EP 101: How to Scale Your Business with Confidence Through Marketing w/ Peter

I'm more Kevin's deal. I'm more Kevin's deal I'm here to help and teach him what I know and how I did it to discover freedom There ain't no question mark Kevin's when he stepped in the doubt he's closing deals. Time to tell him what the DM stand for. I'm a deal maker A deal maker. But I'm not just a deal maker. I'm a dream maker.

Hey everybody, it's your boy, Mark Evans, dm. Hope you're having an amazing day. Today's show is going to be a little bit different. As you know, last week we had our 100th show. So again, thank you so much to everyone that gave messages and joined the 1k a month club. Thank you guys so much. I'm super excited and honored that we're on this journey together. As you know, we got a lot of big stuff to do moving forward. In the meantime today what I want to do is I want to bring on my right hand man, Peter. Him and I have been rolling together for a long time. He was in the real estate company actually. Yeah, you're in the tech side of company things, you know, virtual deal factory back in the day. And then we started doing real estate stuff together and kind of, we'll share that story, how that evolved as well as talking about data. If you own a company, this is the call. Maybe if you're like a, you know, maybe you're a small time business owner, maybe you're, maybe you're a solopreneur right now, or maybe you're trying to grow a company wider and bigger. This is a, definitely a conversation you want to listen in on and it's gonna be laid back. It's just Peter and I hanging out. I'm in parkland, he's up in Jupiter, Florida area. And like I said, we've done a lot of stuff together, made and lost millions of dollars together over the years. And we're gonna share with you guys the raw truth about data. Because everyone has data. Very few people know they have it. Very few people know like what it says. Very few people understand how important it really is for scalability. And we're gonna talk about, you know, all this stuff if you, maybe you're selling products on E Comm, maybe you're selling products out of the front door of your facilities. Maybe you're a real estate investor, which Peter does a lot of real estate stuff at a company we own. And you know, you need good data. So you're not wasting your time, wasting your energies, but if you're sitting there listening to this, thinking, like, I need to grow my company, I want to grow bigger, this is the show, this is the conversation you need to understand, because this is what changed our business and our life and every business that we work with. And not say there's not confusion and problems as you scale, as there always is. But that's why it's important to understand what's going on. So, Peter, what's going on, buddy?

How you doing? Little cold snap today for us down here in Florida.

Yeah, I know everyone up north's pissed off because it's 65 freezing, but yeah, no, definitely, man. So, Peter, we met, I don't do, what, 13, 14 years ago?

I don't know, it's been 12 years now. It'll be 12 years in April, I think.

Yeah, long.

12 years, long time.

But no, like, Peter and I met actually he was doing tech, more like CTO work. We had a website we built out called Virtual Deal Factory, that was for investors. It was like a Facebook, if you will, for investors, where they'd match people up and connect and talk deals and kind of how Peter and I got started. That's where we started. And then probably, what, a year or two later, I actually, at my real estate company, I did a webinar. We sold like 200 something properties in a day on a webinar. And I was like, oh, shit, that worked really well. And we had no clue how to facilitate it. And then Peter's like, oh, I could jump in and help, you know, build out some basic. You know, not basic. Back then it was different, but like a structure where people could pick the plots that they bought because we were selling land. And sure enough, that's what we got. And then, Peter, we just kind of evolved from there, right?

Yeah, I mean, really, it was just about how do we, you know, you found the bottleneck, right? Like, you could sell to a number that was so much more to a multiple than you could fulfill. So the question then became, how do. How do we fulfill it quicker so that we could sell quicker? And that really is just. It's kind of the same thing we talk about still to this day across all the businesses, right? How do you just speed things up, which brings the revenue up? And that's a lot of what we'll talk about today. Cause it's all data based on the data and some of the KPI based. But really what are you doing with the information you have and how to kind of, you know, take that to the next level. Yeah.

Peter, we've seen this because you and I, we've helped a lot of people over the years through other events we've done back in the day, but we've seen a lot of people where they over prepare and undersell. I'd much rather see you and not say be reckless with this. But oversell and over prepare, you need to do both. And I get it. Sometimes you're so deep in the trenches you forget to sell. I was just talking with a buddy today, working out. Dude, the sales arm should never stop selling. If it does, you're out of business. Everyone thinks they're, oh, I'm a, you know, I sell dog leashes. No, dude, you're a marketing company first and your product is dog leashes. And if you don't sell dog leashes, you don't have anything. So the way to do it, right?

Yeah, yeah. And that's really where it crossed over for me because I was like you said, a tech guy, systems guy, more an engineer minded. And I crossed over into sales a little bit with some retail experience and kind of boots on the ground stuff, but never the level and the speed that today's world lets you sell at. So that's where it really crossed over for me and realizing that like, hey, if you do this the right way, you're selling 24 7. Like Imagine in your head all the time, there's things moving that are just going to change. That's the way you want to set these businesses up. I mean, that's ultimately how you are a business owner. And now you can elevate from there instead of working inside the business.

This is back. Like, let's just kind of put some timelines on this because I don't, you know what we're talking about, guys, there's like real time here.

You're saying only 12 years back, longer.

Because I was in Georgia when I did that. That was 08 to 2010. So I left in 2010 in Georgia.

So I think it was like it was right. It was 2010, I think, right there. 09, 2010.

Yeah. You know, I remember I was sitting there like I said, Peter was more like, hey, let's make sure it's right before we do anything. That's engineer mindset, by the way. That's a lot of people, right? Because they want to get it right before they get it going. And my whole philosophy has always been you don't have to get it right, you just got to get it going. And I did that webinar not expect. I knew we were going to sell some, but I didn't expect we'd sell 211 or whatever the number. It was a lot, and I broke the system. These are what we call good problems. My problem was I'm going to have to give people their money back. I don't want to ever do that if I have the product, obviously, but if I can't fulfill, you got to give them the money back. But for us, what happened is, like you said, within 48 to 72 hours, we had an infrastructure in place that could facilitate exactly what we sold. It's not like I said, it's too many people are trying to solve problems that they don't even know exist. And these are what, Like I said, these are good problems to oversell and like, oh, shit, how am I going to fulfill that?

