The $27 Funnel That Scaled 7th Level to 100,000 Buyers | Top Trends

I've worked with a bunch of different people, big and small, in the info space, coaching space and stuff like that for the last like seven or eight years.

And when we always talk about funnel congruence, but congruence with the actual offer in person too itself. And they're not being a fraud or a caricature themselves.

Lead magnets and stuff like that. Some of them were not the greatest, but they also had developed this like NEP Q101, which was originally designed to onboard new sales reps and train them, but it was like a crash course series. And I was like, we could easily teach external people how to learn any PQ faster with an EPQ 101 course.

Guys, this is Blake. Blake is a long friend, and even if he doesn't see me as such, I'd say we're friends at this point. We haven't caught up in years, which is the whole point of this podcast. That was great. I love that he's a 5 out of 10. We'll see by the end of it. But no, truly, I've always respected Blake and like, when I got to do this. The idea for this podcast is to reverse engineer in the top 100 people in our space of what's currently working, not what used to work five years ago. Because a lot of you guys know you don't want to funnel stuff that used to work. You want to funnel hack stuff that's working now. And a lot of what I've seen and what Blake has seen we. We talked about beforehand on Mastermind stages or live events is that people generally will default to case studying on the glory days or stuff that did work but doesn't work anymore or inflate the numbers, various things. And I want to just get cut to the truth, actually learn. And if we're failing, we're failing. If we're winning, we're winning. We want to learn from, you know, what's winning right now, if you're having a hard time with it or if you just want to double down. So with that being said, Blake and me, we shared various things, but needless to say, he's the real deal. And Blake, welcome.

Thanks for having me on. Nick, it's been a minute and glad to be here with you.

I am, dude, I'm super bumped. And we actually, we tried to do this a week ago and just had so much fun sharing things that we never got to got to the podcast, just ghosted straight.

Yeah, I ghosted you. You're right.

I ghosted you too. So we Met up and I ghosted you twice, so I owe you one. I'm gonna make up for it here. What's. What's been new with you and then take me back to what's happened since we first met.

Yeah, dude. So what's new with me is still rolling as VP of marketing for seventh level, which Jeremy Minor. And we grew by 36% last year. So that was good. And you know what's that? Really good. In fact, you get a fact check. Me?

Well, our course database would suggest that you and Cole Gordon had like over the last year were maybe 1 and 2 in the industry as far as what I can see as far as sales training influence being in that.

Oh, really? Okay, cool. So we're substantiated, so we're good to go. So yeah. I mean, honestly, the main thing for me is like they brought me in, so I was hired two years ago to do the. To do a low tick funnel. They're like, we want an slo. Cause everything that had the time was BSL based or lead magnets and they were just working those. And then I basically built the Black Book of questions funnel with them. And I mean everything from funnel to ads to copy to integrations, like everything. The only thing I didn't really do was the graphics for the vsl because I cannot do graphics and I. And I'm not Jeremy Miner, so I couldn't do the vsl.

But in post we'll shout out the graphic design team.

Oh yeah, the dude, the funniest thing when I got hired for that too was like, they. So they were like, yeah, we want to do this, we don't know what to do. And then I. They literally had like, they already had a bsl and it was already like, I watched it. I was, this is pretty good for probably having no direction. And then there's all these pieces. And they already had a product, like at least, at least a core book product. And I was like, you guys are sitting on it. It's like literally sitting right there. You just have to restructure it. You have to package it in a good way. That's going to work for cold traffic. And then you got to get it to. You got to validate it with, with paid ads and then scale it if you can. And yeah. So anyways, so I built that with them. And then the funny story is that they asked me if I wanted to be the marketing director and I said no for about like six months. And then they finally said, well, why don't you just. You Just do a couple other projects with us and see how you like it. And I was like, okay, cool. So, and then, so then I said yes. And then they brought me on a team meeting and they introduced me as the marketing director and I was like, oh, it's like that, okay, part two. Yeah. So I was like, okay. And then I just went with it, to be honest. And then they were right. They were right though. There was the right move. And then I basically dropped everything I could to get more involved with them. And then since then, I've become the VP of marketing for them. But like, I've known Jeremy since 2020 when we tried to recruit him at sales mentor to be the head sales trainer at sales Mentor.

I didn't know that. Yeah. And anecdotally, like, of all of the sales trainings that I, that I asked our sales reps, which have been the most beneficial? And I forget, I always forget the name of the core one, the method, the four letter acronym. That one is most cited of anyone who is a top performer. I would say more so than any training.

Any pq.

Yeah, yeah. Some variation of that. And I know you guys probably have different programs and I'm not sure if it's the high ticket or the low ticket, but like one of those is often most cited is Jeremy Minors.

Yeah. To be honest, I've obviously I've worked with a bunch of different people, big and small in the info space, coaching spaces like, stuff like that for the last like seven or eight years. And I started working with them and it started when the Black Book started selling well. I was like. So I was so relieved because I was like, people are. The people who are buying this are going to be better for it. So I can sleep like a baby at night because I could. There's just all these testimonials coming in all the time. So I was like this, look, the product's legit. Jeremy is like one of the most legit people you could possibly find when it comes to just such a crazy subject matter, expertise and something that should be teaching. It wasn't like he did sales for three months and then became a sales trainer. He was in sales in four different industries for 17 years and then trained on sales.

I need to have here too. I just don't know. So that's super cool. So you found the right guy.

Found the right guy.

Conviction. Is conviction important for you in order to market?

