MBA888 Guest Teacher Troy Stites- Three Strategies to Automate Your Business Growth

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Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that gives you practical business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA and webinar Ninja. And today's lesson is a guest teacher lesson. We haven't had a guest teacher lesson in a while because of our eight part series, our eight part experiment on working while traveling that we just concluded last episode. So I'm happy to share the mic today with Troy Stites who's a growth and optimization specialist@Sumo.com not only is Troy helping entrepreneurs grow their business at Sumo, he's also a YouTube star and boy does he have a wonderful voice. But being a growth and optimization specialist, he's going to be teaching you three strategies to automate your growth. How to make sure your business is growing continuously. I'll be sharing how I met Troy and how I learned about these three strategies and why I said, hey, I got to share this with our audience. As many of you know, if you've been in business for a while, starting a business is easy. Staying in business is what's hard. And you have to continue to grow your business, grow your leads, grow your sales, or you're not going to be around for very long. There's, there's no coasting in business. There's either growth or there is death. Either you're going up or you're going down. The line graph never kind of flatlines. So you gotta make sure you're actively growing your business. And Troy's gonna show us some simple things we can do to automate that growth. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Three strategies to automate your business growth, and that's what today's topic. This is what today's guest teacher, Troy is gonna be teaching us. And I'm passing mic to him. But first, let me give you a little bit of backstory of how I got to know Troy. I got him on the show. Now, full disclosure, Sumo.com has been a part of our show in many ways. We've given him shout outs because we love their tools. We've had Noah Kagan, the founder of Sumo.com on our show and Noah is a good friend of mine. He's somebody I've gotten to know really well in the last couple years. And we're part of the same Mastermind group. So we talk business a lot. And in our last in person mastermind meeting, I asked him, what are the strategies that you're really seeing work for your clients and in growing their business? His business, Sumo.com, the tools that they offer people, help people grow their business on their website. So I want to know from him, he has over half a million users. What works for some of these users to really, you know, kind of 10x their growth. He shared with me some really great strategies in that mastermind. So he told me that he has an expert on his team on this topic. Enter Troy Steitz. He tells me that he's his growth and optimization specialist@Sumo.com and he said, if you like, I can get him to prepare a guest lesson for your audience. I think this would be helpful for them. And I said, hell yeah, definitely. Introduce me to Troy. I would love to learn more about him, learn about these strategies and the lesson he could deliver to our audience. Troy and I got on a Skype call and I was like, man, this guy knows this stuff. So understand he's gonna be delivering this lesson. As somebody who's been doing this, he knows this inside and out. He's been doing this for Sumo.com as their growth and optimization specialist. So obviously he's going to be talking about Sumo a bit, but lucky for you, you can use the tools he's talking about for free. So I'm going to pass on to Troy now, but I'll be back to fill in any gaps and give you my takeaways. Speaking of takeaways, Take it away, Troy.

Well, thanks a lot, Omar. I appreciate you having me. You've got something really cool going on with this podcast and I appreciate the value you've been putting out today. In the next eight minutes, I'm going to teach the three techniques that I wish that I would have known a few years ago, basically to take me from having a website that made no money to. To making good money. And I have a YouTube channel, which is called the Charisma Matrix, and I teach advanced social skills. I drive people to a website and I sell digital products there. So as my YouTube channel began to grow and it crossed a million views, everyone's like, yo, man, your YouTube channel's blowing up. You gotta be making all this dough. I was making no dough. So I knew I had to figure out what techniques was I not using that people making money were using. Basically, I stumbled upon Sumo.com their tools allow you to do all these three techniques that I'm going to talk about now, and now it makes good money. And a little disclaimer. I'm not a multimillionaire. My business last month, still making four figures a month, but it's had a big impact. And the important thing is I've gone from zero to a good amount of money with these three techniques. And a quick note, I know most of you guys don't have YouTube channels. That has nothing to do with it. Whether you have a blog or an e commerce website or another type of website, all these strategies can be used universally across all of them. So the first strategy I want to talk about allows you to emulate what all the multi billion dollar companies do. When you look at Spotify, Uber, Facebook, all these different sites, they all do the exact same thing the first time you go to their website. That's kind of the cool thing about digital marketing is you can see what works. You know, you can see what these big companies that have huge amounts of resources and teams and capital behind them, what they figure out that works because it's what they're using. What do they all do that's in common? They all remove everything from their homepage the first time you go there until they've asked you to sign up, to join or whatever they want you to do. If you look at Facebook, if you had the crazy audacity to sign out of Facebook, I know I haven't in about seven years. But if you did, you'd see the first time you go to their site, it says, hey, sign up. What's your name? What's your email? Before you can join the party inside, you have to sign up. So if your website doesn't look like this the first time people go there, that's a problem that's costing you money. There's a tool within the Sumo Suites called welcome Mat that helps you do that. It removes everything. It'll give your call to action and then after that, they proceed onto your website. Very cool