Yeah, you know, and I think too many people try and, you know, create their system to be perfect. And like, guys, everything in sales is involving a human being. It's never going to be perfect. Like, it's. It's always changing, you know, and that's. We know that now more than ever from the last couple years. So when you think about that and you want to build these systems that really work, work the right way for you, they're always changing. So it's more about, like, you know, the couple top things that you need to take care of in there and make sure you're designed for. But after that, it's all testing. Honestly, it's a science experiment across everything. I think this is gonna happen. Let's throw a thousand into that marketing channel, measure the results. Did that work? Didn't it? Okay, here's our benchmark number. Let's do it again next week. Do we go up or down? And you just start playing with all this stuff, and that's how you really. You create a marketing cycle that's moving with your customer base. Instead of, like, going to design it this way and everybody's going to fit into it. That used to be how things were done, but now you. These are all feedback loops. Like, we're moving so much quicker now that you could put something out there that's kind of raw, get some feedback, adjust off it, put it out again. It's all iteration. So it's all just doing this over and over again. Yeah.

I think, Peter, the biggest thing, what we're talking about is, you know, data. Probably one of the funniest things, because, you know, I've talked about this many, many times, is people Will come to us. I'll use real estate guys to talk about this because we do a lot of real estate. And this also does work in every business, by the way. So when people come to us and say, mark, I want to scale my business, I want to grow from a million to 5 million, the first question we always ask is, how much are you investing in marketing? Notice it's not spending. How much are you investing? And then the second question is, what's your cost to acquire a client? So there's cost to acquire a lead. The cost to acquire a client, a lead is just a name and email. Phone number, maybe, or just a phone number, just something, a warm body. And then a client is someone that's converted. And then the next question on top of that is, cool, now that you know how much it costs to get a lead, how much it costs to get a client, how much is this client work to you? A lifetime value customer.

Right.

How much is the lifetime value of that customer? And if you can understand these four data points that I just shared with you, you understand why. You know, like, why? It's simple. Not easy, but it's simple to scale a business. Because if you come to us, Peter and I, like, say, I want to do four real estate deals a month.

Like, awesome.

How many deals a month are you doing now?

1.

Cool. How much are you spending? Well, you know, a lot of word of mouth, from like 500 to 1,000 bucks a month. Okay, how much? I mean, like, how much does it cost to acquire a deal? It might cost 2,500. Let's say 2,500, but you're only spending a thousand a month. And you're sitting here wondering what you're doing wrong. I need to talk to more people. I need to do. You're right, you do. But you need to market, to talk to people. People aren't just walking around saying, hey, motivated seller, hey, I need to sell my house. Right? So if you need to do four deals, it's just basic math. Cost $2500 to acquire that deal. I need to do four deals. My investment, I need to be spending $10,000 minimum every single month, like, consistently. And if you get consistent with that, you start seeing your numbers start scaling up. Because now all of a sudden, you're starting to gather data. And then you're looking at how obviously you need to know how much you're making per deal on average. Let's say if you're making 10, 10 grand a deal, now you're spending 2,500 to make 10. I mean, Peter, that's what we do all day, every day.

I mean, all you're talking about is roi, you know, so now you're just getting to what's my return on my marketing spend? Different businesses call it, you know, return on advertising spend, different terms across it. But all these things, all these KPIs that are floating around your head, they all mean the same thing. So in the real estate marketing world, it's really simple because you're spending marketing dollars to get to that deal. It's a pretty simple, you know, know, A to B point. There's not. You're not looking at lifetime value as much. You're just looking for, like, month to month. How do I keep churning out that return? And there's two parts to the problem always that. That a lot of people miss. So there's the spending part and the. Are you just. Are you putting enough into your system to get out, to have a chance to get out what you want? And then there's the optimization part. So many people are lost in, like, trying to optimize before you're even putting stuff in there because they're so afraid that, like, oh, I'm gonna spend money and nothing's gonna happen. And I kind of get it. But then how do you think you're going to grow if you're not willing to start to push the limit on some of that stuff? And if that's the issue, figure out how to gain some clarity on what's happening in your marketing so now you can spend with some kind of confidence.

Yeah. I think the thing is, again, there's so many people are frustrated, like, why can't I grow? If you guys see guys like Peter and I and you're seeing us scale stuff almost effortlessly from outside in, by the way, there's a lot of effort internally, so don't assume that we're not doing anything. But what's really happening is we understand that we're in the marketing business first. And to be in a marketing business successfully, you have to understand data. And if you want to understand data, you have to reverse engineer where you want to go again. I want to do four deals a month.

Cool.

$2,500 to acquire a customer.

Cool.

I need to invest 10 grand a month.

Done.

Now I have that allocated. That's all I need to know. It's in motion. There's a lot of different ways you can do direct mail, you know, voice broadcasting, text broadcasting, cold calling. You know, there's a million different ways to do it we're not saying, hey, this is the only way. That's a whole nother conversation. But your data would tell you what to do, by the way. And sometimes, by the way, this is very interesting. Peter, too, and you know this to be true, is like, you might spend $3,500 on one channel in marketing, let's say texting, and then you might spend 1000 on cold calling. But that's phase one of the data. Phase two of the data is how much are each one of those leads bringing into you in dollars in revenue. So let's say if I'm spending 3500 on texting to get a deal, but I make 25 grand, because it's a little bit different plan, a little different list, a little different type of, like, audience. I spent 3,500, make 25 grand. But over here, I'm spending a thousand. But those deals, like, are 7,000. You know what I mean? So I'm only getting a very small 1,000 to make seven. Or would you rather spend 3,500 to make 25,000? Right. So these are two separate pieces of data that you need to start understanding.