Well, absolutely. I think that it's understated because people talk about sales conviction all the time. Like you have to have conviction to sell something. But realistically in marketing, especially if you're doing customer acquisition, you are selling products. And if you, if you don't believe in products. I've actually seen this happen before. A previous offer I was working on and the copywriter lost conviction in the product. And then I was reviewing his copy and I was like, dude, he literally put, this program is so effective that there may be a chance that it works for you someday. And I'm like, dude, I was like, you're pulling all your punches out of the copy. So it was like any hard hitting, like high converting line that you could have made, he would like soft. And I was like, what's happening? And it was, I was like, he lost conviction. He doesn't believe in it anymore. And you know you're not going to try as hard. And when I see, you know, when I hit like customer records in a day or I see the CPA going down, like that means that I get to help more salespeople get better at sales and I feel better about it, then, you know, then, then like, you know, that person's probably not a good fit for this or they might not be better off if they don't. Whatever, you know what I mean?

So what? It sounds like social proof and just the person's general expertise is part of that conviction formula for you. What do you do if you find yourself wondering, like, because anyone like Jeremy being the best, and I agree, like top in his industry, you're still going to get Jeremy Minors a scam post. Probably somewhere on an ad. Yeah, right.

People get on ads all the time.

They'll sort you on review sites so you pay them like it happens. So when you're going about deciding if you want to work with him, is it just those two that you're mainly looking for? And where, where do you encourage, what did you encourage that copywriter who lost conviction to do?

Um, I told him, I mean, I kind of told him to, to go write for someone else because I was like, if you can't write for this, like it's not a good fit if you don't have the conviction and you can't write compelling stuff for it. The funny thing is that he actually is on my team now and he writes really well. He writes really good stuff and it's like in there more creative. It's, it's amazing what happens with conviction whether you're copywriter creative. Like, like my video editor is doing like the craziest stuff with the ads because he's so Pumped about it and has the conviction for it. But yeah, I would say, honestly, the thing that I. That I really value is when the person who's teaching has done it for such an extended period of time. Because I think the problem that I started to find was that people would do stuff for such a short period, and then they would go teach it. And people used to ask me too. They're like, why don't you just do your own course? And I was like, because I want to be in the game for like 10 years so that I'm not teaching anything wrong, or at least I'm being contextually relevant to what I'm teaching and making sure that I have enough experience and subject matter expertise and depth to my. To what I would be teaching, that it would be that much more inherently valuable than spinning it around and doing my own thing to make a quick buck, if that makes sense. But yeah, experience, customer results. That's a really good question, actually. I think. I don't know if there'd really realistically be anything else other than, like, I think integrity is a big thing too. Like, is it. Does the product and the Persona align in a way that's congruent with the like. The like. The methodology, essentially.

Write some notes. That was smart. And I always. We always talk about funnel congruence, but congruence with the actual offer in person, too, itself. And they're not being a fraud or a caricature themselves.

Yeah, because, you know, the other thing too, for example, is it starts to bleed into other things and it becomes. I think that it can become something very detrimental if it's not managed effectively. It's. And what I'm saying is, you know, it also goes to everything that somebody experiences in an ad. The expectation has to be congruent throughout the whole experience, not just the funnel. So if. If Jeremy's like a laid back chill, He's a. Just a chill guy as the. Whatever that. I don't even know what that meme's about. But, like, if Jeremy is chill, laid back, and he's. He's a very, like, detached from the sale, right? And then. And then you go through the funnel. The funnel's chill, laid back, and there's no like, high, like high pressure stuff in the copy and stuff like that. And then. But then you get on a phone call and they're like, hey, sign right here, man. We need. We got to get you going. And like, and they're just like, over hyped up and they're pushing you with a lot of pressure. Then you're like, whoa, what the hell is going on here? Because I had this experience, and then all of a sudden, it was like I walked into a different, like, club or a different room, and I'm being treated totally differently.

Yeah, I agree with everything you said. I almost. I like Blake too much, guys, where I'm agreeing with everything he says. I'm going to have to find.

You got to find something to disagree. I'm sure we'll find something. Give it time. Yeah.

Because I can be disagreeable. But right now, like, truly. I agree. That was. That was perfect. And it gives. It gave me a new maybe definition of a conviction that I just put in the chat for myself. So I, in my hierarchy of importance, usually, like, energy and conviction sit above everything else. And I've just seen it. If you have it, you can over index even in bad situations because of just. I've seen people with utmost conviction. They have no sales script, and they're like, all right, listen, man, I just told you it worked for me. I told you that it worked for him. I showed you it. Like, are you calling me a liar? Because it sounds like you are. This is going to work like, that type of mode. Like, ultimate conviction is hard to beat. So if I had to pick one thing, you want confidence, too, but conviction is pretty important. So I was curious. Yeah. If your copywriter loses it, everyone. I have. I have some separate tactics that I'll be adding that to to my own playbook, so. But I agree, like, you've generally speaking, spoken, done great work, I think, regardless. And that growth rate would suggest that you were doing great work on especially. It sounds like that black, black book funnel. Walk me through what you saw when you came in and why you chose that funnel as being the one that you were going to focus on, at least initially.

Okay, so great question again. Basically, I was like, show me all your funnels. And then, honestly, I just. I went to their website because they had all these, like, free resources and paid resources on the website. Right. So do you want me to walk through that, by the way?

Walk you through? This is a screen share type podcast. People are hopefully going to watch this too, because they're. They're like us. They actually want to learn.

