continuously, build that repo, is that you get a repo a repository of voice of customer data, and that is part of your dynamic ICP.
So your your ICP is an artifact, but it’s also where your customers are talking, and they’re people. They’re humans. They say things. They complain.
They’re disgruntled. They’re happy. They’re sad. The way they talk about things also changes. Like, I’m sure you guys are seeing with with a lot of the AI things that are coming on, the way that somebody may have responded to this email two years ago, they may be talking about the same things, but in a very different language now compared to them.
So we wanna know that keeps us keeps us sharp with what folks are knowing. So I I don’t really use the segmenting, links unless I know definitively, unless I’ve already built, tested, and had my ICP working for a long period of time, and I I know it’s good, then I wanna start with open ended.
Got it. Okay. So you just send these all to, like, an inbox, where you can access them.
I’m guessing if they go straight to, say, the CEO’s inbox, he might not be active in pulling them to your Yeah.
So you’re gonna want there is some coordination that you’re gonna wanna do with the from name.
So you’ll see on that workbook, there’s a lot of different moving parts to this email. So the the copy is, like, that’s your first thing to get it going, but you’re gonna need to make sure that you have sign off from the person who’s going to be using their from name. Maybe you use a fake email address that’s from the real person and you send the CEO the best emails.
And your I use a qualitative research repository as my receptacle. So there’s a tool called EnjoyHQ, Dovetail, notably, Aurelius. There’s several of them several of them now. I send it all to a folder inside one of those tools.
Great. Okay.
Thank you.
There’s probably other ways to do it.
The only thing I like less than quant is figuring out how to use software. So there are ways to do it that or not this, but this is the one that works I have found that works the best and the easiest for me.
Cool.
Okay. I’m gonna keep going because we’re at step three, and I wanna make sure we get to get through everything. So thank you for sharing. This is awesome.
And like I said, you’re gonna generate tons and tons of responses. In almost every case, there are few limited ones where even tweaks won’t won’t help you too much. We can probably, we can still get other data points here. So step four.
So that leading indicator, you’re gonna say, like, they’re coming in. They they’re right in this switch moment. Then we’re gonna look at our lagging indicator. So this is where we’re going to talk to people who are already successful with us and kind of look back at how they made their decision.
So this is where we’ll do some jobs to be done documentary style interviews. So I chatted with Joe a little bit beforehand. I think you guys have some familiarity with it. Jobs to be Done is its entire own, master class series, so I’ll just hit some of the high notes here.
What I I use the jobs to be done, the job story artifact as the main artifact in an ICP. And the top of that artifact, you’re going to have a sentence that describes your customers, what we call their job story.
So their job story is when I am in a set of circumstances, give me a way to make some kind of progress so I can achieve some kind of outcome. And they’re all going to have this sort of story flow. Once upon a time, I was ahead of sales, and everyone was telling me all of these different things that I needed to do. And I couldn’t figure out who was on first, and I wasn’t meeting my quota. So I need a way to figure out how I can tell my team the single sales pitch to make or the couple of sales pitches to make So I can hit my quotas. I can hit my numbers. My team can all get their commissions.
Right? So we may have a job story come out something like that, and that’s what we’re we’re going to be driving towards here.
Lots of great resources on jobs to be done interviews if you haven’t done them before. I don’t have a a desi dedicated script I use for everyone. I mapped them out based on the category.
But I do have five questions here that I wanna share as an example of how to how to get good data.
First, I always wanna ask somebody about themselves and the role of the company. So much gold in there. I wanna know when they first signed up. I wanna know when they first started looking.
I wanna know what else they considered and what they liked about those other solutions. And I wanna know who else was involved in the decision. This will vary drastically. Like, I have one client.
There’s fifteen people involved in the decision. I’ve worked with others where it’s you’re selling to the buyer. Like, the buyer is the user.
So keep so there’s lots of ways to do it. The the important things to remember are how to, ask good questions to make make sure you get really good data and some just some do’s and don’ts.
I don’t know why I said just some do’s and don’ts, like diminutive as if it’s not, like, the the main takeaway for research. That was a weird thing I just did. So what you want to do is imagine you’re a detective or a documentarian. You are studying a thing that has already happened.
You want to know the moment when somebody switched, when they said, I can’t take it anymore. I gotta get something else, And that already happened. You wanna do that instead of imagining that you’re that they’re a fortune teller. Imagining you can say, like you you don’t wanna say, what would you do in the future?
Or do you think you would do this? Or blah blah blah blah blah. You wanna know what happened.
Another thing that you wanna do is focus on having questions that start with what, when, who, and how.
And there’s a lot of reasons for this, but there’s two main reasons to avoid why. Whether you are a student of linguistics linguistics, psychology, hostage negotiation, patriarchy, all of these systems as you study them, they will tell you to avoid the question why because it is very often accusatory, and it has this kind of accusatory note baked into it. So we wanna avoid it. The second reason is that it can be kind of hard to answer.
I like to give the example and I may have learned this one from Joe too. If we say, you know, why do you love your spouse? Oh, well, why do I love my spouse? Versus what do you love about your spouse?
Hopefully, there is a long, long list and you don’t stop talking until we shut you up. So we wanna make sure we’re asking these kinds of questions that are going to elicit good responses.
Do record the call. One thousand percent get consent and record the call. Do not trust your notes. This is one of the biggest beginner mistakes. I know you guys are learning all about VOC.
I also say if you’re talking to other people who have not done this, those low awareness colleagues of yours, make sure if they’re having calls, get them to record it. Expect it to take two to three months before the message really sinks in. Just keep just kinda keep reminding them. Hey. Thanks for the notes. Did you do you have a call? Whatever.
And then two other techniques I like to probe on general words. If someone says, well, it was just better, what does better mean? What about it was better, versus letting a throwaway word lie. You can’t use better in a in a headline.
That’s not gonna get you anywhere. And then recap and restate. So this is a great way to find, where you may have gotten it wrong and to elicit a response. So you may say, oh, okay.
I heard you say that you were, you had three different meetings in one day, and everybody gave you a different, thing they wanted you to sell.
Do I but you weren’t sure which of the people you should listen to. Do I have that right? And then your head of sales might say, well, actually, it was really the CEO told me to go talk to these people because the CEO didn’t know, and he wanted their opinions or whatever it is. So that gives you an opportunity to get someone to correct you while agreeing with you.
Do I do I have that right? Like, am I picking up what you’re putting down? You can say, oh, no. Not really.
It’s still, like, a kind of agreement type mechanism. Okay.
Step five.
Share as you go. So remember at the beginning, we talked about building our coalition. We talked about wanting to get that trust early on, bringing people in. And, someone I don’t remember who asked a question about this problem agreement evidence.
So you’re going to go through and do this research. You’re going to get evidence of other people’s problems, and you’re going to hear it. You’re gonna be able to share it with people. And And you know what you’re gonna get to say? You’re gonna get to say the three best words in the English language. It’s not I love you. It’s you were right.
Very, very few of us get to hear that in at home, at work, and you’re gonna get to hear that. Like, you’re gonna get to or people you’re working with will get to hear that from you, further endearing them to your cause. So I like to say you’re we’re doing less, like, launching the new iPhone. We’re not going off doing our engineering.
We would’ve built them. We would’ve given them a faster horse if we asked them what we wanted. We’re not doing that. We’re not up on stage.
We’re not separate. We’re a lot more Julia Child. Like, this is how I crack the eggs. Do you wanna taste some of this soup before I add add a little bit more salt in?
We are cooking together. We are involved in this. You’re the expert. You don’t wanna diminish your expertise, but you’re involving people, as you go.
And so there’s a lot of different ways that I like to do that.
My favorite, favorite, favorite thing is to take an interview that you’ve done, get a sixty to ninety second clip where somebody where the customer is talking about a pain point someone else cares about. So if I was working with this head of sales and I’m talking with a customer and that customer is like, you know, I thought you guys were, like, I thought you guys were a CRM, but then I started using you, and I couldn’t, like, I couldn’t do this one thing that is essential for CRMs.
Snip it, put it into the script audiogram, send it to the head of sales in a very casual, informal way. Hey. I heard remember that thing you were telling me the other day? Like, I just got off the phone with this customer. I think you’re gonna wanna hear this. And the reason for this, nobody wants to listen to an hour long interview. Nobody.
You we will do them only when we have an external or internal push to do so. I actually have this story of when I had there were some jobs to be done interviews sitting in the repo for a year that I knew I needed to listen to, but I didn’t listen to them until I found something in the data that said, oh, I gotta fix that. Where’s the data? Okay.
So and so did the research. I’m gonna go get it. So we need to give somebody a push. Ten hours of research, one hour of research, half hour call, this is a big ask.
But there is nobody who is going to hit say no to a sixty second clip that breaks up their day, gives them something really easy to listen to that says you were right.
So highly recommend it. Descript, there’s other tools. Descript is the I haven’t it’s the one to beat. So okay.
So you do all of this, and then what happens when you’re done? So you have all these steps. You’re building your coalition. You’re doing your quant research.
You’ve got your leading lagging indicators for qualitative research, and you’ve been sharing as you’re going.
So at the end, we’re not just getting a document, not just getting an artifact. So at the end, we’re getting a team of people who are bought in and want to see ICT succeed. Their awareness is higher. Their engagement with the work is higher. The how like, what’s in it for me? That’s a question that’s been answered answered months ago. They’re really they’re really with you there.
You’re getting a metrics informed ICP. So because you’ve been incorporating so much data in how you’re pursuing the people that you’re going to research, you’re going to get something that has a lot more data, like, grounding in data reality by the time you ship, and that’s gonna make so much of the work that comes later easier to ship.
So ICP, it’s not just an artifact. It’s something that can seem like, it’s an understanding. Like, it’s it’s not just a piece of paper that says this is who we sell to. It’s I know this is who we sell to, and I know what that’s like, and I know what it feels like. I have a qualia of it. So that that magic question email automation, that’s gonna keep building up your, database.
And then you’ll get that dynamic artifact ICP from your jobs research. And then most importantly, you’re gonna have a team of people who trust your ICP because they were a part of making it. It’s not just Thelma’s project. It’s Thelma and Louise’s ICP.
Everyone’s part of it now. It’s not just my thing. It’s our thing. So thus concludes your introductory crash course lesson, researching and mobilizing ICP.
Thank you so much. This was so fun.
What questions do you have?
I’ll start with you.
So good, Ali. Okay. Amazing.
I’m just so glad that I know that some people couldn’t make it today. I’m so glad that they’ll be able to watch this replay, and the documents you put together too. There’s just a lot of really good stuff here. Even things that are just like, are you saying lagging and leading indicator when you’re talking to a client?
Like, are you using the sorts of jargon? And I know it’s not just jargon. There’s so much more to it than what that. Yeah.
But when a CEO or CMO or anybody hears you use the right words, Your invoice gets paid. Right? You’re the person that knows what they’re doing. So Yeah.