Well, really, that the answer to that question isn't even about, you know, hey, I want to spend more, spend more, spend more. That. That's what you're trying to solve. The question now becomes about the next step. Like, okay, you have all these channels you can run. What are they outputting for leads, and what can your team handle? Because a lot of people do that the wrong way as well, right? They just pump money in the front, and then they're like, oh, well, I did it. I quadrupled my spend, and I got nothing good out of the. Like, the end result did not multiply. Well, what happened in the middle, in between there, Right? Did you flood? You quadrupled your spend, but the one person you had, they didn't quadruple, and they were already overloaded. So that spend kind of, you know, didn't get dispersed the right way. So you have to watch how this stuff works together. But. But this is what we're talking about, you know, where everything here comes down to a simple metric at each one of these steps to where you could say, okay, that doesn't look right. Now you know where to dive in. That's the way you kind of like, step back and you run this stuff. And now we always like to say, you know, step back and imagine you're on a. In front of a whiteboard, and you have each of your marketing channels with These key data points and you say, okay, I want to spend more now, where do I put it? Do you put it all in one channel? Do you spread it across each one? And now some of these other questions start to come up. Well, okay, if I go double this channel, can we even handle that lead flow? And you start to kind of figure out how to work those pieces together. That's ultimately the place you're trying to get to, where now you're looking at it as a business owner.

Yeah, let me, let me simplify this because you guys are listening to us on a treadmill or driving. You're like, holy shit, what are they talking about? And by the way, Peter, do you have like a form, like a simple marketing audit document that we could plug in where they can go to a website? You know, in the show notes here, we'll give you guys a link and then you can follow along like on your own time, like, how much am I spending? Marketing cost per lead, cost per dot, you know, all that stuff that we're talking about. But here's another thing too, guys, is all lead sources are not created equal. I cannot stress that enough. You know, there might be a lead source that like I said, you're spending $1,000, but the grind is so much harder. Like you're texting, you're replying, your conversion rate might be 1 in 100. Right. It's just a different animal. It's not bad. It's just different. And if you only have limited time and limited marketing budget, you might want to spend more per client because maybe your conversions, 25, 30%. I'm talking about effort here. So if you have 50 people waiting to make phone calls, that's a different path than if you only are a one or two man show where you need to be maximizing every single conversation from a lead to conversion done. Lead to conversion done. And the higher quality the lead cost, the higher conversion typically you'll have. And this is where I see people fuck up, Peter. I see them, they do it for a month. It doesn't work like they thought, whatever that means, by the way. But this shit takes time. I recommend 3 months minimum getting in there because not only are you scared shitless your first month, because it's probably the biggest investment you've made in your marketing budget because now you can't go to the club, go buy a bottle, because you go spend, you fucking, go rent a Lamborghini for a weekend for five grand. But you won't spend five grand in your business, right? To Grow it. But when you get in there, the first month is always like, oh my God, it's kind of working. I kind of need to start tweaking now. Right. So Peter, you deal with this in push button CMO all the time. What's your ideas and thoughts on this?

Yeah, I mean, so we talk in our business about a 90 day cycle for that stuff. So you really need to let a channel go at least 90 days before you can see the real metrics come through all the way through your pipeline. So really it's whatever business you're in, each step a customer has to go through in your pipeline before you truly acquire them, before you get the sale. Each one of those steps has a different kind of timeline to them. Right. And a different metric inside there. So that's really. You just have to align it to your success metric. Right. So if you're a real estate investor and you run stuff for a month and your success metric, what you're looking at to tell if it worked or not is deals that's very rarely going to come out well because it's hard to close it, it's hard to have the conversation, develop the relationship, get it under contract, check the property, sell it and get that all closed out inside of 30 days. So that timeline to that metric is especially the retail side. So you know that the timeline, the timeline and the metric are misaligned versus if you, if you're looking at it inside the first month and you say, okay, how many leads did I get and how many of those did I talk to? You know, that's a real simple thing that inside of 30 days you can do enough activity to have that metric matter a little bit to you. So just have to align those steps and look at it the right way and then give it the timeline to come all the way, all the way through to get the return. And like you said, so many people jump in and start tweaking right away, which I'm not going to say don't tweak some stuff, some things have to be adjusted. The problem is you're tweaking without understanding what the metrics are even telling you. Right? Or you're tweaking based on a metric that like hasn't had time to happen yet. So you're ending up adjusting, thinking you're trying to make it better, but you're actually making it worse because you're doing it off of the wrong visibility. So just let it run. I mean, like you had a reason. Again, like a science experiment, like in the beginning you ran it because you thought something was going to happen. Give it the timeline, set it in the beginning. Give it the timeline to let it happen. And just watch your sub metrics along the way.

Well, real quick here, back to tweaking. The biggest problem is typically people go balls to the wall out of the gate, they spend 10 grand, they get all excited and they think they need to change everything. The problem is you don't have any handles. You don't know what's working. Don't fix what's not broken and run new business. Run a new marketing channel to the model that you have in place. And then make tweaks one at a time. Because the problem is if you tweak five things at once and something breaks, you don't know which one is wrong or right because you tweak too many things. This is just like cells copy. When your cells copy, there's a thing called the handle. This is the one that we're using. Pulling the. Like, we already have data. We already know what this produces today. And we know like. And then I'm going to change the subject line. I'm gonna drive 10,000 eyeballs to the thing. Subject line change now increases by 0.5%.

Cool.

Now that's the new handle. And then, okay, now I'm gonna change the call to action button from pink to blue.

Cool.

It deteriorated. Okay, well, change it back to fucking blue because it's working better blue than pink. Like, if you try to change headline button, call to action video, do this, do that. Like, now all of a sudden it bombs and you're like, that fucking marketing channel sucks ass. That's always the marketing channel. It's clearly not you because you made all these edits. It's the marketing channel. No, man, you gotta slow it down. You gotta take it one at a time.

Well, these are directed like you're doing intentional tweaks, anticipating an outcome and then measuring if that outcome happens. Right? So like, okay, we're going to tweak this one little thing and it should increase open rate. Cool. Run it for a day. What happens? You know, did we increase open rate? Cool. What was the multiplier? Let's see if we can multiply it again. Change it again. Nope, we went down. Okay, let's go back. And then you just micro tweaks. You're just trying to optimize. But you know, again, that's tiny optimization. People are trying to like, solve everything like you're saying. And one, like flip a switch and solve it all. It just doesn't work that way, guys. It's a, it's a moving I. The way I like to think about marketing. Again, because it's human based. It's just constantly a moving organism. It's growing, moving around. You have to get smart about how you do stuff. Those are the tweaks. Figuring out language or a little bit of copy that changes people's reaction a little bit, gets you a little bit different response. These are tiny little micro tweaks you make along the way, but that doesn't change. You're running the channel for 90 days. These are small things that you plan on doing. So probably the best way to get your mind around it is if you're going in, going, I want to spend ten grand on this channel right now. Back off and go, okay, how much a month do you want to spend for the next three, six months? Set it up that way, Start that way. Once you go, run the first month. If you see stuff working, then you can increase. But if you just go, balls to the wall, month one and month two comes around and now you can't pay for it. Like, that's not the right way to run these marketing channels. That's a common, common mistake people make.