Okay. So this website hasn't really changed too much since I was hired. We're actually in the middle of redoing it. But the. So, like, when they hired me, I was like, give me, like, a few days or a week to just, like, wrap my head around the business and what you guys have. And then I noticed that they had paid resources and then they had free resources in here. And then when I had came in here before, I was like, okay, so these are like the high ticket programs. Oh, this is more like mid ticket. And then they have all the other stuff here. Yeah, that's then. Right, so then this, this is rebranded. This has changed. You notice that this actually doesn't really match the other stuff. It's because it's new. So I didn't.

What do you mean by that? Just the visual.

Yeah, like the, the branding, the copy of it. I mean, you know, Jeremy is a couple years older than he is up here, you know, so. But yeah, and then, I mean, look at the difference between this and.

And this.

So. So this is, this is OG stuff, this is new stuff. But this wasn't. This wasn't here before in this way. And the funny thing was that it was going to. It was going to a funnel that. Oh man, I really. I mean, you guys should see this funnel.

But.

I'll try to bring it up a second. We've added to this since. Since this was like, this is something new. But then they had all of these like pieces in here of lead magnets and stuff like that. Some of them were not the greatest, but they also had developed this like NEP Q101 which was originally designed to onboard new sales reps and train them. But it was like a crash course series. And I was like, we could easily teach external people how to learn any faster with an EPQ101 course. But I was kind of missing this for product. Right. Let me.

It's a crazy name for a product too, by the way.

I love that velvet sledgehammer. Yeah, that's a good one. I didn't even. I didn't come up with that. That was probably the copywriter.

You guys have one in the. Do you have an office or is it all remote?

So there's a block. Sorry. Oh my God. I'm thinking about the blog book. There's an office in Scottsdale. I can't remember where it is. I think it's near the Scottsdale quarter. But it could. I think it may have moved. I can't be. I can't remember.

But get one made and bring it to Jeremy. Just a big velvet sledgehammer.

Oh, that'd be dope. Okay, let me see if I found it. Oh, it's really.

I would love. Yeah, find. Find anything that you can because I would love to share it. And if not, you call out enough of, like, a detail about it. I'll have our team and post link it in the. In the resources section of this.

All right, so this isn't it. But it was something like this, and I was just like. I was like, what the hell is going on with this thing? So had. This isn't even. This isn't the VSL that I have. But they were selling it for 97 bucks. Except we didn't even have all this. So the page that they had, it literally stopped right below this. Like, there wasn't. You couldn't even scroll. It was just, get the nape black book questions and sell more deals or whatever. Earn more commissions. Buy the black book for 97 bucks. DSL. And then there was like a. And then actually in this spot here, there's like a highlight reel that was like a little testimonial DSL reel. And that was it. And I was like. I was like, yo, are people buying this? And they said, yeah, we sell, like, you know, 100 of them a month or 50 of them a month, like, just from people finding it on the website and buying it. And, like, there was no bonuses, no nothing. And then I was like, if people are buying this book that's a PDF for 97 bucks, then we can definitely get people to buy it at scale for 27 bucks and actually have it rounded it out with better offerings and stuff like that. And then.

Specifically, 27 is very specific to throw out there. Is that rooted in experience or you saw something? Why'd you say definitely can?

So 27? The reason why I picked 27 was because it's like, it's close to the average cost of a book on Amazon if you get a hard copy. And I figured that, like, as long as it was. I felt like once you go over 30 bucks of the book, because I. I picked up books myself where I'm like, oh, it's like 35 bucks. That's expensive for a book. But if it's within that 25 to 30 range, I don't question it. So that's why I was like, that's got to be a sweet spot for a book, you know, at least that was my logic at the time, right? And I knew that. Like, I knew that on Cold Traffic it would. Because the other thing is, like, if people are going to the website, they've already seen Jeremy's content. They know who he is. He didn't even have that much of a following at the time. So if people are scrounging the Internet and then they find that thing it means that they really wanted to buy something and so they bought it. But I figured that that wouldn't pan out on cold traffic.

Yep, that super. Thank you. That was great. There's a lot of people choose prices blindly or just copycat. And yeah, when I heard that number, I figured that was rare.

Yeah, like people will say, oh, I know a guy who's got a $3 funnel, so I should do $3. And it's like, it's like, well, what's the, what's the willingness to pay of your market? What are they usually paying for and what are you selling? Because if you're selling, if he's selling like a $3, I don't know what the heck it is. Like a $3 one cheat sheet. And it's just a cheat sheet. But then like you're selling like a, like a full fledged course or a software or something or that they're in real estate and you're in home renovation. It's completely different and you have to treat it differently. You can't just like go, oh, he's got $7 funnel or he's got $3 funnel or $27 funnel. I'm going to do the same thing.

Yep, yep, I agreed. If anyone's learning from this, like reaching out, people do that again all the time. So it's very important to have that infinite thought, the hypothesis and just to test it. So I'll ask you another question. What didn't work when you're trying to crack the black box funnel that we can maybe eliminate from our testing?

Everything worked. It was great. So actually it worked really well. But the thing that like. So this is the other thing too. I'll give you.

It doesn't have to be black box related, but like what did you go in when you were either deciding between this funnel or anything else that didn't work, I suppose. Did you try to scale any of the other offers that they had? Like they were conventional, they were spending.