technique. Allows you to kind of stand on the shoulders of giants and figure out what they've used and leverage that to your benefit. The second thing is, is that so many people online look at business so polarizingly differently from a brick and mortar store. So for instance, online, if you had a brick and mortar store, let's say you had a brand new pastry shop and had a great reputation, but you had a unique situation going on where 90% of the people, they come in, they'd look around, they'd look in the rack and compliment on the pastries and smile and say hello. But then they turned around and left. That business would not be around anymore. But online we come up with these goofy terms, oh, no, no. The bounce rate was just a bit elevated. The time on page is nonsense. What we need to do is engage these people as they're leaving. So as people are leaving your website, or for instance, if someone's leaving the pastry shop, what if a very presentable man or woman or the owner or the chef came up to you and said, hey, I saw we didn't have anything you wanted today. Would you like me to let you know? And we do. It's not intrusive, it's not bothering. It's actually helpful. That's what an exit intent popup does. It's within the list builder suite of Sumo Tools. And as you go, on your way out, it pops up and says, hey, before you go, would you like a chance to do this? Would you like a free audio lesson? Would you like this? Whatever you're giving out, it engages and monetizes people as they're leaving your site. Okay, that's number two. That's a really cool one. This third one is what? Noah Kagan, I'm not sure if you've heard of him. He was a 30th employee on Facebook, started AppSumo, runs Sumo.com. he calls this the most effective way to capture email out there. This is an incredible strategy. And the Reason it works is the same reason that Facebook moved their ads and into the news feed, into the sweet spot, because they know that we're trained to ignore ads. Tell me this, when you look at your screen, the right and left side, the top and bottom, you don't look there because what hangs out there, ads, it takes. It monopolizes our attention. It takes from what we want to see and gives us stuff we don't want to see. So Facebook knew this, and they put the ads in the meat. But what happens when you see that little text, that gray text that says sponsored post, all of a sudden you're over it. Because you don't want to see that. You don't want to see an ad that someone paid to get in front of you. You want to see Uncle Marty's margarita that he's drinking on Cinco de Mayo on his vacation. So they took it one step in the right direction. But with this strategy called click triggers, they're content upgrades, we took it one step in the further direction in that what we do is we actually offer something of massive value and related value before we ask for the email address. So let's say you're doing. You got a blog post about website optimization and you're read says, hey, by the way, if you want to follow along with the internal website optimization spreadsheet, click here. Of course you want to follow along with the internal website spreadsheet. You just spent five minutes reading about it. You want to see what a pro level spreadsheet looks like. You want to use that if you want to implement these strategies. So what you're doing is you're putting the call to action in the newsfeed and you're giving away something that is of so much perceived value that someone might even pay, you know, 99 cents or a couple bucks for that. We have one of these on Sumo.com's website that's converting at like 71% so you can give away anything printed. Say it's a blog about apple pie. Hey, by the way, if you want a crust recipe that looks amazing with this apple pie, click here. Boom, pops up. Hey, where should we send this? It's your email address. Or just say, hey, if you're in a hurry, click here to download a PDF version of the article. You can print it off and read it whenever you want. Another great way to use this. So by blending these three strategies together on your website, you can have astronomically high opt in rates. Every email you collect is worth money. There's no doubt about it even if you don't have a product now, if you have a product in three or six months, collect the email and say hey, by the way, this product's coming out in three months. If you want a 25% discount, you can buy out now. Now you've got revenue coming in. Or just do the old strategy, you're collecting emails and then you blast everyone or send an email out to everyone who you've collected. When the product is ready, get a windfall of cash all at once because you were sitting on those emails. So emails are worth money regardless of where you are in the process. And even if you just have a little bit of traffic, say you've got 10 or 20 people a day, you got a couple of these opt ins that have, you know, 40, 50%, you can get five, 10 emails a day, say they're worth three bucks to you. That's a decent amount of money even if you're just getting started. So we learned the three techniques. The welcome mat, which copies what all the big boys does. It takes over the webpage. The first time they go there and ask them to opt in, the exit intent pop up. Hey, by the way, saw that you didn't have anything that we didn't have anything you wanted today. Would you like me to let you know we do. And number three, the click triggers, the things that you click, they add massive value and have ridiculously high opt in rates. You can put these to use immediately. You can go to Sumo.com we actually have a coupon code for this in the discount code field. Put in the dollar sign 100$100. You'll get a 10% off discount on Sumo pro suites. And these tools are the best in class. They enable you to do exactly what the pros can do on your own. Leverage that implement these three strategies directly. So that was it, that was a summary. That was my story. That's what's worked for me, that's what worked Appsumo, that's what works for Sumo. And these are three strategies that you can put to work for you today. You hear about people leveraging technology to emulate having a bigger team than you do. This is a great way to basically have three full time employees who are good looking, they know your product, they're hyping it up 24 hours a day. A great way to leverage technology to grow your business if you're just getting smarter, started or a smaller team. So thanks again Omar. I appreciate the opportunity to educate your audience and I'll throw it back to you life's busy.