Oh, we see it, we see it every day. I think too. You know, another thing, most people listening to our voices, you need to get better on the phone. You need to get better at communicating. Because the thing is, when you're doing cold marketing, cold marketing conversations have to be a little bit tighter, they have to be a little bit stronger. You have to be a better listener. It's not like if Peter says, yo, Mark, here's a deal, Boom, he's already established relationship, word of mouth relationship.

I'm almost.

He's already built me up as the solution with cold marketing, to get to warm prospects, you have to understand that you have to build a different rapport. It has to be tighter, has to be, hey, what's going on? They don't know who you are. You're a brand new person in their world. So most of the time too, most people suck on the phone. They suck at conversations. And then that's just one piece. How quickly, if the phone rings, are you answering it? And if so, what are you saying? Well, or is it going to voicemail? If it goes to voicemail, what are you saying? And then the second layer of that, how quickly are you replying back to them? Because a certain marketing channel, typically, I don't know how you guys buy, but how I buy is when I want something that is to solve a problem. I call until someone answers the phone. So the marketing may be working, but the problem is you're not fucking working because you're not playing around. So therefore again, what they do always, Peter, they blame it on the marketing. No.

Yeah, I mean it's a very common thing. There's kind of two, two big pieces to that that you're talking about. So like one of the common things we see is, you know, in the real estate side you're getting trying to get in touch with smaller investors. And a lot of these investors have full time jobs or other commitments. Right. So most businesses out there, you know, we want to be a business, so we're going to do this the business way. What do they do? They have their teams calling from 9 to 5 every day, right? And they're like, oh, none of the channels work. Like nobody's answering the phone. Well, no shit. Like these people are working. Like you're targeting the right people clearly, because if they're at work, they're going to have some kind of financial issue at some point, right? They're not stable enough to be answering the phone between nine to five. That's a great thing that actually points to your market is getting to the people you want, but you're just not touching them the way you need to to get the connection. So again like there it's focusing the process on the wrong metric. The metric is increase the connection rate. If you're having an issue, it's not the leads, increase your connection rate. Cool. What happens then? Like as you talk to more of those people, what's really going on inside there? So it's a simple solution. You start calling from 6 to 8pm during the week. And here's the best thing. How long have we been saying this? For like 12 years. Like call on Saturday, call on Saturday, call on Saturday. If it's funny too, because we saw this in Columbus, Ohio. If the Buckeyes are playing in town on Saturday, cool. Like figure out what time the game is. You can actually call around the game because when the game happens they will stop answering the phone. But like Saturday is the day. If you have not gotten in touch with people during the week, guess what, they're off on Saturday. You can get in touch with them then. A lot of people don't call on certain holidays because they're afraid to. There's ways to do those touches the right way. Obviously I'm not saying bombard them, but like you have to start aligning the process and your actions for the Success. You're trying to get out of these marketing channels.

I mean, dude, in all seriousness, everyone listen to our voices. Most people suck at marketing. They're pussies. They're playing a game of fear. Like, what if I lose money? Hey, fuck wad, you're going to lose money. I guarantee it. But you're going to make way more money than you lose. Peter, we still lose money. We spend money on marketing. Marketing fucking blows up. Something breaks. This doesn't happen. That doesn't. We've sent out direct mail postcards with the wrong fucking number on it. It's called life. But guess what? We didn't stop. We didn't quit. We found the problem. We solved the problem and we went on to make millions from it. That's how winners win. And too many people pussyfoot around talking about because they're afraid. Because you think marketing costs money. It will never cost you money if you have a plan. If you execute the plan. And not only that, most people. Again, you have to get better at communicating via text, via phone, via be it in person. Stop going for the fucking jugular on the first conversation. Hey, Peter, what's going on? Peter, you know, this is how I talk. This is how we do it every. In the real estate. Every day in any business. What's going on? Not like, tell me about your house. How many bedrooms? What's the carpet look like? What's the roof? Why are you selling?

How much you want?

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like it's not a fucking script. Be a have a conversation again.

The marketing, like I see it so much and you come to the other point. I was gonna. I was hoping we'd circle around on is. Is understanding when you're calling people and talking to them based on what you're saying to them, how they're reacting, what it really means. Cause people do this wrong all the time. We'll talk about that with wrong numbers or not interested responses. The marketing is there to start the conversation, to get the spark and then enable you open that door slightly to enable you to start the relationship, not banging the door and go close the deal, right? So you have to start that relationship with the marketing piece and. And all that comes down to your follow up. So when Mark's talking about that energy you have in marketing that you're afraid, afraid, afraid if you're afraid and follow up if you're not chasing after people constantly and not taking no for an answer. We'll talk about what that means in a second. It's the same Attitude, you're not going to win in that game. This phone game of follow up, 80% of where the deals are happening is all the stuff that's already in your pipeline. It's not from the new marketing. The new marketing is just continuing to feed that. It's all sitting there in the follow up. And everybody does this wrong. They'll call, leave a voicemail, but not send the follow up text. Well why, like why would in this world with the way people communicate, if you really want to talk to that person, why aren't you sending the text? Right, so take a step back.

Like I don't know what to say.

