Proven Ways to Close Deals (FAST!)

All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business, this is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so, and you get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you want to learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. Hope you enjoy the episode.

Good morning.

Good afternoon.

Good evening.

Good early, early morning to our guest today, John Logar, and also early, early morning to Allianz. You guys are almost in the same time zone. Allianz, you're in Japan. John is in Australia. Which coast are you on, John?

I'm on the East Coast. It's 3 AM in the morning.

Is that considered the Gold Coast or am I backwards?

I am on the Gold Coast, actually. I'm on a plane. I'm in a, well, the place I'm at is a place called Currumbin Beach, so it's kind of, about an hour's south drive from Brisbane, about 1-hour flying time north of Sydney. And so it's just 40 miles of beach.

Oh, wow, man. That's gotta be amazing. What a great place to live and to do business.

Kind of looks like Miami. If you type Gold Coast, Australia, and you look at it, it looks like Miami, but our sand is white and soft and it's squeaky. Weeks when you walk on it. Better than Miami. I was in Miami a week ago, so yeah, it was, uh, it is a little bit better than Miami.

Nice. Yeah. Now Leon just said 2 AM here.

Uh-huh.

Um, so awesome. I, I have us scheduled for about an hour today. Um, you know, John, thank you for being here and just kind of a little bit of a recap. You know, we, we touched base last week. And you told me that you're running currently an AI, like, sales agency. Um, but you're also in the consulting world. You've, you've grown and scaled to 8-figure agencies as it was. Um, so, uh, and one of the things that you brought up to me that I thought was really interesting was how to create offers, how to create fast offers and, and make pitches and get sales faster than anyone I've ever heard of. So I know that you have a lot to say about that. This session will be more of like an open Q&A, but I'm going to pass it over to you first and yeah, for a little bit more of an introduction. So thank you for being here, John.

Appreciate you having me. I mean, I don't get up at 3 o'clock in the morning for too many people. So I appreciate the fact that you've got me on here. But yeah, probably the biggest thing that I've seen, I mean, we're in a changing world in the agency space. where it's come from and where we're at today. The ability to grow quickly has been exacerbated obviously by technology, but the demand for what we do, obviously due to AI. I mean, I do run my own AI agency. We have a team that works with very large companies. We work with companies $100 million plus where we implement automated systems around sales processes where we literally take the role of the archive of the business to help people through the sales process. And we're almost at a point where we're almost generative in the AI that we've developed. So we're not doing your typical chatbot scenario where we've got what we call an AI intelligent workflow where we can almost take the human out of the loop. We have a human watching in the loop, but one of the things that we've found, obviously sales is probably the biggest driver of revenue opportunity for any business. And in our business, we need to be a sales-driven organization if we want to be successful and if we want to grow. And I think the biggest challenge that a lot of people face is that we're still old school in our thinking of how we offer to the market and how we interact. And so I'm a big believer in setting objectives and going for it. I think a lot of businesses don't think about this clearly. If you want to kind of be busy, you've got to be— there's an 80/20 rule, right? 0 to $1 million in business is 80% sales and marketing, 20% fulfillment, right? $1 million to $5 million is 80% sales and marketing and 20% fulfillment, right? $5 million to $10 million is 80% sales and marketing, And 20% fulfillment. You always buy fulfillment, right? People go the other way. It's normally 80/20 the other way. 80% fulfillment, 20% sales and marketing, right? I learned from a friend of mine. In fact, I had some time with him a couple of weeks ago. We were on a flight from Sydney to LA, a guy called Robert Herjavec. I don't know if anybody knows who Robert Herjavec is, the Shark Tank guy in the US. Lucky enough to fly with him for 14 hours to And I've had several conversations with Rob. Rob and I have spoken on several stages over the years, and it's really funny, we always end up back into a conversation of what's the most important thing that drives opportunity, drives revenue. And he always says, he says, look, when times are crap, it's sales above all else. And when times are Amazing. It sells above all else. It sells above all else, right? You know, if you're building, a company is building its opportunity and its aspirations based around how it serves a market, right? So the faster you get into those opportunities, the quicker you capitalize on the value that you deliver to the market. So I'll talk a little bit towards what I call fast action offers because people kind of There's this thought process in planning for growth, right? And I like to, it's almost like to me, it's the fastest path to revenue. Fastest path to revenue is to have an offer in front of somebody, right? You haven't got an offer in front of somebody that they can address. And that offer doesn't have to be a financial offer. That'd be a may offer. It could be an offer like we should be talking, like it could be an appointment offer. It could be a buy now or buy this thing offer, or it's what's the next step?

Yeah.

