The Secret Power of Intent-Based Searches with Chuck Boyce | Capability Amplifier EP#148

And here's the reality. Like when I look at my server logs, I see a whole bunch of clicks from Pakistan and China and from India and places I know they're not the right buyer. And I told these folks, you know, like, specifically, I only want US based clicks. So they're already screwing you.

We've been able to help companies kind of remove themselves from, from the Facebook, Apple, Google trap. And we do that by using, by accessing data that's available at time of search.

So now we have to pay them for the courtesy of a bad click and then we have to pay them over and over again until hopefully they convert. And instead what you do is you interstep the search, which basically other than some general fees to you for that service, they don't have to pay for anything.

Hey everyone, welcome. Welcome to an episode of Capability Amplifier. This is Mike Koenigs. I'm here with a very special guest, my good friend Chuck Boyce. I've known him over 15 years. And the question I have for you today is what if you could get an accurately qualified prospect who wants to buy what you have and you could capture their intent and attention before they click. That might sound a little bit weird, but it will make sense today. So think about it. What if you could qualify prospects better based on intent and get their contact information to follow them everywhere, but only pay when they click? And what if you could decrease your online ad spend by 60 to 80% or more and then hijack competitor searches? That means someone who's searching for your competitor or someone like them. That is the power of intent based searches. So my guest today, Chuck, helps eliminate your biggest business pains and that is lower cost per lead, getting only qualified prospects, being able to find your prospects before your competitors do, and then make your prospects buy from you and not your competitors, and also knowing which half of your marketing budget you're actually wasting. So if you think about it, and this is a very few people know this, but it's possible to get data outside of Google, Facebook and Apple that you're currently not using and then beat these organizations at their own game, which is basically getting your money whether they produce results or not, so that you can highly target and build your audience and then speak to the one who's looking for the answer to the problem you solve. Now you can find intent data and have it delivered to you. So someone could be searching for fill in the blanks. Think about what do people search for when they want to buy what you have. So it could be business coaching or Advising or Better Sleep solutions or maybe Longevity Healthcare. But you could get exactly who that person is, including all their contact information. You could qualify them and then grade them. And then you can have that data delivered within 24 hours so that you can follow them around and retarget them on their devices or on any media, including TV or streaming. You could send them an email, you could call them, send a postcard or any kind of sales material, all for less than the cost of what you pay for social media advertising, potentially reducing your paid advertising spend by, as I said earlier, 60 to 80%. Now, your target audience may not even know that they need you. But with this data, you can educate them and convert them. And also with this data, you can figure out exactly how big your audience is and go after the most lucrative audiences. You can do this with no shenanigans or spam. Only the people you want will see you. And this can all be done legally, ethically and morally. So as I said earlier, I'm with my friend Chuck Boyce. He's the founder of Accuclients. He's going to tell us more about this. So first of all, say hello, Chuck.

Great to see you as always.

Always. It's been an absolute blast spending some time with you. And we've been working together, I think for like 15 years. You had an amazing business sale. One of the last times you called me up and said, hey, selling my company. I said, what are you going to do next? And you're like, well, let's talk about that. And you had the good fortune of selling to big company legalzoom. So you had a huge return and you've been building technology platforms for a long time. So why don't you talk a little bit about your background and then we're going to get into the nitty gritty here. Sure.

So I've been involved in systems development for nearly 30 years. You know, back in when we had things like DOS and Debase and Clipper Summer 87 release.

I remember those days.

So yeah, these young whippersnappers and all their fancy gooeys, you know, we, we didn't have that. We knew it the hard way command.

Line back in the good old days.

Exactly. So and, and the, the common theme of all of the these systems that I've worked on for the past 30 years is we've always been dealing with a massive amount of data. So the challenge has always been, you know, how do we make sure that, that we are monetizing and getting the most value of all this Data that we're being collected. And certainly in the modern age, there is no such thing as a free lunch. And certainly as we were all online, as soon as we've signed up for any social media site or any kind of free online service, unfortunately, most people don't realize that the currency that they're giving up for that is their data.