You know, it's like, it's just nonstop stuff. But like, you know that. And then people go, oh well the channel's not working because they're all saying, nope, wrong number. Like, okay, why are they going, no, wrong number. Hanging up in the first five seconds of your spiel because you're rattling off a 30 second intro. Yeah, no shit. They don't know who you are. You're calling from a number they've never seen before. If you're calling out of a dialer, it's coming up stam likely, which now they answered, which is amazing even to happen. And now you're blowing it by trying to rattle off this whole thing to try and catch this book in the first 30 seconds. And what do you think it sounds like? Sounds like a telemarketer. And they're going, nope, not interested. Cause what's the easiest way to get off your list? Nope, not interested. Right. So people stop calling that, they're like, oh, it's a terrible channel. Couldn't be me, can't be my intro. I'm perfect. I'm a great salesman, right? So you know, you look at this stuff happening and that's what eats away every, every week I talk to operations on the real estate side. Doesn't matter how much they're spending, Nothing up to 60,000amonth. And it's always the same thing. It's always the deals that are sitting in the pipeline that are being lost because of assumptions on stuff like this not following up the right way. I had a big operation that was triple tapping twice a day on people, five days. I mean, just such aggressive calling, but never once sending a text message to them. You know, it's just, it's stuff that's like, is gaps. Sometimes they're, they're, you know, glaring gaps that affect it. But you just have to get better at follow up and just talking to people like These are human beings you're trying to talk to, right?

So like human beings and technology is evolving, right? Our conversations are getting better. The more you get told fuck off, the better you're going to get if you keep staying in the game because they're going to say fuck off. You're like oh wow. Yeah, my wife said the same thing. Anyways, tell me about your house. You know like, and you realize it's not rejection. They're not saying fuck off to you. They're saying that in their brain because they don't know what else to say. So have fun with it. You get better at that. You understand how to navigate these conversations. How? Through effort, through conversations good and bad. Oh wow, that worked. Like every call you're learning. Wow. Wow, don't say that on intro. Wow, don't say that. Hey, my phone hung up. Hey, sorry, I can't hear like there's so many ways to enter a call to make a sell and I don't care what business you're in. I know we're talking a lot about real estate. I don't care what business you're in. If you have an outbound call center or someone that's contacting prospects which if you don't, absolutely crazy. Because most deals like Peter saying too, you know this is why most people aren't successful is because they think, you know, they're going for the one next stand deals. I said marketing out, get on phone, boom, close the deal. Yeah, that's how I like to close by the way. But I also know typically, you know the long cycle, you know, 30, 69 depending on what your sales cycle is. That's you know what happened today was from an effort 90 days ago. Today it's just coming to fruition. So that's why you need to have lifetime value of a customer. How much is each customer worth? If you really want to get real serious in E commerce world, you know, or any business that is selling real product, insurance, etc. The question is how much can I spend? How much more can I outspend my competition to acquire a client? Because you might have to spend $300. It sounds crazy if you don't understand what I'm saying but you might have to spend $300 to an acquire customer. Buy something for $100, you're going to go negative 200 day one. And why in the world would you do that? Well because in 365 days, that 300, that that hundred dollar buyer, your lifetime value is worth 1500 bucks. You know that mind your own fucking numbers. That was one of my biggest shows actually we talked about last week is now I know I can go spend 300 to make 100 today to build 1500 in the future total. Or I could try to do what everyone else doing, play this game where I'm spending $20 to make 100 or maybe spend 90 to make a hunt like whatever that game is. And now you're competing against a bunch of people as opposed to go overspend. And when you really understand lifetime value, this is how you can really, really change the game and opportunity.

Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest things we always understood along the way, even when we didn't realize it. With a lot of the direct mail we were dropping on a lot smaller game than the stuff we have going on now. But it's the same mentality we were always trying to figure out, okay, if everybody else is trying to do the cheapest card, how do we do the more expensive one? And the reason really for it was we understood the value of the difference in the entire world of the people you can reach. And hey, we got them to respond once. Now they're in this tighter circle that we can do a lot more with. Right, so you're willing. In retail, they do this all the time, right? A loss leader, where you're selling a product out there to draw people in the store, you're going to lose money on that product, but you're hoping they're going to buy other stuff. So that's the whole idea behind it. By understanding the value of your customer long term, whatever that long term means for you, you start to play a game that's different because you're playing a long term game where all these people are out there trying to go bang, bang, bang, play the short term game, you know, spend 10 grand now, make as much money on it a month as possible and then quit. Instead of no, I'm gonna spend this for 12 months, increasing every three months. And here's how we're gonna do it. You know, it's a much. It's a business, it's a business versus a cash grab. I mean, that's the difference.

Well, again, I think, you know, you guys gotta understand There's a reason McDonald's still is running commercials. McDonald's is still still running billboards, McDonald's still running advertisements and newspapers. If you are not relevant with your message, you will become irrelevant eventually, I guarantee, I don't care how fucking big or how small you are, you will become irrelevant so you always have to be thinking about fun. You know, you got like, a lot of people. Like, again, Peter, that's another thing, too. Everyone's very delusional. Oh, I do this. Everyone knows my name. Especially in real estate.

Right? Everyone's like, king Dingle, I'm so glad you're going here. This is exactly where I wanted to go on this, dude.

Let's call 10 title companies and see if they heard of your company. What LLC do you buy under? And they're like, nope, never heard of them.

Nope.

Never heard of them.

Nope.

Never heard of them.

Nope.

What do they do? Nope, never heard of them. And it's like, well, I thought you fucking. Everyone knew you. It's because, again, you have delusional thinking. I used to do the same thing. I still do sometimes, by the way, but delusional thinking. No one truthfully knows who the fuck you are on the grand scheme of things. You're like a speckle of water in the ocean. Nothing. So you have to always be relevant. You always have to be in front of people. Yes. Always be forging new relationships. Like, not all relationships last forever. It's just part of life, Right. It's just art. So you got to always be constantly plugging in new people in your life.

We're in the impressions game. Like, it's all about. That's the world we live in now. It's. It's all about how fast you have to do it. What's the time cycle you can get away with, you know, so, like, if it's specific channels like text, cold call, stuff like that versus ppc. Like, it's all about getting in front of people as often as you can, where they're actually going to see the message. And then what's the message that's going to work. That's the whole game we play in. That's why text is. Listen, guys, the stuff the biggest companies in the world are doing, they're doing it for a reason, right? So they're using these channels for a reason, because of how those costs work out. In the impression game, you just keep getting that message in front of people and you keep acquiring them on a real simple scale. On the delusional piece, there's also a piece to just assuming that, like, everybody's seeing what you're sending, right? So I see people do this all the time. They send an email and like one, you're assuming their open rate is accurate, which we know that doesn't give you everything, but, like, you're sending a message out you send it five times and you're like, oh, anybody who wanted to respond to it has already respond to it. It's like, no, dude. Like people are busy. They're not seeing it. Even if they open it, they're not reading it. Like, there's so much going on. Take all that assumption out of it and just go, okay, like, maybe that's not happening. How do I make sure I get my message in front of them? I hit them via email, text and calls, right? So like, I overlay this stuff to make sure I'm going to put out there in different channels and allow them to respond back to me on their terms the way they're going to. That's why text is so effective, because people don't want to get on the phone as easily as they'll respond to a text message. So these, like, you have to start looking at these things and like take the assumptions out and just. It's just actions and impressions. You just got to keep hitting people with good messaging and then start testing, you know, start adjusting it a little bit. That's it. In every game, in every marketing channel, it's the same thing.