What's the next step for people? There's a person that I coach and they were in a situation to say, I'm just trying to craft an offer. And I'll use this as an example to give you a perspective of how fast you can change things. So he said, I need to make an offer. And so he's going through the analysis by paralysis, overthinking, what's the best offer that I can put in the market? And I said, well, what do you want the offer to do? And he says, well, I need to talk to people right now who want to do business before the end of the year because this is their opportunity to leverage time into the new year. If they buy us in the new year, the result of what we deliver is going to be in February and March. If they buy us now, we're going to kick off January 2nd and generate outcomes and results for our clients now. So I need clients today, right? So I said, well, great. What's the best result that you've achieved for a client? Well, what are some of the best results you've achieved? And so he went and he said, well, we're in the kitchen and bathroom remodeling market. We've got a couple of clients where in the last 4 months we've been able to generate half a million dollars worth of sales through our process of driving people through their sales cycle. And I said, so you've been able to do this consistently for a few people? He said, yeah, we've got a model. We know it works as long as they follow through and we educate the client as to why it's important to treat the opportunity we create for them is critical and they get a result. They close half a million dollars or plus sales within a 3 to 4 month period to their business. And I said, great. I said, how many people you got on your cold list of people in the market that you want to talk to about this idea? And he says, I got about 2,000 people. So the offer was very simple. We have a model and a framework where we've helped a client from zero in additional revenue, from zero to half a million dollars in Extra revenue by using our frameworks to leverage those sales. We're looking for a kitchen bathroom remodeling service that wants to beat that number. We want to work with you with our model, our framework. We want to beat that number with you. We don't want to do the same. We want to beat it. So if you want to see our framework that generates half a million dollars worth of revenue within four months for a kitchen bathroom model, so two thousand of those messages went out. The day before yesterday. So day before, 2 days ago, 3 days ago, right? 232 replies, 7 appointments booked, 7 appointments booked within an hour and a half, right? Because the chat was, yeah, I'm interested in learning how to do that, right? I'd like to generate half a million plus in revenue in the next 3 months. Well, where do we go to from here? All right. So he's madly, he was overwhelmed. First of all, his phone was going off the hook because people are replying to the message, right? Second is like, well, shit, I can't leave these people hanging. I've got to respond quickly. So he literally got his team and say, we need to reply to these people and book appointments, right? You know, their conversion rate is 1 in 3 on average. They, if, you know, I think they're madly working on it right now, but they They literally made 7 appointments in about an hour and a half for the team from that offer. So if you've got a great result and you know how you got your client that great result, you want to use that result because you already have a framework, you have a model, you know how you got there, right? And other people in the market who are in the same market would love to know how somebody else is winning the game. Right? They'd love to, like, everybody's curious about, well, if they're generating this, I'm not generating this right now, or we don't have a system that's generating half a million dollars worth of revenue right now. I'd like to see this, right? So the thing is, is what is the most compelling thing that you can share with the market that piques their interest, right? So if I had a framework, so there's an example. So right now, and I'll use our AI agency in a moment, We're working for a law firm. What we're doing is we're essentially reigniting old contacts into new contract or case contracts for the law firm. We're averaging about $100,000 in new fees per week with our AI process, right? And it's taken us, it took us about 7 weeks to formulate our strategy to be able to achieve that result for our client. And that's working week to week now. It's been, we're hitting $100 grand weeks now for about 5 weeks in a row, right? Just using AI. And some of these leads and contacts like 3 years old, right? So we're reigniting a conversation and bringing people back into the system. So if I'm adding $100,000 worth of legal fees a week from contacts and connections that are more than up to 3 years old, other law firms, I would imagine that are similar to the one that we're working with, would be probably very interested in how we're doing that. So we're reaching out and saying, hey, we've built a generative AI model, an agent that is instigating conversation and bringing caseload. And right now our caseload that we're delivering for one client is $100K a week. If you are open to seeing the model or the framework we are using to generate that extra $100,000 of fees per week, right? Let me know. And so we have gone out to about 300 law firms and we've had about 72 law firms come back and say, we want to see this thing. We want to see the thing working. So the message is simple. Thank you for saying that, Singh, because we don't have time to read War and Peace. Most people are creating offers like the old webinar model. We're creating, like we're trying to create The open loop, we're trying to gauge their interests, we're trying to draw people in. Those types of messages, they still work. They work in a contextual environment. What works right now is something that I can just get my hands on very quickly. Even your emails, our emails, a sentence, 2 sentences, that's it, right? If you want to know more, are you open to this idea, right?

We don't...