I just love this for, like, introducing people more and more or, like, expanding on, the way that they already talk in organizations.
Yeah. So lots of good stuff here. Thank you, Ali. Yes. Does anybody have any questions for Ali today on ICP research? Or I want you to anything in particular to what we just saw?
No? How are we gonna go forward and use this? What do you think your clients would want to know from Ali if they were here?
That’s a different story. Yeah.
No? Are we good?
Yeah. I think there’s a lot to think about. Oh, Jessica is here. Okay. Jessica has, a question.
Feel free to play. Oh, Clara already asked her. That’s right. So, Jessica, come off mute.
Let’s hear your question. Normally, I would like a win first, but I feel like, I think, honestly, everybody is kind of, like, a little bit scared right now. Yeah. A lot.
Yeah. In a good way, though. Right? Like, there’s a lot of information downloaded on a very specific thing, that is so high value, and now they can go out and talk about this, but it’s, like, processing time.
That’s what I’m thinking of at least. Okay. So, yeah, that’s, Jessica, please.
Can you hear me okay?
Yes.
Okay. Sorry. I’m on the iPad again. Okay. So hi. Thank you so much. I I so I announced in our group last week that, I’ve shifted my business a lot.
So I’m moving away from freelance copywriting to building a book publishing agency. And so this has really shifted all the things because what normally I would go you know, all this focus on companies and, you know, teams and things like that, I’m starting to feel like it might focus a lot more on the thought leader themselves, and there may be a limited number of team involved if at all.
And so I guess I’m just kind of wondering what your thoughts are on how to really identify even the people I’m focused on even for step one. Because the one person that comes to mind for me is the person who wants to either write their book or get their book written and published and marketed and all that.
But I’m not sure, especially in the book writing stage, how much of their team will be involved. So I guess I’m again, all new. This is a very recent shift. So any insights you would have would just I’d really appreciate.
So you are you are starting a book publishing agency. Have you published any books yet, or you’re very, very early?
I’ve published books before, but since this shift in the agency in doing this, no. Not since then. K. We just closed the first.
You just closed your first Yes.
Project since shifting this bus to back to this. Yeah.
And if you had to describe the people who are the authors here, their thought leaders, and their team may or may not be involved in the authorship of the work that you publish?
Yes. I’m not I I haven’t encountered a situation where I would be working with the team, especially in the writing part of it.
Okay.
So your your an ICP can be an an individual.
Is there a reason why you’re feeling like you need to in include the your customer’s team or your client’s team?
No. I just in step one, when you had it broken down, I was like, okay. Well, obviously, the person we would be writing the book for, which is typically, like, the CEO, the founder, the person who wants to build up their authority, you know, that part.
But in terms of any other roles that might be involved, I’m not sure at this point, but if I were working on their marketing, then I could see team more involved. But I was just curious, you know, if yeah.
I was just trying to get any I know it’s a very niched, market I’m talking about.
But Okay.
Good. This is good good point of clarification.
So the people in that first section, like the CEO, your work desk, whoever it is, those are going to be people who are going to be part of the develop development of your ICP.
So when you are working, when you’re working on this agency, the people for you might be your editor in chief, whoever edits the books that come in, or maybe it’s the person who’s responsible for getting the manuscript from digital to paper form or working with the Amazon, some kind of coordination liaison. So you would be working internally with those folks. And then Yeah. If you need to be looking at your your client’s ICP, so the the ICP that they may have would more likely be for their readers if the product that they’re going to sell is a book.
So that would probably be how I would shift that. I it sounds like their team is probably not super significant here.
Yeah. That’s what I was thinking at first. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. Sure.
Awesome. Yeah. It’s quite tricky when you’re figuring out something almost brand new. Like, in Jessica’s case, she has, of course, done lots of this work for other people before just over time, and now she’s, like, turning it into an agency.
But the people differ. You know? And it’s been years of doing this work, so, really tough to to figure out your I mean, this is a huge challenge. Right, Ally? Like, nobody easily lands on their ICP. Or do you know anybody who has?
No. No.
No. Just fully no. Yeah. Exactly.
I mean, maybe maybe maybe maybe people who had a very clear idea in mind before they started, like, the founder of American Girl Doll, I think, had the vision for that entire company, but those are so, so rare.
That’s true.
But I can tell you. Okay. So I’m actually doing jobs to be done research now on people who hire jobs to be done providers because I’m so curious about this. Yeah.
So, what I would say to you, Jessica, is I don’t I would go, like, do some interviews with people who’ve hired a publisher. Like, there’s the one that, what’s it called? I don’t know. Nine or two.
It’s I don’t know what it’s called. I think April Dunford used them.
Page two.
Page two. Okay. There’s a number. So I would go say, like, did you, you know, did you hire an publishing agency and do some interviews?
Find people who are making that switch to go from all just make an ebook or I’ll or, or, actually, I don’t even know what the switch they’re making it from. I shouldn’t make the assumption. I love this game. I’d love to guess what the research is gonna tell.
I am wrong. I’m right fifty percent of the time and way wrong fifty percent. So that that’s what I would probably do to to investigate that.
That’s so smart. I love it. Cool. Excellent. Ali, that was amazing. Thank you so much.
Where can people do you are you on Instagram people can, like, reach out if they have further questions or wanna learn more? Yeah.
Okay. So I’m on LinkedIn now. The other socials, not so much.
And I’m working now on getting a more detailed, like, building your coalition around buy in for jobs to be done, DOC, etcetera.
Yeah. Email, course and a more detailed workbook with a little bit more. So I don’t tell Joanna, but my email my business’s email is not really that great. So, so, anyway, I’m getting that all done. It’s alie blum dot com, and it should be done hopefully, hopefully, middle of August.
Okay. Alie bloom dot com. Well, pop that in there. Amazing. Cool. Thanks again so much.
Thank you.
Thanks from everybody, and we look for I look forward to seeing you again, hopefully, at some event we both planned at somehow. Yeah. Hopefully.
Me too. Yeah.
Cool. Alright. Thanks, everybody.
Have a good day.
Take care.
Thank you.
Bye. Bye.
Your Buyer Handbook: Closing High-Ticket Offers
The Buyer Handbook: Closing High-Ticket Offers
Transcript
So Jo on Monday shared, you know, the buyer handbook and how to go high ticket, and my training kind of builds on that where we talk about selling high ticket packages and just being going beyond the usual, oh, let’s just, you know, put more things into it or let’s so what I would wanna focus on is how do you actually, instead of just creating a package, actually sell a package. And I’m pulling on loads of experience here. I’ve I’ve sold a hundred thousand dollar package.
And just this year, like, I’ve sold multiples of packages upwards of fifty thousand dollars.
So it’s something I’m very familiar with and and good at.
So we’re gonna kinda dig into how do we do things, and I’d love to get your questions as well after that.
And, of course, yeah, if anyone’s got copy they like, critiqued, we can look at that too.
So cool. Abby’s here as well. Hey, Abby. Welcome. We’re just getting started.
Cool. Okay. I’m gonna share screen.
And let me pull this up first. Present.
Alright.
Cool.
So high ticket offers, offers. Like I was saying, this is something that I am deeply familiar with, love doing, and, yeah, have sold several projects upwards of fifty thousand dollars, and these are, like, single projects. So, yes, we’ve also done a lot of, you know, multiple projects with the same client where the client lifetime value exceeds a hundred thousand dollars or more.
But right now, we’re talking about a single a single project that you can, you know, sell for fifty k, twenty five k. Whatever is, say, you know, I’m saying fifty k because that used to be my aspiration. You know? Like, that was where I was a few years ago.
But then we sold a hundred k project. And I was like, okay. So maybe my, you know, new baseline could be fifty k, and then we go upwards from there. So, but that said, you can define what high ticket means to you right now. Like, if you feel like, oh, I’m selling packages, I’d say, or projects for fifteen k, twenty k, maybe your high ticket could be forty five k. You know? This is just don’t use this as like, oh, that’s what it needs to be.
Alright. So like I said, we’re not gonna be looking at the basics. I’ve done a couple of other trainings on selling packages and all in the past, which you’ll find in your CopyScore professional dashboard. You can revisit those.
But this one, essentially, we wanna look at, specifically, the tactical elements of closing and convincing clients that you’re worth it.
So the one thing most freelancers forget when going high ticket, the three key elements in a high ticket offer, and you’ll be surprised that they don’t include, oh, you need to do this and you need to do that. And then the five tactical strategies you can use when you wanna close high ticket.
So core principle that you need to remember is when you’re selling high ticket, you’re not selling a ton of deliverables. You’re selling high impact transformation for your client. That needs to be at the core of the package or the, you know, proposal that you create for that client. So it’s not about, like, just shoving a ton of items in there to, you know, make it look like a very robust package. The idea here is what’s going to create the maximum transformation for your client.
So it could you know, you could have, like, a few deliverables, but the impact and the transformation for your client would be huge. So this is something that we all need to remember when creating these high ticket packages. The idea here is not to just throw in a bunch of stuff at them. The idea is to think deeply about what is going to create the biggest transformation for them.
So one thing I find that most freelancers forget is that some of your existing offers can be high ticket too, which is something that this is I’m speak sharing this from personal experience.
So, one of the projects that we sold for this was twenty twenty three maybe. Yeah.
Was around seventy five thousand dollars, and it was an existing offer. So you don’t always have to create from scratch. You know? You don’t have to sit down and think of a new offer.
You may full disclosure. You may have to, but sometimes you may have an existing offer that you can optimize for this client and turn that into a high ticket offer.
So what are the key elements?
And we’ll kind of dig into how to kind of deliver on these key elements in the sales process as well. So the first thing is you wanna start thinking of your discovery calls or whatever you call your, you know, your, the I call them copy chat. Like, essentially, your initial consult with a client, you need to start thinking of them as a consult call and not just, oh, tell me more about the project. What are you looking for?
Yes. All of that information is great, but you also wanna look at what’s a quick win that you could deliver on that call and really wow them without having to kind of give away the entire strategy. Because I know that is a struggle that a lot of us have where we start asking these questions and then our brains are spinning ideas out and we think that, oh, let me just share all of these with the client only to then end up either overwhelming the client or just kind of giving them way too much for that initial consult call where they start to feel, do we really need this? Should we look at a different direction?
You don’t wanna start doing that. You wanna give them a quick win, but at the same time, you don’t wanna give away the form. The second element is you wanna make your offer a no brainer. I’m gonna dig into this in a bit, as well.
I When I say a no brainer, you wanna start thinking about when you put that proposal together when you put a high ticket proposal together, you need to have all the information you need from the client to be able to give them the results that they’re looking to get.
So sometimes that may mean meeting for two calls before you set out a proposal instead of just the one call. And when someone is paying you a hundred grand for a single project, it’s in your interest to do that second call and get as much clarity as you can before you put a proposal together. Because, again, remember, it’s not about, like, oh, I’m gonna just toss in a bunch of line items at them. The idea is for you to be able to create the maximum amount of transformation for them. So you wanna have every possible objection in mind.