Here's the thing is, guys, again, because you guys are on here on the dm, making of a dm. The truth is you need to be spending six figures a month minimum marketing. If you're not, you don't have a business. You know, and I know it might sound like very rude or brat rash, like brash in your face. The reason is because it fucking is. You've been playing small. I remember going to all these events and all these guys like, dude, I'm doing this now. I'm doing this. They're just bouncing around. And I always ask, how much are you spending on marketing? Oh, I'm a word of mouth business. I'm like, so you have no business. Word of mouth is not a business model strategy. By the way, stimulating word of mouth is, right? I can have word of mouth. I'm not saying that's not amazing business, but how do you stimulate word of mouth? Well, I could direct market. I could market to the people that I've done business with to get testimonials. Send them money trees, which we do. Peter, Send them all these things for social, like social media, social proof. Like, hey guys, thanks for the money tree. Blah, blah, blah, follow direct, skip, boom. That's how you drive different types of eyeballs. But at the end of the day when I'm talking to someone, I'm like, how much are you spending on Marketing, they say five grand, ten grand or fifty grand, and yet in the same breath they're complaining about their business isn't growing. My natural question always is, well, when's the last time you scaled your marketing? They haven't, if anything, they've actually pulled it back.

Right.

I fired a company. That was a long time ago when we were having tough times financially as a company. And the first thing they said, we got to cut this market. I said, you're fucking. I fired him right there on the spot.

Why?

Marketing is never an expense, it's an investment. And if you truly believe that, you would invest accordingly. Because if you could put a dollar and get 10 bucks back, why the fuck wouldn't you be trying to ask to do this? How many times can I do it? Every minute, Right?

Yeah, I mean, honestly, it's like, what action can, what actions. Can we push a button today or take today to increase revenue? If you're a word of mouth business, you got nothing. Like, what are you going to do? Call people and be like, hey, can you go start talking to other people for me? Like, that's not going to work. I was curious, I was going to, in the beginning of this, you know, affiliates, right? So affiliates are an interesting part of this because people don't consider them marketing, but when done the right way, I mean, it's tied to a commission piece to where they're driving sales for you. Right. So that is a way to. Now if you have an affiliate network that drives consistent sales for you, and now you can take action and activate that network. That is a marketing channel that you're able to activate to increase revenue. So it's just about, what can I do right now to increase revenue, to cause a bump in revenue? And that's, that's all your marketing.

Yeah, and all this shit. Like, you know, Peter's saying, let's say if you're sending an email out to your prospect list to stimulate conversations and you're getting a 10 to 20% open rate, by the way, 20% open rate is amazing.

Right?

So it means percent did not see it. It's not like people are sitting around saying, oh, can't wait till Mark sends out Mark, come on, Mark, it's been a minute. No, they're fucking busy. They got kids, they got life. Things are happening. However, if it's a very important message, maybe you're trying to raise money, maybe you're trying to sell a deal, maybe you have a special offer going on that you have limited inventory and you know, this client Typically buys this kind of stuff. Maybe what I would recommend is you take your email list, you scrub it and get phone numbers as well and just shoot a text and. Or ask for their cell phone number and the privilege to do this. By the way, everything we're talking about is legal. Do it the right way and you send them and say, hey Peter, I just shot you an important message. Check it out via email. That's it. I don't have to say, hey Peter, this is Mark. I've worked really hard to do like, you know, it's, don't over talk it. Just give them a quick heads up. Think you're texting your buddy. Yo, Peter, check your email. Done, right? They know it's from me because my numbers on this thing. But like, hey Peter, it's Mark, check your email. I got you something. And then now all of a sudden they're like, damn, stop, check email. I'm in or I'm out. Cool. Either way. But you would see your open rates drastically increase just with that one strategy, you know.

Yeah, same thing with, you know, so again that's, that's. How do you use the data? Just like I was saying, right. So how do I give them an impression on different channels? So how do I use the data I have and what I'm trying to do to now get another touch on them? Same thing with this is something that's working really effectively for the guys on the real estate side is going in skip tracing, getting emails. And we know they're not all good, but they're not emailing them out where you have to worry about scrubbing them and balance rates and all that. They're just loading them in to Facebook, targeting stuff and letting the PPC work that much better for them where it makes sense. Right. So that's a very cool thing they're starting to do that's using the data in a different way than how real estate investors have been using it in the past. So that's very cool. You start to see guys overlay channels, right? So like where before you only did direct mail, now what you do is you hit them direct mail and because you're getting a phone number now you text them as well. Hey, did you get my cart? A week after it goes out or two weeks after? So all these pieces come down to like what, what do I have for contact information and what am I missing? How can I get it? And now complete the circle of communicating with people across all fronts.

Exactly. And stop being a chicken shit, get on the phone. This true Story. When I was 18 years old, my parents used to get the Sunday dispatch. It came Saturday night at 10pm True story. And you know, back in the day, this is before Internet existed, kind of like it does now. But back I go straight to the home for sale section, right? Immediately. 959, I'd hear that paper at the fucking ground. Boom. I'm running out getting it. I'm like mom and dad go to bed, they're drinking beer, hanging out, have fun smoking cigarettes. And I'm sitting in the literally the dining room with a rotary phone calling fucking sellers at 10 o' clock on a Saturday night. True story. Like you got to put yourself in the customers. They literally just to run an ad in a newspaper to sell their house. Do you think anybody else is calling at 10 o' clock at night and oh well, you can't call at your 10 o'.