Do free appointments. Our appointments are paid. So we charge people $500 for a chit-chat, for a 15-minute chit-chat upfront, right? We're saying, look, this is what we're doing. This is the investment to have that time about that specific idea. If you want to book in, we've got 2 spaces this week for you to take advantage of. We always fill out the spaces, right? We charge for that time. We do a foot-in-the-door offer. We don't go straight into doing a deal where we are trying to get clients on retainers and those sorts of things. We don't know if our clients are going to be good clients, so we vet them. So what we sit there and say, our foot in the door is a $20,000 deposit for us to run a test, right? And generally a test is paid for upfront, but we guarantee a return on the investment of the test, right? So they're going to get their 20 grand back. in the tests that we're running for our clients, right? So we, because the people we're working with are not small mom-and-pop shops and not small businesses, our clients, $50 million, $100 million, $300 million plus, they're the people we talk to, right? So $20 grand for a test is nothing, right? They, you know, $20 grand for them is like a pin drop in the ocean. But if we don't, if they're not willing to invest the $20 grand upfront, then we know that they're not qualified for us. For us, we want to qualify the customer. So you want to, and a foot-in-the-door offer is a smaller percentage of what you do that allows the customer to have an experience with you, right? But it also allows you to take a bit of a deeper dive with your customer when you set up a foot-in-the-door. Foot-in-the-door can be anything. Like, I work with a web dev agency. Their foot-in-the-door is a $10,000 mapping session on their website. They do not quote for websites. They don't do quotes. It's 10 grand. We sit down and we work out the functionality of what you're trying to build from the most important marketing portal in your business. Now, most of the people that come to them and they go, well, 10 grand, but the other web devs do free strategy sessions. They do free quotes and say, well, ask them if they do strategy. Ask them if they build functional sites that are going to convert sales, right? If they don't tell you or can't explain to you how they involve strategy and they can't explain functionality, then you can come talk to us. So every client pays $10,000 upfront, right? To build a website. And it's not that $10,000 is not given towards the website build. That $10,000 is for the time to do the mapping session, but their average website is $75,000 is their average sale, right? Any sale under $30,000, they refer to another web dev. They don't do the work. And they're working on 10, 15, 20 projects at a time to the tune of millions of dollars worth of revenue. So the more precise you are in what you're trying to achieve as an outcome, the better your offer will be accepted by the market. And here's the other thing. If you want to, what we do is we call it piggybacking sales. If we have a client, say for example, we've just got a client in the baseball training world. This is a $40 million company that teaches kids how to swing a baseball bat. They make $40 million a year teaching children how to swing a baseball bat. That's what they do. And families will pay $7,000 to put their kids through this program of how to swing a baseball bat, which is insane. I literally lucked, we came across this time, company and thought, this is an interesting business model, right? Only been around for about 6 years. They're doing $40 million revenue. They're going to grow to about 120 locations. They're really good on their stats. And we've just literally onboarded that company. Now, we didn't realize sports training is a very big thing in the United States. Baseball camps, soccer camps, all these sorts of things. There's some very lucrative businesses in that market. So we basically wrote a message out to all these other sports type training companies. And we said, hey, we just got this company that's come on board and this is what they bought us for. This is what they're getting us to create for them. Are you open? We've got room whilst we're developing this for them. We might as well develop for somebody else. We've got room for 1 or 2 more people who might be interested in the same process. So we let the market know, their market know who bought. And oftentimes we'll pick up another 2 to 5 sales just from people seeing that people are investing in what we're doing. So that is an offer to the market. Hey, we're building this because this person said this is what they wanted from us. We thought whilst we're building it, we might as well build it for you, right? Here's why they bought it. Here's why, what they're investing in the process, right? We're right up front with it. Generally, we'll get a handful of people coming back and say, hey, I'm interested too, right? It's the same with appointments, right? If you're setting appointments yourself, the appointments are a lifeblood of your business. 20 appointments a month is going to give you 5 to 7 sales a month, 20 appointments. On average, if I look at our clients that are doing a million plus revenue, they're generating, their average is between 14 and 16 appointments per month, 14 to 16 appointments per month, right? So, and you want those appointments with the people that you want to work with, right? So you target the audience you want to work with. So it's not hard to generate 16 appointments a month. Right? The only reason why agencies don't have 16 sales appointments a month is because they don't focus on setting sales appointments. That's why they don't have them. It's not because they can't do it. It's actually quite easy to set an appointment. The example I gave earlier on with the kitchen bathroom modeler, 7 appointments in an hour and a half, 1 offer, right? They'd never, like, they always struggled. They would get 3 or 4 appointments a week and, you know, they felt that they were doing okay. But I ask them, well, what's your appointment strategy? What's the strategy you've got during the appointment and what's the purpose of the appointment? What are you trying to drive to? Who are you targeting? Why should somebody hop on a phone with you? That's the question, right? And how do you make that compelling? And so I'm of the belief you need to sell the appointment rather than selling your services. So the biggest and the easiest thing is, Well, why should anybody, like, for example, right now I know in automation because we're in the AI game, we know that pretty much every company we talk to is broken, right? They don't follow up leads. Like, you can be great at ads and running, well, we're pretty good at running Facebook ads. One of the biggest challenges is the finger-pointing game. The finger-pointing game is the reason why these leads aren't working is they're not following up in real time, right? Or they're not following up at all. Or they're treating the lead poorly, meaning that they're treating that lead like a tire kicker, right? So if you treat a lead poorly, then the response or the efficacy of that sales conversation is going to be pretty poor as well. So we know that for a fact that most sales processes are