And how do you overcome that? And we’ll look at that in a bit, but you wanna have a plan to overcome that objection.
Oh, but we don’t have our brand voice. Okay? But we you know, you you’ve had that objection handled. Oh, but I don’t have a designer.
Alright? I have that objection handle. Oh, but, I wouldn’t know what to do with a Google Doc, which honestly, like, not a high ticket fan would say, but maybe. You know?
They’re like, would you work with a designer? You know? So you need to have an answer for every objection, preempt those objections in that proposal.
Sometimes I’ve not had that experience, but I’m just kind of preparing you. Sometimes, a client may come back to you and say, but we don’t have this. They may come back with an objection that you may not have thought of, in which case it’s totally good to say, alright. Let me look at the proposal again.
Let me see what we can do. So you would need to kind of then think about, okay. How can we handle this objection? Can we handle it or not?
Nine times out of ten for your high ticket offers, you will be able to handle objections. You will be able to make it happen.
I’ll tell you how.
And then the final thing is you wanna make it ridiculously easy for them to pay you and work with you. Now most of us may think that, yes. Oh, yeah. I have Stripe or I have PayPal or I have, you know, Wise or whatever payment mechanism, but you need to be sure that it runs seamlessly.
With a lot of these high ticket plans, they would have, and here’s the the fun part. I don’t know if this is true for all niches, but in the niche that I am, which is online course creators, coaches, and consultants, Even with high ticket projects like these, like anything upwards of fifty k, you do get paid in advance. Like, it not the entire amount, but we have milestone based payment plans, which is what I say make it ridiculously easy for them to pay you. So, I know with a lot of enterprise level clients, you may have, like, net thirty, net sixty as payment terms.
That is not the case with us. We get paid a certain amount for them to you know, when they book us. We get paid a certain amount before kickoff. We get paid a certain amount during the project.
We get paid a certain amount towards the completion of the project. So by the time, the project’s completed, like, we’ve been paid completely.
So we do divide it up into milestone based payment plans, but we do get paid well before the project is completed. Now, again, this may not be true for all industries, for all issues. I’m just I can speak for the industry that I’m in. So if you, like me, are in a coaching, cost creator industry, I know Abby is in that, Claire. I don’t know about your industry right now. But or, and I know Andrew is in in, you know, SaaS as well. Todd, I don’t know what your industry to pointing.
You would need to look at your industry and see what’s the practice there. But if you’re in this particular industry, I can tell you you will get paid before the project so well.
But you need to make it really easy for them to pay you. So you need to think about how are you gonna split the payments. How does it make sense for you, and how does it make sense for the clients as well? Right?
It needs to be a win win at all points of time, and you wanna make it very easy for them to work with you. So it’s shocking, but one of the you know, I would say I’m gonna call it feedback. Like, one of the things that comes out in our testimonials from clients who’ve worked with copywriters in the past is that they find it they’ve worked with copywriters earlier, but they’ve not had a great experience. They didn’t know what was going on at different stages.
They didn’t know, you know, when things would happen. They didn’t know, where to find what. So you need to have those processes in place if you’re looking to go ahead hit it. You it’s a nonnegotiable.
You need to have your onboarding in place. You need to have your client portal in place. You need to know exactly what when client communication is gonna happen. The good thing is, yes, you can automate a lot of this.
Speaking for myself and our business, we don’t have it automated.
Shocking.
But we do have a project manager. We do have our an assistant. We you know, who maps out all of the dates in the Notion in the client portal that we have, so clients can see exactly when what happens, when they get what, when when would when they need to give us feedback so they can plan accordingly when to schedule calls. Everything is there.
And also communication channels. With Hiretteq clients, you will end up joining their communication channels. Sometimes you may even end up joining their project man management systems and setting the whole thing up there for them. So you need to be kind of prepared to do that.
I I usually join their Slack channels or, their, you know, whatever communication medium they’re using.
But for the most part, they’re pretty cool. Like and, again, I’m speaking from our clients. They’re pretty cool with using our client portals, except probably in one case last year where we had to use appliance Asana. But yeah. Point is make it really, really easy for them to work with you.
So how do you do this? How do you do all of this so that you can go ahead from, like, just kind of putting packages together to actually selling them. First up, show initiative. Like I said, your consult calls, you need to show initiative.
You need to go prepared. You need to have your research done on that client on what you can help them with. You need to have all of that information before you get on the call. You need to have the relevant case studies to share on the call.
You need to have relevant pro product, you know, service assets that you may wanna show them on the call. For instance, in some cases, I need to show a client what the final wireframe sales page is gonna look like. In other cases, I may walk them through what my, you know, messaging document could look like. So you need to have those relevant everything lined up so you’re not wasting time on the call looking for things.
You’re not wasting time thinking about, oh, who was a similar client that I worked with? What relevant case studies do I have? And you’re not wasting time thinking about how can I best help this client? You do go in with enough background about the client.
You do with about the prospect. You do do some digging, some, you know, due diligence and some work on all of that, but then you spend most of the time trying to understand how can you best help them and then show initiative. So like I said, initiative means sharing an idea that can help increase profit margins. You don’t go ahead and implement it for them.
You don’t go ahead and start mapping a funnel out for them on the call. It’s about making moves that help your client and you win. And you can you can, and, ideally, you should be doing this even when you’re working with the client. I’m sure most of you already have that done, but remember this even for your discovery calls.
Okay. Better have a drink of water, and I’m just gonna check.
Chat.
Okay. Oh, Claire’s in SAS. Cool.
Cool.
So I don’t know why this poll is not showing up, but, anyways, you wanna use the who not how method.
So this is Benjamin Hardy’s book.
Point is you need to know who you can bring in to handle an objection that a client may have. So I’ll give you an example. I’m working on a fairly high ticket project right now. It’s, it’s a huge project where I’m doing, like, multiple launch funnels and all of that. So but when the client came in, one of the big challenges was that their brand voice was muddied, and they did not have a brand voice guide.
Right? And that could have caused them to either wait. And they have a very, very, very distinct brand voice, a one that, you know, I just can’t immerse myself in the brand and then write for it. I needed a brand voice guide. So we brought in a brand voice expert. In fact, I had my call, where we presented the guide to them this morning.
It’s for those of you who don’t know, it’s late evening for me right now. I’m in India. So, yeah, I’m towards the end of my day.
But point is, you need to start thinking about who can you partner with for projects. And you wanna start doing that right now before you get a high ticket client. So I’ll give you an example. For the hundred k project, we partnered with a brand voice expert again because that was a it was a brand new brand, basically.
Like, they it was a membership site. They were they were launching their membership. They had, like, a summit, and they’ve not it was, like, absolutely new. So we needed we were starting from scratch, which is exciting, but that also meant that they didn’t know what their brand sounds like.
They literally had no idea. So we needed to bring a brand voice expert in. We needed to, you know I always hire out research. That that’s a given.
But before we had, like, a regular research contractor, it would be something someone we would bring in for, you know, these bigger project. But now it’s, like, almost it’s a given. So you need to start thinking about what are possible objections that a client may have when wanting to hire you, a. And, b, if not you, then who can help solve that objection?
And you wanna start doing that now. You don’t wanna be scrambling and settling for whatever option you get should a client prospect comes in. So you wanna prepare for the kind of clients you wanna have right now.
Bring those partners in, bake in the cost and a percentage because, well, you would also be doing communication, coordination, all of that stuff, right, into the quote that you prepare and the proposal that you give them.
So and that is how you help your clients overcome objections really easily.
High ticket positioning. And I think our last call was about positioning, for those of you who did not you know, weren’t able to attend it. And if you get a chance, please watch it because your positioning matters, especially when you’re, you know, quoting high ticket. The moment you’re seen as an expert, price kind of becomes irrelevant.
The moment your clients know that you you’re you’re speaking on stages, you’ve, you know, got case studies under your belt, you can offer the same package for five k, twenty five k, or a hundred k when your positioning shifts, which, you know, is to my point that sometimes you don’t need to create anything new. The more expertise you bring to the table, the easier it is for you to command highlighted prices.
Ease equals easy yachts.
Like I said, make it really, really easy to work with you. So you wanna be really communicative with the appliance. You wanna show them the deliverables that they’ll be getting, when would they be getting them, walk them through their client portal.
Every time we onboard a client and this goes for, you know, this goes for all our clients, by the way. But the you know, everything that we’re discussing goes for all our clients, but even this one, for instance, every single client we onboard, but it’s only for a sales page or it’s for, like, a, you know, high ticket offer. I will record a Loom video walking them through the Notion portal explaining how everything works. Can I just record a video once and send it out to everybody? Because, well, the Notion portal is pretty standard.
Yeah. Sure.
But for us, client experience, and I’ll come to that in a bit as well, is paramount. It is what helps us stand apart and create a really great experience for people for clients working with us. So I will record that for every single client.
I will show them exactly what they would be getting, when would they be getting. We have a communication cadence with you know, if depending on the number of deliverables. It could be middle of week updates and end of week updates. Otherwise, it’s end of week updates always to fill them in on what’s going on with their project. Who have we interviewed or who have we or where are we on the research phase? Every single thing. Where am I on the writing phase?
They’re in the loop. My experience can be such a differentiating factor. I mean, I’ve been in business, like, for years. Like, Mank and I, we started our business in two thousand and eleven. So yeah.
It’s been over a decade, and I cannot tell you how many times I have heard from from peers, from prospects, from clients about poor experiences with with copywriters, with contractors, you know, which is why your client experience counts. Now this does not in any way mean that you need to have no boundaries and you should be available all the time. Absolutely not.
But you do need to give your clients the experience that, you you know, you’re charging for.
So it’s easy when you create a client experience your clients talk about. Because when they talk about it, it creates word-of-mouth, word-of-mouth creates credibility, credibility creates high ticket conversions. It becomes so much easier because when clients talk about you in rooms that you’re not present, it becomes, you know, at least referrals. People who come in are already sold on you. They have zero resistance when it comes to pricing.
They know what it is like to work with you. It just makes it so much easier.
So your high ticket offer should be a solution, a high impact one. You need to start thinking about that right away. Like I said, if you wanna look at what to put into a package, we’ve already done that, or it would be in the CSP portal. I would highly recommend visiting that.
But when you’re putting your proposal together, when you’re going on those sales calls, you need to start thinking about the solution you’re offering.
And closing your high ticket offer will be so much easier if you show initiative, solidify your positioning, have a delivery team in place, make it easy to work with you, and create a client experience that has clients talking about you in rooms you aren’t present. And you can actually do pretty much all of this, including client experience even before you sign on a high ticket client. Even start, you know, testing it out with your current clients so that when you do have that high ticket client coming, everything’s running like a breeze. In fact, I would highly recommend upgrading any of these systems and processes for your business right now.
Alright.
