We Took 50 Sales Calls In 3 Days — What Happened? | Espresso Hour E9

Boom. Welcome back to another episode of the Espresso Hour where the running joke is this is going to be much shorter than an hour because we are yet again hyped up on caffeine. Last episode we did a breakdown of making $70,000 in about two days with our ChatGPT webinar. If you haven't checked that one out, make sure to go watch it or listen. In this one we are going to do a breakdown of our last week's sprint, which was building out the initial infrastructure for our ghost writing intensive. So if you've been following along on the last couple episodes of the Espresso Hour, we're launching a new four week ghost riding intensive. And this last week was a sprint, man.

Total, total sprint. I mean, first of all, this is the epitome of idea to execution as fast as possible. I mean, I think help me retrace the steps because was it Monday?

Monday it was Wednesday. So today we're filming, this is the 17th, but this will go live in another week and a half. So we had a meeting about ChatGPT and ghostwriting on Wednesday 1st February. And so in that time we did start to finish the webinar and start to finish build out of ghostwriting intensive. 50 calls, full curriculum outline, survey launch campaign, all of that. And so yeah, it's cool to. We need to go back and listen to the first Espresso hour where we talked about the idea. But here's where we're at.

Yeah, so I think. So the big, big thing I want to point out. So one was we did the bulk of the ghostwriting intensive prep work and the chat GPT webinar at the same time. And so how we did that was like one or two days we would be fully locked in on. Okay, here's everything that we need to set up for the ghostwriting stuff. And then once, you know, I was freed up, or Dickie, you were freed up, we like would just pause, pass the baton and then shift focus. Okay, two day sprint on ChatGPT. Okay, we reached a point there. Pass the baton, go back to ghostwriting. Like it was very tight feedback loops. And I think the cool thing to share was we had a whole plan for how we were going to kick off this ghostwriting intensive. We set up all this infrastructure, we wrote all these emails. We basically had this plan where we, we had a bunch of people that filled out the survey that we thought were great fits and we were going to do this whole email campaign inviting them to be part of it. But this is the first time we've done high ticket and we sat with it and literally like the night before we were going to press go and execute this whole thing. We were like, wait a second. In order for this to work, I don't think that email is the best. So even though we just spent four days creating all this infrastructure hard pivot, we realized that we needed to do this over the phone with people. We needed to explain the value directly, we needed to go through the process ourselves if we were going to eventually build a sales team. We needed to create the sales script. We needed like, we needed to do it. And so in a matter of 24 hours, we basically scrapped the whole plan of what we were going to do then very next day, filled our calendars nonstop. Each of us six, seven, eight sales calls a day for five days straight. And, and then we just went and executed and we just put our head down and each did what? 30, 30 plus sales calls each and ended up filling the whole cohort and, and hitting our goal within like four days.

It is crazy to look back at that. We were about to do that. So we weighed the ups and down or the, the pros and cons of we had 1200 people fill out the survey. We found the people that we thought were the best fits. We were going to send them a, the most expensive product we've sold and all it was going to have was like a video and here's what you get. And we first off reflected that we weren't 100% sure that this is what people wanted. So why not bootstrap the validation one literally one person at a time. And we talk about this in ship 30 and just overall is like, you only need validation from like one or two people before you go. And you know, we've changed a bunch of things on the offer itself from what we were going to send that out. Right. And so the risk was like if you send something to everyone who's interested in it, you're, you have no clue what their initial take is. Right. So rather we said let's block our entire calendar, put in the work on this kind of thing. So yeah, we held what, 49 or 50 individual hour long calls talking this out. And I mean I wouldn't trade that experience for the world. We learned so much about who's interested in this, why they're interested in it and now I feel like we could go launch it to that. But I don't, I don't think we need to because we want to keep it limited. We want to do. So we're capping enrollment in this initial cohort and eventually turning it to Evergreen and we can talk about some of that. But huge lesson there. And that was just our own ignorance tax of like, oh, yeah, we should just send this to everyone. And we kind of talked it out of like, no, that's probably not the best idea. And so what did we learn in our 50 calls?