broken. I can give you the best, I can run the best marketing and ad campaign, drive the most leads, but if the strategy's wrong on the other end where they don't engage or facilitate, It's broken. So one of the things that we will lead with is right now we know that if you're buying leads, that your system's broken because 2 things are happening. One, leads that you're taking an hour, you're taking a day, 2, 3 to get to the lead, right? To follow up, or you're not following up at all. Do you believe that you're losing opportunities because you're not following up? Most people go, yeah, right? So imagine you can actually engage a lead at the point of inquiry. And direct that person into the next logical step of the sales process. What would happen to your conversion rate if we could engage the inquiry at the point of interest, right? Most people will say it'll double sales. So if I can get every lead engaged at the point of inquiry, right, that means more conversations for what people are looking for. And 2, you're going to very quickly, if you start tracking that, you're going to very quickly find out what ads are working, what marketing's not, what marketing's working, what marketing's not. You're also going to find out the efficacy of your sales team, right? So you can make improvements and adjustments based on focus. So we'll say to people, you know, we're right up front with people and say, right, we want to double sales conversions. The fastest way to do that is to engage an inquiry at the point of interest. Do you agree? Yes or no? Right? And some people go, yeah, right? So imagine if I could guarantee you that we could double sales conversions. By engaging leads at point of inquiry. Are you open to that idea? That's the offer, right? We send that message out all day long and we get people saying, yeah, I want to do something about that. It's a really simple offer, right? So we're plugging in basically a text speed to lead, right? It's pretty simple, right? So if you've got a great result, talk about the great result, ask people if they want the same result. If they want to, we talk about it in terms of, We don't want to create the same result for you. We want to beat the result with you. Are you open to beating? We're looking for somebody who wants to beat this result, right? When you say that, people go, yeah, I want to beat that result, right? I'm not even getting close to that result right now, but I want to beat it, right? So the biggest thing is, is what's the most compelling transition that you can make for somebody and just make a direct offer for that transition, right? All of us have cool things that we sell, right? We're all in different types of agencies, but we've all got cool things. What is the coolest thing that you have and what is the outcome that will occur from the coolest thing you have, right? Right now we have a sales agent, right, that is literally converting hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue from leads that are 3 to 4 years old, right? That's a pretty cool thing, right? Would you like to talk to the agent? So we have a demonstration. We ask 2 questions and then our agent will actually sell their product back to them. Act like a customer of your business, ask any question you want, and our agent will actually start selling your services for real, right? 2 steps. So, you know, would you like to see an effective sales process with our agent selling your product category back to you? And imagine every single customer goes through that journey, right? Again, the right information at the right time at speed, right? That's the thing, right? So we get a lot of people going, yeah, we want to try that, right? Because most people have got this idea, or some people have got this idea, it's like it's a chatbot. It's not a chatbot, right? It's actually a 4-level. It negotiates contracts, it negotiates price, It'll actually go to a conversion to sale. It'll direct to an appointment if they need to speak to an expert or somebody who has more knowledge to help the client in the sales process. And so it almost acts like a human. It's not, right? But it acts like one of their team, basically, right? And it has nuances in real time. So most people go, you want to, you know, do you want to interact with something that's going to represent your company in a way that You're— that people can't or don't, right? So what's the, what's the cool thing you've got, right? And then let people know what the outcome of the cool thing is. That's a very quick offer. We built this or we're working on this right now. We've got a Facebook ad campaign that we've been working on a funnel right now. And right now we've dramatically changed conversion rates and got far better quality appointments for our clients. Would you like to see our framework? That is getting high qualified appointments for clients right now, right? So what is the cool thing that you're working on? What is the outcome that you can create from the cool thing? And pitch that to your clients, right? Hey, we're working on this cool thing. The other thing is when somebody sets an appointment with you, let everybody else that you're prospecting know that people are setting an appointment with you for this reason, right? If you're getting appointments, if somebody says. Yeah, I want to sit down with you. Other people want to sit down for the same reasons. So what you want to do is you run out to the market and say, hey, we're just talking to 4 or 5 companies right now about this specific aspect. If this is something that's on your radar or you're interested, we're literally, right now we've got companies that want to actually start looking at the opportunity of putting this type of offer or putting this type of thing in place. Are you open to taking advantage of the same call? Right? So let people know what people are interested in. Other people will take interest in what you have, right? What you focus on most becomes a reality. If your business is driven by conversations, you need to focus your strategies on generating conversations as much as possible. We have a thing. December and January are my 2 biggest revenue months, right? Every year we try to beat the record. So this year we're trying to put in $470,000 a month in revenue. to our business. And January, we've got about $525,000 we're trying to put into revenue in our business, right? So because we're focused on that, we've been building up to this since September, right? The only reasons why December and January are going to be awesome is because we've had this real concentrated effort on giving people a very valid, important reason To actually start now, right? So January is a momentum month, right? Because people are going to put you off. Oh, we're going to look at this in the new year, right? Anybody that's putting us into new year, we make one particular key statement to them. Understand that if you put it, if you start us in January, our efficacy, our outcome is going to be February and March. Our goal is to make January 2nd your revenue starter. So do you want to leverage January, February, or do you want to leverage January, February, March? Right? And so a good 25% of the people we talk to will go, you know what, that makes sense. Let's work together now.