Clock. The fuck?

Dude, they just ran an ad. They obviously are motivated to sell. If I call them and they say F you, they're not motivated. Cool. Sorry to bother you. Hey, I was calling about your property. F you. Cool. Hey, I was calling back your property. Yeah, thank you for calling. I can't believe you're calling so late, but wow, I really need to sell this today. Awesome. Now I'm in the game. I'm the first contact. I'm the first person called them. I'm nice, I'm professional, dude. Like people, they're like, well, you know, I don't call 7:30 because I'm kind of busy, dude. It's not about being convenient, it's about being profitable. And one more thing. Yeah, go ahead, Peter.

Sorry, sorry. Yeah, on that. Because that's something that really kind of sums up a lot of what we've talked about. And what I see is that too many people are designing their sales processes, marketing processes, all that kind of stuff without the customer in mind. Like thinking about who's the customer, how do I get through to them the right way and value add to them, right? So like that first and foremost, if you step back, think about that, am I designing things the right way? All this other stuff makes sense. How do I hit them the right way? Do I send a text? When do I call them? All that stuff makes sense. And then take however you're feeling about it and just get a little bit more aggressive with it and see what happens. And then a little bit more aggressive and see what happens. Like that's the problem is people just don't push. Take what you're doing and like do all those actions in one week instead of six weeks, right? If you're very simple example, I see guys doing list marketing and they'll go pull a big list and contact it over nine weeks and it's like cool. How do you do that same activity in two weeks? Because what's going to happen, you're going to speed up every revenue, conversations, all that kind of stuff. So you have to kind of start looking at things that way. And then ultimately guys like the marketing, no matter what you're doing for the marketing, none of it is going to work. If your sales process and your follow up process isn't tuned into getting to the person you're trying to get to. Right? How many times do we have to call them to get there? Cool. Do we call them one more time? What do I have to do to get in touch with every single person that is in my CRM, right? Without fail, non stop. Even if they say no, I'm still going to check in with them three months from now because conditions change. Understanding that like the people that you're afraid to, to run into, to talk to, the angry ones that just emotionally outlash on you, those are the ones that are the best customers. Like those are the ones you need. If they're a motivated seller and they're yelling at you, guess what? They're not too happy with their life. I don't want the guy who's sitting by the pool in Florida. I don't want Mark to be the investor I have to call to convince to sell me his property. Right? That's going to be the hardest sale. What's going to be the easiest one is the ones like fuck you, dude. I can't deal with you right now. Don't ever call me again.

Cool man.

Listen, sounds like you got a lot going on. Apologies, didn't mean to intrude. If that's the house, if this is the house you own, like I'm really interested in buying no matter what the situation is. I can help you out. Like that's a human to human touch that A lot of people don't do that. Just go past the bullshit, put that piece out there and see what else is there. Those are the best deals always. And those are the ones everybody is like too afraid to call, too afraid to ask the next question, whatever it is. The emotional outbursts are the ones like don't be afraid of those. Those are the best deals out there. Learn how to navigate them. You'll be one of the best rock stars on the phone right There.

Yeah, I mean, listen, like you said, you're almost like a psychiatrist. You know, let them talk, let them vent. The more they talk, the more they're telling you they don't even know it. They're just venting. And I'm just sitting back like, yep, noted. Yep, yep. And all I'm doing is going to use this on the crafting of the message to the next conversation and moving forward. Like Peter said, it's like, wow, yes, you do have a lot going on. I would like to make your life a little bit easier by taking over this property that you have that you posted.

Blah, blah, blah.

There's so many ways to enter that. It's like, listen, I'm not for everybody. I move pretty quick. I might solve your problem way faster than you want to solve it. You want to sit there and talk shit about for the next five weeks or do you want to knock this out in five days? I'm already assuming that's called assumption selling, by the way. So, I mean, there's a lot of stuff here over the last 26 years, I've learned. And another thing real quick here, another problem. I see a lot. Peter will roll here in a few, but is, you know, when you're talking about ppc, by the way, it means pay per click. It's one of the most expensive marketing channels out there, dollar wise. It doesn't. Again, that's just one piece of data. Most expensive dollars. However, those leads are typically very. It's like gold, right? If you get that lead and you call and you can convert, there's literally no competition. And you can literally make more money than you typically would ever make if you're competing against 10 other people, right? So it's funny, I went to guys like, man, PPC is outrageous. I'm like, okay, what's that mean? And he's like, I'm paying $500 a lead. And I'm like, okay, cool. How much are you making? Well, we make 25 grand a deal. But fuck, man, I used to pay $100 for the same lead. And I said, okay, I used to pay $100 for the same lead. How much did you used to make with that same lead? Two years ago? It was like seven grand. See, the thing is people get this shit twisted. Like, look, you got to look at the full picture, not the one piece. The next question. And it might, I asked him, I was like, dude, how much you spend in a month? He's like, 30 grand a month. I was like, well, that's your Problem, you need to be spending 100 grand a month because he's trying to grow, but he's focused on the wrong problem. He's focused on spending 500 when he used to spend 100. It's different times, man. You know?

Yeah, I mean, honestly, we, we asked a different question. Right. So in our heads, I'm sure Mark is similar on this one. He's more looking like, okay, if I'm making 25, what's the highest cost per customer I can come up to? How do we spend? What's the number we can spend before that number gets crossed? Right. So like instead of, oh my God, it's 500, I'm scared. We're like, cool, how do we drive it to a thousand but double the traffic coming through.