That’s it, folks.
Q and a copy critique time.
Okay.
Alright. Andrew, are you subcontracting the brand voice expert and folding them into your project, or are you just getting the client to hire that Yeah. No. So the client is not hiring the expert.
We let the client know that we will be bringing in. So in this case, for example, this current client that I’m working with, we work with Justin Blackman.
Right? And we let the client know that we will be bringing Justin in to create the brand voice guide. So we had Justin, the client, the client’s team, me. We were on the brand voice discovery call where, like, he has his whole process, where he works for the client to kind of uncover their voice.
Then today, we did the brand. Then in between, we met Justin and I met to go over the voice guide so that, you know, I could bring in my insights and he could share his and all of that. So it’s a very it’s very much a collaborative effort. It’s not it’s not one where I would say, oh, we will create it for you, and then Justin has no contact with the client.
He he has contact with the client. He meets the client because I want him to follow his process. Right? He’s the expert there for brand voice. And neither is it, where I’ll we tell the client that, oh, here’s who you should work with for this so you can you know, so they run that separately.
It’s very much an it’s integrated into our project. Like, their the time like, when we present the timelines to our client, the timeline has these, you know, outsourced deliverables as well.
Question? Yes.
Absolutely.
Do you have, a certain, like, gross margin that you aim for when you bring someone like that in? So if you bring those margin that you aim for when you bring someone like that in?
So if you bring let’s say you bring in Justin, you, yeah, like, what percent are you looking for a margin in terms of, yeah, difference between what what they’re paying you to bring to bid and then what you think?
Excellent question. I would need to bring Mayank in for that. So because he’s the one who does all of our, SEO, he handles all of that side of the business. So let me ask him and come back to you on that.
That’s a great who not how answer.
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I have, like yeah. He does all all of that, so I’m gonna ask him and come back to you on that.
K. Yeah. No problem. I’ve heard I’ve, I asked Shane in the in the group similarly, and he said that he aims for I think he said sixty five percent gross margin, but, yeah, I’m just asking the developers to get the general feel. So Sure. Starting starting to hire a little bit more, and I’m still having trouble wrapping the head around the path of how this ultimately benefits me.
Appreciate it. Thanks.
Yeah. No. Absolutely. You’re most welcome. And I will I will ask him and come back to you in Slack and answer your question there. Cool.
Any other questions about selling high ticket?
Yeah. I have I’ve gone on delivering, so I’ve got a lot of experience doing, but delivering has always been historically weak for me because two reasons. One, like, it all works up to this big frenzy and you’re like, here, implement it.
Mhmm.
And then either it takes them forever to implement, some people never implement.
Mhmm. So I decided that it would make sense to start implementing.
But I was wondering if you have experience on how to how to make that streamlined.
So where exactly in the delivery process do you find yourself struggling the most?
Well, I’m sort of changing what I what I usually do. So I used to it used to be all about web copy, and now I’m sort of shifting over to emails.
So that would be actually getting access to their email platform. I’m a little uncertain as to how a high ticket client would react to me going, give me all of your passwords kinda thing. Add me as a user, and give me all all the edit access. Oh, and my team as well. Like, how do I streamline that part?
So you would do that when you walk them through your process on your discovery call.
You would walk them through your process. You would tell them like, for instance, I’ll give you an example with with our clients. Right? And I do emails as well, and sometimes I need to look at how are their past email sequences performing or how because how would I otherwise, you know, come up with strategy if I don’t know what’s working?
Or sometimes I and not sometimes. All of the times I need access to their courses. So when I’m discussing my process, I walk them through that. And I say, so what I walk them through the re and research.
We’ll, you know, interview students. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All of that. But then I also let them know that for me to really understand your student experience, I will need access to the course, the community.
You will need to add me as a user on your email service provider so I can see how your emails are doing.
You don’t need to give me most of them don’t even need to get passwords. Sometimes they do. They use either they use LastPass or they resend it late one time or whatever. That is that is on that.
You can give them options. You can say, you know, I’m I can work with anything you’ve got, but I will need access to this because without it, I would not be able to do a, b, and c. So when clients know that, it’s they’re prepared for it. And then when you press you walk them again, you remind them about all of this when they sign on and when you’re walking them through your client portal.
They need to know that so we have two sections in our client portal. We have deliverables, and then we have, you know, research and materials needed from the client. And in that, we, again, have these as line items.
Add to the student community. Add to email account. Send us heat maps record and recordings. Add us on this whatever is needed, everything is laid out for them, and, yeah, they know exactly what’s expected of them.
Got it. So it’s all it’s all up front.
That makes sense. And then just sorry. Just to follow-up on that. In terms of do you guys actually do, like, the designing of emails as well?
No. No. No. But we Yeah. So, for emails, again, this is audience specific. Right? Like, your audience may need those emails designed.
What my audience needs essentially is the emails written. They’re semi wireframe. There’s, like, a rough wireframe so they know exactly where, if I’m using a GIF that goes if I’m using an image where that goes, everything is there. They have their subject line options, their preview text.
Everything is, like, laid out very neatly, but there’s no designing involved there. For sales pages and opt in pages, on the other hand, however, I present my initial copy in a Google Doc. But then once it’s final, we have a designer wireframe it. It’s a black and white wireframe.
It’s it’s not it’s very low key, but it it’s super helpful for clients to see how the copy should be laid out. They may go ahead and do something different, which is fine, but at least, you know, we know it makes it faster and easier for them to implement again.
Right. Makes sense. Cool. Thank you.
You’re welcome. Todd, you had a question.
No. It was just gonna be in reply to what Claire was saying. Just something that, she could look to do. So I just I’ll hit her up on Slack after and go over it with her if she wants. It just goes back to what you’re saying with automating.
Your onboarding email, your kickoff email, your onboarding email right away should have a doc where it says we need such and such and such and such with a link to such and such and such. And, I mean, it it’s again, if I can say it clear, the thing is is that the more you let the client control the engagement, the more they’ll put you at arm’s length and control an engagement. So the the goal is to start controlling it right away and professionally, of course. And the more you control it right away, there’s less hiccups because then your timelines will go from, say, if it’s a two month project, for example, to a three month project because you’re waiting for Google Google Tag Manager or you’re waiting for their goo GA or your, like, your email and everything.
So you’re onboarding right away, control it, and then your kickoff. When you go over, you have a visitor checkbox. We’re still waiting for such and such. So, like, you know, what you’re saying is the more you automate it, the more you control it, the other the easier it becomes.
So there you go. Blair ends. Thank you. Yeah. Exactly what it is. It’s Blair ends.
Exactly. Pricing creativity. Right? Exactly. That’s exactly what it is. So, yeah, I just didn’t wanna jump in with that, Claire.
I can hit you up after, but, yeah, it’s absolutely. Andrew, I think, will be best friends. But, yeah, it’s Blair Ends for sure. So yeah.
Thank you so much. That’s for being helpful. Is that a book by Blair? Yes. Blair?
I yeah.
So It’s in a book. Yeah.
Yeah. I I would share it with you. It’s a five hundred dollar book. My, my business my manic max business partner has it now. It’s called Pricing Creativity.
You can also I would start with, winning without pitching And I know that’s a brand manifesto.
Thinking. Yeah.
So but, yeah, we can talk after. Also, I’ve really upgraded that clearance. I’ve got stuff I can share with you. I’ve got some docs, but I’m doing what’s called blueprint training right now with, Ryan Stewart.
And he really kicks stuff off really nicely, like questions that he asks. And, yeah, it it you have to. I I don’t wanna control the conversation story. It’s just that it just makes life so much easier. This is not my workshop.
So Thank you.
Yeah. Yeah. No. Absolutely. You need to start like like I said, you wanna show you’re sharing if you wanna create a great client experience, but at the same time, you don’t wanna let you know, you don’t wanna have any boundaries. You wanna have those guardrails set right from the start so your client knows exactly what happens. And it you know, you’re in control of the project right from the start.
Cool. Any other questions?
Nope. Okay.
Copy that needs critique.
All good. Yeah.
Hi. Sorry. I have a question about the copy needing critiquing part. Like, how does that work?
Oh, fairly straightforward. If you have copy that you need critique, you show up with a Google Doc that I can, you know, review and make edits in. And, obviously, we’d need some context and yeah.
Okay. Cool. So, like, if I put together a sales pitch, for example, would you be able to critique that? Okay. Great.
Yes.
Good to know. Thank you.
You’re welcome.
Awesome.
Any other questions? Any thoughts about high ticket selling? What does high ticket mean to you?
Yep, Todd.
With high ticket prices and depending on what the project is, what are your normal deliverables that you’re looking at? Like, how long, for example?
So as far as length of project goes, I’ll give you an example. Right now, I’m working on a fairly high ticket project. It’s upwards of fifty thousand dollars.
We it’s so, basically, what I’m working on is two sales pages, two opt in pages, a whole bunch of emails about, say, I would say, twenty six maybe twenty six, thirty odd emails.
That’s those are the deliverables. Of course, my research process is baked in.
The brand voice is baked in, all of that.
That’s that’s the project.
So how long, though, like, how long are those twenty six emails? Is it over, like, a week, four weeks, two months?
Oh, gosh. No. No. No. No. So, essentially, most of our projects are spread out, which is what a lot.
So here’s the thing that you should and this is, again, this is true for our business because it may not be true for every other business. So I need to caveat that by saying, I’m the only copywriter in the business.
Mhmm.
So I write all the copy. That’s how we built it. I we have tried subcontracting copy in the past. It doesn’t really work out the way we want it.
We much rather subcontract. I’m much faster, and dare I say better. So it just makes more sense. So with that and plus the other thing is I like working on multiple projects at a time.
So I’m working on this massive project, but I’m working on two other massive projects as well. I’m writing website copy for a school, and I’m working on website copy for a food blogger at the same time. So which means we structure the projects in a way that they take a few weeks. So for instance, this particular project, we’ve we’re we’re wrapping up with the research phase towards the end of June when we enter the offer optimization phase, but and then the client needed to go on a break for a while.
She’s on a book tour. So this one’s gonna finish oh, and then we are moving house, so we needed to factor that in as well. We’re moving house in August. So, this one’s gonna finish in September.
Cool. Alright. So September. Okay. Yeah. That’s one of the things for me.
I mean, we have, you know, twenty minutes here. I don’t know if I’m I don’t wanna hijack your day, but but you’re asking for questions and feedback. For me, that’s one of the things I’m really liking about the intensive is in the past, when you’re saying, like I think you said here, You just talked about the different, tactics and everything. I’ve sold projects.
It was, like, ninety k over six months. We’ve sold, like, eighty k over four months. We’ve sold, like, fifty k over four months, and some of them were, like, you know, full. Like, the ninety k was full email.
It’s like it ended up being newsletter and social and all these things. You’re just throwing the kitchen sink at people, And they’re like, yeah. Great. I get all this for that.