Right?

So give people a compelling reason as to why they should be working with you right now. The reason why December and January are the biggest months that you should be generating revenue is, is because this is where people are planning their budgets, planning their new year, looking at what they're spending. Analytics right now is the name of the game, right? Data is absolutely critical right now. And most people can't access the right data, right? They don't have the right systems in place. Their automations are broken. They're not able to read the data. This is huge, right? For us, we're in the data world. If we are generating revenue, generating clients, automating businesses, doing marketing strategy, everything we do is about numbers. Everything you do is about numbers. So People right now, the biggest conversation on the planet is for us to be able to speed up the sales process or become more efficient in what we do. We've got to fix what's broken, right? And right now, most marketing strategies are broken because they don't incorporate data. And right now with tech, with AI, and with all the other services, we can incorporate that. We can sit down with a client and say, listen, we can leverage revenue really quickly because we can now focus on the data points. It's like running a Facebook ad campaign, right? We have an agency, it's in the physical therapy market. We've got 700 clients that we manage. It's doing about $70 million revenue. We know because we've got so many clients, we've got a spread of data about, we're spending about $3 million a month in Facebook ads for physical therapy patients, right? In the US. So we know from all that data what campaigns work, when they work, and when they don't work. And so we can walk into a client and say, listen, you're in this market. This is our experience with this market right now. Here's what happens when we run this campaign. Here's what the numbers look like. At the end of the day, depending on how good you are at managing that patient, we could probably guarantee you're going to generate between $30,000, $50,000, $100,000 a month in extra sales from our campaign, right? You get to choose on whether that money, that revenue comes to you or the guy next door gets it. What do you want to do? Right? So what you focus on, like if you focus on having a great month, guess what? You're going to have a great month. If you focus on putting out fires, then the attention's going to be in putting out fires, right? You want to work to— the last thing I'll say and then I'll open up to questions. You want to work to milestones. What is your next milestone, right? So if you're at half a million and you want to be at a million, What's the gap, right? What's your average client and what's the gap, right? There are 3 stagnant points in the growth of an agency in the early stages, right? Everybody here has hit the $10K mark. That's a mindset stage, right? The second stage of growth is to hit $85,000 a month in recurring revenue, right? That's the second milestone, right? That milestone is all driven by optimizing your sales process. It's 100% sales and marketing, right? That gets you from doing $10K a month to $85,000 a month in recurring revenue, right? So you've got to scale sales. You've got to scale your appointment and scale sales. Operations and fulfillment is going to be driven by sales, not the other way around. You're going to get better at what you do, right? But you're going to get better because you're resourced to be able to get better. Most people are trying to build the perfect mousetrap. I'd rather build a mousetrap that kind of works, but it's not perfect. Jump out of an airplane and build the parachute on the way down. And the way to do that is through experience with clients. How you build a better system, a better process is to work with more clients. You get better at what you do. You get better at the data. You get better at what's working, what's not working. all your clients as they grow. 7 years ago, our physical therapy clients, we got okay results, but it wasn't fantastic. But year 2 with our clients with datasets and data points, we were rocking Facebook ads. We were literally rocking. We could literally predict revenue by year 2. And that's because we'd spent close to $1 million a month on Facebook ads. If you're spending $1 million a month on Facebook ads, you can figure it out. Very quickly, you know what's working, what's not working. But if we're only working, if we're only spending like we're spending $5,000 a month on Facebook ads, we can't work that out, right? It's going to be a hit and miss scenario. So the more clients you generate, the more experience you get, the better you get at what you do, right? So that milestone, so there's plateau moments, $10K, $30K is a plateau moment because that's you running your business about $30K a month. Once you go, I need sales, you're going to hire SDR and sales. You can literally go from $30K a month to $100 grand a month within about 4 to 6 months with one salesperson and one appointment setter, right?