Yep.

So the good thing is that data now becomes available to companies in a variety of different ways and a variety of different sources that lets us help find those people that are looking for a solution to a problem that we know that we're really good at doing. So traditionally, you know, for the last, you know, 10 plus years, digital marketing has been about cheap traffic. You know, so 10 years ago, if you had a halfway decent offer, a halfway decent budget, you could, you could generally make money online. Well, what's really happened is that the big technology companies, you know, the Facebook, Apple Googles of the world, have really taken more, have taken their data privacy more seriously, and it made it much harder for marketers to contact people, for companies to get their information in front of the everyday person. So what we've now been able to do is we've been able to help companies kind of remove themselves from the, from the Facebook, Apple Google trap. And we do that by using, by accessing data that's available at time of search. So as soon as you type a specific search, that data becomes available. Well, as marketers, we want to know when someone's looking for something that we provide in our service area. We want to capture that lead. So that's really what we're focused on right now.

Yep. And I'm just going to repeat what you said, because when you told me about this, I was like, oh my God, this is a massive game changer. And I immediately referred you to a bunch of clients. You've been talking to them, they're signing up. And, you know, there's two big sides of this, which is what we're used to is the, you know, if you put an ad on Google or Facebook or any other platform, you're first of all going to have to give them a whole bunch of keywords that you want to target. You're going to have to tell them who you want to get clicks from, and then.

You have to, you know, wait for that click to happen, send them to a page, and then hopefully they're going to do something. And if they don't, the only way to get after them is to retarget them. But instead. And then here's the Reality, like when I look at my server logs, I see a whole bunch of clicks from Pakistan and China and from India and places I know they're not the right buyer. And I told these folks, you know, like, specifically, I only want US based clicks. So they're already screwing you. Okay. And then we know that a lot of these are not only unqualified, they're not necessarily filtering out bots. So we know they're not real based upon the bounce rates and all the other stats we get. So now we have to pay them for the courtesy of a bad click and then we have to pay them over and over again and until hopefully they convert. And instead what you do is you interstep the search, which basically other than some general fees to you for that service, they don't have to pay for anything. And then your systems use what's known as first party data. Add that to the mix and I can say I only want to speak to and target US based citizens with a physical address, for example, maybe a homeowner who makes a certain amount of money, a certain income. And we could even say with an iPhone, I mean you can get really, really granular. And then if it's a B2B service, for example, we can send them an email, we could technically call them, we can send a postcard. There's any number of media options and that is again a massive game changer that historically either wasn't available at all because the technology didn't really exist or way out of the reach of a normal business owner. Am I right so far?

Correct. And really the one of the things that this does is it puts back into play certain media that previously has just become simply too expensive. So when you're trying to mass market or broadcast and you don't know who you're actually trying to target, that media becomes very expensive. So now if we can take that same media, so whether it be direct mail or Dr.tv and we can just target the households that we know have had express some interest in that. Well, again, the costs to do that come significantly down versus hitting every house in a neighborhood when we can hit the 150 houses that we know are interested and qualified to for our offer.

Yeah, it's, it's really amazing. So the next two mini questions I have for you is we had put together a little bit of like a quiz that helps you determine, you know, I would say reveals the pain people have, but also activates the greed glands, which is as soon as you start thinking about what you can do with this how much money you can save and how much better targeted you can get. And also being able to intercept, you know, competitive intent because just because someone searches we might get interrupted and not even go through with a click. Right. So you're going to get like an incomplete thought pattern, but it's still a search for I want to buy an XYZ 1, 2, 3 or the shopping for it. And they're just not aware of what they don't know or if it's genuinely intent based. So it's like schedule a full body scan at company name. Right, right. That would be something where you absolutely know. But the, you know, if you're a competitor to whatever that company is, boom, you can identify them, you can qualify them and then target them and follow them around.