No, I, I didn't even look at any of that stuff. They had an agency running everything else. They were like, this is your thing, you run this thing. So that's all I had to look at and all I had to think about, which was great and. But I think what people don't realize, especially if they're, whether you're publishing an offer for somebody who has a following when you launch it, there's always what I call a warm front where you'll think that you're a God for the first couple days of traffic. Right. Like you. You launch it with like a $50 a day or a $20 a day budget, and you get like three sales for seven bucks. And you're like, I'm the greatest marketer of all time. But then once you. Once you push the budget and you. You kind of like, it's almost like the, the organic. It's almost like the organic warm audience is always populating or like, almost like it's like a different level of atmosphere. And if you play in there, your metrics are really good, your ascension's really good because you have this like, lift from the fact that everybody who's engaging with this stuff is already aware of who you are or who Jeremy is or whoever your. Your guru or your, your influencer is. But once you scale past that atmosphere into true cold traffic, everything changes. And like, the ascension rates change, the CPAs change, and everybody just starts to think that something's wrong with the funnel and it's like, no, you're actually running cold traffic now. Yep.

Yeah, it's entropy. Like, it's right. You have the mix of warm, cold, and then you have your like, eccentric circles or whatnot. So you have entropy as you scale up or attrition or CPMs or you're getting further from your ICP and it becomes more complex, so it becomes harder for the media buyer. That's what I usually tell people. The only thing that can counteract that or even make it a non issue is optimization at scale of so. But yeah, I experience that all the time. We're even having some questions today that I'm seeking the answer of. Hey, why. Why is there such a degrade over time? Frequency of the offer can be another thing too, that I typically see. So I wanted to share Blake real fast. Blake called me out. I felt attacked a little bit because normally when media buyers, I will go off and post in like Facebook ad buyers and show off, and I'm definitely cherry picking, like the best ads to put. I'm not putting everything I've tested. I'm showing the big numbers of like, amount spent. And I don't even know if you can really see roas even. No, I cut it off so people wouldn't call me out here. So just know, just know that that was intentional. I wanted to show amount and impressions because I know that's what people care about. But it would have been probably a lot cooler if I would have showed the roas, which was still good, but just wasn't, you know, amazing. Somewhere between two and four.

That's all right, man. I appreciate the, the substantiation of the claims. Yeah.

Now, now I'm gonna. If I do that again, which will be inevitable if Blake needs media buyers at the end of this when I ask him what's your biggest need right now? I'll just go post for him. I'll be like, dang, like, showed me some stuff. Here's a screenshot that I plucked.

Actually. I took over the ad account January 1st and CPA has gone from like 130. I checked it like an hour ago. It was like 67 bucks and, but more volume. I didn't cut it down.

Like it's over January 1st too, which is better than December.

But yeah, so the, yeah, the whole. It's like the holiday slump came down. That's like probably 80 of it. But. But yeah, no, it's been, it's been going really well. So like I think the other thing too that people make a big mistake during the holidays time is they pull, they pull back or they shut off stuff too much. I actually, I actually don't do that. I don't know. This may be something we disagree on. I don't know. But people are like, hey, yeah, they're like, hey, the sales people are going away for a couple of days. Should we turn it off? And I'm like, yeah, but what's, what's the cost of turning off a well oiled winning campaign for two days and then turning it back on and then it doesn't work again or it's. It's up for a week versus just letting it burn for a couple of days, still acquire customers that the sales team can still call and then work those leads. That's my theory anyway. And I, it like it drives people crazy because they're like, yeah, but they're not going to be able to take the calls, man.

Oh, I have, I agree with the majority of what you just said. Just a different strategy around it. So I never, I'm never. It's never acceptable to turn things off because yeah, the pixel, especially if you're paid ads heavy. If it's SEO, probably fine. The SEO traffic like it's going to send a Google like assign back to Google at some point in the funnel that maybe page on time. Slower but not a big deal. With Facebook ads. Yeah you're sending them into like a complete vortex of nothing if there's no availability on a calendar call funnel. So. But what I will say though is like do not shut them off. We aim for 90% fill rate on our calendar and expect to slightly underfill most days because if that happens, that I want to be close to 100. Right. Without having to turn things off. Turning things off in like a media environment. Like, I'm blowing all my budget for the week on Monday. Hey guys, I'm going to take the rest of the week off. The calendars are all full for a month. That's not good. Show rates are like, lower. So what I say is like, cool, we have to almost plan for this consistent of spend and then we adjust the window. And if I'm around, I say you can't go any more than 72 days. 72 days is the max. I'll allow you to adjust like schedule once or calendar and push bookings, but I'm not going to allow you to scale up and overfill a calendar for two weeks just because, like. And by two weeks, I mean, like reps are off for three days and then they're filling into January on December 20th. So to me, that's a bad, bad idea.

Oh yeah, yeah. I agree with you on that. Because then like the, yeah, the show rate, the further out they are, it gets. It goes like that. Like, it's really bad. So yeah, it's. I'm like, I'm like, just hold the line.

Yeah, hold the line. Right.

And let the business just keep running and we'll get back to business when we're back. But I am a big, A big.

Proponent of budget for December at half the rate you do for January if you can. But that's not every really with a call funnel, I don't have the ability to do it that aggressively. But if I'm in info and Black Friday CPMs and I'm trying to compete with E Com during them, like, did you get a CPM drop on January 1st or like after Christmas?

Yeah, and we had pretty much. I mean, we ran Black Friday promo, like just on email for the most part. We ran some ads for it actually. And. But yeah, huge CPM drop on. On JAM one after everything was done. Cool.