If you're an agency owner looking to break high 7 figures, 8 figures, or even 9 figures, the Agency Owners Association is for you. It's ran by my partner, Neil Patel, and myself. And we've been there, done that from an agency standpoint. And if you want If you want to learn more about it, if you want to grow faster, get more clients, take yourself out of the day-to-day, just go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more.

That's what it takes to go to a million plus. From there, you're going to hire more sales to scale sales. So you're going to go from a million to $5 million. $5 million is your next milestone. From a million to $5 million, much faster, much easier, right? Because you've learned all the lessons getting to that million. The first million is always the hardest and you're paid your apprenticeship. Normally people in this game, I don't know where you are in your journey, you normally pay a 2-year apprenticeship. That 2-year apprenticeship is figuring out how good you are at getting good at what you do, right? That's what the 2 years is on average. You can make it faster if you get really zeroed in to one offer, one market, one conversion mechanism, then one plan, right? We want to keep it really simple. Who's your avatar? What you're offering that avatar, what's the mechanism for conversion, right? And then what's the plan to get them? That's the fastest path to growth, right? Focus on selling one thing. We focused on selling one back pain funnel before we built funnel number 2, which was a knee pain funnel. We solved $30 million in a year of one back pain funnel, right? We sold one funnel and got to $30 million revenue in annual revenue before we built funnel number 2, right? And we got really good at selling one funnel. Like we got really good at selling one funnel. We had one salesperson would book in $3 million worth of business with us every year. One salesperson, right? We had a team of 5, right? So we, and we had a great funnel. It was a fantastic back pain funnel.

Yeah.

It worked, right? So fastest path to revenue is make an offer every day. Invite people to your cool thing every day. If you're getting a great result, if you do get a great result with a client, let everybody know that you got this result. You helped them with your strategy, with your methodology, and say you're looking for somebody who wants to do the same thing or better. That is the fastest offer or the best offer you can make because that's what people want. They want the outcome. They want to transition. Nobody wants to make an appointment with you talking about Facebook ads, right? People don't want leads. They want paying customers. Our customers do not want more leads. They want more revenue in the bank account. So our focus as a growth partner is to add revenue to their bank account. If we're not adding more revenue to their bank account and they're paying us, we're not doing a really good job, right? We sit down with a client and we sit and say, listen, our number one priority is to become the revenue officer for your business. And we want to make sure that the minimum that we're adding is 3 to 1. If you gave us a buck and we gave you $3 back, are we good? Right? We have people saying, if you give me 3 bucks for every buck back, I'll name my firstborn child after you. Right. In profit, right? Because it's a no-brainer offer. We're trying to make it easy for people to say yes, right? And the fastest way for people to say yes is you ask them, you ask them why they want to do this. You ask them why this is important. What's the real objective around this that you're trying to achieve? Why is this really important? Why is it a must? And then why aren't you doing it right now? Why isn't it working? Right? And then say, at the end of the day, if that's important and this is a must and we bridge the gap between there and there, can we work together to do that? Is that something you're open to? And 99% of the people you ask that question to are going to go, yeah, I want to work with that. Great. Your investment's going to be this. Your investment needs to be anchored to the objective. So if your investment, like for example, for us, the average investment, average client spends about $25,000 a month with us. That's about our average recurring. We say, listen, at the end of the day, you are trying to generate $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 a month in recurring revenue. Your worst case scenario with us is an investment of $25,000 a month. That's your lowest investment, right? But if we're making you $300,000 and you are paying us $30,000 or $40,000, are we good? Nobody has said no to that offer yet, right? If we are working towards that outcome, you are making more than what you're paying us and we can account for that, right? Then should we go ahead? Right? And most people will go, if they've said, this is my objective, this is why this is a must for me, why it's important, why we must do this. We can't do this right now, so we need your help, right? Great. Let's collaborate together on a plan that's going to bridge that gap. At the end of the day, if your investment is a fraction of that, are we good? Every person's going to say yes to that. Offer every person, right? If they say no to that offer, you're talking to the wrong person, right? If you're getting a no, you're talking to the wrong person. Yeah. So you want to keep things very simple. You want to keep things very fast. We are moving at a very fast pace. The demand for what we do is higher than ever before. There are going to be teenagers who are going to run million-dollar agencies in half the time of what most people running million-dollar agencies. There are people right now that have gone into automation around around Facebook, around Google. They only started a year ago. They're already doing $1 million, $2 million, $3 million plus, right? They're leveraging tech, they're leveraging AI. They are getting into the market much faster than what we have learned traditionally. And here's the other thing, always look 2 steps above where you are at, right? If you are seeing, if you want to be 2 steps above or a couple of steps above from where you are, don't look at the guys that are doing $1 million a month. Look at the guys that are doing, you know, if you're at $50 grand, look at the guys that are doing $100 grand a month, right? If you're at $100 grand a month, look at the guys that are doing $300,000 a month. Don't look at the guys doing a million a month, right? Because you're not there yet, right? You need to actually go through your milestones, right? And you can grow as fast or as slow as possible, right? To me, speed is everything. Speed is everything, right? If you look at the fastest growing business on the planet right now, It's all about speed, right? Speed to market, speed with the offer, speed with the idea. It's being fast and first, right? People aren't pontificating, strategizing, you know, like where's the market? Your market right now is telling you where it's at, right? You, if you've had enough conversations, you kind of, you know, you've kind of figured it out. And the other thing is the concept of niche jumping. The reason why people leave or jump niches is because they just haven't understood the market. It's not because the market wasn't a good market. Like I know people, so I have a friend of mine runs a $12 million marketing agency. They're going to do $20 million this year in restaurants. They have a Facebook ad agency for restaurants. They're going to do $20 million revenue this year, right? Last year they did $12 million. This year they're doing $20 million, right? In restaurants. I know somebody that's running a $67 million business doing Facebook ads for gyms. Right? $67 million in Facebook ad work for gyms. That's how much they're making, right? And 70% of their sales on the phone. Remember speed to market? You know, nobody's calling anybody any right now. Everybody's texting because that's where people are at. We're all texting, messaging, blah, blah, blah. That means the phones are not ringing. The call bookers are not calling anybody. So if you start calling people, guess what? You stand out from the crowd. You're going to get appointments much faster, right? 67% of all sales that are made in our industry are made direct. They're not made by Facebook ad leads. They're made direct. Yeah. So I'm going to stop talking. Happy to answer questions. And, you know, if you want a strategy or an offer from me, I'll give you one.