Oh, so many things. So, yeah, I was going to say that the biggest takeaway and the biggest benefit of doing those individual calls is you really hone in on who the archetypes are and the archetypes of who's most likely to say yes, like, who really needs this? And who are the archetypes most likely to not get it and just say no. And I think a really interesting archetype that you pointed out, Dickie, was the freelancer who's doing like three or four grand a month and is just sort of comfortable. And they want to improve and they want to figure out why they're not earning more, but there's no real, like, urgency for change. It's like they know they're uncomfortable, but they're not uncomfortable enough yet. And that person, anytime you or I had a conversation with them, it was like they were like, oh, this sounds interesting. But it just wasn't enough for them to take action because they weren't in enough pain or. Whereas the two archetypes of people who felt more pain were one. The person who was like, I've tried everything and I'm just burned out, overworked, I have no pricing power. Like, something needs to change because whatever I'm doing is not working. And we're like, great, we know how to solve all those problems. Okay. Or interestingly, it's the person who is working a full time job and they're like, I have the resources, I want to learn, I want to make this career pivot. I just don't know how. And so I need someone to walk me through step by step. And like, I want to invest in myself and those two archetypes, like, over and over and over again. It's like, oh, we know exactly how to do this. You know exactly how to solve those problems. You're the great, you're a great fit. So even just that, we didn't know until we went and did 50 sales calls, you know?

Yeah, I think it's the, the notes I took, I narrowed it down to three. So a little bit of an extension of that. It was the full timer who 100% wants to start freelancing, has the disposable income to do it correctly from the beginning and has that like self awareness of if I'm going to go do this, I want to shortcut my learning curve. So I'd say that was about a third. Another third was people who are actually having more success as freelancers. So in that like 10k plus range but very burnt out and understand that they can't keep this forever and have to change. So it was full time or freelancer having a lot of success or young up and coming freelancer who just started, who has extremely low risk to trying something new. Because part of that what goes with the freelancer making like three to five a month that has been doing that for like eight years. They're comfortable and they've just gotten so used to it that like there's risk to potentially going lower to change the offer. But the, you know, a couple of those, you know, 19, 20 year old dudes we talked to, they were like, I'm bought in on this, let's do it. Because I want to get, I want to do everything. I want to learn from you guys, I want the mentorship, I want all that. So I thought that was a very interesting one too. So why we wanted to distill that down is now when we have our survey or based on our survey answers and when we end up selling this over the long term, we are going to ask questions that very easily help us sort people into each of those categories and that is going. When we have our full time sales process, it's going to do auto screening, right? If you have not fallen into one of these or if you've fallen into the bucket that we think is not a great fit. When we have a setter and a closer doing the sales of this rather than us, we know that that's not worth time to put together. Secondly, we know that in our marketing campaigns how to reach those people and how to talk to them, right? So you could see how. And this is just as I was outlining it, right? Someone goes to the landing page, they watch the VSL and they opt in. Now that time between opt in and call to learn more about the program, you send them things. Now if you are talking to someone working a full time job, you don't want to send them success stories and testimonials of someone who was a freelancer doing 10K who learned something new and now does 25, right? You want to send them testimonials of someone who was working a full time job, started with this. And so that's how we're going to bootstrap our marketing campaign. From this is from this initial cohort. We're going to bucket each person and when they start to see success, we're going to capture their testimonials and success stories and build those into our campaigns. Now another thing we'll do to get the exact language that each of those individuals use when they're describing their situation. We're going to have interviews once they're seeing success of what were you struggling with in the beginning? So then when we're crafting our marketing language to talk specifically to the three different avatars, we know what words to use. Right. So this is where I'm so glad we're starting with this initial cohort because you get that foundation right. And this is just us learning over the last two years of how to do this kind of stuff. You have to craft language that makes it feel like that person is heard. Right. So the words that go into that, the benefits that it unlocks, it's all there. And you can see how starting with this initial cohort, with that long term vision in mind, we're gonna be able to kind of knock that foundation out.

Yeah, there's. Oh, there's so much here. It's so exciting. Two things I want to share also and kind of reminders for us. So one thing I noticed was so this idea of the method that we're selling is educational email courses. That's the opportunity that we see and training ghostwriters on how to create those for other people. But I'm also aware that a lot of the people that we're attracting already are ghostwriting something else. A lot of them are like, I already have Twitter ghost writing clients or LinkedIn ghostwriting clients, or I ghostwrite someone's email newsletter or whatever it is. And so where I think there's benefit in turning this more evergreen, where we're not doing this by cohort, but we're doing it where almost similar to kind of captain's table, where you have a standing call each week and then a lot of the curriculum and activation points are evergreen and they surround it is I think there's a lot of opportunity for educating people on how to reframe and repackage existing services. Because one of the things I noticed so often was someone who's like, I'm ghostwriting for someone's Twitter. But like, I'm charging, you know, 1,000 bucks a month or 2,000 bucks a month, and immediately I'm like, that's a problem.