So here is. Here is my info. Like, I have seen this anecdotally more than five times to where that's why I was curious because it doesn't always work like that. However, this is like the. Here's a good example of how much of a force multiplier it can be for you scaling up in the sense that I'm going to attach it, guys, but you'll basically see some data where it goes from about $26 CPM to 16 month over month from December to January. And at that point I'm like, okay, if I want to look better as a media buyer and I have a Tocart funnel or an evergreen funnel, like, I don't want to compete with E commerce people in December. And when January hits, you get two psychological factors too, which is new year, new you, and then you get more room so you're more aggressive as a media buyer. So you're like, whoa, I'm the best. Like, my freaking realize. Like, kind of what you said to.

Me just said, like, put the.

Put the foot on the pedal. I'm gonna show much everyone how much better I am. This isn't even enough. I'm taking it two times further. So to me, those are really powerful. And you have more budget to do it potentially. So that's. Yeah, that's just an info thing now.

That's really interesting. The only thing is, like, you go. It's the way that the model works with the black book is they go to a call, right? And we, like, if we were liquidating 100 of the black book, that would say, like, yeah, I would totally scale.

The crap out of it. How fast does the funnel take to liquidate? Because I imagine it sounds like it's the front end plus the setter closer model.

Set model. So that was the thing that we did very differently with the black book funnel was instead of going like straight to a strategy or straight pitching people after they buy, we positioned it as an implementation call where it is a setter call. It is like a discovery that gets set on a strategy call. I'm sure people are very familiar with the model, but the reason why it especially worked well for us is because we're selling to salespeople. And I don't like to use this terminology because people will call it like you're disguising the sales process, which sounds unethical, but we actually do a mini role play session with them. We actually review the first few minutes of their script with them, and we actually try to help them see where they're lacking in their current sales ability, whether it's their tonality or like, the, like, how they introduce themselves. They're in, like, all different elements of the sales conversation while simultaneously building a gap to tee them up for a strategy call if it's a good fit. But what's that?

That's just smart. That's not manipulative. I wouldn't say at all.

Yeah, yeah. And then, like, we actually tried calling it a role play call. Actually, funny story. We actually had it. We Actually had a customer. Right.

A fun frame to play with. So not strategy. You.

You.

You took strategy session and put role play instead.

Yeah. So for. For a period of time. Right. So we had it where. Because they're salespeople, so we were like, let's call it a roleplay call. Cause it's the language that they're used to, and that's what they usually do. And we're like, hey, we'll role play with you. Right? No. Yeah. No, no innuendo.

His underwear saying it's signing up for a role play call.

Oh, God. They. But they wouldn't think of it that way. Okay. They don't have a mind, you know, so basically. And then the sales reps. But they had to be very highly trained reps to be able to role play them. But they were. But at the time, we had a handful of really, really strong sales reps that were taking those calls. And then I was like, how are those calls going? And they said, basically, what happens is they get on the call and we start the role play, and then we just slap them around because they're. They're like, we're so much better than they are at sales that they see the gap without us even saying anything about their skills or anything, because we just role play them so hard. And then they're like, I want to get as good as you are. What are you doing to me on this role play? And then they're like, well, I'm just doing any pq. And then they'd be like, how do I get that? And then that's. It worked really well. But then at scale, it got hard to replicate because you need more and more highly, highly trained people to do those. So then we switched it back to implementation call. But for a time, there was this one customer who ended up on the calendar like, three times in a row because I guess he had saved the role play booking link, and he just, oh, that's smart.

I love that. Do you guys still do that? I kind of want to experience it.

We don't do it anymore.

I'm gonna make him go back.

That was like, a year and a half ago. I mean, I wish. And then they.

Who is your partner in crime on, like, that funnel flow? Is that you and David Duncan?

That was actually me and Marco Cortesi at the time. Crazy. He was the CRO at the time. He was the one that, like, basically got me to go internal and all that stuff. So.

If I was marketer, I would cut this right now and go, hey, guys, I'M thinking about bringing Blake and Marco for a part two of like how that sales marketing handoff work. Opt in below and give me a thumbs up, otherwise I'm not gonna do it. So I. Yeah, actually we cut. We can continue, but like, that's an option now. So that brings up a really good point though. Is like you in a meta funnel or you're teaching what you're teaching, a lot of people will call you out. I've been there with consistent consulting dot com. I know the pressure that comes from being the top leader in, in a craft and you have to be. A lot of people think that it's easy and a lot of people think it's like, oh, it's just coaches coaching, coaching. Like that is the apex. Like Tony Robbins is extremely good. Maybe the best I've ever seen at coaching. And I've been in the room only once with him where he was doing it like Date with Destiny intervention style. I was like, holy crap. He's using techniques. I can't even pinpoint the logic or reasoning in his head. Like it's, it's intuition built over 40 years. So I think the degree of difficulty in doing what you guys are doing, selling the salespeople who are already good at sales is very hard.

Oh yeah, it's. It's an interesting thing to sell. And they're very. Even though we're like not selling outright, they are. They're still skeptical. Like, I don't know what the call's for. Yeah, you know, so, but yeah, man, it's so. So yeah, so we switched back to implementation call and now we have like an implementation team and they handle that whole process.

But implementing the black, like the black black lock system or should I go through the funnel and find out?

You should go through the funnel and find out. Help me drop that cpa.

All right, guys, I'm going to go through the funnel and find out and actually post it because I haven't been through the black box specifically. I have seen a Jeremy vsl, but I'm not sure what's on the other side of this.