Yeah. So, so one of the examples we always talk about is if you go online and you type in dentist near me, generally you've got an issue that you need addressed immediately. So that would be an example of a really high intent because nobody, you know, I love my dentists but nobody's really looking forward to go and go, oh yeah, I really need, want to find me a great local dentist. So yeah, so we really want to look at those high intent keywords and it really then takes us out of the, the, some of, some of the other kind of games and traps that, that we fall into both as small businesses and very large businesses. You know, we're no longer competing for that, that mass market. So basically we can move our dollars further down into the funnel where it becomes much more cost effective to go ahead and target those because we're not targeting 90% of the people that are not interested or not qualified for our product.

Right. So another big question that's pretty simple, pretty obvious, but who is this for? Who is this not for? So if you're going to create, I like to say, if you're going to create your perfect client who you know you can for sure succeed with, where it's like a no brainer, they come to you, they describe the business, they describe what they're selling and you're like, I get this is a for sure yes. And what's a for sure no for us?

Really? A for sure yes. Is anyone that has an online offer that's performing particularly well, we can certainly make it, we can help them definitely drop their cost of client acquisition. This generally is going to work best at higher ticket offers. So if you're looking to work with high end real estate investors, if you're looking to reach.

Car buyers if you're reaching large high dollar purchases where traditionally if you're trying to target them from the front end just to get into that pool is could be $100 a click. So you've got all of that unqualified traffic that you have to deal with. So really high volume, high dollar offers work really, really well. If you've got a solid campaign and you've been doing online marketing, this really just is pouring gas on the fire for them. This generally does not work as well. For my earlier example, if this is a single dental practice in like where I live in Orlando, Florida, probably not a great fit for us. There's just not going to be the volume and their lifetime value of that patient is not generally high enough to use this type of marketing. You know, certainly there are other avenues that we can explore, but the, it generally is going to be cost prohibitive for those lower, those lower offers.

Yep. And I, I can speak from experience because there was someone I introduced you to and you immediately started generating traffic for them and they found out really quickly that their follow up was bad. Right. So I think another important thing, and then there's another example where you were dealing with a very high tech legal related business where you generated a lot of qualified people. I mean they were like full on the exec people and you delivered hundreds of candidates and you were appalled by how poor their marketing and follow up was. So I mean there's nothing worse than finding out, okay, yeah, you got all the traffic you had ever hoped for and then you basically hurt your reputation because you weren't ready or capable of converting and your people don't follow up and they don't know, they don't have a message. I've seen this before where the message that got someone to say yes in the first place isn't what your salespeople are saying on the other end. So it's inconsistent messaging.

And so the ideal person is someone who's already spending money. They've got a high tech client, they have a sales and marketing system that can bring someone all the way through. So you're not wasting those leads and harming your reputation because you get a reputation for not following up. And I know you and I were talking about an individual who you had signed up for, for a procedure or you know, basically to Schedule 1. It's been months, nothing. Okay, that's not good. That's not good. So I think this is for, and.

That'S a five figure service, you know, so this is, this isn't that. This was not, you know, just going, booking my dentist for a cleaning. This is a, you know, a, a higher end service. So you would expect to see that a higher level of follow up. The one thing that this system is very good at, if there are cracks or any kind of small faults in the sales and marketing process, when we start applying this and that volume begins to grow, the holes in those buckets start gushing and the bucket will just start to overflow.

Yeah, that's, that is, that in itself is exciting. And like when I set up your system on my site, first of all, you learn a ton about your business and what the real universe of intent and demand is. You also can learn an awful lot about what your competition is doing and up to, there's any number of ways to spy and.