And then, you know, lately, it was, like, website. We’re doing, like, full ICP work, full, SEO work, full work. We weren’t doing the SEO work. We were doing, like, full, site planning, full wireframing, and full dev.
And those would take three to four depending on the page size and everything like that. And then we would just chuck so much more into it. And that’s what I’m liking about this. Is that really what this is teaching me is just the refinement of what we do.
Because like you said, most of us when when you are the person who understands things like, when you say brand voice, to be honest, the first thing I do when I come into it is what’s your brand voice? Because, like, you’re gonna walk into a room. I I love I love Jasmine Blackman because soon as you walk into a room, people are like, well, you know, we think we’re we’re playful. And it’s like, well, that’s not a great that’s a personality.
Right? And then they’re like, like, I’ve I’ve had people I’ve gone into meetings who are like, yeah. Her voice is like think of, like, buttery potatoes with a side of horseradish that’s just kinda splintered into it, and you’re not expecting that. And I’m sitting there going, that’s not a voice?
And they’re like, well, yeah. It is. It’s it’s it’s a surprise voice. I’m like, no.
There’s nine types of voice.
Yeah. Yeah.
I’m like, yeah. There’s, like, three types of outlook, three of accessibility, three of authority, and you’re like, what? And it’s just you just you just stop edits.
It’s weird. You squash edits right away. Yep. So that’s what it is for me. But the idea of the copywriting, yeah, that’s what I’m thinking is, like, yeah, I just I did all the copywriting. When we sold a package, I was eighty to ninety percent of the work. So that’s why I’m wondering about the projects and the deliverables.
And I’m just also like, I like where this is going because what you’re saying, I wanna go CRO. And this is a conversation I’ve I’m really bringing it up, but I know there’s time with CRO, and I know I’ve got things really refined. But, you know, when you were saying you you didn’t say really CRO. You said some you said web copy and everything there. But I’m just curious about, yes, what you’re selling, what the deliverable is, and what that is. Because it’s I just find what this is happening is really kinda fascinating. So that’s just me.
Yeah. Yeah. No. You need to, like again, our our packages are fairly straightforward.
Most of them are on our side. They I have made the mistake of throwing the kitchen sink at a client and then just, yeah, feeling overwhelmed and not being able to see the transformation that we wanted them to see, which means, like, yeah, it doesn’t make any sense.
The other thing that I need to you know, like, let everyone know is, like, I focus only on the copy and the strategy side of things. Everything else that is not my core skill is outsourced, baked in. So like I said, editing, outsourced, baked in. I don’t spend any time on edits, before the copy goes to the client.
I don’t spend any time on wireframing. I don’t spend any time on research. I don’t spend any time on things like if a client needs brand voice or if a client needs design or whatever or implementation.
Nope.
So I just focus on what my zone of genius is, and, yeah, that’s it. Every it’s it’s who not how for me, basically. Yeah.
Yeah. And that’s what I think I for me, it’s it’s the who has always been this guy. It’s always been the design, the Well, that’s been the way this guy. Brand, everything from logo, illustration to everything.
The only thing I handed over in the last last little bit was dev work because we were using Thrive, and I use Elementor. And I just didn’t wanna be in like, really just start a new thing from scratch in that. So I hear all of that. Absolutely.
But I find when I have done that, standards drop. So that was the only thing for me, and and you’re absolutely right. And getting people in the but, yeah, standards drop. And when standards drop, you’re running behind then, like, you’re you’re you’re off on projects.
Right?
So Yeah.
Yep.
Yep. So which is exactly why what we realized is, like, for us, for and this is what we realized with with copy is, like, I wanna own the copy start to finish. Everything else, I wanna work with you know, mine kinda very clearly work with, like, whoever’s the best when it comes to, say, you know, research or whatever or editing. So we and we start we what we what we found was we needed to work with a few people to kinda see what the experience was like before we knew that we were going to bring them into a bigger project, which is why I said, you wanna start looking for the who’s now before you, you know, have like, you’re starting a huge project, but you wanna finish in a certain amount of time and you wanna be working on other projects. Like I said, like, from in our case, could I finish the project sooner? Absolutely.
But the way I’m wired is, like, I like to work in different projects so that it just kinda keeps me creative. If you wanna pull off one project in a shorter piece I mean, like, the amount of copy I’m writing, like, we could easily condense it.
But, yeah, I wanted to also work on the school website project. I also wanted to work on the blog at Baker.
Hundred percent.
You know? Yeah. So but most importantly, what I want everyone to remember is, like, you need to start looking for the people who you can bring in right now.
Use them for smaller projects. Use them for a project for your own business if you have to. That’s exactly what we did when we have a brand voice. We hired someone to work on our brand voice guide.
Great great work. But we also knew that we wanted when it came to client work, we wanted to work with someone who was the next level.
So Yeah.
For me, you know, one of my moments is this last couple of days. And I, again, I don’t wanna hijack this, but I, you know, I just think it’s important for us to share. One of the biggest things for me is, principles that we learn in copy school are not really easily replicated, and you need people need to know certain terms that you’re sharing, like sophistication levels, awareness levels, emotional journeys. And, you know, when I’ve talked to people, like, I when we were when we were hiring and I was looking at an intern, I’m like, how do you, you know, how do you define brand voice? And they were just like, crickets.
And I’m like, oh, it’s three measures. And I, like, walked them through it and walked them through master of headlines. For example, I had SOPs. What my moment was was that takes a lot of time, but I could be wrong in saying this.
But, you know, I think it was last week. Claire, I think you were on the call with that. And Jo was like, you know, we kinda turn a blog a blind eye to when someone logs in with your credentials. And for me, that was kind of a game changer.
You can bring someone on and go, okay. Take this course, and then we can get that going. But it I I really, yeah, hundred percent, it’s a who not how. I had a site planner, and that’s what they were doing was just site planning.
And then I was reviewing it because I, you know, I think to build what we’re building, and I could be wrong, is you need to be more of a reviewer and not a doer. Right? You need to get to that level. So and I still like to do.
I you know, the, idle hands or the devil’s play things, you can insert two weeksdays everywhere you want, but I like getting my hands dirty a lot. And I think what this is teaching me is that all I have to do is just make sure your fingernails are clean. You know what I mean? You can still keep them dirty, right, kind of idea.
So yeah. And I like that on the coffee side. Again, I don’t wanna hijack this, but what I’m learning, like, this workshop, everything we’re looking at is just that the refining process is the most difficult. But I think once you clear that that that hurdle, you’re like you just have no one in front of you, and that’s gonna be the coolest thing.
So Yep.
Absolutely.
Talking too much.
But Yep.
All good. Awesome. Great. So if you have no other questions, we can wrap up.
I’m sorry. I have one more.
Sure. Go ahead.
First, thanks, Todd. That was really helpful to to listen to and understand about your process. But, you mentioned celebrity I can’t remember the exact way of phrasing it, but, celebrity equals, like, easy conversions or something.
The moment you start talking on stages Amplify your positioning.
Yes. Yes. That’s the one.
So I’m kind of in this phase where I’m like, I do wanna talk on stages. I’m sort of too terrified to even ask someone if I can, because I tried once and failed. And I’m like, that’s it. That’s the rule, which it’s it’s obviously not, and I’m learning to accept that. But I I wondered if you had any advice on how to stop, like, at the very, very beginning involving your celebrity authority?
Yeah. I would say start by, again, looking at who you know. So you wanna look you wanna start by seeing, okay, have you spoken to smaller groups before? If not in person, have you spoken virtually before? If not virtually, can you start there? Can you warm up those speaking muscles by presenting to smaller groups? You know?
Or in if you have been speaking to smaller groups virtually, can you start speaking to smaller groups in person? Is there a coworking space close to where you live where you could, you know, possibly go and do a session for SaaS founders?
Do you know a friend who’s spoken at an event? Could you ask for an introduction? So just start by who do you know and what you know right now and how can you use it. I would start there.
None of us started off speaking on big stages.
We all started with the smaller ones. I’m pretty sure maybe some people have. None of none of us is too wide a generalization.
So but I would say most of us started with the smaller stages, built up our, you know, courage and confidence to speak on bigger stages. So that is where I would start. Yeah.
Awesome. Thank you so much. That’s really helpful. You’re welcome.
Also, we would be, I think I’m pretty sure, we would be talking about, you know, speaking on stages and on A list podcasts, in the near future, for sure. I know it’s it’s the theme for one of the months. So yeah.
Great. Thank you. I look forward to it.
You’re welcome. Thanks, everybody. Have a great rest of your day. Bye. Bye.
Thanks, Berta.
You’re welcome.
Transcript
So Jo on Monday shared, you know, the buyer handbook and how to go high ticket, and my training kind of builds on that where we talk about selling high ticket packages and just being going beyond the usual, oh, let’s just, you know, put more things into it or let’s so what I would wanna focus on is how do you actually, instead of just creating a package, actually sell a package. And I’m pulling on loads of experience here. I’ve I’ve sold a hundred thousand dollar package.
And just this year, like, I’ve sold multiples of packages upwards of fifty thousand dollars.
So it’s something I’m very familiar with and and good at.
So we’re gonna kinda dig into how do we do things, and I’d love to get your questions as well after that.
And, of course, yeah, if anyone’s got copy they like, critiqued, we can look at that too.
So cool. Abby’s here as well. Hey, Abby. Welcome. We’re just getting started.
Cool. Okay. I’m gonna share screen.
And let me pull this up first. Present.
Alright.
Cool.
So high ticket offers, offers. Like I was saying, this is something that I am deeply familiar with, love doing, and, yeah, have sold several projects upwards of fifty thousand dollars, and these are, like, single projects. So, yes, we’ve also done a lot of, you know, multiple projects with the same client where the client lifetime value exceeds a hundred thousand dollars or more.
But right now, we’re talking about a single a single project that you can, you know, sell for fifty k, twenty five k. Whatever is, say, you know, I’m saying fifty k because that used to be my aspiration. You know? Like, that was where I was a few years ago.
But then we sold a hundred k project. And I was like, okay. So maybe my, you know, new baseline could be fifty k, and then we go upwards from there. So, but that said, you can define what high ticket means to you right now. Like, if you feel like, oh, I’m selling packages, I’d say, or projects for fifteen k, twenty k, maybe your high ticket could be forty five k. You know? This is just don’t use this as like, oh, that’s what it needs to be.
Alright. So like I said, we’re not gonna be looking at the basics. I’ve done a couple of other trainings on selling packages and all in the past, which you’ll find in your CopyScore professional dashboard. You can revisit those.
But this one, essentially, we wanna look at, specifically, the tactical elements of closing and convincing clients that you’re worth it.
So the one thing most freelancers forget when going high ticket, the three key elements in a high ticket offer, and you’ll be surprised that they don’t include, oh, you need to do this and you need to do that. And then the five tactical strategies you can use when you wanna close high ticket.