I mean, I could show you if you want. So this is the new funnel. So this is, this is the. All credit to my, like, my team and like the, the copywriter, the funnel builder, the graphic designer. We've just so actually fun, fun fact about the two. This page is probably one of the most compliant pages you'll see. The irony is that the original page that I wrote and put together, it was very like how to like, out earn or like increase, like unlock outlandish commissions. That was my original headline. Tagline. Thing was like outlandish commissions, which toes the line. But we had this mandate this year. Or sorry, 2024. We were like, we've got to make the funnel, like squeaky clean compliant. And then I was expecting conversions to go down. They actually went up by 30%. What?

Why were you expecting to go down?

Because we changed. I mean, this headline also used to say, like, the old control was how to quietly outsell your competition in 2024. And. And I was like, that's too. I was like, that's too unsexy or too straightforward.

Lightly outside my competition. I want to be loud and let people know.

Yeah, right. But I was like, this is like, it's so vanilla. This is not gonna. Yeah, I was like, it's not gonna work. But then it worked really well.

That's cool.

So this is my funnel builder, actually. Is Tyler good?

This is a clean looking page.

So hella clean. We got some breakdowns and stuff like that. But do you notice anything that's not on this page? Oh, of course.

There's but omission of stuff or omission of key elements. Is that what you're saying?

There's no testimonials on this whole thing.

Social proof.

There was some social proof right there other than this. This is social proof. But the original Black Book fund was like, I bought the Black Book and now I'm making 10k a day in commissions.

A testimonial wall, basically.

Yeah, it was all testimonials all down the side, all baked throughout. People like breaking records and stuff like that. And while that's still happening, we don't even use it.

So did removing all the social proof increase the funnel conversion? Kept it the same, or D. Or do you think that you change multiple elements at the same time and it's hard to pinpoint.

It's way too hard to pinpoint because this page is so different. It's literally like saying, what's the difference between that apple and that banana? Yeah, I'm a. I'm a big fan of home run swings.

My team called Cowboy Test.

Cowboy. Oh, I love that. All right, I might steal that.

They go, nick's not a B testing. He's like. He's jumping with his intuition to a cowboy test.

Okay, so we're apparently spirit sisters. Or maybe I should say. Maybe I should say blood brothers.

Yeah, I never tap into my feminine energy normally, so I like that. That's good.

I gotta tap into it a Little bit. So anytime my team's like, hey, what should we split test? I'm like, let's just change the whole thing. And then. And then they're like. They're like. They're like, wait, why don't we try a red button? And I was like, no, that's too fucking basic.

To lift 1%. Lifts don't interest me.

Yeah. Is it okay if I swear, by the way? I don't know if it is, dude.

I believe in free speech almost to, like, an Elon Musk level almost.

Okay, sweet. So we're gonna let the sparks fly then.

But I think people should be smart enough, and we should teach people how to think critically instead of worrying about fact checking, like, everything or, like, false claims, but that's another story.

All right, I'm on board with that. We got the hearts, so I think.

That'S a mark too. While on a webinar, always, Always use the little. No, mine got turned off. I need to figure out my settings. That's my favorite one, too.

You gotta. You gotta kick it back on. So I guess, like, basically what happened was so, like, the design's different, color schemes different head. Like, all the copies different. The layout's different, the graphics are different. So everything's different. So there's no way you could be like, oh, was it the compliance, or was it this or was it that?

Right, right. Does that top social proof click, like, trusted by 52,000 sales reps.

Does it click?

Yeah, that was the. That was my first thought of what to do when I saw the. Above the fold to click that.

Oh, really? It's because you're probably used to the trust pilot thing. Yeah. But no, so the. Actually, the irony is that. That that number is now over 88,000. So I'll show you too, if you want to see.

Dang, guys.

Blake.

Oh, man. We are. I love. I love when I tell people, Mike, it's actually a lie. It's 80,000 now.

Yeah, as long as Kajabi didn't log me out, which it did. Dang.

That's. That's legitimately crazy if you guys have that many. Like, are those just texts or, like, starred ratings or just verified.

Oh, sorry. Not. Not rating. It's just the number of customers that we have.

Oh, number of customers.

Okay, so it doesn't notice it. Like, it doesn't say, reviewed by blah, blah, blah.

Like, but I saw the stars and I associated with it. That was that many star reviews. But, yeah, that's just my brain. Not. Not what you claimed of Course that's right.

So I mean to be honest like there's. It's really hard to. It's really hard to be like so squeaky clean and like. You know what I mean that it's. It's like even when you're, you know we have like an in house legal team and stuff. It's like even with that there's always going to be times where you're toeing the line probably. Yeah.

And there's going to be people that at your level of customer volume definitely like a lot of one and two stars in addition to the. To the fives like we used to go. Yeah.

89, 000 just passed it actually.

And there's a look at that verify.

The tire verify is higher and you gotta under promise and over deliver. And plus these, these also count. This is a split test variation that I'm running right now that has 650. So I'm almost at 90000 almost. But yeah, give me like two months. I'll be at a hundred thousand.

I would love to have you back. Like, like I said, we're creating a community of people that really want to go deep and learn this. So Blake is going to be someone I invite to be in there. Now whether he contributes and continues to contribute depends on the people that we put in there with him I would imagine. If you're like me because if I'm the only one giving value then I really don't want to just be leeched from forever. Forever. So if that is you guys and you guys are like a giver or if you have nothing to give right now but you are a learner and you will actually do the things that Blake is recommending that he said in this and come back with him and maybe share insights that to me is super valuable and affirming. So if you're that either one of those, I would love to have you in this community basically.