And also it gives you real clear direction on what you need to do to improve parts of your sales process that might not be accurate. So as I always say, the best and most equipped business is one that knows who they want to sell to intimately. They know what their message is. They know that if they get someone to listen or hear something, they'll raise their hand and say, yeah, I want that. Let's have a conversation or start the buying process. Which I think this is a perfect place to ask you because I think what is revolutionary not just about the service you have, it's how you deliver it. So let's walk through that because for anyone listening, watching right now, a, you're going to learn a lot about how to think right about really good service delivery because you're doing it right. And you've also added some new capabilities incorporating AI for example. And that's super, super exciting. I've been looking at the system, we've been talking about it for the past couple days. So let's say someone says I want higher value traffic. I'm sick of paying the big data knowing full well that a big chunk, whether it's 20 or 60% is going to waste.

And I have a higher ticket service and that higher ticket can be anywhere above. Let's just give a range here.

It could be, you know, five to $1,000, 500 to $1,000 with, with high enough volume if it's, if it's a lower. We've had a prospect we're talking to now who will, will be ecstatic with 10 deals a month. But that's a several hundred thousand dollars sale. So it really is.

It'S really the total lifetime value of the clients that you're going to get on a month over Month basis is really the best way to look at it because you can have a $5,000 offer that you're doing enough volume with that this makes sense. But you know, and if you have a $400,000 offer then you know, you only meet, maybe need five or six a month. So it's really that the, the combined monthly expected value that you're going to get.

Right on. So at the end of the day, you know, they've got to invest in you, the service, some traffic and make sure that like anything, you've got to spend some time iterating. If you're lucky and you've got your systems all set up, man, you convert those leads, you're, you're cash flowing and net positive first month, sure. But for someone else it could take a little while because man, you find out where the holes in your bucket really live. So getting back to answering the big question here, let's say someone says yes, I'm qualified, I want this. They raise their hand, they contact you on your website and start the conversation. What exactly.

Would happen when someone goes to accuclients.com shameless pitch right there and fills out a talk to me now I want this. So what's it take, how long does it take and what happens next?

Sure. So we're going to start with a conversation and kind of go through some of the things that we've just talked about, kind of go through kind of our eight key questions of what really makes an ideal client for this system, then if that's all good and that is something that boat that we all want to look at moving forward to our service delivery for this is certainly, I think, unique because what we're going to do is we're going to start your onboarding process and there is, as you can imagine, lots of data and everybody's using lots of systems. So it's going to take us a couple of weeks to build up the, all of the, kind of get all of the data, kind of get the state of the union, you know, where you're at today. So we're going to kind of set up and get some access to your existing data, kind of look at what you're existing doing. We're going to put some of our tools, we're going to deploy those out on your websites so that we can start getting an idea of what your traffic looks like today. So we can really set that baseline.

And I'm going to stop right there because I'm going to make this even more real. So that would mean like if you're using a WordPress website, you're going to get the access admin access, you're going to install some of your software, you're going to access if there's a Google Ads account or Facebook Ads account. You got to log in there, look at some reports and, and probably gather some data, transaction history, buyer data, so you can really understand who the client is, find out who the competition is. And then you've got these little AI agents that go to town and start gathering data and learning things that frankly humans can't easily do because the tools are so good now. Right.

And the amount of time that, the amount of value that we can add now using some of these AI tools.

Because what they can complete now in mere minutes would normally take my team hours and hours and hours to do. So that really then frees up our team to dive deeper, to look at the data and really apply their expertise. So that you with having, having the AI tools do kind of a lot of the grunt work that we need because keyword research, oh man, that used to take us forever. Now we've got tools and systems in place where we can do that very quickly and we can do much, much deeper. And you know, normally we would stop after 2 or 300 keywords for any client. Now I could do 3000 keywords and still be in significantly less time. So that's definitely allowed us to increase the value that we deliver for the same price basically.

Okay, and so you've got the, we'll call it the onboarding call. Well first of all, the are you ready? And you do the eight question toolkit, which I think is super valuable and important. You can get that@accuflo clients.com. you'll learn a little bit more there. You do the onboarding, pass over the information, your team goes to town couple weeks later because you got to get the data put together and know what to do. So then you meet with the client for essentially a workshop style experience. Because the power of what you do isn't, oh, we get started and it takes weeks and weeks and months and months like a typical agency does. We just so annoying and frustrating. But you actually get it done now. So what's the get it done now implementation side of this look like?