Yeah. John, this is amazing. Thank you. You're super full of wisdom and it's clear that you have experience and obviously you're, you're walking the talk. So thank you for being here and sharing with all this. I know we had a couple of questions. I actually wanted to ask a question myself that I think will be relevant. You know, you're talking about making these offers and pitching people and speed to lead. Where are you finding like where to actually meet the people? Like, Old lead lists, you know, where are the contacts coming from?

So your number one list is your familiar list, right? That's the first list. Friends, family, associates, acquaintances, they should know what business you're in. I get more referrals from people I'm connected to who know me personally than I do outside of getting referrals for clients, right? But if you let people know who you are and what you do on a consistent basis, we run on what we call a familiar campaign every month. Every month we ask our familiar connections, who do you know? We're working on this project. Do you know anybody who should be looking at this project? And guess what? We get 7, 10, 15 referrals every month, every month just by going to our existing list. Now you might say, well, they already know what you do. No, they don't. They're still going to have this. I'm going to tell you a story about the familiar list. So for about 10 years in my agency life, my mother would say, son, when are you going to get a real job? What's this entrepreneur bullshit? When are you getting a real job? We're doing millions of dollars in revenue. We're doing okay. But she's sitting there going, I don't know what you do. When are you getting a real job? So I flew my mother to my offices. At that time they were in Sydney and I flew her up and said, look, come and hang with me for a couple of days. You might as well see where things are happening. So she came into the office, she met our sales team and our marketing team. She saw our boardrooms and we had a fairly nice office and she saw clients coming in and she saw the business for the first time. She had no idea what I did. I said, yeah, we run a marketing ad agency, right? Of which she's like, what do you mean? You're always flying around, you're doing, you know, what's going on? So I showed her that, right? A week later, my mother referred me to an $80,000 client, right? Because now she knew what I did. Your familiar list needs to become familiar with what you do because they want to help you out. So number 1, 3 familiar lists. Whatever's in your phone contacts right now, dump it into a Google spreadsheet, a Google spreadsheet. in your email inbox @company.com, name@company.com. Anybody with name@company.com? So I had a Gmail email and it was a really old email. I had 16,000 @company.com people in my Gmail account. Now that's going over a number of years. So what I do is I pull the last 2 years. I still ended up with over 2,500 people were @name@company.com in my own email account. So I put that into a spreadsheet, right? And then all my socials, right? I've got about 11,000 followers on LinkedIn, right? So 11,000 followers, I'll extract their email, put them into my spreadsheet. Now that spreadsheet alone will probably generate, that could generate $2 to $3 million in revenue a year for me without going prospecting for new leads. Right? That familiar list can generate that revenue. Then who do I want to talk to? The biggest database on the planet is LinkedIn. Biggest business database on the planet is LinkedIn, right? So who do you want to talk to? Sales Navigator lets you know. In our case, you've got to have 5 or more salespeople in your company. That's the minimum requirement we have. You have to be spending money on advertising promotion. If you're in the marketing game, only work with people who are investing in money. in advertising. Don't work with people who don't invest money in advertising or marketing, right? Because people who are not investing in advertising or marketing are not growing, right? If you're not investing in marketing, you are not growing and you can't afford not to now. You can't afford to have a digital footprint that is small. You've got to have a business that you're building online because that's where, you know, this is the most powerful computer on the planet, guys. That is the most powerful computer on the planet. 95% of all searches are on this device. And right now it's voice. It's not text, right? You know, hey Siri, find me this, right? You know, hey Perplexity, find me this. Hey ChatGPT, find me this, right? It's all— Siri's fired off right now. But that's, that's, you know, this is, this is 2008. Right? This is 2008. This is when this came about. Okay, that was a long time ago, right? I was in nappies in 2008, right? So understand that this is the most powerful device you're working for. So if you don't optimize for this device, you're going to miss out because this is where everybody's attention is, in this. So I always ask people, how can I find you on here? And what do you look like on here? Right? So people are spending money. For me, we don't talk to anybody who doesn't invest in marketing. Don't talk to anybody. And if you've got 5 salespeople, you have to feed them leads, right? So LinkedIn, really simple. And here's the thing, people overcomplicate the LinkedIn thing. What we do is, it's very, I'll share the strategy. It's really simple, right? Who do you want? What's the decision maker? Owner, founder, managing director, president, blah, blah, blah. You can identify that in Sales Navigator. Then what location? Pick the city location first, larger locations first, or you can say East Coast, West Coast, USA, you want the whole country, but I would prefer cities first, right? So pick your cities where you want to work because that's where the most majority of the businesses are, right? So then your cities, right? Then your niche, what business are they in, right? And then 40 or more people. If you've got a company with 40 or more people, you have to be spending money on marketing because your payroll is going to be a couple of million dollars a year. So companies are turning over $10, $15, $20 million, right? They have to spend money on marketing. They have to, right? So now how do I reach out to them? It's really simple. I literally take the lead out of LinkedIn, drop it into Apollo, and I'll get a verified email, a phone number, and their socials, right? And then I will reach out to them 2 ways. I'm going to reach out to them on LinkedIn and say, hey, I talk to people as successful as you are, right? Can we connect? Right? That's it. No, this is who I am and this is why we're connecting and we know each other. No. Hey, I just connect with people who are winners. You look like a winner. Can we connect? Right? That has a 30% conversion rate because most people think that they're winners, right? If you tell them they're a winner, oh yeah, I'm a winner, right? So they'll connect, right? My next thing is I don't then start War and Peace. Right? I will just ask one question. It'll be a this or that question. Hey, I'm just really curious. What do you think is most important, this or that and why? And stop right there. Don't say, this is who I am. I'm wanting to work with people like you and collaborate and partner and don't do that, right? We're in a world of speed and fast information. We don't want to bore the shit out of people and we don't want to come off pitchy, right? We just, we want to talk about them. It takes about 8 communications to get to an appointment if you're doing this? 8, right? So we go back and forth, back and forth and say, hey, are you open to having a quick call? Yeah, I am. Great, let's have a call, right? Let's get on the phone. I don't say book an appointment, right? Here's my number, I'm ready now, do you want to dial me? I get them to call me, not the other way around, right? So because if I say, oh, book an appointment, I'm going to give them a calendar link, then I've got to wait for them to do the thing, right? No, I'll say, are you free now? Like, have you got a minute now? Are you open? No, no, I'm busy right now. Great. Can you do me a favor? Open up your calendar, give me a time and we'll be there. Not, here's a link to my calendar. You tell me when you're free. Right? Okay. And then we get appointments. You should be able to generate, if you follow that methodology, you should be able to generate with an email and a message in LinkedIn like that. You should be able to get about 20, 30 appointments a month quite easily. quite easily. And then what you can do is like have somebody just monitor that. You should be doing it. We just outsource that to a VA that does that all day long, right? So that's appointment by chat basically, right? So for our qualifier salespeople, because we're in the business of leveraging leads for salespeople, right? Next qualifier, you must be spending money on advertising or promotional marketing, right? You must be spending money on marketing. If you're not spending money on marketing, you are not in our stratosphere. We don't want to talk to you, right? You want to talk to growth-minded companies. Growth-minded companies know they need to invest in growth, right? Don't talk to people who don't grow. Small business, don't ever— like if I was in Google Ads, the only people I'd be selling Google Ads to are people who are already buying Google Ads. I would not be selling Google Ads to anybody who's not doing Google Ads. I wouldn't waste my time because now I have to educate them and convince them as to why they should use that platform to leverage their marketing. If I have to do that, I'm talking, I'm selling, and I'm not helping anybody, right? What I want to do is like, I know that 90% of campaigns are unoptimized, right? I know that most people will say the leads that we get are shit. I know that, that's the vernacular, right? So at the end of the day, I want to sit there and say, listen, stop getting shitty leads. Like we only want to work with qualified opportunities. Are you open to that? And they go, oh yeah, that's what we want. Okay. They want clients. They don't want leads.