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Thank you Troy for that awesome lesson on three strategies to automate your business growth. Now I just want to add a few of my insights to what Troy was talking about. One of the things he shared is making sure you collect email addresses when people visit your website. But you might also say to yourself, well, I want them to buy too, so I need to make sure that they buy. So a lot of people have this resistance of asking people for their email address on their homepage in exchange for some sort of value like a course or an ebook or a PDF or something like that. Because they're like, hey, I don't want them to do that. I want them to buy. Patience, my dear. If somebody's visiting your website for the first time, have never seen any of your products or services, doesn't know anything about you, it's not likely they're going to buy. It's very unlikely. And if you take a look at your Google Analytics, you'll notice that most of the people that are visiting your website are for the first time and the first thing they go to is your homepage, right? So what are they more likely to do? They're more likely to give you their email address in exchange for some sort of value. You got them to the site. That was all the hard work. They're there now. Make sure they convert. Make sure you can create a relationship or build a relationship with them. That's why it's so important to to make sure you have a way to get their email address so you can then email them later and give them more value and cultivate that trust. You can have A pricing page or a buy button up in the menu. And if they want to buy, they can go to buy. But you know, the homepage really should be somewhere. You can have a pricing page or a buy button somewhere in the, you know, header menu or in the footer. But the homepage really should have one mission. I want to continue to have a relationship with this person. Give me your email address so I can continue to give you great value and prove to you that I'm worth your business. So resist the urge of trying to get people to buy as soon as they hit your website. That's just not going to happen. What you need to do is channel that energy and get them to convert into email subscribers. That is a transaction. Just see that as a purchase. And then from there you can cultivate that relationship and have a more likelihood to get a potential customer into see that as a transaction, as a purchase. Once you're on your email list, you can build that trust and you have more of a likelihood to turn that potential customer into a customer. The other thing is that you don't want to confuse your visitor. You want to give one call to action, one cta, right? And your whole mission on your homepage should be like, hey, I want to have a relationship. I want to build something with you. I want to show you that I have value and that I want to continue to give you value. I want your email address. That is what the mission should be. One mission. Not a million missions. Not click on, you know, my Twitter feed. Don't check out these images in the, you know, right column. The whole goal of that page should be one thing. Get on my list so I can continue to serve you. And basically what you learn is that's a sales exercise. You really want to sell people on giving their email address, make it lucrative. Hey, if you give me my email address, this is what you're going to get. Not only this immediate thing, but you're also going to get these things later in the future. Maybe put some testimonials from people that are already on your email list or people that know you or have done business with you and say, hey, by being part of this list, this is what I experience. Sell them on being a part of your email list. Play the long term game. It's really going to help you build a sustainable business. Buyers are very well educated now and you know that fast buck is just not there. People need to trust you. They need to learn that they are the right fit for you. And you do that by getting them on your email list and you cultivate that relationship on email. All right, I hope that helps. I hope you enjoy Troy's guest lesson. The next episode is a very special episode. In today's episode, I mentioned that it's easy to start a business, but it's really hard to stay in business. That's what makes people great. That's what makes businesses great. That longevity, the sustainability. And I've been working on a project this past 18 months that is focused on that. How can I help businesses stay in business? And it all boils down to making more sales. You need more sales, you need more money coming in than coming out in order for you to be staying in business. Right? And one of my passions is webinars. As you know, I'm the founder of webinar Ninja. So in the next episode, I'm going to show you how to stay in business, how to grow your sales with webinar. I'm going to give you exactly what I do, how I grew my businesses with webinars and how we're helping over 11,000 businesses do the same. Can't wait for that episode. Make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Alright, that's it for me today, guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. This last year has been incredibly hard for me. I am so tired, but I've been working really hard. Even when I was on that travel while working experiment, it was a whole lot more work than travel. But what I learned in this last year is that if you want to build something great, if you want to build something that's going to last, you know, a long time, that's going to sustain you, your family and everybody that works for you, it's going to take sacrifice, it's going to take a lot of hard work. It's going to take not having weekends. I've had two hour weekends for the last year. I literally spend two hours playing basketball on Sunday. That's my weekend, all day Saturday. Everything around that two hours on Sunday. I'm working now. I'm not going to be doing this forever. Obviously, you know, I need to build something and then I actually have to put people in place to manage it for me. But that building phase takes a lot of hard work. And I know that. I know I need to just buckle down and do it now. But I'm sharing this with you because if you're grinding, if you're working hard, if you're hustling through and trying to build your business and feel like oh, this is so tiring. Know that that's just how it is. You are amongst everybody else is trying to do the same thing. And the people that don't make it, they don't build that thing. They don't build that business. It's not because they're not smart enough or didn't have the resources. It's because they quit. So just keep going. Keep going. This is a reminder to myself as well to you. Don't give up. Keep moving forward. All right, I'll check you in the next episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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