Right, so, so we've, we've compiled all the data. We, we've done, you know, we've done a, a ton of the heavy lifting before we sit down and we have that, that two day kind of workshop where we're going to go through the data with you, let's look at the opportunities, let's make sure we understand who our ideal clients are. Let's look at what the keywords we're going to target and we're going to set all of that up. Because I've been doing this long enough, I know it's been a problem in the past. We basically throw up a bunch of data on top of clients and their teams and they, they, they freeze up because it's so much information, it's so hard to, to really know kind of what the proper next steps are. So to combat that and to make sure that our clients can get the most value as quickly as possible, we've developed this two day workshop where we're going to sit down, roll up our sleeves, look at the data, we're going to set our priorities, and then we're going to just start banging through those priority lists until the end of our workshop time together. And we're going to make sure that everybody leaves that clear and understanding kind of what success looks like for this, kind of what our next steps are and then how do we support and keep this moving forward?

Okay, so does that mean during that workshop you've got enough data beforehand that you can actually turn it on and turn on the traffic faucet so they can start getting traffic and leads and.

Do something with it? And are you like connecting, let's say the incoming leads to their CRM system? Are you either. Where do you do, you know, like, where does this begin and end? What can someone expect and not expect? Because again, I know the most frustrating thing for a founder, as a founder and I work with a lot of founders, including you, that like, we'll get all excited that, oh, we found finally the magic key that's missing, only to find out that like 2% of it's covered and 98% is still. It's like going to an event, you hear all this great stuff and you have all these great ideas and you walk away and it's like all you got is a big long list of homework, right? What's left after you do the two to three days with you and your team and get this thing turned on?

Our goal when we leave that our time together is to have as little to nothing left as homework. We're really all about the no homework. That's why we're going to do our homework in that, in that four to six weeks before we have that first meeting and we're going to hit the ground running, you know, so we're going to be Ready to work with your team to connect this to your CRM. You know, let's look at your ads accounts. Let's look at how your current ads are performing. You know, what can we do to start blocking bad traffic? You know, let's. Let's get rid of all of the traffic that's not appropriate and decide what to do with that. Because people go, okay, well, that traffic's not appropriate for me, but that traffic might still have some value. So that there are, there are different strategies that we can use as to where we might want to put that traffic. But yeah, so we're going to go through that list and pretty much end that session done with a system up running, connected to all of your systems, and that we're going to start seeing data flow through that immediately. So that we've also. Then, you know, the other big piece of this during our workshop time is creating a feedback loop. Because the way the systems are designed, the more data that we put back into it, the better and better the system gets going forward. Just like with any other data AI tool, the more, the better our feedback loop is, the better the system just keeps getting better and better as it goes along.

Okay, that's really good. And I'm going to ask you a hypothetical question. So let's say, for example, I had a whole bunch of traffic coming to me from, let's say, Pakistan, India and China. Could I root those to my enemies?

Certainly we have the ability within our tools to take that traffic and redirect it to any URL on the web that you would so choose. We do generally take. We have been known to set up what, like, honeypot sites that look and feel very similar to our, our primary site and then. And direct the traffic there. We can do the same thing with competitors. So we can really protect your offers from the eyes that you don't want to see them.

Okay. And I meant that to be a joke, of course, but I couldn't help it anyway because I have literally had that problem. And when I was first working with you, I jokingly said, I don't want anything to come in from specific countries. And well, that's exactly what we did. And it was supposed to be funny. And it ended up being, well, it's actually a pretty good idea because you really do want to filter out the junk. And part of the reason I brought that up was exactly what you said. You could literally identify domains, competitor domains, and route them to fake content. For example, if you wanted to protect yourself in some way, you do have an Enormous amount of control that most people simply aren't aware of.