So I don't know if you know who Charlie T is but he, he's a Facebook ads guy but he's. He's more so a growth marketer. And Charlie, Charlie.

Oh he's dyes.

Yeah. It does his hair. He's got the nails. Yeah. So I, I won't say anything more than that but this was really smart and it actually panned out to make a lot of sense. So he was basically saying that like you need to look at your like the actions that contribute to ascension in a matrix. And he said there's probably a correlation between people who take the upsell and people who fill it because after they. After they book their call they get to the thank you page. There's an intake form that says if you fill out the 62nd form and tell us about like your industry, what made you buy the black book and whatever I'll give you a two hour objection handling training for free. So I've gotten like 16,000 plus responses so that I get market research back from the funnel.

That's sick. So what I'd convert and. And conversion rates or add conversion rates. That first bullet in the top find.

Unit value per customer for these four.

Buckets like and conversion rates or add conversion rates. Was it a misspelling? I guess both applies.

Yeah, I don't know. It could be both. I actually don't remember.

Yeah.

So this, this one I actually didn't even go far enough into this rabbit hole to look into this. But his basic theory was that like if you. If you find that certain messaging ads. So let's say that Jeremy says are you struggling with objections then La la la. Or he says are you struggling with cold calling Blah blah blah blah. But you find that the one. All the videos that start where he talks about objection handling in the hook they ascend at five times the amount as any other like hook. Then he's like just do that.

Yes. Which speaks to the average time from payback period. Basically. It increases the payback period.

Yeah.

Payback period.

Yes. So anyways but he was saying that like if you. If they take the upsell there's no form. So basically like AOV and first purchase value and then intent over here. So the intent we define intent as filled in the intake form and first purchase value and 8 is the AOV. So then.

Yeah I'm just. Now I'm seeing what as a little bit below the fold clarifies the levels. Yeah. By quite right. Most people don't think that way. Yep. And then do you guys actually look at is financial means or like their financial resources on a survey actual Is that predictable of the velocity or the payback period at all?

It's very predictable as to whether or not they will close and what in which. Which tier they buy it. We have a few different levels that. Because we're 7 level after all. Right. We got.

Yeah. Why we'll save that for maybe Jeremy if he comes on.

If you look up like seventh level in like religious. Ancient like religion. You'll see it's very interesting. It's based on like the seven. The seven levels of heaven or something like that. And then the seventh level is the ultimate level of perfection that you're striving for. So it's a whole thing. But I'm only on. So it's okay Joe, I'm still level one down here. It's lonely, you know. But fifth level ld. So here I'll show you how this pans out. Right. So if we go here, right. So I took this and basically what I did was I took, I downloaded all the black book buyers of all time with the value and then I took, I downloaded all the type form responses that had all the intake forms and I had. And then I downloaded a list of all the clients who had purchased the black book and then I gave them all, all three of those to chat GPT and I asked it to look for these specific correlations.

That's smart.

The only thing I will give you, like everybody listening as a caveat is that you have to check ChatGPT's work because it will make mistakes. But basically what we found was that the LTV is approximately $407.61. So if our CPA and a black book buyer is 100 bucks or less for xing our money over time. But I think it was over like a, an all time window too. So like it's probably an inflated LTV.

From all time but the LTV keeps inflating for infinity.

Yeah. And then I think here you go. So check this out. So if they did not fill out the form they send at 2.83. If they did fill out the form 8.1.

So how important is fourth bucket to you in retargeting or do you seek to eliminate it?

The fourth bucket being that fourth bullet.

Point of people who don't fill out the form because there's two schools of thought of like hey DQ these people or do you have just have a certain like retargeting approach.

Oh, like just retargeting them to fill the intake form. I mean to be honest with you, I probably should do that or we should probably have that in the tags in our email follow up.

Yeah.

Or not.

But it's definitely.

You could, you could do it. Yeah. It's just like. But what's the. I just wonder how much the spend would be worth getting to do that, you know and then plus you're like in the waters a little bit in the account maybe. I don't know. That's, that's a really interesting idea though to look into.

So the reason why I thought of it is because are using type form at all, it's the former now long term. Okay, so Typeform doesn't capture part or doesn't capture partial captures. So like if you can get to seven to eight questions and then they have to go or the computer crashes or the page refreshes then that still fits into that category. And I wish that you could do it without this little plugin or development thing that you have to code in. But yeah, you can't get those partial captures. And I always looked at their analytics and we're like okay, I'm getting all the drop off rates but I don't actually have the data from the partial capture so so you can questions and move it around try to make the form easier. But yeah, I, I just end up retargeting those people. But again I don't know if that's the right move or not because it could speak to a variety of things.

Yeah, I mean I'd have to, I have to take a think about that for sure. The other, I mean the other thing you could do is or like I guess the thing you could argue with that is if you're going to retarget for them to fill out a form you just retarget them with an offer to get on a call and sign up for this stuff.

Right.

That's maybe you know.

So yeah in retargeting typically with a form fill it's interesting because if they already watched the BSL or watched any videos from Jeremy at this point so they have some level of context. So yeah they either need more context or more more they don't know like or trust in one of those like three buckets.

Right.

Or they don't have the time would be.

But the VSL play rate on that Blackbook funnel is really low. It's like less than 5%. What? How? I don't know dude. I don't know. It's crazy.