So core principle that you need to remember is when you’re selling high ticket, you’re not selling a ton of deliverables. You’re selling high impact transformation for your client. That needs to be at the core of the package or the, you know, proposal that you create for that client. So it’s not about, like, just shoving a ton of items in there to, you know, make it look like a very robust package. The idea here is what’s going to create the maximum transformation for your client.
So it could you know, you could have, like, a few deliverables, but the impact and the transformation for your client would be huge. So this is something that we all need to remember when creating these high ticket packages. The idea here is not to just throw in a bunch of stuff at them. The idea is to think deeply about what is going to create the biggest transformation for them.
So one thing I find that most freelancers forget is that some of your existing offers can be high ticket too, which is something that this is I’m speak sharing this from personal experience.
So, one of the projects that we sold for this was twenty twenty three maybe. Yeah.
Was around seventy five thousand dollars, and it was an existing offer. So you don’t always have to create from scratch. You know? You don’t have to sit down and think of a new offer.
You may full disclosure. You may have to, but sometimes you may have an existing offer that you can optimize for this client and turn that into a high ticket offer.
So what are the key elements?
And we’ll kind of dig into how to kind of deliver on these key elements in the sales process as well. So the first thing is you wanna start thinking of your discovery calls or whatever you call your, you know, your, the I call them copy chat. Like, essentially, your initial consult with a client, you need to start thinking of them as a consult call and not just, oh, tell me more about the project. What are you looking for?
Yes. All of that information is great, but you also wanna look at what’s a quick win that you could deliver on that call and really wow them without having to kind of give away the entire strategy. Because I know that is a struggle that a lot of us have where we start asking these questions and then our brains are spinning ideas out and we think that, oh, let me just share all of these with the client only to then end up either overwhelming the client or just kind of giving them way too much for that initial consult call where they start to feel, do we really need this? Should we look at a different direction?
You don’t wanna start doing that. You wanna give them a quick win, but at the same time, you don’t wanna give away the form. The second element is you wanna make your offer a no brainer. I’m gonna dig into this in a bit, as well.
I When I say a no brainer, you wanna start thinking about when you put that proposal together when you put a high ticket proposal together, you need to have all the information you need from the client to be able to give them the results that they’re looking to get.
So sometimes that may mean meeting for two calls before you set out a proposal instead of just the one call. And when someone is paying you a hundred grand for a single project, it’s in your interest to do that second call and get as much clarity as you can before you put a proposal together. Because, again, remember, it’s not about, like, oh, I’m gonna just toss in a bunch of line items at them. The idea is for you to be able to create the maximum amount of transformation for them. So you wanna have every possible objection in mind.
And how do you overcome that? And we’ll look at that in a bit, but you wanna have a plan to overcome that objection.
Oh, but we don’t have our brand voice. Okay? But we you know, you you’ve had that objection handled. Oh, but I don’t have a designer.
Alright? I have that objection handle. Oh, but, I wouldn’t know what to do with a Google Doc, which honestly, like, not a high ticket fan would say, but maybe. You know?
They’re like, would you work with a designer? You know? So you need to have an answer for every objection, preempt those objections in that proposal.
Sometimes I’ve not had that experience, but I’m just kind of preparing you. Sometimes, a client may come back to you and say, but we don’t have this. They may come back with an objection that you may not have thought of, in which case it’s totally good to say, alright. Let me look at the proposal again.
Let me see what we can do. So you would need to kind of then think about, okay. How can we handle this objection? Can we handle it or not?
Nine times out of ten for your high ticket offers, you will be able to handle objections. You will be able to make it happen.
I’ll tell you how.
And then the final thing is you wanna make it ridiculously easy for them to pay you and work with you. Now most of us may think that, yes. Oh, yeah. I have Stripe or I have PayPal or I have, you know, Wise or whatever payment mechanism, but you need to be sure that it runs seamlessly.
With a lot of these high ticket plans, they would have, and here’s the the fun part. I don’t know if this is true for all niches, but in the niche that I am, which is online course creators, coaches, and consultants, Even with high ticket projects like these, like anything upwards of fifty k, you do get paid in advance. Like, it not the entire amount, but we have milestone based payment plans, which is what I say make it ridiculously easy for them to pay you. So, I know with a lot of enterprise level clients, you may have, like, net thirty, net sixty as payment terms.
That is not the case with us. We get paid a certain amount for them to you know, when they book us. We get paid a certain amount before kickoff. We get paid a certain amount during the project.
We get paid a certain amount towards the completion of the project. So by the time, the project’s completed, like, we’ve been paid completely.
So we do divide it up into milestone based payment plans, but we do get paid well before the project is completed. Now, again, this may not be true for all industries, for all issues. I’m just I can speak for the industry that I’m in. So if you, like me, are in a coaching, cost creator industry, I know Abby is in that, Claire. I don’t know about your industry right now. But or, and I know Andrew is in in, you know, SaaS as well. Todd, I don’t know what your industry to pointing.
You would need to look at your industry and see what’s the practice there. But if you’re in this particular industry, I can tell you you will get paid before the project so well.
But you need to make it really easy for them to pay you. So you need to think about how are you gonna split the payments. How does it make sense for you, and how does it make sense for the clients as well? Right?
It needs to be a win win at all points of time, and you wanna make it very easy for them to work with you. So it’s shocking, but one of the you know, I would say I’m gonna call it feedback. Like, one of the things that comes out in our testimonials from clients who’ve worked with copywriters in the past is that they find it they’ve worked with copywriters earlier, but they’ve not had a great experience. They didn’t know what was going on at different stages.
They didn’t know, you know, when things would happen. They didn’t know, where to find what. So you need to have those processes in place if you’re looking to go ahead hit it. You it’s a nonnegotiable.
You need to have your onboarding in place. You need to have your client portal in place. You need to know exactly what when client communication is gonna happen. The good thing is, yes, you can automate a lot of this.
Speaking for myself and our business, we don’t have it automated.
Shocking.
But we do have a project manager. We do have our an assistant. We you know, who maps out all of the dates in the Notion in the client portal that we have, so clients can see exactly when what happens, when they get what, when when would when they need to give us feedback so they can plan accordingly when to schedule calls. Everything is there.
And also communication channels. With Hiretteq clients, you will end up joining their communication channels. Sometimes you may even end up joining their project man management systems and setting the whole thing up there for them. So you need to be kind of prepared to do that.
I I usually join their Slack channels or, their, you know, whatever communication medium they’re using.
But for the most part, they’re pretty cool. Like and, again, I’m speaking from our clients. They’re pretty cool with using our client portals, except probably in one case last year where we had to use appliance Asana. But yeah. Point is make it really, really easy for them to work with you.
So how do you do this? How do you do all of this so that you can go ahead from, like, just kind of putting packages together to actually selling them. First up, show initiative. Like I said, your consult calls, you need to show initiative.
You need to go prepared. You need to have your research done on that client on what you can help them with. You need to have all of that information before you get on the call. You need to have the relevant case studies to share on the call.
You need to have relevant pro product, you know, service assets that you may wanna show them on the call. For instance, in some cases, I need to show a client what the final wireframe sales page is gonna look like. In other cases, I may walk them through what my, you know, messaging document could look like. So you need to have those relevant everything lined up so you’re not wasting time on the call looking for things.
You’re not wasting time thinking about, oh, who was a similar client that I worked with? What relevant case studies do I have? And you’re not wasting time thinking about how can I best help this client? You do go in with enough background about the client.
You do with about the prospect. You do do some digging, some, you know, due diligence and some work on all of that, but then you spend most of the time trying to understand how can you best help them and then show initiative. So like I said, initiative means sharing an idea that can help increase profit margins. You don’t go ahead and implement it for them.
You don’t go ahead and start mapping a funnel out for them on the call. It’s about making moves that help your client and you win. And you can you can, and, ideally, you should be doing this even when you’re working with the client. I’m sure most of you already have that done, but remember this even for your discovery calls.
Okay. Better have a drink of water, and I’m just gonna check.
Chat.
Okay. Oh, Claire’s in SAS. Cool.
Cool.
So I don’t know why this poll is not showing up, but, anyways, you wanna use the who not how method.
So this is Benjamin Hardy’s book.
Point is you need to know who you can bring in to handle an objection that a client may have. So I’ll give you an example. I’m working on a fairly high ticket project right now. It’s, it’s a huge project where I’m doing, like, multiple launch funnels and all of that. So but when the client came in, one of the big challenges was that their brand voice was muddied, and they did not have a brand voice guide.
Right? And that could have caused them to either wait. And they have a very, very, very distinct brand voice, a one that, you know, I just can’t immerse myself in the brand and then write for it. I needed a brand voice guide. So we brought in a brand voice expert. In fact, I had my call, where we presented the guide to them this morning.
It’s for those of you who don’t know, it’s late evening for me right now. I’m in India. So, yeah, I’m towards the end of my day.
But point is, you need to start thinking about who can you partner with for projects. And you wanna start doing that right now before you get a high ticket client. So I’ll give you an example. For the hundred k project, we partnered with a brand voice expert again because that was a it was a brand new brand, basically.
Like, they it was a membership site. They were they were launching their membership. They had, like, a summit, and they’ve not it was, like, absolutely new. So we needed we were starting from scratch, which is exciting, but that also meant that they didn’t know what their brand sounds like.
They literally had no idea. So we needed to bring a brand voice expert in. We needed to, you know I always hire out research. That that’s a given.
But before we had, like, a regular research contractor, it would be something someone we would bring in for, you know, these bigger project. But now it’s, like, almost it’s a given. So you need to start thinking about what are possible objections that a client may have when wanting to hire you, a. And, b, if not you, then who can help solve that objection?
And you wanna start doing that now. You don’t wanna be scrambling and settling for whatever option you get should a client prospect comes in. So you wanna prepare for the kind of clients you wanna have right now.
Bring those partners in, bake in the cost and a percentage because, well, you would also be doing communication, coordination, all of that stuff, right, into the quote that you prepare and the proposal that you give them.
So and that is how you help your clients overcome objections really easily.
High ticket positioning. And I think our last call was about positioning, for those of you who did not you know, weren’t able to attend it. And if you get a chance, please watch it because your positioning matters, especially when you’re, you know, quoting high ticket. The moment you’re seen as an expert, price kind of becomes irrelevant.
The moment your clients know that you you’re you’re speaking on stages, you’ve, you know, got case studies under your belt, you can offer the same package for five k, twenty five k, or a hundred k when your positioning shifts, which, you know, is to my point that sometimes you don’t need to create anything new. The more expertise you bring to the table, the easier it is for you to command highlighted prices.
Ease equals easy yachts.
Like I said, make it really, really easy to work with you. So you wanna be really communicative with the appliance. You wanna show them the deliverables that they’ll be getting, when would they be getting them, walk them through their client portal.