Right. So between this, the system has AB testing we can test based on the device or the connection that the lead is coming in on. There are probably several dozen different parameters that we can set up and then just build a set of rules so that each when every time a piece of traffic hits, it goes to the rule and then the rules engine says, okay, you belong over here or you belong over there or we're not going to show you anything, we're going to show you that the site is down. We had on one of our testing sites, we had made some changes, we were testing in development and all of the sudden.

One of our search engine tools that we used to kind of verify traffic and kind of stopped connecting. Well, turns out we had it flagged in our database as an enemy and sure enough, it got zero stats. It could not see our site at all. It just basically looked like it went away.

Okay. And I think again, part of the reason I brought this up, ingest at first, is there's the traffic side and there's the what you know and what you want. And then when you start going down this path, there's a lot that you don't know that you don't know or what's even possible. And what you have a long line of experience with. And in your arsenal of tools, there's literally dozens of additional add on tools that you can provide that can do things that you wouldn't even know to ask unless some of the data shows up. And part of the experience of doing this in a no homework done, do it together environment is sometimes you can get more done in three days of focused effort and work than you could in three months or even a year or never. And if there's things that are on your mind as a founder, as an owner that you've been asking for and begging for, and either the team never gets it done or they end up saying, I don't even know, it's because they don't even know what to look for or ask. What you have access to are lots and lots of relationships and connections, A database of decades of relationships with organizations and people and the founders. And if you can't do it, you can make it happen very, very quickly as well.

Yeah, absolutely. I enjoy some excellent relationships. So there are very few times that we're working with a client and they ask for something that might be outside of the scope of what we do. But we have a long list of really solid, trusted people that we've worked with for years that we would use on our own internal projects. My general rule of thumb is I will never put a client with any service or product that I don't personally use. So it's, it's really that that's really important to us because, you know, we really want to be the general contractor that, that's working with you on your, on your data and digital strategy.

Okay, so I'm going to do this for you, but I'll have you fill in the blanks. So when people go to accuclients.com they get the eight question toolkit that'll really help you identify the holes and the opportunities that exist in the business. There's a brochure there, detailed webinar presentation where you and I go really deep into some of the minutiae of how the system works and how it works and what's included and then there's an onboarding opportunity as well. What else would you like to share about the experience, the process, or what happens next?

Well, the experience, you know, certainly we want to provide an excellent experience and we are working really hard to break the common misconception that data in marketing is hard. It's only hard because we don't know because there are so many people that don't know or understand what, what's available and how to put the tools together. We work really hard to make it as simple and easy on the client and give very specific directions, tasks and goals to accomplish that are, that are easy for teams or even their agencies to complete. You know, because we're not an agency, you know, we truly want to be partners with our clients and their either internal marketing departments or their agencies. We have a very tight focus on what we do. We have a lane and we're very happy to swim just in our lane.

Okay, so I think the best way to wrap this up then for you watching, listening right now is head on over to Accuclients.com there you can get the eight question toolkit, the brochure, the detailed webinar presentation, and also go through the onboarding process. And I'm happy to say I've referred a lot of business to Chuck. I know he's meeting with a couple of them just this coming week. And it's fair to say that Chuck is more interested in high quality, high value relationships with high quality companies and a great lifestyle than he is. He's not out here chasing the money. He'd rather keep this focused and do fewer and less than scale too quickly. And also this is a massive competitive advantage for you as well. So he purposely builds a moat around the people he works with. So I'm going to give this to you one more time, Chuck. Anything else that I didn't say that I should have said before we let people go?

No, it's we're a very special time where there is all of this data and the ability to, to really help more people by delivering high quality products and services to people that are looking for and actually want to hear about them is, is certainly a much different approach. And we really look forward to continuing to work with our kind of portfolio of client companies to bring this technology to and let them use it to their advantage.

All right. So seen it here. Go to accuclients.com all the information from Chuck. And thank you so much for watching. See everyone.