So.

So one opportunity is helping them sell something new and package this service of educational email courses. And another opportunity is going and you already have existing clients and here's where you're going wrong. Like you should be charging double. Here's how to charge double, here's how to sell what you're already doing. So there's a lot of like tangential education and multiple people on these calls. What I thought was so cool, this is what excites me about this so much, is so many people have said I've been ghostwriting for a year, two years, and I've looked everywhere for resources and there's almost no education around ghostwriting. No one shares pricing, no one shares how to do it, no one shares how to get clients. No, like there is just no like ghostwriting hub. Here's everything you need to know. And that gives me so much confidence for building out what we're building because we have so much knowledge to share and no one is supplying it.

Yeah, the long term Evergreen vision is I think probably more than one call, but have standing coaching calls across each of the pillars we talked about. So positioning yourself as a premium ghostwriter will be one. So social content, niching down all that writing email courses themselves or creating high value assets. There'll be a call to help people with that, like, hey, can you critique my email course? There'll be a third that is sales and direct reach outs. So client acquisition, someone goes, hey, that's what I'm struggling with right now. Go, go attend that call. And then the fourth will be scaling up and down and then the fifth one will be with us. That's my vision for the weekly agenda. So someone joins, they get the curriculum. We have a success manager who's sending them in the right direction based on, hey, go through the curriculum once you're on this part, attend this call, ask these questions. Where it's going to get a lot of fun is I think those coaching calls will come from people in this initial cohort. Right. They're going to learn so directly from us that the ones who are best at each of those things we're going to say, hey, you want to teach this for us on a weekly basis? Right. So another benefit of having a small initial cohort for this course and intensive is the relationships we're going to build with these first round of students who I bet go on to either be our success managers or our coaches within the program, not to mention our shining star testimonials.

I love that. That's A great. It's a great plan. The last thing I want to share too. So I tweeted about this yesterday or two days ago, and I want to bake this into part of the curriculum and then I want to break this out as like the front end lead. Like I'm imagining. Once we build this all out, we have our landing page. I want this to be like, the VSL is so many people who enroll in the ghostwriting thing. It's actually really different than selling digital products. Digital products is way more reliant on you having an audience and you, you know, then bridging that audience to your own email list and selling digital products. That way when you're selling a service and even ghostwriting, you really don't like, you could. You could easily make 20 grand a month and have no audience at all. Because it's all about cold outreach and pitching. And that was one of the questions I got asked all the time, is people were like, I have very little audience on Twitter. Does that mean that I won't be able to get clients? And so to prove and to show exactly how this works, I am going to go through each module myself and I'm going to create an alias on Twitter, a completely blank Twitter account. And I'm going to go through the, building out my profile, building out my first asset, posting about ghostwriting content, cold DMing people. And I'm going to, under an alias, not once mention that it's me. Not once mention my credibility. Like, completely blank slate. I'm going to show how I can land a $5,000 client in less than 30 days. Just doing all of these steps. And I feel like for people inside the cohort, that's going to give them so much confidence, which I'm excited about. And then for people outside who are looking in, wondering if they should do this, they're going to watch that, like, mini documentary and just be like, oh my gosh, this is of course right. I am so excited to do this experiment, dude.

It's like you get to create a new video game character. Like, you get to craft the whole thing. Don't even tell me what the name is. Like, I don't even want to know because I just want to see you go and do it. No influence at all. From zero to 5k email client. That's me. Fun to watch, man. And I'm going to.

And just for fun, I'm going to go pitch like some of our friends on it, like other Twitter people that we know. And I'm just going to show up in their DMs as some random name and, like, we'll see. They might even say yes. We don't know.

Yeah, we'll get. We're going to get a ton of validation, and you're going to learn what someone might have to do differently than what you're expecting. So I think it makes perfect sense for you to do that. Exciting times, man. Exciting times. So we're going to continue to do this build in public throughout this cohort. If you have questions, drop them as a comment, leave a dm. We're happy to answer. We want these to be as valuable as possible for anyone building any kind of Internet business, any kind of writing business, any kind of ghostwriting, whatever. We want to answer those questions. So toss this video a like, leave it a comment. Leave it a five star. If you're listening on a podcast feed, what else can they do? I don't know.

Yeah, and drop ghostwriting questions because we are going to dedicate the next five months to just immersing in the world of ghost writing.

We're going to share everything. So drop questions and send this to a friend if you're listening. That's all for this week. We will see you all in the next espresso hour. Have a good one, y'. All.