I'm really interested in your funnel. This is a very, very cool funnel dude. And these metrics are great and it's, it's really sweet that you're approaching a hundred thousand of something that you got to create and own or co create and own. So shout out what we can.

We could totally do a part 2D dive of the funnel.

I actually do and we're going if, if you want. I'm curious what would be more fun for you on a part 2 bringing someone else or like the sales leader back and you guys could talk about what the marketing sales like approaches at this stage because that's interesting to me. Or a panel where it's like you, me and maybe like someone else from another external company and we further like nerd out on this type of stuff and just theorize of what we could do the test.

I would say the latter. Well just because the, the sales management just shifted hands again so they're not even going to be able to.

Yeah, I hear you. Well, we'll give them three month, three months to prove themselves.

Yeah, we'll do it later. Yeah. But actually we might be testing some stuff soon that might make it really interesting to catch up again in the three months. But, but then the other interesting thing with this data is the, if they fill out a form they actually have a higher aov. So like if their AOV is higher, they're more likely to fill out the form.

Interesting. It's like is it self fulfilling because it's commitment and consistency that they.

So that's, that's the caveat with this too is I'm like, I don't know if, if, if I don't know if the intake form is making them committed or if I'm just identifying the committed.

It's probably both. But which one is more powerful? I don't know because commitment and consistency, that's why double tie downs and triple tight ends exist. Just principle. So it is self fulfilling in the fact that like you want to be consistent with what you say you're going to do. But to some degree like and usually when it's not asked or asked in a form, I would have to, I would have to think that financial means, because people lie financially, they, well sandbag it either way in, in either direction.

Right.

Yeah.

So you asked about that. If so we've tried not necessarily on this funnel oddly enough that's something that we might look into. But with some of the VSL like direct to strategy call funnels we have, we've asked if they make less than 3k between 3 and 5, 5 to 10 over 10 like some weird combination numbers. Right. If they say less than 3k a month they, they close at like 1%. Like it's really low. If they make over 3k it's like any, anything over that is better. Like and it's and they're all within like approximate range and then it actually goes down over 10k. And I'm like well it's because they're not as in as much pain to like make a decision because already doing fairly well in my mind.

Yes. So I will first of all prefi, who I hope sponsors this podcast. Do you know about them no, they pulled the. The best point of enrichment data I could possibly ask for at this point, which is people lie on forms and they pull their of total available credit, the inverse of utilization basically of their credit cards. So like, to me it doesn't really matter. They make 5k a month if they can put 20k down on cards right now between a variety. So having that data allows you to be like, oh, should we have DQ'd this person? They make, you know, like $2,000 a month, yet they could afford this. Like, they could afford it today. It could be a one call close. And arming sales reps with that data and knowledge gives them the ability to push because I, you know, like great sales reps usually like really identify the desired situation and sell through conviction of like, don't you want to. Where you want how bad you want it? But ultimately a lot of people will pull off and they're like, look bro, I'm broke. Like, run the card, it declines and prei. Exposes the fact that like across multiple cards they could do it. So you can either split the payments or like, could it one shot kill. So the match rate is. But I'll send you the demo and I'm going to send their founder this little clip of the podcast too, but robbing the free tie. So that's great because historically I never knew and I just would use like tower data and be like, okay. Which just also guesses that their net worth and their income and it's really hard to figure out a correlation, but I figure that there's probably people out there that just don't want to get sold. They're like salespeople, savvy salespeople who know that the more money they put that they have, the easier it is for them to, you know, to be sold.

So yeah, I tried to, like, I tried to do qualitative ways of addressing that. Like I, I was like, describe your current situation. And it's like. And I said, I'm, I'm currently in sales but I'm struggling to hit quota, you know, type of thing or I'm experienced in sales and I'm doing fairly well. But I know there's another level, you know what I mean? But it's. That's not as black and white I find, you know, as, are you making this, this or that?

You know, I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna send this, this link. This is the meeting I'm about to go to. I was telling you a little bit about last time. We got like five minutes And I'm supposed to be running this meeting, but I would love for you to meet them, because they are. If you have that new sales leader, we'll audit and pull that stuff for free on pickup convo, dial, like offer and get his analytics all set up so he can actually manage this stuff. I would love for you to see it and just know what it looks like.

Like. Sure. Yeah. The only last thing I guess I was gonna say on this was, yeah.

What do you need?

That part. I'll.

I'll add that at the end, too, is add what? Like, what do you need? What are. What are you looking for right now? Is it more talent? Is it to fix a certain funnel? Is it What. What can you ask this audience of. Of 0 views currently right now, but will be more the right people?

I don't know, man. This episode might go viral.

Who do you want to go viral to?

Between my 37 followers, which is mainly my mom and her friends, I would say if I wanted help with something, it would be thinking about how to take this really strong core customer acquisition thing and then build a really strong revenue model around it. Or, like, backend or, for example, like publishing.com, it's like they're teaching you how to publish on Amazon or whatever, or Audible. But then they also have a software that helps you write your book automatically. And it's like, I think we're missing something there that's like, this thing is working so well that if we could just get something that would compound it or double its efficacy, that would be what I'd be looking for.

Heck, yeah. All right, guys, if you can help Blake out with that problem, go ahead and reach out. What social do you want blown up?

Oh, God. I mean, I don't have any.

If you want Blake. No, I wish I could do that. That'd be fun.

Maybe my ig, I don't check it.

That much, but I'll drop it for you guys here somewhere around the screen or in the resources below. Go follow Blake on ig. He's one of the greats of this industry, I would say. Truly. And I will see you guys next time.