LinkedIn ads are great, but let me give you the bad news first. The bad news is that you can't personalize the ads and you can't scale up the ads as quickly. The good news is if you're in the B2B space, you're doing account-based marketing, we have a solution for you called Karrot. That's K-A-R-R-O-T. And the good news is that you can create a lot of these campaigns with the click of a button. You can personalize the ads and there's a whole host of new things that are coming. If you want to get on the waitlist, just go to carrot.ai. Again, it's carrot.ai and we'll see you on the other side.

Right? They want clients, they don't want leads. I want to talk about engaging clients, right? So, uh, to answer your question, for me, list first. Every month, let people know what you're working on, right? Second thing is target who you want to work with. We built a $4 million agency in 7 months just by, with a lead list of 297 people. And all we did was communicate to those 297 people every single day. The average sale for us was $125 to $250 per client. How we got those clients, how we built that agency to that level of revenue was by talking to them every day, messaging them every day, right? You either buy or you die, right? That's the philosophy. How do I get off your list, John? Really simple. You become a client. All right. How do I stop you from calling me, John? Really simple. You become a customer. All right. So be very clear about what you want to achieve in your business, right? Break it down into a milestone step and work to the gap, right? Work to the gap. If you want to say, I want to bring on $20 grand worth of revenue, or let's say, well, can we do this exercise really super quick? This is how you make money that you want to make, right? If we do this exercise. What I want you to do is January 31st is about 6 weeks away, right? January 31st. Just write down the cash in that you want to bank by January 31st. Just write that down. Whatever number comes to your mind right now, just write that number down, right? When you've done that, just put one in the chat. This is how much money I want to bank by 31st of January, right? I want to bank this cash, right, by the 31st. Okay, so you got the number. Now what I want you to do is I want you to divide that number by your average deposit. Divide the number by the average deposit. Somebody wants to bank $250,000 in cash. So divide your number by the average deposit you collect, right? And that's going to give you a new number. What's the new number? So let's say I want to bank in $30,000 worth of cash by January 30th, brand new cash by the 31st of January. And let's say my average deposit was $3,000, then my number is 10. That means I've got to bring on 10 clients by January 31st. So whatever the dividing of your number, your deposit, that's because that's cash collected, not cash projected. I said, how much cash do you want to bank? That's the number. So divide that by your average deposit, and that's going to give you a number. So generally, let's say, oh, well, I'm going to make it small. Let's say it was $10K and my average deposit was $2K. The number is 5. Now, whatever that number is, you need to multiply that number by 4. So if I need 5 clients, I've got to multiply that by 4, which is 20, right? That means I've got to show my offer to 20 people to bank $10K, right? If my average deposit, if I want $30,000 and my average deposit's $3,000, I've got to literally talk to 40 people with my idea. 40 people with my idea, I'm going to bank $30,000 cash. Now, Here's the thing. Some people, this is going to play towards price. I need to talk to less people if I put the price up, right? If I've got a project of getting this amount of revenue, I might say, I'll do a deal if you pay for it upfront, right? If paying for it upfront is $36,000, $3,000 a month for a year, right? I'll give you the deal at $30,000. I only need one client to get my $30,000. To get one client, I've got to make that offer to 4 people. Right? So you can leverage revenue based on the average spend of you, right? Now my question is, and this is the question, if you've got, let's say that's, it's, you know, 10, let's say it's, it should be around 6 to 8 clients, 6 to 8 clients by January 20th, by January 31st, 6 to 8 clients about the average, right? That's roughly a client a week. That's roughly a client, one client per week. That's your goal. That means you've got to have 4 offers a week. That's it. You've got to offer your deal to 4 people a week, right? Offer your deal to 4 people, you'll close those deals, you'll make that revenue jump, right? Now here's the thing. If I've got to do 4 offers and I'm going to place, I want to do this in a pragmatic and practical thing, right? If it's 4 offers that I've got to make in a week to make 1 sale, I'm going to put up 4 Post-it notes in front of me and I need to tear them down by the end of the week. Because if I don't tear them down, guess what? I don't have my sale, right? So then my number 1 goal every day is to tear down a Post-it note, is to sit down with somebody with my deal and offer the deal, right? And if I'm tactically doing this every day, I'm going to hit my objective. Or go past my objective. If I don't do this and I've got, this is my goal, the end of the week comes and you go, I haven't spoken to 4 people because you've been too busy doing other things, right? You want to spend, so the way that I split up a day is the morning up to 12 o'clock is all about active income generation, right? In the afternoon, it's all about putting out fires, right? That's it. Morning is money time. Afternoon is management time, right? So if you can spend, if you can operate at that level, if you're doing, if you do 1 hour of active business generation per day, right? I'll guarantee you, because most people don't even commit an hour. If you do 1 hour of active business generation a day, I'll guarantee you, you're going to blow your revenue out of the water because most people do not spend an hour focused on growing their business. Most people don't. And I know this because I didn't used to spend an hour doing that. I was sitting down, there's a guy called Mark Victor Hansen. I don't know if anybody knows who that is. Wrote a great book called— wrote a great series. They sold 500 million copies of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series with Jack Canfield, right? So I'm sitting down with Mark Victor Hansen and there's another guy who was kind of an up-and-comer guy called T. Harv Eker. T. Harv Eker was the guy who wrote the book, The Millionaire Mindset. And there's this other guy who was the legendary teleseminar guy called Alex Mandossian. So I literally flew from Singapore to LA to have lunch with Mark Victor Hansen, right? I'd arranged that lunch. He brings his buddies, T. Harv Eker and Alex Mandossian, sitting in the room. And Alex asked me a question and he said, I'm just curious because I ask people a lot, how much time do you spend in actively generating revenue for your business right now? Per week. And I'm looking at, well, we're always active together. And I know, how much time are you spending? So I pull out my calendar and I look at how many, what I was doing. And he said, shit, last week, 45 minutes, right? 45 minutes. And he looked at me and said, how's that working for you? Right? How's that working for you? Right? And he says, what you want to do is you want to create a doctor's appointment. He says, if you go to your doctor, are you looking at your phone? Are you distracted or are you listening to the doctor? Is it, no, I'm paying attention to what the doctor's telling me. You sit down with your lawyer and your lawyer's charging you by the hour, right? Do you sit down and look out the window, open up your laptop, work on shit, or are you focused on that conversation? So I'm focused on the conversation. So it's a 1 hour a day, start with 1 hour a day as a doctor's appointment. But in that doctor's appointment, the only thing you can do is generate revenue. Your activity is all about generating revenue opportunity, nothing else, right? Then you want to turn that 1 hour into 2 hours. If you do 2 hours a day, 10 hours a week, right? You'll grow real fast. And then if you teach your people to do exactly the same thing, you'll go real fast. In one of our agencies that we built, every single person in the company, I had 150 team members in this agency, every person did cold calling. Every person, including the cleaner of our offices, would spend, would actually, we taught him How to do cold calls, right? Every person, because that was the lifeblood and the first contact point of the Graph Era Agency, right? And one of my mentors told me this, said, get everybody in the company to do an income-generating activity in the company because that's where their opportunity, that's why they're in business. My accountant, my bookkeepers, my HR people, right? Everybody hopped on the calls at least once a week for an hour. And cold called, right? We were generating, we were direct generating 3,000 leads a week just by cold calling, right? I'm not suggesting you go out and cold call, but it's the focused activity that's the key.

Yeah.

I'm happy to hang out, Austin, if you've got time. I know that I've been talking a lot. So if, you know, I'm here, like it's freaking 4 o'clock in the morning for me.

So I've got I don't know where to go.

So if you want to hang out—

I'll do that.

If you have any questions, I'm, I'm fine with going a little bit longer if you want.