Every time we onboard a client and this goes for, you know, this goes for all our clients, by the way. But the you know, everything that we’re discussing goes for all our clients, but even this one, for instance, every single client we onboard, but it’s only for a sales page or it’s for, like, a, you know, high ticket offer. I will record a Loom video walking them through the Notion portal explaining how everything works. Can I just record a video once and send it out to everybody? Because, well, the Notion portal is pretty standard.
Yeah. Sure.
But for us, client experience, and I’ll come to that in a bit as well, is paramount. It is what helps us stand apart and create a really great experience for people for clients working with us. So I will record that for every single client.
I will show them exactly what they would be getting, when would they be getting. We have a communication cadence with you know, if depending on the number of deliverables. It could be middle of week updates and end of week updates. Otherwise, it’s end of week updates always to fill them in on what’s going on with their project. Who have we interviewed or who have we or where are we on the research phase? Every single thing. Where am I on the writing phase?
They’re in the loop. My experience can be such a differentiating factor. I mean, I’ve been in business, like, for years. Like, Mank and I, we started our business in two thousand and eleven. So yeah.
It’s been over a decade, and I cannot tell you how many times I have heard from from peers, from prospects, from clients about poor experiences with with copywriters, with contractors, you know, which is why your client experience counts. Now this does not in any way mean that you need to have no boundaries and you should be available all the time. Absolutely not.
But you do need to give your clients the experience that, you you know, you’re charging for.
So it’s easy when you create a client experience your clients talk about. Because when they talk about it, it creates word-of-mouth, word-of-mouth creates credibility, credibility creates high ticket conversions. It becomes so much easier because when clients talk about you in rooms that you’re not present, it becomes, you know, at least referrals. People who come in are already sold on you. They have zero resistance when it comes to pricing.
They know what it is like to work with you. It just makes it so much easier.
So your high ticket offer should be a solution, a high impact one. You need to start thinking about that right away. Like I said, if you wanna look at what to put into a package, we’ve already done that, or it would be in the CSP portal. I would highly recommend visiting that.
But when you’re putting your proposal together, when you’re going on those sales calls, you need to start thinking about the solution you’re offering.
And closing your high ticket offer will be so much easier if you show initiative, solidify your positioning, have a delivery team in place, make it easy to work with you, and create a client experience that has clients talking about you in rooms you aren’t present. And you can actually do pretty much all of this, including client experience even before you sign on a high ticket client. Even start, you know, testing it out with your current clients so that when you do have that high ticket client coming, everything’s running like a breeze. In fact, I would highly recommend upgrading any of these systems and processes for your business right now.
Alright.
That’s it, folks.
Q and a copy critique time.
Okay.
Alright. Andrew, are you subcontracting the brand voice expert and folding them into your project, or are you just getting the client to hire that Yeah. No. So the client is not hiring the expert.
We let the client know that we will be bringing in. So in this case, for example, this current client that I’m working with, we work with Justin Blackman.
Right? And we let the client know that we will be bringing Justin in to create the brand voice guide. So we had Justin, the client, the client’s team, me. We were on the brand voice discovery call where, like, he has his whole process, where he works for the client to kind of uncover their voice.
Then today, we did the brand. Then in between, we met Justin and I met to go over the voice guide so that, you know, I could bring in my insights and he could share his and all of that. So it’s a very it’s very much a collaborative effort. It’s not it’s not one where I would say, oh, we will create it for you, and then Justin has no contact with the client.
He he has contact with the client. He meets the client because I want him to follow his process. Right? He’s the expert there for brand voice. And neither is it, where I’ll we tell the client that, oh, here’s who you should work with for this so you can you know, so they run that separately.
It’s very much an it’s integrated into our project. Like, their the time like, when we present the timelines to our client, the timeline has these, you know, outsourced deliverables as well.
Question? Yes.
Absolutely.
Do you have, a certain, like, gross margin that you aim for when you bring someone like that in? So if you bring those margin that you aim for when you bring someone like that in?
So if you bring let’s say you bring in Justin, you, yeah, like, what percent are you looking for a margin in terms of, yeah, difference between what what they’re paying you to bring to bid and then what you think?
Excellent question. I would need to bring Mayank in for that. So because he’s the one who does all of our, SEO, he handles all of that side of the business. So let me ask him and come back to you on that.
That’s a great who not how answer.
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I have, like yeah. He does all all of that, so I’m gonna ask him and come back to you on that.
K. Yeah. No problem. I’ve heard I’ve, I asked Shane in the in the group similarly, and he said that he aims for I think he said sixty five percent gross margin, but, yeah, I’m just asking the developers to get the general feel. So Sure. Starting starting to hire a little bit more, and I’m still having trouble wrapping the head around the path of how this ultimately benefits me.
Appreciate it. Thanks.
Yeah. No. Absolutely. You’re most welcome. And I will I will ask him and come back to you in Slack and answer your question there. Cool.
Any other questions about selling high ticket?
Yeah. I have I’ve gone on delivering, so I’ve got a lot of experience doing, but delivering has always been historically weak for me because two reasons. One, like, it all works up to this big frenzy and you’re like, here, implement it.
Mhmm.
And then either it takes them forever to implement, some people never implement.
Mhmm. So I decided that it would make sense to start implementing.
But I was wondering if you have experience on how to how to make that streamlined.
So where exactly in the delivery process do you find yourself struggling the most?
Well, I’m sort of changing what I what I usually do. So I used to it used to be all about web copy, and now I’m sort of shifting over to emails.
So that would be actually getting access to their email platform. I’m a little uncertain as to how a high ticket client would react to me going, give me all of your passwords kinda thing. Add me as a user, and give me all all the edit access. Oh, and my team as well. Like, how do I streamline that part?
So you would do that when you walk them through your process on your discovery call.
You would walk them through your process. You would tell them like, for instance, I’ll give you an example with with our clients. Right? And I do emails as well, and sometimes I need to look at how are their past email sequences performing or how because how would I otherwise, you know, come up with strategy if I don’t know what’s working?
Or sometimes I and not sometimes. All of the times I need access to their courses. So when I’m discussing my process, I walk them through that. And I say, so what I walk them through the re and research.
We’ll, you know, interview students. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All of that. But then I also let them know that for me to really understand your student experience, I will need access to the course, the community.
You will need to add me as a user on your email service provider so I can see how your emails are doing.
You don’t need to give me most of them don’t even need to get passwords. Sometimes they do. They use either they use LastPass or they resend it late one time or whatever. That is that is on that.
You can give them options. You can say, you know, I’m I can work with anything you’ve got, but I will need access to this because without it, I would not be able to do a, b, and c. So when clients know that, it’s they’re prepared for it. And then when you press you walk them again, you remind them about all of this when they sign on and when you’re walking them through your client portal.
They need to know that so we have two sections in our client portal. We have deliverables, and then we have, you know, research and materials needed from the client. And in that, we, again, have these as line items.
Add to the student community. Add to email account. Send us heat maps record and recordings. Add us on this whatever is needed, everything is laid out for them, and, yeah, they know exactly what’s expected of them.
Got it. So it’s all it’s all up front.
That makes sense. And then just sorry. Just to follow-up on that. In terms of do you guys actually do, like, the designing of emails as well?
No. No. No. But we Yeah. So, for emails, again, this is audience specific. Right? Like, your audience may need those emails designed.
What my audience needs essentially is the emails written. They’re semi wireframe. There’s, like, a rough wireframe so they know exactly where, if I’m using a GIF that goes if I’m using an image where that goes, everything is there. They have their subject line options, their preview text.
Everything is, like, laid out very neatly, but there’s no designing involved there. For sales pages and opt in pages, on the other hand, however, I present my initial copy in a Google Doc. But then once it’s final, we have a designer wireframe it. It’s a black and white wireframe.
It’s it’s not it’s very low key, but it it’s super helpful for clients to see how the copy should be laid out. They may go ahead and do something different, which is fine, but at least, you know, we know it makes it faster and easier for them to implement again.
Right. Makes sense. Cool. Thank you.
You’re welcome. Todd, you had a question.
No. It was just gonna be in reply to what Claire was saying. Just something that, she could look to do. So I just I’ll hit her up on Slack after and go over it with her if she wants. It just goes back to what you’re saying with automating.
Your onboarding email, your kickoff email, your onboarding email right away should have a doc where it says we need such and such and such and such with a link to such and such and such. And, I mean, it it’s again, if I can say it clear, the thing is is that the more you let the client control the engagement, the more they’ll put you at arm’s length and control an engagement. So the the goal is to start controlling it right away and professionally, of course. And the more you control it right away, there’s less hiccups because then your timelines will go from, say, if it’s a two month project, for example, to a three month project because you’re waiting for Google Google Tag Manager or you’re waiting for their goo GA or your, like, your email and everything.
So you’re onboarding right away, control it, and then your kickoff. When you go over, you have a visitor checkbox. We’re still waiting for such and such. So, like, you know, what you’re saying is the more you automate it, the more you control it, the other the easier it becomes.
So there you go. Blair ends. Thank you. Yeah. Exactly what it is. It’s Blair ends.
Exactly. Pricing creativity. Right? Exactly. That’s exactly what it is. So, yeah, I just didn’t wanna jump in with that, Claire.
I can hit you up after, but, yeah, it’s absolutely. Andrew, I think, will be best friends. But, yeah, it’s Blair Ends for sure. So yeah.
Thank you so much. That’s for being helpful. Is that a book by Blair? Yes. Blair?
I yeah.
So It’s in a book. Yeah.
Yeah. I I would share it with you. It’s a five hundred dollar book. My, my business my manic max business partner has it now. It’s called Pricing Creativity.
You can also I would start with, winning without pitching And I know that’s a brand manifesto.
Thinking. Yeah.
So but, yeah, we can talk after. Also, I’ve really upgraded that clearance. I’ve got stuff I can share with you. I’ve got some docs, but I’m doing what’s called blueprint training right now with, Ryan Stewart.
And he really kicks stuff off really nicely, like questions that he asks. And, yeah, it it you have to. I I don’t wanna control the conversation story. It’s just that it just makes life so much easier. This is not my workshop.
So Thank you.
Yeah. Yeah. No. Absolutely. You need to start like like I said, you wanna show you’re sharing if you wanna create a great client experience, but at the same time, you don’t wanna let you know, you don’t wanna have any boundaries. You wanna have those guardrails set right from the start so your client knows exactly what happens. And it you know, you’re in control of the project right from the start.
Cool. Any other questions?
Nope. Okay.
Copy that needs critique.
All good. Yeah.
Hi. Sorry. I have a question about the copy needing critiquing part. Like, how does that work?
Oh, fairly straightforward. If you have copy that you need critique, you show up with a Google Doc that I can, you know, review and make edits in. And, obviously, we’d need some context and yeah.
Okay. Cool. So, like, if I put together a sales pitch, for example, would you be able to critique that? Okay. Great.
Yes.
Good to know. Thank you.
You’re welcome.
Awesome.
Any other questions? Any thoughts about high ticket selling? What does high ticket mean to you?
Yep, Todd.