Yeah, and not only that, dude, you literally squash every competitor in your marketplace. You're freaking out about 500. Could you imagine what some other small time investors doing or other person that's investing in marketing, like marketing against you? Dude, you'll smoke them because you know your data. Data gives you confidence. Data gives you direction. Data gives you swag. Data's gonna bring, by the way, you get this shit data, you're better employees. You're gonna have better staff, you're gonna have better team. Why? Because they have opportunities to make more money playing the game that most people are playing. The reason you can't hire good people is because you don't have fucking any opportunity for them to grow and scale you. Because you're playing small. You're supposed to find the opportunity because you're scared. Quit being a pussy. That's the ultimate goal today. Quit being a pussy. Step your marketing game up. It is scary. It is going to fail. It is not going to make you money sometimes. But if you stick with it and you start working and understanding real marketing, I promise you, you will make more money than you've ever thought possible. Because you understand marketing. I don't care if you're fucking selling coffee, real estate, dog leashes, art, it doesn't matter. It works once you understand how it works. And that's what's cool about this. So, Peter, I know you have two companies, Push Button CMO and Direct Skip. Can you talk about like Direct Skip, what that does? That's mostly for real estate investors and some other industries, but just give a quick synopsis.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, Direct Skip. So for real estate investors, you guys know that mostly as list builder and skip trace. So you know, going in, targeting the neighborhood, you want to find a Property in or cash buyers in certain neighborhoods, building a list off that, skip tracing it, getting phone numbers, email addresses, reaching out to them. So you guys kind of understand that already the big value add for you directly is we had really corporates LLC trust better than anybody else out there. We constantly test it. So that's massive for you. And really just the level of data. So we've gone, we've tested this data for 3, 4 years, really longer than that because this goes back to using list source 8, 10 years ago, but tested it, got into the most premium channels all the way up and just got the best collection of data to put that stuff together. So that's the easy one for real estate investors. If you're outside of real estate investing, what's cool about it is really anything you're looking for in terms of either phone numbers or email addresses, we can help in some way. So it just becomes a matter of what data do you have, what do you try to do with it? We've been helping a lot of different industries now do different things. So you know guys in call centers that are trying to access different customer bases, but we can source the data using their input list and different things. So hard conversation to have here on that level. But we could probably open up a way for, if you guys are in real estate, we'll make it really easy for you to get access to that system. It's pretty straightforward if you're outside more to set up a call and talk about KPIs, these other things, or maybe how the data can be used in your business. We're always looking for different applications. So the data we sit on is super, super powerful. The contact Data is like 99, 99.9% accuracy. It's credit bureau source. So it's constantly updated, constantly refreshed. And then the property data we have is updated every morning. So this is highly, highly accurate stuff that lets us get in touch with sellers and buyers of all levels. So even up to big hedge fund buyers and corporations pretty easily. So we're even testing it right now with some companies outside of real estate that have done business in another, another industry where we can kind of back source their contact info and get in touch with their CEO. So very powerful stuff. There's a lot of different uses.

And that's dot com, right? That's the domain.

Yeah, that's direct skip.com. if you guys just go to direct skip.com and sign up for that, you'll, you'll get the normal package, you'll get some Free hits in there to test around with it. And again, anything from there you could reach out to us and any kind of special application we can definitely help you out with.

Yeah. So again, for being here, Peter, how much free traffic are you giving them? How much free skips?

Yes. You guys will get 500 free skips and 500 free property downloads just to get in there and get rolling. And then, you know, if you're a power user and you're doing 100,000, 200,000amonth once you sign up, reach out to us. Sure. You know, we'll talk about that.

What's that in skips?

Not skips. Yes, and skips. Yes. And skip traces. So a hundred thousand records, 200,000 records. You know, some of you guys are doing that if you've got platform. So we've got an API on that system as well. So if you've got a platform or you've got a custom podio solution, stuff like that, all those things can be tapped in via API to us to get that information as well, which is super powerful. So we serve a bunch of different platforms out there that you know of. I don't want to say it, but we serve a bunch of them and then even down to personal CRMs that people are kind of doing and looking into. So again, the whole idea behind Direct Skip is what I wanted to do is take the data question out of it. Right. So, like, there's so much going on that you're trying to figure out in marketing and your processes. We talked about so much of it today. How do you just eliminate? There's so many little things that you can tweak that you're trying to figure out and all these things. The more you can eliminate as not an issue, the easier it is to focus on getting the other things. Right. Right. So if you eliminate the data and the probability of those being the wrong people or bad phone numbers out of what you're doing for outreach, you eliminate that error, that percentage down the line that you lose. So the whole idea of it is how do we set that up the right way, get it to you at a better price, and then let us, as the data guys, continue to do the work and evolving what's in there, how to use it. We're constantly announcing new features, new ways to filter, new ways to get to the people you're trying to. So that's really what you want. Like, you guys don't need to think about data all day long. We talked about it enough today. Use somebody like me. Use somebody like us, that is in that all day long in the back end, looking at what we have, what we can take action on, and figuring out a solution for you on how you can use that in your business. That's what I do with a lot of big companies now.

Well, if they're spending three to five grand a month on marketing, you know, Peter will get on the phone with you for 15 minutes, do a quick rundown audit of your marketing path, you know, give you a couple tweaks. It's free, we're not charging for it. We want to be a value add to you. But you know, there could be an opportunity that you plug into some of the stuff he has to offer. We call that push button CMO where he's kind of like the chief marketing officer of your company. He's seen, like I said, he's spent many, many, many, many millions of dollars and of spend, not counting earning, of understanding the data so he could actually come in there and help expedite everything we're talking about. And as you guys know, we're all about buying time. This is the fastest way to know, to buy time.

What I know and how I did it, to discover freedom. There ain't no question mark. Kevin's, when he stepping it down, he's closing deals. Time to tell him what the DM stand for. I'm a deal maker. A deal maker. But I'm not just a deal maker. I'm a dream maker. The journey's where it's at. It's all about the process. Time to get over to the DM project from a small town in Ohio, so I know how it is. Can I come from a lot of money. I remember as a kid, wanted to make a honey rack. Didn't see no one making more than that. Graduated high school with a 1.8. Should have helped me back. I hope my principals and teachers are alive just to witness this. I'm my own boss. I'm out here running two way figure businesses. I can walk away from it all and I'll be good. But I've been called to help people just like y', all, learn the game. It's time to ball everybody. Chasing the money. But I'm not chasing the money. I'm out here chasing the purpose. Yo, I've been working my whole life. What got us where we at? Is it gonna get us where we wanna go? It's time to push. Time to learn, time to grow. I'm here to help and teach him what I, what I know and how I did it to discover freedom There ain't no question more Kevin's when he stepping the doubt he's closing deals Time to tell him what the DM stand for. I'm a deal maker, a deal maker But I'm not just a deal maker. I'm a dream maker. The journey's where it's at. It's all about the process. Time to get over to.

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