With high ticket prices and depending on what the project is, what are your normal deliverables that you’re looking at? Like, how long, for example?
So as far as length of project goes, I’ll give you an example. Right now, I’m working on a fairly high ticket project. It’s upwards of fifty thousand dollars.
We it’s so, basically, what I’m working on is two sales pages, two opt in pages, a whole bunch of emails about, say, I would say, twenty six maybe twenty six, thirty odd emails.
That’s those are the deliverables. Of course, my research process is baked in.
The brand voice is baked in, all of that.
That’s that’s the project.
So how long, though, like, how long are those twenty six emails? Is it over, like, a week, four weeks, two months?
Oh, gosh. No. No. No. No. So, essentially, most of our projects are spread out, which is what a lot.
So here’s the thing that you should and this is, again, this is true for our business because it may not be true for every other business. So I need to caveat that by saying, I’m the only copywriter in the business.
Mhmm.
So I write all the copy. That’s how we built it. I we have tried subcontracting copy in the past. It doesn’t really work out the way we want it.
We much rather subcontract. I’m much faster, and dare I say better. So it just makes more sense. So with that and plus the other thing is I like working on multiple projects at a time.
So I’m working on this massive project, but I’m working on two other massive projects as well. I’m writing website copy for a school, and I’m working on website copy for a food blogger at the same time. So which means we structure the projects in a way that they take a few weeks. So for instance, this particular project, we’ve we’re we’re wrapping up with the research phase towards the end of June when we enter the offer optimization phase, but and then the client needed to go on a break for a while.
She’s on a book tour. So this one’s gonna finish oh, and then we are moving house, so we needed to factor that in as well. We’re moving house in August. So, this one’s gonna finish in September.
Cool. Alright. So September. Okay. Yeah. That’s one of the things for me.
I mean, we have, you know, twenty minutes here. I don’t know if I’m I don’t wanna hijack your day, but but you’re asking for questions and feedback. For me, that’s one of the things I’m really liking about the intensive is in the past, when you’re saying, like I think you said here, You just talked about the different, tactics and everything. I’ve sold projects.
It was, like, ninety k over six months. We’ve sold, like, eighty k over four months. We’ve sold, like, fifty k over four months, and some of them were, like, you know, full. Like, the ninety k was full email.
It’s like it ended up being newsletter and social and all these things. You’re just throwing the kitchen sink at people, And they’re like, yeah. Great. I get all this for that.
And then, you know, lately, it was, like, website. We’re doing, like, full ICP work, full, SEO work, full work. We weren’t doing the SEO work. We were doing, like, full, site planning, full wireframing, and full dev.
And those would take three to four depending on the page size and everything like that. And then we would just chuck so much more into it. And that’s what I’m liking about this. Is that really what this is teaching me is just the refinement of what we do.
Because like you said, most of us when when you are the person who understands things like, when you say brand voice, to be honest, the first thing I do when I come into it is what’s your brand voice? Because, like, you’re gonna walk into a room. I I love I love Jasmine Blackman because soon as you walk into a room, people are like, well, you know, we think we’re we’re playful. And it’s like, well, that’s not a great that’s a personality.
Right? And then they’re like, like, I’ve I’ve had people I’ve gone into meetings who are like, yeah. Her voice is like think of, like, buttery potatoes with a side of horseradish that’s just kinda splintered into it, and you’re not expecting that. And I’m sitting there going, that’s not a voice?
And they’re like, well, yeah. It is. It’s it’s it’s a surprise voice. I’m like, no.
There’s nine types of voice.
Yeah. Yeah.
I’m like, yeah. There’s, like, three types of outlook, three of accessibility, three of authority, and you’re like, what? And it’s just you just you just stop edits.
It’s weird. You squash edits right away. Yep. So that’s what it is for me. But the idea of the copywriting, yeah, that’s what I’m thinking is, like, yeah, I just I did all the copywriting. When we sold a package, I was eighty to ninety percent of the work. So that’s why I’m wondering about the projects and the deliverables.
And I’m just also like, I like where this is going because what you’re saying, I wanna go CRO. And this is a conversation I’ve I’m really bringing it up, but I know there’s time with CRO, and I know I’ve got things really refined. But, you know, when you were saying you you didn’t say really CRO. You said some you said web copy and everything there. But I’m just curious about, yes, what you’re selling, what the deliverable is, and what that is. Because it’s I just find what this is happening is really kinda fascinating. So that’s just me.
Yeah. Yeah. No. You need to, like again, our our packages are fairly straightforward.
Most of them are on our side. They I have made the mistake of throwing the kitchen sink at a client and then just, yeah, feeling overwhelmed and not being able to see the transformation that we wanted them to see, which means, like, yeah, it doesn’t make any sense.
The other thing that I need to you know, like, let everyone know is, like, I focus only on the copy and the strategy side of things. Everything else that is not my core skill is outsourced, baked in. So like I said, editing, outsourced, baked in. I don’t spend any time on edits, before the copy goes to the client.
I don’t spend any time on wireframing. I don’t spend any time on research. I don’t spend any time on things like if a client needs brand voice or if a client needs design or whatever or implementation.
Nope.
So I just focus on what my zone of genius is, and, yeah, that’s it. Every it’s it’s who not how for me, basically. Yeah.
Yeah. And that’s what I think I for me, it’s it’s the who has always been this guy. It’s always been the design, the Well, that’s been the way this guy. Brand, everything from logo, illustration to everything.
The only thing I handed over in the last last little bit was dev work because we were using Thrive, and I use Elementor. And I just didn’t wanna be in like, really just start a new thing from scratch in that. So I hear all of that. Absolutely.
But I find when I have done that, standards drop. So that was the only thing for me, and and you’re absolutely right. And getting people in the but, yeah, standards drop. And when standards drop, you’re running behind then, like, you’re you’re you’re off on projects.
Right?
So Yeah.
Yep.
Yep. So which is exactly why what we realized is, like, for us, for and this is what we realized with with copy is, like, I wanna own the copy start to finish. Everything else, I wanna work with you know, mine kinda very clearly work with, like, whoever’s the best when it comes to, say, you know, research or whatever or editing. So we and we start we what we what we found was we needed to work with a few people to kinda see what the experience was like before we knew that we were going to bring them into a bigger project, which is why I said, you wanna start looking for the who’s now before you, you know, have like, you’re starting a huge project, but you wanna finish in a certain amount of time and you wanna be working on other projects. Like I said, like, from in our case, could I finish the project sooner? Absolutely.
But the way I’m wired is, like, I like to work in different projects so that it just kinda keeps me creative. If you wanna pull off one project in a shorter piece I mean, like, the amount of copy I’m writing, like, we could easily condense it.
But, yeah, I wanted to also work on the school website project. I also wanted to work on the blog at Baker.
Hundred percent.
You know? Yeah. So but most importantly, what I want everyone to remember is, like, you need to start looking for the people who you can bring in right now.
Use them for smaller projects. Use them for a project for your own business if you have to. That’s exactly what we did when we have a brand voice. We hired someone to work on our brand voice guide.
Great great work. But we also knew that we wanted when it came to client work, we wanted to work with someone who was the next level.
So Yeah.
For me, you know, one of my moments is this last couple of days. And I, again, I don’t wanna hijack this, but I, you know, I just think it’s important for us to share. One of the biggest things for me is, principles that we learn in copy school are not really easily replicated, and you need people need to know certain terms that you’re sharing, like sophistication levels, awareness levels, emotional journeys. And, you know, when I’ve talked to people, like, I when we were when we were hiring and I was looking at an intern, I’m like, how do you, you know, how do you define brand voice? And they were just like, crickets.
And I’m like, oh, it’s three measures. And I, like, walked them through it and walked them through master of headlines. For example, I had SOPs. What my moment was was that takes a lot of time, but I could be wrong in saying this.
But, you know, I think it was last week. Claire, I think you were on the call with that. And Jo was like, you know, we kinda turn a blog a blind eye to when someone logs in with your credentials. And for me, that was kind of a game changer.
You can bring someone on and go, okay. Take this course, and then we can get that going. But it I I really, yeah, hundred percent, it’s a who not how. I had a site planner, and that’s what they were doing was just site planning.
And then I was reviewing it because I, you know, I think to build what we’re building, and I could be wrong, is you need to be more of a reviewer and not a doer. Right? You need to get to that level. So and I still like to do.
I you know, the, idle hands or the devil’s play things, you can insert two weeksdays everywhere you want, but I like getting my hands dirty a lot. And I think what this is teaching me is that all I have to do is just make sure your fingernails are clean. You know what I mean? You can still keep them dirty, right, kind of idea.
So yeah. And I like that on the coffee side. Again, I don’t wanna hijack this, but what I’m learning, like, this workshop, everything we’re looking at is just that the refining process is the most difficult. But I think once you clear that that that hurdle, you’re like you just have no one in front of you, and that’s gonna be the coolest thing.
So Yep.
Absolutely.
Talking too much.
But Yep.
All good. Awesome. Great. So if you have no other questions, we can wrap up.
I’m sorry. I have one more.
Sure. Go ahead.
First, thanks, Todd. That was really helpful to to listen to and understand about your process. But, you mentioned celebrity I can’t remember the exact way of phrasing it, but, celebrity equals, like, easy conversions or something.
The moment you start talking on stages Amplify your positioning.
Yes. Yes. That’s the one.
So I’m kind of in this phase where I’m like, I do wanna talk on stages. I’m sort of too terrified to even ask someone if I can, because I tried once and failed. And I’m like, that’s it. That’s the rule, which it’s it’s obviously not, and I’m learning to accept that. But I I wondered if you had any advice on how to stop, like, at the very, very beginning involving your celebrity authority?
Yeah. I would say start by, again, looking at who you know. So you wanna look you wanna start by seeing, okay, have you spoken to smaller groups before? If not in person, have you spoken virtually before? If not virtually, can you start there? Can you warm up those speaking muscles by presenting to smaller groups? You know?
Or in if you have been speaking to smaller groups virtually, can you start speaking to smaller groups in person? Is there a coworking space close to where you live where you could, you know, possibly go and do a session for SaaS founders?
Do you know a friend who’s spoken at an event? Could you ask for an introduction? So just start by who do you know and what you know right now and how can you use it. I would start there.
None of us started off speaking on big stages.
We all started with the smaller ones. I’m pretty sure maybe some people have. None of none of us is too wide a generalization.
So but I would say most of us started with the smaller stages, built up our, you know, courage and confidence to speak on bigger stages. So that is where I would start. Yeah.
Awesome. Thank you so much. That’s really helpful. You’re welcome.
Also, we would be, I think I’m pretty sure, we would be talking about, you know, speaking on stages and on A list podcasts, in the near future, for sure. I know it’s it’s the theme for one of the months. So yeah.
Great. Thank you. I look forward to it.
You’re welcome. Thanks, everybody. Have a great rest of your day. Bye. Bye.
Thanks, Berta.
You’re welcome.